House to House: A Tale of Modern War (15 page)

Knapp slips through our door into the street, winds up, and slings a grenade clear over the front wall of our target house. A muffled
thump
follows. Overhead, Pratt and Lawson cover us with their heavy guns.

Knapp now launches himself fully into the middle of the street. The man is all steel and guts. During a firefight in Muqdadiyah last August, he stood atop a building and poured hot slugs into a group of about twenty insurgents. Bullets and RPGs flew all around, but he never even flinched. He stood and took it, and dealt out much worse.

He reaches the far side of the street. As he does, I urge the next group forward. Slapping helmets, I hiss, “Go! Go! Go!”

Fitts’s squad follows us out of the courtyard. We dash across the street and into the compound of our target house. As I get close, I see Knapp frozen in the doorway.

What the fuck, Knapp? Get inside the fucking house!

The rest of the squad stacks up behind him, and though I try to stop, I careen into the men. We’ve got one big gaggle fuck right in the front yard, and we’re vulnerable as hell.

“Get the fuck in!” I order.

Knapp immediately counters with, “No! No! Get the fuck out! Get out now!”

“Whaddya got?” I demand, still trying to get untangled from the rest of the squad now backing off from the entrance.

He swings around and grabs my body armor. As the rest of the men back up indecisively, he drags me into the doorway.

“Knapp, what the fuck….”

“LOOK!”
he roars.

The first thing I notice are the wires. Wires are common all over the ruins we’ve traversed so far, but they are always dirty, torn, and dull in color. The wires I see inside this house are crisp and clean and bundled neatly with zip ties.

That is not good.

“GO! GO! GO! Get the fuck outta here,” I scream to my squad.

A cluster of wires funnel through one wall, then fan out all over the inside of one room just inside the door like green and orange ivy vines. I follow a few with my eyes and see they end in undersized bricks. This puzzles me for a split second, then I realize the bricks are chunks of C-4 plastic explosive.

Another group of wires runs to a pair of go-cart–sized propane tanks stacked along the nearest wall. More explosives are scattered around them.

But the pièce de résistance, the stroke of insurgent genius here, is the centerline aerial drop tank sitting in the middle of the room. Designed to give MiG fighter jets extended range, it’s a fuel tank that looks like a misshapen teardrop. The insurgents have slipped garbage bags onto its tail fins. The nose has been removed. The wires disappear inside from there. Using jet fuel as a bomb is what caused the fireballs at the World Trade Center on 9/11. This tank makes one hell of a weapon.

We could lose the entire squad—we could lose most of the platoon—right here, right now.

I turn to Knapp. “Get back to the other house, now!”

He grabs the other men and everyone careens back across the street. I’m left alone in the doorway, staring at this enormous booby trap. I’m horrified by the thought of what almost happened to my platoon.

Fitts jogs to me. “What’s going on?”

I’m so stunned, I can only point.

He peers inside the house and flips out. “What the fuck is this? Holy shit!”

“This is a BCIED, man.” Building-contained IED. “Fucking…building bomb.” I can’t even talk in complete sentences.

“This whole block would go,” Fitts adds.

We can’t let the shock overwhelm us. I struggle to regroup.

“What the fuck is this, Bell? Who drags a fucking drop tank into a house?”

This is as close as I have come to seeing Fitts flip out. It’s unlike him. In fact, it is usually Fitts who stays calm in a crisis while I flip out. In October, just before we learned of our Fallujah mission, the platoon was on a routine patrol. Specialist Michael Gross tripped on a branch and fell face-first into the dirt. When he pulled his head out of the turf, he saw a trip wire only a few inches from his eyeballs. It was connected to a land mine. Gross yelled at the tops of his lungs. The squad stopped as I shouted, “Freeze! Everyone freeze and turn off your equipment!” We discovered several more mines strewn around us. Immediately, I tried to go through the doctrine on what to do in a minefield.

Fitts and his squad were directly behind our wedge. Fitts saw he needed to keep all of us calm, starting with me. “Listen, Bell,” he said in a controlled, mellow voice. “I understand what you’re doing. That’s fucking Hooah. But you don’t need to turn off all that shit. What exactly is going on?”

