Carrying

by Theodore Weesner

  We tread-heads stand in silence as the colonel comes at last to speak from the hatch of his C&C battle wagon. The colonel himself. He’s our CO, a lanky Texan with a PhD from Yale and two years teaching history at West Point, wearing a cavalry kerchief at his throat and looking like Rommel, into his part and drawing our admiration and devotion. A dying sun is on the thickened horizon, faintly highlighting his features where he stands amid the vehicle’s dozen antennas reaching eight, ten feet into the sky. The breeze is blowing in a way that has him shouting to be heard. If anyone has questions, none are asked when invited. As we know, questions are redundant; each has been asked and answered many times over. We’re trained, taught, oiled, ready, and eager to go.

  “Hear this!” the colonel calls. “No one is better at night fighting than 2nd Cav! We’ll take some hits and casualties, but our Graf and Hohenfels training will pay off in the end. What I want is for each of us to carry out our tasks, however hot and heavy the action becomes. With heart and brilliance we will navigate, and load and fire! We will do so again and again. We will end up–as good soldiers–doing two things, three and four things at once. We will dismount with personal weapons and return fire, if it comes to that. Fight with our hands and shovels if it comes to that. The enemy is composed of veterans who are battle tested. For our part, we’re strong and hungry. Nasty and ferocious. Believe you me, when they get a taste of 2nd Armored Cav they’ll be wishing they had travelled north for the winter!”

  We troops clap and shout, “Yowsa!” and “We’ll kick their asses into the Persian Gulf!”

  The colonel raises a hand in a call for silence. “Be alert to your mission…extra alert to your position!” he shouts. “We don’t want to shoot each other. Listen to your radio communications, your platoon leaders and vehicle commanders! Know the phase lines and quadrants like the backs of your hands! Be smart! Live up to the history of this proud regiment! Have our chapter say, ‘They brought their hearts…and their heads and computers to the battle! They hit the enemy like a ton of bricks and knocked him flat on his ass! Toujours pret!”

  Baghdad Betty. More rain and low-hanging gray skies. Chilly temperatures. As news squeaks in from BBC and AFN on antennas, so does Baghdad Betty add to our amusement and heartache in a voice seductive, friendly, informative. She plays old-time tunes that we enjoy, which keep us listening. Some are extremely old, one an original version of a World War I army song in a crooning megaphone so pure it amuses while breaking hearts, my own among them.

  “’My Buddy,’” she informs. “Written by Henry Burr…recorded in 1922:”

  Nights are long

  since you went away…

  I think about you

  all through the day…

  My buddy…

  My buddy…

  Nobody’s quite so true.

  I miss your voice…

  the touch of your hand.

  I long to know

  that you understand…

  My buddy…

  My buddy…

  Your buddy misses you!’

  The song’s sincerity is genuine, and I can’t help thinking of DeMarcus Owens. Friendship. Brotherhood. An emotion almost as comical as it is moving. Dee…who has become my soul-buddy in the army. Not the touch of his hand, nor the sound of his voice, which are too intimate, but a sense of him being a person who understands what I have to say. A person with whom I can speak of almost anything…a soldier in whose company I enjoy spending time, drinking beer, trading stories. Within whose friendship I know the comfort of camaraderie.

  A buddy.

  The song has me wondering how he’s doing out there as a dismount scout. Radio strapped tight, antenna flagging in the air, and M-16 in hand, slipping through darkness, looking and listening, reporting in whispers what he hears and sees in extended cat-like observations?

  A friend with whom to speak of Magdalena and of Lotte. Of combat anxiety, and of death and dying. Of life at home and in uniform. Your buddy misses you.

  Coming off vehicle guard at 0400, word is out that food and coffee are available in the field kitchen. Today is January 15, and I’m one of a string of soldiers who bypass sacking out as we make our way (as several of us always do) to what is reminiscent of a diner lighted in darkness. Food, coffee, bottled drinks and hot water are available out of one side of the big wheeled truck and there is room all around to sit on sand and chewed up earth…if a person is not of a mind to carry his food to a mud-belly where other soldiers are knotted into dry seats trying to get some sleep.

