Princes of War (7 page)

Halliburton said, “When those two towers went down in flames, I knew what I had to do. I made up my mind that fucking day.” He bent forward over his plate and spooned up a mouthful of creamed corn. Mongrel Moog, tearing open a plastic packet of salad dressing, looked as if he wanted to respond, but thought better of it.

Everyone knew why everyone else had joined the Army. Or at least their claimed reasons. For most of the youngest guys, it was 9/11. Everybody defended their reasons 24/7. Pretending not to believe each other was a kind of game.

Mongrel, after scratching his crotch, spoke up. “I’d already made up my mind by then, but after 9/11, I didn’t have to worry no more about persuading my Mom. It was a done deal, dude. She never said another word.”

“Those Fuckers,” Halliburton continued, referring to the 9/11 attackers, shaking his head with disgust as he spooned up more corn. “Ain’t nobody in this man’s Army going to rest until we bury those bastards.”

“Sure better not,” Cuebas answered.

Mongrel and Halliburton, two of the youngest guys in the platoon, looked at Cuebas. Neither had noticed him until this point. Mongrel reached over and acknowledged him with a fist bump.

“You brothers are still wet behind the ears. Surprised the boys in recruiting took you in,” Cuebas jabbed.

“Shit,” Randell said.

“I was born a killer,” Halliburton protested. “They saw killer in my eyes when I walked in. Now I’m here. We need to get down to business in this place.” He hunched back over his food, leaning so low he looked worried someone would steal it.

“We, the few and the brave,” Mongrel offered, not sure if he had the line right.

“Shitttt,” Halliburton grunted, “that’s the Marines you thinking about. The few and the proud.”

“You’re thinking ‘home of the brave,’ Mongrel,” Cuebas said.

“Tell you one thing, I’d give my left nut to be the guy that puts a bullet in Bin Laden’s head.” Mongrel smirked and looked around, seeking praise.

Cuebas whistled to get their undivided attention, seeing a perfect opportunity to spring a trap.

To Mongrel, he said, “I’d give your left nut to blow away that bastard, too.”

All laughed. Cuebas picked up his tray and got up to leave.

“Eat me,” Mongrel replied.

Cuebas looked back. “What? Your boy, Halliburton, not making you happy anymore?”

Mongrel, flustered by Cuebas’ retort, dribbled bits of food out of his mouth.

Cuebas walked away, chuckling. Another score by an insult artist. He claimed victory if he left them sputtering.

After 9/11, Cuebas felt vindicated. He’d joined the Army just over a year before the attack. In the early days, he watched his fellow citizens’ surge of patriotism with a combination of amusement and a where-you-been-all-this-time bravado. Nonetheless, he didn’t begrudge those joining because of 9/11. It was an excellent reason. Yet in his way of thinking, they’d needed an extra push, a push that he didn’t require.

He of course wouldn’t deny he too got caught up in the post-attack patriotism. Everyone did. Even his aunt, and he’d never heard her say an angry word. She’d called Bin Laden El Cabrona. Son-of-a-Bitch. And the letters! Cuebas had received dozens of “thank you for your service” emails and letters, including from folks he didn’t remember. His aunt had distributed his address. One letter had come from his high school English teacher. He’d had a crush on her in school. She wrote to him as if he were a rock star or something, even calling him “hot stuff.” Once, four or five months after 9/11 while back in Puerto Rico on leave, he’d thought of looking her up with ideas of her thanking him in another way. He’d decided against that. The mass support made everyone feel proud to be a soldier.

But this was Iraq, not Afghanistan. Few thought they would be putting a bullet in Bin Laden’s head here. So why were they here? Cuebas didn’t need explanations. He wasn’t sure it mattered. The thing was, some Islamic bastards here were fighting us—just like those 9/11 terrorists did. Better here than back home. It made sense to him.

5

Wynn walked over to a new wooden picnic table under a grey tarpaulin near the FOB's mini shoppette. The outside heat sizzled. Even the bugs sought shade. He sat down, hoping for a bit of privacy. The rug and jewelry shop trailers were to his right. The barber shop further up, and beyond that the Burger King and Pizza Hut stands, arranged in trailers like vendors at a county fair. He had just gotten a haircut, and now planned to finish his weekly report for CPT Baumann. Wynn looked around. The FOB used massive quantities of wood. Where did it come from? Someone said that America shipped it in. As far as he knew, Iraq had no forests. New guard towers with four massive telephone pole corner supports. Bus stops. Outdoor furniture. Indoor shelving and partitions and desks. Army engineers were hard at construction, erecting new American-style things on top of the war-damaged Iraqi stuff. It made you think. But those were unimportant thoughts.

