Your Lotte
A day later, coming in from full troop tank maneuvering exercises, Captain Kinder addresses Geo as if we’re classmates from West Point, reminding us that the air campaign is presently being directed at tactical targets, mainly in Baghdad, and as successful as it may be, it will not change the need for a ground campaign against Iraqi divisions that, with armor and artillery, remain dug in around the capital. We face “one huge clash,” he says, as I sit in possession of a love letter (in my buttoned-down fatigue shirt pocket) that has me feeling excited love in turn, seeing the world of war through rose-tinted glasses.
The Captain explains that Iraqi supply lines are being interrupted by our fighter- bombers, but they’ve had months to prepare and their field units are known to be well supplied. Enemy forces, we hear, heavily equipped and battle-tested from their war with Iran, and even if our air strikes hit targets surfacing in the desert, the damage estimate against forces so well dug in is a mere ten percent. This despite our flyboys having said they could knock out fifty percent when the time came!
“I’ll tell you what we’ll be doing,” the Captain says. “This is restricted, not to be mentioned in letters to anyone. 2nd Cav, leading the way, will enter Iraq on a thirty kilometer front of which, in our attack, Geo will be responsible for a three-kilometer width. Recon scouts have verified the presence, as close as forty kilometers inside Iraq, of at least three Iraqi divisions, including the Elite Tawakalna dead center in our line of advance. The regiment’s mission is to drive a wedge into Iraqi defenses that will allow VII Corps infantry and heavy armor to pass through on the way to delivering decisive knockout punches. 2nd Cav will play a key role. Geo itself will move in a double-line combat formation, scout platoons followed by tank platoons. Geo will use thirty tracked vehicles, and when we attack we’ll be like polecats throwing one hellacious blow at the throat of the enemy! We’ll knock him aside and get the hell out of the way as VII Corps heavy hitters pass through with their massive power!
“That’s our mission,” the captain says. “Let’s be soldiers and make each other proud! Toujours pret!”
An alarm goes off one evening later as we’re preparing for night exercises and, unlike gas and germ alarms, is one for which we’ve trained but never experienced, false or otherwise. As I’m outside The Claw, returning from filling my canteen, there comes a battle station siren and words bellowed by Sergeant Tourneau: “BATTLE STATIONS! CRANK IT UP! IRAQI ATTACK COMING STRAIGHT AT US! CRANK IT UP!”
Soldiers run, leap, slither, and slam into compartments, get engine exhausts humming and motors growling. Within sixty seconds, The Claw, among others within sight and hearing, is churning toward its covering-force position. For my part, super-sabot loaded into the main gun, my heart is alive and I’m preparing to avoid the recoil and shove in another as Sherman has us slamming over rough terrain and the lieutenant (on the platoon radio net giving orders, receiving and confirming on the troop net) keeps us up to the minute on our intercom, managing three conversations at once.
What comes then, offering relief to our thumping hearts, is an all-clear. Someone has misread something.
Apparently it’s a scouting party returning in Bradleys from recon. Iraqi armor is not attacking. There is joking and carping about the secrecy of our position as we pull back and resume preparations for the night’s maneuvering exercise. There is vague anger, and when the Captain comes on to apologize and congratulate us on our speed of response, he says, “Next time, don’t worry, it’ll be for real.” The larger message is that we’re not involved in exercises but rather in a war that is about to explode.
We continue training and bitching day after day, slamming through sand berms, border obstacles, and mine fields; coordinating faux artillery fire and covering smoke; as well as ground recon and air scouting. Helicopters thwonk at all hours in exercises of their own, as sleep increasingly comes by way of cat naps rather than blocks of hours. When there is time, I strip down, like others, to reacquaint my body’s malodorous crevices with soapy water, whore’s-bath style, sometimes on the way into sleeping…other times on the way out. Someday, I think, I’m going to lie in bed with Lotte and it will be the gold at the end of a rainbow. If I survive in one piece.
