The line wavered and swayed as drivers dozed and awoke. We’d been driving for eighteen hours.
We turned off the highway down a dirt road running between a ditch and a wall, passing tall grass, palms, and farms. Things felt close.
Lights swam as I fought to keep my eyes open. My neck bent under the weight of its dumb head, like a cripple who can’t hold his face up, like I needed a tube to talk with. We followed the convoy past a checkpoint and turned to the east fading ashen to white. In the distance, some kind of tower stabbed into the lightening sky. We turned again.
I saw great bands of painted Indians boil up out of the dark on steaming war ponies, ululating, attacking with tomahawks and Winchesters. I’d make my humvee jump like a frog: bounce over the burning wreck and over the ditch by the road, bounce across low scrub to the savages we’d land on and kill with a splat. Bounce, bounce, fuck.
“Wake up, Wilson.”
The truck in front pulled off. I put us in gear. Too tired to care whether I’d fucked up or what, so I’d fallen asleep, so what. Fuck shit fuck whatever, cockfuck shitfucker asscunt.
“Where the fuck are we?”
I followed the five-ton onto an airfield. We stopped between two Black Hawks.
“We must be close,” I said.
“I think so,” said Captain Yarrow.
I jerked awake, pulling my seven-hundred-pound head up off the steering wheel. Captain Yarrow lay slumped against his door, drooling on his armor. Sergeant Chandler snored in back. The convoy was gone. The sky a cool and milky white.
We’d been left. Abandoned.
I slid into drive, honked the horn twice, then took off.
Captain Yarrow heaved forward. “What?”
“Hooah, sir.”
“What? Where’s the convoy?”
“Dunno, sir.”
“They’re what?”
“There.” Intersection. In the distance, off to the right, the line of red lights.
Loaded with gear, we shuffled onto the plane and rode east, out of the sky, down the night.
Stewardesses brought our meal and choice of nonalcoholic beverage. I watched White Oleander and slept through most of A Beautiful Mind. The screens all along the dim aisles flickered on the faces of sleeping soldiers.
Dreaming valkyrie wings: we’d be FNGs at first but lickety-split start wasting hooches and fragging LTs, di-di-mauing back to the LZ, dropping bloopers into rice paddies, riding Hueys into the Shit, hog on our hip. We’d have hearts and minds sharpied on steelpot covers, tattoo our days down till we’re short, wear our shit all fucked up and say, “Fuck the regs, man, this is Indian Country.”
We’d prepared our whole lives for this. Bombed little brown people, helicopters swooping low, the familiar sight of American machinery carving death from a Third World wasteland. We expected nothing less than shell shock and trauma, we lusted for thousand-yard stares—lifelong connoisseurs of hallucinatory violence, we already knew everything, felt everything. We saw it through a blood-spattered lens, handheld tracking shot pitting figure against ground. We were the camera, we were the audience, we were the actors and film and screen: cowboys and killer angels, the lost patrol, the cavalry charge, America’s proud and bloody soldier boys.
We stumbled blinking off the plane into the night’s heat and crammed onto buses that drove us to a tent in the sand, where we downloaded bags into a box trailer. Shuffled to another tent to wait. Mustered into another where we swiped IDs, shunting through the green machine’s hive mind, finally officially in theater. We got briefed on snakes and General Order One—no pork, no porn, no booze—then sent back to the tent to sleep. Then rousted again, onto buses driven by Arabs. We lumped in on each other in our gear, bitchy in the crowded stink. The sun rose over an empty desert.
At Camp Connecticut, a swath of tents pitched in the middle of nowhere like a mirage, we downloaded our bags from the trailer. We slept in piles like dogs. Not enough water. The high 114.
Lieutenant Colonel Braddock brought us to his tent for a PowerPoint presentation and speech.
“Men,” he said, “tomorrow we embark on a most important and dangerous mission. We have trained months for this, and it is the epitome of our job as soldiers. I am proud to be leading you into our unit’s first combat mission since World War II. I know you will acquit yourselves with honor and courage, because I know your leaders and they are the best leaders in the Army, and I know your sergeants and they are the best sergeants in the Army. Together we’ll accomplish our mission and follow up on our nation’s great victory in Iraq with successful stability-and-support operations and a peaceful transition to democratic governance.
“I know many of you are too young to remember World War II, but I think this is a good time to reflect on the tremendous work we did stabilizing and securing Nazi Germany after the war and for fifty years protecting it from the Warsaw Pact threat. This was no mean feat, and if it seems overshadowed today by campaigns like D-Day and Anzio, then I will tell you this is a matter of perspective. Because winning the peace can be as hard, if not harder, than winning the war. We have our work cut out for us.
“In the coming weeks and months, we will be tested, challenged, and stressed, and there will come times when home will seem very far away. But let me remind you that we are Deep Steel, we are the tip of the spear, and home, men—home is here, with your fellow soldiers. We are each other’s family. We’re a band of brothers. Support each other, follow your leaders, listen to your NCOs, and we will overcome, we will rise up and grab that brass ring. We will succeed and we will be victorious.
“We are soldiers, the fighting men who man the ramparts protecting America from the insidious evils of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism that now threaten our way of life. We’re here because Saddam Hussein was a threat to America, his nuclear weapons and biological programs poised to be handed over to terrorists who hate us because of our freedom, who hate our way of life, and who have no compunctions about murdering your wives, mothers, sons, and daughters in cold blood. Because of the great bravery and professional dedication of your fellow soldiers, Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat. Men, we’re here to make America safe, and to make the world safe for America. I have the utmost faith that you will rise to the occasion and make me proud.”
an arab worldview is based upon six concepts:
atomism, faith, wish versus reality,
justice and equality, paranoia, and the importance of family over self
No running water. No electricity. No AC. No grass, no carpet, no windows, no fans. Everyone in the world wears camouflage—the others talk gobbledygook and stare.
No running water means no showers, no sinks. No hoses, no faucets, no drains. No cold water, no ice. No laundry, no bath, no toilet.
We had a toilet. We had a plywood outhouse with three stalls. You sit on a wood O and crap in a washtub. Every day two soldiers pulled out the three tubs, poured in diesel and gasoline, and lit the shit on fire.
You stir the burning shit with a four-foot pole and drift around the smoke. You pour more diesel on the fire. You stir the shit. You gag. You stir. You eyeball the grunts in their hooch down the way, sleeping and playing cards, and mutter to yourself. The wind shifts and you circle, stir, pour.
No music, no TV, no radio. No magazines, no newspapers, no news. No internet. No books except the ones you brought.
The only information came in daily briefs: Fedayeen active in the area. Today two soldiers were killed in an RPG attack. Coalition Forces are securing the city of Baghdad. Watch for a white and orange compact sedan, suspected Fedayeen vehicle. Be on the lookout for a blue or white pickup. Saddam loyalists may be planning a series of coordinated attacks.