Sunrise Over Fallujah

  “He wants to know if you play football,” Ahmed said.

  I knew he meant what we called soccer in America and I told Ahmed to tell him I knew a little about the game.

  “Omar says he wants to play a game against the Americans,” Ahmed said.

  Okay. It was me, Jonesy, Captain Coles, and two guys from the 422nd against five Iraqi kids. We set up goals about fifty feet apart. Some of the Iraqi adults came out and stood on the side. One woman sat at her window with her arms on the sill. It reminded me of the black women in Harlem who would sit in the windows and watch the kids playing in the street.

  The Iraqi boys were either better than we thought they should have been or we were worse. Much to the amusement of Marla, they scored at will past a lunging Captain Coles. We were weighed down with body armor and combat boots; the Iraqi kids, barefooted and dressed in light shirts, flew around us. We played for nearly thirty minutes before Coles, mercifully, said we had to leave.

  Omar, the boy who had been standing in the doorway, said something to me, making sure it was loud enough for Ahmed to hear.

  “He said any Iraqi could beat an American any day,” Ahmed said. “And maybe you could get the monkey to play next time.”

  I said that next time we would win. It was something to say. I patted the boy on his head and he pushed my hand away and stood up straighter, almost defiantly. Okay, I could deal with that.

  The soldiers from the 422nd seemed like really good guys. They said that they would try to build a goalpost for the kids when they finished getting the water pumps working. We let the villagers empty the water buffalo. They brought out jars, buckets, even a few pots, and took as much water as they could carry.

  Back to Baghdad. I was glad to be back in the Green Zone, back to feeling safe. Coles read us his report. It said that there was no “friendly fire” incident, and that the village guys could be called enemy combatants.

  It all looked good on paper, but I knew that Miller would have trouble with it. I was beginning to understand where she was coming from. She didn’t have any easy answers, but she didn’t need them.

  Back at the tent Jonesy peeled off his boots and socks and collapsed on his cot. His feet stunk so he poured some water on them. “Yo, Birdy, how’d you like playing against those kids?”

  “It was okay.”

  “I really liked it,” Jonesy said. “That’s what I want life to be about.”

  “I thought life was going to be about the blues,” I said.

  “I’m going to be playing the blues at night,” Jonesy said. “I got to find something to do in the daytime. That’s why I’m over here.”

  “So what do you think of these Iraqis?” I asked.

  “It’s like my uncle Herbert used to say.” Jonesy propped himself up on one elbow. “You don’t need to be around nobody you got to watch all the time unless you making love to them. And God know this Georgia boy ain’t making love to nothing over here.”

  Sergeant Harris and Jonesy got into a stupid shouting match that almost ended up in a fight. We were watching some cop program, the usual stuff with police dealing with low-level street crime. The cops were picking up prostitutes and Harris said that in a way most women weren’t much more than whores.

  “They get a man to support them and then they just sit back and watch television,” he said.

  “Yo, man, you got to show more respect than that,” Jonesy said. “Your mama is a woman.”

  “No, you got to watch yours,” Harris said. “I’m a sergeant, fool!”

  “You also sounding like your brain is AWOL,” Jonesy said. “We over here fighting with women.”

  Harris jumped up from where he had been sitting, pushed Jonesy up against the wall, and drew his fist back as if he was going to punch him. I grabbed Harris from the back and spun him around while Victor and Evans jumped in front of him.

  “I’ll kill you and that little jerk!” Harris was spitting as he talked.

  “Hey, we’re over here together, man,” Evans said.

  “You going to grow you some eyes in the back of your head?” Jonesy was still against the locker as he shouted at Harris. “ ‘Cause you’re gonna need them!”

  “Why? Why?” Harris balled his fist up again. “You going to sneak up on me? Huh? Huh?”

  “No, because your butt is in a combat zone and you going to need somebody to be watching your back,” Jonesy said.

  “I don’t need you!” Harris spat on the ground and then pushed by me toward the door.

