War Stories (8 page)

      
West of Tikrit, Iraq

      
Saturday, 26 April 2003

      
0100 Hours Local

T
he satellite telephone vibrating against my chest awakens me with a start after less than half an hour of sleep. Many years ago, as a Marine officer, I learned to nap with a radio handset tucked into my helmet, up against my ear, so that an urgent call on the command net would rouse me. Since being in Iraq, I've done a similar thing, catching snatches of sleep with an Iridium satellite phone placed inside my flak jacket, up against my chest, so that I won't miss a message from the FOX News Channel foreign desk. These calls have been coming nearly nightly for two months, alerting us to prepare for a live “hit” with a FOX News Channel host or correspondent in New York or Washington.

But tonight's communication is different, the message is both welcome and bittersweet. “Come on home,” says Brian Knoblock, the head of FOX News Channel foreign operations.

I awaken Griff Jenkins, my very brave and resourceful field producer and cameraman. He arises, smiling, and starts packing our camera equipment and satellite broadcast gear in the dark. We are the last FOX News Channel field team still embedded in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Our cameras are full of sand. The portable generator has been gone for days—left for dead beside an Iraqi airstrip. Our manpack satellite broadcast gear has been cooked by the sun, soaked in the Tigris, and bathed in dirt. The rest of our equipment is just about shot. And so are we.

Yet leaving these soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines we've been covering since before the start of this “Second Iraq War” isn't easy. We have been eating the same meals, breathing the same dust, sharing their fears, frustrations, and euphoria—and enjoying their protection—for too long not to feel awkward at leaving them. We're going home. They are not.

Well before dawn breaks across the Tigris, while Griff sorts through our gear, I go into the Battalion Tactical Operations Center (TOC) to plug in my laptop computer and enter these final notes—a last Sit Rep (situation report) from the war we have been covering since before it started on March 20. At a computer and radio console inside the TOC, a watch officer—called a “battle captain” in this U.S. Army armor unit—hands me a clipboard holding a printout of the daily Air Tasking Order. “Pick your flight and make your reservation early to avoid the rush,” he says with a smile. He points to a flight scheduled for shortly after first light—an H-60 Black Hawk—with space for two passengers headed for Baghdad. He puts Griff and me on the flight manifest and says, “We'll miss you guys. The Colonel [Lt. Col. Larry Jackson] believes the toughest part of this war is still ahead of us.” Unfortunately, he's right.

The 4th Infantry Division—the 4th ID in military shorthand—is also known as the “Digital Division” because of all its high-tech equipment. These seventeen thousand highly trained and motivated soldiers were supposed to have entered the fight through Turkey, charging south toward Baghdad from bases that had been carefully negotiated by Pentagon planners months before the shooting began. But in the convoluted course between NATO headquarters outside Brussels, the UN in New York, and the State Department in Washington, the Turks said no and the plan fell off track.

Instead of fighting their way into Iraq, the 4th ID had to come in weeks later, through Kuwait, and then travel by convoy to Saddam's hometown over ground seized by other soldiers and Marines who had come before them. Many of the troopers in this prized unit regard their belated arrival as a terrible insult foisted upon them by the State Department. “They held a war and Colin Powell—the SOB—made us late,” volunteered one 4th ID officer.

Other officers and senior non-commissioned officers are much less concerned about the action they have missed and more anxious about what lies ahead. They have seen low-intensity combat before and know it can be just as deadly and demanding as any other form of armed conflict. “This is just another phase in what's going to be a long war,” says Lt. Col. Larry “Pepper” Jackson, commanding officer of 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment. “My mission is to hunt down HVTs [high-value targets—the U.S. military's euphemism for terrorist chieftains and enemy leaders], find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction, protect the oil refinery down the road, restore essential infrastructure [electricity, water, sanitation, and medical services], provide security for the local population, and protect my own force from attack by terrorists, Baathists, and criminals. I've got plenty to do, but I've got great troops to get the job done.”

“Great troops.” I've been hearing those words for most of my adult
life. I used to say that—and mean it—about the Marines I led in war and in peace. I have also heard those words a lot since arriving in Kuwait, before the start of the war. Now, having lived with the troops and seen them fight, it's apparent that they really are just that: great troops.

I have a standard of comparison. I first saw the carnage of combat as a rifle platoon commander in Vietnam. And I've been an eyewitness to the valor and horror of war in Lebanon, Central America, Afghanistan, and Israel. In my experience, there have never been brighter, better-trained, better-equipped soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen, and Marines than those now serving in Iraq. And the credit for this goes to the staff non-commissioned officers, chiefs, and junior officers who held the military together during the budget cuts, social engineering, fruitless deployments, and lack of training in the 1990s.

