Two large bomb depressions on either side of the circle of vehicles look like the marks a fist would make in a block of clay. A few men are dead in the cabs of the trucks, and the hatch of one troop carrier is open, bodies on bodies inside it. The men around the fire are bent forward at the waist, sitting dead on large steel ammunition boxes. The corpses are badly burned and decaying, and when the wind shifts up the rise, I smell and taste their death, like a moist rotten sponge shoved into my mouth. I vomit into my mouth. I swish the vomit around before expelling it, as though it will cover the stink and taste of the dead men. I walk toward the fire circle. There is one vacant ammunition box, the dead man felled to the side. I pull my crackers from my pocket. I spit into the fire hole and join the circle of the dead. I open my crackers. So close to it, on top of it, I barely notice the hollow smell of death. The fire looks to be many days old, sand-and windswept. Six tin coffee cups sit among the remains of the fire. The men’s boots are cooked to their feet. The man to my right has no head. To my left, the man’s head is between his legs, and his arms hang at his sides like the burnt flags of defeated countries. The insects of the dead are swarming. Though I can make out no insignia, I imagine that the man across from me commanded the unit, and that when the bombs landed, he was in the middle of issuing a patrol order, Tomorrow we will kick some American ass.
It would be silly to speak, but I’d like to. I want to ask the dead men their names and identification numbers and tell them this will soon end. They must have questions for me. But the distance between the living and the dead is too immense to breach. I could bend at the waist, close my eyes, and try to join these men in their tight dead circle, but I am not yet one of them. I must not close my eyes.
The sand surrounding me is smoky and charred. I feel as though I’ve entered the mirage. The dead Iraqis are poor company, but the presence of so much death reminds me that I’m alive, whatever awaits me to the north. I realize I may never again be so alive. I can see everything and nothing—this moment with the dead men has made my past worth living and my future, always uncertain, now has value.
Over the rise I hear the call to get on the road. I hear my name, two syllables. Troy is calling, and now Johnny, and Troy again. I throw my crackers into the gray fire pit. I try, but I cannot speak. I taste my cocoa-and-pears vomit.
I join my platoon on the other side.
We hump until past dark and form a combat bivouac within about two hundred yards of ten burning oil wells. The flames shoot a hundred feet into the air, fiery arms groping after a disinterested God. We can also hear the fires, and they sound like the echoes from extinct beasts bellowing to reenter the living world. We can feel the heat. We begin to dig individual prone shelters—shallow, gravelike pits, effective protection against small arms and artillery.
Kuehn is especially aggravated by the fires and the constant petrol rain. He asks Johnny if we can use ponchos to build a lean-to of some sort, or if he can sleep under a five-ton. Johnny refuses both requests, and Kuehn begins to scream, he tries to speak, but he’s making no sense, flipping out, speaking a lost language of fear.
Kuehn is a large man, and Johnny is small, even gentle, but Johnny grasps Kuehn’s shoulders and shakes him, yelling, “Wake up, Kuehn, come back to me. Come back to us. This is war, baby, this is your war.”
Kuehn laughs. “Goddamn, you know I’m here to fight. I just want to get the hell out of this oil.” He collapses into the desert. I throw my poncho over him, and I dig his shallow shelter and coax him in.
The oil fires burn and moan all night. The petrol rain falls, and Gas is called two or three times, and finally I fall asleep with my gas mask on, a good way to die, but I don’t.
The next morning I awake with my gas mask stuck to my face. I peel the mask away, and despite the fires, the morning air is fresh and cool against my skin. Because the moisture inside the mask may have tainted my filters, I replace them.
Johnny and I are attached to Fox Company in order to take part in 3/7’s assault on Ahmed Al Jaber Airfield. The remainder of our battalion is supposed to rendezvous with trucks or troop carriers and join the attack in progress. Johnny and I drive with Fox Company in five-tons. The grunts aren’t supposed to like us, and they don’t. The goodwill that the Golf Company sergeant showed us is many days in the past. We jump on the truck and the grunts eye our rifles with suspicion and disdain, unconvinced that our weapons and our training are superior to theirs. I consider their weapons to be rather filthy, and the men themselves are filthy, and of course I’m filthy too, but my weapon is clean, and I cannot see myself.
