Digging for Fire

My Namesake and His War

2011-06-16T21:50:00.003-05:00

Benny Christensen. Known to 10th Mountain Division, 86th Regiment rolls as "Christensen, Frank B." To his platoon buddies in 3rd Platoon, India Company, he was of course "Tex." Named by his Norwegian emigrant parents to honor Benjamin Franklin. He was my father's young uncle, the last of six sons to his doting mother Caroline, who was his dependent when he was drafted in 1943. He was taken into the elite mountain infantry of the 10th MTN as a linguist because he spoke Norwegian, which was to be useful when the Allies invaded Norway to draw off German troops to another front. When the Norwegian invasion plans were scrapped, Benny was sent into the line as a grunt, away from the relative comforts and safety of Headquarters Company.

Benny, as my dad calls him, was only four years older than my old man. My dad was an only child, so they were as close to brothers as my father had. Because Caroline died while Benny was training at Camp Hale, Benny signed over his death benefit ($10,000) to my dad. Today the death benefit is $250,000. Adjusted for inflation, the WWII benefit is still a lot of money.

On April 17, 1945, just 17 days before Nazi capitulation in Italy, a machine gunner with the 90th Panzer Grenadiers cut Benny down as he made a charge with a grenade to take out the gunner who'd pinned his squad down. He wasn't awarded a medal. My dad ultimately used the money to fund a master's degree in physics from Texas A&M. Benny was killed after having lived through some of the most intense fighting seen during the Second World War, namely the battles for the five peaks called "Riva Ridge" by history. Benny fought on Della Torraccia, the fiercest one. David Brower, a major mover in the Sierra Club, was his Company's historian, and recorded his death for posterity.

So begin a few of the themes with which I will begin to portray in an idea for a memoir I share with the son who didn't return. After all, that's what this war business is to we who partook and to our families: a matter of those who survived and those who did not. Those who came back and those who never lived to see Texas or New York or Toad Suck, Arkansas ever again.

Benny is buried in Kingsville in the Christensen plot. I have conversations with him. I always have had, before I went to Iraq and learned what it has always been for the foot soldier.

My grandmother Rosa only had this to say about him, her baby brother-in-law: "He was such a nice boy."

Stand By for Next Half of Blog Installments!

2010-03-22T21:50:00.002-05:00

Righty ho, then! Got more of this coming, now that tennis season is almost up. The district tournament is the first Wed&Thurs of April, and then we can "skate" and I can write. Which is a good thing, because I have a deadline coming up for a story I'm writing for BoatU.S. Magazine.

Cheerio.

Happy Thanksgiving, Infidel

2009-12-01T20:45:00.007-06:00

Above Photo: Vantage of FOB Hit from the south, near the entry control point (ECP). Our little machine gun post is pictured atop the right corner of the long building. November 2004.

Day after Thanksgiving, 2004 I was standing post in the sand-bagged rooftop bunker atop the Combat Operations Center, overlooking the entry to FOB Hit. I was on post with Lance Corporal Bud Wiser, his real name.
A convoy was entering the FOB, directed by my buddy Corporal Andy Rogers, who my son Andrew is named for.
I was shoveling a slice of pumpkin pie into my mouth with a plastic fork when the rush and bang of rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) cut the hazy air, which was filled with blowing sand in something of a minor sandstorm.
WHOOOSH. BANG. WHOOOOSH. BANG.
They sound a lot like bottle rockets on steroids, no one who's been up-close and personal with them will deny.
Wiser and I got down (always a good first reaction), and then got back up to see if we could identify the point of origin, which we were trained to do in order that our mortarmen on watch in the mortar pit could get a good fix for some counter-battery fire.
As it so happened, red streaks were coming up directly in front of Wiser's M-240G .308-caliber belt-fed machine gun, which was fixed on a tripod in the bunker overlooking the FOB's entry, as a guard against potential vehicle-borne suicide bombers.
The attacker(s) were probably 600 meters distant, but on the same line exactly as the gun.
"Wiser," I said, "raise the gun so it'll hit the point-of-origin and fire."
The third rocket launched and hit somewhere "out back" by the trash-burning pit.
Wiser, who has a minor speech impediment that hinders his pronunciation of "r," answered, "Aw you shuw, sawgeant?"
"Of course I'm sure, Wiser, raise the gun and fire it."
"We won't get in twouble?"
"Goddam it, Wiser, fire the gun!" I yelled, and I think I vaguely remember giving him a couple of kicks.
Wiser cranked the elevation knob about seven clicks and punched the safety off the gun, which sat perpetually cocked and ready.
WHABABABABABABAM. WHABABABAM. WHABAM went the gun.
Angry bad-ass tracers flipped through the sandy air.
An angry red couple of tracers came back at us, and I realized the incoming tracers appeared to be floating because they were aiming it at our muzzle blast. Not bad shooting, but neither Wiser nor I were hit (I ducked as soon as I realized it was incoming small arms fire).
WHABABABAM. WHABABABABAM. Wiser gave it a couple more bursts before I told him to stop, because I couldn't see the result of our fire and we'd done what we could for the moment.
Gunnery Sergeant Bliss, the Company Gunny, came charging up onto the roof, and I explained the situation.
He called for illumination flares because darkness had begun to settle over the dusky desert.
The flares burned bright in a hazy halo, but the insurgents knew the blowing sand provided excellent cover. A humvee with Marines from first platoon, who were nearest the attack, pulled up to the COC.
"Did we get 'em?" I shouted down to them.
"Yeah, thanks to you we couldn't put our heads up over the berm to see anything," one junior Marine said.
The other Marine, a sergeant, shut him up and said, "You guys did a good job. Your bullets went straight into the point of origin," and they hurried into the COC to give their report.
Spoilsport, I thought, about being upbraided by a cocky young shit who didn't have half the vantage and firepower we commanded from our elevated position.
I found later that my SAW Gunner, Jesse Lopez, had fired several bursts of belted .223 into the point of origin as well.
My platoon commander LT McKinley and Staff Sergeant Avendano went with some other Marines on an excursion to see if they could find any sign of the attackers, but came back much later after dark with nothing to report.
If we didn't kill or wound the attackers, I know sure as hell we scared them off, and old Gunner Schneider, the Vietnam Veteran and Chief Warrant Officer in charge of our defenses, told me I'd done a commendable job of being aggressive and giving the order to shoot.
I felt proud and happy, and so did Wiser, because he was the first Marine in weapons platoon to "get some," having fired his machine gun at insurgents. Marines didn't stop coming up to our post to slap him on the back.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Semper Fi.

Phantom Fury in Fallujah

2009-11-13T19:10:00.005-06:00

Observations on Fallujah, Quite Literally...

Somehow, Bravo Company 1st Battalion, 23rd Marines became the darling of our Battalion commanding officer, whom Lieutenant McKinley had nicknamed "Angry Hanks," because he looked like Tom Hanks' evil twin. So it was Bravo Company, and not us in Charlie Company, who went down to Fallujah to help out during Operation al-Fajr, or "Phantom Fury." This operation was a swift kick in the ass for the Iraqi insurgency in al-Anbar Province, Marine Corps style.
In counterinsurgency operations, the quest is for "hearts and minds" of the local populace. Che Guevara said it himself: one doesn't have a revolutionary movement if not supported by the indigenous people. A popular saying among Marine infantry regarding counterinsurgency was, I think, relevant: "If you get 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."
Gen. Richard Natonski oversaw the operation, which turned out to be a brilliant one.
Roughly it went thusly, just about 40 miles down the road from us that early-November 2004: Marines cordoned off the city, allowed women, children, and elderly to leave. They denied most military-aged males exit, but told them if they wanted to survive, just to sit out the military incursion.
Within 16 hours, Marines moved in with main battle tanks, amtracs, and light-armored vehicles, with infantry sweeping on foot, house-to-house. It didn't take long for the stuff to hit the fan.
Lieutenant McKinley and I watched Fallujah unfold on the "Blue Force Tracker," a real-time GPS interface over a computer topographic map on the
Toughbookin his Humvee. The Blue Force Tracker showed our positions and those of all friendly units in the entire al-Anbar Province. It was the coolest thing. Little by little, we could see the various-colored dots representing various Marine units creep into the city, moving from one end to the other, and back again over four days.
In the sky, Cobras flew back and forth continuously over our position, and so did F-18 fighter jets.
At night in the clear sky I could make out illumination flares being fired over the city. I vaguely wished I was going house-to-house in this historic, heroic fight. The next best thing was to serve with the Marines who had done the operation a couple of months later, and hear their stories and see their photos and footage. I have some of that footage, which I will show the reader here (READER CAUTION: FOUL LANGUAGE. turn off the sound of your computer after the bomb blast to avoid the coarse Marine infantry celebratory rhetoric):

Result of Phantom Fury? 35 U.S. servicemen lost their lives and more than 1,200 insurgents stood up to fight and be killed. Fallujah was pacified.
And the surviving insurgency, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had escaped Fallujah dressed as a woman, moved into our neighborhood in the Hit-Haditha corridor...

2009-11-08T20:14:00.007-06:00

First Skirmish with Insurgents, Part II

After Rod and I "set," that is, having dashed around the corner of the house and taken our covered positions, I yelled the word and the two snipers came up, followed by Lopez and Salinas.

As I came to the threshold of the house whose rooftop the snipers wanted to be up on, I saw the door was open and a man was sitting in front of it.

"Good American soldiers?" the man asked, fear tightening his face as he sat.

"Yes, good, good," I said, and wiped my feet on the doormat he had at the front doorstep. The mud that came off my boots was the same mud that had stuck the LAVs and prompted the attack.

"Wipe your feet guys," I commanded. I thought it was a thoughtful request. At this point in the war, having lost no friends except for Capt. Ford's shrapnel wound that had sent him home, I still felt we needed to do as we were told as far as the smiling and waving bit.

"Is there anyone inside the house?" I asked the man.

"No, no one," he said anxiously.

He told me he taught English in Fallujah but had left recently to work in Hit and that the home was freshly built for his bride-to-be. It had just been finished judging by the construction material around the courtyard and the newly moved furniture and applianceseverything out of the box.

"Ani Abu Boutros," I said, proud of my cultural awareness training. "Abu Boutros," is what my name should be properly in Iraqi Arabic, where a man very often identifies himself as "father of so-and-so," so-and-so being his eldest son. Because my eldest boy was Peter (Boutros in Arabic), I called myself "Abu Boutros."

As I shook his hand, I noticed the man was shaking almost convulsively from fear. He was terrified. I felt sorry for him.

The man expressed his intention to leave his house.

I radioed Lieutenant McKinley and told him I had a man in the house who wanted to leave. He OKd the deal, and I told the man to scoot.

"You come with me," he said.

I laughed. "Hell no, you go on by yourself."

"Tell American soldiers no shoot."

"Americans won't shoot," I said.

"Come with me," he said again.

At this point I suspected ulterior motives and started to get frustrated.

"You can stay here if you'd like, but I'm not going into the street with you."

Hesitantly, he walked into the street, looking like he was afraid to get shot.

Meanwhile, the snipers had been up on the roof, accompanied by Lopez and Salinas. Rodriguez had stuck with me, checking the first floor.

"All right, Rod, let's clear the house."

We cleared the thing, looking under beds, in the man's new wardrobes, and it was a fancy house.

Up on the roof, we scanned targets with the snipers while the Huey Cobra and its counterpart Huey Gunship flew protection for the LAV crewmen, who were still digging out of the mud.

The snipers watched intently in every nook and cranny of the city, finding nothing to kill.
Suddenly, SGT Scheele started cracking up, laughing.

"Now I know what those women wear under all those clothes," he said.
SGT Morales looked through the spotting scope and laughed.

"That's a hot-pink thong!"

I looked, and there it was, hanging out on the rooftop about 100 meters away, along with a bunch of more conservative looking clothing: a hot pink pair of thong panties.

It was a cultural experience.

The sun was beginning to set when the 7-ton trucks came from the FOB with tow ropes and commenced pulling the LAVs out of the mud.

First Direct Contact: An Ambush and a Skirmish

2009-10-31T21:05:00.004-05:00

First taste of guerilla-style battle was south Hit, Nov. 14 2004. A light armored reconnaissance vehicle patrol of about eight LAVs got stuck in the mud as they were turning around. Insurgents had come out and fired off salvos of RPG and mortar fire, and machine-gun fire, and had only pissed the Marines off.

Our truck gurus were on their way to pull the LAVs out of the mud, but we in third squad were on QRF (quick reaction force), so we threw down our shovels on the command and jumped into the Hummers.
I was in the back of the last Hummer with two sniper teams: Doc Petraglia and SGT Morales, and SGTs Scheele and Little. I remember chewing gum excitedly as they teased me about being afraid as we rushed for what we thought was a full-on firefight (it sure had been when the call came in).
When we got there, we dismounted on the north flank of the LAV patrol, where the Marines fearlessly dug at the mud surrounding their vehicles' tires, and I noticed several undetonated RPG rounds stuck in the mud around the vehicles. We had scarcely dismounted when an insurgent opened up on us with a machine gun. No bullets that I knew of struck near me, but I remember noting very distinctly that the machine gun fire sure was loud when it was pointed in one's direction.
SGT Morales dove nose-first into a pile of concrete, some of the Marines jumped for the sewage runoff tributary, and I took a knee behind the cement pile Morales had busted his nose on.
We advanced to the first row of houses after our three SAW gunners, including my SAW gunner Lopez, had suppressed fire. I knelt behind a low wall and raised my middle fingers in the air, yelling taunts for any would-be insurgents in an attempt to get something to shoot at.
Nothing. In the streets, plenty was going on. A woman walked with a baby on her shoulder in the alleyway in front of me, while men came and went from the houses and word came over the radio to watch for a flatbed truck that had insurgent snipers in it. The men who were coming and going from houses to cars were wearing dishdashas, the "man-dresses" we loved to call them, so I couldn't tell if there were weapons hidden beneath them or not. The woman in front of me paced back and forth, screening the activities of the men.
I told all this to Lieutenant McKinley over the radio, and the whole squad watched the houses intently. It was tense and boring, and I wanted to shoot but had nothing but thinly veiled insurgent activity in front of me. We were supposed to be showing great restraint at this point in the mission, as Fallujah was preparing to kick off 60 km southeast of us.
"Come on you cowardly bastards, shoot!" I taunted. Some of the men looked at me. No takers. Meanwhile, the snipers were getting impatient. They wanted to be up on a rooftop, so I radioed LT McKinley to ask. He said sure.
We tried the two-man assist to assail the wall of the two-story house immediately to my right, but it was too tall. We'd have to go around the corner, exposed to the streets and alleys, and go in through the front door.
We "stacked" SWAT-team style like we'd been taught, and I gave my guys the order. Corporal Rodriguez, my point man, dashed around the corner, and I followed...

A Very Remarkable Marine Memoirist

2009-10-22T18:06:00.008-05:00

If I Had to Fit My Feelings on Iraq Into an Essay for a Magazine...

...Then Benjamin Bush's February 2009 Harper's Essay "Bearing Arms" would be it.

I mean, where has Major Benjamin Busch been hiding all this time? Funny that Eugene Novogrodsky is the one who sent me the article, cut straight out of Harper's, in a letter to the school where I work. From what I can tell through correspondence, I have mostly befriended "Pinko Gene," who five years ago called me out in a letter to The Brownsville Herald while I was actually in Iraq.

My response to Gene's letter was vehement, and still sums up that particular set of feelings about how I felt at that point in time, though I've since read more detached commentary that has refined my views. I still find the exchange, which I have hyperlinked above, amusing.

But back to Major Busch's article. Read it. It's brilliant.

Eery similarities that we share: parents both anti-war intellectuals, grew up playing war in the country, served long stretches in the Marine reserves as infantrymen. Busch's paternal grandpa was a sergeant in the 10th Mountain Division who served in Northern Italy in WWII, while my dad's uncle, for whom I am named, was a 10th Mountain PFC who was killed just before the division got to the Po River, 20 days before that war ended. For all I know, they served together (Benny was 10th MTN Division, 86th Infantry, India Company 3rd Platoon).

I guess I've not heard of Maj. Busch because he's a big television guy, writing and acting. I don't have television, so I've not seen him on shows like HBOs "The Wire." But his essay sums it all up. Down to the bats in the night-vision goggles' field of view.

We were both in Iraq at the same time in March of 2005, as we headed out, and he was downriver 30 kilometers away in Ramadi.

I was looking for his contact info, but have not found it. I would write him and tell him he nailed it. He did.

Semper Fi.

Field Study: Why I Hate Reporters

2009-10-19T22:22:00.005-05:00

Because they load up wacky questions via e-mail for one to answer hastily, then cut and paste to make a poor man like myself sound like a raving reverse-jihadist:

Sept. 12, 2004

Three years later, soldiers continue fight started on 9/11

By LAURA B. MARTINEZ

The Brownsville Herald

On Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. Marine Reserves Sgt. Ben Christensen was in Los Fresnos teaching a high school English class.

Like most Americans, he thought it was going to be just another Tuesday.

“I was in my classroom the morning those two airliners smashed into the World Trade towers and was utterly sickened,” Christenen, 27, said last week in an e-mail from his base in Iraq.

Christensen, a Laguna Vista resident and former sports reporter for The Brownsville Herald, had just completed his service with the U.S. Marine Reserves in June 2001 and had no plans of re-enlisting — at least until that September day.

“I knew immediately our commander in chief would strike back, so I knew it meant war in some form,” he recalled.

Christensen re-enlisted in January 2004. His unit was called up in June.

He is stationed in Central Iraq to serve a seven-month tour of duty with Charlie Company, First Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment headquartered in Houston, with a two-platoon detachment in Harlingen.

Many of the men in the second platoon are from the Rio Grande Valley. They come from McAllen, San Benito, Harlingen, La Feria and Mission.

Miles from home, “from my beautiful wife and sons,” Christensen says his family understands why he re-enlisted. They understand it was his duty.

“My parents and brother and sister say that, like it or not, I’m a man and our nation’s men must ultimately answer when called.”

Christensen explained that the U.S. presence in the Middle East is because “the enemy” in Iraq has the same mentality as the terrorists responsible for the attacks on the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.

And it is these people who keep Iraqis from getting on with their lives.

“They (terrorists) are cowardly, culturally backward bastards who do deserve to die, and the United States Marine Corps wants to ensure that we kill as many as we can here and now, keeping them away from our nation’s borders,” he wrote, explaining why U.S. soldiers were sent to the Middle East after 9/11.

Under the oppressive heat and constant threat of danger surrounding his unit in Iraq, Christensen clings to his faith.

