Ryan Smithson (5 page)

Our shift is over. We’d love some sleep, and none of us is very hungry. But we decide to walk a half mile to the chow hall anyway. The thing that’s great about army camps overseas is they have four meals a day. Because so many soldiers are working through all hours of the night, there’s a midnight chow. We fill the generator with gas first, and the three of us walk and talk and laugh and bond on a level I never thought possible with people I’ve known less than two months. We eat through our hour-long break and then continue working.

And this is the life of a soldier in Kuwait. Soldiers doing what they have to do to enter Iraq, a country they don’t really want to visit in the first place. Simple GIs doing their part in their generation’s war. Our involvement probably won’t mean anything when the war’s all said and done. The
war will probably come to the same conclusion no matter what we do. So we do what we’re told. There’s no point in fighting it. Just do the best we can. Me and this ragtag group of GIs called Equipment Platoon.

The army tells me to go to Fort Bragg so I do it. The army tells me to pack my shit and hop a plane to the throat of the Persian Gulf so I do it. The army tells me, an average teenage boy just doing what he can after witnessing the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, to armor my own 20-ton and then drive four boys and a platoon sergeant into a combat zone so I do it.

I
’m not really ready for it. I’m a GI following orders. Somehow I think we’ll be pulled back, our mission scratched. “Sorry about the confusion, folks. Return home to your families.” But, really, no such luck.

It goes on as planned. Our convoy leaves for Iraq on December 22, 2004. And ready or not, here it comes.

Driving in the middle of a thirty-vehicle convoy, I feel my nerves relax. This is how training is supposed to work. You do it so much, it feels natural. True, this is my third time driving a 20-ton dump truck, but my MOS is operating equipment. I’m used to the rough, wide handling of military junk, and my experience relaxes me. Of course we’re not yet in Iraq.

After a full six hours of convoying, we stop at another camp in Kuwait: Camp Cedar Two. There isn’t enough room or necessity for us to be set up with tents like at Camp Virginia, so we stage the vehicles in a large formation and use them for a barracks.

Attached to my rucksack is the army-issue sleeping bag that smells like old vinyl and cooked pine. When we stop, the vehicles are staged in two long lines. I’m somewhere in the middle, and I dismount the tall dump truck to begin my after-operations PMCS.

As I come around the right side of the 20-ton, I see SGT Tim Folden doing an after-PMCS on his M916. He’s rubbing his backside with his empty hand.

“How’s your ass?” I ask.

“I’ll let you know once I can feel it again,” he says. We both laugh.

We continue our PMCS and then head off to dinner. In the chow hall I find one of the long tables with EQ members sitting at it. At this table the meal is quiet. Soldiers stationed at this camp surround us, and we look at them with a bit of jealousy and a bit of pride.

We’re crossing the border tomorrow. Most of these soldiers won’t go into Iraq for their whole deployment. They eat their meals, laughing and joking. We look at them the way a pack of wolves must look at domesticated dogs.

Like we’ll be fighting to survive tomorrow while these
guys will be sitting in these same seats. Like we’ll be lucky to eat tomorrow while these guys just wait for a dinner call, for a pile of food in their bowls.

That night the temperature drops 30 or 40 degrees. The chill is so fast it seems to drop down my spine. This sudden chill, it’s like the Grim Reaper tracing your spine with his fingernail.

I lie in the back of the dump truck trying to fall asleep, and the cold desert night even reaches me in my sleeping bag. These sleeping bags work for, like, forty below. I tell myself it’s the metal of the dump truck bed. Metal’s a conductor, and it sucks the cold right out of the air. I tell myself it’s keeping me from falling asleep.

I climb out of the back of the 20-ton and gaze up at the mere sliver of crescent moon. I think of the old adage of God’s thumbnail. In this part of the world, during this time of the year, God’s thumbnail points straight down. And since the Middle East is the supposed birthplace of civilization (and Jesus and Mohammed), well, I guess that makes sense.

I take my bundled-up sleeping bag to Folden’s tractor trailer. The 916 trailers have two-by-eights running down the center. These pieces of wood, unlike the metal dump bed, are insulators. They’re resistant to temperature change. There are already more than a dozen soldiers claiming Folden’s trailer as their bed, man-sized cocoons huddling
to the center of a flatbed.

I find an empty spot and bunk down. As I fall asleep, I watch the stars. The sky here is so clear that I see five shooting stars before I doze off. That’s five wishes. And they all involve tomorrow.

As we awake, we brush the frost off our sleeping bags. We pack our stuff, brush our teeth, and pee behind the vehicles’ wheels. We PMCS, I open an MRE and take out the instant coffee.

