Sunrise Over Fallujah (10 page)

Ahmed rode with us to translate; we all gave him high fives as our small convoy started out.

Three days earlier a suicide bomber had blown up a truck in a northern Baghdad neighborhood. Two marines were injured and several Iraqi policemen were killed along with a bunch of civilians. Every time we passed a slow moving truck I tensed.

We reached the northern end of the city and started to pick up speed. Ahmed was in the middle of a story about his brother playing Little League baseball back in Ohio.

“I tried to teach him how to hit,” he said. “But no matter what I told him, all he could hit was little ground balls back to the pitcher.”

“You should have told him to keep his hands back,” Marla said. “That's why he doesn't hit the ball solid. He lets his hands get too far over the plate. He keeps them back until the last minute, he'll hit the ball solid.”

“How do you know that?” Ahmed asked.

“Because I can hit, numb face!” Marla said. “How do you think I know it? Anybody from Long Island can outhit anybody from—where did you say you were from? Nowhere?”

That was kind of hard on Ahmed and he shut up. I wanted to say something to ease the tension a little but couldn't think of anything.

We passed an outdoor café where men sat at the tables, watching everything that happened. I imagined them calling in to some Iraqi headquarters, reporting every move we Americans made.

Outside of Baghdad the vehicles from the 3
^rd
picked up speed. Iraqi trucks careened off the road when they saw us coming toward them. No one wanted to mess with the American army. They had seen what happened to people who confronted the Infantry.

We reached Ba'qubah at 1230 and I remembered that I had packed water but nothing to eat. I told Jonesy.

“Don't worry about it, man,” he said. “We'll just trade the Racks some ammo for raisins or whatever they be eating over here.”

Right.

Lieutenant Maire came over and asked Ahmed to find out where the animals that needed the medicine were. Ahmed said they were probably in the fields and waved toward some low hills in the distance. Maire looked at him, then looked at me.

“Tell this guy to remember whose side he's on,” he said.

“He's American,” Jonesy spoke up. “You didn't know that, sir?”

The lieutenant looked Ahmed up and down and then walked away. Creep.

Maire set up his security positions. Marla got up on our squad gun and Victor, who was with our medics, got upside on their Humvee. All in all we had twelve guys from the 3
^rd
and eight guys from our unit, so I thought we'd be okay. The Iraqis never seemed all that anxious for a direct confrontation.

Maire sent some of his men through some of the nearby houses. Everything looked cool. Captain Miller and the medics were walking around and Marla told me to go with them, which pissed me off.

“Who put you in charge of security?” I asked.

“So don't go with them,” Marla said. “Let them walk around by themselves and maybe get killed, okay?”

I walked with them.

Ba'qubah looked like Greek villages I had seen on National Geographic TV. The people were thin, old-looking. That was a funny thing in Iraq. You could tell who the important people were by how fat they were. Most people were thin, but all the muck-amucks looked heavy.

I was thinking again about Marla, about how she seemed to act and think more like a soldier than I did. It was a weird combination, a foxy-looking lady as tough as she was. I was wondering if she was really that tough inside or was it all an act when Owens, who was up ahead of Captain Miller and me, came back to us in a hurry.

“There are wounded people in the house up ahead,” she said.

Lieutenant Maire started giving orders and backing us out toward where the Humvees were parked. I felt a familiar tension in my gut and had to keep my hand tight against the side of my weapon to keep it from trembling.

We moved back to a defensive position and watched as a squad of guys from the 3
^rd
moved up.

The area we were in didn't have that many buildings. It was away from the small cluster of two-story houses, and I knew it could have been an ambush. There was a small grove of trees off to my right. The branches seemed silvered and shimmered in the heat.

“No problem! No problem!” Ahmed was waving his hands in the air.

The guys from the 3
^rd
let him through their line and listened as he talked. I couldn't hear what he was saying from where I was, behind the First Squad vehicle, but I could see he was pretty excited.

A sergeant said something to Ahmed and let him lead as they went forward. They went into a house, which was painted white and gleamed in the afternoon sun, while other soldiers looked through the windows. A moment later they came out. The guy from the 3
^rd
had lowered his piece. I guessed he thought things were cool.

Lieutenant Maire took Ahmed over to an older man and began a three-way conversation with Maire doing most of the talking. He screamed at the man in one breath and then at Ahmed in the next. Captain Miller got into the conversation and soon Maire was screaming at her. The guy could curse up a blue streak.

