The War I Always Wanted (25 page)

“What'd he say?” I asked.

“He says ‘Take us to the hospital.'”

I shook my head and looked down at the guy. He looked up, his eyes meeting mine for the first time. “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

Waseem and I walked over to the RPG guy's backseat friend. He was lying face down in the gutter on the side of the street. He had been shot through the knee, and it already looked like a purple and black cantaloupe. His leg was twisted behind him at a somewhat disturbing angle. Sergeant Collins was standing over him trying to direct some of the guys to place this guy in the back of one of the humvees. As soon as the first soldier touched the guy's leg he let out a blood-curdling cry. It was like nothing I've ever heard before. Instead of a scream, it was more reminiscent of an animal-like howl. It sent a shiver down my spine.

“Waseem,” Sergeant Collins said impatiently, “tell this guy we're tryin' to help him.”

Waseem leaned down and translated the message. When they picked the wounded man up the second time and set him in the bed of the humvee, he only let out a few involuntary squeaks and grunts.

I walked to the Passat where some of the guys were extracting the driver. His brains were all over the dash and the windshield. He had been shot in the head twice. One round had exited out of his left eye. In all, we hit the driver with maybe ten rounds. I figured a few of them were mine. There was blood everywhere. I thought to myself that this guy had really taken the brunt of it. Someone brought up later that if the RPG
had
gone off, the backblast would have killed him anyway. Just wasn't his night, I guess.

I looked at Collins and thought I could feel what he was thinking as he surveyed the scene of crumpled bodies before him. He must have been satisfied—after two years, our platoon—
his platoon
—had finally achieved a state of carnage.

Around the other side of the car, the guman who had been beaten was still lying face down in the street. He had closely cropped hair and was wearing black parachute pants. He had been wearing a white tank top, but the guys had since torn it to ribbons during the scuffle after they pulled him from the car. I could see several marks on the guy, including a nasty cut across the bridge of his nose where he'd been kicked. The only bullet wound was on the left side of his head. It was only a grazing wound, but heads bleed profusely, and he was covered in blood.

Yet something about his wounds didn't seem right. I walked back over to the Passat and looked into the front passenger seat. It was peppered,
riddled
, with bullet holes. I looked back at the guy lying face down on the ground, and then back into the car. The holes were still there, lots and lots of them. Stuffing was showing in places. I looked back at the guy. One partial hole in his head. I looked into the car again.
What the fuck?
For a moment I thought that we had hit one of the running civilians, but then I remembered this guy being pulled from the car. I showed some other guys and they just shrugged. I couldn't imagine how he'd managed to sustain one grazing bullet wound under such an intense hail of gunfire. I didn't know why he was basically untouched when his seat had been shot to shreds. But I did know that I should have been dead at least twice, and yet here I was, still hanging on. These things happen, I guess. You just accept them, move on, and don't tell your mother.

The expression “dead weight” comes from dead people. I'd never thought about that until I got to Iraq, until we had to get the wasted driver in the back of a humvee. The operation was
more complicated than it sounds. Not only heavy, the guy was also a mess. He was bloody and nasty and no one wanted to touch him, much less wrap their arms around him.

Sergeant Collins had the idea that four guys should grab one appendage each. One guy on each arm and leg. In unison, the idea went, they would swing him, and on the count of three, they would launch him into the bed of the truck. He thought that would be the most hygienic way to handle it.

This was a good plan, and it worked on the second try. When they threw him on the first attempt, someone's timing was off and the lifeless guy's head hit the side of the humvee. It made a sickening “
thok
” sound that made me want to puke. The sound must have startled the guys too, because as soon as his head hit the truck, they dropped him. His arms and legs were splayed everywhere and when his head hit the asphalt, it made an even more revolting “
thok
” than when it had hit the humvee. Guys groaned at the gruesome sight. After a few seconds and a few deep breaths, they tried again, this time successfully.

