Ryan Smithson Read online

  We widen the road for the military. We cultivate dirt for the local economy. Same mission. Two different goals. Both of them equally our duty.

  There’s an eight-hour delay between Iraq and the United States. Millions of content American families will be sitting down for dinner eight hours from now. They’ll be tired from work. Their boss doesn’t give them the recognition they deserve. They’ll be hungry for dinner and for the evening news. They’ll be ready for the daily body count, the daily Bush-bashing, the story from Iraq. And that’s all it will be to them: a story, a dramatic saga full of twists and turns and epic heroism. It’ll be entertainment, the only thing they’ll ever learn about the Iraq war.

  They won’t see this piece of war footage:

  “On a mission to restore a bridge for the military and to cultivate farmland for a local Iraqi family…” A voice-over won’t introduce…

  SPC Jeremiah Ingold on his first mission, standing next to a Humvee. Dressed in desert camo, body armor, and a helmet, waiting for his turn on the dump truck. To his right, palm trees overlook an embankment that runs down to the Tigris River. Behind him dump trucks pour dirt into piles, bulldozers even the piles out.

  Ingold watches for potential hazards. He’s holding his M16, barrel down, by its pistol grip, taking a drag off the cigarette between his fingers.

  And America won’t see the changeover between cameras…

  To a young Iraqi boy, no more than eight, walking down a lonely desert road toward this GI and his cigarette. This young boy wears a dirt red shirt with holes in the collar and under the armpits. He is shoeless. He is carrying a clear, plastic bottle. Its contents are speckled and brown, like water from a mud puddle. Actually, it’s from the Tigris River.

  The boy smiles. He waves to Ingold.

  Ingold waves back. To the boy he says, “I hope you’re washing your feet with that.”

  The boy doesn’t understand.

  Ingold asks him, “Are you drinking that?” and motions to his mouth with his hand.

  The little boy nods.

  “Oh, hell no,” Ingold says to this eight-year-old without shoes.

  Ingold reaches into a cardboard box in a nearby Humvee.

  Content American families everywhere won’t see the beaming gratitude on the boy’s face when Ingold shows him what drinking water is supposed to look like: clear and sparkling. There won’t be a voice-over with some cutesy little pun about a clear future for Iraq.

  Because it doesn’t matter either way, does it? Bombs still go off and people still die for no good reason. Good deeds mean nothing when they’re cast in the shadows of bad ones, right?

  America will never sit down and feel a lick of guilt as they watch this boy and this soldier in their one true moment of glory. Because, unlike this little boy who won’t be on their televisions, they’ve never had tears in their eyes over a bottle of water.

  They’ll never see…

  The way our efforts are shunned. At first we don’t care. In a way it makes us proud. It’s humility. And selfless service is truly selfless if you’re never recognized. All in due time, we tell ourselves. America will know. All in due time.

  This is what we say. This is what we actually believe. The truth always comes out in the end. But somehow the truth doesn’t come out.

  So there’s nobility. Hanging on for the sake of sharing our story. Because we realize that the truth can come only through us. So we tell people. We yell it right in their ears. But these letters and e-mails, they never break out further than with our family members. For the bad news is what people want to hear. Oh, sure, it’s still the truth. The half of the truth that sells newspapers.

  And this truth is what buries us in frustration. We become consumed with anger. No acceptance, no sympathy. Just pure, boiling anger. The way people don’t understand, the way they can’t understand—it’s like a back alley full of hot metal. The only people who understand are stuck here with us, feeling the same outrage and same fear that we’ll die without a chance to share our story.

  And there’s nothing we can do. No words or e-mails or made-for-TV movies we can produce to show our side. No Iraq war memoir that can explain what it feels like to watch our efforts kicked out of the way for the juicy car bomb footage. The good things we do and did, and the way our country tries to take those away from us.

  “Support the Troops” isn’t the way people feel. It’s a slogan. Just like “The War on Terror.” Just like “We Will Never Forget.”

  Anger is lonely.

