Standing in the turret, I snapped some quick pictures of our small convoy leaving the gate with the hazy industrial towers of the cement factory silhouetted in the distance. The surreal contrast of the vast, cloudless sky and flat, monochromatic desert seemed photogenic in a way that couldn’t be captured in a single frame. Many vehicles had taken the same trail before, gradually grinding the sand into a fine powder that billowed in choking clouds from the wheel wells of our vehicles. I put down the camera and pulled my neck gaiter as best I could over my mouth and nose.
One of the shots had been over the barrel of the new fifty-caliber machine gun the Marines in the arms room had been kind enough to let us borrow. My double-fisted grip on the trigger assembly felt solid and reassuring. I felt confident and safe, not only with the added firepower, but because I thought it less likely we would encounter a fight so close to the base. Or perhaps it was a growing kernel of faith in divine protection. Earlier that morning, I’d inked a small crucifix on the inside of the turret with a marker, visible only to me, including the inscription Jer 1:19. In the King James version of the Holy Bible, the verse reads:
And they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee, saith the LORD, to deliver thee.
The more I thought about it, the more I believed it. I couldn’t explain to myself otherwise why I continued to escape unharmed while everywhere else around me seemed so beset with death and suffering. Maybe God was trying to prove his existence to me. Maybe my faith was the price of his continued protection. As someone who had doubted for a long time, it was a question that gave me more pause than it ever had before.
The plant itself seemed mostly abandoned. The place had a postapocalyptic feel to it, as if cobbled together from spare parts and kept running with duct tape and prayers. Ostensibly the whole apparatus still worked, in spite of its run-down appearance. Most days we could see clouds of dust rising from the towers even from the base, but today the machinery was still. A solitary guard sat at the entryway, looking very fragile and alone. He stood to open the flimsy chain-link gate as we approached, though if he hadn’t it probably wouldn’t have stood up to a firm push from a bumper. Cat got out of the truck to hand him a handbill with the phone number of the local tips reporting line on it. The man took the paper but gave Cat a look of polite acknowledgment I usually reserve for those who pass out unsolicited religious pamphlets in front of local shopping centers.
After a cursory inspection of the dilapidated equipment by the civil affairs team, the mission was deemed complete. The plant manager was supposed to have met us at his office, but in his absence, we could do nothing but go back the way we came. The major in charge of the civil affairs team tried to reach him on his cell phone but got no answer. A quick search to verify no weapons were hidden in the few corners they could have been and we were back on the road again in time to make it to the chow hall for lunch.
Al Qa’im had started to feel like home. The chow hall always had a wide selection of good food, the Marines seemed willing to let us tag along with a large degree of immunity from the routine pettiness reserved for their privates, and though there were few amenities otherwise, they had real toilets, a gym to occupy our down time, and plenty of missions to keep us busy in the interim.
“If we are going to stay here,” Cat reasoned, “we are going to have to get the rest of our stuff from the dam. I’m not going back down Mined Supply Route Tin for a sleeping bag, though. I’m going to see if I can get us a ride on a chopper.”
During his routine maintenance the next morning, Josh found that even if we had wanted to drive back down Supply Route Tin and dodge mines, we wouldn’t be able to do so in our own truck. The temperamental starter that had been dying slowly over the previous days had finally worn itself out. We unloaded all the ammunition boxes, posters, handbills, soccer balls, radios, MREs, water, and sundry into the SEA hut and towed the dead truck into the maintenance bay next to the long line of other Humvees already waiting for service. It was an inconvenience, to be sure. We couldn’t easily move the speaker and amplifier to another truck and the Marines didn’t want us welding or drilling into their loaners. To make things worse, we were supposed to support a mission to Ubaydi in two days.
The city of Ubaydi was actually two cities, new and old, with the newer portion supposedly having been built to house the workers of a nearby phosphate plant. Our predecessors in the region, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, had done their best to clear the insurgency from the area, but since they lacked the manpower to establish a permanent presence, the city had gained a reputation for being a fortified stronghold of insurgent fighters. In the face of this, the loss of our truck meant we would be forced to rely on our backup speaker for broadcasts.
The Man-Portable Loudspeaker System (MPLS) is a speaker in a rucksack with an effective range of under one thousand meters. It is cumbersome, but still provides the ability to broadcast prerecorded messages from the minidisk or amplify the voice of an interpreter. Even with its reduced range, we felt thankful to have at least something to avoid saying, “We can’t help you,” to the Marines and risk losing the rapport we’d built. Josh may have thought otherwise, though, since he would have to carry it.