  Dawn is breaking beneath the cloud covering, and a wash of twilight is visible on the northeastern skyline over the emerging cold desert. I step along with my canteen cup, looking for a place to sit on a roll of earth where I can consume my rations at this quiet and lonely hour. From the mess truck, at a distance of forty feet and barely heard, BBC is reporting “possible” attacks on Scud sites, cautioning that the report is unconfirmed and possibly a false alarm triggered by Iraq for the purpose of gaining a strategic advantage. All the same, it’s the day of reckoning, and if the U.S. Army holds true to its ultimatum (which it doesn’t always do) something may happen.

  Silence gathers like water deepening moment by moment in the half-dark air. I’m one of several troops in proximity to the field kitchen, just off guard and night exercises, or surfacing after having snoozed under a tent fly or in a tank or Bradley, tracing the grassy dirt trail to where hot water, coffee, and bites of food are available.

  Stillness. A broad brush stroke of cream defining the horizon. Noordwink, carrying his canteen, joins me without, at first, uttering a word. He’s been listening to radio reports, and after a moment he mutters to himself, “Planes won’t be passing here if they want to hit Baghdad. They’ll be coming in from the east, over water. Or from Turkey in the north.”

  Blending into his voice (of all things!) there comes a distant hum, audible over the barren desert, a gathering hum that within a moment is deeper…and deeper…coming, yes, from the south. Within the several seconds needed to swivel my head, three astonishing F-117 fighter-bombers scream by in a formation hardly eighty feet above, under the gray blanketing, leaving a roar in their wake that envelops my lonely heart and carries it into eternity within its ineluctable force and power.

  The air campaign is beginning.

  The war with Iraq is under way.

  It is under way now.

  The force is as real as life and death.

  The Iraqis in their T-72s and trenches, and on their camels, have to be shitting in their pants. Western power, western training and technology is about to obliterate them as the proud fools they have been, thinking they could defy power of this kind.

  Three additional fighter-bombers suddenly screech by to one side of the path blazed by the first three. Three more do the same. Three more. The air campaign is under way. The low-flying aircraft screech at speeds faster than thoughts. The war with Iraq, the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, has begun. More screeching trios follow, and the captain and lieutenant materialize, as do astonished soldiers from all about, eyes on the horizon with its repeated explosions of low-flying F-117s and F-15s. Shock and awe. It’s what this has to be to the enemy just as it is to us tread- heads with our mud-bellies in wagon wheel formations in a barren desert. Life continues somewhere. Civilization, despite this gasp, continues to unfold.

  Soldiers commence hooting and laughing, shouting into the reverberating sky: “SADDAM, HERE’S YOUR FUCKING BREAKFAST, YOU ASSHOLE!” “EAT THIS, YOU DUMB PRICK!” “HAVE SOME U.S. AIR FORCE SAUSAGES FOR BREAKFAST, YOU FUCKING MANIAC!”

  A phrase from a movie updated for this new context is repeated many times over: “GOOD MORNING, SADDAM!”

  And: “THINK IT’S TIME TO GET OUT OF KUWAIT NOW, YOU STUPID FUCKING MORON?”

  More soldiers materialize about the field kitchen and word is flying that the captain has ordered fresh fried eggs and pancakes for all… which news occasions more raucous hoots and cheers from the
exhilarated troops.

  Is it the sound of bombing we hear coming back over the desert floor? It’s hard to tell, while there’s no doubt that distant flashing on the horizon is not the stuff of thunderstorms. Does the bombing mean more of us will survive than otherwise? That our mission will end sooner rather than later? That we tankers will return earlier than expected to our bases in Germany?

  Through night-vision goggles passed around, the flashes on the horizon are more visible than with the naked eye. My heart, I must confess, has hardly left my throat. The fighter-bombers are of another universe, another dimension. The Iraqis messed with the wrong army. Given an opportunity to withdraw, why didn’t they do so? Intransigent Arab pride? Stubbornness? Now they’ll pay a hundred times, a thousand times the initial cost.

