Sunrise Over Fallujah

by Walter Dean Myers

  There were three Iraqi men, two young guys and an older man. They were looking under the wagon and pointing.

  Captain Coles got into the Humvee, turned on the engine, and we watched as the back end of it slipped even farther. The Iraqi men started talking to one another and one of them climbed onto the wagon.

  Jonesy and I had our M-16s ready and I stepped a few feet away from him. The Iraqi that had climbed into the wagon, one of the younger guys, came out with a rope. He started our way.

  None of us spoke Arabic, so we had to figure out that he meant to tie a rope to the Humvee and pull it out of the marsh.

  “We could call back to the base and get another vehicle out here with towing equipment in a half hour or so,” I said.

  “Or whoever is watching us could get a vehicle of Arabs over here in five or ten minutes,” Jonesy said. “We’d be sitting ducks on foot. There’s nothing to get behind.”

  I smiled at the Iraqis, or at least pushed my face forward into what I hoped looked like a smile, and reached for the rope.

  The Iraqi held his hands up and then started toward the Humvee. The other young guy went out into the goo with them and I remembered the box of grenades we had left behind in the Humvee. Wonderful.

  The two men left their sandals on the road, lifted their long shirts, and waded through the mud to the back of the Humvee. They found the tow hook and tied the rope to it, and then held the rope high while they came back onto the road.

  Then the oldest Iraqi went and got the mules.

  “Birdy, this is embarrassing!” Marla said as the guy tied the rope around the mules’ halter.

  “Gahhh!” he yelled. The mules started to pull.

  Jonesy got behind the wheel and started the engine.

  A few more Iraqis, two older guys, and a woman with three children stopped to look. One of the men was hollering out something and trying to show Jonesy which way to turn the wheel. It took fifteen minutes before the Humvee cleared the mud.

  We thanked the Iraqis and offered them ten bucks in American money, but they turned it down. There was a lot of smiling and bowing and I could see that the Iraqis were pleased with themselves. Here we were, the conquering heroes stuck in the mud, and here they were, rescuing us.

  Back in the Humvee we were very embarrassed and smelled like dog crap. Marla cleaned her hands with disinfectant gel and wiped them off on me. The Iraqis cheered us as we started off.

  We reached Shuyukh, the place we were supposed to be, and found the other squads.

  Sergeant Harris came over and, as soon as he got a whiff of us, stopped and backed off two steps.

  “Man, y’all smell baaad!”

  “Shut up, Sergeant,” Captain Coles snapped. He was trying to wipe the bottom of his fatigues off with hand wipes.

  Harris went back to the other squads and soon they were all around us, offering helpful comments about personal hygiene. Jean Darcy asked us if we had some kind of secret weapon.

  “We’re in the same unit, so if you got something good you should share it,” she said. “I think you’re like clouding the enemy’s mind or something with that stench.”

  Marla blamed the whole thing on Jonesy.

  “I can’t handle the turret, lead the way, and drive at the same time,” she said.

  “You could at least change them when they make poo poo in the pants,” Jean said.

  Captain Coles tried to smile but couldn’t.

  We were at the Shuyukh site for an hour, while the Intelligence guys talked to some locals. I found out they were looking for weapons of mass destruction and this was one of the suspected sites. They didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, but they did find a crate of American cigarettes.

  On the way back to the base the stink got worse and Captain Coles said we had better wash good. “Maybe even get antibiotics or something,” he said. “God only knows what we were wading through.”

  When we hooked up with the guys from the 3rd we found it was the Signal detachment. They had trucks full of communication gear as well as dozens of portable generators. We were given a choice of what we could do. We could go back to the bivouac area that the headquarters element of the 3rd ID had set up outside of An Nasiryah that night, or the first thing in the morning.

  None of us could stand the smell any longer so we decided to stay the night.

  Field showers are usually cold but the water had been warmed enough by the sun to make these all right. I washed and thought about what my mom would have said if she had seen us being pulled out of the marsh. I was sure she would have laughed.

