Kaboom

by Matthew Gallagher

  As we pulled back into the staging area on the FOB, the platoon net buzzed.

  “Ain’t this mutha fucka’ a time-sensitive target, sir?” Staff Sergeant Bulldog asked. “Or are we gonna meet him for dinner?”

  “Maybe he’s not there yet,” I said, pausing. “Maybe. Just stay redcon-1 here guys. I’m sure whatever the holdup is, it won’t last long. I’ll be right back.”

  I ran into the squadron TOC. Some sixty minutes later, I returned.

  As I staggered back to my Strykers, I found SFC Big Country, Staff Sergeant Bulldog, and Staff Sergeant Boondock smoking cigarettes on the front side of the lead vehicle.

  “Well?” they asked simultaneously.

  “Well,” I sighed. “Well. There was some . . . debate between some captains and some majors as to who should execute this mission. We were originally tapped to go because we were available and on the FOB, and the squadron operations officer wanted speed.”

  “That makes sense,” SFC Big Country said.

  “That it does,” I replied. I needed to be more forthcoming about what had happened with these three, I thought. They deserved it. “Not everyone agreed. To make a long story short, Lieutenant Colonel Larry got involved, and while we’re still doing the raid, we’re now under the landowner’s command for it.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, you’re telling me some invisible lines on a fucking map and a bunch of territorial officers bitching at each other did this?” Staff Sergeant Boondock fumed. “This is bona fide bureaucratic bullshit, sir. This dude is high level, and like Bulldog said, it’s a time-sensitive mission! What the fuck are they thinking? This isn’t some goddamn cowboy movie where the bad guy waits for us at a corral.”

  I nodded. “I hear you. But our time is not our own to manage anymore. We anticipated rather than reacted. Lesson learned.” I smirked. “Now the four of us, we have to go meet up with the landowning commander. He’s going to brief us on his plan.”

  I found the landowning captain’s plan a solid one, though more complex than mine, certainly, as it had more moving parts and involved units that had never worked together before. Whereas my plan aimed for crashing lightning, in and out just long enough to nab Abu Mustafa, this aspired for rolling thunder, a methodical cordon with a very clear step-by-step process. Admittedly, his brief was better than mine; I found it very smooth and thorough, and it lacked my infamous crutch phrases, like “fuckin’” or “you know?” Further, he had color maps, which contained all sorts of cool—if irrelevant— demographic breakdowns in pie chart form. Even disgruntled, I still appreciated shiny things.

  Some two and a half hours after we got the initial confirmation of Abu Mustafa’s whereabouts, we finally kicked open the front door to his house. No one was home, although we found food in the pantry and a few other signs of recent habitation.

  “Guess we was late for dinner,” Staff Sergeant Bulldog said as we moved back to our Strykers after clearing the house.

  Various possibilities for the mission’s failure swept through my mind. Maybe the presence of so many Coalition forces tipped Abu Mustafa off; anything larger than a roving platoon stuck out as out of the ordinary for any village in this part of Iraq. Maybe he had guards posted on the outside of town and fled at the first sign of Americans. Or maybe we just took too fucking long. Whatever the case, Abu Mustafa had escaped and, as far as I knew, wouldn’t be found at any point during our deployment.

  The recentralization movement continued. In the ensuing months, Higher developed an obsession with quantifying every aspect of the war effort. PowerPoint slides and pie charts and information overload for the sake of information overload then became our raison d’être—the more of those things we did, the more we were left alone to conduct legitimate counterinsurgency operations the way we knew how. The mass quantifying reached a personal apex when I tracked “nose time,” the number of minutes a military dog spent sniffing for explosives over the course of a mission.

  We certainly were no swarm of killer bees. As I looked back on the experience though, I liked to believe that if nothing else, we made our elephant cut some of its excess lumbering weight. That was something, at least.

  That was the war I fought.

  MERRY MEN AND MICROGRANTS

  “Why the hell are we doing this again?” Staff Sergeant Axel (recently promoted) asked.