What was important for him was understanding this part of the world. Everybody asked the same questions: Do Iraqis want what we want? Can we win this thing?

At Temple University, he’d taken a course on psychology on his way to a political science major. He remembered a discussion on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the theory that basic physiological needs came first: food, water, shelter, basic survival, things like that. Then came safety. Sophisticated political considerations came much later, if at all. Was there a message in that for a counterinsurgency? Societies developed step by step and what you had at any given time was a Sudoku puzzle, with thousands of big and small imprecise evolving pieces. The ruler, whoever was on top, dealt for better or worse with what he had. In most times and places, retaining power was all-important. Sometimes rulers fiddled benevolently with the pieces. Sometimes they smashed them. Sometimes they didn’t care.

Two young soldiers walked over to the Pizza Hut stand, carrying their rifles and wearing their helmets. The security rules required that soldiers stay in this uniform in most places on the FOB. Wynn didn’t recognize the men. They had combat patches on their right shoulders, so they’d been in country at least a month. The pizza man slid open the stand’s window and Wynn smelled the rich spicy aroma.

Eighteen or nineteen years old maybe. Nations sent their young men to fight wars. Few of them had studied psychology or sociology or Middle East history or anything else like that. Few understood the puzzle pieces: the Sunni and Shia, the Arab and Persian rivalries, the history of confrontation between the Islamic and Western Worlds. Who in America really did? Academics, maybe. But even within that academic community differences were intense. Some political leaders, maybe. But they weren’t here. He and these young men, and other men and women like them, were here. They manned the front lines of America’s foreign policy, to work and fight—and possibly die—for political ideas. It was ironic, even cruel, that these ideas were imperfectly understood. Could that be enough to motivate men? There had to be something more.

Wynn had five or six years on the soldiers ordering pizza. A few years more of school. Maybe nature had given him better cognitive abilities and a better memory. Probably no difference in drive. Or in ambition. The two soldiers walked to the other side of the break area, holding their pizza slices and their guns.

The talk with Amir today had, again, confirmed the incredible complexity of the whole enterprise. Wynn wanted to think he’d made some progress—despite the great distances between them and us, language obstacles, huge cultural differences. And culture clearly mattered. Basic to everything was information. Information was available all around him, information about the area, the people, about the tactical situation on the ground. The question was how to absorb it and use it.

A sparkle of color on the ground caught Wynn’s eye. Curious, he got up from the bench, took a step, and bent down to take a closer look at the colored object. On the ground lay a thin inch-long strip of bright green-and-red plastic foil attached to a broken stick of black plastic the size of a toothpick. A piece of waste blown here by wind perhaps. He picked it up. It looked vaguely like a part of one of his grandfather’s old fishing flies.

His grandfather—Paps—had made his own flies. He liked red and green feathers best. “Good fishing requires attention to detail,” the old man would say. “That starts with first-class flies.” Attention to detail was critical for progress here in Iraq as well.
      

The other two soldiers got up from their table, their pizza and drinks finished. They glanced at Wynn, probably recognizing him as an officer. Did they wonder what he was thinking about? They would never guess “fishing.”

The cabin up in the woods where his grandfather did most of his fishing had a thickly shellacked oak countertop. Paps treated the countertop like an altar. On that countertop, always clean and polished, he did his fly prep. Everything in fishing had to be well thought out. He’d described fishing as an intricate conspiracy of man and water, requiring the smooth blending of delicate motions and an artful lure to secure the strike, make the catch, and get a win for the hunter. Maybe what the Wolfhounds were trying to do in Iraq was not too different.

“Fish are smart, boy. You can’t fool a fish with a bad fly,” Paps would say.