  Nobody said anything. We had all seen it but there wasn’t anything to do but to get over it. I wondered if we would.

  “You could report him,” Evans said.

  “Or shoot him when he goes to sleep,” I said.

  “Let it go,” Jonesy said. “Every dog gets his day.”

  We sat around for a while, each of us thinking how we would have handled the situation. I knew that most of us wouldn’t have had to. Harris had picked the smallest dude in the unit to jump on. There was no way he would have done it back in the world.

  I hadn’t thought about it much, but Jonesy was right. We needed one another to get out of this war alive. We needed one another and a whole lot of luck.

  When Harris came back in, Pendleton told him he was wrong to be hitting a member of our unit.

  “You want a piece of me? You want a piece of me?” Harris stood up, glowering at Pendleton.

  Pendleton was a big, slow-talking white boy who could have broken Harris in half and everybody knew it. We just waited until Harris got his thirty seconds of showboat time and sat himself down again.

  Some of the guys in our unit got along well. The others were okay but they didn’t hang out much. But we were all living through the same things, seeing the same fighting, feeling the same moments of boredom and terror. We were used to looking for one another in the mess tent, and expected to see one another in the mornings. There wasn’t any room for any BS.

  Coles came in just after sunset and told us that we were going to be escorting some Intelligence guys out to a place in the Rusafa district before daybreak in the morning. He asked if anything was wrong, and after Jonesy said no, we all said no.

  “Look, I’m really not volunteering you guys,” Coles said. He looked around a bit more. He knew something was wrong but couldn’t figure out what, so he left.

  Morning came long before it was supposed to. We were barely dressed when Coles came into the tent. He looked around to see that we were all dressed and ready to go, and then brought in the two Special Ops guys who were with the Intelligence Unit. Darcy and Marla came in with them.

  “Guys, this is Lieutenant Davis, and this is Corporal Lawler,” Coles said. “They’ll explain the mission.”

  Lawler had a square head and a short haircut. He looked like a Nazi from an old World War II movie. “We got some information from the confession box that we thought we should check out,” he said.

  “The confession box?” Darcy sucked her teeth and looked away.

  The confession box was a booth the Intelligence Unit had set up. They paid the Iraqis who anonymously visited the box for information on insurgents. Most of the information intelligence got was bogus. But every once in a while something valuable was passed on.

  “Anyway…” Lawler went on, “the information is that there’s an IED factory in the Old City area. We’re going to pay a surprise visit and see what we find.”

  “Who’s translating?” Coles asked.

  “I will be,” Davis said.

  Marla rolled her eyes up and away.

  “Look, let me give you people a few clues.” Davis’s jaw tightened, which made a white line across the bottom of his face. “We won the ‘stand up and fight’ war. That was over when we reached Baghdad. This is different. We’re getting guys killed every other day by roadside bombs. These people here have been at war for the last twenty or so years. Before they invaded Kuwait they were fighting with Iran. Intelligence estimates that there are over two million
unspent artillery shells and mines spread across Iraq. Each one of them can be rigged into an IED. If one percent of them worked—one percent—they could kill twenty thousand of our people. Are you with me?”

  “Hey, man, you want to catch the next train out of here?” Jonesy asked.

  “They’ve got the weapons. And yeah, they’re crude, but they can kill you just as effectively as a sophisticated weapon. They’ve got the weapons all over the country, and the technology to arm them is spreading. That’s where you come in. We’ve got guys to jump over tall buildings and run through fire. We’ve got guys who can shoot the balls off an anorexic flea. We need some soldiers with people skills and with insights. And from what I’ve heard, that’s what you bring to the table.”

  “So we’re going to be looking for these shells?” Marla asked.

  “If we can find artillery shells that would be good,” Davis said. “But we’re looking for the people who have the technology. If we find electrical wires, detonators, clock assemblies, cell phones, then we’ll know we’re getting close.”