On the day of the mission, our truck still inoperable, the only place for the three of us was in the back of one of the AAVs. As we walked up the ramp I chuckled to see that someone had scratched the phrase “If only my girl was this dirty” with their finger into the dust that caked the back of the vehicle. Inside smelled of fuel and sweat. It had the claustrophobic atmosphere of sitting in a boat below the waterline, with no view of the horizon, only the faces of the Marines on the opposite bench staring back. My ears were filled with the clattering of the tracks and the vibrations traveled up my spine into my brain. The top hatch was open and when the transmission shifted, a sickly cloud of black smoke belched into the troop compartment.
There was no point in trying to talk over the racket. I leaned my head back and watched the sky through the open roof hatch. It was gray and getting darker. I wasn’t sure if the clouds were really clouds or just dust. It seemed unlikely rain ever fell on this bone-dry corner of Iraq. We stopped and one of the Marines stood on the bench to look outside. I was curious, too. I wriggled around and poked my head out, but there was nothing to see, just the desert and the line of squat, ugly AAVs idling. The wind grew stronger now, and bits of blowing sand stung my cheeks.
The AAV in front of us had broken down. Their gunner leaned out of his turret trying to see assess any damage to the treads, signaling the driver with his upraised left hand. The vehicle lurched forward and stopped. It looked like the treads might slip off their wheels; they’d gone slack. The gunner let loose a string of profanities. He motioned for the track to back up.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
The vehicle lurched back and stopped abruptly. Angrily, the gunner clambered out of his turret and jumped to the ground, examining the broken right track.
“Damn it!” he exclaimed, kicking sand at the stalled vehicle. It wasn’t going anywhere. Visibility was dropping due to the approaching sandstorm. The only thing clear was that the mission would not go ahead as planned. With much cursing and banging, the Marines attached a tow bar to the disabled AAV and dragged it back to Al Qa’im for repair.
By the time we arrived back at camp the sky had turned red with sun-blotting dust. Gale-force winds bowed the antennas of parked vehicles like blades of grass. I ran inside our hut to grab my camera, hoping to capture the scene, so curiously martian I thought I might never see the like again. The tarp on the roof flapped maniacally and threatened to blow away. When I came back out, some of the Marines who had been riding in the broken AAV stood leaning into the wind, holding their uniform tops open and extended like wings. I snapped the picture and took refuge in my bed, waiting for the storm to pass.
Not until nightfall did the wind abate, and there was no escaping it, inside or out. The sand storm blew in through the cracks of the plywood walls and filled the entire hut with choking dust. We could only laugh about it and shine our flashlights like light sabers though the polluted air. Our faces were grimy but spirits were still high. No one had been looking forward to working or fighting in such weather, and the next day’s mission was canceled, too. Our leaders wouldn’t risk sending Marines to their deaths if the medical evacuation helicopters couldn’t at least see to fly in and pick up their broken bodies. As the walls banged and flexed in the space beside my bed, I heard mercy in the violence of the wind.
When the weather cleared the next day I fully expected to be alerted for another mission to Ubaydi, but the order never came. Our truck had come fresh out of the shop with a new starter and flywheel, so at least the ride to the city would have been more comfortable than on our first attempt. Instead, I busied myself with cleaning weapons and inventorying product, the term we used for our handbills. We’d discovered the key to the shipping container Jon’s team once used for storage had been inherited by the civil affairs team, and after popping the lock found stacks of paper-wrapped bricks of handbills still inside. As yet, our own company had not sent anything new. But there wasn’t much we could do to change how far we were from their support, and since most of the handbills were generic enough for continued use, the piles seemed a fortunate find.
Tens of thousands of handbills cluttered the container, probably enough to last the rest of the deployment without any addition from the awaited resupply, addressing every topic from proper sanitation measures and vehicle checkpoint procedures to wanted posters of high-value targets. Cat and Josh took advantage of the lull in operations to catch a flight to the dam and back to Al Asad for the rest of their personal gear, leaving me alone to catch up on our random busy work and experience how Marines’ priorities change when their focus is off destruction.
In Cat’s absence it fell to me to represent our team at the daily battle update briefings, in which the intelligence section shared the latest information on enemy activity and the company commanders outlined their plans for the near future. The main focus centered on coordination for a major offensive they called “Operation Scarecrow.”
At the end of the meeting the battalion sergeant major usually chimed in with his pet peeves and told his leaders to get on it. His latest frustration was with graffiti in the bathroom stalls.
“I’m tired of seeing that shit,” he growled. “You tell your Devil Dogs they can use the Port-a-Shitters until I say otherwise. I’m locking those heads.”
I groaned inwardly, being careful not to show disappointment, knowing that as a lowly sergeant I’d be affected by the mass punishment, too. Naturally the toilets in the headquarters used by the staff would be unaffected, but those were already off limits to the lower-ranking Marines, part of strict measures in place across the Marine corps to prevent fraternization between the ranks. Over time, the cumulative effect of such policies had fostered a culture of rank-based elitism markedly more entrenched than I was used to in the army.
