War Porn (6 page)

“Alright, Crusader CP. This better fucking work.”

We passed more houses, lights burning bright in the darkness, more men standing in courtyards staring. Children watched from balconies. At the next turn, we went right and Lieutenant Juarez's team went left and we rolled down the alley to what looked like a cul-de-sac.

“There, there!” the BC shouted, pointing to a gap between a house and a small canal. “That's the road.”

“We can't get through there, sir,” I told him. The path was no bigger than a walkway.

“Don't
fucking
contradict me, Specialist! Drive down that road!”

Grinding teeth, I poked the truck into the alley. The right side dipped precipitously down the canal's bank. Left tires against the wall, my right tires churning mud at the water's edge, undercarriage dragging, I inched forward as the path narrowed and the slope steepened. I stopped the truck so I could shift into low-drive.

“Keep going! What are you stopping for!”

I eased the truck forward. The path narrowed and the right side sank deeper into ditch muck. Soon there wouldn't be any path at all.

“Sir.”

“Fine, I see! Fine!”

I put the truck in reverse and backed out. Thankfully the drivers behind us had waited, so it was a straight shot back to the cul-de-sac. Mud flung up from the tires.

The BC called up Lieutenant Juarez. His team hit a dead end, too. The BC radioed Lieutenant Krauss and told him to ask the MPs for directions. We reformed the convoy and returned to the CP.

Lieutenant Krauss radioed just as we were coming in Gate 1 and told us the MPs had started their assault, but they still needed us. He told us they had a route that went around BIAP. We were to go through Checkpoint 7 and take the first right.

“Do you mean go in through Checkpoint 7 or out?” the BC asked.

“
Uh, out.”

 

“Alright. Let's roll.”

We drove out Gate 2 and headed for Checkpoint 7. Just before reaching the checkpoint the BC told me to turn off the road. We drove between two closed-up vendors' shacks into a rough field of hard furrows. The humvee bumped up and down.

“I don't think this is a road, sir.”

“Keep going, Wilson.”

We came to a low berm separating the field from a flooded pasture.

“Fuck,” Captain Yarrow said. “Alright, turn around.”

We got back on the road and went through Checkpoint 7. The BC had me hug the right side, searching for the route over the canal. We eventually hit a dirt road that led off into the dark. The BC told me take it.

Lieutenant Krauss radioed that the MPs had secured the site but still needed help. They were undermanned and unable to handle security, processing prisoners, and chasing down fleeing targets all at once. Captain Yarrow told Krauss we were on our way.

The road rose onto a wide berm running along a canal. We drove down one side until it stopped, then doubled back to a bridge we'd passed and crossed to the other. We followed the berms, a maze in bas-relief, not sure where we were going but definitely headed the right general direction.

Eventually we came to a dip where the road led off the berm and through a depression. We followed it down then up around a low hill onto another berm, lined on one side with concertina wire, running northeast by southwest along an even larger canal.
This
was the canal we had to cross. There was no way across. We stopped.

“That's the house right there,” the BC said, pointing out a low, distant building surrounded by trucks. I looked with my NVGs: Martians making the green scene, maybe six hundred meters away.

We mounted up and drove until we came to a Bradley parked across the berm. Beyond the Bradley rose a wire-topped wall, BIAP's outer perimeter. Captain Yarrow scowled. He got out to talk with the Bradley commander, who didn't think there was any way across the canal from this side.

“You've gotta go around north,” he said, “through Gate 7.”

Captain Yarrow came back to the truck. “Head back to the CP,” he said. It was nearly midnight.

He radioed Lieutenant Krauss and told him find another route. Lieutenant Krauss said he thought he had one that went through Abu Ghraib, west along the highway, but that he had to show him on the map.

As we pulled through Gate 2, Lieutenant Krauss radioed and said the MPs had called off the request. We pulled up to the CP and Captain Yarrow ordered senior leadership into the hooch for an After-Action Review. Everyone else was dismissed.

I unloaded my rifle, stripped my battle rattle, and bummed a smoke from Healds. We had little to say. The whole thing was too dumb. All I could think about was how soon I'd take off my boots, crack open my cot, and rack out.

Halfway through our smoke, Lieutenant Krauss came out and started digging in the humvee, at first leisurely then with growing panic.

“Wilson, you see the BC's sidearm?”

“No, sir,” I said. “Why?”

“You sure?”

“Not since we rolled out.
Why
?”

“You might wanna get your gear back on.”

He ran back into the CP. Healds and I put our gear back on. A few minutes later the BC, Lieutenant Krauss, and some other soldiers mounted up and we took two trucks, C6 and C5, out the gate.

“Lock and load,” the BC said flatly, his empty white hands in his lap.

•••

He decided we'd start at the last place we'd been, so we drove all the way back through Checkpoint 7 out to the berm, going the whole way at walking speed so we could search the road with flashlights.

