Our convoy to Baghdadi, a tiny desert town outside Al Asad, in the new-to-us speaker truck proved mercifully unexciting. To avoid mines, those of us trailing the lead vehicle followed as closely as possible the tracks of the vehicles ahead. What few civilian vehicles we encountered on the road stopped and gave a wide berth to our speeding column, a survival habit the Iraqis learned by painful experience over years of occupation. The last Humvee in line wore a sign on its bumper that threatened, Stay back 100 meters or you will be shot in both Arabic and English. Each truck alternated the direction of its gun, providing a bristling 360-degree field of fire. If an Iraqi driver failed to slow down, the gunners leveled their machine guns at his windshield and quickly settled the question of who would pull over first. Josh simply followed the other vehicles like a duckling follows its mother, Cat monitored the radio, and I stood upright in the turret, watching the desert miles pass by.
A huge rectangular six-cone speaker mounted in the two o’clock position blocked a quarter of my field of vision from atop the truck. I tested the hand crank at my waist and found the turret swiveled easily left and right on a geared track, an improvement from the old style that had previously required spinning the heavy armor plates by hand. The snaky cable to the amplifier in the trunk twisted around my legs when I turned.
I’ll have to watch out for that. I wouldn’t want to trap myself.
Parm, or someone before him, had written four or five Arabic phrases on the back of the chicken plate, an angled piece of armor designed to deflect shots aimed at the turret gunner. I sounded out “Awguf Terra Armee!” (“Stop or I’ll shoot!”) and imagined the situation in which I would be forced to shout the words. Hopefully never. I dug into the compartment at the base of the speaker and found some bungee cords, matches, and an empty pack of cigarettes. Another man might have dismissed the find as garbage, but whenever moving into a new workspace, I’d always been curious to analyze the artifacts people left behind and enjoyed imagining their personality from the items they didn’t think were important enough to take with them.
I considered the turret my office. I tried to envision its potential, cramped though the space was. I could strap my water bottles to the back of the speaker.
It’s not so rough up here, after all, and manning the gun probably means I won’t have to do a lot of walking.
I gripped the hand rail with my left hand and tested my stance in the turret. If I stood upright it felt like surfing over the roadway, but more comfortable to slide my legs forward and rest my armor on the lip of the turret to take the weight off my shoulders. I leaned back and scanned the empty desert. The rushing wind filled my ears as the sun dipped closer to the horizon.
I could tell instinctively the cluster of buildings ahead would be where we spent the night even before the convoy slowed to follow a dirt road toward them. An abandoned school sat a hundred meters off the roadway, surrounded by a brick-walled courtyard. It made a perfect fortress. From the second-story rooftop, our sentries could easily spot unannounced visitors, and the approaches were flat. Like clockwork, the Marines quickly formed a defensive perimeter around the compound and cleared the buildings. Josh followed the lead vehicle and found we could barely squeeze through the gate and back the truck snugly up to the wall next to the others, with not much room to spare.
The classrooms ringed an open courtyard in which Marines burned the trash from their MRE dinners. Josh and Cat walked the perimeter looking for an unclaimed space on the ground floor, while I helped Ali with his bags. In every room, jumbled stacks of chairs and desks hinted that no children had sat in them for a long time. Ali wrote his name in English on the blackboard and erased it. To protect his identity he used a pseudonym. He once told me his name, but after knowing him as Ali for so long, his real name didn’t seem to suit him.
Joining him, I wrote, “Welcome back, students” in big letters across the top of the board. Josh smiled and took a break from laying out his sleeping bag to snap my picture while I posed with a stick, pointing to the board as if leading an English class of imaginary students. It was unsettling, sleeping in a school, for its emptiness seemed to my mind evidence of the implosion of social infrastructure Iraq experienced after the invasion.
Where were the students? Where were the teachers? If they were still alive, what did they call a life?
A faint afterglow of dusk filtered through the glassless window, silhouetting a darkening gallery of faceless shapes. I took my boots off and slid under my thin sleeping bag. The trash fire cast long flickering shadows through the doorway, and I strained to make out the labels of the food packets strewn on my lap. I kept a red keychain flashlight in my trouser pocket, but had long since learned to eat and dress in the dark. Sometimes I preferred to. It seemed more intimate, required more skill, to operate in the dark. I’d always had a masochistic streak anyway. Secretly, I enjoyed the challenge of privation and suffering and felt somehow more satisfied whenever I could accomplish anything in the most inconvenient way. Naturally I ate my dinner cold and closed my eyes feeling deliciously deprived.
