The War I Always Wanted (21 page)

I wondered why they'd felt the need to bring their problem to us. The war was over. The partisan war we'd all feared in the beginning had never materialized. Issues of violence no longer concerned us. We were more worried about cooking gas distribution, drinking water issues, possible elections, and which coalition country would be the one to relieve us in the next couple of months.

Several days later I was given a one-week notice by Captain B. that I would be leaving Delta Company. He told me that I was being promoted to executive officer and that I'd be going back to Bravo Company to become its second in command. I would return there only two days prior to a new commander taking over for the departing Captain K. That part suited me fine. It would hold the conflicts to a minimum.

I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. I was looking forward to returning to my old company, but I had become comfortable with Sergeant Croom and the Delta guys. I'd fought my second war with them and bonded with them—and
I felt like I was leaving them right in the middle of something we hadn't yet finished as a team. There's never a good time to leave a squad or a platoon or a company. It's just harder in a war—or a sort-of-war. Out of everybody, I think it was Mohamed who took my transfer the hardest.

I spent the first week or so of my new job in a fog. Every aspect of it was foreign to me. Having spent two years in the world of “shoot, move, and communicate,” I now had to learn resupply, maintenance cycles, and the art of company movement planning. The new commander, Captain Mike Jones, a West Pointer, had never commanded a company either—so we were learning together.

The whole thing—the war, my job—seemed to be smooth sailing from here on out as far as I was concerned. Northern Iraq was peaceful, unlike the areas nearer Baghdad and Fallujah, where the situation still seemed to be smoldering. I felt like we had lucked out in coming up here.

When the insurgency started in Tal Afar, nobody was killed. There was neither a wounded soldier nor a shot fired. When it happened, we weren't even sure if we'd actually been attacked. The event was at the same time insidious and laughable—and it signaled the spread of the cancerous insurgency to northwest Iraq.

I had been inside the TOC talking to Phil and another soldier when I decided to rack out for the evening in Bravo Company's barracks building next door. I walked outside the open door in the rear of the TOC wearing only desert camouflage bottoms, sandals, and a brown t-shirt. There was a slight breeze blowing that made the hot night bearable. I first
stepped toward the barracks building, but then remembered that I wanted to take a leak before heading off to bed.

The piss tubes were located at the rear of the property, not fifty feet away from the door through which I'd just walked. They backed up to the fortified, sand-filled barrier that marked the northern edge of our headquarters. I walked that direction, carefully stepping over the puddles of water left by our big metal camouflaged water buffalo. I reached the tubes, picked out the most sanitary-looking one, unbuttoned, and conducted my business. The operation went as planned.

I shook it off, buttoned back up, and turned to head back to my waiting cot. I'd walked about thirty feet when a blast shattered the evening calm. It came from the alleyway behind the barriers, on the other side of the piss tubes—not twenty feet from where I'd been standing. I wondered if I was just a magnet for random explosives.

For a second I stood there, confused.
Does this concern me?
I looked at the barrier wall, scanning for smoke or a breach, listening for voices or a car. But in the darkness I couldn't see anything. And there was only silence. The thought of an attack didn't even register. That was out of the question. Our war had ended two months earlier, sometime in April. Of course there was some harassment taking place in the newly christened Sunni Triangle, but that wasn't anywhere close to us. Our main problems were civil in nature—not guerilla.

From inside the TOC I heard a, “What the fuck was that?”

Then something changed inside my head. I don't know what and I don't know why, but it did. It just didn't
feel
right anymore. I turned and hurried back to the building. Before I got there, guys were already coming out to see what all the
racket had been about. I walked back to the CP near my room. Some guys were putting on boots; others were just sitting on the edges of their cots looking inconvenienced by the mystery noise. Nobody knew what to do. We debated whether you could counterattack a mystery noise and couldn't come up with anything.

Word was passed to gear up into full battle rattle, and we decided to dispatch a squad to go check out the perimeter of the headquarters. Those of us now indoors largely ignored the first order, but we did send a squad to investigate.

