Sunrise Over Fallujah

  “Birdy is compromising, ma’am,” Marla said. “We’re doing the best we can with what we got.”

  Yo! Marla got my back! All right!

  Major Sessions had a brief discussion with Captain Coles, showing him the location of the school, and then left.

  “Yo, Captain, that’s a hand-drawn map,” Jonesy said. “You sure they know where this place is?”

  “They bombed it, they should know,” Captain Coles said. “Okay, we’ll take First Squad and Second Squad. I’ll take the money. Get Ahmed ready, too. Look, Miller, they probably do need medical help, too.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Captain Miller said. “And should we put on our veils?”

  “We need us some blues in here,” Jonesy said, and started singing.

  Well, the bombs are falling, yes the bombs are coming down

  Baby, them bombs are falling, they really coming down

  Sometimes they on target, and sometimes they runnin’ wild

  But I’m so glad they ain’t falling on my mama’s child

  And that’s the truth!

  We started clapping for Jonesy. The guy could really sing. All of a sudden his dream about that blues joint made sense.

  I thought about what Captain Miller had said as we convoyed past a construction crew setting up what looked like a fuel depot. I thought the colonel had been right. Nothing was as neat as it looked in the movies or on television. War was sloppier, faster, and more violent. The noises were louder than I had thought they would be. The sounds of shells hitting a target, the heat, and the vibrations from the impact seemed to go through me. After a while the vibrations were there even when nothing was going on. It was as if, little by little, I was bringing the crash of war inside me. As if, little by little, the war was becoming part of me. Maybe the smiley face wasn’t for the Iraqis. Maybe it was for us.

  It took only an hour and ten minutes to reach the area that the A-10 had hit. There was a small building that could have been a mosque, very plain looking, and about fifteen two-story buildings. Most of the buildings had been hit and two of them were nothing more than a pile of rubble. There were two Humvees patrolling the area, just tooling through the streets.

  “Italians,” Coles announced. “I don’t know how we convinced them to send actual ground troops, but they are part of the Coalition.” That got all our interest and I was hoping we could meet them. We drove around until we found what could have been a school. Half of the top floor was blown away. A line of pockmarks ran across the front of the building at an angle; where the line met the door, there was a huge chip in the cement. The top of the front door was intact but the bottom was gone.

  A group of women sat to one side in the shade of a tree. They were cutting up strips of cloth and rolling them into small bundles. Ahmed went over and spoke to them. One of the women turned and pointed to a low building about fifty yards away. There was writing on the walls and a circle that looked like some kind of logo.

  “Birdy, go with him,” Captain Coles said as Ahmed started for the building.

  “Birdy?” I was surprised. “That’s my official name now?”

  Captain Coles laughed and checked out my name tape. “Perry, go with him,” he said.

  I caught up with Ahmed, who told me that the local chief owned the store we were headed toward.

  “You understand everything they say?” I asked.

  “Just about,” Ahmed said. “But the woman back there pretended she didn’t understand anything I said.”

  “They don’t like us over here, I guess.”

  “No, it just means that they don’t trust us,” Ahmed said. “Whatever else we deal with, that’s going to be part of the picture.”

  We got to the store and found a really fat man sitting beside a pile of shoe boxes. There was clothing in the small store; most of it was American-style clothing, some Iraqi stuff. I thought about buying some Iraqi clothing and taking it back home. Mama would like that.

  Ahmed started talking to the man in Arabic. The guy didn’t answer. There were coins on a table near him, and as Ahmed spoke, he pushed them around with one stubby finger. Finally, after a while, Ahmed stopped talking and the man looked up at him, then away. He didn’t look at Ahmed when he spoke.

  I wished I knew what the guy was saying. He was very calm as he spoke, very deliberate with his words. He didn’t gesture with his hands but kept pushing the coins around the table. Ahmed spoke once in a while, and his voice was low, matching the Iraqi shopkeeper’s.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked.

  “He’s saying the mothers of the dead children don’t want our money, they want their children,” Ahmed said. “I don’t know if he wants me to beg him or something. I don’t know.”

  “Ask him if he’s refusing the money,” I said. “Tell him if he is, we’ll just go.”

  Ahmed spoke to the guy again and he answered.

  “He wants to know if you’re my commanding officer,” Ahmed said. “I told him no and now he wants me to go get Coles.”

  “You should have told him I was your commanding officer and the most dangerous man in the army,” I said.

  We went back to the Humvees. Marla, Jean, and the other noncom woman were already with the children. Captain Miller was talking with the women.

  “She speak Arabic?” I asked Captain Coles.

  “A little,” he said. “What’s the situation with their chief?”

  “He’s playing it cool,” Ahmed said. “He was kind of chewing me out in a calm way. Asking me stuff like if I thought the money was going to make up for the death of the children. I didn’t answer that. Now he wants to see you.”

  “Which means that he’ll probably take the money,” Captain Coles said.

  As we started back toward the store the guy appeared at the door. He called to some of the women and two of them—I figured they were the ones who had lost children—came over.

  Inside the store the man spoke to the women. Ahmed said he didn’t understand what they were saying, that they had switched to a dialect he didn’t know. The women started yelling at us.

