None Left Behind (20 page)

“I need to talk to you, Sergeant Major,” Connell would say in his soft voice. “Working up here in staff, you get pulled away from the troops. I want to be assigned back to the field. I'd like to have a platoon.”

The CSM kept putting him off, not because he thought Connell wasn't up to it but instead because he thought the senior sergeant might not be tough enough for day-to-day combat. Paradoxically enough, for an Airborne Ranger type whose job it was, in the words of the Joes, to break things and kill people, Connell was a gentle, compassionate man who honestly tried to see the better side of everyone and everything. From the perspective of many hardcore career infantrymen, this kind of mindset connoted a weakness. CSM Jimenez thought Connell might be better
suited for Civil Affairs where he could actually employ his philosophy in helping Iraqi people rather than killing Iraqi insurgents.

Still, the man deserved a chance, had earned it. It was another decision CSM Jimenez hoped he never lived to regret.

“Sergeant Connell,” he finally promised, “you'll be considered the next time a field opening comes up.”

Delta Company's First Platoon needed a new platoon sergeant after an IED injured Platoon Sergeant Charles Burke and he had to be evacuated for recovery.

“You still want the job?” CSM Jimenez asked Connell.

“You bet.”

In such ways are decisions made that alter lives and change the course of individual histories.

“I'll deliver a big howdy for you to your ‘son' in first Platoon,” Sergeant Connell joked, meaning Specialist Jimenez.

CSM Jimenez looked at him. “All those boys are my sons,” he said.

Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery remembered well the chain of events that led him and many other soldiers like him to Iraq. In September 2001, Bravo/502
^nd
(Bravo Company, 502
^nd
Infantry) of the 101
^st
Airborne Division was running patrols in another far-flung trouble spot of the world, interdicting weapons and drug smugglers down by Chicken Lake in the crossing point between Kosovo and Macedonia. It was tough and dangerous work, with the occasional firefight and a few artillery or mortar duels. One night while Montgomery and his platoon hid in the woods to catch a few well-needed winks of sleep, a barrage of artillery rounds sought them out, almost jarring him out of his sleeping bag.

The next morning, Bravo Company's CO got on the horn to inform his platoons that terrorists had flown hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The loss of civilian lives was expected to top three thousand, perhaps as many as ten thousand. President George W. Bush had declared war on terrorism.

“The terrorists have been at war with us for ten years,” a GI grumbled. “It's about time we went to war with them.”

That was five years ago. Some of the guys in Second Platoon, like Jared Isbell, Chiva Lares, and Nathan Given, were only thirteen or fourteen years old when it happened and the War on Terror began. Now they were fighting it; Given had lost his life in it.

First came the Afghanistan campaign to destroy the Taliban and the terrorist training camps. Montgomery had missed out on that. But he knew he was going to war when he received PCS (permanent change of station) to the 10
^th
Mountain Division, the most deployed outfit in the army. The U.S. had some unfinished business with Saddam Hussein and his support of terrorists.

Kosovo had been a piece of cake, a walk in the park, compared to The Triangle of Death. Although Delta Company had occupied its positions on Malibu Road for only four months or so, it seemed like forever since the 101
^st
Airborne sergeant predicted that Polar Bear soldiers would never safely drive Malibu. Well, they
were
driving Malibu. Maybe not safely, but they were driving it. What's more, Delta Company had established battle positions the length of the road—and was holding them. Montgomery supposed that counted as progress toward Colonel Infanti's “turning point.”

While the deaths of Messer and Given were not the first KIAs the 2
^nd
BCT suffered, they were the first in Delta Company. The mental picture of Messer lying in the field with his legs blown off and Given with the blood all sucked out of his body would stay with Sergeant Montgomery for the rest of his life. Sure, guys had been blown up before all along the road and a few even shot by snipers, but Messer and Given seemed to jolt the soldiers into a new realization that the war had jacked up another level.