  It’s the sheer loneliness of manning a .50 caliber machine gun at two o’clock in the morning. It’s a cold, wet perimeter watch on our first mission. It’s gazing up at the empty desert sky.

  In the center of a Middle Eastern desert, no moon out, our platoon running in blackout, and the night sky. The Milky Way, no longer just milky but a streak of white paint. It’s opaque and filled with brilliance that can’t be seen through the polluted mess we call air in the United States.

  I slip on the night vision goggles. You have no idea how many stars there are. I once heard that for every grain of sand on the earth, there is a star in the sky. I never believed it until I saw the sky in night vision. At least three shooting stars per minute. All night long.

  There’s so much beauty and no one with which to share it. I am alone.

  No one really wants to hear this story. And no one who hears this story will truly hear it. For the beauty of war is surrounded by the gruesome. And that damn eight-hour delay filtering everything.

  THE TOWN THAT ACHMED BUILT

  We move out of Tent City and into a concrete building. The best thing about a hard building is no more mortar bunkers, just report inside. But there is some work to be done if we want to live comfortably.

  The best part about being engineers is our access to supplies. Most units would have to find another unit, probably engineers, that would be willing to give them supplies. The paperwork could take weeks. Longer if it wasn’t for something necessary, like comfortable quarters.

  So when we move into our new barracks, we have plywood and 2x4s, hammers and nails, power drills, and rotary saws. And we have MOSs that say we know how to build stuff.

  There’s a large bay in the barracks filled with bunk beds and wall lockers, sort of like we had in Fort Bragg. But this isn’t Bragg. We have to live here for a year. And that means we want our privacy. We build ourselves some partitions. Think plywood cubicles.

  Sergeant Folden and Sergeant Lee, the two head sergeants in first squad, run the show. Like a classic duo, Tim Folden is tall and thin and Jeremy Lee is short and stocky. Just like Jay and Silent Bob in Clerks.

  I am given a room in one of the “lower enlisted” bays for privates and specialists.

  The leadership bay is for the sergeants of the platoon. The plywood walls in this bay form the main hallway as you come into the barracks. The leadership rooms are bigger than the lower enlisted rooms, second only to the rooms of the squad leaders, platoon leader, and platoon sergeant.

  After a week of building the whole platoon settles down in its new plywood rooms. Plywood doesn’t sound very luxurious, but at least we have some privacy, a place we can call home. In Fort Bragg we slept in an open bay. In Camp Virginia it was a tent with cots. On the convoy it was the trailer of an M916. And until recently at Anaconda it was a tent with cots. Finally, we’re in a hard building with actual metal-framed beds and walls separating us from one another.

  I lie in my bunk for the first night thinking of accomplishing my first mission and wonder what is supposed to happen next.

  My purpose, I conclude, is to understand the point of this deployment. To understand why the drill sergeants said, “There’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole.”

  On EQ platoon’s next mission, we watch war happen. What’s different about the Iraq war from any other is that there aren’t “front lines.” But we come pretty close on our second mission.

  Loud. Decrepit. Nauseating. Decayed. Heav
ily populated.

  A place I will never forget. It overflows with destruction, oozes the rotten stench of death, and hatred.

  This is Samarra, Iraq.

  This is the town that Achmed built.

  We are not soldiers to our commander; we are bodies. “I need four bodies to send on the convoy tomorrow,” he says. “Give me two bodies to help carry these supplies for the motor sergeant.”

  “Pack your gear,” he yelled at the mission briefing a week ago. “Clean your weapons, and send a letter home to your family.”

  We write every letter as if it’s our last. In my letters I tell my family I love them. Little else matters.

  “When you contact your loved ones,” he tells us, “do not disclose information that may be threatening to the mission. I say again…” He repeats himself two more times. OPSEC.

  He knows that if the wrong person overhears us and our mission is foiled, he’ll have to do the mess of bureaucratic planning again. We know that if the wrong person overhears us and our mission is foiled, it could mean our lives.

  We’re leaving on a new mission. A dangerous mission. An exciting mission. One that could look great on the commander’s credentials. One that requires almost all of our platoon. Almost all of our bodies.

