Sunrise Over Fallujah (7 page)

“A marine detachment,” Nelson said. “They're telling us it's safe for us to go in.”

“You're looking for civilians; do you speak Iraqi?”

“I speak Arabic,” Nelson said, looking about as white as a human being could look.

The Intelligence guys supposedly knew where they were going and would lead the way with Second Squad. Captain Coles rode with us. Inside the Humvee the captain was mumbling to himself.

“Something we should know?” Jonesy asked.

“The chain of command is getting weak,” Coles said. “If you listen to the air traffic, you hear a lot of people trying to find out where their units are.”

“I thought they were hitting fast and hard?” Marla chimed in.

“If you're in a fight and you're winning, it's fine,” Captain Coles said. “But if something looks fishy and you need some backup in a hurry, it would be good to know where the cavalry is.”

“And the way I figure it, you can never tell when you're going to need some backup in a hurry,” I said.

“This reminds me of when they started a happy hour in a bar in my hometown,” Jonesy said. “It was a colored bar and they ain't never had a happy hour. Some folks thought they was gonna get free drinks. When they found out that they had to buy a drink to get a free one they got to fighting and tore the place up. That's what's happening over here. They don't know if they should be getting happy or tearing us up.”

Marla was on the squad gun and I tapped her knee to get her attention as Jonesy pulled the Humvee out onto the road. I thought she might be tired. She kicked me with the back of her heel.

“Yo, Marla, I'm a friendly!” I called to her.

“Mess with my leg again and I'll shoot you through the top of your head,” she answered.

“Yo, Jonesy, is Marla weird or what?” I asked.

“Hey, man, we all weird,” Jonesy said. “Or do you always do drive-bys in the name of democracy?”

We were going south again to meet up with a company from the 3
^rd
ID. Captain Coles had the GPS system going and was comparing the coordinates on the screen with our maps. That made me feel a little better because there weren't any map landmarks that I recognized. There were some American military trucks on
the road, mostly supply units, and a few British units. There were Iraqi vehicles as well, older trucks and an occasional overcrowded bus. Captain Coles started talking about what was probably going on in his hometown and we figured out that the time difference was eight hours.

“It's three in the afternoon here and back home they're just getting up,” he said.

“Contact ahead, they're moving to one side!” Marla's voice was crisp, hard.

I felt myself tensing. For a moment I closed my eyes, then realized what I was doing, and opened them again. I felt my hand sweating and wiped it on my pants leg.

Please, God, don't let me do anything stupid.

“What do you think?” Captain Coles asked.

The first two Humvees had already passed an old wagon. Its right side was broken down and it leaned precariously. One of the Iraqis was unhitching the two old mules that had been pulling it, while two other men argued with each other.

“They don't look like hostiles, sir,” I said.

“Keep moving, Jonesy,” Coles said.

Jonesy had slowed to a crawl, and started edging along the left side of the road when the wheels started slipping. There were a number of curses as the Humvee slid along the shoulder and into the marshy area.

Jonesy revved up the engine and tried to get us out. Nothing.

The other Humvees slowed when they saw us stop. Coles got on
the radio and told them what was going on. The Humvee in front of us stopped sixty yards down the road and Second Squad backed up for security behind us.

“Keep your eyes open, Marla,” Jonesy said.

Jonesy frantically spun the wheels, but the Humvee just slid deeper into the marsh. Coles got off the radio and started cursing again. He was really good at it, too.

“Nobody's got a tow chain,” he said. “If they try to push us out we'll all be stuck here.”

I got out and sank into a foot of warm, stinky mud. It smelled like human waste; I wanted to gag. I slogged my way up to the road until I was on solid ground. Captain Coles came out next. Jonesy and Marla followed, sinking thigh deep in the slop.

“What the hell we going to do?” Jonesy asked. “No way I'm walking back.”

“We'd have to destroy the vehicle if we left it,” Captain Coles said. “Let me try to get it out. Keep an eye on our guests.”

There were three Iraqi men, two young guys and an older man. They were looking under the wagon and pointing.

