The War I Always Wanted (12 page)

Me on the left, standing with Sgt. 1st Class Steve Croom in Baghdad.

Having dinner at Ammar's family's house in Baghdad during the lull between the invasion and the insurgency. Clockwise from left: Ammar, Spc. Brandon Moose, Mohamed, Pfc. Eric Poling, Spc. Trent Wykoff, and Pvt. James Worley.

The peppered Volkswagen Passat from which the insurgents tried and failed to launch their attack.

Bravo Company's 3rd Platoon failed miserably in their attempts at covert action. Though garbed in dishdashas, they were pegged immediately as Americans and photographed. Comedians from left, Spc. Adam Sines, Lt. Jim W., and Spc. Zachary Wyant.
Photo courtesy J.W
.

7
 
Hillah, Iraq

April 2003

The familiar thud of a bomb detonating had been unmistakable—as had the sound of fighter jets off in the distance. The morning was hazy and humid as I sat in the front seat of my truck, listening to a Matchbox 20 song on the satellite radio and eating a warm peach cobbler. We had left the desert, moving around Najaf, and were now within eight miles of the ruins of Babylon. I put the brown plastic spoon back into my snack and looked at it. One package of peaches, two large crackers, four packets of sugar, two packets of cream, some extra water, and a water-activated MRE heater—dessert. I had learned the recipe from Sergeant Croom somewhere between Kuwait and here. Just then I heard another explosion off to the east, but this one sounded
different
. Swallowing some of the cobbler, I figured it was probably a mortar.

The afternoon prior we had inched ever closer to the fighting. Before stopping, we came to within two miles of the
Euphrates River. It surprised me that the Fertile Crescent would begin and end so abruptly. We had been on a desert highway, and after a right turn, had entered into an area full of ditches, tall green grass, and huge palm trees. I could smell the water.

Ancient Babylon is now called Hillah. Sitting along the banks of what is now a Euphrates offshoot, it is a site that has been continuously inhabited for over four thousand years. It has been conquered, liberated, and conquered again. It has been ruled by men known worldwide—men with names like Sargon, Hammurabi, and Nebuchadnezzar.

When we arrived on the outskirts of the town that day, Hillah was the last major Shia city still under the control of Saddam and the Baath Party. The Shias of Hillah had despised him from the very beginning of his reign. They rose against him and had been massacred following the first Gulf War in 1991, their bodies being stacked in graves on the outskirts of the city.

Pushing to within six miles of the city that day, we were reassigned from the ACP back to Delta Company for the attack that was to go off the next morning. I learned this from my commander, Captain Corey B.
*
, a red-haired West Pointer who had served with the 1st Ranger Battalion before joining the Rakkasans.

The main assault would be two-pronged, from the northwest and from the south. We would attack from the main road leading into Hillah from the west at dawn. In the meantime, a kind of skirmishing force had been sent forward to probe the outskirts of Hillah and to clear all the obstacles in the road.

By midafternoon, the units that had moved forward were in contact. Their brazen move to take down the Iraqi obstacles was too much for the Iraqi defenders to handle. It was an assault on the defenders' pride, and they had chosen confrontation. Events were already unfolding as I dialed into the brigade net, 101.3 WRAK, All Rakkasans, All the Time.

Two Iraqis were already KIA. Two soldiers from Alpha Company had also been wounded, as had one soldier from our company. The Voice said that it was the soldier from Delta who had been the most severely wounded. A piece of shrapnel from an exploding hand grenade had hit him in the face.

I recognized the brigade commander giving instructions. There was talk of maneuvering to take a building, of firing tank rounds into buildings. It was surreal. It was like listening to a game on the radio.
He goes into the shotgun . . . he drops back . . .

I stuck my head out of the truck to see if I could hear any of the fighting. Nothing. Just a light breeze in the grass and a few voices in the truck parked next to me. I looked up and saw a few wispy clouds and a handful of flying birds. I couldn't hear any of the telltale sounds of combat—no thuds or poppop-pops. I guessed that we were still too far away to hear small arms fire. Around me, most guys in the company were just milling about, either bullshitting or lounging in their vehicles. They didn't seem to care that a battle was unfolding six miles away. They didn't seem to care that come morning, it would be us.

