The War I Always Wanted (15 page)

He walked over and stuck his head into the open door of my humvee. Together, we listened, neither moving nor speaking. After a while the chaplain looked up at me with an expression that combined incredulity, skepticism, and astonishment all in the same glance. He said, “I mean . . . I guess . . . I mean, it's over.”

The sense of relief that came washing over us was palpable. Five minutes earlier we had been prepared for a bloody siege of Baghdad, for violent urban warfare. Now I was thinking that I could be home within six weeks. I was conscious of the feeling that now I knew I wasn't going to die. When I heard of the statue falling in Baghdad, fifty miles away, the weight of considering my own death had fallen away with it. Silently euphoric, I sat there in the front seat of my humvee. I was covered in dirt and
sweat, but I was in the shade, and the radio had been switched back to music.

At dusk I took my platoon back into the center of the city. The Iraqis of Hillah were shooting guns, honking horns, and defacing everything that bore an image of Saddam.

We were traveling south on one of Hillah's main avenues and traffic was tight. Everybody who had a car was out driving around and celebrating. For me though, it wasn't personal. I was too strung out emotionally to feel anything. I had taken part in the storming of the city like a robot and I would leave the city, I assumed, in the same fashion, intent on mopping up Baghdad in similar fashion.

And that's when the white four-door car in the right hand lane nearly crashed into my truck, causing me to put my thoughts on hold. I yelled at Sergeant Hemingson, “Hey, look out . . . car! Fuck!”

The white car swerved right, putting a few feet between our two moving vehicles. I thought he might be trying to ram us. Then the driver swung his car back in my direction. My index finger drifted to the safety switch on my M4.

As he pulled within three feet of my speeding humvee, I stared, wide-eyed, at the driver. He was an Iraqi man probably in his forties or early fifties. He had a thick, dark moustache with hair to match. However, his hair had receded on top, leaving most of his head completely bald. I looked at his eyes, hoping to glean from them his intentions.

Keeping both hands on the wheel, he was nodding his head backward, pointing with his eyes toward the back seat. I could see that he was smiling. I was confused. Slowly I took my gaze
from his face and moved it along the car toward the rear window of the moving car. I expected to see some form of weaponry pointed at me.

Instead, I saw a little girl of no more than five wearing a white dress. She was outstretched, leaning half of her small body out of the car's backseat window. Her arm was fully extended. In her tiny hand she held a rose.

Then things became clear. I said, “Hey man, get closer.”

“What?” Hemingson asked incredulously.

“Just do it,” I said, shifting my gun to my other hand. “Slow down and get closer.”

When he did, I stretched out my arm in its desert camouflage sleeve, reaching for the little girl. A moment later I grasped the stemless rose, briefly touching her hand. With the flower now in my possession, I withdrew my arm. She smiled at me. For a brief second I smiled back. As we began to pull away from the white car I glanced back at the man driving. Still smiling, he simply nodded at me.

Shivering in the cold on the roof of an Iraqi barracks building that night, I was at the same time relieved and let down. I suddenly saw the attack on Hillah as being a big cock-tease. I had gotten so mentally prepared for bullets ricocheting off walls and RPGs crisscrossing in front of me that I couldn't let it go. Now that the danger was over, I had reverted to being a junkie who needed a fix. I was jealous of the 3rd Infantry Division in Baghdad—they were getting action and I was desperate for some. As I saw it, I had now been in two wars and never squeezed the trigger on my own personal weapon. I had combat blue-balls.

I was a raving storm trooper, but I was humiliatingly petrified of death. I wanted to fight, but I didn't want to hurt anybody. I wanted to be a hero and I didn't care if I was hero. I felt alive inside, but disconnected from everyone. I loved my family and friends and I didn't care if I ever saw them again.

I was suffering from emotional whiplash.

8
 
Baghdad

April 2003

As we approached the city limit, the first thought in my head on seeing the city was,
Yep. That's what it looked like on TV
. It was a city alight with red tracers—tracers that glowed white in our green night vision. Some slashed horizontally through the darkness, while others arced upward into the night sky. But now they weren't originating from the well-known anti-aircraft guns positioned throughout the city. Now the fight was close—now the tracers were from machine guns, Bradleys, and AK-47s.

I knew so little of Baghdad before I first entered it, that now, looking back, I don't see how I could have been so ignorant. When we left Hillah, all I knew of the Iraqi capital was what I had seen on TV in the first Gulf War—it was green and black at night there, and they had lots of anti-aircraft guns. That was what I knew. However, when I thought of the
idea
of Baghdad, my mind conjured other images—magic lamps and flying carpets; Ali Baba and Aladdin;
Scheherazade and Sinbad. When we finally entered the city, half of me expected to be met by bullets and anarchy, the other half by cartoon characters.

We swept into Baghdad on a night that found the city's resistance in its final hours. The airport had been seized, the statue of Saddam toppled, and the Marines were thrusting into the eastern portion of the city. We entered from the south, on an abandoned Highway Eight. We were streaking down the empty road, looking for the interchange with the Daura Expressway. I hadn't been prepared for the sheer size of Baghdad, for its freeways, loops, and exits.

My section and squad leaders started calling about the tracer fire. “3-6, this 3-3, we've got tracer fire off to the left, four hundred meters, over.”

“3-6, this is 3-1, 3-2 says he saw some fire off to the right, two separate bursts, over.”

They kept coming.

“3-6, this is 3-4, I just saw a tracer to my left, four hundred meters, over.”

I liked the fact that they were alert, but this was definitely “gunfire that didn't concern us.” Nothing was coming our way. I got back on the radio.