  We don’t care. We live for this. We are carved out of stone, ready to handle anything. LT Andy Zeltwanger, he knows how to motivate us, how to mold us. Our lieutenant bands us together like cement binds rock.

  We have to stick together. For survival.

  We enter the city today as we’ve done it a hundred times before. Iraqi Army soldiers patrol the streets like the way the police covered sixties’ civil rights protests. Every day soldiers are scattered about the city at various checkpoints, but today they are everywhere. They wave to us and continue to patrol. The city depends on them for protection.

  It’s Thursday. The insurgents with a jihad on their agendas want to kill infidels today and brag to God tomorrow. Tomorrow is Friday, the Muslim holy day. By the way, an infidel is not Christian. An infidel is not Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu. An infidel is not an American or a Brit or an Australian. An infidel is anyone who doesn’t support the murder of infidels. What a convenient, self-serving philosophy.

  Infidels can be, and often are, Muslim. The same Muslims who sit at the local mosque and pray for peace. This town is full of them.

  These are the people that live in the town that Achmed built.

  An orange bubble rises from the ground. It is a hundred yards away and growing bigger, higher, brighter. The sound catches up to it. A popping roar like a thousand synchronized fireworks. I feel the percussion blast in my head, in my chest, in my legs.

  The bottom of the orange bubble caves in on itself as the explosion turns into a black mushroom cloud. I see body parts flying through the air.

  Dismembered people.

  I know the location where that bomb exploded. It’s smack in the middle of our route out of the city. We’ve driven through it many times before. We were on our way there. It’s a populated area full of markets and homes. I have a sickening hunch that those body parts belong to women and children. Infidels.

  This is the bomb that killed the people…

  We are stuck in the middle of this armpit of a city. The metallic smell of gunpowder and the dusty smell of broken concrete fill my nose. We are stuck, and people are dying. People have died.

  I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to run.

  Instead, I am watching death rain pieces of children from the sky. They will not wake up tomorrow. They are infidel hamburger.

  I sit in this sorry excuse for a dump truck as the machine-gun fire starts.

  These are the guns that accompany the bomb…

  In the middle of downtown Samarra a small American infantry base sits in a square block of rubble. Buildings surround the rubble on all sides. Fifty yards lie between the base and the nearest street. The infantry tanks have to use this route when they go on missions. Problem is, insurgents come in the cover of night and bury mines outside their main gate. So far, they’ve lost three tanks.

  “We’ll take care of it,” we tell them. “We’ll bring gravel in trucks and dump it outside your base. Shovels can’t dig through rocks.”

  For a week we’ve been running small rocks from a pit. One way, the ride is two hours. We make two runs per day. Sometimes things hold us up and we make only one run. Today the insurgents hold us up.

  These are the insurgents that fire the guns…

  We had a long day yesterday, too. We’re running on two hours of sleep, and we haven’t eaten anything except MREs. We are tired and hungry, but it doesn’t matter. We do not care about our rumbling stomachs or heavy eyelids.

  The explosion, it’s like the first snowball of an avalanche. It sets off reactions in my body I didn’t know existed. The adrenaline pumping through my veins could power a city. It could melt steel. Stop bullets.

  People are screaming and dying and burning and dying.

  This is the death that drives the insurgents…

  I watch my “sector of fire.” My training kicks in. I do not make panicked decisions. Rubble from previous battles is laid out before me. Unidentifiable pieces of broken concrete and messy rebar blend together on the ground. I pay no attention to the people dying to my left. I watch my sector: a 90-degree angle fanning outward across the broken, spiritless city. If everyone watches his sector, we make a 360-degree perimeter of overlapping fire.

  Impenetrable.

  Thirty yards away, in my sector of fire, I watch the house we took fire from the other day. We could not get to the triggerman. He was a coward taking cheap shots at us. If LT hadn’t turned at the right moment, he would have been shot in the chest. When we took fire, four tanks rolled out and blew Triggerman away. I couldn’t tell if they killed him, but we haven’t taken fire from that house since.

