Some of my worst nightmares are filled with the men I have lost, my fallen brothers who told funny jokes and ate meals with me, regaled me with their stories about girlfriends and wives and children, showed me pictures of babies and shared hopes and fears. I am doomed to remember their laughing grins and quirky habits, the cracking voices and shy integrity. They haunt me, not by accusing me, not by terrorizing me, but by grinning and clasping my hand, as noble and good in death and dreams as they were in life.
There are many reasons that armies, for thousands of years, have enforced a chain of command which separates the officers from the enlisted men. The Greeks and Romans understood the psychology of it, and modern armed forces before The Fall categorically embraced the philosophy. I had studied the theories and knew intellectually, if not emotionally, the reasoning was sound. Officers and leaders must have the respect of the men under their command or else the men will not obey.
The leader who is too attached to his men, a man who truly sees his soldiers as individuals, can become unwilling or unable to do what he must to fulfill his mission. The anguish the leader feels as he faces the prospect of sending good men to die can overwhelm ideology, strategic plans, and even self-preservation. Human history is littered with the torn and twisted bodies of young men ordered to “take that hill.” It is much easier to place colorful arrows on a map and decide what the margin of 'acceptable losses' is, than it is to look into the eyes of the men that by your word will perish and issue the order to fix bayonets and leave the trench to hurtle into the teeth of waiting machine guns. It is a soul eating burden to bear.
*
I held my breath, my crosshairs centered on the helmet of a man three hundred yards away who was smoking a cigarette at the doorway to one of the buildings. Another man came through the door, and from his gestures and the way the first soldier put out the smoke, I figured the newcomer was an officer. I adjusted slightly and targeted the officer and I gently squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked against my shoulder, and the report was a quiet metallic clack, a baby smacking a tin can with a spoon. When I adjusted from the recoil, the soldier was simply gone. I shifted a hair and fired another round into the other man, who had not gone for cover, but stood frozen, probably momentarily shocked at the abrupt spray of blood and brain matter that erupted from his commanding officer's head. The roar of the Raptor grew louder.
My men were sniping at machine gun nests, trying to neutralize the greatest threats first.
Before I could fire another shot, bombs slammed into the runway and the world was suddenly very bright. I felt the concussion in my bones and the ground under me trembled and shook with the violence of it. Fireballs exploded a thousand feet into the air and the sound of the blast, a deep guttural boom that seemed to come from the earth itself rolled over me. There was a guilty kind of exultation in me, an awe at the terrible raw power of the destruction I witnessed. One of the thousand pound bombs had landed next to the Stryker, and it was gone.
“Weapons free!” I shouted, but there was no need.
We fired into the compound, acquiring targets. The fifty caliber Brownings chewed into the buildings and the SAW raged.
“Put some fire on those birds!” I yelled. When the smoke cleared, I saw that the helicopters remained unscathed. Even as I gave the order, the platoon on my right opened up on the choppers with the heavy machine guns and the helos burst into flames.
Enemy soldiers swarmed from buildings. I fired single shots, choosing targets based on proximity. Men fell.
“Holy shit they missed the tank!” someone shouted.
I heard the distinctive jet whine of an Abrams tank powering up, and I was afraid. My team had no anti-tank weapons, but Gonzo's men had that capability. The problem was, the tank was equipped with heavy armor designed to defeat even armor piercing weapons. The Abrams would chew us to bits if it was not neutralized.
“Hit that tank!” I ordered. I hoped Gonzo's men would kill it.
Rocket propelled grenades streaked toward the Abrams and exploded against the armor. The tank rolled through the blasts and advanced toward the platoon on my left flank. I watched helplessly as the heavy barrel swung around and belched fire. The explosion was a deep muffled whump. Seconds later the tank fired again.
“Rounds close! Rounds close!” someone was screaming. There were muzzle flashes throughout the compound from small arms and machine guns.