He believes God’s will brought him to Iraq.

“We are here because He willed it, and we must only be professionals relying on Him for our care and well being.”

U.S. Army Cpl. Jurgen Valdez returned safely from a 13-month tour in Iraq in April.

On Sept. 11, he was working as a trainer at a South Beach health club in Miami.

Valdez, 32, remembers being inside the club’s cardiovascular room when someone pointed to one of the television sets.

The network was replaying video of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the Twin Towers.

“That was the major factor,” for joining the military, said Valdez, who is based at Fort Drum, home of the 10th Mountain Division in New York.

“9/11 changed a lot of people’s minds.”

Valdez joined the Army in January 2002 while in Miami.Troops were deployed to Afghanistan in October 2001.

Valdez suspected he would spend time in Iraq after attention turned to former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and rumors of a biological weapons program began to circulate among soldiers.

“We knew this individual in Iraq had a lot of power and had a lot to do with terrorism,” Valdez said. “We had an idea that we were eventually going to go in there and get to the bottom of the problem.”

The Army corporal arrived in Iraq in March 2003.

Valdez said knowing the men and women in his unit were protecting him helped him make it through the year.

“When you train, you train hard … you get to trust everybody so you know you are going to come back. Of course, it’s a matter of luck sometimes.”

According the U.S. Department of Defense, 1,005 soldiers had died in Operation Iraqi Freedom as of Sept. 9.

Though he’s completed his tour and is living comfortably in Fort Drum, Valdez knows deployment orders could come unexpectedly.

He’s not afraid, he said. It’s part of his job.

“In order for some people to be over here living and having a good time, somebody has to have a hard time. It was our (soldiers’) part to have that hard time, but I believe it’s worth it.”

(END)

Notice the date. This was the expertise of a lad who'd been "in country" for about two weeks. I hadn't carried any dead insurgents, nor fired my rifle in anger, nor suffered any wounded comrades at this point. I was still smiling and waving to the populace, and had been outside the wire once.

Still, as crazy or naive as I sound in the article, it sounds even crazier to the guy who wrote it. The "culturally backwards bastards who deserve to die" gung-ho comment was tongue-in-cheek and I did not for a second think she would actually frame it in a story as a quote, which is why I used the word "bastard." They're not allowed to print "bastard" in the newspapers, are they?

The Road to Fallujah

2009-10-09T20:41:00.005-05:00

The road leading up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election was marked with a great deal of ignorant and idle talk from the grunts.

One of our Marines, Gus Ruiz, wanted Kerry to win. Everybody else ridiculed him for that, and his nickname stuck: Democrat. I wanted Bush to win only because at that point I knew that if Kerry lost, it looked like we had lost Iraq, and what was very important to me at the time was winning al-Anbar Province if not Iraq.

Needless to say, bin Laden's pre-election message that essentially said Americans should vote for Kerry tipped the scales in Bush's favor two weeks before the election, and I knew in my bones that when Bush won he would send the Marines to clean out Fallujah.

My mother tried with all her might to get me to vote absentee for Kerry.

When the snipers killed two insurgents at an intersection west of Hit, third squad was 7 kilometers south at the Bronze-Uranium split, on the main supply artery from al-Assad airbase to Ramadi and Fallujah.

We had to go and get the snipers, since their kill had alerted everyone to their presence in the area.

We had inserted them into their hide site two nights prior to their kills at 3 in the morning with the Hummers, with false stops at intervals along our patrol route to mask their insertion. It was a large group of snipers for one hide site: SGTs Aifong, Alice, and their spotters, and the battalion's scout-sniper section leader, who was a staff sergeant. Aifong had the .50-caliber Barrett and Alice had the M40 .308 bolt-action rifle.

I had been writing dispatches for The Brownsville Herald back home, so when we got to the kill site I sauntered up to do some rubbernecking. By this time weapons platoon had arrived all mounted up in their Mad Max column, and were busy snapping photos of the corpses and anti-tank mines for posterity.

I arrived at the two bodies at the same time as the snipers, and they all looked grimly pleased. Alice knelt next to the one he'd killed, a young man wearing a police uniform, and peeled up his shirt. The insurgent had been shot through the chest: one shot, one kill.

SGT Aifong looked particularly happy with the old Saddam-looking insurgent he'd shot with the .50 cal.

"Good shooting," I said.

"Thanks," he said, smiling.

"Hey sergeant, engineers are gonna blow these mines up, so we have to move the bodies," the weapons platoon guide told me. "Help me move this one."

"Nah, I don't even have my gloves on," I said. "I'm not touching him."

"Come on, dog, you can have his ankles and I'll get his jacket."

I tried to talk myself out of it, but ended up grabbing the muj's room-temperature, ash-colored bare ankles and lugging him a few feet before throwing him down.

I was unmoved either way, neither disgusted nor philosophical. I was only uplifted, in a good mood.

Back at the split, I found a care package from my mother with a New York Review of Books with highlighted sentences about how the Iraq war was misguided and so on, but she'd sent me three bags of peanut M&Ms, which I ate greedily before realizing I hadn't even washed my hands.

The article killed my good mood. For some reason, my mother's total opposition to the war infuriated me to a degree of anger I've never felt over anything else.

"Shit," I said, "I should've washed my hands."

Tootsie Roll and the Pork Chop

2009-09-25T21:42:00.002-05:00

Second platoon spent most of our tour in Iraq not actually at FOB Hit. Together with the Bronze-uranium Split and ASP Dulab, which we had to man constantly, our tour was beginning to resemble one dreadfully long camping trip, but without fishing and not much in the way of hiking. True, there was stargazing and campfires and instant oatmeal and coffee made over compact, one-burner backpacking stoves and cigars in the evening, but it was mostly a life lived in the dirt, with relative shelter afforded by tents or sandbag bunkers or camouflage netting.

At Dulab, we befriended the non-Marines who worked beside us, developing our relationships with the mercenaries, especially Matt and Eric, the former 1/7 Marines from Texas who made PX runs at al-Asad for us, buying us Ramen noodles, cartons of cigarettes, and Doritos. Matt and Eric, for the record, were wonderful guys, very friendly and professional, unlike some of the other mercenaries they rolled with. We also cultivated relationships with our comrades in the Iraqi National Guard, who had been given one week of training by CAP platoon back at FOB Hit, who helped man checkpoints and security posts. The Iraqis went to the market in the town of Baghdadi, just up Bronze (a very hostile insurgent town) zooming up and down the dusty roads three to a motorcycle, bringing us rotisserie roasted whole chickens in black plastic bags and omelets and selling us cheap Korean cigarettes and throwing the football around with us. Soon many of them had nicknames, like Tootsie Roll, an Iraqi who loved Tootsie Rolls, and we all showed each other pictures of our “madams.” I gave some of them some of my good Dominican cigars, and we talked through the translator about things that interested them, like how things were back in Texas and about Biblical figures revered by both Muslims and Christians, namely Eesa—Jesus. Dulab was better than the Split in that respect, because we could talk to someone other than each other, where we told the same stories and the same jokes.

In one particularly funny episode with Tootsie Roll, some ungodly infidel Marine, Fabian I think, offered him a Pork Chop MRE. Definitely not halal (kosher for Muslims).

Tootsie Roll gesticulated, pushing his nose up with his finger and snorting.

“La? Snort snort. La?” Not pork, is it?

“La, la,” the Marine assured him, doing the hands in the armpits and bock-bocking like a chicken. “Chicken.”

Tootsie Roll ate the pork chop delightedly, just as the sun set. At midnight we were awakened by a hellacious thunderstorm with ripping high winds.

“Oh shit,” someone said, “we shouldn’t have given Tootsie Roll that pork chop.”

Egress back to FOB Hit

2009-09-20T09:08:00.000-05:00

After the excitement had died down and the adrenaline subsided, we lapsed into another long and anxious wait for our withdrawal. We staged our backpacks and then at around 10:00 at night were tasked with covering the first couple of rounds of the withdrawal from the high ground flanking Bronze. We went, and the air felt chilly as we climbed up to our respective positions and the wind whipped at us.

Large, menacing dogs came up and began barking at us. They looked hellish in the dim moonlight and through the night-vision goggles, and gave me the willies. It felt more like creepy Halloween portrayed in some weird and gloomy independent film than like the happy Ramadan we had enjoyed irreverently earlier in the day.

Just before midnight we were ordered to our Humvees, and we loaded them happily, if warily. The ride back to base, via the Bronze-Uranium split, would be hairy with the threat of IEDs.

I was particularly on edge because half the company had already been taken back to the Split, which served as our company’s rally point for the big movement back to base. The enemy would be alert. I needn’t have worried, though, as we rolled through the dark we encountered nothing more than constant flashes of lightning that heaped on more eeriness.

An autumnal desert thunderstorm was blowing up from the southwest and as we drove south on the Iraqi highway individual, massive bolts materialized in the flashes, forking across the night sky. As the storm drew nearer, thunder hammered down, Allah’s pointed reply to mortar fire and 500-pound bombs.

The wind picked up to a veritable whipping, but for some odd reason dust wasn’t yet blowing. As per standard operating procedure, we drove with no lights and I began to grow more fearful of a vehicle accident than either the enemy or the weather, particularly because the drivers sped madly in a dead rush to get back to the relative safety of the FOB.

Lance Corporal Saul “Little Guerra” Guerra, drove our Humvee, at the rear of the formation (the other Guerra, Jeremiah “Big Guerra,” was Second Platoon’s Preacher Man, the Baptist missionary with a degree in philosophy from Texas A&M).

The lightning capturing photograph flash-frozen images of helmeted heads and rifle muzzles and monstrous seven-ton trucks and the overpass over the train tracks. The convoy was flat hauling ass, going at least 50 miles per hour, and Little Guerra was having a hard time seeing the road through his night-vision goggles with the blackness and strobe of lightning, and he continually swerved off both non-existing shoulders of Uranium when we had reached it. He corrected each veering off with small fishtailing skids that threatened to flip us that invariably sent him swerving off the other shoulder. I was positively cold with fear.

If we veered far enough off the shoulder and onto the steep bank Uranium was built on, the Humvee would surely flip, and that would be the end of us, just as so many Marines and Lance Corporal McDaniel had been killed in training, in flipped Humvees. Nammie was sitting directly across from me against the vinyl-clad cab, and I kept telling him he needed to make Little Guerra slow down, but it really wasn’t an option to be left behind, since we were the very last vehicle in the convoy. Through my own NVGs things did not look very well illuminated at all.

Some nights, the very dark ones, the night vision equipment that relied on ambient light just didn’t work, and this was one of them. Amazingly, and a great credit to Guerra, we reached Route Paige without flipping and being killed, and without being ambushed. Guerra turned left on the perpetually muddy track and we slowed considerably. I relaxed. The thunderstorm was fast approaching, and the bolts seemed bigger than most I’d seen in my life.

It was a boiling, angry type of storm and I felt like it was stalking us. We pulled back into the FOB and it was impossible to hide our silly glee. The base, which looked at its best like the Third World hellhole that it was, felt the same at that moment as Grandma Levings’ house in Fort Worth had felt at Christmastime when I was a little kid with a vinyl parka and a plastic shark.

Moving out of Town with the Dogs Nipping at our Heels

2009-09-19T21:07:00.001-05:00

If 1/8 encountered a lot of resistance, we would be going in behind them. The attack was underway, with Huey Air Cobras patrolling, all around, noses angled sharply downward, hunting. Fewer than five miles north of us, people were getting killed, and, because of the news networks, the folks back home had a better idea of what was going on than I did.

At about 7:00 in the evening, after more lounging and more turns on watch, Nammie came in with very sudden and overwhelmingly good news: 1/8 had encountered zero resistance, Iraqi troops were moving freely through the streets of Hit, and we were going back to base as soon as darkness had fallen. Against my better judgment, I yelled to Abul from my rooftop, “Ya hajji, Abul, salaam in Hit! Salaam!” and he smiled and waved. The day waned and the sun sat on the barren horizon opposite the Euphrates. As soon as the words of my proclamation of peace in our time with honor had left my mouth, we heard the hollow thump of a mortar round being launched out of a tube.

Should’ve expected that, I thought. BOOM! The round landed nearby, across the street on the bank of the Euphrates. Another one hit a second or two later.

“Incoming!” went the worn-out shout.

Thinking only of how vulnerable we were on the rooftop, I hustled the troops who were up with me to the interior stairway, and everyone eagerly accommodated my orders.

After a moment, however, and with no subsequent fire, I realized I might be able to get a point of origin on the launch as I had back at OP Paige, so I ran back out, onto the roof, and knelt behind the parapet. I saw some smoke at the farthest bend in the road, where it curved out of site, or thought I saw some. I wasn’t entirely sure.

“Come on, you cowards!” I shouted in the direction I determined the fire had come. “You pussies! Come out and fight like real men!”

Of course, no one did. No one had been hurt in the two-round attack, and there were wildly varying assertions of the point of origin, so none of us returned fire. We had nothing to shoot at, which was becoming something of a frequent occurrence, and it was beginning to feel like I had a bank account where Frustration was the currency, and the enemy was compounding my interest in it. I wanted to shoot, especially after I’d been shot at, but there was nothing definite to shoot at—if there are no targets, Marines just don’t shoot.

That’s how we were trained. The whole thing just wasn’t working out as neatly as I’d always thought it would.

Arabs like Abul enjoy Mother's Milk

2009-09-18T21:06:00.002-05:00

As afternoon drew toward evening, Abul sent his kid Abbas over. Abbas, a skinny 15-year-old with a black caterpillar mustache, came bearing broad tin bowls perfectly brimming with omelettes, stacked high with pita bread, and two liters of RC Cola, as well as my four or five packs of odious, sulphur-flavored Court cigarettes and thankfully not-pine-tasting Pine cigarettes.

It was time for the infidel Christian dogs to have a Ramadan feast in broad daylight front of Allah and the Arab world. We weren’t trying to be insensitive to Muslim sensitivities—we loved many of our Muslim brothers, but we were famished. We ate, we took pictures with Abbas, Abbas took pictures for us, and we ate some more. Rather than give us our eggs and vegetables as we had ordered them—uncooked—Abul had the old lady whip it all up for us. It was the most thoughtful thing I had seen any Arab civilians do for us, and I was touched.

After we had eaten our fill, Eddie and I went over to Abul’s farmhouse to thank the old man profusely.

“Salaam aleykum, Abul. Shukran! Shukran!” I said emphatically, shaking his hand and touching my heart and bowing, doing everything I could to make the old farmer know we were indebted to his kindness. I felt warm inside. He seemed pleased. The old lady poked her head out from the house, and Eddie asked, “you make the food?” using ample hand gestures.

“Ee, ee,” she answered back, along with a bunch of other Arabic we didn’t understand. Yes she had.

“It was good, good. Mmmmmm,” Eddie said, smiling and rubbing his stomach. The two universally understood English words to Arabs we’d encountered in Iraq were: “mister,” and “good.” The old, worn-out-looking, life-weary woman beamed happily and said some more in Arabic and then closed the door. Abul shouted something after her in his raspy voice. After some brief conversation squatting on our heels with Abul and Abbas in the clover, the woman brought out a pitcher of piping hot, sweet chai.

It was Ramadan, and Abul wasn’t having anything pass his lips during the daylight, but he poured Eddie and I a cup each and had us take and drink. It was the first chai I had had in Iraq and it was delectable as a dessert. We lit cigarettes.

Soon enough, we were making headway in our vigorous attempts to communicate, with prolific use of gestures and many trips to my Iraqi Language Survival Handbook, and Eddie pulled a picture of his wife and daughter from his wallet to show Abul.

“Madam?” Abul asked, pointing to Eddie.

“Yes, yes, my madam,” Eddie said.

Abul said something indicating daughter, and Eddie said yes to that too. Then the old man, in his raspy voice, said, “Bebe?” and, putting his thumb between his index and middle fingers, proceeded to suck on them, imitating nipple sucking. “You?” Abul asked.

Eddie was perplexed, but I thought I knew what he was getting at.

“He wants to know if your daughter was breastfed,” I told Eddie.

“What?” Eddie asked, completely thrown.

“No, really,” I said, “he wants to know if she was breastfed.”

“Yes, yes,” said Eddie, smiling and laughing.

Abul laughed a long and raspy laugh, then repeated the gesture over and over, despite the fact that I was trying to brag about having three sons, which generally seemed to impress the hell out of Arab men. Abul ignored me entirely and continued pointing to the picture of Eddie’s wife, then to Eddie. I realized he wasn’t pointing to the photo of their daughter.

“Hey Jimenez,” I said, “I think he wants to know if you ever got any milk from your wife.”

“Whaat?” Eddie asked, incredulously. Somehow I felt like a pervert, but I knew exactly what Abul was trying to communicate.

“Dude, just say yes,” I told Eddie.

“Yes, yes,” Eddie said, in the spirit of going along to get along.

Abul laughed a long and raspy laugh and said, “Good, good!”

He seemed perfectly delighted and made several more rounds of his gestures, sucking the tip of his thumb and pointing at the pictures and at Jimenez, forcing Jimenez to insist upon the fact that yes, he had suckled from his wife’s boobs. This is getting weird, I thought. They didn’t warn us about this one in our culture training. It was time to be getting along back to the house. Eddie and I finished our chai and thanked our host several more times and skirted the lush little clover field back to our outpost. It had been a heady day, and only the sense of foreboding kept me from feeling truly at peace with the world.

In Search of Fresh Food, Eddie Jimenez, Abul and Abbas

2009-09-06T07:08:00.000-05:00

To have an assault in Iraq, Marines had to have resistance. We weren’t shooting anybody who didn’t want to play the game, and so the insurgents generally knew this and generally chose the time they wanted to play.

And it was hardly ever our favored time.

So 1/8 had begun moving into the city while we occupied our blocking position, and we settled in groups into the farmhouse rooms according to individual preferences.

My old friend, Sergeant Eduardo “Eddie” Jimenez, who served as the machine gun section leader for weapons platoon, approached me before long wanting to talk business.

Jimenez’s business was the acquisition of real, fresh food from the locals. No stranger to the dealings of the Black Market back in Laredo, Jimenez was good at what he did. He never ate a Meal, Ready to Eat if he could scrounge up some fresh meat and vegetables, which was often.

“Hey ah, Chris,” he said in his Spanish-accented streets-of-Laredo voice, “you know a lot of hajji words, don’t you?”

“Not really, bro, but I have my book with me.”

“Hey, do you think you can help me? I have some hajji money and I want to get that old man next door to buy us some eggs and potatoes and maybe a goat.”

