Kaboom (17 page)

Five minutes later, Staff Sergeant Boondock's voice ripped across the radio net.

“White 1, this is White 3. We got some real shady mother fuckers low-crawling onto the road, coming down from the canal. It looks like two . . . yeah, two personnel.”

I had been lying down in the back of my vehicle, reading T. E. Lawrence's war memoir. I bolted straight up when I heard Staff Sergeant Boondock's report and started studying my map. The White 3 vehicle was on the complete other side of the Stryker diamond, oriented due south, overwatching Route Islanders.

“Keep watching them,” I said, stating the obvious while I sorted through my conflicting thoughts.

Were they sure they'd seen two guys low-crawling? It was night. They still hadn't done anything wrong yet. Technically. Not yet. Were they sure? Why were they low-crawling? A few units in the brigade had been shot at, ourselves included, but no one had shot back yet. There was a reason for that. After all the briefings and lectures about previous units' war crimes, cover-ups, scandals, and prison sentences, everyone was trigger shy. No one would say it, but everyone felt it. Had I left my rules-of-engagement card in the laundry? Why were they low-crawling? Why couldn't we just shoot, again? They hadn't displayed any hostile purpose. Yet. It wasn't just night, it was
midnight. Farmers wandered around that road all the time. So did kids. But it was midnight. I used to sneak out at midnight as a kid. Staff Sergeant Boondock said they were shady. Were he and his men sure? Could they be sure with night vision? Could they ever be sure with night vision? Were they fucking sure?

“Any heat signatures?” I sputtered out.

Five or so seconds passed before Staff Sergeant Boondock responded. “Roger! Roger! My golf [gunner] reports that they have set down a boxlike object 250 meters from our position.”

Three simple words hung on my tongue like a swing: Light them up. A quick burst or two of 50-caliber machine gun rounds would suffice. Although I had come to Iraq prepared to kill, I hadn't come needing to. But now—kill or be killed. Never had this war been so clear, so pure, so obvious, so clean. Light. Them. Up.

But I didn't give that order. I couldn't. Or maybe I wouldn't. Not yet. They hadn't dug anything yet and thus hadn't emplaced anything. I couldn't stop thinking about the investigation a shooting would inevitably initiate, a truth that mortified me later in hindsight. I understood that such retrospective studies were usually healthy for a military unit, and I was more than familiar with the COIN principles of precision and restraint. Part of what made an American soldier an American soldier was that he fought with rules that sometimes hindered him in an attempt to keep sight of the ideals and principles that led him to fight in the first place. But I also understood that events that started out just like this became war crimes. I knew that events that started out just like this led to soldiers going to jail. The blunt truth of it all was that we had no idea who was actually down on Route Islanders, and because of that, we couldn't open fire. Everything was too grey, and we currently lived in a black-and-white world and served in a black-and-white army. It was still just too damn grey.

I kicked out my Bravo section's dismounts, one team led by SFC Big Country, the other by Staff Sergeant Boondock. They stood behind the cover of their Strykers and were on order to move south to the two personnel's location. I told Sergeant Axel, the 3 vehicle's gunner, to beam the targets with a bright naked-eye laser in order to let them know we were watching. Then I told him, “If they start digging, or don't stop whatever it is they're doing, or do anything other than totally freeze, open fire and engage the targets.” There. I had satiated the gods of “what if” and found a way for my soldiers to still do their job. It was the best I could come up with under the circumstances.

“Roger. Will comply!” Sergeant Axel responded.

I had given the order to kill. Haughty enough to condemn two individuals to The End because they had been dumb enough to be seen in a war of shadows. Somewhere in the time-space continuum, the boy who had cried after his first fistfight—not because he was hurt but because he thought he had done something to upset the instigator and didn't yet understand the concept of bullying—hung himself with a calendar rope.

“X-ray, this is White 1.” It had been a few minutes since I had sent up a situation report to troop headquarters. Remembering to do so at this precise moment became my biggest regret of the whole ordeal. I still don't know why I did it.

“This is X-ray.” It was one of the TOC NCOs.

“X-ray, we have a possible IED emplacement happening time now, at our location. Grid to follow. We're employing ROE and will engage with fire if detainment is no longer a viable option.”

“Negative, White 1, you will not engage!” Captain Whiteback now spoke on the other end of the radio call. What the hell was he still doing up?
I wondered. I wouldn't have called this up if I'd thought he was still awake. “Attempt to detain the individuals. Do not open fire unless the individuals attempt to directly engage you.”

“This is White 1 . . . I copy the only way we can open fire, even after positive identification, is if these guys open fire at us with rifles or try to detonate the IED on us?”

“Roger,” came the reply. “You have to be absolutely sure.”

I sighed, disbelievingly, and switched back to the platoon net. “You monitor the commander's traffic, 3-Golf?”

Sergeant Axel's voice was so sharp, it could have cut through steel. “This is 3-Golf. Roger.”

I howled and ripped the hand mic out of our radio, throwing it into the back of the Stryker, waking up a very confused Suge. Truthfully, I was angrier at myself for calling up a situation report than I was with the commander for making a commander's call. Sergeant Axel did as he was told and lasered the two shapes. They stood up and darted back into the canal. I instructed the two dismount teams to pursue them. After forty-five minutes of searching, nothing had been found but two sets of muddy footprints behind some broken reeds.

“What the fuck?” Staff Sergeant Boondock raged over the radio. “It's not like these goddamn mother fuckers are the fucking Vietcong and tunneled the fuck out of here. Where the fuck did they fucking go?” He was frustrated. We were all frustrated.