“Birdy!” Marla called down from the squad gun position. “Go see what's happening!”

Lieutenant Maire was getting into it with Captain Miller and I pulled Ahmed aside and asked him what was going on.

“The guy who asked for help is a village elder,” Ahmed said. “He said before that the animals were sick, but it's really wounded people.”

Technically, Miller outranked Maire, but he had taken charge of the mission.

“You can do what you want,
Captain
,” Maire was saying. “But I'm moving my men out now!”

“Have a nice trip, Lieutenant.” There was a calmness in Captain Miller's voice. She turned to Owens and said, “Bring the medical supplies.”

Lieutenant Maire knew that we might be helping wounded guys who had attacked Americans. There was also the possibility that the whole setup was some kind of trap. That wasn't anything Captain Miller didn't know, too; she had just made a decision to help whoever she found.

The afternoon sky was dazzling white above the small village. The room we entered was dark and smelly and for a moment I was blinded by the contrast. There were only a few candles lit against one wall.

When my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw that there were mats lined up along the floor. There were a few women on them, but most of the bodies lying side by side were children.

“What happened?” I asked Ahmed.

“The fedayeen,” Ahmed said. “They came and said everybody in the village had to fight against the invaders. The fedayeen knew the villagers were mostly from minor tribes and they didn't
care about them being killed. Anybody who refused to fight would be shot. They even gave the children guns.

“They put a bomb on the road and told the children to shoot when they saw an American convoy passing. The children didn't know how to shoot but they fired the guns.”

“Who made them shoot?” Marla asked. “The feda-
what
?”

“They're guerrilla fighters,” Ahmed said. “They don't have rules. No uniforms. They use any kind of weapons they find and just kill whoever is their enemy.”

“Including children?” Marla said; she turned away before Ahmed could answer.

Captain Miller had started attending to the children. Jonesy set up a portable light and I saw that there were fewer kids than I had thought at first. I counted seven. One body was completely wrapped and I figured that kid was dead.

“The convoy that passed here was marines,” Ahmed said. “When they heard the firing they shot back. The convoy was moving very fast. The bomb didn't go off so they never stopped, and none of them were injured. The fedayeen, there were maybe nine of them, had two trucks, old army trucks, and after the marines had passed they went down the same road. But first they beat some of the children. Even ones who had been wounded.”

“Why didn't they tell us that in the first place?” I asked.

“Would we have come if we knew that there were wounded Iraqis here?” Ahmed asked. “Or that they had fired on Americans?”

None of the children were crying. Kneeling, I looked at one small, round-faced boy of about eight or nine as Captain Miller examined him. A woman sat on the floor next to the child. Miller opened the child's shirt and he tried to stop her.

“I know it hurts, baby,” Captain Miller said. “I know it hurts.”

The woman reached over and opened the boy's shirt.

The wound was in the crease between his chest and shoulder. The area was dark and swollen. Captain Miller took a pair of scissors and cut away more of his clothing. His arm, a child's arm with round, doll-like muscles, was darker than his chest.

Captain Miller closed the boy's clothing and turned to the next child. The woman grabbed Miller's arm and looked into her face.

“I'm sorry,” Captain Miller said, and moved away.

Captain Miller and Owens treated the kids as best they could. Ahmed talked to some of the women.

“The child who is wrapped died this morning,” he said.

“Where are the men?” Jonesy asked.

“Some the fedayeen took them with them,” Ahmed said. “Some were killed. Others are hiding. It's all hard for them.”

Seeing the wounded kids made me feel like crap. This wasn't what the whole thing was supposed to be about. It wasn't what I wanted in my life, but I knew I didn't have a choice. I saw Jonesy talking with one of the kids. Then he sat down, took off his helmet, and started beating on it slowly. Then he started singing a
slow blues song. The kid didn't have any idea what Jonesy was doing, but he seemed to like the singing and the dark American soldier sitting next to him.

I said hello to a small girl, her face half hidden by a scarf. She tried to smile. Captain Miller had bandaged the side of her face and I could see the girl wince as her mouth moved.

Outside Ahmed took off his jacket and started helping a man digging what I thought would probably be a grave. We waited until it was deep enough for a small body, and then we started loading up.

Lieutenant Maire hadn't pulled his men out after all. He watched, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, as Captain Miller gave out the bandages and some painkillers to the women.

