Walk in My Combat Boots

by James Patterson

  I see the Bedouins when we cross. They live in tents and most of them are shoeless. They remind me of the sand people from the first Star Wars movie—the Tusken Raiders that scavenge the Tatooine desert for scrap metal. The Bedouins are aggressive and immediately jump on our vehicles, looking to steal food, water, sunglasses—anything they can make a dollar on.

  Our vehicles don’t have any armor on them, and we’re not wearing any armor, either. We’re wearing old frag vests, which are worthless. It’s like wearing a pillow, basically. We eventually shake off the Bedouins and continue driving.

  We stop in the middle of the desert, off Route Jackson. It’s well after midnight, and we can’t get a good view of the entire area. After we build camp, we pull half security and take turns sleeping.

  The next morning, someone sees a piece of rebar sticking out of the ground. Everyone’s Spidey sense starts kicking in. The thinking is it’s an anti-tank mine.

  A closer examination reveals that it is, in fact, just a piece of rebar. Command, in its infinite wisdom, says, “All right. We’re going to probe for mines.” Literally, in the middle of the desert. Us middle management guys think, Man, these people are dumb.

  We end up staying there for three days, probing for mines.

  And we’re still ten hours away from our primary destination: Baghdad.

  One of my first refueling missions is for a couple of vehicles on Route Tampa. We go out in a convoy of ten fuel trucks and a pair of gun trucks, which are old-style Humvees with guns mounted in the back beds. One has a forty-millimeter automatic grenade launcher, the other a modified turret with a .50 caliber machine gun. When we arrive, we pull off the highway, park, and wait. There’s a little village nearby.

  We start hearing gunfire.

  My blood pressure goes up a little bit, but there’s a comfort that comes from training. I start maneuvering my people into the necessary fighting positions.

  We hear two explosions. Two Humvees come flying up over the side of the road. They’re following each other pretty closely.

  The first Humvee has a screaming eagle on the front of it. It slows down, revealing its passenger, General Petraeus. He gives us a thumbs-up and takes off. Right behind him is his deputy commanding general, Lieutenant General Freakley, who offers his own thumbs-up before rolling on.

  The vehicles that need refueling never show up. We end up turning around and going back to the base.

  I have female soldiers. They’re serious fighters, these women, and they embrace the warrior spirit. Neither I nor the other soldiers look at them or treat them any differently. The same is not true of the enemy. As time goes on, I’ll discover that the insurgents go out of their way to attack our female soldiers. They pinpoint the truck carrying female soldiers and try to hit them.

  Our mission is to deliver fuel out to the Al Asad area, which is over past Ramadi and Fallujah. What we do is run down Route Tampa and get on another route called Golden, which is at a market area. You take a right there and it takes you through some back roads out to Route Mobile, the major highway in Iraq. Route Mobile takes you all the way out to Al Asad.

  Fuel is a commodity. Every time I go out on a mission, the insurgents try to take out our trucks and steal our fuel. The majority of attacks involve IEDs. When you’re carrying bulk fuel and get hit, you don’t stop to do a BDA, which is a battle damage assessment. You just keep going, get to your destination, and then do a BDA.

  The attacks get more frequent.

  Become more planned.

  It’s like the Wild West out there when we’re driving.

  Each time I go out, I take with me a light machine gun called a SAW. I want the most firepower with me while I’m out on the wire because we’re getting hit every day. Command doesn’t believe we’re getting hit every day and refuses to change our driving route. It’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.

  Inside the truck, we have a CD player set up with portable speakers so we can blast music, keep us amped up and occupied. I’m sitting next to my driver, changing out the CD, and glance in the side-view mirror and see a motorcycle with two gentlemen on it. The gentleman on the back has his hands in tight behind the other guy’s back, and right then I know something’s going to happen.

  I look to my driver and say, “Keep your eyes peeled.”

  She nods.

  The road explodes.

  I feel like the air is sucked out of my lungs. Something hits me in the face, and I feel some stuff hit me in back of the vest. Thankfully, because I anticipated the blast, I was able to turn sideways in my seat, so I don’t take everything straight to the front of my face. But the blow still glances off my side.