“Suppressing fire on those fifties!” I shouted. Above my head, I could hear, and worse, feel, bullets cutting through the air. I wanted to be tiny and invisible. Instead, I forced my body to obey and put my scope on the fifty caliber machine gun raking our position from the water tower.
My scope revealed a three man machine gun crew. I held my breath and steadied my aim, squeezed. The muzzle flashes ceased. One of the enemies tried to get behind the gun, and I put a round into him that sent him over the side of the tower.
The tank was moving with astonishing speed, the main gun firing continuously into my flank, and the machine guns on top strafing the position as well.
From the far right, a TOW missile smacked into the tank. Gonzo's crew fired the BGM-71, our only real defense against the Abrams. The blast was brilliant in the night.
To my horror, the tank kept coming. The night was a cacophony of gunfire, explosions, and screams, and the air full of the unnatural smells of propellant and burning fuel. A second missile rocked the tank, and still it came.
“Move out! Go Go Go!” I screamed. I stood and began to sprint toward the compound. We could not engage the tank effectively, and our only hope was to take cover in the compound itself. We came on in a ragged wave, running across bitter open ground. I did not bother to try to shoot as I sprinted, cursing the heavy rucksack and my gear and feeling as naked as a newborn baby at the same time. It was a slow motion run through waist deep water surrounded by sharks with a taste of blood in the water.
The Hummer shot forward and smashed through the fence, the gunner firing on the concealed machine gun nests. I followed behind and leaped over the twisted metal. The relative safety of the first buildings was as distant and unattainable as the stars. That charge into fire was terrifying in a primal, visceral way, and most of me wanted to dig a hole and disappear into the earth.
I heard the sound of Chewy's SAW behind me and to my right as I ran. My boots slapped the pavement and I crossed the final long yards to the base of the air traffic control tower. I removed the magazine from my weapon, reflexively placed the old one in a pocket of my cargo pants, and slapped home a fresh magazine. I crept around the side of the structure, putting the building between me and that damn tank.
My men were right behind me. Already, we lost four. The machine gunners were forced to abandon the fifties and we were left with only the SAW for support. Almost everything had gone exactly according to plan. Our insertion was a success and we had taken our position without detection. A single M1-A1 Abrams tank was proving to be the instrument of our destruction.
I was gray and desolate and there was a rare hopelessness in me. I winced as the Abrams boomed again, relentless and inexorable. The men were looking at me expectantly, their faces dark and tense, their eyes white. I was proud of them and sad for them.
“Chewy, get up those stairs and lay down some suppressing fire on the building behind us,” I said. “Lutz, Veejay, you help cover him. The rest of you, we're gonna run for the next building as soon as we hear the SAW.”
Chewy held my gaze and nodded, steel in his eyes. His son moved reflexively to follow him, then paused and looked beseechingly at me. I nodded.
I heard the Hummer careen past, the fifty clunking away at the buildings we were about to assault.
“Hit that building with smoke and frags,” I said. Behind us, the tank was still firing.
A young man, I never knew his name, stepped from behind the wall of the air traffic control tower we huddled against to throw a grenade. He had already removed the pin, had his arm wound back for the throw, when machine gun rounds ripped his arm off at the shoulder. He stood looking surprised, spurting blood onto the pavement while the grenade clattered to the pavement.
He twisted and fell when more rounds tore through his flesh and he died without a sound.
“Fucking grenade!” someone screamed.
Another young man I'd fought and laughed with fell on the thing. I don't know what thoughts were in his head in that moment, whether he thought at all about what he was giving up before he acted. He jumped on the errant grenade with the enthusiasm of a kid playing football, trying to recover a fumble, and a memory flashed through my mind as I watched it, playing Pop Warner as a kid and hearing my father scream “FUMBLE!” in a drill as I scampered to beat my teammates to be the first to clasp the football to my belly and hold it close.
The blast lifted him from the ground and sent parts of him through the air. He gave us all of his tomorrows.
“Smoke!” I screamed, taking a grenade from my belt. Two of the men lobbed smoke grenades, exposing only their arms. I pulled the pin and threw my frag. Above us, I heard Chewy firing the SAW. I pulled the pin and stepped out from behind the wall.
“Frag out!” I hollered, and made a long throw, a touchdown bomb, through the smoke. I retreated back behind the cover of the wall. The blast rang in my ears despite the ambient noise.
“Move out!” I yelled. “Go go!” The men obeyed and ran into the smoke and gunfire. I waited until the last man had gone, then sprinted toward the next building. I joined the soldiers, who were stretched out in a line against the wall. One of them tossed a grenade through an open door and then led the way through it. The ensuing firefight was over before I entered the room, as my men split up and engaged the enemy. The first two had gone to the right, the next two to the left, making quick instinctive decisions based on training. I stepped over the bodies of lifeless men my assault team had taken down.
“Clear the second floor and the roof,” I said. Two squads pressed up the stairs while our remaining men set up a defensive perimeter on the first floor. Outside and above, assault rifles cracked, high notes of a symphony of death and destruction, the main gun of the Abrams the bass drum.
“Friendlies!” I heard from outside. We covered the door and I was relieved to see Gonzo running through the smoke with the rest of his platoon behind him. They huffed and cursed, and carried each other into the room. Those who were able took defensive positions around windows, while others joined my men upstairs.
“That damn tank is killing us,” Gonzo said. “We don't have any missiles left.”
“Copy that. We need to move farther in!” I was shouting over the raging gunfire. An explosion, probably a round from the tank, landed just short of the left corner of the building we occupied, and the wall caved in. Part of the ceiling fell down in a landslide of drywall and two-by-fours.
“I've got Chewy up in the tower. We've gotta get him out of there,” I said. “The Abrams is going to be on us any second. Start moving out.”
Gonzo shouted orders to three of his men and they ran out the door, heading toward the air traffic control tower where Chewy was still firing the SAW.
“Let's get ready to move out.” I ordered Crazy Dan to get our guys from the roof and from the second floor. Crazy Dan was a man in his twenties who was one of those rare people who liked the thrill of combat, a born trigger puller, and had he been born in a different time, he would surely have found his way into a Gladiator's ring. Gonzo and I crouched down with our backs against the far wall while we examined our maps.
The cries of the wounded pierced the thrum of battle and were somehow louder and more urgent than the shots and booms, and inside me there was a kind of shrinking. My boys were dying and I was letting them down because I wasn't ending it. Several paces away one of my men lay screaming for his mother, his left leg mangled and torn apart above his knee, spouting his life one heartbeat at a time all over the carpeted floor in shock with the last minutes he had left on Earth. Other men tried to tourniquet the mortal wound, knowing their actions to be in vain.
“Both Hummers are down,” someone said. Our mission was turning into a catastrophic failure.
Chewy came through the door with the other men. His son John Luke was not with them. He held my eyes and shook his head slightly. “Sniper,” he said.
We ran for the next building, a single-story brick structure with an arched roof. Thirty yards over concrete, completely exposed to enemy fire. The tank rounded onto the road, only a hundred yards distant, the main gun swiveling at an angle, lowering implacably, and in my mind I could visualize the gunner smirking as he lined up for a kill shot. There was nowhere to hide.
In a second, I saw my past laid bare, all my mistakes and triumphs flashing by me in a fleeting blur I wished I could hold on to. My children, my wife, holding onto me and to each other, laughing and playing, my father and mother bickering over politics at the dinner table in Miami, my grandfather patting me on the head and telling me he was proud of me. Mom, staring vacantly into the past in her childhood room at Magnolia, sitting up in bed with a soft pink quilt covering her while I sat next to her and played Dad's old guitar. And I saw the future too, dark and desolate, Crystal and Ryder weeping and alone, cowering in a small place at the sound of boots on the ground and the door kicked in by evil. But I was gone and I could not protect them.
“Jesus,” I said. I wanted to meet him, but I wasn't ready yet.