“How do you know there aren't a dozen enemy fighters hidden somewhere near here, Captain?” Maire confronted Captain Miller. “How do you know those bandages won't go directly to them?”

“I don't know, Lieutenant,” Captain Miller said. “Isn't that wonderful? To be able to do something with nothing more than the hope that it's the right thing? Isn't that wonderful?”

On the way back to the base, Ahmed, his clothes dirty with dark sweat stains under his arms from digging, thanked us.

“Hey, we're in the same army, bro,” Jonesy said.

Ahmed nodded but didn't say anything. That was the way things were getting to be. There were things you said and things you didn't.

I thought about the fedayeen forcing the children to shoot at marines. They were lucky that they hadn't been accurate, that the marines hadn't taken the few minutes it would have taken to wipe out the area, or hadn't called in Close Air Support to blow the building apart. The face of the boy with the chest wound came back to me. I had asked Captain Miller if it was possible that he would make it—she just shook her head.

“No, he's going to die,” she said. “Right now we don't have the facilities to take care of them.”

“So we just let them die?” I asked. “Even if they're children?”

“Even if they're children,” she said.

When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, I wondered why God made the insides of people. Why not just make solid people that could do the same things we did instead of all the little parts, veins, arteries, hearts, and things that could go so wrong. Why didn't God just keep it simple?

From a distance, say the eight feet between eyes and television screen, or perhaps at the silent impact of a long-range missile hitting a neatly framed target, combat seemed so simple. There was good and there was bad and the clear distances between the two held their own comforts. But as those distances narrowed, as they came within the range of smell and the feeling of warmth as a shell hit a target or the gentle shaking of the ground beneath you that stirred the constant fear within, the clarity disappeared.

I had seen Ahmed digging the grave for a stranger's child. There was something that Ahmed knew that we all knew: The
children belonged to all of us. It was a message the heart wanted to sing.

“Hey, Marla, what you think it's like getting shot?” Jonesy had taken off his boots and was soaking his feet in a basin of water. “You think it really hurts a lot?”

“The thing to do is to get Birdy shot first,” Marla said. “He's good with words. He can tell us just how it feels. Right, Birdy?”

I didn't answer, but Jonesy did it for me. He strummed the oud he had found and sang a song he made up called the “Got Shot and It Hurts Like Hell Blues.”

Back to Baghdad. You have to go through a maze of
cement barriers to come into the main areas, and a private engineering company was putting fences around the place. But our quarters are okay.

There are a lot of private security companies protecting the Iraqi bigwigs. They're mostly white, but there was also a group of sort of short guys who were dark.

“They're from Chile,” Victor Ríos said.

“We need scorecards,” said a big guy from the Civil Affairs construction crew who had brought over our mail. “That way at least we can tell who all the players are.”

“I don't care who the players are,” Jonesy said. “I just need to know who don't like my brown butt.”

I got a catalog from a shoe company in Florida, two offers for credit cards, and a letter from Mom.

The letter made me feel bad even before I opened it. Mom seemed so far away; home seemed so far away. I hadn't thought much about being away since we started the march to Baghdad, only about what I was seeing around me, and staying alive. I decided to save the letter for after supper.

Victor Ríos, who wasn't exactly chatty, cursed aloud as he read his letter and I knew I didn't want to know what was in it.

Marla stuck her head into our tent. “You studs decent?” she asked.

We were all dressed and she came in with Owens from the Medical Squad. They were carrying a portable television. Jonesy was out taking a leak, so they sat it on his bed.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“Traded it from the Arabs for two tanks and a portable foxhole,” Marla said. “We have one in our tent, so we'll trade you this one for your collective souls.”

“Yo, Owens! Ríos got a Dear John letter,” Harris said. “You need a new boyfriend?”

Ríos, who is the meanest-looking guy in the unit, got up on one elbow and gave Harris a look that would have chilled ice water at the freaking North Pole. “I didn't get no Dear John letter,” he said. “My woman don't want to leave me.”

“So what you cussing for?” Harris asked.

“My brother's got my mother all upset because he wants to join a gang,” Ríos said. “If I was home I'd bust him upside his head.”

“In a way, you already belong to a gang,” Owens said. She sounded cultured but looked unsure of herself as she tugged at the shoulder of her T-shirt. “We're like a big gang.”

“Yeah, man, but people respect what we do,” Ríos said. “We have a legit purpose. You go banging on the street and you don't have no win, you either going to jail or you going to end up dead. If I get nailed over here, everybody is going to say I was okay. Nobody is going to look at my mother and be turning their heads. You know what I'm saying?”