As we rolled slowly away from the scene, I could see a throng of Iraqis gathered on the sidewalks up ahead. The city hadn't seen this level of violence in a long time, and word traveled fast in Tal Afar.

As we drove, no one said anything. The silence in my truck mirrored the stillness of the crowd. They all knew what had happened. As we continued slowly through the mass of citizenry, it looked like a macabre, twisted sort of Mardi Gras parade.

When we arrived back at the TOC, all of Bravo Company and the entire Battalion headquarters section were outside waiting. The medics had already set up an emergency casualty treatment
area outside in the courtyard. When we first arrived back, I was disoriented. Everyone who had been back at the TOC listening to the play-by-play on the radio was grinning from ear to ear. The air at the TOC was electric. As soon as we dismounted, everyone at the TOC mobbed us. It was like a media crush.

I didn't get it at first. All I wanted to do was to sit down and have some time for personal reflection. But everybody there wanted to know
exactly
what happened. Like little kids waiting for Christmas presents. To them, the shooting meant vindication for the deaths of Jordan and Garvey. We had been hurt on that night, and now someone, whether or not they had anything to do with that attack, had paid. On that night, as a battalion, we not only lost two friends and soldiers, but the attackers had taken our pride and shaken our confidence. But now, the enemy was no longer elusive and invisible. He wasn't the boogeyman. He was flesh and blood. Lots and lots of it.

The medics were working furiously to save the lives of the wounded attackers in true American fashion. At the same time, Hameed was interrogating them in true Iraqi fashion. As our physician's assistant toiled away, attempting to keep Mr. RPG's intestines from falling out of his body, Hameed stood over him getting irate. His eyes were like hot coals and I could see spittle coming out of the sides of his mouth as he spoke to the man. He was seething with anger, ready to push the Doc out of the way and throttle the guy right there on the stretcher. When he was finished, he walked over in my direction.

“Hey Hameed, what'd you say to that guy?” I asked curiously.

“I tell him,” he said in heavily accented English, “I make
him eat his own guts if he doesn't give us information.”

“Oooookay,” I replied, not quite sure how to respond to a statement like that.
Sounds good Hameed, keep up the good work
.“So, did he say anything?” I asked.

“Yah, he says he was paid twenty-five dollars to attack TOC.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

After a while, I walked back to the barracks building. Several guys had started photographing themselves with the dead body and I wasn't interested. I was neither interested in participating, nor in putting a stop to it. I just didn't care anymore. They could have started playing soccer with his head and it wouldn't have made a difference to me.

Detachedly, I wondered what was happening to us. I thought about how I had once gotten angry with the sergeant for shoving the kid in Baghdad. I thought about how bad I felt after the bags went on the heads of the looters on our first full day in that city. Back then I had cared. I looked at my watch. It was 11:57 p.m. on a night in October. After only seven months in Iraq we were becoming savages. I wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

I couldn't sit down either. I was too wired. I walked back over to the TOC, where most of the guys in 1st Platoon were at the computers, emailing the news to family and friends back home. I asked if we could use the satellite phone. Seconds later it was in my hand.

I called my dad on his cell phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey, how's it goin',” I asked.

There was a pause. “Great!” he said as soon as he recognized my voice. “This is a surprise. I didn't expect to hear from you for a while. What are you doin'? What time is it there?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it's almost midnight here.” I paused. “Well, first, how's Grandpa?” The old marine was in the hospital and the doctors didn't think the prognosis was very promising.

“He's hanging in there,” my dad said, “but your mother is still pretty upset all the time.”

“Yeah . . .,” I paused. “So what are you doing right now?” I asked.

“Oh, I'm at the gas station getting the oil changed.”

Real life
, I thought.
It's daytime there and he's getting his oil changed. People are being normal and going about their daily lives
.

“I'm glad you called,” he said. “We hadn't heard from you in a while. So what are you doing up at midnight calling me?”

“Well,” I said, “the strangest thing just happened . . . .”

