Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  Galvan, on the other hand, cool old Galvan, he didn’t bother with moralizing. He’d get at us with a kind of evil baby talk.

  “Oh, it’s hot?” he would say, making his voice high pitched and too sweet. “Is I-wack too hot for you? Is it too hot for my precious wittle boy?”

  That usually ended the grumbling pretty quick. “Fuck you” was about the only comeback to it.

  The good thing about the heat was that it meant we didn’t have to patrol much during the middle of the day. There was no need to. Life in Anbar Province slowed to a crawl. All living creatures, from people down to the goats and sheep and wild dogs and even the biting horseflies, found a piece of shade and would not budge. Few households in our sector had air-conditioning, the electrical grid only worked a couple hours at a time, the shops closed from midafternoon until dusk, and the Iraqis took a long siesta. They came out again at sunset, maybe to eat a roasted chicken and drink a few cups of chai tea in an open-air restaurant, before heading back to their roofs, to bed down together as families, preferring the roofs because the insides of their homes were intolerable.

  When we did go out on patrol, one of the few tasks we enjoyed was passing out candy to the local kids. Galvan would toss handfuls from the turret like he was throwing favors in the world’s most dangerous Mardi Gras parade. We stockpiled the candy from our MREs and guys wrote home requesting more in care packages. Fitzpatrick’s mom sent him a five-gallon bucket of Dubble Bubble. It tripped me out to see that at mail call. We had the logistical supply chain in place to move that heavy-ass bucket of gum, which no one in his right mind could argue was essential or even important to our mission, ship it from the United States to the opposite side of the world, seven thousand miles in less than two weeks, but somehow, we couldn’t figure a way to wrap up the war and get out. It didn’t seem like we were going to anytime soon. Halliburton was busy at the Row, cleaning up the rubble, building out the palaces with offices for the generals, the CIA spooks, and the State Department honchos who’d moved in to replace us. We heard stories about how good they had it there at the newly renamed “Green Zone.” We heard they served rib-eye steak and king crab every Friday, and they had a big PX that sold American cigarettes, and a mobile Burger King trailer, and movie nights and salsa dances on the weekends—I shit you not, really, they did. From time to time I’d think of the Row and what we’d done in the water palace. When I was feeling really rotten, I’d wonder what’d been inside those safes, the price of our souls unclaimed. I couldn’t decide whether I wished it was a million bucks or nothing.

  There was still no sign of Wigheard. Most of our missions were straight patrols and had nothing to do with her but sometimes we’d get tasked to pull cordon security for the Rangers or SEALs or whoever was going to raid a place where some informant had claimed she was being held. Higher got tips about her constantly, but after a while, with none of them panning out, you had the feeling the Iraqis had wised up to using her as a pawn in their internal beefs. Like, one sheikh who hated another would rat out his enemy to us, claiming dude was a terrorist holding Wigheard.

  This time, SEAL Team Six was going to hit a mosque in a neighborhood with a rough reputation. Our task in the mission was to secure a particular street corner near the mosque and not let anyone through. We expected contact even if we didn’t find her. When you roll into a hostile city with a battalion’s worth, you are bound for mayhem any way you cut it.

  In a long column like a bristling steel centipede, Crusader Battalion crossed the bridge into Fallujah. Only one tank at a time could enter the bridge, a two-lane truss with supporting beams connecting to the sides and top. It was like driving into a long cage. Forty-foot drop to the river. On more peaceful days I’d seen Iraqi men and boys taking elaborate dives off the upper trestles to prove their manhood.

  We made the other side, and the platoon at the lead of the column reported a fire. I swung the turret over the front to check it out.

  “Get back on your sector,” Galvan said. “You’re looking right where hajji wants you to.” He twisted the handle on his hatch and cracked the cupola. The smell of burning rubber came streaming in. “Tires,” he said. “They’re burning fucking tires.”