Meanwhile, the platoon leaders and I wagered on what the result would be. I didn't have any clue as to what it could have been, but I wasn't yet convinced that it was a
real
attack. Things had just been too
peaceful
in Tal Afar for the last eight weeks.

The next morning I was told that somebody had set two barrels against the back wall of our compound. In the bottoms they had placed old artillery shells. And on top they had placed wood and trash. They lit the barrels on fire, in the hopes that when the fire reached the bottom the shells would explode.

It was good initiative, but bad judgment on their part. Unfortunately for the insurgent, only one of the rounds detonated, causing a minor fire on the barrier wall. The effort had been paltry at best, showing distinct signs of amateurism. Placing explosives at the base of a “blast wall” usually runs contrary to conventional wisdom in guerilla warfare. You're supposed to hit the weak points, not the blast walls.

But that's not the point. The bottom line was that the peace forged after the fall of Baghdad—the peace in which we'd
lived for the last two months in Tal Afar—had just ended. With a muffled boom and nothing else, it had ended. By the hands of some clumsy amateur, it had simply ceased being. Unknown to us, we had been facing a dam all along—a dam that had now cracked and sprung a leak. Behind it was a deluge of terrorists and insurgents, IEDs, and RPGs.

I am in the mountains, standing next to Sergeant Collins. The Shah-e-Kot Valley, still smoking after an endless week of pounding, stretches out before us. It is a clear dusk and now that the sun has dropped behind the ridge to the west, we can each see our own breath. A B-52, thousands of feet above us, is flying in our direction. Without taking his eyes off of the plane, Collins says, “Wouldn't it be fucked up if he dropped his payload right now?”

“Yeah, it would,” I say. “Hey, wait a sec . . . What is . . .”

A dozen little pale dots are now visible below the flying aircraft. Slowly, they fall behind it—drifting in our direction. He has dropped his payload of dumb bombs. For a second I want to panic. I realize that if I could run at this altitude, there's no way I could outrun such a number of bombs. If they are going to hit our position, they will hit it, and we will be vaporized. Even if the pilot has made a mistake, even if he realizes it, there's nothing he can do to call them back. It has already happened to us once
.

Reading my mind, Sergeant Collins, eyes still glued to the sky, says, “That's the kind of shit you can't run from.”

The bombs gradually float directly over us, getting bigger by the second. Their trajectory takes them onto the south side of the mountain next to us, where they impact with not-too-distant thuds
.

I often dream of falling bombs. Sometimes they're of things that really happened, and I'm back in the valley. Other times
they're not, and strange, far away cannons are launching screaming orange fireballs in my direction. Either way, it's the same feeling of helplessness and terror. In neither dream can I escape.

In Iraq, these were replayed weekly like old film reels through my head at night. And when it wasn't falling bombs it was mountain shootouts. When it wasn't combat, it was Nikki.

I can't remember now what I was dreaming about at half past eleven on the night of July 19. It could have been any of the three.

I opened my eyes and turned my head toward the door of the room. I was still half asleep. In the doorway I could see a silhouette against the lit hallway. I recognized it as Specialist Kuykendall, Captain Jones' RTO. Not sure if I was still dreaming, I wondered what he was doing standing there. Then I realized he must have awakened me. He'd probably been standing there saying my name. I reached up to my ears and pulled out a pair of now silent headphones.

“What . . .” I paused and cleared my throat. “What's up, man? What do you need?” I asked him.

He said something about a shooting, but whatever he said didn't really strike me as something that was important to me.

Still groggy and unmoved from my cot, I said, “Anybody hurt? Was it any of our guys?” I only had one eye open.

He said he didn't know about casualties but that it was definitely not Bravo Company.

I propped myself up on an elbow. “Kuykendall, do I need to get up for this?” I felt like I was about to pass right back out. I was vaguely thinking that this was most likely gunfire that didn't concern me.

He said he didn't think so. He said he was just passing along chatter he'd heard on the radio and thought maybe I should know about it since Captain Jones was gone for the evening.

“Thanks, man,” I said. “Come wake me up again if this turns into a big deal or something.”

