MIRAGE
All that day and into the early evening, into the rain and fog and the salt-marsh wasteland that made one solid gray sheet out of earth and sky, the IFVs of Baker Company had played a long maddening game of follow-the-tankers.
On the way, they had encountered virtually nothing. It was as if the Iraqis had drifted away into the desert on a soft wind, or shivered into air like a mirage. The fight at the breach had been short and nasty, but the breakthrough afterward was a headlong charge into southwestern Iraq, with everyone tensed for incoming, everybody straining to see enemy formations, ready for an ambush that never came.
Nevertheless, Crane was shocked when the orders came down to bivouac in formation that first night. Everybody knew that the plan called for Franks to engage the Guards, but Franks was playing it safe. Rhame was probably boiling about it, but what could he do?
So they huddled in their IFVs or in shelter halves strung from vehicle to vehicle, digging morosely into their MREs and staring out into the rainy night. The bivouac lasted a few hours, time enough for some fitful sleep and on-the-fly maintenance, but little else. The chopper scouts were up and out, and the word from Corps Command was that the download from the J-STARS showed distant Iraqi formations—probably the Tawakalna and Medina Divisions of the Republican Guard—but no one in the immediate AO.
It was, militarily, all wrong.
Not even the Iraqis could be this stupid.
They weren’t. By 1900 hours of that first day, only fifty percent of VII Corps was actually through the Iraqi berms and into the rear areas. General Franks was looking at his troop dispersions in the J-STARS download—the God’s-eye view provided by reconfigured Boeing 707s loaded with radar and heat sensors, flying high above the battlefield—and he was not a happy man. As far as he was concerned, last-minute troop redeployments coming out of CINC, or Commander in Chief, back in Riyadh had screwed up his logistics. It looked to him that he had half his corps strung out in a long wide-open line running sixty miles into hostile territory with zero protection on their flanks. He was also getting Intelligence reports that some of the toughest Iraqi Guard units were right in his path, and he wanted to engage them in strength. So Franks did the cautious thing, and pulled the 1st Division up short and lagered them for the night while he hammered at the rest of his corps commanders to get their asses up into the AO on the double. Of course, no one was telling any of this to the grunts, or the sergeants.
Crane himself was feeling the beginnings of a weird imbalance, a kind of vertigo, a sense of falling forward into chaos. They had leaned the full force of all their armor and guns up against a solid wall of Iraqi demons, and the demons had turned to water. They had steeled themselves to kill and to die, they had gone forward to do it as well as they could, with all the weight of their beliefs and their professionalism, and they had encountered … nothing.
Yet all the Intel reports—at least those with CIA backing—had stressed, to the point of paranoia, the awesome combat firepower the Iraqis had in the field: entire divisions of T-72s backed up by BMPs and support units, whole parks of artillery. And they were battle-hardened from ten years of war with Iran.
Schwarzkopf and dozens of analysts had been on the tube warning America about the ferocious, fanatical force that they were going up against. Back in the States, the families of all the troopers were sick with fear, expecting the worst, waiting for the hall phone to ring or for that tan cruiser to pull up in the driveway with two base officers on board.
CNN was everybody’s amphetamine every night of the week. And Crane knew that the drill was to impose a complete press blackout as soon as the ground war started, which would send all the home folks straight into cardiac arrest. Yet out here in the field … nothing.
Nothing. It was making him crazy.
It was also making him suspicious, but he wasn’t sure what it was he was suspicious about. All of these emotions slammed around inside his chest for a long time until they settled down into a deeply felt unease and a hair-trigger hypervigilance.
Then he realized with a jolt that he hadn’t felt this kind of intense hypervigilance since that last night back in August, when they’d first gotten the news of the Iraqi invasion. That made him grin. At least, this time, he had a damn good reason for it. Maybe he ought to find a pay phone and call Carla, tell her how he’d cured himself. He just took his paranoia overseas until he found a place he could really use it.
The kids saw it all very differently, of course, because this was their first look at the tiger, and as far as they were concerned, things were going just fine, thanks very much. There had been injuries, though, and not just the Iraqis back in the trench lines.
It was strange the way the modern war was like an electric web—they were so interconnected that right now the thermal and radar image of their company parked in a delta formation along the east bank of this little wadi was showing up on the radar screens of the J-STARS five miles up. There were two J-STARS in the KTO, reconfigured Boeing 707s, loaded with Norden multimode side-looking radar linked to seventeen onboard screens and twenty data techs. The twenty-four-foot radar boom along the underside of the J-STARS could pick out any vehicle—stationary or in transit—within a one-hundred-and-fifty-mile radius. The entire Department of Defense Internet communications web was globally interlaced and instantly accessible to any commander—or so the manuals promised—from Schwarzkopf to a Spec 5 looking for fire coordinates, and the web was so delicate that when one of the Kilo Company IFVs had driven over a mine, they had all heard that brief electronic snap when Abel Three had blown up. Seven men badly injured. And all they knew about it was that short sharp snap, like a nerve firing, a little tremble of the big web and they were all rolling by it, rolling on into the big Iraqi dark. The kids had been quiet for a time, and they had chased the M1s a little more carefully, barely keeping them in visual contact, staring hard into the dense black night just to see the red slit lights on the rear of the vehicle ahead, relying on the Kiowas and the GPS to keep them all in formation.
Their part in the battle had been like a slingshot, with the British 1st Armoured Division as the stone. The 1st was charged—tasked—with the job of breaking through the Iraqi lines along an eleven-mile front, and they had done that. Farther to the east, there were two more massive divisions committed to the breakthrough, the U.S. 1st Armored Division on their left flank about twenty miles off, and beyond that, aiming at an Iraqi town called Makfhar al Busayyah, the U.S. 3rd Armored Division.
