Sunrise Over Fallujah

by Walter Dean Myers

  “Where is my oil, my friend?” Jamil stood up, opened his shirt, and turned slowly around. “Where do you think I’m keeping it?”

  “Close your shirt,” Marla said. “You’re getting Owens upset.”

  We turned to the television and worked at getting the news. The news was important to us. We gathered around the set, all of us edging closer, turning away as we saw things at times that we didn’t want to see, or that we knew weren’t true.

  The broadcast started with images of Iraqis in Baghdad waving flags, and celebrating. Humvees and tanks rolled down the streets past smiling children. There was a quick cut to a poster of Saddam Hussein on which somebody had drawn horns.

  The press conference was the usual: a general talking about our progress. There was a map with arrows on it.

  “Anyone see Ba’qubah on that map?” Owens asked.

  No one did. All we saw was that we were the winners. Our side had won and the Iraqis were glad that we were there. I looked over at Ahmed. He was watching the television intently.

  “Ahmed, what do you think?” I asked.

  “How do I know, man?” he said.

  “You got to listen to the president,” Harris said. “He’s got a plan and we’re just following it.”

  “Harris, you can suck up without even having anybody around to suck up to,” Marla said.

  “Yo, Miss Molly, you’re lucky you a woman.” Harris stood up, feet apart.

  “Looking at you,” Marla said, “I can believe it!”

  Marla and Owens left. Luckily they didn’t take the television with them.

  The guys rapped for another half hour, then started scrounging around for food. The 3rd had set up kitchens and anybody could eat there, so we got some hot food. Not bad. Definitely better than MREs.

  May 1st, 2003

  Dear Robin,

  I have just come from Thursday night services. They were wonderful and everyone prayed for all the young men and women over there. I was watching the news this morning and saw that tanks headed into the city over there. The people look friendly enough and they were smiling on the television. I saw the women were not wearing veils or anything. I thought they wore them all the time.

  Things are going well over here. Well, almost well. I told Sister Jenkins from church that you were in the army and she said she didn’t believe me because you were too young. She had the nerve to tell me that right to my face! Then she told Wanda ( Rett’s cousin) that she had heard you were in jail. You would think that as old as that woman is she would be a little less evil. She says she has arthritis but I think it’s just the meanness gathering in her bones.

  Two little stores down the street closed. Some of the people are worried that white people will move in and take them over but I don’t care, because the stores needed fixing up. Something is also finally being done with those buildings on Lenox Avenue.

  LaKeisha, Edie Law’s oldest girl, was talking about dropping out of school, which was supposed to get me all upset. I told her to go on and drop out because they need some more people serving up them hamburgers and sodas for minimum pay.

  On the television I saw a church in Alabama, a white Baptist church I think, gathering food and stuff to send to the boys overseas. Do you need anything? Do you want the church to send you anything? You tell me and I will do everything I can to get it to you.

  Robin, I love you more than anything and pray to God for you to be safe every night. Please take care of yourself. You were always the brave type, but I want you to be careful and remember those who love you at home.

  Your father is not watching his high blood pressure and I need to get on his case but I don’t want to hear his mouth about me nagging him. You know he still thinks he’s nineteen. He sends you his love and says for you to be careful over there.

  Your loving mother, Jackie

  I lay on my cot and felt exhausted. It was the way I was always feeling lately. I was up too high too much of the time to really relax. I thought about what Mama had said, that I was the hero type.

  No, Mama, I’m not the brave type. Not over here where the booming goes through you, where explosions in the distance shake your whole body. It’s hard to be brave when you can stumble across a world of hurt around any corner, where dying becomes so casual you don’t even notice it sitting next to you.

  Even though the war is supposed to be over, there is still fighting in and around Baghdad, and the sounds of bombing just outside the city at night are awesome. It is like a thunderstorm in the distance. When the night sky lights up, our guys cheer, but it scares the crap out of me. The booming is far away, but it’s inside of me, too. It’s not so much the noise, it’s like something shaking in my chest. The president said that our mission has been accomplished. But there are still guys getting killed, and Captain Miller said they were only counting guys who died on the spot.

