I glanced across the street, spying Staff Sergeant Bulldog's team snaking its way north in parallel with us. Staff Sergeants Bulldog and Boondock, Sergeant Fuego, PFC Van Wilder, Private First Class Romeo (recently promoted), and Super Mario all had ice-cream cones and seemed to be laughing and joking with a few Iraqi police and local children. Leave it to my guys, I thought to myself. They'd be able to turn a concentration camp into a poker game.
“Hey, sir!” SFC Big Country yelled from three stalls behind me. “Suge wants to apply for a microgrant so he doesn't have to walk up this damn road with us anymore. It's Iraqi welfare!” Both my platoon sergeant and my terp chuckled openly, slapping each other on the back, while eating flatbread and sipping on juices provided them by the local vendor they had just talked to.
Despite my black mood, I smiled. I wished I could make the best of situations like this and (again) decided to make a concerted effort to be more like my men. Yes, this mission qualified as fucked up beyond all recognition (FUBAR), but none of us could do anything about it except finish it. I really needed to learn to worry only about matters within my control.
Suge walked up to me and patted me on the shoulder. “This is very good program, Captain! It make the people very happy and make them like the Americans very much. It is always good to give poor people money.”
SFC Big Country followed. “Kind of like Robin Hood, huh, sir? I know how you like those old stories.”
I looked up at my grinning platoon sergeant, who clearly had keyed in on my current temperament and decided to poke at it. “Gee, thanks, Little John,” I said. I almost continued on to say that we weren't exactly taking from the rich to give to the poor, but I stopped myself. Rich was a relative term, and the Western middle class funding this trillion-dollar effort in Iraq, while tragically trappedâalso a relative termâin American society, would be considered beyond affluent by Saba al-Bor standards.
“I fucking love your platoon,” Skerk said, pointing across the street.
Staff Sergeant Bulldog had seized control of a donkey cart and was softly lashing the trotting donkey down Route Maples, much to the delight of the local Iraqis. On the back of the cart, Staff Sergeant Boondock and PFC Van Wilder attempted to surf the ride, waving to the shoppers as they passed.
“I guess that makes them the Merry Men,” I said, shaking my head in wonder.
“Then who is Suge?” SFC Big Country asked. Our terp had wandered over to the nearest grocer stall and already held a glass of chai in his hand as he talked with the shop owner.
“You're wrong if you aren't thinking a very drunk and very crazy Friar Tuck,” Skerk stated.
We all laughed. “Too bad your blog got axed,” SFC Big Country said to me, as we continued up the street. “This would make for a good story.”
I nodded. “I'll save it for that book everyone thinks I'm writing.”
We finished our mass microgrant assessments three and a half hours later and headed back to the combat outpost. Later that night, after I'd finished organizing our collected information and putting it onto a PowerPoint slide so Higher could understand and quantify it, I thought about the bigger things again. One of the central tenets of our counterinsurgency operations called for us to inject funds into the lifeless Iraqi economy. Did it really matter if all of the microgrant awardees didn't actually meet the arbitrary bureaucratic standards put out? Wasn't it inevitable that we were funding some of our enemies by doing things like this? What would COIN architect General Petraeus think about how my platoon had spent our day? Would he believe it to be a grey means to a less grey end, or would he consider it part of the bastardized counterinsurgency spirit passed down through the ranks of a conventional army still struggling to adapt to nonconventional warfare?
I didn't know what he would think. I didn't even really know what I thought. So I went to bed and dreamed of a world less complex.
TRASH VILLAGE
Just before my platoon
and I departed for a late-morning counter-IED patrol of Route Tampa, Captain Ten Bears called me into his office and told me that Lieutenant Colonel Larry had finally found a new platoon leader to replace me with and that he would be in Saba al-Bor the following week. I nodded and said that I had known this moment was comingâI had been operating on borrowed time ever since the blog fiasco. They still weren't sure what my next position would be, but my troop commander guessed that the squadron staff lay in my future. Captain Ten Bears patted me on the back and told me not to let the Man get me down and to get moving on our mission.