  “You don’t need to speak Arabic to understand what they’re saying,” Ahmed said.

  He was right. We stood there for about ten minutes while they screamed at us. One woman spit on the ground in front of my feet. Captain Coles told Ahmed to offer up some more apologies, and Ahmed did.

  “It’s not going to do any good,” Ahmed said.

  “No, but do it, anyway,” Coles said.

  It was the Iraqi shopkeeper who put an end to it. He put his arm around the shoulders of one woman and spoke to her softly. The women left and we gave the man the money. He signed for it and then we left.

  I didn’t know how much money we gave them. It looked like a couple of thousand dollars. I didn’t feel good about it. Everything the Iraqis were saying was right. We couldn’t buy an end to their grieving, or an end to their missing their kids.

  The Italians came over. They shook hands all around. One of them asked in English if I was an Iraqi. He knew I wasn’t. I guess they thought that was funny. But they seemed like okay guys, eager to try out their English. One of them said that he had been to the United States.

  “Bayonne, New Jersey,” he said. “I took the bus off New York and live with my cousin two weeks at Bayonne. I go to New York three times.”

  Captain Coles had gone to Rome on his honeymoon. He mentioned that and one of the soldiers congratulated him and patted him on the back.

  The Italians’ vehicles were smaller than ours and didn’t have squad guns. The Italians were more casual than we were, too, and I noticed that none of them were wearing body armor.

  We mounted up and Captain Miller told us that one of the women said that there were children playing near the school when the plane attacked it.

  “She was pretty pissed and I can’t blame her,” Miller said. “There’s a hospital behind the school. It’s a wonder they didn’t attack that.”

  “You know, Miller, I
bet those guys flying that mission that day are as sorry about what happened as you are,” Coles said. “Nobody wants to kill innocent people.”

  “I don’t think so, either.” Miller pushed a strand of hair away from her face. “But we learn to let ourselves off the hook pretty fast when we do, don’t we?”

  “Well, I…” Captain Coles started to say something but changed his mind.

  I really wanted to know what he was going to say.

  “Hey, Captain Coles!” Marla was on the intercom.

  “What?”

  “You think Birdy is an Iraqi?”

  “Could be,” Captain Coles answered. “He’s very dark.”

  We drove for another few minutes when we saw the ambulance about a hundred yards ahead of us. It had the cross on the side and two guys standing by it.

  “Contact straight ahead,” Marla said.

  The ambulance made a quick U-turn; the back doors opened and two guys came out.

  “RPGs!” Jonesy shouted; he braked to a skidding halt.

  My heart jumped and I heard Marla send a burst of machine gun fire toward the guys with the rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Captain Coles screamed into the radio that we were being attacked.

  “Watch out for more bandits!” he yelled.

  Me and Ahmed piled out and got to the right side of the road, which was higher. The fire from the squad gun must have spooked the guys ahead because they split and went to either side of the road. It couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away.

  I went to one knee and brought my piece up to my shoulder. The scope was full of dust and I fired looking over the barrel, panning across the road.

  One of the Iraqis was sitting on the ground. He wasn’t firing. I saw him push at his legs as if he were trying to get them to move. Then he fell backward.

  The other Humvee pulled up with Darcy on its squad gun. Both our guns were trained on the ambulance; we could see the smoke and sparks where the bullets hit its side. Another moment and someone was calling a cease-fire. Nothing moved near the ambulance.

  “Mount up!” Captain Coles shouted.

  We got back into our Humvees and rolled up cautiously, checking all around us for bad guys. When we got near the ambulance it was riddled with holes. Now both of the guys were on the ground, either dead or badly wounded. The ambulance driver was older than the ones who had started the attack. He was slumped over the wheel. From where I sat I couldn’t see any wounds, but I saw the holes in the windshield.

  Ahmed picked up the attackers’ weapons and then looked in the back of the ambulance. He stood stock-still for a long moment. He was going to the door when Captain Coles yelled at him.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  Ahmed got back into the Humvee. He threw the two RPGs into the back and held up several vials of something.

  “There’s a dead guy in the ambulance,” he said.

  Jonesy got back on the middle of the road and pushed the Humvee as fast as it would go. Marla hung on and told me to grab her leg so she wouldn’t bounce out, so I did.

  We didn’t slow down until we hit the first MP checkpoint. He waved us through and we went the last mile or so to our quarters at regular city speed. My legs were weak when I stepped out of the Humvee.

  “Check your weapons,” Coles said. “Make sure the safeties are on.”

  As I checked I saw that I had skinned the knuckles on my right hand.

  “See you guys had a little fun!” A wide-faced corporal looked at the side of Second Squad’s Humvee.

  I looked and saw a neat line of bullet holes. Who had been shooting at us? Had one of our own guys shot our Humvee?

  Marla came out over the top and slid down the side of Miss Molly.

  “You think that was an ambush? Something they planned because they knew we were coming?” she asked me. “Some serious payback?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “They didn’t know we were coming to the village. They didn’t know when we were going to leave. I think they just saw us and took a chance.”

