Weapons of Mass Destruction

by Margaret Vandenburg

  The spring of their senior year, it became painfully apparent that Pete wasn’t the only one keeping secrets. Sinclair’s entire family was on edge. His sister, Candace, started moping around in her room day and night, and his mother cried more often than usual. All the anxiety at home made him want to buddy up with Pete more than ever. But even when they went hunting, something wasn’t right. Instead of being alone in the woods together, they were lonely. Sinclair sensed that Pete wanted to confide in him. Eventually he broke the cardinal rule of male friendship and tried to talk about what was wrong.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re so quiet.”

  “I’m always quiet.”

  “Not quiet like this.”

  “Lay off, will you? You wouldn’t understand anyway.”

  At the time, Sinclair had been pissed off. It felt like Pete was being dishonest. Disloyal. But he may have been right after all. Three years later, staring at Evans’s head wound, Sinclair still didn’t understand. Otherwise he’d be mourning Evans rather than trying to resurrect Pete. Trapp kept asking him why Pete shot himself. If only he knew. If only he didn’t know. Pete was barred from their house that summer. Sinclair and his sister went off to college without him that fall. His father and Grandpa practically came to blows over whether to throw the Swans off the property. And through it all, Sinclair had said nothing, neither defending nor denouncing the boy who was like a brother to him.

  They said it was an accident. Even without studying the trajectory of the bullet through the roof of Pete’s mouth, Sinclair knew that this was the first in a series of lies they would tell themselves about his death. Consummate hunters don’t have accidents with guns. They wield them deliberately, with infinite respect for their capacity to kill at will. Sinclair made them show him the death certificate, signed and dated September 10, 2001. Cause of death: accidental gunshot wound. The fact that suicides couldn’t be buried in sacred ground seemed to justify falsifying the document. The coroner obviously deferred to Grandpa, who had found the body. They must have thought they were protecting Pete’s father, or Sinclair, or even Pete himself with their lies. God knows they were really protecting themselves. The pretense that Pete died accidentally let them all off the hook. It meant no one was responsible. It ameliorated the moral outrage they felt in the face of senseless death. Sinclair still felt it.

  9/10/01. A date which will live in infamy. When the Twin Towers came crashing down the next day, the nation’s tragedy seemed to echo Sinclair’s personal loss, one cataclysm following the other in such rapid succession he was too numb to grieve. In self-defense, he made sense of all the senseless killing, constructing a narrative in which moral certainty filled the void left by Pete’s suicide. The second calamity redeemed the first, giving Sinclair something to believe in again. As an act of terrorism against American ideals, 9/11 backfired. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness rose out of the ashes, inspiring Evans and others to make the ultimate sacrifice. His death was not in vain.

  “He did it because he thought there was nothing to believe in,” Sinclair finally said.

  “Why does that scare you so much?” Trapp asked.

  “I was afraid he might be right.”

  Trapp could tell from the way Sinclair’s eyes focused that he had snapped out of his flashback. They had witnessed their share of what civilians called PTSD, a ridiculous acronym. Nothing was post-traumatic about relentless trauma. Sinclair wasn’t so much living in the past as unstuck in time. The only remedy was to keep grounding him in the palpable present. Trapp led him across the rooftop to Evans’s body. One of the great paradoxes of combat was the solace of succoring fallen comrades. No matter what triggered PTSD, the root cause was more fear of dying than death itself. The dead are a kind of comfort, a reminder that there is repose at the end of that terrifying passage.

  Together they laid out Evans’s body, straightening his limbs to accommodate the stretcher. Sinclair retrieved the bandana Trapp had left behind. He wet it with canteen water and started wiping the blood off of Evans’s face. His ears. His neck. He would have done the same for Pete if he’d had the chance. He knew Trapp was watching, making sure he was okay. As long as he focused on the task at hand, he would be fine. He pulled the chain around Evans’s neck and his dog tags spilled out of his uniform. His fiancé would probably get to keep them, once he made his way back home. Trapp reached out and held them in the palm of his hand. EVANS, THOMAS C. 676-41-2625. O NEG. CATHOLIC. Their buddy.