I needed cigarettes so I agreed. Eddie had tried to give the dinari to a young boy and girl who were tending sheep in the clover in front of our farmhouse, who were apparently the neighboring farmer’s kids. He had no luck, however, so he tried in vain communicate his need for fresh food to them while they looked right through him and pretended he wasn’t there before hastily walking away. Going straight to the old man was our last resort.

We felt it would be best when we went to greet the old man and his teen-aged son that we remove our flak jackets and helmets and don on our more casual floppy-brimmed boonie hats, though we had our rifles loaded and ready, slung down in front of our chests ready for use.

We caught him while he was outside fiddling with some thing or other, looking as though he wanted to project calm confidence.

“Salaam aleykum,” I said. Eddie said likewise.

“Salaam, salaam,” the old man said.

We started in on the niceties. My name, I said, was Abu Boutros. They always liked that. His name was Abul, and he introduced his skinny son, Abbas.

Eddie managed to communicate that his name, Eduardo, was Spanish. Abul liked that, too. He offered me a cigarette and, just like that, the three of us were as amiable as regular neighbors. The old man still looked slightly uneasy, however, until Eddie began communicating his desire for food, breaking out his new Iraqi dinari. The local currency was good, the old man explained, because if he tried to use American dollars down at the market in Mohammadi, he would be killed.

Note to self, I thought, the town we had cruised through so freely less than a month previous was an insurgent hotbed.

I ordered cigarettes and Eddie was visibly disappointed when the old man said he could not afford to sell us a goat and wouldn’t be able to get us one.

Some Kids, Some Candy, and a Metaphor for "Democracy Building"

2009-09-05T07:58:00.000-05:00

As soon as the sun had come up and snatches of sleep had been had, the family lived up to their intentions and began loading all of their earthly possessions into two small flatbed trucks. Mattresses, furniture, pillows and bedding all came out, along with about 10 boys and girls who all looked younger than 10 years old, followed by several men and women. The old man and woman seemed to be the patriarch and matriarch, respectively.

Like Fabian, Third Squad’s Navy Corpsman, Doc Santa (his real last name) was always eager to give candy to children, so he threw a bag of Peanut M&Ms off the roof onto the ground near the kids.

They all rushed to get it, but one of the ladies gave the kids a fierce tongue lashing in Arabic. The children froze, then backed away as they would from a dangerous snake. The adults continued to bustle around, tying mounds of possessions on the flat beds of the trucks, while the children lingered around the bag of M&Ms lying on the ground.

Some of us watched curiously. Then, sure enough, when the old lady wasn’t looking and one of the kids could take it no longer, one of the older boys rushed in, swiped the yellow package off the ground, ducked around a corner and gobbled them down. In Iraq, I assure you, they do not teach children to share in kindergarten.

But what really struck me was that the whole episode seemed a metaphor for our attempts to build democracy in Iraq. I think the metaphor would have been more complete if one of the other kids had beaten the piss out of the one who swiped the candy before he could eat it for nothing more than to not have to watch him enjoying it.

Soon after the family had left, 1/8’s attack on Hit began.

Blocking Position

2009-09-04T07:49:00.001-05:00

We packed tightly into the Humvees and seven-ton trucks and, loaded down with weaponry and ammunition, made our collective way once again past Mohammadi, past Aqabah and up to the southern fringe of Hit, where we commandeered two farm houses on a bluff overlooking Bronze and the Euphrates, in our newly claimed chunk of the Sumerian heartland.

We dismounted and set up a secure perimeter without encountering any resistance, and then our squad was selected to ask the nice farmers up the bluff for their rooftop, with instructions to re-assure them they would be able to stay in their houses and go about their business as usual and have a happy Ramadan and just pretend we weren’t there.

As we patrolled stealthily to the two-story stone farmhouse, wearing our night vision goggles, we saw an old man and woman sleeping by a low-burning fire outside, in front of the house. It was 4:00 a.m. by then, and there was a festive litter of candy wrappers strewn all over the grassy ground around the fire and the old couple sleeping. Ramadan at first glimpse seemed very festive indeed, with old people cuddling by the fire and all.

The old couple stirred when one of their dogs started barking and growling menacingly at Fabian, and they told us through Safwan, our interpreter, that we were welcome on the rooftop and that they would be leaving later in the morning, not on account of us, of course, but they had already planned to visit some family in Baghdad. We thanked them and climbed up to the rooftop, warily, and soon found in the darkness, as we took kneeling positions and a few plopped wearily down on their butts, that the surface was covered in piles of feces and smelled strongly of urine.

There was a restroom in the house, with the typical keyhole in concrete squat-a-potty, but from what I could see it seemed that the rooftop was the most convenient place for the younger children to relieve themselves. When at last we had the opportunity to rotate watches with some sleep, though, it didn’t matter much, though we knew we were lying on the dried up piss and feces.

When it was my turn to get a little sleep, I only half-heartedly hoped in my state of sheer exhaustion that I wouldn’t be laying in any particularly fresh excrement. As tired as I was, it was really only a passing thought.

Happy Ramadan, Little Feller

2009-09-03T07:40:00.000-05:00

The day of the first night of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the time came to conduct the leaders’ reconnaissance, and third squad was selected to go along as the security element. So in the middle of the day we drove Lieutenant McKinley straight north on Bronze, through Aqabah and Mohammadi to a point just south of Hit, and poked around in some very vulnerable terrain, hyper-alert and expecting the life-ending IED any moment, waiting to be blown to hell at any moment, miraculously not running across any on the way to the reconnoiter site.

Most of the route was jammed with hostile-looking men, who looked very much to me like insurgents displaced by the air strikes.

When we rolled up to our first security halt, I rushed out of the Humvee and set up in the prone, lying behind a berm facing a walled-in farm on the bank of the Euphrates. The people at the farmstead acted normal, even cool, standing outside or hoeing the farm patch, then they began to slip into the house, one at a time. At one point it looked as though one man was signaling and shouting to unseen people on the other side of the river, which made me leery, but nothing materialized and after a half-hour—too long we loaded back up and headed for Hit.

We pulled over next at a spot with a perfect view of the southwestern edge of town, and the city looked dead still and quiet, and I noticed that nothing was burning. It felt like a pre-storm quiet, however.

I took a position standing in an irregularly shaped courtyard of a walled-in compound, where we let ourselves in, and I pissed happily on the side of a building while remaining as vigilant as I could. The piss left me feeling a bit more relaxed, and I stood in the shade of my wall for another half hour, taking turns scanning windows and rooftops, like a lifeguard at a water park, and I studied the construction of the stone and cement storage building I was standing against.

The structure seemed as loosely put together as a sand castle with pebbles pressed into it, and the mud-colored cement could be easily chipped off with my fingers, but it was stout, tall, and impressively squared. The seven-foot wall surrounding the compound was built in the same manner, and everything was monochromatic desert beige with the irregular grid of gray mortar holding it all together.

When it was time to go, we all jumped into the backs of the Humvees and rallied up.

As we waited for God-only-knew-what to depart, Corporal “Fabian (it was his real first name and therefore an excellent nickname)” Hernandez, always fond of giving candy to Iraqi kids, waved a kid over from where he sat in the front seat of the car behind our Humvee behind our patrol. The boy’s father said something to the boy, and gestured to his son, who promptly popped the car door open and came running over as fast as he could. Fabian gave him a Jolly Rancher and a cereal bar, and the kid looked as if he’d just scored, big time.

Happy Ramadan, little feller. The boy ran so fast back to his father’s car that he tripped and fell on his way over. He was about six-years-old, and was so visibly embarrassed by falling in front of a bunch of American infantrymen that he kept his head hidden from us until we rolled away. I felt a paternal sense of sympathy for him, and found myself hoping his father would comfort him.

Two nights later, at 3:00 a.m., we were finally given a mission: to move in and seal off the south side of Hit at the place we had checked out, setting up a blocking position to keep reinforcements from coming into the city during the main assault.

Frustration is the Real F-Word in Counter-Insurgency

2009-09-02T07:31:00.000-05:00

Most of the time in the lead-up to our operation against the Euphrates River city of Hit, I sat listening to some sad song, thinking of how appropriate a song that would make for a funeral.

It would be easy to pretend that my balls are bigger than my head and that I was raring to go out and get opportunities to fight and kill and all that other high school football crap, but there is a great deal of despair knowing that you have to do a job that could result in the forfeiture of your mortal coil, knowing also that you don’t have any say in the matter.

You cannot call in sick for a combat operation, though I have never wished so much in my life for broken bones and typhoid and all manner of serious ailments as when I was in Iraq—and they never came. In fact, I think the stretch of those seven months I was in the Al-Anbar Province was the healthiest streak I’ve enjoyed in my life. But the despair was real. What of my wife, and my sons? My father, who’s already been through this war death thing in the family, it would crush him to lose a son (even a middle child). And so on and so on, anguish and despair and quiet tears at night and all of the other Marines going around looking as though they’ve just woken from a long nap, sort of dazed and somber.

It was to be our first taste of combat, and just adding a sense of sufficient gravity to the situation, Bravo Company’s First Platoon had met with very heavy resistance while on a mission to seize and occupy the police station in Hit. They seized the station without a shot in Hit and threw the dirty insurgent/cops out into the street and then found themselves the targets of a massive attack. From 4:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. they shot it out with an uncharacteristically tenacious enemy force, sustaining just one minor casualty, caused by a ricocheting bullet a Marine took in the leg, below the knee. Staff Sergeant Avendaño told us that he had been able to hear the whole thing on the battalion’s radio frequency.

“It sounded like one of those Vietnam movies, man,” he said, “all this gunfire in the background and shit.

“Battalion kept asking the platoon leader some question over and over and he got pissed and said, ‘I can’t answer that right now, I’m in the middle of a firefight.’”

If combat was going to be the Heavy Superlative, it was inevitable, and because I began to accept that it was inevitable, I wanted it done right. I found myself wanting that to Bravo Company’s First Platoon so bad, duking it out with the insurgents, in danger of running low on ammunition, finally beating the insurgents away. Sitting around at the Split just felt Frustrating, with a Capital “F.”

An Approaching Storm

2009-09-01T07:28:00.000-05:00

In the week preceding the attack on Hit, during which we were told we would be mopping up for 1/8 after their initial assault, we in Second Platoon were assigned to set up a vehicle checkpoint for traffic headed north while truck after truck filled with families and crammed with their belongings headed south.

Because I now had in my possession a powerful spotting scope my father sent me, I set up and manned an observation post with my fire team south of the checkpoint, charged with picking out suspicious vehicles headed north to search during times when the other squads were not conducting 100-percent checks.

It was relaxing work, I had the scope trained on the farthest bend in the road, about two miles south, so I had time to pick my vehicle and radio in for our Marines to set up a snap checkpoint. With just four Marines and one unarmored Humvee, we were rather vulnerable from where we watched the highway, not 200 meters off to the east. Some of the civilians even waved, without us waving first, which surprised me.

I felt sorry for them. They looked as though they were evacuating for a hurricane, like we had to do every few years back home, living on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and some hurricane this was promising to be.

We set up defensive positions and I went over scenarios with Rod, Lopez and Gunner in case we were attacked by RPG or small-arms fire. For three days while the situation developed, we sat in our OP in an area notorious for vehicle-based suicide bombings, not more than twenty miles northeast of Ramadi, the next big town over.

Huey Air Cobra attack helicopters and F-18 fighter jets had been busy, noisily hammering away on the old city 10 kilometers north of us. The mornings were filled with most of the activity, the booming of 500-pound bombs reverberating like thunder from squall lines in a hurricane’s outer bands. I despaired over the upcoming mission, alternately feeling sorry for myself and trying to enjoy the strange combination of what I can only describe as “tense relaxation,” unique to my time in Iraq.

Second Squad's Sheep Incident

2009-08-31T07:23:00.001-05:00

All right, second squad’s sheep incident.

Long story short: Sgt. Joseph “Cowboy” Morales took his squad on a patrol to the farms down by the Euphrates and they all pitched in to buy a sheep and Doc Edes killed and butchered and cooked it, all to LT’s disapproval.

Good thing he didn’t see Cowboy mooning me from the back of his Humvee as his squad cruised by my observation post, yelling “We just bought a sheep. We’re gonna eat it!”

And I had thought he was just joking.

Just for emphasis we passed a roadside bomb laying in a hole that one of the Weapons Company had found on a security patrol. We were at base for two hours to resupply and then it was back to the Bronze-Uranium split where we’d had such happy times patrolling through the villages with Adam and Alice.

As soon as we were at the Split we were told offensive operations were being undertaken against Hit, effective immediately. First Battalion, Eighth Marines, along with First Light Armored Reconnaissance, would be coming down from Al-Qaim to spearhead the operation, and it was going to be a big assault on the city, Fallujah style.

I would be lying if I said I wanted my unit, Task Force 1-23, to spearhead the operation. At this point in early October, I wanted to fake everything and loaf and lounge at my ease and come back home with all my appendages in tact. I didn’t want combat when it came down to it, even though it had been the reason I signed on for Iraq. I wasn’t a full coward, but at that point I was keen to avoid the weight that the real prospect of flying shrapnel and bullets brought with it. It was like The Perpetual Wince thinking about a roadside bomb blast or an anti-tank mine or an RPG or the shock of a sniper’s bullet. I knew it was inevitable, and it was.

So the prospect of combat hung about, a heavy-assed superlative that doesn’t lend itself to sort of easing in.

Insurgents Rough Up the General's Convoy

2009-08-30T19:11:00.005-05:00

I began to feel mentally exhausted because of a pervasive feeling that I was out of the woods at the close of September, yet I knew I was only entering the thicket. We were at Dulab and my fire team and I got the best duty, stationed at an observation post, just the four of us, on the eastern perimeter of the ammo dump, tasked with keeping people out.

It was a cakewalk, we lounged around and I read and wrote and sometimes napped. We were only menaced out there by some lightning in passing storms, with brilliant bolts that left me feeling vulnerable at the roofless destroyed building we called home, with nothing in the way of overhead cover and a radio antenna sticking up, higher than anything for miles.

I have an irrational fear of lightning, but our last morning there, while I was on watch at 3:00 a.m., I watched a particularly fierce display, east over the river, and prayed it wasn’t headed our way.

Thirty minutes later, though, it had mostly dissipated, and a sliver of moon shone through the rain clouds as the thunderheads broke apart and there was just enough moon so that it didn’t obscure the starlight, and it was all peaceful and picturesque—nighttime in the Sumerian heartland, with a sky full of dawdling gods.

The morning we rotated out of Dulab, we learned insurgents had sprung a fierce ambush in Hit at Traffic Circle One, a problematic intersection on the west side of town, with coordinated RPG and machinegun fire, hitting a convoy that Marine General Richard Natonski was in.

The machinegun fire had been so intense that for a while the gunners couldn’t get their heads out of the gun turrets to return fire. So Lt. McKinley gave us a pep talk about getting our heads back in the game, etcetera—he was kind of miffed about second squad’s sheep incident.

Nabbing the Mad Mortarman

2009-08-22T15:32:00.001-05:00

On October 5^th Charlie Company netted the so-called “Mad Mortarman” at his house not more than two kilometers away from base in the palm groves to the north. I was standing post, along with the rest of third squad, though we were slated to conduct the raid on his home that night. Our rehearsal area was set up using photographs of his compound during some very thorough reconnaissance by our intelligence assets in our friendly Marine Corps Human Intelligence Exploitation Teams (HET). Anyhow, we were ready. But at 10 a.m., while I was still on post, Charlie RAF went tearing off with second platoon’s first and second squads, out of base, and I knew the raid was going down on short notice.

Second squad kicked in his door and found him and a buddy chilling on Valium, with syringes scattered all around. The Mad Mortarman was likely responsible, almost certainly directly involved, in five of Echo 2/7’s KIAs, along with most of their wounded. Echo 2/7 had raided his home once, as had our own Charlie RAF, but no one had caught him at home during either raid, nor had they found any incriminating evidence to point to the owner of the house as the suspected insurgent.

However, as second squad poked around, Corporal John Ovalle, who I often found to be something of a killjoy and entirely too serious, though he justified himself in this instance, detected a hollow sound underfoot, brushed away some dust on the floor and located the trap door that concealed stacks on stacks of 155-mm warheads, 122-mm Katyusha rockets, 82-mm mortar rounds, anti-tank mines, homemade mortar tubes, RPG launchers and rocket-propelled grenades, bomb-making equipment such as circuit boards and soldering equipment and two-way handheld radios. It was the biggest find in AO Denver up to that time, and everyone up to Col. Tucker at Regimental Combat Team Seven seemed very pleased with it.

Our Marines, admittedly, weren’t terribly gentle on the skinny bastard and his buddy, but the worst of their treatment—the thing that really set him off crying and sniveling, they told me—was to whisper “Abu Ghraib” in his ear. They said he cried the whole way to the detention facility at al-Asad—almost as much, I guess, as the American public cried about Abu Ghraib while our guys were driving him away.

Captain Ford and the Anti-Tank Mine

2009-08-21T21:18:00.003-05:00

Captain Mike Ford, CAP platoon commander, was Charlie Company’s first wounded Marine. Following a mortar attack on Monday night of October 4^th, he went with a squad to investigate the impact area of the rounds on a “crater analysis” to determine what they were shooting at us and from what general direction, and he was still within the perimeter of the base, though on the wide-open section of the southern border of the FOB that faced Hit. He had dismounted and was guiding his driver, Corporal Nava, while Nava turned around in bumpy terrain when the vehicle’s rear driver side tire struck an anti-tank mine, sending shrapnel into his left leg, arm and face. Capt. Ford sustained extensive damage to his calf, suffering some lost muscle tissue.

His wounds, though serious, weren’t life-threatening and he was reportedly more angry than anything. His ballistic goggles had likely saved his eyesight, though his eyes were deeply bloodshot because the mine’s concussion had burst most of the blood vessels in both of them. He was evacuated on a medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) Blackhawk helicopter to Balad, the surgical hospital in south Baghdad, then flown to Germany and on back to the United States.

From then on, Gunnery Sergeant Gonzalez, the battle-tested veteran from 3/5, led First Platoon.

Captain Ford and I had been young Lance Corporals in the reserve together, and we graduated from college at the same time, he from Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University) and I from the University of Texas at Brownsville. He received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Marines then and became an infantry officer, while I stayed my course as an enlisted Marine in the reserve. Mike had just gotten back to Charlie Company as the new Inspector-Instructor, intending to take a break from the high tempo of the deployment rotations of the active-duty “Fleet.”

