Sunrise Over Fallujah (20 page)

The trek to the mess hall was just reflex. I wasn't in a mood for breakfast or even the hot coffee sitting in front of me. After breakfast I went to the main tent and lay on my bunk. Colonel Rose came by at eleven o'clock with Coles and the women. He waited until everybody had been called to attention and then gave us the “at ease” command with a grin as if he wasn't all into the gung ho crap.

“Boys, I got some good news for you!” he said. “Anybody here want to hear it?”

I looked over at Coles and he was rolling his eyes up. Crap.

“I'd love to hear some good news this fine morning, sir!” Harris, sucking up as usual.

“I'm sending the First, Second, and Third Squads to As Sayliyah for a briefing,” Rose said. “A little change of pace. See something different in this part of the world. Major Sessions will give you the details. But I'll tell you this much. When they called down from CENTCOM and specifically asked for men from our unit I
was proud as hell. Proud as hell. It means we're taking care of business. And we're going to continue taking care of business. You'll be moving out at 1800 hours this evening. God bless you all.”

The moment Rose and Coles left, we started asking around to see if anyone knew where we were being sent.

“Wherever you're going we're not going with you,” Marla said. “He specifically said ‘men.' ”

“He think he's paying us a compliment by including us with the ‘men,' ” Darcy said. “But wherever it is, it can't be anything good. Did you see Coles? He was definitely pissed.”

“What is it with you guys?” O'Crowley, one of the construction guys, came over and sat on Corbin's cot. “You're supposed to be CAs but you're getting into firefights, going on combat missions, getting hit real hard. How come they're giving you the dirty end of the stick all the time?”

“We ain't nothing but some bait,” Jonesy said. “They put us out there to smile and see who shooting at us. Then when they pop enough caps in our rear ends they change the Rules of freakin' Engagement so the Infantry can start shooting back.”

“I think you're right,” Captain Miller said. “We're supposed to be helping our side win the peace and we don't even know what we mean by peace.”

“Maybe you don't know what
you
mean by peace,” Jonesy said. “What this little brown boy means is sitting home making sweet love to his guitar. It ain't got nothing to do with this foul mess over here.”

“We're serving a purpose, I think.” Corbin hardly ever spoke. “It could be that we just don't see their purpose. And I think the place we're going to, As Saylah or As Sayliyah, something like that, is where President Bush spoke.”

“You think he's there now?” Marla asked. “Because I seriously need to talk to that man about getting the Port-O-Potties air-conditioned.”

Sessions came in next. She looked tired, older than she had just a few weeks before. She didn't say anything, just motioned for us to come to her.

“The first three squads and Medical are going to As Sayliyah for a briefing and then going on a special mission,” she said. “I don't know what the briefing is going to be about, or the mission. Neither does Captain Coles, but he's going with you.”

“Yo, ma'am, from your tone of voice you don't seem to happy with this business,” I said.

“Sometimes I feel as if we're being asked to do a lot,” she answered. “But I know that if we weren't doing a good job they wouldn't be asking. So…”

The army had a way of throwing crap at you in waves, and this just seemed like another wave. We got into a serious group funk for about twenty minutes, but then the word got around about where we were going. Then guys started showing up saying that it was R&R heaven.

“They're building everything down there,” an Infantry dude with a bad case of acne and terminal dandruff said. “It's in Qatar and
there's no shooting going on, at all. My friend went down there for four days and didn't want to come back. They've got a swimming pool, lounges, beer, everything you can think about.”

“How come he was only there for four days?” Jonesy asked.

“That's what it's about,” Dandruff Dan answered. “It's wind-down city for guys in combat. Four days of chill and thrill in Q-8 and then back to bang-bang city.”

Combat? That didn't sound good.

Marla went over to HQ Company and begged a guy to let her send an email home. She came back ready to blow somebody away.

“The creep said no!” she said. “Something about all the area being jammed for security. I don't believe him. I asked him to check my emails and he did and he didn't have any problems. I should go back and shoot him.”

“Emails are coming through?” Corbin asked.

