None Left Behind (29 page)

Afterwards, those closest to him detected a subtle, almost imperceptible difference in his demeanor. First off, he grew increasingly cautious, watchful, protective of his boys. The second difference was more difficult to pin down.

“Do you believe in predestination?” he once asked another platoon sergeant. “I need to go home and see my family while I have a chance.”

Captain Gilbreath approved leave for the forty-year-old. Connell caught the next Freedom Bird to Tennessee where his mother and father were looking after his two sons and daughter while he was overseas. Nick was sixteen, Bryan twelve, and Courtney fourteen.

Lake City was Norman Rockwell Middle America. Mom and Pop, apple pie, Fourth of July celebrations, baby Jesus in the Christmas manger, sitting on the front porch watching lightning bugs, chatting over the yard fence with the neighbor, strolling the sidewalks where people smiled and called out greetings. “Good to see you, Tiger.” That kind of America.

James had played Little League baseball in elementary school and first-string football for Anderson County High School before he graduated in 1984. James Senior always showed people photographs of his son in uniform.

“He's just a real good son,” he said. “We're all so proud of him.”

Connell's parents still lived in the same comfortable old porched house where he grew up. He arrived home just in time for Sunday dinner after church, a family tradition attended by his parents, three brothers, one sister, and their respective broods. There was laughter and hugs, and James seemed loose and happy. He avoided most questions about the war with a terse, “It's hard. Mostly it's hard on my boys.”

He ran at full speed the entire time he was on leave. Catching up on old friendships, visiting and chatting with chums from high school, having dinner with relatives. Soldiers on leave were always on the go, but James seemed to bring a certain urgency to it. Someone observed that it was almost like he was trying to live an entire lifetime, make every minute count, in the couple of weeks before he returned to Iraq and The Triangle
of Death. Those closest to him detected a sense of melancholy poking out through his normal cheerfulness and optimism.

He spent much of his time with Nick, Bryan, and Courtney. He wore the uniform in which he so proudly served and spoke to Bryan's and Courtney's classes at Lake City Middle School. The newspaper ran his picture in the paper. Father, two sons, and daughter took an all-day outing to Dollywood where they rode all the rides and stuffed themselves with hot dogs and cotton candy. Everybody took lots of snapshots. One showed him standing on a trampoline with the two younger children. In another he was sitting in uniform on a sofa with both sons.

Each of his kids was allowed to skip school for one day in order to do something special one on one with their father. Courtney wanted to go to West Town Mall to get a pedicure; father and daughter, laughing uproariously, took off their shoes together. Bryan chose Knoxville Center and a movie. Nick decided to go horseback riding in the Smoky Mountains.

James' melancholy appeared to build as his time at home came to an end. One morning he was standing at the kitchen window drinking coffee and watching the sunrise. When he turned back around, his eyes were moist.

That afternoon while the family was sitting around laughing and talking in the living room, James got up and returned a few minutes later carrying the uniform he wore home. He presented it to his Uncle Charles.

“To remember me by,” he explained.

“You'll be home in another few months,” he was reminded. “You'll soon have your twenty years in. What are you going to do?”

“I'm never getting out of the army. I don't know anything else.”

The day before he returned to Iraq, he took his brother Jeff aside for a confidential talk. He watched Bryan and Nick working on a bicycle in the front yard. He looked up at the clear bright sky. America was such a wonderful, safe place to live. No one was afraid here. Any time he felt the urge, he could jump in a car and drive down to the local convenience store for a Coke without having to worry about snipers and IEDs.

“Jeff,” he said, “some of my soldiers are not much older than Nick.
They're just kids. I don't want Nick or Bryan to ever have to be one of them.”

“You're their hero. They're like you. They're following in your footsteps.”

James nodded. He continued to watch the sky. Then he turned to his brother.

“I need you to make me a promise, Jeff. Look after my kids. I probably won't be coming back.”