MREs are the vacuum-packed meals the army gives soldiers in the field. At room temperature MREs have a shelf life of over ten years. And each little pouch of food can withstand a static load of two hundred pounds for three minutes. This means that a two-hundred-pound man could stand on top of a bag of applesauce without it bursting. The downside of this strength and stamina is everything in them tastes like salty cardboard.

I pour the powdered coffee into a Baggie and add cold water from my canteen. I use as little water as possible. That way I’m not forced to sip the coffee. Instead I take it like a shot of caffeine.

One of the maintenance guys pulls out a stick of chalk. It’s good chalk that doesn’t wash off easy. The maintenance platoon uses it to write on equipment, to mark it for whatever kind of maintenance reason. We use it for decoration.

One guy draws a target on his 20-ton with the exclamation “You won’t do it!” Someone else writes “Iraq or Bust” on his Humvee. The 20-ton ahead of me says “C-Ya in Hell” on its rear bumper. The Lord’s prayer is written on an armored 916 door. Someone else writes “Acme” on a gun turret. Another draws flames.

The rumble of thirty or so diesel engines starting wakes up the sun. It comes up as we roll out the gate of the camp. It’s December 23. I joined the army exactly two years ago.

We’re in Iraq. Iraq is on TV—the evening news. Being in Iraq is like being on a new planet. It’s something other people do, like curing world hunger. It’s something that’s not supposed to happen in real life. Not to me. It’s getting AIDS. It’s being broken down. It’s the first day of Red Phase.

A small number of the company already flew into Iraq to coordinate things for our arrival. I get to drive into Iraq. I am jealous of the advanced party. They got the easy way out: a stress-free C130 aircraft. I get a 20-ton dump truck. But all of us who have to convoy, maybe we’re the lucky ones. We claim injustice, we ask why we can’t all fly, but really we don’t care. We didn’t come to Iraq to fly over Iraq. We came here to fucking own the place.

In Kuwait we don’t travel with locked and loaded magazines. When we near the border, Munoz picks up his M16, loads a magazine, and slams the bolt forward. He does the same for mine. That sound of a weapon being loaded,
metal crunching together, it sounds lethal. That
click-clack
, it sounds like power.

We cross the border, and we’re ready for buildings exploding, for car bombs and mushroom clouds. We’re ready for bloodstains and dead bodies. I can feel my heartbeat in my throat, and I’m ready to fight my way through towns and villages. Kuwait isn’t where they riot in the streets and burn the American flag. Kuwait is not where they plant roadside bombs and shoot at us. That’s Iraq.

We cross the border, and we’re ready to kill. We’re ready to die.

We cross the border, and there are children. Little girls and little boys. Their faces are dirty with desert sand and sweat. But it’s not what they look like that shocks me. It’s what they do.

They see our convoy. We Americans, we’re occupying their country. CNN says it’s wrong, and on some level, I know it’s wrong. MSNBC says the people of Iraq hate us, and on some level I know they hate us. And I know that Josh Miller—an average, redheaded farm boy—will be forced to shoot these children when they start throwing rocks at us. That’s the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).

It was covered in the convoy briefing. The “hooahs” that we yelled were forced and pathetic. “Hooah” is the army phrase that lets everyone know you’re all in. Think “Tonight, men, we take that hill!” and then a crowd of
scruffy guys yells, “Hooah!” from their guts. By definition hooah means anything but no. But in the briefing before we left when LT reminded us of our SOP, gave us orders to shoot children if they threw rocks, the hooahs sounded desperate, like boys acting tough.

Rocks are life-threatening when you’re traveling sixty miles an hour.

Suck it up. You’re a soldier and this is war.

I’m an American, and I know these children and their parents don’t want me here. I know they hate me and burn my flag and drag soldiers’ bodies through the streets.

Fuck ’em. I didn’t choose to come here. I’m here on orders.

They want to throw rocks, I’ll give them a brain full of 5.56 rounds. Put my M16 on burst. Three rounds in rapid succession. The military took the automatic option out of M16s after so much ammo was wasted in Vietnam, but they’ll never take away that three-round burst. Aim low. Maybe I’ll get ’em in the stomach and they’ll suffer some before they bleed out. Right there on the side of the road. Right there in front of their stupid sheep.

Suck it up. This is war we’re talking about, GI. This is your life we’re talking about, GI Joe Schmo.

I have four men standing in the back of my dump truck. One has a mounted M60 machine gun. Another has a SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) machine gun. The other
two have M16s and hand grenades. Let’s see some blood, gunners.

Throw rocks at you? You’re going to let
haji
rocks take you out of the game on your first convoy? You’re going to let
haji
rocks keep you from your family? That won’t happen on
my
truck. Let’s bathe the streets in blood, comrades.

