Virtues of War (38 page)

Chutes is grinning. “What's your name again, man?”

“Chris Candelaria.”

“Chris, you're my kinda dude.”

They bump elbows. In we go.

Nazirabad is situated at the juncture of two highways—8, which runs north-south, and 41, east-west. The three-level interchange and
its security station, Checkpoint 290, is the funnel through which all motorized entry and egress is channeled. There's an industrial slum to the north called Ali City, from which most of the bad actors come—tribal militias, criminal gangs, Mahdi revivalists, cabals of displaced army officers, as well as Jaish al-Sha'b, “Army of the People,” which has replaced AQP—al-Qaeda in Persia—plus every imaginable hue of nationalist, separatist, and irredentist forces, including foreign fighters—Turks, Chechens, Syrians, Saudis, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Uighurs, as well as Shiite Kurds, Afghan Hazaras, and Lebanese.

As recently as ten years ago, Nazirabad was a secure, attractive tourist destination. Brochures called it the “city of artists.” The Old Town had four souks, one entirely for tiles, another for decorative ironwork—gates, lamps, chandeliers. Nazirabad had two synagogues, believe it or not, and a Christian bookstore. A woman could walk alone and bareheaded, even after dark. Eighteen months ago, when our team deployed, a foreigner could still get a private villa, with cook, driver, and laundress. No more. In the space of ten weeks, since the start of the third Iran-Iraq war, the place has degenerated to a level of violence equal to Baghdad or Ramadi twenty-five years earlier—and the last half year has been even worse.

We take side streets into the city, bypassing Checkpoint 290. The sun is dropping fast. Mac has made radio contact with our engineers; they have abandoned the company compound and made their way to a safe house (actually the home of their supervisor's father) on Espresso Street, a well-to-do boulevard so named because it has the only Starbucks within five hundred miles. The only problem is that Espresso Street has become the epicenter for whatever conflagration is currently consuming the city.

We approach from the west, so the sun is behind us. We can see Iranian-badged Hind gunships overhead, putting out rocket and machine-gun fire—probably at sniper teams on rooftops—and see
the propellant trails of heat seekers and SFRs, shoulder-fired rockets, corkscrewing up in response. I'm navigating by the electrical power lines, which run along central thoroughfares and are the only objects taller than three stories in the city. In an urban firefight, you can't simply race to the action like a fire truck toward a burning building. You have to patrol up to it, employing “movement to contact,” which basically means keep advancing until somebody starts shooting at you. Our engineers are talking us in over line-of-sight squad radios, which work for two seconds and then break up as buildings and vehicles intervene. “How close are you to the fight?” I speak into my mike.

“We
are
the fight!” comes the answer.

Espresso Street, when we enter it, is as broad as a boulevard and sizzling with spent shell casings, smoking bricks, rubble, and blocks of concrete-and-rebar and is pocked by craters from which ruptured water-main fluid floods, mingling with raw sewage, garbage, and gasoline to form an inch-deep burning lake across the welcome-to-hell cityscape. We pass one Russian-built Iranian T-79 tank coming out, protecting two gun trucks with wounded regulars inside and on top. Local civilians are running up to my window and Chutes's, shouting that there are snipers on such and such a rooftop or drone swarms above such and such a block. Unarmed boys race on foot toward the action, just for the excitement. We see a press pickup, with “TV” on the windshield in masking tape. Chutes is my driver. The boom box blares Bloodstone's “Death or Dismemberment”:

Cars are burning in the middle of the street; we're jinking around downed phone poles. Adrenaline is flooding through me; I can tell
because the pulse hemometer on my wrist reads out at 180/15. But my subjective experience is the opposite. I'm cool. The hotter it gets outside, the cooler I become. This is nothing I can take credit for or claim to have achieved by virtue of training or application of will. I was born this way. When I was nine years old and my old man would wallop the tar out of me for some infraction of his demented code of honor, I would stare up at him icy eyed and not feel a twinge of rage, even though I could have and would have killed him on the spot if I had taken a notion to. I was remote. I was detached. I felt like another person was inside me. This other person was me, only stronger and crueler, more cunning and more deadly.