My helmet bit into my temples. Next to me, Yarrow's neck was tight with tension, his mouth set in a grimace.

We drove up to the Bradley, inching across the sand, then came back. We stopped so Lieutenant Krauss could kick at shrubs and poke in shadows. We drove back to the field outside Checkpoint 7 and parked in the furrows, policing them on foot. Please, I prayed, somebody please attack us.

We drove back to the other side of BADW, back among the houses, scanning the ground at a creep. The moon had set. It was after three. I was too tired to care anymore. We stopped in the cul-de-sac and searched the ditch on foot. The Iraqi men came out to watch us again.

We drove back down the alley with the wall on the left and the vegetation on the right, the first place we'd gone, and there, next to the donkey cart, was the Battery Commander's pistol, its lanyard splayed in the dust. It still had a round chambered.

The BC smiled as he holstered his sidearm. “Good work, men. Let's head home.”

 

P
rerecorded bugles pierced
the dark. “Crusader Rock!” Mondays and Wednesdays out the kaserne gate, running up past
the Edelsteinminen into the wooded hills or down through the
cobbled streets of Idar-Oberstein. Muscle-failure Tuesdays, push-ups, sit-ups. Thursdays training. Fridays the “fun run,” the whole battery, straight down the hill to the Bahnhof then suffer back up.

Mondays were Preventative Maintenance Checks and Services, Tuesdays and Wednesdays Army business, Thursdays Sergeants' Time Training, and Fridays motor-pool closeout. Clockwork.

Omens foretold action, if not an invasion at least serious bombing. Global drama, weapons inspections, secret reports.

Good. Yes. We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

Meanwhile, we grunted through the week, waiting for Freitag, aching for pilsner. We'd start a little on Wednesday night and sometimes Thursday too, and by the weekend hit full swing: hefeweizen, fräuleins, döner and schnitzel, jäger and techno, hazy days, hazier nights. There was Café Carré down the hill, our informal battalion pub, and there were The Matrix and the Q and a dozen others, and oh, the herman girls. If you got sick of the barracks sluts at The Matrix, the ones who knew more guys in the unit than you did, you could always take the train to Köln or Saarbrucken or a cheap flight to Prague or Berlin. There was the Savoy, too, where for eighty euros you could relieve your tensions with a Thai girl, and Rot Frankfurt, only an hour away, a red-lit sex bazaar of six-story whorehouses, titty bars, and erotik-shops, jam-packed with Japanese businessmen. Or, like my roommate Villaguerrero, whose girlfriend was back home in Queens, kill the weekend with
Grand Theft Auto
.

Rumors said we're deploying, rumors said we're not. Ultimatums were issued. Bullwinkle said there's no fucking way we're going. Sergeant First Class Perry shrugged.

Briefly, after settling into the routine but before we knew we were going, I came back to myself. After the shocks of Basic Training and moving overseas, months of pure action, I began to see myself again and wonder who was this strange and stronger man in camouflage. The past clung fragile, like dying moss, barely felt. I kept in touch with my old ex-girlfriend but didn't tell her about Julia and Sabine, didn't tell her much—what was there to say?

What was I now, a soldier?

Fuck no. All a sham. I'd tricked them, and I'd ride these four years till I got out and made a new plan. I'd drink the pilsner, salute the butterbars, and hop to it, pretending I cared. I'd wear the stars and stripes on my shoulder and intone the soldier's creed. Too easy.

We're not going, Bullwinkle sneered. Of course we're not going. That's fucking retarded.

•••

The president made a speech. Captain Yarrow told us be ready. That Friday we had battalion formation. The colonel said we'd be in the second wave, relieving the units currently moving in, either to finish the war or more likely for SASO. We had a tentative ship date at the beginning of May. Things'd be hopping and popping till then, but the colonel insisted we'd all get a week's leave.

We spent that weekend drunk—calls home to tearful mothers—tense discussions with wives and kids—and Monday started the paperwork, packing, predeployment logistics clusterfuck. We got issued new gear. We got ceramic SAPI plates for the vests, but only two sets per battery. There weren't enough desert boots. The DCUs were all the wrong sizes.

We watched the war on TV. We tracked Fox News, Nasiriyah and Basra, the Old Breed, Rock of the Marne, the Screaming Eagles. A few days later, we were told we'd have the next week for block leave. I called my ex-girlfriend and asked her if she wanted to come to Paris. I said I'd pay for everything.

 

squeezing the trigger releases the hammer,

which strikes the firing pin,

causing it to impact the primer

 

 

I woke to a dull sky, the air not yet warm. Early sun shot between massive apartment blocks to the east, gleaming off the turquoise dome beyond the north wall of Camp Lancer, gilding palm leaves, turning the streets to light. I crammed my patrol bag in my stuff sack and folded my cot.