And far beyond that advance, deep inside Iraq and only a hundred miles south of Baghdad, the XVIII Airborne Corps had driven all the way to the Euphrates to block any reinforcements from the east and to slam the lid on every Iraqi unit inside the AO.
This entire operation—this wide sweep under cover of air superiority—was the main-force strike in the Gulf War. The Iraqis had been deliberately conned into believing that the main assault would come on the beaches of Kuwait City and along the Khafji road. The first day of the ground war had added to that impression, as two Marine divisions and coalition forces breached Iraqi lines along the Kuwait-Saudi border. Hussein and his generals had taken the bait and all of their attention was focused on Kuwait City.
So, in a massive main-force assault, VII Corps had taken his flanks and cut them wide open. It had taken about two hours of tank and Kiowa and Warthog fire, and of course the thing was done at the trenches, those big dozers just rolling down the trench line, like a kid pushing sand into an anthill, but after the word went down the Iraqi lines, the resistance had, basically, stopped.
Crane and Baker had come in through a gap behind a delta of tanks from the 1st Battalion 34th Armor—behind Boomer Riebold’s Abrams, as a matter of fact; you could always tell Boomer’s M1—he had an old cavalry guidon on a whip antenna and was always the first one into a breach. It had been like slamming into a prisoner-of-war camp.
When the smoke had cleared and the battle ended—a space of time that felt like an hour or a year depending on how close the enemy fire was coming to your personal AO—Crane and the men of Baker Company got a view of the entire fortification: a set of four triangle-shaped emplacements with the broad bases forward, running maybe two thousand yards wide for each triangle, a total of about twelve thousand yards wide, and the entire position was now a smoking wasteland, littered with the flaming hulks of Iraqi armor and the blackened craters where enemy artillery had once been. Pillars of blue and red fire rose up all around them, and their M1s and M9s and their IFVs were running all over the Iraqi positions.
Trench lines had been plowed over or filled with plastic fascines, tank traps crossed with bridging vehicles, fougasse trenches ignited and bypassed, razor wire shredded and scattered around the landscape like Christmas tinsel.
And the dead.
It took a minute to make the leap, to get the gestalt, to see suddenly that the shape inside that armored car was not the stuffing from the bench, or that this blackened heap over here, at the center of a cratered smoking pit, had hands stretched outward from the center of the burning, or that across the line of tracks there, that huge stain in the sand had once been a running soldier. But they got it. It could not be missed.
The dead were everywhere, thrown in tangled heaps by incoming missiles or main gun rounds, burned into skeletal cinders or shredded by minigun and chain-gun fire, weapons scattered, helmets upturned, limbs and torsos torn apart, jaws gaping in cooked faces, bodies crushed into a kind of jelly out of which bright pink bone chips rose, sections of rib or spine or thigh bone, little arcs of skull fragments, red as taillight glass, heads without faces, ropes of fat purple entrails fifteen feet long, great pools of blood like freshly spilled lacquer, or shiny and wet on scraps of uniform, on pale bellies.… Driving over the site was an unspeakable experience and it would take hours for the rain and the sand to clean the tank treads.
They were glad, finally, for the reek of cordite and fire, because every now and then a wet wind would blow the stench of some soldier’s opened bowels into the vent of an IFV or a tank intake and the men inside would stop talking and gag.
Welcome to the war. Take a deep breath. Never forget this.
Driving through it, Crane was not surprised. It was something he had seen before, a long time back, and the only good thing about it this time was that no one on the ground in front of his humvee had been a friend. He could see what was reflected on the faces of the cherry troops—sick shock, sudden silence, and underneath it a kind of heart-racing, hammering pulse, your own blood in your own body, and death all around.
But not you.
And from every possible direction, there had been Iraqis.
They were coming out of bolt-holes all over the battered terrain, scraggly guys in shit-brindle uniforms, unshaven, soaked in urine many of them, or reeking of their own shit, lousy with fleas and lice, dehydrated, covered with white silica sand, eyes red rimmed and wild, shaking in mortal fear, dropping rifles and RPGs, and every goddam one of them was waving one of those safe-conduct passes the PsyOps guys had dropped all over the AO.
They’d come up with the idea back at Fort Bragg, a creation of the Green Berets of the 4th Psychological Operations Group. Each safe-conduct pass was printed on a photocopy of an Iraqi dinar—there was an engraving of Saddam on every one—and on the back of the copy, there was a set of Arabic instructions for surviving a surrender:
SAFE-CONDUCT PASS. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DIE. YOU CAN BE SAFE AND RETURN TO YOUR FAMILY AND LOVED ONES IF YOU CEASE RESISTANCE. YOU MUST FOLLOW THESE STEPS: REMOVE MAGAZINE FROM WEAPON. SLING YOUR WEAPON OVER YOUR SHOULDER MUZZLE DOWN. APPROACH SLOWLY. HOLD THIS PASS IN YOUR HAND ABOVE YOUR HEAD. IF YOU DO THIS YOU WILL NOT DIE. YOU WILL BE TREATED WELL AND SOMEDAY YOU WILL RETURN TO YOUR FAMILY.
Crane had seen truckloads of these leaflets stuffed into plastic water bottles. The Air Force and the Navy had floated or dropped them all over the KTO. More rear-echelon patty-cake as far as he was concerned, but here they were, well and truly into the war, and there were long lines of Iraqi troops, and each trooper was waving one of these things in the air and saying Salaam and Inshallah and Please don’t blow my balls off, Mr. Grunt, and, well, it was just plain weird.
Mosby and his boys had climbed out of their IFV to shake down a file of Iraqis at the far side of the first berm. Crane pulled up with Mitchell to cover them with the .50. For Mosby and his fire team, it was a dreamlike interval, Crane could see it on their windburned and dusted faces as they pulled their scarves away from their chapped lips and bailed out of the rear gate, M16s at port arms, safeties off, selectors on full auto.