But suffering is not always enjoyable, I reluctantly admitted to myself in the morning, waking to stiffness in my neck and back from sleeping on the hard concrete floor.
I ran my tongue over my fuzzy teeth and reached for my water bottle. The gray coolness of daybreak brightened the desert and peeked through our window once more. I walked to the sill, spat out a mouthful of tepid water, and brushed aside some petrified scraps of pita bread left there by squatters or former students. Josh stood outside shaving with the aid of one of our truck’s side mirrors.
“Everything good to go?” I grunted, clambering over the hood and into the turret to put the machine gun back in place.
“Yepper,” he nodded, carefully eyeing the razor he guided over his puffed cheek.
He rinsed the blade with a trickle of bottled water. I would have to grab another case of water soon. In the desert heat, the four of us guzzled at least four bottles a day just for drinking. The stash in the trunk ran through our hands like … water.
“All set.”
Cat and Ali emerged from the disintegrating huddle of team leaders that had been gathered around a map spread on the hood of one of the other Humvees. They walked toward us.
“Your stuff’s in the back,” called Josh.
“Thanks, dude.”
As we drove, Cat explained the concept of the upcoming mission. While the Marines formed a cordon around the town, our team would patrol to the mayor’s house to gauge atmospherics, or the people’s reactions to us, in addition to providing a diversion from the search for weapons. It wasn’t going to be exciting, but the assessment was nonetheless important because the PSYOP product development headquarters in Ramadi depended on the teams’ situation reports of what Iraqis thought of our presence in order to adjust their analyses of each area we covered and to tailor future radio broadcasts and handbills.
When the convoy arrived, we peeled off with the command vehicles and formed a defensive circle at the head of a long street bordered on one side by houses and on the other by a steep rock cliff.
“Good place for an ambush,” I remarked darkly.
Although I hope not, with all these kids around.
I could see a cluster of children playing soccer down the street. Josh stayed to guard the truck, ready to drive to us if he heard anything on the radio. Cat, Ali, and I fell in with the column of Marines strolling down the road into Baghdadi. We passed fruit stands selling watermelons, cucumbers, and onions, not far from the fields that grew them.
Only young kids and teenage boys wandered the street, but they seemed receptive and smiled as we walked by. Some flashed thumbs up or greeted us in halting English.
“Hello, mistah!” they cried, eager to show off their knowledge of the language. “What time is it?”
I passed out handbills from the stash in my pants pocket to those I thought could read, and pointed out the phone number their parents should call to report roadside bombs. The younger kids crowded on tiptoes around those who held the handbills, excitedly trying to get a glimpse of the pictures. The older kids basked in their recognition from a stranger and refused to relinquish their handouts, instead reading, or pretending to read, the message aloud to the younger children.
I looked over my shoulder when we had traveled a few dozen yards and saw the same handbills already littering the ground. A middle-aged man in a green Adidas track suit snatched papers away from the kids and gestured angrily for them to go home with a threatening upraised arm, as if to slap them.
Maybe the village hid a darker reality, one less peaceful than it seemed, after all.
My restlessness dissipated slightly upon arrival at the mayor’s house. Hidden behind a nondescript gate, the yard flushed green with a well-cared-for lawn dotted by fruit trees. His young daughter dropped the sidewalk chalk she had been happily playing with and hid behind the mayor’s legs in the shadow of their house porch. He eyed our crew warily from beneath dark bushy eyebrows and carefully exhaled a stream of smoke from the cigarette he held. With his other hand he smoothed his moustache.
“Asalaam Alaikum,” called Ali.
“Alaikum Salaam,” replied the mayor dryly.
Cat advised the Marine captain walking with us that we should have Ali ask for permission to enter in accordance with Muslim tradition. Regardless, we would enter, as the meeting had been prearranged by telephone, but we might get more accomplished if we were polite. The mayor consented and welcomed us inside with an open palm held to his side. We followed him into a dimly lit room furnished with rugs and cushions. The mayor’s wife hurriedly wrapped her hair in a scarf and scurried into the kitchen to prepare a pot of tea. I noticed a selection of old PSYOP handbills yellowing on one of the side tables.
From the start, our meeting unfolded under a pall of uncomfortable politeness. I sensed the strain on the mayor’s lined face as he recounted his village’s daily toils. The water made people sick. The school had no teachers. I saw the doubt cloud his eyes as he patiently listened with deference to the promises made that Coalition Forces could help make everything better. He was restless, too. We tried to convince him that as security improved, our focus would shift more toward improving the infrastructure of his town, but we ourselves did not remove our body armor inside the man’s house. In his mind, our seemingly innocuous decision implied, We don’t trust you to keep us safe, and we aren’t going to help you until you help us first.
