The Last Full Measure (54 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
Sweeping roads for IEDs was like playing Russian roulette, except it was not a discretionary divertissement. Lee Reynolds was an APC crewman in Vietnam.
We did a lot of road security. We’d go out looking for signs of the enemy and “bus” the road, which is, in effect, a stupid minesweeper technique of driving down the road and seeing if you can run over a mine and blow something up. We got a lot of people hurt and killed unnecessarily doing that. I remember writing my girlfriend and telling her about that, and she wrote me back … if you know the roads are mined, why don’t you stay off the roads? It was brutal logic but initially too overpowering for our colonel. One day, one of our tracks [armored personnel carriers] was demolished by a huge mine. Eight of our people were blown to bits. Shreds of their tissue hung from the trees, and birds came to feed on it. After that happened, we stayed off the roads.
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Marine lieutenant Donovan Campbell describes the hair-raising procedure of the early morning IED sweep of a main thoroughfare in Ramadi, Iraq:
Because Michigan was such an important transportation artery for all coalition forces in the area keeping it free and clear of IEDs became a high priority for our company, so almost every morning started off with a platoon patrol straight down the highway from the Outpost.… The mission seems sound and practicable in theory; even the term, “route sweep,” sounds professional, efficient, antiseptic. The reality is anything but—a route sweep is a nasty mission that can only be accomplished by ugly, primitive, and fairly risky methods.
The Army had performed its sweeps by driving down the highway in fully armored Humvees at forty miles per hour, minimum, looking for whatever suspicious objects they could spot at such high speeds while holding their breaths, just waiting to get exploded. By contrast, we performed our
route sweeps by walking down Michigan wearing body armor. Like the Army, we also held our breaths, waiting to get exploded. Walking at five miles an hour rather than driving at forty, we stood a much better chance of spotting unusual objects among the trash and other clutter littering the road. Wearing only body armor, though, we also stood a much worse chance of surviving a blast. Even at the slow speed, Marines still rarely spotted well-camouflaged IEDs until we were about thirty to fifty feet away, well within the kill zone.
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Some of the most lethal IEDs looked deceptively innocent, about as scary as a can of Coke. But these “explosively formed penetrators” (EFPs)—shaped charges that projected molten metal into the target—were deadly. Sean Michael Flynn, a company commander with the Sixty-Ninth Regiment of the US Army National Guard in Iraq, describes what happened when one of their Humvees was hit by an EFP: “The EFP that insurgents detonated against Lwin and Ali’s truck sat just a few feet away from the vehicle in a pile of brush along a narrow center median. The penetrator shot from the can and entered the Humvee behind Lwin, who was driving. The molten steel killed the Burmese American [Lwin] instantly. Ali was sitting in the gun turret facing rearward. When the round exited Lwin it blew off Ali’s hindquarters, before sending shards of steel into Sergeant Maiella’s chest cavity and head.”
Ali bled to death en route to hospital; Maiella survived.
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Next to mines and booby traps, probably the most potent weapon in the insurgent arsenal was the RPG—the rocket-propelled grenade launcher that is heir to the bazooka. Being highly portable, relatively cheap to manufacture, and not complicated to operate, it fits the insurgents’ bill nicely. The only problem, from an insurgent point of view, is that the operator has to
be quite close to the target, which, together with the highly visible back blast, makes him extremely vulnerable to counterfire.
RPG tactics usually follow a fairly consistent pattern. First, the enemy is brought to a halt, perhaps with an IED or some kind of road blockage, and then he is hit with an RPG. Jim Ross was a Twenty-Fifth Division soldier on an armored personnel carrier in Vietnam:
Being mechanized infantry, our firepower was so superior to a straight leg infantry unit that we didn’t think the enemy to be much competition as far as toe-to-toe battle. When we did, the enemy almost always had the opportunity of striking the first blow. That’s one of the main disadvantages of mechanized forces. You move around a lot, you make a terrific target, you can be seen from quite a distance, and you can be heard from even a farther distance, so they had ample time to interdict us if they chose to do so. And very often, they could get away with that without paying any price at all. All they would do was simply set up a 2- or 3-man RPG ambush, attack the lead APC or maybe the tail APC and either damage or destroy the track.
