I Lost My Love in Baghdad (7 page)

We stopped to move gas cans away from the road.

“They make great fireballs with the IEDs,” explained Lieutenant James Martin, who used to work in financial services in New York City before 9-11. After 9-11 he joined the Marine Corps. “I hate to do it, because that's how those Iraqis make a living, selling the gas in those containers. But we have to.”

There was a tree branch in the middle of the road—another possible IED. Martin approached on foot, poked at it with his boot, then dragged the branch to the side of the road. An hour later, we came upon a half-open cardboard box. Martin stepped out, raised his rifle, and gave the box a kick. Nothing. Out in the field, troops often didn't wait for the EOD units; they preferred to walk up to suspected IEDs and check them out for themselves.

Martin told me he once kicked a car tire inner tube, and all he heard was a thud—a 155mm mortar shell made in South Africa was on the inside. “I confirmed it was an IED.” He laughed.

A little later, the Humvee's radio sounded off. Another platoon on patrol from the 2-2 had gotten hit with a bomb. No one was killed, but the machine gunner on the Humvee had been hit with shrapnel. The gunner in my Humvee, hearing the news, peeked down inside the truck to get clarification.

“What got hit?” the gunner asked.

“The right side of his face,” one marine answered. “Don't worry about it. You don't need the right side of your face, do you?”

Lance Corporal Freebase, still driving, remarked over his shoulder to me, “I told you, drive around and don't get blown up.”

Martin's platoon dropped me off at another, smaller outpost near Karma. Karma was like a suburb of Fallujah, a rural town of a few thousand people about fifty miles west of Baghdad. Karma had become a Sunni insurgent and Al Qaeda hotspot.

The marines in Karma wanted to take me on a foot patrol the next day. They told me to wear fatigues when I went out with them. I was uncomfortable with this—journalists aren't supposed to dress like marines. If a sniper sees me in civilian clothes, they said, I'd be the first one shot. I wore the fatigues. They also told me to shave, because a beard would make me look like an Iraqi interpreter, or “turp.” Insurgents liked to shoot and kill Iraqis who work with Americans, the marines explained. But I didn't shave. I wanted to have my beard once the embed was over, to look as much as possible like an Iraqi. There were obvious limits—I was still a white boy with blue eyes. But, at least in theory, I tried to blend into the culture as much as I could.

My anxiety the night before the foot patrol wasn't a fear of death or dismemberment. It was that the last thing Scott had said to me before I headed off to Fallujah: “Don't go on any random patrols. Just report the video-game story.” (A story I was working on about how soldiers spent their free time. The editors in New York thought we'd been doing too many embed stories lately, and they were pressuring Scott to not put his correspondents at risk for stories that might or might not run.) And here I was, not twenty-four hours into my trip, going out on a random patrol. But what else was I going to do? Sit around the base and chat? I was worried, though. If I get hurt, I thought, Scott's going to be really pissed off at me. It's going to seem like I fucked up, like I couldn't follow a simple instruction—don't go on a random patrol.

It was night on the small outpost. I called Andi to check in. I was wearing my helmet and body armor with boxers and flip-flops, as you weren't allowed out in the open without full protection. Andi was going to a wedding in Boston with her friend Keri. All the guys are going to hit on you, I told her, so be careful. I felt a little insecure from this far away. I didn't like the thought of her going to a wedding without me. Make sure you tell everyone you have a boyfriend, I said.

The next morning, I drove in an open-back Humvee to OP2, or Outpost 2. I was surprised that the marines were still traveling around in the backs of trucks without armor, as exposed as they would be if they were lounging in the back of a pickup truck. The marines told me that they never got the good equipment; their battalion didn't have enough of the newer “up-armored” Humvees to go around. They dropped me off at OP2. OP1 had been truck-bombed a few weeks earlier, injuring four marines, so they'd moved OP2 farther back from the main road leading into Karma. It was a shitty house, concrete and no glass, with two floors and part of the roof missing. About twenty marines lived there in the most spartan conditions.

