Sunrise Over Fallujah

  Yeah, and he was going to teach them.

  It was still dark when Jonesy woke me, shaking me by the shoulder. I opened my eyes. “What’s up?”

  “You believe in God?” he asked.

  As I sat up I saw that he was holding a flashlight in one hand and a small Bible in the other.

  “Yeah, I do,” I said.

  Jonesy bowed his head for a moment, then turned on his flashlight and began reading from the Bible he held. “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.”

  I felt awkward. It had been years since I last prayed, and I had never prayed with a friend. Jonesy held up his fist and I touched mine to it.

  “What’s up, man?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just got a feeling.”

  “Like, what kind of feeling?”

  “Crossroads,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “There was this blues dude—Robert Johnson—got to the crossroads, met the devil, and they struck up a deal. Sold his soul to the devil for some guitar licks.”

  “Yeah?”

  Jonesy stood up and tucked the Bible under his arm. “I’m just wondering if I need to strike me up a deal,” he said. He went back to his bunk, lay down, and turned his back toward me.

  In the distance I could hear the roar of planes. I looked at my watch. It was five thirty. The sun would rise soon.

  “This is not my grandmother.” Jean Darcy was pissed out of her mind. “This is my great-grandmother and she is eighty-five years and four months old. Her birthday is the same as mine and I promised to write her and tell her what is going on. She don’t understand stupid, and that Colonel King was just talking stupid!”

  We had just had a lecture from King, who was in charge of all Civil Affairs in the area. If what he told us wasn’t exactly stupid, it was at least confusing.

  “So what do you need to know?” Pendleton asked.

  “Who are we supposed to be shooting over here?” Darcy asked. “Because I am not worried about who we’re supposed to be getting along with. I figure if they’re trying to get along with us they won’t be shooting at us.”

  “Anybody who has on a different uniform than we have on we can shoot,” Pendleton said.

  “Unless they’re Coalition forces talking Dutch or Italian or something else I can’t understand, right?” Darcy asked. “And King was talking about if the Iraqis are fighting and things don’t go right for them they just take off their uniforms and act like civilians but we’re not supposed to shoot civilians.” She was on a roll. “Now can you tell me how I’m going to explain that to my great-grandmother?”

  “Okay, let me straighten this mess out.” Jonesy was soaking his feet in a basin of water. “If somebody who looks like an A-rab shoots you, the first thing you got to do is to pull out your Rules of Engagement card and see what the rules are for the day. Because it could be a Rodney King day and we just all trying to get along and then you don’t shoot him.”

  “You think that’s funny but it ain’t funny, Jones.” Darcy was still mad. “And how about that stuff with the Sunnis and the other people?”

  “The Shiites,” I said. “Colonel King said there might be battles between the two sects.”

  “So if they’re shooting, you have to see who they’re aiming at,” Pendleton said. “They could be shooting at each other.”

  “And Saddam wiped out a whole village of Kurds,” Marla said.

  “My great-grandmother is not going to understand this crap,” Darcy said. “I don’t understand it, either. We’re over here talking about an enemy we can’t identify and friends we’re not sure about.”

  “What bugged me was when Captain Coles asked if we were going to disarm the Iraqis and Colonel King said we weren’t,” Pendleton said. “He said it would be disrespecting the tribes and we can’t do that because we’re going to be dependent on them to give us information.

  “What we got to do over here,” Pendleton continued, “is to kill all of them and let God sort them out.”

  I turned and looked at him and saw he wasn’t smiling. He meant just what he said.

  King had been talking about treating people humanely, and with dignity, but we were thinking about how hard staying alive was going to be.

  The bombing of Iraq has started. I don’t know what it’s doing to the Iraqis, but it’s filled us with shock and awe. We watched the first impacts on Baghdad this morning on television just before daybreak. The dim images of city buildings suddenly illuminated by explosions that swept across the night sky filled the TV screen with brilliant color. A reporter wearing a flak jacket flinched as the bombs exploded behind him. Some of our guys were cheering; most just watched quietly. It wasn’t hard to imagine those bombs falling somewhere near you.

