We mill around the barracks. It’s an
off day. There are no new missions to speak of. Most of the platoon is out on
various operations. Some are outside the wire convoying, some are inside the
wire pushing gravel and moving lumber.
Everyday’s different. We’re a headquarters company – it falls on
us to support other companies’ missions while maintaining our own – it’s
stressful but it has its rewards. It’s never boring. It’s always changing. Everyday’s different.
Today we’re the loners. We’re stuck
back at the base. We’re supposed to work. It’s bullshit, meaningless work: PMCS
the vehicles, sweep the hallways, police the motor pool.
Yeah, right. We play poker and
dominos. We watch movies and stay out of the heat. We play guitar and share
stories and laugh. Who really cares? We got back from a mission yesterday, and
there’s another one coming up. You want us to waste our “time off?” Get real.
“Look busy,” our squad leader tells
us. Sergeant First Class Ken Renninger grins, but his words are what matter.
One guy fills a mop bucket and plants a broom within arms’ reach. We’re busy.
Our lieutenant opens the door and
blinding Iraqi light shines off the tile floor. He just got done with some
stupid meeting and he smiles at the sight of his soldiers.
He walks up and closes our
semicircle.
“What’s up, guys?” he asks.
“Nothing,” we say. He notices the
motionless yellow bucket filled with water.
“I see you’re mopping,” he observes.
We all laugh.
“Hey, Z, I need you and two E-4’s to
meet Sergeant Whistler by those humvees that came in this morning,” he says.
“Whistler will explain the details to you.”
“Yes, sir,” responds Sergeant
Zerega.
We usually reserve the title of
‘mission’ for operations which are at least quasi dangerous. We call work
inside the wire, especially when it’s in our own motor pool, tasks. This is a
task, and tasks, although safer, are worse than missions. So we fix our gazes
in another direction as Zerega looks around the room. It’s nothing against him
or LT. We’re just comfortable. It’s nice to have a couple hours without
obligation.
Despite our best wall-staring
efforts, Zerega grabs Roman and me. We button our tops, put on our field caps,
and follow Zerega out the front door. The rest hang out and “mop” the barracks.
I flip them off behind my back.
We walk across the motor pool.
Dozens of vehicles are lined up, ready at a moments notice to leave on a
mission.
Near the middle of the motor pool
lie two humvees.
“Have you seen these yet?” Zerega
asks us as we approach them. Roman says yes, and I say no.
“Came in this morning,” he says.
“Guess a couple of guys died in ‘em.”
This doesn’t affect me a whole lot.
This is a war. People die.
Here they are. Two blown up humvees
side by side. Our mission, our task, is to scrounge for parts: armor, mostly.
We take armor that’s still intact and put it on our own humvees. Some of which
aren’t armored at all.
We poke around one of them for a
minute or two. The inside is coated in dusty black. It’s residue from the
IED’s, the Improvised Explosive Devices that destroyed them.
The first thing I notice is the
smell, scorched rubber, smoldering hair, burnt metal, and cooked meat. It
reminds me of ham, but I know there were no ham steaks burnt in this humvee.
It rolls my stomach, but I deal with
it. We have a mission to do. We have a task.
We’re curious. This is a little
taste of death, and somehow, we’re enlivened. That’s what death does. It
defines life. What would peace be without war? We need both or neither exists.
In a way, death and war are everything.
Can
there ever really be peace? Yeah, everyone gives and everyone receives and it’s
like we’re in some wonderful, vast utopia. Sure, great, now put down the joint
and come join me in reality. Can true peace exist if war isn’t there to compare
it with? What are we anyway but the opposite of something else? Good and evil.
These humvees define death and life.
I feel immense sorrow for those who were killed here. And I feel immense joy
knowing there’s one more KIA, one more statistic, that isn’t me. I’ve made it…
so far.
Isn’t life not being dead?
Isn’t death not being alive?
So here we are, and we’re curious
about this little taste of death. Whistler has already removed an armored door
frame that he’s drilled to modify with our own. Zerega, Roman, and I poke
around the charbroiled humvee.
We find a piece of desert uniform.
It’s about four inches by four inches and has a seam running through its
middle. I hold it to various seams of my own uniform. It was found next to the
gas pedal, and we’re fairly certain it was a knee. It’s gray from the bomb
residue and blood stained. It smells like burnt ham.
We find several pieces of shrapnel.
