Chapter 26: Playing Defense

May 2004

That was the high point of the early spring. Gary Halston transferred over to Second Platoon, over in the Alamo, as a fire team leader. They had taken a few hits earlier on and needed a replacement for a buck sergeant who was sent home after getting shot up. The rule was that if you were promoted from Specialist to Corporal or Sergeant, or from Corporal to Sergeant, you had to transfer to a different platoon. Anything higher than that and you had to transfer to a different company. I was going to miss him; he was from a different squad but had taught me a lot about shooting hajjis. The Gun Club and I all promised to buy him a drink when we had a chance. Any booze that had managed to make it over with us was long gone by now.

One of the bright spots of our time at Camp Custer was that it was possible to phone home. That was a real first in warfare. Colonel Gilhooly had managed to come up with a couple of satellite telephones, which were cell phones that could talk directly to a satellite, and then connect to the States. You just punched in your home number and boom, you were talking to Mom! We heard that the Colonel was paying for them out of his own pocket, and that just showed the guy was a class act. He gave them to a pair of sergeants, who would travel from camp to camp, visiting each one once a week, and if you wanted to call home, you’d sign up for it. It worked out to about twenty minutes a week, and that sergeant would sit there across the room with a stopwatch, timing you. There was no guarantee when you’d be able to call, and Camp Custer was eight hours ahead of the East Coast, so if my chance to call home was in the morning, I’d be waking people up in the middle of the night.

Most of us didn’t care. Just a chance to be able to call home could boost morale unbelievably. Sergeant Satterly was able to call home and learn from his father that Satterly’s wife had just delivered the son that she had been pregnant with when we deployed. He was floating on air the rest of the week. Sometimes calling home could be depressing. Some guys would call home and the phone would just ring and ring, and you didn’t get a second chance. Maybe you’d leave a message. That happened to me a couple of times. I left a message at the house, then tried both my parents’ cell phones, and then Kelly, and got nowhere. I ended up leaving messages, and finally got through to a human when I called the feed mill and managed to speak to my grandfather for five minutes before running out of time. Even then, some of the guys considered me lucky. At least one guy called home and found out his wife was divorcing him. That really sucked.

That was in addition to the letters that we’d get when the mail made it through. It was a little haphazard and slow, but usually made it over to us. Kelly usually sent me a picture, which I would put next to my heart, or maybe tuck inside my helmet. You learned the old trick of putting the mail in order of the postmark date, and then reading the most recent letter first, in case there was bad news. Then you’d start from the beginning, so you’d get things in order. Everybody was doing well. Kelly would be graduating on time in May, Jack had another new girlfriend, Duke had passed away from old age, Grandma broke a hip, Mom was worried sick about me. It was all the usual stuff, but it was good to hear from home. Some of the guys had nobody back home, and I couldn’t fathom how tough that had to be.

Another way of staying in touch was email, which was new. More and more people were getting computers, but they were expensive and connection speeds weren’t very fast. Worse, a computer wasn’t something that adapted well to the joys of Camp Custer. We only had a few, and they were kind of finicky.

Every once in a while, somebody would get a Care Package from home. A box would show up with all sorts of stuff crammed inside. Some cookies that might be broken to crumbs but would get eaten anyway, some magazines from home, maybe a bottle of booze that got snuck past the inspectors. Games proved very popular. In addition to the usual packs of cards, one of the guys got a big box of Green Army Soldiers, which proved a real hoot, and another guy’s family packed him Operation, where you tried to remove various body parts without the patient’s nose lighting up. That was also hilarious, in a very macabre way. It struck too close to home for some of the guys.

For the next few months, the hajjis worked at grinding us down. When we changed tactics, they changed tactics. They changed the locations of where they were planting IEDs, focusing on places impossible to see, and further away from our forts. One cute little trick was to begin firing heavy weapons at us randomly. You’d be watching, and this car would come into view, not driving towards you, but maybe crossing a road, or traveling further away and parallel to the main road. Suddenly it would stop, and a bunch of hajjis would pop out. Inside of fifteen seconds they could get a small mortar set up and start lobbing shells at us, with maybe a machine gun next to them popping away. They weren’t all that accurate, but so what. You’d fire back, but unless you nailed them immediately, they’d pack it up and run off after another minute or less.

