America owns the night.
So goes the army’s claim, and on its battlefields our military relies on night vision goggles and thermal scopes for a distinct technological edge during nighttime operations against less well-equipped insurgents. The supply convoys from Al Asad to Haditha typically departed after nightfall to take advantage of the cover of darkness, and so Josh, Cat, and I had the day to ourselves while waiting for dusk. Big as it was, the camp did not offer much in the way of entertainment, but we were too anxious to be able to tolerate wasting the day sitting in our room. Hours ticked relentlessly by as we rifled through stacks of pirated DVDs at the shops outside the small post exchange and rode the Korean-built shuttle buses aimlessly in hopes of discovering someplace new. Finally we were obliged to grudgingly walk back to our trailer to pack our things. One of the other team leaders gave us a ride in the van to meet our convoy at the gate as the last light of day cast long shadows.
I had been expecting to ride in a vehicle more enclosed for my first trip outside the wire, and was surprised when the convoy leader directed us to the back of a cargo Humvee with a box of quarter-inch steel plate welded around three sides of the truck bed. At least I would not be alone with my uneasiness, exposed to the open air. Six Marines already seated on benches in the back seemed to quietly endorse the safety of the vehicle, as none of them showed any concern, although they, as I, may have been too proud to do so. One of them extended his hand to help Cat and me climb in with our rucksacks. Josh and Ali, our freshly assigned interpreter, rode in one of the trucks further forward.
Once situated, I unzipped the green nylon bag that protected my night vision goggles and fixed the support arm to my helmet mount. Looking outward proved an awkward operation, as I had to turn around and kneel on the bench with one foot in the bed of the truck. There were cutouts for rifle barrels in the steel walls, but the only Marine who seemed concerned with security manned the SAW mounted just behind the Humvee’s cab, aimed to the left of our direction of travel. If anything serious happened, we would be alerted by his firing soon enough. All the same, I had a strong, creeping sense of paranoia as the truck lurched forward and followed the convoy out the gate. I couldn’t help constantly turning around to look outward.
Enough light reflected off the sky to make out the darkening shapes of Saddam’s destroyed MiG fighters scattered in the desert on each side of the highway, dozens of them, out of place, with broken wings dipped in the sand. After a few miles they stopped appearing and the desert seemed at once more featureless and foreboding. Every pile of dirt seemed to be a potential hiding place for the roadside bombs that had recently featured so prominently in the news and intelligence reports. When we left the gate, Cat and I had been chatting with the Marines, but now we drove on in silence.
The drivers did not burn their headlights. I held my hand in front of my face, wondering if I really saw it or if the shadow was just my imagination. By now even the moon hid itself, and the only light visible came from stars and the faint red string of blackout taillights on the vehicles ahead of us in the convoy. They looked eerily like a procession of wide-set demon eyes. I flipped down my night vision goggles. Their weight dragged my helmet down low over my eyes, and I fumbled tightening the straps until it sat stable and comfortably.
The demon eyes were almost blinding through the intense magnification of my night vision goggles. Looking up, I marveled as I always did at how many usually unseen stars bejeweled the heavens. On the other side of the cargo bed, the shining eyes of those Marines who weren’t wearing goggles blinked blindly with widely dilated pupils. Everything was quite distinct. I could clearly see the line of our vehicles barreling through a haze of dust, and on the crest of a hill, a cluster of buildings straddling the road. My throat tightened.
Lights burned in the windows of the village, and as we entered, the townspeople stepped aside warily. A group of men in long dishdasha robes stood gathered around a corner storefront, eyeing us, their drawn features highlighted under the harsh fluorescent glow. None of them smiled. They gave the kind of looks that made one feel unwelcome. We sized each other up quietly, the solemn men engaged in their evening social ritual and the nervous young warriors dressed like outlandish spacemen with the black machinery of our goggles protruding from our faces. My head spun on a swivel. Each approaching alleyway or piece of trash on the roadside made my heart beat faster, but the convoy continued into the night unmolested through the outskirts of the village. I allowed myself to relax, just a little, and breathe a sigh of relief.
Suddenly a staccato burst of machine gun fire rang out. My head dropped lower behind the steel plate, panning back and forth, watching for a muzzle flash. The back of the truck bristled with rifle barrels hastily turned outward. I could hear the radio in the cab crackling with transmissions and the metal-on-metal scratching of the Marines’ rifles scanning for targets. Our SAW gunner keyed the Motorola on his shoulder to ask for a report, but no new fires broke the stillness of the night. The convoy sped on.
The lead vehicle had spotted a quad bike pacing the convoy on a parallel road across the canal and fired a burst to discourage its following us. Our SAW gunner relayed that the man driving it had not been killed, but dumped the quad on its side and wasn’t following us anymore.
“Most likely,” he laughed, “the man went home to change his shorts.”