I’ve missed riding five-tons, something I haven’t done since joining STA Platoon because we use Humvees. The big, hulky trucks offer an expansive view of the desert, and the same destruction I saw yesterday from ground level is spread out for me in a 360-degree panorama. Death is everywhere at once. The shells of troop carriers and tanks burn, flames rising from the vehicles in a profane tribute to the dead men. Bodies litter the desert as though the men were in a great crowd, chanting with fists raised as they waited for their deaths. Everyone on the five-ton shares the same view, but none of us has anything to say to the others. It’s as though we want to keep the carnage to ourselves.
As we drive in the tactical convoy toward the airfield, we occasionally pass a POW internment area, nothing more than a few-hundred-foot circle of concertina wire, and in the center a mass of surrendered men, constrained with plastic thumb cuffs. Marines walk the perimeter with M16s. We drive close enough to the wire so that I see the faces of the POWs, and the men look at us and smile. Occasionally an embarrassing scene of thanks unfolds as a detainee is processed, the detainee kneeling in front of his once enemy and now jailor, weeping and hugging the marine’s legs. I suspect the performances are equal parts genuine and dramatic, men genuinely happy at the prospect of not dying and smart enough to please their fierce and potentially deadly jailors with an act of supplication.
It’s easier to surrender than to accept surrender. The men who surrender do so with blind faith in the good hearts and justice of the men and the system they surrender to. They are faithful and faith is somewhat easy. Those who accept the surrendering men must follow the rules of justice. This requires not faith, but labor and discipline.
I feel more compassion for the dead Iraqi soldiers I witnessed yesterday than I do for these men, alive and waving the propaganda pamphlets with vigor and a smile as they await processing. These live men were my enemy just before surrendering, while the dead men are quite simply dead. Moments before surrendering, these incarcerated men might have tried to kill me, so until very recently they were capable of receiving my bullets. The dead men have been incapable of killing me for days or weeks or at least hours and so I would not have shot them. When I’d considered my enemy in the past, I’d been able to imagine them as men similar to me, similarly caught in a trap of their own making, but now that I see these men breathing and within arm’s reach, witness them smiling and supplicating and wanting to be my friend, my friend, even as I am on my way to kill their fellow soldiers, I no longer care for the men or their safety or the cessation of combat. The enemy are caught in an unfortunate catch-22, in that I care for them as men and fellow unfortunates as long as they are not within riflesight or they’re busy being dead, but as soon as I see them living, I wish to turn upon them my years of training and suffering, and I want to perform some of the despicable acts I’ve learned over the prior few years, such as trigger-killing them from one thousand yards distant, or gouging their hearts with my sharp bayonet.
We dismount the trucks two klicks from the airfield. The lieutenant we’ve been assigned to doesn’t know how to use snipers, so Johnny advises him. This problem is common—grunt officers know a sniper might be a good thing to have on the battlefield, but what can they do with the sniper and that fancy rifle? The lieutenant’s dilemma is understandable, because he must first decide how to deploy his own grunts. Johnny and I want to be as far away from the
grunts as possible. Grunts get antsy and kill the wrong people, just like tankers. Johnny points out a nearby rise to the lieutenant and tells him we’ll be there and gives him our freq and our call name.
The lieutenant asks, “What will you do, Corporal?”
Johnny says, “Sir, we will call in air and arty if you need it, and we’ll tell you what we see, if anything. We will eliminate targets of opportunity. Sir, we will save you if you need saving.”
We hitch a ride nearer the rise with two combat engineers. They’re in a Humvee with enough C4 in the back to blow a hole the size of Mecca in anything. The engineers are proud of the work they did at the minefield, as they should be, and they are prepared to detonate a path all the way to Baghdad. The driver has written, on the back of his Kevlar helmet, COMBAT ENGINEERS BLOW YOUR MIND.
