Kaboom (5 page)

This incessant obsession with money, from the sheiks to the terps all the way down to little Mojo, cannot be overstated. It was absolutely vital to
the continued development of Iraq and the American military's success in the Iraq War. While it often seemed blatantly crude, who was I, a suburbanite who had always lived in comfort, to question it? I had never known poverty or the desperation it brings. Daily, we had local-nationals come to our gates looking for jobs, and daily we turned them away, sending them back to whatever Mesopotamian hellhole they'd crawled out of. It only took a few weeks for me to grow numb to this recurrence.

Democratic birth and the quest for financial independence seem to be intrinsically linked—freedom's dirty little not-so-secret. I'm sure Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty would agree. And while the idealist in me—back then, I guess I still thought of myself as one of those—looked upon greed as the ultimate of vices and viewed people who talked about their finances publicly as boors and covetous tools, I couldn't help but sympathize with the locals' fixation. Theirs was a penury only dreams could escape. And for a while, that dream ran through the lean, tall men in body armor from across the sea who arrived in ghost tanks and smiled too much.

They didn't all feel that way though—about us or our money. There were just enough of them out there who wanted us gone or dead, or dead and gone, that battles and skirmishes continued; thus, so did the war.

Reality endured.

I staggered toward the latrine,
delirious with too much caffeine in my system and not enough sleep, weaving like an indolent zombie. PFC Cold-Cuts bounced into me with a large smile plastered across his face, and the sound his throat emitted would be considered a giggle in most circles outside of the U.S. Army.

“It's snowing, sir!” he said.

“Cold-Cuts,” I said, “it's too early for that shit.” I brushed my teeth, put on deodorant more out of habit than concern for what I smelled like at the combat outpost, and checked up on the status of my novice attempt at a war moustache—still pathetic, wispy, and a general affront to facial hair everywhere. I walked back into the main hallway and spied Staff Sergeant Boondock across the way, hard rock music blaring out of the headphones wedged into his ears.

“We still leaving in an hour?” he yelled, speaking over the lyrics of the band Rage Against the Machine's “Calm Like a Bomb.”

I checked my watch and nodded.

“Still dismounted?”

I nodded again and bit down on my lip, remembering the details of the early-morning mission laid out to me the night before by Captain Whiteback. Maybe a glass of chai at the local market would wake me up, I thought. There's only so much black coffee and Rip It energy drink a body can take, and I still tried to avoid nicotine this early in the deployment. I smelled bacon from a nearby breakfast plate and began to head for the chow line, when I heard Staff Sergeant Boondock's voice sound off yet again from behind me.

“You might wanna rock the long sleeves, sir. It's penguin weather out there.”

He was right. And so had been PFC Cold-Cuts. For the first time in any Saba al-Bor local's memory, the penetrating, white precipitation falling from the sky wasn't metal shrapnel or a downpour of civil-affairs pamphlets. It was a gift straight from Mother Nature herself, with a possible assist from her redheaded stepchild, global warming: snow. And the kind that stuck. I was too preoccupied with mission preparations, though, to give this anomaly much attention.

One hour later, we moved out of the wire on foot. All the joking stopped as soon as the first foot hit native ground, as did any talking above a whisper. I gave the hand-and-arm signal to stagger our columns, but a quick glance around me proved that my reminder was unnecessary: The soldiers had already moved into their dismounted positions with an expertise and confidence that only excessively meticulous military training can produce. Specialist Fuego, loaned to us for the day, automatically assumed the point position, and the rest of the platoon followed his lead. They moved fluidly, calm and crisp despite the foreignness of our environment, heads rotating like they were on a swivel. Even Private Das Boot, who loped behind me with a radio on the back of his long frame, had managed to manufacture some level of comfort.

Our terp, Suge Knight, bundled up like a small child learning how to ski, walked in the middle of our formation, unsure as to why his American employers always insisted on working during the most miserable of times. He looked at me, pointed at the grey sky, and asked, “Why?” from behind the crooked cotton mask that covered everything but his eyes. He usually only wore the mask when we were in areas he didn't like or wasn't familiar with, but he wore it today because of the cold. I shrugged my shoulders and said that I'd been asking that question for twenty-four years but hadn't received
a satisfactory answer yet. I wasn't sure if he understood, but he laughed along with me anyway.

A middle-aged mammoth of a man originally from Sudan, Suge had earned the trust of my soldiers by admitting that he sometimes missed the Saddam era because there had been discos back then. Anyone willing to admit that to American soldiers, they reasoned, couldn't be dishonest. Everyone in Saba al-Bor knew Suge, and Suge knew everyone. We didn't know it quite yet, but he was to become an unlikely, yet vital, asset in the counter - insurgency fight. Even a war zone appreciated a big belly, a deep rolling chuckle, and a deviant sense of humor. He wasn't all jokes though. As with many comedians, his humor hid a deep sadness. He had lost three young children during the bombings of the first Gulf war, and he still visited their graves every time he returned home. Further, many of us suspected he suffered from mild posttraumatic stress disorder, as he had survived multiple IED strikes in the three years he had worked for Coalition forces. He had seen far more war over the course of his life than any one man ever should.