  I black out.

  When I come to, the truck is stopped. I don’t know how long I was out. The trucks that were driving behind me have stopped. I go into checklist mode. I’m checking to make sure I have all my bits and pieces when I hear gunfire.

  We take multiple rounds.

  I hear more explosions. Right then I know we’re in a complex, coordinated attack with multiple IEDs.

  The next step on my checklist is to identify a target and eliminate the threat. I scan the area and see three hundred, maybe four hundred meters away a white truck sitting between two berms. Normally, Iraqis don’t sit around: they take off. This truck, an SUV, is creeping toward us.

  In a situation like this, if you’re sticking around to watch, you’re pretty much gonna be a bad guy. You’re a threat. I target the SUV with my SAW, start throwing rounds at it. In between firing, I yell over to my driver to get the truck moving.

  She doesn’t respond.

  We don’t move.

  I look back over at her. She’s seriously dazed. She has all her limbs and stuff, but I can see she’s been hit—and we’re still taking fire.

  I hear an LMTV horn—the Light Medium Tactical Vehicle horn, this little meep-meep sound, which is comical coming from such a big truck. The horn means the rest of the convoy is coming around the contact side. I check my fire real quick so I won’t blast the people driving by. They all go around me, except the rear gunner truck. It pulls up next to me.

  My truck still isn’t moving, and my driver is in shock, so I jump out. The enemy takes shots at me as I run around to the other side of the truck and throw open the door. I quickly check out her injury, see that she’s taken a piece of shrapnel a little bit bigger than the size of a quarter to her knee. There’s not a whole lot of blood, but the wound is severe, and there’s no way she can walk.

  I see a guy, one of my buddies, in the gun truck trying to get my attention. He cups his hands over his mouth and yells, “Bring her over to me,” just as one of our helicopters, a Kiowa, swoops down to the road in front of me, to about driver level, and lets the enemy SUV know that, hey, if you go any further, I’m going to launch one of these Hellfire missiles.

  There’s a lull in the gunfire. I take her out. As I carry her over to the gun truck, I hear another explosion. It’s followed by more gunfire. I get her inside and my buddy goes to work on her, providing aid. I hear someone call in for a medevac as I run back to my truck to get it moving.

  The air lines, I discover, are severed. I grab some duct tape, get underneath the vehicle, hear another explosion. I duct-tape the lines. When I get back into the truck, I can’t get any air pressure. My truck is disabled.

  We don’t have a wrecker on this mission, so the convoy brings up a 1088 tractor (bobtail) with a tow bar to use as our wrecker/recovery vehicle. My platoon sergeant and my buddy come and tell me they have the firefight contained. All threats have been contained, and they’ve captured the guy from the SUV. Inside, they found a cache of weapons, ammo, and IEDs.

  The medevac shows up while the recovery vehicle is caging the brakes on my truck. I help carry my driver to the bird. She’s got a worried look on her face.

  “Hey, you’re gonna be okay,” I tell her. “They’re gonna take real good care of you.” Then, to lighten things up a little, I add, “Yo
u may not be dancing anytime soon, but it’s okay.”

  When a vehicle is disabled, the standard operating procedure is you destroy it. You put an incendiary grenade, which is a thermal grenade that burns super, super hot white phosphorous, on the engine block. It burns through any type of metal. You burn the vehicle and you take all the sensitive items out of it and you burn them, too.

  The colonel has another idea. “That truck,” he tells me, “is going back.”

  I don’t want to drive the truck back. I want to go with my unit, continue on mission to Al Asad. That said, I really feel like it’s my responsibility to take the vehicle back, so I volunteer to do it. When I get into the bobtail, I find out it doesn’t have working brakes. I drive it all by myself in the convoy, nursing my anger. I’m pissed off at command. We told them we were getting hit every day on this route, and they didn’t believe us and refused to change it.

  On the way back I see a couple of farmers out in a field. They flip us off as we drive by. I’m thankful the truck doesn’t have brakes, because I want to stop, get out, and shoot them, I’m so pissed.