It didn’t matter much if you hit them. There were lots of hajjis out there willing to take their place and get into Heaven for their six-dozen virgins. You might be able to force them to move out and leave their weapons behind, but they also had an inexhaustible supply of mortars and machine guns from Saddam’s days of running things. Maybe you’d manage to shoot up their car or truck, but what was one more busted-up vehicle in Iraq? You couldn’t even brag about the body count, since they would fire from enough of a distance that even if you managed to hit one of them, they’d be able to get the body away before you could get a fire team on-site.

It was a battle of attrition, and they had a lot more hajjis than we had Eleven-Bravos. When we showed up at Camp Custer, we had a sum total of thirty-nine soldiers, including Lieutenant Bernicki. That was back at the end of December, but since that time, we were getting whittled down. Our first death was Timmo Timmons, who was in a Humvee that got hit by an anti-tank grenade right on the door frame he was sitting next to. It blew through the door and tore his legs off, and he bled out before they could get tourniquets going. That was in March. We lost another guy in April, a PFC over in Fourth Squad who caught some shrapnel during a mortar attack. He simply fell to the ground in front of me, and when I got to him, he looked like he was sleeping. Then I pulled off his helmet and discovered that a piece of shrapnel had hit him right below the lip of his helmet and ripped into his brain from the back.

Those were the only deaths we had that spring, but we probably had another half dozen guys get shot up and evacced out to Baghdad. Most returned eventually, but not all. The Professor was going home; his right foot was staying in Dush-el-Kebir. It was mangled during an IED strike too badly to save. Maybe he’d be able to use his GI benefits to go to grad school now. Riley managed to catch some shrapnel and spent three days in Baghdad getting sewn up. He returned with some bullshit stories about nurses, and some much needed personal supplies from Camp Victory. Williger broke a wrist diving for cover when a mortar attack hit and ended up in Baghdad getting a cast on it before flying back the next day.

The Army called this blooding, and it’s what turned green troops into veterans. That sounded very neat and antiseptic. The reality was the word they used - blooding. We shed a fair bit of blood that spring.

Curiously, we also had a chaplain come around a lot. Captain Fariq (“Call me Captain Frank.”) Ramsy was, of all things, a Coptic priest. Copts were Christian Egyptians, and Captain Frank was born in Kansas from Egyptian Coptics who had emigrated there. Any time we lost somebody or got shot up, he would show up to talk to the men, lead church services, and try to help the dead guy’s friends. Personally, I thought the guy was nice enough, but I hadn’t been all that religious before I got here, and I was losing what little religion I had by the day. You want to become an atheist, just hang around a religious civil war for a while. Still, he was easy enough to talk to, and he didn’t mind that some of us didn’t care about his religious job.

Camp Custer changed some, as well. Fourth of the Fourth had a combat engineer company attached, and half a platoon was stationed with us at Dush-el-Kebir in March. That had both good and bad elements to it. Creature-comfort-wise, it was a good thing. It turned out that engineers were just as lazy and addicted to an easy lifestyle as combat soldiers are, but they had the ability to do something about it. Our facilities improved dramatically after they had a chance to look around and see how we’d been living.

On the downside, we had too many people crammed into too small a space, so they expanded through one of the perimeter walls, taking over part of a plaza and erecting a new exterior wall. Some of their gear was pretty neat stuff, and they could build additional walls almost overnight. Still, they were combat engineers, and while they might have the heart for it, they weren’t professional killers like we were. Engineers specialized in building shit, and Eleven-Bravos specialized in destroying shit. When they increased the size of Camp Custer, it also meant we had a larger perimeter to guard. We had to have more guys on watch, and that meant fewer guys going on escort duty and guard duty. The only way to meet the requirements was to outlaw sleeping.

