Sunrise Over Fallujah

  “He says he loves Americans,” Jamil said.

  Coles called Major Sessions and told her what had happened. She told us to bring the boy to headquarters.

  “If she tries to take credit for finding him, I’m going to put a boot so far up her butt she’s going to be sucking toes for a week!” Marla said.

  “Then you can take Muhammad’s place in the jail,” Coles said.

  We took Muhammad to Major Sessions, who already had a press conference set up. That pissed us off. Then they wanted to know who actually found the kid, and when our squad was singled out they took Marla, hat off so her blond hair was showing, and interviewed her.

  “How did it make you feel when you found Muhammad?” The reporter was wearing his “this is serious” face.

  “Pretty good,” Marla said, trying to downplay the whole thing.

  “ ‘Pretty good,’ ” the reporter repeated as he turned away from Marla toward the camera. “For American soldiers this rescue mission, reuniting an Iraqi child with his parents, is just part of the day’s work…”

  We got back just in time for supper. Jonesy started interviewing Marla again, holding his spoon up as a mike.

  “Yo, Miss White Lady, how you feel rescuing a poor little Racki boy?”

  “It’s Ms. White Lady,” Marla said. “And I feel so glad to have done my part to save the world from evil and introduce a little boy to the joys of the free world. And if I see his little ass on the street after curfew, I’m going to shoot him.”

  We kept Muhammad overnight and took him back to his village the next morning. Captain Coles asked Major Sessions if she wanted to go along. She said no. Marla made some more promises about what she was going to do to the major, but actually we were really glad Sessions didn’t go with us.

  Some women who knew Muhammad spotted him the moment he stepped out of the Humvee and started calling for his mother. She came out and we went through the whole bit of thank-you and hand-kissing again. It felt good to see people happy with something we had done for a change.

  From: Perry, Robin

  Date: 13 May 2003

  To: Perry, Richard

  Subject: Various

  Hey Uncle Richie,

  I am online again because they have set up a whole bank of computers for Headquarters Company and the press. The press can chase us off any time they want, which sucks. The guys in Headquarters Company sit and write letters to their friends. No big deal. I see the Yankees are kicking butt again and with Jeter out. We’re going all the way this year! We had a guy try to kill himself today. Captain Miller said that’s happening a lot. Guys are getting spooked with the IEDs and the way the Rules of Engagement keep changing. Sometimes the rules—we get them on what they call ROE cards—can change in the middle of the day. My friend Jonesy said he was chasing a suspected sniper down the street and had to dial his cell phone with his other hand to figure out if he could shoot him or not. Mama is always asking if she can send me anything. I don’t know how her money is with Pop in and out of the hospital with his high blood pressure. If her money is good will you have her send me some toy dolls? They don’t have to be expensive. We have little trucks and things for boys and the girls don’t mind them but…I was just told I have to get off the computer. I hope there’s a curse on this machine and that it gets this big-nosed sucker standing over me reading as I type and I don’t care if he is a Company Orderly. Love—Robin

  Jerry Egri was a Polish-American guy assigned to our unit for one week until he got his regular assignment. He was going to be the liaison between the American troops and the Polish soldiers who were fighting with the Coalition Forces.

  “What did you do back home?” Jonesy asked.

  “I taught kindergarten in Cleveland—not really in Cleveland, in Shaker Heights,” Jerry said. “Shaker Heights is like Cleveland dipped in gold paint.”

  “You didn’t like that?” I asked.

  “These kids were so pampered they made me change the rules when I taught them how to play soccer so they wouldn’t get hit with the ball.” Jerry laughed.

  “You taught soccer?” Jonesy was lying on his bunk and pulled himself up on one elbow.

  “Yeah. I played in Poland before I came to the States,” Jerry answered. “You guys have a movie on this base?”

  “How good are you?” Jonesy asked.

  “Whoa!” Marla pushed next to me on the foot locker. “Jonesy, don’t tell me I’m going to hear what I think I’m going to hear.”

