by Dana Canedy
The evening before the christening, I got a call from Dodson: there had been a change in plans, and what was supposed to be an intimate occasion would be anything but that. There had been a series of high-profile gang shootings in the neighborhood that week—shootings that left a teenage girl and boy dead. Dodson had hastily organized a reconciliation service for the families of the dead children, and it was scheduled for the same time as your baptism. (Apparently it was the only available time slot on the mayor’s calendar.) Since you and I were returning to New York on Monday, we could not reschedule the christening.
It seemed like a macabre idea, but Dodson said that he envisioned the ceremony as a homecoming for those families, culminating with a celebration of life for ours.
Reluctantly, I agreed.
Television crews and half a dozen police cars were parked outside the church when we arrived, and armed police officers stood guard on the church lawn. The sanctuary, ordinarily spacious, was packed with people. I questioned my judgment in agreeing to baptize you under such conditions. What if the rival gang members who had killed those kids decided to drive by and shoot up the church?
I was still trying to decide whether to back out when something miraculous happened. I saw those other parents seized in sorrow and knew then that our place was in the sanctuary. I wanted to ease their suffering in any way that I could.
When it was time for us to make our way to the front of the church, I stood there swaying with you in my arms as the pastor placed a hand on your forehead, closed his eyes, and prayed. I looked at the mother of one of the dead gang members and wondered if she was thinking back to a time when her own child was still tiny and untouched by hatred and violence.
Pastor Dodson had told me that during the service I would have to literally hand you over to the members of the congregation so that they could welcome you into the church. When that time came, I instinctively offered you to that dead child’s mother. She clutched you to her breast, shaking as she rocked you and wept. The brother of one of the victims, a boy of about sixteen, rubbed your head and kissed your cheek. Those strangers with whom we were suddenly connected passed you among themselves before someone placed you back in my arms. Tears flowed freely as you were welcomed into the church and christened as a child of God.
You squirmed when the minister sprinkled water on your head but otherwise remained silent and still. Then the congregation prayed for your father’s protection and for your health and safety.
As the service concluded, so many people wanted to greet us that we stood in an impromptu receiving line accepting their hugs and good wishes. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa held you and posed for pictures. An old Asian man with a creased face and white hair waited at the end of the line. When he finally made his way closer with an unsteady gait, he clutched my hand and smiled.
“God is pleased,” he said, looking at me with tired eyes, and hobbled off.
This was salvation.
The healing you brought to those hurting people must have been what your father meant when he wrote to me after you were born: I know he is a blessing to everyone who meets him.
I am not sure why, but I never told your father about the reconciliation service that preceded your baptism. Perhaps I wanted to ignore the symbolism of it, representing as it did the tenuous thread between life and death. I tried to provide as idyllic an image as possible of your life during the months that remained until your father could come home—in case it was all he would ever experience of it.
Within weeks of the trip to Los Angeles we were on a plane again, flying to Kentucky to spend a weekend with both sets of your grandparents. It was important to me that you meet them, and for your father to see pictures of you with them. I was surprised at how sentimental I felt returning home as a mother for the first time. I had come of age in Radcliff, had kissed my first boyfriend there and learned to drive on those roads. Now my son would sleep under the same roof where I had grown into womanhood and met his father.
You met my father that day and he held you up and tickled your face with his gray beard—no longer the fearsome man who had raised me, but a gentle, rotund grandfather, the kind who passes out candy before dinner and gives rides on the back of his electric wheelchair. Arthritis had claimed his body and age had softened his heart. He still liked to lecture and to have the last word, but usually not when his grandchildren were speaking. Maybe you represented our second chance.
I took you out into the front yard and pointed out the spot where I had knocked over a bush when I was learning to drive and where I once played hopscotch. Then we walked under the towering oak tree that I had loved as a girl—the tree your dad and I had walked under the day we met.
I was sitting with you on the front porch when the Kings arrived the next morning. Your grandmother walked up the driveway with arms outstretched long before she was close enough to touch you.
“Just look at this baby,” she beamed, rubbing her cheek against yours. Our two families were finally united. Even your aunt Gail, a lawyer in her mid-forties who was known as a fierce negotiator, softened when she took you into her arms. I did not know her well but she and I were both professional women with spunk and strong opinions, which might have been part of Charles’s attraction to me.
The Kings took enough pictures to wallpaper a room and covered you with kisses when they left two days later. I also snapped dozens of pictures to send your father. He was so happy to receive them, especially the ones of you in his parents’ arms. He told me he had been showing the pictures to his soldiers.
He wanted to know where I had gotten the Polo shirt and shorts you were wearing in the photos and how much weight you had gained. He asked if you were sleeping longer and wanted to know if I was still reading to you every day. I put the phone to your ear so he could speak to you and told him that you seemed to turn toward the sound of his voice. In those moments he was not simply a leader of men at war a world away—he was a father in love.
Eleven
Dear Jordan,
While I was writing to Charles in the spring of 2006 about your first smiles and the smell of your skin after a bath, he was writing to me about Iraqi children searching trash heaps for scraps of food to eat. He wrote of proudly watching American boys he had trained become men during battle, only to see them die in pools of blood in the streets in Iraq.
