Chapter 24: Camp Custer

December 2003 - February 2004

Once we got off the airplanes, we were greeted by a blast of hot air. Kuwait must not have gotten the memo stating it was the winter, since the temperature was in the nineties and climbing. I had stowed my rucksack and M-249 in the overhead of the plane, so I retrieved them and carried them off. I was sweating by the time we got to the terminal, otherwise known as the JPRC, the Joint Personnel Reception Center. That was where our personal gear and baggage would be brought, and where our heavy gear was waiting for us. More than a few of the old-timers were surprised to find any of our stuff there, let alone all of it.

For the next several days, we unpacked and sorted out our equipment. Our weapons were restored to operability, and ammo was issued. I think that was the first time I realized that I was at war. Back at Fort Benning and Fort Drum, you might have been issued a weapon, but that simply meant you were handed an ID tag and you stored the weapon in the Armory. When you needed it, you gave them the tag and they gave you the weapon. Ammo was only issued at the firing range, and you had to either fire it or give it all back, and they counted every single cartridge. Forget about bringing ammo in from outside, too, since that was completely forbidden.

Now, we were expected to carry our weapons everywhere, and they issued us ammunition like they expected us to use it. We didn’t have to sign or account for anything. That felt very strange. Likewise, once we unloaded our gear, we were expected to wear our helmets and armor vests, everywhere and all the time. If you didn’t, you could expect to get chewed out by every sergeant and officer over you. A recurring theme would be that they really didn’t care if you died, but they would be damned if they wanted to do the paperwork. Your life or death was your problem, so if you wanted to stay alive, wear your gear!

Part of our training was acclimatization to the climate. That part was easy. Imagine sticking your head in an oven, and then crawl inside so your entire body can enjoy the experience. Finally, make sure to pull the door shut afterwards, so you don’t let the heat out. Heat stroke and heat exhaustion and dehydration were suddenly something that wasn’t just a lesson we had been taught at Basic, but real problems that could kill you. You were drinking water by the quart, simply because you were sweating everything out by the quart.

The one thing we hadn’t had to ship over were vehicles. Trucks and Humvees were already waiting for us at the airbase. We had left our trucks and vehicles behind at Fort Drum. These were new vehicles, with that new-vehicle smell. We broke down the shipping containers into company and platoon containers. Personal gear was loaded into Humvees, usually one Humvee per fire team, with maybe a small trailer hauled behind it. Some of the gear stayed in the twenty-foot containers and was shipped that way. We stayed at Ali-as-Saleem through Christmas, and were able to have a real Christmas dinner, with turkey and stuffing and gravy and everything else. It might not have been home, but it sure beat MREs.

The next day it was time to go to war. We were replacing the Second Armored Cavalry Squadron in Iraq, and they had sent down some guides and drivers as a welcoming committee. We were being sent north, first to Baghdad and then from there we would drive west to someplace called Ramadi. This was part of what they called the ‘Sunni Triangle’ and was the heart of Iraq. The guys from the Second Cav looked really beat up and tired, and I am sure we looked like green newbies to them. I noticed that every one of them had his head on a swivel, constantly looking around for threats and targets, even in Kuwait. Was that because Kuwait wasn’t safe, or because where we were going it was the only way to stay alive?

Alpha Team was able to fit into a single Humvee, with a lot of our gear in the trailer we were pulling behind us. We were assigned Sergeant William Fuller as our guide. That put five of us in a four-seat vehicle, but it wasn’t a problem. Satterly had Williger, Riley, and me alternating up on the Ma Deuce on the roof turret; he and Fuller rode inside the entire trip.

Fuller was about twenty-three I guessed, and darkly tanned and rawhide tough and thin. He had a way of looking at you like he was looking right through you, as if you weren’t worthy of his notice. We were traveling in a convoy north, out of Kuwait. First, we headed up Route 80, which Fuller told us was the famous Highway of Death during the Gulf War back in 1991. The Iraqis tried to run north back to Iraq and were strafed and bombed by Coalition forces. That ended in Basra, and then we got on Route 1, which headed straight towards Baghdad. Along the way, Fuller was giving us a running description of what we were seeing.

Trust Riley Fox to ask all sorts of strange questions. Williger was doing a rotation on the .50 cal when Riley asked. “Why in the world did they send a division that is supposed to specialize in climbing mountains with pine trees to a desert?” Fuller just gave him a look that said he didn’t answer idiot questions. (Satterly simply said that it was just a name, nothing more.) Riley then followed it up with, “Are there any women around where we’re going?”

I rolled my eyes at that. We had gotten several lectures about women in Iraq, the general gist of which was to leave them alone, or else. Still, Riley was eighteen, like me, and horny. Sergeant Fuller sighed and twisted around to look back at him. I was driving, and Riley and Satterly were in the back. “You want to know about women where we’re going?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure!”