I went out through the X-taped glass door to the balcony overlooking the courtyard. At the near end were two plastic chairs, and at the far end Captain Yarrow on his cot in a sleeping mask. I sat down, lit a smoke, and watched the sky brighten behind the mosque's minarets.

The city slept. To the north, an orderly middle-class neighborhood, a grid of streets, houses and yards, cars parked in driveways, shaded sidewalks. Kids played soccer there. To the east and west, thoroughfares lined by shops, market stalls, and cafés. Farther east stood high-rise apartments, but to the west the neighborhood thinned to a desolation of half-built homes and vacant lots bordering the UN compound at the Canal Hotel. Beyond that lay the borders of Sadr City, a warren of low wires and bristling a
erials ruled by Ali Baba and Shi'a militias. To the south, beyond the defunct cigarette factory, the city stabbed up: minarets and smokestacks, the Green Zone's palace spires, Ba'athist icons, cyclopean dream-sculpture. In the distance a great blue egg hung against the sky like a fallen planet.

This was the only time all day the city breathed softly, evoking in the pale, slanting light imagination's Babylon, letting me feel for a moment like the poet I'd once been.

Later the temperature would top 115. Later I'd chamber a round and prepare to kill. Later the heat and stink of the day, the yelling faces, rancor, noise, and fury broiling and thrumming in waves off the blacktop would make me both want and fear needing a reason to pull my trigger, to feel my grip buck in my hands, to tear jagged red holes in men's flesh.

But for a moment, I had white-gold serenity glazing still arcades. I prayed in the morning's ease for grace, that I might find it somewhere out there over the wall and down shadowed alleys, under arabesques of purpled gold, beneath the hovering sun now glaring like a blooded eye.

Downstairs I showered in a makeshift stall between two ponchos. I put on the same sweat-stiff DCUs I'd worn the day before. I checked my combat load, made sure I had the BC's MP3 speakers. I did daily maintenance: oil, coolant, transmission fluid, belts. Struts, CV joints, tires. I checked the undercarriage for leaks.

•••

Healds, Porkchop, and I headed for breakfast, walking through the shattered central hall of the bombed-out six-story ruin that stood between us and the DFAC. Wires and collapsed supports hung from the ceiling like vines. Holes blasted in the floor dropped into stinking sub-basements full of soda cans and rot, pits yawned in dusty corridors littered with rock and paper, the scent of things long dead wafting up from below. Stories of crushed stone loomed overhead, gashed rebar jutting and bristling rust-red through tunnels of light burrowing into the sky, broken granite, twisted metal. Sometimes chips of stone clattered down rubble-choked stairs and we'd flinch, imagining the whole thing collapsing in on us.

We came through the shade into a flash of light outside the DFAC where three sergeants lounged smoking cigars. We cleared our rifles and went inside. We got our food and coffee, slathered our plates with Texas Pete, then sat in plastic chairs at plastic tables and watched Fox News on a widescreen TV.

Glory. The salt and pepper shakers, the napkins and plastic forks and Styrofoam plates, the bad food, the worse coffee, even the ketchup packets and juice boxes glowed sublime, transcendent, essential. I cherished it. I needed it. I relished those eggs and that coffee and the witless ballyhoo on the satellite news, dizzily feeling for a moment like a man in a world where people had
opinions
about
events
, a world of APRs and Dow Jones numbers and mortgages and “thinking outside the box,” a world where celebrities had breakdowns and we complained about cell-phone service and no one was trying to blow my fucking legs off.

A humvee burned, caught in the TV's frame like a votive. Honorable Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came on and said we'd reached a turning point. He was followed by a man with mousse in his hair standing on the roof of the Palestine Hotel, then a commercial for Viagra.

The
Hagakure
reads: “The way of the samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance
. . . 
If by setting one's heart right every morning, one is able to live as though already dead, he gains freedom in the way.”

I checked my weapon, patted down my armor plates, reminded myself that I was a soldier and this was my fucking job and I would damn well try to die with a little dignity.

Beyond the gate, the roads were already thick with cars, the skies hazy with smog. The chaos out there, the crazy Arabic writing and abu-jabba jabber, the lawless traffic, the hidden danger and buzz and stray bullets and death looming from every overpass pressed down on my soul like a hot wind. On the streets, eyes scanning trash for loose wires, I sank into the standard daily manic paranoid torpor: trapped in a broiling box with big targets on the sides, damned to drive the same maze over and over till somebody killed me. We rolled down Canal Road, our escorts weaving in and out of traffic, our hemmets and Iraqi semis chugging behind.

“Whatcha wanna listen to?” Captain Yarrow yelled over the engine.

“Whattaya got?” I shouted back.

He waved his MP3 player at me. “All kinds of stuff,” he shouted.

I shrugged. He pushed a button. The Pet Shop Boys blasted from the speakers, singing “West End Girls.”