From the day your father and his soldiers crossed into Iraq from Kuwait, he realized that Operation Iraqi Freedom was different from any other conflict he had known. Instead of fighting at a distance, with missiles launched from ships and artillery rounds fired from tanks, U. S. soldiers engaged their elusive enemy in narrow, unfamiliar streets. He wrote to me about training Iraqi soldiers by day, never knowing whether they would join the insurgency by night.
I wondered how a man who knew he could be shot by an unseen adversary at any moment could ever reenter a world in which he was safe. I tried to focus on keeping his spirits up until his two-week leave, still several months away. I sent care packages stuffed with some of his favorite things: tuna, smoked nuts, Rice Krispie treats, and fitness magazines. I included cards scented with my perfume, my way of reminding him that he was adored.
There were times when my packages made things more difficult. In some of his letters, he wrote that the photographs and cards made him long even more for all that he was missing.
Much later, I would discover the details of your father’s life in Iraq. I learned that Charles was a Death Dealer, as the roughly one thousand men of his heavy-tank, armor, and infantry battalion called themselves. As such, his survival depended on his ability to shut out thoughts of us. Formally the ist Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division from Fort Hood, Texas, the Dealers operated in an area about thirty miles south of Baghdad—one of the most dangerous Sunni-Shiite fault lines. Iskandariyah, the town where the Dealers made their forward operating base, or FOB, was part of a larger region of about 2,700 square miles. Insurgents were everywhere. Th
e military called it the Triangle of Death.
First Sergeant King, “Top,” as his soldiers called him because of his rank, was in charge of the 105 men of Charlie Company— the Carnivores. He reported to a young West Point-trained commander named Stefan McFarland who was as ambitious as he was demanding. Captain McFarland, a tall, white, boyishly handsome former football player from Carrollton, Texas, was only twenty-nine but had considerable combat experience. He had served in Kuwait and was on his second tour of duty in Iraq.
Given his resume and his gung-ho reputation, McFarland seemed destined to travel a straight line up the military chain of command. Charles sometimes referred to McFarland as “The Golden Boy,” but he respected his command.
If the two men had taken different paths to military leadership, they shared a love for the institution and the company they led. While Charles had more experience, he considered the junior officer a competent leader who shared his high standards, and under their command the company became known for its willingness to take on tough missions.
“We were kind of famous,” said Specialist Harold Garcia, a proud Carnivore. “Charlie Company was the shit.”
As first sergeant, Charles was Captain McFarland’s go-to guy. Before the troops deployed, Charles oversaw their training for combat, making certain they could navigate a battlefield and operate sophisticated weapons. He also made certain that they knew something of the culture of Iraqi Muslims, both for defensive reasons and to avoid giving offense.
Charles would exercise with the weakest soldiers to improve their fitness and stamina. “When we went on company runs, he would go with us and smoke us sometimes,” said Sergeant Adam Martinez, twenty-nine, a tanker in the unit “It was uplifting for soldiers to see that a first sergeant could run us into the ground.”
Leading his young soldiers tapped into Charles’s paternal impulses and made him feel as if he were personally obligated to them. He even counseled the youngest soldiers about saving the first money they had ever earned. Their race, upbringing, religion, and politics didn’t matter. What did was that every one of them had a family and a life to get back to. He would dedicate himself to their survival.
Before he left, I asked your father to describe what a typical day in Iraq would entail. “Everything from making sure my soldiers get their mail to recovering their bodies,” he said.
Given his gentleness at home, I was astounded to learn about Charles’s demean or in the field. The first sergeant was a different person from my sweet, shy fiance.
“He would get out there and yell his lungs out at us,” Martinez told me. “He’d tear our heads off and stomp on us if we fucked up, but then he’d tell us, ‘If you get in trouble, I’ll come get you in the middle of the night.’“
Charles tearing people’s heads off? I searched my mind for such an image.
As their leader, he would admonish his men before they headed out on missions to “stay alive and kill shit,” which became Charlie Company’s battle cry. I had never heard my Charles swear.
“I guess he was real good at turning on the switch and turning it off,” Martinez said.
But Charles only yelled when he believed he had no other recourse, which is why his soldiers and superiors recall in great detail the times that he did. “He was an almost strikingly quiet, thoughtful leader,” said Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Donahoe, Charles’s battalion commander. “Here was a guy who looked like some Greek statue. He had the physical presence, so he didn’t have to talk loud and didn’t have to always shout at guys. He had this kind, calm demeanor to him that soldiers just responded to.”
It was precisely because Charles and McFarland were such superior leaders that their Charlie Company saw the most combat action in the battalion. “I told them what that meant for them is that they get the most difficult missions we had in Iraq and they would get the most dangerous areas we had in Iraq,” Donahoe said. “Those guys were war fighters. They were the guys who could figure out how to get to their objectives when, given the same set of circumstances, other companies would not. If I was going to send anybody up there, I had to send a unit that was cohesive enough that, if it came to it, they could take the losses and take the everyday grind of going in there. And I had to have a unit where the individual solders were confident in their leadership.”