A rumor surfaces (a radio report someone has picked up) that has the Air Force ignoring Schwarzkopf’s orders to include Republican Guard defense lines in its bombing sorties. The reason? The Republican Guard divisions are hard to locate and low-level desert bombing runs are risky (Iraqi fortifications include heat- seeking SAMs). Also that sand bunkers do not explode like Baghdad buildings and are less likely to make news broadcasts at home! The line goes: There’s the war, and there’s a PR battle for ratings, which the Army always loses to Fourth of July air shows put on by the Air Force, Field Marshall Schrawzkopf be damned.
Another line has it that every kid in America believes the Air Force is more high-tech than the Army. This while soldiers know that the Army packs ten times the technology and a hundred times the testosterone when it comes to getting the job done. There are REMFs (rear echelon mother fuckers) who never confront danger face to face and AEMFs (air echelon mother fuckers) who fly above it all, pose for photos next to hundred million dollar aircraft and, silk scarves fixed at their throats, give interviews (before heading to the officers’ club for cocktails) on how they won battles with instrument panels in minutes while the grunts needed weeks to haul their greasy asses and armor to the battlefield.
There comes a windblown afternoon when the lieutenant calls a meeting of the crew, and only in looking back will I see that I saw it coming. Having us sit against The Claw, out of the wind, he says that within four days we’ll be making a move to our penultimate attack position where, henceforth, we’ll live on MREs and stored water, and mail call and latrines will be the stuff of dreams.
“Definition, sir, penultimate?” Sherman wants to know.
“The move before the final move. The next-to-last move.”
“Sir.”
“I could have told you that,” Sergeant Noordwink says.
When we arrive at the new position, the lieutenant proceeds to explain, we’ll be but hours from the opening of the ground war. “Another ultimatum will be issued to the Iraqis, and when they decline to withdraw from Kuwait, as expected–they want to take us on, believe they can give us a fight!–2nd Cav will lead a charge into Iraq. At the same time, XVIII Airborne to the west, and First and Third Marines to the east, by land and by sea, will be attacking in a ground campaign that is expected to last six weeks and will decimate the Iraqi military.
“I’m not going to kid you, though, the Colonel said we can soft-peddle this or not. Going in first means we’ll be taking casualties. Twenty-plus percent is the expectation. One in five, in case your math is weak. Word from on high remains this, however: First in, first out. 2nd Cav will be the first to deploy home to Germany when the shit is behind us. The better we do our jobs, the fewer casualties we’ll take. The return home will not have to be tragic. We hit them hard, we can cut that estimated figure to one in ten, one in twenty.
“What I have to say now is something I’ve been thinking about long and hard, because we’re a family here and whatever happens in the coming weeks I wouldn’t want any of you to think I bullshitted you in any way.
“Don’t be embarrassed. When we move up, we’ll be in a combat zone that will have us under fire. They’ll be looking to hurt us just as we’ll be looking to hurt them. What I want you to know is how important you are to me as friends…as family and comrades.”
In this moment a faint fear is letting me know the lieutenant is going to say he loves us as brothers, which fear hits Sherman, too, as he says, “Sir, you’re going to say you love us, aren’t you!” which remark is so on the money that we all explode with nervous laughter.
Nor can the lieutenant not laugh with us, or not go misty-eyed as he says, “I’ll never forget any one of you as long as I live. I do love you like brothers. Brothers under th
e skin. Even you, Sherman. Okay?”
Like the others, I have no reply, which is not to say I’m not touched by what the lieutenant has dared to utter.
“This the new army?” Sherman wants to know, breaking us up all over again.
“Indulge me,” the lieutenant says, adding, “Something else I have to say is more awkward. Something I’d like to sugar-coat, but don’t know how. This: Irrespective of seniority, I’m rearranging positions in The Claw as we move to enter combat. It’s a move that I believe can save some lives…maybe my own. That was meant to be funny,” he adds as no one laughs.
“It’s something I’ve been considering every which way possible, only to see that I have no choice except to just do it. Henceforth, Murphy will be riding gunner full time. Sherman will ride loader. For the way they’ve shown they can work together. Sergeant Noordwink will ride driver, where I’ll be pleased to have his experience in navigating this beast with its pleth of electronic and radio wonders. That’s it, desert dogs. It’s where we’ve been many times before, so there should be no problem working anything out.”
