Sunrise Over Fallujah (14 page)

They finished searching the top floor—I could hear them throwing things around—and then came downstairs. The baby started crying and the woman who held it began to rock her gently. The woman was pretty. I couldn't tell how old, but she had huge eyes that I would have loved to have been looking into under different circumstances.

The two men kept shrugging their shoulders and shaking their heads. Once in a while they spoke to each other and Davis would yell at them to stop. The older woman was crying softly. She didn't answer any questions and looked away any time Davis spoke to her. It was as if they couldn't believe what was happening to their lives.

Davis asked questions for another fifteen minutes and then asked us to search the Iraqis. He told us to get one of the women to search their women.

Coles called Marla and told Jonesy and Harris to stay with the vehicles until she got back. Harris muttered something under his breath and left with Jonesy. God, I didn't like that sucker.

I also didn't like searching people. I had been stopped on 136th Street once, just outside the Countee Cullen Library, by two plainclothes cops who had searched me. I knew what it felt like.
Embarrassed that I had to stand there with my hands in the air while strangers patted me down and went through my pockets, humiliated because they were assuming power over me and I couldn't do a thing about it. I felt I knew how the Iraqi men felt as I searched them. They were just wearing shirts, nothing under them, and I could see they didn't have any weapons on them. Davis saw it, too, but he was taking out his embarrassment on the enemy.

Marla came in and she searched the women quickly and found nothing.

“I'll get his name and address so we can compensate him for the damage,” Davis said.

We stood around while Davis took the guy's name and address. Davis asked the infantry guys how much damage there was upstairs and they said none.

“Go check,” Davis said.

Marla was looking around in the kitchen area. She stared at a wooden tub.

“We'll make sure that everything damaged is noted so we can pay for it,” Davis was saying to one of the Iraqis. “I'm sorry that we disturbed you.”

The man was shaking his head in disgust.

“Captain Coles,” Marla called. She lifted a hand full of flour and let it fall through her fingers.

“Dumplings of mass destruction?” Coles asked.

“No, just flour,” Marla said, lifting a handful and letting it run through her fingers. She did it again. “And detonators.”

Everything stopped. Marla pulled out some of the cord and Davis told her to stop. I went over and looked at the tub. There were thin light blue tubes visible; each had two wires, one red and one yellow sticking from one end.

“Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” Davis was visibly shook.

I looked at the Iraqi man who had been shaking his head. Now he was standing with his head down, biting his lip.

Davis told Coles to post the CAs as security. As we went out, the other Infantry guys piled into the house.

I couldn't wait to fill Marla in on what had happened.

“You mean they had finished searching and I was the only one that found the stuff?”

“The only one!” I said.

By the time the 3
^rd
guys had brought out the two males, blindfolded and cuffed, and got them into their vehicles, I could see a streak of light in the distance. It was almost a new day. The sound of the muezzin, calling the Islamic faithful to their morning prayers, lifted eerily across the rooftops.

“Hey, Marla, that was just luck, right?” I asked as we turned the Humvee around to head back to our camp.

“No, I like to cook,” she said. “One foster home I was in had me doing most of the cooking. I didn't mind it. But nobody smoothes the flour out like that on top. That's all show-andtell, man.”

I'm not going to live through this war. These people around me, Marla, Jonesy, Victor, Pendleton, even Harris, they're all better
soldiers than I am. I would have never noticed that flour. Not in a thousand years.

But I felt good as I undressed and fell across the bed. I hadn't been shot at, and First Squad had found the detonators. Maybe we had even saved some lives. But then I started thinking about the Iraqi women, one crying and one rocking the baby. I remembered how bad I had felt for them, only to find out that they were in a family that probably would have killed me if they had had the chance.

Then I started thinking about Marla in a foster home. What was that like? She was so open at times, but she gave only glimpses of who she was.

The word came down that some supply officer got
promoted to lieutenant colonel and Major Sessions, who thought she was going to get the promotion, got passed over. I didn't care but I thought Marla, who was all into being a woman soldier, would. She didn't.

“She's humping behind a desk,” Marla said. “I haven't seen her out here ducking bullets or playing hide-and-go-seek with Pablo.”

“The whole promo thing's political,” Coles said. “Once you get up to captain you have to start kissing butt to move up. Either that or you're in a hot zone and everybody above you gets nailed.”

“They'd have to send an IED by mail back to Mama Sessions to get her,” Marla said.

Okay, so we all had the 411and so here comes Major Sessions
into our squad meeting looking like she just stepped out of a fashion magazine and talking about how good a job we've done.

“We've been asked to help a woman find her son,” Major Sessions said.

She went on about how, in what she called “all the area conflicts,” it was easy to lose track of people and how we were showing our humanity by helping the Iraqi woman find her son.

She gave us some details. The kid was fourteen and belonged to a tribe that we were trying to influence, and that even if we could confirm that he was dead it would be cool because then they could have a decent Muslim funeral. All the time I was trying to imagine her with no pants on and her pistol strapped to her thigh. She added that she would be coming along with us.

“I'm not holding the blanket,” Marla said when Major Sessions had left the tent.

“What's that mean?” I asked.

