Though the car was still traveling fast, I yelled, “They’re gonna jump! They’re gonna jump!” Suddenly, something came out of the open door. It was an object, but I couldn’t tell what kind of . . .
The dive horn began blaring inside my head. Failure was suddenly not just an option. It was likely. For the first time in my life, someone was leveling an RPG at me, preparing to fire.
Mother. Fucker. TV had rotted my brain. The guys in the car had no intention of making a break for freedom. They wanted to scrap.
Why the RPG round did not fly off the launcher at that moment, slamming into the windshield of my humvee, killing all seven of us, I wouldn’t find out until later that night. For the moment, though, I was using the extra microseconds to think. Suddenly the passenger—now officially a combatant—withdrew the RPG and the door swung shut—for a second. Then, to my surprise, it opened again.
We were now coming up quickly on a T-shaped intersection. As the car took a right turn, nearly flipping, the RPG was dropped out of the door, onto the road. We flew right past it. As we came around the corner behind the Passat, we were within fifteen feet of it. I could see people on the sidewalk scattering. It was as if they could sense the impending danger. The corner turned, I saw something else being raised in the back seat and pointed at me—either another RPG or an AK-47. This time I was not going to wait around to find out what it w—
Neither was Lawrence on the SAW. He squeezed the trigger on the machine gun and held it there. The sound of this weapon, not twelve inches from my head, was indescribable. It was so fucking loud that all I wanted was for it to be over. I wasn’t just hearing it in my ears. It was penetrating into my head, making my brain tingle. I didn’t know things could be that loud. Not to be outdone by Lawrence, and still aiming at the Volkswagen’s back windshield, I started shooting . . . and shooting . . . and shooting. All I could think of was that we had no cover. If the gunmen packed inside the still-moving car were able to launch a single rocket-propelled grenade, we would be dead. The fear washed over me instantaneously with tsunamilike force. I suddenly became desperate to kill them before they got off a shot, and the only cover I could think of was to keep shooting. It wasn’t a complete thought, though. I didn’t have time for that. It was more like an instinct. I knew that a wall of lead was all we had.
My vision quickly became telescopic as the adrenaline forced me to focus on nothing but the back windshield of the car in front of us. All I could see was smoke, flying glass, and red tracers coming from my M4 and Lawrence’s machine gun. Time and space no longer existed as it had only moments before. As I continued to fire into the back of the car, I felt like it would never end. At that moment, with death swirling around me, I felt like I couldn’t be killed—like I was never going to die. Each time I pulled the trigger of the weapon I’d slept with for nearly two years, it felt like it had become an extension of my body—as if I were willing those in the Passat to die. And I couldn’t pull the trigger fast enough.
Detachedly, I noticed Corn trying squirm between Lawrence and me. I could feel him trying to get in on the action. He managed to fire three or four rounds before he got squeezed out. Lawrence, on the other hand, continued to hammer away at the car by coldly and steadily using up his ammunition. The sounds and vibrations of our barrage began to swallow me up and my vision became tunneled. Because of that, I didn’t see two gunmen roll out of the left door of the back seat. Lawrence did however, and he drew a bead on both of them, knocking them down with his second long burst from the SAW.
I kept firing into the back of the car. The cacophony of gunfire continued for an eternity—or five or ten seconds. Hot brass shell casings were pinging every which way—bouncing off the railings of the humvee, off of each other, onto the sandbagged floor, onto the concrete below. Finally something in the trunk of this car, not twenty feet in front of us, made a popping noise and caught on fire.
The blue Volkswagen Passat rolled to a stop.
I’m in the bottom of a well. Someone is yelling, “Cease fire! Cease fire!” I know that I’m not shooting my gun anymore, but this is all I know.
I was still staring at the Volkswagen in the light of the streetlamps. I could feel people moving around me.
People are jumping out of the humvee. I’m not sure what to do. The barrel of my weapon is hot. It feels just like it does after we shoot at the range or in live fires. I have just finished firing it. I think I’m out of ammo. Is this real? Was I just in a shootout?