  “So our squadron’s microgrant bar graph on the brigade PowerPoint slide can be the highest,” Staff Sergeant Spade answered offhandedly. “Don’t worry, it’s all good. We’re about halfway done. If we keep the same pace, we’ll be done, in what, another four, five hours?”

  The Gravediggers, 2nd platoon of Bravo Troop, 2-14 Cavalry, circa August 2008, at combat outpost Bassam. Front row, from left to right: Corporal Spot, Doc, PFC Stove Top, PFC Smitty, PFC Romeo. Middle row, from left to right: myself, Staff Sergeant Boondock, Sergeant Tunnel, Specialist Haitian Sensation, Sergeant Fuego, Staff Sergeant Axel, PFC Van Wilder. Back row, from left to right: PFC Das Boot, SFC Big Country, Sergeant Prime, Staff Sergeant Spade, and Staff Sergeant Bulldog.

  I didn’t bother correcting my NCOs, as I silently agreed with their cynical assessment of our mission’s purpose. The Gravediggers and I had spent our entire sunny morning on Route Maples, writing down local businesses’ contact information, and we were bound to spend our entire sunny afternoon the same way. The microgrant program had developed in and with the American military’s COIN efforts; in theory, it supplied local Iraqi-owned businesses with a small sum (generally US$300 to US$500) for specific refinements to aid their commerce. These businesses were supposed to be vetted beforehand for any shady connections, and their refinement purchases were supposed to be verified by American units after the issuing of the microgrant—again, all in theory. In practice, the microgrant program devolved into another quantifiable figure that unit commanders used to compete for officer evaluation report (OER) bullets. So, when Captain Ten Bears got the order to devote his entire troop to mass microgrant projects in Saba al-Bor over the course of three days, I knew we weren’t meeting the program’s intent. But other than a sarcastic comment or two to my peers, I shut up and executed. I wasn’t walking the pariah road again.

  My platoon’s slice of this mission proved the smallest in area but held the largest number of businesses. Approximately two miles long, Route Maples served as Saba al-Bor’s main strip as nearly every building, shanty, and tarp on both the east and west sides of the cluttered street contained a business of some kind. Later that night, as I organized our mission’s collection efforts, I totaled 532 local businesses on Route Maples.

  “Dude, I feel so dirty doing this!” Skerk yelled over to me, both of us jotting down names, type of business, and phone numbers supplied by the owners. “It’s one thing to witness a scam like this, but it’s a whole other thing to be the one peddling it!”

  As our troop’s artillery and contracts officer, Skerk oversaw the microgrant program in our AO. For the first few months of our deployment, he used its funds the way we had been taught to—precisely targeting specific businesses that supported the efforts of Coalition forces, helping them out with a new freezer or upgraded furniture, and allowing news of the benefits of working with us to spread through the populace by word of mouth. Obviously, that was before the microgrant program came onto Higher’s radar. Now, Skerk served as the ringmaster in a circus of mass microgrant issuing. We often joked about which specific American taxpayer had paid for the random object deemed “vital to commerce” by an Iraqi business owner, but it was only funny because the concept of money meant nothing to us anymore.

  While I listened to a young Iraqi grocery shop owner explain to me why he wanted to use his pending microgrant on a foosball table, I thought about how unenforceable all of this was. We couldn’t take back a grant after the fact, whether the Iraqis bought something pragmatic or not. And while our guidance for dealing with this problem had us telling transgressors that we had added them to our terrorist watch list, we could only issue
the threat so many times before it became an Arabic punch line.

  I glanced across the street, spying Staff Sergeant Bulldog’s team snaking its way north in parallel with us. Staff Sergeants Bulldog and Boondock, Sergeant Fuego, PFC Van Wilder, Private First Class Romeo (recently promoted), and Super Mario all had ice-cream cones and seemed to be laughing and joking with a few Iraqi police and local children. Leave it to my guys, I thought to myself. They’d be able to turn a concentration camp into a poker game.

  “Hey, sir!” SFC Big Country yelled from three stalls behind me. “Suge wants to apply for a microgrant so he doesn’t have to walk up this damn road with us anymore. It’s Iraqi welfare!” Both my platoon sergeant and my terp chuckled openly, slapping each other on the back, while eating flatbread and sipping on juices provided them by the local vendor they had just talked to.