The Dealers’ mission was to locate and destroy insurgency cells, train local military and security forces, and help transfer the region to Iraqi control. Achieving that goal required as much diplomacy as armaments. So the Dealers worked to broker peace deals between Sunni and Shiite factions. They protected the construction site of a new police station in a small, volatile town not ten miles from their base, Jurf as-Sakhr. Insurgents had blown up the last one. They whitewashed schools, oversaw the installation of water purification systems, and built marketplaces for local merchants to sell their wares. But before the battalion could work on the governance and goodwill efforts, Charlie Company had to pave the way with a far more arduous task.
“An awful lot of killing had to be done before we could do that,” Donahoe said. “Charlie Company was down there in the knife fight, if you will, rooting out a very well-entrenched insurgency.”
Within a month of Team Carnivore’s arrival, civilians and insurgents alike had felt its presence. The soldiers had seized large caches of weapons and commandeered an enemy encampment they called “Carnivore Island”: a one-story concrete house surrounded not by water but by desert. It got its name because of its isolation, rather than its proximity to the Euphrates River.
Word spread quickly among the locals about how the Carnivores had transformed the Island. Before they took it over, it had been the site of what the New York Times called “a clandestine court,” where, according to Iraqi police, “insurgent judges would try, torture and execute collaborators.” Thereafter, it became a patrol base from which the company conducted surveillance of the region and launched attacks on insurgents.
“That was an enemy sanctuary where we found thousands of pounds of explosives,” McFarland said. “Taking over the house put us in their backyard, so the big, bad Americans were in there now and the enemy had to face it.”
The position also put the American soldiers in good stead with the locals. In an area that had known constant fighting as the warring Sunnis and Shiites looted merchants and killed locals caught in their crosshairs, the soldiers added a measure of security.
There was, however, a tactical downside to making this the company’s patrol base: the ten-mile route between the Island and the battalion’s forward operating base in Iskandariyah. It was a perilous sliver of asphalt known as Route Patty, not more than a lane and a half wide and littered with deadly IEDs, or improvised explosive devices.
“Everyone knows that it was pretty much IED alley,” Martinez said. Charles called it “one of the most dangerous roads we have.” He had even discussed the dangers with his “battle buddy,” First Sergeant Arenteanis “Tony” Jenkins, who was his bunkmate in Iraq and led another company in the battalion.
“Everybody had an uneasy feeling about that road,” Tony told me. “There were so many blind spots coming around curves with a bunch of trees, and what you were trying to look for was a tree out of place. One time we halted a convoy because we noticed that a tree wasn’t there a week before.” Trees often contained camouflaged wires attached to detonators. A wire mistaken for a twig could be deadly.
The explosives that lay in wait for the Americans were as crude as they were lethal. They could be deceptively small when hidden inside a soda can, or as large as a discarded crate at the side of the road. They could be packed into propane canisters, disguised in rubbish, or tucked into a briefcase in an abandoned car. The bomb makers were creative and audacious—sometimes mockingly so. They even hid IEDs in discarded MRE (meals ready to eat) packages.
Making an IED required only a rudimentary knowledge of explosives. All the insurgents needed was a combustible substance (usually gunpowder, dynamite, or a mixture
of hydrogen peroxide, gasoline, and nitrate) along with nails, metal, glass, and rocks, all of which were crammed into the container. The bomb makers often used nine-volt batteries as power sources and triggered the explosives with detonators fashioned from common electronic devices. A cell phone or car alarm could serve as a bomb trigger. Even the remote control for a toy would do.
Sometimes, under the cover of darkness, the insurgents dug craters in the road, placed explosives in them, and repacked the asphalt. After they scattered dirt around the area, the road looked untouched, especially from atop a tank. The enemy also hid bombs in the carcasses of dogs and other animals, which were then placed along the road.
It was on the treacherous Route Patty that Charles would look not just for bombs but Iraqi children, who would stand at the side of the road and marvel at the American convoys.
“He’d say to his gunner, ‘Are my kids out there?’“ Tony recalled. “He took candy out there to those kids all the time. He thought if he could make a difference or have one smile, just by throwing people candy, why not do it? He didn’t look at it like some soldiers did, that these were little Iraqis growing up to be big Iraqis who were going to kill Americans.”
But it was on Route Patty that Charlie Company also experienced its most crushing defeats.
Corporal Robbie Light was just twenty-one years old. His wife was pregnant with their first child, a daughter.
Charles was so shaken after he recovered Robbie’s body that he mailed the journal to me immediately, even though it still had about a dozen empty pages, in case he never made it back. Charles also seemed to need to tell me about Robbie’s death. In a letter he wrote:
He would have said all this to me on the phone, but the military restricted what we could discuss. Once, when I was venting about “stop loss,” the government’s practice of adding another tour of duty for soldiers who were about to be discharged, the line suddenly went dead. Your father called back and told me not to say anything like that or we would once again be cut off.