The lieutenant diddles with sand in one hand, as his message settles in. No one says a word. “I know there has to be some disappointment here. If you have something to say, let’s talk it out here and now.”
The silence holds.
“We happen to be blessed with one of the best gunners I’ve ever seen in uniform,” he adds. “I’d be derelict if I left him in the bull pen as the game begins. Someone might get hurt. Sergeant Noordwink, anything to say?”
“Not at all, sir,” Noordwink replies.
“Anyone?”
Silence.
“I don’t want disappointment in any form to be riding with us into battle,” the lieutenant adds. “Is that clear?”
“Yes sir,” we mutter in ragged chorus.
“Dismissed,” he says. “Get your minds straight and your shit together. We’re going to war. We’re going to kick Iraqi ass.”
I must admit that I’m awed by the responsibility coming my way. As my crewmates move apart from The Claw, I’m relieved to have a moment to organize my thoughts. The seventy-ton beast with its loaded firepower and fuel is all at once different to me. I sense its lethal soul touching my own, which (in love with a woman in Bindlach and a little frightened!) is already confused. As much as I’ve been a tanker, as much as I’ve dreamed of being a gunner, riding into battle with the responsibility to fire is different. Do your job, I tell myself. If you don’t do it to them, it will be done to you.
An ultimate mail call occurs as we’re readying The Claw and other armored vehicles for a stealthy move to within five or six kilometers of the Iraqi border. We could be submariners undertaking a mission directly into Tokyo Harbor. Receiving another cream-colored envelope, I button it into my shirt pocket until I can hunker in and relish the words. For the time being I need to checklist my thermal sights and firing mechanisms and strapping bags, and load in water and MREs.
“The colonel says it’s time to live like savages,” the lieutenant reminds us.
“Meaning, sir?” Sherman says.
“Meaning, Sherman, you fart in the turret try henceforth to generate an officer’s non-smelling variety. What do you think it means?”
We hoot while Sherman calls with weird joy, “Gross, sir! Officer farts are the worst!”
At last we’re ready to move out, filled with anticipation and glued as a team. As Sergeant Noordwink engages The Claw’s 1500 diesel horses and the lieutenant clears radio contact with other tanks in our platoon, our excited mood becomes more one of leaving for the beach on a Saturday morning than of moving, with three hundred other armed beasts about to invade a country that remains unwilling to withdraw from a neighbor it bullied into submission.
I fix my forehead to the thermal sight headrest and re-test the handgrips and the trigger mechanism. Though I’ve done it dozens of times, with blue target ammo as well as black, the power within my fingers conveys a new enormity. I can pinpoint a T-72 tank, a two-story building, a warehouse, pull it into detail with the thermal sight’s magnifying range, squeeze the trigger, and see it reduced to flames and rubble in an instant. We can win or lose, as in OPFOR exercises at Hohenfels. We can live or die. I’m frightened and eager at once as I try to understand if I’ve ever felt more engaged. Saddam messed with the wrong army, and it’s time to show him what a dumb mistake he made.
February 1991
With the nation uncertain whether the next few days will bring sudden peace or a devastating ground war in the Persian Gulf, student groups on college campuses around the country yesterday held antiwar demonstrations, but fell short of the coordinated effort they had hoped to achieve. Opinions about the war remained split on many campuses, but often students expressed a sense less of rage than of forceful anger narrowly directed at President Bush and top administration officials. Some demonstrators emphasized that they support the men and women serving in the armed forces and did not hold them responsible for the killing.
–The New York Times, February 15, 1991
O Iraqis, you triumphed when you stood with all your vigor against the armies of thirty countries… You have succeeded in demolishing the aura of the United States, the empire of evil, terror, and aggression… The Guards have broken the backbone of aggressors and thrown them beyond their borders. We are confident that President Bush would never have accepted a cease fire had he not been informed by his military leaders of the need to preserve the forces fleeing the fist of the heroic men of the Republican Guard.