  At 0600 we saddled up and went out to the range to test-fire our weapons. Targets were a hundred yards out and each squad took a turn trying to hit them. In stateside training, the shooting was a pastime, something you did because it was interesting but you didn’t really like because you knew it meant you had to clean your weapon. Here on the Kuwaiti desert, target practice was suddenly serious.

  When it was my turn on the squad gun I was on target when we were stationary but way off when the Humvee was on the go.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Captain Coles said. “When we’re on the move it’s suppressive fire—all we want the enemy to do is to keep his head down while we get away.”

  Jonesy wasn’t any better than I was, but Kennedy was on the money big-time.

  “You do a lot of shooting back in the States?” I asked.

  “I guess,” she said with a shrug. “My training officer said it just comes naturally to some people.”

  “You’re a lot better at it than I am,” I said.

  “Birdy, the way you shoot is pitiful.” Marla grinned. “Maybe you should just practice making mean faces at the enemy.”

  I didn’t like that. The girl had an edge to her that ran along my nerves all the time. I thought about what my father said: I’d meet a lot of lousy people in the army.

  We left the target range and trekked to supply. Sergeant Harris was in charge; he had checklists and made us lay out all of our equipment on the ground.

  The supply sergeant, a huge black dude who looked half asleep, gave us a mini lecture on the equipment. When he saw that some of the medical officers weren’t paying attention, he stopped.

  “My apology, Sergeant,” one of the doctors said, throwing the supply sergeant a sloppy salute.

  “You don’t have to be sorry, sir,” the sergeant said. “But if you don’t have the right equipment and you get your sorry butt wounded or killed, it won’t be funny. And the first time you see somebody lying on the ground with a sucking chest wound where his body armor should have been, you’re going to be thinking about getting back here and making sure you have the right equipment. You might be smart enough to be a doctor, but you ain’t smart enough not to die.”

  “I think that’s enough, Sergeant,” the medical officer said, trying to sound more authoritative.

  “No, it ain’t, sir!” the sergeant said. “ ‘Cause you don’t know more than me about being over here. I been here before. I went home. Hope you get that message.”

  Captain Coles stepped in front of us. “Everybody is responsible for everyone else in this unit,” he said. “If you see somebody out there without his protective gear on, speak up. If you see somebody walking away from his goggles, or who isn’t taking care of his gear, speak up. The teams going out in the field are too small to have to deal with wounded or killed soldiers. Medevac worked in the first Gulf War, but we don’t know what the enemy has learned since then.”

  We finished getting our
equipment together, signed for all of it, then broke for lunch. Me and Jonesy sat together. I had hoped Marla would come over, but she sat with some women from a PSYOP unit. What they did was work on the minds of the enemy. Sometimes they dropped leaflets, sometimes they did nasty little propaganda things, like spread rumors about the enemy’s officers. They spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the enemy was thinking.

  A small, round Specialist came over and asked if Jonesy and I wanted to join a prayer group.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Maybe…” I looked at Jonesy.

  “No way,” Jonesy said. “I’m a blues man. All we believe in is the blues and hard whiskey.”

  “Sometimes prayer can help you see what you’re missing,” Small and Round said.

  “No interest.” Jonesy waved the guy away.

  I watched as the SPC went to the next table before I looked at Jonesy. “Yo, man, you came to my bunk the other night and asked me if I wanted to pray.”

  “That wasn’t me talking,” Jonesy said. “That was my testicles talking. I ain’t worried about dying, but you know how testicles get sometimes.”

  We were scheduled to move out right after lunch. I didn’t feel like eating. Coles pulled out some maps and showed us where we were, north of Kuwait City.

