None Left Behind (17 page)

It had been a good Christmas Eve. Nobody had been blown up or anything. Cook began singing off-key.

“Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane . . .”

The convoy swung into the small S-curve approaching Inchon, in the bend of which crater watch was busier than anywhere else on Malibu Road due to the large number of IEDs that kept going off there. The
trucks were almost through it when the “Christmas sleigh” with the goodies hit an IED.

It was a small charge, as IEDs went, but it was still a hell of a jolt that rung the ears of the four occupants and blew off the rear hatch. As per Company SOP, the convoy busted on through and out of the kill zone before pulling up to check on injuries and damage.

The Christmas sleigh made it past the explosion on momentum alone. The back of the truck was mangled and twisted like a stepped-on tin can. It was done for and would have to be towed. Joes who jumped out of their vehicles to establish security for the disabled hummer were astonished at the amazing sight that met their eyes.

The explosion had done more than damage the truck; it had also blown up the Christmas mail. A blizzard of Christmas cards and wrappings,
Playboy
magazines, candy, summer sausages, little stuffed love bears, fruitcake, and other presents all shredded into little sparkles of color swirled and drifted like a fractured rainbow in the red light of the setting sun.

“Merry Christmas from Mohammed and al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Michael Smith groaned. “They know how to screw up a perfect day.”

Parrish stared. “I never thought they'd blow up Santa Claus.”

Delta Company tried everything to put a stop to IEDs—patrols, stakeouts, crater watches, static guards. No matter what pest control measures it initiated, the mice continued to plague the corn crib. It seemed impossible to eradicate them short of placing armed guards every ten feet along the road, an endeavor both impossible and impractical. It would have required almost unlimited manpower.

Business returned to business as usual right after Christmas dinner. Lieutenant Dudish and Sergeant Montgomery came up with the idea of clearing off the roadside undergrowth by burning it and thus eliminating hiding places for mice to collect and plot their mischief. They started at the S-curves where reeds and weed beds had overtaken many of the neglected fields and choked the bar ditches.

The best time to do it was after nightfall, when snipers would have more difficulty in selecting a target. Four Second Platoon trucks loaded with bear—Polar Bears—pulled up in the crooked road between Inchon and 152 and soldiers armed to the teeth piled out in the gathering darkness. The sun was setting inflamed and wonderful with scarlet and orange and streaks of violet and lavender, an evening so lovely and peaceful that it was inconceivable that evil could exist anywhere in the world.

But, of course, evil did exist and no one understood that better than the boys of Malibu Road. Spidery purple shadows deep in towering reeds lurked and slithered and made everything seem to come alive. In the soldiers' imagination, each bush, each blade of grass concealed a hostile waiting to jump out and drill a hole through the nearest GI. This truly was Indian Country. It was just that no one saw the Indians until they were ready to be seen. Maybe the platoons could burn them out.

While the rest of the platoon kept guard, Sergeant Montgomery and
Sergeant Chris Messer left the road and waded into the scrub, disappearing. They flicked their Bics to ignite a tangle of grass and brush alongside a canal that would act as a barrier against the fire running out of control. They could safely burn off only small sections at a time. What kind of community relations would it be if they accidentally torched a farmer's house or left his orchard in ashes?

As soon as the flames caught and began to spread, the two tall sergeants crashed back through to the road. Flames twenty feet tall were already licking at newly appeared stars and flickering across the front of a nearby house where a number of Iraqis gathered to watch. The soldiers kept an eye on them, nervously fingering their triggers and wondering how many Jihadists might be among them.

“Back home,” Nathaniel Given said, “farmers sometimes burn off their fields in the winter to get rid of rats and snakes.”

Jared Isbell responded with a grim little laugh. “Isn't that what we're doing?”

Heat from the blaze grew so intense that the platoon retreated to the other side of the road, behind the trucks, in order to escape it. That turned out to be a fortuitous move. Somewhere inside the inferno, the fire reached an enemy weapons cache and began to cook off explosives and rounds of ammunition, spewing smoke and tufts of flame high into the night. Ricochet bullets and green tracers spanged against asphalt and steel armor and rocketed wildly into the sky from all angles. Soldiers ducked for cover and waited for the fireworks to subside, laughing and hurling one-liners at the Iraqi spectators who took off in alarm.