Things began to turn to real crap by mid-May. Intelligence was reporting that the hajjis wanted to make a big stink before the rest of the brigade arrived, maybe as a way of demoralizing us. Around us the locals, none too friendly at the best of times, began making threatening gestures. When our Iraqi Army interpreter, ‘Ali the ‘Terp’, was tasked with finding out what was going on, he simply told us that Allah had determined that the infidels were to be exterminated. Details weren’t available. The imams and mullahs in the mosques were working the locals up, and we had a couple of suicide-vest bombers the second week of May. One blew up the Iraqi Army checkpoint, and the other was shot and exploded himself between the Iraqi checkpoint and our checkpoint. Something was about to happen.

On Friday, May 14, it got weirder. You could hear the prayers at the mosques, and loud chants of ‘Allah akbar!’ were singing out. ‘God is great!’ Wonderful! That was usually what the suicide bombers were saying right before they lit the fuse. For days now the local children were nowhere to be seen. Maybe their parents knew something and were keeping them home, or maybe they could sense trouble on their own. We didn’t know, but the word came down from Battalion that, all up and down the line, tensions were increasing. Captain Holman began making trips down to the platoons, staying the night and surveying the situation.

The shit hit the fan on Wednesday night, the 19^th. It was a very dark night, pitch black with a new moon, so that the only light was what we were generating inside Camp Custer. Everybody was nervous and we were starting to get short with each other. We knew something was up. Alpha Team was scheduled for over-watch duty on the roof of the command post for four hours that night, beginning at 2200. At 2130 I geared up and grabbed Precious and headed out across the compound. I left Riley behind because he had been an ass and we had gotten to arguing about Kelly, and if I stuck around him much longer, I was going to deck him. I mean it was just random petty bullshit, since the mail had arrived and a letter from her was missing, and my last call to her had gone to voicemail. He had made it out to be something more than our crappy mail service and simple bad timing. Still, I needed to get away from him for a few minutes, even if we were going to be on watch together for the next four hours.

I was halfway across the compound and heading towards the command post when all hell broke loose. I heard a familiar whistling sound, and then somebody screamed out “INCOMING!” and a siren lit off. There was a loud ‘WHUMP!’ up on the roof of the command post, and a bright flash up there. Seconds later a bunch of other explosions started up.

“Oh shit!” All around me guys were boiling out of their squad rooms and posts. I ran forward to get to the command post and get to the roof. Even through the chaos, I could tell this wasn’t a routine and random attack. There were too many mortars attacking, and too many explosions, and they were big explosions, too. Something hit my right leg like a baseball bat, and I staggered, but I didn’t fall, and I made my way to the side of the CP and began climbing the stairs that we had built on the side of the building. We no longer had to scuttle up through a hatch in the roof.

I made it to the roof and scrambled over the side of a sandbag revetment that had half caved in and landed on a body. There wasn’t any response either, so I knew that my leg was the least of our worries. I looked around, wildly, trying to make sense of what was happening. Then I ducked, because another loud explosion collapsed the stairwell behind me. Whoever was on the roof was going to be up here for a while.

I looked around the compound. There were a couple of guys up in one of the observation towers and they were shooting outward, but a couple of streams of tracers were firing back at them, green tracers like most of the Russian gear the Iraqis had been equipped with. Then a bunch of RPGs were launched, and enough of them slammed into the observation tower that it collapsed backwards into the compound. One of the mortar rounds had landed in the middle of some engineer vehicles, messing them up, and one had landed right on the roof of a Humvee, which had exploded and was on fire. Then it got real dark, so I knew that they had taken out a generator.

I scrambled over to the nearest firing pit and rolled over the top and inside. It was pure bloody disaster inside. A couple of guys were there, moaning in pain, and Specialist Blackfox’s head was laying on the side, looking at me. That was all I could see, his head; the rest was somewhere else. Even as I stared, another mortar round landed on the roof, and that jolted me alive. If I didn’t do something, we were all going to get killed!

I stuck my head back up over the top of the revetment and looked out, ignoring the disaster around me. I could see at least three hajji strongpoints out there on roofs and in the open, each of which had a mortar firing and a couple of machine guns; I spotted them by the tracer fire coming from them and the occasional bright light when a mortar round was launched. There was also a large truck lumbering up the road, so it was probably a bomb truck. I didn’t have a decent shot at it, but it was already starting to draw fire from the gate area. They were going to have to handle it by themselves. I was going to have to handle the heavy weapons positions.

