House to House: A Tale of Modern War (2 page)

Right here we have the dichotomy that defines our military. We all wear the same uniform, but we might as well be from two different armies. We’re the frontline bullet-chewers. This officer embodies all that we despise about the other half. He is scrubbed; we are filthy. His skin has rarely seen the sun. We are sunburned and leathery. He is well fed and a bit on the pudgy side. Most of our platoon has lost over ten pounds since getting to Diyala. Maybe that’s because when we get a chance to eat, the appetite doesn’t stick around long. Our mess hall is an abandoned Iraqi morgue.

“Boys,” the major says, “Go tell your sergeant that Quarter Cav is here!” The major obviously thinks he has a flair for drama. He doesn’t realize that he’s just insulted both of us. Fitts and I are both staff sergeants; our rank insignia are not easily missed. Fitts turns bright red.

In our world, the world of the infantry, this major is a wannabe. He sits safe behind the wire, but tries to act the part of a combat leader. Most of the time we must simply suffer fools like him as we go about our business.

I’m prepared to do just that. Fitts, on the other hand, has no inner censor. He’s allergic to bullshit and fears nobody. He’s made plenty of enemies in our battalion for this, but you have to admire a man who reacts with pure honesty to every situation and never, not once, considers the consequences to his career. It has cost him, too. Several times he has lost rank, but he always earns his stripes back.

Fitts nods to the major and shouts across the road to his A Team leader, “Hey, Sergeant Misa! The Quarter Cav is here. What’s that? You don’t give a fucking shit either? Well, that makes two of us, two hundred-fifty thousand if you count the whole sector.”

My jaw drops. Fitts has just emasculated a major the same way he would a private. I wait for the fallout.

The major stammers, pushes his glasses up on his nose, turns to his driver and says, “Move on.”

The Humvee speeds up the highway for the safety of Forward Operating Base Normandy. The fact that we are willing to submit ourselves to filthy conditions and brutal fighting sometimes gives us a free pass with the other half of the army. It is the one card that saves our asses from charges of insubordination.

Sergeant Warren Misa steps over a rag-dolled Iraqi corpse and approaches Fitts. A muscular, Cebu-born Filipino who grew up in Cincinnati, Misa is the only man I’ve ever met who speaks Tagalog with an Ohio accent. We can barely understand him.

“Sergeant Fitts?”

“Yeah, Misa?”

“They are trying to get you on the radio. There’s trouble in Muqdadiyah again.”

We head for our Bradley Fighting Vehicles and pile inside. The interiors of these armored troop carriers are like mobile ovens in the Iraqi heat. In our fifty pounds of full battle rattle—Kevlar, body armor, ammo, weapon, water, and night vision—we sweat pounds off on every drive. It makes us long for the less terminal heat of the FOB outhouses.

The Brads lurch forward, leaving the shattered checkpoint in their dust. A short ride later, we reach downtown Muqdadiyah. It was here the day before that our platoon saw the heaviest fighting of its short combat career.

“Holy shit,” comes the voice of our platoon sergeant, James Cantrell, over the Bradley’s internal speaker. I peer out the viewing port and gasp.

We’re surrounded by coffins.

Fresh wooden ones line both sides of the street. In places they’re piled two and three high. Nearby, an old man stoops over two boards as he swings a hammer. I realize he’s building a coffin lid. More lids lie scattered on the street around him, blocking our path ahead.

Cantrell orders us to dismount. Our vehicle’s ramp flops down and clangs onto the street. We sprint out into the brutal morning sun. Buildings still smolder. A battle-damaged house has already been gutted by men wielding sledge hammers. All around us, interspersed among the coffins, women cry and children stare into space. Old men, survivors of Saddam’s reign of violence, the war with Iran, and Gulf War I, regard us with hollowed eyes.

We slowly make our way past the house we used as our casualty collection point the day before. Stacked out front are three caskets. I wonder if one of them houses the teenaged kid I had to shoot.

In the middle of yesterday’s fight, my squad reached a gated and walled house. Sergeant Hugh Hall, our platoon’s stocky, door-crushing bruiser, smashed the gate and led the way into a courtyard. Just as we got inside, the face of the house suddenly exploded. A chunk of spinning concrete slammed into Hall and sent the rest of us flying for cover. A sudden barrage followed as three Bradley armored vehicles opened up with their 25-millimeter Bushmaster cannons in response to the explosion of the enemy rocket. As the high-explosive rounds tore up the area outside of the house, the din was so intense I could hardly hear.