“Dude,” I said getting even more excited, “this is a fucking minefield.”

Fitts barked out, “Listen up. I need two SAW gunners pulling security at 9 and 3. A 203 looking 12. Light up anything outside our area. Everyone get probing back to the path. Look around you.”

“Gross, don’t move yet. I am looking behind you.” I was starting to think straight again. Fitts had cleared my head in a stressful situation, as usual.

“Fitts, we are being overwatched. You don’t put up an obstacle unless you are watching it.”

“I know, that’s why I set up security. “

I crawled behind Gross. He was able to get up and move out. After a while I started digging a small hole with my knife near the base of the mine.

“Bell, we are clear to move back here. What the fuck are you doing?”

“I am going blow this bitch up.” I pulled a block of C-4 from my butt pack and placed it inside my little trench.

“Let me get these guys outta here before you get us all killed,” Fitts replied.

“I got this, man. You gotta trust me.”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, Bell. Stop poking that danm thing with your fucking knife.”

“We may very well all blow up, okay? That is a very real possibility. But I need to focus and you are not helping me to fucking focus,” I shouted in frustration.

“What the fuck. You doing this from what? Reading books with Lockwald and the engineers?”

“No, this is from their PowerPoint presentation. Remember? The one you said was a fucking waste of time. Well check it out, dude, this is an Italian toe popper.”

“Just let me get these boys outta here,” Fitts protested again.

Our soldiers crawled out of the minefield one by one. I looked around and realized that I was left alone. I began poking another small trench on the side of the second mine and planted another brick of the C-4. The next thing I knew, Fitts is laying on his stomach next to me, his shotgun at the ready.

He locked eyes with me and casually asked, “You got a dip for me?”

It was typical of the roles Fitts and I played with each other. When I flip out, he stays calm and cools me down. He keeps me in control when I’m on the verge of losing it. Similarly, when I push the envelope and take risks, he’s always there to stop me from going too far. Whatever my state of mind, whatever situation I get us into, Fitts is always there for me. But he never has a dip. The bastard.

Fitts is very uneasy. I realize that I’ve got to be the calm one this time, at least to pay him back for what he did for us in the minefield. This role-reversal is not easy for me.

I suck air and work at staying calm. I must think this through.

What did we learn from the minefield?

A minefield is an obstacle. The enemy places obstacles to slow infantry down and funnel them into kill zones. Kill zones mean they are overwatching the obstacle.

Somebody must have eyes on this place.

At the corner of the house, I examine the hole dug in the wall through which the wires sprout into the room we almost entered. This makes me wonder where they go and what they’re attached to, if anything.

Fitts and I walk into the courtyard and do a little exploring. The wires run through a tunnel burrowed under the outer south wall of the compound.

“They burrowed under that bitch?” I say in incredulity. That looks like a hell of a lot of work. Why didn’t they just run the wires over the wall?

Because they’d be easily visible from the outside and vulnerable to shrapnel from artillery or bombs.

This shows me a level of sophistication that sends a chill over me. Whoever built this trap is good.

We swing out into the street and move along the compound wall to the next house. The insurgents burrowed through this yard as well. They weren’t booby-trapping the house. Their tunnel runs under another courtyard wall. This must have taken hours of digging, and there’s no loose dirt anywhere in sight. They concealed their work carefully.

We follow the tunnel to yet another house, where it ends in a well-camouflaged hole. Right next to the hole is the shredded remains of the Battery Man.

Well, Captain Sims has his answer. Now we know where he was going.

It is easy to see now what he was doing when we shot him. His mission was to sit in the hole and wait until we took down the booby-trapped house. Then he would have touched the wires to the battery and blown us all up. Had we been five minutes slower, we’d all be mist adrift on the desert winds. The bulk of an infantry platoon shredded to pieces.

Earlier in the spring, a Special Forces unit got a tip and hit a warehouse in Baghdad. After they stormed it, the insurgents detonated a BCIED. The better part of that highly trained team was blown to fragments. Such traps are almost undetectable until it is too late.

I tell Fitts, “You realize by stealing my kill and waxing this piece of shit you saved our entire platoon, right?”

Fitts shines a confident smile, “I stole
your
kill, huh?”

