Major Conflict (19 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Stirrup Modification Kits (Caissons) Go Rolling Along

We could hardly believe it when we got word that all hostilities were about to cease. It felt like coitus interruptus, and we were baffled. With our hands firmly around the neck of the Iraqi army, we were well on our way to finishing the job and removing the threat of a loose cannon in the Middle East. Removing Saddam would be left for another time and another army, the unfinished work of the moderate father would be left for the radical son, who'd exploit the worst attack on our nation's soil in order to defeat his father's foe and to do the bidding of his father's former cronies. Removing Saddam was always a good idea. What was
never
a good idea was trying to do it unilaterally, especially when the UN sanctions were actually working and the rest of the world (and more than a few here in the United States, as well) was in such opposition to it.

But back in 1990, the moderate father had us stop on a dime and adjust to the new orders. We would impose peace now and stabilize Kuwait as it licked its wounds from the horrible mauling it had received from Saddam's army. The scenario was completely unexpected, and it seemed surreal. As more recent history has shown, winning the peace is often much harder than winning the war itself, and it's never been one of our strong suits. It requires employing a touchy-feely approach to the very people you were just days or weeks or months before trying to kill and conquer. Shifting from aggression to patient coaching is easier said than done. We worked hard at improving this part of our job in the 1990s, and I think we got much better at it. We were ill prepared for what awaited us in Iraq in 2003, but our failures weren't from lack of trying, rather from a great deal of bad and misleading information and from the myopic hubris of an inexperienced commander in chief and his neoconservative handlers.

In the days after the fighting, we were given time to rest and recuperate. The focus was on getting our positions along the demilitarized zone up to snuff and then rotating troops to the United Arab Emirates for a little R & R. We were stranded in the deep desert for about two weeks and then were ordered to redeploy to the Safwan area, which is where the peace talks would occur. I couldn't wait to get back to civilization, any civilization, it didn't matter; all my senses craved the fresh stimulation of a city. We had spent almost a month in a place where there was nothing at all but sand and sky—everywhere you looked, in every single direction. It had been almost impossible to maintain any sense of place in this formless desert landscape, and it left you feeling lost, unmoored, entirely out of context, a random dot within the vastness of infinity.

For several months I had slept in this formless infinity on the front cover of my Hummer or on a cot, and I longed now for the feel of a real bed and clean sheets against my sand- and sunburned skin. For months the only entertainment I'd had was talking to other people and eating with them. Meals were hands-down the highlight of every day, and they served as milestones, too, a way of measuring the passing of time, and of keeping track of how close we were to finishing the ordeal. That's not to say we ate well. We ate MREs and T-rations (vacuum-packed meals designed to last a half a century—yes, fifty years). And not only was the food bad, but occasional distribution problems sometimes caused disruptions in supply, and we ended up eating the same thing several days in a row. In February, we ate vacuum-packed chicken breasts and sweet potatoes the whole month straight, three meals a day, because of a distribution problem in the rear.

With much time on our hands and little to do, our energies turned to amusing ourselves at one another's expense, and doing a bit of sightseeing. We had all been brought up on the war stories of our fathers or grandfathers or both, almost all of which were associated with some souvenir that often acted as the touchstone of the tale. And so we figured we'd try to find some souvenirs for ourselves. The lure of souvenirs was very powerful, despite the dangers inherent in looking for them. Battlefields are extremely dangerous, even after the fighting stops, on account of unexploded ordnance and traps that may have been left undetected.

What was truly amazing was the sheer amount of destruction. The pictures on CNN didn't even begin to represent the devastation. Everywhere we went we saw hastily abandoned bunker complexes, many of them completely destroyed; mile after mile of charred vehicles, some of them unrecognizable, all evidence of just how completely overwhelmed the Iraqis had been, how they'd been caught by surprise at every turn. They just hadn't known what hit them. There were tanks with turrets blown straight off, personnel carriers with blast marks and bullet holes, mangled Jeeps with charred bodies still in them.