  Ahmed still had the vials of drugs and gave them to Captain Miller. Captain Coles went to Major Sessions to tell her what had happened. Jones fell across his bunk, facedown.

  “You okay, Jonesy?” I asked him.

  “When you playing the blues you always know where you going,” he said. “You hitting them same chords your granddaddy hit and you singing about them same old blues. You can jazz it up a bit here and there, but sooner or later you coming back to the bad times. That’s what’s going down over here, Birdy. Sooner or later, man. One of them crazy suckers is going to hop out from behind a bush or jump out a tree, get lucky, and that’s going to be the end of my butt. Right now some sucker is probably got a bullet with my name on it under that dress they be wearing.”

  Pendleton from Third Squad asked what had happened at the school. Jonesy stammered as he tried to tell him.

  I could hardly remember what had happened. Somehow the moment was already lost. Nothing had happened and the only thing that had ever happened in my entire life was the time on the road. Had it been two minutes? A minute? A few seconds? People had tried to kill me. Maybe I had killed one of them. What else could matter?

  Captain Coles said that the Iraqis had broken the rules of engagement when they used a Red Crescent vehicle to attack us.

  “If they shoot my ass and they broke the rules doing it, does that make me less dead?” Marla asked.

  I was dog tired. My shoulders ached. The sand on my face and neck scratched my skin as I pulled off my T-shirt. The bunk was hard, but anything was better than standing up.

  A dream. I was riding along some highway in the back of a truck. Then it stopped being a truck and was an ambulance. Suddenly the ambulance/truck stopped and I got out to see what was going on. The road was covered with a low dust cloud. I could see the sun playing in the swirls a few feet in front of the ambulance. Looking up beyond the cloud I saw a group of soldiers. They had lifted their guns and were pointing at me. Somehow it seemed that I would be all right if I didn’t move. I tried to stay as still as possible, but then I moved and could see the fire from the muzzles of the guns. I was hit and panicked. No matter which way I turned I couldn’t get away.

  When I awoke I was sweating. I had thrown my blanket off onto the floor. I got up and thought about going out to the Port-O-Potties, but I went back to bed and pulled the cover over my head.

  What got to me was that I didn’t think any of the attacks against us were being planned in any big way. It was just some guys sitting around with weapons, maybe even weapons we had given them, and talking about what was going on. Then, if they had gotten themselves worked up enough, or mad enough, they attacked whoever came along. It didn’t make any sense to me and I knew that wasn’t good.

  May 3, 2003

  Dear Uncle Richie,

  Things are going pretty well here. I’m getting along really well with the squad. We understand things about each other. Probably the most important thing is that nobody is perfect, but that’s okay, we’re tight with each other. We were sitting around the other day talking about an incident on the road and Jonesy asked if anybody had been scared. Nobody remembered being scared, but we all remembered being scared after it was all over. We couldn’t even tell if we had been in danger or not. Ahmed pulled a muscle in his butt and limped for two days.

  Mom sent a package with salami and American cheese. I don’t particularly like salami but it was from home. I wrote to Dad and asked him to send me some photos from home and the neighborhood and instead he sent a picture of Morehouse College in Atlanta. I guess that’s supposed to be a hint or something. I think when I get out I’m going to apply to some liberal arts colleges in New England or maybe Johns Hopkins in Maryland. I heard that they had a pretty relaxed program but well respected. Finance seems so far away from where my head is now.

  By the way, Mom said that her hip is really bothering her when it rains. Is that something serious that I shou
ld be worried about? Maybe you should tell her to take care of it. Pop has good medical coverage, so I don’t think that’s the problem. More like Mom is “being strong” as usual. Did you read where the Iraqis sent a mortar shell into our HQ zone? No one was hurt but a television reporter packed up his bags and left THAT DAY! We all laughed but would have gone with him in a heartbeat.

  Supply got a batch of laptops in and we’re trying to steal one so we can email back to the States. The computers are supposed to be for field commu nications and they’re watching them pretty closely but…keep checking your email!

  Robin

  We had been sitting in our base, which Jonesy called Forward Base Beale Street, for two weeks and I was getting to like it. Rumors had started again that we were going to be rotated back to the States before summer started and that sounded good, too.

  I was also getting used to hanging out in Baghdad. You could tell it had once been a beautiful city, and in many ways it still was. But how you saw the city depended on where you were. We had all taken turns going into the presidential palace, which was as fancy as I could imagine. Marla said it looked like an old movie set.

  The main streets in Baghdad are wide tree-lined roads that are well laid out. There are parks, squares, and markets off the main drag. When we weren’t sightseeing we hung out or cleaned our equipment. It was boring, but boring was getting to be real good.

  We were cleaning our weapons when Marla and Major Sessions came into the room. The major gave us the signal to stay seated. She was wearing a 9-mil strapped to her thigh. Very sexy.

  “We have a request from the local people of Ba’qubah for medicine for their sheep or goats or something,” the major said. “We need to get a team up there to see exactly what they need. And we need to know what they’re thinking about us. We believe these villagers are mostly Sunnis and there’s been some talk they have ties to the Sunnis in Lebanon.”