Our reception was not quite as welcoming as expected following our return to base. Josh and I had just settled back into the hooch after refueling the truck for another mission when Cat stormed through the door. His angry steps clattered like hoof beats across the plywood.
“Damn it! Damn it! I think I’m in trouble. Fuck!”
He sat down heavily on the edge of his bed.
“What happened,” I wondered, looking up from unlacing my boots. “Oh, I just told that asshole Hart to go fuck himself, and he called Gerry. I don’t know. I’m supposed to go back to Al Asad for a while.”
Cat huffed out a frustrated sigh and lay back on the bed, covering his forehead with one arm.
This unpleasant friction between Cat and the information operations sergeant had been festering since our arrival at Al Qa’im from the dam. Neither of them could ever agree on whom should be responsible for what, and refused to compromise. Cat’s brash personality hadn’t made the situation any easier to resolve. Apparently their distaste for each other had just come to a head in the office and Staff Sergeant Hart decided to use the trump card of his superior rank to get Cat in trouble with our boss. There was probably more to it than Cat would admit, but I had to agree I didn’t like Hart either.
“What about the mission? When are you leaving?”
“You guys are going to have to stay here and take care of it. I should be back in about two weeks.”
After that afternoon, we didn’t see much of Cat. He left the next day on an early chopper flight, and as next ranking, I assumed his position as team leader. But with Cat gone, the team was just a pair: Josh and myself. Being short one man meant I would have to beg the Marines to fill the vacancy for us.
At the daily battle update meeting no one mentioned Cat being sent away, but I got the impression everyone already knew. People normally friendly to me avoided eye contact. Everyone else simply briefed their slides as if nothing had happened. I felt like an outsider, small and very alone. If the PSYOP mission at Al Qa’im were to continue I had to swallow any feelings of resentment I held and succeed in spite of whatever Hart or anyone else thought. Unfortunately, for the most part it didn’t seem as if many of the leaders present cared if the battalion kept its TPT or not. Their priority was killing, not talking, and we were simply a rival service’s novelty imposed upon them to be tolerated as necessary until some excuse could be found to send us away.
When the meeting ended I walked downstairs to the civil affairs office. Staff Sergeant Williams, the CA team chief, sat behind his laptop, busily typing some sort of report.
“Staff Sergeant,” I asked politely, “could I ask a favor of you?”
“I guess that depends,” he replied, still typing, “on what you want.”
“I was wondering if you could spare one of your guys to gun for us on this mission to Shereya tomorrow. We’re short one man now.”
“Yeah …”
Williams looked up from his screen and glanced at Hart’s empty desk and then back to me.
“I guess that’s not a problem. Go talk to Z about it.”
Z, another of the CA team members, was a stocky Marine sergeant of Mexican heritage known to his subordinates as a strict disciplinarian. Even so, I’d always found him approachable and friendly when he wasn’t working. I walked back to the hooch to find him. He sat in a camp chair in front of the communal television, absentmindedly watching a bad copy of a pirated movie and cleaning his rifle.
“Yeah, man, I’ll gun for you myself. I’m tired of sitting around here anyways. Where are we going?”
“Nothing major. It’s some village called Shereya, near Ubaydi. Kilo Company is going to search some houses and we’ll probably just do a civilian noninterference message and pass out some lickey-cheweys.”
“Yeah, I’m down. Too easy. Just let me know.”
Before dawn our vehicles assembled in front of the battalion headquarters. Marines scurried about in the darkness, the lights of their red flashlights bobbing like lightning bugs, conducting radio checks and a final convoy brief around the sand table. Z sat in the turret’s swing seat, tapping his feet on the radio mount. It was dark, but would soon be too light for night vision goggles. Josh carefully followed the dim black-out lights of the vehicle in front of us out the gate. As the miles passed the sky grew lighter, and where before only two dim points of light were visible we could make out the shapes of vehicles.
The desert always seemed most peaceful in the morning when the heat had not yet reached its peak. Occasionally one could spot a rabbit or kangaroo rat hopping toward a shady spot to rest the day away after a night of foraging. A few wispy pink clouds lay dying in the distance. I slouched in the cramped troop commander’s seat and leaned my helmet against the thick pane of bulletproof glass, reflecting quietly on the passing landscape and underappreciated beauty of the Iraqi dawn.
“Flash! Flash! All victors, convoy commander! We have a FRAGO from battalion!”
I’d turned the speaker up loud, paranoid that I might miss anything during the previous period of radio silence. The startlingly loud announcement burst the static bubble of white noise. I reached up to turn down the speaker and held the handset close to my ear.
A FRAGO meant we’d received a high-priority fragmentary order from headquarters. Captain Lund’s familiar voice continued through the handset.
“Listen up, gentlemen; we’re going to deviate from our current course. Battalion just sent us the grid location to what is likely Zarqawi’s safe house. We have good intelligence that says he is in the house right now. Break. Task force is en route to the objective, so let’s not waste any time. This is our chance to get this asshole.”
The lead vehicle made a sharp left turn and increased speed.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the Jordanian-born leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Under his leadership the organization claimed responsibility for hundreds of bombings and assassinations, leading the U.S. government to offer a $25 million reward for information leading to his capture. He had gained personal notoriety for videotaping himself cutting off the heads of his American prisoners. His capture or death could potentially inflict a significant blow to the insurgency and would mean a major propaganda victory for Coalition Forces, at least until the next figurehead of evil replaced him.
Our objective appeared in the distance, a nondescript adobe structure nearly camouflaged by the surrounding sand, alone in the midst of nothingness. It had probably been a shepherd’s shelter once. A rusty orange and white taxi sat next to the building. Clouds of dust rose in the opposite direction, signaling the approach of another convoy of Humvees, and together we surrounded the objective. There could be no escape from the ring of firepower trained on the building’s doors and windows.
Two Humvees skidded to a halt close to the house and its occupants piled out to form a hasty stack at the front door. The Marine at the back of the stack ran forward with a shotgun, blasted the lock, and kicked the door in. In the same instant another man threw in a concussion grenade.
Boom!
Light flashed through the windows and the stack disappeared into the house.
“He’s not here. The house is empty,” came the report from the clearing team. “The lights are still on … we’ve got computers … bloody bandages… a shotgun.
Looks like we just missed them.”
Zarqawi was alleged to have been wounded during an earlier encounter with U.S. forces, so the bandages seemed to corroborate the fact he had again somehow managed a narrow escape. Further inspection of the surrounding area uncovered fresh vehicle tracks leading back to the road. It wasn’t clear how, but it seemed obvious the man had been tipped off to the raid minutes before we arrived. Maybe he had seen the dust, or perhaps he had spies posted along the way.
But the raid was not a total failure. In his haste, Zarqawi and his aides left behind valuable evidence of their past and future plans, which intelligence experts could extract from the hard drives of their abandoned computers. He also left a sample of his blood, which might yield a DNA fingerprint to identify the corpse we hoped to turn him into.
The Marines loaded all they could carry into their vehicles and we returned to Al Qa'im to deliver our consolation prizes to the intelligence shop. Zarqawi remained free to kill again, though with a few less secrets.
Is he too symbolic of terror for us to ever be allowed to catch him?