One of the Marines stood guard at the door, as if the mayor were a prisoner receiving his weekly visitors. Some turned down the offer of tea for fear it would make them sick, but the offended mayor tried hard not to show his displeasure.
So presumptuous, these Americans, he must have thought, but the man holding the gun is always right.
He smiled and nodded in agreement, but he had heard it all before and still waited for all our predecessors’ many promises to bear fruit. We left with his assurance that he would phone the base if ever any insurgent activity disturbed his neighborhood. I doubted he would. If he did, I never heard about it.
We returned to the school feeling rather unaccomplished. Winning these people over would take more time than we imagined. It had been years already. It wasn’t surprising given how impermanent we must have seemed to them, and we still couldn’t see it in ourselves.
All the major roads in our area of operations were named after various metals and alloys. Other units derived their road names from sports teams, or celebrities, or any topic really, that could be divided into subcategories. According to rumor, somewhere a unit had even named a road after Britney Spears. Route Bronze led back to the dam. Our convoy left the school along it, but instead of continuing straight we veered right onto a dirt track toward the village of Abu Hayat. Ten seconds after making the turn I heard a loud Bang! and turned my head to see a spindly mushroom cloud of dust rising thirty feet in the air on the other side of the intersection.
“IED!” One of the rear trucks called over the radio, referencing the acronym used to describe an improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb. My stomach tightened to imagine what the scene might have been if the convoy had gone straight, as the bomber anticipated.
The Marines reacted instantly.
“Find that trigger man!” shouted the convoy commander over his radio.
Four vehicles previously designated as a quick reaction force raced across the field parallel to the explosion, searching for a wire or someone running from the scene. The rest of us pulled off into a herringbone formation, facing alternate directions to defend against a possible follow-up attack from either side. I scanned the humps of dirt in the middle distance with my binoculars but could see nothing unusual.
A report crackled over the radio.
“Victor 6, victor 2 … There’s no command wire … Break … Looks like the IED was on a timer … Over.”
Someone had been watching us. They knew our tactics. The bomber must have calculated how long it took to drive from the school to the intersection, and placed the bomb as he watched us gear up that morning. Fortunately he had been unsuccessful, but it sent a chill down my spine to know our enemy could attack at his leisure and disappear before we even knew he had been there. These men were crafty, not to be underestimated. Our only defense had been luck.
We waited for someone, anyone, to drive by and show interest. The whole village seemed suspect. A second group of Marines walked to the crater to take measurements and pictures of the bits and pieces left of the device. Perhaps a fingerprint or a serial number or particular configuration of parts survived that could implicate whoever had emplaced it.
A white-mustachioed old man soon approached from behind us on a dirt bike, his red-checked keffiyeh snapping in the wind. He kept a distance from the road and slowed down as if to indicate his intention to pass through and we need not go through the trouble of stopping him. Maybe he suffered from senility or simple passive aggression, but he could not have chosen a worse time to pass the convoy. Though too far away to hear his voice, I sensed from his body language the distress he felt at being inconvenienced by the inevitable search of his person and his bike. I watched him through the crosshairs of my rifle’s telescopic sight and imagined his face opening up and the white fabric of his dishdasha flapping over his prone, lifeless body, stained with blood. Suddenly a tang of bile rose in my throat and I lowered my muzzle, silently scolding myself. The man had done nothing to threaten us, and he probably had not had anything to do with the explosion.
I can’t afford to lose my humanity. Not yet. Not when so many already have.
Thoughts of Barwanah still troubled me.
When a search determined there were no more IEDs in the immediate vicinity, our convoy continued into Abu Hayat. The village rested on two levels, one portion surrounded by fields of grain and vegetables and the river, the other perched atop a rocky cliff. With some trepidation, I watched the rough stone wall bordering the edge of the cliff, half expecting to see a hand appear to drop a grenade on my head.
Instead, a tiny child’s face—then another—peeked over the edge. Ours was the first force of Marines to return to the village in more than a year, which to our knowledge had not seen any outsiders since. The children excitedly watched our parade of Humvees and tracked vehicles, gradually growing bold enough to show themselves. They sat interestedly on the edge of the wall, swinging their legs and waving shyly. When I waved back, they squealed with delight.
