Chapter 14

I might have a bone or two to pick with Norman ... but he wasn't remotely responsible for the biggest single fuckup of my entire life. No one was, except for me.

I hadn't realized on that September morning many years ago when I kissed Red goodbye that I'd never see him alive again, that he wouldn't return to our tent in the hills in our gawdawful corner of Iraq. And that as a result my once happy life would turn to complete shit.

As a lower ranking member of our security unit, he was often assigned to ride shotgun with various supply missions. In this particular instance he was riding security inside the cab of a five-ton 6x6 M809 that was going to make a routine four hour trip to our main supply base closer to Bagdad. Anything critical (but light) was choppered in usually, but bulk stuff like fuel, toilet paper and MREs needed to get brought in the hard way.

It was a milk-run usually, with at most an odd badly aimed sniper bullet or two to give a little adventure to the mundane routine, but not this particular day. About forty-five minutes after they'd left we had one all-too brief radio message that they were taking heavy weapons fire near the village of Hasakam and then they were cut off in mid-message. Did I mention that the female truck driver, PFC Caroline Beckett, was also the lover of my direct boss, Lt. Strauss?

Yeah ... this really complicated the issue. In one fell swoop, our entire chain of command was mentally lobotomized. It only got worse a few nights later when we found Caroline's and Red's naked and horribly tortured and abused bodies dumped like garbage near the front gate of our remote camp. Shock and disbelief turned at once to implacable rage and a burning desire for horrific vengeance ... assuming that we could find the appropriate guilty parties involved.

Repeated armed (and rather ungentle) searches of the village of Hasakam turned up nothing, despite these locals being the closest inhabitants to the ambush site where the burned out shell of the supply truck still remained. Most of the Iraqi's living in this particular valley had prospered under Saddam's régime and there were a lot of hardliners still in this area that didn't like Uncle Sam and his underpaid boys and girls very much. Under rather unfortunate and perhaps excessive duress, one hard-eyed young man of military age grudgingly admitted that they had perhaps seen and recognized a few of the attackers. He claimed these were supporters of a Colonel Rahman, who had an estate and a double-handful of armed personal guards, and a burning hatred for the American usurpers and occupiers. In short, a pretty viable suspect for the perpetrator of this outrage.

It took a few more days to get some better intel about the Colonel from further upstream our chain of command, but slowly a few minor facts did seem to indicate his probable participation. Enough so to warrant a closer heavily armed inspection with most of our available security forces, and a few of our spec-ops friends.

None of us had planned or prepared for a massacre ... but that's what we ended up with.

The Colonel had himself a nice little estate house, almost something like a small castle on a hill in the rats-ass part of nowhere. He was also more or less the feudal warlord of this area and when we showed up armed and ready to play hardball, he was more than willing to take us all on. Even the local villagers from a collection of brick huts down at the bottom of the hill were eager to show their loyalty to their local warlord (or even the old régime) and it seemed that every window and doorway contained at least one gunman with an AK pointed right at us.

There were enough of us to deal with most of the half-trained local militia riff-raff, and our spec-ops friends proved to be more than worth their weight in firepower. Unfortunately taking that small heavily fortified keep up on the hill was going to cost us a lot more casualties than any one of us wanted to deal with. In the end, we retreated back a bit out of range and let the bloodied ragheads cheer and shout that they won ... right up until the moment that the bombs hit. It took two sorties to finally suppress the defenders, but after that last one, a therombaric fuel-air bomb that utterly obliterated the walls and guard towers ... and pretty much pulverized everything and everyone still inside. There might have been two or three bricks still mortared together and standing after the dust and flames cleared ... but not by much.

Clearing up the rest of the village and rounding up the survivors who were mostly women and children didn't take us too terribly long and our casualties from then on were all minor. They were a surly lot, glaring daggers at us the entire time. We wouldn't have needed gunshot residue tests to know that many of the women and even some of the kids, had been the very ones shooting at us. Many had been captured or wounded while still armed.

By the normal laws of war, they really shouldn't have been considered enemy combatants, but by the new rules of our War on Terror (hell, where there any?), the situation was now different and we really didn't quite know what to do with them. We'd taken about half a dozen casualties ourselves, fortunately mostly relatively minor wounds but enough that we weren't really going to be able to cover-up our private little war to any poking noses from higher up the chain of command. That was the least of our concerns at the moment anyway.

As I said, neither Lt. Strauss or myself had been thinking very clearly lately and our blood was still boiling. It didn't help cool things down the slightest bit when our search teams combing the huts started to find evidence that Caroline and Red had indeed been here ... and had died here.

