Sunrise Over Fallujah

  I remembered Ahmed and was about to ask Captain Coles to get him to talk Arabic to the wounded man when the guy swung his arm up. There was a pistol in it.

  The gunman shot wildly, almost as if he wasn’t trying to hit us, just making one last defiant statement. Harris shot him more times than necessary. The body had stopped moving with the first shot.

  Second squad policed the long end of the street, collecting some weapons from the smashed car. I watched them search the dead dudes. Yuk. We got back in what amounted to a little formation and headed on.

  The tension was unbelievable. I couldn’t keep my head still. It was almost daybreak and every shadow looked as if it had a gun.

  Captain Coles put himself on intercom as he tried to contact the unit we were looking for. He gave our position and in minutes a Bradley appeared to pick us up and lead us to their medical setup.

  We reached a café being used as a makeshift hospital for wounded Iraqi civilians. The medics came out and I saw that Owens, who was with the medics, had a bandage on her forehead. A sergeant from the 3rd ID came over and asked if she was all right.

  “Just a helluva bump,” she said.

  “Then get your damned Kevlar back on,” he said. “And do it now!”

  The medic shot him a dirty look, and then gingerly put the helmet over Owens’s bandage. There were wounded civilians, men, women, and children, in the café. The worst off were on stretchers along the wall and our medical people looked at them. We were told to search everybody. The guys searched the males, and Marla and the female medics searched the women. They didn’t have weapons.

  Only one person had been shot. All the others had either been burned or hit with shrapnel or flying debris. A thin brown man, bald on top, looked closest to dying but had no visible wounds except for a few spots of blood under his nose. An Iraqi who spoke English said that the man had been sitting on a folding chair when a shell hit down the street and the shock of it had picked him up off his chair and thrown him against a wall.

  Some of the other wounds were terrible. An old man was lying in a corner on his back. He had a string of beads draped across his palm. His hand and the beads shook uncontrollably. The front of his robe was covered with more blood than anybody was supposed to lose. When the beads fell from his hand I bent over, picked them up, held his wrist, and draped them over his fingers. The old man looked up at me. I don’t know if he could see me clearly or not, but he looked.

  “Birdy, give me a hand,” Marla called.

  She had a little girl, maybe eight or nine, whose leg was bloodied. We carried her over to the aid station our people had set up and laid her on the ground. The front of the little dress she was wearing, it might have been her nightgown, was covered with blood. Marla lifted it to see if the girl was hurt bad. She was. An angry wound seeped blood diagonally across her small chest.

  None of it was good. I didn’t want to be connected with the wounds, or with the dying. It all looked so much better in the training films, when the figures were just silhouettes flickering across a screen. When it was all just a video game. But up close, the smell of blood was connected with real people. I knew that many of them wouldn’t make it. They would be dead before the night came, or surely by the next morning.

  Then it was noon and somebody said that the 3rd was serving hot food down the street. There was still the sound of sporadic gunfire, but it seemed farther away. I looked for Marla and Jonesy and asked if they wanted to go get something to eat. Jonesy did but Marla wanted to help the medics. I thought of staying, too, but I went for breakfast instead.

  We lined up with the guys from the 3rd, had scrambled eggs and sausages. The military cooks were actually using a local Iraqi guy to help them. Me and Jonesy sat down and ate. We took some eggs and coffee back to Marla. Her face was pale with the strain of the work. She ate the eggs on the edge of a cot in which an Iraqi woman was lying. The woman, dressed in black, was facing the wall.

  “She okay?” I asked Marla.

  “What do you think?” she answered.

  The portable toilet facilities stunk and the small cabin was filled with tiny flies that bit my butt. But it was the sounds of incoming mortars that shook me the most.

  “Hey, man, you could be sitting under a tree and if a mortar hits you it’s all over,” Jonesy had said.