He had scarcely returned from Afghanistan when we got called to Iraq. So much for a respite with the Reserve.

I got to talk with Corporal Nava, who was driving the Hummer when it hit the mine. He was unhurt, but said that following the mine strike there had been cheering from across the Euphrates in the direction of the Sharqi mosque. A little later, weapons platoon was guarding the disabled vehicle when they heard gunfire from across the river—likely celebratory rather than offensive—and claimed to have seen figures running in the palm groves along the riverbank, so they opened fire. The Company Commander called it a dubious judgment call, but no reprimands that I know of were officially handed down.

It was a very tense night for us all, wondering about Captain Ford’s status.

We were glad he was all right, but sad to see him go so early in the tour.

Hello Haji! Sneaking into a Riverside Town on a Thursday Night

2009-08-17T22:10:00.003-05:00

Like wolves on the night of October 3^rd, we headed out toward the wadi, driving sans lights, with night vision goggles on, north up Uranium.

Thursday nights are party nights in the Middle East, when celebrants before the Friday Sabbath like to shoot flares, AK-47s, and machine guns into the night sky. We stopped where the wadi passes under the railroad trestle, to wait for an hour for the night to progress a bit, and we could hear the happy gunfire popping to the east. The wadi splits Mohammadi from Aqabah, and the snipers told us that according to intelligence briefs, the two towns were run by warring clans.

Gunfire and rockets and mortars were regularly traded between the two villages across the wadi. We could not know for certain if the firing was hostile or not, although it most likely wasn’t serious unless mortars and Katyusha rockets were flying, which they weren’t that cool October night.

At 10 o’clock things had quieted to a sufficient degree, and we rolled past the trestle, down one of the many dirt roads used by gravel-hauling dump trucks, toward route Bronze. Although the map told us the road wound up to a levee, we didn’t know anything about the levee or the rest of the route, as it didn’t really appear clearly on the map.

I was in vehicle three out of the four Hummer patrol, with Jeff driving. I rode shotgun as usual and we had Jeff’s SAW gunner, Lance Corporal Mark “Ollie” Olivarez in the back, his weapon resting on the vinyl cab top. We followed the vehicles in front like ducks in a row up onto the levee and found immediately that we were committed to a one-way route.

On top of the levee, 20 feet above the soggy cropland, the dirt track narrowed such that it barely accommodated the Hummers’ wide wheelbases. There was zero wiggle room to the left or right, and turning around or even exiting the levee were not even close to being options. All there was to do was to simply press forward with apprehension into the unknown.

Because it was night, smoking the comforting cigarette was not an option.

So we pressed on. A farmer on a tractor with headlights plowed the field to our south, on our right, the Aqabah side of the levee. A couple of times we slowed to a near stop because the levee narrowed to precipitous edges, and I began to wonder if we’d become seriously stuck. All it would take was for one Humvee to roll off the side of the levee and stick in the soft mud below.

We crept forward, and then it became apparent that we were snaking directly toward Aqabah proper.

Soon we were in the palm groves, and the levee’s height was reduced by the upward sloping ground. Even in the green hue of the NVGs, with nearly a full moon high above the river, the landscape turned striking and alluring.

The palms stood and spread their fronds, forming a jagged green roof over a lush grass carpet. The palms were cultivated in orchards for their dates and were spaced evenly, and then the Euphrates appeared on our left side, abruptly, not 10 feet away, and stretched off, wide, into the night, broad and gentle in its vast fluid sweep.

We hooked right, away from the river, finding ourselves at the foot of an 80-foot cliff, atop which Aqabah perched. We followed the dirt track up, winding, with the cliff on our left side, and I couldn’t get over how bad a spot we were in, tactically speaking.

My head was reeling. It was exciting and beautiful and nerve-wracking.

Shortly, we popped up atop the bluff and found ourselves on a narrow street with every young Iraqi man out on the street, hanging out like on a Saturday night in the West. They stopped, collectively, about 70 of them crowded in the space of a block or two, 20 at one pool table, and looked at us, petrified.

I couldn’t believe that we had managed to sneak up on them as we had, but it occurred to me later that diesel engines like those in our Hummers are so commonplace because of the ubiquitous tractors and diesel trucks that the diesel growl of the Hummers would not have seemed out of the ordinary.

What ensued was frankly very funny: never have I seen a collective display of surprise on the scale of that night when we crested the back road into Aqabah. Many of the young men did double takes, and more than a few had their mouths hanging open.

They froze. No one moved except a couple of women who collected up little children and ran-walked to the nearest houses. The Arabs, by their posture, seemed to expect us to start shooting at any second.

Instead, we rolled on through, southward toward Bronze, leaving the stunned Iraqis to wonder what the hell that was all about.

Victory was ours without shooting a single round.

Our sneaky intelligence-gathering/propaganda disseminating intelligence Marines, “Adam” and “Paul,” had been putting word out on the streets of Hit and the surrounding area about the cowboys from Texas that we were.

They said we were straight-up fighters with deadly aim and itchy trigger fingers, that we were deadly serious and so on. In that context, those young men of Aqabah would likely have thought our appearance that night was a simple and disquieting display of cowboy bravado.

In all, it was one of the classic moments of my tour in Iraq.

Patrolling Around Rural Anbar

2009-08-16T09:30:00.002-05:00

Later that day we patrolled again down the Mohammadi Wadi, this time following it westward instead of east toward the railroad trestle, to see what was out there. We passed several oases of date palm groves before we found ourselves outside a small village that was represented on our military topographical maps but bore no name, about seven kilometers west of the Bronze-Uranium checkpoint.

Our platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant “Alley Cat” Avendaño was with us, riding in the last Humvee, and Sgt. Moreno was in the lead vehicle with the Blue Force Tracker, a 21^st Century navigational computer that interfaces a global positioning system with topographical maps and shows positions of other friendly forces.

I rode in the third Humvee with Corporal Jeff Jones, my old friend, who drove. We all had radio headsets on with which to communicate.

“Staff Sergeant, uh, the road goes straight through this village,” Moreno radioed back, chuckling with his affected “oh shit,” laugh. We weren’t exactly encouraged by the leadership to be gallivanting through populated areas.

“Yeah, f*&% it,” Alley Cat said. “Let’s just go on in and have a look.”

“Gimme a cigarette, Jones,” I said, and he did and we lit them as we pushed forward, quickly within small arms range of the little hamlet. Driving through small, unfamiliar villages in the Al-Anbar Province of Iraq, of course, tends to be sketchy business, with probably 40 percent chance of driving into an ambush.

Two-Seven certainly had run into a few, first in Hit and then in Kubaysah. So we drove coolly, slowly down the dirt track until we were flanked on both sides by mud brick houses. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon. A few children were outside, watching us but not waving, looking terrified and standing stock-still. I did see one man, wearing a maroon dishdasha, who made a mad-dasha for his house, which alarmed me at the time as it was a reaction I hadn’t really seen before.

“Be advised I just saw a hajji with a maroon man dress haul ass into the house directly to my right,” I said into my radio.

“Roger, I saw him too,” Alley Cat said.

But we rolled past and no small arms fire came and no RPGs ripped past, and the kids stared dully at us and the whole thing gave me the willies but we drove on out of the village. I was exhilarated, again, the second time in 12 hours! Iraq was starting to get more interesting, anyway, I thought. It beat the hell out of sitting back at FOB Hit as sergeant of the guard, listening in on stupid conversations.

When we got back to the split, where the snipers had been catching up on their sleep, we told them we’d driven through a village and they acted disappointed that they hadn’t come. It had been our first mounted patrol through an unknown and likely hostile village. When we went on a second patrol that day, toward Mohammadi, the snipers stayed behind yet again, asleep, resting for an upcoming nighttime mission. We drove to the Euphrates in the evening and pushed just west of Abu Tiban, within small arms range of the row of houses.

We were disappointed when Moreno made the call not to turn left and actually drive through the village, and we peeled off to the west again after a few anxious glances from the villagers standing outside.

So it wasn’t surprising that evening when Alice wanted to chuck his previously planned sneaky sniper mission for something more overt.

“Let’s just go and patrol though these villages at night,” he implored, trying to hook Moreno and I with his enthusiasm.

Adam, probably the more levelheaded and less excitable of the two, opted for a less ambitious patrol, eastward along the Mohammadi wadi, beyond the railroad trestle, through the palm groves all the way to the Euphrates, then hook south to Bronze just outside of Aqabah, a good-sized town south of Mohammadi. Moreno and I consulted the map, mulled over whether the route was even passable, and then decided, with a lot of cheerleading from Alice, to go for it.

Slinking into the darkness with Marine Snipers

2009-08-13T06:56:00.000-05:00

At the end of September, after our first time out at Dulab, we took over the Bronze-Uranium split from Bravo Company, which was sent to al-Asad to serve as the battalion’s maneuver element, a more mobile company not anchored down to any specific base or area.

Nammie detached my fire team from third squad and we reinforced first squad, and we served as the patrolling and quick reaction force for the platoon. First squad leader, Sergeant Mario Moreno and I hashed out patrols to support the two scout-snipers who were with second platoon for the rotation, none other than my old friend, Sergeant Adan Rostro, and his partner, Sergeant “Alice” Allison. So we conducted two patrols on average per day and one at night, the nighttime patrol usually done to insert and extract the snipers.

Our first couple of patrols centered on the Mohammadi Airfield, an Iraqi military airfield that was blown to hell by American forces back in March 2003, with huge craters smashing through the asphalt runway and jagged shrapnel littered everywhere. Unexploded anti-aircraft shells were everywhere also. Together with the route along the Mohammadi Wadi, patrols went routinely and were hot and boring and I sweated heavily under my ballistic goggles. During the day we lounged around or filled sandbags and ate MREs and smoked cigarettes.

The snipers, who addressed one another as “Adam” and “Alice,” made quite a funny pair. They had served together in First Battalion, Fourth Marines at Camp Horno on Camp Pendleton and both had gone through sniper school during that time. When they got out of active duty, both being Texans—Rostro was from San Benito and Allison from Houston—they went to the Department of Public Safety State Trooper Academy in Austin together. Adam was a trooper in the Rio Grande Valley and Alice was outside of Houston when they volunteered to come to Iraq with 1/23 in hopes of “killing people legally and without any paperwork,” as Allison put it.

Actually, neither ever used the word “kill” in their peculiar vernacular, preferring to substitute the word with “blast.” Not that “blasting” people to describe shooting them with a .308-caliber sniper rifle is not accurate—it is—it was peculiar that they used the same term interchangeably to describe sex. So a “blast fest” could be either a fierce battle some of their old counterparts had been in during the initial assault on Fallujah back in April 2004, or it could be a noun describing a honeymoon.

Things didn’t get interesting until our fourth night at the Split, when Adam told me he needed two-man infantry support to accompany them to look at Mohammadi that night. I volunteered myself, because my issue weapon had the M203 grenade launcher attachment, and volunteered my squad automatic weapon (SAW) light machine gun man, Lopez. I was positively giddy; that moment marked the beginning of a certain enthusiasm I had for the mission in Iraq for foot patrols and sweeps. I guess it was the break in rotational monotony and the mundane stretches of driving the desert with nothing to look at. We weren’t really allowed into populated areas at that time because Col. Tucker had made treaties with local leaders of cities like Hit in which he agreed to keep out of the city in exchange for general peace from the local populace—a peace that was constantly being broken by incoming mortar and rocket fire back at the FOB, and by anti-tank mines and IEDs on the roads.

So we went out at 1:00 a.m. in the morning, slinking into the darkness in the blacked-out Humvees, everyone wearing and relying on night vision goggles. We crossed MSR Bronze and threaded through and over hard, gravel-studded hills toward the Euphrates and the small village of Mohammadi. We were inserted about a kilometer from the site the snipers had planned on using, and Alice told us to take our helmets off and put on our cotton boonie hats instead. I covered my face with a stretchy cotton camouflage neck gaiter and wore my black Nomex flight gloves, and I had one, of course, the ubiquitous 50-pound flak jacket.

Off we went, Lopez with his SAW, Alice carrying the M40 sniper rifle, Adam with his spray-painted, camouflaged M16 with the M203 grenade launcher, and I, carrying my thermal sights, 230 rounds of M16 ammunition, eight high-explosive grenade cartridges for my launcher, my K-BAR knife, and my NVGs.

We made no noise moving into position, but the Mohammadi locals did. We could hear sporadic shouts, donkeys braying, cars on the highway and, once we’d settled into a small dugout made by the bucket of a front-end loader, a loud burst of machine gun fire was let loose not more than six-hundred meters to the east. It was startling, but the Iraqis are awful when it comes to weapons and fire discipline, so it wasn’t as alarming as it would seem given the context. After a little bit of “oh shit,” and “what the fuck are they shooting at?” whispered about very softly, we had relaxed and the snipers got busy prepping gear in order to move closer up while we provided cover from the rear. And I had been afraid when I volunteered that I would get sleepy on our little mission! Not a chance in hell.

Adam and Alice moved up another 300 meters closer to town and I watched them sneak off, silhouetted by the town lights, feeling a decent amount of trepidation. The town’s lights blacked out shortly after, the result of rolling blackouts experienced throughout the towns along the Euphrates, and I eased up a bit, scanning the area with my thermal sights, keeping an alert watch, listening, looking, looking again, for the couple of hours they were gone, and then they came back and we snuck back to where the rest of the squad waited for us. It was a good feeling to get back, and in all it was a good night.

Leisurely Conversations with "Security Contractors"

2009-08-12T06:38:00.001-05:00

In the middle of (Area of Operations) AO Denver, which was the area Task Force 1/23 took care of while in country, a junkyard sits in the desert less than a kilometer from the Euphrates River, the remains of one of many hundreds of ammunition supply points (ASP) of the Saddam Hussein regime.

These old Iraqi ammo dumps were some of the main supply points for insurgents acquiring warheads for their roadside bombs. Powerful ordnance lays scattered in the open over uncontainable pieces of real estate, thrown over many barren square kilometers by American B-52 bombers during the initial invasion, something of a military faux pas. One of the many responsibilities of Marines and soldiers across Iraq was to prevent Arabs from stealing ammunition at these abandoned, bombed-out ammo dumps. It is dreary, frustrating duty.

Charlie Company was tasked with guarding ASP Dulab, twelve miles north of the FOB, just south of a hot little insurgent town called Baghdadi. Al-Asad Airbase sprawled only ten kilometers away to the west as the crow flies, and just about every day, civilian explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) personnel came to gather the strewn rounds and stack them into piles of thirty or more, and detonate them in “shots,” two a day on most days.

Each morning EOD came out, they came escorted by the corporate mercenaries, “security contractors,” this particular group being employed by DynCorp (pronounced dynacorps).

The mercenaries fascinated me to no end, and I loved to get up in the morning, bust open a pre-packaged military ration, called Meals, Ready to Eat (MREs) in the shade of the camouflage netting and sit on the concrete steps, smoking cigarette after cigarette listening to their tales. Two of the contractors were Americans, former Marines from Texas, two were South African, and there were three other Americans, one a fire-fighter medic from Florida and two other former Army Rangers.

They loved to talk about the pay, and though no one ever got specific, it was let on that they were all making six figures, and they loved to discuss what they would do with the money after just a couple of years. They spoke of past attacks they had encountered as “getting nailed,” discussed co-workers who were Vietnam veterans, and talked about the hairy early days in Baghdad “with the WGI contract,” whatever that meant.

The big South African, who they called “Taki” because of his apparent Greek descent, was perhaps in highest standing as the most experienced of the group. He liked to wear a sporty red short-sleeved shirt with a pair of black stripes running on top of the sleeves and down the sides, disappearing under the tactical vests worn by all, with a 9-mm Beretta pistol and six magazines for an M-4 carbine (a shortened M-16 service rifle) tucked into the front. Taki wore comfortable looking khaki cargo pants and Marine Corps-issue desert boots, which were the same as all the Marines wore and even bore the Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem on the outside side of the heels, and a baseball cap.

Most of the mercenaries wore the same Casio G-shock watches many Marines, including myself, wore, and Taki’s was a variation of mine but with a silver face and a smooth blue watch band that would look good with civilian attire back home. Taki had a deep voice and a strong South African accent and liked to talk about young women and the WGI contract.

I conversed with the bunch, leisurely smoking cigarettes for hours while we rotated in and out of guarding ASP Dulab, and topics were mostly centered around what you would expect of Soldier of Fortune’s readership: three dollar whores pimped out by Iraqi parents, evasive driving moves after getting “nailed,” sketchy jobs in the past, sixteen-year-old Filipino brides, crazy friends snapping and threatening to kill Arab civilians working with the coalition, and so on. All the talk disgusted second platoon commander,

Second Platoon Commander, Lieutenant Patrick McKinley, a New Englander my age who signed on for the ride like I had, bore a poorly disguised contempt for the mercenaries, though some of them grew on him after we had been in country for a few months.

I, on the other hand, very much enjoyed talking with the “contractors,” particularly the smaller of the two South Africans, a short, benevolent-looking thirtysomething with a mustache and goatee who talked of his past business guiding horseback rides on a game preserve, and his new dream of opening a coffee shop in a university town back in South Africa. He provided revealing commentary about ethnic and political strife back in Africa, and we talked about Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. He told me he thought South Africa was bound to go the way of Zimbabwe in thirty years, but I see it happening much sooner.

We Don't Promise You a Rose Garden ... Or a Shower

2009-08-11T06:20:00.000-05:00

We were finally relieved on a Friday at dark by Charlie Company’s newly formed fourth platoon, a provisional rifle platoon put together from active-duty amphibious assault vehicle (AAV) crewmen.

I had taken for granted the advanced age of our reserve unit compared to our active-duty counterparts. The 2^nd Lieutenant who led 4^th Platoon, our dismounted AAV provisionals, was 22 years old. I was 28 and he looked to me like all of 13 years old.

Fourth Platoon’s platoon sergeant was a tough-assed Gunnery Sergeant, two ranks higher than me at sergeant, and he was my age!

So Charlie Company had a new platoon to throw into what was going to become a 20-day rotation: 20 days at ASP Dulab guarding munitions to prevent them from being stolen by local insurgents and turned into roadside bombs, 5 days back at base to man the observation post in the wadi and FOB security, and 20 days guarding the entrance to the military-only route, Uranium, where it met the civilian highway, codenamed Bronze.

This rotation, while frequently interrupted for other operations, was the basis of the tour, and ensured that we got one shower every 20 days.

This equaled less than one shower per month.