  “We’re following two Infantry brigades,” he said. “We’re going to be traveling southeast and then swing around so that we’re behind the Infantry all the way.”

  My stomach tightened. We were actually going into combat.

  There wasn’t a whole lot of talking as we lined up our vehicles and moved over to the fuel station. Some of the crews turned back their odometers to zero so they could record how many miles we totaled.

  The fuel line was two miles long and we had nothing to do but hang out and notice that other units got to fuel ahead of us even if they were after us in line.

  “Hey, where you guys from?” I turned to see a roundish sister who looked a little bit like a short Queen Latifah. She was with two other little lady soldiers.

  “Harlem,” I said. “Where you from?”

  “El Paso,” the woman said. “I know you never been there.”

  “These guys from New York have never been anywhere, never seen anything, and don’t know anything,” Marla said. “Birdy’s still waiting for a cab to take him home to his mama. Who are you guys with?”

  “Five Oh Seventh.” The little blonde’s accent was thick enough to laugh at if she had been on television. She crossed her legs, squatted, and then sat. “You guys with the Third ID?”

  “Sort of.” Jonesy was looking hard at the little blonde. “We’re Civil Affairs—trailing behind them, making friends with anybody they don’t kill.”

  “We’re logistical support or something like that,” the black woman said. The name tape over her pocket read johnson. “We got thirty-two trucks of stuff to transport some freaking where.”

  “You going north by the Blue Line?” Marla asked. “That’s what we’re doing. Then 106 to the IHOP, a hard left when we reach Petticoat Junction, then straight on to Disneyland.”

  “Yeah, that’s about it,” Johnson said. “I hope this mess is over before we get into it. If you people hear about any parties, let us know.”

  “You got thirty-two trucks and about how many dudes and dudettes?” Jonesy asked.

  “What’s a dudette?” Johnson asked.

  “Girl dudes,” Jonesy said.

  “Girl dudes? Okay.” Johnson had a nice smile. “We got sixty-six people, little man. Each truck got a driver and an alternate. I can drive anything that got more than two wheels.”

  The third woman in their group leaned against Evans’s Humvee. Sometimes she smiled but she didn’t say anything. It was a funny trio: a sister, a tiny blonde, and a dark-haired girl who could have been Spanish.

  “Y’all get your ROE cards?” the blonde asked.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “They gave us these Rules of Engagement cards saying who we supposed to shoot and stuff,” she said. “I can’t figure out what they mean when they talking ‘bout ‘Happy Shooting.’ ”

  She passed a card over to Jonesy. He read it, shaking his head slightly as he did, and then handed it back to the blonde.

  “According to what I was told, when these people get happy they shoot off their pistols or AK-47s into the air,” Jonesy said. “When they do that, we’re not supposed to shoot at them.”

  “Let me see that card?” Marla asked.

  The blonde handed it over. “Where you from?” she asked.

  “New York,” Marla said. “Not from the black part, like Birdy, though. Okay, rule six in the Rules of Engagement. Expect ‘Happy Shooting’ from the local populace. This shooting is not hostile and should not be responded to as such.”

  “So if some guy’s smiling and shooting in the air,” Jonesy said, “it’s okay. But then he lowers it a little bit and he’s still smiling while he’s lighting your ass up, then you can shoot back?”

  “It depends,” Marla said. “How big is his smile?”

  “Five-Oh-Seven!” a captain called out. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

  The Five-Oh-Seven women piled back into their vehicles and started lining up for refueling. Their trucks were huge and I tried to imagine the little blonde behind the wheel.

  We didn’t finish fueling up and loading extra fuel cans into the back of the Humvee until late. Captain Coles told us to go bunk down for the night and be ready to leave for the border the first thing in the morning. He had just finished telling us that when a command vehicle pulled up and gave him new orders.

  “Okay, guys, mount up! We’ve got hearts and minds to win!”

  We were on our way to Iraq.