“Fittsy, if you were a field grade officer, I think this would result in a valor award. This fucker was going to blow us all up. Instead he’s in hell blowing Hitler.”

He laughs at that, and for an instant, I catch a glimmer of the old Fitts.

We report in. I pass along what we’ve found to Cantrell. He passes to Meno, who reports to Captain Sims. Our commander wants clarification. He bumps his radio down to our platoon net and talks directly to us.

“What is it that you’ve got?”

“It’s a BCIED,” I reply, “a big one, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

The question annoyed me. Who was Sims to doubt my judgment? Then I realize that I did the same thing to Knapp. Knapp must have felt the same annoyance with me.

“Yes, I’m sure, sir.”

Fitts gets on the radio. “Hey sir, this is a fucking BCIED.”

“Okay, come on back.”

We return to our courtyard. Sims has been thinking about this new threat. When we give him the grid location of the BCIED house, he writes it down and calls it up. Then he orders us to mark it. We toss an infrared strobe onto the roof. This way, the tanks or air overhead will recognize it as a threat.

“Okay, change of plans,” Sims tells us, “We are no longer going to walk separate from the vehicles. We’ll keep our support by fire base.”

Fitts and I are greatly relieved to hear this. It means we won’t be kicking in any more doors without the Brads and tanks backing us up.

Sims gets on the radio. I hear him tell the tracks, “I don’t give a fuck what happens if we have to go down phase line Abe, or go down phase line Cain.” Those are the two most heavily barricaded and IED-strewn roads in our sector. “We’re not leaving our dismounts alone anymore.”

Sims tells us to move out. His plan is to push south to an intersection and link up with our armor.

The platoon files into the street, the BCIED weighing on all our minds. What door will bring us to another one? Can we get this lucky again, or will we run into one lone insurgent with a battery, squirreled away in some hole waiting for his big chance?

If we face it again we’ll need to handle things differently.

For starters, I should have trusted Knapp. I undercut him in front of his men. I can’t do that again. I’ve got to be their leader and not micromanage, not second-guess.

One night a few weeks back, Fitts cut me to the bone. “Bell,” he said, “You’ve got to quit being a soldier and be a squad leader.” At the time, the comment hurt. Now I understand what he meant. Part of being a leader means you must trust your subordinates to do their jobs, and that requires trusting their judgment.

I can’t be a cock-strong asshole. Knapp needs to know I trust him. If he tells me to turn around, I’ll do it. His judgment is sound. The kid is on the ball.

We reach the big intersection, our rendezvous point with the armor. It is early morning now, and the night’s chill soaks through our uniforms, leaving us shivering. Minutes pass. Sergeant Jim’s tank rumbles around a corner and links up with us. Cantrell in his Bradley is not far behind. Soon, the entire platoon is reunited.

Our tracks had a hell of a fight to get to us. They’ve shot their way south through the city, killing every insurgent in their path. Sergeant Jim’s tank has been busy blowing up booby-trapped IEDs and Texas barriers with its big 120mm gun. Now we mount up and continue the advance.

We come to a new block of houses. We’re in the heart of the Soldier’s District, the upscale neighborhood of Saddam loyalists, Ba’athists, and retired military. The Brads stop. The ramp drops. We pour into the street and break into a house. Just before we burst through the door, my mind races. What will the house contain? Will we die and never know what hit us as a BCIED vaporizes us? Will there be bad guys waiting for us? What other booby traps might they have devised for us?

The first house is cleared without incident. The stairs have been ripped out so there’s no access to the roof. We find food rotting in the kitchen and a layer of dust a half-inch thick on all the tabletops. This one’s been long abandoned. We move on to the next building and find children’s toys scattered all over the floor. Clothes are strewn about; the place looks like the family fled in great haste, or somebody has looted it. The house is rank with human stenches. Somebody’s been living here. We are extra vigilant, but we find nothing.

At the next house, a bricked-up stairwell leading to the roof is, for a change, a welcome sight. The insurgent who built it was obviously a greenhorn mason. The wall looks weak. We give it a solid series of shoves and it collapses into a heap of bricks and broken mortar. The way to the roof is open.