Chapter 1

It happened again last night. Somewhere around one AM I was sitting up in bed, covers tossed off, sweating. No the room wasn't hot.

I would even be happy that I was worrying about bills or leaky roof or plumbing or that funny noise the car makes. Wasn't, though.

I needed the sleep. I have a job. No, I don't stack jeans at Wal-Mart. Late arrival to the engineering game. I started right out of high school and then Dad's business went belly up. Rather than take out student loans, I did ROTC and out of college went on active duty. Ended up in Iraq.

I thought that a graduate engineer would be one of those 'behind the lines' job, but the title is 'combat engineer' and in Iraq after the big battle, that whole 'line' thing went away. I had the engineering platoon of a tank battalion. It's one of many things I've been wrong about. Tanks. Armor. Combat arms. Hot zones. All that was part of my participation. And when the Iraqi government and army fell, there we were in a makeshift base camp trying to keep the lid on a country that had lost the strong man who kept the lid on various factions.

Factions, groups, each thinking that the country would be better off if two things happened. The first was if THEY were in charge, and the second was if WE were gone. It took no time before we found that every cockeyed group in the country harbored a grudge against us.

Between us and other base camps were roads and just about every supply we needed came in on trucks over those roads. Naturally, it occurred to our 'friends' that if you messed with the roads you messed with EVERYBODY, including rival groups AND the Americans.

A lot of people don't know whose job it is to make sure roads are safe and mine and bomb free. I have two words for you: Combat Engineers.

I suppose that some people would liken it to a game. Every morning we'd run out the gate, me and a couple of my soldiers in a Hummer, a couple of Abrams tanks, another Hummer and three soldiers. A third Hummer with a trailer full of blocks of C-4 explosives and other tools of the trade.

The tanks were our watchdogs. The Iraqi insurgents hated 'em. Nothing they had, RPGs, small arms, would do more than aggravate an Abrams and that 120 mm gun was a very definitive expression of 'don't do THAT again'. We usually had a couple of Apache helicopters up there somewhere, too, but they usually watched US and a few other similar activities in a pretty good sized area.

The drill was simple: Run up the road, looking for the telltales of a new IED. That's Improvised Explosive Device. Think a bomb or artillery shell or two, buried in a hole, with a wire or a cellphone set up to receive the command to blow up. Then our worthy opponent would sit a convenient distance away and wait for something to come by that was worth blowing up.

And we'd go out every morning and find the new bombs and de-activate them. In most cases, this was simple: Locate the bomb. Put a few pounds of C-4 next to it. Blow it up. Simple, on the surface, at least. Remember that 'remote' thing? Our friends got better and better. First few weeks, we just looked for the wire. Then they got wise and we had to start doing some electronic things, jamming cellphone signals.

Finally we got 'Robbie'. Robbie was a robot, a little tracked thing with a camera and a shotgun head. Instead of me sending a real live human (or me. Don't ask your men to do something YOU won't do yourself) to go poke in the vicinity of the bomb, we'd unload Robbie and control him out there, look at what he saw, and decide on the next step.

I won't bore you with the details of how we did what we did, but there were some things that we keyed on. Disturbed dirt. Our main 'road' wouldn't be a good goatpath in the states. It was hardened mud. Hardened. And any time you saw something that wasn't hardened mud, we suspected a bomb. Most of the time we were right.

Another one was the 'dead donkey' trick. Donkeys were common transport in the area. Some of them, sadly, did not fare well in the occasional firefight. Donkeys know little about blast radii of mortar rounds and penetrative capabilities of small arms fire, and the lack of knowledge means, all too often, a dead donkey. A dead donkey where we'd had some vigorous interaction with our 'neighbors' was one thing. The random appearance of a dead donkey on the side of the road was reason for suspicion. You can hide a lot under a dead donkey, or inside a dead donkey. And after a day or two under the Iraqi sun, a dead donkey provides its own olfactory brand of security.

And one fine day, a donkey played a part in the incident that ended my military career.

Lead team was me, my driver, a hulking black guy from South Carolina, and our gunner, a Southern white boy manning our beloved M-2 machinegun in a ring mount on top of the vehicle.

Second Hummer, that was one of my engineering teams.

And the last Hummer, with Robby in a little trailer. No tanks today. Kinder gentler rules of engagement, you know. The appearance of sixty-ton behemoths on their streets was disturbing to the gentle folk therein. I missed my tanks, although I'd never admit that to the tanker that frequented our after-hours gabfests.

A pair of Apache helicopters swooped by noisily, scanning our route before we left, then they disappeared into the distance with other fish to fry.

Out of the compound and up the road and I'm scanning ahead with binoculars. I see it, about the same time that SPC (that's 'specialist', an enlisted rank in the army) Whiteboy said "Dead mule up there, El Tee. "El Tee" is the abbreviation for lieutenant in the Army, "LT", and it's as good as 'Sir' in informal situations.

"I got 'im, Smitty. And that's not a mule, it's a donkey. You know the Quran forbids mules."

"Mule, donkey, whatever. He's fresh from yesterday. You think?"

"I think we send Robby to look." I spoke on the radio and out column halted. The guys in the last Hummer unloaded Robby and one of them came up with the controller in his hands, running the little robot. I stood beside him, looking at the camera's screen. The little tracked 'bot whined and bounced up the road the hundred and fifty yards to the target donkey. The operator panned the camera. Nothing.

