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  To help quell the terrorists’ offensive and to reestablish a sense of order, a meeting was called in Bassam for all the local Sunni chieftains, American officers, and Iraqi security-force leaders. Both Captain Ten Bears and Captain Whiteback, on his last day of command, attended with our squadron commander. So did the IP and IA colonels. Haydar went, as did Abu Adnan, Boss Johnson II, and Colonel Mohammed’s former deputy, Osama. From all accounts, a productive meeting ensued; however, when a 57-mm rocket flew over them as they exited the house after the meeting, the details of such were scattered to the winds of evermore. The rocket men missed their target, significantly overshooting the meetinghouse. Instead they decapitated a seven-year-old girl playing in her house with her family.

  Retribution was in order, and Coalition forces were the obvious choice to enact it. Identifying the villains served as the first point of order. Two days later, Captain Ten Bears, now in command, sent my platoon with an intel geek to Haydar’s house, knowing that this sheik maintained his own extensive intelligence network. Although our unit maintained a strong relationship with Haydar, it had deteriorated slightly in the preceding months, as he felt we didn’t give him and his village enough attention or funds. Whenever we tried to explain that we were simply trying to empower the various echelons of Iraqi government and weren’t playing favorites, he would laugh scoffingly, “Government? This is Iraq, not America. We are tribal society, not democracy. Don’t you Americans read any history books? The sheiks are government in Arab culture!”

  Another event factoring into Haydar’s dissatisfaction was the state of the water-plant contract. Predictably, it had been awarded to a cousin of Sheik Nour, and thus to the Tamimi tribe. As a result, the areas to the north and east of Haydar’s village benefited, but Haydar and his people did not. And although he knew that such decisions weren’t made at our level, he still gave us hell about the situation because we were there and we had to listen.

  “I will never listen to fancy American in suit again!” he said, smiling bitterly. “We make very good bid, and I explain how it is fair to give us just this one contract instead of Tamimis. Just this one! And fancy American say yes, yes, he understands. And what happens?” Haydar slapped his head in anger and left the answer to his rhetorical question adrift.

  We all sat on the ground in his rectangular meeting room, waiting for the feast always provided for dinner at this residence. Haydar and two of his advisers intermixed with me and five members of the Gravediggers—Staff Sergeant Boondock, Sergeant Fuego (recently promoted and permanently back with the platoon), Doc, Specialist Tunnel, and PFC Smitty—with Suge attempting to provide translation for us all. The rest of the platoon pulled security and would rotate in for food over the next hour. As per the Arab custom, we sat without chairs, facing one another in conversation. On the far wall of the room hung portraits of Haydar’s grandfather and father, both dressed in the traditional dishdasha and turban and both the spitting image of their successor. The current sheik often reminded us that his grandfather worked with the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, his father with the British. It was a subtle way to point out that while the American presence in Iraq was temporary, his family’s was not.

  In an attempt to change the topic of discussion, I asked him about the rocket attack. He looked back at me knowingly. “Yes,” he said. “I have my eyes looking into it.”

  “Will you share that information with us if you find anything out?”

  He nodded. “Of course. As long as my American friends promise to support me over Abu Adnan, if it comes to that.”

  Confused, I looked over at Staff Sergeant Boondock, who shrugged his shoulders in response. “Support you in what, Haydar? I’m not following.”

  He stroked his chin and smiled. “Nothing particular. Not yet, at least. I speak in . . . hypo . . . hypo . . . hypo . . . .”

  Suge struggled with the translation of the last word. “Hypotheticals?” I proffered.

  “Yes! That is it! Hypotentacles! That means maybes, yes?”

  I tried not to laugh at Suge’s crossbred word and considered Haydar’s statement carefully. “You’re a smart man, Haydar,” I said. “You know how we feel about Abu Adnan. We wouldn’t ever support an act of violence between villages or Sahwa leaders, but in terms of having our respect and our ears, you have nothing to worry about from him. Captain Whiteback felt that way, and I know Captain Ten Bears feels that way, too.”

  He nodded again. “As much I believed,” he said. “My head needed to hear it to agree with my heart.” He clapped his hands and barked orders in Arabic to the kitchen, where some of his junior Sahwa temporarily served as cooks and waiters. “Now we eat!”

