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  Later that week, an individual detained by a unit to our south admitted to attempting to emplace an IED at the exact spot and on the exact date we had observed him. Like most emplacers, he was just a poor teenager who had been paid $20 for his act, which he used to feed his family for a week. Other than identifying his emplacing partner, he knew nothing of intelligence value and was later sentenced to six months at Camp Bucca. His partner’s dead body was found some four months later in Baghdad, next to a pre - maturely detonated IED he had been putting into the ground. Sometimes I wondered how he spent those four months of borrowed time.

  SADR’S SPRING JAM

  March 25, 2008, day: The Gravediggers and I were out in sector conducting security sweeps in the eastern villages. A radio call from Captain Whiteback informed us that Muqtadah al-Sadr had lifted the freeze on attacks against Coalition forces by his militia, Jaish al-Mahdi. Half of my men said, “Fuck.” The other half said, “Fuck yeah.” We spent the rest of the day patrolling the Shia havens of Saba al-Bor, but all appeared normal.

  March 25, 2008, night: The steady purring of distant automatic fire stirred me out of sleep an hour after I collapsed into it. A second passed, and then my entire room shook with inevitability while a M240B machine gun on the roof of the combat outpost returned fire directly above us. I rolled out of my bed, getting my legs wrapped up in my poncho liner, breaking the fall to the ground with my face. Staff Sergeant Bulldog barreled through our door like a runaway freight train. “It on now! Oh yeah, it be on now!” he boomed. We all started throwing on our gear in great haste, with the notable exception of SFC Big Country, who yawned loudly from his bed and scratched his head. “You probably have time to put on pants, sir,” he advised, causing me to look down at a pair of boxer shorts contrasting sharply with the combat boots, body armor, and helmet I had managed to get on my body. I peeked my head out of the doorway and didn’t see any terrorist hordes coming up the stairs, so I silently agreed with my platoon sergeant’s assessment. The gunfire above us continued while I found my pants.

  Five minutes later, my platoon and I sprinted out of the combat outpost to the dark shadows in the motor pool we believed were still our Strykers. We locked and loaded on the run. The gunfire that originated at our location had spread across the city almost instantaneously.

  The reports came rushing in. “Tracer rounds to the west, Lieutenant.” “Flares to our east.” “Audible contact with shots to our south, sir.” There was a bright flash and then a resounding BOOM. “Umm. You probably heard it LT, and saw it, but that was an explosion to our north.”

  The firing from the roof had stopped altogether by this point, until we heard a burst of rounds strike the outside wall of the outpost directly to our front. The hissing of M4 bullets spraying above us reminded us that other soldiers were still on the roof, and they were firing at something on the other side of the wall.

  “Get into the fucking vehicles and get redcon-1!” we yelled to one another.

  March 26, 2008, day: I stood in the street, looking at a building with a sloping roof and two cannonball-sized holes in the middle of it. We had spent many hours zigzagging through the various Shia neighborhood cores, chasing a lot of ghosts and a lot of gunfire but finding nothing. Only now, in the light of the morning, did we comprehend the full scope of JAM’s resurgence. The aforementioned holes were the gift from the main gun of an Iraqi army BMP (armored personnel carrier), and the aforementioned building was the local Sahwa headquarters.

  The one Son of Iraq who showed up for work this day expressed his displeasure with the situation. I thanked him for his devotion to duty and asked him where his coworkers were. He looked at me like I had a dick growing out of my forehead and said, “At home, of course. It is not safe here.” I asked him why he wasn’t at home then. “Because my father kicked me out and told me to go to work, and I have nowhere else to go.”

  Phoenix laughed at the Sahwa member and asked if we could go visit one of his girlfriends. “It depends,” I said. “Can her mom make chai?”

  March 26, night: We spent the night conducting a counter-IED OP on the southern end of Route Islanders. Many hours in my vehicle were spent discussing the finer intricacies of deer hunting, a pastime at which both PFC Smitty and Private Hot Wheels considered themselves expert. I couldn’t tell if they were more horrified or shocked to find out that the first time I had fired a gun of any sort was in a military uniform. I, in turn, explained to them that Suge Knight was an interpreter, not an interpolator.

