Fire and Forget (22 page)

YOU ARE A UNITED STATES INFANTRYMAN.
An Imperial Grunt. The emblem of American militarism. Your rank is: Specialist. It is late 2004, and you are behind a machine gun in al-Anbar, Iraq, swathed in bulky armor and expensive gear and sitting—almost reclining—in a wide nylon sling slung across the roof of a Humvee that's as cartoonishly bulky as you. Your job as a Humvee gunner is to provide rear security for a convoy of fuel tankers that's currently wending its way from the Baghdad airport to a Forward Operating Base one hundred miles east.

You're no fool; you're a college kid. You were just about to declare a poli-sci major at UC Riverside when you got the letter ordering you to active duty for Iraq, along with the rest of your California National Guard brigade. You're smart, and you get the joke. The fuel will be used to fill the vehicles and generators of the combat and combat support units at the base, whose main task is to secure the area around Kut, the security of which presumably increases the security of the country and then the region, which helps to secure the world in general and the United States in
particular. It's tough to make a direct connection between what you're doing right now and the peace and prosperity of your hometown of Riverside, but that's no surprise because global security is all about action that's collective as well as synergistic, as far as you understand it.

As you think this, you reach into one of the nylon pouches of your vest. You pull out a Met-RX Big 100 protein bar and unwrap it with your teeth while your left hand rests on the handle of the Browning .50 caliber machine gun mounted to a swivel in front of you. The air smells of dust and burning garbage. The sky is eggshell white with brown and black highlights. You're about to see some action, although you don't know it quite yet.

At the front of your field of vision is the enormous black barrel of an M2. 50 caliber machine gun, a weapon that's longer than you are tall and that shoots rounds the size of small dildos. In the middle range of your vision, fifty meters away, is a pack of cars following your convoy. Any one of them could be a suicide car bomb, but they're probably just average Joes, day-to-day Iraqis trying to get somewhere. The reason they're all fifty meters away is that there's a large, white, bilingual sign affixed to your Humvee's rear that reads “US CONVOY DO NOT APPROACH WITHIN 50 METERS OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON,” the Operation Iraqi Freedom version of the good old “IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU'RE DRIVING TOO CLOSE.” And of course, there's you, crouched in the gunner's hatch menacing everyone with the .50 cal.

 It doesn't always work. Some hajjis are weirdly—almost nihilistically, you think—unresponsive to menacing. You wonder if nihilistic is the right word to use. Your PHIL 101 Intro to Western Philosophy course went over nihilism last semester, but thanks to the letter you got sending you here, you never finished it. Your PHIL 101 professor was nice about you leaving midway through, although he kept on saying he was, “So, so sorry,” as if someone you loved had contracted a terminal illness.

Your thoughts drift. You know the importance of vigilance and constant scanning, but you are perhaps too imaginative for sentry work or rolling down Baghdad highways day in and day out. Consider: there is a large crater in the intersection outside your unit's walled-off living area on the edge of the Green Zone where a silver BMW exploded, beheading rush-hour commuters and landing a guy from 1st Cavalry Division in the ICU with “polytrauma,” which is the new buzzword for injuries sustained in the kind of blast that would kill anyone lacking 100 pounds of Kevlar and ceramic armor and twenty-first-century surgical care. Thanks to a recent mop-up operation, you can now mentally produce a photorealistic image of what your own body would look like after such an explosion, and this image comes unbidden to your mind during long stretches of highway.

The protein bar is incredibly dry and needs to be washed down frequently with rubbery-tasting water from the hose of your CamelBak. You think about going back to UC Riverside and enrolling in ENGL 302 with no lower jaw or tongue, having to write out your conversation or type through some text-to-speech thing like a twenty-year-old Stephen Hawking, your old roommates looking at you with kindness and awkwardness and pity, no one really wanting to talk to you in that condition, and you not wanting to talk to anyone either. Sex with the Riverside coeds would be out of the question, with you looking like either the Phantom of the Opera or that Marine in the
New York Times Magazine
with his face and scalp totally burned off and scarred over, a too-scary-for-PG version of the guy in
Goonies.
And that's just what could happen to your head. A bomb could leave you dickless and castrated too, which would probably take at least one leg off pretty close, which would lead the few girls you have gotten with to suspect that it's worse than it looks and to have nightmares of what's become of you “down there.” Your buddies wouldn't be able to take you out for drinks without acknowledging it and thinking about it, the worst thing that could
happen to a guy, your catheter filling your bag with fluid after a few Heinekens and one of your friends, most of whom front like they're assholes but are actually really nice guys, changing it out for you, trying to decide whether wisecracking about it or refraining from wise-cracking would make you feel worse.