  That we did. Dishes and dishes of roast chicken, masgouf (a grilled fish mixed with spices), kafta (lamb meatballs), flatbread, and eggplant salad appeared, with dips of amba (a pickle condiment) and hummus providing additional flavor. Dates dipped in sugar served as our dessert. Halfway through the meal, Haydar’s three-year-old son, Ghazi, ran into the meeting room to give his father a hug and a kiss.

  “This is why we fight,” Haydar said as he picked up his giggling son and twirled him in the air. “So that they might have peace in a land that has never known it.”

  I immediately pulled out my notebook and wrote that quote down, as Suge mumbled his agreement in broken English and celebrated with a cigarette. That, I thought to myself, is the most profound fucking thing I’ve heard in a long time. True dust of the desert. I wondered how much better it sounded in Arabic.

  The next day, Haydar called Suge at the combat outpost and gave us the names of the three men responsible for the rocket attack. He said that his sources would be willing to write out sworn statements against the men, contingent on our detaining them first.

  The names didn’t surprise anyone. Two of them belonged to the Daraji family, an inbred Sunni clan whose members all lived together in a small village southeast of Bassam. The patriarch had been arrested the prior year for a lethal IED attack on an American convoy and still called Camp Bucca home. Various sons, cousins, and nephews had been jailed or were wanted for arrest or questioning. These men didn’t necessarily qualify as straight AQI; they were more like poor rural labor contracted for acts of terror. Ironically, all three of the rocket men worked as Sons of Iraq in the Bassam area, albeit at different checkpoints. Not that any of that mattered. They had brutally murdered an innocent young girl, and we got the green light for a raid. Our clarity of purpose returned.

  The day after that, in the tranquil silence of the predawn, we raided the Darajis’ small village.

  Captain Ten Bears’s plan had the three line platoons of Bravo Troop striking three target houses in the greater Bassam area simultaneously, while the Estonians pulled outer-perimeter security as the cordon. Acting in accordance with Higher’s desire for more joint patrols, a three-man fire team of Iraqi army jundis augmented all of our units. One of the other platoons detained their man immediately, and the other one found no one home. At our objective house, we sorted through a multitude of women, children, and young men without finding our specific target, Ali, the reported rocket trigger puller. “He is at his Sahwa checkpoint now,” his younger half-brother and second cousin eventually told us. “Why do you seek him?”

  “Uhh, we just want to talk,” I responded. “He said he had information on some Ali Babas.”

  “Ah, very good,” responded the Iraqi. “There are many Ali Babas in this area, especially in the Sahwa.”

  As my platoon walked out of the house and back to the vehicles, I gave them the hand-and-arm signal for “Let’s hurry the fuck up” and shook the young Daraji’s hand. “Just tell him we’ll come back next week,” I said, ignoring the urge to wink behind my sunglasses. “We’re not in a rush to talk with him or anything.”

  “Of course. Thank you for coming.”

  “No problem! Take care!”

  Making a liar out of me almost immediately, our Strykers screamed out of the village as though with the wrat
h of God. We moved to the Sons of Iraq checkpoint on the southern end of Route Islanders as quickly as the tight turns of the canal roads allowed.

  By the time we arrived at the checkpoint, however, Ali Daraji was nowhere to be found. His fellow guards said that he hadn’t shown up to work that morning and they didn’t know why. While searching the surrounding area though, Staff Sergeant Spade discovered a grey sedan parked behind a dirt mound that matched the description of Ali’s vehicle given by Haydar’s sources.

  “Yes, that is Ali’s car!” piped in one of the Sons of Iraq, eyes shifting nervously, when he realized what Staff Sergeant Spade had found. “I switch with him last night. He take my car.”

  Suge now seized the moment. Our terp used his imposing size and backed the smaller Sahwa guard against a wall, roaring menacingly at him in Arabic. Two minutes later, he turned back to me, slapped his helmet and sighed, and said, “Fucking Iraqis.” The guard now wore the look of a plane-crash survivor, mainly because, I learned later, Suge had threatened to have us drop the Son of Iraq off alone in a Shia neighborhood if he did not cooperate.