They were aching to rock and roll, pumped up and primed by two years of training and six months of listening to Saddam bullshit the planet, and here they were, on the ground in Saudi, with about a hundred goddam Iraqi troopers scrambling around the IFVs, gabbling like turkeys.
That was when Crane had begun to feel that slight sense of vertigo, of something surreal and false about the whole breakthrough. But for Mosby and the guys, it was a moment, and Crane saw them ready to fire, thought for one mad moment that one of them might do it, might open up on the crowd of prisoners.
Things like that happened all the time. Surrendering was one of the most dangerous maneuvers a fighting man could ever undertake. There were unwritten rules and you could never be sure that everyone was on the same page. Sitting there behind the .50, Crane traversed the muzzle along the crowd of Iraqis, watching each face and every pair of hands, looking for a sign, a twisted expression, someone racing to a stupid conclusion with his eyes fixed on a martyr’s dimwit death.
Mosby was out now and running down the line, his SAW on guard, and he was waving for the Iraqis to drop their rifles and hit the sand, which they did, a sudden clattering tumble of guns and belts, all the prisoners talking at once, falling down wherever they stood, and Mosby’s men spreading out to cover them, and more IFVs and tanks grinding up to bring their chain guns and .50s onto the Iraqi troops.
Hearing the rifles hit the dirt reminded Crane of that old joke about the Arvins in Vietnam: Wanna buy an Arvin rifle?
Never been fired. And only dropped once.
They’d been drilled on prisoner processing back at Riley, by noncoms from the Military Police section, who would ultimately be taking charge of the POWs the ground attack would generate.
Mosby and his squad were running the show, and the crowd of beaten Iraqis was growing rapidly as clusters of men saw the activity and came forward, waving their passes. Polanyi—his face thinned by stress and adrenaline—was prodding them into a line with the muzzle of his M16, while Orso and Mosby and the rest of his team stood back and provided cover. Polanyi, who had a talent for languages, was saying something to them and the Iraqis were nodding, still trembling, eyes huge, and dropping to the ground. Other troopers were coming in and frisking them.
Frisking them meant stripping them down to their shorts, and in the cold and rain, it was a miserable sight to see. Crane felt something like embarrassment and shame for the soldiers—a feeling he crushed as soon as he became aware of it.
If they were so goddam upset about being soldiers, then one of them should have found the sand to take Hussein out. Instead, the whole country had jammed itself into the streets of Baghdad, waving their fists in the air and screaming about the Great Satan.
Fuck them all. As far as Crane was concerned, this was a long-overdue payback for all those years of impotent rage, sitting in the base PX with a can of warm beer and watching a crowd of ragheads in Tehran shove a hostage around, listening to Khomeini gargle away in that rasping drone, looking for all the world like Charles Manson in a toga, or crying for two hundred and forty-one poor son-of-a-bitch Marines in Beirut, and for Colonel Higgins, twisting in the wind, and the fliers Hussein had humiliated and beaten in the early days of the war.
Fuck them all; sorry now doesn’t cut it.
It was sweet to sit there in the rain and feel his thumbs on the .50 triggers, see a whole gaggle of piss-stained Iraqis crying in the dirt at the far end of the barrel. Sweet, and long, long overdue.
There was a burst of angry chatter at the end of the line, where a Spec 4 from Charlie Company was shouting at an Iraqi and the Iraqi was shouting back. The outburst sent a shock wave down the line. Mosby and his men were bringing up their rifles. Mosby ran down the line, shouting at the Spec 4.
“What the fuck’s the problem?”
The Spec 4—a massive black soldier—never took his eyes off the Iraqi in front of him. The Iraqi was on his knees, his hands locked behind his neck, but he was white faced and shaking his head back and forth.
“This raghead won’t shuck!”
Mosby turned to look down at the man. The Iraqi’s eyes were red and his windburned skin was dusted with white sand. His uniform was worn and torn. He looked like something that had been run through a shredder.
“Polanyi, get down here! Tell this dumb fuck to get his pants off!”
Polanyi, enjoying the sudden rise in status, ran down and began to shout at the Iraqi. Now there were three troopers standing around the man, all of them shouting at him, and finally he bowed his head and—incredibly—the man began to cry. The tears made brown lines down his dusty cheeks, and the man’s mouth was twisted in a terrible way. Crane could see this from the deck of the humvee and suddenly he knew—dumb bastard.
“Hey, Mosby!”
Mosby swiveled and sent Crane a hard look, and Crane saw for the first time what he had been hoping to see in the kid. He saw iron. Mosby had finally shown up for his life, he was here and fully engaged.
“Come here, would you?”
He made it soft, so Mosby wouldn’t lose face. Mosby jogged over, his rifle at port, his face wary.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
Crane leaned down and spoke softly to Mosby, whose face closed up, set, and then broke open again. He looked up at Crane, his eyes wider.
“Happens a lot,” said Crane.
Mosby walked back to Polanyi.
“Take him to a latrine, let him clean up, will you?”
Polanyi looked puzzled, and then it hit him.
“Oh … Jesus. Of course.”
He said something to the soldier, and the man, his head still lowered, got to his feet and shuffled away in front of Polanyi, and as he went they could see how he had fouled himself.
Mosby told the rest of the squad to get back to it, and walked over to Crane’s vehicle.
“Jesus, why’n’t he say something?”
“You’re gonna see a lot of that.”
“What’s with them? The trots?”
Crane looked at Mosby, thinking, Mosby, you’re gonna be a good soldier, and it’s time you found out a couple of things they didn’t put on the recruitment posters.