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Drivers of trucks in Vietnam were particularly vulnerable because the vehicles were powered by 90 gallons of gasoline and, as novelist (
Paco’s Story
) and Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division vet Larry Heinemann recalls: “A gallon of gasoline is equal to nineteen pounds of TNT and a gallon of gasoline has enough energy to lift one thousand pounds one thousand feet into the air instantly. Don’t fuck with gasoline. You got ninety gallons here and if an RPG hits the bull’s-eye you go up like the head of a match.… If anything happens, the driver always dies.”
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IF WE LISTEN
closely to the voices of the modern battlefield, we can hear quite distinctly the echoes of ancient ones. Under the Kevlar we can still smell the funky reek of ancient warriors that no amount of modern sanitation seems able to wash away, often to our embarrassment, sometimes to our shame.
Modern warriors speak in old tongues and answer to the ancient gods. The joy of rolling in the primal mud can be wonderfully liberating. The presence of death becomes an exhilarating narcotic. Lance Corporal Thomas P. Noonan wrote to his sister on October 17, 1968, from Vietnam: “Please disregard any small note of flippancy that might reveal itself in this letter. I try to avoid it, but when one is having such a good time it is hard not to be cheerful. I’ve thrown off the shackles of silly society. I’ve cast out my razor, divorced my soap, buried my manners, signed my socks to a two-year contract, and proved that you don’t have to come in out of the rain. I scale the mountains, swim the rivers, soar through the skies in magic carpet helicopters. My advent is attended by Death and I’ve got chewing gum stuck in my mustache.”
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Noonan was killed four months later.
The chaos, paradoxically, can offer clarity not to be found in “ordinary” life: “Basically I enjoyed Vietnam. It was the most vivid part of my life. I enjoyed the anarchy of it. You know, self-law. No one ever bothered you. You know what it’s like to walk down the road with twelve guys armed to the teeth and anybody who shoots at you is in trouble? You’re living every minute, you’re with the guys who really look after you.… I missed that a lot when I got back to the States. You really appreciate that now when you’re getting fucked over all the time dealing with society.”
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One can hear the great crazed shout of the atavistic gods of war in the voice of a soldier in Iraq:
At one point, an insurgent spotter appears … I see him point us out to his buddies.
Fuck him
.
I stand up on a chair, point back, and roar, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” … you fuckers!
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Or this helicopter gunner in Vietnam:
It turned into a turkey shoot. They were defenseless.… I was in there with the best of them. Blowing people off the boats, out of the paddies, down from the trees for Chrissake. Blood lust. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. Caught up in the moment. I remember thinking this insane thought, that I’m God and retribution is here, now, in the form of my machine gun and the Miniguns that I take care of and the rockets that we are firing.… You begin at that point to understand how genocide takes place.
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The power of killing in combat—a sanctioned release for our murderousness—is as though some ancient and psychotic genie that we normally keep stoppered in its civilized bottle has been let loose. We can hear the voice from this soldier in Vietnam:
I would take C-ration cans and booby-trap them with pressure release devices. Very small. You put the explosive inside the C-ration can, turn it upside down so it doesn’t look like it’s been opened. Then you put it on top of a pressure-release device. When somebody picks it up—
whoosh
—it’s all over. We used to love to do that.
I have to admit I enjoyed killing. It gave me a great thrill while I was there.… There was a certain joy you had in killing, an exhilaration that is hard to explain. After a fight, guys would be really wired. “Wow, man, did you see that guy get it. Holy shit.”
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It is so easy and thrilling to let the genie out. Just a twitch of the trigger finger. Staff Sergeant David Bellavia exults in a kill in Al Fallujah, Iraq:
He doesn’t notice me.… His back is to me. He casually continues to smoke, with his AK strapped over his right shoulder. At first I think I’m hallucinating. Does this jackoff think there are unionized smoke breaks in battle?