Thick, twisted chunks of metal. One of them has small vertical scratches
running along the top. They are close together and parallel. They’re from the
metal band that held the round together. It’s from a 133 or 155 round. I look
at those tick marks, and it occurs to me that someone has looked at these ticks
before. Someone who hates me. Someone who doesn’t even know me. Someone who’s
killed my fellow soldiers. I throw the piece of shrapnel back into the mess of
junk inside the humvee.
We find a piece of an ammo can. .556
rounds lie nearby. They’re expended, but they weren’t shot. They were cooked.
The actual bullets are gone, cooked off; the casings are all that’s left over,
mangled and ripped apart like the piece of ammo can. I’ve heard of this happening, but I hadn’t actually seen remnants
until now.
“Look at this,” says Zerega from the
other side of the vehicle.
I walk over. The passenger door is
riddled with ball bearings. They’re stuck halfway into the armored door. The
inside of the door is wavy with impressions, but there are no holes.
The armor worked. On the door,
anyway. The floor is ripped apart. The shrapnel that came through here was not
stopped by armor. This part of the bomb pulled the metal apart like pork. I
look at the seat. It’s army green and black with bomb residue and brown with dried
blood. Someone died here. This part of the bomb killed whoever sat in this
seat. It ripped them apart like pork too.
I’ve had enough. “What do you want
first, Sergeant?” I ask Whistler.
“I need the brackets from that
door,” he says. He goes back to drilling holes in the humvee’s door frame.
I grab a socket wrench and reach
into the crack between the bloody seat and the door frame. In the darkness of
the crack I see something, a small square. I reach into the crack with my knife
and poke it. It feels peculiar. I can’t poke into it, but I know I should be
able too. I pour water on it. I don’t know why I think this will loosen it up;
it works. It becomes spongy and I stick it with my knife.
Out of its dark resting place, I
examine it closely. It’s about the size of a quarter and roughly the same
color. Like everything else in the humvee, it’s the color of death. Except for
a couple of small, circular pockets of white fat, the thing is dead gray.
Curly, black hairs stick out of it. The fleshy thing hangs off my knife, and I
study it like I’m in high school biology class. Sebastian Koproswki always
busts my balls for picking my teeth with this knife after chow. I tell him it
gets the job done as good as any toothpick.
This knife won’t be picking my teeth
after today.
I fling the meat back into the hole
and continue unscrewing the bracket for the armored door. Zerega, Roman,
Whistler, and I joke around and bust balls like we always do. We unscrew,
unfasten, cut, grind, drill, and transfer parts from the old humvees to the new
ones. Then it comes time to transfer the armored roof.
We unscrew the A-frame that holds
the roof on. Part of one edge is folded up from the explosion. Whistler says to
not worry about it. It’s just the over hang and won’t cause any real weakness.
It takes all four of us to lift the roof off the old humvee and place it on the
ground. We set it down and we stop.
The two A-frames, centered and on
either side, cause the whole roof to tip forward when we put it down. It sits
on the dirty, hard ground like a wide, armored seesaw. No one wants to sit on
this seesaw, though. The rotating turret is unhitched and swings down so that
the heavy cover rests toward the ground. The turret is directly in the middle
and half of the roof is covered with a dusty, brown bloodstain.
It was the gunner’s blood.
We stand there. We don’t say a word.
We look at the blood that covers half the roof. It belonged to someone. It ran
through his arteries and veins for years. It kept him alive. Now it’s spread
out across the top of a tan humvee roof that lays on the ground in our motor
pool. It is life, taken and destroyed. It’s speckled with the dusty sand of
Iraq.
I picture the gunner, not just his
body bleeding out as it lies across the roof, but the whole scene. My morbid
fixation, life before it was transformed into death.
###
It’s
4:45 am, and the convoy sits in a motor pool. Desert camouflaged soldiers sip
coffee and strap down chains and tighten ratchet straps and bullshit and gear
up and dispatch vehicles and nap and chew gum and load crew serve weapons and
check their vehicles and adjust body armor and pray and inspect weapons and
lace boots and daydream and strap Kevlars and kiss old photographs and line
their vehicles up and wait.
The
gunner of this humvee asks the loader operator, who sits behind the driver and
is simply hitching a ride to the mission site, if he wants to man the 60 today.
“You
wanna jump in the turret?” asks the gunner.
“Maybe
when we come back; I’m gonna sit back here and catch a few,” says the loader
operator.
