House to House: A Tale of Modern War (33 page)

“Who is this? Billy the fucking Kid?” I whisper to Fitts.

“What unit is this?” he demands harshly.

Nobody responds. This pisses him off.

“Soldier!” he barks at me. “What outfit is this?” He sounds like a tough-guy wannabe.

“Excuse me?”

“What outfit you in?”

“That’s fucking Staff Sergeant, guy.”

He ignores that. “What unit is this?”

I’m ready to bitch-slap him until he squeals. Instead, Lieutenant Meno stares at this turd and says, “
Sergeant,
this is 2-2 Alpha.” Our platoon leader talks like a badass now, which, after the second-floor battle, he is. Meno killed more than his share that day. The divide between officers and NCOs is usually impenetrable, but Meno broke it. He is one of us. A brother.

Billy the Kid refuses to fuck off. Fitts sits up, and demands, “Hey dick, what do you need?”

“General Batiste is coming. Danger Six wants to thank each of you personally for what you’ve done.”

Outstanding. Somebody cut my face so I’ll have a scar and will always be able to remember this day.

He waits for a reaction. I suppose he wants a cheer, or an “Oh boy!” from us. We’re not having any of it. All we want is chow and a few hours of sleep. Our lives have whittled down to these two needs. Anything else is simply an obstacle.

Knapp speaks up next. “If Danger Six brings tacos, I’ll carry him around this bitch like we just won the Super Bowl.” We all break out laughing. Our visitor is not amused.

Billy the Kid tries again. He takes a few reluctant steps toward us. His handcuffs jangle on his body armor. “Danger Six is coming. You men need to get cleaned up for him.”

Does this mean I need to put a fresh strip of T-shirt up my blistered ass?

The soldier behind the Bradley dry heaves again. Fitts lies back down into the dirt. We ignore our visitor. The breeze blows the stench of fresh vomit over us, and Billy the Kid makes himself scarce.

Ruiz starts powdering his mangled feet. I’ve got shit on one side of me, puke on the other. And our general wants to come and talk to us.

I can’t take this anymore.

I close my eyes and lie back in the morning sun. In the distance, the REMFs smoke and joke while eating our food. They seem to be talking about some NBA basketball game highlights on ESPN’s
SportsCenter.

A figure blocks my sun. I open my eyes to an upside-down silhouette of a man. I cannot see who it is.

“What’s up?”

The man bends forward to look down at me. I see he is a major.

“Danger Six is in the AO (area of operation),” he says dramatically. I notice he’s got his rank on the front of his pristine helmet. He also has the classic mark of an REMF: there’s no night-vision mount on his Kevlar.

“You men need to get up and shave. He’s got the
Army Times
with him, and he’s got
Stars and Stripes.
”

We gawk at him like he’s a martian. He sees our reaction and decides to scold us, “I know you men have been in the bush, but we’re all in the army and we need to uphold the standards, Hooah?”

Nobody responds.
In the bush? Does this fucker think we’re in Vietnam?

The major opens his mouth to say something, but Fitts cuts him off. “What the fuck? You’re fucking kidding, right?”

I’m so congested and my hearing is so bad that I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or the entire platoon. I sit up and look around, trying to contain my fury.

Then I see him. A hundred meters away, Staff Sergeant Lockwald, our guitar-strumming, berm-blowing engineer, is talking with General Batiste.

Lockwald looks freshly shaved.

You’ve gotta be kidding. We spent last night sleeping nut to butt in body bags to stay warm. Now we’re supposed to shave so the general can have a photo op?

Lockwald isn’t the same man who opened the breach at the start of our assault. For one thing, the man who never wanted to take a human life found himself covering a road when a wave of insurgents rushed past, on their way to our precarious second-floor position. He faced a choice. Should he abandon his principles or let the Third Platoon’s dismounts get blindsided by thirty insurgents?

He racked the bolt on his Ma Deuce and knocked them down like bowling pins.

For another, the next morning, his half-joking wish came true. Captain Sims was done fucking around, and he ordered Lockwald and his band of engineers to fire a MICLIC down our target street. For blocks in all directions, windows shattered, buildings shook. Debris fell. The concussion wave killed dozens of insurgents. When we went through the neighborhood, we found them twisted in awful ways. In one house, I discovered a man who succumbed while clawing his own face and eyes. The concussion wave turned some of them almost inside out.