Some time later, having not seen any more vehicles, I noticed a portion of the sky near the horizon had no stars in it. The nearer we got the larger the section of starless sky became. It occurred to me we were close to arriving at the base of the dam, which at around eight stories tall blotted out the sky as a huge, looming shadow. My only frame of reference as far as dams were concerned had been small ones spanning the Missouri River back home in Montana. I had not expected to encounter such a huge structure in the middle of the desert! The roar of rushing water grew louder as the convoy slowly rolled to a halt at the very base of the megalith.
The Marines unhinged the truck’s back gate and quickly dismounted. The SAW gunner took down his weapon and in a matter of seconds disappeared too, leaving Cat and me standing alone behind an empty truck. All around us the night hummed with running Marines and shouted orders, and above everything, the roar of the dam.
The dam swarmed very much like an anthill. After linking up with Josh and Ali we easily followed a line of Marines through the dark to a central stairway. Cat asked one of them where to find the first sergeant’s office.
Getting upstairs was like driving in rush-hour traffic: slow going. On both sides of the stairwell, Marines muscled boxes of equipment and weapons between floors. The narrow stairwells and landings crowded with men forced to wait for a path to open up behind the boxes. Those of us waiting below warily watched the movers struggle with their awkward loads up the steep passageway, mindful of the fact that we had nowhere to move should one of them happen to fall.
Luckily, strong backs won out over gravity and the way cleared quickly. We located the command office, and Josh and I waited in the hallway with our bags while Cat went inside. A few moments later Cat followed the first sergeant back out. First Sergeant shook each of our hands and stated he was glad to have us as his guests, but Ali would have to stay with the Marines’ other interpreters in a separate area as a security precaution.
Even when they wear our uniforms, no one trusts these men. I wonder if he feels like a prisoner.
The rest of us would lodge in a room at the end of the hall, which the first sergeant indicated with an outstretched finger. He called one of his Marines over to escort Ali to his quarters, and Josh followed to check that he got settled.
Our roommates didn’t seem to be expecting us. They were still putting away their own things and stood about in various states of dress. Only one bed looked unoccupied among the two rows of bunks, and judging by their tired expressions, the current occupants weren’t keen to add three more bodies to an already crowded space. After we explained the first sergeant had sent us, one of them yelled down the hall for one of his Marines to bring in another bunk bed. I left my bag on the floor and went to help, not wanting to seem lazy or take our hosts’ hospitality for granted. My roommates were all staff sergeants, and I had seen them eyeing my three stripes with veiled condescension as if to question my right to sleep next to them. In their mind, I was still an unproven greenhorn with two strikes against me: I wasn’t a Marine, and I wasn’t staff.
On his way back to the room, Josh took over for the Marine who had been carrying the other side of the bunk bed with me. We set it up as quietly as we could, nearly impossible given the bed’s metal legs and the concrete floor. Even though we made some horrible scrapes, the staff sergeants seemed to be either already asleep or ignoring us. I eased onto my creaky mattress, hopeful that tomorrow would lend the opportunity for some friendlier introductions and prove I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the deployment tiptoeing through a briar patch of Marine Corps rank and perceived disdain.
I smelled cigar smoke. One of the blacked-out screen doors at the other end of the room tapped its frame loosely in the breeze, and I could hear Cat and one of the staff sergeants talking on the balcony. They both looked up at something, puffing on their cigars. As I joined them, Cat gestured to the space above his head.
“Bats,” he noted.
Dried guano of a colony of the sleeping creatures littered the floor of the balcony. Their tiny brown bodies twitched in a tightly huddled mass in the dark recesses of the underside of the balcony above. They didn’t seem to be the blood-sucking type, but I gave them a wide berth and leaned over the edge of the retaining wall to see what lay below. A trio of soldiers in strange green uniforms walked abreast, toting Kalashnikovs, looking very small.
I had noticed a blue-, red-, and green-striped flag I didn’t recognize flying next to the Iraqi and American flags atop the dam. These soldiers must be representatives of that nation sent to Iraq as part of the Coalition of the Willing. The smoking Marine, who called himself Tony, pointed out that Azerbaijani forces guarded the other side of the dam. The view to their post framed an unexpectedly beautiful desert panorama, an oasis of greenery and flying birds whose calls sweetened the morning air in concert with the rush of water from the floodgates below. A bloom of verdant grasses and palm trees bordered the water’s edge, softening the rift between the river and a desert of sun-baked sand. Further down the spillway, a bridge spanned the boundary where the river turned from frothy foam to cool, clear water.