Then I snapped back. I should jump out of the humvee. I moved.
The first thing I noticed was that we had clearly won the fight. There were bodies and shards of glass everywhere. There was blood starting to pool. The next thing I saw was a soldier from one of the other humvees open the front passenger door of the Passat and pull one of the men out. Apparently he was still alive. Where did he come from . . .? Then I realized the other trucks had arrived without my noticing. The soldier threw him on the ground and kicked him in the face. Two other soldiers pounced on him and zip-tied his hands behind his back.
I turned around, looked back at the intersection, and started to move in that direction when I noticed the first RPG lying in the road. “Hey, I need some help over here,” I called back in the direction of the Passat. No response. “Hey!” Nothing. Everyone was busy crawling all over the carnage. Fuck it. I ran out into the intersection and grabbed the RPG launcher. When I picked it up, the round started to fall out. Quickly, I moved to catch it before it hit the ground. If it’s been fired . . . All I needed was for the round to detonate on contact. In the process of fumbling, I nearly dropped my weapon. Now I was juggling an M4, an RPG, and an RPG round. I couldn’t fire my weapon. Goddammit. I hurried awkwardly back to scene of the action with my armload of weaponry and carefully deposited the launcher and round on the sidewalk next to . . .
Suddenly I saw what had been pulled from the car. Lying on the sidewalk beside the Passat were two RPG launchers, three RPG rounds, two AK-47s, seven magazines, and four hand grenades. All three RPG rounds were armed and the one I had picked up had been fired. Its fuse had been ignited, but for some reason it hadn’t gone off.
I’m back in the Shah-e-Kot Valley, where Takhur Gar looms above me. I’ve just been told that the thing that fell out of the sky on my platoon’s position mere moments ago was a two-thousand-pound satellite guided bomb dropped by an air force F-16. No one knows yet why it didn’t go off. It would have killed all of us. I would never get a satisfactory explanation.
Now, nineteen months later, it’s happened again. As of that moment, I should have been dead twice. Not in the “that sure was close” way you experience in busy interstate traffic, but in the “This is no shit—I’m really not supposed to be here anymore” way.
Stepping off the sidewalk, I looked around. I noticed that the driver was still in the front seat, slumped over the steering wheel. I walked over to the two men who had rolled out of the still moving car. They were alive.
The first one out of the car, the RPG gunner, was sitting cross-legged in the street behind the Passat. He was wearing khakis and a white button-down, short sleeve shirt, and he was pudgy. Hands zip-tied behind his back, he had taken two rounds in the gut. He was bleeding, but I’d seen worse. For having been shot through the abdomen twice, he seemed in relatively good shape. As for his health in general, the picture wasn’t as rosy. He was drenched in sweat and his breathing was labored. I could see his chest heaving up and down. Waseem was standing there with me. I turned to him and said, “Waseem, ask this dude, ‘What the fuck?’ Ask him why they did this.” Waseem leaned down and said something in Arabic. Through labored breathing, Mr. RPG said something softly to Waseem. Waseem stood back up.
“What’d he say?” I asked.
“He says ‘Take us to the hospital.’”
I shook my head and looked down at the guy. He looked up, his eyes meeting mine for the first time. “Go fuck yourself,” I said.
Waseem and I walked over to t
he RPG guy’s backseat friend. He was lying face down in the gutter on the side of the street. He had been shot through the knee, and it already looked like a purple and black cantaloupe. His leg was twisted behind him at a somewhat disturbing angle. Sergeant Collins was standing over him trying to direct some of the guys to place this guy in the back of one of the humvees. As soon as the first soldier touched the guy’s leg he let out a blood-curdling cry. It was like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Instead of a scream, it was more reminiscent of an animal-like howl. It sent a shiver down my spine.
“Waseem,” Sergeant Collins said impatiently, “tell this guy we’re tryin’ to help him.”