  The next hot topic had to do with which one of Staff Sergeant Boondock’s designated call signs for our soldiers was the most offensive. Ironically, the troop’s equal-opportunity representative, he chortled with pride when PFC Das Boot identified himself as White 3-Kraut. I pointed out that Doc’s nickname of “Twinkie”—yellow on the outside, white on the inside—would probably offend an outsider the most. As we rolled back into the combat outpost, Captain Whiteback relayed the latest frago concerning the next morning’s mission. We slept in our vehicles for two and a half hours.

  March 27, day: Somehow analogous of the Gravediggers’ current mission, Iraq, and life in general, a scrawny, dirty rooster started to crow an hour after sunrise but quit with a coughing cackle halfway through the attempt. My Stryker lay parked in the driveway of Sheik Nour’s sprawling compound. For reasons obvious to everyone, Sheik Nour pushed up the dates for his vacation to Jordan, and we were tasked to ensure that he made it to Baghdad Airport without exploding into bloody bits of Mahdi Army propaganda.

  While we waited for the sheik to finish packing, Specialist Flashback and Sergeant Cheech pontificated about deployment cycles.

  “Three deployments. Wow. Just think Sergeant Cheech, you’ve spent a tenth of your life in Iraq,” Specialist Flashback observed.

  “Gee, thanks for pointing that out,” Sergeant Cheech replied. “Next time, do me an actual favor and shoot me in the foot, okay?”

  Sheik Nour shortly waddled up to the back of my vehicle’s ramp, while his servants followed with three pieces of vintage leather luggage. Nour stared expectantly at Sergeant Cheech, who gave him a wild-eyed “you-must-be-fucking-crazy-this-is-my-third-deployment-to-this-hellhole-of-a-country-and-I’ve-missed-the-birth-of-two-of-my-children-for-you-and-your-people-I-came-here-to-seek-out-and-destroy-I-am-not-fucking-carrying-your-damn-luggage” look. PFC Smitty and I quickly loaded up the suitcases instead; I had done far more embarrassing things in life than that, albeit usually under the influence of alcohol. Higher diverted our route before we departed due to multiple IED attacks on Route Tampa in the previous hours. The ride passed uneventfully, and the sheik spent the majority of it perusing Specialist Flashback’s College Girls edition of Playboy.

  March 27, night: We conducted another counter-IED mission. Specialist Big Ern sang twenty minutes of soul music, punctuated with a Tina Turner song, while Sergeant Axel and Specialist Prime competed in an infrared Chem-Light match. In the back of my vehicle, PFC Smitty got bored.

  “Weeeh!” Private Hot Wheels exclaimed from his position in the rear hatch.

  “What the fuck was that?” I said, startled by the pitch in my soldier’s voice.

  “Sorry, sir . . . uhh . . . Smitty poked me in the ass with an antenna pole. I didn’t like it.”

  Fifteen minutes before the scheduled end of mission, an IED exploded four hundred meters to our south, on a convoy of supply vehicles, just outside of our AO. My Bravo section raced down there to find a broken rearview mirror and a few rattled souls, but no casualties.

  Despite the facts that this IED exploded out of our sector, had obviously been emplaced before our OP started, and was out of our OP’s scan due to a series of canal rises, we still saw the irony of the situation. “I’d keep this one out of the blog, LT,” Staff Sergeant Boondock told me. “Nothing like a counter-IED mission that has an IED explode during it. People are going to start getting the wrong idea about our heroics, you know?”

  March 28, day: We drove up to the m
ain checkpoint in Saba al-Bor and found the IAs and the IPs not searching any of the entering or departing vehicles, although they immediately started searching them once they spotted our Strykers. They told me, to a man, that they always searched the vehicles. I was told later that I lost it on them and yelled in ways my soldiers had never seen before. I didn’t remember much of it.

  I walked back to my Stryker, yawning noisily, trying to ignore the body soreness underneath my armor and the buzzing in my mind that demanded rest.

  “Tired, sir?” Sergeant Spade asked.

  “Nope,” I lied. “You?”

  “Hell, no. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

  After six hours of joint checkpoint operations with the Iraqi security forces, we left and paused for fifteen minutes to observe them from a distance. They continued to search all the vehicles, which shocked us all. An hour later, another platoon passed through the checkpoint and reported that the Iraqis were no longer searching any vehicles moving into or out of town. They stopped to remedy the situation.