When we entered the bunkers that housed the chain of command, we were stunned to discover that the Iraqi army, the army the whole world thought was so formidable, was, in fact, at least ten years behind us in quality and compatibility of communications and weapons systems. It was not unlike the more recent miscalculation of Saddam's strength, though that miscalculation had far more serious consequences because it was the rationale (well, one of the rationales) for the war itself. It was the very reason we went to war, unlike August 1990, when the actual invasion of another country was the reason the United States, with a broad-based UN-sanctioned coalition, went in to oust Saddam from Kuwait. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Seeing what the Iraqis really had we could only conclude that we had prepared for an enemy that didn't quite exist. It was like the 1990 New York Giants playing all out with a local high school football team, and it made me believe, arrogantly although the 2003 offensive would prove me right, that to go on to Baghdad would have been a cakewalk.

As for souvenirs, there were all manner of weapons lying around that soldiers snapped up and shipped home to be displayed on trophy walls all across America. A short time later new rules were instituted to restrict what could be shipped home; soldiers had been trying to send things like AK47s and presumed duds from cluster bombs, the latter of which caused several deaths when they turned out still to be live.

In addition to collecting souvenirs from along what became known as “the highway of death,” the road the Iraqi army used to retreat into southern Iraq, and where the air force had destroyed several thousand vehicles, soldiers made the remnants of these ruined vehicles and bunkers that sat abandoned all along the road into what might be called “the gloating graffiti wall.”

“Your army and a quarter won't buy you a cup of coffee, Saddam.”

“What were you thinking?”

“Need a battalion destroyed, call B Company, Two/Sixty-seven Armor.” It was funny but brutal, I thought, particularly in spots where some of the remains of Iraqi soldiers had yet to be removed, easy to locate by the swarms of flies and the horrible smell rising up from the wreckage.

As for amusing ourselves at one another's expense, literally a nonstop stream of jokes and pranks occurred throughout the day. We'd just come out of an extreme situation, after all, and the adrenaline still ran high. One of my favorites involved the service battery commander, Ron Vasquez. Ron was a good man and a dedicated officer who worked hard. He was also a little too trusting on occasion, which made him the perfect target for pranks.

One day I was sitting in my command post carrier with some of the other lieutenants, who had come by to visit.

As we were sitting there talking about the latest care packages and letters we'd gotten from home, Paul Duggan said to me: “Listen, I gotta go, one of my ammo carriers is down, and we need to get it up by tomorrow. I gotta get the parts.”

“What's wrong with it?” asked Mike, who was sitting on the ramp.

“It just needs a new length of track and servicing.”

“Oh, I wonder what they did before we had ammo carriers,” he mused, while lying on his back staring up at the sky. “I mean, did they use special harnesses for the horses or something? You could call them stirrup modification kits maybe.”

John, Paul, Dave, and I marveled at the fact that Mike didn't know the army had originally used caissons. It's practically the first thing they mention when teaching the history of the Artillery. “The Caissons Go Rolling Along” is actually the field artillery song.

“Mike, look at me, please . . . are you focused?” Paul said. Mike looked at him innocently. “Good. Now, Mikie, they say there's no such thing as a stupid question, but you, sir, have just proven them wrong. You, sir, have just asked the stupidest question I have ever heard.”

Dave started to sing. “ ‘Over hill, over dale, as we hit the dusty trail, and those caissons go rolling along.' Sound familiar?” he asked, looking at Mike.

“Caissons, Mikie, caissons! They called them
caissons
! What, were you out sick the first day of Artillery One-oh-one or something? Geez.”

“Oh, right, right,” Mike said. “Caissons. I remember from the song.”

“Duh . . . good, Mike, very good,” Paul said, laughing. “But you know what? Now you got me thinking. We shouldn't let this opportunity go to waste,” he said, and raised one finger in the air as his face lit up with malicious joy. “We should see if our esteemed service battery commander will, in fact, order some . . . let's say . . . ‘M109A3 stirrup modification kits,' whaddya say?”

