Sunrise Over Fallujah (5 page)

The section they were searching was only about a hundred yards deep. Some guys from the 3
^rd
said they had received fire from a rocket-propelled grenade from somewhere.

“So don't fall asleep!” a square-shouldered corporal said.

If we were scared, the Iraqis seemed even more terrified. Some of the men waved white rags in the air, showing they were surrendering. Most of these men were old. The women spoke to us in Arabic.

“Ahmed, what are they saying?” I asked.

“Mostly they're saying they don't want to fight,” Ahmed said. “That they're not in the army. Some are saying ‘Welcome to the Americans.'”

Me, Marla, and Jonesy got out of our Humvee and walked into the first building we came to with our weapons high, sweeping the rooms, checking for movement. We kicked in the doors, just as we did back in training. But in training I was just trying to get points for doing it right. Here I was holding my breath. Here I was trying not to tremble.

I couldn't tell if the house we were in was an apartment house or one family. It was neat. There were onions on the counter and a mesh bag with eggs. A magazine on the table had a picture of Oprah Winfrey on the cover with something written in Arabic under it. It was a nice picture of her, so I guessed it was an entertainment magazine.

“I got something! I got it!” a voice called out from down the hall. “Somebody get a translator!”

“Ahmed!” I called to him.

“Coming in!” Marla called as we approached the room to let the guy inside know who was carrying the weapon.

Marla went in first and then me and Ahmed. There were three people, an old woman, a boy younger than me, and an old man, sitting on a couch covered with what looked like an old sheet. A small girl stood at the end of the couch, her elbows on the armrest, her dark eyes watching us closely.

The guy from the 3
^rd
, a big, thick-necked sergeant, was holding up a tube. It was an RPG launcher.

“Ask them who this belongs to!” the sergeant barked at me. Did I look like an Iraqi to him?

Ahmed asked the Iraqis and they all started talking at once. The sergeant was on his radio.

“They're saying it was their uncle's and it was here since the war with Iran,” Ahmed said. “Nobody knows how to use it.”

The sergeant repeated what Ahmed said into his radio. Marla took the tube and sniffed it. She handed it back to the sergeant and he sniffed it.

“Yeah, it's been recently fired!” the sergeant said.

We covered the two old people while the sergeant searched the young guy. I thought he might have been my age, maybe a year either way. He was babbling in Iraqi and broken English.

“I love America! I love America!” he was saying.

Another infantry guy came in and they began tearing the place apart looking for more weapons. The sergeant told us to shoot the kid if he moved.

The old woman started crying and pleading. Marla tried to calm her. Then she took off her helmet and the woman saw that Marla was a female. She tried to take her hand and kiss it. Marla didn't want the woman kissing her hand and tried to get her to sit down. The man, gray-haired and toothless, was babbling away. I felt as if I had to pee.

“He's saying that the boy is good, that he doesn't fight anybody,” Ahmed said.

“You believe him?”

“They have the weapon,” Ahmed said, with a shrug.

The woman stood up again.

“Sit down!” Marla said, indicating with her hand what she wanted the woman to do.

The woman's eyes widened and she got down on her knees.

Ahmed said something in Arabic that I guessed meant “sit down,” but the woman got up and took a picture from the counter. She took it out of its frame and handed it to Marla. Her hands were shaking as she spoke in Arabic.

“She saying that he's her grandson and he's a good boy,” Ahmed said when the old woman went on.

“Take him outside!” the sergeant snapped.

We started to take the boy and the grandmother let out a wail that filled the room. The old man fell to his knees and began to pray. The little girl began to wail, too. When the old man started to stand I pointed my rifle at him and he got back down on his knees and held his hands palm-up and began to pray again.

“Tell her we'll take care of her grandson,” Marla said.

Ahmed began talking to the woman, who was tearing at her clothes and crying almost hysterically. When she saw Marla put the photograph down she got up and gave it back to her.

“She wants you to think of her because you are a woman,” Ahmed said.

We started out and I told Marla to put her Kevlar back on. She was biting her lip, but she got it back on. The 3
^rd
ID guys had the Iraqi kid by one wrist and his hair and took him outside. We reached the street and four or five other infantry guys jumped down from the truck they were on.

They pushed the kid down into the dirt as an officer came over. The sergeant who had found the launcher was explaining what had happened in the house, when a shot rang out.

