Either the Jihadists weren’t serious about the attack, or they had underestimated the resistance. The charge stalled and turned into a fixed gunfight, with both sides shooting at each other from behind cover. Sergeant Burke darted from vehicle to vehicle, all stooped down and scurrying with an M4 in his hands, checking on the men and encouraging them in their first battle.
“Everybody calm down!” he shouted. “Don’t pull the trigger unless you got a target. If you ain’t directly engaged on the orchard, I want you to orient south. I don’t want any fuckers sneaking up on us from the rear.”
As soon as he recovered from the shock of almost having his head blown off, Sammy Rhodes grabbed a SAW and scooted around to the front of the truck with nineteen-year-old Daniel Courneya right behind him, carrying an M-4 with attached M203 40mm grenade launcher. They raced past Lieutenant Vargo kneeling in the open door on the lee side of his hummer, yelling into the radio mike. They joined the fight, using the truck’s hood as a shield.
A SAW, though a lighter weapon than the old faithful .50-cal or the newer two-forty, was still capable of dispatching an awesome swath of death and destruction. Rhodes stood on the trigger and raked the gun back and forth at muzzle flashes and enemy figures ducking and dodging among the trees and waist-tall underbrush, joining .50-cals operated by Jimenez and Specialist Brandon Gray in scything the underbrush into shredded mulch.
A hajji wearing a red-and-white shemagh screamed and threw up his arms. Another turned tail and bolted deeper into the orchard while Corny rained 40mm grenades down on his ass.
The radio net was alive with people shouting and screaming on both Company and Battalion frequencies. Captain Jamoles had to cut in to restore order.
“Break! Break! Break! Delta One-Six [Vargo], this is Delta X-Ray [Jamoles]. Send your traffic . . .”
“Roger. Contact! Contact! My platoon is caught in an ambush . . .”
“Roger that, One-Six. Tell me what you got out there. What do you need?”
“We’re taking fire, X-Ray. Small arms . . . across the road in the orchard and next to us from the treeline . . . We can see them maneuvering. Estimate platoon-sized enemy personnel . . .”
Another overload jammed the company net.
“This is Delta X-Ray. Clear the net. Say again, clear the net. One-Six, what’s the SITREP [Situation Report]?”
“We’re handling them. They’re pulling back from the orchard toward a canal and some houses . . . We’re firing them up . . .”
“One-Six, do not engage the houses . . .”
“We’re taking some fire from the built-up area . . .”
“Repeat. Do not engage the houses. Do not pursue. Battalion QRF is on the way.”
“Roger, X-Ray. Send in the cavalry.”
The fight was over almost as soon as it began, a brief game of cat and mouse. As Delta Company soldiers were beginning to find out, short engagements of this nature were almost SOP with the Jihadists. Typically, they attacked with RPGs, AK-47s, and mortars to do as much damage as they could within a few minutes, then hauled ass because they knew reinforcements would be on the way. After dumping their weapons in a canal or other pre-determined cache location, they fled back to their houses and became Farmer Mustafas again, blending in because the locals were too intimidated to snitch on them.
Sergeant Burke ran by again. This time he was shouting, “Cease fire! Damnit, cease fire! Is anybody hurt? Is everybody okay?”
Unbelievably, no one had been hit, although most were pretty shook up. Rhodes took a deep breath and stood cursing to himself, swatting at flies, and staring at the shattered window that had saved his life. Corny was pale and blinking at the now-silent orchard, almost as though he found the preceding minutes hard to accept as having happened. Lieutenant Vargo looked pissed; he had been so busy with the radio that he hadn’t got off a single shot.
PFC Joe Anzak walked over. He was a real horse of a guy, a hard-charging martial artist with a belt in Judo. He licked his thumb and touched the hot barrel of his M4 as though testing it to see if it would sizzle. He grinned.
“We lit up them fuckers,” he said. “I saw we got a couple of them. Who’s gonna bury ’em?”
“Not us,” Byron Fouty said. “Muslims bury their own. It’s part of their religion.”
“They drag off their dead,” Jimenez added, still in the turret, watching. “Probably won’t be anything out there except an IED waiting for us.”