–Saddam Hussein
Under cover of darkness, our engines leaving exhaust curls, we roll over sand and gravel in the direction of the Iraqi border. Two hours, then three slip by as our armada of M1A1s and Bradleys crawls forward. In its war with Iran and in its maneuvering in recent months, Iraq is known to have used old roads and dried-up river beds for the re-positioning of its armor. Conventional wisdom has it that they’ll be shocked out of their underwear to see our creepy crawlers approaching, each employing the mechanical and electronic elements that define U.S. armor as faster, stronger, more superior.
2nd Armored Cav proceeds until the barren Iraqi frontier is within a single kilometer. Nothing moving or generating heat has appeared on our screens. Initial enemy defensive positions are known to lie between thirty and forty kilometers inside the underbelly of this desert country the size of Arizona. It’s not known if our approach will surprise them or not, if they’re aware at all of an armada amassing on a segment of their border and approaching from an unusual angle.
Our orders are to pause at the border while maintaining radio silence. Intermittent rain sweeps in as we assume offensive formations, and we exit our vehicles for one last minute of air and face-to-face talk. Cav scouts are patrolling into Iraq (my buddy Dee among them) probing in Bradleys and on foot, returning radio signals from crevices and ridges. On turning off our motors in the darkness, all remains quiet except for the pattering of rain. Here we are, preparing to enter a country in an act of war, soon to draw fire as we unleash lethal strikes. It’s as quiet as bivouac evenings in desolation near Graf, not excluding our well-rehearsed hearts and minds, eyes and fingers.
Returning from having stepped away to piss, I see Sergeant Noordwink outside The Claw unstrapping a waterproof bag and pause to make peace with him. “Sarge, check me out on this,” I say. “We give notice each time we cross an Easting line?”
“You got it.”
“We’ll hold at five klicks until we’re told to move? Fox will be on our left, Eagle on our right?”
“You got it, Murphy. Don’t worry,” he adds. “I’ll be at the wheel and the lieutenant will be telling everybody what to do.”
“I don’t wanna make any mistakes.”
“Like I said, you got it. I don’t think you’ll be making any mistakes.”
“Sorry about what happened, you know. I’m pleased to become the gunner. It’s nothing personal…I’m sorry if it’s a downer for
you.”
Sergeant Noordwink smiles but gives no response, appearing focused on what he’s doing. But as I move to depart, he says, “Murphy–it’s not a downer at all. I like being driver. I like instrumentation. Always have. GPS is turning me on, especially in a high-tech battle wagon. I won’t be sorry I’m not pulling the trigger! It’s serious stuff, firing weapons, and you’re good at it. It’s no surprise that younger people are, and you’re even better than that! You got the instincts. The lieutenant had to make a call. It’s what he’s paid to do. Far as I’m concerned, it’s the right call. He’s a funny guy, the lieutenant, but he ain’t no wimp like some people wanna think. I know I’m better placed as driver. Of course I don’t like losing my seat, but I’ll get over it. Go study the goddamn overlays and leave me alone.”
Inside The Claw, I remove Lotte’s letter at last and touch the envelope to my lips in hope of invoking the girl herself, her downy skin and sparkling blue eyes, the civilization where she resides, the drinks, warm food, buses, and bikes that color her existence. For a moment, feeling pity for the Iraqis, I gaze within and glimpse her remote world of sidewalks and neon, movies and books, the civilized cafes and music that make up Germany, Europe, the U.S.
Shielding my position in the gunner’s seat, where a dome light illuminates her inked words, I inhale the envelope again. I could devour her tonight, I allow myself to admit. My hunger is one of an animal that has been leashed in cold rain and is longing for intimacy and friendship. I’d love to connect deeply and passionately with her, would like above all to know the pleasure of her words and smile. I’d like her to be my girlfriend as we walk out together…as she tells me things about herself. When love happens, you’ll know, I’ve always heard. Well it’s happened and is happening now. Love at a thousand miles filtered by hunger, warfare, loneliness.
Carrying Page 24