  March 28, night: Finally. A combat mission. We were tasked with a raid deep into the countryside, far beyond even the dimmest of Saba al-Bor’s checkpoint lights. The target was a key leader of a renegade JAM golden group, who had trained substantially in Iran. We owned the night; he owned a wanted poster. We were motivated. He was fucked.

  I briefed my men that this would be a snatch-and-grab mission, quicker than most romantic comedies. “We should be home before breakfast,” I told them, because that was what I had been told. In the mean time, PFC Smitty handed me another Rip-It, and adrenaline pumped through my body, raping the fatigue into submission.

  An hour or so later, we set the cordon. “Time to move in, dismounts,” I ordered. Staff Sergeant Boondock and his team took the lead, followed by me and Phoenix, then Staff Sergeant Bulldog and his section. We hadn’t even stacked up on the first building yet when a burst of AK-47 fire roared through the dark stillness from somewhere close. To the east, I gauged. The radio soon provided an answer. Two individuals had been spotted and had their hands up. Scared farmers, maybe. Maybe not. They were both detained without further incident. No one had been hit. We continued our movement.

  We crept up to the target house, using hand-and-arm signals the entire way. “No need for flashbangs,” I whispered to Staff Sergeant Boondock and his team, referring to our stun grenades. “The teams will leapfrog through the house. Separate the males. Don’t let them talk to each other.” Then the radio spoke again. Two individuals had hopped out of a window in a house to our north and were running straight into the cordon like quails in the brush, rustled right into the hunter’s sights. One of the runners was our target, the gunner reported, as the mug shot was a perfect match.

  We moved through the house anyway, as nonlethally as lethal soldiers could. It wasn’t just grandma; there was dad, and mom, wives one and two, and the kids. All kinds of kids. We hit the mental switch, calmed down from the raid hype, and became counterinsurgents again, clearing the house and searched for bomb-making materials and fake IDs. We brought the family some bottles of water, and I had a chat with the man of the house about his just-detained eldest son.

  March 29, day: “Why are we still here, LT?” I couldn’t tell anymore if one of my soldiers had asked that question or if I had asked it of myself yet again. “Because Higher says so.” Why? “Because Higher says so.

  “And no, it doesn’t matter that they said so from an air-conditioned TOC ten kilometers away on an eight-hour shift while we sweat through hour sixteen of this clusterfuck.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Larry wanted more intel and to prove a point to the villagers that they shouldn’t harbor insurgents. I thought this violated the COIN principle of precision targeting, but what did I know? I was just a lieutenant. We had already detained ten more military-aged males in the area to be brought in for tactical questioning. Sergeant Spade escorted an Iraqi woman and her grandchild from the other side of the village. The man detained with the original target needed positive identification; we may have inadvertently rounded up another top target but lacked confirmation. During the area sweeps, though, we had run into a family whose names matched our records.

  The detainee sat in the shade on a small patch of grass, blindfolded, with a bottle of water next to him. Three of my soldiers pulled security around him. Phoenix talked to the woman, who sighed, shook her head, and turned to me. “Ali Baba?” she asked. I nodded my head in the affirmative. She clucked to herself and told the terp that the detained man was in fact her son and her grandson’s father. The little boy ran over to the detainee. “Abu?” Phoenix asked him, using the Arabic word for father. The boy nodded and began to cry. His grandmother yelled coldly at him, which caused him to snap up and run back her way. He stopped halfway, turned around, and ran back to his father to kiss him on the forehead.

  A month before, this scene would have caused me some sort of internal anguish. Now, it just brought me that much closer to getting out of my gear and out of the fucking sun.

  “Hey, LT. They need you on the radio.” It was Sergeant Spade.

  “Of course they do.” I grunted. “Sergeant Spade, take PFC Cold-Cuts and walk the woman and the kid home.” I reached into my Stryker and pulled out a plastic bag full of Beanie Babies that my mother had sent me to distribute. I held it down to the child, who smiled and picked out a giraffe.

  March 29, night: Somehow, we had made it off the raid objective. We now patrolled the streets of Saba al-Bor dismounted, with the stony silence of men too exhausted to care anymore about being exhausted. I remembered the adage, “Don’t worry about the soldiers who bitch; worry about the ones who don’t,” so I worried about all of them.