I was interested to observe that from my balcony, in the daylight, the dam looked more like a huge hotel. American and Azerbaijani sides mirrored each other, with higher floors getting smaller and smaller until they tapered to a point at the peak of the dam’s retaining wall to form a right triangle. On the way back from shaving, I’d seen diagrams of the place in some of the books that littered the hallway, written both in Arabic and what looked like Russian. Tony explained that army Rangers had thrown anything of potential intelligence value into the hallways when they had gone through, room by room, to seize the dam from the army of the former regime. Ostensibly, intelligence specialists had long since combed through them to pluck out anything of value, but years later the stacks still remained, piles upon piles of manuals written by the Yugoslav engineers who had helped build the structure for Saddam, and reports full of numbers left by the men who had operated it.
Gradually the activity at the base of the dam, where the trucks were parked, began to increase. Marines turned their trucks to face back out toward the road and made preparations for another mission, loading boxes of MREs (meals ready to eat, those bland prepackaged meals that guarantee constipation), water, and ammunition. This time, the convoy would include not only the new arrivals from Al Asad, but troops from the dam as well. We new soldiers had missed out on a mission briefing held the day before, but Tony assured us everything would go smoothly in spite of it since our destination was only a short distance away.
Josh anticipated our imminent departure with the increasing commotion both outside and in, and returned with Ali to join our trio on the balcony. Ali smiled as he recounted for us his memories of swimming and fishing in the river below. The four of us followed Tony downstairs to find a seat on the convoy to Barwanah.
The trip was short but nonetheless hot and monotonous. On the road out from the dam, I watched a greasy, lazy plume of black smoke rising from a trash fire, the only feature that stood out on an endless lunar plain of broken rock blanketed by a cloudless sky.
Barwanah’s outskirts were the same dull color as the ground the town sprouted from, as many of the buildings were actually constructed of dried mud brick. The convoy made a wide circle and came to a halt around a row of unfinished buildings. Piles of sand and brick haphazardly stacked sat within the rough outline of foundations.
Unfinished it may have been, but the town was not deserted. I saw several brown-skinned children darting around corners in the distance and peering curiously at our trucks. We were not the first visitors they had observed that day, it appeared. Already several armored vehicles blocked the roads into the village. In the shade of one of the buildings’ courtyards I spotted the unmistakable silhouette of a Humvee-mounted loudspeaker. There were familiar faces there!
Josh, Cat, and I walked briskly toward the speaker truck that, in a few days, would be ours. I imagined the Bravo Company soldiers we were replacing would be glad to be rid of it.
The Marines had all recently exchanged their old-style uniforms for ones in a digital camouflage, so when they saw the old fashioned tan pattern of our uniforms, the PSYOP soldiers standing in the shade must have known we’d come for them. I expected to see more light in their faces, but though they shook our hands politely, the men looked worn down and tired.
Manny, the outgoing team leader, was a tall, stern-faced black man with a respectable sized bushy moustache. Over the next four days he would pass on a year’s worth of insights and local contacts, he explained, starting with the mission to Barwanah.
While Cat and Manny continued to talk, Josh and I walked back to the speaker truck to speak with the gunner and driver. The gunner, Parm, had a moustache too, which made him look older than he probably was. Ordinarily not many soldiers in the States wear them, but here, the gunner explained from his turret, moustaches helped build rapport with the locals as a small symbol proving one’s willingness to identify with their customs.
The locals were getting bolder now that they saw we were not kicking in doors or pulling anyone from their houses. At the edge of one of the buildings I saw a group of youngsters push a shy little boy into the open. At first he dragged his feet but was persuaded after much shoving by his friends to play on the bricks stacked in the courtyard, casting furtive glances at us and back to his comrades in the shade. Two more children ran out to join him. Parm handed Josh a bag of candy.
“Mistah, mistah!” cried the hawk-eyed kids, who forgot their shyness and ran toward us with grubby, outstretched hands and broad smiles. It was heartening to see the children’s universal appreciation for sweets transcended any cultural differences between us.
Then, as easily as they swarmed out of the shadows, the children darted back into them. I turned to see a pair of Abrams tanks cresting the hill along the same street our convoy traced before to enter the town. The crew had painted the words “New Testament” on the main gun of the lead tank. Their treads ground through the dust with a metallic clanking and came to a stop behind a low wall, which hid the tanks but gave the turret gunners a clear view of the surrounding countryside as their massive main guns panned back and forth. They powered down their turbines and waited like lions for gazelles, unmoving, with only an occasional whirr or click to betray their presence.
Shortly after the tanks arrived, a black Opel sedan driven by a Marine led an open-backed Humvee into the shade where we stood. The Marines had been manning vehicle checkpoints before the convoy from Haditha arrived, and now returned to the fold with their bounty. The Humvee carried prisoners. Four blindfolded men stumbled from the vehicle and the Marines seated them on the ground with their backs to each other.
One of their guards called for Ali.
“Hey, Terp!”
With Ali’s assistance, Cat and I questioned each of the men under the suspicious eyes of their captors.
What were they doing with so much money?
They had nearly five thousand dollars in American bills among them.
