Sunrise Over Fallujah (17 page)

“You never can tell,” Coles started. “You never can tell…”

You could tell.

Two A-10s flew overhead and circled us, looking for bad guys. The first medevac chopper came and took Victor and Jonesy, who had a piece of shrapnel cut through his chin, and the two PR guys. A 3
^rd
ID company rolled up and deployed around us. The next medevac took a cameraman and Pendleton.

I felt pressed by a huge weight, like every bad minute you had ever had in your life had come back and was inside your chest and just sitting there. It was like having a huge vulture eat at your stomach and being too tired to do anything about it. I couldn't stop crying as we made our way back through the streets of Baghdad to the Green Zone.

“Stay alert!” Coles said.

“No.” I heard myself say the word. I wasn't sure if it was loud enough for anyone else to hear. I didn't want to be alert anymore. I
didn't want to be a good soldier. I just wanted to shut down this whole damn war.

“Stay alert,” Coles said again.

I straightened up and focused on the low rooftops, barely visible through the dust rising from the vehicles ahead. I wiped my sweaty palm on my pants leg and gripped the stock of the weapon in my lap.

Back in the Zone, Major Sessions got us together in the officers' tent. Her face was swollen badly. One eye was shut and she couldn't talk clearly. Captain Miller was there, trying to get Sessions to lie down.

“We'll have a memorial service this Sunday,” Sessions said.

She was crying, too. I was glad to see her tears. I wanted the whole world to feel the pain.

We went back to the quarters and guys started asking us what had happened. We just told them that Pendleton was dead and that we would let them know the rest in the morning.

I was lying across the bed when Marla came in.

“I just figured it out,” she said. Her face was twitching in anger. “Somebody knew all the damned details. Somebody knew all the damned details and passed it on.”

When we thought of it we realized that she was right. The insurgents had had time to set up the IEDs along the road, waiting for our convoy. We had taken a different road out than the one we had taken going in, but still they were waiting for us. Somebody had called them. Had given them our route.

Later, as I lay in the darkness, I thought about Pendleton's two little girls. How he had talked about sending them to college. I hadn't even looked at their pictures when he was showing them around. Oh, God, why hadn't I looked at the pictures?

The memorial for Pendleton was held two days after we watched a plane lift off with his remains from Baghdad Airport. Earlier that morning we had received word that Saddam's two sons had been killed in a firefight. Reporters were running around shoving mikes into faces and getting the responses they expected. Al Jazeera was trying to spice up their stories with talk about whether the sons' bodies should have been displayed.

“They're trying to play it down the middle.” Evans was sipping from a plastic cup of coffee. “I bet they're coming off a lot different when they talking to the Arabs.”

What was the right way to report a war? A neat list of names in a hometown newspaper? Maybe your picture in
The New York Times
?

That was all that mattered. Nothing was ever settled. It was just who was dying and who was coming home.

Darcy showed up with her plastic mug full of coffee. She sat at the end of the table and cupped it in her hands. She was still standoffish, but drawing closer.

Coles came a bit later and told us that Jonesy was back with a puffy chin, but Victor couldn't make it.

“He wanted to come but they ordered him onto the plane for the hospital in Ramstein,” Coles said. “They think they can save two of his fingers. They can definitely save the thumb. That's good.”

That's good
. I imagined Victor on the streets back home. Would the streets be less hard because he had lost two fingers?

The memorial was in front of the tent we were using for a chapel. We lined up in four rows. First, Second, and Third Squads were in the first row, with other CA Squads behind us. Some guys from the 3
^rd
were there, too. Miller was crying. So was Jonesy.

The ceremony was brief. Pendleton's boots, M-16, and Kevlar were on the small altar. We stood for the national anthem. He asked if anybody wanted to say anything about Pendleton. No one did. No one really knew him that much. Finally Coles stepped forward and took a paper from his pocket.

“Lord, have mercy on us as we feel the pain of loss, and the endless emptiness that marks the passing of Corporal Pendleton; and have mercy on us as we feel sorrow for ourselves, and for all the angel warriors for whom we feel kinship. Let us fear death, but let it not dwell within us. Protect us, O Lord, and be merciful unto us. Amen.”

The chaplain spoke of the need to move on, that those who find strength in the Lord would renew their strength and mount up with wings as eagles. They would run and not be weary. They would walk and not faint.

I felt like fainting.

“Roll Call Officer!”

Major Sessions stepped forward. She lifted her clipboard, glanced down at it and quickly up again. “Pendleton!” she called out.

The moment of silence was crushing.