  “Damn straight!” Jonesy said. “He’s here for a week. We can kick some Iraqi butt before he goes.”

  Okay, so we got a dynamite team together. It was me, Jonesy, Marla, and Victor from Second Squad, and Third Squad with a promise to Pendleton that he could play goalie. Darcy and Evans said they would be our cheerleaders and even Captain Miller said she’d come to see the game.

  Captain Coles radioed the 422nd and in less than an hour they called back with the news that Omar would set the game up for the next Friday. Jerry was going to teach us the basics and play with us.

  “We need a few thunder kicks,” Marla said. “Shock and awe, baby! Shock and awe!”

  We set up a practice area and started assigning positions. There were defenders, forwards, centers, the whole works. Soccer was a lot more complicated than I thought it was. The bad part was moving the ball. If you stopped to kick it somebody was on top of you and it didn’t go in the direction you wanted it to go. If you tried to kick it while it was moving it might go anywhere.

  “You gotta concentrate!” Jerry said.

  I could see the frustration on his face the first day, especially when a few of us missed the ball entirely. And any time Jerry wanted to come over and take the ball from us, he could. He could just work his feet better than we could. Finally, he stopped us from trying to move the ball up and down the field and just put us in a circle and had us kick it around to one another. By the third day we were almost getting it. Victor was pretty good, and so was Ahmed.

  “You’re not bad, Perry,” Jerry said to me. “Somewhere between Ronaldinho’s grandmother and my dog.”

  Yeah, thanks. I thought we were getting it. We could actually pass the ball to one another and, as long as Jerry wasn’t too close, move it some. The week had been slow; the 422nd was moving into Baghdad and taking over the big stuff. They were trying to get a hospital and a school up and running on the edge of the Old City. Our guys were mostly playing cards and watching television and staying out of the heat.

  Nobody was anxious to go out of what they were now calling the Green Zone. There had been some nasty incidents in town. An IED had gone off near a marine vehicle but no one was seriously hurt. It turned into pretty nasty business when some Iraqi men started cheering and the marines opened up on them. One of them was wounded pretty badly and lay in the street for a half an hour before a Red Crescent ambulance picked him up. A newsman asked some of the guys what they thought about the incident and they all shrugged him off. Later, in the tent, we talked about it again.

  “Man, you got to be kidding,” Jonesy said, pulling at his crotch the way he did when he was mad. “Don’t be smiling and showing your teeth when some sucker is trying to shoot me. You might as well be doing the shooting yourself as far as I’m concerned.”

  “The ROE for Baghdad says you don’t shoot anybody unless they’re clearly engaged in trying to harm you,” Pendleton said.

  “That’s not true, Pendleton,” I said. “The word this morning was that we’re authorized to shoot looters.”

  “That’s not right.” Pendleton was shaking his head. “That’s just not right.”

  “Yo, man, come here for a minute,” Jonesy leaned forward and whispered to Pendleton, who didn’t move. “You take those Rules of Engagement and pin them over your butt and see if one of these dudes running around with a tablecloth on his head don’t shoot you through it.”

  Jonesy was right. The rules counted only for us. The Iraqis who were out to get us could do anything
they wanted.

  We got clearance in the morning of the game and were rolling toward Al-Uhaimir by 1000 hours. Captain Miller and Jerry rode with Second Squad. We took along three extra balls for the kids and some notebooks and pencils. For the first time in a long, long time I felt really human. I hadn’t been down or anything, just tired all the time. Sleep didn’t count in Iraq the way it did at home. I always woke up tired.

  We got to the village and the first kid I see is Omar. He’s there and he’s got a soccer ball under his arm. There were a batch of guys from the 422nd, some officers, and a photography crew, too. Somebody had leaked the game.

  “Man, you guys are going to be on CNN tonight,” Marla said. “Maybe Captain Miller and I should strip down to our shorts and shake our booties for the camera.”