More Desert Beauty, Harsh Conditions, and 1-23's First Casualty

2009-08-10T06:14:00.003-05:00

The first day out at the helicopter security site, Corporal Villarreal, known as “V,” a radio operator for Charlie Company, killed some sort of desert viper, about a foot-and-a-half long. Our Georgia country boy corpsman, HM2 “Doc” Edes, separated its skin very skillfully and rolled it up, vowing to make a hatband out of it.

A striking skin it was, similar to a sidewinder in pattern, but without the rattle. My old hunting buddy Corporal Jeff Jones, a Marine rifle instructor and one of the platoon’s designated marksmen, had cut the viper’s meat into strips and attempted to sun-dry it on the bumper grille of a Hummer. When we returned to check the meat for readiness we found it had fallen in the dirt. I was very disappointed, wanting some exotic fare to go with my exotic locale. I never did eat any sun-dried desert vipers during my tour.

As night set in, the sky came alive with the electricity of stars. It was a new moon and the desert way out between Kubaysah and Hit boasted the least amount of ambient light pollution I’ve yet encountered except far out to sea.

The Milky Way glowed overhead with clouds of stars and all night long meteors fell and burned long and beautiful with amazing frequency. I taught the Marines out on the hill with me how to find the north star using the Big Dipper, how to see Scorpio stretching out on the southern horizon, and Orion as he rose up later that night in the east.

When midnight rolled around and a twenty-knot wind began to bite with cold. I knew I was in for a long, hellish night. For the better part of a month I had slept in that country with sweat running down my face, hair damp, and had done just fine. However, from 3:00 a.m. until the sun-warmed dawn arrived, I shivered violently and uncontrollably, feeling stupid for not having brought my fleece jacket, or my Gore-Tex bivy sack. It was a miserable, hateful night, laying for hours, awake, my body sapped by the cold.

The next morning my most resourceful Marine, Corporal George “Hot Rod” Rodriguez and I dug a hole big enough for the two of us to lay down in, and Jeff lent me his polar fleece jacket and I slept the next several nights without shivering a bit.

The exposure to the harsh desert conditions was hard for everyone, though. The wind whipped us by day, most days reaching at least thirty knots, and the sun hammered down on the tops of our heads. We escaped the elements when not on watch by sleeping in tomb-like caves nestled under lime outcroppings, out of the sun. With shade and rest you could ignore the rocks and pebbles that bit into your back.

On the day we left there was a report that Bravo Company, adjacent to us over the ridge to the south, had received rocket fire. Conflicting reports said that there were two urgent MEDEVAC cases or none whatsoever, but two Army Blackhawk MEDEVAC helicopters did fly fifty feet above our knob and over the ridge to the south, not to be seen again. I hoped there were no casualties, but I came to learn that when the MEDEVAC birds went out, there were casualties somewhere.

Anyway, it wasn’t rocket fire. When we arrived at a godforsaken bombed out Saddam-era ammunition supply depot called “Dulab,” there was an anti-tank mine crater in the perimeter road big enough to fit a Volkswagen Bug in. It was a spot I drove by hundreds of times over the next few months, with mines and MEDEVAC helicopters hovering in my mind.

Beauty of the Desert

2009-08-07T06:25:00.000-05:00

While I waited for insurgents to come popping out from somewhere for me to shoot, I took the time to enjoy the physical nature of the desert. I suppose that enjoyment makes me something of an anomaly in the war zone in Iraq, a nature lover mesmerized by the Arabian wilderness. Out at OP Paige, I loved to look at the stars on clear nights with the new moon leaving the night sky free of light pollution, looking at the Milky Way with the NVGs on, which I had discovered in the desert at Twenty-nine Palms. The faintest stars were clear and so the Milky Way in particular revealed veritable clouds of stars that looked like those Mandelbroth sets patterned inside of a College Algebra textbook. They were green fractal hurricanes and they captivated me. Later on at OP Paige, one of the two Navy medics in second platoon, Hospital Mate 2 “Doc” Miles Edes brought out his star chart and we did some enthusiastic stargazing, looking for some of the more obscure constellations such as Cassiopeia and Pegasus.

Also at the OP I liked to scramble to the top of the highest knob during the day, where the Marines we replaced had dug a shallow fighting hole (they’re called fighting holes and not foxholes in the Marine Corps, because, we were told, Marines don’t hide like foxes in holes), and I loved just looking out over the wadi and down toward the Euphrates and her palm groves and out over the western expanse of desert, where there was nothing.

When we were called out on a sudden mission on September 14 to secure a helicopter that had force landed in the desert toward Kubaysah because of mechanical problems, we were told we would be there a day or two, packed lightly therefore, and rushed off.

I put my PAS-13, my NVGs and my little brown Polar Fleece watch cap into my patrol pack, thinking it would suffice to keep me warm at night. We drove out to our site and circled the wagons—we had five Humvees and one seven-ton truck—and promptly dug in. It was early afternoon when we arrived and very hot, though with an uncharacteristically fresh breeze. I took my fire team out to a little hill, actually two small quartzite knobs, where we set up a hasty OP and spent the rest of the day reposed on our hillocks. Along about evening time the ridge to our north began to stir with movement. A couple of men’s silhouetted figures appeared, with some sheep. Shepherds. We scoped them out; they were twelve Bedouin men, not carrying any arms from what we could see, with two small children on foot and the men all riding donkeys, with sheep all around, spilling down the ridge. Down they all came, ambling down, the Bedouins and the sheep, and more sheep and more sheep until we could see literally hundreds of them, brown, black, the majority of them with thick wool colored a dirty white, almost the color of the desert. The shepherds were leading the massive flock to a pool in the wadi that ran west to east just north of us, emptying into the distant Euphrates. We counted sheep until we felt we had an accurate estimate, somewhere around seven or eight hundred. The shepherds wore the traditional dishdasha, white, flowing robes, and shemagh headdresses. It was a timeless scene, really; it could have been identical thousands of years back at that same wadi, on that same day of the year in the same orange-hued evening. I had seen the signs left by Bedouin on the desert floor as we patrolled up to the site on foot for the last few hundred meters: a small slipper, traditional in fashion and definitely not Western in appearance, discarded on the desert floor. There was also a discarded headband made from a strip of brightly-patterned cotton fabric, and later I found a piece of clay pottery that I picked up and put in my patrol pack, which I later mailed home to Lynette and it now sits on the bookshelf in our room. The roughly-made piece of hand-thrown pottery is of modest size and bears what looks like a woman’s thumbprint; not an artifact by any means, but certainly ageless.

Before we left for Iraq we met with some of the non-commissioned officers from Third Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment, who had just returned from Iraq. They were the first to mess with Fallujah, during April of 2004, taking over two-thirds of the city before the politicians ordered them to hand it back so Iraqis could secure it. During our informal symposium, held in the duty office of one of the barracks on the base at Twenty-nine Palms, the corporals and sergeants told us about the Bedouin. They were fiercely loyal to tribe, had virtually no concept of a broader nation or nationality, and were subsequently good sources of information for insurgent activity. I got the feeling that the men in the procession before me couldn’t have cared less if Mikhail Gorbachev was president of Iraq, as long as he didn’t steal one of their wives.

Musings on 9/11

2009-08-05T22:17:00.004-05:00

On September 11, I couldn’t help but vent in my journal, writing something I felt at the time was significant and now looks to me like so much politically-oriented babbling, as larger thoughts of the war in Iraq’s context now just exhaust me, and I don’t even have to chase them from my mind because I don’t bother with them. But here, nonetheless, is what I wrote that day:

“Three years ago at about 8:30 in the morning I watched with cold shivers and struggled to comprehend the devastation I beheld on the news channel on the TV in my classroom where I taught high school English. I was a former Marine then, twenty-five years old, a little overweight, and comfortable. My two sons were aged six and five, and I had seven happy years of marriage behind me.

Until that day, Arab and other Islamic terrorists were just pathetic murderers, capable of only a few particularly noteworthy attacks, specifically the bombing of the Marine barracks by Hizb’allah in Beirut in 1982 and the Khofar Towers Air Force Barracks bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1997. Both, obviously, targeted large concentrations of American military personnel.

But that one wretched morning changed the deal in an unquestionably absolute way. This was a total war being declared against the United States of America by a stateless and shadowy enemy—a postmodern war, a guerilla conflict of total proportions where the military response warranted was one limited to simple hunting, not much different from the sort of hunting pursued by deer hunters across America any given winter. Find signs of the prey, hunt the trophy first, stake them out and kill them.

What I wanted then, and in the days that followed, was a large-scale conflict against the rogue states where terrorism had always been openly endorsed and sponsored by fanatical regimes: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia—places where they danced in the streets with joy that morning when the news of the attacks broke. But I also knew that since the Korean War, our superpower nation has become totally incapable of prosecuting a war to its finish. America has its empire, a de facto global empire that is inarguably the biggest in world history, but exercising brute and overwhelming force against countries that are so far outgunned makes Americans painfully self-conscious and the world extremely critical.

But we did it anyway, first in Afghanistan with the support of a world that still shuddered for two reasons: the first because they beheld the mass destruction that befell the United States on September 11, but they shuddered also at the wrath the Americans would bring to bear. The latter is illustrated by Mohammar Qadaffi’s extension of sympathy and support after the attacks—Mohammar Qadaffi! It was a noticeable global shudder, to be sure.

And so we toppled the Taliban in no time, with the help and support of the world, except Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who said America deserved the attacks. He knew damn well that he was next. The games he had played with United Nations weapons inspectors and former American President Bill Clinton mocked American resolve over the course of nearly a decade, and even for a full year following September 11. When a couple of European nations and most of the Third World nations around the globe refused to support an American takeover in Iraq and the accompanying downfall of the Hussein regime, we did it anyhow. It was a textbook operation, except for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s refusal to believe a massive occupation force would be needed to hold down Iraqi factions and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists while a new regime was cobbled together, and that led to the subsequent lapse in Iraq into a textbook guerilla war against Damned Yankee Imperialists. What Americans really have no stomach for, after Vietnam, is textbook guerilla war. Yet, the nature of the enemy we faced, as I have mentioned, is rooted entirely in a guerilla force that is waging an unprecedented total war against the United States.

Isolationism, as the American Left essentially advocates, won’t cure the problem. One only has to look as far as the Islamic concept of the Khalifa to understand that the same Wahabbi fundamentalists won’t rest until American women wear bhurkas. The Khalifa is the concept of world rule within an Islamic theocracy under the Caliph, a benevolent and holy Muslim king.

So we sit in Iraq with a public back home that has no stomach for guerilla war and a leadership that is incompetent or unwilling to form a large, sturdy and no-nonsense occupation force. Even talk of occupation is anathema, and dealt with in anti-Orwellian euphemisms, like “coalition forces,” and “provisional governments.”

Well now that I’m here, in Iraq, waging a counter-guerilla war against anti-occupation insurgents, I will do my duty whether anyone back home wants to stomach it or not, and our duty goes straight back to what I knew the war on terror was in fact when those four airliners were hijacked on that wretched morning: hunting, plain and simple.”

GI Joe Comes back to Haunt Me

2009-08-04T07:04:00.001-05:00

It is the nature of the Fall that we as humans cannot have our paradise without a cost that is always too exorbitant for most to pay. That first glimpse of Eden was nothing more than an illusory, partially formed picture not in keeping with reality. The stern glares of the Arab men cancelled the friendly smiling and waving of the children. The small farm plots, plowed so frequently, were perfect for burying arms and munitions without generating suspicious, and those were deadly fruits. I knew this when I picked up a copper-jacketed bullet I found near one small field, laying in the soil like a seed of destruction. But my glimpse of Eden that day, that initial glimpse, even in its fallen state, showed it to be nonetheless a delightful garden.

It was a lifetime in those early months between dawn and dusk. The days ran together like the colors in a child’s finger painting. Some of our first forays outside the wire were patrols, like our first mounted patrol riding in the backs of Humvees down the military-only Main Supply Route (MSR) code-named “Uranium,” down the Mohammadi Wadi that runs east into a small village south of Hit, back to Uranium all the way down to the Bronze-Uranium split, where Uranium merges with the Iraqi highway dubbed “Bronze” and continues on to Ramadi and Fallujah.

I began using the GPS my father used to take sailing and had given to me before I left, complete with some of the old sailing routes logged in it that we enjoyed in the Laguna Madre. It is funny for me now to remember how indignant I was that we were having to conduct regular security patrols along the supply routes, certainly some of the most dangerous work in Iraq, but the most necessary.

It is a catch-22: the more security patrols that are run, the less the threat from roadside bombs, but more time on the road brings greater risk of actually being hit by one. I was indignant because I thought patrolling might get someone killed, and would not change the course of the war. I don’t know about the veracity of the latter, but the former held true.

But we in second platoon were riflemen, and it was weapons platoon’s role to serve as route security, conducting Mad Max style patrols armed to the teeth up and down the road hunting for insurgents and roadside bombs.

It was also early in the tour that I was haunted by that cartoon from my childhood that is so heavily responsible for many Marines’ and other service members’ initial enlistments: GI Joe. Nammie brought three DVDs of GI Joe cartoons with him and Big Worm—Sergeant Richard Hernandez—was mesmerized by them, so that I sat many hours in the squad bay trying to read or write letters listening to Big Worm watch the damned cartoon on his portable DVD player.

GIJoe was my all-time childhood favorite, but it was a cruel irony that I was sitting in Iraq, in one of the more heavily mortared outposts in the country, having to listen to old episodes that I recognized!

To give credit to my parents, they never would have allowed me to watch so much GI Joe, but I was what they called then a “latchkey kid,” riding the bus home and watching TV for an hour or so before they came in from work. I suppose it all happens for a reason.

In the meantime, we were constantly receiving “Be On the Lookout (BOLO)” bulletins over the radio while on patrol or manning OP Paige about a maroon sedan with four doors. The maroon sedan belonged to the Mad Mortarman, and our Human Intelligence Exploitation Team (HET) of Adam and Paul, two secretive Marines we had on base, wanted to talk to him. Badly.

Turns out, second platoon ended up doing a lot of work for Adam and Paul.

Leaving the Wire for Fallen Eden

2009-08-03T06:51:00.003-05:00

Our first patrol down by the Euphrates River was an eye-popping, sensory extravaganza.

The place was so beautifully rustic it seemed to me that every European attempt at a country garden, whether English, Tuscan, Mediterranean, or even Texan, could never begin to reach the beauty I beheld during that first patrol, and would behold many subsequent patrols along the ancient Euphrates.

Where my predisposition, formed by descriptions given me by veterans of that theater, led me to think I might find some sort of garbage-strewn squalor with naked children and pools of typhus-generated diarrhea, I found instead one of the most enchanting realms I have ever been. There were mud and masonry brick hovels and farm plots hedged in by irrigation ditches where domesticated ducks swam under the shade of pomegranate trees and date palms, where hay, clover, and thick tufts of Bermuda grass grew as fodder for sheep, goats and cattle.

Grapes hung from roughly fashioned trellises and the small farms, situated on hillocks to guard against sudden flooding, were fenced in with date palm fronds woven through strands of barbed wire—regular barbed wire like the kind we use on our ranch in Texas.

The terrain dipped and rolled all the way down to the river until it fell flat and uniform on the riverbank proper, where the tall date palms and well-kept homes, some palatial in scale, crowded to the river. Peaceful children were there, with big eyes, crowding around us, waving sweetly and watching, shouting “Hi mista! Hi!”

There were mud henhouses with wire-screened popholes and goats bleating, hens clucking and roosters crowing in the midday sun and the organic smells of sheep urine and river water and rich, rich soil. I was in ecstasies over the rustic scenery; I was transported to the pastel illustrations in the Children’s Bible from my childhood. I wanted so badly to see Jesus or Abraham walk out. According to Scripture, Abraham had actually trodden this part of the Euphrates after God uprooted him from where he had previously lived in modern-day Iraq.

The farmers used staves fashioned from the palms as shepherd’s staffs and in their thatched palm awnings over patios and used self-made wooden tools for haying, as it must have been done for more than six millennia. When I first learned the Army had named the base we now occupied “Forward Operations Base Eden,” I laughed, never having traveled outside the wire down to the riverside. But here we were, in a peopled Eden, where it straddles beautiful blue-green waters, where the green hues strike out against the encroaching dullness of the neutral khaki desert pressing in upon it.

I wanted then to drop my uniform, throw on some loose khaki trousers, a T-shirt, and some sandals and go native, smuggling my wife and sons up from Kuwait and living in peace in the majestic villa I could build for $10,000.

I would keep Arabian horses in stables, Barbado sheep, ten heifers, chickens and I would cultivate dates and melons and pomegranates and sit out on the balcony of the second floor bedroom at night with Lynette, under a full Arabian moon and watch the water move through the gaps in the neatly lined palms.

But the reality jabbed ugly holes in the fragile cellophane veneer of my utopian visions. We were not there for agriculture research. We were looking for a local insurgent weapons expert who’d been dubbed “the Mad Mortarman.”

"Frustration" is the F-Word in Iraq

2009-08-01T06:28:00.003-05:00

Two days later the last remaining personnel with 2/7 were scheduled to leave, and third squad, second platoon was tasked with occupying the observation post (OP) high above Route Paige a mile due west of base, across the highway and the railroad tracks. The OP, appropriately enough, was called OP Paige.

It sat on a knob, surrounded by higher knobs to the south and therefore quite vulnerable to attack and hard to cover on the southern flank. We had to rely on the insurgents’ lack of willingness to attack directly, so it was always an uneasy feeling one had at OP Paige. Add to that the fact that only one rifle squad—thirteen Marines and a navy hospital corpsman—manned the OP at any given time and it felt all the more vulnerable. But it was also an opportunity to be away from base for a while.

We arrived before daylight and at nine in the morning a shepherd leading a donkey with a younger boy came winding up the hill with a small flock of sheep. He looked non-threatening, and we were still green and naïve and friendly, and Nammie and I greeted him in Arabic.

“Salaam aleykum.” Peace be with you.

He pulled a small piece of notepad paper out of his shirt pocket with English writing on it. The paper said, “My name is Mick Dundee and I need to talk to Lieutenant Paul.”

Now this was cool, I thought: an informant wearing sunglasses and a traditional Arab shemagh headdress, with a code name and everything. I was mesmerized. For the next hour-and-a-half I worked the pages of my Iraqi-language phrase book and tried to communicate some basic things about myself: I am the father of three sons, my name is Abu Boutros (Arabic for “Peter’s father” the familiar way to render my name and much less Hebrew sounding than Binyamin), I am a school teacher when I am not in Iraq, I come from a ranch in Texas and I love Arabian horses.