“Darryl, you’re gonna find, in this pack alone, a whole bunch of them will have done that. They can’t help it. It happens to everybody if it gets bad enough. You never been shelled, or got your berm pounded by a Buff. It’s an automatic response, you can’t help it. Only way to get around it, hit the latrines every chance you get, so when it gets hairy, you’re empty. Getting shelled, it’s the worst. It’s like, you lie there, you’re more scared than you ever been, only you can’t do anything about it. That’s worse than a firefight, because in a fight, you can change the situation, but when you’re on the wrong end of Arty, each round comes in, it goes through you like a jolt of electricity, or like you were lying under a subway train. It is huge. These guys, they’ve been to a place I hope you never go.”
Mosby looked up at Crane for a time, processing the image. His face lost a little bit more of its youthfulness.
“Christ …”
“Yeah. Well, it’s reality. Don’t tell the folks at home, though. That kinda thing, it don’t play on Regis and Kathie Lee.”
“Man. I won’t.”
“Anyway, bag these and saddle up. We still got a war on.”
It had been a big moment for Mosby and the rest of the 1st Infantry Division. Taking a surrender is an exhilarating experience, if you’re not too far into the war.
Back in the Triangle, they had taken a lot of prisoners during the first few months. And they’d gotten a chance to see what happened to some of them. Every platoon had a couple of Arvin G2s along, interpreters and Intelligence guys. They were not nice guys.
After Crane watched what happened to maybe ten VC over six months in the bush, he and the others had pretty much given up on taking surrenders. And when the VC found what the Arvins were doing to their prisoners, they started doing the same thing—and sometimes much worse—to any GI they caught alive.
Crane had come across two guys from the 16th, left in the tree-line by a cherry LT after a VC ambush near the Courtenay Plantations up by Xa Cam My—Shock-Me was what Crane’s unit called the place—and what the VC had done to those guys, it was something a Comanche would have admired, one professional to another, something one of the old cavalry sergeants would’ve talked about, stuff he’d’ve seen when Kansas was a territory, not a state. Come to think of it, everybody in the 1st used to call the Iron Triangle Indian country—after a while every grunt in Vietnam called the bush Indian country. Some things never changed.
Anyway, after that, the whole question of taking VC prisoners was pretty much set aside, and they usually capped off any live dink they got their hands on. Shin loi, VC.
Crane watched Mosby and Polanyi and Orso go through the routine, telling the Iraqis they were gonna be okay, they were gonna be fine, and not to worry. Crane got some more of that off-balance vertigo feeling.
So far, Baker Company hadn’t lost anybody, just a few bums and scrapes and one guy rotated for dysentery. But if the Iraqis had fought harder, maybe killed a few people? When the blood was up, all a guy wanted to do was kill something. At Iwo Jima, there’d been, what, twenty thousand Japanese on the island. Maybe one hundred were taken alive.
It was one of those rules. If the enemy fought all-out, did terrible things, killed a bunch of your friends, then he had no right to surrender. And even these clean young high schoolers, these farm kids and football jocks, Mosby and every last one of them, they’d light up the whole crowd, turn them into road kill, if they’d lost a few friends. Call it the My Lai factor: leave a grunt out in the bush long enough, especially in some rat’s-ass counterinsurgency meat grinder where he can’t tell the VC from a friendly—let him see some of his buddies cut up like a Christmas turkey or step on one too many shit-caked pungi traps, and the time will come, he’ll get his payback, even if he has to light up a choir to do it.
You don’t like it, then don’t start wars.
Looking at the guys right now, Crane could see they were still cherry, still untouched by the thing, and he didn’t know what he really thought about that. Maybe it was a good thing.
But probably not.
Well, right now it was all high fives and big grins and Iraqis begging for mercy, and all around them that big iron and smiling tankers and … well … by Christ, it was very, very sweet, and they were all Jolly Green Giants in ten-league boots, and the U.S. Army was the meanest son of a bitch in the whole goddam valley. It made him nervous.
Crane tried to enjoy it too, but something was all wrong. It made him nervous.
The surrender, though, that had been very fine.
As soon as the 1st had broken through the Iraqi forward positions, the armor and the mechanized infantry units had pulled off to the right and left flanks of the breakthrough, herringboned, with muzzles out into the desert and thermal imagers on.
Someone had painted a sign and planted it in the middle of a plowed-up berm. It had the insignia of the 1st, a large red numeral 1 on an olive-drab patch. The sign read:
WELCOME TO IRAQ
COURTESY
OF THE
BIG RED ONE
Once they’d cleared the breach, the second echelon of armor in VII Corps had hammered through, the Warrior IFVs and the Scorpions and Scimitars, the Striker AFVs, and of course the Challenger tanks of the British 1st Armoured Division—Crane watched the Challengers go by and shook his head for the poor sons of bitches who had to go to war in them. Firing the main gun was like trying to program a VCR upside down in an iron lung. Blindfolded. God bless them.
The entire action was essentially a slingshot maneuver, with the 1st doing the initial pull and providing the momentum that would take the British tankers on into the Iraqi rear echelons, where they’d seek out and destroy whatever Iraqi armor they found in flank attacks. The idea was to cause so much unexpected havoc that the Iraqis would break and run for it, or wet themselves and faint.
And all through those first hours, it was a headlong charge into thin air. After they’d punched through the initial Iraqi defenses, all three divisions had advanced miles into Iraq and the only hard contact had come at Al Ubayid, where the 101st Airmobile and elements of the 82nd Airborne literally dropped in out of the sky and surprised the hell out of an entire Iraqi division, the 26th. They’d taken five hundred prisoners and lit up an unknown number of others, men who would never see daylight again, men who died in an eye-blink flash of white phosphor or HEAT rounds, or got chopped into bits by chain-gun fire and missiles.