Dozens of children line the road. They raise their hands. Their hands are empty. The kids look at Munoz and me with dark round eyes and pull their hands to their mouths. Their sheep stand in huddled masses behind them, and the children motion their empty hands to their mouths over and over again. They are begging for food.

Cold lightning drops down my spine. Tears leak into the corners of my eyes.

This is Neil Munoz’s first time in Iraq, and he waves to the kids.

“Jesus,” he says. “See that?”

You don’t know what sadness looks like until you’ve seen children begging for food. Munoz rummages behind his seat, finds an open box of MREs. He tosses a few out of his window, and the kids rush to pick them up. In the side mirrors I can see the children devouring the salty, cardboard meals.

This is the moment of my epiphany. When adults say, “Someday, you’ll understand,” this is what they’re talking
about. When your parents yelled at you for not finishing dinner—“There are children starving in Africa.” This is why the drill sergeants told me I was stupid to be a hero. This is why we invaded Iraq.

On the side of the road: Their faces are worn. Their bodies are scrawny. Their clothes are rags. To get around, they use their feet—dirty, farmland feet that have grown up walking on rocks, thick-skinned feet that have never worn designer shoes.

The children look as if they should be in elementary school, but their eyes show wisdom I never would have understood in elementary school. These kids have wisdom I’m only beginning to grasp now. They are dirty and sweaty from working in the fields all day. They don’t work to make money. They don’t get allowance. They don’t have part-time jobs after school busing tables so they can buy their first cars or new clothes or TV/DVD player combos for their bedrooms. They work to live. They farm crops and livestock so their family can eat.

How many kids in America can say their day-to-day efforts are a result of the struggle to survive?

Conscious of the fact that the military sees them as more of a threat than their children, the parents stand farther away from the road. They wave or hold their thumbs up, but they don’t beg. In Middle Eastern culture giving is more valued than receiving. On their faces
I see them watching our convoy intently, curious as to whether or not we will throw food. Because they are hungry too.

They are not burning flags in large chaotic riots like I expected, like the evening news said. Their thumbs are up.

After six hours of driving we arrive at Camp Scania in southern Iraq for a fuel-up.

Moore is the first one to break the silence as we stand beside our long line of staged vehicles, some of us smoking cigarettes, some of us pissing behind wheel wells.

“You see those kids?” Scott Moore says.

“Yeah,” we say.

“Didn’t expect that,” I say.

“Me neither.”

There’s no point in being tough about this war, this vile stomach of a country. Being tough, being bloodthirsty, no longer seems important.

Moore adds, “It breaks your heart.”

After fueling we drive, past Baghdad and over the Tigris River. We pass Balad and arrive at Camp Anaconda. According to the rumors, it’s not such a bad spot to end up. It’s an old air base that was built in the 1980s. This means that our housing should be pretty decent. The base has been established for a while, so the chances of occupying a hard building (i.e., not a tent) are pretty good. The air
force is based here, and the air force treats its servicemen about a thousand times better than the army does. They wouldn’t be stationed anywhere without access to showers, and at the very least, housing trailers.

We unload our gear into our temporary homes. They call it Tent City, and it’s similar to how we stayed in Kuwait. A bunch of tents dress, right, dressed as if standing in formation.

It’s almost 2300 hours (eleven
P.M
.), and as we park the vehicles and unload our personal gear, Christmas is just around the corner. I’m standing in my tent when the clock strikes 0000.

“Merry Christmas,” I say in the driest voice possible. Imagine if Christmas was a doctor’s appointment. That’s how much we feel like celebrating.

After a couple hours of unloading and a short briefing by the commander we bunk down. A dozen or so fold-out army cots are squished into this tent on concrete floors. On the outside rocks cover the ground. The rocks cover the dirt. Because the dirt turns to mud when it rains. And in Iraq, during winter, it rains a lot.

When we wake up in the morning, we rally between the four tents that EQ platoon occupies. LT Zeltwanger, platoon leader, stands in the middle.

“Great job on the convoy,” he says. “You guys are released
for the day. Go contact your families. Tell them you love them.”

He gives us information about where the phone centers are, the internet cafés, the chow hall, and the shower trailers, and gives us our mailing address so our families can send packages.

“Oh,” he says. “And Merry Christmas.”

I think of Heather and my parents. Back home, eight hours behind, it’s about midnight. I can’t call them yet, this afternoon maybe. For the last three days we’ve been convoying. We haven’t been able to call or e-mail. Just like when we left for Kuwait, I didn’t discuss specifics when I talked to them.