He looked at the lance corporal by the Arabic Coke machine. Don’t end up like her, he swore to himself.
Melton raised an eyebrow at Milosz and asked, ‘Would you mind? I don’t have any of my gear. My newspaper is gone, but I’m still a reporter. I shouldn’t be sitting here on my ass feeling sorry for myself – I should be telling stories. Your stories. Would you mind?’
‘Of course not!’ the sergeant cried out, holding his arms wide. ‘I am always interesting in hearing myself talk. And these, my poor little bastards, they have no choice – they have to listen. Why should they suffer alone? Yes, Melton, of course you can tell my stories. Where should I start? With our attack on the Mukarayin Dam? Yes, that was us. We flooded Baghdad. Everyone thinks it was Green Berets, pah, Hollywood pussies! It was GROM.’
Melton couldn’t help glancing around to see if any Army Special Forces were around to hear that remark. If they were and heard, they didn’t make themselves known.
Still struggling with his pen and paper, Melton came up short. The Polish special forces were not an old and venerable outfit. They had only been established in 1991. But they already had a rep as a very closed-up shop. You rarely heard about them, and they never did press. Yet here was one of the senior enlisted men, suddenly happy to give up details of a mission that he would have denied even happened a week or so back.
Milosz had no trouble translating the American’s puzzled look. ‘Do not be surprised, Melton,’ he said. ‘Everything has changed now. I will tell you about Mukarayin because it suits our purposes.’
‘How so?’
‘It is like I said – there will be much more evil in the world soon. There is already, yes? My country, she has suffered more than most through her history. But not this time. Or not without making others suffer for what they might do to us. I will tell you about Mukarayin because you will tell the world, and then she will know that we Poles, we will not be ploughed under again. You know what most people see when they imagine Polish Army? They see horsemen galloping off to charge Hitler’s tanks. Brave, but stupid, and doomed. But now, if you tell them about Mukarayin, in future when people think about Polish fighting man, they maybe think about that dam blowing high into sky and that mountain of water flooding out and drowning city of Baghdad. They will think twice about wishing evil upon us, yes?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Melton. ‘I think they will’
It was more than he had imagined writing about. He’d been more interested in Milosz’s story of calling home and talking to his brother, of being trapped in the broken machinery of a vast war machine, suddenly cut off and alone in a hostile world. And he did do that interview, but he also filled half of his notebook with stories from every man in the sergeant’s extended squad – GROM usually operated in teams of four – about blowing the dam that flooded Baghdad.
As he did so, the strangest thing happened. A small audience began to gather around them – just two passing Cav troopers at first, but increasingly building up into a circle of attentive listeners that drew in even more men and women by virtue of its novelty. After ten minutes Melton was sure that over two hundred people surrounded them, perhaps the majority of the walking wounded in the hangar space. The Polish operators spoke into a rapt silence, but occasionally someone would call out, confirming a detail of their story, or others would clap and cheer like believers at a revival meeting.
The specialist from the 101st Airborne stood over him, his fist full of dog tags, his eyes clear now. ‘Sir?’
‘Yes, Specialist?’
‘Can I… Would it be okay if I told you…?’ The soldier held up the identity discs. There must have been twenty or more of the tags, some with blood and skin on them.
‘Sure, Specialist,’ Melton replied. ‘Tell me what happened.’
A Marine stepped forward. ‘Hey, need a recorder, Mr Melton?’ he asked.
The reporter took it and smiled. ‘Just call me Bret.’
When the dog tags were connected to formerly breathing, living, loving people, the army specialist moved away. The batteries were low, but an Australian commando contributed a set of triple AAA batteries. Bret then talked to the Marine who’d loaned him the tape recorder, until the tape ran out. He ejected the mini-cassette and passed the recorder back to its owner, who had a boy, a girl and a horse called Eagle back home, but the man shook his head.
‘No, Bret, you keep it,’ the Marine said. ‘You need it more than I do.’ He fished around in his pocket and pulled out some fresh tapes. ‘I don’t have anyone to record messages for anymore.’ He then stood up, squared his shoulders, and moved out of the hangar. At the bay doors he collected a rifle and a helmet from another Marine, and they walked out into the searing Qatar daylight.
Melton had no idea where he would place the interviews, or what form they might take. But he kept scribbling and taping, encouraging people to talk about… well, about whatever they wanted. And they did.
‘So the bastard was up in the ceiling,’ one Private Adrian Bennet said. ‘He popped four in my squad before we finally figured out where he was hiding…’
‘Our convoy got cut off,’ a Native American army private by the name of Piewesta told him, shaking her head. ‘We took a hell of a lot of fire and my friend Jessie, she was in the back of the Hummer when we got hit. She didn’t make it.’
‘That was a helluva mess,’ someone added. ‘You with 507th Support Battalion, right?’
Piewesta nodded.
‘The bullets came flying from everywhere,’ an Apache pilot, half of his left foot missing, recalled. ‘Hell of a thing, Bret. I thought I was home safe after knocking down those three Iranian helicopters, but then all of this ground fire comes up. Like being trapped in a mason jar full of lighting bugs. Just wasn’t my day to be flying.’
Melton noticed that the pilot didn’t mention his gunner. Probably didn’t make it, he decided.
‘She just wouldn’t sink,’ a sailor from the USS Belleau Wood said. ‘That Iranian sub put three torpedoes into her, but she wouldn’t go down. We were trying to get the fires under control when we got word to abandon ship. We could’ve saved her but they said resources were tight. Better to scuttle her.’
A Tarawa class LHA lost – scuttled. The US Navy hadn’t lost a ship that large in combat since World War II.
The sailor smiled. ‘We got that fucking Kilo sub, though. ASW guys from the Nimitz got us some payback on that bitch.’
‘Hell, yeah,’ someone else said. Others took up the chorus: ‘Hell, yeah! Payback!’
He heard a seemingly endless stream of combat horror stories. Units cut off or abandoned. Enemies materialising out of nowhere. Supplies running out. Air cover disappearing. Waves of Iraqi troops flowing towards them, then suddenly disappearing inside great roiling walls of flame, or enormous volcanic eruptions of high-explosive dropped from miles overhead. He heard small, intimate stories about men killing each other with whatever weapon came to hand. About a female truck driver, trapped in a hostile village, crawling out via the thousand-year-old sewage system, and souveniring a couple of old Roman coins she discovered on the way.