The platoon felt pretty good about itself, even cocky in its adrenalin high. The only damage was to the trucks—tires shot out, shattered glass, bullet dents, and dings in the armor.
“We showed them assholes.”
“Yeah, man. They won’t be so eager to take us on again.”
“We the killer platoon, that’s what. We’re killers.”
“Get some local security out,” Lieutenant Vargo ordered. “Keep your heads down. This might not be over yet.”
“It was pretty hairy for a moment there, L.T.,” Chris Murphy said, still riding his excitement. “Real intense.”
“Yeah, well. For a dirtbag, thrown-together bunch of misfits and shitbirds, you guys did good. You proved you can drop the hammer. Give me a cigarette and we’ll call it a win.”
Rhodes showed Murphy the shattered window that had stopped the bullet meant for his head. First, he had almost drowned. Now this.
“It’ll be a miracle if I make it through, Murph,” he said.
The QRF assisted First Platoon in searching the battlefield. The insurgents had left nothing behind except trampled terrain, empty cartridge casings, and some blood trails leading deeper into the orchard and out along an overgrown canal. Rarely were bodies or other evidence found at a contact site. A separate Jihad squad always accompanied fighters to police up the battlefield of casualties and dropped equipment.
It was getting late by the time search squads had pounded on all the doors in the vicinity. Like always, no one knew anything about the insurgents; they must be out-of-towners, strangers. Right, and if you believed that, there was some beachfront property in Kharghouli for sale. The QRF flex-cuffed a couple of guys and took them back to Battalion for questioning and to test for gun powder on their hands. First Platoon never learned the outcome.
EOD arrived a few hours before nightfall to defuse the bomb in the road. Almost twenty-four hours late, First Platoon continued its route recon to Mahmudiyah. To add insult to injury, Sammy Rhodes’ vehicle hit a second IED at a curve in the road. The massive concussion swept through his body and lifted the front of the truck off the ground, almost flipping it over backwards. It seemed everyone was shouting at once, but from a distance since Rhodes could hardly hear after the blast. He was also half-blinded from dirt flying up from the floorboard. The smell of engine coolant and battery acid made him choke.
The entire platoon breathed a big sigh of relief when it finally reached the FOB at Mahmudiyah without a single casualty other than eyes irritated by dust and ears stopped up from explosions and gunfire. Murphy commented how Someone must be looking over them.
Rhodes was still thinking about the shattered glass.
FOURTEEN
For several weeks after “the occupation” of Malibu Road, resupply for Delta Company’s isolated platoons proved to be hit and miss. Supply convoys venturing onto the blacktop were frequently blown up, mortared, or waylaid by crazy martyrs, resulting in long delays while tow trucks pulled damaged humvees back to Battalion HQ at Yusufiyah for repairs. Sometimes, insurgents cut the road, blasting out impassable trenches in an effort to keep Delta isolated and vulnerable.
Guys began to complain, as soldiers will, that they were under siege, that al-Qaeda was trying to starve them out, and that Battalion didn’t give a damn. Eating leftover MREs wasn’t all that appetizing, especially if they had been opened that morning or the day before.
“Nothing’s too good for Dyin’ Delta—and nothing’s what we’re getting.”
One morning after Sergeant Joshua Parrish offer
ed to eat his combat boots if somebody had an extra bottle of hot sauce, a thousand-pound bomb blew up with an ear-shattering, house-rattling boom down the road from 151 and changed the day. It exploded directly in the bend of the big curve where Fourth Platoon RON’d its first long night in the AO and not far from where the Joes had labored two days chopping down trees before somebody in authority changed his mind and they took over Abu Ahmed’s house instead and turned it into a battle position. Thinking themselves under attack, soldiers of the Fourth and Second Platoons, who were working together out of the PB for the week, grabbed their weapons, threw on body armor, and rushed outside to defend the perimeter. The sight of a nuclear-like mushroom etched against the near horizon stopped them in awe.
“Holy shit!”
So far, they had seen nothing that big, just the smaller IEDs that rattled bones, busted vehicle tires, and bent axles. An explosive that powerful would do a whole lot more. They hoped it wasn’t a harbinger of things to come.