This branch of the frontal assault consisted of two thousand soldiers, fifty IFVs and humvees, towed artillery and supplies, all of it lifted by three hundred Chinooks and Sea Kings, supported by Kiowa and Apache assault choppers, their mission the creation of a sixty-square-mile cleared area deep inside Iraq, called Cobra Base. For the Iraqis who found themselves underneath the assault as it came down, it must have looked like a coffin lid closing.
To the west and south of this position, the 1st Infantry Division was pushing ahead, but not as fast as they would have liked. The terrain sucked, the salt marshes and the rotten weather slowing them.
Crane, in his humvee, kept in radio contact with DerHorst and Wolochek, and with the fire teams and IFVs in their echelon. Everyone was painfully alert, expecting to run into a strong enemy position at any moment, expecting mines or arty, expecting a battalion of Iraqis to rise up out of the wet sand like plumes of pale fire. They had one hard contact when a burst of heavy-caliber fire sprayed the flanks of Mosby’s IFV, making a neat row of bright polished-steel dents in the dull ocher paintwork, but they never established where the rounds had come from, and Crane privately put it down as friendly fire from some overwired boot down the line, a sloppy traverse, or just plain asshole behavior from one of the other platoons.
And so it had gone, until Franks pulled them up at the wadi and told them to wait for backup. Their entire division was spread out along the Wadi al Batin, right on the Kuwait-Iraq border. Now that they had reached their first objective and all they could do was wait for the 2nd Armored Cavalry on their left to come up and cross in front of their lines, they had time to consider.
These kids were going through a sea change, turning from well-trained civilians in uniform to combat soldiers, and the thing that made that change was the act of killing another human being. Back at the trench line, as the M9s plowed down the line and the Iraqis died in their position, all the men had watched in shock. Now no one seemed particularly upset about it, although Crane could hear the difference in their voices, and see it in their eyes. They had practiced the maneuver over and over again, but seeing those plows go down the lines, seeing that wall of sand falling forward like a big brown ocean wave, and the arms and legs and shapes struggling under the surface … well, it was ugly. He noticed Mitchell was silent too, and Crane let him get out and walk over to his unit.
He slid out and slammed the door and Crane got in behind the wheel and took his helmet off. The Motorola radio was buzzing quietly and now and then he’d hear Wolochek or some query from the colonel, but mainly there was silence all down the line, except for the muted growling of the engines, and the whine as the M1 tankers swiveled their main-gun turrets and established fire zones.
Turrets clanged and doors grated open, choked with sand and dust, and hundreds of guys all down the line were walking out into the desert to piss while their buddies sat behind the chain guns and covered them, staring out into the night. Now and then a Kiowa would hammer by overhead, its Midnight Sun searchlight flickering over the underbrush and down the rocky canyons of the Wadi al Batin.
There was nothing around them. They had driven so far into the AO that none of the Iraqis even knew they were there. As a military maneuver, it had been an unqualified success, and it seemed to Crane that the Iraqis had better get their shit together in a hurry or they were going to get mauled.
Crane was parked beside the wadi, facing west into Kuwait, looking out over the sodden expanse of the valley, into the darkness of Kuwait itself. The troops were sitting all over their IFVs, under ponchos or canvas, eating MREs and talking things over. Crane could hear their voices, rapid chatter and sudden barking laughter, as they stitched their worldview back together in a slightly different pattern. He was proud of them. They’d done their jobs well, and no one had screwed up badly enough to attract an officer’s attention.
But then the ground war was only twelve hours old.
That business of the trenches, they’d hear about that later. Let the press get wind of that, they’d be howling like wolves. Maybe that was what came of letting the public wander around with deeply vague ideas about combat, all those John Wayne fantasies about guys only getting shot in polite places, dying neatly in an artful pose against a bamboo plant, looking up with Bambi eyes at their high school buddy—Christ, was there a polite way to kill somebody?
The idea was to kill the enemy. Why was it okay to shoot the shit out of him, or smash him flat as road kill under a Buff strike, or nuke a couple hundred thousand, but for chrissakes don’t bury them! Civilians.
The only real feeling Crane had taken away from that experience was the main and most important one; thanks to Colonel Stephen Hawkins over at the Engineers HQ, the 1st Infantry Division hadn’t lost one man on that assault. Not one. Hawkins deserved a medal and a handshake from every living grunt in the KTO.
Crane dug an MRE—Mainly Rat Entrails—out of the food locker in the humvee and walked around to the engine hood release, the MRE in one hand and his Beretta in the other. Although he was in the middle of an entire infantry division, he could still feel the weight of all that empty desert off to the west, and the threat of hidden Iraqi armor beyond the horizon line.
He tugged the outside lever and lifted the hood, placing the MRE on the engine block to heat up. He was staring out over the wadi, leaning on the humvee grille, his mind at Harry’s Uptown Bar, when he heard someone calling his name.
Sergeant DerHorst was walking across from his IFV. Rimed with white dust, sweat stained from the overheated IFV interior, his eyes were red and his lips were blackened from the windburn.
“Hey, Dee—what’s for dinner?”
Crane grinned back at him. “Paws and tails. What’re you having?”
“Dog lips in a snot sauce. It’s superb! Boomer’s a goddam cordon blue. Gimme some room here.”
He settled back against the humvee beside Crane, tugging at his neck scarf. Miserable rain was pattering down on them, making little tear tracks in the white grit on DerHorst’s face. He looked back at the MRE on the block.
“You really gonna eat that?”
“Somebody has to. We leave them lying around, some kangaroo rat will eat one and die, we’ll get sued by the Sierra Club. Where’s Wolochek?”
“Over at Baker Tango Oscar with Boomer, waiting for a fax.”
“How’re the looies?”
“Ackisson’s wrapped too tight. Not that he doesn’t have balls. But he’s afraid to make a mistake, so he waits too long. Back at the breach, he was through in his IFV and then he stops—stops dead—and I pull up, he’s got his driver doing a GPS verification. Fucking rounds are coming in, his boys are stuck in the hold, pissing themselves, tankers are hitting their sirens behind us, here’s Ackisson doing a sit-rep update for the log!”