“Yeah, I hear you,” Owens said. She had got the television on and we watched as a distorted image moved diagonally across the small screen. “But this morning Captain Miller was saying she wasn't sure what we're doing over here.”

“Hey, Jamil, what you want America to do over here?” Harris called to the old Iraqi man who sat in the corner. It was the right question, but I didn't think that Harris gave a damn about the answer.

“I can tell you only what we want to do,” Jamil said. “We want to live in peace and worship Allah in peace and walk down the streets in peace. Islam is a religion of peace, true Islam. This sounds simple but it's not. We have Allah in our hearts, but sometimes it's hard to hear the true voice when the stomach is making so much noise. Americans can't understand that.”

“Yo, man, you people got oil over here,” Harris said as Jonesy
came back into the tent. “If you got oil, you ain't got nothing to worry about.”

“Where is my oil, my friend?” Jamil stood up, opened his shirt, and turned slowly around. “Where do you think I'm keeping it?”

“Close your shirt,” Marla said. “You're getting Owens upset.”

We turned to the television and worked at getting the news. The news was important to us. We gathered around the set, all of us edging closer, turning away as we saw things at times that we didn't want to see, or that we knew weren't true.

The broadcast started with images of Iraqis in Baghdad waving flags, and celebrating. Humvees and tanks rolled down the streets past smiling children. There was a quick cut to a poster of Saddam Hussein on which somebody had drawn horns.

The press conference was the usual: a general talking about our progress. There was a map with arrows on it.

“Anyone see Ba'qubah on that map?” Owens asked.

No one did. All we saw was that we were the winners. Our side had won and the Iraqis were glad that we were there. I looked over at Ahmed. He was watching the television intently.

“Ahmed, what do you think?” I asked.

“How do I know, man?” he said.

“You got to listen to the president,” Harris said. “He's got a plan and we're just following it.”

“Harris, you can suck up without even having anybody around to suck up to,” Marla said.

“Yo, Miss Molly, you're lucky you a woman.” Harris stood up, feet apart.

“Looking at you,” Marla said, “I can believe it!”

Marla and Owens left. Luckily they didn't take the television with them.

The guys rapped for another half hour, then started scrounging around for food. The 3
^rd
had set up kitchens and anybody could eat there, so we got some hot food. Not bad. Definitely better than MREs.

May 1st, 2003

Dear Robin
,

I have just come from Thursday night services. They were wonderful and everyone prayed for all the young men and women over there. I was watching the news this morning and saw that tanks headed into the city over there. The people look friendly enough and they were smiling on the television. I saw the women were not wearing veils or anything. I thought they wore them all the time.

Things are going well over here. Well, almost well. I told Sister Jenkins from church that you were in the army and she said she didn't believe me because you were too young. She had the nerve to tell me that right to my face! Then she told Wanda ( Rett's cousin) that she had heard you were in jail. You would think that as old as that woman is she would be a little less
evil. She says she has arthritis but I think it's just the meanness gathering in her bones.

Two little stores down the street closed. Some of the people are worried that white people will move in and take them over but I don't care, because the stores needed fixing up. Something is also finally being done with those buildings on Lenox Avenue.

LaKeisha, Edie Law's oldest girl, was talking about dropping out of school, which was supposed to get me all upset. I told her to go on and drop out because they need some more people serving up them hamburgers and sodas for minimum pay.

On the television I saw a church in Alabama, a white Baptist church I think, gathering food and stuff to send to the boys overseas. Do you need anything? Do you want the church to send you anything? You tell me and I will do everything I can to get it to you.

Robin, I love you more than anything and pray to God for you to be safe every night. Please take care of yourself. You were always the brave type, but I want you to be careful and remember those who love you at home.

Your father is not watching his high blood pressure and I need to get on his case but I don't want to hear his mouth about me nagging him. You know he still thinks he's nineteen. He sends you his love and says for you to be careful over there.

Your loving mother, Jackie

I lay on my cot and felt exhausted. It was the way I was always feeling lately. I was up too high too much of the time to really
relax. I thought about what Mama had said, that I was the hero type.

No, Mama, I'm not the brave type. Not over here where the booming goes through you, where explosions in the distance shake your whole body. It's hard to be brave when you can stumble across a world of hurt around any corner, where dying becomes so casual you don't even notice it sitting next to you.