You're not a worrywart, though. You cut that train of thought off and start mouthing Jay-Z lyrics while swiveling the Fifty around and aiming at cars and windows and the rooftops of the drab apartment buildings that line the highways. One interesting tidbit you heard from the 3rd Infantry Division troops, whom you relieved, is that some gunners have been ordered to crouch way down in the hatch, like too far down to really be able to see anything, since the main danger is IEDs, which you won't see anyway, but which will take your head off in a close blast or in a rollover if you're standing up tall and trying to scan this way and that.

In your (albeit limited) army experience, this is the kind of decision that sergeants or officers make for you, but you haven't been instructed either way, probably because your sergeants and officers, being new here themselves, either haven't thought of it or aren't sure whether it's wise. You figure you're probably justified in going either way, even though you're the rear security and are supposed to be keeping an eye out for threats coming from the rear of the convoy. You can crouch down low, popping up for a quick scan every fifteen or twenty seconds. You might miss the telltale lumps of a roadside IED that didn't detonate, but this also means you'd avoid taking the blast in your face if it does. All in all it seems prudent. On the other hand, there are things you know you don't know and things you don't know you don't know. And as long as you're crouched down, you're not watching the convoy's six.

DO YOU:

Crouch down in the turret and pop up to scan every twenty seconds? TURN TO SECTION (2)

Remain standing and scanning as before? TURN TO SECTION (3)

Here's the worst situation: after having mulled over keeping your head down, you decide to keep it up, and then you get hit with an IED, which burns your face off or gives you the kind of brain trauma that disables you for the rest of your life but doesn't erase the memory of mulling over and then failing to take a simple precaution that could have saved you. You feel around for a comfortable sitting position and then settle into it, figuring out by trial and error the best method for hauling your heavily armored self up at twenty-second intervals for a quick scan. Your armor and equipment increase your body weight by about seventy pounds, and human nature and muscle fatigue being what they are, the twenty-second intervals become more like thirty seconds as the hours wear on. The convoy is keeping speed and making good time. The traffic is staying fifty meters away from you. You pass a billboard advertising Mr. Brown Canned Iced Coffee, which has actually become a personal favorite and is sold by the case by Ali at a kiosk he set up at the outskirts of your Forward Operating Base. Body armor is uncomfortable to move around in, but the immobility (along with the drone of the engine) can be somewhat sleep inducing in the heat, hence the regular drinking of Mr. Browns. The cartoon Mr. Brown himself looks jolly and avuncular. Popping back down into a sitting position on the turret's swinging foot-sling, you dig a strawberry-yogurt-flavored protein bar (that you've added for snack purposes) out of the extra ammo pouch on your flak vest and take a bite. Guardo, the medic, is sitting in the right rear seat looking troglodytic and pudgy-faced in his helmet and armor. Your boots have been resting on his trauma bag since you've assumed your new, protected position. Guardo does not seem to object to this. He holds a fist up, and you give it a bump.

The explosion sounds like a huge beam of hardwood snapping in half. The driver and your squad leader, Staff Sergeant Boyle, call out, “IED.” Your gun truck runs over a large pothole
almost immediately, smacking your neck painfully against the edge of the turret and pushing your Kevlar down over your eyes. Your platoon leader is yelling something indecipherable on the radio, and Guardo is yanking at the bag under your feet. You hear some of the gunners farther up in the column open fire. You untangle your feet and yank yourself back up behind the Fifty.

You are surprised to see a black BMW sedan passing you on the left at a high rate of speed and headed straight for the fuel trucks about fifty meters up in the middle of the convoy. Your Rules of Engagement (ROE) card, which you are required to keep in your left chest pocket at all times, reads:

In bold is the caveat:

By the time you get the barrel swung around, the BMW has passed you. The time for warning or disabling shots is over, given that a shot going into the engine block at this angle would also go through the driver's head. You either engage the BMW or let it drive right into the middle of the convoy.

DO YOU:

Fire on the BMW? TURN TO (5).

Let the BMW pass into the convoy? TURN TO (6).

You'll try and find a way to broach the subject with your squad leader tomorrow in a way that doesn't sound like you're just being a pussy. For now, your job is rear security and you have to be scanning at all times. You stay standing and facing the rear like a good trooper, only every once in a while allowing half of your mind to slip into a daydream about mom's kitchen or the Riverside coeds, and you wonder if thinking about whether you're a wartime cliché prevents you from being a wartime cliché.

About an hour after you made your decision to stand, an IED goes off at the front of the column. You can feel it as well as hear it: a pocket of stiffened air busting by with a sound like an
enormous firecracker.
*
As soon as the IED goes off, your truck swerves slightly and hits a pothole, jolting you against the rear of the turret and pushing your Kevlar forward over your eyes. You push it back up and see that a black BMW about fifty meters away has floored it in the left lane and looks like it's going to try to pass you. After about a second's worth of deer-in-the-headlights hesitation, you remember your Rules of Engagement, which are printed on a small, yellow folding card that you keep in your left chest pocket. The card reads: