War Porn

by Roy Scranton

  Later the temperature would top 115. Later I’d chamber a round and prepare to kill. Later the heat and stink of the day, the yelling faces, rancor, noise, and fury broiling and thrumming in waves off the blacktop would make me both want and fear needing a reason to pull my trigger, to feel my grip buck in my hands, to tear jagged red holes in men’s flesh.

  But for a moment, I had white-gold serenity glazing still arcades. I prayed in the morning’s ease for grace, that I might find it somewhere out there over the wall and down shadowed alleys, under arabesques of purpled gold, beneath the hovering sun now glaring like a blooded eye.

  Downstairs I showered in a makeshift stall between two ponchos. I put on the same sweat-stiff DCUs I’d worn the day before. I checked my combat load, made sure I had the BC’s MP3 speakers. I did daily maintenance: oil, coolant, transmission fluid, belts. Struts, CV joints, tires. I checked the undercarriage for leaks.

  •••

  Healds, Porkchop, and I headed for breakfast, walking through the shattered central hall of the bombed-out six-story ruin that stood between us and the DFAC. Wires and collapsed supports hung from the ceiling like vines. Holes blasted in the floor dropped into stinking sub-basements full of soda cans and rot, pits yawned in dusty corridors littered with rock and paper, the scent of things long dead wafting up from below. Stories of crushed stone loomed overhead, gashed rebar jutting and bristling rust-red through tunnels of light burrowing into the sky, broken granite, twisted metal. Sometimes chips of stone clattered down rubble-choked stairs and we’d flinch, imagining the whole thing collapsing in on us.

  We came through the shade into a flash of light outside the DFAC where three sergeants lounged smoking cigars. We cleared our rifles and went inside. We got our food and coffee, slathered our plates with Texas Pete, then sat in plastic chairs at plastic tables and watched Fox News on a widescreen TV.

  Glory. The salt and pepper shakers, the napkins and plastic forks and Styrofoam plates, the bad food, the worse coffee, even the ketchup packets and juice boxes glowed sublime, transcendent, essential. I cherished it. I needed it. I relished those eggs and that coffee and the witless ballyhoo on the satellite news, dizzily feeling for a moment like a man in a world where people had opinions about events, a world of APRs and Dow Jones numbers and mortgages and “thinking outside the box,” a world where celebrities had breakdowns and we complained about cell-phone service and no one was trying to blow my fucking legs off.

  A humvee burned, caught in the TV’s frame like a votive. Honorable Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came on and said we’d reached a turning point. He was followed by a man with mousse in his hair standing on the roof of the Palestine Hotel, then a commercial for Viagra.

  The Hagakure reads: “The way of the samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance . . . If by setting one’s heart right every morning, one is able to live as though already dead, he gains freedom in the way.”

  I checked my weapon, patted down my armor plates, reminded myself that I was a soldier and this was my fucking job and I would damn well try to die with a little dignity.

  Beyond the gate, the roads were already thick with cars, the skies hazy with smog. The chaos out there, the crazy Arabic writing and abu-jabba jabber, the lawless traffic, the hidden danger and buzz and stray bullets and death looming from every overpass pressed down on my soul like a hot wind. On the streets, eyes scanning trash for loose wires, I sank into the standard daily manic paranoid torpor: trapped in a broiling box with big targets on the sides, damned to drive the same maze over and over till somebody killed me. We rolled down Canal Road, our escorts weaving in and out of traffic, our hemmets and Iraqi semis chugging behind.

  “Whatcha wanna listen to?” Captain Yarrow yelled over the engine.

  “Whattaya got?” I shouted back.

  He waved his MP3 player at me. “All kinds of stuff,” he shouted.

  I shrugged. He pushed a button. The Pet Shop Boys blasted from the speakers, singing “West End Girls.”

  whenever possible, you should avoid kill zones

  such as streets, alleys, and parks

  Driving the edge of Sadr City through bumper-to-bumper afternoon jam, I heard Lieutenant Krauss behind me yell, “Weapon on the left.”

  “What, where?” the BC shouted.

  “Pistol. Pistol left side. Blue shirt. Pistol left.”