  Captain Miller, who was in a surprisingly good mood, raised an eyebrow.

  We met the Iraqi kids. Only they weren’t the same kids we had played the first game with; these guys were older, teenagers.

  “Hey, Birdy, you getting a bad feeling about this game?” Captain Coles asked.

  “Yep.”

  I got Omar by the sleeve and asked him what was up with all of the new guys.

  “People from three villages wanted to play,” he said, holding up three fingers. “They all know about the game and want to play against the Americans.”

  “Who told them?”

  He grinned and stuck his chest out.

  We wore sneakers and shorts. The Iraqis, for the most part, were barefoot in djellabas. Two had on regular pants and one was wearing sneakers. It was a bloodbath. We were competitive for about three minutes. Then they figured out that Jerry was our only real player, and kept the ball away from him.

  The Iraqis had six shots on goal before we had one. They only made four. The score was twelve to nothing before we had to stop it while they argued among themselves. They were yelling at Omar pretty hard and I think he wanted them to have mercy on us. They brought in two more players, teenagers again, and ran the score up to twenty to nothing.

  Then Omar got the teenagers to sit out and got some really young kids in to play against us. By that time we were all standing with our tongues out and our hands on our knees and Captain Miller was warning us about dehydration. Meanwhile the camera crew was having a field day, running up and down the field preserving our humiliation for all time.

  “I make a motion we should come back and shoot them,” Victor said as we lay on the ground afterward.

  We voted on the motion and it passed, nine to nothing.

  The 422nd served up some lunch and the film crew took pictures of some of the Iraqis and some officers. Miller wouldn’t let them take her picture.

  “Tribe loyalty,” she said.

  That was cool.

  Omar and three of his friends ate lunch with us.

  “Omar, what would you do if you came to America?” Marla asked.

  “I would go to New York City and see the tall buildings,” Omar said. “And I would go to college and play a horn.” He made a movement as if he were playing a trombone.

  “Do you play trombone?” Coles asked.

  “No, but I would learn in college,” he said.

  “How did you learn to play football so well?” Miller had been writing down the ingredients on an MRE package.

  “I don’t play so well, but I am Islam, so I win.” He reached over and touched each of his friends on the chest. “Islam, Islam, Islam.”

  “And we aren’t Islam so we don’t win?” I asked.

  Omar touched each of us. “Infidel, infidel, infidel, infidel, infidel, infidel…”

  He had to get up and walk around the table to get to me and Pendleton, and he did.

  “We need us a little old grandmother to sit out on the porch and let us know what the real deal is.” Pendleton’s drawl had gotten thicker. “This morning they were talking about how this thing is almost over and by noon we were hearing that a bunch of Special Ops guys got nailed up at An Nasiriyah.”

  “That was supposed to be friendly fire,” Jonesy said.

  “I don’t know why they calling it friendly fire if it kills you,” Pendleton said. “A jet wasted a truckload of guys.”

  “I thought those pilots had to have clearance before they shot anything on the ground.” Victor was hanging out more with First Squad. He was sharpening the huge knife he carried all the time.

  “How are they going to communicate with our people jamming the radio frequencies?” Jonesy asked. “That’s what they were doing last Sunday. Jamming the frequencies so the Iraqis couldn’t set off their IEDs by cell phone. You couldn’t communicate from the top of your bunk to the bottom last Sunday. If Marla and Darcy were in here begging for some action by radio you wouldn’t even know it.”

  “You guys sweating those chicks when you should be sweating getting home in one piece,” Victor said.

  “Hey, Victor, who you going to attack with that knife when you got your 16, grenades, and a mouthful of teeth to fight with?” Jonesy asked.