So I told him the story. Then I walked back to the barracks. Nobody in 1st Platoon could sleep. We stayed up most of the night talking—going over and over every detail of what had happened. At three o'clock in the morning, I finally grabbed a cot. Lying there, I remembered a line I'd read in a book about Vietnam. It was called
Everything We Had
and it was a collection of stories told by veterans and compiled by Al Santoli. An infantry officer who had also been in the 101st had remarked at the end of his story, “What a fucking way to live your life.”

As I drifted off to sleep, two hours before the sunrise, that's all I could think of.
What a fucking way to live your life
.

Eventually I made it to the airfield. I spent my last few days there eating at Kellogg, Brown, and Root's fancy new chow hall
and emailing people, mostly my mom. She was updating me on my grandfather's condition, while at the same time grilling me on how safe my convoy to Mosul would be. Though the whole war thing had never sat well with her, she was beginning to panic because the insurgency had begun to snowball all across northern Iraq in the last week.

Two days before I left, I met Croom and some of the guys for lunch at the chow hall. It had been several days since the shooting and I hadn't yet seen anyone from 3rd Platoon. “What the fuck happened, man? You're not supposed to be gettin' in shootouts anymore. You're on the way out, for chrissake,” were the first words out of Croom's mouth. He grinned and then sank his teeth into a corncob, waiting for me to tell him the story.

So I gave him the rundown. But since I'd spent the first half of the deployment telling him stories about Anaconda, it seemed strange to be telling him about my experiences in Iraq—as if I were telling some random soldier, and not the guy with whom I'd been closest for the first half of our time in Iraq. Somehow, my most intense combat experiences had straddled the time in which we'd worked together.

I told him how tunnel-visioned I'd gotten, and how I hadn't been able to see anything but the car once the shooting started. I also told him that I hadn't been trying to save the guys' lives around me, or trying to prevent an imminent attack on the TOC. Instead, I told him that I'd been trying to make my way down to the airfield for a good night's rest and ended up fighting to save my own life. Not very noble, I said, but fuck it. That's combat in a guerilla war for you.

* * *

I spent the rest of the week hounding Shields about the issue of weapons on the bus ride from Tal Afar to the Mosul airfield. If you were one of these soldiers, you weren't allowed to carry a weapon because you were leaving the country—and brigade wouldn't assign anybody to handle the return of all the weapons to Tal Afar. All they did was provide a heavy weapons platoon escort, along with armed guards on the bus. The trip hadn't been a problem for most of the summer, but now, with the violence escalating, I considered it a major one. I was convinced that the person who devised the rule was a person who rarely traveled the roads of northern Iraq.

Shields and the battalion mail clerk, Damian Heidelberg, were going to be the armed guards on our bus as we drove to Mosul. For that reason I pestered Shields all week to see if he could find a way to allow me to hold on to my weapon. After having an RPG pulled on me several days earlier, the idea of riding through western Mosul's ambush alley unarmed seemed insane to me. Even the idea of getting up off my cot to go take a shit without my weapon had grown disturbing in the past few days. I didn't care if there was a gun truck escort or not. I wanted a gun and I wanted bullets.

In the end, I grudgingly boarded the bus without a weapon, taking a seat behind Heidelberg. I looked over his shoulder and gazed longingly at the M4 sitting in his lap. It was the weapon of a mail clerk—no special sight, no infrared laser on top, no tactical flashlight mounted on the side of the barrel. Just a gun with a plain, old-fashioned iron sight.

Before I knew who Heidelberg was, he'd approached me out of the blue one day while I was picking up Delta
Company's mail with Sergeant Croom.

“Hey, Lieutenant Friedman, here's a letter for you. I just found it. It was in the Bravo Company stack.”

I don't know this guy's name, but he continues walking toward me. “I just saw it lying there and told the guy that put it there that you hadn't been in Bravo Company for months.”

I look at him curiously and take it from him, glancing down at the return address. I see that it's from my parents. I look back up at this person who obviously knows who I am and can only assume that he is our battalion mail clerk
.