  At first I thought that I just didn’t want to die with my pants down around my ankles. Then I realized that it was the noise, the constant booming, that just filled my guts with a trembling sensation. I knew if I heard the boom I was safe because whatever had exploded hadn’t hit me. But it was the idea that at any moment it could be all over, that I could be dead or lying in the sand twisting in agony, that filled me with a terror that I hadn’t known before. Terror. It wasn’t just being scared. It was a feeling that was taking me over. I knew it but I hoped no one else saw it.

  When I came out I saw Jonesy drinking a bottle of water. He had his Kevlar pushed back and the water up to his lips. He held a thumb up to me as I approached.

  “How you doing?” I asked.

  “Keeping on, bro,” he said. He pulled another bottle of water from his vest and handed it to me. “Captain Coles just got chewed out.”

  “Captain Coles?”

  “A Third ID guy jumped all over him, man. Chewed him up one side and down the other. The guy seemed so pissed I thought he was gonna shoot him.”

  “What happened?” The water was cold and delicious. I poured some in my palm and wiped my face with it.

  “Somebody said that we had to take prisoners up to PSYOP to be interviewed and the captain said we weren’t messengers,” Jonesy said. “I guess he was wrong.”

  I didn’t dig the PSYOP guys too much. The ones I had met thought that being in Psychological Operations meant that they were smarter than everybody else. They might have been, but they didn’t have to act like it. I had seen the leaflets they dropped over Iraq and the ones they handed out wherever we went. Most were threats with English on one side and Arabic on the other. If you shoot at us we’ll kill you, and if you’re friendly we’ll help you build a new nation—that kind of thing.

  “If it was up to me I wouldn’t be taking them no place,” he said. “Not after that scene.” He half lifted his empty water bottle to point to a place behind me.

  I looked to see what he was talking about and saw guys putting the bodies of dead soldiers into a truck. Four men were taking the dead, two soldiers to each body bag, past the others who were standing at attention. The bodies seemed light as they loaded the litters into the back of the truck. A heavy Iraqi woman, dressed all in black, glanced at the operation, then hurried down the street. In a narrow street, small brown kids stood against the walls and watched. I wondered what they were thinking.

  “It’s tough to go down so far from home,” I said.

  “My moms couldn’t take that,” Jonesy said. “That would kill her faster than it would kill me.”

  A image of my mom, sitting at our kitchen table in Harlem, flashed through my mind. If I were killed she would cry, I knew. It would hurt her so much, and as I stood watching the ritual of gathering the dead, I felt sorry for her. I knew what Jonesy was saying, that the dying hurt everybody.

  I wondered what my father would think. Would he blame me for dying? Would he say I should have listened to him? I wanted to talk to him so bad. There wasn’t anything special I had to say, just that I thought what he wanted for me was okay. Maybe that I loved him. I took out my pen and started to write a note to myself to tell my parents that I loved them. It was BS. The part about reminding myself.

  There were three prisoners. Second Squad took two of them and we took one, an old man. He was nearly bald, with patches of woolly hair on the sides of his head turning white. He was the same color as me, too. Thin, square-shouldered, slightly stooped, the old man looked too small to be considered dangerous. He was scared of us. He tried to smile but only showed a small row of bad teeth.

  Ahmed rode with us. Third S
quad took the point, we were next, and Second Squad followed us.

  “Stay close and stay in contact.” Captain Coles was subdued. He had had his ass handed to him by the officer from the 3rd ID and it showed.

  We mounted up and moved out. I got the map coordinates for the FOB and went over them with Jonesy. He asked Marla if she wanted to drive and she said no.

  “I want to be up so I can see what’s going on,” she said. “And if I’m up there I don’t have to make small talk with you dudes.”

  Good. Marla was coming back.

  The prisoners’ hands were held together with plastic strips. The two prisoners in the other Humvee had cloths over their heads but ours didn’t.

  “Hey, Ahmed, ask him why he was doing whatever he was doing,” Jonesy said.

  Ahmed said something to the guy but there was no answer. Ahmed hit him in the forehead with the heel of his hand, snapping his head back, and the guy looked first startled, then angry. My rifle was between my legs and I turned slightly so that it was pointed at him.