I ducked back down as a machine gun raked the front of the roof positions, and I took a second to check Precious out. Then the burst was past me, so I stood back up and twisted around. I put a long burst into the nearest mortar and machine gun position, and then switched over to the second, about fifty meters from the first and to the left. Neither was decisive, though I’m sure it disrupted their plans, since three machine guns began firing on my position. I shifted left a few feet, tripping over somebody who moaned, and then popped back up and put a long burst into the first position again. That must have done a number on them, because the mortar and one of the machine guns suddenly went silent.

I shifted right again, all the way as far as I could, knocking Blackfox’s head to the side. I hoped he’d forgive me, because the way things were going, I’d probably be seeing him soon enough. Mortar fire began raining down on the roof again, shifting from the courtyard. That was probably good for the guys down below, but it was going to fuck me over. I heard several loud ‘SSSTT!’ sounds as shrapnel whipped by me. At least they didn’t have any air bursts. Everything so far was impact fused. An airburst would have sunk me. I felt a burn on my left arm, but ignored it, like I was already ignoring my leg.

The first position I had hit was getting back into action, at least as far as the machine gun, but the mortars were the most dangerous thing out there. I targeted the second position and fired on it until Precious ran through the belt in the hard magazine I had loaded. The barrel was getting hot, too, but I had lost the spare in the revetment. I moved back to the left and found the M-240 that was set up there. I set down Precious and picked up the M-240. It wasn’t my favorite weapon, because it was so heavy, but that was also a virtue now. It fired NATO 7.62, a much heavier round than the NATO 5.56 the M-249 fired. I could probably fire right through a car or truck with an M-240, something I would never try with Precious. Everything felt right with the weapon, and it seemed like it had a full belt feeding it.

I took a deep breath and popped back to my feet. I sighted in on the second position and pulled the trigger. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! The M-240 is a lot louder than an M-249, and it slammed back against my shoulder, but as I poured fire into the second position, I could see that it was taking a toll on the hajjis. Within seconds the position went silent, and I walked fire across the position, and into anything around it. Then I shifted fire back to the first position, which was nearer. The machine gun there was firing, and I silenced it as well.

BOOM! I looked far to the side and saw a huge fireball outside the gate. The bomb truck must have been stopped, but I could see the gate was destroyed, and a line of soldiers was inside it, and up along the wall, firing at targets out on the street. Still, I couldn’t help, since a third and a fourth mortar position was targeting the compound and the roof of the CP. I ducked down and felt around for the spare barrel to the M-240, and switched it out, and then loaded a fresh belt of ammunition. Normally an M-240 gunner had at least one assistant to help with all of this. My assistants were busy dying up there on the roof, so I didn’t have that luxury.

Praying that I hadn’t managed to jam the gun in the dark, I charged it, and then went back into action. I didn’t know what the Iraqis had going, but they had some heavy stuff out there. Most of their heavy weapons were on the light side since they were at least as lazy as the average American soldier and didn’t want to carry anything heavy. Most of their mortars were American or Russian stuff, 60mm or 82mm, but they had at least something out there that was firing heavier rounds, maybe 120mm. I sighted in on something over to the far left of my field of view and fired. I didn’t hit it directly, but walked my fire into the position, and then moved around as much as I could. I was taking heavy machine gun fire from everywhere, but most went over my position or impacted the sandbags. Then I felt something slam into my head, and I was knocked back on my ass.

My head and my neck were killing me, but I felt around, and nothing seemed broken, although my vision in my left eye was blurry. Maybe some dust got into it. I crawled upright, because my right leg was really bothering me, and got the M-240 back into action. I alternated firing at the various mortar locations until it went through the belt. I set it down and grabbed Precious, and fumbled out another magazine, and moved down to the right side of the position and began firing again. My left eye was definitely fucked, so I closed it and fired right-eyed. I wouldn’t be as accurate as I wanted, but I did the best I could.

