None Left Behind (7 page)

Hardly anyone dared doze off. Bad guys could sneak right up on the trucks and no one would know it until they were right
there
.

Around midnight, the sound of a distant explosion reverberated across the land, further escalating tension inside the trucks. Mayhem wasn't
supposed to be here, not this time. Except for Stop-Loss, he would have been a civilian by now, hanging around the beaches back in Florida ogling the foxes in their teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy bikinis.

He thought about going home at the end of all this and never coming back to this shitbag country where the babes covered up their faces, hajjis shot off AK-47s in the air every time they got drunk, and where American soldiers in The Triangle of Death were the biggest targets in the world.

For the first platoon to venture onto Malibu Road and
stay,
daybreak seemed an eternity coming. But arrive it did at last, as all things in time do, with a burst of color that first illuminated the sluggish stretch of Euphrates River visible from the curve in the road. After touching the river gently, slow sunlight melted yellow butter over an expanse of forest and undergrowth before touching the roofs of the few houses in the vicinity and reaching the covey of four humvees arrayed in defensive posture on the blacktop.

Corporal Mayhem Menahem opened his eyes when the sunlight caressed his face through the window. He blinked, surprised that he had managed to doze intermittently between watches after all. He looked out and saw an Iraqi man way down the road herding a flock of sheep from one side to the other, a scene from the Old Testament, including the crooked shepherd's staff the man carried. The muezzin were calling the faithful to prayer at the mosque on down the road, a five-times-a-day event. The magnified voices sounded like racing go-carts.

Things appeared so much less threatening in the full light of day than they had last night when most of Fourth Platoon soundly expected the enemy to hit them. A few even considered the possibility that they might never see another sunrise. Michael Smith, doing his turn in the turret, shifted to a more comfortable position and grinned down at Pitcher sitting behind the steering wheel. Both of them seemed a little abashed that, in the darkness, they had succumbed to their fears and imagination. Hell, there wasn't a damn thing out there after all, was there?

“How many armies over the centuries do you suppose have seen the sun rise like this over the Garden of Eden?” Mayhem mused.

“I really don't give a rat's ass,” Smith decided. “What I need is a hot cup of coffee.”

They ate in shifts, half on watch while the other half heated canteen cups of coffee over heat tabs and rummaged through the trailer for MREs. They stood around inside the circle of hummers flapping their arms against the morning chill that would quickly become a morning scorcher, farting, yawning, joking a little, and behaving in general the way soldiers do in an all-male environment.

Even before everyone finished eating, Iron Claw escorted up a convoy of army engineers with chainsaws and axes, along with an IA (Iraqi Army) interpreter who would remain with the platoon. Lieutenant Tomasello put everyone not pulling security to work with the engineers clearing timber and brush on the river side of the road where they would erect blast walls and stretch tents for Delta Company's first battle position along the road. It was going to be a primitive site at best—living in tents with few amenities. By comparison, the Battalion FOB at Yusufiyah was the Waldorf Astoria. Sergeant Parrish dubbed the budding patrol base Fort Apache; Smith referred to it as the Alamo.

From his experience of having been to Iraq once before, Mayhem questioned the tactical advisability of building in the curve of the road, which limited visibility in both directions. Lieutenant Tomasello agreed with him, but it wasn't their decision to make. Work continued.

Neighborhood residents shunned the newcomers. A few ventured out onto the road to watch from a distance, but almost no pedestrian came by, unusual in a country where everybody was constantly out walking.

“What, no welcoming committee?” Michael Smith wisecracked.

“You probably won't be getting cake and cookies,” Lieutenant Tomasello said.

Mayhem looked up from work once to wipe sweat and happened to notice a rare, lone pedestrian. He was big and young, maybe nineteen or so, with his head bare. He wore baggy, filthy trousers and a shirt that might once have been any color but was now a dingy gray. His most striking characteristic, however, was the way he walked. He weaved back and forth, dragging one crippled leg and leaning forward sharply with each step to throw the bad leg forward.
Scrape, Thunk! Scrape, Thunk!
Stalking down the road in the gait of a physically challenged T-Rex.

A short while later, along came a gawky teenager on a rusty bicycle, pumping along bare-headed wearing sandals and a robe even dingier than the crazy legs guy's shirt. That was it until in the afternoon when the owner of the rather nice house down the road and his skinny son timidly took the initiative to come over. Mayhem observed them standing at the edge of the road, smiling and looking interested. He went up to them, along with Lieutenant Tomasello and the IA terp (interpreter).

The kid looked about thirteen or fourteen, wiry and strong. The father was short and rather stocky with a broad face, a scraggly beard, amicable brown eyes, and that perpetual smile. He said his name was Abu Ahmed Rafi Ibrahim Al-Hasan Al-Tikriti. Mayhem blinked. The terp, whose name was Sabah Barak, laughed softly and explained how, in Arabic culture, names were made up of a combination of the names of a man's grandfather, father and given names, along with tribal affiliations.
Abu
at the beginning meant a man had a son. Simply by looking at a man's name, you could tell to whom he was related, where he was from, and even where his loyalties lay.

The kid's name was Nezham. That was enough for his size.

Both appeared genuinely glad to have the Americans move into the neighborhood. Insurgents, the father explained through the terp, were vicious beasts that killed anyone who opposed them, including women and children and unborn babies. Americans would drive them out so the people could live in peace. Mayhem didn't know how much of that to believe, having learned from his previous tour to trust no Iraqi completely. If the guy was legit, he had a set as big as basketballs. Sooner or later, the insurgents would make him pay for consorting with foreign soldiers.

Abu Ahmed and Nezham went beyond lip service and volunteered to help in clearing the woodlot. For the next two days, they labored cheerfully alongside the soldiers in clearing a substantial portion of the woodlands. Fourth Platoon soldiers slept better at nights in their trucks in front of Abu Ahmed's house, having grown to trust him. They assumed he would notify them of anything suspicious. They also felt less vulnerable after having survived that first crucial night. They were also exhausted from playing lumberjack.

The engineers were about ready to start putting up blast walls when brass showed up from Battalion and declared that the blind curve was a shitty place to build a patrol base. Mayhem snorted in disgust. If the assholes at Battalion had had their heads out of their rectums, they could have saved everybody a lot of work and several tense nights forted up in trucks.

The brass strode across the road with Lieutenant Tomasello to look over Abu Ahmed's house. It was the same scoured dirty brown as most ordinary Iraqi houses, one story tall, with a flat roof that had a lip around the edges about three feet tall and two feet thick. Larger and nicer than most houses in the area, its five rooms would be quite adequate for a platoon base. It sat about fifty steps off the road in a grove of palms, but the open roof allowed views over and through the palms to an expanse of the road in either direction.

“It'll do,” the officer from Battalion declared. “Cut down the trees and erect a blast wall around it.”

So this was how they were going to repay Abu Ahmed and his son for their toiling—by kicking them out of their house?

Surprisingly, Abu Ahmed took his dispossession cheerfully enough. Of course, the U.S. would certainly compensate him generously. Some of his neighbors showed up with flat-bedded bongo trucks, and the Americans helped load the family's few possession onto them. The departure was cordial enough. Ahmed, his son Nezham, and all the neighbors with trucks insisted on shaking hands with every American.

While this was going on, the man with the crazy legs stalked past.
Scrape, Thunk!
He stopped and looked, then kept on going.
Scrape, Thunk!
Ahmed made a screwing motion with his finger against his temple.

“He is not right,” he said through Sabah Barak, the interpreter. “He was once shot in the head.

By Americans or by insurgents?
Mayhem wondered.

War is such that just when you begin to forget you're in one, it comes back to bite you in the ass. Mayhem's squad and several of the Iraqis, including Ahmed and his son, were gathered in the road saying last farewells when, suddenly, the air filled with the bloodcurdling whistle of an incoming mortar round.

“Holy shit!
Incoming!”