I walked down the stairs and outside to the motor pool. I promised myself that I'd make every remaining minute and moment count, in order to savor my last experiences as a scout platoon leader. I also promised myself to finish as strongly and as passionately as I had started when I assumed the position some twenty months before. The men who waited at our Strykers, who had taught me what true honor and true stoicism were, expected and deserved nothing less.
They taught me some other things along the way, too.
“I'm telling you, food tastes better out of the garbage,” Doc said to the confused laughter of the rest of the platoon. Apparently, he had been found rummaging through the trash, looking for a half-full bag of potato chips.
“Ain't our medic supposed to be sanitary?” Staff Sergeant Bulldog asked. “You're the last person who should be doing that shit.”
Doc shrugged his shoulders, grinned, and shared his potato chips with PFC Das Boot.
I called the platoon in, SFC Big Country and I gave the mission brief, and I told them to mount up. The other news could wait.
We moved out of Saba al-Bor and east on Route Lincoln, reaching Route Tampa in fifteen minutes. Our initial counter-IED patrol called for us to move between the Grand Canal in the north and the Baghdad Gates in the south. But as soon as I checked in on the radio with the squadron TOC, they already had a different task and purpose for us.
“Roger, White 1, we read you loud and clear. We received a report from an Apache pilot an hour ago about a big metal object and possible IED he spotted from the air. We need you guys to check it out. Grid to follow.”
Fuck, I thought. Flyboy information. While helicopter pilots meant well with their reports, all too often what we found on the ground resembled nothing like what they saw from the air. Like the time we woke up a pack of wild dogs that they thought was a VBIED. Or the time we discovered a teenager peddling Jordanian porn out of the trunk of his car instead of the reported RPGs.
I relayed the frago and grid to my platoon.
“Hey, sir,” SFC Big Country immediately said, “that grid is right in the middle of the city dump on the west side of Tampa. Either that grid is wrong, or that pilot is blind. There's all kinds of metal in a dump.”
Jesus, he's fast, I thought. I plotted the grid on my own map, and my platoon sergeant, as usual, was spot-on. I called back to squadron and asked if they were aware where they wanted us to go. They said that, yes, they were and just to execute and let them know what we found.
“White, this is White 1,” I said. “Go ahead and rock those hate fists. We're taking a field trip to the dump. Hopefully, we can confirm or deny the IED report from our vehicles.”
Some thirty minutes later, it became unmistakably clear that we couldn't. With Staff Sergeant Boondock navigating in the lead vehicle, we wound our way through the dump, but there was absolutely no way to reach the grid in question without walking to it. The dismount teams met up on the ground.
As soon as I set foot in what we'd soon designate Trash Village, the pungent smell of compost blitzed my nostrils. I gagged and felt my stomach rumble. Layer upon layer of refuse, debris, and scrap besieged us. We walked on a coating of plastic wrappers, empty cans, soiled clothes, and everything in between, with blotches of runny, black mud filling the gaps. Up a small rise to our north, in our direction of travel, sat multiple stacks of metal paint cans, patterned to mimic building structures.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Staff Sergeant Boondock said. “Are those houses?”
They were. As our wedge formation crested the knoll, we came upon six or seven of these buildings. Frail, sallow creatures sat on tires in front of their paint-can houses. They didn't acknowledge our presence as we strolled past, nor did they even seem aware of it. I took off my sunglasses and blinked repeatedly, verifying that these grey-skinned people with eyes devoid were actually human beings. The men and the women wore rags of various sorts, clearly pulled out of the dump where they lived. Most of the children, however, walked around completely naked and completely lacked the verve and bounce of even the most destitute child in Saba al-Bor. Staff Sergeant Spade pulled a Beanie Baby out of his pocket and tossed it to a little boy we passed. The little boy just stared at the ground where the toy lay and never looked up to see who threw it there.
Makeshift pens of thin wire rested behind the paint-can houses. Various gatherings of bulls, cows, goats, and pigs all lived together there, munching away on their own waste or on the garbage around them. They proved to be the only fat farm animals I saw during my entire deployment to Iraqâobviously more a product of their diets than their health. I whispered a Hail Mary to myself, a prayer I hadn't said since high school, and tried to push the thought of these people eating these animals out of my mind.