It didn't take the fire long to consume the patch. The platoon loaded back up once the fire had burned down and returned to 152, where it was currently on rotation.

“We'll come back in the morning and check out that cache when things have cooled off,” Lieutenant Dudish decided.

Later that night, Sergeant Messer pulled roof security with Specialist Robert Pool, who was temporarily attached to Second Platoon from Third. Pool was the tall, slender kid from California who wanted to be a psychiatrist. The two soldiers had a lot in common. Both were married,
both were Christians, and both possessed that true passion for helping people that transcended the ambivalent love-hate relationship nurtured by most American GIs when it came to the Iraqis.

The fire up the road in the S-curve had burned down to glowing embers. Above, the night sky was full of stars like jewels spread from horizon to horizon. Messer and Pool discussed Scripture and human weaknesses in the privacy of the night high on the roof overlooking the date palm groves and the Euphrates River.

Specialist Dar-rell Whitney and Nathaniel Given relieved them after four hours. Given yawned and looked down the road.

“The fire's still burning,” he observed.

“It's just coals,” Messer said.

The four men stood and watched the glow for a moment, Messer and Given shoulder to shoulder as though unable to break some inextricable link that somehow bound them.

“Tomorrow's my wedding anniversary,” Messer said, and his friends heard the ache and longing in his voice.

Second Platoon was gearing up for a patrol to check out the burn from last night where the weapons cache cooked off. Specialist Jared Isbell finished a shift of guard duty on the roof and entered the small common area at 152 just as Lieutenant Dudish completed his OpOrder.

“Hey, dude,” Isbell called out to Nathan Given. “My buns are dragging and I'm starving my ass off. I didn't have any breakfast this morning. How about getting me a Gatorade and some food?”

“What do I look like, your
aide de camp?
”

Some of the platoon was scheduled to remain behind to provide post security. Given, Chiva Lares, and Mike Pope were supposed to run the security truck to overwatch the foot patrol from the road. However, there had been one of those serendipitous changes of plans that sometimes altered a man's destiny. Given volunteered to take Isbell's place on the dismount and relinquish his seat in the truck to Isbell, who had been up much of the night on watch.

“You're a real buddy, Nathan,” Isbell said. “What do I owe you for this?”

“Your firstborn,” Given joked. He thrust a Gatorade and sandwich at Isbell and snatched up his SAW to join Sergeant Messer's First Squad. “It looks like me and you are connected at the hip,” he said to the sergeant.

Sergeant Montgomery was already outside in the yard getting the patrol organized. He was moving a little slow and should have stayed in his rack from an infection and a fever that had him on antibiotics. But he never copped out of a mission. The guys got a little nervous without him. Young soldiers looked to their leaders for guidance and motivation.

Accompanied by an IA interpreter, the dismount departed the fort into Indian Country on foot, crossed Malibu in a traveling overwatch and took to the fields on the other side to parallel the road toward the burn. Isbell,
Lares, and Pope kept pace on the road in a humvee. Now and then they caught sight of their platoon mates as the patrol wended its way through palms and across an open meadow nestled against a citrus orchard.

A traveling overwatch entailed two V-shaped wedges of men in tandem, the trailing wedge “overwatching” the point wedge. Lieutenant Dudish commanded the lead element, while Sergeant Montgomery took trail. Specialist Sidney Streibel had point with Joe Merchant. Nathan Given, Sergeant Messer, PFC Chris Christopher, and the rest of the section fanned out behind Streibel and Merchant at intervals. Lieutenant Dudish walked the command position between the two wedges with his RTO (radio telephone operator), interpreter, and medic. Sergeant Montgomery's element followed about twenty-five meters back with the rest of the platoon.