  “Yo, Birdy, you know all this part of the world is in the Bible?” Jonesy asked.

  “If you say so.” I was on the ground with my gear under my head.

  “You go to church back home?” he asked.

  “Sometimes. You?”

  “My father’s a minister,” he said. “But I don’t go.”

  Jonesy had a portable radio and turned it on. He put it on his chest but was soon asleep and the radio fell off. When he rolled over on it, I thought he would wake up. He didn’t. It had been that kind of a day.

  April 4, 2003

  Dear Dad and Mom,

  Things are going well here. We have met very little resistance. The Infantry guys and the Marines are catching it a little but my unit is still cool. I think we are helping the Iraqis, but even more than that, I think we are showing them that Americans are good people, and that we don’t want to hurt them.

  Iraq is weird—kind of an odd mix with old stuff and new. Some of the cities look as if everything was built a few months ago, but other places could be directly out of the Old Testament. I guess that sounds silly because I don’t know what the world looked like during the Old Testament, but it’s what I imagine.

  We did have some people take a few shots at us but nobody in our unit was injured. When the Iraqis shoot at Americans, there is a terrible price for them to pay because what we have to shoot back with is overwhelming. The only problem is that it is hard to know who the bad guys are or if there are really any bad guys. I don’t know what it will be like later on. It depends, I guess. If they respect us and accept democracy, then everything will turn out all right. I heard a guy from one of the infantry units say that this is a camel-tank war. They have the camels and we have the tanks. The whole thing should be over soon, which is good.

  I will try to get copies of pictures to send to you. There are reporters everywhere. They are allowed to come along on the missions and even film in combat zones. They let the Arabic newspeople come along, too. There are a lot of ways of looking at what is happening over here, I guess.

  Mom, Dad, I love you both very much and miss you as well. Your son, Robin.

  P.S. This girl in our squad, Marla Kennedy from Long Island, calls me Birdy, and now everyone is calling me Birdy. I don’t mind, though.

  April 12, 2003

  Dear Uncle Richie,

  It’s over! I didn’t think I would be so relieved, but I am. Everybody here is celebrating. We rolled into Baghdad early this morning and people on the street were waving to us. Whoa! It’s like winning the Super Bowl or something. We picked up a Marine escort and they asked us if we wanted to go to Firdos Square, which is like the main square in Baghdad, I guess. We said yes, of course, and they took us to where the statue of Saddam was torn down.

  We’re bunking down in an office building. It had air conditioning before the war but the electrical system is down big-time. Jonesy found something that looks like a guitar but an Iraqi called it an oud. Jonesy is trying to play the blues on it.

  We’re all kind of relaxed. There were casualties, but none as bad as what I thought might happen. I think the 4th Marines took the most hits. There is talk that they had more guys killed than the papers or television mentioned. Some guys from the 4th came here to pick up Quick Clot bandages. They said it wasn’t for them, but for some of the Kurdish fighters from the north. To tell the truth, you can’t tell the players over here wit
hout a scorecard. There are Iraqis all over the place—it is their city and everything, but who knows what they are thinking. I asked Ahmed if the Iraqis are really glad we’re here and kicked out Saddam. He said he couldn’t tell because they were afraid of him. Him and us, too. I guess.

  I think they were glad to see us. Otherwise wouldn’t they have fought more? I don’t know how many Iraqis were killed or wounded. They don’t count them except in the After Action reports, and then I think it’s more of a guess than anything because a guy in the 3rd said that the Iraqis always drag away their bodies. I know they could have fought more because we are finding huge amounts of shells, ammo, and stuff. Some of it’s old and nobody is paying much attention to it but there’s tons of the stuff around.

  There’s looting going on, too. Guys with wheelbarrows piled high with furniture, office machines, and anything else that isn’t nailed down.

  Anyway, I’m sure everybody at home is glad the war is over. Yesterday (or the day before, I couldn’t tell) the Iraqi 5th Corps formally surrendered. There are rumors that we could be going home within two weeks. I think we’ll have to serve a full six months before they start rotating us back. I just hope they start counting the six months from the time we first landed in Kuwait.