I don’t know much of that he understood, but I did know that when I heard a mortar fired about a kilometer away, I was squatting on my heels under a rock outcropping with the shepherd, his younger brother, and Nammie. We all heard the hollow pop of the rounds being fired and perked our heads up and I thought they must have been the small, controlled explosions of the EOD personnel up at ASP Dulab. Then I heard what sounded like a jet peeling into a dive, which was soon discernible as incoming artillery sounds in the movies—the whining whistle.

“Shit. Hey, get up against the cliff,” I said to Mick Dundee. “Take cover.”

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

Marine mortarmen have told me before that you won’t hear the incoming mortar rounds as long as they’re coming down directly on your position. The whining whistle only sounds directly overhead when it’s heavier artillery such as 105-mm howitzers or larger. These were enemy 82-mm mortars, and they impacted in big dirt blossoms over at the FOB.

I was relieved the rounds hadn’t impacted on the exposed knob of our observation post.

Nammie and I ran up an embankment to where the rest of the squad was, yelling at the Marines who were goose necking around to get into their holes, and I saw the blooms over at the FOB, behind the mortar pit, the sandbag-reinforced dugout where our mortarmen lounged around in the shade of the bunker waiting for the occasional fire mission. The rounds had landed about two hundred meters off target, again, and I thanked God for that.

Out of the peripheral vision of my right eye I caught the white smoke signature from where a mortar had been fired, on the west side of Bronze, out front of the base and south a bit. The insurgents had already split in the half-minute or so after the episode had elapsed. I called out the position of the signature to Al and he came over and shot a direction with his compass and radioed it in.

Weapons platoon was sent out in Humvees moments later, and a daylong search yielded one suspect who was subsequently released, and thus was our Frustration born.

Arab and Chechen Jihad, Beslan Massacre and My Fury

2009-07-30T06:28:00.000-05:00

Third platoon was the first of Charlie Company’s rifle platoons to leave the wire (I was in second platoon, third squad), and they conducted a seven-and-a-half hour security patrol outside the perimeter, in the dark of the new moon night very early on in our tour, early in September before Echo 2/7 had cleared out.

It was then, in early September, checking my e-mail, that I read about the Beslan school massacre in Russia, where mothers and children were killed in the most horrifying circumstances I could fathom. To be killed in an attack is one thing, but for a mother, or worse, a child without his or her mother, to be terrorized for two days before being mercilessly slain by a terrorist’s suicide bomb or bullet is the worst sort of death.

When I was a child growing up in the 1980s, the Adam Walsh kidnapping horrified America and I grew up with an acute fear of being kidnapped. I hated the idea, as a child, of being separated from my mother and father, being kidnapped and then being killed and decapitated. Prolonged fear and then death, all perpetrated on the innocent—chalk one up for the Chechens and Arabs and their jihad, I thought—they can get no lower, no more debased than that.

Yet there we were in Iraq, Marines being made to tiptoe about in an anti-guerilla war trying to counter insurgents devoted auspiciously to Islamic jihad, and it was just tormenting me. Once, about that time, when I was serving as sergeant of the guard and posting Marines at guard posts atop the Joint Operations Command Center, a two-story building two-hundred meters south across some open ground on FOB Hit where Iraqi National Guardsmen were being trained by Task Force 1/23’s Combined Action Platoon (CAP)—first platoon in our own Charlie Company—several young Arabs, presumably Iraqi, sat and stared hard and ugly at my Marines, while I watched them, unobserved by the hostile-looking young men.

My experience since then shows that the ugly stare is, of course, a universal thing that transcends cultural barriers, and it made me so angry then, seeing the belligerence in their traitorous eyes, that I wanted to insert the magazine into my weapon and simply shoot them.

After all, the Marines with 2/7 had told us never to trust the Iraqi troops, saying the Iraqis had led them into not one but several roadside bomb attacks and sundry ambushes. We were leery of them for a long while, but eventually we noticed there were several who stuck around and who proved their loyalty and they earned themselves nicknames and a certain amount of endearment by us.

Notes on the Heat in Hit, Iraq

2009-07-29T07:00:00.000-05:00

One night in early September I picked the large black smallpox scab off my upper left arm. We had been vaccinated before we left the United States and the smallpox vaccine created its trademark pustule that had scabbed over.

I had felt that when my smallpox vaccination pustule had scabbed and the scab subsequently fell off that I would have been “in country” long enough to have established my routine, that I would be in my groove. What tripe. After two weeks in Iraq I felt lost, confused, and was certain that, aside for some poorly aimed enemy mortar and rocket fire, my tour would be uneventful and drowned by boredom.

Even so, I began smoking cigarettes regularly, which belied a deep-seated anxiety in which I sensed that I knew I was lying to myself for thinking I had it figured down to boredom and uneventful days, weeks, and months.

In those early September mornings the breeze came out of the northeast off of the Euphrates, which acted something as a swamp cooler, cooling the breeze and bringing the scent of farms and riverbank humus up to us from the date palm groves down below.

The heat during the day, however, which reached into the 120s and got up past 130-degrees at one point, was so intense it burned the toes inside my boots so that I thought they would blister, forcing me to retreat for the shade.

I suppose one cannot serve in a desert outpost in the middle of Arabia in late summer and not address the heat. It was a Western movie rattlesnake heat, with shimmering desert tabletop stretching out like so much salt flat, except where it was cleft by the green belt of the ancient Euphrates, and when the sun was barely beginning to rise in Texas, back in the world I belonged to, where I thought I had known heat, it was washing our world more than 7,500 miles away with all the heat it could muster, and that was real heat, indeed.

It made metal surface entirely too hot to touch, and left the squad bays where the troops slept stifling until well past midnight. It turned the water in your water bottle as hot as a steaming cup of coffee or tea if you couldn’t get your water into some shade, but you drank that water incessantly regardless of its temperature, risking death if you didn’t. We covered all the exposed skin on our bodies with light cotton garments; otherwise it was, quite literally, a matter of being exposed to damaging radiation.

But after having trained, thankfully enough, in the California high desert, where temperatures rivaled those in western Iraq, we went about our business and did what we had to do, all joking of purgatory aside.

Devildogged by Chaka Zulu

2009-07-28T06:59:00.000-05:00

Over the course of the next week-and-a-half, Echo 2/7 cleared out, bound for home. During that time I got to know their company first sergeant, a tall, cruel-looking Marine who was not infantry (everyone mentioned that right away) and had been a drill instructor.

The way this guy acted was inexcusable. He had a plastic chair reserved for him, with an ice chest packed with an assortment of sodas in it next to the chair, in front of the computer room, a vantage from which he could “devildog” the passing Marines, and we were certainly not immune from his attacks. The term “devildogging,” comes from the generic Marine-to-Marine term, but as a verb it denotes being chewed out by someone of a higher rank (as in, “Damn, I just got devildogged for my long hair”).

But I have to put this first sergeant down as the worst non-commissioned officer I have ever encountered in the Marines, a real worthless hack I called Chaka Zulu. He was the petty dictator of FOB Hit, tearing into exhausted Marines for wearing dirty fatigues (which, of course, was unavoidable) and failing to render him a proper greeting. He even devildogged our platoon leader for 2^nd Platoon, Lieutenant Pat McKinley, for wearing his sunglasses on his breast pocket (definitely not regulation).

The Charlie Company Marines were downright indignant at his definite non-first sergeant type of behavior. You see, in the Marine Corps, the company first sergeant is the acting father for the enlisted Marines. He takes care of Marines, and it is the sergeants and gunnery sergeants who are left to rip into Marines for breaches in discipline. If the first sergeant has to jump into the fray, then it invariably: a. will get ugly and b. mean a corporal, sergeant, lower-ranking staff Non-Commissioned Officer was not doing his job.

But while we were indignant and dreaming of things to do to the guy, the Echo 2/7 Marines looked too tired to give a damn.

One day, I was standing outside smoking my pipe, with Chaka Zulu nearby and some Marines lounging around, and one of the controlled disposal blasts by civilian contractors getting rid of Saddam’s old ammunition supplies twelve miles north at a place called Ammunition Supply Point (ASP) Dulab, a little louder than the average blast. Some Marines started getting a little antsy, and thought it might be incoming fire, but in whatever level of common sense I carry with me, I figured, if that was incoming, it sure as hell was a long way off.

So I continued to puff on my pipe. The first sergeant strode over around the corner of the building, looking toward the palm groves below on the Euphrates. After some consultation, he and some other high-ranking Marines decided it was nothing, or just Dulab, and as Chaka walked past me he said, “Hey Dr. Grabow, when you hear something that sounds like it might be incoming, you’d better get your ass behind some cover.”

“Aye aye first sergeant,” I replied with discipline and snap. Inside I was laughing about two things—his clever and humorous Dr. Grabow insult and his obvious lack of physical courage.

Screw You and Your Rockets, Haji

2009-07-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

Getting mortared when we were all inside the heavy concrete barracks building was one thing. Getting caught out in the open by an indirect fire attack was always quite another.

On September 1^st I entered the following passage in my journal:

“Yesterday was a nice afternoon. I was enjoying a long, involved conversation with First Sergeant Hoover about law (he is originally an attorney from Oklahoma City and law school has always fascinated me). The temperature was falling and it was about 6:30 p.m. Many of the salty veteran Marines we are replacing were gathered outside in front of the western building, mulling around, smoking and laughing.

Everyone was happy and at ease with the world. And then I noticed they all turned their faces skyward in an instant, in unison. Then the whistle and rush, the boom and the shouts, so cliché, every moment of it, of “incoming!” The open area in the front cleared out quick. I figured if the Marines from 2/7 Echo were moving that fast then things were touchy. I rushed into an empty room with about fifty other Marines in it as the rockets impacted on the western side of the building about one-hundred and fifty yards out.

“General quarters!” came the next call, time to make one’s frantic way to the squad bay to which one belongs and don Kevlar flak jackets and helmets and get troop accountability. I left the safety of my room and had to sprint forty yards on the bottom story of the building, right flank exposed. What a rush of adrenaline! What running! Arms pumping, legs pounding, face screwed up tight. What living and breathing! Hyper-alert, alive, screw you hajji!

I almost ran into [Chief Warrant Officer] Gunner Schneider as he rounded the corner in front of me, headed in the other direction. His face was twisted with stress and concern—all right, fear—and we rolled off each other’s right shoulders. Gunner is fifty-seven years old, a Vietnam veteran who came out of retirement on his ranch near Beeville, Texas, and re-joined us, literally, just in time to board the plane over to Iraq.

And then I was pumping my legs up the stairs and I could see the signature dust clouds of where the rockets impacted, fairly significant blooms, to be sure. I ran to the room, the power was off and had been for a while, so I pushed my way through the stale black space crammed with Marines tensely listening in the stillness. I donned my flak jacket and helmet and went to the troops’ squad bay next door, where the corporals and below of second platoon were billeted.

“Rodriguez! Lopez! Salinas!” I yelled into the chaotic din.

I got my three answers and saw their faces and breathed a little sigh of relief. My guys were accounted for.

I scarcely had time to wonder aloud how long we’d have to wear the gear in the cramped, sweaty, darkened squad bay, when another sergeant came up to give the all clear.

Afterward, cooling outside in the evening air, everyone had a great laugh. We’d survived our first attack, two rockets launched from the date palm groves lining the ancient Euphrates. Screw you, hajji.”

Insurgent Welcoming Committee

2009-07-26T07:00:00.001-05:00

Second Battalion, Seventh Marines lost eight Marines killed during their seven-month tour, six of them based at FOB Hit. I never took a college statistics course, but I ran the numbers the best I could over and over, trying to figure out the chances of my being killed, and I figured they were fairly remote.

Of the six killed in action (KIA), three were combat engineers killed by a single roadside bomb, Lance Corporal Aric Barr was killed by an enemy directional mine rigged to a street lightpost in the city of Hit, another by yet another roadside bomb and the last 2/7 Echo company Marine killed, Corporal Kane Funke, was lost to an anti-tank mine that detonated when the Humvee that he was riding in on Route Paige ran it over.

We had passed the crater the blast had made, and would continue to pass it for many months, thinking every time we passed it about Corporal Funke, the young Marine from Echo 2/7 who had died at that spot.

One of the 2/7 Marines was a young man named Dustin Sekula, from our area back home. He was killed by enemy machine-gun fire in the notorious Traffic Circle in Hit, an insurgent ambush hot spot. Sekula was a cousin of Lance Corporal Boyd in 3^rd Platoon. I thought it was strange that this cousin would get to walk where his cousin had been killed only months earlier. Must’ve been hard on all the mothers.

Knowing that we were in fact in an area where Marines did get killed was something that tied up a lot of one’s thoughts. I wondered who might die, perhaps none I hoped, though I knew someone among us, or more, would. It was awful turning it over in my mind, and I hoped nearly as much for my comrades’ safety as for my own.

Which one of us, walking around, eating, sleeping, going on patrols, thinking about home, would be killed? Someone in my own squad, maybe? Maybe one of my own guys? The lieutenant? It was tough, the whole time it was like holding my breath, waiting for the balloon to burst.

FOB Hit was mortared and rocketed mostly every day, earning it the status of one of the most mortared outposts in the whole of Iraq while we occupied it. We didn’t receive any incoming fire for the first few charmed days at the FOB, but on Monday morning, August 30, I awoke to the cliché whistle and boom of an incoming mortar round hitting somewhere back behind the trash-burning pile. I put on my flak jacket and helmet and got back in my rack in the un-air-conditioned concrete barracks building, eyeing the plywood-covered window opening across the room from me.

We had heard from the insurgent welcoming committee.

“Time to get to work,” I thought, and the months ahead appeared lengthy.

Welcome to Our World, Replacing 2/7

2009-07-25T07:05:00.000-05:00

We convoyed to Forward Operating Base (which all troops in Iraq call “fob” for the acronym) Hit, at 5:00 a.m. on August 26^6h, 2004. Individual days of the week had already begun to fade into insignificance. We locked and loaded our M16A4 rifles, piled into the backs of massive seven-ton trucks with plate steel armor with 210 rounds of ammunition loaded into thirty-round magazines tucked neatly away in our ammunition pouches.

We faced outboard, a squad to a truck, and I sat with my four-man fire team, the bare essence of Marine Corps infantry units. The fire team as the most basic small unit is the most intimate by nature, and mine included—besides myself—Lance Corporals Jesse “Lopers” Lopez, Miguel “Gunner” or “Uncle Mike” Salinas, and Corporal George “Hot Rod” Rodriguez.

We were ready for Indian country, and we headed out of al-Asad as the full moon set in the west with the constellation Orion climbing into the sky high above us.

We headed south on Main Supply Route (MSR) Uranium, the code name for a thin strip of asphalt roadway no wider than a single highway lane back home, which served as a main supply artery for Marine outposts as far as Ramadi and Fallujah. FOB Hit (pronounced heat) was about 60 kilometers or roughly 35 miles from the sprawling safety of al-Asad.

Our convoy cut across the morning river fog that had gathered over the Euphrates and headed east toward that ancient river down a very muddy wadi (the Arab term for a streambed that feeds into a larger river) nearest FOB Hit, meandering down an unimproved track dubbed Route Paige in honor of Sergeant Mitchell Paige, who won the Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal.

We passed under the railroad trestle and pulled onto Route Bronze, a regular two-lane civilian Iraqi highway, traveling south another two kilometers to the entrance of the base.

A Marine manning the entry control point greeted us with an enthusiastic but tired-looking wave.

“Welcome to our world,” he said.

You could see the happiness in his drawn face. His replacements had arrived.

Welcome to Lonesome Dove, Notes on Guerilla Warfare

2009-07-24T06:59:00.000-05:00

Colonel Craig Tucker, the full-bird commanding officer of Regimental Combat Team Seven, of which we were a part while serving as “Task Force 1-23” in Iraq, said it well in his brief the day following our arrival at al-Asad.

“How many of you Marines in here were here for the initial invasion?” he asked, speaking with the gravitas that comes with hard experience and staggering responsibility over decades, echoing forth in a measured cadence devoid of any humor.

Very few hands went up, not more than perhaps twenty in the battalion, nearly one thousand strong.

“Not very many. Good,” he said. “For those few of you who were here during the invasion, all I have to say is the situation is very different now. The honeymoon is over, gentlemen. The crowds waving and cheering in the streets are gone. They have been replaced by insurgents who want to kill you. I want to ask each and every one of you in here to make yourselves hard to kill. I have written too many letters to too many mothers and fathers of Marines who have been killed in this AO (the military acronym for area of operations). Be professional, be Marines, and most of all, make yourselves hard to kill.

“Now,” he continued after the hearty acknowledgment of “oorah!” from his audience, “I understand most of you in this battalion are from Texas.”

There was another, louder oorah! from the Marines in the hangar.

“Well,” he said, “Iraq is a lot like Texas back in the 1800s. How many of you have heard of Larry McMurtry?”

Quite a few hands went up.

“Well, Lonesome Dove comes to mind. Gentlemen, welcome to Lonesome Dove.”

With that short speech I believe Colonel Tucker put all of us in 2^nd platoon, in Charlie Company, in 1^st Battalion, 23^rd Marine Regiment in the right frame of mind for what was ahead.

His speech reminded me of something a family friend from back home, David Woolverton, had said about Vietnam. Woolverton had been a long-range reconnaissance scout with the Army’s 101^st Airborne Division in Vietnam. He told me once that his experience had been “just like playing cowboys and Indians.”

Indeed the nature of guerilla warfare in the American psyche is forever framed in the context of the saga of the western frontier.

In the days of the Revolutionary War for independence, we were the guerillas. As a conventional superpower, we no longer finds ourselves having to be guerilla underdogs.

We have been the conventional, well-organized warriors, a role inherited from the British, who we had sniped at and laid ambushes for during the Revolutionary War, when British officers surely scoffed at what poor sports and cowards we were for not facing their firepower head on. Rather than run around thinking of ourselves as the domineering Imperialistic British, we went forward as the cowboys, and the bloodthirsty Arab insurgents were the Indians.

Arriving in Iraq

2009-07-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

The flight to central western Iraq was an hour and forty-five minutes. At its end, our aircraft seemed to fall out of the sky before the pilot scooped it back up in a steep bid skyward and a couple of hard banks to either side.

With that non-subtle welcome-to-the-war-boys maneuver, we landed at al-Asad airbase, square in the middle of the desert of western Iraq’s al-Anbar Province. It was August 24, 2004, 10:30 in the morning Iraqi time. Local time was nine hours ahead of the Central Daylight Savings Time back in the quiet bayside village back in Texas, where my wife Lynette and our sons slept as I stepped into the heat with my rifle.