Our trucks fanned out between the scattered palm trees in two concentric semi-circles, facing away from the cliff. Before the last vehicle lurched to a stop, squads of Marines were already disgorging themselves from the open rear hatches of the AAVs, their boots clattering like machinery over each lowered ramp. Marine
The Marines’ AAV (amphibious assault vehicle), a cross between tank and steel-plated bathtub, is designed to carry troops from ship to shore and beyond. In Iraq’s deserts they serve as armored troop transports and platforms for heavy machine guns and grenade launchers. They are notoriously unreliable when crossing the rough, sandy hills and wadis, and riding in them feels like sitting on a paint shaker. To keep water from getting in the engine, the vehicle’s designers routed the exhaust port to blow out over the troop compartment. Flaw or not, the exhaust’s placement has the perhaps no-so-unintended effect of ensuring that when the Marines arrive at their destination they are half-cooked, high on diesel fumes, and mad as bees.
The farmers who observed us from the fields and farmhouses on our periphery were also angry as they watched the Marines’ heavy-tracked vehicles drive through a wire fence and plow deep, jagged ruts into the damp earth of the fields that were their livelihood. One stood with folded arms in the frame of his doorway, expressionless but visibly displeased.
Josh, Cat, and Ali left with a small patrol to search the upper portion of the village for the family of a girl accidentally killed by Coalition Forces a year earlier. I stood alone in the turret, soaking up sun and idly listening to radio traffic. In the palm groves and fields below, the rest of the Marines lined up shoulder to shoulder and combed methodically through the tall grass searching for weapons caches. I noted their finds over the radio.
“Red six, red six, red four … Found a 155 … Request blast window … Over.”
“Red four, red six … Good copy … Battalion confirms your blast window … Over.”
“Roger … Controlled detonation in ten mikes … over.”
“Detonation in five mikes …”
“Stand by for controlled detonation …”
A loud explosion echoed off the walls of the canyon. The engineers had discovered an old 155mm artillery shell of the type frequently jerryrigged by insurgents to make roadside bombs. Rather than move it, they simply attached explosives to it and destroyed it in place.
The sun beat down ferociously. I couldn’t touch the metal of the turret without burning my fingers. Sweat ran from under my helmet into my eyes. The bottle strapped to the back of the speaker felt hot to the touch and did little to satisfy my thirst, more like drinking from a thermos of hot tea. I poured some water into my hand and splashed it over my face, tasting the salt on my lips as it quickly evaporated. A pair of pigeons huddled on a shady shelf of the cliff face watched me watch them, with their feathers puffed and mouths open, parched tongues panting.
After discovering several other weapons caches, the main body of Marines walked back to their AAVs lugging flour sacks weighted with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
So, it seemed, a deceptive quiet blanketed the valley and hid the intentions of people who hated us but who waited patiently to live and fight another day. As long as they returned the favor we had little choice but to let them wait. Frustration grew, not knowing for sure if the men who watched from a distance were simply farmers or mujahideen, but at least they would be short a few weapons next time we met. The Marines filed into their tracks and rumbled back the way they had come, leaving me with a short string of Humvees to await the return of the party from the upper village.
Two young boys, probably thinking we had all gone with the tracks, emerged from the reeds by the river and made a beeline for the path up the cliff. They carried fishing poles and faltered for a second when they realized our trucks were still parked along the road, but continued walking right up to my vehicle.
“Mistah! Give me football!” cried one as he mimed holding a soccer ball.
“La,” I replied. “Maku. No football.”
I swept one hand over the other to emphasize the point. My heart had not yet hardened against their pleading childish eyes. I had to give them something.
“Here. Catch.”
I tossed down a granola bar to each of them. They caught the treats with great enthusiasm, but upon seeing something behind me ran back toward the village on the cliff, giving up on their attempt to charm any more freebies from me.
I heard the Marines returning before I saw them. A horde of happy children surrounded Ali, laughing and reaching for the candy he and Cat shared. The pair of Pied Pipers descended the path to our truck, waving back to the kids whose grinning faces lined the stone wall. Ali threw a few last handfuls of candy.
“No joy, dude,” Cat remarked as he climbed into the passenger seat.
“You didn’t find them?” I asked.
“Nope. Nobody knows anything. Typical.”
Josh started the truck and we followed the lead vehicle out of the canyon in silence. The heat drained everyone’s energy. I looked down to see Ali’s glistening forehead lolled back on his seat and his mouth slightly agape.
We spent the rest of the afternoon cooling off in another abandoned school, this one in even worse condition than the last. Most of the rooms seemed to have what looked like petrified human feces in the corners and what remained of the desks were broken and scattered randomly. Piles of childish drawings and textbooks gathered dust against the base of peeling walls. One of the lines in a battered English primer read, “We love Uncle Saddam.”
