Weapons of Mass Destruction (12 page)

“Know what happens when you straddle the fence?”

“Sir!”

“You get your balls blown off. Know what happens to your buddies?”

“Sir!”

“They get their balls blown off.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Want to live the rest of your stinking life with their blood on your hands?”

“No, sir!”

Sinclair vowed to shoot anyone carrying anything even vaguely resembling a gun. This was a war zone, not a kindergarten. Kids too young to drive were packing guns. Their mothers concealed grenades in their abayas. Not all of them. But it only took one to maim and mangle a body beyond recognition.

“Better theirs than yours,” Sergeant Troy shouted.

“Yes, sir!”

A firefight erupted in a nearby compound, answered by the boom of a grenade. Two men dressed in black with checkered kaffiyehs jumped from second-story windows. Finally some action. They tumbled to break the impact and sprang up with the dexterity of either athletes or trained combatants. Sinclair hit the lead runner square in the chest, a clean shot. His fourth kill of the day tripped up the second man, who sprawled and skidded across the pavement behind a low wall. Sinclair dialed in the distance and bided his time. All those hours spent in hunting blinds had honed his patience as well as his aim. Sooner or later, kill number five would peek over the wall or make a run for it. Suddenly Trapp and McCarthy appeared at the back door of the compound.

“Watch the wall,” Sinclair said into his headset. “One concealed insurgent.”

“Got him,” Trapp said.

Trapp motioned and Vasquez joined him at the door. They opened fire to cover McCarthy as he sprinted across the courtyard. The insurgent realized he was surrounded. Jumping to his feet, he dropped his rifle and raised his hands over his head in a single urgent motion. McCarthy emptied a round into the man’s torso and then signaled to Sinclair, giving him a thumbs-up.

Sinclair didn’t respond to this breach of protocol. Giving away a sniper’s position was strictly taboo. McCarthy was obviously pretty pumped up, so much so he had just plugged a man in the act of surrendering. Sinclair refrained from scoping the corpse to check for the concealed weapon that would justify McCarthy’s decision to fire. Second-guessing a fellow marine would have been another breach of protocol.

Wolf and the rest of the squad joined McCarthy’s celebration in the courtyard. Like football players, they had been warned not to hotdog. Rubbing victory in your opponents’ faces was especially bad form when the stakes were so high. But cameras were seldom around to enforce the ban. In any case, platoons could usually count on media discretion. Embeds had received their own warnings. They turned a blind eye to the spectacle of Americans dishonoring corpses. Conversely, footage of the enemy gloating over American bodies was worthy of prime time news. No one would ever forget the image of terrorists cheering the falling Towers. The image alone launched the War on Terror, allegedly justifying the eventual invasion of Iraq. Had Fallujans not been caught in the act of reveling on Brooklyn Bridge, Sinclair and his buddies would have been playing pinochle back at base camp rather than racking up kills in East Manhattan. The pictures, not the four charred bodies themselves, prompted Operation Vigilant Resolve.

Trapp high-fived Vasquez. McCarthy mimicked the dead insurgent, mincing around with his hands over his head.

“Don’t shoot! I’m unarmed.”

“Looked a fuck of a lot like an M16 to me,” Vasquez said.

“He was on his way to the pawn shop,” Trapp said. “To trade it in for a white flag.”

The minute Radetzky’s squad filed out of the adjacent compound, everybody sobered up. He had zero tolerance for anything except the mission at hand. Wolf started waving his men on to the next block of compounds, but Radetzky intervened. The closer they got to Highway 10, the less affluent the residents. Presumably Ba’athist fat cats disliked the sound of traffic as much as any other privileged faction. Houses in more modest neighborhoods were built practically on top of one another, close enough to facilitate jumping from one roof to the next. Radetzky ordered the platoon to mix things up, alternating street-level and rooftop points of entry whenever possible. The more varied their tactics, the less likely insurgents would anticipate their movements.

Ambushes were often conducted by lone gunmen stationed on living room couches. They were really more like suicide bombers, content to die as long as they took American soldiers along with them. Lounging around for days on end, they passed the time getting high on epinephrine and adrenaline. It’s a wonder they managed to aim their weapons, given how high they were. Most of them never even bothered to stand up when coalition forces finally stormed their compounds. They just fired and took fire from prone positions until even the drugs stopped pumping through their veins. All that dope made them practically impervious to pain and death. The more syringes strewn across the floor, the more bullets their bodies absorbed before accomplishing their martyrdom.