I loved a good practical joke, so I reached for a hand microphone from one of the radios and said, “Kiowa Six, this is Gunner Six, over.” Kiowa and Gunner were our Hollywood call signs. Every unit had its own call sign so that you could identify who was calling on the radio. For instance, our brigade was known as “ready first combat team.” The brigade commander was known as “Ready 6,” the number 6 designating the speaker's status as a commander.

“This is Kiowa Six, over,” a voice crackled out of the radio.

I said, as quickly and professionally as I could without laughing, “Kiowa Six, this is Gunner Six; the new stirrup modification kits for the howitzers are in at division, and I want us to make sure that we got ours signed over before anyone else does. This is a top priority; get on it now.”

“Gunner Six, Kiowa Six, roger, over.”

“Gunner Six, roger, out.”

And then we all burst out laughing.

“Listen,” Paul said, gasping, “we gotta keep the pressure on, give him a call later and check up on him.” He was holding his side from laughing so hard. Then, to John, Dave, and Mike, he said, “Come back at around four o'clock, and whatever you do keep it close hold; the commanders can't know or we'll get in trouble.” He looked at me. “I hope you didn't use the command net, did you?”

“No, I used A/L,” I said. A/L stands for Administrative/Logistics. If I had used the command net, the battalion commander would have known instantly and come down on all of us.

With that, Paul turned on his heel and started off, whistling the caissons song. John and Dave joined in, too, and soon Mike joined them grudgingly as they walked off, in mock seriousness. I couldn't believe they knew the words.

Then it's hi! hi! hee!
In the field artillery,
Shout out your numbers loud and strong,
For where e'er you go,
You will always know
That the caissons go rolling along.

The four of them looked hilarious marching across the sand singing this old song, John and Dave arm in arm, Paul and Mike shadowboxing back and forth behind them.

At four o'clock, not only did my original four co-conspirators show up, but also seven more lieutenants from various nooks and crannies of the battalion. I was lucky that my boss was off attending a meeting at headquarters. Had he been around, he would have surely noticed the large group of Hummers parked next to my track.

Once everybody was in place I picked up the radio again.

“Kioiwa Six, this is Gunner Six, over.”

There was a long silence, and some of the guys started laughing. Finally, he answered, “Kiowa Six, over,” but he seemed a little tentative. I worried that he was on to us and was now just trying to figure out who was tormenting him.

“This is Gunner Six,” I said loudly, trying to sound brisk and impatient. “I would like an update on the stirrup modification kits, over.”

There was another long pause, and Paul started whistling the caissons song again; soon most of the group joined him.

“This is Kiowa Six,” I said, cracking up, placing my hand over the mouthpiece for a second to prevent the guy from hearing the whistling. Paul stopped, made a cutting motion across his neck, and the whistling stopped abruptly. I cleared my throat and then continued, “I went to division, and they didn't have the paperwork ready yet, over.”

The whistling now had been replaced by hoots of laugher, and Paul was trying to get everybody to shut up. I figured this would be a good time to press him a little bit more to make sure Vasquez wasn't just playing along.

“Kiowa,” I said, deepening my voice, “this is Gunner Six. I am not happy at all. My guidance to you was to get ahead of the power curve and get this done. I was talking with Thunder Six, and he says he got some of his already, so what seems to be the problem? Do I have to give this mission to someone more capable?” I had raised my voice just a little, to sound as though I was starting to get angry.

“Roger, Gunner Six . . . I'll get right on it . . . I'm sorry, over.”

“This is Gunner Six . . . Okay, but I want you to give me an update at command and staff tonight. Gunner Six out.”

At around seven that night, Paul and I were enjoying our MREs and talking about the upcoming NFL draft when our commander's Hummer pulled into the battery area. We'd decided not to bring up the prank, figuring it would be safer simply to wait for him to mention it. Captain Hart walked toward us, and, as he entered my vehicle, we both stood up.

“Sit, sit, guys . . . so how's it going?”