“What’d you say?”
“I sucked up nice, suggested he should redeploy out of this AO on account of there seemed to be an overload of incoming ordnance.”
“Bullshit you did. I heard you on the ’net. What’s a tanglefoot?”
“It’s a horse, can’t walk without tripping.”
“How’d he take it?”
“He’s okay. Bugged his eyes out, then swallowed it and moved out. Came up to me a while back, thanked me for the pointer. He’ll be okay. Petrie I like; he gives you the idea he’s having fun. His boys like him, and he knows his stuff. By the way, ask him about that Stoner he’s got. Anyway, he listens to his noncoms and doesn’t trip on his dick. Seafferman … man, he got it from Wolochek, I don’t know why, he’s sitting over there in a humvee, staring at his crotch. He might be crying. Rossberg … I don’t know. I mean, he looks busy, but his platoon was always just getting there, always a few seconds late. I think he might be holding back a bit, maybe afraid to lose a man.”
“That’s the best way to lose one. It’s the timid ones get lit up first. They have no forward motion, easy to nail. You want me to talk to him?”
DerHorst considered it while he ripped the top off a pack of something that claimed to be pork and rice in a barbecue sauce. He dipped his fingertip into it and tasted it, made a face, and began to eat, talking around his mouthful of mystery meat.
“My job, supposed to be. But you’re the pro around here, it’d be easier, coming from you.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Tell him that story, about the pencils.”
Crane stared at DerHorst.
“Hey, Dee … it was a joke!”
Crane had nothing to say.
“I know, let’s get him some grenade rings, he can stick them on that boonie hat of his.”
“What will that do for him? That was a Nam thing.”
“He needs to connect, get into the war.”
“He’s in it, all right. He just doesn’t know it yet. I’ll say something to him. He probably just needs an ear. He thinks he’s the only one worrying.”
“Then he’s not watching Wolochek.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Good. Like I say, you can see him worrying. He worries about everything. I like a captain who worries about his men. But he gets it done. He’s got his shit together. Loves the Internet toys, though. One of the tankers had a wiring glitch and Wolochek got the Internet to download a schematic of the wiring buss from the factory in Michigan, pulled it off the fax, and walked it over to the tank and unrolled it like it was a Dead Sea scroll. Very neat.”
“Christ. This isn’t war, it’s a computer game.”
“Yeah. It’s virtual reality. I think your meal’s ready. It stopped screaming just now. It is a weird war. I look up, try to see a J-STAR, I know it’s up there looking down at us. They could pick up the heat from all the grunts pissing into the gully over there.”
“They probably can. They’re sure getting returns from all this hot metal. They can see right through the cloud cover.” “Thank Christ. Damn, this is a miserable country.”
“That it is.”
“Figure the Bear is watching us?”
“No. I guess the CINC would stay back in the rear echelon. That’s doctrine. I hear they have something like thirty mobile satellite uplink stations in the KTO. I mean, the goddam tanks have fax machines and video monitors. Look at this—” Crane dug his hand-held GPS receiver out of his ALICE gear and punched the keys. The little LCD screen lit up and flickered through some numbers. “See—lats and longs. By the numbers. This is where we are, and if I walk away fifty yards, the numbers change. We have three geosynchronous satellites above the horizon line right now. In Vietnam, we had maps and compasses and we guessed a lot. Orders were ticker-tape rip strips. There was a reason they called the radios Prick-Two-Fives. Even with a Two-Niner-Two extender, the goddam things might as well have been tin cans and waxed string. Wolochek over there has his own laptop computer, a modem, we can auto-encrypt at the flick of a switch and talk to your mom in Buttwad—”
“Benewah.”
“—Idaho … get a download of Iraqi positions, assign fire missions and deploy elements. Today I heard one of our Kiowas doing a rapid-burst encrypted upload of fire data. It went from the Kiowa to a J-STAR and from the J-STAR back down to a battery of arty six miles in the rear, went straight into the Range Data computer, didn’t even have to be keyed or encoded. It was like the pilot was the gunner, setting aim points by computer from miles away, while he’s looking right at the target.… It feels very strange. I never thought this shit would work, but so far … it’s been okay. Not perfect, but better than the last war.”
“You’re a dinosaur, Dee. When this is over, you oughtta take an Early and sit by the river, tell your grandkids lies about the war.”
“I don’t have grandkids … anyway, I thought I was supposed to put in for TRADOC and climb the stairway to heaven.”
“An obsessive consistency is … is … shit. Something about little minds, would have been a very neat quote. Some guy with three names said it.”
“James Earl Jones? Frank Lloyd Wright? Lee Harvey Oswald?”
“Whatever … So, waddya think so far?”
“About what?”
“This war. goddamnit!”
Crane smiled at DerHorst. “Remember what Tonto said to the Lone Ranger?”
“Tonto said a lot to the Lone Ranger. All they had was each other and the horses. You get lonely out there on the range, and Tonto had wonderful soft brown eyes. But then, so did Silver. What was the question?”
“Tonto and the Lone Ranger are sneaking up on this Indian village, and the Lone Ranger says to Tonto, Say, it’s kinda quiet, isn’t it, Tonto? And Tonto says, Yes, Kemo Sabe. Almost … too quiet.”
“You think we’re gonna get something slammed on our fingers?”
Crane shrugged, took in a long breath, feeling the stiffness in his back and legs, and the bruises from being bounced around in the humvee. The morning seemed a century in the past. “That breakthrough … what the fuck are the Iraqis doing? They’re supposed to be soldiers, fought a big war for ten years. Why the hell fall apart like that? It’s just too easy. It worries me. Remember the Fetterman massacre?”