“Okay, let me tell you a little story, and you’ll learn all you need to know about women in Iraq. It was shortly after we arrived, and we were stationed at this little shithole outpost that was near this canal. One afternoon, some asshole Iraqi comes driving up in this piece-of-shit flatbed truck, racing hell for leather up the road. None of these assholes actually know how to drive in any case, but anyway, here he comes, pounding up the road. It’s cold as hell that day, so he’s inside, along with his son. His wife and daughter are sitting on the bed of the truck, not because there’s no room inside, but because women ride outside in the cold, not inside with the men. They aren’t worth anything, got it?”

Riley nodded silently, and Sergeant Fuller continued. “So, anyway, this asshole comes pounding up the road when he sees our checkpoint, and he suddenly gets nervous. He hits the brakes, but he’s driving too fast, and he ends up bouncing off the road and into the canal. We’re just watching this, it’s right outside the front gate, and a bunch of us run out to rescue them. They aren’t too far into the water, and it’s not that big a canal, so this guy, PFC Jones, skinny kid, he goes into the canal and starts helping them. He pulls out the driver, who is screaming and cussing him in Arabic, and then he reaches inside and pulls out the boy, who’s only about five or so. Meanwhile Mustafa, or whatever his name is, is standing there on the bank of the canal, cussing us all. His wife and daughter have fallen into the canal, but he’s not moving to rescue them, he’s cussing them for not getting out on their own. They’re going to drown because they aren’t worth as much to him as the truck is.”

I gulped at that. Fuller wasn’t finished. “So, Jonesy, he decides that since he is already cold and wet, he’ll rescue the girl and the wife. He wades further out into the canal and fishes them out, first the little girl, and then the wife. She’s really in bad shape, so he puts her down on the road and we begin doing some CPR, to get the water out of her lungs. While all this is going on, her asshole of a husband is still cussing us and demanding we pull his truck out and leave his wife alone. He’s drunk, too, completely blasted on something. We get the wife alive, and she stands up, and Mustafa starts cussing her out, and then starts hitting her. We pull them apart, and he pulls out a knife, not to attack us, but to attack her! That was all it took for us, and Jonesy shot the dumb bastard.”

“Huh. What...”, asked Riley, but Fuller waved him silent.

“I’m not done yet. It gets better. We sent the woman and her family home with the body. The next morning, we found her head out by the front gate. We sent Hamid, our interpreter, into the town with a couple of troopers to find out what had happened. Because we had helped her out of the canal and then killed her drunken asshole of a husband, her husband’s brothers and cousins first gang-raped her, then killed her in front of her children, an honor killing they called it, and then cut off her head and left it for us. The son was being raised by an uncle and the daughter was sold into slavery in another town.”

“Jesus Christ!” muttered Riley.

“So now you know everything you need to know about Iraqi women. If you even look at one funny, she’ll be killed, and it will be on your head. You got any other damn fool questions?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“Then you can sit there and shut up for the rest of this trip.”

I cleared my throat, and Fuller looked over at me. “You got something to ask, Private?”

“Uh, did anything happen to Private Jones? Did he get in any trouble?”

Fuller smiled. “No, he was good. As soon as that knife came out, it was justified.” He turned back to the front, and then turned back to face me. “Of course, three weeks later he got blown up in an IED explosion. Welcome to Iraq!”

Fuck me!

We spent the night at Camp Victory, which was everything and anything surrounding the Baghdad International Airport. The place was fucking huge and was a gigantic construction site in the middle of a war zone. It was sort of nice, if you didn’t mind being in the desert and getting shot at occasionally. We were directed to a deserted area to one side and told to park and not to leave our bivouac site. We got there too late for dinner, but they knew we were coming, so meals were placed in large thermos-type containers called mermites for us. The next morning, we were escorted, the entire battalion, to a dining hall for breakfast. We were told to eat well, since this would be the last decent meal we might get - ever!

After that we were back on the road, Taking Route 97 and then Route 1. Distance-wise we weren’t that far, maybe 130 klicks, about 80 miles or so, but it took us hours. Sergeant Fuller was on high alert and kept telling us to keep our eyes open. We were moving slowly because we had some engineer vehicles ahead of us looking for buried IEDs, improvised explosive devices or booby-traps, and since that slowed us down, it made us easier targets for anybody who wanted to shoot at us.

Eventually we pulled into an open area that looked like a fortified camp. We could get out of our Humvee but were told to not get too comfortable. We were at the local headquarters and laager for the Second Cav, but it was not our final destination. Around us were parked Bradleys and M-1s. From there, we would be split up into company and platoon formations and get sent on to our new homes. Sergeant Fuller turned us over to a very quiet Specialist, and we took off again, this time to a place called Dush-el-Kebir. That was our new home away from home.