  “What’s the deal with the cars?”

  “He say that Ali Daraji make him trade cars last night at his house. He say that Ali Daraji tell him he needed to borrow his truck to move things. I think he tell truth. I put the fear of Allah in him.”

  I smirked. “Looks like it. What kind of truck does this guy own then?”

  Suge barked in Arabic at the Sahwa, received his answer, and nodded. “Old white truck with flat bed in back.”

  The TOC kept radioing for updates, and with SFC Big Country on leave, the acting platoon sergeant—Staff Sergeant Bulldog—and I talked over the situation.

  “This guy could be anywhere,” I said. “He has to know we’re looking for him by now. We may have to call it a day.”

  “Maybe we should swing back da house one more time, make sure that white truck ain’t there,” Staff Sergeant Bulldog recommended. “Just to make sure.”

  “Sounds good to me.” We loaded back into our Strykers and moved east from whence we came, with Staff Sergeant Boondock’s vehicle in the lead. After months of pleading, we had switched Staff Sergeant Boondock to the senior scout position with Staff Sergeant Bulldog’s blessing. This helped both men’s careers as Staff Sergeant Bulldog was more than ready for a platoon of his own, and such a move freed him up in the event that one became available.

  About halfway back to the Daraji village, our front Stryker slammed on its brakes, just past a small turn to our left that snaked north into more farmlands. This brought the entire patrol to a halt. A few seconds passed, and I keyed the hand mic.

  “3, this is 1. What’s up? Why’d you stop?”

  “We’re staring at a vehicle that matches the new description,” he said. “It was traveling west until it stopped when we came up on it.”

  Before I could respond, Staff Sergeant Boondock spoke again. “He’s moving! He’s fucking gunning it north! We’re past the turn though!”

  “Take the lead!” I yelled to PFC Smitty, who slammed on the accelerator and took the north turn in pursuit of the fleeing truck. From the gunner’s cupola, Sergeant Prime reported that we were about seventy-five meters behind the truck but closing. The Stryker engine hummed with glee as we winded through backcountry dirt roads on a high-speed canal chase.

  My heart pumped with excitement, but I attempted to maintain calm on the radio. “2, 3, follow us. We got a bead on this fucker.” And then on the internal net: “Prime, when we get close, point the 240 [M240B machine gun] straight at him to let him know we mean business. Smitty, how fast are we going?”

  “Heh, sir, you don’t wanna know. We’re good. Don’t worry.” I found out later the answer to my question was forty-nine miles per hour—in a nineteen-ton armored vehicle.

  Approximately thirty seconds later, with the truck’s speed fading and us within twenty meters, Sergeant Prime aimed his machine gun straight north. “He sees it!” he reported. “The truck’s turning right, into a driveway!”

  “We’re dismounting!” I yelled, while PFC Smitty parked our vehicle perpendicularly to the driveway. As the ramp dropped, I jumped out of the back with Sergeant Fuego, Corporal Spot, Specialist Tunnel, and an IA jundi right with me. Suge eventually followed.

  As we rounded the corner of the driveway, a lone Iraqi male tossed a metallic object into the lawn, turned around, and crouched over in a defensive position resembling that of a cornered animal. He found five rifles oriented on the tiny spot just between his eyes. He then put his hands up in the air. No question existed as to the man’s identity; in person Ali Daraji looked almost exactly as he did in his target photograph, just with a beard and longer, curlier hair. My men searched him and the white truck, finding pistol cartridges, seven fake identification cards, a large hunting knife, and a computer hard drive. Corporal Spot and Specialist Tunnel walked into the lawn and found the Glock pistol he had thrown off his person moments before.

  Staff Sergeant Boondock walked up a minute or so later with his dismounted team and found me crowing in jubilation as the soldiers finished up their search. Sergeant Fuego had flex-cuffed and blindfolded Ali and sat him underneath a nearby tree.

  “We got the bastard!” I exclaimed, ecstatic that we had nabbed our guy, adrenaline from the chase still coursing through my veins. This moment was why I had fought to stay with my platoon, I was sure of it. This was why I had told the Establishment to kiss my skinny Irish ass. It made all of the melodrama of the last two months worth it. “We got this stupid-ass raghead, and he won’t be killing anymore little girls with his stupid-ass rockets anytime soon!”