  Captain Yarrow grabbed the hand mike and I looked left, taking the scene in a glance. First it was a mass of bodies on a corner then I picked out two people arguing, a blue shirt, a pistol. Captain Yarrow said something into the mike and Lieutenant Krauss shouted, “He’s aiming! He’s aiming!”

  Then two loud bangs behind my head. Brass dinged off my Kevlar and fell burning down the back of my shirt.

  In my periphery, movement: Iraqis scattered and dove to the ground.

  “There he goes!” shouted Krauss and fired two more times. I scrunched my head into my shoulders like a turtle, closing the gap between my helmet and armor. His empty shells plinked off me.

  More shooting, ours, into the crowd. Across the street I saw a woman in black jerk up and swing to the ground.

  “Cease fire, cease fire!” Captain Yarrow shouted. “Keep driving! Keep driving!”

  Our windows wide, we sucked down exhaust, refinery smoke, propane, and the reek of sun-baked sewage. Crowds and traffic, buildings looming, cars and stucco, and we come up out of the mess onto the expressway, flow at a dead stop. Honking cars clogged the lanes, bumpers scraping fenders, brown faces glaring. Up ahead we could see American soldiers blocking the road, gun trucks and air guards, some big Army goatfuck.

  “IED?”

  “Didn’t hear anything.”

  “Maybe it hasn’t gone off.”

  “Could be a checkpoint.”

  “I think it’s an IED.”

  Ahead on the left, Iraqis cut through a gap in the guardrail where a tank had rolled through. We moved slowly forward, filling the space opened by the fleeing cars.

  “If it was a checkpoint, we’d be moving.”

  An Iraqi car started backing toward us, angling for the gap, and I laid on the horn. The driver stuck his head out of his window and pointed where he wanted to go. I flipped him off and goosed forward, ramming his rear. His hands flew up in anger.

  “Good job, Wilson.”

  “You want me to go for that gap, sir?”

  “No, we’ll wait it out.”

  Twenty-five minutes later, broiling between the sun and the engine, I asked him again about the gap and he said yes. We edged over, nudging Iraqi cars out of the way with the brush guard, then swung around and took off back the way we came.

  Captain Yarrow scanned the thick red and blue lines on his street map of Baghdad. He gave me directions across the 3ID bridge and into the Green Zone, but we got lost and wound up driving down a quiet, tree-lined boulevard along the Tigris. We passed a building spray-painted Iraqi Communist Workers’ Party and a looted bank. Iraqis ambled along like it was Unter den Linden: couples holding hands, businessmen talking, heads bowed like mendicants. The smell of the trees cut the stink of exhaust, and in the dappled shade, it seemed we’d fallen through a rabbit hole into some alternate Baghdad, an oasis of brotherhood and peace.

  Then we came up on a bridge and into the burning sky. Refinery fires licked the horizon.

  A couple days later was the Fourth of July, and to celebrate they had a barbecue at the DFAC, hamburgers and hot dogs, and a Star Wars marathon in the compound’s decrepit movie theater. After dinner, as the sun went down, Healds and I and some other guys went up on the roof of our building and smoked.

  The upper six floors were off-limits because of snipers. The first few times, we went cautiously, for souvenirs. Someone found a framed photo of Saddam. I got a hadji calenda
r and a picture of some guy getting an award. We also found what the Marines had left, a pile of shit, half-eaten MREs, and graffiti, Fuck Iraq! and First to Fight!

  Now we went up to watch the city: Sweeping cloverleaf interchanges, satellite dishes, pileups and traffic, six million souls watching DVDs and blogging, texting each other, hurrying through markets past sheep carcasses hung to bleed, spice sellers, bags of black, dried limes and reed baskets and old women haggling over okra, children running between stalls and down alleys, faces flickering in brass. Up out of the ancient garden of Sinbad’s Baghdad and the nightmare of Saddam’s Ba’athist dystopia grew the fiber-optic slums of tomorrowland, where shepherds on cell phones herded flocks down expressways and insurgents uploaded video beheadings, everything rising and falling as one, Hammurabi’s Code and Xboxes, the wheel and the Web, Ur to Persepolis to Sykes-Picot to CNN, a ruin outside of time, a twenty-first-century cyberpunk war-machine interzone.