  “A lot of them are being rotated back to Germany or the States and might not make it down the road,” she said. “And nobody’s talking about the wounds over here. Blast wounds are terrible.”

  “They covering stuff up?” Marla asked.

  “I don’t think so.” Miller shrugged.

  “They just making sure they talking in the sunshine,” Jonesy said.

  “Jonesy, you only make sense about fifty percent of the time,” Marla said. “Everything else you say is beyond me.”

  Jonesy grinned.

  But maybe he and Miller were right. Maybe more people were dying than made the news, but I didn’t want to hear about it.

  When we patrol north of Baghdad, outside of the safe zone, we see a lot of dead Iraqis. This morning we found two civilian cars, both riddled with bullets, both with bodies still lying in them. A small crowd of men, some weeping, some talking quietly, stood around the car, waiting for the ambulance to take the bodies away. I keep looking away from the dead because I don’t want to see them. When I do look I see that the dead are not like human beings anymore. They are not neatly laid out but twisted at obscene angles on the side of the road. Sometimes there are mourners. They sit near the bodies, wailing and tearing at their clothes. They hold their hands up to the sky, as if asking, Why is this human being lying here? I know that human beings are not supposed to look like this. Sometimes there are just body parts lying along the side of the road. At first I felt a little bit ashamed at how scared seeing bodies makes me, but I notice that everyone in First Squad stops talking when we come on that kind of scene. We do it in public, but this is a private war.

  We have the war on two radios. Jonesy has the news on all the time on his little portable. On our squad radio we listen to the 3rd ID guys. They sound efficient except for every once in a while one of them will comment on how something got blown away. They have so much firepower that even they are impressed.

  We found out that the guys from the 507th were rescued.

  “They said the girl Lynch might have been raped,” Coles said.

  “She’s lucky she’s alive.” This from Jonesy.

  “Shut up!” This from Marla.

  I looked at her to see if she was kidding. She wasn’t.

  For a week we did nothing but hang around the zone. The television guys in the area were interviewing soldiers and some Iraqis willing to talk about how well the Americans had done. Jonesy went around our squad tent pretending he was interviewing guys, holding his flashlight in front of them.

  “I would just like to say that we did it all for Mom’s microwaved apple pie!” Jean Darcy said.

  “Hi, Mom!” This from Victor.

  “I’d like to thank all the little people who helped make this war possible,” said Evans. “Without you I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

  “Right now I’m talking to Corporal Danforth,” Jonesy said. “Where you from, son?”

  “Richmond, Virginia!”

  “This your first time in a combat zone?”

  “No, I worked as a guard in the mall downtown across from the Marriott,” Danforth said.
/>   “Which was rougher?” Jonesy asked. “The mall or Baghdad?”

  “If I had had my body armor, the mall would have been a piece of cake,” Danforth said.

  Funny thing. Pendleton was embarrassed when Jonesy spoke to him.

  “I’m not too good at talking,” he said.

  “Who you want to give a shout-out to?” Jonesy asked.

  “My lovely wife and two daughters, Kayla and Karen.”

  “Don’t ask Birdy anything,” Marla said. “You’ll just give him a headache.”

  Jonesy signed off the news, then went into a commercial for Muddy Waters energy drink. It was funny.

  Another week of sitting around. Jonesy practiced his blues and he was good at it. We did equipment maintenance, and when the supply room was restocked, we replaced anything that looked too hard to clean. It was the sand, mostly, that really screwed things up. Jonesy made a list of things that he liked about Iraq.

  “The weather is good,” he said. “I don’t mind the heat. And I like Baghdad, but they could build them a few more bars.”

  “They don’t drink over here,” Ahmed said. “It’s against their religion.”