If the world ever needs an enema, the nozzle will be stuck in Dush-el-Kebir. The place was dirty and smelled like a combination of shit and incense. In Arabic it probably meant ‘Paradise of the Virgins’, or some stupid shit like that. The English name was scrawled in a badly painted sign over the main gate, ‘Little Big Horn II.’ Since that was too long a name to use, it was simply known as Camp Custer. There was a lot of symbolism there. I looked over at Billy Hastings, over in Bravo Three, and asked, “Hey, Billy, any of your relatives at the first battle?” Billy, despite the English sounding name, was supposed to be half Sioux.

“So they say.”

“How’s it feel to be on the other side?”

“I suddenly feel sorry for Custer; you know?”

I snorted and nodded. I had taken a good hard look at people as we rolled into town and got nothing back but a look of raw hatred. Those people did not want us to be here. It was an almost physical reaction.

Riley looked around and said, “This is the Fertile Crescent? This is the cradle of civilization?”

Tom Pernikov from Second Squad, answered. He was a PFC but hadn’t been in any longer than Riley or me. He was older, twenty-two, and had graduated from college with a degree in English literature, and when he couldn’t find a job that would pay for graduate school, had joined the Army. His nickname was ‘The Professor.’ “It actually was very fertile, up through most of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. This is what happens when you combine global warming with the increasing salinification of the soil from excessive damming, flood control, and ground water pumping.” The Professor was probably as smart as Kelly and should have been back home trying to get in some college girl’s pants, but he suffered from the fact that he was as ugly as the butt end of a porcupine.

Riley looked over at me and shook his head. I smiled back and asked Pernikov, “Hey, Professor, how’s that college degree working out for you?”

“I think I should have taken that opening at the McDonalds after all.”

“Yeah, suddenly pushing a broom at the feed mill is looking a whole lot better,” I agreed. That night I wrote a pair of letters, one to Kelly and one to my folks, and marked the envelopes ‘Send in the event of my death’ and propped them up on a little table next to where I kept my chimp box.

The guys from the Second Cav stuck around for a day, just long enough to show us the sights, which were limited, and Camp Custer, which was pretty minimal as well. It was basically a two-story building off one side of the edge of the town. The main drag went past our front gate, an offshoot of Route 1 from Baghdad to Ramadi. Across the road was a half-assed canal that had overgrown weeds along the banks and stagnant green water in it. There were several outbuildings in a square around the main building, and a low wall surrounded the entire compound. The wall was topped with concertina wire, and sandbag fortifications were everywhere. The relatively fresh bullet holes and pockmarks on the walls were unsettling.

Fourth of the Fourth was deployed in a line of these small forts all along the main roads south of the Sunni Triangle west of Fallujah. It was like a string of pearls, really ugly pearls. Each pearl was about two miles apart and was a platoon-strength strong point. That meant Alpha Company was stretched out about eight miles along the road. The rest of the battalion was positioned further up the road, to Ramadi and beyond. The total stretch was about twenty miles from end to end. There was supposed to be a battery of 155s nearby to support us, stationed at battalion headquarters in the center of the line. The theory was that each strong point would be close enough to support the ones on either side. In case anybody ran into something they couldn’t handle, first company and then battalion assets would be able to be brought in as reinforcements. Camp Custer was just one of the strong points.

First Platoon’s job was to man Camp Custer. We had to guard the camp, provide backup for the Iraqi Army and police, secure the road, and provide escorts to the aid agencies who were trying to help the Iraqis rebuild their country. We had thirty-nine guys to do that.

The shit started hitting the fan the day after the guys from Second Cav took off. Maybe the Iraqis knew we were the new guys in town and didn’t know what we were doing, so they decided to test us. That test took place at about 1000, when Staff Sergeant Budreau was dragged into the medic shack with a bullet in his left leg. A sniper had nailed him while he was walking across the courtyard. The Raging Vipers had just earned their first medal of the deployment, a Purple Heart. Budreau was going to be okay - Doc Jenkins dug the bullet out and sewed him up so that he didn’t even need to be sent to Baghdad - but he was off his feet for a few days and the Iraqis had welcomed us in style. Suddenly the nickname of ‘One One Bullet Catcher’ became something a lot less amusing.

I killed my first person the next night. Alpha Team was assigned to man the roadblock on the eastern side of Camp Custer. To go through, a driver had to come to a complete stop and be inspected by an Iraqi Army patrol. If there was a problem, we were supposed to back them up. The IA patrol was supposed to stop all cars, inspect them, question the driver and occupants, and then clear them for further travel. This was supposed to keep everybody safe from possible car bombs and control the traffic in illegal weapons. At night there was a complete curfew.