  It isn’t until we learn of the attack scenario from the lieutenant that we come to appreciate the breathtaking strategy and success of the air assault. Returning from a squadron-level briefing, the lieutenant tells us at tank-side, in the wet and cold air, what went down. “You have to hear this…it is unreal,” he says.

  We press close, taking in every word.

  “First shots in the air campaign did not come from those Air Force fighter-bombers or British Tornados,” the lieutenant says. “No, they came from Apaches attached to XVIII Airborne! First shots were fired three hours before the fighter-bombers screamed by overhead! Here’s the deal. Timing down to the second: Fifty-four minutes past midnight. Two teams of choppers, Red Team and White Team, rise from a staging area to the east. Flying five meters (five meters! you got that?) above the desert floor to avoid radar, they tool into Iraq with their sights on two radar sites IDed by British commandoes, three hundred klicks away. It’s farther than Apaches can fly without extra tanks, which they can’t carry on the mission because they’re loaded with ordnance. Each team is supported by a Pave Low for navigation and a Chinook carrying a shitload of fuel.

  “Sixty-four minutes later Red Team and White Team enter Iraq. They maintain the five-meter altitude. You could damn near reach up and touch their bellies! Apparently they scare the shit right out of some Bedouins scouting for the Iraqis, who fire rounds anyway in the wake of the airships passing in the dark. Imagine: You’re on a camel in the middle of nowhere in full darkness and these choppers explode overhead five meters in the air…letting it out at a hundred and twenty fucking knots! Talk about Abdul soiling his toga!

  “On they go…too low to appear on radar. Sites they’re after are thirty klicks apart, close over the border. Imagine Iraqi techies, sitting with their equipment, sipping green tea and not having clue one as Red Team and White Team blast over the desert floor close enough to be touched! Onward, you fucking Apaches! Ain’t nothing gonna stop them now!

  “Support ships follow as Red Team and White Team remain on course, driving hard. They make radio contact but once…ascertaining coordinates down to the second. Iraqi techies go on sipping their green tea and telling their tales, taking leaks in the sand and not having a clue that two teams of Apaches are coming their way at all-out speed.

  “Zero-two-four-eight. Skies remain dark as the radar sites enter view on the chopper’s cross-hairs at six thousand meters. Iraqis remain clueless. Red Team and White Team. Noses down. Trucking all out as they prepare to fire. Zero-two-thirty-eight. No sooner, no later. At four thousand meters, each team releases Hellfire missiles that need five seconds to reach their targets. On the scope of one chopper, an Iraqi technician is seen running from an exploded building, heading for another building where a Hellfire precedes him. The building, as big as a house, is obliterated.

  “Two primary radar sites are gone just like that! All they know in Baghdad is that they’ve lost contact with two sites out west! Red Team and White Team have unloaded in less than twenty seconds. Their two-point-seven-five rockets release thousands of fleckettes that take out every vehicle and wiring system within two hundred meters. They mop up with .50 caliber machine gun fire. Photograph the sites to be sure nothing continues to generate anything. Tool for home, touching down with the waiting Chinooks to re-fuel.

  “What Red Team and White Team have done is this: They’ve opened a ten-mile-wide radar-free corridor into Baghdad where the Iraqis still do not know what is coming their way! As the teams return home, passing in the other direction–at thirty meters altitude!–are the F-15s and Tornados on their way to Scud launching sites around Baghdad itself, all of which is still unknown to Iraqi artillery!

  “End of story? Not quite. Only the beginning.

  “Throughout this time, launched from ships in the Gulf at zero-two-one-three, as the Apaches were approaching the radar sites, Tomahawk cruise missiles are heading for Baghdad, where, as they start hitting targets at zero-three-oh-five, they trigger every last radar and anti-aircraft artillery installation guarding the city.

  “You follow Tomahawks with fighter-bombers, right? Not this time.