  “This knife makes me feel good,” Victor said. “I’m thinking, suppose it’s just me and Pablo in a dark room. He’s scared and I’m scared. I hear him breathing, you know, slowlike. Then I move toward him and he’s listening and thinking and getting into position for some hand-to-hand. Then ‘Unnh! Unnh!’ He feels some cold steel going into his side and he don’t know what’s happening. ‘Unnh! Unnh!’ Then he knows but it’s too late.”

  “You saw that in the movies?” I asked.

  “No, man, in a drained-out water canal in Albuquerque.”

  “So what are we going to do about the radios?” Jonesy said.

  The radios were a problem because the bad guys were wiring their bomb detonators between the phone and the ring-tone device. They would wait for a convoy to come along, then call the number. Instead of ringing, it would detonate the bomb. Countermeasures could block their signals but it was messing with our radio communications. Operation Iraqi Freedom had started off with all of the high-tech stuff being on our side, but now the Insurgents, as they were being called, were doing some low-tech stuff that was just enough to kill or hurt somebody every day.

  When the God Squad came over, Chaplain Nichols and his bodyguard started talking about how proud the folks back home were of us. Captain Coles asked Nichols point-blank what he thought the folks back home knew.

  “They know that the same American army that put itself in harm’s way for the sake of democracy is also building freshwater wells and giving shots to the children in Iraq,” the chaplain said. “They know that even though there are casualties and deaths there’s also a spirit among the men and women over here that wants to help the Iraqis build freedom. Is any of that not true?”

  “I just wondered if they knew how many people are getting wounded here,” Coles said. “I don’t see any of that in the news at night.”

  “That’s because we’re still in a war zone,” the chaplain answered. “Do we really want to broadcast everything we know?”

  All of that was true. A directive had even come down from CENTCOM about what we could put in our emails.

  I could see that. The more information our guys put online, the more the bad guys would know and use against us. On the other hand, the more they clamped down on bad news, the more rumors went around. Everybody was edgy and nobody wanted to leave the Green Zone until they couldn’t stand the closeness anymore. But even in the Zone we couldn’t shake how randomly things were going down.

  “Just the way we’re playing poker here and looking to see what hand we get—that’s the way this war is going down,” Sergeant Harris said, looking at his cards.

  “I’ve got two pair, jacks over eights,” Marla said, throwing two dollars into the pot. “So it’s going pretty good for me.”

  “Yeah, but the next hand you might get nothing,” Harris said. “That’s what I’m talking about. You never can tell what’s going to come up.”

  Everybody folded and Marla scooped up
the money and laid her cards on the table.

  “Hey, you don’t have any jacks over eights,” Harris said.

  “No, but you folded, so I got the money!” Marla said.

  “What makes it so random is that we’re fighting on three levels.” Lieutenant Colonel Petridus was from PSYOP. A tall guy, he played poker wearing a cowboy hat and chewing on a skinny cigar that wiggled up and down when he talked. “There are the big guys in the back with the money and their plans for this country. They’re the ones we need to kill, but we’ll never see them because they’re too far underground or maybe not even in this country. Then there are the people who hate everything American, everything Western, and want to go back to a religious world that never existed in the first place. The last level is all about people who don’t have jobs and will plant an IED or take their chances shooting at us because they need the money. And since the big people, the players behind the scene, just want to keep the chaos going until they see a chance to step in, they don’t care who they kill. Not really. They’d kill each other as fast as they kill us. Whose deal is it?”

  “It’s my deal,” I said, picking up the cards.

  “Yo, sir, this sounds like a crack house operation,” Jonesy said. “Not that I know anything about crack houses.”

  “Just about,” the PSYOP guy said.

  “You think the people in Washington have it all figured out?” I asked. “If they don’t, maybe we should send them a telegram.”

  “I once played in a poker game in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia,” Lieutenant Colonel Petridus said. “I had a real lucky night and the little girl I was going to marry—I’m still married to her—was sitting there admiring me all the time. But the guy who ran the game was taking five percent of every pot. At the end of the night I was the big winner and went home stone broke. Think about it.”