Waseem leaned down and translated the message. When they picked the wounded man up the second time and set him in the bed of the humvee, he only let out a few involuntary squeaks and grunts.
I walked to the Passat where some of the guys were extracting the driver. His brains were all over the dash and the windshield. He had been shot in the head twice. One round had exited out of his left eye. In all, we hit the driver with maybe ten rounds. I figured a few of them were mine. There was blood everywhere. I thought to myself that this guy had really taken the brunt of it. Someone brought up later that if the RPG had gone off, the backblast would have killed him anyway. Just wasn’t his night, I guess.
I looked at Collins and thought I could feel what he was thinking as he surveyed the scene of crumpled bodies before him. He must have been satisfied—after two years, our platoon—his platoon—had finally achieved a state of carnage.
Around the other side of the car, the guman who had been beaten was still lying face down in the street. He had closely cropped hair and was wearing black parachute pants. He had been wearing a white tank top, but the guys had since torn it to ribbons during the scuffle after they pulled him from the car. I could see several marks on the guy, including a nasty cut across the bridge of his nose where he’d been kicked. The only bullet wound was on the left side of his head. It was only a grazing wound, but heads bleed profusely, and he was covered in blood.
Yet something about his wounds didn’t seem right. I walked back over to the Passat and looked into the front passenger seat. It was peppered, riddled, with bullet holes. I looked back at the guy lying face down on the ground, and then back into the car. The holes were still there, lots and lots of them. Stuffing was showing in places. I looked back at the guy. One partial hole in his head. I looked into the car again. What the fuck? For a moment I thought that we had hit one of the running civilians, but then I remembered this guy being pulled from the car. I showed some other guys and they just shrugged. I couldn’t imagine how he’d managed to sustain one grazing bullet wound under such an intense hail of gunfire. I didn’t know why he was basically untouched when his seat had been shot to shreds. But I did know that I should have been dead at least twice, and yet here I was, still hanging on. These things happen, I guess. You just accept them, move on, and don’t tell your mother.
The expression “dead weight” comes from dead people. I’d never thought about that until I got to Iraq, until we had to get the wasted driver in the back of a humvee. The operation was more complicated than it sounds. Not only heavy, the guy was also a mess. He was bloody and nasty and no one wanted to touch him, much less wrap their arms around him.
Sergeant Collins had the idea that four guys should grab one appendage each. One guy on each arm and leg. In unison, the idea went, they would swing him, and on the count of three, they would launch him into the bed of the truck. He thought that would be the most hygienic way to handle it.
This was a good plan, and it worked on the second try. When they threw him on the first attempt, someone’s timing was off and the lifeless guy’s head hit the side of the humvee. It made a sickening “thok” sound that made me want to puke. The sound must have startled the guys too, because as soon as his head hit the truck, they dropped him. His arms and legs were splayed everywhere and when his head hit the asphalt, it made an even more revolting “thok” than when it had hit the humvee. Guys groaned at the gruesome sight. After a few seconds and a few deep breaths, they tried again, this time successfully.
As we rolled slowly away from the scene, I could see a throng of Iraqis gathered on the sidewalks up ahead. The city hadn’t seen this level of violence in a long time, and word traveled fast in Tal Afar.
As we drove, no one said anything. The silence in my truck mirrored the stillness of the crowd. They all knew what had happened. As we continued slowly through the mass of citizenry, it looked like a macabre, twisted sort of Mardi Gras parade.
When we arrived back at the TOC, all of Bravo Company and the entire Battalion headquarters section were outside waiting. The medics had already set up an emergency casualty treatment area outside in the courtyard. When we first arrived back, I was disoriented. Everyone who had been back at the TOC listening to the play-by-play on the radio was grinning from ear to ear. The air at the TOC was electric. As soon as we dismounted, everyone at the TOC mobbed us. It was like a media crush.