  “What Uncle has up his sleeve is another brilliant trick. Following the Tomahawks are drones, also fired from ships in the Gulf. Meanwhile, making the trip from the west–don’t forget, they’ve been driving hard all the time, undetected through that ten-mile-wide radar gap–are the F-15s and Tornados we saw passing as we were hitting up the field kitchen for coffee at daybreak!

  “The drones reach Baghdad, where they start circling and drawing radar beams and anti-aircraft fire. The Iraqis are going nuts because they think they’re knocking dozens of fighter-bombers out of the sky when all they’re doing is revealing their radar and artillery locations to our computers! Still undetected, our F-15s and Tornados take out every radar and artillery site, one after another, with HARM missiles!

  “By now the Iraqis have to be awakening to what they’ve brought on themselves by messing with the wrong goddamned army. The Iraqi radar goose was cooked before daylight hit the horizon on the first day of hostilities! They have their armored divisions in desert bunkers, waiting to fight our armored divisions (that’s us, folks) but their radar is gone and we own the skies. The war isn’t over. Not by a long shot. We dog soldiers have to take on their dog soldiers. But we own the sky, and there is no way in the world we can lose the war.

  “I could hardly believe this scenario when it was laid out at S-3. They say it’s the most precise attack ever executed. It’s a scenario that can work but once in a lifetime. Can you imagine? Before daybreak, on day one of the air campaign, Iraq lost eighty percent of its radar! We shot out their eyes. Now the good guys can chart targets, take them out, return home at minimal risk. Which isn’t to say it changes what will go down in a ground war, because it doesn’t. We’ll have to take on the Elite Republican Guard in the Rooski tanks they have buried in the sand. We’ll have to find out how elite they really are.

  Two days later, as we’re preparing to roll into another night exercise, the mail clerk appears with his mail bag and there is another cream-colored envelope from Lotte Lengemann. I know it has to be a reply to the only outright love letter I’ve ever written, and I fear at once that she’ll have found me foolish in professing my love and brash in my dream of being with her forever. Or (feeling sudden terror at what I’ve done) that she will have taken me seriously (no matter that I only recently turned nineteen!) and is opening a door into her heart and life that I may not be ready to take!

  It isn’t until The Claw is moving, an hour later, that I’m able to open the letter and hold the pages under the panel light in the loader’s position. Taking a breath, exhaling, I read:

  Dear Jimmy,

  I have read your letter every hour and each time it fills me with happiness. In November I had thought we hardly know each other, but moment by moment I have gotten to know you better, because knowing you is what my heart wishes to do.

  Jimmy, that you are my dear friend and not already lost to the currents of time is important above all else, is a friendship I pray is never lost. For this I thank you one million times over.

  Shall we be boyfriend and girlfriend? May we be lovebirds
yet again in the park? I’m teasing.

  Of course we may form such a precious bond. I am telling you the truth, Jimmy, when I say that I have never known a bond of the kind, not as a schoolgirl, nor while working in Bindlach. Nor have I ever felt as happy as I am feeling today.

  Now, dear one, compose yourself as I tell my promising news. All the time, secretly from you, I’ve been learning more English at home. I’ve tried to introduce to my pale brain a host of verbs and idioms as I toil and moil each day to improve my incomplete English. Alas, in Bayreuth is an excellent school for languages and only Monday evening I have been examined. I now have the second degree in your language! The third will make of me a ‘special interpreter,’ though I may have to study one more year at least for that. I shall also be trying now to learn English shorthand, and if this keeps up longer I shall become quite intelligent! (To gain true intelligence of the heart, I shall need someone with whom to take quiet walks when the sun is hiding!)

  Jimmy, I want also to tell you that my desire to go to the States existed when I first met you. From the start the main reason was that I wanted to see and learn about your country. I’ve thought I will like it there with the friendly American style, and that it would be the best way to fulfill another desire–to improve my English until it is nearly perfect. Then I have met you and in the process of time we are to become the dearest of friends, and I began to think of you being in America, too, when I am visiting, and the world is no longer feeling so vast and lonely.