Ryan Smithson Read online

  A Humvee crew is a team. Think of limestone and clay. Think of adding calcium sulfate and water. That’s how you bind rocks.

  We move inside the gate, and the gun trucks stay behind. A half dozen tanks wait for the congestion to thin out. The last dump finds its way, and the tanks roll, throwing dust in circular clouds behind them. They split and wage war in the city streets.

  These are the tanks that avenge the bullets…

  The gun trucks have accomplished their mission. They return to the safety of the base. We hear explosions for another hour as the tanks avenge the ambush on the engineer convoy.

  Military Intelligence would later inform the LT that the ambush didn’t go quite as planned. The untrained insurgent set off the explosion prematurely. He killed himself. His untrained insurgent allies were all lined up and down the street ready for holy victory. The triggerman was supposed to throw the switch on our first vehicle, thus trapping our cumbersome dump trucks on the narrow road. Instead, he spoiled the plan with a sweaty trigger finger, taking out four Iraqi Army soldiers and seven civilians with him.

  No Americans. All infidels.

  I think of the consequences if the plan had been carried out with success. We would have been stuck in the middle of downtown Samarra with crappy do-it-yourself armor. Insurgents would have been feet away from our vehicles sinking round after round into our weak armor. Gun trucks would pull out, but they would have no leverage. Not compared to men on their feet. A gunner can’t aim straight down in front of him. The ambush would have taken out many more infidels.

  This is the ambush that deploys the tanks…

  My driver and I, our adrenaline rushes slowing down, listen intently as the fifteen vehicles in the convoy call in their ACE reports to the LT. An ACE (Ammo, Casualties, Equipment) report is a quick and easy way to estimate the standing of an entire convoy. Green means full or good; yellow means some or slight; red means none or very, very bad. An ideal ACE report is your call sign and green, green, green.

  “Hunter Six, this is Hunter One. Yellow, green, green. Over.”

  “Roger. Out,” LT responds calmly. If he’s calm, we’re calm.

  “Hunter Two. Green, green, green. Over.”

  “Roger, Two. Out.”

  There’s slight apprehension while we wait for the reports to come in. If anyone had taken a casualty, we’d probably know about it by now. Still, we hardly breathe.

  The ACE reports are done. No casualties. How did that happen? It doesn’t matter. We are alive.

  We are the soldiers who survive the ambush that deployed the tanks that avenged the bullets that flew from the road that harbored the death that drove the insurgents that fired the guns that accompanied the bomb that killed the people that live in the town that Achmed built.

  So many questions follow the ambush in Samarra. What was the purpose for the loss of life? Was the loss of the eleven Iraqis my gain? Does my life hold a higher value? Do I pity their calamity or honor their sacrifice? Am I lucky to have survived or unlucky to have witnessed those who didn’t? Does my life become troubled with guilt or more meaningful? What makes true sacrifice worthwhile?

  It is my full responsibility to give purpose to myself, to my family, and to your freedom.

  For the infidels.

  A TASTE OF DEATH

  When we’re not on missions like the one in Samarra, there is work to be done back at camp, filling sandbags or stacking sandbags, flattening patches of bumpy gravel in some parking lot on post. Or PMCSing vehicles and getting ready for upcoming missions.

  Busy work, we say. Sometimes, the command calls them “missions,” to motivate us, I guess. We reserve the “mission” title for something at least quasi-dangerous. We call the on-post, or “inside the wire,” operations “tasks.”

  Most of the time our tasks are boring and tedious. Sometimes they’re strenuous and demanding. Sometimes they’re meaningless and irritating. They’re things we’ve done a thousand times, like a PMCS, things we could do in our sleep.

  But every once in a while a task is as interesting as a mission.

  Today, like most other days, the majority of the platoon is out on various missions. Some are outside the wire convoying. And some are stuck inside the wire pushing gravel around, pulling security shifts, moving concrete barriers to make mortar cover, hauling lumber and supplies around post, loading tractor trailers. Some of the platoon is inside other wires helping the line companies, staying at their camps, pushing around their gravel, moving their lumber and supplies. Engineering stuff.

