None Left Behind (22 page)

“Be it ever so humble . . .” he commented drily.

It was a true fort in every sense of the word, standing as a challenge against insurgents to give it their best shot.

Humvees and utility trucks with their lights off idled deep-throated in the middle of the night on Malibu Road, the beds of the utilities filled with rolls of tough concertina wire delivered from Battalion and Brigade. Second Platoon's concrete-pouring, brush-burning, wire-laying infantrymen labored in the ditches on either side of the road, unraveling concertina into Slinky-like coils and filling ditches all the way up to the edge of the road so that even a mouse would have a hard time getting through without cutting himself to death. They wondered what they would have to do next to win this strangest war of all.

Battalion had come up with the bright idea of using wire to restrict access. Delta Company had tried everything else in its ongoing struggle with IED artists. Why not just fence the monsters out? If saboteurs couldn't sneak up to the blacktop, they couldn't plant their fireworks.

Being nothing but neighborly invaders, of course, the Joes weren't allowed to wire across side roads and private driveways. The reasoning went something like this: You wouldn't want to piss off more people, as there already seemed to be a surplus of pissed-off people in the AO. The Americans were even pissed off, and getting more so.

“Check this out,” Specialist Jared Isbell sourly invited. “We fence them out, but we leave them gates so they can still get in.”

“That's because we're a considerate, fair-minded people,” Chiva Lares explained. “We wouldn't want to violate the rules of the IBTU.”

“IBTU?”

“International Bomb Throwers Union.”

Second Platoon Joes bitched about how they seemed to get assigned every shit detail that came down the chain. Everyone knew how all the others had turned out. Brush burning got Messer and Given killed; road
repair ended up with Sergeant Montgomery shot. Laying wire was bound to go the same way. Why not just line up the 130,000 American soldiers in-country shoulder-to-shoulder and march through Iraq like green grass through a goose, leaving nothing behind standing except one sign saying
USA THIS WAY
?

The wire project would take months to complete since the plan was to lay wire from the JSB all the way down Malibu through the S-curves. Theoretically, each new roll of wire unstrung in the ditches left the Jihadists less access to the road and therefore fewer places for the platoons to cover. But just because the platoon toiled each night with wire didn't exempt it from its other duties. It still had patrols to run, raids to execute, craters to guard.

At first, Command wanted the assignment carried out during daylight hours. Lieutenant Dudish argued that working in the sun would subject his men to being picked off by snipers. He used Sergeant Montgomery's incident as an example.

“You tell me what to do,” he said. “I'll come up with the plan.”

That was how Second Platoon's Joes began moonlighting. Wearing night vision goggles, they resembled a voracious swarm of giant bug-eyed insects. It was tough laboring like that in the dark, even with NVs, but it was better than working exposed to the world and every Ali Baba with an urge to shoot Americans and access to a rifle. Security could see bad guys sneaking up, but the bad guys couldn't see them. Hopefully.

“Maybe if we're lucky,” someone suggested, “Crazy Legs will come along, stumble over his feet, fall into the wire and bleed to death.”

“Better yet. We could rig up a grenade booby trap and give the asshole a little thrill of his own medicine.”

The Joes were always devising new schemes to get rid of him, each more outlandish than the last.

“That's fine, if you want to spend the rest of your life in Leavenworth for murdering civilians,” Montgomery cautioned.

“Hell, Sarge. Ain't they
all
civilians?”

“Better take a look at what's happening to the Marines at Haditha.”

“This, Sarge, is one fucked-up war.”

“It's not much of a war, but it's the only one we got.”

Sergeant John Herne blamed concertina for finally ending his long streak of luck as the only member of Second Platoon not to have been blown up by an IED. According to the way he told it, what the openings in the wire did was channel the saboteurs into placing more IEDs in fewer places, therefore increasing his chances of hitting one.

One night after the beds of the utility trucks were empty, Second Platoon headed toward Company HQ at Inchon to pull a rotation with Lieutenant Vargo's First Platoon. Except for sentries, most of First Platoon was on downtime. An explosion down the road jarred everyone awake. Joe Anzak, Brandon Gray, and a few other guys jumped out of their bunks to follow the new platoon sergeant, SFC James Connell, outside to see what was going on.