I instructed the dismount teams to move back north, sweeping the road, to investigate the boxlike object Sergeant Axel had initially spotted. Specialist Tunnel and Private First Class Das Boot (recently promoted) stumbled over a compact, bricklike object covered in tumbleweeds on the east side of the road.

“What's that?” Specialist Tunnel asked.

“I don't know,” PFC Das Boot said. He leaned down, pulled aside the tumbleweeds, scratched, and sniffed.

Staff Sergeant Boondock walked up behind the soldiers. “What the fuck are you guys doing? Das Boot, are you high? Back the fuck away from that thing!”

After marking the object with Chem-Lights, the army term for glowsticks, we called EOD and waited. In the mean time, the engineer unit had finished up their pothole fillings, so they waited with us. EOD arrived an hour later, and it turned out the brick was a medium-sized pressure-plate EFP designed
specifically to penetrate Coalition force armored vehicles. EOD detonated it without incident, and we continued our escort mission deep into the night. We didn't finish up until four in the morning, and we all went straight to bed. No one said anything to anyone about what had happened. There wasn't really anything to say.

The next day, the platoon played enough of the Guitar Hero video game that they didn't care about the rules of engagement incident anymore. I still did. While talking on the back porch, Staff Sergeant Boondock told me that he wouldn't have given the order to engage like I had. I didn't believe him. He also said that the rules now were too constrained, too political, totally different from his last tour in Iraq, and that no Joe's life was worth one lousy dead hajji.

“Shit's always clear in hindsight, sir,” he said. “Nothing made sense last night, and that's a fucking fact. All that matters is that we're all still here. If this is the most fucked up thing we deal with on this deployment, we've had it easy.”

Later that week, an individual detained by a unit to our south admitted to attempting to emplace an IED at the exact spot and on the exact date we had observed him. Like most emplacers, he was just a poor teenager who had been paid $20 for his act, which he used to feed his family for a week. Other than identifying his emplacing partner, he knew nothing of intelligence value and was later sentenced to six months at Camp Bucca. His partner's dead body was found some four months later in Baghdad, next to a pre - maturely detonated IED he had been putting into the ground. Sometimes I wondered how he spent those four months of borrowed time.

March 25, 2008, day:
The Gravediggers and I were out in sector conducting security sweeps in the eastern villages. A radio call from Captain Whiteback informed us that Muqtadah al-Sadr had lifted the freeze on attacks against Coalition forces by his militia, Jaish al-Mahdi. Half of my men said, “Fuck.” The other half said, “Fuck yeah.” We spent the rest of the day patrolling the Shia havens of Saba al-Bor, but all appeared normal.

March 25, 2008, night:
The steady purring of distant automatic fire stirred me out of sleep an hour after I collapsed into it. A second passed, and then
my entire room shook with inevitability while a M240B machine gun on the roof of the combat outpost returned fire directly above us. I rolled out of my bed, getting my legs wrapped up in my poncho liner, breaking the fall to the ground with my face. Staff Sergeant Bulldog barreled through our door like a runaway freight train. “It on now! Oh yeah, it be on now!” he boomed. We all started throwing on our gear in great haste, with the notable exception of SFC Big Country, who yawned loudly from his bed and scratched his head. “You probably have time to put on pants, sir,” he advised, causing me to look down at a pair of boxer shorts contrasting sharply with the combat boots, body armor, and helmet I had managed to get on my body. I peeked my head out of the doorway and didn't see any terrorist hordes coming up the stairs, so I silently agreed with my platoon sergeant's assessment. The gunfire above us continued while I found my pants.

Five minutes later, my platoon and I sprinted out of the combat outpost to the dark shadows in the motor pool we believed were still our Strykers. We locked and loaded on the run. The gunfire that originated at our location had spread across the city almost instantaneously.

The reports came rushing in. “Tracer rounds to the west, Lieutenant.” “Flares to our east.” “Audible contact with shots to our south, sir.” There was a bright flash and then a resounding BOOM. “Umm. You probably heard it LT, and saw it, but that was an explosion to our north.”

The firing from the roof had stopped altogether by this point, until we heard a burst of rounds strike the outside wall of the outpost directly to our front. The hissing of M4 bullets spraying above us reminded us that other soldiers were still on the roof, and they were firing at something on the other side of the wall.

“Get into the fucking vehicles and get redcon-1!” we yelled to one another.

March 26, 2008, day:
I stood in the street, looking at a building with a sloping roof and two cannonball-sized holes in the middle of it. We had spent many hours zigzagging through the various Shia neighborhood cores, chasing a lot of ghosts and a lot of gunfire but finding nothing. Only now, in the light of the morning, did we comprehend the full scope of JAM's resurgence. The aforementioned holes were the gift from the main gun of an Iraqi army BMP (armored personnel carrier), and the aforementioned building was the local Sahwa headquarters.

The one Son of Iraq who showed up for work this day expressed his displeasure with the situation. I thanked him for his devotion to duty and asked
him where his coworkers were. He looked at me like I had a dick growing out of my forehead and said, “At home, of course. It is not safe here.” I asked him why he wasn't at home then. “Because my father kicked me out and told me to go to work, and I have nowhere else to go.”

Phoenix laughed at the Sahwa member and asked if we could go visit one of his girlfriends. “It depends,” I said. “Can her mom make chai?”

March 26, night:
We spent the night conducting a counter-IED OP on the southern end of Route Islanders. Many hours in my vehicle were spent discussing the finer intricacies of deer hunting, a pastime at which both PFC Smitty and Private Hot Wheels considered themselves expert. I couldn't tell if they were more horrified or shocked to find out that the first time I had fired a gun of any sort was in a military uniform. I, in turn, explained to them that Suge Knight was an interpreter, not an interpolator.