  Our job, it’s always different. Every day, mostly, we change gears. This is a good thing. I hear about the snipers on post. Cool job, right, being a sniper? No, it downright sucks here. Snipers sit in a guard tower all day, for thirteen months now.

  Our camp gets mortared quite a bit. But the enemy is smarter than you’d think. During the hottest part of the day, they’ve figured out a way to fire mortars and disappear before a sniper or QRF (Quick Reaction Force) has a chance to get them.

  They set up the mortar tube, aim it at camp, drop in a chunk of ice, and then drop a mortar round. When the ice melts, the round falls down the tube, gets primed, and ka-blam! A mortar lands somewhere on post, ruins something. And a whole camp of soldiers is squatting in mortar bunkers.

  Our enemies are cowards. They take potshots at us from alleyways, drop ice in mortar tubes. They don’t rush bases. They’d be killed instantly. Probably by the snipers. So every day this team of snipers, they sit in a guard tower with their binoculars reporting suspicious vehicles and people to the post command.

  Not to downplay the snipers’ role in this war. They save lives, and the potential for attack is high. But being a sniper probably sounded much more exciting when those guys were sitting in a MEPS station back home.

  Engineers, though, we’re doing pretty much what they said we’d be doing in AIT. And at least our busy work keeps us busy. It gives us something to write home about, something to keep our minds off the fact that we’re stuck here.

  Today a few of us mill around the barracks. It’s one of our off days. There isn’t much to do, even in the way of tasks. We’ve already done our PMCSes, cleaned the barracks. It’s ten o’clock and the half dozen of us stuck without any mission or task plan on hiding out for the rest of the day.

  The desert is starting to live up to its reputation. It doesn’t rain anymore. In fact, I haven’t seen a single cloud in weeks. And the temperature is climbing. It’s only February and the days are creeping up around 90.

  We hang out in the common area and play poker and dominos. We watch movies and stay out of the heat. We play the guitar and share stories and laugh. Who cares? We got back from a mission two days ago, a convoy to drop off supplies for Charlie company, and there’s another mission coming up.

  Who cares? The commander, the higher-ups. That’s who.

  “Look busy,” says Renninger, grinning as he walks by, heading toward the door.

  He understands our need to relax, but his words are what matter. If the guys in his squad are caught slacking around, Renninger is the one who gets yelled at.

  “We are busy, Sergeant,” says Josh Roman, pointing to the yellow bucket full of gray mop water.

  Renninger laughs and repeats, “Look busy.”

  When he opens the door, blinding sunlight shines off our tile floor. He passes LT and the two stop to talk quickly.

  LT comes inside, removes his patrol cap, and smiles at us. He sighs.

  “Something the matter, sir?” I ask.

  He shakes his head and puts up a hand. This is his way of letting me know that something is wrong, but he can’t talk about it. Some nonsense with the commander, I’m sure.

  “Smithson,” says LT.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What’s the best part about being in Iraq?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Wrong,” he says. “One way or another, you know you’re going to leave.”

  We all laugh.

>   “Even if they have to take me home in a pine box,” he says, “I’ll be the hell out of here.”

  “Or if they have to take you in handcuffs because you killed the commander,” I say.

  “I saw him walking to chow with gloves on yesterday,” says Koprowski.

  “He wipes the dirt off his Humvee tire before he uses it,” says Roman.

  “It’s okay,” says LT. “I use it against him. ‘Neat freak’ doesn’t even begin to describe your commander. I think he has a coaster for his coaster.”

  We all laugh, not doubting for a second that he does.

  “Before I went into the CQ (Command Quarters), I was out helping Greene PMCS our Humvee,” says LT. “And we greased it.”

  We all cringe, laughing. Greasing a vehicle is one of the messiest jobs an engineer can do. Picture a tube of grease the size of a tube of raw cookie dough. It’s pumped out of the end, and it always slops out on your hands. This grease, it doesn’t even come off with soap. The ground just makes your hands dusty, so you wipe the grease on your uniform.