There were several problems with this whole program, starting with the Iraqi Army units assigned to Dush-el-Kebir. One of the first things we did after invading and setting up a new government was to fire the old government and fire the old Army. That was complicated by the fact that the old government and Army had been manned and run by the Sunnis, who had lorded it over the Shiite majority. Now the Shiites were in control, and either didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t care. Or worse. Both the Army and the Police were a wild combination of incompetent and corrupt. They thought nothing of shaking down everybody they could, so if somebody was bringing in a car bomb, they could be paid off to let it through. That meant that an American patrol had to watch to make sure they inspected something. Otherwise, it was a lock that a car bomb would be passed through the checkpoint and come straight for our front gate.

Guard duty was boring and dangerous. It was ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent sheer terror. The same night that Sergeant Budreau got shot, a family decided to drive around despite a curfew, so the Iraqi Army guards manning the western checkpoint decided to simply light them up. That got all of us out of our racks. The next night Riley and I were on duty watching over the eastern roadblock, with Williger and Satterly covering us.

At about 2300 Riley said, “Did you hear that?”

I looked at him, and answered, “Hear what?”

He cocked his head to one side. “I don’t know. Something. It almost sounded like a truck engine.”

“Nothing’s running. It’s after curfew,” I replied. Then I heard something, too. And I turned towards the eastern roadblock. The side roads between Camp Custer and the roadblocks were supposed to be blocked off, but something was rounding a corner that wasn’t supposed to be open.

Riley yelled, “The roadblock is open, the shits are gone!”

“Oh, fuck me in the heart!” A large diesel truck was coming around the corner, gears grinding as it accelerated.

Riley grabbed the radio from the Humvee we were next to, but I knew this would be over long before Lieutenant Bernicki or Platoon Sergeant Turner could be contacted. Suddenly it was like time slowed down for me, or maybe I sped up, or something like that. Sergeant Turner later told me that it was simply the training kicking in, and my body was moving on something he called ‘muscle memory’. I don’t know if that was true or not, and it sounded like something to ask the Professor or Kelly or somebody smart.

I didn’t even have time to think. I simply stepped to the side and brought my M-249 up to my shoulder. As soon as I had the proper sight picture, I let out half a breath and pulled the trigger. I was running a standard mix of one tracer round to four ball rounds, and it looked like a laser was being shot out of the barrel. After a second, I stopped firing, and then touched the trigger again. At a cyclic firing rate of 800 rounds a minute, my 200 round hard magazine would be empty in 15 seconds. It would also probably melt the barrel. Instead, I fired short bursts, keeping the weapon on target rather than allowing the recoil to make the barrel climb towards the sky.

I kept pouring the laser light into the cab of the truck. The truck, originally aiming directly for Riley and me, began to jerk and buck, and then suddenly veered to the right and ran off the road and into a pile of rubble. Then Riley grabbed me and pulled me down behind our sandbagged revetment, and it was a damn good thing he did. The truck exploded, and the blast wave was enough to jolt the Humvee and kick it sideways a couple of feet.

Williger and Satterly came running up and jumped into the revetment with us. Sergeant Satterly was yelling something, but I couldn’t hear him, just the ringing in my ears. He grabbed my shoulder and hauled me upright and pointed me back down the road. I think he wanted me to protect against a possible follow-on attack. That was the logical idea anyway. Use a suicide truck bomb to breach the gate or wall, and then rush the breach on foot, hoping to penetrate during the confusion and either kill or capture some of the soldiers inside.

I shook my head, trying to shake off the fuzziness and ringing in my ears. Around us Camp Custer was going batshit crazy. Floodlights were focusing on us and the surrounding area, and Lieutenant Bernicki and a couple of other guys were running out of the gate towards us. Any chance that any of us were going to get any sleep had just gone right out the window.

After things got settled down some, Alpha Team was brought back inside Camp Custer and debriefed. That involved Lieutenant Bernicki wanting to know what happened and why we did what we did. Shortly after dawn, it got crazier. Captain Holman showed up, flying in on a Blackhawk with a ready team from Company. He hadn’t just heard about the truck bomb from First Platoon, he had also heard about it from Second Platoon, further down the road at a fortified spot they called the Alamo. The blast had been loud enough that they had heard it two miles away!

We went through it all over again. By then my hearing was getting back to normal. We’d been at it all night, and I looked at Captain Holman. “Am I in trouble, sir? Am I going to get charged with something?” That would just be the icing on the cake as far as I was concerned, getting arrested for killing a suicide bomber without reading him his rights first.