Kaboom

by Matthew Gallagher

  Back from leave, I walked into a tempest of fury.

  According to the staff officers, Lieutenant Colonel Larry forced some of them to comb through my blog—all six months’ worth—to search for any hint of an OPSEC violation. They were unable to find any because I had taken great care with this matter, although not for this purpose. However, because I posted the piece in question without showing it to Captain Whiteback first, my squadron commander ordered me to shut down my blog, effective immediately, under the pretext of “conduct counter to good order and discipline.” My grandfather, a career navy officer and retired two-star admiral, later told me that citing this regulation was a commander’s ultimate cop out in lieu of actual substance.

  I did as ordered and posted one final piece explaining the situation, taking full responsibility for my actions. Other than getting yelled at for having “an authority problem” and “a persecution complex,” I received no punishment. I wasn’t counseled on paper or removed from my platoon leader position, mainly because there wasn’t anyone they were willing to replace me with. They even promoted me to captain the next month, right on time with my peer group, because my blog drama had nothing to do with job performance. As he put on my captain’s bars, Lieutenant Colonel Larry muttered snidely about wanting to punch me through the wall. I smirked and saluted.

  The passing of time did not yield bygones. I had committed heresy against the church of the officer corps by airing my grievances publicly. Some careerists gave me a very open and a very personal cold shoulder, although most of my friends and fellow junior officers found the whole thing hilarious, as it reinforced our contempt for the Cold Warrior mentality of fraudulent pseudostoicism. Lieutenant Colonel Larry told me I had discredited the unit. After much internal deliberation and self-examination, I eventually interpreted that to mean that I had discredited him, as all he ever seemed to care about was how many people had read the piece and who they were. At no point was I ever asked, “Why did you write this?” Higher seemed interested only in treating the symptom, me, not the problem itself, the state of the unit. Perhaps the unit’s leaders didn’t want to hear the response. They must have known how unhealthy our squadron was.

  I received widespread and fervent support in the aftermath of my blog’s death from a variety of active military, retired military, and civilians. A Judge Advocate General (JAG) lawyer called me at the combat outpost, saying he wanted to help resurrect my website, as he believed my chain of command had no legal right to shut it down, even under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I thanked him but said that I didn’t want to distract my platoon or myself any further from the mission at hand. Hundreds of e-mails poured in from people across the globe expressing their gratitude for my dispatches and for bringing the war home to them, as well as their disdain for my command’s reaction. Some came from the Pentagon, a few others, from the Department of Defense. Former military members living as expatriates wrote from Indonesia, France, and Chile. Two different people claimed that they had shared my website with General Petraeus, as an example of an ideal twenty-first-century counterinsurgent’s tool, and one stated that the general “was a fan.” I had no idea if this was true or not, although even the possibility of it led to some serious holy fuck moments. In the ensuing months, Lieutenant Colonel Larry answered multiple congressional inquiries brought on by some of my more passionate followers, who had expressed their outrage to their congressional representatives.

  Personally, I thought the whole affair was much ado about nothing, with a lot of smoke and not much fire. I had been in the wrong, and while others handled the situation poorly as well, I was the lowest-ranking individual involved. That was how the army worked: Orders were orders, and I was a soldier first. I understood and accepted all of that.

  Shortly thereafter, the press—the officer corps’s undeclared hostile enemy—got hold of the story.

  Ernesto Londono, a writer from the Washington Post embedded in Baghdad, penned an exposé in July chronicling the rise and fall of my blog. Concurrently, my hometown paper, the Reno-Gazette Journal, did the same. Two days after the Washington Post published Londono’s article, the Stars and Stripes, a prominent military newspaper, reran it as their cover story. I refused to comment for the articles, again not wanting to distract myself or my men any further than necessary, but my parents were free of such burdens. They asked if I minded whether they spoke to the journalists, and I told them no, I didn’t, just as long as they spoke honestly and for themselves. They did so, and as a result, thousands upon thousands of readers across the globe read my father’s lambasting of Lieutenant Colonel Larry as a middle-management bureaucrat who made a mockery of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

  As Lieutenant Virginia Slim said of the matter, “Wow. Don’t fuck with a lawyer when constitutional rights are involved. They can and will publicly humiliate you.”