  The enemy had made a fiery wall across the road to slow us down and mess with our thermals. We could’ve rolled right through, but Higher thought the obstacle might be booby-trapped. I felt scared and also a little like it was Christmas morning. I knew it was just the chemicals in my brain making it feel okay to die. Somewhere out there were thousands of people who hated my guts and wanted me shot to pieces and dragged through the streets, or with my head sawed off. That shit was real. My mouth had long since gone dry.

  The fighting started with many things happening at once. Colonel Easton got on the radio and ordered the lead tanks to open fire on the tire obstacle with high-explosive rounds. The report of the cannons came from the ground up, like a dangerously close thunderclap. With the obstacle cleared, our column crawled forward again, creaking steel track snuffing shreds of burning rubber. That was all I could smell. In the thermals I scanned a line of buildings at the edge of the city. There was a hot flash on a roof, and a bright-green dart hissing and cracking through the air. “RPG!” Galvan yelled, and more flashes came from the uneven line of rooftops, some of them dimmer than the rocket, blinking like flashlights switching on and off, small-arms fire. Someone on company net was reporting contact northwest. All at about the same time.

  In dim green light my face was reflected in the LCD like the ghost of a better world. I placed the reticle on the roof where they were shooting at us and let off a burst. Squeezed the trigger and the coax shuddered beside me in the servo mount. It took one long second for the rounds to arc through the air and smack the building. They hit short, the points of impact like dirt clods thrown and bursting against the wall. I’d missed badly, forgetting to laze to the target. I pressed a little red button on the paddle to activate the laser range finder, the firing computer came up with a solution, and the hydraulics jolted the gun to a forty-five-degree angle, a dicey shot, half a mile, the edge of the max range for the coax, like lobbing the ball from half court, spraying and praying, a twist of my wrists moving the reticle and the gun, the turret, me, Galvan, and Patterson, who’d been subbed onto the crew to load for us that day, since we were short-manned. Fitzpatrick was down below in the driver’s hull and only moved when the tracks did.

  I covered the roof with burning tracers that chipped and burst concrete and raised a white haze that made it impossible to see what I’d just destroyed.

  “Gunner, heat, troops!” Galvan said.

  I switched the fire selector knob to HEAT. Patterson hit a lever to arm the gun and hollered, “Up!” He shrunk to the side of the turret behind the radios so the recoiling breach wouldn’t crush him.

  “Fire!”

  “On the way!”

  Boom.

  The big round flew faster and flatter than the small arms. The top corner of the building disappeared in flame and a lingering cloud of pulverized cement. The sound of the cannon firing just off my shoulder was like the smacking of a machine press that weighed two tons and was being worked by an angry giant as we rode on top of it. A sharp, violent kuh-chunk. Enough to rattle every organ in my body.

  “Target, target!”

  The roofline fell quiet. Our column pressed forward into the city, driving on both sides of a divided road. On either flank there were storefronts shuttered with steel accordion curtains. The buildings’ upper floors, five and six stories tall, were subdivided into apartments, laundry hanging on lines strung between balconies, colorful dresses and starched shirts, burqas twisting in the wind like black flags. I was most worried about what was going on above us, since there was no way to get a good sight picture on the balconies. They were too close—the gun wouldn’t elevate enough, the tank designed to fight at distances of miles, not meters—so I settled for watching the streets. Normally they would’ve been packed with traffic, ever
ything from donkey carts to semi trucks, but now were empty. Not one person anywhere. The lack of life in such a dense city was the most frightening thing, like we were on display, like seeing the world after the end.

  An attack helicopter banked overhead and dropped a salvo of rockets that shook the next block over. The smoke grew denser, twisting the light brown. Our tank passed an alleyway and someone on my blind side launched a rocket that hit our turret with a loud bang like a sledgehammer against the armor, and we cursed and flinched in our stations, but Fitzpatrick kept rolling, gassing the throttle, knowing that you can never lose the momentum in a tank fight or you’ll get stuck and die. The smell of burning metal drifted into the turret, but we were all still alive, which meant the rocket had failed to penetrate.

