Giant camel spiders roamed our camp, some bigger than a grown man’s palm.
One skittered across the sand at me on crazy legs and I stomped it. The thing reared back, inch-long fangs sawing the air, and lunged. I stomped it again, again and again, mashing it to yellow meat.
In addition to the camel spiders, there were brown recluses, black scorpions, mosquitoes, flies, fleas, biting ants, and, we were told, the deadly asp. There were cicada-like bugs in the trees as well, which didn’t bite but sang all day in maddening skreeks. When they stopped, it was like going deaf.
Wild dogs prowled the camp at night. The muezzin five times a day.
reminder, you are a representative of the united states while in iraq
it will be important to use good judgment, tact, and diplomacy
in any dealings you may have with the people
Mail came, packages and letters from home. I inked a chessboard onto the bottom of an upside-down apple crate and made pieces from scavenged Russian commo gear: the king and queen glass diodes, the rooks resistors, bishops capacitors.
We started catching camel spiders and scorpions instead of just killing them. Did they burn? Drown? Could you poison them with laundry soap? Healds used his snips to cut the legs off one, leaving it hobbling on six, then five, then three. Down to two, it fell over wriggling. We thought about letting it starve then decided to burn it.
Operation Iron Bullet got underway. National Guardsmen and Iraqi workers came to load our bunkers’ munitions onto trucks for transport to AHA Taji.
We were issued Humanitarian Daily Rations to give the Iraqis. Wrapped in tough yellow plastic, they were labeled A Food Gift from the People of the United States of America. The Iraqis brought their own lunches, flatbread with lamb and vegetables, and took the HumRats home.
They were a raggedy bunch, mustached and bony, wearing the same dirty clothes every day. We watched them with distrust and curiosity. Sergeant Chandler was the exception. Tasked with ferrying the work crews back and forth and guarding them during their shift, he got friendly. He ate their flatbread, gave them extra MREs, and bought their old dinars and army badges. Soon we did too. We bought the Pepsis they kept on ice in little coolers.
We captured a camel spider and a scorpion and Lieutenant Krauss announced a match. We fought them that night in a water bottle with the label peeled off. We cut the top off the bottle and cut another top off another bottle so it fit over the first like a cap. Several joes came to watch, huddled around us, and we dumped in one then the other. The camel spider skittered down to one end. We tilted the bottle so the scorpion fell on him.
Zang! went the black stinger. Zang! Zangzang! We cheered and shouted as the spider curled in death.
The next day, we fought this scorpion against another scorpion and he won again. The crowd multiplied and the shouts got louder.
The following day, though, our champion seemed sluggish. We were concerned. Did he need water? Was he depressed? We fretted and urged him to keep up his strength. We asked Healds but he snarled, “Dammit, I’m a medic, not an entomologist.”
That night we fought our hero against another camel spider, this time in a new arena. We took the apple crate I’d made into a chessboard and turned it right side up, covering it with a sheet of acetate. It was delicate work: one person held the arena and another the acetate and a third the water bottles caging our gladiators, then we dumped them in one by one, sliding back the cover, shaking the warrior in, fixing the acetate quick. The second fighter was always trickiest.
Our champ beat the new spider handily and in honor of his string of victories we dubbed him Saddam. The next day, however, his stupor worsened, even though we’d left him the spider’s carcass to eat. We had another fight that night, between him and a new, very large camel spider, but he was too sick or listless to attack, and since the camel spider’s jaws couldn’t pierce his thick exoskeleton, the fight was a draw. We doused both in gas and lit them up. The scorpion burned slow, sadly inanimate, but our camel spider ran, a skittering ball of fire, and crumpled outside the hooch. We cheered.
We staged more matches, got good at it. The scorpions were viciously territorial and fought both each other and the camel spiders, but the spiders for all their fierce appearance were comparatively irenic: they couldn’t stand up to those black stingers and wouldn’t fight against each other, no matter how much trash we talked. Scorpions were both rarer and harder to catch, so after our first lucky string of fights the battles grew infrequent. When we got a scorpion we fought him against camel spider after camel spider until he died in captivity or was killed by another scorpion. The winner we named Saddam.
successful combat operations in urban areas
require skills that are unique to this type of fighting
The radio crackled: MPs requesting assistance, moving in on a suspected cache, needed backup, wanted us, four or five humvees ASAP. The assault in two-zero mikes.
I threw on my battle rattle and ran into the CP, where Captain Yarrow, Lieutenant Krauss, and Sergeant First Class Perry stood pondering the sat-map.
“I think you can go out Gate 1 and down this road here, past, uh, what are those, houses?”
“Some kind of building.”
“Past those houses, right, and you can turn down this road over the canal.”
“Is that a bridge?”
“It’s uh, I can’t tell.”
“Can we go around?”
“Around the canal?”
“I mean, you know, a crossing.”
“You can go through BIAP but we’d uh, we’d need to get that route from somebody. I mean, we don’t know. And it’d take forty-five minutes at least, just to get there, never mind the site.”
“So down these roads here?”
“One of them must have a bridge.”
“Sir, we should roll,” Sergeant First Class Perry said.
“Can we take the map with us?” Yarrow asked.
“It’s mounted to the wood, sir,” Lieutenant Krauss told him. “And it’s too big.”
“Maybe we can fold it up.”
“It’s the only map we have, sir.”
“Sir, we should go.”
“Yeah, fine.” He turned to me. “Wilson, you see this?” He pointed at the map.
“Roger, sir.”
“That’s where we’re going. We go out Gate 1, we take the second left, then the second left after that. That should take us over the canal.”
The smudge of tangled gray resembled a crushed spider.
“Roger, sir.”
We headed out, headlights blazing, five humvees fully loaded. “Weapon status red,” the BC called, chambering a round in his nine mil and grinning. “Lock and load!” My rifle’s bolt slid forward with an exhilarating clack.
We rolled through the night past the first huts and trees and took the second left onto a dirt road bordered with thick vegetation. I strained to catch the twitch that would warn us of imminent attack.
“Turn down here,” the BC said.
“That’s the first one, sir.”
“The what?”
“You said the second turn.”
“I what?”
“You said the second turn.”
“Hold on. Stop.” He got on the radio. “Crusader CP, this is Crusader Six. Will you check the map here, we’re at the first turn on the road but I think it’s where the second turn should be. Can you verify?”
“CRUSADER SIX THIS IS CRUSADER CP. IT’S, UH, DIFFICULT TO DETERMINE EXACTLY.”
“Crusader CP, this is Crusader Six, yes or no. Yes or no. Do I turn down this road or not?”