Sunrise Over Fallujah

  The chaplain spoke of the need to move on, that those who find strength in the Lord would renew their strength and mount up with wings as eagles. They would run and not be weary. They would walk and not faint.

  I felt like fainting.

  “Roll Call Officer!”

  Major Sessions stepped forward. She lifted her clipboard, glanced down at it and quickly up again. “Pendleton!” she called out.

  The moment of silence was crushing.

  “Corporal Phillip Pendleton!”

  Another moment of silence, and then the mournful sound of the bugle sounding taps filled the tent. The final roll call for Pendleton was completed. Two soldiers took his medals and laid them in front of his weapons.

  The ceremony was over. We drifted away from the tent and went about the business of trying to walk and talk among the living.

  The day began badly. The smell from the river drifted over us like the stink of doom. Nothing was right. I tried to push the vision of Pendleton out of my head but it was impossible. Who was he? Why didn’t I know more about him? Why didn’t I sit with him and talk to him and try to understand what made him who he was?

  “Let’s go find Marla,” Jonesy said.

  We found her in the corner of the dayroom in front of the television. There was a game show on, but I knew she wasn’t really watching it.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said.

  May 29, 2003

  Hey Mom!

  Go on with your bad self getting online. I’m really proud of you. I know you go down to the Countee Cullen branch with Mrs. Lucas to use their computers but be careful at night. Okay—so first thing, thank you for the dolls. Everybody in the church must have donated one. We gave them out to girls just north of the Green Zone—the safe zone here. And, just as you said in your letter, the little Arab girls really went for the Black dolls. These little Iraqi girls are very sweet. Please thank everybody from the church for me. Jonesy is taking some pictures and I’ll get some printed up for you as soon as I can.

  If we weren’t at war with these people this would be a great place to spend some time. You would really be impressed by the mosques. If you saw the one up at Kazimayn it would take your breath away.

  Second thing—the women in Iraq mostly don’t wear veils. They dress like ordinary businesspeople. Sometimes you see women in veils but they’re often from another part of the Middle East. They do cover their hair and mostly don’t wear makeup. In a video store they sell tapes of belly dancers and every guy over here has at least one tape. Except me, of course, since I’m not interested in wriggling ladies. Okay, maybe just not wriggling Iraqi ladies. Did you know they also have Christians over here and a Christian church? According to the locals it’s no big deal.

  I can’t always get online but now that you’re on I’ll try to find an in and email you as much as possible. Much love to you and Pops.

  Robin

  We got an official notification of Victor’s transfer and a brief note about Pendleton. Colonel King, from the 422nd, came by and said a prayer with the God Squad. The colonel said he had written to Pendleton’s widow.

  I don’t know why I kept reading the newspaper about what’s going on over here. I could just look around but then I’d only see a small piece of it. What I’m seeing is confusing. Marla put it best.

  “You go out and you see people shopping,” she said. “Women buying onions and bread or people having coffee. Then down the street somebody gets blown up. Jesus, it’s weird.”

  It was weird—weird and unnerving. Somebody buying onions, somebody getting their fingers blown off, somebody dying.

  “Hey, Jonesy, how you doing?” I called across the tent.

  “I’m good, man,” he said. He was lying on his bunk humming to himself. “How you doing?”

  “You want to hear something crazy?” I asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I was wondering about Victor’s monkey,” I said. “Whether he should have kept it. Isn’t that stupid? I mean, to think that a monkey was going to make any kind of difference?”

  “At the service for Pendleton I was wondering if God made a difference,” Jonesy said. “I guess if I’m wondering about God, you can wonder about the monkey.”

  The whole place is in an uproar. We got word that nobody is to leave the Green Zone in groups of less than seven and with only up-armored vehicles. Marla told Captain Coles to go find out what was happening and he got pissed because he didn’t like Marla’s lack of respect.

  “Okay, sir, don’t go and find out,” Marla said. “But they’re not going to tell me anything because I’m not an officer.”

  Coles shook his head but he went.

  Jonesy had a toothache but Miller wouldn’t give him any painkillers. She told him to go and see the dentist.

  “Captain Miller, I am not stupid,” Jonesy said. “If I go to the dentist he might need to drill my tooth or pull the sucker, which will put me in more pain than I’m in now.”

  “And he might save you some pain down the road,” Miller said. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “That’s all right, Captain.” Jonesy lay back on his bunk. “I’ll just lay here and suffer because no one cares about how I feel, anyway.”

  We all knew that Miller would give him some painkillers in the end but a lecture would go with it. With all her bad-mouthing, she was becoming the mother of the CA Squads; I think she enjoyed it, too.

  Coles came back with the news. It wasn’t good.

  “A marine unit found a bunch of civilians dead in a garage,” Coles said.

  “They think Americans killed them?” Evans asked.

  “They don’t know who killed them,” Coles said. “But they found them with their hands bound behind their backs and all five were shot in the back of the head. And they were all Sunnis, so something is going down that doesn’t smell right.”

  “Were they working with us?” Miller asked. “Maybe they were killed because they were being looked on as traitors or something.”