“Yeah,
that’s what I wanna do,” says the gunner. He yawns.
“Sorry,”
the loader operator says. He shrugs and puts his feet up. His body armor sits
open and his soft cap lies over his eyes.
The
convoy commander calls for a rally and everyone gets out of their vehicles. The
convoy brief is short and concise, for they’ve all done this many times before.
“Keep
your eyes open. Use your escalation of force. Remember your rules of engagement,”
he says.
“Shoot
first; ask questions later!” someone yells out. The circle of yawning,
morning-disheveled soldiers produces a small laugh. It’s a laugh from the gut,
but through the nose. The joke is tired. So is the crowd.
“…remember
your rules of engagement. Keep your intervals. Watch each other’s backs…”
Same
old shit.
The
driver gets in, checks his gauges one more time, and lets the e-brake off. The
assistant driver, or A-driver for short, gets in and radio checks with the
convoy commander, once into the hand held and once into the SINGARS radio. The
loader operator velcro’s his flak jacket, places his weapon at his feet
pointing up, gets a loaded magazine ready, and yawns. The gunner scales the
humvee, drops through the hole in the roof, and situates his ammo so it’s
easily accessible when it needs to be loaded at the gate.
They
pull out in convoy manifest order to the base’s main gate. They sit some more,
waiting, wondering what lunch will taste like, hoping it’s better than the last
time they went to this little Forward Operating Base (FOB).
The
humvee drives down the boring desert road as the sun comes up. The driver is
sipping Red Bull at 5:15 am and appreciating the sunrise. The sky is a light
shade of grayish blue, lined with a polished gold flame where sky meets earth.
There isn’t a cloud for miles, hasn’t been one for months. The air is
pleasantly cool on the gunner’s face, but the sand in the air requires him to
wear goggles.
The
humvee is the third vehicle in a convoy of seven. They’re pulling engineering
equipment to a FOB. In between gun trucks like this one, they carry two loaders
and one dozer on the back of M916 tractor trailers. This is their sixth run
this week to the FOB. Everyday, it seems, they run back and forth between the
two bases with equipment. Drop off so-and-so, pick up so-and-so. They follow
orders. They are soldiers.
The
driver sees the first vehicle swerve madly to the left side of the road. The
whole convoy is doing about 60mph. His hands grip the wheel, ready for
whatever. The second vehicle swerves wildly like the first. The radio jumps to
life.
“Back
off! All elements, back off! IED right. Over!” The first vehicle responds.
It’s
too late. The third vehicle, this humvee, jumps to the far left side of the
road.
What
looks like three giant bullets lies on the ground, conspicuously concealed with
thin shrubbery. Wires are wrapped around them and lead off to the right across
the quiet early morning desert.
There’s
no time. The driver slams on the accelerator.
It’s
a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life.
He
had no other options. He was cruising at 60mph and if he had slammed the brakes
he would have stopped fifteen feet from the three 155 rounds wrapped in wire.
He plants his foot on the accelerator. It’s a last minute effort to throw the
enemy’s timing off. There’s a delay between the trigger and the explosion. All
he can do is stomp the gas and pray, but there’s no time to pray.
Even
though he couldn’t have done it differently, it’s a decision that will haunt
him for the rest of his life. Two of his friends will die today. For the rest
of his life he’ll wonder if he could have stopped. He’ll go mad with the
question. His fading memory of the explosion will merge with the maddening
weight of his guilt. They’ll merge, and he’ll convince himself that he could
have stopped. The combination of guilt and reality will sear his heart with
more fiery pain than he ever thought possible.
His
heart will burn like scalding water. It will keep him up for many nights to
come. And, years later, when he thinks he’s come to grips with it all, it will
reappear suddenly and more painful than before. When he lights the candles on
his son’s 7th birthday cake, his heart will blister with scorching
pain. When he kisses his only daughter on her wedding day, his heart will melt
like burning rock. And when he holds his first grandchild in the delivery room,
his heart will smoke and smolder until it feels as if nothing is left.
The
bomb explodes. The cloud is enormous, and the blast throws the speeding humvee
across the road into the dusty sand. It spins 180 degrees and stops thirty feet
from the edge of the road.
The
driver’s hearing is temporarily stunned. His head his ringing, and the first
sound he hears is the loader operator screaming. He’s screaming to the gunner.