I picked up a stick and jabbed around one room to scare the snakes I feared might be hidden beneath the refuse. With my boot, I carefully pushed aside a sheet of particle board. Instead of snakes, I had the good fortune to uncover a stash of paint and brushes left over from what must have once been an art class. For some unknown reason, in the moment of finding the unexpected, in spite of the less-than-sanitary surroundings, inspiration struck.
What do we have to work with?
I squatted and hefted one of the pint-sized cans to read the label.
Black.
Blackboard paint, in fact. In the dust behind the first sat long-forgotten cans of red, yellow, and green tempera.
The wall beside the door presented a perfect canvas of smooth white plaster. I wasn’t sure what to paint, but the biggest can contained the black. That could be the night sky. I pried open the lids of the other cans and looked inside. In all but the black, the oils had risen to the surface and were dotted with colonies of mold.
Nothing a good stir wouldn’t fix.
I broke off some splinters of a rotten board and stirred the paint.
First I framed a three-foot-by-four-foot area with a thick black line, and methodically filled in the top half. The paint quickly soaked into the parched plaster and needed a second coat. I painted a range of red mountains, mixing in shades of black for depth and texture. Then grew the grass and the yellow-green leaves of trees and foothills. I forgot the smell of my own filthy body and the oppressive heat. I didn’t mind not having blue or white paint. It felt good to create, or vandalize, depending on one’s perspective, and the emerging image became a manifestation of the mountains of Montana I wanted so much to see again.
One of the Marines came in and plopped his sleeping bag down.
“What are you doing, painting a mural, Michelangelo?”
“I guess so,” I chuckled, and continued adding tree trunks. I stood back to admire my handiwork. Something still seemed absent. To be sure, the river of blood looked a little disconcerting, but without blue a red river had to do.
I chipped a flake of plaster from the black sky to reveal the white beneath, improvising a star. I poked out the Big Dipper, and Orion, and remembered the spark of recognition I felt the first time my dad pointed the constellations out to me that winter night in Montana, so long ago.
“You mean I have to go to sleep looking at that?” teased the Marine. He stared at the scene quietly, then crossed his hands behind his head and lay back in his bag, eyes glossing in deep reflection.
I smiled, adding one last touch. Below the grass I wrote in black:
Ironically, as one who might normally sleep until noon if I had the chance, I found it difficult to sleep late the next morning, especially since our operational tempo usually made the time set aside for sleep a luxury rather than routine. With no mission scheduled I certainly had the opportunity, but the extra hours just didn’t seem as appealing with nothing except a filthy sleeping bag spread over concrete to call a bed and spiders for bed-mates. Rather than staying on the floor daydreaming and sucking up dust, I rolled up my sleeping bag and wandered outside to wash my face and check the progress of my new moustache in the mirror of one of the Humvees.
Under normal circumstances, I didn’t grow any sort of facial hair, but with no girls around to make fun, wearing a moustache had developed a novel sort of appeal. I noticed the Iraqis liked it, too, since most Iraqi men wore them. Looking and acting different from the majority of Marines may have singled us out to malevolent observers and our own strict sergeants major, but helped make approaching us more comfortable for a greater number of the ordinary country folk we interacted with.
For some of the same reasons, the HET (human intelligence exploitation team) Marines had started growing their own moustaches, too. Of everyone occupying the temporary stronghold, the Marines of the HET were the only ones preparing to leave the school that morning. Everyone else read, slept, or smoked in the hallways.
The army’s TPTs, as well as Marine civil affairs group (CAG) teams, often worked closely with HET, sharing information and intelligence on relevant local issues and personalities. However, instead of intelligence gathering being a secondary capability as it was for PSYOP and CAG, HET actively dragged information out of people who otherwise might never have revealed their secrets. When I asked where they were going, one of the Marines mentioned that an Iraqi man had approached our building shortly after dawn with information about the whereabouts of a suspected local insurgent facilitator. No one seemed to know why the informant had gone out of his way to be so uncharacteristically helpful. Maybe the man had a personal grudge or had seen the suspect on one of our bounty posters. Either way, even if the wanted man had already stepped out of bed he would doubtless soon face a rude awakening.
After watching the HET convoy leave to pluck their suspect from his house, Josh and I leafed absentmindedly through the tattered children’s workbooks we found on the floor and compared drawings that depicted Iraqi tanks shooting American planes out of the sky and soldiers marching under flags.
Perspective matters so much to the formation of a child’s worldview, I mused. What we call truth; what we tell our children, is more consensus than fact, and so different from country to country.