  We watched cars zoom by below while Kiowas whickered overhead. An RPG went off in the distance, yellow sparks shrieking up at the helicopters ceaselessly circling, and we cheered. Tracers rose and fell across the sky like burning neon.

  “I can’t believe how much this place looks like L.A.,” Burnett said.

  Foster flicked a butt over the side. “You up here last night?”

  “Naw.”

  “Wicked firefight.”

  The sun bled magenta across the horizon and the lights of the shops and cafés carved tiny scallops in the purple night. Cars without headlights flew down the road, weaving crazily. No traffic lights, no cops, no streetlamps. We waited for collisions, explosions, gunshots.

  “This stupid fucking place,” Burnett said. “I don’t know why we don’t just nuke it.”

  “What, Burnett, you wanna miss this? This is your war, man.”

  “Yeah. I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture and kill them.”

  “Shut your fucking face, Pyle, you sick piece of shit. You do not deserve to survive in my Corps.”

  “You ever notice Bullwinkle looks like Pyle?”

  “Better watch out. He might shoot you in your underwear.”

  “He better fucking kill me if he thinks he can take my underwear.”

  “C’mon Burnett. I know you’re a secret hadji lover. You blow your wad every night dreaming of some fat-assed hadji bitch riding your cock all belelelelelelelelah.”

  “See that bitch today in the blue jeans? Shit hot. Just like a fucking American girl.”

  “Ass cheeks like melons. Honeydew melons.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about, some sweet hadji ass.”

  “Fuck that. Hadjis stink.”

  “Shit, they wash up like normal people. Besides, you stink too.”

  “Yeah, but I ain’t gonna fuck me.”

  “Unless you get some hadji twat, you’re the only thing that’s fucking you. Just let yourself go for a few weeks till you’re really filthy. Then you won’t even notice.”

  “Negative. They’re probably fucking diseased or some shit. Catch some freaky Mohammed clap.”

  “The Black Syphilis.”

  “Hell yeah. They got diseases here you ain’t even heard of. I heard the PA say watch out for leeshamaneesis. What the fuck’s that? We shoulda just fucking nuked this fucking fucked-up fuckhole from the fucking start. And then we come back and take the oil whenever we want.”

  There was a flash in the distance.

  “Oh shit you see that?”

  “Looked like an IED.”

  An Apache swung low over the gray cloud rising where the flash had gone off. We lit cigarettes as the last of the light faded, watching the Apache dip and swing like a giant angry wasp.

  we are heroes in error;

  what was said before is not important

  The road bent away from the river and climbed a low berm. Oil glimmered purple in the sun in puddles, leaking through the berm’s sandy skin. To our left stood hovels wreathed in wires and clotheslines and a flock of raggedy children, shoeless, hooting and pointing. Far to the west lay the outskirts of Baghdad, smudged with haze. We turned past a wrecked BMP slouched inert on the shoulder.

  “It’s right up here somewhere.”

  We passed some blown-out tanks half hidden in the palms to our right, then hit a road leading around the village toward the city. The BC pointed and I turned and we drove by the husk of a building, just two ruined walls standing in the shimmer like sundial hands.

  “It should be right here,” the BC said.

  I scanned the earth for telltale fins, black mounds, glints of aluminum casing.

  “Pull off over there.”

  The BC and Lieutenant Krauss got out. C27 pulled aside and Staff Sergeant Smith joined them. I dismounted and stood smoking, watching the perimeter.

  Two older hadjis in man-dresses walked toward us from the village. The flock of children from before overtook them, rushing at us.

  “Ishta,” I shouted at the kids.

  They jabbered back. “Mista, Mista! MRE!”

  “Uskut,” I yelled. They laughed and capered.

  We didn’t have a proper translator, but the manager of our hadji work team spoke a little English. The BC called him over and tried to ask the two villagers if they could help us find the ammo cache.

  “Boom-boom,” Captain Yarrow said, gesturing with his hands.