A gunner on a Humvee spotted the shooter and opened up. The sniper was in a second-story window; I saw the rifle go spinning into the air and his arm fly up as he fell backward into the darkness of the room.

The kid on the ground jumped up and started to run.

The gunners' first bullets kicked up the dust near his feet. The next spun him completely around. The last knocked him backward.

Some 3
^rd
ID guys headed toward the house where the shot had come from. Two heavily armed soldiers walked slowly toward the kid's body lying in the street. I didn't want to see him, but I couldn't help walking toward the still figure.

The boy's body was curled forward, head bent toward his knees. There was a dark stain on the front of his light blue shirt, a triangle of blood spread on the ground in front of him. One hand was closed and one opened, the fingers slightly spread. I felt myself holding my breath. I moved the muzzle of my weapon away from him. It was harder to move my eyes away.

The grandmother ran from the building. She looked heavier than she had in the apartment. Her mouth was open, a black hole in her gray, lined face. Her lips moved but there was no sound. She gestured toward the boy, took a tentative step to him, then stumbled forward and fell on her knees. She looked at him and
then up at me. Her anguished eyes pleaded hopelessly. I walked away. Away from the house, away from the body, away from the grandmother. The buildings across the street, the soldiers moving cautiously past them, were unreal through my tears. It was a horror movie badly out of focus, with only the images in my head crystal clear.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in An
Nasiriyah. Ahmed did some translating. We talked to some children who gathered around us, pointing at our weapons, waving to us. Some of them imitated us, walking the way they thought we walked. I guess we looked funny to them in our desert camouflage, Kevlar helmets, and Molle vests.

Were they so used to the killing that they could go on with their lives so easily? Did the wailing of the woman for her grandson seem too familiar to them? They were only kids, for God's sake.

The children either wore American-type clothes or long shirts that came down to their ankles. Some spoke to me in Arabic. I forced smiles but my mind was in chaos. The sight of the dead boy had scared me, as had the walking away from him. I looked over at the small crowd of Iraqis gathered around the body. They were wrapping him in cloth.

Some 3
^rd
ID guys came over to where I was standing with some candy and started passing it out.

“They're like all kids,” the guy next to me, a stocky sergeant with a southern accent, said. He offered me the box.

“Yeah.” I took the box.

“You get used to the killing.” He said the words softly. “It don't help much at night when you're trying to sleep, but you get used to it.”

March 25, 2003

Dear Uncle Richie
,

I'm writing this letter but I probably won't mail it. I probably won't save it, either. Today I saw a stranger die. I saw what the M-16s could do. I don't know why the kid started to run. Maybe he was afraid. But what happened was that he was killed, and we left him lying on the ground. At first I was really sad, depressed. Then I felt myself trying to shut it out. I started by telling myself that he was probably one of the guys who wanted to kill Americans, but that was a dead-end street. It just didn't work. What works is to put it outside of you. To let it be not part of who you are. I know I won't ever be able to talk about it. I wonder if that is the reason you never talked about anything that happened in Vietnam.

On the way back to our base I saw that Jonesy's hand was shaking. Nothing else, just his hand. I thought about putting my hand on his, but I didn't. None of us in First Squad talked about what had happened.

The medical truck was all goodness. So were the medics who deal with Civil Affairs. They put out white tables and took out boxes of supplies. All the Iraqis recognized what was going on and started edging forward.

“You know what they have over here that they don't have at home?” Marla asked me as she leaned against the fender of the Humvee. Her hip was touching mine.

“Arabs?”

“Lame people,” she answered. “Most of them look all right, but you see a lot of people with birth defects and things they would have taken care of in the States.”

She was right. There were more crippled people and blind people in Kuwait and Iraq than I had ever seen at home. For many of the Iraqis it would be the only medical treatment they'd ever get. The two guys and two women doing the medical stuff treated anything, from chest colds to rashes. It was weird. On one side of the square, there were people washing the ground where the kid was killed. On the other side our medics were looking at sores and passing out antibiotics.

And there were some Iraqis who just stood silently.

The kids began to get over their shyness once they saw adults talking to the medical people. They surrounded us, pulling at our gear, asking for candy, sometimes just trying to touch us. One kid had on a Derek Jeter Yankees T-shirt. I liked that.