Each day, they still underwent the necessary routines of briefings, inspections, and rehearsals before they donned their heavy body armor, helmets, weapons, night-vision devices, rucks, and other implementa of modern warfare and moved out to do a job on the treacherous devil road where each and every one had a price on his head. Their faces reflected how they thought the odds were against them.

“We're dead. We're never going home.”

“Yeah, but at least you'll die with your buddies.”

“We'll deal with it,” Sergeant Montgomery said. “We're all in the same shitty situation together. There's nothing we can do about it. We're soldiers and we're getting paid to clear this road.”

It was up to leaders to project an image of confidence and optimism. They must not show disillusionment with the American mission. Whenever the men voiced their doubts, Montgomery staunchly defended the war and all its intricacies, waving his right hand in a shaking motion at shoulder level in the Iraqi gesture for “What the fuck you talking about?”

The soldiers of Second Platoon gradually reached a turning point of
their own. Montgomery sensed a new, harder, more dangerous mood starting to develop to replace the fatalism that had infected the platoon since the day of the deaths in the field. The guys became anxious, angry, itching for payback. They weren't going to take this shit any longer.

“They're mindfucking us,” they protested. “We need to start mindfucking
them.
”

Malibu Road remained a lawless environment in spite of Delta Company's every effort to tame it. Since it sometimes took Rapid Road Repair crews days to get out and patch up holes in the roads left by IEDs, Joes charged with the additional duty of standing static crater watches became even more vulnerable to attention by local insurgents. Sergeant Montgomery looked at the watch as an engraved invitation to be attacked. Sitting in one place too long, especially at night, was like the tethered goat in the movie
Jurassic Park
waiting for T-Rex to come eat him. Sooner or later, the goat got eaten.

Prior to his enlisting in the army, Montgomery worked as a laborer with a concrete company where he learned how to mix cement and knead in steel rebar to make the mixture stronger—and, therefore, in the case of Malibu Road, more difficult for insurgents to dig down into it to plant their devices. He offered to speed up the road repair effort by taking over a share of it to limit the time his men spent as bait. Engineers agreed to provide the necessary materials to repair the blast holes if Montgomery's soldiers wanted to do the work themselves. It was worth a try.

Second Platoon's first and, as it turned out, last endeavor in road-building was the daunting task of filling in a five-feet-deep pit left in the blind S-curve south of Inchon. The platoon's “motor pool” of four humvees arrayed themselves in a perimeter on the road around the hole. Some of the guys pulled security in the hummers while the rest mixed and poured cement from utility trailers pulled onto the worksite. They found it a satisfying break from the daily grind of getting blown up. Their greatest handicap was working beneath the hot desert sun garbed out in all their battle rattle. Uniforms and faces were soon soaked in sweat, to which
adhered a patina of gray concrete dust that lent the soldiers the appearance of a gathering of ghosts moving about on the road.

It was backbreaking work. Montgomery designated a long-abandoned mud hovel by the side of the road as a safe house in which his men could remove their suffocating armor for brief rest periods. After one break, he looked at his watch, drew a last puff from his cigarette, stomped out the butt on the bare dirt floor, and shrugged back into his gear.

“Time to get back to work, people.”

“War's hell,” Sergeant Herne said. “At least you Joes are learning a trade.”

Lieutenant Dudish and Montgomery were removing lengths of steel rebar from one of the trailers when something caused the sergeant to suddenly pause and look around. The sun was high and bright, a couple of kids were herding sheep across a distant field, and there was the somnolent hum of normal daily activity in the air. Nothing extraordinary at all. Then why had the thought passed through his head that,
Oh, my God! We're going to get shot!

He looked up and down the road and saw soldiers in the turrets of their humvees. Steffan in the nearest vehicle caught him looking and gave a thumbs-up. Montgomery dismissed his sudden premonition as part of the hyper-awareness that Second Platoon had experienced after Messer and Given died.

He turned to walk away from the trailer with an armload of steel. The thought struck him again—but it was too late to react. A sniper's bullet whapped him in the upper chest with the force of a big guy like Joe Anzak slugging him with a ten-pound sledge hammer. The blow staggered him and knocked the wind from his lungs. He somehow managed to stay on his feet. Realizing he was hit, but not knowing how badly, he ran in a lumbering, staggering gait toward the cover of the nearest hummer.