  “Cell phones?”

  “They hook the cell phones up so that when the phone receives a signal, it sends an electrical impulse to a detonator instead of the ringer,” Lawler said.

  “So if you come across an IED, and the guy who put it there sees you”—Jonesy was scratching his crotch—“all he got to do is to make a call and he got your number?”

  “You got it,” Davis said.

  More scary crap. We started putting on our gear and I made sure all my body armor was strapped down tight. I had heard about IEDs being wired up for remote and even being thrown off a bridge, but it looked like it was getting more and more high tech. It was like the Iraqis were getting better at killing us and we were standing still.

  “What happened between you and Harris?” Coles asked Jonesy as we mounted up.

  “Nothing.”

  “It didn’t sound like nothing,” Coles said.

  “Hey, Captain, if I go to the confession box and tell you what Birdy dreams, about how much can I get?” Marla leaned against the side of the Humvee with one foot on the ammo can.

  “If it saves lives, Marla, it’s worth looking into,” Coles said. “I’d rather meet up with an IED on my terms rather than on the bad end of some nineteen-year-old kid making a name for himself at my expense.”

  Headquarters had set up a booth for Iraqis to complain or make suggestions. The guys in the 3rd ID started calling it the confession box because the soldier taking the information sat on one side of a wall and the person giving it sat on the other. If they gave us any useful information about insurgents or plots, we would pay them for the information. Word got around Baghdad quickly and every Iraqi that needed a few bucks was showing up with a long story—or a short one—about how he had seen three guys plotting to take over the Green Zone or building a weapon of mass destruction. It got to be such a joke that one guy actually said that he had seen someone put explosives inside a goat and it was going to run wild through the barriers.

  We were set to go but I had to go back to pee and so did Coles, so First Squad was the last one ready.

  An Infantry squad from the 3rd went with us, split into two Humvees, one in front of the convoy and one in back. Their vehicles had iron plates on the sides.

  “Birdy, hold Yossarian’s hand,” Marla said. “He gets scared when we go out in the middle of the night.”

  We headed east and then circled back around the Green Zone toward the Old City section. We had been told that the Iraqis who were pretty well off lived in Old City before the war. The Iraqis who were really rich lived on the outskirts of the city in walled homes with guards.

  Jonesy was half humming, half singing something and I asked him what it was because it didn’t sound much like the blues.

  “‘Survivor’!” he said. He was always rocking when he drove and also hunched forward toward the wheel. “When you were peeing, Marla said that was the monkey’s theme song. Destiny’s Child put it out.”

  I could hardly see the monkey’s face because somebody had put a helmet on its head. I hoped God wouldn’t think it was funny to let me die sitting next to a monkey.

  The first Humvee driver knew his way pretty well and we reached the Old City area in quick time. We stopped, killed the engines, and were told to dismount and get our night-vision goggles ready. Crap. Iraq is dark at night and the only thing you’re going to see with the night-vision goggles is something that’s trying to kill you. The streets where we had stopped were narrow; perhaps a Humvee could get through but there was no way we were going to take a chance. If some guy popped out with an RPG in those narrow alleys you were toast.

  The houses usually had a courtyard behind a fence. The fence was locked with either a dead bolt or a bar across the entire door and if you had to bust through, you woke up the entire neighborhood. Once you broke through the fence, if you couldn’t climb over it, you had to find the door. That would be a tough mother to crack as well.

  “They act as if they’re living in New York City!” Jonesy had said.

  I didn’t have a comeback for that.

  The officer from the 3rd placed his men at each corner of the house. I felt like peeing again as I watched them crouch into position. Two of their guys went toward the outer fence. They knelt together for a split second and then one of them went over. I held my breath for a long second, and then saw the front fence open. So far, so good.

  The Humvees were on the outside perimeter of the operation. If the thing went down wrong we were to retreat to the vehicles. I thought of Marla in the turret. She had the squad gun ready and her nine cocked.

