“It’s that big, Radetzky. We’re mounting another air strike.”
They were ordered to fall back three full blocks. Battalion headquarters had tremendous faith in the accuracy of laser-guided missiles. Radetzky prided himself on never having lost a man to friendly fire. He pushed the platoon back even farther. Covering the same terrain in reverse was demoralizing. They had risked their lives every step of the way. Insurgents they had killed that morning were bloated and stinking in the heat. Entire limbs had been gnawed off by dogs wandering in packs, already feral with starvation. One of Sinclair’s kills was unrecognizable as a human being. Location was its only identifying characteristic. Another was almost completely intact. Its lips alone had been chewed off, probably by cats rather than dogs, judging from the relatively dainty teeth marks.
“It’s like mosquitoes,” McCarthy said. “They either like you or they don’t.”
The sun was low in the sky by the time they reached the designated compound. Everyone not assigned to security duty congregated on the roof to watch the bombardment. The sky was ablaze, another stunning sunset in a landscape spectacularly oblivious to violence perpetrated for the sake of tradition or progress, in the name of this or that god. Empires came and went and the desert endured, unfazed. There was something comforting or menacing about its resilience. It would survive the apocalypse.
They could hear but not yet see Bradleys rolling into the neighborhood. Two Cobras crisscrossed the sky and disappeared. As usual, calm descended before the firestorm. The ubiquitous din of gun battles was conspicuously absent in the wake of the retreat. All the mosques in the vicinity had already been silenced. Sinclair noticed for the first time that his ears were ringing. Back home in Montana he loved the quiet. In Fallujah he had learned to dread it.
You could never see them coming, even in the desert. Fighting Falcons materialized instantaneously, precluding defensive measures, let alone evacuations, standard air raid precautions in days of yore. Blinding light eclipsed the sunset. The platoon was far enough away to avoid friendly fire but close enough to feel the secondary impact of laser-guided warheads. They waited for someone to crack the inevitable jokes.
“Just like the Fourth of July.”
“Minus the keg.”
The display of force was impressive, though nothing compared to Baghdad. There had been no-holds-barred there. Specter gunships. Close-support aircraft. Artillery. Everything except helicopters, which were too clumsy to keep pace with the bombardment. Spontaneous combustion. Smoke detectors from Libya to Pakistan must have been going off like crazy, alerting terrorists that there was a new gun in town. Good old Uncle Sam with a holster filled with everything but nukes. At first they had oohed and aahed in jest, like kids at a fireworks display. Pretty soon they weren’t kidding around anymore. Even McCarthy stopped making Armageddon jokes.
Every time they thought the assault had peaked, explosions redoubled. Smoke billowed half a mile high above Baghdad. Tracers arced across the sky, lacing over bright bursts of color. Red. Orange. Blue mushroom clouds. The lighting effects beggared description. It would have been counterproductive to view the spectacle as anything other than a pyrotechnic marvel. They were soldiers, not Red Cross nurses. If hospitals and schools and playgrounds were destroyed, nobody could see them. If actual people were incinerated in beds, at desks, and on merry-go-rounds, nobody could hear them. Assuming the bursts of color had faces, it was best not to make eye contact.
In Fallujah, air strikes hit way too close to home. There was no getting around the fact that familiar landmarks, if not people, were being wasted, neighborhoods the platoon had patrolled on a daily basis. Proximity to targets was physical as well as emotional, just blocks away. Within earshot. The screams of insurgents burning to death haunted Sinclair. His phobia of suicide bombers was matched only by his fear of death by fire. He could never have been a firefighter like McCarthy, whose thick skin was like psychological body armor. Of course you wanted your enemy to suffer, given the alternative. It was either him or you. But there was a limit to how much Sinclair could take, at least in theory. In practice, he had already exceeded the limit. Sometimes he envied drone pilots. They complained about being too far removed from the action, claiming boredom was even worse than sensory overkill. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.