“Darcy told me she went with some woman captain to mass and when the captain had to pee she made Darcy hold the blanket on the side of the road,” Marla said. “So if Major Sessions has to pee, you're going to have to hold the blanket, Birdy.”

“I'll hold it,” I said. “I want to see what she's got under those fatigues, anyway.”

“You got a girl back home?” Marla was sitting on an empty MRE case loading up canisters of ammo for the squad gun.

“Sort of.”

“Sort of ?” Marla turned to me with a big grin on her face. “What does ‘sort of ‘ mean?”

“It means she's his old lady but she doesn't know it!” Jonesy called from across the room.

“It means that we talked and she said she was going to—you know—be my old lady and write and stuff and we'd make all the big decisions later,” I said.

“Birdy, the only letters you're getting over here are from your mother,” Jonesy called.

“Jonesy—up yours!”

“No, really, Birdy.” Marla folded her fingers and laid her chin on them. “You can tell me. Are you sleeping with this girl?”

“How come that's your business?”

“Yo, Jonesy, we got to make sure that Birdy gets home safe,” Marla called out across the room. “He's a virgin.”

“Marla, you know, the last person that put their nose into my business—”

“Oh, yeah, what kind of gun did she have?”

I didn't mind Marla getting on my case. I would have minded a few weeks before, but now it seemed cool. Like family.

The big deal about our mission was that the kid, Muhammad Latif Al-Sadah, was the son of a Sunni imam. Only we weren't to mention the Al-Sadah part of his name because it meant something and some other tribes might want to hurt him. We were getting more and more of that kind of talk. There was fighting
going on between tribes, fighting between Sunnis and Shiites, and even between people living in different cities. It was like going into a neighborhood to stop crime and then finding out that most of the crime was about what gang you belonged to and nobody really wanted to stop it.

The kid had been out on the streets of Baghdad past curfew and just disappeared. We were going to search the hospitals, detention centers, and the morgues. I knew he might have been shot and that if we found him at all it would be in one of the makeshift morgues they were setting up all over the city. Every day Iraqis were being killed in Baghdad. Our army killed some of them. The ones we killed were mostly guys who attacked convoys or thought they could fire off a quick shot from a window. Sometimes Iraqi men were killed when they were out past curfew. Nobody could tell if they were trying to find something to steal or if they were really up to something.

The coalition forces had won the hot war and the newscasts kept telling us that we were in the stabilizing and rebuilding phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, but the situation was getting hairy. I couldn't understand what the Iraqis were about, or what they really wanted. The television coverage showed interviews with them, always men and usually, according to Jamil, Kurds, talking about how glad they were that Saddam Hussein was overthrown. It was Jonesy who had the question we all wanted to ask.

“If all the Racks are so happy with what we doing over here,
who the hell is shooting at us and laying out all the IEDs?” he asked.

Nobody had the answer. We did know that when they lined up to fight against our Infantry guys, they went down hard. For every one of the coalition people that got killed, there were from five to ten dead Iraqis. Maybe even more. Dead Iraqis didn't show up on the late news.

When one of our guys was killed we got the body off the streets quickly. We even washed up the blood. When the Iraqis were killed it took a while for an ambulance to come and get the body. There would always be other Iraqis around, friends, mourning and crying, sometimes swearing revenge. I didn't know what they did with the bodies. I had heard that, according to their religion, they had to bury them within three days. A guy in the 4
^th
Marines told me he had seen a bunch of dead bodies packed in ice in one of the morgues. He said the sight of it was something that would stay in his head forever.

“Yo, man, the Euphrates River looks blue and the Tigris looks green,” Jonesy said.

We were headed along the Tigris toward the Republican Hospital. They had snatched Ahmed from our unit for the week and sent him over to where they were setting up a jail or holding pen at Abu Ghraib. We weren't supposed to take Jamil with us because he was a civilian, but we gave him five packs of American cigarettes and he came along.

The hospital hadn't been hit during the bombing or in the
fighting that followed. But it was shoddy, as far as American standards were concerned, and available only to the richer people.

“A poor man in Iraq might never speak to a doctor,” Jamil said. “In the West you complain about the cost in dollars. In Iraq your life is always in Allah's palm.”

We were waiting in the third-floor office area for the hospital administrator to talk to us. We waited nearly thirty minutes, with Major Sessions sending first her aide and then Jonesy to remind the Iraqi staff that there were Americans to be dealt with. I felt a little bit ashamed of her. She was tough, but it was easy being tough when you had all the cards.

The Iraqi who showed up was a tall, thin man in a white jacket.

“May I help you?” he asked.

Major Sessions told him about the kid we were looking for.

“We have a morgue attached to this hospital,” he said. “We are trying to put together a list of people we have identified who are in other morgues or buried. We can go over our lists—When did he disappear?”

“On April fourteenth,” Major Sessions said.

“So long ago?” the Iraqi answered. “We were overwhelmed during that period. It was all triage—very selective, very much—”

“Check to see if he is here!” Major Sessions interrupted the Iraqi. Her voice was flat, hard.

The Iraqi inhaled sharply, as if he were startled, and nodded. “Of course,” he said. “We will see. Please come with me.”