The Australian Special Air Service (SAS) took al-Asad away from Saddam in the most recent conquest of Iraq, and we were promptly taken to a mammoth bunker/hangar where 2^nd Battalion, 7^th Marines had set up their motor pool. We grabbed aluminum “Army” cots and set them up and, having done that, walked to the Kellogg, Brown and Root (now known by the more hip acronym KBR) chow hall to eat.

The air-conditioned chow hall was better than the one at my dorm back in college. Arabs and Pakistanis and others from every nation you never thought of served us cheeseburgers. We gawked at the corporate mercenaries they euphemistically call “security contractors.”

The mercenaries wore black shirts and tan trousers, like the British constabulary in Ireland in the 1920s, and carried their shortened M-16s (called M4s) slung muzzle-down across their backs.

I gawked, too, at the salty old Texan civilians in their Wrangler jeans and at one fat, older man with a T-shirt advertising his explosive ordnance disposal company “Specializing in High-Risk Ordnance Disposal,” a job for which he was no doubt paid handsomely by the Federal government. None of those people would have been there if they didn’t feel they were being well provided with tax-exempt dollars.

The air base was not that dangerous, really. Like everywhere else it got dusted by poorly aimed, hastily fired mortar rounds, 120-mm Katyusha rockets, some of which managed to kill a Marine or two. Even so, civilian “contracting” in Iraq was dangerous work, which is why I supposed it drew cowboys and even the occasional cowgirl, like the brassy forty-ish woman in her Wranglers jeans and boots with leather skin and dyed blond hair, a real honky-tonk queen who flirted with young soldiers half her age as I ate a cheeseburger.

Sitting in the chow hall at al-Asad with the Wild West types, civilians who seemed cut out for frontier work in a hostile desert, I felt proud and happy in spite of myself. They were all so quintessentially American, pioneering in Indian country, working hard for a better life.

A Layover in Camp Victory, Kuwait & My First Cigarette

2009-07-22T09:29:00.002-05:00

I had arrived at last in the fabled Middle East. The U.S. government payscale regards Kuwait a combat zone, and extends all of the wonderful imminent danger pay, hardship duty station pay, and combat zone tax exemptions to the Marines, sailors, soldiers and airmen who work there, which must be wonderful for them.

Camp Victory, I knew at least from my lifetime affinity for war movies, was certainly not a combat zone, despite the pay stipends afforded the service members there. There was a coffee shop that served frozen mocha, a Hardees, Subway, Pizza Inn and a small, well-stocked post exchange (PX) selling magazines, towels, books, CDs, fresh cigarettes and Copenhagen snuff – everything a Marine ever wanted except beer and girly magazines.

The servicemen and women of Camp Victory, Kuwait, were playing volleyball when we drove up that night, silently bristling as we were, prematurely, for war Now That We Were in the Middle East. We were led to a canvas tent and plywood theater where we were briefed about threat conditions and conduct while in Kuwait, but we wound up staying there for fewer than twenty-four hours, so we hardly needed it.

We boarded a C-130 transport plane on the tarmac at 9:30 the next morning. In military speak that is 0930 of course, but what you perhaps did not know is that the first zero is always said “zero” and never “oh”, so that it goes “Zero-Nine-Thirty” rather than the movies version, “Oh-Nine-Thirty.”

AC-130 Specter gun ships sat lazily alongside the tarmac with burly 105-millimeter howitzers jutting out the left sides, looking lovely and deadly, evoking everyone’s immediate admiration. To make Marines ooh and aah, stick a big cannon in a big airplane and tell them you can shoot a 105-mm explosive artillery shell through a window from 15,000 feet.

It worked for us. Man, I still dream about those gunships. Gives me chills.

Next day as we were taking a break from palletizing our gear to load on the C-130 ride into Iraq, 1st Squad leader Sergeant "Scratch" Moreno and I got to talking to some Army grunts (13 Bravos, they call themselves, while Marine infantrymen are called "Oh-Threes").

"Those IEDs are the worst part, man," one of the three black soldiers reported. "And it ain't a matter of if you're gonna get hit, it's a matter of when you're gonna get hit."

At that point I was out of tobacco, including those little twiggy cowboy-ish cigars I loved to smoke. The three black soldiers and Sergeant Moreno, who had not yet earned the nickname "Scratch," were smoking cigarettes.

"Sergeant Moreno," I said, "give me a cigarette."

I smoked it, and that was the beginning of all that. More on those awful hatpins of death later, but they were, ironically, just what the doctor ordered.

A Strange Vision with Lord Kitchener

2009-07-21T13:24:00.001-05:00

The vision was an image of Lord Kitchener and two other Old Guard British officers, obviously from Kitchener’s staff. This was not a dream, but occurred at that point in the consciousness where visions occur, somewhere not very far away from consciousness, but not very far from sleep. Sort of a trance.

So these old British men seemed to rise up from the Black Sea as ghosts, my own Anglophilia come to haunt me, and they bantered a bit with themselves and then turned to me.

“Good luck, young chap,” Kitchener said.

“Bloody fine mess he’s heading into,” said the other one, who wore an Old Guard mustache like Kitchener’s.

Kitchener disagreed with a bah, and said, “They’ve got one thing really going for them – firepower!”

They all agreed on that point, then disappeared into the cabin ether.

I shook my head, feeling ridiculous, strange, and unnerved, and sat up and looked out the window to see the strait of the Bosporous, the Dardanelles out of sight to the south, stretching toward the Mediterranean.

“We’re over the Black Sea,” the stewardess said with a smile.

But I already knew we were and said so. I wrote the vision down shortly afterward and that is how I know my mind did not fabricate it ex post facto.

Anyway, that was my experience on leaving Europe and, for the first time, venturing out of the genuine home comfort of Western civilization. The mountains over Turkey jutted up at us bald and a moonlike gray, huge and staggering, even from the air, cut by gorges with fierce rivers which I beheld while staring out the window, trying to push the deepening gloom back into the dark corner of my soul by blasting the 1990s indie-rock band, The Pixies, in the headphones of my portable CD player.

There is no song that makes me as joyfully wistful as the The Pixies' weird lullaby, “Caribou.”

Before long we were over Syria with its farmland – Lebanon with Beirut over the mountains, out of sight. We changed course over Syria to avoid flying over Iraq, which is off limits for civilian airliners. I woke up after another nap over Saudi Arabia, which appeared Mars-red and as barren, cut by the occasional blacktop road, which I noted, invariably ran straight toward the Iraqi border. A few Bedouin tents could be seen nearer Kuwait as we began our descent, just four hours out of Frankfurt. I saw the beautiful azure Persian Gulf with offshore oil terminals being sucked by fat, greedy supertankers. There was oil in black money pools on the ground contained within square dikes. Towers, power lines, six-lane highways and huge oil tanks could be seen in the overhead view of Kuwait before me that I had seen before in National Geographic.

Departing the West

2009-07-20T21:18:00.003-05:00

Less than a week later, we in Charlie Company, Task Force 1-23, Regimental Combat Team Seven, had our gear packed, our weapons cleaned, and our knives sharpened.

At 3:00 a.m. on August 23^rd we boarded white diesel school buses with civilian drivers that took us to March Reserve Air Base near Riverside, California. The hangar there was vintage World War II, and instead of the massive United Airways 747 sitting on the runway, I could envision the old twin-propeller DC-3s as they had once lined the runway, ready to ferry troops to various points Pacific.

The Veterans of Foreign Wars were making a good attempt at making us feel like heroes (we felt mostly self-conscious instead) and the second casting of the Liberty Bell, this one not cracked and obviously not sitting in a museum in Philadelphia, sat outside, ready for the old VFW dudes to bang on as we boarded the airplanes. We ate doughnuts, drank coffee, and my stomach was telling me I was on the road trip of my life, though I’d be flying this one. Sure enough, they rang the bell as we queued up to board the gargantuan jet, and it’s safe to say we all got goose bumps as the bell rang solemnly that clear California morning.

In less than forty-eight hours we would be on the ground in Iraq. Our first leg was a nine-hour flight east to Frankfurt, Germany, where we stopped for two hours after adding seven hours of time to our circadian clocks as we crossed two American time zones and the North Atlantic, flying over Fargo, North Dakota, out over Newfoundland and beyond, where the stubborn stretch or gray rock continent gradually gave way to the steel gray ocean, with its white-speck icebergs thirty-three thousand feet below.

The plane made it across the Atlantic proper in no more than four hours, and the lights of Edinburgh, Scotland greeted us, sodium yellow and happy in a clear August North Atlantic night. I got that warm feeling I remembered from my arrival in Europe the previous two times I had been, more than a decade earlier, as a teenager visiting relatives in Norway.

We spent two hours in the Air Force’s terminal in Rhein Main at Frankfurt, while the chartered 747 was refueled and re-crewed. I felt dazed and stomach-woozy. I had flown business class for the first time in my life, and joked about it with Corporal Jeff Jones, my good friend whom I had gone fishing and hunting with a few times back in Texas. We enjoyed a chilly early-morning smoke session outside the terminal, in a fenced-in compound. I smoked one of those cheap cigars I frequently smoked back on the ranch, though which I was not terribly fond of, but alas, I had no Montecristos at the time.

We were back on the plane shortly, not having so much touched German grass before we headed out over Eastern Europe en route to Kuwait City. I missed Budapest because of the clouds, but they broke in time for me to see the weird, slate-gray mountains over Hungary.

A little while later I had one of two very strange visions. One of three visions in my life, as cockamamie as that sounds. One was heavenly, which I experienced as a youth opening myself to ideas of God and eternity, one was strictly evil and frightening, which I beheld in a tent in Iraq, but this one, on the airplane, involved Lord Kitchener, and it caused me to wake as the plane flew high above the Bosporous, leaving the European promontory at Hellespont.

"You'll be going to al-Anbar Province"

2009-07-18T22:01:00.002-05:00

We knew nothing about where we would be stationed once in Iraq—we were only told we would be “in the al-Anbar Province, somewhere near Fallujah, maybe on the border with Syria.”

To everyone’s severe though impotent consternation the twenty-day block leave was cut down to seven days of block leave, which I spent with Lynette in nervous irritation except for some days we spent at the Sheraton on South Padre Island, playing on the beach with my oh-so-cute three-month-old Andrew and my big boys, Peter and Daniel. It was lovely, hot beach weather.

The family had a party for me at a big, newly opened Chinese buffet in Brownsville and my tough, stoic father broke down into tears when giving his speech wishing me well. I felt like a total ass putting him through this just for my Big Adventure, my selfish concept of going off to see my own Real Live Guerilla War so I could have My Valid Observations about the Nature of Human Darkness and so I could Prove My Mettle.

To be certain, I knew nothing about what I was getting into at that point. I knew there were landmines and these things called IEDs — improvised explosive devices, more easily called roadside bombs — that killed about two U.S. service men and women a day, but beyond that, I knew jack.

The days on leave seemed good and leisurely, and I left Lynette at our house the morning I had to fly back to the Stumps, swinging by my parent’s ranch house first, so my sister’s husband Tony, who had been a buddy of mine in School of Infantry 10 years prior, could give me a fresh Marine Corps regulation haircut.

After the haircutting, Eric, my cousin Stephen, and Tony took me to the airport in Harlingen, and we did our farewells and these were as difficult as farewells ever were.

When we in second platoon were all formed up for roll call when leave expired, platoon guide Sergeant “Big Worm” Hernandez, a big Puerto Rican brought us in.

“Group hug, everybody, bring it in,” he said. “I know how you all are feeling. I’m feeling it, too.”

We all laughed, but that was my first experience with collective consciousness at that level. It would be that way from that point forward: in second platoon, in Charlie Company, maybe in all the rifle companies forming Task Force 1-23, if one was feeling it, everyone else was, too.

That shared consciousness, shared awareness was a phenomenon that I had never encountered nor thought possible. Which made it all the more difficult to walk headlong towards death, which I would be forced to share, and the grief and the guilt that comes with survival.

That headlong walk was still a ways off that day in August, but it’s with me now, inside. I don’t cherish it.

In Memoriam: LCPL Justin McDaniels, Our First Casualty

2009-07-17T07:02:00.002-05:00

We got our first shock of the war on July 17, 2004 when we lost our first comrade killed during training at March Air Reserve Base near Riverside, California. Lance Corporal Eulice Justin McDaniels, a radio operator from Headquarters Company, was killed when his Humvee rolled with him in the turret. Training was suspended for exactly twenty-four hours, and a memorial service was held. I find it uncanny of the timing of this post. I hadn’t planned it. McDaniels was killed 5 years ago today in a training mishap that was both avoidable and inevitable.

Working through the death of young people as I have had to do, I have concluded that God gives us a birth day and a day in which our time is up and the chips are cashed in. What we do within those mortal parameters is entirely up to us. For McDaniels to be serving his country when it called him was a noble thing for him to do with his free will, and that’s how I feel about our war dead, even if others do not.

At the time, however, I was not processing things at that level. I was completely floored by the implications of a training-related death while we stared across the highway from where we’d been training at the air base where we would depart the U.S. for Iraq in just over a month.

Shit, I thought, we haven’t even left the United States and we already have a dead comrade.

I certainly felt, and feel, for McDaniel’s parents and friends, though I did not know him personally. My cousin, Stephen, who was a motor-transport Marine, lost a friend the same way we lost McDaniel, at a CAX three years before. Riding in the gun turret in a Humvee is not safe when the vehicle rolls. It’s certain death.

Training is dangerous, after all, regardless of all attempts to make it safe, and war is infinitely more dangerous than training. McDaniels’ death was tragic and helped to eat away at any sense of assuredness I had for survival.

His death was affirmation for that gnawing, evil voice.

“There’s casualty number-one,” the voice hissed. “More to come, I promise. It’s war. The odds are against you and your buddies. People get killed.”

Even so, the 24-hour standdown was all we got. I was pre-occupied at that time with hustling cell phone time from my buddies, who invariably had “only one bar” of charge left, etc. etc. Then it was back to training.

You fight how you train, we’re told, and the training we had working up for our Iraq deployment was a credit to the Marine Corps.

They had us doing a more intense version of SASO with simulated mortar attacks, a simulated Forward Operating Base (FOB) that we had to go in and establish, and patrols, etc. This was done in the condemned and abandoned housing that had been used for March Air Reserve Base. The training was first rate. M1 Abrams tanks rolled in the streets, and we had a class on casualty evacuation with helicopters, where we communicated with the helicopter, brought it in for a landing and loaded a simulated casualty.

The training was so realistic, when we took over our polling site in Haqlaniyah six months later, I kept getting the willies thinking of how eerily similar it was to our simulations at March Air Reserve Base.

And the little ditty is perfectly true: you fight exactly the way you train. Muscle memory and all that.

The New Sergeant Gets Static

2009-07-16T19:43:00.000-05:00

Eric and I parted on Monday when he and Brandy drove me back to the Stumps, and Eric snapped pictures of me while I showed him my own little purgatory. He was sufficiently awed by the heat and desolation of the desert. We parted with lumps in our throats, looking forward to August when we would meet again for the twenty-day block leave we had been promised.

Eric went on to surf Lower Trestles, just outside the San Cristianitos Gate at Camp Pendleton, but I had a promotion to attend to. I was getting the coveted third stripe of a sergeant – on the same day as Nammie. Third squad would have two sergeants to run it.

By way of explanation, here’s the Marine small unit structure: a squad consists of three fire teams, which is itself composed of three Marines and a fire team leader. Therefore, a squad is three fire teams, or twelve members, plus the squad leader.

A platoon consists of three squads, or 39 Marines, plus at least two Navy Corpsmen, as I mentioned before, putting it up to 41 personnel. Add the platoon guide, who is in charge of checking gear and getting supplies (more on his duties later), plus the platoon sergeant (usually a staff sergeant or gunnery sergeant) and the platoon leader (usually a lieutenant), and you have 44 men in a platoon, 13 in a squad, minus Doc.

There are three rifle platoons in a rifle company, around 130 men, plus a weapons platoon of the heavy crew-served weapons grunts like machine-gunners, mortar men and assault-men (who launch rockets and detonate explosives).

My place in Charlie Company, Task Force 1-23 was as senior fire team leader of second platoon. I was the lead fire team leader in third squad, and an assistant to Nammie. I was certainly odd man out because I had jumped in sort of adventuring with the whole re-enlistment thing. Nammie, Fabian and the third fire team leader, Corporal Flores, had been on a yearlong UNITAS deployment that circumnavigated South America. They trained in every coastal South American nation together, and had their Marine Corps Ball in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These three guys were tight, and I was regarded in a sort of sidelong manner.

Except by Fabian, the joker who never disliked me. Toward the end of my first hitch in the reserves, Fabian had come in as a new “boot” Marine, and we had gone to Fort Hood during a bitter winter weekend. Fabian had not packed well, and he remembered that I had given him my knit stocking cap to keep him warm, even though we were all in a bad way. I had not remembered it, but apparently that had endeared me to him. I was glad of it, because Flo straight hated me during those pre-deployment training months.

One night I came into the barracks room I shared with Fabian and Flo and found my sneakers on my pillow.

I was furious, but neither of the two said anything, and the hostility was palpable. I let the incident go, and it was probably best. As a sergeant in a corporal’s billet, I had to be humble.

"Libo" is Slang for Time Off: Fourth of July in Oceanside

2009-07-15T07:39:00.000-05:00

As much as I yearned to see Lynette and our sons during the four-day liberty we were granted for the Fourth of July weekend, we couldn’t afford my airfare to Texas for just four days.

Instead, my brother Eric opted to fly out and stay with our mutual high-school friend in Oceanside who happened to have a rather posh condo a few blocks from the beach.

Though few people outside the state equate Texas with any sort of surf scene, tropical storms and hurricanes produce a number of excellent swells that support a vigorous surfing community, and Eric and I had grown up surfing near the north jetty of the Brazos-Santiago Pass on South Padre Island. I had caught an excellent swell generated off of Hurricane Claudette the previous summer with Robert, who had just returned from Iraq after the invasion, and only two other local surfers who ventured into the biggest line of breakers nearly a mile off the beach, which we had reached by boat.

Eric had actually filmed one of my rides from the boat and we sold the video clip to a Texas Gulf Coast surfer who was putting together a film called “There Ain’t No Surf in Texas.”

So Eric flew to San Diego and we met up in Oceanside late Thursday evening on my first day of liberty. He had a copy of the “There Ain’t No Surf in Texas” DVD, which we watched, and we spent all weekend surfing Oceanside Pier and the marina jetties and drinking coffee at the Oceanside Marina in the early mornings.