Johnny and I dig a shallow hide and settle in for the afternoon. The air control tower is our main target of interest. I read it at eight hundred yards and Johnny agrees. Distance estimation cannot be taught. You can show a marine a target and tell him that it’s five hundred yards from him, but unless that five hundred yards is felt, he’ll believe you but he’ll never know for sure how you came up with that figure; he’ll believe you but he won’t know. He’ll say, I have no idea how you figured that out, it looks like five thousand yards to me, or fifty. He can stare all day at that target and never understand. And another marine, you can tell him that it’s five hundred yards away and he’ll say, I knew that. This is the marine you want next to you, the marine who understands distance.
We prepare both weapons in the hide, Johnny behind the .50 and me behind the M40A1. That .50 is so damn heavy, and Johnny humped it twenty miles yesterday, that I want him to shoot it as payoff for his labor. We’re above the grunts, northeast of the airfield, and we wait for the battle to unfold. The wind has shifted so that the entire area is blanketed with the thick, dark smoke from the burning wells. Occasional brown pockets of lucidity are available, and they offer a scene of devastation, the landing strip pocked with bomb depressions and disabled vehicles and corpses. The grunts from Fox Company dig their temporary shelters to the south of us. The sporadic radio traffic tells me that to our northwest the other marine task forces are engaged in tank battles and occasional firefights with foot infantry.
A recon platoon is situated south of the airfield and 3/7 is entrenched to the east. The Iraqis at the airfield sporadically fire artillery, with their usual lack of precision. Gas is called twice and we put our masks on, but by now it has become a chore rather than a lifesaving necessity. I know that within minutes the all-clear will be announced, and I wonder if it isn’t the same prick calling Gas every time, just for the fun of it.
Enemy soldiers are moving inside the air control tower. An argument is occurring between two commanders. They point at each other’s faces and gesture toward the enemy troops, us, and I’m sure one man wants to fight and die and the other man wants to not fight and not die. The men scuffle, and their troops pull them apart.
I request permission to take shots. The men in the tower are perfect targets. The windows are blown out of the tower, and the men are standing, and I know that I can make a headshot. Johnny has already called the dope for the shot. He thinks I can take two people out in succession, the commander who wants to fight and one of his lieutenants. He thinks that the remaining men in the tower will surrender plus however many men are under that command, perhaps the entire defensive posture at the airfield.
The Fox CO tells me over their freq, Negative, Sierra Tango One—break. Negative on permission to shoot—break. If their buddies next to them—break—start taking rounds in the head—break—they won’t surrender, copy.
I reply, Roger, roger. I want to say, Fuck you, sir, copy.
I know the opposite of the captain’s assertion is true, that when you’re sitting in a tower and your neighbor’s head becomes a gushing wound, his new wound will be the proper motivation for retrieving the white towel and the propaganda pamphlets from your ruck.
I can’t help but assume that certain commanders, at the company level, don’t want to use us because they know that two snipers with two of the finest rifles in the world and a few hundred rounds between them will in a short time inflict severe and debilitating havoc on the enemy, causing the entire airfield to surrender. The captains want some war, and they must know that the possibilities are dwindling. The captains want war just as badly as we do. And also, the same as us, the captains want no war, but here it is, and when you’re a captain with a company to command and two snipers want to take a dozen easy shots and try to call it a day, of course you tell them no, because you are a captain and you have a company of infantry and what you need is some war ink spilled on your Service Record Book.
The combat engineers blow two breaches in the eastern fence line, and as the dark oil-fire smoke gets darker, and the sky blackens like midnight even though it’s only seventeen hundred, the infantry assault companies enter the airfield and we watch. We watch the grunts moving like mules, we watch the smoke, and we hear the resulting confusion, over the freq. The infantry take more rocket and artillery rounds, and it sounds as though a few grunts have shot one another, that one fire team rounded a corner of a building and shot up their buddies, because they couldn’t see to know that the movement they heard came from their own platoon. Gas is called again, and again we put our masks on, but we don’t believe.
