I was sharing a room with Captain Jones, but he had been spending the night with Sergeant Collins and the guys in my old platoon. They were just over a mile away at a compound near the southern edge of the village. Now he was en route back to the guesthouse with Mike Bandzwolek, the lieutenant to whom I’d given over command of the platoon before the deployment.
I walked into the dining room where we had the radios set up. It was also where we had meetings. I sat down, half asleep and half in shock, and just stared at the table in front of me. Kuykendall told me that the other platoon leaders had been called and were on their way here.
At that moment 2nd Lieutenant Ted P.* swung open the screen door at the front of the building, letting it slam behind him on his way in. He ambled over to the dining room table and plopped down at my left elbow. He was a big guy and had only joined the battalion in Baghdad. I noticed he had red sleep lines on the right side of his face.
He looked at me, raised his eyebrows, and smiled. “What’s up, man? What the fuck am I over here for?”
He had no idea. I looked him in the eye and saw that he was still grinning. For the moment, Ted was innocent. He had a degree in music, and I was pretty sure Ted had never killed a mammal. To my knowledge, the most trauma Ted had experienced was being “raped” by an older woman he’d brought home from a bar one night in college. There were a couple of other guys in the room and I could feel them stop moving.
“Two KIA. Friendly. One wounded,” I stated flatly. “I don’t know anything else.”
Ted looked at me, his grin widening. Then he glanced at someone who was standing on the other side of the table. He looked like he thought we were playing a joke on him. “Yeah, right. Whatever,” he quipped. “Seriously, why am I not still asleep?” The war wasn’t real yet for Ted.
I looked him directly in the eye again. For some reason I had the strange urge to laugh. Nerves. I’d never before announced a death to someone—at least not one that mattered like this did, anyway. I stifled the smirk and kept a straight face. When I spoke, I spoke softly and awkwardly. “No man, I’m serious. We got two dead. Commander’s on his way back with Mike.”
Ted’s eyes doubled in size. He grinned again in reflex, except this time he looked nauseous. He said, “Who was it?”
I just shrugged. “Don’t know yet.”
When Captain Jones burst in with Bandzwolek behind him, they strode directly to our table and sat down. We waited in an awkward silence for 3rd Platoon’s leader. He was coming from the town of Zumar, five miles away. It seemed like hours—the fidgeting and the glances and the nervous exhalations. Finally, he walked through the screen door carrying his green bound notebook.
Then we learned details.
Justin Garvey and Jason Jordan. I didn’t know either of them personally. I only knew their faces and names—from passing them in the upstairs hallway at Fort Campbell to sharing time in the chow hall line in Kuwait to any other number of places. Five minutes earlier, they had just been two sergeants in the mortar platoon. Now, all around the battalion, their names were being seared into our collective memory. It’s like that the first time you’re given the names of people killed in your unit. You get their names permanently branded onto your mind.
Someone had fired RPGs at the mortar section’s convoy at nearly the same time as they hit the TOC in Tal Afar. The TOC took only a minor hit from two RPG rounds that took out a chunk from the outer wall, shredded a few cots, and caused one minor injury. The other half of the coordinated attack had turned out differently.
The mortar platoon had been conducting a traffic control point that evening, stopping and searching cars, looking for anything out of the ordinary. They had run the traffic stop several miles east of Tal Afar. When they’d finished they had driven several humvees back in the direction of town. They were following the main road that links Tal Afar with Mosul, just after eleven o’clock at night. As they passed through the village of Abu Mariyah, a single RPG round struck the lead vehicle containing Garvey, Jordan, and a sergeant named Doug Norman, a former Bravo guy I knew well. It was a one in a hundred shot, hitting the front windshield and killing the two sergeants instantly. Norman was thrown out of the bed of the truck with shrapnel embedded in both of his legs. In a burst of adrenaline he was able to get up, recover his machine gun, and return fire.
He emptied an entire drum of bullets into the darkness, hitting absolutely nothing.