The blast blew a crater eight feet deep and the width of the road. As far as anyone could tell, the bomb had probably been buried there quite some time, including the night Fourth RON’d at the curve. Some of the guys went into mild shock for days afterwards every time they thought of what could have happened to the platoon if the bomb had cooked off while they were parked right on top of it. Its sheer size was enough to put everyone’s teeth on edge for the rest of the day.
Michael Smith’s first thought when he recovered was of resupply. He groaned. “No fucking chow today,” he predicted.
Each patrol base kept a security force behind the walls at all times to defend against attacks and takeover. Lieutenant John Dudish’s Second Platoon was pulling security while Lieutenant Tomasello’s Fourth was on the day’s schedule to patrol for insurgents and meet and greet the locals to win hearts and minds and the war while avoiding IEDs and ambushes. Everyone felt as though he had survived a close call with the big bomb and probably shouldn’t even be alive.
With that kind of overall distracted mood and the resulting drop in morale in the platoons, leaders of both elements got together and decided to call a work holiday. The platoons would hold a backyard barbecue. Captain Jamoles needn’t know. Fourth Platoon would go patrolling as required—but only to the nearest open-air market in Kharghouli.
Tomasello loaded up his men and set out. Morale picked up immediately. The expedition took on a festive air. Heavily armed and armored GIs descended upon the market in a rush that caught vendors and, hopefully, any insurgents in the area by surprise. Some of the platoon watched the trucks while Tomasello, Platoon Sergeant Garrett, and Mayhem Menahem quickly made their selections in order to be back on the road again before the local outlaws got over their astonishment and cooked up a little something of their own.
The choice of delicacies, as Mayhem noted sarcastically, was enormous. Dried or boiled goat heads, river fish in various stages of putrefaction, dead chickens and live chickens, geese flopping on the ground with their legs tied, whole sheep carcasses hanging in little open sheds, and kid goats tied up bleating by their necks, all garnished by swarms of black flies attracted to the stench. Women wearing hijabs, men standing around in dirty white robes, and barefooted, filthy kids stared at the soldiers.
Tomasello nixed a live goat. “Who’s going to butcher it? You, Mayhem?”
“I’m no country boy. Doesn’t Doc Brown have a scalpel?”
“He’d cure it and keep it for a pet.”
Sergeant Garrett rejected home-grown vegetables. “Do you know what they use for fertilizer?”
They finally settled on live chickens, scrawny, bare-assed specimens with their legs tied to keep them from getting up and running off. Tomasello paid for them—a real bargain, he decided—and they threw the squawking birds in back of one of the humvees and took off in a cloud of dust.
Back at 151, the platoons confronted the issue of how to prepare live chickens, starting with butchering them. Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery and several other country-bred boys who had served in poverty-stricken rural areas of the world like Kosovo and Haiti demonstrated how to wring a chicken’s neck. Grab it by the head and swing the bird vigorously at arm’s length until the body separated from the head, whereupon the dying chicken kicked and spasmed all over the yard, spewing blood from its ruptured jugular.
PFC Nathaniel Given, who had been a bit of a minor fuckup at Drum before deployment, released his victim too soon. Head intact but twisted over to one side, it jumped up and ran drunkenly all over the enclosed grounds, pursued by a lynch mob of roaring, laughing GIs who finally cornered it and assisted Given in completing the execution.
Finally, the first task completed, some of the guys gathered up wood and built an open fire. Sergeant John Herne of Second Platoon and Sergeant Parrish of Fourth volunteered as cooks to roast the chickens. Colonel Sanders, Sergeant Montgomery declared, could have done no better.
The barbecue and games ended at sunset, everyone having stuffed himself with fresh meat. Mayhem watched the Iraqi sun go down from the flat roof of the house and listened to the calls for the faithful to come worship at the 109 Mosque down the road. Other than the thousand-pound spontaneously ignited bomb, which didn’t count as an attack, no one had shot at him all day, and no vehicle had got blown up. It was therefore a good war. The land lay quiet and peaceful all around as though it had never been touched by violence.