  “Watch those index fingers! Watch those index fingers!” The officer from the 3rd’s voice was a loud whisper.

  I checked my finger and took it out of the trigger housing. Don’t kill anybody who didn’t need killing.

  Me and Jonesy went with two Infantry guys, one of them carrying a ramming tool, to the left side of the house, and Harris and Victor went to the right, looking for side doors. We found one and the Infantry guys went up to it and pushed gently. Then they clicked into their radios, knelt on one knee, and waited.

  I got down on one knee and Jonesy squatted. I heard the voice in the radio and the infantry guy stood, waited a second, then hit the door with the tool.

  BAM! Nothing.

  BAM! It broke partway. I imagined whoever was inside reaching for their AK-47. BAM! The door broke open and the two Infantry guys moved in quickly, one to either side of the room. I was scared shitless as I went through the door and to my left. The room was lit up as the night light flooded the room, making the whole place seem kind of a spooky green through my goggles. I pushed them up onto my helmet.

  The rooms were in a circle around a hallway. In the hallway there was a stairwell, not much more than a ladder going up to the second floor.

  The Infantry dude yelled something. It might have been Arabic or I might have just misunderstood him. He fired into the wall, and the next thing he called out I knew.

  “Americans!” He was up the stairwell in a heartbeat and the guy with him was close enough to run up his back.

  They were screaming at the tops of their voices, trying to take command of the situation. By the time the first two had reached the second deck three more Infantry guys had come in. One went up the ladder while the other two started checking out spaces on the ground floor.

  “These guys are scaring me and they’re on my side!” Jonesy said.

  There was more shouting upstairs and then a guy shouted down the well. “Control!”

  “Clear on the first floor!” was the answer.

  Two minutes later one of the Infantry guys came down followed by two men, two women, one of them holding a baby, and three small children.

  Their officer came in, checked as they sat the Iraqis down in the inner hallway, and sniffed his approval. Then he told the men to start their search.

  “Check the upper floor first,” he said
.

  The two Intelligence guys from the 422nd came in and started talking to the Iraqis. There were a lot of shrugs and palms-up gestures indicating that they didn’t know what we were talking about. One of the men kept squinting toward Davis, who was doing most of the talking, and I could tell Davis was repeating the questions, slowly and deliberately.

  “What’s he saying?” Coles asked.

  “He wants to know who’s going to pay for his door,” Davis answered. “He says he doesn’t know anything about any weapons. He’s an accountant but we blew up his bank.”

  “Man, this is just a wild-goose chase,” Harris said. “We just busted up some more damn doors and almost killed some more people for nothing.”

  They finished searching the top floor—I could hear them throwing things around—and then came downstairs. The baby started crying and the woman who held it began to rock her gently. The woman was pretty. I couldn’t tell how old, but she had huge eyes that I would have loved to have been looking into under different circumstances.

  The two men kept shrugging their shoulders and shaking their heads. Once in a while they spoke to each other and Davis would yell at them to stop. The older woman was crying softly. She didn’t answer any questions and looked away any time Davis spoke to her. It was as if they couldn’t believe what was happening to their lives.

  Davis asked questions for another fifteen minutes and then asked us to search the Iraqis. He told us to get one of the women to search their women.

  Coles called Marla and told Jonesy and Harris to stay with the vehicles until she got back. Harris muttered something under his breath and left with Jonesy. God, I didn’t like that sucker.

  I also didn’t like searching people. I had been stopped on 136th Street once, just outside the Countee Cullen Library, by two plainclothes cops who had searched me. I knew what it felt like. Embarrassed that I had to stand there with my hands in the air while strangers patted me down and went through my pockets, humiliated because they were assuming power over me and I couldn’t do a thing about it. I felt I knew how the Iraqi men felt as I searched them. They were just wearing shirts, nothing under them, and I could see they didn’t have any weapons on them. Davis saw it, too, but he was taking out his embarrassment on the enemy.