  “And I like the kids,” Jonesy said. “If I was running this war, I would take all their children, bring them back to Georgia, and teach them to play the blues. Now, you ain’t never heard of no blues army. Am I right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  Jonesy went on about what he liked and what he didn’t like about Iraq. What he didn’t like was people that he didn’t even know shooting at him. “This is the drive-by capital of the freaking world!”

  What I liked about Iraq at the moment was that I wasn’t involved in any of the heavy fighting. From what I heard on the radio and from guys passing through, all of the fighting was rougher than what was making the news.

  Marla and Barbara came by and asked me if I wanted to go shopping with them.

  “We’re going with a group of Third ID chaplains up to a mosque just north of the city. It’s supposed to be safe,” Marla said. “You want to come?”

  “Yeah, okay. We riding shotgun?”

  “No, the chaplains have their own security,” said Barbara. “Captain Coles said we can take one Humvee. We’re going to stop at a market on the way back and then at a PX they got set up in one of Saddam’s palaces, so make a list of things your guys might need.”

  I actually got a piece of paper and started asking guys what they wanted. But after the first guy said what he wanted, which was the horniest girl in Iraq, it got stupid big-time. Danforth from Third Squad was the most stupid when he said he wanted a girl with three breasts.

  “Why don’t you go tell Marla that,” I said.

  The chaplains—two Asians, a black woman, and a white guy about forty—seemed like good people. They said they had been invited to the Shiite mosque by one of the local religious leaders.

  We got into the Humvee and Marla told me I could get up on the squad gun if I wanted.

  “If we’re going shopping, I guess the war is really over,” I said.

  The 3rd ID and 4th Marines had secured an area in downtown Baghdad they were calling “the Bubble.” It was like a “don’t stick your head up after dark” zone for the Iraqis. The military’s Central Command was bringing in all kinds of communications equipment, computers, and Global Positioning Systems and setting it all up in reinforced buildings within the area. The chaplains were from the 3rd and they shook everybody’s hands before we took off. Our route was northward through the city and just out of it to the Al Kazimayn mosque. One of the chaplains told us it was a Shiite mosque and the Shiites were friendlier to us.

  “Saddam is Sunni,” he said.

  The mosque was huge but delicate and probably the most beautiful building I had ever seen. The chaplains met the imam who had invited us. The imam asked us to leave our weapons in the trucks.

  “They’ll be fine there,” he said.

  The 3rd ID guys wouldn’t leave their weapons and decided to stay outside of the mosque. Marla, Barbara, and I left our weapons locked in Miss Molly and went on a tour. I wasn’t sure if the man who led us around was an imam or something, and didn’t want to ask him. Nothing that he was telling us made any sense to me because he was speaking about people who had been in the area or were buried at the mosque centuries before and I couldn’t keep up with the names or dates.

  We spent nearly an hour in the mosque and then were invited to lunch. I didn’t think we should go and leave our weapons in the Humvee and neither did Marla. Barbara said she didn’t care but decided to go back with us anyhow.

  We mounted up and made the trip alone back to Baghdad. It was only a few miles and took about twelve minutes before we spotted the first American patrol. We got ID’d and a marine lieutenant offered me two laptop computers and a lifetime pass to Yankee Stadium in exchange for Marla and Barbara. Marla thought it was funny, but Barbara got uptight about it and cursed a blue streak as we pulled away. We met up with another marine Humvee, told them we were headed for the Bubble, and asked if they minded if we tagged along. The driver said no but he was surprised that we were armed.

  “I thought Civil Affairs people didn’t carry weapons,” he said. “Like chaplains.”

  “The difference,” Marla said, “is that the chaplains think they’ve got an in with God and don’t mind dying. We’ve got a few problems in that direction!”

  The marine patrol moved slowly. The guys were young and one of them was eating a sandwich, which reminded me how hungry I was. We were in sight of the palace and I was explaining to Marla why I didn’t have a list of things to buy when a Humvee across the wide avenue blew up.

