One Bullet Away

We passed the mullah’s mosque and pulled off into a dirt lot on the other side of the road. The platoon set up a perimeter around the tanker. Expecting a frenzy, we strung cloth tape between the vehicles, controlling access to the water through one narrow entrance and exit. I was suspicious when no crowd gathered while we worked. After ten minutes, we still sat alone on the street corner.

“Motherfucker trumped us,” Gunny Wynn said, shaking his head. “I guess we know who’s boss around here.”

We gathered our tape and led the tanker north a few miles to a town we had not yet visited. Alongside the road, women dug down through the trash heaps to the shallow water table. Even little girls helped to cart home buckets of muddy water. As always, the men sat in the shade, watching the women work over the tips of their cigarettes.

The road split on the north side of the town of Al Jabr, enclosing what in the United States would have been a village green or town square filled with flowers or a gazebo. In Iraq, it was a flat piece of dirt with the supreme virtue of being mostly free of trash and raw sewage. We set up our cordon with the tanker in the middle and within minutes were thronged. People streamed from every corner of the town, carrying, pushing, and dragging receptacles of all kinds: plastic buckets, antifreeze bottles, rubber bladders, even a child’s wading pool. Tractors and donkeys did some of the lifting, but mostly it was done by women and girls. I watched in awe as seven-year-olds hefted five-gallon cans of water weighing forty pounds onto their heads.

Espera’s team pulled security on the road, and he leaned against the quarter panel of his Humvee to watch the melee. “Goddamn, sir, if we’d had to fight the women around here instead of the men, we’d have gotten our asses kicked,” he said.

I had placed Sergeant Reyes’s team north of the square where the two sections of road rejoined and disappeared around a bend. We worked the northernmost American zone, and I didn’t want a truck full of fedayeen to come barreling down the highway and blunder into a fight with us in the middle of a crowd of women and children. The other teams kept order among the people waiting for water. Gunny Wynn and I were talking with two Iraqi men when we heard shouting up on the road.

“Gun! He has a gun!”

“Hold your fire! He’s turning around.”

We ran to the pavement and saw a white Toyota Land Cruiser being stopped at gunpoint by Rudy’s team. Four men inside held up their hands in surrender. Apparently, they had been traveling south when they saw the Humvee sitting in the road. They tried to do a quick U-turn and in the process threw an AK-47 out of the window of the truck. Raising that rifle had nearly cost them their lives. Jacks saw the weapon and was about to fire his Mark-19 when the AK was dropped instead of aimed. He sighted in on the truck, ready to stitch it.

Wynn and I approached the Land Cruiser. The men inside looked well dressed and neatly groomed, traits we had noticed among the fedayeen and foreign fighters. The driver began to speak.

“We Kurdistan. Kurdistan. America friend. Come boom-boom Ba’ath Party. Boom-boom fedayeen. George Bush very good. We Kurdistan. America friend.”

He thrust a folded piece of paper at me. The top bore an official-looking embossed seal, and some of the writing was in English. From what I could decipher, it was a permit issued by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan allowing the man to carry an assault rifle.

“These guys are peshmerga,” I said. I knew the Kurdish fighters were staunchly pro-American. They had been helping U.S. Special Forces fight Ansar al-Islam, a terror network based in northern Iraq. That afternoon, they were doing exactly what we’d been briefed they would — exacting revenge on the Sunni-dominated Ba’ath Party for atrocities committed against them under the Hussein regime. All the intelligence reports had a “wink-wink, nod-nod” quality. Like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the peshmerga were thugs, but our thugs.

We were under orders to disarm the populace but also to avoid getting tangled up in other people’s fights. In Sadr City, I had listened as senior officers had encouraged the revenge killings as a necessary part of Iraq’s eventual stabilization. Some American units were even reported to be distributing captured weapons to anti-Ba’athist militias. Once again, grand strategy and national policy came to a head in a single decision by a small platoon.

“Give him his rifle back, Rudy, and let them go.”

Rudy handed it over, saying, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

“I never thought we’d say that,” I replied. “We’ve spent too much time in the Middle East.”