One Bullet Away

The dirt road twisted through small hills and disappeared over a rise. We followed it at a halting pace. I split the platoon into two elements, with Colbert, Espera, and I moving as one unit and Reyes and Lovell moving as another. One group advanced while the other stopped to cover them.

“Tank! Tank direct front! Back up, back up!” Colbert’s voice on the radio was frantic. His Humvee wheeled around, with Espera close behind. I jumped from my seat to get a better view. Ahead of us, the dirt road ended at an intersection. Beyond the intersection ran a dirt berm. Pointing over it and directly at us was a beige barrel with a yawning black opening. I expected it to turn Colbert’s Humvee to cinders at any second. Over the radio, I asked for backup from an LAV armed with antitank missiles.

From behind us, in the overwatch position, Sergeant Lovell’s laconic voice cut through our fear.

“Hey, fellas, is the tank to the left or right of that irrigation pipe?”

Irrigation pipe? I looked again. Our “tank barrel” was a farmer’s water pipe. Time froze for a second. Humvees stopped spinning around. Marines abandoned their mad scrambles for AT4 missiles. We stared at the pipe, then looked at each other. I collapsed in the seat and closed my eyes. Would I have made this mistake three weeks ago? Was it heat, dehydration, fatigue, or frayed nerves? The only reason we hadn’t blown that pipe away was that we didn’t have any weapons that wouldn’t bounce right off a tank. What if there had been kids around, or innocent villagers? Not shooting hadn’t been discipline; it had been unpreparedness. I looked at Gunny Wynn.

“Hey, don’t worry about it. No harm done,” he said. I needed the boost.

After self-consciously telling the battalion that the antitank missiles weren’t needed, I set the platoon up in a checkpoint at the intersection. The road we had come in on dead-ended there, and the other dirt path ran roughly north-south, paralleling the highway the battalion was on. A white sedan drove up, and the passengers looked startled to see our armed Humvees. Mish and I stood by the driver’s window. Before we could say anything, a man in the back seat began speaking rapidly. I waited for Mish to translate.

“He says you are the first Americans they have seen here. Ba’ath people are waiting for you at an intersection up this road. He says about five miles, where this road meets the highway.”

“That sounds like what the other guy told us.”

“He also says there is a dam near Ba‘quba. Many soldiers are at the dam, and they have buried chemical bombs in the ground there.”

“No shit? He said ‘chemical bombs’? You think he could show it to me on the map?”

“These guys don’t read maps.”

While I reported the information about the dam to the battalion, Mish continued talking with the men in the car. They kept glancing between him and me. Finally, one of them forked over three packs of cigarettes, and they drove off, looking back at us through the rear window.

“What the hell, Mish? We should be giving them smokes as thanks for helping us.”

“Yeah, but I’m out. I told them to hand over some cigarettes, or you’d kill them.”

“Mish, you can’t do that. Pretty soon we’ll be fighting the whole goddamn country.”

33

WE CAUGHT UP with the battalion just south of the intersection where we’d been told to expect an ambush. Aircraft had pounded it. A brushfire crackled in the tall grass, revealing a mortar pit and a twisted machine gun. RPG launchers and unfired rounds carpeted the pavement. We weaved carefully to avoid hitting them. Across the road, a car had suffered a direct hit from an aerial bomb. Its metal frame crinkled in the heat the way a piece of cellophane does over a match. The driver had escaped, but not far. He lay in the dirt, frozen in a lunge with his arms stretched out before him. His whole body was toasted to a deep almond brown, except for one hand. That hand wasn’t burned at all. Its white palm was open, waving at us.

The Marines heaped abuse on the dead Iraqi as we passed.

“Hey, check it out. Beef jerky man.”

“Shoulda worn sunscreen, motherfucker.”

Immense concrete pipes were stacked along the sides of the road. It looked like the town road crew had planned to install a new sewer system before the war changed everyone’s priorities. Fighters had been living in the pipes. Their blankets, water jugs, and piles of food were stashed inside. We sat at the intersection while another platoon rummaged through the wreckage and the fighting holes looking for anything of intelligence value. At the crossroads stood an enormous stop sign, more than three feet across. It was the customary red octagon, but the word STOP was written in Arabic. I thought it would be perfect for our roadblocks; it might even keep us from killing someone.

“Christeson, cut that stop sign down and put it in the back of the truck.” He looked at me in disbelief. An officer had never before ordered him to commit vandalism.