Over the radio, I made out Cantrell yelling—“Bellavia, give me a fucking SITREP.” Cantrell’s voice is the only thing that can rise above the cacophony of a firefight. He has a real gift there.

Confused and dazed, I initially failed to respond. Cantrell didn’t like this. “BELLAVIA, ARE YOU FUCKING OKAY?”

I finally found the wherewithal to respond. All I had heard was the Bradley fire, so I finally screamed back, “Stop shooting! You’re hitting our location.”

“Hey asshole, that wasn’t us. That was a fucking RPG,” Cantrell’s voice booms through the radio. “And here comes another.”

The top of a large palm tree in the courtyard suddenly exploded overhead. Cantrell and the other Bradleys immediately returned fire. Bits of wood and burned leaves rained down on us. Hall, already covered with concrete dust, dirt, and blood, blurted out, “Would they kill that muthafucka already?”

“Get inside and take the roof,” I holler over our Bradley’s fire.

The men moved for the door. As they forced their way inside, I peered around the corner and caught sight of a gunman on a nearby rooftop. I studied him for a moment, unsure whose side he was on. He could be a friendly local. We’d seen them before shooting at the black-clad Mahdi militiamen who infiltrated this part of the city earlier in the fight. Not everyone with a rifle was an enemy.

The gunman on the roof was a teenaged boy, maybe sixteen years old. I could see him scanning for targets, his back to me. He held an AK-47 without a stock. Was he just a stupid kid trying to protect his family? Was he one of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite fanatics? I kept my eyes on him and prayed he’d put the AK down and just get back inside his own house. I didn’t want to shoot him.

He turned and saw me, and I could see the terror on his sweat-streaked face. I put him in my sights just as he adjusted his AK against his shoulder. I had beaten him on the draw. My own rifle was snug in my shoulder, the sight resting on him. The kid stood no chance. My weapon just needed a flick of the safety and a butterfly’s kiss of pressure on the trigger.

Please don’t do this. You don’t need to die.

The AK went to full ready-up. Was he aiming at me? I couldn’t be sure, but the barrel was trained at my level. Do I shoot? Do I risk not shooting? Was he silently trying to save me from some unseen threat? I didn’t know. I had to make a decision.

Please forgive me for this.

I pulled my trigger. The kid’s chin fell to his chest, and a guttural moan escaped his lips. I fired again, missed, then pulled the trigger one more time. The bullet tore his jaw and ear off. Sergeant Hall came up alongside me, saw the AK and the boy, and finished him with four shots to his chest. He slumped against the low rooftop wall.

“Thanks, dude. I lost my zero,” I said to Hall, explaining that my rifle sights were off-line, though that was the last thing going through my mind.

Now a day later on a street surrounded by coffins and mourning families, their grief is too much for us to witness. These poor people had been caught in the middle, abused by the fanatics who chose to fight us. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi militiamen are the foot soldiers of the Shia uprising. They’re the ones who have created this chaos in Muqdadiyah. They use innocent people’s homes and businesses as fighting positions and ambush points.

The angst-filled scenes on the street cannot compare to what we find inside these battle-scarred houses. Yesterday, my squad kicked in one door and stumbled right into a woman wearing a blood-soaked apron. She was sitting on the floor, howling with grief. She looked to be in her mid-forties and had Shia tattoos on her face. When she saw us, she stood and grasped Specialist Piotr Sucholas by the shoulders and gave him a kiss on his cheek. Then she turned and laid her head on Sergeant Hall’s chest, as if to touch his heart.

I stepped forward and said in broken Arabic “La tah khaf madrua? Am ree kee tabeeb. Weina mujahadeen kelp?”
Do not be afraid. Injured? American doctor. Where are the mujahadeen dogs?

She bent and kissed my wedding ring. “Baby madrua. Baby madrua.” The despair in her voice was washed away by the sound of a little girl’s laughter. When the giggling child came in from the kitchen and clutched her mother’s leg, we immediately realized she had Down’s syndrome. I was struck by the beauty of this child. Specialist Pedro Contreras, whose heart was always the biggest in our platoon, knelt by her side and gave her a butterscotch candy. Contreras loved Iraqi kids. He had a six-year-old nephew back home, and seeing these little ones made him ache for the boy.