  The old man spoke in Arabic and I looked at Ahmed. Ahmed asked something and the guy answered. His voice was soft and he talked with his head down. I wanted him to speak louder even though I didn’t understand Arabic.

  “What’s he saying?” Jonesy asked.

  “He’s saying that he’s been a good man all of his life,” Ahmed replied. “He’s made his Hajj and does God’s will. He says he’s an old man and doesn’t know why we want to kill him.”

  “Why are we taking him instead of some of the others?” Jonesy asked.

  Ahmed talked to the man again. This time his voice softened and I wondered what he was saying, because whatever it was changed Ahmed’s attitude toward him. Ahmed had just rapped the old guy in the forehead, but now I could definitely hear a change in his voice.

  The man answered, then looked away out of the window. He was looking at a road he had probably traveled all of his life. Past familiar rocks, past a burned-out building, maybe even past people he knew.

  “He says that the Americans found an AK-47 in his house,” Ahmed translated. “He said it was a Russian gun that he bought years ago to protect himself. He says he wanted to protect himself from robbers, and he didn’t expect Americans to come to kill him.”

  “Tell him we didn’t come to kill him,” I said. “That we’re trying to build a democracy over here.”

  “You bombed my village,” the old man, his head down, replied slowly in English. “First you shoot into my house, then you come to the door.”

  “Where you learn to speak English?” Jonesy asked.

  “I drove a cab in London for twelve years,” answered the old man. “When I had enough money to buy a house for my family, I came back to my country.”

  “You’re going to be all right,” Jonesy said. “We don’t hurt our prisoners.”

  “My house had holes in the walls,” the old man said. “I am away from my family. Is this all right?”

  “Your ass could be dead,” said Jonesy.

  We drove the next miles in silence.

  It was all pretty confusing. We had been attacked. The guys who had fired on us didn’t know us, and we didn’t know them. I thought of them getting up in the morning and having their breakfast. Perhaps they had talked about the war. Perhaps they had imagined themselves fighting heroically against us. Now they were dead and the meaning of it was somewhere in the thin smoke that rose over the buildings.

  There were lots of vehicles on the road: Bradleys, big trucks, all headed north. We passed Iraqis going about their business on the highway. Some of them just stood by the side of the road, watching us. There was a man and a boy on a cart piled high with old furniture, being pulled by a donkey. We passed a tank that had a sign on its side: john 13:15. I asked Jonesy what it meant; he didn’t know.

  We reached a command post set up in a private house. An MP took the old man from us and put a hood over his head before leading him away. I hoped they were going to treat him gently.

  The 3rd, according to Captain Coles, was headed toward Tallil Airport, which was southeast of us.

  “Yo, Captain, is the Third leaving a couple of companies when they take over a place to make sure it stays safe?” Jonesy asked. “They moving so fast they’re going to have one dude left when they reach Baghdad.”

  “That’s the point,” Captain Coles said. “Hit hard and hit fast.”

  “Yeah, all that’s good on paper, sir,” Jonesy said. “But one time I hit a guy hard and fast and knocked his tooth out. Then he commenced to kick my butt long enough for him to have to take a lunch break.”

  What I thought was bothering Jonesy, and what was definitely messing with my mind, was that it was hard to tell who the enemy was, and with our soldiers moving from place to place so quickly, it was getting hard to tell where our friends were, too.

  We picked up a new Intelligence officer, Captain Phil Nelson, and two other Intelligence types. We were supposed to go from the FOB, which was nothing but a few tents in the sand, to a mining area about fifteen to twenty miles away.

  “Is this a hot zone?” Captain Coles stood close to Nelson as he spoke.

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Captain Nelson said. He was short with a huge round head and big blue eyes that made him look like a baby in uniform. “This place has been inspected by the United Nations a hundred times, but what I’m hoping for is that we can find some civilians who can give us a feel for the area, let us know if they’re glad we’re knocking over Saddam.”

  “Any friendlies there now?” Coles asked.