  The marines opened fire immediately, scattering the people on the sidewalk and forcing cars to a screeching halt. The driver ahead of us spun his Humvee sideways, nearly tipped the thing over, and headed for the burning vehicle. Barbara was driving and she made a hard right, and stopped a few feet from the burning Humvee.

  Three marines were already out and were trying to pull their comrades from the vehicle, which was now completely engulfed in flames.

  “Look out for snipers!” a marine officer yelled.

  I started scanning the windows and the rooftops, pointing the squad gun at anything that could possibly be a threat. A few of the marines fired at nothing in particular. They were just keeping everyone’s head down.

  Then I saw it. A marine was carrying the upper part of a body—I could tell it was an American’s by the uniform—to another vehicle. They were producing body bags from somewhere and in minutes the dead marines were off the street.

  I retched and was a heartbeat from vomiting. I could feel my mind closing down. It was too much to take in all at once. The explosion that had rocked the Humvee. The sudden bursts of gunfire. Marines leaping out of their vehicles ready to fight. The body of the dead marine.

  There was a wounded Iraqi, a heavyset man who had been carrying a bag of oranges, lying on the sidewalk. The marines searched him, then lifted him gently and moved him against the side of the building. Barbara went over and looked at him, kneeling by his side until two Iraqi men came up to them.

  The marines put out the fire and then took out the equipment from the still smoldering hulk of the damaged Humvee. The vehicle, lying on its side, was just a dark shell, like a huge prehistoric animal with flames licking at its blackened ribs.

  “IED.” Barbara’s voice was high and a little panicky as she got back to our vehicle. “Two dead. The Iraqi is going to die, too. They didn’t stand a chance.”

  I had heard about the IEDs, the improvised explosive devices, but I had never seen the damage one could do before.

  Two other marines were wounded and I saw their medics tending to them. The others in their unit did a quick sweep of the street, but they didn’t find anybody they could identify as the trigger person.

  The whole thing was over in a heartbeat. The marine patrol had been coming down the street, the IED had exploded, and now people were d
ead. There was no confrontation, no blurred figures flying across the busy street, no one to chase down for revenge, no one to be mad at.

  A wide-eyed young marine, face smudged from the smoke, came over and told us they were leaving and that we had better get back into the safe zone. The tears on his face had traveled through the grime and stopped halfway down his cheek.

  “Sometimes they take potshots at people coming to help,” he said. “Even their own people.”

  “Did you see what exploded?” Marla asked.

  “I don’t know.” The marine looked away. “I might have. Just a paper bag about twenty feet in front of the vehicle. They plant them and set them off with cell phones. I don’t know. I might have seen it. They were good people. Good marines.”

  We were all dripping sweat when we got back to our base unit. Barbara and Marla came in with me. Harris was sitting on a field chest in a towel and made some stupid remark about women coming into the men’s quarters.

  “We met up with a marine patrol near Zarah Square,” Marla said. “They weren’t more than fifty yards ahead of us when they got wasted by an IED.”

  “Anybody…” Jonesy didn’t finish his sentence.

  “Two marines got it and an Iraqi,” Barbara said. “One of the wounded marines is in deep, too. It blew off part of his hand.”

  “I didn’t see that!” Marla said.

  “He was just sitting there, numb,” Barbara said. “The marine medic gave him a shot which put him right out, then put a tourniquet on the arm. I hope he doesn’t lose it.”

  Pendleton asked what had blown up and we told him about the paper bag. He got up and punched the side of the tent. I knew how he felt. The whole thing was a nightmare. The blast had completely destroyed the marine truck and it wasn’t even a direct hit.

  After Barbara and Marla had sat for a while, talking about the IED, trying to make some kind of sense of it, they got up and started to leave.

  “You okay, Birdy?” Marla asked.