We Meant Well (25 page)

1045 ON IVO BALAD ROUTE (
_____
): (
_____
) CIV WIA (
_____
) CIV KIA AIF ATTACKED THE ENTRANCE TO CP. (
_____
) AND (
_____
) (CHILD—(
_____
) WERE KILLED AND 6X WIA.

Translation: At 10:45 in the morning in the vicinity of Balad, on Route (
____
), near the town of Balad, there were civilians wounded in action and civilians killed in action after anti-Iraq forces attacked the entrance to a checkpoint. (
____
)and (
____
) plus a child named (
____
) were killed and six others were wounded.

Seeing the Dragon

BANG!
Just like that.

Being mortared was like a sneeze coming on; you knew it was going to happen but there was nothing you could do about it. The insurgents' targeting was never precise, more like “somewhere on the FOB,” and your job was to not be standing on the invisible X when the rounds hit. Maybe roulette was a better example; one of those numbers was going to win (lose), but there was no way to tell. Pay your money, take your chance.

The worst mortar attack on FOB Falcon ripped apart a containerized housing unit, leaving torn shards of metal poking out of the sides like ugly silver flowers. I was outside when it happened. First there was a little boom when the mortar was shot off and then a second later a big boom hit my chest like a fist. People died. Another time a bomb went off right next to my wall while I was in the shower. The blast was all on the outside but the shock wave was strong enough to make me lose my balance. In the space of six months, the insurgents mortared or rocketed FOB Falcon over seventy times, meaning you had to get used to not being used to it—my luck was tested more than my courage. Even with a lot of practice I couldn't manage to pretend my body and the cheap trailer I lived in were not fragile as a biscuit.

This was what we came to call passive violence—you stood there and it happened to you, like weather—but it was still whack dangerous. There was no warning for these kinds of attacks, and of course you never knew who was firing on you. The insurgents had learned to keep the trajectory of their mortars flat to avoid our shell-seeking radar. One minute I would be getting up from dinner and the next a shell would strike in front of me. It would happen too quickly for me to be scared; instead I would be scared for the next time. While there was no warning, there was usually no aftereffect either. The shell hit, a big plume of dust went up, and then the breeze blew the dust away. Gun shots were just as disconcerting. The first time I got shot at there was a zipping sound in the air, like a nasty insect passing that was small and big at the same time. I never saw the person who fired at me and I never had a moment to react, human reaction time and bullet physics being what they are. I stood there like an idiot asking, “What was that?” while the soldier with me smiled like I was six years old, the dumbest son of a bitch he had ever seen.

What would we do if we came under fire? This was the question we chewed over endlessly. Raised on war movies and video games, many of us wanted to see it and feel it and to go home knowing we'd been tested. A Major who was too old too young overheard these conversations and told us we were stupid. He said people who got shot at got hurt, and once you saw someone hurt you carried that around with you. You'd wrestle those images for freaking ever. As the Chinese saying goes, you can't unsee the dragon. Once you've seen it, it's always with you.

Modern weapons were designed to destroy human beings with maniacal efficiency, to shred and tear flesh and shatter, not break, bones. In real life, things are built specifically to prevent harm. My lawn mower has all sorts of guards and safety switches and at home we round off sharp edges and take slippery rugs off the stairs. I was shocked when I held a mortar shell for the first time—it was deliberately designed to cause the worst possible injuries, with grooves cut into the exterior so it would break apart easily and split into shards. Smart people had gone out of their way to make this thing as deadly as they could.

Soldiers took the necessary precautions. They wrote their blood type on their boots on the theory that, unless your leg was blown off, your boots would stay on. I heard about a “meat tattoo” where soldiers had their blood type, name, and social security number tattooed on their torso somewhere so they could be identified. Despite these steps, standard medical help in the so-called golden hour following a trauma was no longer enough. As weapons had become more lethal, the golden hour was now compressed to minutes. The only way any of us would survive a catastrophic injury was if the guy next to us did exactly the right thing right now. The Army called it “be quick or be dead.”