Lockwald shakes hands with General Batiste. They share a few words before the general moves on to another engineer.

“Hey, Fitts?”

“Yeah, bro?”

“They made all the engineers shave.”

Fitts spits a wad of chew into the dirt. “I can’t fucking take this shit.”

The major rejoins General Batiste’s brass-heavy entourage.

My stomach is grumbling. I look down and my belly is inflated with gas.

If I stand up, I’ll blow through the T-shirt strip and it’ll be Mount St. Anus again. I will coat my boots with a lava flow of feces.

We are all giant germ bombs. We detonate periodically. None of us has the strength to do anything more than lie in the dirt in our own filth.

“Fitts.”

“Bell.”

“All I want is some fucking Imodium or Pepto or something to clog me up. Then I want some food and sleep.”

“With ya.”

Behind us, the soldier dry heaves one final time, then collapses back into our group.

Knapp blows a wad of snot into the dirt. He’s got a fever and his throat is a bright crimson.

Our new sergeant major walks up to us. “What did that major want?” he asks.

When we tell him, Sergeant Major Bohn looks at us with incredulity. “He didn’t really say that, did he?”

“Yes he did, Sergeant Major.”

First Sergeant Smith gets wind of this as well. He comes tearing across the mess area cursing in German. His entire bald head is bright red. I’ve never seen him so livid. Sergeant Major Bohn goes to intercept him, but Captain Doug Walter collars him first.

Captain Walter. Our old Alpha Company commander.

He’s one of us again because of yet another loss. On the day after our second-floor siege, Captain Sims moved up to the next block and entered a house. We heard shots ring out. Sims went down. He’d walked into a prepared ambush. Two others were hit as well: at point-blank range, Joey Seyford took an AK round in the shoulder and another in the leg. Seyford stayed in the fight and drove off two insurgents. Air Force Staff Sergeant Greg Overbay, assigned to Alpha Company as a Joint Tactical Air Controller, was also shot in the house. Sergeant Travis Barreto pulled the men to safety and one of our interpreters, Sammy, ended up shooting an insurgent during the fray.

Sammy, a former Republican Guard weapons’ sergeant, felt especially close to what he considered his own commander, Sean Sims. As Barreto carried Seyford and helped Overbay out of the house, Sammy lifted heavy fuel drums so that the American soldiers could cross over the walls to be evacuated.

As they evaluated their wounded, Sammy was an emotional wreck. Tears streaming down his cheeks, Sammy knew what none of the other soldiers giving aid to the two wounded soldiers had yet to realize. Captain Sims had died inside that house.

Not since Vietnam had a unit lost so many leaders in one battle. Our immediate chain of command, Lieutenant Meno excepted, had fallen to enemy fire. Iwan. Sims. And our most senior enlisted man, Faulkenburg.

Captain Walter, who was living in Sims’s room at the base to protect his stuff from roving pillagers, caught a Blackhawk and flew to Fallujah to take over Alpha Company. Sims was his best friend, and he grieved more than anyone.

“Fuck the photos! Fuck shaving!” I hear First Sergeant Smith scream to Captain Walter. Sergeant Major Bohn is with them now. He nods his head. Smith is still livid, “All they want is fucking food, sir. Enough of the bullshit. They don’t know what these kids have been through.”

Before Doug Walter arrived to lead A company, First Sergeant Peter Smith became the acting commander. During a time of great stress, with his company reeling from all the tragic losses, Smith became a steady presence and brought his company to fight only fifteen minutes after losing Sean Sims.

General Batiste is not far away, talking with another engineer. Unless he’s as deaf as we are, he can’t possibly miss what’s going on. He ignores it.

Wow. This is awesome. First Sergeant Smith is about to snap. Our leadership is fighting for us.

But they lose. We are ordered to shave and try to clean up as best we can.

I find a beat-up travel razor powered by a couple of AA batteries and go to work. My beard is so thick, it’s like hacking blackberry bushes with a stick. I twist and tear chunks of hair out. By the time I’m done, I’ve ripped open old cuts all over my face. New ones crisscross the old. I get to my feet with the rest of the platoon. Our faces are splotched with blood from dozens of nicks and cuts. Normally, this would be no cause for worry. But here in Fallujah, they’ll be infected before morning.