  Third squad took the lead. Captain Coles rode with them. Second squad with Sergeant Harris, Eddie Evans, and Jean Darcy came next. Two vehicles with medical personnel and Intelligence Ops followed; our squad pulled up the rear.

  We traveled across country for a while headed for Highway 1 and started past a long line of MP vehicles. Some Kuwaiti workers waved us off. We waved back. Jonesy was hunched over the wheel, trying to adjust his seat belt by wiggling his butt.

  I wasn’t exactly scared. My mouth was dry, the way it felt before a big game or an important test in high school. But I was going to be doing something I had never done before. I was going to be in a war.

  We rode deep into the night and into the early morning. The Kuwaiti desert, in spots, was beautiful. The rising sun spread like a brilliant egg flattening out. A distance away, we could see small dust storms changing the colors that played along the edge of the horizon. I remembered part of a song by Bob Marley.

  Check out the real situation

  Nation war against nation

  Where did it all begin?

  When will it end?

  We were in the longest line of vehicles I could ever imagine. It extended as far in front of us as it did behind. Periodically we were stopped for identification check. Once, when a Military Police officer thought we were with the 352nd Civil Affairs Battalion, we were told we were going the wrong way.

  “We’re attached to the Third.” Captain Coles looked over the MP’s organization table and found us listed. “Civil Affairs detachment Alpha. Right there.”

  The Brits were going into Iraq toward Basrah and we were swinging around to get behind the American forces. We went south toward Camp Virginia and then west from there. We were told to pull over and dismount as it grew dark. There was already a makeshift camp in the desert and we pulled into it. Captain Coles told us to inspect the vehicles but nobody was thinking about the Humvees, only the sounds of the big guns booming in the distance. The vibrations from the heavy weapons traveled through the air and I could feel something deep inside my bowels react every time there was an explosion. The scent of gasoline mixed with the smell of sulfur in the warm air.

  “Birdy, how far are we away from Iraq?” Marla’s face was caked in sand from her nose do
wn. Her eyes and forehead, covered by her goggles and helmet, were clean.

  “We could make it there in a couple of hours,” I said. “Easy. You want to shake this joint and bust on in?”

  “No, what I want you to do is to explain to me who they’re shooting at. I thought the Iraqis would be too shocked and awed to fight,” Marla said.

  We had to eat MREs, the packaged food we had brought along. I still wasn’t hungry.

  “Makes me feel like a big boy,” Jonesy said. He took off his Molle vest and flopped on the ground, using his helmet as a backrest. Captain Coles told us to stay together and be ready to move out on a moment’s notice.

  “And don’t sleep under the Humvees,” he said. “Years ago, in my father’s unit, some guys were sleeping under their trucks and when they moved out in the middle of the night they were run over.”

  “So, Captain, why don’t you tell us again what we’re going to be doing in sunny Iraq,” Jonesy asked as Harris, decked out like a gunslinger from a cowboy picture, came over.

  “What we’re going to be doing,” Coles said, “is testing some of the theories that the PSYOP people think will work. We’ll go and smile and ask the people what they need and see how they react. They think they’ll be slow to react because they don’t want to get killed. But if they don’t react right away and we’re genuinely helpful to them, then we’ll be able to keep them from the battle.”

  “And the 352nd? That’s a whole battalion of Civil Affairs specialists,” Marla said. “How come they’re headed to Kuwait City instead of to Baghdad?”

  “I promised the guys at the mall in Kuwait City I’d send them some business,” Jonesy said. “So I sent the 352nd.”

  “Part four of the program is the most important part,” Captain Coles said. “If we just go in and take out their weapons of mass destruction and their regime, then we’re just tough guys. But if we go in there and take out their desire to fight us and help them build their own democracy, then we’re heroes.”

  “That’s the theory, anyway,” Darcy said. She had cut her hair short and looked like a boy with her helmet off. “My great-grandmother doesn’t care two figs for theories, so that’s another thing I can’t tell her.”