  “From what I gathered the thinking is that they were killed by one of the Khalid death squads,” Coles said.

  We had all heard about the death squads. There was some sort of vague connection between them and the people we were pushing toward the leadership of the new Iraq. Before the invasion the Sunnis had been in power and the Shiites had been pushed around pretty good. Saddam was a Sunni and had put all his peeps in the key positions. Now that Saddam was out and we had put the Shiites in power, there was a sudden explosion of mysterious killings.

  “Why aren’t we trying to stop these death squads?” I asked Coles.

  “Maybe we are,” Coles answered. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  The whole thing sucked big-time. Every day we were hearing about stuff that had nothing to do with democracy or freedom. There were stories about looting, about some Iraqis being put out of their homes so that others, the ones we were backing, could move in, and stories about Iraqis becoming suddenly rich and nobody knowing why. Now the talk was about death squads.

  Coles went on to say that some of the victims had been tortured. There was a whole battle going on around us that we didn’t have any grip on, that we really didn’t know about.

  Some of the construction guys, engineers, started talking about bodies that had been found at the power plants north of Baghdad.

  “Those dudes were just executed,” one of them said. “It had to be other Iraqis. There wasn’t anyone else around.”

  I thought about a basketball game I had played against Lane High School. Lane had the better team but we had the lead. The coach signaled for a time-out and we gathered around the bench and he started yelling at me because I had kept looking at the scoreboard.

  “The game is on the floor!” he had screamed.

  Yeah, that was true, but the win was on the scoreboard. I knew when the time ran out, whoever had the most points was the winner. I didn’t know if we were winning here in Iraq o
r not. If we just talked about dead people, about bodies lying in the streets, then we were winning easy. But somehow it wasn’t about who was doing the most killing. Jonesy had said it best.

  “The only dying that means anything is your own,” he had said. “For everybody else, you just shakes your head and keep on keeping on.”

  So how did we know if we were winning or not? And if we weren’t winning anything, what was the dying for?

  Coles came over to me on Saturday night. He looked exhausted. I thought the war was finally getting to him.

  “So, Birdy, what do you think about this war?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I like war,” I said.

  “It teaches you things, though,” he said. “What it’s taught me is that I love my wife and family more than I knew, and a lot more than I ever told them. Doesn’t that suck? I mean, having a wife and family and not getting around to telling them how much you love them. Doesn’t that just suck?”

  “If you know it now, it doesn’t suck,” I said.

  Captain Coles shrugged, patted my shoulder, and headed off to bed.

  I thought of what Jonesy had said about keeping score. I knew there were stories about the Iraqi police we were training, that they were mostly Shiites more than willing to kill Sunnis anywhere in Baghdad. The thing was that killing was taking on a different meaning to me. To take a human life had always been so heavy a deal. It had always meant that some terrible thing had happened, some horrible wrong had occurred that brought people to the far ends of sanity. But now I was willing to kill because I was afraid of being killed, willing to kill people I had never met, had never argued with, and who, perhaps, had never wanted to hurt me. But I was afraid and so I would kill.

  And now, when I was hearing about the Sunnis being killed, or the bombs going off in the marketplace, the only thing I could think of was that I was so glad it wasn’t me lying in the streets of Baghdad, or Fallujah or Mosul. I was glad that it was not my blood being cleaned off the streets or getting swept up on the roads outside of the city.

  Images flicked through my mind. Pendleton’s body awkwardly twisted in death, the pictures of his girls still in his pocket against his cooling skin. The parts of the marine on the busy street. Muslim women in black, their hands over their mouths as if they were holding in the screams that would reveal their souls. The old grandmother wailing over the body of the boy.

  The amazing thing was the randomness of the dying. If you were American, your picture might be in some daily newspaper. If you died on a slow news day, your mother’s grief might be captured in a thirty-second spot. If you were Iraqi, there would be no mention of your dying unless you could be called an insurgent.

  “The only dying that means anything is your own,” Jonesy had said.

  Amen to that.

  We stayed in the Green Zone for the next two weeks. All right with me. I didn’t want to leave. I took care of a lot of necessary business. I cleaned my M-16, all of my uniforms, and even my boots. I also took out a subscription to The Source, mostly to keep up with the music scene.

  The only work we did for the entire time was unload a truckload of gifts from the Free Will Baptist Church in Martinsburg, West Virginia. We had a big debate over whether salami was pork or beef, decided it must have been pork, and kept all the salamis, the cookies, and the candy bars for ourselves. We gave out the canned foods, toys, powdered milk, and toothpaste to the Iraqis.

  A tribal leader named Hamid Faisal Al-Sadah complained that the Coalition was not protecting his people, and that a number of young men from his area had been killed when they entered Fallujah. A PSYOP major from the 3rd ID was supposed to talk to him, take his complaint, and see if he could establish a liaison. We were going along as backup.

  “Security?” I asked.