  The two villagers spoke. The team manager listened and nodded and smiled. “Is bombs no here,” he told Yarrow. “No bombs. People good, Bush good. Saddam bad.”

  “No, not people’s bombs,” the BC said. “Old bombs. Saddam bombs. We’re here to clean them up. Tell them we’re here to take the old bombs away.”

  “Oh yes, yes. Okay good. No problem.” The team manager turned back to the two men and they chatted back and forth.

  “Mista!” one of the kids shouted at me. “You give me dollar!”

  “Fuck off,” I said. “Ishta.”

  They laughed and pushed each other toward me.

  The team manager turned back to Captain Yarrow. “He say no bomb. Bomb bad. No bomb. He say Saddam bad, no bomb. He say al-Ameriki come, go bomb.”

  “Go bomb?”

  “Go bomb, bomb.” The team manager mimed hauling something off.

  “Take bomb?”

  “Yes, take bomb! No problem!”

  “What about the tanks? Is there anything over by the tanks?”

  “Tank?”

  “The tanks.” Captain Yarrow hunched his shoulders and rocked his body back and forth. “Brrrrrrrrrum,” he growled, swinging his head side to side.

  “Ah, tank, yes. No. Yes. No problem.”

  The kids edged forward and I waved my rifle at them. They shrieked and scattered, then reformed in a mass. They laughed and pointed.

  “Mista, you give me.”

  “Mista, MRE.”

  “Ishta,” I said.

  “Ishta, ishta!” they shouted back.

  “He say yes, bomb and tank, yes. There, there. No problem.”

  “Great,” said Captain Yarrow. “Tell him thank you, and to keep his people back while we’re working. Tell him it’s very dangerous.”

  We drove back up the road, where we found a small cache of tank and mortar rounds in the palms, hidden behind a berm. It took about two hours to clear everything. The kids kept running over and we had to keep chasing them off.

  •••

  Driving down the road something exploded behind us, shaking our truck, then something else exploded and the radio squawked: “Grenade Grenade Crusader Two- zero-three what’s your status?”

  “Status green over.”

  Captain Yarrow stuck his head out the window, trying to see the convoy behind us. He told me pull over.

  “Sir?”

  �
��Pull the fuck over, Wilson!”

  I eased off the gas and slid to the shoulder. Shots to the right, AKs, close.

  “Fire right side! Right side!”

  Healds’s rifle went off pop-pop-pop.

  “I can’t see,” Lieutenant Krauss shouted.

  “Keep going, keep going!” the BC yelled.

  I swung back onto the road and took the convoy up to fifty. The shooting kept on, mostly us, then petered out.

  Captain Yarrow got on the radio and called for a status report. Everyone responded except Two-zero-two. Yarrow screamed into the hand mike: “Crusader Two-zero-two, Crusader Two-zero-two, what’s your status, over? Respond! Respond!”

  No answer. I exhaled, staring at the road. The world was clearer now, numinous, drenched in light.

  “Crusader Two-zero-two!” Captain Yarrow shouted. “What’s your status, over? Respond!”

  My armor plate lay on my chest like a lover’s head. I needed a cigarette.

  “Any Crusader element, this is Crusader Six, does somebody have eyes on Two-zero-two?”

  “Crusader Six, this is Crusader Two-zero-five November. We have eyes on Two-zero-two, status green, break. They don’t have a radio. Over.”

  “Well make sure they get a goddamned radio,” Captain Yarrow shouted into his mike. “Somebody give me a sitrep.”

  “Six, this is One-six November. Two grenades from the overpass, break. One fell wide and the other bounced off the back of Two-zero-three.”

  “All Crusader elements, this is Crusader Six. Keep a tight eye on your twelve. Watch those overpasses and don’t take any chances. Let’s get this load of ammo to Wardog.”

  “You see who was shooting at us, Healds?” Lieutenant Krauss asked.

  “Uh . . . honestly, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not really.”

  At the next overpass I saw two hadjis crossing above so I swung wide right to keep the convoy from passing beneath them. As we drove into the shadows under the arch, I heard the trucks behind open fire.