The big discovery was made in the downstairs basement of what was more or less the local village café or diner. This was local meeting or hang-out place of the colonel's loyalists here in town and unfortunately for them they hadn't cleaned up much, if at all, from their prior fun and games with our loved ones and friends. It wasn't a pretty sight with bits of torn uniform and remaining bits of excised flesh littering the blood, not to mention that awful pool of blood. The blood was dried up now but there was an appalling amount of it, and it still stank horrifically. No one could stand to remain downstairs for very long, except for the lieutenant and myself. This cellar was where our friends and lovers had been slaughtered, slowly and maliciously, worse than any butcher would have killed or dressed a goat for cooking.

Something within us both died at that moment and parts of our souls that had once been kind, loving, generous and entirely human, instead withered into darkness and something more sinister and alien. As for me, I never even noticed when it happened. I was beyond caring about anything and I just wanted revenge.

When one of our spec-ops friends, a marine sergeant I shall forever leave unnamed, came down the stairs awhile later to ask the lieutenant about what should be done with the prisoners, he didn't seem too terribly surprised by our response.

"Kill them all!" Lt. Strauss cried in his flowing tears, kneeling on that bloodstained floor where his lover had been butchered without the slightest remorse or mercy.

Then, to my eternal shame, I agreed. "Do it quick and bury them deep in the sand. I want this village to just disappear ... as if it never existed." Hell, on most maps it already didn't! An hour or so later, you couldn't even have found these ruins even with a map, let alone from any satellite camera. The village just ceased to exist ... along with all of the sixty-two men, women and children who had once lived here.

Lost in my thoughts and grief, I didn't go back upstairs to watch the shooting, but Lt. Strauss did. He went to supervise and stayed from start to finish and apparently did quite a bit of the shooting himself personally. I could hear the ragged sounds of irregular gunfire quite clearly enough and I had no illusions whatsoever concerning what was happening upstairs. Our folks had seen what had been done to Caroline and Red and most of them didn't particularly object seeing some rough sort of justice done. A few of our folk didn't participate in the shootings, which was quickly done with AK weapons fire, using their own insurgent guns against them, but everyone helped with the cleanup, myself included.

We dug a deep burial trench as far out into the sand as we had patience for and then we tossed in the bodies. Every man, woman and child of the former village of Najad was dumped into it. All sixty-two of them. Then we poured in gasoline and burned the bodies for a couple of hours while we systematically completed the demolition of every single hut and structure within eyesight. When we were done, few if any bricks remained standing at all and the first good sandstorm would probably cover the remains of the town for good. Hopefully forever to then be lost to the sands of time. Lost and with any luck at all, soon very forgotten.

When the bodies were mostly ash we quickly filled in the trench with sand and by the time we'd driven away the wind was already scouring away any traces that we'd ever been there. No one looked back and as far as I know no one ever returned here.

As far as I know no one ever spoke of what we had done here and if anyone had any regrets they were kept silent.

The worst part of the entire thing by far was when I was packing up all of Red's personal effects to be shipped back home to his parents and I saw the name of that small Texas town. Lovett, Texas, that small rural town that my parents and I lived just outside of!

Apparently it was of considerable amusement to both Red and his parents, according to the stack of old letters that I now had the chance to read, that while Red had instantly remembered me from middle school, I had not. Here halfway across the world was my old classmate, a boy that had had a crush on me since third grade! What made this farce an even worse joke by the fates was small jewelers' box with a relatively inexpensive engagement ring inside that he'd bought from our poor excuse of an exchange store in Bagdad. Apparently according to his last unfinished letter home he was planning to pop the question to me in a few weeks!

The fact that I would have said not only 'Yes' but 'Oh hell Yes!' just made things now seem twice as bad as they already were! If anything, I now just felt worse than I'd felt even before we'd had our revenge ... and the slight sweetness of that feeling was now forever lost. The Fates had played the cruelest of possible tricks upon me and I was now furious with the entire world! I'd been robbed and cheated in the worst and most spiteful sort of way and I wanted everyone around me to pay and suffer the way that I now suffered. And as for my own guilt, it just grew and ate away at me like the worst possible ulcer.

I don't know for sure how exactly the word of our private little mission of revenge made it outside our remote backwater and slowly all the way up the chain of command, but it eventually did. The Army had a brand-new 'My Lai massacre', but at least this time the cover-up was conducted a bit more privately and no official word of what we'd done was ever put down on paper, or at least without being heavily classified.