  When I arrive at the base, I go get checked out at the medical clinic. They say I have some hearing issues and took some glass to the face. The cuts are so fine they had all mostly healed up during the hour and a half drive back. I’ve also got a bruise on my back from the piece of shrapnel hitting my vest. There really isn’t anything wrong with me, which is a surprise, given the amount of shrapnel that entered the cab.

  I’m told the battalion commander is going to talk to the company later on that evening about what went down earlier. I’m told I don’t have to attend, but I’m going. There’s no way I’m going to miss it.

  I go to take a quick nap. When I lay the side of my head on the pillow, I feel something sharp poke me in the face.

  It’s a piece of shrapnel.

  That fuels my anger even more.

  The battalion commander stands on an elevated sidewalk and talks to us about the attack. We all stand there, listening to him brief us.

  “Are there any questions?” he asks.

  I know I shouldn’t be here because I’m still super amped about how everything went down, but I’ve got some things I want to say. I raise my hand.

  “Sir,” I say, “it’s really fucked up that we’re going down these routes every day and there’s no route clearance.”

  My first sergeant gives me a look that says You better shut the hell up.

  “We’re getting hit every single day,” I tell the battalion commander, “and you guys are doing shit to ensure the safety of the convoy.”

  I have no business talking to a lieutenant colonel this way. I’m not saying he’s stupid; I am saying that the higher-ups are making tactical mistakes force-feeding us these routes despite our continued protest. We need to be seen and our voices need to be heard.

  “Sergeant McKenzie,” the battalion commander says, “today is your day to say whatever you want. After what you’ve been through, I totally understand.”

  After the meeting, my first sergeant pulls me off to the side and cusses my ass out. It’s worth it. It’s the last time we ever go down that route.

  During my four deployments, there are multiple times when I have to be brutally honest with the chain of command to the point where they take great offense. But I always do it. The welfare, safety, and morale of my soldiers is way more important than officers’ feelings.

  JOHN KNITTEL

  After graduating from the University of Akron in 2002, John Knittel worked a series of law enforcement and security jobs before deciding to join the Army, in 2005. He was a lieutenant and served as a platoon leader when he was deployed to Baghdad, Iraq. John left the service as a captain.

  Here’s the issue,” the operations officer tells me. “Lieutenant Martinez is transferring soon to another unit, which means Alpha Company needs a new platoon leader. Problem is, we have two lieutenants, you and this other guy, and only one spot.”

  It’s 2008, my first morning in Baghdad. I’m half awake, my nerves raw. Last night, as I flew into FOB Loyalty by helicopter from Kuwait, flares lit up the sky. I didn’t know if someone was shooting at us or attacking the base. It was completely overwhelming.

  “So,” the operations officer says, “whoever does the better job painting the battalion commander’s office gets the platoon.”

  Is he serious? It’s hard to say, given his deadpan expression. But if he wants me to enter a painting contest, okay, fine. I’ll go all HGTV, do an accent wall, whatever it takes to get Alpha Company. I’m going to be here a year, possibly longer, and I’m sure as hell not going to spend it in an admin office, working as a personnel guy, helping sort out pay problems.

  I’m given a cheap roller and local paint that probably has a bunch of lead in it. The concrete here in Baghdad is made of shitty materials, so as I paint the cement walls, little rocks get stuck in the roller. Still, my painting project turns out really, really good for an Iraqi building.

  I end up getting the platoon.

  I meet Alpha Company later that day, at Combat Outpost 762, for their evening platoon. Lieutenant Martinez is with them. He introduces me and then says, “Lieutenant Knittel would like to say a few words.”

  I wasn’t expecting to speak. I see these kids sizing me up, looking at me like I’m an old man—which to them I am, since I’m twenty-six. After I graduated from the University of Akron in 2002, with my degree in political science/criminal justice, I bounced all over Ohio, working law enforcement jobs—first for a private company that did undercover narcotics investigations, then as a private investigator, and, finally, as an investigator of insurance fraud. When my dad got cancer, I moved back home, and I started reevaluating what I wanted to do with my life. That was when I decided to join the Army. After basic training, I went the officer route, going to Officer Candidate School.