Heavy artillery had positioned itself in the middle of three intersections a block apart. Bradleys and Abrams tanks. They mortared the target sector, sending gusts of shrapnel-laden debris in every direction. Sinclair refrained from hoping they wouldn’t haul out the white phosphorous. He was too good a soldier to second-guess strategic decisions. Special Forces would either flatten the block, the quick and dirty way, or mount a Shake and Bake offensive, flushing insurgents into ambushes. The virtue of the more complicated tactic was that buildings would be left intact, yielding potentially vital intelligence. The more information you had, the better your chances of eluding the enemy. It was messy, but it saved American lives.
Special Forces went with Plan B. Artillery squads started alternating between white phosphorous and high explosives. Rivers of fire shot through the air, through doors and windows, glazing everything in flames. Sinclair relinquished his front-row seat on the roof. Guys jostled to take his place. Downstairs, windows were packed with more men craning to see. After particularly violent concussions, his buddies clapped and slapped each other’s helmets. Teacups rattled in the cupboards. Sinclair staked out a seat at the kitchen table, as far away as possible from all the excitement, and started cleaning his weapon.
“Nothing I like better than fried chicken,” Trapp said. “The crispier the better.”
“I love the smell of Willy Pete in the morning,” Wolf said.
Wolf was a wealth of movie and television trivia. He and Trapp liked to stage contests to see if they could stump each other with obscure references. Everyone knew this one. It was a cliché in Iraq where WP was used almost as frequently as napalm in Vietnam. Infamous Life magazine photographs had forced the US military to stockpile its napalm arsenal. White phosphorous had the advantage of having not yet had its fifteen minutes of fame.
“Apocalypse Now,” Trapp said. “Vintage Brando.”
Johnson was on his satellite phone with CNN, reporting live. Sinclair wondered if the audience back home could hear the screams of people burning alive in the background. They probably dubbed them out. Television audiences had a tendency to misinterpret the significance of cries for mercy. Radio listeners were even less reliable. Without the benefit of visual evidence, their imaginations ran wild. High-pitched screams didn’t necessarily mean the target was a woman or a child. In distress even terrorists sometimes sounded pathetic and defenseless.
Johnson had resolved or repressed his ethical qualms. The only way to counterbalance Al Jazeera’s bogus reportage was to provide real, albeit carefully curated, photographs. A CNN news anchor confirmed that a major insurgency stronghold was under siege, not a neighborhood of middle-class homes. True as far as it went. Had the screams been allowed to air, she would have described enemy combatants flushed from their lairs, not victims burning alive. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. CNN wasn’t really withholding information, just strategically manipulating its interpretive lens, more an act of patriotism than anything else. Waging war with images was bound to result in ethical collateral damage.
Sinclair heard a chorus of cheers as bombs hit the cell’s central weapons cache, leveling an entire city block. Still not as mind-blowing as Baghdad, but definitely worth the price of admission. Radetzky started breaking up the party, ordering everybody to bed down. The decision to use white phosphorous pretty much grounded the platoon for the night. WP had an insatiable appetite and would burn for hours. The heat was so intense, undetonated ammunition might decide to cook off, firing in random directions. The area would need to cool down before they could resume the ground offensive. Radetzky told them it would probably be awhile before they had the luxury of another night’s rest.
He didn’t tell them why.
Outrage over staggering casualty figures was flooding the airwaves. If the American media didn’t regain control of the narrative, Washington would be forced to initiate a ceasefire. It wouldn’t be the first time public pressure hobbled the war effort. Bleeding-heart liberals were forever hijacking the moral high ground, as though liberating a country weren’t high-fucking-minded enough for them. They blamed coalition forces for civilian casualties, oblivious to the fact that the insurgency was using them as human shields. Thankfully diplomatic wheels in Baghdad turned even more slowly than in Washington. Radetzky assumed Centcom would step up the pace of the attack to take full advantage of the time political posturing took to run its course. If they were lucky, Operation Vigilant Resolve would achieve its strategic objective before the Coalition Provisional Authority wimped out.