I kept my eyes away from the house we had searched. Over and over I told myself that the kid had used the rocket
launcher, that he had tried to kill Americans. Maybe he even had already killed Americans, and he was the enemy. In a way I was cool with that. In my head I could deal with his being dead. But it had all happened so quickly. One moment he was alive and he was scared, as I was scared with him and for him. And then he was dead. I had never been that close to anyone who was killed. I had heard the boy talking, had seen his dark eyes darting around the room. Then I saw his body jerking in the dusty street, as if he had already been separated from it. I wanted not to think.

Marla was back up in the gunner's turret and I headed back to the Humvee.

“Yo, Marla, how you doing?” I asked.

“If you see a bus schedule for Dix Hills, Long Island, save it for me,” she said. “I'm ready to leave this mother.”

“Tell me about it.”

We weren't going home, of course. We were still wandering northward toward Baghdad. We weren't at the front of the action and I was glad of that, but there was enough going on where we were to keep us on our toes.

“Who's supposed to be the bad guys here?” Jonesy asked as he slipped behind the wheel of the Humvee. “We got people standing around looking like civilians one minute and then the next they're pulling heat from their closets.”

What I wanted, more than anything else, was to go to bed. I felt more tired than I could imagine, as if my very bones were drained
of marrow. Captain Coles came over and said that we were chang ing direction. He seemed jumpy, too. Darcy was with him.

“Where we going?” Jonesy asked.

“The 204
^th
Medical called asking for some help south of An Najaf,” Coles said. “That's about a hundred and some miles northeast of here. There was some heavy fighting and the Infantry suffered a number of wounded and a half-dozen KIAs. Their medical unit is dealing with the infantry and the worst of the wounded Iraqis. They want us to deal with some of the minor wounds of the Iraqis.”

“We going to do it?” I asked, instantly knowing that we would.

Coles looked at me, then pivoted sharply and walked away.

The medical team attached to us consisted of two physician's assistants, one male and one female, and two technicians. They seemed okay, dedicated really, and they worked well with the Iraqi women and kids. They hauled along a trailer behind their Humvee, and I watched as they loaded up.

“We're moving too fast,” Marla said. “How the heck can we fly past these villages and just leave them as if they're not Iraqis and we're not invading their country?”

“I bet this all looks good on paper,” Jonesy said.

I asked Marla if she wanted me to take a turn on the squad gun.

“Don't get careless,” she answered. She took a drink from her water bottle and swallowed hard.

My throat was dry, too. The water was warm but it felt good in my mouth as I settled down behind the machine gun. I shook my
shoulders to loosen up. I wasn't afraid when we were moving. It was a different feeling when we were out of the vehicle and roaming around the villages.

Second squad, with Ahmed along to interpret, was going to lead the way with the medical team next, and then us. The whole route was supposed to be under control of the 3
^rd
. I could only hope it was. Our little convoy of four vehicles took off. Darcy popped up in the Two Squad gun position and waved. Jonesy measured the distance in time between vehicles and eased onto the open road.

I felt vulnerable in the turret, as if every gun had an eye on the end of it that was looking for me. I felt ashamed of what I was thinking.

I wanted my mind on the road and what was happening around me. I turned sideways, trying to see if anything was coming behind me. I kept the gun sights moving along the building lines. We passed one low building with tables and chairs and men eating and drinking. They pointed at us as we passed, and when I pointed the gun at them, one of them opened his shirt as if to dare me to fire at him.

I reminded myself of my mission in Iraq. I was defending America from its enemies, removing weapons of mass destruction from Iraq, and building democracy. If the jerks drinking tea didn't appreciate that, I didn't care.

We drove with as much speed as we could. I was really sorry that I had volunteered to relieve Marla on the squad gun because
it was uncomfortable as anything I could imagine. My legs were aching as we drove north along the Euphrates River. The 3
^rd
had set up roadblocks along the way and I was glad to see them. They had put MPs, military police, at some of the places on the roads: It was reassuring to know we were at least going in the right direction.

Occasionally we hit traffic, mostly supply trucks headed in the same direction we were or empty trucks headed south to pick up more supplies. The traffic worried me because I didn't want to get separated from our convoy.

I expected we would pull into An Najaf, find something to eat, and sit around for the rest of the night in whatever facilities they had set up. But as we approached the city, I knew that wasn't going to happen.

The noise from the fighting was unbelievable. If you listened you could tell what was firing. AK-47s, M-16s, mortars, tanks, grenades. All kinds of ways to die in a hurry.