The gunner’s legs are convulsing as they hang into the humvee. One foot is
turned sideways and the other appears to be doing a rapid jitterbug. Most of
his weight is supported by edge of the turret.
The
loader operator is screaming the gunner’s name and shaking his leg. In his
mind, the loader operator pictures the roles reversed. He pictures the gunner
shaking his leg as it
convulses because he’s dying. All in
a single moment the loader operator imagines the guilt the gunner would feel if
they had indeed switched positions before the convoy rolled out. And, as if it
comes in a wave, the guilt knocks the wind out of the loader operator. What if
they had switched positions?
He
stops shaking the gunner’s leg.
The
A-driver is slumped over the SINGARS radio. The hand closest to the driver
still clutches the hand-held radio. His face is unrecognizable. He is
unmistakably dead. His face and head were ripped apart. His helmet hangs onto a
disfigured stump. The blast came from the ground on his side. It nearly blew
the helmet off. It succeeded in placing half his brain and skull into the foam
that lines the roof.
The
driver stumbles out of the vehicle. He grabs his weapon and stands up. His
hands are black with bomb residue and the side of his face is covered with the
blood of his A-driver. Something runs down the back of his neck and, in a state
of numbed shock, he reaches back to touch it. His hand comes back covered in
blood.
Is
he hurt? He turns around.
The
gunner is sprawled out across the roof. His neck has been sliced wide open and
blood gushes from the wound like a hose. The driver is amazed at how much blood
there is. It’s dripping off the roof in three different spots. It’s what
dripped down the back of his neck.
The
gunner, still convulsing and feebly grabbing the wide gash on his neck, looks
at the driver on the ground with wide, blank eyes. No passion lives behind
those eyes, no life. He’s convulsing and trying to hang on, but he will soon
die. The gunner’s wide eyes are dead, but he doesn’t know it yet. He holds his
throat as he bleeds out. His eyes, fixed on the eyes of the driver, eventually
glaze over and give up their struggle.
The
driver pulls the panicking loader operator out of the humvee and away from the
smoking, crippled death scene. The first humvee in the convoy comes barreling
through the desert, leaving a rising, dusty trail, and the driver faints.
###
A giant, dried pool of someone’s
blood. I should be crying. That’s what normal people would do. But I can’t cry.
I don’t feel anything. It’s lifeless blood, dead blood and it takes the emotion
of life right out of me.
“We’re gonna have to spray this
off,” someone finally says.
We use a small forklift and bring
the bloody thing over to the pressure washer. Whistler takes hold and begins
spraying the dusty blood off the roof. It flows down into the dirt. It’s brown
just like the dirt.
Recycling,
I think.
Whistler hits some sort of pocket,
maybe from the turret, and the dirty blood and water spray into his mouth.
Zerega almost keels over he’s laughing so hard. It’s disgusting, but Zerega’s laugh is maniacal and contagious. Now I’m
laughing too.
Whistler is spitting and wiping his
tongue on his sleeve.
“Oh, God,” he says.
“Oh, God,” says Zerega. “You ate
brains! You ate brains! Oh, my God!”
“Shut up,” says Whistler, and now
he’s laughing.
“Zombie!” Zerega points and laughs.
“You ate brains, zombie!”
Once the initial shock of Whistler
eating brains is over, we get back to hosing down the rest of the roof.
Over the next week, we scrub, strip,
and scrap the old humvees. We use putty knives to scrape off the foam that
lines the inside of the roof. The foam is riddled with chunks of bone and
brains and shrapnel, and we don’t really want this in our humvee.
We offer the foam to Whistler who we
know is starving for some good human brain. We check Whistler’s eyes every
morning to see if they’ve glazed over and turned yellow. We pretend to watch
our backs when he’s around, afraid he’ll try to sneak a bite out of the fleshy
part of our shoulders or necks.
We joke about the death we
encounter. Relieves the anxiety. Makes
it not real. Zombies are not real. This little taste of death is not real.
It’s blistering hot, so we accuse
each other of having swamp-ass. It’s terrifying outside the wire, so we make
fun of the “Wire-weenies” who never leave camp. We haven’t seen our wives or
girlfriends for eight months, so we joke about masturbating. We may never make
it home, so we joke about being stuck in this damn place forever. We call
ourselves the Shroom Platoon. We remove the remnants of dead soldiers from the
lining of a humvee, and offer them to Zombie Whistler.
None of it’s real. It’s a joke, a
little taste of death.