With the exception of hunkering down after the mosque attack, the platoon had been fighting almost nonstop for three days. In spite of having to literally slap himself awake during sniper duty, Sinclair had avoided popping Provigil pills in anticipation of precisely this scenario. A few hours’ respite in the relative quiet of post-bombardment darkness was as close as you could get to ideal snoozing conditions. He stretched out next to Logan, who was sleeping the sleep of the righteous, as usual. Nobody conked out faster than Logan, goddamn him. The familiarity of his breathing patterns helped Sinclair pretend they were back at the base, nowhere near the bombed-out quarter. He was careful not to think of the white phosphorous, still burning in bright pools just beyond the safe zone. The screaming had subsided but a sensory hangover lingered, an echo that was as bad or worse than the real thing. More persistent. He tried to visualize serenity, fly-fishing knee-deep in a mountain stream, to calm himself. What a joke. He finally gave up, pretending he was too tired to sleep.
A group of insomniacs was clustered around McCarthy in the master bedroom. He was holding court, as usual, regaling them with bedtime stories. Combat fatigue kept them all awake. Something somewhere was still at the ready, fending off unremembered trauma lodged too deep to access alone. There was safety in numbers both on and off the battlefield. Wolf and Trapp had taken off their boots and joined McCarthy in bed. The box springs protested whenever anyone moved, three huge men sprawled with legs and arms spilling over the edge of the sagging mattress. Guys on the floor were using their rucks as pillows.
After every random act of violence, they rehashed what happened, or what might have happened, trying to salvage some semblance of meaning, if not the illusion of being in control. Lost buddies were commemorated. Scapegoats were mocked. In the unfolding narrative of the Thundering Third’s adventures in Iraq, enemy combatants were little more than stick-figure foils accentuating the epic stature of heroic Americans. When there weren’t battles to remember, they recounted exploits on patrols and raids. Narrowly escaping yet another roadside bomb explosion. The haunting look in the eyes of suicide bombers. Surprising feyadeen in shower stalls, on the crapper, one time even in bed. They let the woman escape, wrapped in sheets, before they gunned him down.
“The ultimate coitus interruptus,” McCarthy always said.
He had told the story numerous times, invariably concluding with the same punch line. The entire squad had been involved in the sting operation, but they always let him do the honors. No one else could do justice to the delicious blend of the burlesque and the macabre that made the story an all-time favorite. They laughed as hard on the tenth telling as they had on the first. McCarthy was like a one-man warm-up band. Once he loosened everybody up, he made sure they all got a chance to unload, telling their versions of the day’s exploits. Stories were like ballast. They kept the platoon afloat.
“What’s up?” Sinclair said, taking a seat next to Percy on the floor.
“Funny you should ask,” McCarthy said, making a lewd gesture. He pointed at Vasquez, who made a show of covering his crotch with his helmet. “Goldilocks here is in the middle of one about three bras.”
“Next thing I knew, this freaking bra was three inches away,” Vasquez said. “Eye-level. Black lace, no less.”
“So much for the chastity of Muslim women,” Percy said. As usual, the peanut gallery was in full force.
“Get real,” Wolf said. “Underneath it all, they’re as hot to trot as your high school girlfriend.”
“Those burqas are a come-on, if you ask me,” McCarthy said.
“Reverse psychology. Playing hard to get.”
“Works for me.”
“What’s a bra doing hanging off a bedroom door, you may ask,” Vasquez continued. He had unwittingly picked up the habit of asking rhetorical questions, a surefire way of heightening dramatic tension. McCarthy’s inspiration was apparent even when he wasn’t actually telling the tale.
“The suspense is killing me.”
“It would have killed me too, if I hadn’t had my wits about me.”
“You got lucky. All your wits were really thinking about were tits, just like the rest of us.”
“Unlike you, I can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
“Or think of tits and ass at the same time, as the case may be.”
“Anyway we get the picture. The old femme fatale trick.”
