The War I Always Wanted (18 page)

Then Saddam invades Kuwait. You talk about it over dinner with your family, and here, in the privacy of your own home, you all decide that this could be disastrous for Iraq. After the war, the United Nations, led by the United States, imposes harsh sanctions on Iraq. At first you think maybe there is a silver lining—that maybe this will force Saddam to change his ways. But then the food becomes rationed—along with the electricity and the gasoline. The supply of medicine in the hospital dries up too. You go to the dentist for a toothache and he tells you it needs to be pulled. You say okay. But then he tells you there's no anesthetic. It's the sanctions, he says
.

For twelve long years you live like this—in a city under siege. The thought of a foreign invader coming to handle your own problems is painful to you because you are a proud Iraqi. But with two healthy children and one sick child, your family cannot bear to live like this much longer. Whether you are Sunni, Shia, or Kurd, you begin to wish that the Americans would come. At the very least, their coming could not make life worse than it already is under the sanctions
.

Finally, the first bombs begin to fall. Terrified, you huddle with your family and your dog on the first floor of your home. You've barricaded yourselves with cushions from the couches because that's all you have. As the bombs rattle the windows, through your fear, you think that Saddam and his thug government are finally getting what they deserve
.

Within days Saddam's government flees. You are hopeful, but you still sleep with your family on the first floor. One night you know the Americans are near—you can hear the shooting. You hear a tank rumbling through your neighborhood. You hear it fire once, and the sound is incredible—it's deafening. It fires again. But this time the round strikes close, shattering every window in your house. The next morning, while sweeping up the glass outside, you find that the
American tank round landed in your neighbor's house, killing his wife and two daughters
.

Distraught, you confront the first American you see on foot the next day. You want to ask him what happened—you want to know how this could occur. Don't the Americans have satellites and lasers to guide their weapons? As you approach the young man in desert camouflage, the first thing he does is point his rifle straight at your chest. You can see that he is more terrified and confused than you are. You show him that you're not a threat and continue moving in his direction. He screams something at you in English and fires a shot in the air. You plead with him in Arabic that you only want to talk to someone. That is when he comes over and throws you on the ground pointing his weapon at your head. Your family comes outside, crying
.

Lying there, your face in the dust and your lip now bleeding, you wonder how things have ended up this way
.

Eventually the wounded kid blended back in with the crowd. In the end, we abandoned the debris field before any ordnance disposal people arrived to take over. It was getting dark and I wasn't going to allow my platoon to become stranded in a minefield after nightfall. We left all of the ammunition and artillery pieces where they lay.

Dealing with this unexploded weaponry became a way of life in Baghdad. But in a city blanketed with all types of hardware originally primed to explode on contact, you knew it was going to happen.

I remember blowing through traffic trying to get to the site of the blast. The road down which we drove, like all the others in Baghdad, was dusty and crawling with little kids playing in
the late afternoon sun. On our right was a row of homes—the southern edge of a neighborhood. To our left was an open field, strewn with bricks and garbage. All I could see ahead of us were the tall palm trees that meant we were close to the Tigris—and the farms along the river. We drove into the forest.

Arriving at the scene, I jumped out of my truck in a street that had suddenly become nothing more than a narrow alleyway. Immediately I could see that my platoon's presence there would have a minor effect at best. Events were already in motion and there was nothing I could do to alter them. As I stepped out, the first thing I noticed among the moving soldiers and growing crowd of onlookers were the footprints on the dusty ground.

They were bloody footprints. But it wasn't like somebody got some blood on his foot and then walked around leaving partial prints. These were solid crimson footprints. I could see every single toe. I could see the entire outline of the foot—where it narrowed at the arch, and then where it widened and curved back into the heel. They had come from an open gate to our right. I followed them in reverse for ten or fifteen feet. Walking inside the gate, I noticed the prints went as far back along the concrete path as I could see. They were spaced widely apart—as if the man had been running and bleeding profusely at the same time. I turned and followed them back out on the street. This time, though, I followed them to their source.

He was an Iraqi civilian and he was lying on his back, nearly naked. He wasn't moving, and there was blood everywhere. Kneeling over him and working feverishly were two sergeants I recognized from Charlie Company. Sergeant Salido was bent
over the man trying to insert an IV into his right arm, in a last desperate attempt to replenish his limp body with fluid. At the same time, Sergeant Iosefo was performing CPR.

Watching his hands and his face as he worked, I could see desperation beginning to work its way into Salido's movements. The man's circulatory system was rapidly failing and Salido couldn't find a vein. Suddenly he looked up and cried out, “I can't find a vein! I can't . . . .” His eyes were searching for anyone who could help him. For some reason I noticed he was still wearing his glasses. Then, for a brief second, we made eye contact, and I stood there, frozen.

Salido knew that no one could help him. We were all the same there—everyone was nearly equally ignorant in how to treat traumatic injuries. His statement seemed to have been posed more out of exasperation than anything else—as if he were trying to preemptively explain to the universe why the man was going to die. As he went back to work, I noticed that the man's eyes had already rolled back in his head.

Sergeant Iosefo was across from Salido, trying to perform mouth-to-mouth. He pumped one, two, three, and then bent over to breathe into the dying man's mouth. I watched him do this three times. But then the man's lungs began to fill with fluid, and the next time Iosefo blew into his lungs, the man began to vomit. Iosefo kept going. He kept pounding on the man's chest and breathing, pounding and breathing, until finally, he started to gag himself on the man's vomit. Gasping and coughing, he finally quit and sat back. Iosefo didn't move—he just sat there next to the body, staring straight ahead. By that time, Salido had also stopped. He dropped the man's arm and stood up.