  The medevac unit was clamoring up the stairs again. This time Trapp waved them onto the rooftop. He and Sinclair relinquished the body but not Evans. He would always be part of the platoon. When the medics took his body away, Trapp and Sinclair stood for a minute surveying the wasteland surrounding them. Smoke still obscured the sky, but an orange glow low on the horizon confirmed that it was sunset. They rarely had time to contemplate the terrible beauty of combat zones, the apocalyptic wonder of it all. There was nothing more peaceful than the aftermath of war. The more in-depth conversation they might have had about Pete hung in the air. It would have to wait, especially now that Sinclair had recovered his equilibrium. Evans deserved the full force of their grief, tempered but not blunted by their compulsion to keep fighting. His death steeled their purpose to decimate the rest of the city. Nobody killed Americans with impunity.

  “Evans was a brick,” Trapp said. “Every inch a marine.”

  “He died a hero,” Sinclair said.

  “Amen to that.”

  Trapp took the desert fossil from his breast pocket and gave it to Sinclair.

  “If this bug can survive fifty million years—”

  Sinclair joined in on the chorus.

  “—we can survive this goddamn war.”

  When Sinclair tried to hand Evans’s talisman back, Trapp waved him off.

  “You keep it. Something to believe in.”

  They turned and marched back down the stairs to rejoin the platoon. Radetzky had set up a makeshift base camp just south of the bombed-out quarter. The battalion had cleared everything from there to the feeder highway, and runners were able to deliver an actual cooked meal. Chicken à la king was gourmet compared to the MREs they’d been scarfing down all day. Blankets were spread across the floor. Half of the men were already conked out. A guard was posted at every window, more a formality than a necessity. As Wolf liked to say, employing one of his stock urban metaphors, the exterminator had made his rounds. The place was debugged.

  “First-class accommodations,” McCarthy said when Sinclair and Trapp showed up. It was the kind of snide comment McCarthy always made, and it comforted them. Everybody was relatively subdued, in unspoken deference to Evans. But they exchanged their usual flippancies to reassure themselves that life goes on, even in the combat zone. Radetzky approached them as they sat in actual chairs at an actual table, eating their dinner.

  “Better grab some shut-eye while you can,” Radetzky said. “We’ll be moving out at 0200 hours.”

  Trapp checked his watch. “Four hours? I thought you said we’d take a break after we blew the cell.”

  “New game plan.”

  “Whose?”

  “Centcom’s.”

  “Where’s the fire?”

  “Pretty much everywhere. We’ve got to keep pace with the other battalions.”

  “Are they encountering as much resistance?”

  “Apparently not. We’re the lucky ones.”

  “Figures.”

  “2/1 has already secured the Jolan District.”

  They just kept eating. Even McCarthy was too exhausted to gloat over the news.

  “And 1/5 expects to control the northern half of the industrial sector by morning,” Radetzky said. “Colonel Denning says we’ve got to stop dillydallying around.”

  “I suppose they think Evans was killed dillydallying around,” Trapp said under his breath. Radetzky pretended not to hear him.

  They mobilized at 014
5 hours, to leave time to tidy up after themselves. Blowing up a house was kosher, but not leaving dirty dishes in the sink. Marines were famous for upholding standards of decency that were either noble or nuts, depending on your perspective. Hygiene was a particularly irritating virtue. Not that grunts wouldn’t have welcomed clean socks to stave off foot rot. But purely symbolic gestures, especially shaving, just pissed them off. Officers were forever ordering them to haul out their razors, even when they were in combat mode. If there were logical explanations for such random priorities, they had more to do with image than substance. Bearded, drug-infested insurgents were terrorists, not freedom fighters. Clean-cut marines were liberators, not infidel invaders. Never mind that facial hair was a sign of piety in Iraq.

