Taco right away handed the rifle to me. I had no tripod, so I laid the barrel on the hood of the Jeep and took the shot. Jamieson was using binoculars, but I didn’t need them to see one of the speakers go tumbling to the ground, trailing its wire. There was no hole in the dome and the harangue, at least coming from that side, was noticeably less.
‘Get some!’ Taco yelled. ‘Oh yeah, get summa that shit!’
Jamieson said we should bug the fuck out before someone started shooting at us, so that is what we did.
I look back on it and I think that day summed up everything that went wrong in Iraq, why ‘we love America’ changed to ‘death to America.’ The lieutenant colonel got tired of listening to that endless crap so he told us to shoot one of the speakers, which was stupid and meaningless when you considered there were at least six more pointing in other directions.
I saw men in doorways and women looking out of windows when we drove back to the base. Their faces were not happy we love America faces. No one shot at us – that day – but the faces said the day would come. As far as they knew, we weren’t shooting at a loudspeaker. We were shooting at the mosque. Maybe there was no hole in the dome, but we were still shooting at their core beliefs.
Our patrols into Ramadi started getting more dangerous. The local police and the Iraqi National Guard were gradually losing control to the insurgents, but US forces weren’t allowed to take their places because the politicians, both in Washington and Baghdad, were dedicated to the idea of self-rule. Mostly we sat out in camp, hoping we wouldn’t end up doing protective duty while a repair crew worked on fixing a broken (or vandalized) watermain or a bunch of technicians, American and Iraqi, tried to get the broken (or sabotaged) power plant working again. Protective duty was just asking to get shot at, and we had half a dozen Marines KIA, many more wounded, by the end of 2003. The muj snipers were for shit, but their IEDs terrified us.
The whole house of cards tipped over on the last day of March, in 2004.
Okay, Billy thinks, this is where the story really starts. And I got here with a minimum of bullshit, as Up Yours would have said.
By then we had moved from Ramadi to Camp Baharia, also known as Dreamland. It was in the countryside about two miles outside of Fallujah, west of the Euphrates. Saddam’s kids used to r&r there, we heard. George Dinnerstein and Donk Cashman were back with us in Echo Company.
The four of us were playing poker when we heard shooting coming from the other side of what we called the Brooklyn Bridge. Not just isolated shots, a regular barrage.
By nightfall the rumors had settled and we knew what had happened, at least in broad strokes. Four Blackwater contractors who were delivering food – including for our mess in Dreamland – decided to take a shortcut through Fallujah instead of going around, which was the normal protocol. They were ambushed just shy of the bridge over the Euphrates. I suppose they were wearing their armor, but nothing could save them from the concentrated fire that poured into the pair of Mitsubishi utes they were driving.
Taco said, ‘What in God’s name made them think they could drive right through the center of town, like it was Omaha? That was dumb.’
George agreed, but said that dumb or not, there had to be payback. We all thought the same. The killings were bad enough but killing wasn’t enough for the mob. They dragged the dead from the ’Bishies, doused them with gasoline, and set them on fire. Two of them were pulled apart like rotisserie chickens. The other two were hung from the Brooklyn Bridge like Guy Fawkes dummies.
The next day Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson showed up while our squad was getting ready to go on patrol. He ordered me and Taco down from the back of the Hummer we were in and told us to come with him, because there was a man who wanted to see us.
The man was sitting on a pile of tires in an empty garage bay that stank of motor oil and exhaust. It was also hot as hell because all the doors were closed and those bays had no air conditioning. He stood up when we came in and looked us over. He was wearing a leather jacket, which was absurd in a stinky room that must have already been eighty-five degrees. It had the Darkhorse Battalion emblem on the breast: CONSUMMATE PROFESSIONALS on top and GET SOME on the bottom. But the jacket was just for show. I knew it right away and Taco said afterwards that he did, too. You only had to look at him to know he was ‘fuckin’-A, CIA.’ He asked which one of us was Summers and I said that was me. He said his name was Hoff.
Billy stops short, bemused. He has just crosswired his present life with his life in the suck. Was it Robert Stone who said the mind is a monkey? Sure it was, in Dog Soldiers. The one where Stone also said that men who shoot elephants with machine guns from Huey helicopters are just naturally going to want to get high. In Iraq it was camels the grunts and jarheads sometimes shot at. But yeah, while they were high.
He deletes the last line and consults the monkey that lives between his ears and behind his forehead. After a few seconds of thought, he comes up with the right name and decides the mistake is entirely forgivable. Hoff was at least close.
He said his name was Foss. He didn’t offer to shake hands, just sat back down on the tires, which was sure to dirty up the seat of his pants. He said, ‘Summers, I heard you were the best shot in the company.’
Since that wasn’t a question I didn’t say anything, just stood there.
‘Could you make a twelve-hundred-yard shot across the river from our side?’
I took a quick look at Taco and saw he had heard it too, and knew what it meant. Our side meant anything outside of town. And if there were sides, that meant we were going in.
‘Are you talking about hitting a human target, sir?’
‘I am. Did you think I was talking about a beer bottle?’
A rhetorical question I didn’t bother answering. ‘Yes sir, I could make that shot.’
‘Is that the Marine answer or your answer, Summers?’
Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson kind of frowned at that, as if he didn’t believe there was any answer except the Marine answer, but he didn’t say anything.
‘Both, sir. Confidence maybe not so high on a windy day, but we—’ I cocked a thumb at Taco. ‘We can correct for wind. Blowing sand is something else.’
‘The wind speed forecast for tomorrow is zero-to-ten,’ Foss said. ‘That wouldn’t be a problem?’
‘No, sir.’ Then I asked a question I had no business asking, but I had to know. ‘Are we talking about a bad haji, sir?’
The l-c said I was out of line, and would have said more, but Foss waved a hand at him and Jamieson closed his mouth.
‘You ever tagged a man before, Summers?’
I told him I hadn’t, and that was true. Tagging means sniping, and when I shot Bob Raines it was up close.
‘Then this would be a very good way to start your career, because yes, this is a very bad haji. I’m assuming you know what happened yesterday?’
‘We do, sir,’ Taco said.
‘Those contractors went through downtown Fallujah because they were told by what they considered to be a reliable source that it would be safe. They were told that goodwill was shifting toward the Americans. They were also given an escort by the Iraqi police. Only their escort was either insurgents in stolen uniforms, or renegade police, or real police who chickened out when they saw what a truly awesome raft of shit was coming their way. And they didn’t do the killing, anyway. That was done by four dozen AK-wielding bad boys who … what do you think, fellas? Who just happened to turn up on the scene?’
I shrugged like I didn’t know and let Taco carry the ball. Which he did. ‘Doesn’t seem likely, sir.’
‘No, not likely at all. Those mujis were all in place. Waiting. A couple of pickup trucks were blocking the main drag. Someone planned that ambush, and we know who it was, because we were up on his cell phone. You follow?’