Where were they going?
The men asserted that they had been on their way to purchase a vehicle, and didn’t understand why they’d been stopped. Most of them barely suppressed their visible anger, which only served to strengthen the Marines’ doubts. They were left to sweat in the sun and questioned again thirty minutes later, this time by a specially trained interrogator who brought another translator with him. Their stories did not change, but in a wartime environment where such stories seemed suspicious, their alibi did not satisfy the Marines. The prisoners were stuffed back in the truck to await transportation to a detention facility.
After the prisoners had gone, the order came for everyone else to mount up and push further into Barwanah. Our element conducted a brief search of the town and seized a small arsenal of unauthorized weapons hidden in caches, including several cheaply made Balkan AK-47s and a World War II-era German Luger pistol stamped with the year 1938. The weapons proved the town was an area in which the enemy had been recently active, but when questioned, the townspeople refused to admit they had seen any insurgents.
“No Ali Baba,” they replied, meaning no insurgents. “There are no problems here.”
On one of the blue sheet-metal gates lining the main street, someone had drawn a picture in chalk of a twin-rotor Chinook helicopter being shot down by a kneeling man wielding a rocket launcher. I remembered reading about the actual crash, and the stickman seemed to be both a boast and a warning that we were unwelcome. The townspeople were either unwilling or too scared to help us or say anything that might later be interpreted as providing aid to the Americans.
The Euphrates River marked Barwanah’s edge. Where the main street met the river, a rickety string of red pontoon boats bridged the distance across the water to her sister city of Haqlaniyah. There had once been a stone bridge, long ago, but all that remained were broken foundations. Our heavy trucks would be unable to safely cross the pontoon bridge, so the Marines commandeered a dilapidated white sedan and parked it lengthwise to block the opposite end. Before night fell it would be important to secure this approach. Haqlaniyah sat within shooting distance and we had no way of telling who waited for us there.
Josh, Cat, and I took up position on the roof of a building directly overlooking the bridge. Some Marines climbed the stairs with us and set up a machine gun and radio position on the retaining wall. Once we had established a watch roster, I returned downstairs to explore.
The owner of the house had been either a shopkeeper or a smuggler, evidenced by a small mountain of soft drinks and candy stashed in his front yard. Empty cans littered the ground around the pallets as his most recent guests helped themselves to his supply. Ali pawed through the refrigerator in the kitchen.
“Try some,” he said.
He handed me a chunk of pita bread liberally spread with feta cheese. I noticed he left an American dollar on the shelf in place of the food he took. It was fresh and delicious, a welcome change of taste and texture from the MREs we had been eating. I munched as I walked around the kitchen, trying to savor it and hoping I wouldn’t be sick later.
The kitchen door opened onto a portal to Eden. A flock of chickens clucked and pecked the grass busily beneath a canopy of grape vines trained into a living roof, the pillars of which were orange and peach trees. If I hadn’t known better, I would have guessed I had stepped into a barnyard somewhere in the Mediterranean. A healthy-looking mother cow and her calf mooed softly in a corner. It seemed sad that such an idyllic and pastoral scene had not escaped the war.
I could see myself enjoying a quiet, peaceful life here, if the neighbors weren’t sure to kill me.
The setting sun made it harder to see, so I went back up to the roof. The other PSYOP team adjusted their speaker from behind the cover of a corner of a building to point across the bridge.
Entibah, Entibah!
The speaker crackled to life, commanding, “Attention, Attention!” in Arabic.
Curious faces peered out from windows across the street to determine what the fuss was about. My Bravo Company comrades broadcast a notice that a curfew would be in effect and that the townspeople should not interfere with the Marines’ operations during the night.
Around midnight, an earsplitting rendition of babies crying startled me from my sleep. The intention was to irritate any unseen enemies into showing themselves, but the problem with such harassment broadcasts is that the broadcasters are unable to rest either. I tossed and turned irritably but could not shut out the noise. Just when I had begun to really hate the speaker, the baby’s cries were replaced by an even more horrendous loop: mewling cats in heat. If there hadn’t been anyone in town who wanted to fight after those two hours of dreadful noise, I’m sure we made more than a few enemies with the racket. I approached the verge of complaining myself before the aural assault finally stopped. But the anticipation of waiting in silence for it to resume without warning proved almost as upsetting.
Any hopes I had for a peaceful night were drowned in a disjointed cacophony of barnyard noises, threats, and insults to our hidden opponents. However, the night passed without any sign of them.
Dawn broke, and mosques across the river responded with their own speakers, echoing the call to prayer. Ali warned that the Imam seemed upset and was calling for the people to stand up to the occupier. I could hear honking from an unseen highway on the other side of the hill.
Then for several hours, all was still. A palpable tension rose in conjunction with the heat. Something was not right. I couldn’t justify my feeling, but the quiet did not fit the mood.