In the combat arms—infantry, artillery, armor, airborne, reconnaissance, and special operations—they are all male, since current law forbids putting women into combat units. That doesn't mean young American women aren't in harm's way. Women serve in combat support assignments in every branch of our Armed Forces. That means young American women like Army PFC Jessica Lynch, arguably the most famous female in recent U.S. military history, can easily find themselves under fire. Cpl. Amanda Hoenes of HMM-268 qualified as combat aircrew in Iraq, and during one terrible night over Baghdad in a CH-46, I watched her skillfully employ a .50-caliber machine gun to dispatch the enemy troops who were firing on us. Given our current force structure—with women constituting almost 14 percent of the Army and 6 percent of the Marine Corps—it's fair to say that this war could not have been fought without the fairer sex.

Without taking anything away from women like the Army's Jessica Lynch or the Marines' Amanda Hoenes and the role they play in our military, it's still important to recognize that nearly all those on
the ground who took the fight to Saddam are males. And while there is no typical soldier or Marine, it is possible to describe the average young American who carries a weapon into battle.

He's a volunteer, 19.6 years old, making him about six months older than his grandfather was when drafted to serve in World War II and Korea or his father was when conscripted for Vietnam. He isn't old enough to buy a beer, and if he were back home in the United States we'd call him a boy. But because he's in uniform and fighting a war, we call him a soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine.

This young man in uniform was probably a team sports athlete in high school and graduated somewhere in the middle of the pack, making him better educated than any prior generation in our military. Unlike many of his peers, he's never drawn an unemployment check and he doesn't ever want to.

He had a job in high school in order to buy a car that was already about ten years old. He bought the car to take his high school sweetheart out on dates, and when he left for a war halfway around the world, she promised to wait for him.

Unfortunately, unless they were married before his departure—about 15–25 percent of those who live near their military bases are—she is likely to be dating another guy by the time this Iraqi war veteran returns home. When our trooper does get back, he'll call her new beau a “wimp.” And she'll know he's right.

About three times a week, he grabs a few minutes to write home. When the mailbag arrives by helicopter, he's hoping to get a letter from his girl and his mom, though he'll never admit to the latter. If his girl or his mom sends him a care package with disposable razors, shaving cream, toothpaste, M&Ms, beef jerky, toilet paper, and baby wipes, he'll share them with his whole squad and be a hero for a day.

He has a short haircut and tight muscles, and wears a four-pound Kevlar helmet and an eighteen-pound flak jacket to work. He can march all day in one-hundred degree heat with a sixty-pound pack
on his back. This young man in uniform knows how to use every weapon in his unit and can fieldstrip and reassemble his own weapon in less than a minute—in the dark.

Over here he's gone weeks without bathing but cleans his weapon every day.

His rifle company gunny (gunnery sergeant in the Marines or sergeant first class in the Army) has been in combat before. Yet this is the first time he and his lieutenant have been shot at. Under fire he obeys orders instantly. But if asked, he'll always have an opinion on how to do something better. Often he'll be right.

He's been taught chemistry, physics, and ballistics, and can navigate with a map and compass but prefers the GPS he bought at the base exchange. When he catches a break, which isn't often, he reads paperback books; he loves thrillers.

Before joining the military he couldn't be bludgeoned into picking up his room, doing his laundry, or washing the dishes, but now he's remarkably self-sufficient. He prepares his own meals, washes and mends his own clothes, digs his own foxhole and latrine, and keeps his feet dry and his canteens full.

The kid who once wouldn't share a candy bar with his little brother will now offer his last drop of water to a wounded comrade, give his only ration to a hungry Iraqi child, and split his ammo with a mate in a firefight. He's been trained to use his body like a weapon and his weapon as if it were part of his body—and uses either to take a life or save one, because that is his job. But he's patient and compassionate too. He will offer his own food and water to enemy prisoners of war, and go out of his way to make certain that captured enemy wounded get medical help.

The youngster who used to stay in the sack until noon now exists on just three or four hours of sleep a day. When he comes home to the United States, he'll be, on average, twelve pounds lighter than when he left.

By now he's already had more responsibility and seen more suffering and death than most of his civilian contemporaries will see in their entire lifetimes.

He's learned a whole new vernacular of foreign-sounding words. It's not Iraqi Arabic, but military shorthand. He uses words like “CONUS,” “h-hour,” “zulu time,” “incoming,” “snafu,” and “fubar” that mean nothing to most civilians.

He's been told that grown men don't cry, but he has wept unashamedly in public over a fallen friend, because he knows heroes aren't defined by the way they die but how they live. And though he can now take profanity to the level of an art form, it's also likely that he has a Bible in his rucksack and isn't afraid to be seen reading it.

He's proud to be serving his country, reveres his commander in chief, and knows that he is respected in return. While he is modest about his own courage and military prowess, he's absolutely certain that his is the toughest unit in the U.S. Armed Forces.

When he gets home, he won't talk much about the horror of war and probably won't have post-traumatic stress disorder, but he will want more fresh milk, salads, and homemade cookies than anyone ever thought possible. And when he goes to a ball game or some formal event, he'll resent those who carelessly ignore the national anthem when it's played or don't join in when the pledge of allegiance is recited. He'll put his hand over his heart, gaze at the American flag, and sing or recite proudly and loudly.