The elevator wasn't working, so we walked down two flights of stairs to the basement morgue. The staff was working in blue overalls. Some wore surgical masks. One of the women wore a burka and a surgical mask. The smell was strong enough to knock you down. I thought I was going to puke.

The bodies were stacked in shelves, wrapped in cloth. Most had tags that I thought were ID. Some of the bodies were short, maybe only three feet long; I guessed they were either children or body parts.

The Iraqi who had brought us downstairs spoke to a woman in Arabic and she glanced at us before leaving the room. Through the doorway I saw her go up a flight of stairs.

“None of these bodies have been here that long,” the administrator said, “but since we don't know if the boy is dead or when he might have died, we can't tell much from the dates. Please feel free to look around. You can also see how successful the Americans and British have been in dispatching your enemies.”

The administrator was showing us what dying was about, what it looked like up close. Major Sessions looked around her, as if she needed a place to hide. Jamil found a chair for her and she sat. The major looked smaller sitting there, and for a moment I felt sorry for her. Just for a moment.

“Can't we just look at the records?” she asked. “An American hospital would have records.”

The woman I had seen go upstairs returned with a huge book
and put it on the desk against the wall. Jamil started looking through it, turning the pages, shrugging now and then, sometimes stopping to look at a name.

The smell when we entered the morgue area was terrible, but as we breathed in the foul air it got worse and worse. A male attendant handed Marla and Major Sessions masks. Marla put hers over her face, but Major Sessions didn't. Instead she got up, took two steps toward the door, and threw up.

There were two other morgues to check. We dropped Major Sessions off in the Green Zone and me, Jonesy, and Marla went with Captain Coles and Jamil.

“Yo, Marla, you looked pretty cute in that surgical mask,” I said. “It looked as if you were wearing a burka.”

“What do you say we don't check any more morgues,” Marla said. “We'll just say we did.”

Captain Coles wasn't going for it until Jamil told him it wasn't any use.

“We don't know what he looked like in life,” Jamil said, shrugging. “And the records just say things like ‘male body' and give some suggestion of how old the person might have been and how he came to die. Sometimes there is a name and address if they found identification on the body. But…”

“But what?” Captain Coles had his head to one side as he looked down at the shorter man.

“A lot of time the papers are taken by people who need them more than the dead person,” Jamil said.

That was enough for us to decide not to go to any other morgues.

We went to another hospital and an aid station. None of the doctors or nurses or whoever they had working there were interested in helping us.

“One more dead boy is not of great importance when so many are dying,” Jamil said with a shrug. “The hospital workers don't think you're doing anything but wasting their time.”

We did see some horrendous wounds in one of the hospitals. There were men with limbs amputated, the bandages wrapped around the stumps of arms or legs. Sometimes they would be bloody. Relatives were in the wards, and even in the emergency rooms, comforting the patients.

“Doesn't say much for sanitation,” Jonesy said.

“Jamil, are they bringing in insurgents to these hospitals?” Captain Coles asked.

“Sir, they are bringing in Iraqi peoples,” Jamil said.

I'd been to American hospitals. Even the worst ones looked like palaces compared to the Iraqi hospitals.

We took a break near a bridge and watched the MPs search the people, cars, and trucks going over it. A busload of schoolchildren rolled by; they waved at us.

“Jamil, what you thinking about all of this?” Jonesy asked our interpreter. “You glad to see Saddam go?”

“Come back and ask me the same question in one year and I will tell you,” Jamil said. “We knew that Saddam was Satan, but
we could recognize his mustache and learn to smile when he walked down the street. Who will be the new Satan?”

A guy with a cart of fresh fruit came down the street and we stopped him and bought some. Jamil negotiated the price, which must have been pretty good, because after the guy gave us the fruit he was smiling. We mounted up and Coles said that we were going to go to only one prison.

“When we got here the place was empty and all the cells were open,” the captain that ran the prison said. “The Iraqis had let them all out. I'm told the tanks were down the street and the prisoners were running out the side gates. Murderers, thieves, lunatics, everything. They let them loose. I guess the theory was that they'd make trouble for us the same way they made trouble for the Iraqis.”

“Who's in here now?” Coles asked.

“Whoever we pick up and don't know what to do with,” was the answer. “We're not sure if they're POWs or criminals or what. I think Central Command is trying to decide that back in Kuwait.”

“Can you ID any of them?” Coles asked.

“Most of them,” the captain replied. “They're people we've caught at checkpoints with weapons in their cars, some with RPGs, a few who were looting. We were going to turn the looters over to the Iraqi police, but they didn't want them.”

The captain got two corporals to go through their records looking for the fourteen-year-old Muhammad. They came up with five possibilities.

“Muhammad is the most common name over here,” one of the corporals said. “And half of them discard their ID and tell you that they're young so you won't put them in prison.”

They got the five guys out and Jamil took each one aside and talked to him.

“This is a creepy-looking place,” Marla said, looking around at the grimy walls and barbed wire. “Even for a jail.”

“I was in jail one time in my life,” Jonesy answered. “For being drunk in public and I wasn't even drunk.”

“Then why did you go to jail?” Marla asked.