  “Get the gun over the side,” Galvan said. “They might try us again from that next one.”

  I traversed the gun perpendicular to our line of march and we passed the next alley where a bearded man wearing black sweatpants and a green silk sash draped around his chest stepped from behind a parked car and hefted a rocket tube onto his shoulder, kneeling for a solid base to launch it from, when he saw our gun pointed directly at him, too late to scramble for cover, though he tried. The coax flung tracers down the alley at twice the speed of sound, and I remember seeing a burning round like a small hurtling star disappearing through the center of him. He sat down hard, dropping the rocket, catching himself with his palms. A stunned expression crossed his face like he never thought this would happen to him.

  “Oww-woo-woo-woo! Mother-fuck yeah!” Galvan whooped and crowed, reaching forward from his station, clutching my shoulder like a proud father. The way he sounded, we might as well have just scored a touchdown or been shotgunning beers as killed a man who was trying to kill us. People always want to know what it feels like to do that, and when it’s happening, the answer is simple, and usually disappointing. Like fear and adrenaline and not much else, like winning at Russian roulette and having the taste of gunmetal forever on your tongue because even if you win, you lose. The man with the green sash in Fallujah was the first and only person I ever killed that I’m sure about and meant to. The rest were accidents. Except you can’t really call them that. They’re not accidents.

  Our line of tanks crawled forward, stretching over ten blocks. We turned a corner and sighted the remains of a burning fueler. Diesel smoke billowed from it like drops of black ink spreading through water. A platoon from Lancer Battalion had gotten it bad. They had Bradleys on scene and were fighting back, puffs of white vapor streaking out from their machine gun ports. You could almost see the flit of the bullets if you trained your eye. We neared their position and crossed a major intersection about half a klick away. That was when we got it. I was thrown from my seat, head slamming against the turret ceiling, the tank hanging weightless for a moment before crashing back to the street. I was poleax stunned, vibration shooting through me. Sound as pain. An overload of sensation that left behind no memory of itself.

  My neck hurt and the soles of my feet throbbed. I could see nothing through my sights. The bomb buried in the road had sent up a plume of dust and we were in the middle of it. I clicked the control paddles for the hydraulics but got no response.

  “Fucking god,” Galvan said. “Holy shit that was crazy.”

  “My back,” Fitzpatrick groaned from down below in the driver’s hull, where he’d been nearest the blast.

  “You bleeding?” Galvan said. “Can you move your feet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bleeding?”

  “No, I can move.”

  On the other side of the turret, Patterson clutched his thigh.

  “Lemme see.” Galvan took Patterson’s wrist and pried his hand away from the leg. No blood. Concussive wound from the blast wave. He turned to me. “You all right, Sleed?”

  “I think so,” I said, my feet still throbbing, going numb, but only the soles. A strange pain I’d never felt before.

  “Try and start it.”

  Fitzpatrick said he had already but the engine wouldn’t fire up.

  “You have hydraulics?”

  “Negative.”

  Colonel Easton came on the radio. “Blue Two, Crusader Six. What’s your status? Over.”

  Galvan keyed the net. “Six, Two. No critical wounded. May be a couple routine. I’m gonna need a tow. Over.”

  “Roger that. Goddamn. We thought we’d lost you men.”

  Galvan dropped the hand mic. “Get your vests on,” he said. “Everybody. We’re gonna have to dismount to help the mechanics when they bring up the Hercules.”

  I reached below my seat where I kept my gear, struggling to shoulder my body armor in the cramped space. We waited for word about the mechanics. A couple minutes passed. The lieutenant came over the net.

  “Two, One.”

  “Two,” Galvan said.

  “Battalion’s saying it’s gonna be twenty mikes, minimum, on a Hercules.”

  “I ain’t sitting here no twenty minutes.”

  “Roger,” the lieutenant said. “Crusader is saying we should self-recover.”