I never told anyone about this secret me. I was afraid they might think I was crazy, or try to take this other me away, or convince me that I should be ashamed of him. I wasn't. I loved him. In sports or fistfights, in moments of crisis or decision, I cut loose my conventional self and let this inner me take over. He never hesitated. He never second-guessed. Later, in combat, when I began to experience fragments of recall that were clearly not from this lifetime, I knew at once that these memories were connected to my secret self. They were his memories. I was only the temporary vessel in which they were housed.

This secret self is whom I surrender to now, entering Nazirabad. I become him. I feel fear. At times it threatens to overwhelm me. But my secret self pays no attention. I hear the gunships overhead and see the vapor trails of their rockets. A man must be crazy, I think, to head of his own free will
toward
that. But at the same time, no force beneath heaven can keep me away. This is what I was born for. I'm geeked out of my skull—and I'm curious. I want to see what's up ahead. How bad is it? What kind of fucked-up shit will we run into this time?

In action there is no such thing as thought, only instinct. We blow
past two sharp exchanges of fire and suddenly there's the house. Our engineers have spray-painted on the compound wall.

THIS IS IT!!!

in block letters two feet high. I wave to the other trucks: Keep moving. We can't burst in on our own engineers or their bodyguards will shoot us, not to mention the wicked stream of fire that is pouring onto the compound from rooftops and circling drones and is now zeroing on us.

“I know the place!” Chutes is shouting across at me. We accelerate past the rusty front gates—seven feet tall and perforated like cheese graters by .50-cal fire—and swerve hard left into an alley. Chutes is bawling across the seat at me. I can't hear a word but I understand from his gestures: there's a way in, from the rear, which we can access from one of the myriad cross-channels if we can find it. I'm raising the engineers and telling them to hold their fire when they see the rear gate blow in. “I will throw a flash-bang,” I enunciate with exaggerated clarity into the Motorola mike duct-taped to the right shoulder of my Kev-lite vest. “When you see the flash, run straight out to us.”

Nothing works in combat the way you think it will. It takes us almost twenty minutes to cover the two hundred feet to the rear compound gate. By then our besieged engineers are too petrified to stick a toe out. Snipers are on every rooftop, with rocketmen racing up, more every minute. We break in the gate with our Lada Neva's tailboard and are just starting in reverse across the court to the rear entry of the house, when one of the security men—a Fijian, no taller than five-foot-two, probably making forty bucks a day—appears in the rear egress, shouting, “IED! IED!” and pointing to the dirt drive over which our truck is about to roll. Three 177 mm artillery
shells sit unburied, big as life, with their wires exposed, lining the south side of the lane. “Brake!” I shout to Chutes. The Fijian dives back into the house, one nanosecond ahead of a fusillade of 7.62 fire that blows the jamb and the security door to powder. Chutes powers the Lada Neva back out through the gate, to safety behind the four-foot-thick main wall. “What the fuck do we do now?”

There's nothing for us but to go in on foot, blasting every hajji triggerman on every rooftop as we go.

Junk, Q, and I bolt back through the gate. The rear door of the compound is about sixty yards away. We dash past a line of parked Toyota trucks and Tata/LUK compgas cars; I can hear the sheet metal shredding as gunfire pursues us. We can hear Iranian voices everywhere, not just on the overlooming buildings, but on the flat roof of the compound building itself. They know exactly what's happening. They could trigger the IEDs right now and take us out, but they're greedy—they want our vehicles, too. We dive into an alley and take cover beneath two gigantic air-conditioning units supported by pipe stanchions. I can hear one gunner on an overhead taunting us in English. Another in a baseball cap pops up behind the roof wall and starts firing. I jack myself left-handed into the clear and blow his head off. “Man!” shouts Junk, whooping.

I'm shouting to the Fijian, telling him we're coming. “All!” I cry, pantomiming to the group. “Run for it!” Does he understand English? I can't see him. Where are the engineers? The Fijian pops out again, flashing five fingers and a thumbs-up. Again gunfire shreds his nest as he plunges back inside. Junk and I spring out. Hajjis are pouring gunfire from rooftops and upper-story windows. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Junk take a hit and drop. “Go!” he's shouting. “I'm okay!”