I didn’t get it at first. All I wanted to do was to sit down and have some time for personal reflection. But everybody there wanted to know exactly what happened. Like little kids waiting for Christmas presents. To them, the shooting meant vindication for the deaths of Jordan and Garvey. We had been hurt on that night, and now someone, whether or not they had anything to do with that attack, had paid. On that night, as a battalion, we not only lost two friends and soldiers, but the attackers had taken our pride and shaken our confidence. But now, the enemy was no longer elusive and invisible. He wasn’t the boogeyman. He was flesh and blood. Lots and lots of it.
The medics were working furiously to save the lives of the wounded attackers in true American fashion. At the same time, Hameed was interrogating them in true Iraqi fashion. As our physician’s assistant toiled away, attempting to keep Mr. RPG’s intestines from falling out of his body, Hameed stood over him getting irate. His eyes were like hot coals and I could see spittle coming out of the sides of his mouth as he spoke to the man. He was seething with anger, ready to push the Doc out of the way and throttle the guy right there on the stretcher. When he was finished, he walked over in my direction.
“Hey Hameed, what’d you say to that guy?” I asked curiously.
“I tell him,” he said in heavily accented English, “I make him eat his own guts if he doesn’t give us information.”
“Oooookay,” I replied, not quite sure how to respond to a statement like that. Sounds good Hameed, keep up the good work.“So, did he say anything?” I asked.
“Yah, he says he was paid twenty-five dollars to attack TOC.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head.
After a while, I walked back to the barracks building. Several guys had started photographing themselves with the dead body and I wasn’t interested. I was neither interested in participating, nor in putting a stop to it. I just didn’t care anymore. They could have started playing soccer with his head and it wouldn’t have made a difference to me.
Detachedly, I wondered what was happening to us. I thought about how I had once gotten angry with the sergeant for shoving the kid in Baghdad. I thought about how bad I felt after the bags went on the heads of the looters on our first full day in that city. Back then I had cared. I looked at my watch. It was 11:57 p.m. on a night in October. After only seven months in Iraq we were becoming savages. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
I couldn’t sit down either. I was too wired. I walked back over to the TOC, where most of the guys in 1st Platoon were at the computers, emailing the news to family and friends back home. I asked if we could use the satellite phone. Seconds later it was in my hand.
I called my dad on his cell phone.
“Hello?”
“Hey, how’s it goin’,” I asked.
There was a pause. “Great!” he said as soon as he recognized my voice. “This is a surprise. I didn’t expect to hear from you for a while. W
hat are you doin’? What time is it there?”
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s almost midnight here.” I paused. “Well, first, how’s Grandpa?” The old marine was in the hospital and the doctors didn’t think the prognosis was very promising.
“He’s hanging in there,” my dad said, “but your mother is still pretty upset all the time.”
“Yeah . . .,” I paused. “So what are you doing right now?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m at the gas station getting the oil changed.”
Real life, I thought. It’s daytime there and he’s getting his oil changed. People are being normal and going about their daily lives.
“I’m glad you called,” he said. “We hadn’t heard from you in a while. So what are you doing up at midnight calling me?”
“Well,” I said, “the strangest thing just happened . . . .”
So I told him the story. Then I walked back to the barracks. Nobody in 1st Platoon could sleep. We stayed up most of the night talking—going over and over every detail of what had happened. At three o’clock in the morning, I finally grabbed a cot. Lying there, I remembered a line I’d read in a book about Vietnam. It was called Everything We Had and it was a collection of stories told by veterans and compiled by Al Santoli. An infantry officer who had also been in the 101st had remarked at the end of his story, “What a fucking way to live your life.”
As I drifted off to sleep, two hours before the sunrise, that’s all I could think of. What a fucking way to live your life.
Eventually I made it to the airfield. I spent my last few days there eating at Kellogg, Brown, and Root’s fancy new chow hall and emailing people, mostly my mom. She was updating me on my grandfather’s condition, while at the same time grilling me on how safe my convoy to Mosul would be. Though the whole war thing had never sat well with her, she was beginning to panic because the insurgency had begun to snowball all across northern Iraq in the last week.
The War I Always Wanted Page 17