Suddenly, the distinctive double Boom, BOOM! of rocket-propelled grenades shattered the stillness as their engines burst from their launchers and whooshed across the river to explode against our rooftop redoubt!
Enemy gunners waiting for the signal opened fire with their machine guns from the shadows of the palm grove on the riverbank.
“Incoming!” Cat shouted as he leapt to man the machine gun. I scrambled to join him with my SAW, slamming it atop the retaining wall and sighting down the barrel. Spent cartridges from our guns jingled as they spat upon the rooftop. I heard the careful shots of Marine snipers picking off targets from positions behind us.
My reaction was all muscle memory. I had the distinct sensation of being back on the range where I had zeroed my weapon. It had been a rainy day, and I lay in the mud making adjustments until the gun fired exactly where I aimed. Today, the men on the other side of my finely tuned sights fell as easily as those plastic targets had.
Aim. Squeeze.
The recoil of the gun jogged my shoulder with rapid taps as it spit out stinging rays of metal. With each shot the bipod scratched backward on the lip of the retaining wall. I fired short bursts to compensate, and carefully sighted down the barrel to pivot onto the next target. Without thought, I felt no remorse, seeing the enemy crumple to the ground and knowing that I had just ended a man’s life. In the moment, they were only plastic targets, muzzle flashes, and shadows, not human beings. I didn’t consider their families or their motivations. I felt no fear, only adrenaline. Time seemed to slow down, so that I could actually watch the bullets glinting in the sun as they sped back and forth over the water. What was only a minute in real time lasted an eternity in the space between life and death. Eventually we realized the enemy had stopped shooting back.
The wind carried faint screams of pain from the palm grove. Cat looked over his shoulder at me.
“You all right?”
“Yeah,” I replied, taking a deep breath. “I’m okay. I need more ammo.”
I ran downstairs and peeked out the front gate. I would have to cross the street, fully exposed to the bridge, and run to the PSYOP truck for another box of SAW ammo. Hopefully whoever was left on the other side of the river was in no shape to shoot at me. I sprinted across the open space and ducked behind the truck. My mind raced.
Half my mind glowed with excitement. I felt validated as a soldier, having finally experienced combat. The other half doubted whether I would live to see the end of my deployment. It was, after all, only our first mission.
“You guys are bad luck!” Parm called down from his turret. “That’s the first time anyone actually shot at us.”
Manny conferred with his interpreter inside the truck, crafting a message in response to the attack.
I called up to Parm. “Do you have any extra SAW ammo?”
“There’s some in the back.”
I opened the hatch, which took some effort because of the spare Humvee tire strapped to it. The pneumatic assist that usually made it easier to lift had been broken by the weight of the tire. I snatched one of the metal boxes of belted ammunition and ran back upstairs. Several more Marines had joined Cat and Josh and were perched behind their rifles, scanning for movement. One of the men was an air force combat controller who carried a radio with a long antenna he could use to speak directly to the pilots of the Marine Corps’ F-18 fighter bombers. He conferred with a gunnery sergeant, pointing out buildings on the riverbank. Cat joined them and indicated which ones had been sheltering enemy fighters.
After hours of waiting for a second attack that didn’t come, the excitement level abated somewhat. The increasing wind was heavy with sand, which stuck to my sweaty skin. I felt exhausted and dehydrated. Not being able to sleep through the night had left me in a mental fog. I chugged one of the sodas from downstairs and propped myself against a wall to wait for my shift on the gun. Footsteps crunched in the street. I looked over the edge of the roof to see two Marines and one of the lieutenants standing with Ali and an old couple who appeared to be husband and wife.
“They want to feed their cows,” Ali explained.
The lieutenant sized up the old man and finally relented to allow the pair into the garden under guard. The big mocha-colored cow munched the pile of dried palm fronds the farmer offered to her quite appreciatively, but the little one kept a safe distance behind Momma.
Huh. I didn’t know cows liked palms.
Maybe the old couple was spying on us.
After the owners of the house had gone back to wherever it was they were staying, I intended to ignore such distractions and finally get some rest. I sat down with my eyes closed, face to the sky, and heard a hollow sound at once both unfamiliar and immediately recognizable and terrifying.
Thooomp! Thooomp! Thooomp!
It was the sound of a mortar tube launching death toward us. I opened my eyes in time to see a trail of flame pass directly over my head and land somewhere in the neighborhood beyond.
“Everyone, down!” Someone shouted in a tone of such solemn urgency no one questioned him.
Another mortar sizzled overhead. Another. They were getting closer and the dreadful sound of impacting explosions grew louder. I was petrified by fear. Mortars are called indirect fire weapons because they come from above. The enemy does not need line of sight to kill with them and can launch rounds from behind hills and buildings, unseen. Under an open sky, there is nowhere to hide. I had never felt so vulnerable. Another mortar landed in the alley directly beside our rooftop between two cars, blasting a six-inch hole through the base of a concrete wall and sending shrapnel through our kitchen door. The rear car’s radiator fluid bled in a dark circle onto the dust.
