One Bullet Away

Baghdad’s veneer of routine wasn’t without cracks. An Army patrol picked its way through an industrial park. Tanks manned checkpoints at regular intervals along the road. Most neighborhoods looked untouched by war, but the government buildings towering over them were shells turned black inside. Shock and awe. One highway underpass hid the burned remains of an Abrams tank, a tank retriever, and two supply trucks. Their sad story begged to be told.

At sunrise, we passed the blue clamshells of the Martyrs Monument, a tribute to the Iraqi dead in the war with Iran. Public memorials appeared to be one thing the Hussein regime had done right. This one soared above the surrounding homes, opening, closing, and changing shape with the shifting perspective of our movement. The monument’s beauty, after so many weeks of mud brick and wreckage, was staggering. Near a sign for Saddam International Airport, the battalion turned south on Highway 1 and left Baghdad behind.

The sun beat down between billowing clouds. Riding with my head pitched back, I watched them swirling and changing shapes. No smoke. No jets or helicopters. No gunfire, no mortars, no turtling inside my body armor. All we needed was music. I played with the shortwave, but the choices were the BBC, Arabic talk radio, and religious chants. Six hours south of Baghdad, we pulled off the highway into a field of reddish clay. I observed the ritual of emplacing the machine guns at hundred-meter intervals and sketching a fire plan, but it was a struggle. As quickly as we’d been thrown into the war, we were being withdrawn even faster.

We dallied in the field for three days. Surely, we mused, there had to be a power plant to guard, a school to rebuild, a convoy to escort, or even a plane leaving Kuwait City with a few empty seats to fill. Anything beat roasting in the dirt and debating our future. On the second night, three combat engineers attached to the battalion were marking an Iraqi minefield along the side of the road. One of them stepped on a small antipersonnel mine. The blast tore his leg off at the knee and liquefied the eye of a Marine standing next to him. When I told the platoon about the accident, Espera shook his head. “There are a thousand ways to die,” he said.

Our only consolation was the flood of Army soldiers streaming north toward Baghdad. Their columns of tanks and trucks passed without pause through the days and nights. The Fourth Infantry Division had missed the war because Turkey had vetoed an American attack through its territory. But it arrived just in time for the occupation. We empathized with the soldiers on their way to a hot and dangerous summer of peacekeeping.

On our last night in the field, I was walking the battalion’s lines along the highway when an Army tanker truck pulled to a stop at the edge of the pavement. Five more swung in behind it. A second lieutenant hopped down from the cab and waved to me.

“Howdy. Can you tell me where to find the intersection with Highway 8?” he asked. He held a crumpled, hand-drawn map.

“Christ, man, you’re still like fifty klicks south of it.”

He looked perplexed. “Well, how’s the road up there? Safe?”

“Depends. You got an escort? Heavy weapons?”

The lieutenant gave a quick nod, dismissing my question. “We’re armed.” It was the verbal equivalent of snapping his suspenders.

“You mean that thing?” I pointed at the pistol on his belt.

“A rifle in every truck.” Defiant.

“Stay the fuck away from me. You guys have no maps, no weapons, no fucking clue where you are. I don’t want to be around when you get hosed.” I hated feeling that way and tried to make a joke of it, but I couldn’t. Sometime in the past month, we had become veterans. And like the veterans in every war, we didn’t want to be near the new guys. New guys got themselves killed.

On April 22, we drove another hundred kilometers south to what the division euphemistically called Tactical Assembly Area Paige, a former Iraqi military base on the outskirts of Ad Diwaniyah. RCT-5 had shot its way through the town a month before, and the bullet holes and shrapnel scars remained. The Marines said that Paige was biblical, not because it was down the road from Abraham’s Ur, but because each day brought a new plague — heat, wind, sand, flies, mosquitoes, and sickness. Our first morning there, after waking up in a septic field surrounded by burning trash fires, Gunny Wynn stared at the Iraqis digging for water in the noxious dirt. “These motherfuckers are tough,” he said. “Third world tough.”