Less than an hour after the initial attack, the response plan didn’t amount to much. All we knew was that the bulk of the battalion—a unit of six hundred men spread over six hundred square miles—was going to converge on the village of Abu Mariyah before the sun came up.
It sounded to me like it had the potential to get ugly. It sounded as if we were getting ready to sweep through the village like a tornado.
I was partly disturbed at the idea. Not because I didn’t think we should show up there that night, but because, to me, it had all the hallmarks of the invasion of Iraq—a poorly thought out, hasty plan that ends in far more lives being lost and property being destroyed than is really necessary. And I knew for a fact that there were lots of women, children, old people, dogs, goats, chickens, and mules in Abu Mariyah. The village itself was constructed of mud, straw, and perhaps a few cinder blocks. And now they were going to face one of the single most deadly military units in the world—a unit that was going to light upon them in the biblical sense, probably in a blind rage.
I thought of the lone horse in Anaconda and then to that first day in Baghdad—to the girl and the two men who thought we were going to execute them. I remembered how they had had nothing to do with the reason why I was in Iraq. And I remembered how horrible that made me feel. This coming altercation was going to be far worse for everyone on both sides.
On the other hand, I couldn’t stop thinking about how we had been violated as a unit. I couldn’t stop thinking about how two guys had just been murdered—and how their families didn’t even know it yet. That part of me was ready to burn the entire place to the ground.
We began staging in the darkness outside of the guesthouses. A single streetlamp lit the area. I could see 2nd Platoon’s squad leaders going through pre-combat checks with their guys. Near me, Captain Jones stayed glued to his radio’s hand mike, taking instructions.
Two of Bravo’s three Kurdish translators were conversing in Arabic next to a humvee. Like Ammar and Mohamed, Hameed and Waseem had come with the battalion from Baghdad.
Hameed was the crazy one. After returning to Bravo Company, I’d learned immediately that if the Iraqi military was ever going to get back on its feet, he should be in charge at some level. Just from looking at the friendly smile plastered on the balding guy’s face, you would never have believed that Hameed had been an Iraqi Special Forces commando during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
Always wearing a baseball cap to block the harsh Iraqi sun, Hameed used to recount his war stories for the guys. Sometimes he would compare them to this war. “Yah, that war was much, much different than this one,” he’d say. “In that time you were always having to jump around like a monkey to get away from bullets . . . like this.” He’d then hop back and forth from one foot to the other.
His experience in the Army, along with his being of Kurdish descent, had made him virulently anti-Saddam. He was also equally as violent when it came to his pro-American leanings. Hameed wasn’t afraid to hit or threaten to kill Iraqis who gave us a hard time. He was the most proactive translator I’d ever seen—always trying to get tips from the populace to help out the Americans. And Hameed feared no one.
Waseem was Hameed’s opposite. He was the reserved and sincere one—and not nearly as reactionary as Hameed. Waseem had been a track and field champion until he was barred from the 1988 Olympics simply for the fact that he was Kurdish. There were always a lot of guys like that who joined the unit—guys who had been fucked with by Saddam’s thugs.
Considering what had just happened, there didn’t see
m to be a lot of talking between soldiers. For one thing, except for the few who had been patrolling or on guard, everyone had just woken up. On top of that, nothing like this had ever happened to us. It hadn’t yet set in that the Battalion had just endured a successful surprise attack—or that we’d taken casualties while exacting none in return. It had that 9/11-like quality to it, where you’ve been slapped in the face so hard that the reality and gravity of the situation isn’t really registering. We had been numbed by so much quasi-combat for two years, that now, faced with the real thing, it had an almost anticlimactic air about it.
As I got closer and closer to launching Bravo Company into the village of Abu Mariyah, I began to feel nothing—for myself, for Jordan and Garvey, or for the inhabitants, whether they were innocent or guilty. I just wanted to get it over with.