The next one will be on the roof.
In that instant I knew I would die, and experienced a strangely peaceful acceptance of my fate. My life was not important, in the scheme of things. I could not change it in these final seconds, and regrets I had were too late. It would be better to go to the wall and die shooting back than lying on my belly, helpless. Sharing the same realization, the rest of our crew converged on the wall and returned an earsplitting barrage of rifle and machine gun fire. The Marine on the machine gun had dropped the plastic butt stock on the ground, cracking it, but the weapon was not too damaged to preclude adding its bass bark to the uproar. We were all so close together and the volume of fire so great that our boots rolled on a brass carpet of spent cartridges.
Josh had a grenade launcher attached to his rifle and very methodically began raining down a hail of high-explosive grenades on the enemy’s positions. The first round plopped in the river, but he walked the explosions up the bank with deadly accuracy. Patches of the palm grove smoked and the red glow of fire flickered eerily through the shadow of the trees.
Kaboom!
A rocket exploded against a parapet to my left, sending pebbles skittering across the rooftop. Our opponents were determined to throw everything they had against us. I felt totally free, having already welcomed the certainty of my death. I was no longer afraid. The mortar fire ceased, but I hardly noticed. Somehow it wasn’t important anymore.
The other PSYOP team began to broadcast Drowning Pool’s Let the Bodies Hit the Floor at full volume. The Marine next to me looked over and nodded. He smiled approvingly.
“Everyone, inside! They’re gonna shoot the main gun!” yelled the gunnery sergeant.
We crowded into the stairwell. I heard the metal squeaking of treads through the wall as two tanks lurched forward to the end of the street, just outside the front door of our house.
“Open your mouths and cover your ears!” screamed Gunny.
New Testament was back.
What followed was the loudest sound I had ever heard. The pressure wave walloped my chest and simultaneously broke all the windows on both sides of the street with a deafening crash of exploding glass.
“They’re doing another one!” Gunny warned.
It felt like our house had been magically transported to the inside of a thundercloud. My ears rang and I touched them to make sure they weren’t bleeding, half expecting my fingers to come back red. I could see Gunny motioning for everyone to go back upstairs but his voice sounded far away, as if filtered through cotton.
Back on the rooftop we were greeted by a surreal scene. The assault from the opposite bank had stopped, and the air glowed red with fire, dust and smoke. One of the buildings the enemy had been using as cover from our counterfire lay mostly in ruins, blasted into a pile of bricks by the tank shells. A patchwork of fire ignited by tracer and high-explosive rounds spread quickly through the dry vegetation, and flames licked high above the crown of palm trees.
While we watched, a dust devil materialized out of the west and scoured the length of the grove from the river to the hilltop. The little funnels were not uncommon during the Iraqi spring; we had seen them before. This one, though, preposterously took the form of what could have been seen as a godly disembodied hand, as if to signify the presence of a divine ally. I often doubted the existence of God, but while watching the hand rake the enemy positions in awe I experienced a brief moment of supreme, unwavering faith. Not only had my life been spared in spite of my worst expectations, but I was in the presence of the hand that saved me.
One Marine next to me murmured incredulously. “Holy shit! Do you see that?”
I could only nod my head in grateful admiration.
We had won the day, perhaps with heaven’s help, but no one expected the fight to be over. Our watch on the bridge continued. We established a guard roster and I left to find a suitable area to nap until my next shift.
The previous night had been one of the coldest of my life. I always assumed Iraq would be a steamy desert and had left my sleeping bag at the dam, forced to shiver in a corner until dawn as a result. While looking for a better spot, I opened a door and found the room full almost to the ceiling with blankets and pillows! Fleas or not, I slept soundly until startled by gunfire once again. I grabbed my helmet and ran outside but stopped as I realized the shots came from behind the house. It was only the Marines shooting out streetlights to prevent their glow from silhouetting us on the roof. At least, that must have been the reason they gave their boss to convince him to let them do it. From the sound of their laughter they enjoyed their target practice, an activity that would have seen them thrown in jail for vandalism back home.
Josh nudged me awake with the toe of his boot at the end of his shift to let me know it was my turn. The air was cool and still. I tiptoed through the maze of sleeping forms, my path illuminated faintly by a crescent moon. The Marine on duty hunched over the machine gun, peering through his night vision scope.
“Come look at this, dude,” he whispered. “Do you see someone moving?”
I switched places with him to see for myself. The Marine shook one of his buddies awake.
“Where?”
“To the left of the bridge, by the water. Do you see someone crawling down there?”