Sinclair kept one step ahead of the platoon as they leapfrogged from one rooftop to another. He was perched high enough to see over the parapets of all but two target buildings, which were obscured by an apartment complex. He reported both blind spots to Radetzky, just in case. The squads modified their tactics accordingly, clearing these two compounds from down below. Their prudence paid off big time. Terrorists may not have had tanks and Bradleys, let alone Cobras and F-15s. But they had learned to make weapons out of almost anything. Trip-wired cars. Hijacked airplanes. Booby-trapped buildings. The roof of the second compound had disappeared into thin air. Artillery sometimes blew the tops off houses, but there was no evidence of bombardment. Telltale signs of demolition offered a more insidious explanation. Insurgents had destroyed the roof with sledgehammers, leaving a gaping hole that would have swallowed Wolf’s entire squad. It was the biggest booby trap they’d ever seen.

“Holy Jesus,” Wolf said.

Having worked in demolition before graduating to construction, Wolf appreciated the amount of muscle necessary to take down the roof. The entire top floor of the house was knee-deep in rubble.

“It’s ingenious,” Trapp said.

“It’s cowardly,” McCarthy said. “Like shadow boxing.”

“Necessity is the mother of invention.”

“Who said that?”

“Some stupid ass Arab dude. Too chickenshit to face the enemy.”

“If it works, it isn’t stupid.”

“Guess what. It didn’t work.”

Volleys and grenade blasts erupted in a neighboring compound. Radetzky’s squad had evidently hit the jackpot. Wolf regretted having to tear himself away from the pitfall. There was never enough time to marvel at the wonders of the combat zone. He ordered his men to descend and disperse across the courtyard below. If insurgents managed to elude the initial attack, they’d run right into Wolf’s firing range. No such luck. Radetzky made short work of the compound, hoarding every last kill. Wolf’s team felt cheated until they found out, much later, what they’d missed out on.

It wasn’t that they were bloodthirsty. They had simply been trained to believe that the more they killed, the less likely they themselves would be killed. Not to mention the allure of heroism in the face of mortal danger. Sinclair in particular had been cursing his luck all day, feeling more like a spectator than a combatant. The fact that he’d just saved an entire squad from plummeting to their deaths provided some solace. Given his training, though, killing would have felt even more constructive than saving lives. He perked up when one of his gunners issued what sounded like a warning.

“We’ve got company.”

In addition to watching Sinclair’s back, the two other members of his team acted as spotters tasked with locating enemy fighters. Unless the threat was imminent, they let him do the honors. Stealth made them hold their fire. One clean shot from a sniper rifle was far less likely to give away their position than bursts of automatic rounds. Sinclair prepared to scope the target. False alarm. He heard footsteps and Johnson emerged from the stairwell.

“Mind if I shadow you for a while?” Johnson asked.

“Help yourself.”

Johnson unhooked his camera straps and sat down. He seemed oblivious to the panoramic view of three US Marine battalions engaged in conquering a city. Maybe not Pulitzer Prize material, but pretty damned impressive. Even Sinclair, whose experience was limited to snapping pictures on his cell phone, appreciated the potential for dramatic photojournalism.

“I thought you guys liked to be in the thick of things,” Sinclair said.

“There’s nothing much to shoot down there.”

“Sounds like Radetzky’s squad is ripping through magazines at a pretty steady clip,” Sinclair said. “What are they shooting? Mice?”

“I meant photographs,” Johnson said. “Not a lot of good photo ops.”

Sinclair no longer resented Johnson’s presence in the platoon. They needed him now more than ever in the wake of the Australian camera crew debacle. Unauthorized Aussie reporters had secured a rooftop post in the Jolan District. They were shooting live, feeding footage directly to a CNN special report on terrorist cells in Fallujah. Aerial gunships were pummeling a middle-class neighborhood held hostage by Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda militia. Several interrogation sites, where coalition sympathizers were tortured and even beheaded, had been targeted. Al Jazeera managed to hijack the footage, which they stripped of context and characterized as an unprovoked attack on innocent civilians. American reporters were expected to provide counterevidence of the insurgency’s infiltration of so-called residential neighborhoods.