One of the guys on security heard the shot and spotted a muzzle flash from the window of a small house in a field about five hundred meters away. He opened fire with his .50-caliber and shouted the target location into his platoon band mike. Every soldier in the platoon able to reach his weapon in time opened up in a mad minute. Two-forties, .50-cals, SAWs,
and M4s riddled the mud exterior of the house, nearly exploding it in a furious dust storm of hot lead and steel. Someone was yelling so loudly that his voice carried above the fierce rattle.

“Motherfuckers! Motherfuckers!”

Another soldier was even laughing demonically. The guys were pissed. Pissed on and pissed off. Working off their rage and frustration. It was good for their morale to get a chance at some payback after what happened to their dead platoon mates.

Montgomery was in such pain that he hardly dared breathe. He opened the door of the hummer in which Chiva Lares manned the turret and was hammering away with his .50-cal machine gun. He collapsed into the front seat. Lares glanced down and saw blood.

“Holy shit! The Sarge is hit!”

“Don't worry about me,” Montgomery managed.

“I'll call Doc Bailey.”

“Everybody—” He coughed, but there was no blood in it. Probably not a sucking chest wound then. “Everybody keep what you got,” he wheezed, “until we know what's going on.”

He hunkered down below window level to check himself out, shrugging out of his FLK to get to his shirt and armor. His Kevlar chest plate was shattered. He reached a hand underneath it and it came back bloody. He took some deep breaths to double check whether the bullet had penetrated his lungs. It hurt like hell, but there was no lung congestion so far.

When he got down to bare skin, he saw that his chest was bloody and turning black and bruised from the collar bone down to the bottom of his rib cage. He felt for an entrance wound and found where a piece of the broken vest had gouged out a superficial but bloody laceration just below his heart. The slug that did it was still lodged in the Kevlar. But for the vest, he would have been a goner sure. He could have almost wept from relief.

“Sarge? Sarge?”

“I'm good to go, Chiva.”

Lieutenant Dudish ran by. “Ronnie?”

“I'm all right, L.T.”

Dudish kept going. Montgomery lay back on the seat and closed his eyes. His head was spinning. He heard the lieutenant restoring order. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”

The somnolent hum of a normal day returned. The hajji who fired the shot was no doubt long gone by now, scooting down weeded irrigation ditches to get out of the AO and collect his bounty for having shot at and nailed an American. Chances of apprehending him were slightly less than that of winning the New York lottery. The QRF would try, but none of the locals were likely to snitch on him.

Doc Bailey crowded into the front seat with Montgomery to check out his injuries. Top Sergeant Galliano came up on the company freq wondering what the hell was going on.

“I'm good, Top,” Montgomery reassured him. “But the plate in my vest is bent to shit.”

“You need to come in for a checkup.”

Montgomery was wired, now that he knew he wasn't going to die. “Can't do that right now, Top. I'm not getting on no damned truck and running. We're going to check out this house.”

“
Let me speak to the medic.”

Bailey took the mike. Galliano's voice was as hard as turpentine, like he was the one getting shot at and about to kick a few tires.
“Medic, you tell that stubborn, pigheaded sergeant to get his ass in here or I'm coming out to get him—and it won't be pretty.”

“He's right, Sergeant Montgomery,” Doc Bailey said. “There could be complications. All the bruising might cause a blood clot to the brain or to the heart.”

Montgomery relented. It still hurt to breathe and his entire chest was the color of rotting grapes.

Within the hour he was at the CASH in the Green Zone. After being examined and assured that he would survive, he went outside to smoke a cigarette. Company and Battalion TOC, he subsequently learned, were already on the hook with each other about the road repairs. Rifle platoons would no longer serve as road engineers; that wasn't their job.

A physician's assistant came out. He was a thin guy with thin white
hands, his gentlemanly appearance all the more contrasted by the big, grimy sergeant in the bloody ACU jacket.