I glance down at my body armor. It is still stained with the Boogeyman’s blood. After Lawson came up and found me on the rooftop, we checked the house and pulled the bodies out. Fitts and Lawson later found a sixth insurgent in a room upstairs behind the door I didn’t clear. They shotgunned him through a hole in the wall.

In the kitchen, we found drugs and U.S. Army–issue autoinjectors. They had been full of atropine and epinephrine. The muj inside the house had shot the drug directly into their hearts. It acted like PCP—angel dust—and kept them going long after my bullets should have killed them.

In another section of that house, I found a pouch with a Hezbollah insignia. At least some of the six men inside were Shia, not the radical Sunni we were told were so prevalent in the al Qaeda–dominated Anbar Province. Somebody else found documents from the Palestinian Authority amid the debris upstairs. Three flat stones called turbas were found under a Koran in a velvet cloth. Shiite Muslims place their foreheads on these stones when they prostrate themselves in prayer.

As I stare at the bloodstains on my body armor, I think about how those men died. The young ones were committed and they fought hard, especially the one in the wife-beater T-shirt who ran from the Jersey barriers to the kitchen at the start of the fight. I shot him two separate times, and he still came after me when I was trapped in the bedroom.

I find it ironic that the oldest of the bunch, the Boogeyman, hid in the armoire while his cell fought to the death. Then, when he felt trapped, he made a break for it and tried to run away. In the end, he pleaded for his life.

The young ones were more committed. They’ve been indoctrinated since childhood and are radicalized beyond reason. They will go willingly when their leaders stay back and order them to their deaths.

I wonder if this place is beyond hope.

General Batiste is coming toward us now. His shiny major lackey hangs back over one shoulder. Photographers and army reporters cluster around him. At this moment, at this place, General Batiste is a rock star.

I wish Mick Ware could see this. He and Yuri left us on the morning of the twelfth. Before going, Ware handed me his sat phone and told me to call my wife.

“Let the men call their families first,” I replied.

One by one, the men took turns talking to their loved ones. I went last. I took the phone and tried to dial with shaking hands.

The phone rang back in New York. Deanna answered.

She knew it was me. “David! Where are you?”

“I’m safe,” I said. I wonder what she’s been doing as all this has gone on.

“I’ve been watching the news. Are you in Fallujah?”

I couldn’t tell her that without violating operational security. Yet I wanted to tell her everything. I didn’t have time and I didn’t know how. How do you tell the love of your life that you smelled a man’s breath as you drove the life from him?

“My heart is killing me,” she exclaimed. “Every time I watch the news, I can’t stand it. Where are you? Tell me! You’re in Fallujah, right?”

“No,” I manage. “I’m near it. We’re okay.”

“I have had a horrible feeling. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

As I replay the conversation now, I marvel at how she could sense that.

A minute later, my little boy took the phone, “Daddy, make sure you fight bad guys!”

“Okay, buddy. I love you.”

“Fight bad guys!”

“Okay, Evan. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Daddy.”

And then, their voices were gone.

General Batiste shakes Meno’s hand. The two men chat, and as I watch them, Evan’s words return to me again. Maybe it is time to stop being a soldier and go home to be a father. And a husband for Deanna.

I’m not sure how.

General Batiste turns to Pulley. He surreptitiously reads his name tape before shaking his hand. “Private Pulley, I’ve heard good things about you, son.”

Cameras click and whir. We’re in the middle of a brass and grunt pony show.

The major appears in front of me. Despite my stench, he leans forward and whispers, “Hey soldier, give me your email address, and I’ll send you photos of you with Danger Six.”

“Sir, that would be david at eatabagofshit dot com.”

Fitts starts smiling. I realize we’ve come full circle. I am just like him now, intolerant of bullshit.

Anger flares across the major’s face. He sucks air, then says almost to himself, “We’re in Fallujah. I’m with the
infantry.
Just handle it.”

An hour later, we’re sent back into the fight.

EPILOGUE

Broken Promises

Summer 2006