Sometimes it felt like they were waging war against Al Jazeera. Inflammatory photographs of the bridge mutilations had been largely responsible for launching Operation Vigilant Resolve in the first place. In retaliation, rogue media outlets were broadcasting inflated civilian casualty figures designed to make Americans look like terrorists rather than peacekeepers. The international community was horrified. More to the point, Fallujans were turning against them. There was a notable difference already, in spite of Baghdad’s official support of the offensive. The insurgency was being aided and abetted by more and more former civilians every day.

“You never answered my question,” Sinclair said.

“Which one?”

“The one about mice.”

“You’re right.” Johnson tried to laugh it off. “Dead mice everywhere.”

“Feisty little buggers. I could have sworn I heard grenades. And lots of cross fire.”

Johnson was an ethical man. He believed in the power of journalism to safeguard the moral integrity of war. If someone had told him a week ago that he would cave under the pressure of propaganda, he would have decked them. The airwaves were swamped with images of leveled mosques and devastated neighborhoods. Nowhere, not even in the fine print, was there mention of insurgent snipers in minarets or terrorist cells in master bedrooms. The only thing more damning than footage of aerial strikes were photographs of civilian casualties. Johnson knew a booby trap when he saw one. Al Jazeera would have to get its own damned pictures of civilian casualties.

Johnson didn’t know which was worse, the casualties themselves or his refusal to report them. Dozens of corpses were buried in his camera, most of which would stay there. Women. Several children. He couldn’t stop shooting. Radetzky had finally pulled him aside to ask what the hell he thought he was doing. Surely one or two shots would have sufficed. There were kids in the hallway and mujahideen in a bedroom behind them, lobbing grenades over their heads. The squad tried to shoot around them. The women tried to protect them with their bare hands.

It felt like Vietnam all over again, back in the days when the war first started airing on television. Graphic shots of field hospitals. Villagers running from napalm. Kids on fire. Bleeding-heart liberals applauded the media, but the troops themselves felt betrayed. They put their asses on the line day in and day out. This was the thanks they got. But Johnson’s perspective on the role of media had changed since Vietnam. He was on the other side of the lens now, far more aware of the big picture. On balance, news coverage protected rather than indicted soldiers. It kept governments honest, or more honest. Someone had to hold them accountable for the missions they masterminded. Atrocities could almost always be prevented on the drawing board, and almost never in the field.

“What’s going on down there?” Sinclair persisted.

“Nothing much,” Johnson said. “The usual.”

Confiding in Sinclair would have been cathartic. He probably would have interpreted the decision to suppress the photographs as prudent rather than unethical, an embed’s act of solidarity with his host platoon. Often as not in war, the very thing that made everyone feel better was exactly the wrong thing to do. Telling the truth would ultimately be bad for morale. Sinclair needed to be able to pull the trigger with a clear conscience. Killing was nerveracking enough without having to worry whether your next bullet would end up lodged in some kid’s gut. Snipers had a bad reputation for indiscriminate killing, yet another example of media hype. They were, in fact, the least likely of all soldiers to make mistakes.

Suppressing the photographs. Johnson tried to think of a less incriminating way to frame his decision. Given Al Jazeera’s media stranglehold, the only way to combat trumped-up civilian casualty figures was to downplay them in the American press. Surely covering up something that wasn’t true to begin with no longer qualified as a cover-up. At the same time, all this equivocation made him suspicious of his own motives. Shirking responsibility was always a crime against humanity. Civilians were killed. Photographs were not forthcoming. A fundamental truth remained behind closed doors, quite literally
in camera
. Wars waged in kitchens and bedrooms inevitably resulted in dead women and children. This was the kind of simple spatial calculation the architects of the War on Terror overlooked, pretending instead to protect family values at home and abroad. Making the world safe for democracy for yet another blood-soaked century, God willing. Johnson was no fool. Pretending that the ethics of journalism were complicated didn’t change the stark clarity of facts on the ground. Erasing evidence didn’t erase accountability.