“Not offhand, but I’m sure you’ll bring me up to date.”
“This was in ’66, Red Cloud’s War—”
“This would be 1866?”
“Yeah. Fetterman was a lieutenant, he was stationed at Fort Phil Kearny, that’s in—”
“I know where it was! I’m from Idaho, not Pluto! It’s in Wyoming, up near the Montana border. Wyoming is right next to Idaho, Dee. Hasn’t moved an inch for years. Try to keep up, will ya?”
“Yeah, and Fetterman, he was a real badass, itching to get out there, kick some redskin butt. So this time, Crazy Horse and a bunch of braves, they come in real close to the fort, up into these low hills all around it, and Crazy Horse, he pretends that his pony is blown, he draws Fetterman out. Now, Fetterman has orders, don’t go flying off into the distance chasing the Sioux, but now his blood is up, he sees Crazy Horse and his braves just out of reach, so he goes charging up over the hill and down into the valley beyond it—gets all stretched out, cavalry in front, all his infantry lagging behind, out of breath—”
“And of course, all the Indians in the world ride down on him. I know the story. Red Cloud called it the Hundred in the Hands. They butchered them all, Fetterman included. I’ve seen the cairn, it’s just off I-90 south of Sheridan. You can see it from the interstate.”
“Yeah.”
“So what you’re saying is, Hussein’s doing a Crazy Horse on us, drawing us in and letting us get all strung out, get ahead of our supplies, then he whacks us?”
“I can’t think of another reason why he’d leave his flanks so weak. He can’t be that stupid!”
“Why not?”
“This is a tricky part of the world. Fools don’t last long. Hussein managed to run a ten-year war with Iran, fought them to a standstill.”
“Yeah, and that’s his problem, Dee.”
“What?”
“He stands still. They all do around here. They play positional warfare, they sit and wait for someone to come ahead, take them head-on. They can’t maneuver without stepping on their turbans. They’re not real soldiers, anyway, they’re fucking fanatics.”
“It still worries me. It feels wrong.”
“Fuck ’em. They wanna be martyrs, here’s the Third Army, come to help them get to paradise. Hussein’s not eleven bravo, you said that yourself, back in Riley. I heard you telling the grunts.”
“Maybe, but it seems too—”
They heard some low talk and laughter, getting closer, and boots on the stony ground. Shabazz and Fanand’s replacement, another black kid named Duvall, were picking their way across the rocks, Shabazz listening hard to some story that Duvall was telling him, his face set and a big grin showing.
“Hey, Shabazz,” said DerHorst, “go down to the PX, get me a six-pack and some Twizzlers, will ya?”
Shabazz and Duvall came up just as another Kiowa slammed through their airspace, kicking up twigs and stones. Duvall looked up, gaping, as it flew overhead. Crane was peeling his MRE and watching Duvall.
“You like the choppers, Duvall?”
Duvall ducked his head, looked for a second like a twelve-year-old, then smiled at Crane.
“Yes, Sergeant Crane. I put in for Scouts when I signed.”
“What happened?”
Shabazz shook his head. “Homey don’t play that. They dissed the nigger good.”
Crane hated the word “nigger.” And “dissed,” and “word,” and a lot of other black slang. It grated on him, but the blacks used it like salt, spiced up every conversation with it, and anyway he was getting to the age where it was easier to list the things that didn’t irritate him.
“That’s not true, Sergeant. Shabazz turns it all around.”
“It’s word, nigger!”
“No, it isn’t. I can’t take heights.”
DerHorst laughed. “Well, that’s a problem.”
Shabazz was smiling too. “Nigger can’t drive either. This brother, he belongs in the infantry.”
“Not you, though,” said DerHorst, who liked Shabazz in spite of all that black attitude.
“Not me. I get out of this, I’m transferring to the one-oh-one.”
“Intel? You?”
“Military Intelligence, that’s it. I get out of the shit, I’m going to work uptown, get rank. We need more niggers in the upper echelon.”
Duvall was looking nervous. “We already got General Powell.”
“Powell’s not a nigger. Powell’s an African-American, homey! We need a brother up there in the sky, give all the white boys conniptions.”
“You tell Powell that, Shabazz,” said DerHorst. “He’ll fry your black ass. He’s been to the mountain already.”
“I know that! I ain’t dissin’ the man. But he ain’t been where I been, either. The corporation still got a thumb up its butt, and that ain’t gonna change until enough wild niggers get to the Palace.”
Crane was interested. “How’d you change the corporation, kid? What would you do first?”
Shabazz looked at Crane, trying to read him, see if Crane was angry. “Well, Sergeant Crane, I don’t mean no disrespect.”
“I know that, kid. I’m just asking.”
“Okay … don’t take this wrong, but we oughtta bring back segregation, stop trying to mix the races.”
DerHorst started to say something, but Shabazz hurried into it.
“You see, homey, he don’t wanna assimilate! You guys, you’re Irish-American, or Italian-American, or Swedish-American, but the black man, if he ain’t black, what is he?”
“What about African-American?”
“Man, what about it? What’s Africa to me? I was born in Chicago, Sergeant. I don’t know shit about Africa. How’d it be, I go back to Africa now, say to some homey sitting on his butt in, wherever, Zambia, and I say, Hey, bro, it’s me. I’m home. He’s gonna look at me, say Who the fuck are you? I got no other thing to be than black. I assimilate—which ain’t gonna happen anyway—what have I got left? I’m a Twinkie, got white on the inside. The black man, he has to stay away from all that Africa shit, because that’s just like, you’re a Jew from Wichita, you go back to the homeland, to Israel, land on some Palestinian, he’s been there a thousand years, you walk into his house, say June, I’m home! I got no more rights to a piece of Zambia than a Jew has to a chunk of Palestine. That country, it belongs to whoever stayed there. Black man, he has to accept that he’s got no place to go home to. It’s either the United States or start swimming.”