The mission was threefold: search for more caches in the vicinity; chat up local farmers and villagers through the interpreter in hopes of picking up information about anyone suspicious that might have been hanging around the area; and, three, possibly jump up an insurgent trying to get to the burn to scarf up anything left.

“Watch it, people,” Sergeant Montgomery cautioned. “Don't let your guard down. We're heading into bad-guy territory.”

It was about 1000 hours, the day was already heating off last night's winter chill, and it was slow and dangerous work. Children laughed, waved energetically and gave “thumbs-up” as the wedges crept through small settlements. Montgomery had heard somewhere that the “thumbs-up” sign carried an offensive connotation in the Arab world, almost as insulting as being hit with a shoe, but the kids employed it so enthusiastically and with such flashing white teeth that he figured they intended it in a friendly way.

On the other hand, old men and women and their adult families tending livestock and miniature gardens around their simple mud huts remained as closed-mouthed and standoffish as usual. The passage of soldiers through their homesteads elicited little visible reaction. Lieutenant Dudish halted the patrol a number of times while he and the terp questioned people. But, of course, few had anything to say. See no evil, hear no evil . . .

Sometimes Montgomery felt like a dirty secret smuggled into the country.

Signs of old violence marked some of the buildings nearest the road—walls scorched by explosives and pock-marked by gunfire and shrapnel. Tall marsh grass grew so thick along canals and irrigation ditches that anything could be hiding in it. An ambush threatened around every corner, at every turn.

A taxi unoccupied on a dirt road near some houses caught the patrol's attention. Lieutenant Dudish and the IA questioned Iraqis in the nearest residence. A couple of kids ran out and tossed a soccer ball back and forth with the soldiers. Some more kids rode by on rusty, big-tired bicycles.

The patrol trudged on.

Lieutenant Dudish collapsed the formation into a “modified wedge,” otherwise known as a file, in order to jump across the narrow point of an open sewer cutting across one end of a meadow, with a scattering of mud houses on the other side. A sickening odor rose from raw sewage.

Given took a short run when it came his turn to cross, his gear rattling and flopping. He sailed across the sewer, only to stumble and fall on the other side. He caught himself by thrusting out one arm elbow-deep into the filthy water. It seemed he could never go out without getting his feet tangled in something at least once and falling. Today was no exception.

He scrambled disgustedly to his feet, shaking his dripping arm and performing a credible impersonation of First Sergeant Galliano getting hit by an IED. “Damn this fucking place. I hate this fucking place. Everyplace you go there's all this fucking shit.”

Someone shut him up with an amused, “Hey, Given. There's no crying allowed in baseball.”

Streibel, on point, turned the wedges toward the burn by the side of the road at the little S-curve. A wire fence stretched loosely between crooked eucalyptus posts separated the burn from an ancient orchard grown up in weeds and the houses where the Iraqis had gathered last night to watch the fire. Streibel halted at a gap in the fence where the wire was broken.

“Hey, Sergeant Messer,” he called out. “I'm not taking this. I'm making my own way.”

Sergeant Messer to Streibel's left and rear walked forward. “Go on,” he said. “I'm going this way. That cache should be right over there somewhere.”

Streibel and Merchant off to his right both hesitated. This wasn't like Messer. He and Sergeant Montgomery used almost the same litany: Never take the easy road; the harder route is always safer; go around even if it takes more time; better caution over haste.

PFC Given shifted toward Messer in order to pass through the downed fence with him. Weapons and armor made crawling through fences a real bitch.

Sergeant Montgomery couldn't tell what was going on up front from his place in the trailing wedge. The first indication he had that something might not be right was when he spotted kids running toward their houses like the devil was pitch-forking their little bottoms. He grabbed his radio mike to broadcast a warning.

The first indication those in the security truck on the road had that something might be about to go horribly wrong was when Sergeant Montgomery's voice suddenly blurted over the air:
“L.T., something's going on!”

That was as far as he got. The enormous
Thu-wump
of the explosion rattled the truck and the three men inside it. Out in the field, between the gnarled old orchard and the scattering of Iraqi houses, a plume of earth, black smoke and flame jetted fifty feet into the sky.