Then, with trucks rumbling and troops loaded, I was told that the operation had been stopped indefinitely. Brigade, sensing a slaughter I presume, ordered the battalion to cease with the operation. Again, I was caught in the middle. I was incensed that the brigade commander would pull the plug on our right to avenge our dead. But at the same time, I could sense that before daylight we would be knee deep in a bloodbath. It hadn’t been ordered; there was just a feeling of recklessness and reprisal attached to every aspect of the plan I’d heard. And I could just see it in the looks on guys’ faces, their attitudes, their comments. As emotionally detached as everyone seemed to be, it could have been bloody. Expressionless robots are capable of inflicting the most damage.
As guys were dismounting from the trucks, I found Captain Jones. He was still geared up and standing near his humvee. I said, “What the fuck is this? What are we gonna do now?” I felt like we had to do something. And while I wasn’t too keen on killing civilians, the idea of doing nothing in the face of a fatal attack was simply wrong.
He just looked at me and shrugged. Then he said, “I guess we go back to bed.”
My men are not expendable. And I don’t do this kind of work.
Lying on my cot that night, I hated. It was a new thing for me. It had been building each day that no weapons of mass destruction were found—and now it was coming to a head. I had never hated before—not like this. I had never hated the enemy, nor had I ever feared the enemy. I was always emotionally neutral when it came to that. I had feared dying, but never the enemy. Now still, I did not hate whoever had been behind the RPG. You go to a war—these things happen. I knew that. But you go to an unnecessary war and it happens—well that’s completely different.
I had always wanted to fight. But I never wanted any part of something like this. I was a professional soldier. I wanted to believe in my work. Instead, I was watching as politicians with no military experience hijacked the Army. I was a public servant, not a lackey. Lying on my cot, I came to the point that many people reach in a situation where they stop what they’re doing and say, “Wait a second. This is bullshit. This isn’t right.” Two guys in our battalion were dead, two families ruined. And try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what the purpose of that was.
Things that had been welling up inside me all summer suddenly exploded in my head like a dozen Roman candles. I hated the president for his ignorance. I hated Donald Rumsfeld for his appalling arrogance and his lack of judgment. I hated their agenda. I hated Colin Powell for abandoning the Army—for not taking care of his soldiers—when he could have done something to stop these people. I hated them because the Army had seen this insurgency coming. I hated them because they didn’t listen to the people who told them this was a bad plan. I hated them because now, it meant that my guys could be next. It meant that I could be next. And I didn’t want to die like this—not in a confusing mishmash of ideologies, purposes, and bullets.
I felt like we had been taken advantage of. We were professionals sent on a wild goose chase using a half-baked plan for political reasons. Lying there restlessly, I was reminded of a Schwarzenegger line in one of his movies—when, after being used and lied to, his muscle-bound character had expressed perfectly what was now on my mind: My men are not expendable. And I don’t do this kind of work.
I longed for the clarity of purpose we’d had in Afghanistan.
It is Tuesday, September 11. Nikki and I are standing next to each other in her living room, staring at the screen. President Bush is in a dimly lit room making a speech to the American people. He is in a bunker at Barksdale Air Force Base, not three miles from where we are standing. He seems nervous and anxious—maybe even a bit awkward since he realizes that the entire nation is watching him. But he also seems resolute. It is that sense that makes me feel at least okay about how this will be handled.
We want to get out of the house, so we decide to go get lunch somewhere. A mile down the road, Nikki says she wants Applebee’s. I’m not at all surprised. It’s comfort food for her. Inside, we sit at one of the high tables. Nikki is already disgusted and doesn’t want to watch any more news, so I face the television. Shortly after the server takes our order, I say, “Nikki, turn around. Look at that. People are jumping out of the building. I didn’t see that earlier. Did you?”