We didn’t see the injured baby at first—we still had a job to do. I moved upstairs, searching for an insurgent who had been shooting at our Bradleys. Halfway up, I discovered a smear of blood on the steps. Then I found a tuft of human hair. Another step up, I saw a tiny leg.

Baby madrua.

Ah, fuck. Fuck.

The child was dead. She was torn apart at the top of the stairs. Specialist Michael Gross had followed me partway up the stairs. I turned to him and screamed, “Get back down! I said get the fuck back down!” Gross stopped suddenly, then eased off the stairs, a wounded look on his face. I was overly harsh, but I didn’t want him to see what was left of this dead child.

Leaving the squad on the first floor, I went to clear the roof alone. Three dead goats lay bleeding on the rooftop next to a dead Mahdi militiaman dressed in black with a gold armband. He had died with an AK in hand, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher leaning against the wall at his side. My stomach churned. Was this the woman’s husband? Had he really endangered his family by shooting at us from his own rooftop? What kind of human does this? Revolted, I fled downstairs. The rest of the squad had found shell casings in the children’s bedroom. The Mahdi militiaman had been shooting from the window there as well.

I’ll never forget that house. The woman kissed each of us good-bye. As she touched her lips to my cheek, I pointed to my wedding ring and asked her where her husband was.

“Weina zoah jik? Shoof nee, shoof nee.”
Where is your husband? Show me, show me.

She spat onto the floor and cried, “Kelp.”
Dog.
I guessed he was the corpse on her roof. I touched my heart and tried to convey my feelings, but the language barrier was too great.

Her surviving daughter giggled and waved good-bye.

Now I wonder if the woman is among the crowd around the coffins. If I saw her, what would I say?

Cantrell orders us back into our Bradleys. I climb inside. The ramp closes behind me. We move out. Over the radio, we hear that our battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Newell, and his security detail have made contact with insurgents. We race off to support him.

Newell’s Humvee has a .50-caliber M2 machine gun in its turret. When we arrive, his gunner, Sergeant Sean Grady, is busy hosing down a grove of trees the insurgents are using for concealment. In response, a trio of rocket-propelled grenades land in front of his Humvee. Our battalion commander ignores the incoming and from the right seat he coordinates the fight with a radio in each ear. He is unflappable.

The radio chatter makes us tense and anxious to get into the fight.

Newell’s two-rig convoy takes fire from both sides of the highway. The volume swells as more rockets streak across the road. Suddenly, a small boy of perhaps five or six steps out into the street. Standing next to Newell’s Humvee, the kid holds up first two fingers, then five fingers.

Sergeant Grady swings his machine gun around. It is obvious that the boy is signaling to the Mahdi militiamen how many American vehicles and soldiers are present.

As Grady racks the bolt on his machine gun, Newell realizes what his gunner has in mind. “Don’t shoot the child,” he orders.

“Sir, the kid is giving our position away,” says Grady, his voice nearly drowned out by the swelling volume of incoming fire.

“Don’t shoot the child,” Newell reiterates, his voice stern. Grady gets the message. Our colonel possesses a black-and-white sense of morality. The kid, no matter what he’s doing, will not be targeted. At times, our battalion commander’s adherence to such niceties frustrates us, but I know in time we will thank him. Nobody wants a child on his conscience.

From the backseat of the Humvee, the Iraqi Defense Corps officer accompanying Newell leans forward and says, “Those men out there, sir, they are mine.”

Never intimidated, Newell ignores the Iraqi colonel and remains focused on fighting his task force. The Iraqi colonel falls silent and turns to look out his window. Grady sees him smiling. Is he a Mahdi militia sympathizer, too?

By the time my Bradley reached the fight and dropped its ramp, Staff Sergeant Colin Fitts is on the ground ahead of me, with his entire squad and my B Team. They’re advancing eastward under heavy fire. We’ve got to catch up with them and give him support. We sprint across open ground, making a mad dash through heavy but poorly aimed machine-gun fire. The professional in me derides their skill.

These bastards could kill us all if they’d just give us a two-finger lead.

The heat of the morning is already intense. By the time we reach a cluster of buildings, I am lightheaded and a bit fuzzy from the near-brush with heat exhaustion.