  The Stars and Stripes cover catapulted me to minor celebrity status in Iraq, and I autographed a few dozen copies for amused soldiers, NCOs, and officers. Not everyone found the articles funny. Predictably, a new set of ass chewings and lectures about professional decorum ensued, despite the fact that I had personally refused to speak with the journalists. Again, no punishment followed. Beyond the initial post, I still hadn’t done anything wrong.

  The questions about how many people had read my post and who they were stopped.

  After a few months of correspondence with officers around the military, I pieced together the chain of events that followed the Washington Post’s article publication. Big Army (i.e., the Pentagon) had been caught off-guard by the article because Middle Army hadn’t informed them of their decision to shut my website down. Ironically, many envoys of Big Army—what might qualify as part of Big Brother in our postmodern American republic—loved my blog for its realism, the very reason it got axed. Some of my readers wanted to portray the whole ordeal as a governmental gag order, but that simply wasn’t accurate. Big Army had to back up Middle Army’s decision postverdict; that was what bureaucracies did. The institutional culture demanded such, even if it didn’t agree with or understand the original decision. If anything, my father’s much-publicized analysis of the circumstances proved far more accurate than the Big Brother hypothesis.

  The hoopla surrounding the articles eventually faded, and for a few more months at least, I finally got what I wanted in the first place—to be left alone with my platoon to continue to fight the Iraq insurgency on the ground level. The whole matter was so silly, so trivial compared to what our day-to-day lives entailed. I continued to write for myself because I needed that outlet and that therapy. The blog originated as a communication tool to stay in contact with family and friends but had somehow morphed into something else entirely. With the website’s end, I let go of trying to wake up the American public to our war and finally learned to concern myself with matters I could control and impact.

  Thus, my last connection to the old world was severed. Given the time and events to come, nothing could’ve been more necessary.

  THE HOT WHEELS INCIDENT

  As I traveled back to Saba al-Bor from Europe, my platoon’s good fortune and luck finally ran out, with tragedy narrowly evaded. After months of chasing insurgents, dodging IEDs, and dealing with trigger-happy Iraqi security forces, something as routine as refilling a generator served as the culprit. Private Hot Wheels barely survived, and the rest of the platoon—especially some of the Joes—never really quite recovered from the experience.

  Although I wasn’t there—something I haven’t yet forgiven myself for, be that illogical or not—I pieced together the events of the evening in question by talking to the involved soldiers and reading their sworn statements. I also watched the security camera footage that captured Private Hot Wheels being engulfed in flames, a scene permanently carved in the crevices of my mind. I only watched the footage once, but once proved enough. Things like that didn’t fade with time.

  While the Gravediggers pulled force-protection securit
y at the combat outpost, Specialist Haitian Sensation and Private Hot Wheels received the task to refill the generators that powered the building. Just before midnight, they moved to the fuel point together, and Private Hot Wheels finished filling his can first. “Go ahead and start filling up the first generator,” Specialist Haitian Sensation said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Concurrently, Doc and PFC Smitty walked downstairs and outside the outpost, bringing out the garbage to the trash point located in the far reaches of the motor pool. As Private Hot Wheels began filling the generator, the metal fuel spout bumped into the starter cable hanging across the fuel tank, causing the positive-to-negative charge contact to ignite the fumes. The fuel can exploded, setting the young soldier and generator on fire. He immediately screamed for help. The soldiers in the TOC first thought they were hearing the death throes of a shot animal, until they saw the fire flash on the security camera.

  Private Hot Wheels takes a knee while providing security during a dismounted patrol.