  We searched an ambulance to see if it was running weapons out of town. It wasn’t. We distributed some pro-Iraqi security fliers to various Sahwa checkpoints. We identified ten armed men on a rooftop and yelled at them to come down to the street or die violently. They turned out to be a very skittish group of Sons of Iraq petrified that the Mahdi Army would attack them.

  March 30, day: We spent another day at the main checkpoint in town, handing out pamphlets and overwatching the IAs and IPs. Taking the pamphlet that showed masked men with RPG launchers and read, “Violent men die violent deaths,” the kids began to arrest one another. “Ali Baba!” they screamed. “Bucca!” they cried, referring to the national prison. It was funny the first few times. Not so much the 820,973th time. I told Staff Sergeant Bulldog that my eyeballs hurt. He laughed, which caused me to laugh, which caused the entire platoon to laugh.

  “It wasn’t even that funny,” I said between wheezes.

  “Nope, sure wasn’t!” he said, still laughing uncontrollably.

  March 30, night: The Internet told me that Sadr had called for a ceasefire on attacks against Coalition forces and the Iraqi government. It also used the term Mahdi Army Revolt. I looked this up on Wikipedia, and there was already an entry. Huh, I thought. I guess the last six days actually did happen. So that was what they were calling it. After all, history didn’t count unless it had a snazzy name reference.

  I checked in with Captain Whiteback. He was talking on the radio to squadron headquarters with his crazy eyes, and he looked frustrated. I decided to come back later. Back in my room, the NCOs played poker, bullshitting. As I walked in, Sergeant Axel wailed in pain. “Gah! I got dip in my skeeter bite! It burns!” I thought he referred to a mosquito bite, but I wasn’t sure.

  Meanwhile, Staff Sergeant Boondock munched on milk bones, dog treats my mother had sent me in the same care package as the Beanie Babies. The milk bones were intended for bomb-sniffing dogs.

  “These are delicious, LT!” he cackled, much to the acclaim of the others. “I wish I was a dog, ’cause then I’d eat milk bones all the damn time!”

  I shook my head, completely speechless and yet not really surprised at these antics, and crawled into bed. As I closed my eyes, I tried to think of how to describe the past week of my life. It’ll hav
e to end with the milk bones, I thought. Nothing else would make sense.

  WISDOM FROM THE HOME FRONT

  A lot of shipped items made their way to the sands of Iraq over the course of our deployment by way of the U.S. Postal Service. Most of the appropriately named care packages, sent by family members and friends, contained allotments of boxed foods, magazines, and random notes of encouragement for the soldiers. Mail call usually meant snack time, and the spoils of such were usually shared among the group. Other care packages consisted of health foods, toothpastes, blankets, books, and small toys, sent for us to pass out to the Iraqi populace. Although these weren’t met with the same sort of celebration, they certainly meant more to those on the receiving end—and there was no surer way to snap out of a bad day or a brooding mood than to hand out Beanie Babies to local children while on patrol.

  Between the care packages though, other boxes arrived; the motivations for shipping these packages were at best odd and at worse perverse. Like the ones that included a photograph of a rather buxom—and obviously available—three-time divorcee not so subtly looking for military health care coverage. Or the ones with a corporate return address carefully stamped in the upper left-hand corner and a collection of tightly wrapped golf shirts emblazoned with the corporate logo in question. I never claimed that Saba al-Bor was Gallipoli or the La Drang Valley, but we still didn’t get to slip away to Baghdad Lakes Country Club for eighteen holes between missions. Even the Iraqi children were taken aback, and momentarily silenced, when they ran up to the Strykers asking for chocolate and were instead tossed a golf shirt some six sizes too big.

  Besides those curiosities, my favorite stack in the combat outpost’s mail room was that of letters written to soldiers by American schoolchildren. Most of them offered the same commonplace banalities sent our way from the greater American public—thank you for what you do; please return home safely; we’ll pray for you. Empty words from an empty people—they wanted to show that they cared, but our experience was so unlike anything in their realm of understanding, only trodden clichés could fill their vacuum of confusion. This wasn’t their fault, though—something I didn’t yet understand when I was still in Iraq.