“Yeah, I got one from Victor,” Marla said. “He wants us to take care of Yossarian until he gets back.”

We were told to turn in our weapons to supply and to put most of our gear into our bags until we returned.

“Just take enough for four days' change of underwear,” Coles said. “And take any civvies you have.”

My one pair of jeans smelled musty and the two shirts were wrinkled but I packed them, anyway. On the way to the bus Miller was cursing up a storm. She was really good at it, too.

“What you thinking, Birdy?” Jonesy was next to me in the
crowded C-3. We were hip to hip with our legs stretched out and touching in the center of the plane.

“I'm thinking that we might be getting reassigned,” I said. “But if the women are going, then we probably won't be getting reassigned to the Infantry. What you thinking?”

“That sounds good to me,” Jonesy said. “I'll think the same thing because I promised my mama I wouldn't get into no out-andout combat.”

It took an hour and a half from wheels up to touchdown in Doha, Qatar. It felt good to get out of the bus and not feel the weight of a vest full of ammunition. The ride to As Sayliyah was short and it was still daylight when we reached the camp. We were taken to our quarters.

“Yo, Birdy, I been here before,” Jonesy said. “This is hog heaven. You know, just before they kill the hogs they bring them out to the pen, let them wallow in the mud a while, then rub their backs.”

“Then?” I had to ask.

“Then they gets their choice, bacon and eggs or Hoppin' John!”

There were people to greet us, to check us in, and to tell us where everything was. A girly-looking lieutenant told us that we had the next day off.

I got up at eight thirty in the morning. We had been given printouts with the layout of the camp but what I saw right away made me feel good. There were guys just hanging out and relaxing
on the front lawn of our building. There were women in robes and bathing suits sitting in lounge chairs and a volleyball game going on. I thought it was great.

“I bet the gladiators had a place just like this that they could cool out in before they fought the lions,” Captain Miller said when I met her coming out of one of the coffee shops with a huge cup of orange juice in one hand and coffee in the other.

We found some lounge chairs near the pool and stretched out. Marla and Evans found us and flopped down, too.

“Did you see that we're allowed so much beer per day?” Marla asked.

“Yeah, but I don't drink beer,” I said.

“That's another thing you need to work on, Birdy,” she came back.

What I was supposed to do was to chill, and I realized I was working on it way too hard. I kept reaching for the weapon I had left back in Baghdad. Some men from the 101
^st
Airborne were dressed in desert camouflage uniforms but everybody else had managed to scrape together a few civvy units. Sometimes it was only shorts and a T-shirt, but it was civvy.

The food was good, but not much better than in the Bubble. The difference was that you could buy as much junk food as you wanted and everybody was lining up to get at it. I wanted to see if Miller, who was all into science and health, would go for it, too. She did.

Darcy slept most of the first day. Love found a religious group and had Bible study. The rest of us played pool or just hung out in the rec room and watched one of the four big televisions. A heavy sergeant from Kansas City—his name tape read dongan—told me that the place had originally been set up for the media.

“They've got every kind of transmission device you want right here,” he said. “Studios, radar connections, the works.”

“They got any amps?” Jonesy asked.

“They have a whole professional setup for visiting entertainment,” Dongan said. “They even have guitars and a few horns. Once in a while somebody comes in who can play them.”

Jonesy checked everything out and I figured he would try a hook-up but he said he was too tired. “If I seen two chords and a big-butted mama walking down the street between them, I'd have to wait until I got online before I could send them a shout-out,” he said. “This war is wearing my black butt down to a freckled nub. Yo, Birdy, did I tell you I had freckles on my butt?”

Jonesy's freckles were not what I needed to hear about. I thought about hitting on Marla. She was looking really good in a beige sweater she had brought with her and some dark slacks. I asked her how she was doing.

“I'm sitting here wondering what Victor is going to do with the rest of his life,” she said. “How many guys you know out there in
the world kicking it with two fingers on one hand? What are you thinking about?” she asked.

I knew I didn't want to answer her. I shrugged and looked away and she asked me again.