My weapon comes up automatically. I don’t even think. In the second it takes to set the rifle on burst-fire, my surprise gives way to cold fury. The muzzle makes contact with the back of his head.
Fuck a zero. I can’t miss now
.
My finger twitches twice. Six rounds tear through his skull. His knees collapse together as if I’d just broken both his legs. As he sinks down he makes a snorting, piggish sound. I lower my barrel and trigger another three-round burst into his chest, just to be sure.…
His head bobbles back and forth. He snorts again.… His face looks like a bloody Halloween mask and I stomp it with my boot until he finally dies.
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Bellavia is reenacting one of the oldest forms of combat in which the real killing is done not face-to-face in heroic confrontation but stealthily, in ambush, from behind. Like murder or assassination, which minimizes the risk to the killer, it is stripped of any pretense of nobility. It is an act of execution, bone simple.
Although intimate killing is a relative rarity in modern warfare, Bellavia also found himself engaged in a type of combat at the other extreme of ambushing: the classic mano-a-mano duel that is at the heart of the heroic tradition. But in the filth and chaos of Al Fallujah, the confrontation is stripped down to the horrific tearing and bludgeoning of a lethal brawl. When the heroic mask slips
it reveals the snarling, blood-and-sweat-and-snot-smeared face of true combat. And it was always thus:
The wounded Boogeyman stirs. He’s flat on his back, but he still holds his AK [47] in one hand.
I step forward and slam the barrel of my rifle down on his head. He grunts and suddenly swings his AK up. Its barrel slams into my jaw and I feel a tooth break. I reel from the blow, but before I can do anything he backhands me with the AK. This time, the wooden handgrip glances off the bridge of my nose. I taste blood.
I back off and wield my M16 like a baseball bat. Then I step back toward him and swing with everything I’ve got. The front sight post catches him on the side of the head. I wind up to hit him again … his leg flies up from the floor and slams into my crotch.
I stagger backward, pain radiating from my groin.…
I leap at my enemy. Before he can respond I land right on top of his chest. A rush of air bursts from his mouth.…
I beat him with the inside of my armor plate. I smash it against his face again and again and again until blood flows all over the inside of my shirt. He kicks and flails and screams.… He kicks and howls, yet he refuses to submit.…
“Shut the fuck up!” I bash his face again. Blood flows over my left hand and I lose my grip on his hair. His head snaps back against the floor. In an instant, his fists are pummeling me. I rock from his counterblows. He lands one on my uninjured jaw and the pain nearly blinds me. He connects with my nose, and blood and snot pour down my throat. I spit blood between my teeth and scream with him. The two of us sound like caged dogs locked in a death match.…
He opens his mouth under my hand. For a second I think
this is over. He’s going to surrender. Then a ripping pain sears through my arm. He clamped his teeth on the side of my thumb near the knuckle, and now he tears at it, trying to pull meat from bone.…
My belt. I have a knife on my belt
.
… I reach for my belt just as he comes up after me. His face rams my crotch. I feel his teeth clamp onto me.…
Finally, suddenly, I become a madman.
My arm comes up over my head, then chops down with every bit of power I have left.…
I pounce on him. My body splays over his and I drive the knife right under his collarbone. My first thrust hits solid meat. The blade stops, and my hand slips off the handle and slides down the blade, slicing my pinkie finger. I grab the handle again and squeeze it hard. The blade sinks into him, and he wails with terror and pain.…
The knife finally nicks an artery. We both hear a soft liquidy spurting sound.…
I’m bathed in warmth from neck to chest.… His eyes lose their luster. The hate evaporates. His right hand grabs a tuft of my hair.… He is feeble.…
His eyes show nothing but fear now. He knows he’s going to die. His face is inches from mine, and I see him regard me for a split second. At the end, he says, “Please.”
“Surrender!” I cry. I’m almost in tears.
“No …” he manages weakly.
His face goes slack. His right hand slips from my hair. It hangs in the air for a moment, then with one last spasm of strength, he brings it to my cheek. It lingers there, and as I look into his dying eyes, he caresses the side of my face.
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