Chapter 42: A Very Bad Day

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

When I got back to Anaconda Three, I was relieved to find that nobody had given Third Squad away. It was still mine. When Platoon Sergeant Willister asked me how my leave had gone, I simply held my hands apart about a foot and said, “Remember how I told you why Kelly loved me so much?” I brought my hands together about half the distance. “Things got a little worn down.”

“Reaper, now I know you’re full of shit. My four-year-old has a bigger dick than you do!”

“Then I’ll bet he’s real popular with those kindergarten girls.”

“OUT!”

I stuck my head into Southerland’s office and let him know I was back, and then headed off in search of Third Squad. Now that I was back, and all our guys were back from medical leave, we were up to full strength again. It was time to get back to work.

Work was pretty much the same as when I left, acting like smiling little yellow ducks. Everything basically centered on a few very specific tasks. We had to alternate squad duty out at Outpost Whiskey. We had to do convoy escort duty up and down Route Indigo, and into Route Malibu, and occasionally we had to go into some damn village and kick in some doors and roust out the local assholes. None of those jobs were all that appealing.

In some ways kicking in doors was one of the safer jobs. The hajjis didn’t normally leave IEDs just waiting around every corner, so once you were off the main roads you usually didn’t run into them. The problem came in knowing which doors to kick in. That seemed like a total crap shoot to me. Occasionally we would get some specific instructions from military intelligence, but other times we might get a local protesting about a neighbor and reporting the neighbor was up to no good. That sounded promising but the reality was anything but. Iraq was a tribal society. There was a very definite hierarchy of importance. Family first, then extended family, then clan, then tribe, and then everybody else. You had to be very careful when the locals told you somebody was committing a crime. It was entirely likely that they wanted you to kill an enemy for them, somebody from a different tribe or clan.

Sometimes we would get lucky and catch somebody in the act of setting a bomb or shooting at somebody. Then you could chase after them. Occasionally you’d find them. They always protested that it was somebody else, but you sometimes got lucky. There were a few hard and fast rules, the first of which was that every family was allowed to own a single AK-47. Another was that nobody was allowed to own anything other than a single AK-47. If you kicked in a door and found an arsenal, you cleaned it out and sent the zip-tied occupants back to Baghdad for questioning. What happened to them there was not my problem. I was heartily sick and tired of trying to win hearts and minds. Far too many of my friends and fellow soldiers had gone home in pieces or in body bags for me to have any sympathy whatsoever.

By the end of February everybody had been here for about eleven months, and it was really starting to get to the guys. Battalion began to do some things that I had seen on my first deployment. The first week of March we began to see Army Commendation Medals with Vs for almost everybody who hadn’t received one already. By April we saw the same sort of thing with Bronze Stars with Vs. You had to be a truly major fuckup not to have both by the time you ended up going home. We also started seeing promotion ceremonies. By now just about every guy who had come over to Iraq had been promoted at least once, maybe from Fuzzie to PFC or PFC to Specialist, and most of the Fuzzies had made it to Specialist. Some of the Specialists made it to Corporal. Again, you had to be a true screw-up not to have been promoted at least once. I put Givens in for a promotion to Corporal or Sergeant when we got back to Drum. He could take the WLC with Nanda and Riley.

In late February Sergeant Willister came to me. Much like I had suspected, he wanted me to reenlist. He was smiling at me, much as Satan probably smiled at Jesus as he took him up on a high mountain and showed him the kingdoms of the earth. In this case, Sergeant Willister was showing me the kingdoms of the Army. He promised that if I signed up for another hitch, then my name would go to the top of the list for the next promotion board, and he would personally help me prepare my packet for the board. “Reaper, if you reenlist, you’ll make staff sergeant, no problem. With your record, and with the recommendations from Captain Vernier and Colonel Barstow, it’s a lock. Staff sergeant inside of four years? When we get home, you do the Advanced Leader Course and then you can pick your assignment. Name the school, and you’re in. You’ll have a platoon slot before you have to re-up again.”

I shook my head. “Sorry, Sarge, no sale. I am going to get out and go home.”

“Then let me tell you the downside. You signed up for Four-Plus-Four. That means you have four years Individual Ready Reserve. I can tell you right now that the Army is calling up soldiers out of the IRR for extended service. You might get tasked to prepare a unit to come back here or go to Afghanistan. Worse, they might wait a year until a unit is going somewhere, and then call you up. They have four years to grab you. You might escape by going into the Active Reserve or the Guard, but they are being called up, too. This might be your best way to get some control out of this,” he told me.

I smiled and turned him down. I didn’t ask him, but I wondered what he had done before joining the Army. Used car salesman?

An additional satellite phone appeared, and we began to get some additional time to call home and speak to our families, and another computer showed up so we could send out email. A few of the guys learned that the hard work they had put in during their leaves had paid off, and that they could expect a little bundle of joy to be greeting them when they got home. Gonzalez was one of them.