  I wanted to write to Dad and tell him about the war being over but he is still acting sour about me being in the army. I received the letter Mom wrote and he added a note that only said that he was glad I was safe. I bet Mom told him to add that. It’s funny, but one of the reasons I’m glad that I didn’t get killed or wounded or anything was that I didn’t want Dad to say “I told you so.”

  Good-bye for now—Robin

  P.S. Another rumor is that they have found a mountain of poison gas canisters and some other suspicious material. I guess those are the weapons of mass destruction that everyone was talking about.

  “Yo, Captain Coles!” Jonesy spotted Coles coming down the wide lane behind the main buildings.

  Captain Coles turned in our direction and then headed toward us. He had a smile on his face and I knew that he understood how pissed we were. We were at some Iraqi military school not far from Rasheed Airport. The school was modern and only had a little damage from the invasion. But they had brought in Port-O-Potties and lined them up in the school’s courtyard and our First Squad was painting them. The other CA Squads were off except for a little work they were doing in the sleeping area because they were going to be on patrol in the evening.

  “Jonesy, you’re doing a good job,” Coles said.

  “Sir, I don’t want to be doing no good job,” Jonesy said. “I’m supposed to be a warrior, not painting outhouses.”

  “They’re inspecting the sewer system for hidden weapons and bombs,” Captain Coles said. “As soon as they make sure they’re safe, and operative and secure, we can abandon the outdoor toilets.”

  “This is big-time wrong, Captain,” Jonesy said. “Big-time wrong.”

  The real deal was that the guys from the 3rd ID and the 4th Marines were bopping around Baghdad and getting on television. They were there when they tore down Saddam’s statue and all the Iraqis were cheering. That was only right, I thought. They were the ones who did all the fighting.

  Baghdad is a trip. It’s a beautiful city with wide, clean streets and modern cars zipping down the highways. The sky is low and huge and so blue it’s almost purple. The Tigris River has a mix of vessels, some large, some small with one or two people. There is a feeling of peace about the place most of the time, but then there is the distant chatter of an automatic weapon or the dark silhouette of one of our planes streaking across the sky and once again you’re reminded that there is a war going on.

  We painted the Port-O-Potties bright colors and Marla found a camel spider in the one she was splashing a bright red. When we finished painting we went to the Quarters Area and found the other squads, including Medical, cursing up a storm because somebody had made them line sandbags along the walls.

  “If the war is over, how come we have to line the walls with sandbags?” Pendleton asked.

  You did what you were told to do in the army, so the question wasn’t even worth answering.

  The first few days in Baghdad were super cool and typical army days in that we didn’t do anything except sit around and watch television so that we could tell how wonderful we were. Most of the guys they interviewed were from the marines but we were all happy. There was talk about fighting here and there, and some of it was serious, but we were cool. The word came down to hire as many Iraqis to do little jobs around the camp as we could. They were all searched when they came to the gates in the morning and didn’t have that much work to do during the day. They left just after chow time in the evening.

  “If we don’t win any hearts or minds at least we can win a lot of gums and bad teeth,” Jonesy said, pointing to the guy that had been assigned to us. “He just sit around and smile at us all day.”

  Jamil Sidqi al-Tikrit was supposed to be Saddam’s fourth or fifth cousin. He spoke a little English and was somewhere between one hundred and two hundred years old, or so it seemed. He went around all day straightening up the bunks and sweeping the floors. He smelled like garlic and cigarette smoke and his hands, spotted and brown, shook the way old people’s hands do sometimes.

  “It’s good to have us a slave,” Pendleton from Third Squad said.

  I didn’t dig that too much and neither did Jonesy. We didn’t say anything but Pendleton caught our attitude. He came over to me later and showed me a letter he had received from his wife.

  “These are my girls,” he said, laying photos of two redheaded girls, about three or four, on my duffel bag.