A pair of First Platoon hummers sat parked in the night at the S-curve between Inchon and Battle Position 152, the darkest and most treacherous stretch of Malibu Road. Sergeant James Connell's platoon had drawn the midnight-to-0600 crater watch over the IED pit that took up most of the road. The explosion there that day had destroyed a Fourth Platoon truck and sent one of its occupants to the CASH in Baghdad. It would take the Rapid Road Repair crew a few days to get out and patch up the hole. In the meantime, somebody had to keep the cockroaches back.

The trucks, fronting opposite directions, were boxy silhouettes planted in the center of the road about 150 meters apart with the crater between them. Concertina in the bar ditches lined both sides of the road, except for the accesses left open to several nearby houses. Second Platoon had been busy most of the winter laying wire until it now stretched almost the entire length of the road between Inchon and 151.

It was a long, boring job on a hot, windy night in mid-May nearly four months after the start of the Surge. The wind blowing like that made the Joes uneasy. Foliage grew thick on either side of the road between the Iraqi houses—big date palms and eucalyptus that resembled twisted pines. Palm fronds rattled like old bones in the wind; the sorry excuse for a moon helped shadows creep and skulk about.

PFC Joe Anzak, PFC Chris Murphy, PFC Dan “Corny” Courneya, and Buck Sergeant E-5 Anthony Schober occupied the north truck facing toward FOB Inchon. Big Anzak was in the hatch manning the .50-caliber machine gun. NVs lent him that singular appearance of a goggle-eyed insect with its head stuck out of a hole, wary of intruders. He kept a particularly keen eye on the openings in the wire at the residence access
points. That would be where the bad guys came through if and when they made an appearance.

He kept hearing movement, seeing things. He swiveled the snout of his machine gun a full three-sixty, back and forth and around in constant movement, scanning through his NVs. The NVs turned everything liquid green and surreal.

Damn that wind!
It kept rattling things, creating furtive sounds, moans and creaking and low shrieks. Shadows stacked and unstacked so that you saw things in them that you knew weren't really there. Anzak hadn't uttered a single wisecrack in more than an hour.

“See something?” Sergeant Schober asked from below in the driver's seat. He felt Anzak's tension.

From Reno, Nevada, Schober, twenty-three, was lanky and intense. One of the more experienced soldiers in Delta Company, he had enlisted at seventeen to make the army his career and was currently on his third combat tour of duty in Iraq. His buds sometimes called him “The Gambler,” due more to his origins in Reno than his skill with cards. He seemed to lose more than he won.

Anzak was still looking.

“In
Manticore,
you never saw the monster until the last minute,” Corny commented bravely, trying to shore up his own nerves by making light of things. It was a sorry excuse for a wisecrack on a night like this and he dropped it.

“It's just shadows, I guess,” Anzak said finally.

Everywhere, everywhere, they're everywhere,
Corporal Mayhem sometimes joked in high-pitched imitation of comedian Ray Stevens. It wouldn't have been amusing tonight.

Anzak was sweating. It wasn't just from the heat and humidity. Soldiers in combat developed a kind of sixth sense after awhile. Something other than the wind was making the big gunner uneasy. Iraq could be a very scary place.

Nights like this was when Battalion's big guns received their most frequent workouts. From up toward Rushdi Mulla came the wind-muted
whumpft-whumpft-whumpft
of 105mm howitzers landing rounds in response
to a call for a fire mission. Anzak suppressed a cheer. He felt like calling in a mission of his own, blowing up some of the shadows that kept moving around in the woods.

“Fuck 'em up good,” Corny said from next to Schober.

“Some asshole out there with an iron pipe and two or three rockets,” Schober commented drily, “and so we pound him with a quarter-million dollars worth of artillery.”

“So long as it gets the job done,” PFC Murphy said from the back seat.

On the opposite side of the IED crater, the second hummer faced south toward 152. Three U.S. soldiers and one IA interpreter manned it. Sergeant Connell, having recently returned from leave, volunteered to take the watch to help spell his men. Platoon sergeants weren't required to stand guard duty, but the platoons were short-handed, Surge or not. He sat in the front passenger's seat.

Specialist Alex Jimenez was in the machine-gun hatch. As with Anzak in the other truck, the wind kept him nervous and alert.