Assuming they ever got home. We continued to take casualties at a low level all that spring. We didn’t have any big battles or massive casualty counts like Yankee North. It was just the relentless grind. We had come to Iraq with about 170 guys spread out across Alpha Company. If you added in the various support elements who were with us - engineers, EOD teams, mortar and artillery guys, and so forth - we probably had 250-300 guys up and down our section of Route Indigo. You could usually count at least one IED strike a day, or more. At least once a week somebody somewhere was getting killed or maimed and being sent home. Probably two or three more were getting dinged up enough to need to spend some time in Baghdad at the hospital before returning to their base.

The policy at both Battalion and Company levels was to keep the platoons at roughly an even level of strength. If First Platoon was down a couple of guys compared to the other platoons, somebody would be transferred in from one of the other two rifle platoons, or maybe from Headquarters Platoon. It affected all of us. Both spare automatic riflemen from Weapons Squad, the M-249 machine gunners in the new and experimental structure, transferred to First Platoon. A Specialist in Second Squad was promoted to Corporal and sent off to Headquarters Platoon. Third Squad wasn’t too badly treated since we had lost guys at Yankee North. Still, Santiago transferred from Alpha Three over to Second Platoon to fill in a blank slot there. It was warfare by attrition, who could kill the most enemies, and there were a lot more hajjis than Americans. No matter how many we killed - and they were killing each other more than we were! - we were getting ground down.

The worst that happened didn’t even happen to us but happened up north on Route Malibu. On Friday, May 11, ‘insurgent elements’ detonated an IED at the S-Curves. That destroyed a truck and sent a guy to the hospital. That was up by Mahmudiya, in the area controlled by Fourth of the Thirty-First, where the Polar Bears were supposed to be running the show. The hajjis must have planted a big bomb, since it basically cut the road in two. The response was to send out a couple of armed Humvees with four men apiece, seven American soldiers and one Iraqi translator, to guard the blast site overnight until the engineers could fill it in. The two gun trucks were positioned on opposite sides of the hole, which meant they couldn’t support each other. That night several dozen hajjis managed to swarm the two trucks under the cover of darkness and crappy weather.

It was an unmitigated disaster! Three of the Americans and the Iraqi translator were killed outright, and then burned beyond recognition in their Humvee. A fourth American was killed as he tried to escape. The remaining three Americans were all taken prisoner and taken away, and nobody knew where they might be, or their condition. It was the worst single day in the Tenth Mountain Division’s time in Iraq, even worse than the four we had lost at Yankee North.

It was a real wakeup call throughout Iraq. Up and down Routes Malibu and Indigo, doors were being kicked in. If there was even a suspicion that an Iraqi might know something, they were being hauled off in flex-cuffs to Baghdad. The Iraqis knew what that meant, too, since we just turned them over to the Iraqi Army for interrogation. They were basically the same people who had interrogated people for Saddam Hussein, and their interrogation techniques started at torture and went downhill from there. More than a few of the people we captured offered to tell us everything they knew, just so long as we didn’t turn them over to the Iraqi Army. We didn’t care, and we didn’t believe a word they said anyway. Once they got to Baghdad, they could put them all against a wall as far as we cared.

Supposedly this was having a positive effect on everything. To keep us off their asses, the Iraqis were starting to kick out the foreign fighters. It shouldn’t have been all that difficult since there were millions of Iraqis and only a few thousand foreigners. We even heard that occasionally an Iraqi would come out and inform us that a certain house would have Saudis or Yemenis or some other foreigners in it, or that bombs or IEDs had been planted and we should be careful.

I didn’t much care. Much more important was that word came down that Fourth of the Fourth would be rotated home sometime around the end of June. Specific details were still being worked out, but if we could hang in another month or two, we would be going home. As soon as possible after that, I was going home to stay, and I heard through the grapevine that more than a few of the guys who were finishing their hitches were not staying in.

As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. Another useful saying was something from one of Newton’s Laws, about how for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The Islamic State foreign fighters began to catch some heat and pressure from the locals. They had been lording it over everybody based on their true belief that they were doing Allah’s work in Iraq. Now the locals had decided that enough was enough and wanted them gone. One predictable reaction would be that to prove that Allah was still on their side, they needed to commit bigger attacks on the Americans. It was the Iraqi version of ‘Go big or go home!’ That was supposed to be part of the attack up near Mahmudiya on the Polar Bears; they were trying to prove they were still more important to the locals than we were. This intensified two weeks later, after we recovered one of the three missing Americans, pulled from the Euphrates with a bullet in his head. We kicked in more doors, and the ‘insurgent elements’ decided to double down.

It happened the night of June 6. In the back of my mind, I knew it was the anniversary of D-Day, when my great-grandfather’s generation had invaded Europe. I vaguely wondered if any of my great-grandfathers had served. The odds were that at least one of them had, simply because there had been a draft, and somebody would have been grabbed. With any luck they were assigned to a mess kit repair facility in Iowa. I would have enjoyed Iowa, for that matter.

It was a Wednesday, not that it really mattered. Every day was the same in Iraq. The hajjis didn’t give us any days off, and we returned the favor. If you wanted a day off, you should have gotten a job back in the United States. It was Third Squad’s turn at Outpost Whiskey. We had been there since Monday, and the first thing that we all noticed was how quiet it was. It was just about dusk, and I was circling the compound, checking our positions. I found Nanda looking out over the canal. “Quiet?” I asked.