  Staff Sergeant Boondock laughed. “Easy, sir. Save the racial epithets for me. I call them ragheads and hajjis; you’re supposed to call them local-nationals.”

  I bit my lip, chided myself, and nodded. Although amused, he was right. I needed to stay cool, no matter how excited or satisfied.

  “But,” the NCO continued, “my preferred slur to describe the Iraqi people is camel jockey. If nothing else does, that better make the cut for that book you’re going to write. And you better not quote me saying anything soft!”

  I laughed. “Gotcha, on both accounts.” Then I grabbed Suge and started questioning Ali Daraji. Extremely unhelpful, he refused to answer anything about the rocket attack, or anything else for that matter. He just glared at me and Suge sullenly, not speaking at all. We relaxed his flex-cuffs and gave him a bottle of water anyway.

  The house in whose driveway we made the arrest belonged to a family with no connection to Ali Daraji or his clan. Though initially surprised and scared to find us on their property, they became very hospitable once we explained how we had ended up there, and they brought out chai for everyone. The children of the house began chanting, “Bucca! Bucca! Ali Baba, Bucca!” (Prison, prison, the thief goes to prison) at Daraji.

  We stacked all of the collected evidence in front of Daraji, took off his blindfold, and told him to smile his biggest terrorist smile. The three jundis posed behind him, backs straight, faces hard. Then, with my digital camera, I snapped the photograph affectionately known as the money shot, nicknamed after the climactic move popularized in modern porno films. The money shot would be used both at Ali Daraji’s eventual trial and for Coalition forces’ posters and propaganda, showing the strength and independence of the Iraqi army to their people. With the rundown over, we now went back to the combat outpost.

  “Thank you,” I whispered on the way back to no one in particular. “Thank you. I really needed that.”

  ALL BECAUSE OF A POPSICLE STICK

  “What the fuck was that? Did you hear that?”

  I sure had. The unmistakable sound of nearby rifle fire nipped at my eardrums over the running Stryker engine. Instinctively, Staff Sergeant Bulldog, Corporal Spot, PFC Smitty, and I dropped to one knee on the ground, using my vehicle as cover. We had just finished clearing a reported IED site on Route Tampa—nothing more than a dirt mound with a l
ong popsicle stick stuck in the middle of it—and were walking back to our Strykers when the gunshots started.

  “3, this is 1,” I said into my dismount radio. “We’re hearing gunfire. What do you guys see up there?”

  Staff Sergeant Boondock’s Stryker sat one hundred meters to our front, oriented due south, our direction of travel.

  “We got six or seven dismounts spread across Tampa, walking in some kind of fucking line formation. Two of ’em just shot their rifles off to the west. Isn’t there an IP station around here?”

  “Roger,” I said. “There’s one just southwest of your position.” As we remounted the Strykers, I intended to drive us down to the dismounts’ location and verify whether they were IPs or not. I didn’t think any type of enemy force would walk across Route Tampa in a line formation, but after seven or so months in Iraq, I’d seen stranger things.

  “White, this is White 1. Let me know when you’re redcon-1,” I said, now back on my vehicle. “3, we’re going to drive down to those dismounts and see what the fuck is up. I think those guys are probably spooked Iraqi police, but we’ll see. After that, we’ll continue to Nour’s for security operations for the night. We’ll be there for the long haul, until 0900, so remember to rotate out your gunners, and—”

  “Break! Break! Break!” Staff Sergeant Boondock’s voice ripped across the radio net, interrupting my verbose mission vomit. “We’re taking fire! I say again, my vehicle is being shot at by those mother fuckers!”

  I waited for the inevitable burst of 50-caliber from Specialist Big Ern to return the favor. When it didn’t come, morbid thoughts raced through my mind. No, I thought. Not another one. Not like this.

  “Sir, I saw the muzzle flashes,” Sergeant Cheech said from my gunner’s cupola. “They were definitely firing right at the 3 vehicle.”

  “If it’s IPs, flash your brights!” I finally shouted over the net. “If it’s not, kill them!”

  Three millennium seconds passed before Staff Sergeant Boondock replied.