A minute later and I had used up my new magazine, and I needed to set down Precious. I sure hoped that things were looking better down in the compound, because I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to be able to keep shooting. I was starting to drag around my right leg, and my left arm was causing problems now. I had taken a round of something in it, though I could move it, painfully. I dragged myself back to the M-240 and fumbled through another barrel swap, and then really fumbled through a new belt of ammunition. It felt like it was taking me hours to do these things, but I got it done, and then dragged myself back into position, and brought the weapon up with me.

“Dear God, don’t take me yet,” I prayed. “Give me one more chance.” I tucked the butt into my shoulder and took aim on a mortar position still firing and pulled the trigger. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! The machine guns in hajji-land focused back in on me, but I couldn’t worry about them. I fired on the mortar position until there was a huge explosion, which fireballed into the sky at that point. I tried to focus on another position, and managed a few rounds at them, but they were either bugging out or, more likely, maneuvering to get a better position to kill me. I dragged the M-240 around to fire at the machine guns and managed to drop it over the side of the revetment. Now I was truly fucked.

I crawled back to Precious and put another magazine in it. I wasn’t sure how many I had gone through by then, and the only one I could feel was one of the soft-sided magazines, not the hard cases I preferred. Beggars can’t be choosers, so I loaded it and levered myself upright again. Somebody must have seen me, and a machine gun swung towards me, firing as it went. I still couldn’t move very well, so I lay there half on the sandbags and pulled Precious to me. I got it into position and said a final prayer and began firing again. Tracers work both ways, as the saying goes. I sighted in on the tracers shooting at me and sent back my own.

I was about halfway through the magazine when the tracers stopped, and I let up on the trigger. I think I blacked out for a second, but another loud explosion woke me up and I looked around. These bastards were just not giving up! Somebody in hajji-land had gotten to one of the smaller mortars, so I put the rest of the magazine into that position. Then I blacked out a second time.

I came to a second time when I heard some guys moving around on the roof behind me. Shit, the bastards had overrun us and made it to the roof! Precious and the M-240 were both out of action. I was down to whatever I had on me, which was a Gerber combat knife and a Beretta M-9 9mm. pistol. Shit! When I was outside the wall, I always had a couple of M-67 hand grenades, but I normally left them off in the compound. Wow, was that stupid! I was reaching for the Beretta when hands grabbed me. I struggled loose, losing the pistol, and was reaching for the knife when I was pinned down.

“GRIM! GRIM! WE GOT YOU, WE GOT YOU!” Somebody was screaming at me, and I tried struggling, but they held me down. “GRIM! CALM DOWN!”

I managed to get my right eye open, though that seemed kind of fuzzy also, and focused on the face in front of me. “Riley?” I asked.

“Grim, it’s okay. Calm down, you’ll be okay!”

“Riley? What happened? I thought we got overrun.”

“Grim, it’s okay.”

Things got very dark at that point.

I woke up the next morning laying on a cot outside the command post. I blinked in the sunlight, and discovered that both my eyes were working, though my head still hurt. That was a very positive thing, I thought. I managed to get up a little with my right arm, but my left was all bandaged up, as were both my legs, and I ached all over. I looked around. First Platoon had been hammered, and badly. Smoke was everywhere, and the place was littered with shell casings and shrapnel. There were almost a dozen other guys like me on cots or in chairs, and four zipped-up body bags were off to one side. I saw Doc Hardesty, our medic, and Captain Frank, the chaplain, moving among them. Fuck! I knew one of them was Billy Blackfox’s, but he had been dead before I ever got to the roof. I hadn’t been good enough to save the others.

I lay back down, suddenly tired, realizing how I had failed, and I slowly started to cry. I hadn’t been good enough. Men had died because I hadn’t done my job and taken out the mortars and machine guns. That’s your job when you’re on over-watch, to spot the enemy positions and take them out before they can take you out, and I had failed. I just lay there and sobbed. Better that I had died up on the roof than to have let other men die.