I thought I saw something moving, but I couldn’t be sure if it was only his suggestion making me imagine things. Maybe it was just a branch blowing in the wind.
“Yeah, I think so.”
Another Marine looked through the scope.
“Yeah, man, I see him!” He whispered excitedly. “Gunny, can we engage?”
The gunnery sergeant walked to the gun and squinted across the river. He motioned for his radio operator and reported the situation to higher headquarters, requesting clarification on the rules of engagement.
“He’s not supposed to be out there during curfew. That’s a hostile act.”
The rooftop and street below buzzed with whispers and the muffled clanking of Marines getting into position to fire, each moving as quietly as possible to maintain an element of surprise. They stood in shadow, shoulder to shoulder against the retaining wall, hunched behind weapons of all sorts, peering into darkness. It seemed like everyone who hadn’t fired their weapon in the days before converged on the spot, relishing in bloodlust, eager to exercise their license to kill.
“On my signal,” whispered Gunny.
The night erupted in a hell storm of tracer fire and the popcorn snapping of many rifles. Streaking red tracers ricocheted off buildings and zinged high into the sky. Bullets stitched left and right, up and down, toward no particular target, into the town beyond. Some of them were aimed at the car blocking the end of the bridge. My heart soared with the thrill of adrenaline, only to be tempered with disgust. The magnitude of fire felt disproportional at best, murderous at worst, and it still was not clear if it had all been for a wind-blown twig. I stopped firing. I willed myself to stop imagining the scene inside the houses on the crest of the hill as bullets rattled through their windows. Hopefully any innocents who might have been cowering there had already had the sense to flee. As for me, I could say nothing.
Morning arrived quietly, cautiously. The damp stillness of dawn broke in stark contrast to the violence of the night before. No birds sang, and the mosques lay still. Only the faintest roar of a jet circling far overhead filtered through the haze. Smoke still rose in wispy plumes from inside the shadows of the palm grove.
The combat controller’s radio crackled with static and a barely audible transmission. He held his sand-stained hand to the earpiece of his headset to hear more clearly.
“Pilot counts thirty-one fresh graves,” he said.
The man’s eyes were red and puffy from lack of sleep. “And the mortar tube is blown up. They are all dead around it. Must have had a bad round.”
The jets he spoke with returned to Barwanah too late to add their bombs to the fight, having been busy with higher-priority operations elsewhere in the country during the night. They had made one pass earlier before leaving to refuel, and I watched in fascination through my night vision goggles as the square reticles of infrared targeting lasers ticked over buildings on the opposite bank. They left without positively identifying any targets. This morning their high-powered optics provided us a damage assessment of what remained of the enemy positions before their noise, too, faded into the distance.
I walked downstairs into the garden. Both cows stood in the corner of their shelter, unworriedly chewing their cuds. The chickens showed no sign of trauma and busily hunted insects, pecking and scratching the dust. There had been no casualties here either, and thankfully the only blood shed on the Marines’ part had been that of one young man who tripped running into the house and cut his eye falling onto his rifle scope. Upon inspection of the front of the house, however, the evidence showed how close we and the animals had been to death. The windows in the kitchen were all broken, the floor covered with long splinters of glass. A dusting of pebbles and stucco lay at the base of the outer wall, blasted loose by bullets. Myriad light-colored craters in the stone marked where each had impacted, some only inches below where we had been standing.
I heard barking and turned to see a dog running along the opposite river bank after another who carried something in his mouth. It was light colored, large and awkward for him to carry. Periodically the first dog dropped his prize to get a better grip. His pursuer caught up to him and I could see that they quarreled over a human arm.
I should have been horrified, but watching them fight brought to mind what I had read of Nietzsche’s theories in Beyond Good and Evil. The dogs did not contemplate how they had come upon their meal, knowing only hunger. Human mores couldn’t convince them that eating the remains of a man who might have been their former master shouldn’t be done. I, however, felt a pang of conscience. A bitter lump of guilt formed in my throat as I recalled how enthusiastically I had contributed to providing them their food, and how indiscriminately our final nightmarish barrage riddled everything within sight. The darkness, the sense of power, and the fact we fought in a foreign land populated by people who spoke and worshipped in an unfamiliar fashion made us feel unaccountable. In the daylight, things seemed different.
They would have killed me if they had a chance, I reassured myself. They tried to kill me. I only did my duty as a soldier.
But the uneasiness remained. Someone cried. I stood stock still, unsure if what I heard carried on the wind was real. Holding my breath, I waited. Again I heard the sound of sobbing, muted and far away.
No. No wind whistling through the trees ever sounded so sad.
Upstairs, the Marine on duty peered through his binoculars toward the village’s western edge. Now above the tree line, the sound of wailing women came much more clearly. The guard handed me his glasses and I looked toward a growing crowd of black hijab-clad figures. Some crouched on their haunches, beating their heads with their hands. Others carried white-wrapped bundles I could only assume were bodies toward a series of graves marked by piles of darker-colored earth. Some of the bundles were very small.