A black cloud of flies then descended on the body. It was as though they had been courteous enough to allow the Americans some time to save the man before diving in to feast on the fresh blood. It was as if they had done this before—like they were laughing at our naiveté, at our surprise that people really did die.
Save that guy?
, they buzzed.
Are you kidding? Couldn't you tell ten minutes ago that he was going to die by the way his body temperature dropped as soon as he hit the ground? By the way his eyes rolled back in his head? This is Baghdad, sheltered Americans. Get used to it
. One of my soldiers quickly grabbed his camouflaged poncho and covered the Iraqi.

I never saw the wounded Americans. They had remained inside the gate. All I knew was that one of them had been a new guy, a new platoon leader actually, named Bilotta. I had only met him two days earlier while he was on his first patrol with his platoon. He was a big guy and a former West Pointer who, when I met him, seemed to be in the fog of confusion that envelops new officers when they first take command. He was instantly likeable, though, and had seemed eager to get started. From what I could gather, his legs were now somewhat shredded by fragmentation.

Once the scene had been cleared, and onlookers and hysterical family members had been placated, we headed back to the palace to which we'd moved that morning. When we arrived, everything was normal. Guys were lounging and listening to music and some were sitting on cots eating MREs. The rest were sweeping and clearing away debris in order to make their new home livable.

While I was sitting alone on my cot, staring at CDs I had no real interest in listening to, Phil came over. He was taking a break from fixing up his area and came to ask if I could get a
picture of him standing next to the indoor pool they had discovered while exploring the grounds. I said sure and we walked across the courtyard to the pool house. As we approached the steps leading up to it, Phil turned to me and asked, “So what'd you guys do today? Anything interesting?” He hadn't heard about the UXO incident.

“Well,” I said, “I just watched a guy die right in front of me. That was interesting.”

He said, “Who, wha—American or Iraqi?”

“Iraqi,” I answered. “Civilian.”

His face turned serious. “You . . . I mean, you okay?”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, for just a split second, I wasn't okay. I thought I was going to get choked up. But then the feeling passed as quickly as it had come. “Yeah, fine,” I said. “Where do you want me to take your picture?”

The first time I watched something die I was fourteen years old. I had a pellet gun that I used for paper targets and for shooting pine cones out of trees. One day I had a friend over who also liked to shoot. Except when it was his turn, he chose to aim at a blue jay that had landed on the fence. The bird never saw it coming. My friend hit it with a single shot, dropping the bird onto the grass below. I was horrified, but didn't say anything.

We walked over to the wounded animal and knelt down beside it. The hole was large, I thought, for a pellet. Its heart was still pumping and I could see the afternoon sun glinting off the bright red blood that was pooling in the bird's chest. The blue jay was gasping and convulsing, its eyes shifting in pain and fear. I wanted to do something to help, but knew that
I couldn't. We watched as the bird slowly became still. My friend just picked it up by the legs and threw it over the fence without another thought.

That day in Baghdad was kind of the same thing.

The translator's name was Ammar. Ammar was twenty-six years old and single, and he liked women, American movies, and beer—in no particular order. As Baghdad became a blur of raids, guard duty, and civil assistance, I'd gotten to know this son of a retired Iraqi general. He was a portly, good-natured computer science guy with a thick black moustache.

Ammar had come to the unit just after our arrival in Baghdad. His family was middle class, and like all the other translators, he began his work with us very informally. There was no real process for hiring translators at that time. Most either approached American units on patrol or simply appeared at the gates looking for work. If their spoken English was good enough, they were then run through a battery of verbal questions in order to properly vet them. The questions asked of each applicant usually went something like this:

Questions regarding the Baath Party were conspicuously absent. Typical responses were yes, yes, no, and yes.

Ammar was always hanging around our compound, talking to anyone who'd listen. Sometimes he'd even use one of our dry-erase boards to teach Arabic to the guys. He couldn't get enough of the fact that he was actually getting to work with
real
American soldiers. Like me, he'd seen too many movies. Except the difference was that in his case, they'd taught him English.

The first raid my platoon did with Ammar was a hunt for one of Saddam's “nephews.” Since we'd gotten to Baghdad, it seemed to me that most raids conducted by the battalion were precipitated by a tip of doubtful provenance that was going to lead us to one of Saddam's nefarious and on-the-run nephews. Yet no matter how much high-tech equipment we used, no one could ever bag a nephew.

That week we were attached to the battalion headquarters as part of a quick-reaction force. According the captain for whom I was working, the nephew was supposed to be at a pool hall on a street lined with shops and apartments. With no margin for error in such a tight environment, Croom, Ammar, and I spent the morning rehearsing with the platoon how it would go down later that afternoon. First we had to make sure that we were going to hit the right building, and second, we had to ensure that our timing was down for all the moving pieces. It was the first mission I'd ever done where I had the privilege of getting overhead satellite imagery of the location beforehand—even though the copied photos of Daura's center looked like nothing but urban mush.

We left in a two-platoon convoy from the Daura refinery when the sun was at its peak that day. My platoon was to raid the pool hall, while Phil's platoon would seal off the neighborhood block. As we closed on the suspected location, my truck and Estrada's truck peeled off from the formation. While the rest of the convoy continued to drive around the neighborhood, Estrada and I went to “casually” case the pool hall with a quick drive-by. There were people everywhere on the bustling street—kids were crowding kebab stands, men were making deals at butcher shops for fresh meat hanging in the windows, and women on apartment balconies were hanging clothes out to dry. And just where I'd expected it to be was an open door through which I was able to barely, but unmistakably, distinguish a pool cue being passed around as we cruised past. While turning the corner at the next intersection, I radioed the positive ID to the rest of the team. This was a relief—usually it was more of guess as to whether we were headed into the right building or not.