  Despite my black mood, I smiled. I wished I could make the best of situations like this and (again) decided to make a concerted effort to be more like my men. Yes, this mission qualified as fucked up beyond all recognition (FUBAR), but none of us could do anything about it except finish it. I really needed to learn to worry only about matters within my control.

  Suge walked up to me and patted me on the shoulder. “This is very good program, Captain! It make the people very happy and make them like the Americans very much. It is always good to give poor people money.”

  SFC Big Country followed. “Kind of like Robin Hood, huh, sir? I know how you like those old stories.”

  I looked up at my grinning platoon sergeant, who clearly had keyed in on my current temperament and decided to poke at it. “Gee, thanks, Little John,” I said. I almost continued on to say that we weren’t exactly taking from the rich to give to the poor, but I stopped myself. Rich was a relative term, and the Western middle class funding this trillion-dollar effort in Iraq, while tragically trapped—also a relative term—in American society, would be considered beyond affluent by Saba al-Bor standards.

  “I fucking love your platoon,” Skerk said, pointing across the street.

  Staff Sergeant Bulldog had seized control of a donkey cart and was softly lashing the trotting donkey down Route Maples, much to the delight of the local Iraqis. On the back of the cart, Staff Sergeant Boondock and PFC Van Wilder attempted to surf the ride, waving to the shoppers as they passed.

  “I guess that makes them the Merry Men,” I said, shaking my head in wonder.

  “Then who is Suge?” SFC Big Country asked. Our terp had wandered over to the nearest grocer stall and already held a glass of chai in his hand as he talked with the shop owner.

  “You’re wrong if you aren’t thinking a very drunk and very crazy Friar Tuck,” Skerk stated.

  We all laughed. “Too bad your blog got axed,” SFC Big Country said to me, as we continued up the street. “This would make for a good story.”

  I nodded. “I’ll save it for that book everyone thinks I’m writing.”

  We finished our mass microgrant assessments three and a half hours later and headed back to the combat outpost. Later that night, after I’d finished organizing our collected information and putting it onto a PowerPoint slide so Higher could understand and quantify it, I thought about the bigger things again. One of the central tenets of our counterinsurgency operations called for us to inject funds into the lifeless Iraqi economy. Did it really matter if all of the microgrant awardees didn’t actually meet the arbitrary bureaucratic standards put out? Wasn’t it inevitable that we were funding some of our enemies by doing things like this? What would COIN architect General Petraeus think about how my platoon had spent our day? Would he believe it to be a grey means to a less grey end, or would he consider it part of the bastardized counterinsurgency spirit passed down through the ranks of a conventional army still struggling to adapt to nonconventional warfare?

  I didn’t know what he would think. I didn’t even really know what I thought. So I went to bed and dreamed of a world less complex.

  TRASH VILLAGE

  Just before my platoon and I departed for a late-morning counter-IED patrol of Route Tampa, Captain Ten Bears called me into his office and told me that Lieutenant Colonel Larry had finally found a new platoon leader to replace me with and that he would be in Saba al-Bor the following week. I nodded and said that I had known this moment was coming—I had been operating on borrowed time ever since the blog fiasco. They still weren’t sure what my next position would be, but my troop commander guessed that the squadron staff lay in my future. Captain Ten Bears patted me on the back and told me not to let the Man get me down and to get moving on our mission.

  I walked down the stairs and outside to the motor pool. I promised myself that I’d make every remaining minute and moment count, in order to savor my last experiences as a scout platoon leader. I also promised myself to finish as strongly and as passionately as I had started when I assumed the position some twenty months before. The men who waited at our Strykers, who had taught me what true honor and true stoicism were, expected and deserved nothing less.

  They taught me some other things along the way, too.

  “I’m telling you, food tastes better out of the garbage,” Doc said to the confused laughter of the rest of the platoon. Apparently, he had been found rummaging through the trash, looking for a half-full bag of potato chips.

  “Ain’t our medic supposed to be sanitary?” Staff Sergeant Bulldog asked. “You’re the last person who should be doing that shit.”