  The explosion shook the combat outpost and immediately brought Specialist Haitian Sensation running from the fuel point to the northwest of Private Hot Wheels, and Doc and PFC Smitty came running from the northeast. Private Hot Wheels stumbled away from the generator, collapsed on the concrete next to it, and was rolling around on the ground in an attempt to douse the flames when the three other soldiers found him. Acting without hesitation, Specialist Haitian Sensation ran inside for help and a fire extinguisher, Doc ran to open up the medical aid station, and PFC Smitty started beating Private Hot Wheels’s body to help put the fire out. PFC Smitty then heard sparks from the generator.

  “I heard the generator making funny sounds, and Wheels was caught under some pipes,” PFC Smitty recalled. “I just thought I had to get him out of there. So I grabbed him underneath his chest plate and pulled him out of the corner, like anyone would.” PFC Smitty suffered minor burns on his hands and his arms for grabbing Private Hot Wheels in this manner, but his actions probably saved Private Hot Wheels’s life. About five seconds later, a bigger, secondary explosion from the generator sent a new round of flames everywhere. Luckily, both privates were safely around the corner. However, all of Private Hot Wheels’s rolling and PFC Smitty’s beating had not extinguished the blaze on his body. Private Hot Wheels was still on fire.

  Meanwhile, Specialist Haitian Sensation had burst into the combat outpost yelling and ran upstairs to grab a fire extinguisher. “I yelled, ‘Help! Wheels is on fire! Wheels is on fire!’ but either people couldn’t understand me, or they thought I was kidding,” he later said. “It took a couple seconds for them to figure out I was for real.”

  One of the first respondents from inside was Super Mario, a young interpreter who had spent many late evenings and early mornings learning about America from Private Hot Wheels and my other young soldiers. As Specialist Haitian Sensation picked up the fire extinguisher at the top of the stairs, Super Mario ran past him down the stairs. He found PFC Smitty struggling with a now immobile Private Hot Wheels outside.

  “Quick,” Super Mario told PFC Smitty, “tear open a sandbag and pour it on him.” Super Mario’s resourcefulness finally put out most of the inferno on Private Hot Wheels, as he and PFC Smitty dumped bags of sand on his body. Specialist Haitian Sensation, a few seconds behind, finished the job with the fire extinguisher. Some of the soldiers thought he had been on fire for fifteen seconds; others said two minutes. The time stamp on the video footage read thirty-four seconds.

  By now, the rest of the troop had keyed in on what had occurred. Two Headquarters platoon soldiers arrived with more extinguishers and put out the still-raging generator fire. SFC Big Country, Staff Sergeant Bulldog, and others loaded Private Hot Wheels onto a stretcher and carried him into the aid station, where Doc immediately hooked him up to an IV and performed what medical treatment he could. Meanwhile, the TOC radioed for a medical helicopter.

  “He kept asking about his face,” Staff Sergeant Bulldog told me later. “He was worried that girls wouldn’t like him if his face was burned. I was like, ‘Your face is good!’ ’cause it was.” Private Hot Wheels had been wearing his full equipment kit during the refueling process, so his body armor protected much of his core. Further, his clear lens glasses saved his eyes. But the cloth on his arms, hands, and legs had burned away instantly, and that was where much of the significant damage had been done.

  “We trained for a lot of events, a lot of worst-case scenarios, before we went to Iraq,” SFC Big Country recalled. “But there is nothing on this earth that can prepare you for the feeling of having to carry one of your soldiers to a medical bird [helicopter]. It was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in uniform.”

  The subsequent investigation determined that the mixture of an army-issued metal spout and a civilian generator played a role in the accident. Extinguishers were soon moved next to our brand-new generators, and safety classes were conducted across Baghdad Province for soldiers regarding refueling operations. Those classes were not taught to suggest that Private Hot Wheels did anything wrong; he did not. Freak accidents happened. This happened.