The 2-2 Marines walked the streets of Karma every day “engaging the local population” and “showing their presence,” a strategy to let them know who runs the place.

Karma was hostile. The locals didn't wave.

Corporal Khalid Aziz, a twenty-four-year-old veteran on his second tour, led the patrol. He explained what to watch out for: “If it's too quiet, you know something is up, because all these motherfuckers know when something is going to happen.” A Moroccan by birth, though raised in Baltimore, Khalid was the rare marine who spoke Arabic, a fact he tried to hide, because once the locals knew they directed all their complaints at him. And there was plenty to complain about. Earlier in the month, two men, two women, and two children in a car failed to stop at the extensive barriers and warning signs near OP2. A marine standing guard fired at the car. He shot the tires out. The car kept coming forward. He kept firing. The two women were killed, one of them the mother of the children in the backseat.

Why didn't they stop?

Bad driving, dusty windshield, human error, stupid fucking Iraqis, who knows.

The Rules of Engagement hadn't saved the family. The ROEs were always a popular topic. The fact that they weren't allowed to shoot to kill right away irritated the marines. The enemy always had the advantage—they could shoot first. As Khalid told me, “You're supposed to wave, throw a flashbang, say hi, make a baloney-and-cheese sandwich, shoot in front, shoot the tire, shoot the other tire, have some tea, shoot the engine, and
then
shoot the windshield.”

We started out on the patrol. There were four marines and five Iraqi Army soldiers on foot. I had on a Camelback, a water bottle you strapped onto your back so you could drink with your hands free. I carried a notebook. The morning patrol wasn't too eventful—a stroll past a school where insurgents frequently launched ambushes, then on to a mosque where Khalid told me they hid all their weapons but which was nonetheless off-limits to search; then to a cemetery, again off-limits, where the insurgents stored more weapons. We went into a house for an activity called the “Yellow Pages” or the “knock and talk.” The purpose was to take photos and record the names of the men in the household and to poke around and see what there was to see. The men in this particular house did not look happy at the intrusion. We took a break, and the family offered us water. I sat down on a couch next to a marine and smoked a cigarette.

It was a little tense. An Iraqi man, one of the family's sons in his twenties, glared at each of the Americans, including me. I asked the marine sitting next to me if this was the usual reaction.

“This is nothing,” he said. “One time, we went into a house to do the knock and talk. One of our guys went up on the roof. The lieutenant was talking to the head of the household in the kitchen. All the women were waiting outside. We heard this sound, like it was raining, and then a woman screaming and we could hear her vomiting. The woman comes running into the kitchen in tears. She's pregnant. The marine on the roof had decided to relieve himself. He pissed all over this guy's pregnant wife.”

“Winning the hearts and minds, right?”

The marine shrugged. “Yeah, we apologized,” he said.

At a traffic intersection known as the Lolly Pop because of a large white circular sign, Khalid asked me if I had ever seen a flashbang. A flashbang is a grenade that just makes a really loud noise. “WHAWHOOM,” he said. “Watch this.” He threw the flashbang in front of an eighteen-wheeler. It went off. The Iraqis standing in the street flinched and looked startled. The eighteen-wheeler slammed on its brakes. “That's the flashbang,” Khalid said and smiled.

That afternoon, I went out on a second foot patrol. This time we walked down the main street, a passage cramped with market stalls, shops, people, and cars. Most of the traffic stopped when the drivers saw the marines on foot, except for a yellow car that kept inching forward. A marine fired his rifle at the ground in front of the car, two quick shots. Pop, pop. The car slammed on its brakes. The marine approached the car. When he got to the window, an Iraqi man sitting in the backseat vomited. “Probably because he's scared,” the marine told me. Toward the end of the patrol, we heard a loud explosion about three kilometers away. The radio came to life: Another platoon had been hit. Four casualties. A gray plume of smoke appeared on the horizon. “That's from the IED,” a marine pointed out to me.

We walked back. As we passed by the school, I was about to step on what looked like a pothole in the pavement. The staff sergeant walking behind me casually said, “Sir, you may want to stay away from that, that's a spot where they've blown up IEDs.” I moved across the street.