  “So I sit down,” LT says. “Right on his bed.”

  “God damn!” says Sebastian Koprowski. Seabass, we call him.

  “And I can see him just…crawling up the wall. My greasy uniform is all over his bed, and his eyes get as wide as golf balls. And I say, ‘This is a nice room, sir’ as I lean on his pillow.”

  We’re all laughing hysterically, picturing the commander squirm in his clean, pressed uniform as LT just lounges all over his bed.

  “So he pulls out this little fold-out chair. And I’m like, ‘No, thanks. Your bed is so comfortable, sir.’”

  “He probably washed the sheets as soon as you left,” I say.

  “Smithson,” says LT, “I’d bet my rank he burned them.”

  “God damn!” Seabass says again.

  “Oh, man,” says LT, shaking his head. “I’m going to get arrested for talking to you guys like this.”

  “It’s not like we don’t already know, sir,” says Buckelew.

  “Yeah, still,” says LT. “Hey, Zerega, can I get you and two guys to meet Sergeant Whisler by those Humvees. You know the ones that just came in?”

  “Yes, sir,” says Sergeant Zerega.

  Zerega grabs Roman and me, and we follow him out the front door.

  Our motor pool is filled with gravel to keep down the mud, and now that the mud is drying, to keep down the dust. Dozens of vehicles are lined up, waiting for a mission or task or yet another PMCS.

  Near the middle of the motor pool lie two Humvees.

  “Have you seen these yet?” Zerega asks us as we approach them. Roman says yes, and I say no.

  “Came in a few days ago,” he says. “Guess a couple of guys died in ’em.”

  This doesn’t really affect me. This is a war. People die.

  Two blown-up Humvees side by side. They’re black and charred. Our task: scrounge for parts, armor mostly. We’re to take off the armor that is still intact and put it on our own Humvees. Some of which aren’t armored at all.

  The smell is the first thing I notice. It’s an odd mixture of scorched rubber, smoldering hair, burnt metal, and…something else. There is an underlying stench of cooked meat. It reminds me of ham, but I know that’s not what it is.

  It rolls my stomach a bit, but I deal with it.

  We poke around one of them for a minute or two. The thing’s insides are coated with a dusty black residue. It’s from the IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that destroyed them.

  We are curious. We poke around because this is a rare opportunity, this taste of death. Right in the charred black seat where we’re poking and prodding.

  That’s what death does. It defines life. What would life be without death? What would death be without life? And what would peace be without war? Without the distinction nothing exists.

  Really, death and war are everything.

  I feel immense sorrow for those who were killed here, for their families. But at the same time, I feel immense relief knowing that there’s one more KIA, one more statistic, that isn’t me.

  Whisler has already removed an armored door frame that he’s drilled in order to modify to our own. He continues to work off to the side as Zerega, Roman, and I poke around the blackened, charbroiled Humvee.

  We find a piece of desert uniform. It’s about four inches by four inches and has a seam running through its middle. I hold it next to various seams of my own uniform. Maybe an elbow? But it was found next to the gas pedal. It was a knee. It’s gray from the bomb residue and partially bloodstained. It smells like burnt ham.

  We find several pieces of shrapnel. Thick, twisted chunks of metal. One of them has small vertical scratches running along the top. They are close together and parallel. They’re from the metal band that held the IED round together. It’s from a .133 or .155 round. I look at those tick marks, and it occurs to me that someone has looked at these ticks before. Someone who hates me. Someone who doesn’t even know me. Someone who’s killed my fellow soldiers. I feel my eyes narrow, and I throw the piece of shrapnel back into the mess of miscellaneous junk sitting in the middle of the Humvee.

  We find a thin piece of metal. It’s army green and shaped like a potato chip, as though it was melted, deformed, and solidified. It’s a piece of an ammo can. The ammo can that held 5.56 rounds for a SAW. Some empty 5.56 shells lie nearby. They’re expended, but we realize that they were not shot. The actual bullets are gone; they had been blasted into a seat or a door or a person. The casings are all that’s left over, but they’re mangled and ripped apart.