“We're holding up here!” Coles yelled into the radio.

We pulled the Humvee off the road. We were less than a half mile from town. Black smoke billowed up above the buildings and then flattened out and drifted sharply to the east. Bursts of automatic fire came and went, as if there were some dialogue between them that nobody understood. In training I used to like the night exercises. We used tracer bullets along with our regular ammo and you could see them streaking across the darkness toward their targets. But here, so many miles from home, in the gathering
darkness, the explosions were terrifying. From where I sat, I could sometimes feel the impact of a shell, feel the shock of an explosion as it traveled through the still night air. I was holding my breath.

Beneath me, in the cab of the Humvee, the radio crackled. We were picking up the communications from the battlefield. Men spoke with a quiet urgency. Tracer fire crisscrossed the city. Brilliant flashes of light illuminated buildings for mere seconds before dying out. I could smell what seemed like oil burning and a sickly sweet odor I couldn't identify.

“Birdy!” Marla pulled on my pants leg.

“What?”

“If you go into town, bring back a sausage pizza and two Diet Cokes,” she said.

“I don't think I'm going in any time soon,” I said. “You think they'll deliver?”

Coles confirmed it. He told us to hunker down and stay alert. “And keep your body armor on!”

We stayed put all night, taking turns sleeping, or trying to sleep. Jonesy conked out first. Marla worked on eating an MRE in the dark. She said she could smell the whole meal, dry and cold, through the packing.

“Marla, you can't smell it through the packing,” I said. “What is it?”

“I can even tell you what kind of cookies they have for dessert,” she said.

“I don't believe you,” I said.

She shrugged me off and told me to stay alert. I asked her who made her the squad's mama and she laughed. It was a nice laugh.

At ten o'clock in the morning, 1000 hours military time, Captain Coles called to say we were moving out. Marla was outside of the Humvee stretching her legs and had to scramble back in.

“I'm back on the gun,” she said.

As we rolled toward the city we could still hear sporadic gunfire. There were lots of our guys around, and down the street a tank stood guard on the corner. Coles called back to us and asked if our map had street names and Jonesy told him that it didn't. I could hear Coles cursing into the radio.

“Contact left!” Marla called out.

I turned left and saw a green car speeding toward us. The Humvee came to a hard stop; I heard the squad guns as they sent bursts of fire toward the oncoming vehicle. The car skidded to a halt and fishtailed slightly; the front wheels ended up on the sidewalk. The doors opened and a group of civilians climbed out, keeping their hands in sight.

“Watch ‘em!” Captain Coles's voice came over the radio.

“Contact right! Contact right!” Sergeant Harris.

Panic. We were situated at the end of a long street. On the left the car had stopped. On the right dark figures skirted along the shadows.

The flash of the rocket launcher spread out in a puff and I
could see the rocket trail headed toward the middle of the street. It hit two-thirds short and sent flame first in the air and then rolling toward us. I couldn't see anyone, but I knew where they had been and started firing.

Somebody shot off some grenades and they exploded, lighting up the area they hit for the split second needed to produce eerie silhouettes.

Whack! Whack!
Bullets hit the side of the Humvee. I couldn't tell who was shooting at us, but I knew they were coming close. We sprayed the street in front of us and the nearby windows.

There was an explosion behind us and the Humvee lifted off the ground for a second.

“Mortar, right corner!”

I looked toward the right corner and saw two figures. They were carrying a house fan on a stand, not a mortar.

Silence.

“Check the buildings!” Coles's voice was urgent and higher than usual.

My eyes were everywhere, jerking around as I pointed my piece from area to area. “Marla, you okay?” I called to her.

“I think so.” Her voice was whispery.

“You sure?” Jonesy asked.

“I'm not shot, so I guess I'm okay,” Marla said.

We lit up the area and saw two bodies lying in the street on my side of the vehicle. The car that had been speeding toward us still rested with its wheels on the sidewalk.

“Everybody okay?” asked Captain Miller in the medical truck.

Everybody checked in. When it was my turn my voice cracked badly.

One of the medics had a head injury from his vehicle being rocked by an explosion, but it didn't seem too serious.

“What do we do about them?” a voice came over the radio. “One of them is still alive out there. I see him moving.”

He was on my side of the street. Jonesy got back behind the wheel, backed the vehicle up, and moved slowly toward the guy.