I reach the rear door. The engineers and two other Fijians crouch back in the dimness, which is dense with brick dust and smoke from the pulverized walls of the building. The engineers wear body armor
and blue civilian Kevlars. The security men have on nothing thicker than khaki; one dude is in flip-flops. “There!” I point to the alley where Junk and Q have taken cover. “Now!”

The mob gets ten steps and the first 177 blows. It's the far one, the one closest to the rear gate. The dumb-bastard triggerman has pushed the wrong button. The blast still knocks every one of us flat and annihilates our hearing. I'm in the rear, driving the engineers forward. Everybody's still alive. My head is ringing like a Chinese gong, but I can still hear the Iranians on the roofline cursing their numb-nuts triggerman. Our gang plunges to cover under the air-conditioning units. Quinones is kneeling between the A/Cs, firing at the V of two tenement rooftops above us. The enemy keeps popping up between clotheslines and satellite dishes. Every time Q pings one and the pink spray blows out of their heads and they drop away out of sight, the engineers yelp with terror and relief. Q and Junk are cross-decking now, firing over each other's shoulders. We're halfway to the compound wall, halfway to safety “Move now!” I shout.

The group bolts to the gate and wall, to Chris, Chutes, and the others. Q and I are dragging one engineer, who has lost sight and hearing from the concussion of the 177, with Junk hopping on one leg and hanging on to one of the security men. We plunge back to safety just as full darkness falls.

Chris's two Kodiaks, which we had held in reserve two blocks back, have come forward now, ready to take us out. They're revving in the alley, thirty feet north, in the safe zone shielded by an adjacent building. Enemy 5.56 and 7.62 fire is ripping into the wall above us. Now the rocket rounds start flying; our Lada Nevas and 7-ton truck have to pull back. Someone is helping Junk into the first vehicle. I hear one of Chris's DSF men shouting in a German accent, “Who? Who's missing?” For a moment I think they mean Junk. I look over. Junk is okay. Then I realize they're talking about someone
else. I turn back toward the compound. On the ground beside the air-conditioning units crawls one of our Fijians.

Sonofabitch! The man is in the dirt, clawing his way toward cover. Furious fire rakes the ground around him. I see him scramble face-first into a cooking ditch, just as a full burst from an AK takes him square between the shoulder blades. Both elbows fly rearward, then flop; his neck snaps; he crashes face-first into the dirt. He stops moving. “Brake!” I'm shouting to Chutes. “Q! Chris!”

“Go! Get out!” Chris Candelaria is calling, waving the vehicles to pull back. He has packed Junk's wound and stripped his own tourniquet, worn lanyard-style around his neck; he's cinching it around Junk's thigh as he and the German DSF man help him toward the first Lada Neva.

“We're going back!” I shout.

“What?”

“The Fijian. We're not leaving him!”

A shoulder-fired rocket whistles overhead and blows the hell out of a house across Espresso Street. What little hearing I have left is now gone.

“We're not leaving without him.”

It's my secret me who's talking. He has made the decision.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” This is Chutes, my tightest mate and most trusted brother. He sticks his jaw six inches from mine.

“We're going back,” I tell him.

Junk curses. “He's not our guy, chief! We don't even know who the fuck he is!”

“He's dead!” says Chutes. “There's two more 177s in there, waiting to blow!”

Other faces stare at me.

“Leave the body,” cries the Fijian team leader. “The man would say so himself if he could!”

I tell the Fijians he's not theirs, he's ours.

Chris Candelaria's two Kodiaks are hauling ass now; they know they're targets. Iranian rocket gunners are trying to blow down the building that protects our flank. As their rounds scream in, blocks of concrete the size of bowling balls sail a hundred feet into the air and fall back, crashing all around us. We scramble into the slit trench of sewage. Guys are trying to crawl up inside their helmets. I'm peering around the corner, back into the compound.

Chutes clutches my sleeve. “Bro, listen to me. We got the engineers, we got the report … that's what we came here for.” He points past the gate to the compound, to the fresh enemy streaming in along the rooflines. “We go back in there, somebody's gonna die.”