  Private Hot Wheels flew to Baghdad, then to Germany, and then to San Antonio, Texas, home of Brooke Army Medical Center, the preeminent burn-treatment center in the world. He arrived in Texas less than forty-eight hours after the accident occurred, a testament to the might and mobility of the U.S. military. While we continued to fight the insurgency in Iraq, he fought for his life half a world away. Over 60 percent of his body suffered second-or third-degree burns in the blast. Serious complications from smoke inhalation and inflamed organs arose over the succeeding summer months. Multiple times, bacteria seeped into his bloodstream, causing serious infections that brought him to the brink of death. With his family praying at his bedside, though, and the burn center’s subject-matter experts treating him, he powered through it, and the center discharged him in late October 2008. Private Hot Wheels’s long road to recovery was, and would continue to be, riddled with battles of a different kind than the rest of us experienced or understood.

  In the weeks following the generator fire, a rumor circulated among the junior soldiers that the fire hadn’t been an accident but rather the result of a well-hidden sticky bomb placed behind the generator by an Iraqi contractor working for JAM or AQI. While the NCOs quickly crushed this fabrication, worried that such misinformation could further disrupt the unit’s already shaky mental structure, I had more sympathy for it. It was simply the product of nineteen- and twenty-year-old kids trying to come to terms with something horrific, seeking out a logical explanation for an illogical situation. Accidents weren’t supposed to happen in wars; that wasn’t what Hollywood had taught us. But bad guys happened in wars. Subterfuge happened in wars. Sticky bombs happened in wars. That much they knew. That they understood. Still, though, no substance ever existed for the sticky bomb theory, and what happened to Private Hot Wheels remained a freak accident.

  Though he was gone physically, Private Hot Wheels’s presence stayed with the Gravediggers for the duration of the deployment. Soldiers routinely checked the website his mother established to chronicle his medical recovery. They swapped their favorite Hot Wheels’s quotes and stories often, as if maintaining the mental image we had of him as a healthy young soldier would help heal the pale and skinny burn survivor in Texas. After the NCOs packed up his belongings and shipped them home, his bunk lay empty for many months, despite multiple bed shifts and comings and goings of soldiers. Private Hot Wheels hadn’t died—thank God—but he loomed over the platoon like a lost ghost nonetheless. Freak accident or no, the men were now down one of their own, and they would have to finish without him. We all felt less whole, less complete, as a result.

  What went unstated, of course, was that maybe something else could happen, and the next time, Fortuna might not grace us with her presence. I knew I felt it, and I saw it in the eyes of the others as well, especially after we finished talking about Private Hot Wheels or the genera
tor fire. But we sucked it up and drove on. No other choice existed.

  Specialist Haitian Sensation, in particular, had a tough time in the aftermath of the incident. “I smell the flesh burning sometimes still,” he told me weeks later. “I’ll be thinking about something totally different, or working out, or watching TV, or whatever, and then it just hits me. And I can’t help but wonder, you know? What else could we have done? What if I had been standing there, too? I just don’t know.”

  I didn’t know either. None of us did. We just tried to remember that things could’ve been worse and kept moving. No other choice existed.

  THE RUNDOWN

  A power vacuum threatened to tear apart the Sunni community of our AO over the summer of 2008. Colonel Mohammed fled Saba al-Bor when it became clear the Iraqi security forces intended to detain and jail him for his past status as an AQI prince. Things became even further muddled when AQI members dressed in IA uniforms assassinated Sheik Zaydan of Bassam in his own house with a point-blank pistol shot through the roof of his mouth into the brain. Bassam, the village to Saba al-Bor’s south, rested on an invisible fault line between the Grand Canal villages of our area and the Abu Ghraib district. AQI still maintained a powerful presence in and around Abu Ghraib, and judging from the recent uptick in violent events, they seemed to be interested in expanding northward. Sahwa leaders, minor sheiks, major wannabes, and newcomers of various stripes all began jockeying for influence in light of these events.

  Iraqi security forces pose behind a detainee, arrested for his alleged involvement with al-Qaeda in Iraq. Such photographs were often taken after such operations and reproduced as posters in mass form. This was done for the purpose of public relations, in the hope of instilling trust within the greater Iraqi populace for their military and their police.