Sunrise Over Fallujah Read online

  “Okay, I hear what you saying,” Harris answered. “But you tell me this, sir. The president is telling him to step down and get out of Dodge. Where’s Saddam going to go? Everybody over here hates his butt. He had a war with Iran, so he can’t go there. The Egyptians don’t like him. Everybody in Kuwait hates him for invading them. Where’s he going to go? If he ain’t got no place to go, he’s got to stay and fight.”

  “He going to stay and get smoked!” a guy named Lopez said. He was olive-skinned with dark short-cropped hair. The dude looked dangerous. I had asked him what the initials tattooed on his hand—alkn—meant and he just looked at me and laughed.

  “You know where Saddam could be safe?” Sergeant Harris was on a roll. “In the United States. We could put him in the witness protection program. Give him a million bucks so he could live good—maybe a little business—that would be funny. Yeah, he could sell pictures of Elvis on black velvet.”

  “You really want to get into this war bad, don’t you?” Marla Kennedy was playing solitaire on the foldout table.

  “Look, Miss Molly. These people need to learn what’s going on. You see what I’m talking about? What they understand over here is power.” Sergeant Harris glanced toward Captain Coles to see how his remarks were being taken. “They got to see your power. They got to see you take out their cities, kill a few folks. In a way, we’re teachers getting ready to let them know what American power is really all about. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What I think”—Jonesy put talcum powder in his boots and shook them—“is that Saddam got a tune in his head and he wants to play it real bad. And when it don’t go right he just play it louder. A lot of dudes do that. They call it music, but it could just be war.”

  “Jones, what are you talking about?” Coles asked.

  “Hey, Captain, why are you over here?” Kennedy looked up from her cards.

  “I joined the army when I was twenty-two and trying to figure out what to do with my life,” Captain Coles answered. “I kept thinking I was going to make up my mind on some career path and then get out. Haven’t quite got around to making up my mind or getting out. I feel good about defending my country, about being in Civil Affairs. You know, we bring a human face to war. I feel good about that.”

  I couldn’t tell if Captain Coles really felt good about it or not. He didn’t share much with us.

  “You think we’re going in?” Evans asked.

  “As you say, Saddam’s backed himself into a corner.” Captain Coles nodded as he spoke. “He understands power. If he backs down now, every gunslinger in the Middle East will be after him. So he might as well stay and fight it out.”

  “Stay and get wasted, you mean.” Harris did seem anxious.

  Captain Coles stood up. He looked uncomfortable. “I’m going to go speak to Sessions,” he said. “She was talking about us pulling guard duty, but I think I can talk her out of it.”

  “Tell her that Sergeant Harris will take a shift by himself,” Kennedy said. “They won’t need the rest of us.”

  “Yo, woman, you got a lot of mouth for a chick!” Harris said.

  “Glad you noticed it, Sergeant.”

  Captain Coles left and Sergeant Harris started flipping through the television channels, seeing if any of them came in clearly. I knew the military channel would, but I didn’t want to watch another rerun of the latest speech from the White House. I got up and went out into the clear spring air.

  Before arriving at Doha I had imagined being on a desert with camels wandering by and palm trees swaying in the wind. It had taken seven hours to fly from Newark, New Jersey, to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, and another seven to reach Kuwait. The place blew my mind. The whole city of Doha was squeaky clean and beautiful. Almost everything was new or nearly new. I arrived on a Saturday morning and went with a bunch of guys into the city. There was every kind of department store you could think about and the street hummed with SUVs. When I saw the Grand Mosque with its golden dome, it took my breath away. One of the guys I was with, a civilian contractor, told me that I would never get used to the architecture in the Arab countries.

  “It changes your whole perspective about the people over here,” he said.

  Nine o’clock this morning we marched to the CENTCOM theater and saw a film about Saddam Hussein. There were at least a thousand guys there, most of them 3rd Infantry dudes and a lot of Marines and Special Ops. Saddam looked like a sweetheart of a guy. Always calm looking, distinguished. In most of the pictures there was no change of expression on his face. In the film he was always seen either shaking hands or shooting a pistol into the air. Then the images changed to the Kurds who were gassed. A woman still had her arm out toward her child. The whole scene looked unreal, as if it had been staged. I wanted to turn away from the bodies lying on the ground. Some looked as if they might move at any moment. Just get up and walk off. I didn’t want to see these people lying dead. I tried to get myself mad, but I only managed to feel scared.

  The thing was that nobody else seemed scared. A lot of guys acted as if they were pissed and were anxious to get the war thing started. A guy from the 3rd Infantry, kind of small, with almost a baby face, kept talking about facing the Iraqis.

  “We need to think about winning this thing and checking ourselves out to see if we really want it. You know what I mean? Because if we really want it we can make it happen,” he said. “Those people, the Kurds, laying on the ground, they didn’t have a chance. We got the chance. We got to do a gut check and see if we got the will to win.”

  I didn’t know if I had the same will to win as the guy from the 3rd. What I did know was that I wanted to do my part. The officers let us sit around and talk up the war and I thought that they did it on purpose. It was like being in a locker room before a big game.