So each of us was a medic and we each carried a pouch with a tourniquet, a bandage, and some blood-clotting agent. If you got hurt, someone grabbed the stuff from your pouch and took care of you. In eighth-grade first aid, we learned that a tourniquet was a last, desperate measure because of the risk it might cut off so much blood flow that you'd lose a limb. In this war, the rule was tourniquet first. Some guys even pulled the tourniquet out of the pouch before going out and had it hanging off their vest for double-quick use. Those extra seconds could mean the difference between living or dying or losing a limb—that, and how well the person with you had done his training. The Army tried to teach soldiers What to Do in every circumstance that could be anticipated, to pound the right lessons into even the dumbest recruit. One of the more extreme things they did to simulate injuries and practice lifesaving before deploying was to work on live tissue.

The preferred victim was an anesthetized pig. The new recruit was given a pig and he had to keep it alive. “Every time I did something to help him,” one soldier told an interviewer, “they would wound him again. They shot him twice in the face with a 9mm pistol and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire. I kept him alive for 15 hours.”
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The guys at Falcon who had been selected for the training all started with a big 180-pound, man-sized hog. The trainers blew half the pig's face away, slit open its belly, and cut the femoral artery. The idea was to get the soldiers to ignore the horrific facial wound and the slit belly and focus on the femoral. If you couldn't stop it from pushing blood out, your pig/soldier/friend bled to death in minutes. The soldiers topped one another with ghastly descriptions of how messed up their pigs had been. The trainers were never done. As soon as you controlled one thing, they shot, cut, or tore the pig in another way. At one point they threw the bleeding pig into the back of a pickup truck and you had to continue to work to save its life as the truck bounced down a rutted back road in North Carolina. The session ended with everyone covered in blood and the pig ultimately mutilated. Anesthetized or not, it was a crappy way to die. Animal rights groups often protested this type of training, and the Army was forced to conduct it in semisecrecy. Soldiers who had undergone the experience were careful when and how they talked about it. No one enjoyed seeing an animal suffer, and most left the sessions with questions in their heads about right and wrong. What was a pig's life worth?

On Route Incubus, outside Falcon, an EFP struck the vehicle a Lieutenant and his Sergeant were riding in. An EFP is an explosively formed penetrator, a steel cylinder about the size and shape of a big paint can filled with explosives. Instead of a lid, the can was sealed with a milled copper plate, a kind of metal lens with a concave bottom. When the explosives detonated, the copper lens turned into a white-hot liquid slug, propelled at enormous speed.

The slug melted through the armor and met the upper side of the Lieutenant's right thigh, about halfway between his unarmored knee and his unarmored hip. The slug, still hot, melted the skin and muscle of the Lieutenant's leg. His femur was solid, like a young man's dense bones are, but the slug shattered the bone by force. No one was sure if it was the slug or bone fragments, but something sliced through the femoral artery and at that moment, as the slug cooled and ultimately came to rest against the metal interior of the vehicle, the Lieutenant, at age twenty-seven, began the short process of bleeding to death.

The copper slug did not hit the Sergeant seated across from the Lieutenant, but his face was peppered with metal fragments and his upper body was covered with the remains of his Lieutenant's thigh. Surfing his own pain, he acted immediately, without thinking. When the Army decorated him for saving his friend's life, the Sergeant said he had imagined him as a pig. He remembered applying a tourniquet to a pig's leg, remembered clamping off a pig's femoral artery, and remembered how he had worked with a pig's ripped flesh and shattered bone all over his face. When called to do exactly the right thing, the Sergeant answered correctly, and that made the difference. There were a lot of ways to die in Iraq and only a few ways to keep on living.

Missing Him

Private First Class (PFC) Brian Edward Hutson, in Iraq, put the barrel of his M-4 semiautomatic assault rifle into his mouth, with the weapon set for a three-round burst, and blew out the back of his skull. He was college-aged but had not gone and would never go to college. Notice appeared in the newspapers a week after his death, listed as “non-combat-related.”

Of the 4,471 American military deaths in Iraq, 913 were considered “non-combat-related,” that is, nonaccidents, suicides. In 2010, as in 2009, more soldiers died by their own hand than in combat.
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Perhaps related, mental disorders in those years outpaced injuries as a cause for hospitalization. The Army reported a record number of suicides in a single month for June 2010. Thirty-two soldiers in all, more than one a day for the whole month.
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Given that suicides sometimes occurred after soldiers departed Iraq, and given that death by enemy action was no longer as common, their lives were probably in as much danger at home as in Iraq.

