We sprang forward and panned the room with our weapons.
Three Iraqi women huddled like frightened birds in one corner. Their ashen faces hovered above trembling hands. They clutched black shawls to their throats. Were they a mother and her daughters? They eyed us fearfully, their gazes fixed on the night-vision goggles clipped to the front of our helmets. Rumor was the Iraqis thought the goggles gave us X-ray vision and we could see through their clothing.
A swaying electric bulb lit the room. Shadows danced across the walls. Broken furniture, loose plaster, and paper lay scattered over a threadbare carpet.
The interpreter entered and was followed by the lieutenant. Pistol in hand, he yelled at the interpreter and the women. “Why didn’t you open the door? Where are your men?”
The interpreter turned to the women. When they heard his Arabic, they surrounded him, gesturing and screaming angry questions. The oldest woman gave the best performance, repeatedly pressing a hand to her forehead and swooping her other arm at the ruin in her home.
An explosion shook the house. We ducked against the closest wall. The women dropped to the floor with practiced agility. Dust trickled from the ceiling.
The lieutenant answered his radio and then hollered. “Sergeant Gomez, we got contact. Get around back ASAP.”
No shit, we got contact. My team dashed into the next room, tramping over unmade beds and knocking over dressers. There was a flimsy wooden door along the back wall that I busted open.
We emerged into an alley-barren and spooky. Reaching to the front of my helmet, I flipped the night-vision goggles down over my eyes. A greenish image materialized inside the lenses, a fuzzy picture of a dark background cluttered with bright abstract shapes.
Hustling to what remained of a brick wall, I lay prone amid the rubble while my team took positions alongside.
The lieutenant whispered excitedly over the tiny earpiece of my radio. “Four, maybe six fedayeen dropped into a canal about fifty meters past the alley.” He ordered me to take my men to the berm overlooking the canal while another team flushed the fedayeen toward us.
We crept down the slope to the canal bank, our reflexes primed as we expected the enemy to open up at any second. I went up the berm first and snaked on my belly to the top. My heart thumped so loud I was afraid the enemy would hear it.
O’Brien startled me when he groped at the dirt to lie down behind his M249. His eyes reflected the dim green light coming from the back lenses of his night-vision goggles. The rest of my team joined us on the berm.
“How many of these guys do you think we gotta kill before we can go home?” O’Brien whispered.
“I’m pretty sure it’s all of them,” I answered.
“Too bad they don’t stay in one place. This war would be over that much sooner if everyone cooperated.”
From the depths of the image in my lenses appeared four figures, moving like specters along the muddy bank of the canal. My breath quickened.
The enemy was close enough to see that they carried equipment over their shoulders. Explosives perhaps? Rocket-propelled grenades-RPGs? They moved haltingly and whispered in Arabic. Their implements clinked together.
The lieutenant blurted over the radio. “Get ready.”
In a quiet voice, I alerted my team. As one, we shouldered our weapons and curled index fingers over triggers.
A machine gun to my left growled, spewing a cascade of red tracers. O’Brien opened up. An M203 barked, lobbing a grenade into the center of the enemy.
We caught the Iraqis in a thick crossfire against the bank of the canal. The four intruders withered under a hail of tracers and the white flash of grenades exploding among them.
I fixed on the falling bodies and fired quick bursts, nailing each one in turn.
The lieutenant’s loud voice sang over the roar of our guns. “Cease fire, goddamnit.”
We released our triggers, the blasts from our guns ringing in my ears. The spent brass casings still whirling in the air pinged on the ground. An incandescent swirl of smoke rose from the hot, glowing barrel of the M249.
I flipped the goggles up from my eyes. My heart pounded in euphoric victory. The moment was exhilarating, my senses taut as a trip wire.
I could hear the smile in O’Brien’s voice as he said, “Damn, that felt nice.”
A wail rose from one of the bodies sprawled at the water’s edge. Not a man’s cry but the shriek of a girl, a horrible noise that told me my life would never be the same again.
The lieutenant and three other men crept around the berm and gathered around the fallen bodies. I pushed up to my feet to join them, the girl’s wail tearing at my nerves.
The lieutenant produced a flashlight and swung its blue-green beam over the area.
A girl in a knee-length dress lay face up on the dirt. She looked maybe twelve years old. Screaming, she stared at us, her eyes so wide with fright that her pupils seemed to hover above the whites of her eyeballs. Her thin legs pumped at the ground as she tried to push away from us. Her right hand covered her belly. Blood seeped through her fingers.
Two women in black robes lay beside each other, mouths gaping, arms and legs ragged with ugly wounds. Each woman rested across a pole. Ropes lay twisted from the ends of the poles to plastic jugs.
An Iraqi with mustache, beard, and a checkered headdress squirmed on his back, wheezing. His eyes were shut in a grimace of pain.
“Oh God, oh God,” one of the soldiers sobbed, “what have we done?”
O’Brien kicked the plastic jugs and his voice broke. “They were just hajis trying to get water.”
Other soldiers had killed civilians by mistake. The bad breaks of war, I’d thought at the time. Now that I’d done it, the earth seemed to heave beneath my boots. I became dizzy and fought the urge to throw up.
The Iraqi man raised an arm and blindly called, “Ani.”
The girl pulled herself toward him, crying out.
The man’s arm dropped. His face slackened.
The girl shrieked louder, realizing that she was alone, wounded, and surrounded by us, a gang of assassins.
“Ah shit,” the lieutenant kept repeating. He took off his helmet and ran a trembling hand over his burr cut. He called the company commander over the radio.
After a brief, tense exchange, the lieutenant released his radio mike. His shoulders drooped as if the world had landed on him. “We gotta evacuate her ASAP.”
I yanked open the first-aid pouch attached to my armor vest and snatched the bandage. “Somebody give me a poncho. Now.”
I tore open the plastic wrapper, pulled apart the ends of the bandage, and knelt beside the girl. She shrank from me, her face pale with terror.
We unfolded O’Brien’s poncho and tried to coax the girl onto it, but she kept scooting away. O’Brien grabbed her hands and held them in a corner of the poncho while another soldier clutched her feet.
I had to expose the wound and drew my bayonet to cut her blood-soaked dress across the middle. Howling maniacally, the girl whipped her body against the poncho before going limp. She whimpered in Arabic. It wasn’t enough that we had shot her in the belly and slaughtered her family, she must have thought, now we were going to rape her as well.
Blood flowed from a hole beside her navel. I pressed the gauze pad against the wound. Her warm blood soaked my hands. I reached under her tiny waist to tie the ends of the bandage around her.
How could this have happened? I knew what I had seen through the goggles. How could I have been so wrong?
We carried the girl away from the canal, her cracking voice echoing across the desolation. The night disintegrated into a dismal blur.
O’Brien slowed and tugged at his end of the poncho. “Hold up.”
We shuffled to a halt. A rivulet of blood poured from the poncho.