  “I seen a 240 take a guy’s leg off from a hundred yards,” a bigheaded corporal said. “The whole leg came off and the sucker was just laying there on the ground, looking at his leg as he died.”

  I felt a little sick.

  After the movie we went back to our quarters. We had settled down into card games and the usual BS when we got called out to formation. Captain Coles saluted the two officers, a colonel and a lieutenant, who gave us a quick inspection. The colonel had enough gear on to be burning up in the heat. He was making sure he looked tough. I thought about his getting heat rash and smiled but wiped it off my face before he passed by me.

  “You people represent the United States Army, and you represent our country and our way of life as well,” the colonel said, sounding like he was making a formal speech. “If we go into Iraq the people there will be watching the combat troops, seeing how well they perform their duties as well as how we treat the local population. But the most lasting impression will be of you soldiers working Civil Affairs. You can do a great job over here or you can undo any gains we make by acting without thinking, acting out of fear instead of logic, or acting in a manner that betrays American principles. Years from now, when the people in the cities and villages remember this operation, it will be your faces and actions that they will recall.”

  Colonel Rose ended the talk with a recording of “The Star Spangled Banner.” It was a little hokey, but standing there at attention with all the other soldiers, I did feel a sense of pride.

  “I think Civil Affairs is going to be the most interesting thing about this war,” Captain Coles said when we returned to our tent. “And maybe the safest if I can convince Major Sessions to keep you guys off patrols. I’m passing out the official vehicle assignments. You’re responsible for routine maintenance and cleanliness and you each have to sign for your assigned vehicle. Look over these assignments and memorize them. If we go in you won’t be allowed to take any documents with you except maps and your personal identification. I’m assigning the first three security squads.”

  He handed out the papers and we looked them over. The assignments were the same as he had put on the blackboard earlier.

  “W
e’ll have different leaders depending on what assignment we’re on,” Captain Coles said. “Regardless of the mission and who the leader is, we need to think of ourselves as a team. If we reach a position in which we’re not only seeing each other but actually sensing what each member of the team is feeling, there’s a good chance we’ll all come out of this war in one piece. Any questions?”

  “So you want to break it down to us one more time?” Danforth asked. “We’re supposed to go out and kill the Iraqis and blow up their stuff. Then we help them find their arms or legs, or whatever we’ve blown off, and patch them back together. Then we all sit in a circle and sing campfire songs, right?”

  “You might not be taking this seriously, Danforth, but the Operations people are and they’re going to make it work. What this war is going to be about—and we’re still not positive it’s going to happen—is regime change and destroying the Iraqis’ chemical and any nuclear weapons we find. It’s not about making the people suffer and it’s up to us to let them know that. If Saddam does step down and they turn over their weapons, we can avoid a lot of bloodshed.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Danforth shrugged. “It’s definitely good on paper.”

  The way Captain Coles laid it out, each squad would have one Humvee, consisting of a driver, a gunner, and two other guys. Marla outranked me but she wanted to be the gunner. I liked her and I liked Captain Coles. Jonesy was okay, too. Coles said he would ride with us most of the time, which was why we only had three in our crew.

  What we did for the next three days was to sit around and wait and talk about whether or not anyone was going to start shooting. Most of what we learned was from the television news. There was a VCR in the dayroom and we watched a lot of flicks. They had every war movie ever produced, including three copies of Tom Cruise in Top Gun, which I liked. We also watched a lot of training films and spent hours practicing putting on our gas masks. I also noticed that the teams were hanging out more together.

  “Hey, Birdy, you know why the mess hall is so empty this morning?” Marla brought her tray over to my table and plunked down across from me.

  “How long you going to call me Birdy?” I asked.

  “It’s empty because half the Hoodlums sneaked out in the middle of the night,” she answered. The Hoodlums were what we called the Special Ops guys who went on secret missions in enemy territory. We had asked a few what they did, but they weren’t talking. Actually, most of them just grunted.

  Marla continued, “Some women from the Engineering Battalion near the post exchange told me. They got them up around two in the morning. They were all blacked up and in every kind of uniform you could mention.”

  “What were those women doing up?”

  “Had to go pee,” Marla said. “Did you know women did that?”

  Captain Coles came by with a cup of coffee in each hand. “Mind if I join you?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “All signs point to go,” he said. “If you’re going to write any letters home…”

  Marla spotted Danforth and beckoned him over. He came to the table, turned a chair around, and straddled it.

  “Marla heard that the Hoodlums left camp last night,” I said.

  “They can’t be going into Iraq yet.” Danforth gestured with his hands as he spoke. “There’s no official war.”

  “They’ve been going in and out of Iraq for the last six months,” Coles said. “They’re setting up scouting operations, making contacts, that sort of thing.”

  “How come they didn’t get the Hoodlums to supply security for Civil Affairs instead of us?” Danforth asked. “I mean, some of those Special Forces guys act like they’d consider it a favor if they killed you.”

  Coles laughed, a big toothy laugh that lit up his whole face. “That’s probably why the average Iraqi won’t talk to them,” he said. He put more sugar into his coffee, tasted it, and pushed it aside. “You guys look like reasonable people. The army probably thinks you might even try to talk to a villager before you killed him.”