Corporal Mayhem and Pitcher the new SAW gunner were standing next to their humvee with skinny little Nezham when the first round impacted only a few yards away, erupting in a fireball. The blast knocked Mayhem off his feet. As he slammed to the road, he heard shrapnel and road debris ricocheting off the truck. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the Iraqi boy being lifted off his feet and flying through the air like a foul ball until he landed on the other side of the road.

Soldiers scrambled for cover, some running for their armored chariots, other diving underneath them as mortar rounds exploded in a concentrated
area around the vehicles, filling the air with sound and fury, smoke, fire, and shrapnel.

A shelling could be a terrifying event, especially if you were out in the open and explosions were walking all around and over you and there was nothing between them and you except God. Mayhem thought he might dig a hole with his fingernails right into the concrete.

He lifted his helmeted head an inch off the blistering blacktop. What he saw only a few feet away filled him with shock. Pitcher lay face down on the road, bloodstains on his back, his legs and arms working like an insect pinned down with a needle through its torso. Casting aside concerns for his own safety, seeing only a fellow soldier in trouble, Mayhem crawled to him as shells continued to stomp around in terrible eruptions all over the road.

“Medic! Medic!”

Doc Bryan Brown, the platoon's African-American medic and, at twenty, one of the youngest soldiers in the platoon, appeared magically at Mayhem's side. Cool and composed as he was, no one would ever have suspected he was under fire for the first time. Together, the two soldiers dragged the wounded SAW gunner to the cover of the nearest hummer. Blood dribbled from his nose and ears and his vest and trousers were ripped, exposing more injuries. Flying shrapnel had caught him in full flight and did a job on him. He was still alive and conscious.

“Mayhem . . .
Mayhem . . .
?”

“Hang in there, dude. You're going to be all right.”

“Am I going to die, Doc?
Am I dying?”

“Easy there, Pitcher,” Doc Brown cooed, ripping open field dressings while still lying on his belly. “Your plates took most of it. You won't die, do you hear me, man? I won't let you die.”

It ended almost as quickly and unexpectedly as it began. Smoke hung heavy in the air among the trucks, swirling. The air tasted bitter from burnt cordite. Men called out to each other. Questions, reassurances.

A 60mm mortar was a relatively short-range weapon, which meant the fire had to originate from somewhere nearby, either from in the woods along the river, probably on the far side, or from among the scattering of
huts down the road. Whichever, the perpetrators were already gone, fading away into the countryside like barracuda into the sea. No one had gotten so much as a shot at them. And, of course, it wouldn't do any good to call in artillery or mortars; there were no firm targets, and Americans never indiscriminately dropped hell into built-up areas.

Abu Ahmed discovered his fallen son. His wailing penetrated the ringing in Mayhem's ears. It was enough to make angels cringe.

Neither Pitcher nor Ahmed's boy were mortally injured, although both would be in recovery for quite some time. A QRF (quick reaction force) from Battalion rushed in and evacuated them to the Green Zone in Baghdad. Fourth Platoon never saw Pitcher again. He had a million-dollar wound. But for his armor, he would probably have gone home in a box.

The smoke laid, the sun shone bright again, and Iraqis down the road came out of their houses to stare. Mayhem stood in the road, blinking and filled with helpless rage. Delta Company had suffered its first casualty on Malibu Road. Insurgents had drawn first blood—and there wasn't a damned thing the platoon could do about it. The fuckers down there standing in the road must have known what was coming down, who the attackers were—but they were too frightened to say anything. None of them trusted the Americans to stay and protect them.

“That,” Lieutenant Tomasello commented drily, referring to the mortars, “was the official welcoming committee. Does it make everyone feel at home?”

Although the ordinary Iraqi did not support insurgency or al-Qaeda terrorists, he had lived under an oppressive government for so many years that he found it safer to stand back, keep his mouth shut, and wait for the Americans to leave—which they would do sooner rather than later. People were being forced to choose among three conflicting sides, either of which left them in the middle. They could side with the occupying infidels and their promise of freedom and democracy; they could revert back to the Sunni-dominated terror and tyranny of the old regime; or they could submit to Islamic fundamentalists and their petty, cutthroat society.