Even when I briefed my portion of the information operations slide, I sensed the amusement of several members of the staff at the novelty of a sergeant briefing a room full of field-grade officers and senior noncommissioned officers. Mercifully I performed well enough that they kept their comments to themselves. But regardless of how I felt about it, I had to admit the sergeant major’s plan would probably work. In an environment of few luxuries, the graffiti artists would rather give up drawing crude images of genitalia and writing comments about whose unit was better than lose running water for their toothbrushes and air-conditioned toilets.
After sending Cat an email to let him know about the upcoming operation plans and eating dinner by myself, I visited the bathroom to verify the sergeant major’s threat. It was locked. A sign taped to the door read, “Closed until further notice by order of the Battalion Command Sergeant Major.” The latrines quietly reopened overnight, but by then the sergeant major had made it clear he had the power to make life very uncomfortable.
He did not, however, have anything to do with shutting off our electricity. A few generators provided the only reliable power to the camp, mostly reserved for the headquarters building and the small clinic next to the medivac helipad. Everyone else, including a large portion of the Iraqis in the towns around our camp, relied on power from the Haditha dam’s hydroelectric turbines. Brown-outs and black-outs were common whenever the dam’s generators were taken offline for maintenance or when demand soared too high. Especially during the hottest days, when people ran their air conditioning the most, electricity was unreliable. On one of these days, when tempers ran high because there was no escape from the heat, I first saw Iraq’s rare rain.
I’d found an excuse to stay in the headquarters building and enjoy the air conditioning, though normally I preferred to make my time there as short as possible. Our TPT’s workspace was in fact only a borrowed desk in the corner of the information operations office we shared with them and civil affairs. Cat had already gotten into a few pointless arguments with Hart, one of the IO sergeants, which afterward made visiting the office uncomfortable.
Staff Sergeant Hart was the type of man one suspects might have been teased as a child and never lost a desire for revenge. Upon reaching a position of authority, he took sadistic pleasure in embarrassing others and making simple things difficult. I sat at my laptop typing up a report on the day’s mission with civil affairs to pay a construction contractor and the broadcast of some noninterference and harassment scripts Colonel Dooney had asked for, listening awkwardly to Hart snipe about Cat to his coworkers. I wasn’t sure if he was intentionally trying to bait me, but rather than get involved in another confrontation I stepped outside to cool my head.
Fat, wet blobs of rain splattered with an audible plop on the pavement, drying quickly at first. As the pavement cooled their dark wetness pooled together and the rain drops fell faster. I put my hand out to feel the sting of heavy droplets smack my palm. The air was rich with the smell of ozone and the dry, gray leaves of the trees that shaded the interpreters’ trailers across the parking lot glowed neon green as their dusty overcoats were washed away.
My mind flashed back to Seoul, and thoughts of running through the monsoon-like rains and flooded streets without an umbrella, happily looking forward to meeting my friends for dinner. My leather shoes had been ruined that day, but I didn’t care. It had been a time in my life I felt I would live forever. Yet, Seoul itself had been totally destroyed by war not so long ago and rebuilt from ashes to become one of the ultramodern, glass-and-steel financial capitals of East Asia. Maybe one day Iraq would have the same fortune to rebrand itself as a place of promise, even happiness, where people could forget the evil stain of violence.
But not yet. Not here. That night, lying on my damp mattress, I again heard the drums of war booming in Husaybah.
Left alone, I found the daily routine of life at Al Qa’im lonely and boring with neither regular missions to break the monotony nor my friends Josh and Cat, so I’d agreed to man the gun for one of the civil affairs trucks on an assessment of the phosphate plant outside the tiny village of Akashat. I didn’t want to file another “Nothing Significant” report with my headquarters, and a niggling inner voice of guilt after a few days of lounging in the hooch told me I should get outside the wire to do something productive.
We stopped in a little orchard, and I found myself wondering again how a land with as much potential as Iraq had become such a terrible place. Dozens of little brown finches hopped happily between the scraggly branches, whistling to each other and interacting the way they do all over the world. The entire scene, in fact, could have been transplanted from anywhere. Surrounding bushes sported a bloom of colorful red-and-pink flowers, sunlight splashed through the shadows less blisteringly hot than usual, and the shade of the trees protected a patchy carpet of emerald grass. A large dry fountain had once chimed in with its merry bubbling, but today it only gathered dust. On the wall behind it someone had chipped off the face of a waist-length portrait of Saddam Hussein done in porcelain tile. The garden would make a good spot for a picnic if only someone could be found to care for it.