The children responsible for scribbling the scenes of violence and militarism I gripped in my hands had evidently already seen more than their share of suffering. Further digging under a pile of scrap wood uncovered an Iraqi flag stitched together from strips of red, white, and black cloth, hand painted across the middle strip of white with three green stars and the words, as Saddam had written in a declaration of victory on his national flag after the first Gulf War: Allahu Akbar. (God is Great.) Josh found an ominous-looking black banner a few feet away. It looked like one of the flags we’d seen in internet videos of Western captives before their beheadings by insurgents.
“Hey, Ali!” he called. “Look at this! What does this thing say?”
Ali held the banner at arm’s length and murmured the words to himself. “It’s a funeral banner,” he declared. “They carried this at the funeral of a martyr last year. It has his name and the date and says he was killed by the Americans. Where did you find this?”
When the HET team returned we learned the man in their custody was the brother of the martyr honored on the banner. Two Marines roughly escorted the blindfolded captive into the room next door, followed by their chief interrogator. The door slammed shut.
Sounds of yelling in Arabic bracketed the slap of skin on skin. Whose, wasn’t clear. More yelling. The wall shook as a body forcibly slammed against it. I looked at Josh incredulously and shook my head.
“They don’t play, do they?” he said, half-laughing in astonishment at the intensity of the interrogation next door.
We listened uncomfortably to a conspicuous silence. I don’t know what information the suspect guarded, but the next time I saw him he sat with his head bowed in the back of a cargo Humvee, still blindfolded with his hands bound behind him. Whatever he knew or had done, he was important enough to take with us back to the dam, and from there on to a proper detention facility, where under the strain of enough time and psychological pressure he might prove less resistant to questioning.
Our convoy arrived atop the dam under an inky blanket of darkness. Maybe it was the fact that we hadn’t spent very much time getting to know the place, or maybe it was the unfamiliar top-down perspective, but somehow Josh and I ended up trying to enter on the Azerbaijani side. At first it wasn’t clear we had, since the dam was symmetrically constructed and as far as we could remember the staircase looked the same as the one we normally used. It wasn’t until we passed a surprised looking Azerbaijani guard holding a Kalashnikov we realized we weren’t in the right place. I noticed that behind him all the placards on the doors were written in Cyrillic characters.
“Um, can we get to the American side from here?” I asked, somewhat embarrassed.
He stared blankly back at me, and I realized he didn’t understand anything I said except “American.” The guard looked hesitant, as if unsure what to do with us, and put a finger up to indicate, “Wait a second.” He knocked on the door behind him, not taking his eyes off us. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of us as spies or trespassers. Unfortunately, we wore army fatigues instead of the Marines’ familiar digital uniforms he normally saw, had just arrived unannounced, and probably looked suspicious as hell to an uninformed sentry. I thought it best to avoid sudden movements, just in case. A tall, shadowy-faced officer answered the door and the guard respectfully asked him something I couldn’t understand. His superior nodded and uttered a single word in English, his hand outstretched.
“IDs?”
We handed him our ID cards. For a split second I worried he would confiscate them, but there didn’t seem to be any other choice. This sort of thing probably happened on occasion and even if we were in trouble, eventually they would have to escort us to the American side. At least, I hoped so. I dreaded the thought we might have just caused an “incident.”
“We must have gotten turned around, sir. Can we get to the American side through here?”
The officer shook his head and returned our ID cards after a cursory glance.
“No, you must go back out and go over the top,” he said matter-of-factly, in a thick accent. We thanked him and quickly excused ourselves, before he had a chance to change his mind.
“This can’t be right,” I muttered.
We stood on a landing high up on the dam, bathed in the pale glow of a full moon just emerging from a break in the clouds. There weren’t any stairs leading to the top, only a two-foot-wide sloping buttress I’m sure the dam’s architect never intended as a walkway. There were no stairs or handrails. Where it met the landing the ramp stood about three feet tall, while the other side dropped off so far we couldn’t see the bottom; maybe into water, or worse, concrete. Either way, at the speed our bodies would fall if we lost our footing, neither possibility was better than the other.
I looked over the edge into endless blackness, envisioning what it must feel like tumbling into it, clawing at empty air.
“I can’t believe we are doing this,” I remarked to Josh. “I hope they don’t shoot us.”
I pulled myself onto the edge of the wall, crouched to grip both sides to steady myself, and started carefully walking up. If we hadn’t aroused suspicion before, sneaking up the side of the dam in the dark, silhouetted against the moon in unfamiliar uniforms, might have been called a perfect excuse for fratricide at the trial of the Marine who killed us.