  “There’s Ahmed.” Marla nodded toward the chow line. “Where’s he from? He’s in the American army? Those aren’t desert camouflage units he wears.”

  “Cleveland,” Captain Coles said. “He’s a civilian translator. Try not to kill him if you can help it. They frown on that kind of thing in Cleveland. The army wants him to blend in wherever possible. Be a kind of go-between.”

  “This be a strange war,” Marla said.

  “Where you from, Captain Coles?” Danforth asked

  “Allentown, Pennsylvania. My family’s lived there for three generations back. Before then we were, or so I’ve been told, in England. Allentown’s a good little place. A couple of hours from anywhere exciting. Some of the best food in the world from nearby farms and some of the Amish folk in the area. Where you from again?”

  “Richmond,” Danforth said. “Right outside of the city, really.”

  “What’s your hometown?” Coles asked Marla.

  “Is this the beginning of a war movie?” Marla asked. “Everybody tells about themselves so when they get killed we’ll all feel sorry for them?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She stood and just walked away. Definitely cool.

  The next morning we watched President Bush give a message to the American people that sounded like it was from a cowboy movie.

  The Humvees came and we received ours with the usual military lecture.

  This is the finest fighting vehicle in the army of the United States of America, so don’t you meatheads go f’ing it up!

  Second squad, Harris, Darcy, and Evans, painted a name on their Humvee, calling it Def Con II. I was still a little mad at Marla for always calling me Birdy, so I suggested we call our Humvee Miss Molly, which was what Sergeant Harris called her.

  “Yeah, that works,” Marla said.

  From: Perry, Robin

  Date: 17 March 2003

  To: Perry, Richard

  Subject: Various

  Hey Uncle Richie,

  Just got online for the first time over here. They have a list of about 100 rules about email. We can’t say this—we can’t say that—all about security. BUT…there are 590 reporters (give or take a 100 or so) asking us questions and reporting everything we’re not supposed to be saying. No real problem because we don’t know anything. I wrote Dad a good letter. Anyway, I thought it was okay. Did you know he doesn’t like the internet? He says it “will mature” in another 20 years.

  The infantry and the marines are the stars over here. The camera crews follow the guys with the most equipment. Oh, this is not important, but I thought you might find it interesting. They have floors in the tents that look like the kind of floors at basketball games, the kind you assemble. We can’t put water on them because when the guys come in with sand on their boots it really messes them up. So we don’t have to wash them down. Small blessings. Last thing. The guys from the Arabic television station, Al Jazeera, all look like they could have come from Harlem…dark skinned, etc.

  If you talk to your brother, aka Dad, you might tell him that I was waiting for a letter from him.

  A lot of guys were getting nervous thinking we were going into combat, but most were just excited. It’s funny, but as much as guys talk about not wanting to be in a danger zone, I think we really do want it. We want to get home safe, but we want the danger. We were shown films of the first Gulf War over and over, watching planes hit small targets with guided missiles, hearing the voice-overs of guys cheering.

  I knew we were building up to it. It was almost like getting ready for a basketball game, reassuring ourselves that we were cool, that we were going to win. It got to be even more like that when the 3rd Infantry Division called a huge formation. It looked like a trillion guys lined up. The colors of the 3rd ID were out front along with the American flag. A few officers spoke, talking about the mission in Iraq and how proud America was of us. Then the main speaker, a tall general with a pistol strapped to his leg, came out an
d gave the order for us all to stand “at ease.”

  “We are the best trained, best equipped, bravest, most daring army in the world,” the general said. “Soon we will be entering Iraq. If Saddam is smart he will step aside and give the order to allow us to enter peacefully. And we will do so. If Saddam is dumb and refuses to step aside, we have to enter with force, and we will do so. How this war goes is up to the Iraqi army. But they will not be an obstacle to the successful completion of our mission.”

  Officers moved smartly, looked tough, reminded everybody over and over about how well we were trained. There was something about the speeches that all sounded alike.

  Back in the tent, me and Jonesy weren’t that sure about our training.

  “You think the Third is better trained than us?” Jonesy asked.

  “Probably,” I said. “I was trained to shoot at targets popping up in a field and they weren’t shooting back.”

  “Most of my training was about diving down when you heard gunfire,” Jonesy said. “Dive down, roll over one time, and get up running.”

  “Where was that training?”

  “In the ghetto, my man!” Jonesy said. “We had drive-through restaurants, drive-through car washes, and drive-by shootings. So on a real busy day the brothers didn’t even have to get out their machines.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “I just hope Marla has enough training to work the squad gun. She could have pulled driver.”

  “I think she can do it,” Jonesy said. “She’s got a little gangsta lean to her.”

  Jonesy was right. Marla Kennedy wasn’t somebody you took lightly.

  When Jonesy and I got back to our tent Sergeant Harris already had the television on; he flipped channels, looking for news. Harris hadn’t found anything official yet but kept saying stupid stuff like how he could tell by the Iraqi minister’s body language that they were going to fight.

  “Man, these people need to learn something!” he said.