“Corporal Phillip Pendleton!”

Another moment of silence, and then the mournful sound of the bugle sounding taps filled the tent. The final roll call for Pendleton was completed. Two soldiers took his medals and laid them in front of his weapons.

The ceremony was over. We drifted away from the tent and went about the business of trying to walk and talk among the living.

The day began badly. The smell from the river drifted over us like the stink of doom. Nothing was right. I tried to push the vision of Pendleton out of my head but it was impossible. Who was he? Why didn't I know more about him? Why didn't I sit with him and talk to him and try to understand what made him who he was?

“Let's go find Marla,” Jonesy said.

We found her in the corner of the dayroom in front of the television. There was a game show on, but I knew she wasn't really watching it.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“No,” she said.

May 29, 2003

Hey Mom!

Go on with your bad self getting online. I'm really proud of you. I know you go down to the Countee Cullen branch with Mrs. Lucas to use their computers but be careful at night. Okay—so first thing, thank you for the dolls. Everybody in the church must have donated one. We gave them out to girls just north of the Green Zone—the safe zone here. And, just as you said in your letter, the little Arab girls really went for the Black dolls. These little Iraqi girls are very sweet. Please thank everybody from the church for me. Jonesy is taking some pictures and I'll get some printed up for you as soon as I can.

If we weren't at war with these people this would be a great place to spend some time. You would really be impressed by the mosques. If you saw the one up at Kazimayn it would take your breath away.

Second thing—the women in Iraq mostly don't wear veils. They dress like ordinary businesspeople. Sometimes you see women in veils but they're often from another part of the Middle East. They do cover their hair and mostly don't wear makeup. In a video store they sell tapes of belly dancers and every guy over here has at least one tape. Except me, of course, since I'm not interested in wriggling ladies. Okay, maybe just not wriggling Iraqi ladies. Did you know they also have Christians over here and a Christian church? According to the locals it's no big deal.

I can't always get online but now that you're on I'll try to find an in and email you as much as possible. Much love to you and Pops.

Robin

We got an official notification of Victor's transfer
and a brief note about Pendleton. Colonel King, from the 422
^nd
, came by and said a prayer with the God Squad. The colonel said he had written to Pendleton's widow.

I don't know why I kept reading the newspaper about what's going on over here. I could just look around but then I'd only see a small piece of it. What I'm seeing is confusing. Marla put it best.

“You go out and you see people shopping,” she said. “Women buying onions and bread or people having coffee. Then down the street somebody gets blown up. Jesus, it's weird.”

It was weird—weird and unnerving. Somebody buying onions, somebody getting their fingers blown off, somebody dying.

“Hey, Jonesy, how you doing?” I called across the tent.

“I'm good, man,” he said. He was lying on his bunk humming to himself. “How you doing?”

“You want to hear something crazy?” I asked.

“Go ahead.”

“I was wondering about Victor's monkey,” I said. “Whether he should have kept it. Isn't that stupid? I mean, to think that a monkey was going to make any kind of difference?”

“At the service for Pendleton I was wondering if God made a difference,” Jonesy said. “I guess if I'm wondering about God, you can wonder about the monkey.”

The whole place is in an uproar. We got word that nobody is to leave the Green Zone in groups of less than seven and with only up-armored vehicles. Marla told Captain Coles to go find out what was happening and he got pissed because he didn't like Marla's lack of respect.

“Okay, sir, don't go and find out,” Marla said. “But they're not going to tell me anything because I'm not an officer.”

Coles shook his head but he went.

Jonesy had a toothache but Miller wouldn't give him any painkillers. She told him to go and see the dentist.

“Captain Miller, I am not stupid,” Jonesy said. “If I go to the dentist he might need to drill my tooth or pull the sucker, which will put me in more pain than I'm in now.”

“And he might save you some pain down the road,” Miller said. “Did you ever think of that?”

“That's all right, Captain.” Jonesy lay back on his bunk. “I'll just lay here and suffer because no one cares about how I feel, anyway.”

We all knew that Miller would give him some painkillers in the end but a lecture would go with it. With all her bad-mouthing, she was becoming the mother of the CA Squads; I think she enjoyed it, too.

Coles came back with the news. It wasn't good.

“A marine unit found a bunch of civilians dead in a garage,” Coles said.

“They think Americans killed them?” Evans asked.

“They don't know who killed them,” Coles said. “But they found them with their hands bound behind their backs and all five were shot in the back of the head. And they were all Sunnis, so something is going down that doesn't smell right.”