“Yo, Marla, I'm trying not to think about the war,” I said.

“You just want to relax here?” she said. “I can understand that.”

“No, that's not it,” I said. “If I think about the war enough, if I think about Pendleton and Victor and some of the other things I've seen over here, it might become part of me. You know what I mean? I'm afraid of that. I've always thought of life as being precious and wonderful and all about the great things you were going to do with it. I don't want the images of body parts lying in the streets in my head. I don't want to think about shooting somebody and seeing their life…seeing their life twitch and jerk away from them.

“Maybe it's all a part of me already. I don't know. Look, I'm trembling. My hand is actually trembling. Jesus, Marla, it's me I'm scared of. Does that make any sense?”

“It makes sense, Birdy,” Marla said. “It makes sense.”

The second night at As Sayliyah went badly with me banging around the bed and waking up a hundred times trying to figure out where I was. I dreamt of being in a firefight. Crap. I dreamt of shooting people. It was like I was shooting and couldn't figure out who the enemy was and just kept on firing. Who the hell was I if I was dreaming about shooting people?

Everybody watched the news in the morning. It was as if we were
in a game without rules and we had to watch the scoreboard to see how we were doing. We watched the president say how we had accomplished the primary mission and were well into the last phase. A reporter asked him when the troops would be coming home and he said they would be home when the time was right to bring them home. Most of the guys cheered that.

Somebody noticed it was Sunday and Marla and Barbara went to early mass. Jonesy and I went to a music store and bought a copy of the
Survivor
CD and a CD player. There were two machines. One for eighty dollars and one for nineteen. I wanted to pool our money and get the eighty-dollar job but Jonesy was all against it.

“Go cheap,” he said. “That way when things go wrong you know why.”

“Don't you ever buy good stuff ?”

“Only in wine,” he said. “In wine I stick with Petrus Clandestinus.”

“I don't know anything about wine,” I said.

“You probably know it by its street name,” Jonesy said. “Sneaky Pete.”

At 1500 hours we were rounded up and told that the CAs had a formation at 0800 in the morning. I wondered if there were other CAs besides us and Dongan said no. In the afternoon Captain Miller bought a map and we gathered around as she showed us where Qatar was. Marla asked her where she had been and she said she had been hanging in the officers' club.

“Trying to get a fix on this war,” she said. “Trying to see if we're really kicking as much butt as we say we are.”

“Are we?” Jonesy asked.

“A lot of people are dying,” Miller said. “Is that the same thing?”

Monday morning formation. Mucho casual. There was a table set up in the lounge with coffee, doughnuts, danish, and OJ. A thin lieutenant colonel with a thousand lines in his face spread a tablecloth over one of the pool tables. In the middle of the table he put a small orange, two figs, and a handful of raisins.

“My name is Lieutenant Colonel John Kelly. I'm a career soldier, and my father before me was a career soldier. Folks, there's not much on this table to eat,” he said. “When you give it to one person, you have a chance to make a friend. When you divide it between two people, you're liable to make two enemies. That's what we're facing here in the Middle East. There's so little to go around and so many people who need both food and spiritual substance that no matter what contribution we make we're going to create more enemies than friends. You've been here awhile and you've seen it in the streets and in the countryside, so you know what I'm talking about.”

He went on and on, but he was right. We knew what he was talking about. There wasn't one war going on in Iraq, there were a dozen. The invasion had made a power vacuum and different groups were rushing in to fill it. There were Shiites and Sunnis and
tribal groups and Kurds, and political parties. Our guys, our army and our marines, were in the middle of it.

“Basically, I'm saying that we believe in democracy, and in the American way of life, and we are trying to export that to the world. We've done a fine job of it so far,” the colonel went on. “In 1776 we were the world's only true democracy. Now most of the world's leadership has followed our example. I don't want to sound utopian, but if we can bring 1776 to the Middle East we can change the world. You young people can take an important step in that direction. You can show us the way. That's what I'm asking of you, that's what America is asking of you. Thank you.”