If I'd had to guess, I'd put the blame for this on Lt. Strauss, although I didn't fault the poor broken man very much. Even after our return to camp he never quite snapped out of the depression he'd found himself now trapped with. Our not so petty revenge wasn't enough to make up for the loss of his lover Caroline. Not to mention that he'd pulled a trigger a few times by that trench in the sand ... possibly more than just a few times. There was a whispered rumor that he'd confessed everything a few weeks later to a visiting Army chaplain who briefly passed through our camp about six weeks later, and the timeline fits because shortly thereafter he was very unceremoniously relieved of command and found himself at HQ in Bagdad being questioned by folks with lots of shiny stars on their shoulders.

The story I heard nearly a year later was that he'd then suffered a severe nervous breakdown and was shipped off to Walter Reed for an involuntary stay. Immediately after his release he took his own life, probably erasing any chance that a real court-martial would ever reveal the tragic events in Najad. Nope, that wouldn't have ever happened ... there would never be any public disclosure of our little revenge massacre, but the big brass all the way up to the top honchos now knew that it had occurred.

As for the rest of us, a flood of new replacement personnel arrived shortly afterwards, a new broom so to speak that came in and swept the base clean, reassigning everyone. My own orders placed me into administrative limbo that was not quite arrest, but close to it, and culminated in a brief and 'informal' bit of interrogation by members of Army CID who obviously already knew most of the important details of our private revenge mission. They scared us hard but no charges were ever filed on any of us for anything that I ever heard about. I played dumb and stupid, sticking to the cover story... 'It never happened' or 'I don't recall Sir', and after a couple of rather unpleasant hours in a locked room they let me go.

Thinking about it later, my guess was that CID was fairly content with our quite effective cover-up of the massacre and now they were just looking for possible weak links, other members of the mission who might someday feel an urge to confess to their priest, or worse ... to a member of the press. There was more than a gentle hint given of the severe and very private punishment that would occur if anyone even thought about discussing this matter ever again. Not me!

In our now way above top secret personnel files, we were all now marked for good on some pretty serious 'shit list'. All of our careers were now more or less toast and the entire lot of us, including the truly innocent, were probably now on every alphabet soup agency watch-list. The only remaining question the brass now had was what to do with us? Gitmo? Or some 'accidental' helicopter crash to make 110% sure that we'd never talk?

My career was one of the first to get stamped over and done with. It didn't help that for the final six months of my 'temporary duty assignment' playing traffic control in the middle of a Bagdad intersection out in the hot sun for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, that I was starting to drink pretty heavy the remaining twelve hours of the night and not bothering with getting much if any sleep. Passing out drunk was already sometimes the only way I could sleep at night without having bad dreams that just seemed to get worse as time passed.

Then I was given the golden opportunity to take early separation from the Army and immediately sign on with one of the top-notch private security firms in Bagdad. A good one, not a crap outfit like Norman's. I'd been pegged (accurately) as one of the main ringleaders of the massacre operation and in a back-handed sort of compliment a few of the local senior generals thought my skills might come in handy (and be much more deniable) working as a private contractor. I'd shown a talent apparently for doing dirty-work, and lord knows that there was plenty of those sorts of missions in Iraq that needed to be done ... and by someone that could obviously keep their mouth shut. Also the money, about ten times what I had been making, was more than good enough to ensure that I'd likely keep my mouth very shut.

But then I had to go and fuck this new job up all on my own. The drinking. Working in a security team out in the back ass of nowhere far away from a bottle worked nicely to keep me doing my job out in the field, but when I was back at base or safe inside the Green Zone I was quickly becoming a liability. Again, this was a good outfit of top-notch professionals, and they didn't need or want anyone they couldn't trust to do their job 110%.

A little transfer was arranged, politely worded almost as if it were a promotion of sorts, sending me off to Blackwell Security Services where I'd been promised a good field intel job. It actually was a decent job for the year or two we remained in the Big Sandbox, where we mostly did bodyguard work for important VIPs. If there was any local wet-work, assassinating political troublemakers (which there was) I didn't much care, since they didn't care too much that I picked up a bottle the minute I was off-duty. Already I could tell that Norman tended to collect the fuckups and local rejects, but the pay was still very good and I just didn't give a shit in those days.

We then spent about six months in Afghanistan doing much of the same sort of shit until our merry band of screwups rather badly botched a political hit in some quasi-Taliban friendly village, and our operators needed to take out about a dozen more or less innocent bystanders to remove the witnesses. They'd missed one and a week later Reuters had a nice little news story and a mini-scandal brewed.

The local brass really needed us and our expensive no-bid contract there locally, but reports of this particular massacre did eventually reach all corners of the media until our name was too hot to politically handle. There was no particular proof that our unit had deliberately shot civilians, but by then our company name (like the more famous Blackwater Security) had an awful lot of black marks against it. Needed or not, we were too much of a political liability now and our contract was cancelled and we were all sent back home.