Like the cement plant, the complex looked run-down and largely abandoned. We knew too well, though, the unreliability of first impressions of the absence of danger and kept a sharp lookout as we ascended a short flight of broad concrete steps to the main office. The civil affairs team’s major placed a cell-phone call to the foreman, who for security reasons we hadn’t told exactly when we were coming, and waited.
We watched him through the thick-paned glass, hustling down a flight of stairs and across the lobby to unlock the doors for us. From outside, the unadorned edifice betrayed no hint of its inner beauty. The lobby and hallways were paved with immaculately swept white tile, and the cool draft that greeted our entrance felt like the breath of heaven. It was dark, but the windows let in enough light that we were still able to see clearly. I took off my helmet and breathed deeply. Sweat dried coolly on my temples.
These conversations were always about money. All over the country American millions flowed freely into countless reconstruction projects such as this one, with a minimum of oversight, but finding evidence of results proportional to the huge amounts of cash being spent remained notoriously difficult. From what I could tell, no one really cared. Our budget was without end, as was the list of men willing to take our money. The act of spending in itself was almost more important than to what degree the government was overcharged for goods and labor purchased. We had to offset the destruction done in the name of our flag, to compensate for blood spilt in error with schools and roads. We used aid as a weapon to break the spirit of resistance and prove ourselves the force more capable than our enemy of providing life’s necessities, and in doing so hopefully force a sense of obligation from the people to repay us for our kindness with complicity. If we couldn’t win their hearts by force of arms, we would buy them.
The foreman wanted more money to rehabilitate the plant, but the civil affairs team wasn’t satisfied with the progress he’d made with the money they had already given him. In his own mind, his was the logic of a survivor trapped between two armed camps, willing to take as much as was offered to him from anyone for as long as possible, but we Americans perceived his requests as bordering on embezzlement, or a thinly veiled shakedown, and the frustration showed in the major’s face. We left the foreman with the number to our office and made the trip back to camp, arriving just after the chow hall closed.
I put away my armor and sat at my desk to file the day’s report. My stomach growled to remind me I hadn’t had breakfast, either.
Another day alone in the office.
I hadn’t been able to get the internet working to send my report that morning, and hadn’t talked to Cat in days. Every time my attempts to phone to the detachment office actually rang through, no one answered on the other end. I assumed some technical difficulty befouled the classified line between Al Qa’im and Al Asad, and when I tried the internet café, I found it locked behind a sign reading, Minimized.
Either someone had been killed or the battalion had begun the planning stages of another big mission. Communications blackouts were the Marine operational security folks’ way of controlling information flow from the camp, as they didn’t want Marines informing outsiders of personnel losses or imminent movement plans before the appropriate military channels had a chance, if they chose to, for fear of leaks somehow reaching the enemy.
Both explanations were equally plausible. In the scattered towns around the camp attacks against Marines increased daily. That afternoon the civil affairs team blustered through the door of our hut chattering about an attack on their convoy in Ubaydi involving two rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire. They had been able to outrun the ambush before suffering any casualties, but not before discovering a troubling bit of evidence: a trigger device for an IED activated by signals from the type of walkabout radios the infantry squads used. More were sure to be hidden in the streets.
After lunch I tried again to phone Al Asad. I’d almost reached the door of the headquarters building when a massive Wha … BOOM! and wave of pressure tore through the air, and I broke into a run.
I ducked my head behind the wall of concrete barriers protecting the front door and rushed inside, crouching instinctively, as if by making myself two inches shorter I could lessen my chances of absorbing the merciless slivers of shrapnel.
Again.
Wha … BOOM!
The door rattled in its frame as another wave of overpressure buffeted against it. These were bigger mortars or rockets than usual this time, and close. Twelve inches of reinforced concrete stood between my body and the shards of metal flying outside, but I exchanged blank glances with the Marines taking cover in the lobby beside me as if to acknowledge, “We’ve hidden as best we can, but a direct hit will probably kill us. Come what may, we accept our fate, but we’d rather it come another day.”
Wha … Boom!
The sound had become almost too familiar over the past weeks, but still it heralded a feeling of dread terror that gripped my heart and filled my body with a sick tension I did my best to ignore. The windows shivered and I heard the thumping rotors of Cobra attack helicopters launching from their pads to engage the mortar team. Then, all was still. Everyone went back to what they were doing as if nothing had happened. Our friend Death was dearly known to us by now, his arbitrary visits something we indifferently accepted as an ordinary element of our existence. To live in fear would have been no life at all, and though we did not seek Death out, we no longer outwardly trembled at his face.
Apparently the enemy mortar team shared our same disregard for death; despite their close encounter with the Cobras, they attacked again at midnight.