We'd been on patrol for two hours. I was tired and dehydrated and wondered how anybody did this every day over the course of a seven-month combat tour. What were the odds that you'd survive this shit? There were roughly 210 days of patrolling on a tour. About three quarters of those days, you're out on three patrols a day. That means some 472 extremely dangerous missions, invariably carried out while sleep-deprived and drenched in sweat and carrying at least thirty pounds of armor and equipment. The story I wrote for the
Newsweek
website was headlined “A Daily Dance With Death.” The odds of becoming a casualty were significantly higher than the Pentagon made it sound. Yes, there were more than a hundred thousand troops in Iraq, with an average of two being killed a day; but the vast majority were support troops, those who never left the bases. Military officials estimated that only about 20 percent of the troops regularly left the FOBs. If you took that into account, then if you were on the front lines, your odds of being killed became more like one in ten thousand. One in ten thousand, 472 times.

It's a cliché at this point to talk about the honor of the troops, how warm and fuzzy and patriotic they can make us feel. But I was amazed at the bravery of these kids. They'd signed on the dotted line in the recruiter's office because they felt an intense need to serve their country, or they were looking for action and adventure, or they were struggling and wanted to make something out of their lives. They were between eighteen and twenty-eight, they chewed tobacco and had had juvenile records and tattoos and three kids before the age of twenty-two. They were poor kids from South Carolina and middle-class kids from Wisconsin and Hispanics from California. They were calm in the face of deadening fear and boredom. I liked them. They were living in a world where a fuckup could get them killed, or their friend killed, or maybe they would kill someone by mistake. And even if they didn't fuck up, they could still get killed. The pressure was enormous. Theirs was a world I looked upon with awe sometimes and as total bullshit other times. It was odd to see them here, so flawed and scared and macho and young, and to think of them as an applause line in a politician's stump speech. But they were also killers. They were highly trained in the art of eliminating other human beings.

After the two patrols, half a dozen of the marines sat with me outside the decaying outpost. We talked in the glow of green neon lights as it grew darker. I sat on a canvas tailgating chair; the marines sprawled out on water coolers, foldout metal chairs, or on the ground. They had their concerns. One explained that he had been asked to come to his high school to speak to the students. A student asked him if he would kill an eight-year-old if the eight-year-old was pointing a gun at him. “If the eight-year-old had a gun,” said the marine, “I'd kill the eight-year-old.” He said the crowd back home gasped, but here the circle of marines laughed at the story. They were not baby killers, though a baby might die every once in a while.

Lance Corporal Andrew Gladue, twenty-two, from Georgia, was on his second tour in Iraq. He had a slight mustache and short black hair matted on his forehead. He inhaled a Marlboro and asked me if I could answer something.

“Sure,” I said.

“Back home, do they think we're fighting a war?”

“I don't know how much time people really spend thinking about—”

“We think we're fighting a war,” he said.

The next morning I went back to Camp Fallujah, arriving at 4
A.M.
and going to the Media Tent, a dusty beige canvas quarters with a plywood floor and rickety iron bunk beds with stained mattresses. Only one air conditioner worked. I passed out quickly, and slept well until my T-Mobile woke me up. It was Andi.

“Hi, baby,” I said, stumbling out of the tent to get better reception. “How are you?”

“I'm good, I'm leaving the wedding and I was thinking of you.”

“That's good.”

“Some guys asked us to go out to a bar, but we didn't.”

“That's good.”

A pause.

“How are you?” she said. “Is there anything you want to tell me? My third eye senses something is wrong.”

“Well, I'm tired right now. I just got back from these patrols, but yeah, I guess I wanted to let you know that I am going to be here for two more weeks, which means I won't get home until like October fifteenth.”

Silence.

I explained it wasn't a big deal, just two more weeks. Scott had asked me if I wanted to stay longer, and I didn't want to pass up the opportunity. The more time I could spend on the ground there, the better, I explained.

“You're not coming home, are you? You're going to stay there.”