Captain Coles got into the Humvee, turned on the engine, and we watched as the back end of it slipped even farther. The Iraqi men started talking to one another and one of them climbed onto the wagon.

Jonesy and I had our M-16s ready and I stepped a few feet away from him. The Iraqi that had climbed into the wagon, one of the younger guys, came out with a rope. He started our way.

None of us spoke Arabic, so we had to figure out that he meant to tie a rope to the Humvee and pull it out of the marsh.

“We could call back to the base and get another vehicle out here with towing equipment in a half hour or so,” I said.

“Or whoever is watching us could get a vehicle of Arabs over here in five or ten minutes,” Jonesy said. “We'd be sitting ducks on foot. There's nothing to get behind.”

I smiled at the Iraqis, or at least pushed my face forward into what I hoped looked like a smile, and reached for the rope.

The Iraqi held his hands up and then started toward the Humvee. The other young guy went out into the goo with them and I remembered the box of grenades we had left behind in the Humvee. Wonderful.

The two men left their sandals on the road, lifted their long shirts, and waded through the mud to the back of the Humvee. They found the tow hook and tied the rope to it, and then held the rope high while they came back onto the road.

Then the oldest Iraqi went and got the mules.

“Birdy, this is embarrassing!” Marla said as the guy tied the rope around the mules' halter.

“Gahhh!” he yelled. The mules started to pull.

Jonesy got behind the wheel and started the engine.

A few more Iraqis, two older guys, and a woman with three children stopped to look. One of the men was hollering out something and trying to show Jonesy which way to turn the wheel. It took fifteen minutes before the Humvee cleared the mud.

We thanked the Iraqis and offered them ten bucks in American money, but they turned it down. There was a lot of smiling and bowing and I could see that the Iraqis were pleased with themselves. Here we were, the conquering heroes stuck in the mud, and here they were, rescuing us.

Back in the Humvee we were very embarrassed and smelled like dog crap. Marla cleaned her hands with disinfectant gel and wiped them off on me. The Iraqis cheered us as we started off.

We reached Shuyukh, the place we were supposed to be, and found the other squads.

Sergeant Harris came over and, as soon as he got a whiff of us, stopped and backed off two steps.

“Man, y'all smell baaad!”

“Shut up, Sergeant,” Captain Coles snapped. He was trying to wipe the bottom of his fatigues off with hand wipes.

Harris went back to the other squads and soon they were all around us, offering helpful comments about personal hygiene. Jean Darcy asked us if we had some kind of secret weapon.

“We're in the same unit, so if you got something good you should share it,” she said. “I think you're like clouding the enemy's mind or something with that stench.”

Marla blamed the whole thing on Jonesy.

“I can't handle the turret, lead the way, and drive at the same time,” she said.

“You could at least change them when they make poo poo in the pants,” Jean said.

Captain Coles tried to smile but couldn't.

We were at the Shuyukh site for an hour, while the Intelligence guys talked to some locals. I found out they were looking for weapons of mass destruction and this was one of the suspected sites. They didn't find any weapons of mass destruction, but they did find a crate of American cigarettes.

On the way back to the base the stink got worse and Captain Coles said we had better wash good. “Maybe even get antibiotics or something,” he said. “God only knows what we were wading through.”

When we hooked up with the guys from the 3
^rd
we found it was the Signal detachment. They had trucks full of communication gear as well as dozens of portable generators. We were given a choice of what we could do. We could go back to the bivouac area that the headquarters element of the 3
^rd
ID had set up outside of An Nasiryah that night, or the first thing in the morning.

None of us could stand the smell any longer so we decided to stay the night.

Field showers are usually cold but the water had been warmed enough by the sun to make these all right. I washed and thought about what my mom would have said if she had seen us being pulled out of the marsh. I was sure she would have laughed.

“Yo, Birdy, you know all this part of the world is in the Bible?” Jonesy asked.

“If you say so.” I was on the ground with my gear under my head.

“You go to church back home?” he asked.

“Sometimes. You?”

“My father's a minister,” he said. “But I don't go.”

Jonesy had a portable radio and turned it on. He put it on his chest but was soon asleep and the radio fell off. When he rolled over on it, I thought he would wake up. He didn't. It had been that kind of a day.