The M-4 rifle PFC Hutson used to kill himself, successor to the M-16 of Vietnam fame, allows the shooter, with the flip of a switch, to choose to fire one bullet per trigger pull or three. Nobody knows whether PFC Hutson spent a long time or no time with the rifle barrel in his mouth, but he must have really wanted to be dead, because he chose three shots. The bullets exploded through his brain in sequence. He left his toilet kit in the shower trailer. He still had Clearasil in the bag. Rumor was he'd had trouble sleeping.

I heard about his death at breakfast and walked over to his trailer. I took a quick look inside and saw the fan spray of blood and brain on the wall, already being washed off by the Bangladeshi cleaning crew. The bleach solution they used was smearing more than cleaning, and the Bangladeshis had little stomach to wring out the mop heads all that often. Blood like this smelled coppery. It reminded you that you were not welcome. Even if you'd never smelled pooled blood before, you didn't have to learn what it was, you already knew something was wrong in this place.

Death does not redeem or disgrace. It is just a mess and no one who deals with it thinks otherwise. Don't ask poets or pastors, because they do not know that pieces of people still look a lot like people and that extreme violence leaves bodies looking nothing like the bodies you see in open caskets or on TV. In Iraq I saw a girl crushed when a wall collapsed, her face looking like a Halloween pumpkin a few days too late. There was a drowned man in an irrigation ditch, gray and bloated, no eyes, no fucking eyes. Fish had nibbled them.

A week before Hutson's suicide, another soldier lost his life. This soldier, a turret gunner, was killed when his vehicle unsuccessfully tried to pass at thirty-five miles per hour under a too-low bridge. The Army counted deaths by accident as “combat deaths,” while suicides were not. Under a policy followed by George W. Bush and for more than two years by Barack Obama, the families of suicides do not receive a condolence letter from the President. Suicides apparently do not pertain to freedom. They died
of
the war, but not
in
the war.

But if distinctions between causes of death were made at the Pentagon, that was not the case on the ground in Iraq. The death of any soldier reverberated through the FOB. This was, after all, a small town, and nobody was left untouched. The comfort of ritual stood in for public expressions of actual feelings, which were best kept private and close. And the ritual prescribed by regulation was the same, whether the death was by suicide or in combat. The chapel had rows of chairs set up, much as it would in Hamilton, Ohio, or Marietta, Georgia, for a wedding, only at the front of the room was a wooden box, made and brought to Iraq for this purpose, with holes for the US and the unit flag and a slot to stand the deceased's rifle. The remains of the deceased were likely already on their way home and not with us. The box was made of plywood, stained and varnished like paneling, and reminded everyone of a B+ wood shop project. The dead man's boots stood on either side of the rifle, with his helmet on top. It was fitting no one had cleaned the boots, because the presence of the dust and dirt wiped away a lot of the cheapness of the ritual. Before the event started, the hum in the room was about future meetings, upcoming operations, food in the chow hall, the workaday talk of soldiers.

There was a program, done up on a word processor, with the official Army photo of the deceased, wearing a clean uniform, posed in front of an American flag—young, so young, you could see a few red pockmarks on the side of his face, a chicken pox scar on his forehead. All these photos showed a vacant stare, same as every high school graduation photo. The program was standard fare—some speeches, the chaplain reading the 23rd Psalm, and a final good-bye.

The speeches were strained because the senior officers who feel it important to speak at these events rarely knew, or could know among the many troops under them, the deceased. As with every other briefing they gave, albeit without the PowerPoint, the officers read words someone else wrote for them to give the impression of authority and familiarity. The dead man's job had something minor to do with radios and most present couldn't say much beyond that. The eulogy thus rang a bit hollow, but you reminded yourself that the words were not necessarily intended for you and that the Colonel may not have been the best man for the job. He was a responsible man, trying hard to do something impossible, and he probably felt bad for his lack of conviction. He did understand why we were all here, and that a task had to be done, and that he need not be Pericles or Lincoln to do a decent job of it.