DerHorst looked angry now. “So be an American. That’s what I am.”
“Look, I don’t mean to … you asked me, Sergeant.”
Crane was looking at Shabazz and thinking about Vietnam. “He’s not leaning on you … I don’t think you’re right, though.”
Shabazz looked down and up again. “All due respect, Sergeant, but you … you’re not black. You can’t know this stuff without you been there. No offense.”
DerHorst looked at Crane, waiting.
“We had this kind of thing in Vietnam,” said Crane, looking past them out at the wadi, still nervous about all the possibilities out there. “The bloods kept to themselves, had their own hootches, places like the Can Hoi Tan Town in Saigon, where you couldn’t go, that ‘dap’ thing, set themselves apart a thousand little ways. But all of that, that was a fire-base thing. In the bush, it was different. It was very different.”
Shabazz started to say something but Duvall raised a hand.
“I know about that, Sergeant. My dad was in the Eleventh Infantry, the Americal. He said one of his best buddies was a white guy, he still has the guy’s picture in his wallet.” Shabazz looked at the ground. “Yeah? And after? After Vietnam? They have barbecues? Go to Disneyland together? You dating the guy’s daughter? Shit!”
Duvall shook his head. “No. Guy was killed, at a place called Quang Ngai.”
“That’s a province, not a place,” said Crane. “But Shabazz gets the point.”
“Well, I do, but the war—”
Crane finished off his MRE and used some crackers to scoop up his applesauce. It was pretty good, actually.
“The war is the point, Sergeant Shabazz,” he said, dropping the MRE kit at his feet. “I get what you’re saying, about the Irish and the Swedes all having a homeland, not that I could go back to my folks in England and expect anything different from your guy in Zambia. But you go look back there, look in the mirror of that humvee, see how much of you is black and how much is desert camo, chocolate chips. Maybe you got a point, about being black in the States. But years from now, you’ll remember one thing. You were Army. You were eleven bravo, and all these men, they are your brothers, they will die for you. You go ask some homey in Chicago to do that for you.”
“It’s more complicated than that. There’s a life after the Army. We get back to Fort Riley, I’m still a nigger. Same shit, different day.”
“Yeah—it is. But not right now. While we’re out here, we’re brothers, and anyone who tries you on, he takes us all on. You get back to Chicago, you’ll never know anything like that ever again, and the day will come, there’ll be a reunion, and you’ll squeeze back into your Class As and you’ll come in the door, your head on a swivel, looking for Duvall, for Mosby even, and Polanyi, for me and DerHorst, all of us, because we were all your brothers. You know why?”
Shabazz was silent, staring at Crane, intent on his words.
“Because we all of us left. We joined the Army.”
“But we’re the American Army, Sergeant.”
“And if this war goes sour, how many civilians are gonna die in it? How many American civilians?”
“None, I guess … unless you count the Spooks from Langley.”
“That’s right. Everybody who’s gonna die is a soldier. When they put it on the wall at Danger Forward, it’s not gonna say ‘a civilian of the First Infantry Division.’ You get out of this war alive, Shabazz, I promise you, when you think about who you really are, from now on, you’ll think, well, whatever else, I was a soldier.”
There was a silence.
Finally, DerHorst slapped his gloves down the side of his BDUs. A spatter of white grit fell off him into the headlight glow in the front of the humvee. “Damn, I think I’ve teared up. Anybody got a Kleenex?”
Shabazz and Duvall tried for a smile. DerHorst looked at them and raised his eyebrows.
“Okay … show’s over. Go see to your flock, kids.”
They started to salute, stopped themselves, and turned away.
Crane was looking off into the wadi, feeling stupid. DerHorst slapped him on the back. “Hey, Dee—you okay?”
“Shit, I’m fine.”
“Well, I gotta go. We’re gonna saddle up in five.”
“I know. See you.”
“Tell you what.”
“What?”
“You doing anything with that humvee, has anything to do with the war effort?”
“Not really.”
“I been riding with Boomer Riebold, in Blue Four. I’ll take your humvee, get Mitchell off your hands. You can go along with Boomer, see what the war looks like from a tank. So far, this ain’t been an infantry show anyway. All we’re doing is a ride-along. How about it?”
“Wolochek wants me with the IFVs.”
“And the IFVs’ll all be with Boomer and his tanks. For chrissake, Dee, I already cleared it with Wolochek. This war isn’t gonna last forever. Get it while it’s hot!”
Crane stood up and stretched. “Where the hell’s Boomer put you? There’s not a lot of extra space there. What’re you doing, standing behind the loader?”
“Yeah. Don’t need air-conditioning. They got the hatch open, I get the seven-six-two, wind in my hair, blow off smoke grenades. I look like Lawrence of Arabia. Gonna get the cover of People, anybody sees me. You’ll look marvelous, Dee.”
“Well, I am sorely sick of that humvee.”
“Done, then,” said DerHorst, grinning. “Tell you one thing …”
Crane waited.
“I think I get it now, why you stay eleven bravo.”
Crane gave him a sideways look, waiting for a punch line. “No punch line, Dee. I mean it just that way. What you said to Shabazz, that was pure iron bravo.”
“Iron bravo? What’s iron bravo?”
DerHorst grinned and walked away a bit. “Iron bravo. Haven’t you ever heard them say it, on the ’net, in the field?”
“No, I haven’t. What’s it mean?”
DerHorst spread his arms wide, palms up, and pulled his shoulders in, a very Italian gesture for a guy from Idaho. “Fucked if I know, Dee. Take it as a compliment.”
He was gone, leaving Crane alone by the humvee grille, staring out across the wadi into Kuwait. It seemed to him that he could see a far-off flicker of yellow fire, as if the land itself was burning.
Which it was.