“Hey, listen up,” I said. “We're clogging the net with all these reports. I know you guys see tracer fire.
We're in the middle of a battle
.” The italics were verbal and blatant. “That's what you're
supposed
to be seeing. This is
normal
for these conditions.” I wanted to say, “Call me if you
stop
seeing tracers. That's something I need to know. That will be newsworthy.”

Sergeant Croom cut in. “3-6, don't you think they need to report this stuff? It's kinda important, over.”

I thought about it for a second. For once I actually felt like I was correct in the midst of dissent from all the NCOs in the platoon. “No,” I stated flatly. “I need to know when the fire is directed at
you
.”

That night we escaped attention and camped out under the stars in a farmer's field, surrounded by a forest of palms.

The Daura refinery is the main oil processing point in Baghdad. Its towering and flaming stacks are symbols of the city's vitality—when they are snuffed out, the city goes with them. In the first Gulf War, Allied planes had bombed the refinery, rendering it useless for nearly a year. This time, however, the refinery—the economic heart of the city—was spared from destruction. It sat against a bend in the Tigris River, between the river and the Daura Expressway. Before dawn we finalized plans to clear an eight-square-mile area of which the refinery sat directly in the center.

The battalion didn't really have a mission in the strictest sense of the word. Instead we were tasked with “clearing” the area. The word “clear” in this case was used very loosely and very subjectively. It basically meant that we were to use the forces of order and goodness to neutralize the forces of chaos and evil. That could mean anything from attacking foreign fighters to stopping looters to capturing weapons caches to observing traffic patterns. There was no plan. There were only sectors. This is your sector. Go there and clear it.

So Sergeant Croom and I, along with our fourteen soldiers, set off into the urban wilderness of Baghdad. We had six humvees, lots of ammunition, over a million dollars worth of equipment, and no idea what the fuck we were going to do with it all.

After its sacking during the Mongol invasion, Baghdad never fully recovered its previous economic or cultural prominence. To that point, the city had been the flourishing center of the classical Islamic world with a population of up to a million people. When Hulagu Khan led the Mongols in their attack on the city in 1258, they slaughtered eight hundred thousand of the city's inhabitants. They also destroyed the city's irrigation system—a move that effectively ended the Abbasid Caliphate. Afterward, the city that had been a major hub of commerce on the road to China shrunk to just over a hundred thousand people. From the time of the Khan's invasion, Baghdad has gradually rebuilt itself, literally from the ground up—suffering through other, less drastic occupations all along the way.

When we arrived on that April morning as the latest in this long string of invading armies, the city had nearly six million residents and a Western-style urban infrastructure. Several of the six million made our first few hours interesting with some periodic harassing fire. They would fire one round and take off, making me even more jumpy than I already was.

An abandoned battery of anti-aircraft artillery sat unattended in a grassy field, just off the Daura Expressway. Croom had radioed me with the information. I asked him if he'd done anything about it and he said no. He said he hadn't felt too keen on the idea of leaving the road to go traipsing around Iraqi Army positions in the open without any cover. When I saw the same pieces from the road I didn't have to think twice about the decision to get out and explore.

I stepped out and shut the door. As I did so, a few of the first Iraqi cars and trucks to venture out that day sped past us, probably curious to get a look. I turned to look in the direction of Sergeant Krueger's truck when the glint of something on the ground next to one of his tires caught my eye.

As I walked over, I could see that it was a pile of discarded clothes. On top of the pile was a shiny object reflecting the morning sun. I picked it up.

It was an Iraqi campaign ribbon with a medal attached. The two-inch-long ribbon was striped in four colors—red, white, green, white again, and then black. The red, white, and green I knew were the colors of the Iraqi flag. The medal itself was an eight-pointed gold star with a solid black circle in the middle. Inside were two swords pointed upward. Above them was a red triangle within which was the Iraqi eagle. The ribbon, I noticed, looked faded and worn. Probably, I thought, thrown in the road by a soldier fearing American retribution. I would learn only later that the ribbon had been issued for service during the Mother of All Battles in 1991.

Estrada and I set out to check the triple-A guns while Krueger stayed on the highway to direct the gunners who were providing cover. The anti-aircraft guns were set two hundred yards off the expressway, in a green field of waist-high grass. We gingerly walked down a slight hill and then picked up a dirt road leading from the highway down the length of the field. On one side of the road was the field; on the other was a thick orchard.

At the same time Captain B. and Corporal Davis, along with Phil Dickinson and some of his guys, were nearer the
refinery investigating their own set of artillery pieces. They had discovered theirs around the same time we found ours.

Estrada and I picked up the hard-packed dirt track and began following it. After about a hundred and fifty yards, we came to a tree on the edge of the path. Beneath it were the abandoned belongings of Iraqi soldiers. There were clothes and black leather combat boots. There were three or four yellowish helmets. There were also the remains of what had been a meal. They had left everything and disappeared.

I had never seen an anti-aircraft gun before. The first one we came to was painted the same flat yellow as the helmets. It was sitting on the edge of the dirt road, looking broken and abandoned by owners who had bailed out in a hurry. The barrel was pointed level, as if its caretakers had lowered its aim from the sky in a final act of capitulation. I noticed that the gun was still locked and loaded. Around the artillery piece were strewn over a hundred rounds of ammunition. There were bits of wood and pieces of metal—the remnants of the ammo boxes broken apart to load the weapon.

I picked one of the projectiles up.

“Fifty-seven millimeter, high explosive, sir,” Davis explained to Captain B. He was looking down at the forearm-length triple-A round he held in his hands. They all had their hands on the gun, each soldier exploring the still-loaded weapon from a different angle.