  Doc shrugged his shoulders, grinned, and shared his potato chips with PFC Das Boot.

  I called the platoon in, SFC Big Country and I gave the mission brief, and I told them to mount up. The other news could wait.

  We moved out of Saba al-Bor and east on Route Lincoln, reaching Route Tampa in fifteen minutes. Our initial counter-IED patrol called for us to move between the Grand Canal in the north and the Baghdad Gates in the south. But as soon as I checked in on the radio with the squadron TOC, they already had a different task and purpose for us.

  “Roger, White 1, we read you loud and clear. We received a report from an Apache pilot an hour ago about a big metal object and possible IED he spotted from the air. We need you guys to check it out. Grid to follow.”

  Fuck, I thought. Flyboy information. While helicopter pilots meant well with their reports, all too often what we found on the ground resembled nothing like what they saw from the air. Like the time we woke up a pack of wild dogs that they thought was a VBIED. Or the time we discovered a teenager peddling Jordanian porn out of the trunk of his car instead of the reported RPGs.

  I relayed the frago and grid to my platoon.

  “Hey, sir,” SFC Big Country immediately said, “that grid is right in the middle of the city dump on the west side of Tampa. Either that grid is wrong, or that pilot is blind. There’s all kinds of metal in a dump.”

  Jesus, he’s fast, I thought. I plotted the grid on my own map, and my platoon sergeant, as usual, was spot-on. I called back to squadron and asked if they were aware where they wanted us to go. They said that, yes, they were and just to execute and let them know what we found.

  “White, this is White 1,” I said. “Go ahead and rock those hate fists. We’re taking a field trip to the dump. Hopefully, we can confirm or deny the IED report from our vehicles.”

  Some thirty minutes later, it became unmistakably clear that we couldn’t. With Staff Sergeant Boondock navigating in the lead vehicle, we wound our way through the dump, but there was absolutely no way to reach the grid in question without walking to it. The dismount teams met up on the ground.

  As soon as I set foot in what we’d soon designate Trash Village, the pungent smell of compost blitzed my nostrils. I gagged and felt my stomach rumble. Layer upon layer of refuse, debris, and scrap besieged us. We walked on a coating of plastic wrappers, empty cans, soiled clothes, and everything in between, with blotches of runny, black mud filling the gaps. Up a small rise to our north, in our direction of travel, sat multiple stacks of metal paint ca
ns, patterned to mimic building structures.

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Staff Sergeant Boondock said. “Are those houses?”

  They were. As our wedge formation crested the knoll, we came upon six or seven of these buildings. Frail, sallow creatures sat on tires in front of their paint-can houses. They didn’t acknowledge our presence as we strolled past, nor did they even seem aware of it. I took off my sunglasses and blinked repeatedly, verifying that these grey-skinned people with eyes devoid were actually human beings. The men and the women wore rags of various sorts, clearly pulled out of the dump where they lived. Most of the children, however, walked around completely naked and completely lacked the verve and bounce of even the most destitute child in Saba al-Bor. Staff Sergeant Spade pulled a Beanie Baby out of his pocket and tossed it to a little boy we passed. The little boy just stared at the ground where the toy lay and never looked up to see who threw it there.

  Makeshift pens of thin wire rested behind the paint-can houses. Various gatherings of bulls, cows, goats, and pigs all lived together there, munching away on their own waste or on the garbage around them. They proved to be the only fat farm animals I saw during my entire deployment to Iraq—obviously more a product of their diets than their health. I whispered a Hail Mary to myself, a prayer I hadn’t said since high school, and tried to push the thought of these people eating these animals out of my mind.

  Primal, internal sirens implored us to keep moving past this place. As we followed a narrow trail deeper into the dump to the designated grid coordinate, we progressed away from the paint-can houses and eventually came parallel with a shallow, coffee-brown lake. A small gust of wind whipped up just as we passed this body of water, bringing a scent of mummified illness with it. I gagged again, feeling nauseous, and held my breath to avoid puking.

  “You alright, sir?” Corporal Spot asked from behind me. “I feel like yakking, too. This is the most disgusting place I’ve ever been.”