“Were they working with us?” Miller asked. “Maybe they were killed because they were being looked on as traitors or something.”

“From what I gathered the thinking is that they were killed by one of the Khalid death squads,” Coles said.

We had all heard about the death squads. There was some sort of vague connection between them and the people we were pushing toward the leadership of the new Iraq. Before the invasion the Sunnis had been in power and the Shiites had been pushed around pretty good. Saddam was a Sunni and had put all his peeps in the key positions. Now that Saddam was out and we had put the Shiites in power, there was a sudden explosion of mysterious killings.

“Why aren't we trying to stop these death squads?” I asked Coles.

“Maybe we are,” Coles answered. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

The whole thing sucked big-time. Every day we were hearing about stuff that had nothing to do with democracy or freedom. There were stories about looting, about some Iraqis being put out of their homes so that others, the ones we were backing, could move in, and stories about Iraqis becoming suddenly rich and nobody knowing why. Now the talk was about death squads.

Coles went on to say that some of the victims had been tortured. There was a whole battle going on around us that we didn't have any grip on, that we really didn't know about.

Some of the construction guys, engineers, started talking about bodies that had been found at the power plants north of Baghdad.

“Those dudes were just executed,” one of them said. “It had to be other Iraqis. There wasn't anyone else around.”

I thought about a basketball game I had played against Lane High School. Lane had the better team but we had the lead. The coach signaled for a time-out and we gathered around the bench and he started yelling at me because I had kept looking at the scoreboard.

“The game is on the floor!” he had screamed.

Yeah, that was true, but the win was on the scoreboard. I knew
when the time ran out, whoever had the most points was the winner. I didn't know if we were winning here in Iraq or not. If we just talked about dead people, about bodies lying in the streets, then we were winning easy. But somehow it wasn't about who was doing the most killing. Jonesy had said it best.

“The only dying that means anything is your own,” he had said. “For everybody else, you just shakes your head and keep on keeping on.”

So how did we know if we were winning or not? And if we weren't winning anything, what was the dying for?

Coles came over to me on Saturday night. He looked exhausted. I thought the war was finally getting to him.

“So, Birdy, what do you think about this war?” he asked.

“I don't think I like war,” I said.

“It teaches you things, though,” he said. “What it's taught me is that I love my wife and family more than I knew, and a lot more than I ever told them. Doesn't that suck? I mean, having a wife and family and not getting around to telling them how much you love them. Doesn't that just suck?”

“If you know it now, it doesn't suck,” I said.

Captain Coles shrugged, patted my shoulder, and headed off to bed.

I thought of what Jonesy had said about keeping score. I knew there were stories about the Iraqi police we were training, that they were mostly Shiites more than willing to kill Sunnis anywhere in Baghdad. The thing was that killing was taking on a different
meaning to me. To take a human life had always been so heavy a deal. It had always meant that some terrible thing had happened, some horrible wrong had occurred that brought people to the far ends of sanity. But now I was willing to kill because I was afraid of being killed, willing to kill people I had never met, had never argued with, and who, perhaps, had never wanted to hurt me. But I was afraid and so I would kill.

And now, when I was hearing about the Sunnis being killed, or the bombs going off in the marketplace, the only thing I could think of was that I was so glad it wasn't me lying in the streets of Baghdad, or Fallujah or Mosul. I was glad that it was not my blood being cleaned off the streets or getting swept up on the roads outside of the city.

Images flicked through my mind. Pendleton's body awkwardly twisted in death, the pictures of his girls still in his pocket against his cooling skin. The parts of the marine on the busy street. Muslim women in black, their hands over their mouths as if they were holding in the screams that would reveal their souls. The old grandmother wailing over the body of the boy.

The amazing thing was the randomness of the dying. If you were American, your picture might be in some daily newspaper. If you died on a slow news day, your mother's grief might be captured in a thirty-second spot. If you were Iraqi, there would be no mention of your dying unless you could be called an insurgent.

“The only dying that means anything is your own,” Jonesy had said.

Amen to that.

We stayed in the Green Zone for the next two weeks. All right with me. I didn't want to leave. I took care of a lot of necessary business. I cleaned my M-16, all of my uniforms, and even my boots. I also took out a subscription to
The Source
, mostly to keep up with the music scene.

The only work we did for the entire time was unload a truckload of gifts from the Free Will Baptist Church in Martinsburg, West Virginia. We had a big debate over whether salami was pork or beef, decided it must have been pork, and kept all the salamis, the cookies, and the candy bars for ourselves. We gave out the canned foods, toys, powdered milk, and toothpaste to the Iraqis.