Even if they hadn’t actually encountered booby-trapped lingerie, they’d all heard tell of it. This particular lace number had been attached to a bundle of wires leading to plastic explosives concealed in a laundry hamper. Had Vasquez grabbed the doorknob, or even disturbed the dangling bra as he sidled into the room, they would have had to scrape him off the walls. No one knew whether femme fatale explosive devices were planted by the women themselves or by their husbands. One way or the other, the more intimate the bait the more deadly the trap. Searching tampon boxes for grenades was standard procedure. Iraq had given a whole new meaning to underwire bras.
“What you’re telling us is that you got a boner and almost blew up the joint,” McCarthy said.
“Lucky for you I snipped the trip wire before giving into temptation,” Vasquez said.
“That’s my definition of a hero. A guy who puts booby traps before boobs.”
“I thought you said there were three bras,” Sinclair said.
“You missed the first half of the story,” Vasquez said. “There were two more in the bureau drawer. Needless to say, I had to search through all the underwear to make sure the lady of the house wasn’t concealing any weapons.”
“You can’t be too careful.”
“How long did it take?”
“Less than a minute,” Vasquez said. “Like I said, black lace is my favorite.”
“Nowhere near as sexy as red.”
“Tell your own goddamn story.”
“Does it have to be about jerking off?”
“Only if you finally manage to get it up.”
Wolf had actually witnessed Vasquez’s run-in with the bra, which may or may not have been life-threatening. But he refrained from editorializing. No one ever experienced the same incursion the same way. One member of the squad would remember being attacked by a dozen insurgents. Another would swear it was double the number. The only real consensus was that the enemy was armed to the teeth. This didn’t mean reality was relative. There was one unwavering measure of what really happened in combat. You either survived or you didn’t. Survivors were entitled to tell the version of the truth that enabled them to cope with the emotional burden of the memory. The closer the call, the more outrageous the story, as long as none of their buddies were killed. Death was the only thing that wasn’t funny. Everything else was a laugh riot. There was no other way to neutralize the fear.
Sergeant Troy had planted the storytelling seed in boot camp. Ruthlessly denigrating recruits was the best way to transform milquetoasts into US Marines, but only if you gave them the psychological tools to survive the abuse. At night when the platoon collapsed in their bunks to lick the day’s wounds, they were encouraged to vent their frustrations. Confess their fears. Brag or bit
ch or moan or whatever it took to put the day’s indignities behind them. If they demurred, he suspended their Internet privileges. At first it was excruciating for introverts, possibly even worse for macho types who never confided in anyone, not even their girlfriends. Everyone got over their initial reluctance when they realized the toughest guys actually told the best stories. By the time they deployed to Iraq, they were spinning yarns like spiders.
Without military experience, recruits were forced to talk about themselves. What it was like growing up in Harlem or the Bible Belt. Unexpurgated versions of how they spent their summer vacations. Sergeant Troy wanted them to get down and dirty. In the heat of battle, they needed to know why they were risking their lives for one another. What made Logan worth evacuating under fire. Why Wolf was worth obeying instantaneously, always and without question. Some platoons relied on blind loyalty and obedience. Sergeant Troy believed that if you really understood how McCarthy ticked, you’d be more likely to take a bullet for him. Marines who fought as one won wars.
Everyone had to divulge a deep dark secret. Sergeant Troy had heard a lot of hair-raising stories over the years. He kept raising the bar. They were required to describe the proudest and most humiliating moments in their lives. Recruits tried to bluff their way out of telling the truth, hiding behind sensational stories. A case in point was Vasquez’s infamous date with a transsexual, complete with graphic details about the inevitable unveiling in the backseat of his car.
“That dude was lucky he got out of there alive,” Vasquez had said.
“Only in San Francisco.”
“Soon to be showing at a theater near you,” Wolf said. “New York is crawling with them.”
Everyone was scandalized except Sergeant Troy. He could tell from Vasquez’s body language that the incident had revolted and pissed him off, but not really wounded him.
“When I say shameful, I mean mortifying. So bad you’d rather die than tell anyone. Ever. Try again.”
It took Vasquez four times to get it right. When he finally told the story about the scene he made at his father’s funeral, high on crack, he was off the hook.
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