Gun Work

A lot of grunts in the unit have heard of RICO statutes, but few of them know what the acronym stands for: Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization, which handily defines most of Iraq’s assorted Ministries — the Ministry of Health, of the Interior, Education, Water Resources, Oil, Labor and Social Affairs. The list goes on unto boredom, with each ministry more corrupt than the last. Untouchable by investigators and immune to prosecution thanks to militia support from Shia leaders, each formerly legal enterprise has been overrun by criminals and there is no operative difference between the terms “militia” and “gang.” It is like Chicago during the Roaring Twenties, but without the charm, the music, or the tuxedos.

(At least you had the security of knowing everyone around you was the enemy, said a small voice in Barney’s head.)

The majority of casualties to Barney’s unit have been the result of Improvised Explosive Devices — IEDs — which are left lying around with the frequency of litter, waiting for some stupid American in body armor to disturb them. Boom, and the guy who gave you a cigarette and lit it for you while sitting across from you in the Humvee ships home with no legs and half his eyesight.

Paranoia is not only rampant in the Sunni Triangle, it is wholly justified. You essentially cannot even go to the head without a buddy watching your six. Patrols are wired tight and your areas of safe movement are strictly limited by arbitrary (and sometimes illusory) boundaries. You shoot hoops with your crew, you have to designate one of them to watch for snipers because you’ve dared to be outdoors.

Sometimes guys just disappear. No record, no rescue, just sucked off the face of the earth as though they had never existed. The fear level acts as a practical version of the boogeyman.

You are either bored to within an inch of self-mutilation because of no action, or scared to death from too much. No middle ground.

The heat is a living, malignant thing. Even the climate seeks to destroy and demoralize you. You do your job while trying to ignore the sound of your eyeballs pan-frying in your skull, wait for your DEROS, and hope you do not lose any vital parts in between.

Virtually every long stretch of road is nicknamed a “highway of death.” The US forces in Iraq face the same problem the Soviets had in Afghanistan — lack of adequate security forces for travel or any kind of troop movement. Whenever a vehicle hits a land mine, eats an IED, or is taken out by an RPG, there is usually an insurgent with a video camera to record the flaming vehicles and dead or dying Americans and deliver it via the Arab TV networks to show the enemy is vulnerable. You need a whole armored division to adequately protect a road, and as long as the troops are there, nothing ever happens.

Until something does.

(Who ordered you to take a nap? said the voice in Barney’s head. Snap to.)

The mine blows both the starboard wheels off the Humvee in which Barney is riding, and flips it. The driver had tacked to avoid what turned out to be a decoy in the road, a suspicious irregularity designed to make you swerve into a real, better-concealed trap. This happens in the middle of a hellacious sandstorm that has reduced visibility to about three feet. No warning; just the eardrum-imploding crack of a bomb going off beneath your vehicle’s chassis armor (which did not function worth a damn because there was not enough of it); you go gravity-less like shorts in a dryer in total silence because you are temporarily deaf, and when you can refocus your eyes, everything is on fire.

Your body armor becomes an impediment, its bulk preventing you from jumping out of the vehicle and getting back to a place where the ground is down and the sky is up, and as you scramble you notice your feet are aflame.

Later you find your boots partially melted; your feet are burned badly enough to prevent you from humping out on your own power.

No glorious mission, no taking that essential hill, just panic and terror as your team scatters into the merciless, sandblasting wind. Nobody knows who is dead and who is alive. What you first think to be enemy gunfire is the rounds in Sgt. Tewks’ magazine exploding from the heat. Tewks takes one in the calf from his own weapon.

Everybody gets immediately lost in the sandstorm and no one can hear anything. Barney scrambles like a mad crab to get distance, and flops on his back from a sudden jolt of pain in his side. A piece of the Humvee is jutting out of him, having breached a seam in the constrictive oven of his body armor. He tries to sleeve sweat from his vision and sees his own blood.