After a couple of minutes, somebody came over to me. I knew by the ugly face that it was Riley Fox. “Grim, Grim, what’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

I blubbered something out and he kept asking what was wrong. By that time Doc Hardesty was beside me. (There must be a regulation that all medics were nicknamed ‘Doc.’ It’s also in the regs that all cooks were called ‘Cookie’ and all radio operators were called ‘Sparks.’) Doc started asking what the problem was.

Finally, I confessed, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Riley stared at me like I was a crazy man. “Grim, what’s wrong? Sorry for what?”

“I failed. I didn’t get the mortars. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I couldn’t stop crying.

“Oh, shit! Grim, Grim, you saved us up there! We were getting destroyed down here, and then all we could hear was this machine gun up on the roof, and suddenly the mortars were stopping. Jesus, Grim, you saved us!” Riley lifted me up and held me to his chest, and then something sharp went into my right arm, and I went back to sleep.

The next time I woke up I knew I wasn’t in Camp Custer. I knew even before I opened my eyes, simply because I couldn’t smell Camp Custer. Pack fifty-plus guys in one place for five months without any decent showers or hygiene, and you’ll know. Camp Custer smelled like blood and shit and sweat and burned explosives and gunpowder. This place smelled - clean! I dragged my eyelids open, and everything was white, and that was another hint I wasn’t at Camp Custer. Everything there was dirty, even the clean areas.

I didn’t think I was dead, though. There was a definite smell of disinfectant, and I was familiar enough with Matucket General Hospital to know what that was like. I was lying in a hospital bed that was partially raised up, and I could see I was in a small hospital room of some sort. I began to move my head and look around, and a dozen tubes or more were in my right arm, and my left arm was bandaged up. I tried to speak, but that didn’t work so well. I was kind of raspy, so I tried clearing my throat, and then managed a few words.

“Hello? Anybody here?” Nothing happened, so I cleared my throat a second time and managed a louder call. “Hey, anybody here?”

I thought I was going to have to wait until somebody came around on rounds, but a few seconds later a female head poked through the door. She saw me looking around, and I got a big smile from her. “You’re awake!”

“Hi. Hey, where am I?” I asked.

She came into the room and approached my bed. That was when I noticed the silver bars on her collar. Shit, she was a First Lieutenant! I straightened up as best I could. “You’re at the Thirty-First Combat Support Hospital. Welcome to Baghdad, Private.”

“Yes, ma’am, thank you.”

“How are you feeling?”

I had to stop and think for a second. “Okay, I guess. What happened to me? Why am I here?” I asked, and then hastily added, “Ma’am.”

“At ease, Private, don’t worry about the rank so much,” she replied.

I smiled a touch. “Yes, ma’am. You sound sort of like my mom, that way. She’s a nurse, too, in an emergency room back home.”

“We’re not much different here. Just one gigantic emergency room. Do you feel all right?”

“Yes, ma’am, I guess so. Why’d they bring me here?” I asked.

“Do you remember getting wounded?” she asked.

I opened my eyes at that. She must have thought I had lost my memory or something. I quickly nodded, and that was when I started to feel my aches and pains. “Yes, ma’am. I must have been hit a few times during the attack, but then I woke up in the compound after being patched up. Why’d I come here? And when? How long have I been out?” I felt pretty hungry, but not like a-week-without-food hungry.

“They brought you in yesterday morning. You were out of it, so we patched you up while you were asleep.”

I tried to work it out in my head. That had to make today Friday the 21 ^st. I asked, “So this is Friday? The 21^st?”

She smiled, seeing that I wasn’t completely out of it. “Yes.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s about 0945.”

“Can I get some water?”

“Absolutely!” She poured me a glass and held it to my lips while I sipped on one of those flex-straws. I drained that cup, and that was another thing that told me I wasn’t in Camp Custer. The water was chilled. Then I drained a second.

“How about some food?”

“Let’s get a doctor to look at you first, but it won’t be long.”

“What happened to me?” I asked again.

“Let me get a doctor for you.” She smiled and left me again, after raising my bed up some more. I spent the next few minutes feeling myself and seeing what was bandaged. I had a lot of bandages on my left arm, both upper and lower, and my right leg felt stiff, but there were some bandages on my left leg, too, on the back of my calf. I was also working on a headache.