  “They’re beginning to respect what we’ve been doing,” Coles said. “The major will be in charge and we’ll just stand around and smile at Al-Sadah’s people. Captain Miller will see if they need any medical attention we can supply.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean, Captain Coles?” Miller had her Molle vest and her game face on. “We can’t give them routine first aid because we’re afraid we’re going to be flooded with their sick; we can’t give them medical supplies unless it’s cleared through thirty-five hundred channels because we don’t want them giving those supplies to the insurgents; and we can’t refer them to their hospitals because half of them aren’t operative. So what do we do? Hold their hands and tell them to take an aspirin?”

  “Would you like to shoot me, Captain?” Coles asked. “I mean, if that would make you feel better…”

  “It might,” Miller said.

  She was right. Sometimes we could see what was needed but we just weren’t allowed to do it. A lot of the guys from the 422nd were talking about sending home for more supplies for the Iraqis.

  That was really strange to me. Here we were fighting a war, or at least cleaning up after the fighting, and sending home to our families and friends for supplies for the enemy. When I saw an entire truckload of notebooks and school supplies that had come in from Forrest City, Arkansas, I was impressed. Americans did care about the rest of the world. A lot.

  Third Squad was going to Fallujah with us. The plan was that we would talk to the sheik and then spend the night guarding a nearby antiquity site. I was just glad it wasn’t Second Squad because as much as I liked Darcy and thought that Evans was at least okay, I was still pissed at Sergeant Harris for his messing around with Jonesy.

  “I want to remind you guys that my birthday is August twelfth, so start saving your money for presents,” Marla said. She had copped some sandwiches from the unit kitchen and was opening each one to see what they were.

  “Yo, that’s not sanitary,” Jonesy mentioned.

  “Shut up or you won’t get one,” Marla answered.

  Marla took the sandwich that looked like turkey and cheese, I snatched the ham and cheese, and Jonesy got the pastrami. That left one sandwich that looked like it could have been tuna fish but Marla sniffed it and so did Jonesy and they couldn’t tell.

  “Smell it, Birdy.”

  I sniffed it. It stunk. “It smells like Fancy Feast,” I said. “Cat food.”

  Marla closed it carefully, and then wrote “Capt. Coles” on the package.

  Sometimes, when the weather was clear and it wasn’t so hot that you thought you were baking, Iraq seemed like the most beautiful place in the world. It seemed huge, with wide open spaces that stretched into forever. When you got away from the rivers it was mostly desert, especially as you went north from Baghdad. You could ride for mile after endless mile and then come across three camels and a donkey going about their business as if there wasn’t any war, or any occupation. Guys would stop to take photos and the Iraqis would wave or just stop and look at us the way we were stopping to look at them.

  The cities were all crowded, huddled together around whatever plumbing and electrical resources they had, but the people seemed to know how to live their lives. They took things easy, spending a lot of time with their tea or coffee or, if they were men, with the hookahs. When they were calm, they were very calm. When they got excited it was hard to tell if they were angry or just looking that way. One minute an Iraqi would be screaming at the top of his lungs or a woman would be falling down with emotion and the next they would just calm down and continue taking care of their business.

  You couldn’t really tell who was important in the towns or villages because there wasn’t much difference in the way people dressed. In a formal meeting the Iraqis would always wear native dress and I didn’t know one unit from the other. Darcy had painted some Iraqi people and scenes using watercolors. They were good and I thought about asking her for one.

  We met up with the PSYOP major and six infantrymen, two of whom were black. They were in a truck with a screen around it.

  “It’s probably a communications vehicle,” Jonesy said as we looked at it from Miss Molly. “They’re usi
ng the whole thing as an antenna.”

  That seemed on the money and we got into a conversation about all the equipment we had and how cool it would be to steal it and take it home in civilian life. I thought I would like to have the night vision equipment. Jonesy wanted the Kevlar protection gear.

  “I just want the squad gun and the Humvee,” Marla said. “If I rode into the Wal-Mart parking lot with that bad boy I could park anywhere I damn well felt like it.”

  We got to the village and the Infantry guys took up casual positions around the cluster of buildings we were visiting. They were supposed to look as if they were just hanging out. That was funny because the Iraqis ran around in long shirts and sandals and we were looking like spacemen with helmets, goggles, vests, and weapons. But the Iraqi kids loved to see us.

  Coles was riding with the PSYOP major and they came over. Major Scott was young, maybe thirty, and six-four to six-five. He looked us over and said he was glad to have us aboard.

  “You people are doing a wonderful job over here,” he said. “Everybody’s talking about it. The more friends you guys make, the fewer people we have to kill, and the fewer who will want to kill us.”

  I never remembered smells before. I would recognize a familiar smell—fried onions or morning coffee—but in the Humvee I remembered one. It was the smell of blood in the cab when we were trying to get Pendleton out. I tried to think of something else to release the tension. It wasn’t a crazy kind of tension but a low-level feeling that I was learning to live with 24/7. I kept my eyes on my side of the road, eyeballing every cart or old pickup that we passed as if it might suddenly turn into something deadly.

  When we got to the meeting place it turned out to be a huge tent, twenty some feet across and thirty deep. It was dyed a deep red that looked good against the reddish sand. There were smaller tents, black and brown tents, around the large one. We thought we would have to take up positions the way the Infantry guys did but Captain Coles came out and said that both the First and Third Squad could come inside and have dinner with the sheik.