Assured by radio that everyone in Second Platoon was all right, Lieutenant Vargo's boys were smoking, joking, grabassing and teasing Brenda the Bitch when Lieutenant Dudish's convoy swept through the gates and unassed their vehicles at the motor pool. John Herne, Chiva Lares, and Dar-rell Whitney staggered through the door into the common area with their faces powder-stained and their hair all frizzed out like they had stuck their collective fingers into an electrical outlet. Their ears were still ringing and they were seeing white flashes before their eyes.

Big Anzak, who was gabbing with some of the others about their favorite subject,
feaky-feaky
, and the girls they had seduced, each of whom became hotter and wilder with each retelling, looked up and couldn't help bursting into laughter. He ran over to encircle the three unfortunates in his big arms.

“Let ol' Joe kiss your boo-boos and make them better,” he offered.

That night forever ended Sergeant Herne's standing in the community of charmed lives and initiated him into The Malibu IED Club. Everyone wanted to hear the story, which the little sergeant was obliged to tell with suitable exaggerations.

Lares had been behind the wheel, Whitney in the turret with his head stuck up, and Sergeant Herne in the TC seat on the right dismount when Lares spotted a suspicious freshly dug spot in the road. He swerved to
avoid it. Too late. The blast blew off the rear axle, one rear door, and sent Whitney's nitch flying out the top of the turret and all the way across the road.

“Anzak, you light off one of your farts in a helmet,” Herne challenged, “and I'll bet it goes further than Dar-rell's helmet.”

“Put your money where your mouth is, Sar-jent.”

That prompted a round of laughing speculation about which was more powerful—an Anzak fart or a medium IED. No longer feeling blessed, Herne let out a deep, weary sigh. Sanchez offered him a canteen cup of coffee and an MRE cake. Cookie Urbina came in, trailed by the ugly brown dog that the Joes had taken in and started feeding scraps. He offered to serve up soup. Captain Jamoles stood back and let his young soldiers burn off their energy and relief, thankful not to have lost another man.

Herne pushed Brenda out of the way and plopped down on the sofa. “We're gonna need more wire,” he said.

What most civilians failed to realize when they thought of soldiers was that many of them were kids only a year or two out of high school. High-spirited, rowdy, energetic, optimistic, with all the quirks and charms of eighteen-or nineteen-year-old boys all over America. Downtime members of First and Fourth Platoons not on patrol, security, or crater watch were having a Saturday night dance at Inchon. Brenda the Bitch was the guest of honor. The Joes would have preferred
real
girls, but an Iraqi female caught so much as smiling at an American ruined her reputation for life. Besides, as far as the GIs could tell, Iraqi women didn't dance or do much of anything else except take care of the men and children.

Someone mysteriously produced a stylish black burka for Brenda to wear to the dance. She quickly shed it in favor of a pair of lace panties open at the crotch. Hard rock music blasted from a CD player. The Joes were having a hell of a good time forgetting about the war. Dancing exaggeratedly and obscenely with the blow-up doll, passing her around, tossing her, jerking her about until it seemed she must surely burst at the seams or rupture like a balloon and fly all over the common room before landing deflated and spent in the coffee.

PFC Byron Fouty, nineteen, smiling bashfully the way he did, watched from a corner of the room where he had retreated with a copy of Stephen King's
It
. A sensitive, introspective kid who liked Jolly Rancher candy, Stephen King, and W. E. B. Griffin novels, he had impressed teachers in high school with his acting and improvisation talents, the one area where he seemed to overcome his innate shyness. A troubled home life, his parents' divorce, and being kicked out of the house by his father had left him rootless. He dropped out of school to get his GED and enlist in the army.

Almost the first thing he discovered about himself in the army was that
he didn't belong there either. The army was such a testosterone-driven organization. Some of the other guys in First Platoon, such as Alex Jimenez and Joe Anzak, were true warriors who thrived in a combat environment. In contrast, Fouty seemed to fade into the background most of the time, like now, the kind of kid who just went along to get along, never saying much, scared to death most of the time, a kid who should not have gone to war.