Across the room from the cabinet where Paps kept his fishing supplies was another small cabinet he called his old war chest, where he kept some other things important to his world—and to Wynn’s. Sitting on top of it was a Korean War Chinese Army helmet. The star on the front of the helmet still held flecks of red paint. Paps had taken the helmet as a souvenir during the fierce fighting in January 1951 that finally blunted the Chinese intervention. Too young for World War II, Paps had joined the Army four months before the North Korean invasion. He’d enlisted to get off the farm. Paps never talked much about the war, said no good came from talking about it. What he didn’t say had spoken loudly enough. Even on all those fishing adventures, Wynn had been conscious of the fact that his grandfather had experienced combat. Over the years, Wynn had read books about the Korean War, and other wars. All that reading and thinking and dreaming had surely been stepping stones to where he now was in Iraq.

Also inside the old war chest were a few notebooks documenting Pap’s military service and a shoebox full of other memorabilia, such as his service ribbons. And his medals. The Bronze Star meant the most. The accompanying citation and its crowning words—for conspicuous bravery—rung in Wynn’s ears all through his adolescent years, and even now. He never understood why Paps hadn’t framed any of these things and hung them on the wall. Paps never satisfactorily explained to him why a man shouldn’t take maximum pride in the things he deserved. Paps’ pat answer was that he was “beyond that” or that it was in the “distant past.” Wynn’s feelings about that now was that you never got beyond or past certain things.

Paps was done with making fishing flies. He had died of cancer three months after Wynn’s last visit to the cabin, four months before the Wolfhounds deployed to Iraq. Arthritic hands had not prevented him from making that last fly. Would Paps be proud of what his grandson was doing in Iraq?

Wynn timed his dinner so he could go straight over to the HQ after chow for his weekly meeting with the battalion S2, the unit’s Intelligence staff. So he lingered alone a few minutes more in the DFAC, enjoying a double scoop of Baskin Robbins ice cream. He looked around at the soldiers. Many faces had that youthful, cool, cocky look, a look that shouted “I’m indestructible.” That mindset that proved indispensable when old men sent young men to war.

As he waited, he thought about what he would tell the S2. Everyone said Intelligence was the key to this war. The S2 asked him and others to share more about what they saw and heard outside the wire. HQ wanted to cull more than the abbreviated material the platoons sent up through channels in their normal reports. In past S2 debriefs, Wynn had tried to add context to operations in his platoon’s battlespace, elaborating on anything the Intel analysts were curious about. He knew the idea was that their info would help build the overall Intel picture. He checked his watch: 1904, time to go. The sun lingered stubbornly, the evening sky the translucent blue of the Caribbean Ocean.

After a short walk, he entered the fenced-off inner compound of the Battalion Tactical Operations Center, passing a guard station at which he had to show his ID card. Pictures of battalion soldiers at work hung on both sides of the center’s hallway, shots the Public Affairs guys had taken from all over the unit’s battlespace, showing daily soldiering in and outside of the wire. No Iraqis in any of the photos. As Wynn approached the S2’s office, Sergeant Rais, an S2 NCO, came out, saw him, and said, “We’re running behind, Sir. One of your fellow LTs is still at the dance.” Rais suggested Wynn come back at 1915.

Wynn left the building and walked to a quiet area with a view into the distance. To his front lay a mustard-colored landscape. The distant horizon, inexact and obscured by haze, appeared to mirror the turbulence and mystery of the human world. It made him realize how alone he was. After a few moments, he went back inside. Soon the steady rush of the electric noises of equipment around the HQ again flowed over him, and he felt reconnected. The technology-dominated mini-world the Americans had planted here could be reassuring. Millions of dollars’ worth of highly sophisticated computer and communications equipment purred, operated by trained soldiers, all installed inside a rudimentary nondescript masonry building, built 30 or more years before by local illiterate labor. Inside, the past was still present. A scent of urine suggested not everything could be erased. Iraqi plumbing, when it existed, was always inadequate.

1LT Nathan Petty, the Battalion’s Assistant S2, was Wynn’s trailer roommate and friend. Petty’s dad was a retired Air Force Master Sergeant and had taken a Korean wife. Now this officer, with 50 percent of his family heritage originating in the coastal Korean villages along the China Sea, tried to help the American Army understand what it faced here in Mesopotamia. Petty had once joked to Wynn that the Army’s multi-ethnicity represented a unique form of globalization. Wynn took a seat at a large brown table the size of something out of a Fortune 500 boardroom. Petty and a couple of S2 Analysts sat across from him.