Primal, internal sirens implored us to keep moving past this place. As we followed a narrow trail deeper into the dump to the designated grid coordinate, we progressed away from the paint-can houses and eventually came parallel with a shallow, coffee-brown lake. A small gust of wind whipped up just as we passed this body of water, bringing a scent of mummified illness with it. I gagged again, feeling nauseous, and held my breath to avoid puking.
“You alright, sir?” Corporal Spot asked from behind me. “I feel like yakking, too. This is the most disgusting place I've ever been.”
I nodded and gave him a thumbs-up, refusing to speak. When we finally got to the spot and SFC Big Country picked up a large, metallic-yellow alarm
clock, no one said anything. We simply turned around, filing down the trail, and broke back out into a wedge as we neared the trash shanties.
I didn't remember much of our walk back. The brain and the senses just shut down, as a means of protecting themselves. The body kept moving simply out of habit. Our four Strykers, green and powerful and humming, seized the horizon as a beaming oasis of escape. Our steps became strides. In hindsight, I'm surprised no one broke into a trot.
As we passed the last of the paint-can buildings, Staff Sergeant Spade's Beanie Baby still sat on the ground untouched. The little boy and a woman old enough to be his grandmother sat on a tire nearby. Feeling her eyes on me, I reflexively looked over at her. I stared at her grey, sagging cheekbones to avoid looking into her eyes.
“Salaam aleichem,” I said, waving my right hand. I thought I saw her head nod, although the movement seemed so slight I couldn't be sure.
The Arabic greeting I uttered meant, “Peace be with you.” No wonder she didn't say it back, I thought. I might as well have been speaking Greek to that woman.
We got back on our Strykers and drove back to Tampa. No one joked; no one laughed; no one said much of anything. It took a few hours to get back into our normal operational rhythm and banter.
SFC Big Country and I finally talked about Trash Village and its inhabitants the next morning, back in Saba al-Bor at the combat outpost. After making some phone calls to contacts in squadron, he had learned that the Iraqi government had offered to move those people out of the city dump, but they had refused, citing their direct access to the trash as their primary means of survival. We decided they were outcasts of some sort, possibly religious ones, as I remembered reading an article on the Internet some months before about a similar situation up north in Mosul. Then we sat around thinking to ourselves about all of that for a few minutes. I decided I was glad I hadn't been to that place in the beginning of the deployment. I doubted that the earnest youth I had been could've brushed it aside as easily as I just had.
“Doc said he's not going to eat out of the garbage anymore,” my platoon sergeant eventually said.
“Probably a smart decision.”
“Yeah. Probably so.”
RAMADAN
On my last night in Saba al-Bor,
I watched a man die.
We had spent most of the day and early evening showing the new platoon leader around the city and its outlying villages. We stopped by Sheik Banana-Hands's Sahwa headquarters, where he gave me a black-and-white Shia headdress as a thank you gift. Not to be outdone, Haydar presented me with a red-and-white Sunni headdress and a brand-new white dishdasha at his house, while we waited for the sun to set so we could begin our Ramadan meal.
The month-long Muslim religious observance known as Ramadan honored the revelation of the Qur'an to the Prophet Muhammad. Every year, practicing Muslims refused to eat or drink anything from dawn to sunset, instead spending their days praying and reflecting on how to better live as Allah intended. Once night arrived, however, the people gathered for nightly feasts, replenishing their bodies for the next day of fasting.
Suge, who also fasted for the observance, warned us that “the fucking Iraqis go crazy in the mind during the Ramadan, without food and water. Other Muslims are good at the Ramadan and keep their mind, but not Iraqis. They are loony people.” He proved a visionary later that night.
Taking a break from packing, I walked down the stairs of the combat outpost to take a piss when I heard a vehicle come to a screeching halt outside at the front ECP gate. Loud shouting in Arabic followed, and some five seconds later, four IA jundis burst in, carrying a man in an Iraqi army uniform whose guts spilled wildly out of his stomach. A blood trail followed, dripping like red liquid from a smashed juicebox.