Pools of brown sludge swirled at our boots with our every step. With seemingly the first drop of snow, the dirt roads and walkways of Saba al-Bor had transformed into a skating rink of earth slime, the landscape of brown contrasting with the falling white all too poetically. Unlike the photos of the Baghdad Green Zone I later saw on the Internet, snow in Saba al-Bor unleashed little curiosity among the local populace. There were no snowball fights or gasps of wonderment. The few families we ran into at the marketplace simply complained that the slush the snow melted into would cause havoc in their neighborhoods; paved roads were the exception in this part of Iraq, and huts made out of dirt were not holding up well in the face of this environmental obscurity. They asked us if we were going to do anything to help them.

“Yes,” I said, “we're going to pay a local contractor to pave many of the roads in the area.”

“No,” they responded, “what are you going to do for us today? We need you to fix the weather.”

Suge laughed in disbelief when he translated the Iraqis' hopes and demands.

“Why do they think we can fix the weather?” I asked him. Suge's African stereotypes rattled through his response: “Because Arabs are crazy in the head, Lieutenant, that is why.”

We were now on Route Maples, Saba al-Bor's main thoroughfare and most prominent marketplace. A series of dead baby trees dotted the trajectory
of the street from beginning to end, an ill-timed city project leftover from the unit we replaced—a stillborn symbol if there ever was one. One of the other platoons in Bravo Troop had been struck by an explosively formed penetrator (EFP)—a state-of-the-art IED whose technology supposedly came from Iran—on this very road only the week before, luckily taking no casualties from the blast. Many of my soldiers were convinced a matching EFP would be found in the remnants of the trees and were taking great care in clearing these areas as they walked past.

“It would definitely suck to die,” PFC Cold-Cuts philosophized ahead of me, presumably to Staff Sergeant Bulldog, who was nearest to him and scanning around the corner of a building. “And it would suck even harder to die in Iraq. But to die from an exploding tree? Please, just lie to my wife if that happens.”

Groups of locals were huddling around smoldering fires, most of which had been constructed from burning tires. According to the intel (intelligence) fobbits, insurgents often used burning tires—along with black kites and homing pigeons—as a means to relay the whereabouts of Coalition forces. I glanced over at Sergeant Spade, who simply shrugged. The groups consisted mainly of old men and children and couldn't have cared less that we were in the market. They looked more like homeless people too tired to pander for change than like terrorists. I decided the odds were in our favor that they weren't planning the next great catastrophic attack with their tires, and we kept moving.

As we headed out of the market area, Sergeant Axel bought some pieces of flat bread from a local vendor. He gave the guy $5 and told him to keep the change, which caused the Iraqi to lean over the counter and, as is their custom, hug and kiss Sergeant Axel on the cheek. Sergeant Axel backpedaled sheepishly, his face turning crimson as the rest of the Gravediggers laughed at the vendor's antics. He refused to share the flatbread with anyone who he determined had laughed too hard at his expense.

“Who's the fag now,” he said, munching down on a large piece of flatbread, while Specialist Haitian Sensation and Private Smitty sulked, breadless and no longer joking.

“How come they get some?” Private Smitty asked, pointing to me and SFC Big Country. “I saw them laughing at 'cha, too.”

Now SFC Big Country laughed openly. “Smitty,” he said, “you got a lot to learn about how the army works.” He took a big bite out of his share. “Hang around Sergeant Axel some more. He has a good handle on it.”

Once we completed our stated mission—conduct an area reconnaissance of the local schools and assess their needs for future public works projects—we turned around and headed back to the American outpost. The snowflakes had degenerated into flurries over the course of our five-hour jaunt. Only Private Van Wilder still sported any cold-weather gear, a result of his claiming to be some sort of cold-blooded reptile ever since a mild case of pneumonia in Kuwait. The streets were now empty, save us, an old cripple hobbling down an alleyway oozing with raw sewage, and an Iraqi army T-72 tank parked at one of the major intersections.

My patrol brief would essentially read as it had for the past two weeks: There had been no contact with the enemy; there was dissatisfaction among the local populace with all kinds of political, social, and civil issues; and the schools still needed more supplies and more renovations. My latest arbitrary snapshot of Iraq could wait a few more minutes though, so I stopped caring about the details of the report I would write and began to count my paces. We traipsed along the mud paths of Saba al-Bor, anxious to shed our heavy gear and take our boots off for a few hours until the next patrol started. The snow flurries continued.

Checkered headdresses of red
and white and black and white dotted the gathering below, colors flamboyantly marking allegiances in the same manner they did for streets gangs back home. The Gravediggers and I were overwatching nearly one hundred local civic leaders and sheiks from the roof of the Taji Provincial Community Center, working next to and with the local security already provided—roving bands of mean-mugging teenage boys armed with AK-47s, all inevitably blood relatives to one of the power brokers yelling and gesticulating below. I looked over at SFC Big Country, who shook his head and took another drag from his cigarette, while his other hand cradled the underside of his rifle. Despite our black sunglasses, which tended to give even the most personable of soldiers a look of omniscient stoicism, I could tell he thought the same thing I did. What. The. Fuck. Question mark.

The short answer was that we were providing security for Coalition forces at Sheikapalooza—an unofficial, though fitting, term coined by Captain
Whiteback. The meeting had been called to have an election for a sheik council that was to supervise the various Sons of Iraq groups, but it had digressed into a shouting match the British parliament would envy. All of the terps were down on the ground level with the commanders, so we weren't privy to the details of the various disagreements. That didn't stop some of my soldiers from filling in the gaps, though. Corporal Spot and Private Van Wilder had each selected a sheik he would translate for, and they were reliving their counterparts' arguments up on the roof while scanning the surrounding countryside in the prone position for dangerous knowns and unknowns.