PFC Byron Fouty in the back seat was always scared, wind or not. He had one of his precious books in his pocket and stared out the windows at the constant interchange of moonlight and shadow. A month ago in his MySpace entry, he called his time in Iraq “a messed-up year . . . coated with nothing but bad news, very little good news showing through.” Having recently learned that the 2
^nd
BCT was being extended in-country for an additional three months did nothing for his mood, which he described as “aggravated.”

The fourth man at the steering wheel was the thinly built Shiite interpreter named Sabah Barak, who looked to be about thirty or so. Having been detached from the 6
^th
Iraqi Army to share room and board with the Americans at Inchon, he possessed a self-deprecating sense of humor and an open honesty that made him generally well liked and trusted by the soldiers of Delta Company. He was one of the few Iraqis who had adapted to going to the toilet in the latrine rather than on the ground, which made him even better-liked.

Wearing NVs, Sergeant Connell and Fouty climbed out of their truck and negotiated around the IED crater to approach the north humvee. Joe
Anzak spotted them coming through his NVs. He gave the others heads-up so they wouldn't startle. Schober offered to move over from behind the wheel to let the sergeant and Fouty inside behind the hummer's steel plates.

“We're just checking, taking a look-see,” Sergeant Connell said.

Fouty flattened his back against the truck door, facing outboard with his M-4 at the ready, seemingly in a hurry to finish whatever business brought them here so they could return to the relative safety of their own truck. Snipers loved to catch soldiers out of their vehicles walking around.

“We're good to go, Sergeant,” Schober said.

“I brought an extra thermos of coffee.”

“Sounds good, Sergeant. Thanks.”

“Make sure nobody sleeps.”

Sergeant Connell had seemed on edge, not quite himself, ever since he returned from leave. More careful, cautious. He had confided in no one about the conversation he had had with his brother in Tennessee.

“It's been quiet,” Schober said, then chuckled. He knew the trite old movie line was bound to elicit a response from Anzak in the turret. Anzak obliged him.

“Yeah. Too quiet.”

Connell and Fouty visited a few more minutes before they departed for their own vehicle, talking softly while their eyes constantly probed roadside ditches and the foliage beyond the concertina.

“It's creepy out here tonight,” Fouty said as they headed back.

The sorry excuse for a moon slowly arced westward. Anzak scanned roadside shadows through his NVs. Palm fronds chattered in the dark like conspirators.

From the corner of his eye he detected a sudden movement—a shadow detaching itself from deeper shadows. He shouted a warning and swung his machine gun. By that time the road was overrun with shadows, all sprinting toward the two American HMMWVs.

Blood-chilling whoops of
“Allahu Akbar!”
suppressed the keening of the wind as masked men in black swarmed onto Malibu Road, their forms blending with the darkness in the wan light from the partial moon. Insurgents could not have selected a better night, what with the wind covering any noise they made and shifting confusing shadows among the restless trees. They hadn't been detected even when some of them crept up through the weeds to cut passages through the concertina to allow the main assault party to rush the trucks, catching the Americans by total surprise.

Attackers sprang like big cats onto the sloped rear hatches of both trucks and slammed grenades down through the turrets, past the helmeted heads of astonished machine gunners. Detonating grenades lit up the insides of the trucks, flashing and flickering in the windows like photo flashbulbs going off. The trucks shuddered on their wheels, convulsing from inner turmoil. Screams of pain and panic tore from the interiors.

Having stunned their prey with grenades, the aggressors returned like lions on mortally wounded prey. Several Jihadists yanked Alex Jimenez out of his turret seat. He attempted to fight back, but he was dazed and bleeding from shrapnel having ripped into the flesh of his lower body. The insurgents overpowered him by sheer numbers, threw him down on the road, and dragged him away.

Armored humvees were double-edged swords in that while they protected occupants, they could also turn and become traps. Men surprised inside at close quarters found themselves at a supreme disadvantage in which they had to either shoot through open windows or leave the vehicle in order to engage. Sergeant Connell and Sabah Barak in the front seat had no chance to do either. Both were either dead or near death from the grenades landing on the seat between them.