  This is my first deployment, my first time in country. I look at this melting pot of kids, from all walks of life, waiting for me to say something profound.

  When in doubt, stick to the truth.

  “I deployed late because of an injury,” I say, “so I’ve probably missed out on a lot of essential training. I’m probably going to mess up a lot, so bear with me while I get up to speed.”

  As we head out to do our patrol, Martinez points to a girl standing beyond the gates of the combat outpost, or COP. “That’s Najima,” he tells me. “She lives nearby, so you’ll see her around here a lot, selling food. Does a pretty good business, too, because who wants to eat MREs all the time?”

  He’s right about that. I grab a falafel and then go off with Martinez, do what we call left seat/right seat—the transition period where you do ride-alongs with someone already experienced with the battlefield.

  “What’s the deal with your rifle?” he asks.

  “When I was at Fort Polk, all the M4s had already been deployed. I had to do my weapons qualification, and they gave me this off-brand M16 that was probably used back in Vietnam.” I don’t have to tell him what a pain in the ass the rifle is, how after every single shot you have to pull back the charging handle. It’s like firing a musket. “When I got to Kuwait and did my two weeks of training, they gave me my vest, all the equipment I needed—”

  “Except an M4.”

  I nod. “They were all accounted for. Same here.”

  “That thing’s a piece of shit. We’ve got to get you a proper weapon.”

  “Good luck finding one.”

  “I’ll give you mine when I leave.”

  We’re beating the streets, about to end the patrol, when we see ten, maybe twenty yards away one of our mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles sitting at an intersection. All of a sudden I hear that psshhh sound an RPG makes.

  We see it coming from a nearby building.

  The RPG hits the MRAP’s roof. By some miracle of God, the RPG doesn’t explode, and as it skids down the street, it doesn’t go off. We take position and start shooting at the
building where the RPG came from. I manage to get off three shots with my musket.

  A couple of hours later, on the way back to COP 762, I start getting super sick. I’m throwing up in front of my new platoon—and shitting my pants.

  “I’ve got to lie down,” I tell Martinez.

  I get back to base and hit the rack. I’m still throwing up, and of course the shitters are two hundred yards away from me. Throughout the night, I’m running over there when I’m not puking.

  The next morning, I’m still sick—and I have to do patrols. After each one, I return to the COP and get an IV because I’m so dehydrated.

  This goes on for two days.

  On day three, Alpha Company is ordered to go out and do an overwatch position. I’m still feeling terrible, unable to keep anything down, as I head out to a three-story house, a rarity in Baghdad.

  The family who owns it is kept on the bottom floor. From the top floor, we watch for a patrol that’s getting ready to come up. Nature is calling again, the bathrooms are outside, and I can’t go out there because that will give away our position.

  The bedroom, I notice, has an armoire big enough to step inside.

  Screw it. I drop my drawers and do what I need to do. I’m dying, making all sorts of sounds. One of my soldiers enters the room.

  “Sir, are you okay?”

  “I’m shitting inside someone’s closet,” I say. “How do you think I’m doing right now?”

  The fighting is intense the first three months. It doesn’t let up even when I return to my new base, the joint security station (JSS) called Camp Marlboro, located on the premises of an abandoned cigarette factory in Sadr City. We’re constantly getting hit with mortars and IEDs.

  We can shoot into Sadr City, but we can’t patrol it. The people there are constantly placing IEDs, especially on Route Predators, our main supply route and possibly the most dangerous place in Baghdad. Small bombs called explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) are hidden inside the roadside mountains of rubber tires, scrap metal, and rusted vehicles. Manufactured in Iran, an EFP bomb is the size of a coffee can and, when detonated, forms a projectile that can penetrate our armored vehicles. EFPs are showing up in alarming numbers, and they’re being smuggled in by city residents paid fifty dollars to place the weapons. They do it so they can feed their starving families.