“Too quiet, if you ask me.”

“You, too?” I hadn’t seen any kids around since we had arrived, traffic was down, and what people we did see would glance at us nervously and scurry away if they saw anybody looking at them. We had also seen some new faces, men that weren’t from around here. I looked down towards the Iraqi Army checkpoint up the road towards Jurf Sakhar. “Where are our allies?”

“Who the fuck knows and who the fuck cares. They’re fucking useless and you know it,” he commented.

“Yeah, but maybe we’ll get lucky, and they’ll get hit by a bullet meant for one of us.”

He nodded, and we looked around together. After another minute I said, “Keep an eye open.”

“It’s always quiet before the manticore attacks.”

“Fuck the manticore, too.” I moved around the perimeter and checked the others and looked at the equipment.

Whiskey hadn’t changed much since we first built the place. Four Hesco bastion walls backed up against a canal, with a single entrance gate facing Route Indigo. The walls were topped with razor wire, which we also had strung along the canal, and Claymores were spaced out along the exterior walls. A two-room bunker had been built along the back wall, with Hesco walls and a roof, supposedly mortar-proof, made of heavy lumber and layered sandbags; the bunker contained our supplies, a radio room, and was where we slept. Outside the bunker was a walled-in area with the Port-A-Potties, our generator, and water and fuel trailers. Otherwise, we had three Humvee gun trucks, each of which was armed with an M-240 machine gun in a roof turret.

There were eight of us there that night, the three remaining guys in Alpha Three, the four guys of Bravo Three, and me. At night we always had two guys on duty, with either me or one of the team leaders, Nanda or Riley, supervising. The rest of us would try to get some sleep in the bunker. During the day sleep was even more questionable. Usually by the end of the week we were severely sleep deprived and needed a full day back at Anaconda Three to become human again.

Something just didn’t sit right with me that night. It was too quiet, but not quiet enough. There was a dry breeze that tended to rustle any vegetation down by the canal, but it was the summer, so the water level in canal was low, and the scrubby brush along the banks tended to build up. I kept walking the perimeter and looking out but didn’t spot anything. I was using my night vision goggles, but even that wasn’t terribly helpful, since it was a clear night, and we had a three-quarters moon. It was too bright for the NVGs and too dark without them. Nanda and his two guys were going to turn things over to Riley and a couple of guys at 2300. Then, at 0300 I would take a turn with a couple of guys. Even so, I just had a bad feeling, and I stayed up.

At 2200 everything turned to shit, and in a big way. A pair of heavy machine guns in the town opened fire on us, followed seconds later by God only knows how many AKs. Nanda had been walking near the gate at the time, and he dove for the ground. We had one of our gun trucks near the gate on the west wall, and the other two were oriented on the inside of the wall, near the northern and southern walls. Within a few seconds Shaniq, in the southern Humvee, began firing back with his M-240, aiming for the heavy machine guns. That was our sole initial response, though. I looked over at the other Humvee, on the northern wall, and it was silent. Then I saw Hollis running for it from the direction of the Port-A-Potties. The hajjis had managed to catch us with our pants down, in more ways than one!

A couple of guys started coming out of the bunker, weapons in their hands, but a second front opened a second later, and cut them down in their tracks. I saw a pair of AKs firing wildly from the wall against the bank, and I realized that the hajjis had managed to sneak a few guys down along the bank and right up to our walls. I started firing at them and ran through the incoming fire towards the bunker, screaming, “CLAYMORES! CLAYMORES!” I wasn’t sure if anybody could hear me, but I saw Riley’s face look at me from the doorway, seeing where I was firing, and he dove back inside. A second later a string of loud explosions rippled down the sides of the walls. He had managed to blow the Claymore mines we had embedded along the wall. As soon as that happened the firing along the walls ended and we began to hear screams from wounded hajjis.

I looked back and saw that Hollis was laying in the middle of the compound. He had never made it to the northern Humvee, so I ran towards it, dodging bullets the entire way. Behind me I saw Riley pulling the two wounded guys back into the bunker. I didn’t know who they were, but it had to be Givens, Montoya, or Gonzalez. Nanda had managed to get into the Humvee by the gate and was returning fire, so I continued to the northern truck, and jumped inside just seconds before a line of machine gun fire stitched the right side.

Before I could start firing, though, I had to get on the radio! I assumed Riley was doing the same in the bunker, but better safe than sorry. I grabbed the handset and called, “Anaconda Three, Anaconda Three, this is Whiskey Base! Do you read? Anaconda Three, this is Whiskey Base! Do you read?” I sure hoped somebody was listening in and not taking a piss, because we were fucked otherwise.

We got lucky. “Whiskey Base, this is Anaconda Three. Say condition.”

“Anaconda Three, we are under heavy attack. Heavy machine gun fire. They tried to storm the wall, but we held them off. At least one, maybe three, wounded. We need help!” Just as I said that I heard some loud explosions in the compound. I glanced back and saw some mortar impacts. “Anaconda Three, now taking mortar fire!”