  I nodded and looked away. From the corner of my eye I saw Pendleton shrug and pick up his photos.

  Jamil said he spoke English, but when we talked to him he mostly just nodded. When Ahmed showed up with a bag of chocolate bars we asked him to ask Jamil what he thought of us invading his country. Ahmed questioned him in Arabic and Jamil answered him.

  “He wants to know what you want him to say,” Ahmed said.

  “We want his honest opinion,” Marla said. “What does he think about us coming in and knocking off Saddam Hussein?”

  Ahmed spoke to the old man again in Arabic.

  “When you kill a camel it is better to cut off the body than the head,” the old man said. “If you cut off the head then the camel doesn’t know what he is.”

  “Birdy, you figure out what that means and I’ll give you a dollar,” Marla said.

  She kept her dollar.

  Morning. I was still tired when I heard Captain Coles call to us. He said something about a meeting in the mess tent.

  “How come they didn’t tell us last night there was a mess tent?” Jonesy asked.

  We found it was the officers’ mess and there was fresh coffee, eggs, sausage patties, and pastry. Captain Miller and Barbara from the medics were already there. Marla and Jean Darcy were the last to arrive; Marla came over and sniffed me.

  “Not bad,” she said, smiling. “I was looking for you last night. I thought we could shower together and wash each other’s backs.”

  The girl is messing with my mind big-time. I’m beginning to think that she doesn’t believe I know much about women, which is true, but I don’t like women knowing that.

  Harris was going on about how he had served a tour in Qatar after the first Gulf War. Jonesy asked him how he had liked South America.

  “Qatar ain’t in no South America, fool!” Harris was incredulous at what he thought was Jonesy’s stupidity. He went on drawing imaginary maps in the air with a stubby brown finger. But he didn’t give us any more war stories, so Jonesy did his job.

  Major Sessions came in with a colonel. Short wide dude with gray eyes and a big forehead. She gave an informal introduction to our crew. The colonel’s name was Opdyke.

  “As you know, sir, we’re sort of out there taking notes and observing to see how our CA Special Ops might need tinkering,
” Major Sessions said. She was looking fresh, well rested.

  “Well, I have a great deal of hope for the Civil Affairs operations in this war,” said Colonel Opdyke. His voice was raspy and I wondered if he worked to make it sound that way. “I was one of the planners that suggested sending a CA unit up front early in the campaign. Give us a head start on the last phase of the overall operation, building a democracy. We build the right democracy and we’re going to stabilize the whole Middle East. That’s going to end the terrorism, end the violence, maybe even be an end to war. I don’t know, but I think we’re going to try. This is the aim of the commander in chief, it’s my aim, and it damn well better be yours.”

  Captain Sessions started applauding, so we all did. The colonel went on: “We’ve got a little situation between An Nasiriyah and Tallil Air Base. Just south of there. They’re Shiites, and that’s good, but apparently the air force sent over some A-10s on a Close Air Support mission and they took out a school. Killed some civilians. A few children. This is a war and collateral damage happens. That’s a fact of war and a reflection of what is known as the ‘fog of war.’ Nothing happens perfectly. Bullets fly. Bombs fall. People stand up at the wrong time.”

  Captain Miller started squirming in her seat about halfway through the talk. Her head rolled back when the colonel turned to Major Sessions and asked if we had any females to send to the village. When it was over and we were outside sitting on some piled-up fuel cans, Miller was close to tears.

  “How do you kill somebody and then talk about how sorry you are?” she asked. “And what was that bit about asking for a receipt?”

  “If they take the money we have to get a receipt for it,” I said.

  “And you feel good about this?” Miller asked, pointing at me.

  I felt myself shrugging, but I didn’t know what to say to her. Finally I got out a “no,” but I don’t think she was convinced.

  “The thing is,” Miller went on, “is that we don’t need to compromise. Maybe somewhere, somebody has to compromise, but we don’t. If we’re supposed to be putting a human face on this war, then we need to seriously figure out what that means. We can’t make it right by giving these people a smiley face.”