“I don’t think they’d do that. They’ve got night vision,” quipped Josh. “I just don’t want to fall. That’d be too ironic a way to die here.”
“Don’t slip then.”
Josh and I never did mention getting lost to Cat, but he didn’t seem to notice, preoccupied instead with making arrangements for transportation back to Al Asad. He had learned from Gerry’s emails of another Marine battalion’s request for PSYOP support, and as a result, since so few teams were available to support the division, we had been temporarily reassigned to 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines. It wasn’t without a sense of anticipation we readied the truck the next morning. The remainder of our personal gear, ice cream, hot showers, and the big post exchange store waited just a few hours away.
We wandered Al Asad aimlessly for four days doing laundry, watching movies, and visiting the internet café. The PX seemed newly special and our dusty bedroom somehow more luxurious. The base sheltered a safe zone, a welcome oasis of leisure and detachment from the harsh existence just outside its walls.
Our first indication as such came within minutes of turning off the main road toward our trailer, when a military policewoman pulled our Humvee over for speeding. She stepped out of her air-conditioned SUV, straightened her crisp, clean uniform, and proceeded to lecture Josh about safe driving habits, oblivious to the dangers we had so recently escaped. After she left I could only shake my head incredulously.
Priorities certainly depend upon one’s perspective.
We were supposed to link up with a weekly resupply convoy to a base called Camp Al Qa’im, which Gerry gravely reiterated as the place a team from the company we replaced had been killed. I knew all too well. Jon, the team’s driver, had been a friend of mine. The last time I saw him had been at his going-away party. When I’d gotten the news of his death, I sat at my desk in the battalion operations office, and could only stare at my computer screen holding back tears of shame and disbelief. Disbelief because I couldn’t imagine such an animated personality forever stilled; shame because the army had never made me suffer as Jon had. My deployment experiences in Korea had been spent in luxury hotels and nightclubs during the same time Jon sweated in Haiti and gave his life under the Iraqi sun. When I found out about my upcoming deployment to Iraq a few days later, it felt like atonement for the imbalance in the price we had each been asked to pay.
The staging yard stretched bumper to bumper with column after column of semi trucks and Humvees. The civilian trucks had been contracted by a private company called Kellogg, Brown, and Root, which seemed to be involved in providing a large portion of almost every service the military once provided for itself. Their flatbed trailers hauled everything from concrete barriers to prefabricated office buildings. There were water trucks and refrigerated trucks too, driven by a colorfully multinational host of men who sat disinterestedly in their ornately decorated cabs or gathered in cliques by their bumpers. We parked the truck and threaded our way toward the front of the assembly to find the convoy commander. After jotting down our personal information and serial numbers he assigned us a place near the front of the convoy.
Compared to most of the Marines we seemed excessively well-equipped and had one of the few Warlock devices in the group, a black box that supposedly blocked the radio signals used to remotely detonate some roadside bombs. The commander alternated as best he could the military vehicles with guns and Warlocks to keep the unarmed civilians within a protective bubble of firepower and jamming waves.
Slowly, the convoy snaked out the gate toward Al Qa’im on another of the roads named after metals, known as Supply Route Tin. I braced myself as Josh aimed the vehicle down a steep grade. My hips were already bruised from so often hitting the lip of the turret. I glanced back trying to see where the convoy ended, but an endless stream of vehicles still passed through the gate, sun glinting off their windscreens. The small trailer that carried our tough boxes and extra gear bounced crazily from side to side over the rocky ground, leveling out as we followed the lead vehicle up an embankment onto the paved surface of Route Tin. I leaned back for what the convoy commander said would be a two-hour drive.
“All victors, convoy commander, be advised, break …” warned the radio. Cat turned up the speaker.
“The bridge we are about to cross is a known IED emplacement area… Break … Route clearance teams went through here yesterday, but tell your gunners to keep an eye out. Over.”
I could see the bridge he mentioned, a plain, two-lane concrete slab that crossed a deep gully and emerged into a canyon edged on both sides by steep walls. Our vehicles slowed to a crawl while the lead vehicle’s gunner scanned the span with his rifle’s scope. I peered through my binoculars. The right lane had been blasted away and bits of reinforcing rebar poked through what was left of the road surface. What should have been smooth and flat was instead defaced by a jagged crater, the aftermath of a powerful IED.
“Uhhh … as you were. We are going to pass this thing up,” crackled the voice on the speaker.
The lead vehicle edged into the gully to follow a winding dirt trail that came back out on the other side of the bridge. I thought I saw something ominous and black hanging on the underside of the bridge. Then it was gone.
Probably just my imagination.