I wasn't any different. As if I had no personal stake in the affair, I felt just as interested as if I had been listening to an embedded reporter on CNN back home.
Wow, look honey. Those soldiers are in a fight on TV. What's for dinner?

For a guy with friends in the line of fire
at that very moment
, I managed to surprise even myself. I hadn't yet realized just how desensitized I was becoming.

By late afternoon the fighting was over. That evening a guy I knew gave me the rundown. He told of an Iraqi who feigned surrender, and then of the Iraqi's comrades who appeared on a flank and began throwing hand grenades. He had ordered his platoon to launch high-explosive grenades from a Mk 19 into each window of a multistory building from which they had taken fire. He told of picking up the shell casings of rounds he had fired. He was keeping them as souvenirs.

By nightfall my detachment had become even creepier by normal standards. The orders had been given, maps had been laminated and disseminated, and the vehicles had been aligned for the morning attack. I had spent an hour trying to get a map of Hillah from the intelligence guys, and then another hour leaning over the hood of my truck in the dark trying to use a permanent marker to properly mark all of the objectives on the map.

I was sitting in the front seat again, listening to music, when Phil, my roommate from back in the States, walked over to me. To Lieutenant Philip Dickinson, another Delta platoon leader, the idea of charging into battle was even newer than it was to me. He had been in Afghanistan with us, but had arrived as a replacement, two days after Anaconda.

It is a chill and dusty morning outside the tents at Kandahar International Airport, and we are shaving out of canteen cups filled with cold water. I've yet to put on my desert camouflage top when I notice a band of new guys have entered our encampment. The first thing
that strikes me is how
fresh
they look, with their pressed uniforms and spotless baggage. Captain K. still has shaving cream on his face when Phil introduces himself as the new officer. Captain K. grunts something and points the clueless-looking new platoon leader over to me. As he walks over, I stick out my hand and say, “How's it going?”

I turned the music down when Phil leaned in, his arm resting on the hood of my truck. I looked up and greeted him. “Sup, dude?”

“Well,” he started, “I guess we're ready to go. Everything's lined up.”

Lips pursed and eyebrows raised, I nodded under the glow of my hanging green flashlight.

Then he continued. “You know, dude . . . tomorrow is ahh . . . tomorrow's a pretty big day for us.”

I grinned up at him. There was no talk of getting killed or maimed or fixing bayonets to go building to building. There was no talk of failure. It was just going to be another day. A big day.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Yeah it is.” Then I asked him if he was nervous at all.

“You know, I can't say that I am,” he said. “Maybe anxious to get going, but I'm not really scared. I guess maybe I should be. I don't know.”

I knew what he was talking about. I was headed into urban combat in less than four hours and I wasn't even scared. It was like the moment just before the helicopter touched down on the mountainside during Anaconda.

I was neither happy, sad, scared, nor angry. I don't even remember thinking of my family. I just remember the music before Phil walked over. I didn't think of my parents or my brother or Nikki. There was only the music.

I used it to dull my senses that night, but I knew that in reality I was hooked up to a low-dose adrenaline drip. I was becoming numb. I was becoming a thinking husk with a gun.

When I had eventually called in mortar strikes on non-American targets in the Shah-e-Kot Valley there had been no fear, no anger, no glee. I was a cyborg on a ridgeline putting steel on target. “
Left 100, drop 50. Shot, over . . . Shot, out. Splash, over . . . Splash, out
.”

Calling in the strikes became like ordering a pizza. You place an order over the radio for what you want—the type of ordnance you want used, where you want it to land, how much of it you want. “Yes, I'll have four high-explosive mortars on such and such a building in the valley, please. Oh, and can I get two white phosphorous rounds also?” The Voice comes back with something like, “Of course, sir. Would you like smoke rounds with that? Or anything to drink?”

It's times like that, I figure, and times like the fast-approaching morning in Hillah that you become emotionally dead. It is adrenaline. Overdose. Addiction. Your personal weapon becomes the needle, and every time you charge the handle to lock and load before a mission, you inject the adrenaline, which over time will become like heroin to you. You let yourself drift into an emotional coma. If you didn't, you would go mad.