FIFTEEN
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Infanti was a Mustang officer, a former enlisted man who had worked himself up through the ranks to earn a commission. As such, he brought with him a special affinity for young soldiers that kept him constantly on the move circulating among his companies, checking on the men, letting himself be seen taking the same risks they did, reconfirming with deed and word the spirit and letter of their mission in Iraq—that the 4th Battalion would live among the people, in the midst of danger, in order to prove it was here to stay until peace and stability returned to the AO. There would come that turning point, he insisted, when it would begin to come together.
A job in the military was one of only a few that entailed ordering someone to go out and possibly die. To Infanti, the lives of his men were his sacred responsibility, a truth the casualty cards he carried in the breast pocket of his ACUs never allowed him to forget. Casualty cards kept a running account of the soldiers of the 4/31st who were either killed or wounded in action. The longer the 2nd BCT remained in Iraq, the thicker grew the deck of cards. He sometimes took out the little stack and shuffled through it, trying to remember the boyish faces that went with the cards.
Although Infanti was too young to have served in Vietnam, he remembered hearing ’Nam vets speak resentfully of how colonels and general officers would live in air-conditioned mobile homes while their troops dug holes and huddled in the rain. He swore his men would never talk about him like that.
At FOB Yusufiyah, he lived in an old steel shipping container that had previously been used by ocean-going freighters, although other facilities offered better accommodations, even with one of the buildings having been gutted by fire. His TOC (Tactical Operations Center)—communications, operations, Intelligence—was housed next door in a GP (General Purpose) Large tent that allowed easy access. He insisted on being awakened any time something happened day or night within the AO.
His battalion second-in-command, Executive Officer Mark Manns, and Battalion Command Sergeant Major Alexander Jimenez, who bore the same name as Specialist Jimenez in Delta Company but to whom he was not related, worried about their commander. After all, due to his penchant for sharing danger, Infanti’s was one of the first trucks in 4th Battalion to hit an IED.
It occurred on Sportster Road while the Colonel, as he was generally called, and his PSD (personal security detail) were on their way back to Yusufiyah following an impromptu inspection of Delta Company’s Inchon on Malibu Road. Infanti’s hummer triggered an IED whose blast bent the frame of the vehicle and slammed it against his knee. He ended up in a sup
port brace that he would have to wear for at least a year or until the Polar Bears returned home and he took the time for more definitive medical treatment.
“Sir, you don’t have to be out there every day,” Major Manns argued.
Infanti was a stubborn man. “The soldiers have to know that we don’t talk the talk while they’re out there walking the walk,” he said.
Infanti had had that same obstinate unbending streak during the previous 2004–2005 deployment when he was Brigade Deputy Commander. Manns and CSM Jimenez had heard all the stories from Corporal Shane Courville, a medic who had been with Infanti then and returned with him as his PSD medic this time.
Courville was big enough to toss a wounded man over each shoulder and jog off the battlefield with them. The big man had in fact carried soldiers out of harm’s way on at least six previous occasions, one of whom was Infanti on a November afternoon in 2004.
Infanti’s convoy was speeding down the overpass leading into the city of Abu Ghraib to distribute blankets to a local school before winter set in when Captain Jennifer Knowlden noticed that the streets were suspiciously deserted. The disappearance of children was always a warning.
An IED went off underneath Knowlden’s lead vehicle and sandblasted out the windows. Infanti heard the whooshing report of an 85mm rocket-propelled grenade belching from the mouth of an alley to his right. It caught the commander’s truck near the right front door, the concussion tossing it sideways in the street and popping open the doors.
Although disoriented and almost unconscious from injuries to the back of his head, Infanti leaped out of the smoking truck with his M-4 blazing against black-hooded RPG gunners hammering the stalled convoy from the alley and from the cover of a nearby wall. Rockets crisscrossed the street, screaming and etching smoke. One struck the pavement and skidded underneath a hummer where it detonated in a ball of red flame, jolting the truck completely off the ground. Another targeted the last unscathed vehicle in the convoy and ripped off a tire. A third penetrated the rear hatch of Captain Knowlden’s disabled truck and lodged in its cargo of blankets without exploding.
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