Those are children. Or pieces of bodies.
I felt very conspicuous, confronted with the consequences of our night of violence, in plain sight of their surviving relatives. There were children, too, staring into space or hugging their mothers’ legs, crying. One by one the black figures lowered the white bundles into their holes and covered them with earth and left. Within an hour the chorus of wails died away and only piles of dark earth and the whispering of the wind remained.
If one could forget the events of the night before, Barwanah might be called beautiful. The Euphrates shone like a jeweled necklace upon the city, her tiny bobbing waves flecked with brilliant spots of sunlight. For six thousand years her waters had borne witness to dozens of changing regimes, been spanned by bridges, and felt her bridges crash into the current. Wars came and peace returned, but the river remained constant. Similarly, the villagers upon her banks inherited the blood of ancestors who inhabited the land before them; before the Americans came, before the British, before the Persians. The same river slaked the thirst of Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians, and fed fields that nourished societies producing some of the world’s first writers, scientists, and philosophers. Watching the river, I felt very young. As an American, I had no frame of reference for what it meant to live in a place that had given birth to such ancient nations, each of them built on the foundation of the people and their land. In the shadow of such history my youthful nationalism, based on transient imaginary boundaries, seemed rude and short-sighted.
The layout of the town evoked a sense of tight-knit community with narrow streets and shop windows open to the sidewalk. There weren’t any parking meters, but many cars of every make and model parked in the alleys and gated yards. Mosques, not churches, anchored the different districts at regular intervals, their distinctive minarets reaching skyward like so many blue tulips. But behind its shuttered windows, Barwanah seemed not so different from small towns in the States. Arabic signs advertised machine shops and convenience stores, even Korean electronics.
Josh and I walked into a barbershop and grinned to see the matted-haired, dirty-faced reflections staring back at us from a long mirror. The shop looked eerily and only recently vacant, as if the proprietor had stepped out to lunch. Josh picked up an electric trimmer still plugged into the wall and flipped the switch. It buzzed to life.
Josh’s eyes lit up mischievously as he asked, “Want to give me a haircut?”
He flopped back in one of the swivel chairs and I draped a nearby filthy towel around his neck. Curls of dark hair left by previous customers still littered the floor. I found a guard, dipped the trimmers in what I hoped was antiseptic solution, and noisily began to shear Josh’s pelt of sweat-dark fuzz close to his head. His chestnut hair quickly fell away, revealing a base of untanned skin. I felt safe and happy and trusting of my teammates. Though none of us would say it in so many words, we shared a willingness to die for each other.
As we drove away from town along a palm-lined boulevard, we passed the flock of villagers walking through the outlying fields to return to their houses. The expressions on their faces spoke volumes, though confusing, conflicting volumes. Some turned their backs rather than watch us go. Some stared defiantly and refused to break eye contact, while others hung their heads. A few even smiled. The children though, if their parents did not restrain them, ran beside the trucks with their hands outstretched, shouting,
“Mistah! Mistah! Candy!”
So, too, as had the Sumerians’ and Babylonians’ before us, 3rd Battalion’s control of Barwanah came to an end, at least for the day. The insurgents were sure to be back before nightfall.
We returned to the dam for a few hours of much needed rest and refit, and I took advantage of the opportunity to finally change into a clean uniform. Barwanah’s action wasn’t meant to have lasted as long as it had, and I hadn’t brought a change of clothes. After days of sweating and sleeping in dirt, my trousers were stiff and stinking. I stuffed them into a rubber-lined bag in my rucksack, hoping the smell wouldn’t infect the rest of my clean uniforms. Laundry would have to wait. We had already gotten word the next mission would depart soon, leaving just time enough for a quick shower and some hot chow.
The shower only trickled lukewarm water, but I had the fortune to beat the majority of a crush of dirty Marines and treat myself to the unbelievable refreshment of washing the days-old caked grit out of my hair and ears. If I closed my eyes, I could feel almost civilized and normal, imagining getting ready for work at home. I relished the comforting feeling of clean dry socks and a smooth, clean T-shirt against my skin.
Manny and Parm joined us for a final meal together in the dungeon of a chow hall while waiting for a separate convoy back to Al Asad. High walls and sloughing paint enclosed the dark industrial space, disappearing into blackness. The Azerbaijanis stood chow duty, their stern Slavic features enhancing the apocalyptic atmosphere as they sullenly ladled green and orange mush that had once been peas and carrots onto plastic plates.
Manny and Cat went over some final paperwork between mouthfuls to transfer responsibility of the truck and equipment. I tried to make my mind focus on the simple pleasure of sitting and eating. It seemed like we never found any time anymore for quiet reflection, or rest or sleep. We were as transient as the wind.