  The city was unnervingly quiet. Night-vision goggles transformed darkness into a spectral landscape of clarified shadows. Once in a while, particularly luminous objects startled them. Billowing curtains. A skittering cat catching the full rays of the moon. The neighborhood appeared to be deserted. Insurgents knew they were at a disadvantage in the dark. Some were probably hiding in underground tunnels, biding their time until daylight. Others had decamped entirely, slipping through security to spend the night in the desert. The platoon advanced three full blocks without firing a single shot.

  The absence of actual fighters didn’t necessarily diminish the threat. It felt like someone was leading them into a trap. Sinclair’s team encountered a brick barrier blocking the rooftop of an apartment complex. Better luck next time. The stairs in a neighboring building had been ripped out, making it virtually impossible to access upper floors. They finally had to settle for a three-story home with good offensive visibility but an imperfect view to the south. Behind them, Fallujah smoldered in ruins. But there were still plenty of places to hide. Technically Iraqi troops were responsible for providing rearguard security. Patrolling cleared quadrants was as strategically necessary as clearing them in the first place.

  Iraqi Security Forces had been deployed in previous high-profile offensives. Fighting side-by-side was the best way to promote the perception that the war was a joint operation, not an American occupation. Early on, Iraqi National Guardsmen seemed eager to get the job done. But when the insurgency terrorized Anbar Province, the feasibility of joint missions became increasingly tenuous. Iraqi soldiers expected the support of regional authorities, something US Marines had long since given up on. The coalition was fragile. When local sentiment shifted, it fell apart.

  The Joint Task Force figured out ways to deploy the Iraqi National Guard without jeopardizing the success of the op plan. Tasking them with rearguard security duty was a prudent compromise. When the ING stuck to their guns, they significantly boosted the perceived legitimacy of the mission. When they didn’t, American soldiers were less likely to pay the price. Controlling the optics of the coalition was half the battle, at least as far as the Pentagon was concerned. The official assessment of the role of Iraqi forces was unequivocal. They were indispensable. Unofficially their impact was negligible.

  Marines were expected to commend their Iraqi counterparts, no matter what went down. This directive, which came straight from Centcom, was designed to make sure loudmouths like McCarthy shut their traps. It was like trying to plug a volcano with a wine cork. Whenever the press corps showed up, Wolf shuffled him off for a cigarette break. The last time McCarthy was interviewed, the entire platoon suffered for his indiscretion. The reporter was an investigative journalist for NPR, the type that snoops around trying to stir up trouble.

  “A lot of folks back home wonder if Iraqi Security Forces are up to the job,” the reporter observed.

  “Good question,” McCarthy said.

  “What’s it like, fighting with them?”

  “Slightly better than fighting against them,” McCarthy said. “On a good day.”

  McCarthy couldn’t help himself. The platoon had almost lost a man when Iraqi Guardsmen failed to hold their ground during a firefight in Saqlawiyah. When Colonel Denning caught wind of the interview, he summoned Lieutenant Radetzky.

  “Ever heard of a loose cannon, Radetzky?” Colonel Denning said.

  “Sir?”

  “One of your boys has been shooting his mouth off again.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Don’t ‘yes sir’ me, Radetzky.”

  “It won’t happen again, Colonel.”

  “Half the world is yip yapping about our strategic objectives. Unilateral this. Occupation that.”

  “Like it’s any of their business, sir.”

  “The last thing we need is grunts bad-mouthing the coalition.”

  For once, Sinclair shared McCarthy’s skepticism. Monitoring the Guard’s movements in the wake of the platoon’s advance, he noticed that their performance was spotty, at best. They kept hanging back, leaving gaps of three or four blocks between offensive positions and rearguard support. Insurgents could slip back into unoccupied areas at will.

  “There’s a defensive breach in the line,” Sinclair reported into his headset.

  “Where?” Radetzky asked.

  “Pretty much everywhere. ING is lagging behind.”

  Radetzky passed Sinclair’s warning on to Captain Phipps.

  “Can you pick up the slack?” Captain Phipps asked.

  “We’re already spread too thin,” Radetzky said.

  “Offense is the best defense. Keep pushing forward.”