  “Let’s do it,” Galvan said. “Back up to my six. When you’re set, I’ll dismount with my guys to hook up to you.”

  He spun in the cupola, watching the vision blocks to see what was happening outside. The lieutenant maneuvered his tank into position directly behind us while other tanks in the column overwatched either direction of the cross street. Whoever had detonated the bomb was out there somewhere.

  The lieutenant said he was set.

  Galvan flicked his head at the loader’s hatch.

  “Pop it,” he ordered.

  The last thing any tanker wants to do in battle is to dismount, but Patterson obeyed and opened the hatch. It was the lesser of two evils. Better to get out and take care of the problem ourselves than give the enemy enough time to mass a coordinated attack.

  Galvan and I grabbed our carbines. He swung open his hatch and hoisted himself through, and I shimmied past the tank commander’s station and pulled myself into the light with the very clear and distinct thought that if I was going to die in Iraq, today would be the day. Into the blinding sun. Fitzpatrick had scrambled from the driver’s hull to the top of the turret and was digging through the sponson box for his rifle. My feet were still feeling numb and I was so jittery with adrenaline, I rolled my ankle leaping down to the front slope. I caught myself, hunched over, and limped down the side of the hull like moving from bow to stern on a small boat with narrow gangways. I saw where the RPG from earlier had exploded against our turret, a bright-silver splat mark like someone had thrown a snowball of liquid metal. A machine gun fired, close, one of ours, gunshots echoing off the buildings rising around us. A chopper zoomed low overhead, blowing rotor wash that kicked up the dust on the street, the sound of the blades and the tanks and gunfire coming from every side and from above like a tornado or the rush in your ears of a panic attack.

  “Come on!” Galvan called from across the tank, where he and Patterson were struggling to free one of the tow cables from its mount.

  I told myself to do whatever he said, concentrate on what was right in front of me. I worked with Fitzpatrick to free our cable, thick braided steel covered in tar to keep it from rusting, eight feet long, two hook fasteners on its ends like the eyes of giant needles. We jerked it free, dropped it to the street, and climbed down.

  The bomb had exploded under our right track, carving a crater two feet deep in the pavement and earth below. It’d blown off the tank’s front skirt which weighed a metric ton, tossing it across the median like scrap metal, shearing the first three road wheels from their spindles. The wheels were nowhere in sight. Worst of all, the tank’s track had broken and a section lay unspooled. Even if we’d been able to restart the engine, we wouldn’t have gone anywhere.

  Little puffs of dust rose from the pavement in the intersection and I stared at them, puzzled, but then realized they were bullets skipping off concrete. I could
n’t hear them whining. It was too loud to hear any one thing. I took a knee and fired my carbine down the street in the direction I thought they’d come from, but I didn’t really know what I was shooting at, not using the aperture sight on the weapon, just squeezing the trigger over and over.

  Galvan grabbed me by the nape of my tactical vest. “Forget that! Help me with this fucking cable!”

  It was the heaviest shit I ever got into. Later, back at the staging area, Galvan said he’d seen a bullet fly right over my head while we were dragging the tow cables across the street.

  “Damn,” I said. “Really?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck it was,” he said. “Bullet, chunk of concrete, shrapnel, whatever. Looked like it came about this far from you. Lucky fuck.”

  He knocked on my Kevlar.

  “Damn.”

  After all that, we weren’t even done for the day. The mission was still on. We took a break to get some water, upload ammo, and trade out our damaged tank for one from First Platoon with two crew members who had combat fatigue. One guy was crying so hard he was hyperventilating. We took their tank and left them behind, heading back into the shit for another couple hours while the SEALs searched the mosque top to bottom, even with some kind of portable X-ray machine, hunting for secret compartments but not finding a trace of her.

  “I sure hope she’s worth it,” Galvan said when it was all over and done with and we were rolling back to Camp Marlboro.

  “I know I’m not.”

  “No argument there. How many people we gonna have to kill, anyway, just to save one fucking life?”