  “A marine detachment,” Nelson said. “They’re telling us it’s safe for us to go in.”

  “You’re looking for civilians; do you speak Iraqi?”

  “I speak Arabic,” Nelson said, looking about as white as a human being could look.

  The Intelligence guys supposedly knew where they were going and would lead the way with Second Squad. Captain Coles rode with us. Inside the Humvee the captain was mumbling to himself.

  “Something we should know?” Jonesy asked.

  “The chain of command is getting weak,” Coles said. “If you listen to the air traffic, you hear a lot of people trying to find out where their units are.”

  “I thought they were hitting fast and hard?” Marla chimed in.

  “If you’re in a fight and you’re winning, it’s fine,” Captain Coles said. “But if something looks fishy and you need some backup in a hurry, it would be good to know where the cavalry is.”

  “And the way I figure it, you can never tell when you’re going to need some backup in a hurry,” I said.

  “This reminds me of when they started a happy hour in a bar in my hometown,” Jonesy said. “It was a colored bar and they ain’t never had a happy hour. Some folks thought they was gonna get free drinks. When they found out that they had to buy a drink to get a free one they got to fighting and tore the place up. That’s what’s happening over here. They don’t know if they should be getting happy or tearing us up.”

  Marla was on the squad gun and I tapped her knee to get her attention as Jonesy pulled the Humvee out onto the road. I thought she might be tired. She kicked me with the back of her heel.

  “Yo, Marla, I’m a friendly!” I called to her.

  “Mess with my leg again and I’ll shoot you through the top of your head,” she answered.

  “Yo, Jonesy, is Marla weird or what?” I asked.

  “Hey, man, we all weird,” Jonesy said. “Or do you always do drive-bys in the name of democracy?”

  We were going south again to meet up with a company from the 3rd ID. Captain Coles had the GPS system going and was comparing the coordinates on the screen with our maps. That made me feel a little better because there weren’t any map landmarks that I recognized. There were some American military trucks on the road, mostly supply units, and a few British units. There were Iraqi vehicles as well, older trucks and an occasional overcrowded bus. Captain Coles started talkin
g about what was probably going on in his hometown and we figured out that the time difference was eight hours.

  “It’s three in the afternoon here and back home they’re just getting up,” he said.

  “Contact ahead, they’re moving to one side!” Marla’s voice was crisp, hard.

  I felt myself tensing. For a moment I closed my eyes, then realized what I was doing, and opened them again. I felt my hand sweating and wiped it on my pants leg.

  Please, God, don’t let me do anything stupid.

  “What do you think?” Captain Coles asked.

  The first two Humvees had already passed an old wagon. Its right side was broken down and it leaned precariously. One of the Iraqis was unhitching the two old mules that had been pulling it, while two other men argued with each other.

  “They don’t look like hostiles, sir,” I said.

  “Keep moving, Jonesy,” Coles said.

  Jonesy had slowed to a crawl, and started edging along the left side of the road when the wheels started slipping. There were a number of curses as the Humvee slid along the shoulder and into the marshy area.

  Jonesy revved up the engine and tried to get us out. Nothing.

  The other Humvees slowed when they saw us stop. Coles got on the radio and told them what was going on. The Humvee in front of us stopped sixty yards down the road and Second Squad backed up for security behind us.

  “Keep your eyes open, Marla,” Jonesy said.

  Jonesy frantically spun the wheels, but the Humvee just slid deeper into the marsh. Coles got off the radio and started cursing again. He was really good at it, too.

  “Nobody’s got a tow chain,” he said. “If they try to push us out we’ll all be stuck here.”

  I got out and sank into a foot of warm, stinky mud. It smelled like human waste; I wanted to gag. I slogged my way up to the road until I was on solid ground. Captain Coles came out next. Jonesy and Marla followed, sinking thigh deep in the slop.

  “What the hell we going to do?” Jonesy asked. “No way I’m walking back.”

  “We’d have to destroy the vehicle if we left it,” Captain Coles said. “Let me try to get it out. Keep an eye on our guests.”