At the fence line nearest us, a platoon of Iraqis appears, waving white towels and smiling. There’s no one there to accept them, and the men push themselves against the fence, as rioters might at a soccer match, but the soccer match is behind the men and what they are looking for is nowhere to be found. The men sit and stretch out in the sand, as though the war is over.
No one has called Johnny and me for many hours. The airfield assault continues and the fence-line platoon of surrendering Iraqis remains, some of the men smoking casually and eating canned rations. Because I’m angry and frustrated over being forgotten and ignored, I tell Johnny I want to shoot one of the Iraqis, and I spend half an hour hopping from head to head with my crosshairs, yelling, Bang, bang, you’re a dead fucking Iraqi.
We hear medevac requests over the freq, and mortars are called in to support the grunts, and in a few more hours the assault is over and I’ve remained a spectator.
The rest of our battalion and platoon arrive at the secure airfield at 2200. The oil fires have decreased visibility and rendered our night-vision devices worthless, and the commanders have made the smart realization that marines who can’t see can’t fight, or they end up fighting the wrong people, each other, and there has been enough of that already. We sleep amidst an occasional volley of friendly and enemy artillery and again more calls of Gas. The only real excitement occurs when the first call of gas comes and Cortes’s team is in their Humvee, playing poker. Cortes can’t find his gas mask, and he jumps from the vehicle and runs in circles, screaming that he’s going to die, and we tell him to stop running and to stop screaming and especially to stop breathing so that he can share a mask with someone until they find his. Finally, Dickerson tackles him and forces his gas mask over Cortes’s face, if for nothing else to quiet him. Welty finds Cortes’s mask, on the floor of the vehicle, right in front of Cortes’s poker seat. Perhaps Cortes has been dreaming for days, putting his mask on and taking it off in somnambulistic splendor, only to be rudely awakened and shocked by this last call of Gas gas gas! Cortes has slept through so many training cycles and firewatch duties, there’s no reason he wasn’t sleeping the war away.
The gas calls continue throughout the night, and because we have nothing better to do, we continue to don and clear.
Though we’ve been running over the enemy or allowing them to surrender by the hundreds, our final destination is Kuwait City and the commanders insist that the fight for the city will be long and vicious, a protracted house-clearing mission costing many thousands of casualties and much heartache and countless widows and sad mothe
rs of America.
The morning after we bivouac at the airfield, Johnny and I are deployed via Humvee to a hide. Our position is in a corridor about twenty klicks north of the airfield (and the rest of the battalion) and ten klicks west of the Burqan oil fields. Another STA team is ten klicks south of us. Our mission is to call for fire on armor or troops in our area and to snipe officers if they present themselves for such treatment. We spend the day dialing theater-wide freqs and listening to jarheads and army doggies getting a little bit of fight at various other locations. Most of these engagements are either armor to armor, air to armor, or artillery and air dropped on the occasional holdout of enemy infantry. Johnny and I talk about what has kept those enemy soldiers fighting, and we decide that it’s probably the same thing keeping us in the fight—pride, bravery, stupidity, fear. As we talk throughout the day and listen to the war unfold on the radio and watch the movement of U.S. troops across massive swaths of desert that until just hours before had been controlled by the Iraqi army, we think the war is ending. We sit and watch and listen, and in the silent stretches between our talking I feel not like a brave and proud and stupid man, but a lucky man, who showed up at the war a boy, with enough training to keep him just ahead of the battle and enough sense to keep him somewhat detached, because the war has been mine to fight but not mine to win or lose, and I know that none of the rewards of victory will come my way, because there are no rewards, not on the field of battle, not for the man who fights the battle—the rewards accrue in places like Washington, D.C., and Riyadh and Houston and Manhattan, south of 125th Street, and Kuwait City.
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