Then again, there must have been a reason the convoy commander hadn’t wanted to drive over the bridge, either.
Once on the other side, the road smoothed out. I noticed the engineers had been patching potholes, leaving their signature paint markings and stamps over the fresh concrete as a tamper-evident seal should any insurgents try to bury explosives in the holes. The black ribbon of road stretched unbent to the horizon, smooth and shining. It had been softened by the sun and gave slightly under the weight of our tires. I watched the faint tracks of the truck in front of me and wondered how long it would take to cook an egg on the blacktop.
There wasn’t much to look at otherwise, only the odd shepherd boy and his flock or a tent far off in the desert.
Nothing to hide behind out here.
The breeze felt good. I could actually breathe freely for once. Ordinarily, whenever we went off-road the trucks in front kicked up so much fine dust into the air I choked for breath through my neck gaiter. It was pleasant to sail along and enjoy the scenery without dirt caking onto my sweaty face and hands or settling into the deepest crevices of my lungs.
We approached a stone tower that could have been hundreds of years old, guarding a hilltop in the middle distance. The convoy slowed and then stopped. More unpatched potholes waited ahead, along with signs that dirt had been swept from around them to conceal digging. I watched curiously as a Marine from the lead vehicle opened his door and jogged to the first pothole. He peered down into the hole and vigorously kicked away a layer of dirt with the toe of his boot.
Cat laughed in disbelief. “He’s kicking it?”
Suddenly the Marine stopped kicking and knelt at the edge of the hole. He took a knife from his belt and carefully probed the dirt, sweeping with his hand to reveal a dull metal circle about eight inches in diameter. He’d found a landmine.
The Marine motioned to his truck for another of his buddies to help him. Together, they gingerly lifted the mine out of the hole, only to reveal another. This time it was the buddy’s turn to extract the mine. Both men carried their deadly finds about fifty yards off the side of the road and set them down gingerly. The second man ran back to his truck and returned with a small shovel, some empty sandbags, and a wooden toolbox. He set the toolbox down and began filling sandbags while his partner rummaged through the box. The first Marine placed both mines into the hole the second had dug, capping them with a C4 plastic-explosive charge, and both smothered the pit with sandbags. They jogged back to their vehicle and the call came over the radio for our vehicles to back up to a safer distance. A loud Boom followed by a rising pillar of gray dust signaled the C4 had done its job.
At a snail’s pace, the vehicles moved forward once more until we encountered another unpaved patch of dirt. The Marine who had dug up the first mine led the convoy on foot now, knife in hand, keeping a careful watch for anything out of the ordinary. The first time he wandered an inch off track, Cat loudly warned Josh to follow exactly in the tracks of the vehicle ahead and we crept forward by inches. No cooling breeze offered any relief at this speed. We moved too slowly to outpace the sand flies, which began to bite at my neck and hands. I irritably crushed their tiny sand-colored bodies between my fingers, and couldn’t help but think of the pictures of oozing leishmaniasis boils from their bites shown at one of the mandatory predeployment briefings in the basement of the base hospital back home.
Our guide held up a fist, commanding the convoy to stop. He knelt and scrabbled in the dirt covering a large pothole, uncovering another double stack of mines.
“Oh, great,” remarked Cat wryly. “This is going to take all day. Two hours, my ass.”
“At least they are finding them before we roll over them,” I remarked.
The mines had been emplaced with impressive ingenuity. They hid in a cone-shaped hole of tamped earth designed to direct the force of their blast upwards, amplifying it. Additionally, they lay buried upside down, so that one vehicle might drive over and press the mines further into the hole but not detonate them. Subsequent vehicles following in the tracks of the first thus assumed the route was clear and exploded the mines when their downward facing plungers pressed against the bottom of the hole and activated their detonators. Mines required no traceable command wire and emitted no radio waves that could be jammed. Simply put, they were setand-forget weapons. Whoever put them there was clever. He was free to fight at his own pace, concurrently forcing our operations to a grinding halt without even having to watch.
After the seventh set of mines had been cleared and destroyed, the convoy commander made the decision to forego the road and head overland to Al Qa’im through the open desert.
The decision came too late to save one of the KBR semi trucks, which found one of the mines the clearers missed. We had been progressing at the relatively rapid pace of ten miles per hour when I heard a muffled Bang! and turned back to see a greasy black string of smoke rising on the horizon toward the tail end of the convoy. I later learned the driver escaped unharmed, thanks to his perch high above the roadway, but the destroyed truck had to be abandoned.
Seven hours later, at midnight, we finally drove through the gates of Camp Al Qa’im.