  The IED blast was so hot and so fast that bullets were heated to a point beyond their tolerance. They cooked off. Imagine how intense an explosion would have to be to cook off rounds. Imagine what that could do to flesh.

  “Look at this,” says Zerega from the passenger side of the vehicle.

  The passenger door is riddled with ball bearings. Hundreds of pebble-sized balls of metal packed together and exploding like buckshot. They’re stuck halfway in the door and surrounding armor.

  On the inside of the armor the door is wavy with impressions, but there are no holes where the ball bearings made it through. The armor worked. On the door, anyway.

  The bottom side of this Humvee wasn’t armored, and the shrapnel came through the passenger floor.

  The cushion on the passenger’s seat is army green, but coated in the black of bomb residue and the brown of dried blood. Someone died right here. I imagine it in slow motion.

  The shrapnel, hundreds of scorching ball bearings, coming through the floor ripping the passengers apart like pulled pork. Chunks of flesh and bone flying through the cabin. Their aortas bleed out over their body armor. A hot, red river of life being lost.

  Enough.

  “What do you want us to do first, Sergeant?” I ask Whisler.

  “I need the brackets from that passenger door,” he says, and goes back to drilling holes in the receiving Humvee’s door frame.

  I grab a socket wrench and reach into the crack between the seat and the door frame. Looking for a bolt, I see something in the dark space. It’s a small square. I reach into the crack with my knife and poke it. I can’t poke into it, but its peculiar texture is one which requires more examination. I pour water into the crack and the square loosens up. It’s spongy, and now I can stick it with my knife.

  Pulling it out of the darkness, I examine it closely. It’s about the size of a quarter and roughly the same color. Like everything else in the Humvee, it’s the gray-black of death.

  Curly black hairs stick out of it. Actually, they’ve grown from it. There are circular pockets of white. It’s human flesh.

  I study it like I’m a biology student. Seabass usually busts my balls for picking my teeth with this knife after chow. I tell him it gets the job done as good as any toothpick. But this knife won’t be picking my teeth anymore.

  I fling the meat back into the hole from which it was taken. Like a burial.


  I continue unscrewing the bracket for the armored door.

  Zerega, Roman, Whisler, and I joke around like we always do. We make fun of the commander and make fun of each other. We unscrew, unfasten, cut, grind, drill, and transfer parts from the old Humvees to the new ones. Then it comes time to transfer the armored roofs.

  It takes all four of us to lift the roof off the old Humvee and place it on the ground. We set it down and we stop, just staring at it.

  The two frames, centered on either side, cause the whole roof to tip forward when we put it down. It sits on the dirty, hard ground like a wide, armored seesaw. But you wouldn’t want to sit on this seesaw. One half of the roof is covered with a dusty brown bloodstain.

  The SAW gunner’s blood.

  I imagine a young kid standing in the hole of a gun turret, loading the SAW he’s loaded a hundred times. Click-clack, metal crunching together. But today it’s not a sound of power. It sounds like fate. I see the kid just standing there, helpless as he takes a black cloud to the face. Hidden in the black cloud, hot ball bearings that end his life. Right here on this tan roof.

  I imagine the kid driving the Humvee. Some kid out of high school who didn’t know what he wanted to do with life. His panic as he tries to swerve away from the IED. His guilt as the warm gunner’s blood drips down the back of his neck from the roof.

  I should cry, I think. That’s what normal people would do, right? But what does crying do for us? It doesn’t solve our problems. It doesn’t make us run faster or shoot better.

  But it’s not this logic that’s keeping me from crying. I can’t cry because I don’t feel anything. Seeing blood, speckled brown blood, takes the feeling, the life, right out of me.

  “We’re gonna have to spray this off,” someone finally says.

  We use a small forklift and bring the bloody thing over to the pressure washer, which lies on the other side of the motor pool. Whisler takes hold of the hose and begins spraying the dusty blood off the roof. The water carries the blood to the dirt.