Sometimes he thought that the politician's quote about “C students with their stupid finger on the trigger in Iraq” applied to him. Except he wasn't even a C student. He was a dropout with a GED.

“How did you end up in the army?” Sergeant James Connell asked when he took over as platoon sergeant.

“I didn't have anywhere else to go.”

Sergeant Connell was the decided opposite of hard-nosed Sergeant Burke, the previous platoon daddy. If possible, Connell seemed even more unsuited to warfare than Fouty. He was a gentle man with a kind voice who treated all the Joes in the platoon as though they were his sons. When they went out on patrols, Connell always carried a pocket full of candy for the local kids, his honest contention being that extending kindness to people paid off in the long run. He never referred to the Iraqis as hajjis or Baghdads or dune coons or ragheads as most of the other soldiers did. He truly embraced the view that Americans were here to win friends and influence people. That was how to win the war.

Fouty found it easy to talk to Sergeant Connell. He was almost like having a real father.

The dance was becoming a bit too loud. Captain Jamoles would be shutting it down soon. Fouty closed his book and slipped out to go to the roof. No one noticed when he left.

The night guards were in the watch towers, which left the roof to him. He leaned both elbows on the lip of the roof and gazed reflectively out above the date palms toward the Euphrates River, catching only a glimpse of silver moon on water through the trees. There was something romantically soothing and deceptively peaceful about the Iraqi countryside under a full moon. Something out of
Arabian Nights
or
Lawrence of Arabia.

Nights on the roof this time of year were cold, as most desert nights were. He pulled his neck gaiter up over his ears. He liked it up here alone, working through his thoughts and feelings.

The people here, the Iraqis, both confused and annoyed him. First of all, he had never seen such poverty. Being poor, however, didn't mean they couldn't at least pick up their own garbage. It didn't cost anything and it would improve their lives overnight. You would think that cell phones spreading all over the country and satellite dishes sprouting from even the most humble mud hovel would bring improvements to their wretched lives. Sergeant Connell said they lived this way because they didn't know how to do things for themselves, having existed for so long under a tyranny that told them what to do and when to do it.

They were so
damned
demanding.

“How soon are you going to repair my house?”

“We need more money.”

“Are you going to build us a school?”

“Who will pay for my wheat field that the soldiers crossed?”

“Our roads must be repaired.”

Yeah! Then why do you keep blowing 'em up?

Iraqis swarmed humvees begging for food or attempting to peddle Blue Death cigarettes at five bucks a pack. Knots of young children ran out and pleaded for new soccer balls in front of a house where there were two craters left by previous roadside bombs. Is that why the Americans were here, to be ripped off by the people during the day and shot at by wacko Jihadists night and day?

Fouty's nerves were always strung to the snapping point. He had been startled more than once by automatic weapons fire outside a mosque, only to realize that it was a wedding celebration and not an attack. Now
this
was a gun culture. Every once in awhile some hajji guzzled too much Turkish whiskey and worked up the courage to show up in front of a U.S. battle position somewhere in the AO to shoot at it. “Fuck you, America!”

Sometimes the Americans shot back and killed him—after which the U.S. Government paid reparations to his family.

None of it made sense. Couldn't these people understand that Americans
were here to bring democracy, freedom, and peace? Why were they so ungrateful?

A U.S. soldier was ambushed and killed while trying to do good in delivering a donation of classroom supplies to a school. Sergeant Messer and PFC Given were murdered, and for what? These people would never appreciate the sacrifices American soldiers were making for them.

Shops in the villages sold fruit and kabobs of goat, peppers, and only God knew what else. Jewelry, fans, satellite dishes, live chickens, and dead goats were on display next to large posters of masked Muslim Jihadists and racks of anti-American, anti-Western CDs with titles like
Heroes of Chechnya, Jihad Warriors, Fallujah Resistance,
and
Allah Will Destroy the Jews.