April 4, 2003

Dear Dad and Mom
,

Things are going well here. We have met very little resistance. The Infantry guys and the Marines are catching it a little but my unit is still cool. I think we are helping the Iraqis, but even more than that, I think we are showing them that Americans are good people, and that we don't want to hurt them.

Iraq is weird—kind of an odd mix with old stuff and new. Some of the cities look as if everything was built a few months ago, but other places could be directly out of the Old Testament. I guess that sounds silly because I don't know what the world looked like during the Old Testament, but it's what I imagine.

We did have some people take a few shots at us but nobody in our unit was injured. When the Iraqis shoot at Americans, there is a terrible price for them to pay because what we have to shoot back with is overwhelming. The only problem is that it is hard to know who the bad guys are or if there
are really any bad guys. I don't know what it will be like later on. It depends, I guess. If they respect us and accept democracy, then everything will turn out all right. I heard a guy from one of the infantry units say that this is a camel-tank war. They have the camels and we have the tanks. The whole thing should be over soon, which is good.

I will try to get copies of pictures to send to you. There are reporters everywhere. They are allowed to come along on the missions and even film in combat zones. They let the Arabic newspeople come along, too. There are a lot of ways of looking at what is happening over here, I guess.

Mom, Dad, I love you both very much and miss you as well. Your son, Robin.

P.S. This girl in our squad, Marla Kennedy from Long Island, calls me Birdy, and now everyone is calling me Birdy. I don't mind, though.

April 12, 2003

Dear Uncle Richie,

It's over! I didn't think I would be so relieved, but I am. Everybody here is celebrating. We rolled into Baghdad early this morning and people on the street were waving to us. Whoa! It's like winning the Super Bowl or something. We picked up a Marine escort and they asked us if we wanted to go to Firdos Square, which is like the main square in Baghdad, I guess. We said yes, of course, and they took us to where the statue of Saddam was torn down.

We're bunking down in an office building. It had air conditioning before the war but the electrical system is down big-time. Jonesy found something that looks like a guitar but an Iraqi called it an oud. Jonesy is trying to play the blues on it.

We're all kind of relaxed. There were casualties, but none as bad as what I thought might happen. I think the 4
^th
Marines took the most hits. There is talk that they had more guys killed than the papers or television mentioned. Some guys from the 4th came here to pick up Quick Clot bandages. They said it wasn't for them, but for some of the Kurdish fighters from the north. To tell the truth, you can't tell the players over here without a scorecard. There are Iraqis all over the place—it is their city and everything, but who knows what they are thinking. I asked Ahmed if the Iraqis are really glad we're here and kicked out Saddam. He said he couldn't tell because they were afraid of him. Him and us, too. I guess.

I think they were glad to see us. Otherwise wouldn't they have fought more? I don't know how many Iraqis were killed or wounded. They
don't count them except in the After Action reports, and then I think it's more of a guess than anything because a guy in the 3
^rd
said that the Iraqis always drag away their bodies. I know they could have fought more because we are finding huge amounts of shells, ammo, and stuff. Some of it's old and nobody is paying much attention to it but there's tons of the stuff around.

There's looting going on, too. Guys with wheelbarrows piled high with furniture, office machines, and anything else that isn't nailed down.

Anyway, I'm sure everybody at home is glad the war is over. Yesterday (or the day before, I couldn't tell) the Iraqi 5
^th
Corps formally surrendered. There are rumors that we could be going home within two weeks. I think we'll have to serve a full six months before they start rotating us back. I just hope they start counting the six months from the time we first landed in Kuwait.

I wanted to write to Dad and tell him about the war being over but he is still acting sour about me being in the army. I received the letter Mom wrote and he added a note that only said that he was glad I was safe. I bet Mom told him to add that. It's funny, but one of the reasons I'm glad that I didn't get killed or wounded or anything was that I didn't want Dad to say “I told you so.”

Good-bye for now—Robin

P.S. Another rumor is that they have found a mountain of poison gas canisters and some other suspicious material. I guess those are the weapons of mass destruction that everyone was talking about.