So we dealt with it, I thought, staring at the ceiling. We fixed a very significant part of the problem. Why this now? In Afghanistan I’d seen captured Pakistanis, Saudis, Yemenis, Jordanians, Kuwaitis, and Chechens, but I’d never heard of a single Iraqi even being in Afghanistan. We had been hot on the trail. Why Iraq? We know they’re in western Pakistan. We know they’re in Saudi Arabia. That we had invaded Iraq with all these other threats swirling around us was beginning to seem more and more preposterous to me.
Whether we had come to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction or to remove an evil dictator, the end result was that we had created an increasingly complex insurgency. And in defining this insurgency, there were those who wanted to pin the attacks on thousands of mysterious al Qaeda terrorists, when in reality most of them were the work of regular run-of-the-mill insurgents.
It was as if no one had read a book on resistance movements and insurgencies—or seen the movie Red Dawn. It goes like this in every insurgency: There are a few fighters who have a real political agenda for killing both the invaders and those who would build a new government; there are a few foreign zealots, a few religious zealots, a few more foreign religious zealots, and then there are the rest of them—the overwhelming majority of whom are young, impressionable, male, unemployed, bored, and pissed about, among other things, the fact that their uncle was killed in an air strike or their cousin was killed at a traffic control point for not stopping soon enough. Without this last group there would be no insurgency. The population just wouldn’t support it in a place like Iraq. Maybe in Afghanistan, but not in Iraq.
You have to put yourself in their shoes. If a foreign country invaded the United States, it wouldn’t matter if they came handing out hundred dollar bills and a cure for AIDS. If they fucked over one family in an American neighborhood, a resistance would form. It doesn’t make it right—it just makes it reality.
And with these types of insurgencies, the longer you stay there the worse it gets. On a long-enough timeline, an occupying force will eventually piss off everyone. That’s just what happens, even when you come with the best of intentions.
I could still hear the words of Colonel Ahuja bouncing around in my head—words spoken months earlier in the Kuwaiti desert: I think there’s always gonna be that guy who’s out to fight for his country no matter what. He doesn’t care about the politics. He just knows that we’re invading his country. And he knows he’s gonna to do everything in his power to stop us.
I didn’t know who’d killed Jordan and Garvey. Maybe it had been foreign jihadists or Wahabbi fundamentalists. Maybe it had been a citizen of Tal Afar who’d felt slighted by us for some reason. It didn’t matter to me. All I could think of was that we should have kept up the fight against the terrorists in their own lairs—and not brought our war to the streets of Iraq. Taking the fight here, I thought, with no p
reparation for what had to be a complicated aftermath, was shortsighted and reckless. Committing soldiers’ lives without having first come up with a coherent plan, I thought, was criminal.
Now I could see that the victory we had achieved in the aftermath of 9/11, all of the good will that we as a nation had garnered, was slowly going to be ground away in the streets of Iraq.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. We were young. We were invincible. We were the good guys. Or so we had thought.
When Garvey and Jordan were killed, it sent a shockwave through the battalion and the community. Iraqis brought flowers and laid them at the front gate of the TOC. The caretaker of the oil company village at Ayn Zalah came around the next afternoon to offer his condolences on behalf of the Iraqis that lived up there by the lake. The response by the people was somewhat of a surprise to me, but after I thought about it, I could see that it shouldn’t have been. We had been working with them on the reconstruction for two months and had earned their trust. Now, in a way, the citizens of Tal Afar and its surrounding communities seemed almost embarrassed at the way their “guests” had been treated.
During the time after the attack we moped. I had always thought that when a soldier from my unit died in combat it would come with a sense of inevitability—a sense that that kind of thing was supposed to happen. Being an infantryman, I thought it would be not only normal, but also easy to deal with. I had seen too many fucking movies.
The reality was a slap in the face. The sense of loss and failure was palpable across the unit, the fear of dying rekindled. We had become so complacent after a long string of anticlimaxes. But now the landscape had changed. Now everything was suspect. From that point on, every time I left the perimeter, I would see an insurgent behind every bend in the road; in every ditch, a possible ambush point.
The War I Always Wanted Page 15