They ran Robby around the other side, the four legs of the donkey stiffly protruding. More camera viewing. Nothing. No disturbed earth. NO incision or open gut where the donkey may have been loaded. However...

"Five pounds of C-4 ought to make sure," I said. "Bring Robby back and let him set it."

Whine bounce shuffle and the robot was back. One of my soldiers prepped the charge, including the detonator, set it on the robot, handy for its arm to pick up and place, and then with the charge set, the robot would back up a safe distance and pop the charge. The donkey would mostly disappear, and if there was a nefarious device, it would either explode or its presence would be revealed in the new crater.

BOOM! New crater. Bits of donkey fluttering wetly down, completing the circle of life, and after the dust and smoke cleared, the resulting crater showed no signs of any bomb.

A thought entered my head. Decoy. And from my youth in the marshes hunting ducks, I knew that when you set a decoy, you do it so your quarry comes in where you want them.

"Mount up and MOVE!" I shouted. My shouts coincided with the sounds of the first incoming mortar rounds. And these guys knew what they were doing. That wasn't surprising. We, the coalition forces, had literally torn apart the Iraqi army without killing everyone nor confiscating their weapons. A lot of ordnance had disappeared simply because it was all over out there and we couldn't collect it all. And of all things, a mortar tube looks like a piece of pipe unless you look closely and the whole stinkin' country was an ammo dump.

And right now some of that stuff we missed was raining down. Fortunate thing: They didn't have the road zeroed, so the first rounds were a couple of hundred yards off target. Unfortunate thing: Whoever was calling corrections could both SEE us AND he knew what he as doing. I was in the middle of the makings of a paragraph in a war report.

In the Hummer I was on the radio. "Panther base, this is Shovel Six. We're taking mortar fire."

"Roger, Shovel Six. Guns is on the horn to Divarty right now. We're sending the QRF." 'Guns' was our artillery forward observer. Divarty was the division artillery and they had some technology that would pinpoint the origin of the projectiles fired at us and relay that information to some artillery unit that had a good shot at the target. The QRF was the quick reaction force, a little party of tanks and armored personnel carriers that would show up to overpower any sticky situation.

Trouble was, our situation was degrading faster than any hope of either development helping us. The second and third rounds of the mortar fire hit the road behind us. Spotter rounds. The next one was close enough for mortars. We were screwed. A dozen (I know. I counted) rained down. The trailing Hummer was on its side, burning. The leader Hummer, mine, lifted in the air and slewed sideways at an angle that told me it wasn't going anywhere.

Smitty was slumped down in the gunmount, dark wetness spreading down his side.

"Unass this thing," I told the driver. "Help me get Smitty."

We were wrestling with Smitty, every move we made provoking sharp cries, but I could smell smoke and I figured that pain was a better alternative to roasting in a burning vehicle.

The heavy machinegun on the second Hummer opened up as we dragged Smitty to the roadside. I saw flying mud brick where the fifty-caliber bullets worked over a doorway. There was a dead, VERY dead Iraqi in the door, an RPG thrown into the street in front of him. But there were several others running out of other buildings, all still a hundred meters off, and my soldier in the middle Hummer was the only one in position to do anything about it.

Until the first of three RPG rounds impacted his Hummer.

Davis and I had Smitty behind a bit of roadside debris and between us we had two M-16 rifles against at least a dozen insurgents who were screaming praises to Allah as they rushed forward carrying AK-47's and a couple of RPG's.

"Fuckety fuck fuck fuck," I spat, trying to target the nearest. Davis was doing his best to match me word for word and round for round. He emptied out his rifle before I did and did a fast magazine change, and that's when the RPG hit the pile of debris in front of us. Smitty didn't know it, being unconscious and looking pretty dead. Davis was on his back, blood puddling in the dirt below him. I rolled back over, sighted on the nearest insurgent, and pulled the trigger. Nothing. I rotated the rifle to clear the stoppage and saw where a steel shard had trashed the aluminum receiver of my rifle.

"Fucked. I am TRULY fucked," I said, then I saw Davis' rifle. I tried to crawl and that's the first time I realized that I was hit. Left leg no workee. Right leg. Push. Grab rifle. Sight. Dirty white pajamas and black wool vest. Squeeze. Again. He stopped. Next target. Squeeze. "Shit!" Flip switch to 'burst' and catch the next one. Oh shit! Motherfucker with an RPG. I'm boned. Shoot! He fires at the same time I do and the rocket hits behind me and he's out of the game. His buddy, though ... I'm on my back, blood in my face. Mine. Can't see. Left hand won't get to my face. Right hand. Wipe. Grab rifle. Turbaned, bearded face, with a big-assed knife in his hand. I lift the rifle. One trigger pull. Three rounds, three hits. And I'm out.

The next thing I remember is waking up under bright lights, naked, wrapped in a sheet, IV's in both arms.

"Welcome back, lieutenant," a nurse said. "Doctor, he's back."

"I hope he's ugly," I croaked.

"Who?" the nurse asked. "The doctor?"

"Yeah," I said, "Because you look like an angel." Then I realized I wasn't seeing out of my left eye. Dark.

The doctor walked up, mask dangling off an ear. "Lieutenant Jackson, welcome back."

I breathed. Oxygen cannula was at my nose. "Glad to be ... Where?"

"Twenty-first Evac. But not for long. You're going to Germany on the next flight out."

"How long?"

Chapter 2 »