  I watch that house like a hawk.

  But the tanks can’t help us out right now. Our convoy is hanging out of their small base. We block their route. We are blocking our own route to get back in. Whatever wreckage caused by the bomb is probably blocking our path ahead. We dare not take our chances on the narrow road.

  This is the road that harbors the death…

  I am stuck “outside the wire” in the passenger seat of a 20-ton dump truck, and my weapon, an M16, hangs out of my window. Its selector switch is no longer on safe. I click it to semi. I click it again. That’s burst.

  Every squeeze of the trigger equals three bullets. Fast, three rounds in succession. LT made sure we loaded our magazines so that every fourth bullet is a tracer. Think of those yellow streaks you see in Vietnam movies. If things are moving too fast to use the sights, we aim off the tracers.

  Aim low. With a three-round burst your rifle will unavoidably kick upward along the front of the target. Aim low and you’re bound to hit him once. If you’re lucky, you’ll land two. Land all three and you’re Green Beret material.

  We wait for direction. I watch my sector.

  We sit on top of a foot and a half of gravel we’ve poured over the last week, and we are under our own firepower: Humvees are mounted with .50 caliber machine guns and M60 machine guns and ammo box after ammo box, and AT4 rocket launchers hang off their turrets. On our person we have fragment grenades and smoke grenades and M16 semiautomatic rifles and M203 grenade launchers and SAWs. LT takes no chances when it comes to firepower. Not here. Not in the town that Achmed built.

  I wait. Nothing in my sector.

  A stray bullet whizzes by from somewhere. A high-pitched whistle. It has missed any target it was intended for. I duck into my body armor like I could actually dodge a screaming bullet. It’s a reflexive maneuver meant to keep me alive. Because I know our trucks are cheaply armored. Half-ass, haji armor on the door. It’s better than nothing. Maybe. Just more shrapnel.

  Another bullet whistles by. I duck.

  A metallic slap. A bullet bounces off the dump ahead of me.

  The
se are the bullets that fly from the road…

  Finally, some direction. The fighting has hit a crucial point: the eye of the storm. LT has a chance to initiate a plan. Over the radio he tells the gun trucks to exit the convoy.

  “Create a perimeter,” he commands, “and give the dumps room to turn around. Over.”

  Three or four gun trucks pull out. One parks directly in front of me. I raise my rifle so I don’t accidentally send three bullets into the M60 gunner who’s taken over my sector. The 20-ton ahead of us moves, and my driver pulls a tentative foot off the brake.

  The rapid gunfire continues.

  “Stay behind the gunners,” the lieutenant reminds the dump trucks.

  The turreted Humvees sit on broken rubble from previous battles. They can drive over anything. They sit like a militant version of Stonehenge.

  In the Humvees the driver waits with watchful eyes. The radio man sits in the passenger seat and relays radio messages to the rest of his crew. His hand is two inches away from the gunner’s foot. He is ready to rattle the gunner’s leg and mark targets with a time designation. Twelve o’clock is straight ahead. Six o’clock is right behind. Three to the right, and nine to the left.

  An ammo guy sits behind the driver with an eager hand resting on box upon box of ammunition. He’s got one open. His palms are sweaty and he absentmindedly thumbs the next round that has to be handed up to the gunner. Hot, expended rounds are dropping through the hole in the roof where the gunner stands. They are smoking and bouncing and clinking.

  The gunner is the backbone of the gun truck. His posture against the weapon’s kickback is stiff and unforgiving. His Kevlar helmet rattles with the ricochet of the .50 cal. His dark gunner goggles bounce beneath them. His body armor is strategically loaded with fragment grenades and smoke grenades, ammo pouches and a bayonet, a medical pouch and a pair of utility pliers. Each piece is stuck to him like paint to a hard canvas. It’s 90 degrees out, but the gunner wears gloves. The black metal weapon absorbs the desert heat. If he doesn’t wear gloves, he’ll get blisters from holding the trigger down.