He said he would, no problem.

I passed into unconsciousness.

“Sir, you need to wake up. Lieutenant Friedman . . . Sir, you awake?”

It was Kuykendall's voice again. I opened my eyes. I felt like I'd just closed them a second earlier. I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since he'd come around the first time. I propped myself up on my elbow again, squinting into the light that came from the hallway. “Yeah, what's up, man?”

“Sir, you need to get up. The commander's on his way back here. Battalion's getting spun up . . . there was an attack on the mortar platoon . . . .”

I stopped him. I knew from the sound of his voice that we were in trouble. I was already swinging my legs out of the cot and putting my boots on. “Kuykendall,” I said, trying to find his eyes somewhere on the silhouette that stood in the doorframe, “how bad is it?”

He didn't hesitate. “Two dead, sir. One wounded.”

Before the words were out of his mouth my stomach had already dropped. I threw my head back and looked at the ceiling. I brought it back down and rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “Be there in a second,” I said.

For twenty seconds I sat there on the edge of my cot, letting the fact sink in that after nearly two years of war, our luck had
finally run out. The barrel-bomb at the TOC had been our luck sputtering. Now it was gone.

I had been sleeping in the master bedroom of an oil company's guesthouse at Ayn Zalah. We had temporarily relocated the company CP to this small but upscale village that sat among a group of hills forty miles northeast of Tal Afar. From the high ground at Ayn Zalah, there is a spectacular view of the lake caused by the damming of the Tigris. On clearer days there, you can see through the summer haze and into the mountains of Turkey. And at night you can look out across the water and view the tiny city lights of the Kurdish city of Dohuk.

I was sharing a room with Captain Jones, but he had been spending the night with Sergeant Collins and the guys in my old platoon. They were just over a mile away at a compound near the southern edge of the village. Now he was en route back to the guesthouse with Mike Bandzwolek, the lieutenant to whom I'd given over command of the platoon before the deployment.

I walked into the dining room where we had the radios set up. It was also where we had meetings. I sat down, half asleep and half in shock, and just stared at the table in front of me. Kuykendall told me that the other platoon leaders had been called and were on their way here.

At that moment 2nd Lieutenant Ted P.
*
swung open the screen door at the front of the building, letting it slam behind him on his way in. He ambled over to the dining room table and plopped down at my left elbow. He was a big guy and had only joined the battalion in Baghdad. I noticed he had red sleep lines on the right side of his face.

He looked at me, raised his eyebrows, and smiled. “What's up, man? What the fuck am I over here for?”

He had no idea. I looked him in the eye and saw that he was still grinning. For the moment, Ted was innocent. He had a degree in music, and I was pretty sure Ted had never killed a mammal. To my knowledge, the most trauma Ted had experienced was being “raped” by an older woman he'd brought home from a bar one night in college. There were a couple of other guys in the room and I could feel them stop moving.

“Two KIA. Friendly. One wounded,” I stated flatly. “I don't know anything else.”

Ted looked at me, his grin widening. Then he glanced at someone who was standing on the other side of the table. He looked like he thought we were playing a joke on him. “Yeah, right. Whatever,” he quipped. “Seriously, why am I not still asleep?” The war wasn't
real
yet for Ted.

I looked him directly in the eye again. For some reason I had the strange urge to laugh. Nerves. I'd never before announced a death to someone—at least not one that mattered like this did, anyway. I stifled the smirk and kept a straight face. When I spoke, I spoke softly and awkwardly. “No man, I'm serious. We got two dead. Commander's on his way back with Mike.”

Ted's eyes doubled in size. He grinned again in reflex, except this time he looked nauseous. He said, “Who was it?”

I just shrugged. “Don't know yet.”

When Captain Jones burst in with Bandzwolek behind him, they strode directly to our table and sat down. We waited in an awkward silence for 3rd Platoon's leader. He was coming from the town of Zumar, five miles away. It seemed like
hours—the fidgeting and the glances and the nervous exhalations. Finally, he walked through the screen door carrying his green bound notebook.