  The squads continued to clear compounds with unprecedented speed, almost without incident. There was nothing to report, nothing to shoot, nothing to do except anticipate the worst hiding behind the next closed door. Lack of resistance had become sinister, as though Fallujah were a monstrous house of horrors, a psychological as well as military threat. The platoon’s anxiety wormed its way up to Sinclair’s perch. He detected it in their maneuvers, which were uncharacteristically jumpy. They kept looking over their shoulders. Suspense alone prompted them to open fire.

  The platoon’s momentum gratified battalion headquarters. Paranoia, among other things, didn’t register on their computer screens. Not that modern warfare was a glorified video game. Civilians were far more susceptible to the perils of simulation than military men. Officers in particular were trained to resist the numbing effects of technology. But training itself was a kind of virtual reality, once removed from actual combat. Battles were primarily conceptual unless you actually fought them, in which case you were never invited into the war room. Nothing would ever really bridge the gap between strategy and execution.

  To a certain extent, commanders have always relegated war to the abstract realm of ideas. Even barbarian generals mapped their maneuvers with sticks in dirt. But historical comparisons were misleading. The degree of abstraction multiplied exponentially with each technological advancement, along with the speed and size of weaponry. As a result, the War on Terror was waged as much in cyberspace as in the real world. There was no there there, no need for real weapons of mass destruction when the idea alone catapulted the nation into war. Enemies were equally elusive, hailing from politically fabricated countries that appeared on maps one year and disappeared the next, if terrorism prevailed.

  “Attention Kilo Company. TOC is modifying rear-echelon support.”

  Out of the blue, Colonel Denning’s voice invaded the airwaves. Radetzky must have opened the tactical operations center frequency so the whole platoon could hear Colonel Denning’s latest decree. He was like the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain pulling levers attached to hundreds of men, thousands of weapons, with untold numbers of lives in the balance. Often as not, his orders seemed counterintuitive. The reality of war waged by boots on the ground seldom reflected the virtual reality of op plans. The gory details of actual combat were tragic, but not relevant.

  “No more relay teams,” Colonel Denning continued. “Just ammunition runners and medevac units, as needed.”

  “What about confiscating weapons caches?” Radetzky asked.

  “Too risky. You’re in
the eye of the storm, whether you know it or not.”

  “Should we blow them or just keep moving?”

  “Step on the gas, Radetzky. Floor it.”

  “What’s the timetable?”

  “Major Linville is expecting you at Phase Line Freddy by sundown tomorrow. You know how he gets when you’re late.”

  The platoon had unwittingly crossed a strategic threshold. The fact that they hadn’t encountered a single enemy outpost since the bombardment was immaterial. From then on, their contact with rear-echelon units would be limited to carrying ammunition in and wounded men out of kill zones. They were on their own, with the formidable exception of big-gun support. Bradleys and tanks lurked within striking distance. Cobras and F-15s could make the trip from desert airstrips to what was left of Fallujah in less than five minutes.

  In global military circles, Americans were accused of hiding behind shields of technology and superior firepower. The quintessential example was Hiroshima, an act of unconditional cowardice. Whether justified or not, pushing buttons was a far cry from pulling triggers. Anticoalition forces begrudgingly admitted that Operation Iraqi Freedom was less egregious than Desert Storm. At least the infantry made an appearance, if only to topple statues and plant flags. More than any other branch of the military, US Marines resented insinuations that they shied away from nitty-gritty combat. They still believed that wars were won by boots on the ground, not Pentagon generals clicking and dragging virtual troops across simulated battlefields. Bigwigs always overestimated the role big guns played in successful campaigns. Obsessing about weapons of mass destruction had prompted more than one disastrous invasion.

  Whenever the topic of WMDs came up, McCarthy went ballistic. All the hype was yet another publicity stunt, a way to rally hawks and silence doves. At this rate, it would be déjà vu all over again, another stinking Cold War complete with paranoid politicians and prissy Pentagon brass who cared more about public opinion than winning battles.