It was idyllic and pleasant and helped break some of the tension that had built in a month of training.

The evening of the Fourth, as we left the water after surfing, a big Samoan girl smelling strongly of rum stopped us. We were going to get ready for the night’s festivities.

“Would you get my friend? She’s f---ing stupid — she says she’s going to drown herself,” the girl said.

Subsequently, we had this very minor drama where Eric and I played lifeguards and suicide counselors while this other big Samoan girl who smelled strongly of rum attempted very dismally to kill herself by drowning because her boyfriend had dumped her. Polynesian Ophelia, or something.

Wow.

Meanwhile, Brandy used the whole scene to catch a few after-dark waves under the lights from the Oceanside Pier, and when we finally loaded the girl on the Harbor Pilot Boat we were ready to blow off some steam.

Brand-New and Clean, Us and the Gear

2009-07-14T07:30:00.000-05:00

Our days at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center were filled with field maneuvers, four and five days long, during which we practiced our patrols and live-fire assaults on various designated firing ranges in the beautiful Mojave desert, then returned to “mainside” for weekends off.

At an area called Lavic Lakes one hot and awful afternoon, we were camped out in the 110-degree sun, and many of us had pitched our poncho liners for shade over shrubs. I was lying in mine, half dazed from the heat, and found it sort of strange that when I moved my left hand, situated near the base of my particular shrub, a funny sound like “SSSHHHHHHH” could be heard.

I tested the noise, moving my hand.

SSSSHHHhhhh.

Moved my hand again.

Shhhhhhh.

Paused a little while (it was hot and I was very overworked). Moved the hand again.

Ssssshhhhhhhhh.

So I glimpsed over at where my hand was, and an angry little sidewinder rattlesnake with his little horns was looking up at me, coiled near my hand, rattling his rattle when I shifted.

I flew out of the makeshift tent yelling “Rattlesnake!” and one of my buddies fixed his bayonet and skewered the snake. We certainly were not supposed to harm the local fauna, but I mean, what the hell, we can’t have rattlesnakes hogging the shade.

Mondays and Tuesdays were given over to daylong classes dealing with Arabic, insurgent tactics and weapons, and the family support information for our loved ones staying at the home front. We updated our wills and powers of attorney, signed the little form that says we don’t ever want to be kept alive by artificial means, got updated identification cards and dog tags, and drew brand new gear out of the supply depot.

The new gear was indicative of the theater of war: knee and elbow pads, ballistic goggles that would help stop shrapnel, newer, lighter Kevlar helmets than the old ones, backpack hydration systems, magazine pouches and grenade pouches, several pairs of brand-new boots and extra combat fatigues, and the newest Marine Corps-issue internal frame rucksacks, which resembled a hiking/backpacking enthusiasts’ instead of outdated Vietnam-era rucksacks. We even got ultra-light, two-person backpacking tents made by a leading American recreational tent-maker, logo included, with the Marine trademark—the Eagle, Globe and Anchor— displayed more prominently.

With the training we received and the treatment of folks on base, who knew we were Texas reservists, I was beginning to feel a lot like a real Marine for a change.

The "New Combined Arms:" Smile and Wave. WTF?

2009-07-13T07:31:00.001-05:00

Soon enough we were in “the Stumps,” as it’s bitterly called by Marines, taking up the barracks rooms that had belonged to the unit we would soon be replacing in Iraq: Second Battalion, Seventh Marines.

We took up the life all active-duty grunts know, with the daily physical training, forced marches (called ‘humps’ in the Marine jargon), rifle ranges, convoy training and several packages of low-intensity conflict “SASO” training – stability and security operations – in urban environments.

We were told that with SASO we had to redefine the Marine Corps classic “combined arms,” which means machine-guns, mortars and even aircraft in combination with maneuvering infantry, as “a smile and a wave.”

When the instructors first said this, we all laughed, most of us of the Marines thought this was a funny joke and laughed (I know I did), but our trainers were being dead serious.

We asked some of the seasoned veterans, like Gunnery Sergeant Gonzalez, who had earned a Bronze Star and the Purple Heart during the Iraq invasion in one of the rare major gun battles in the initial invasion, with First Battalion, Fifth Marines, if the SASO smile was really all it took.

He wanted to tell us that it worked, but we eventually got out of him that when the fighting started “all that SASO bullshit goes out the window."

June was one quick month of training leading us to the 5 days off for the 4^th of July weekend. July, in turn, was another month of training until we would get to return home before shipping out.

In other words, we would soon find out for ourselves whether a smile and a wave were the new combined arms of the Iraqi conflict. We were skeptical, and that was probably good.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

2009-07-12T04:25:00.000-05:00

Andrew Gareth was our first child born at home, and I felt elation that soothed my troubled wait like a balm, though I now almost dreaded the interruption that would finally take me away from this renewed life that I so badly wanted to stay for. I knew I was bound for the dark side of the human condition, but in the pre-dawn darkness of that May morning the wave of death and savagery that I knew would wash over me was still a distant ground swell.

The day arrived for me to leave for Twenty-nine Palms -- June 4, 2004 -- and I rose at 4:00 a.m., donned my brand-new Marine Pattern (MarPat—these acronyms dog the military like a foreign dialect) desert digital-patterned combat fatigues, tied the laces of my suede desert boots, gathered up my gear, and it was time to leave.

My older half-brother, Carl, my father, and my brother Eric came to pick me up. Eric ran the video camera while my wife cried. My boys hugged me sleepily goodbye from where they sat near Lynette on the living room sofa in the dim light, then they both started crying. I felt self-loathing and a deep, deep sorrow for my selfish sins that had set this horrible thing in motion.

But there was nothing to do but go forward, boldly, and get this thing done with. Besides, I thought, I would be back down in August for twenty days (so we had been promised) and we would have a four-day leave for July 4th. It wasn’t much consolation, but it was something to grasp for on that painful morning.

We pulled into Harlingen and got our first taste of what the military does best: hurry up and wait. So we waited and made small talk in the pre-dawn darkness in the parking lot with a bunch of crying women and clinging girlfriends, the bright lights of the news cameras and four big charter buses idling while everyone waited for the Word. In the Marine Corps, the Word is that thing that signals what will happen next, and oftentimes no one knows what the hell the Word is, even the platoon sergeants and others who wish they had the Word.

Then all of a sudden the Word is let loose and everyone scurries about getting their people, getting counts, and so we did, as the sun rose, when the Word hit at last. I left my brothers and my father with hugs and a tearless goodbye.

We loaded fiberglass crates with our brand new rifles, M-16A4s, loaded our sea bags on the buses and were soon enough on the tarmac of Valley International Airport. Leaving time. I love flying and I was eager to get back to Twenty-nine Palms, having only been once before, during a combined arms exercise (CAX) in the summer of 1999. Every battalion in the Marine Corps conducts CAX at Twenty-nine Palms, and it is something of a rite of passage for the infantry Marine.

We all remember the massive 400-series live-fire ranges, where grunts fire and maneuver against cardboard targets, scurrying down trenches with live mortars and machine guns on target in support before the heavy supporting weapons shift off target as the rifle squads close with the enemy and finish them off in textbook fashion. Fire and maneuver is at the heart of what Marines do, and we do have it down to a science.

Fire without maneuver is pointless, and maneuver without fire is suicide. It is a beautiful and deadly choreography, whether applied on a live-fire range with no opposition or on the field of battle. Warriors who have seen it on the field of battle against conventionally arrayed forces say that it really works—against conventional fighters…

Navy Corpsmen and How to Avoid Being Wounded (Denial?)

2009-07-11T07:03:00.001-05:00

A week after meeting Hector Perez’s widow, a former Navy Corpsman who said he had served with a Marine infantry company in Vietnam pulled the loose toenail off of my big toe.

The Marines don’t have medics. We have Docs. There is no “Department of the Marine Corps,” and since the Marines are in the Department of the Navy, the Navy provides all medical service for the Marines.

A hospital corpsman is a sailor who puts on combat fatigues, carries a pistol (or a sniper rifle, as we shall later see), and patches up Marines who get shot, blown up, or dehydrated. There are two or three per platoon, and the Marines call them “Doc.”

Famously, a Navy Corpsman – Doc Bradley – is one of men hoisting the flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, and it was his kid who wrote “Flags of our Fathers.”

Because Doc is always there, living in the dirt, dodging bullets and mortar fire and joking around in the boring times, he becomes one of the guys.

So this old podiatrist had been a Doc, which was only natural. From the corpsmen I had known, it was perfectly in character for the “Take Care of Your Feet” creed of all corpsmen.

The old corpsman gave me some anti-fungal medicine and told me to take care of my feet as I walked out of his office.

Lynette’s grandfather, who had been a Baptist missionary for over 30 years in Ecuador, from the mountains to the jungles, had been a hospital corpsman in World War II. He had served on a hospital ship in Corpus Christi, Texas, nursing wounded Marines returning from the Pacific theatre. He told me he had seen some terrible wounds before the war ended and he was able to finish his degree at Baylor University after the war. The worst wounds, perhaps, were not necessarily physical, he implied.

When I had joined the Marines, he seemed dissatisfied. The only thing he had to say about Marines was that they were a “tough bunch.”

A man of very few words, this was all he had to relate to me upon my enlistment:

“There was a Marine on the hospital ship who had been wounded on Okinawa,” he said in his quiet voice. “He told he was walking along one day and he came upon two natives making love in the grass. Well, they looked up at him, startled.

“He told me he smiled and told them to just keep on going. Then he said he ran his bayonet through both of them where they lay and he laughed about it. He just laughed about it.”

He frowned and shook his head, disgusted, and I understood his view on Marines.

Now as I looked at the real possibility of undergoing savagery and warfare, I simply lapsed into disbelief. I was certain that all we would do, as reservists mind you, would be to guard a perimeter of some big base somewhere in the desert.

Hell, maybe we wouldn’t even be sent to Iraq. Maybe we’d get to do our hitch in Kuwait or something like that. Certainly I could not be expected to murder innocent civilians under such cruel circumstances.

What would I be capable of? What would I be subject to? Those questions were simply too large to ponder, so the refrain in my mind was: probably nothing at all…

Wrong.

Joy and Sorrow, Just Like That

2009-07-10T08:00:00.001-05:00

The evening of Friday, May 14, 2004, Andrew decided it was time to get born.

Lynette and I had decided on a home birth with the midwife at Holy Family Birth Center, and they were game. We called Diana Caplan and she brought a young redhead named Catherine to help, a bottle of oxygen, and a midwifery toolkit. Lynette and I were thrilled.

We sent Peter and Daniel to our pastor’s house, where the pastor’s son, Nathan, their all-time buddy awaited them. Everyone was joyful with anticipation. It was better than anything Disney’s come up with.

I inflated a cheap pool and filled it with water in the living room while Diana gave instructions and Lynette began to work through the contractions. It was 10 p.m.

At just after 1:30 a.m., Diana grabbed my forearms and had me catch Andrew in the water, making me the first one to hold him outside of his mother’s perfect cradle. It was too touched to speak. I was too choked up to talk, so I handed Andrew to his mom and nodded when Diana asked me if I wanted to cut the umbilical cord.

Diana and Catherine worked until dawn while I helped Lynette with sundry tasks. Other than a couple of shots of lidocaine and an ibuprofen, Lynette had gotten through natural childbirth with no painkiller. Just the woman I needed at home while I sojourned. More importantly, she was the sort of tough woman I would need when I got back.

We enjoyed Andrew and his brothers did, too, but two weeks later I was due to depart for The Work-up, just over two months of pre-deployment training at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twenty-nine Palms, California, just across the street from Joshua Tree National Monument.

I had two weeks to build the boys a play fort that could stand in for a very play-oriented father, with whom they were accustomed to pillow fights, tickle monster antics and so on.

At the lumberyard, I dropped a piece of 1-inch plywood on my big toe, just about ruining it. When I got to the counter, a woman in line behind me asked me if I was in the Army.

“No ma’am, the Marine reserves,” I said.

“Have you been to Iraq?”

“No ma’am, but I’m going in August.”

“My husband was in the Army,” she said, and I could see the sadness on her face. “He went to Iraq. He was killed last year in July.”

I felt a rush of empathetic sadness. She looked so pretty and forlorn. Her husband, Army Staff Sgt. Hector Perez, was killed by a roadside bomb July 24, 2003, making him one of the first casualties of the Iraqi insurgency.

This woman standing before me had been married to him for 14 years, and they had three daughters. I was talking to a real-live war widow. What were the odds?

I told her that he was undoubtedly an honorable man and I gave her a hug and left hurriedly because I could feel myself choking up.

My toe was hurting damnably, but it was trepidation, not pain washing over me as I limped behind the lumber cart to where my truck was parked.

American Patriots on the Texas-Mexico Border

2009-07-09T07:57:00.000-05:00

Meanwhile, back at Los Fresnos High School, the students were intrigued that I had been called up. Since 9/11, they had been asking me, “are they going to call you?” they being the Marines. The kids knew I had been a Marine reservist, the Marine Corps lanyard with my keys hanging from it was a giveaway, and that I once proudly served as a part-time infantry NCO.

For three years following 9/11, students asked me that question, and I genuinely had thought the answer would remain “no.” Now, I had sort of jumped in front of something to take that bullet, and the answer was suddenly “yes.” The school was abuzz.

Friday, April 30 was set as my last day to work, because Lynette was due to have Andrew May 15, so I was being turned loose per the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The faculty threw a big party

It had been a memorable year. A group of ninth-grade Pre-AP English students I had taught in 2001-2002 had me again for a tenth-grade Pre-AP course, and they were particularly bright kids. We read “Of Mice and Men” and “Fahrenheit 451” and I had them film their own adaptations of the works, which turned out to be hilarious but very keen.

I was fond of Fahrenheit 451 in particular, having read it as an eighth grader. My mother, who was my seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher, made us all write letters to Ray Bradbury. I wrote mine telling him I wanted to be a writer. He answered each letter individually, typed and signed.

In his letter to me, Bradbury encouraged me to pursue the craft and advised me to read a lot. With the bundle of letters, he enclosed a black-and-white autographed photo for the class of him clowning as Ahab, complete with a beard and a wooden peg leg.

If the school was abuzz with the news of my deployment, so the community was with Detachment Company C’s upcoming tour. Our detachment consisted of two platoons of college boys, firefighters, policemen and postmen from Texas’ so-called Rio Grande Valley, actually the delta of the Rio Grande River where it met the Gulf of Mexico.

With four exceptions, the 60 or so young bucks with the two platoons were Mexican-Americans, and a couple only marginally American. Miguel “Uncle Mike” Salinas, a LCPL in my fire team, lived full-time in Reynosa, Mexico, across the river from McAllen, TX. His English was less than fluent and he spoke it in a thick Mexican accent full of chopped trochees.

But man, even though some of these men were first generation Americans, not yet citizens, they were sure up to the prospect of going more than 7,000 miles to fight Iraqi insurgents.

Might as well be me, or bad idea?

2009-07-08T07:50:00.003-05:00

Like an insensitive fool, I told Lynette that I was deploying over the phone. A Saturday Night Live skit that has stayed with me was a commercial featuring “Bad Idea Jeans.” The comedian, Phil Hartman, (later murdered by his psychotic wife in real life) says “Now that the divorce is finalized, I’m going to tell my ex about the affair,” at which the voice-over refrain “Bad Idea Jeans!” drums up.

Suffice it to say Lynette reacted very badly, and it was a bad idea to break the news over the phone.

Being officially called up brought with it the whole possibility of being killed in a way that felt very real. Getting called to a war zone, the idea of losing one's life is a valid thought. However, rather than processing it in my mind as some sort of logical conclusion stemming from observing an overt pattern, it came to be more as a whisper injected by Satan into my conscience.

Therefore, the idea becomes a sinister "you're gonna die. If you don't, that's OK, because somebody is going to die. So it's you or your friends, Benny." In other words, the mortality issue is much more sinsiter than a dry, sort of thought like this: "well, there is a margin for the rather severe shortening of my linear mortal existence.”

That idea, which occurred to me very early on, was actually very unsettling because of its very persistence. That hissing whisper never went away; it only solidified as a fixture in my psyche, the counter-balance for the jingling bells of tinnitus in my right ear that I’d gotten from shooting the 83-mm SMAW rocket years earlier.

Explaining for dear life to my boys later that evening was an excursion into just how selfish I had to be to put myself in this ghastly situation.

“Why do you have to go to Iraq, Daddy?” Peter asked. He was nine years old, the golden child born during the 10-day block of leave between boot camp and School of Infantry back in September 1995.

“Well, there are a lot of boys who aren’t all the way grown up, and I have to go and help them be brave.”

“So they won’t be scared?”

“Yes, so I can help them be brave so we can all come back. It won’t be very long, not even a year, but it will be a while.”

“Is it a bad war?”

“Well, it doesn’t look so bad. It’s nothing like World War II, where I have to go fight against the Japanese and where we have massive casualties. My chances of getting hurt are real low.”

“Do you have to go, Daddy? Can’t you just stay?”

“Sorry, buddy, I have to. I’m in the military, and when they call you, you don’t get a choice.”

If I could have seen the idyll of family life at our little home at 701 Ebony Lane about to break, and my eldest sons' innocence and security uprooted, I would have opted out. And I could have. At that point, unbeknownst to me, the contract that I had signed at re-enlistment gave me the full choice to opt out of the deployment and finish my year back in Harlingen, where my contract was set to expire January 2005. If I did not choose to sign a contract extension, I would never have to leave the continental United States.

If I decided to sign, it was dam the torpedoes and full steam ahead, and screw the consequences.

Called Up: BINGO!

2009-07-07T07:48:00.001-05:00

I was so motivated to re-enlist that the extra 15 fat pounds were gone in less than a month. At 5-foot, 8-inches tall, I had to weigh no heavier than 183 pounds. I jogged, cut out the high-fructose corn syrup, biked, and next thing I knew the large-framed Navy lady doctor was inspecting my equipment. She seemed rather fond of me.

When I walked up to the parking lot where the Marine reservists in my old unit, Detachment Company C, 1st Battalion, 23rd Marines, 4th Marine Division (Reserve), I recognized a few faces. Everybody has a nickname, so after I’ve given the last name, with the nickname in parentheses alongside, I’m using the nickname. So I recognized Guzman (Goose) and Fabian Hernandez (Faby, like baby).

“We heard you were coming back, corporal,” one said. “Why did you re-enlist?”

“I want to experience combat in Iraq at the squad level,” I said. They looked at me like I had just said that I enjoyed pulling testicles off squirrels with pliers. I felt a little crazy, but it was ungodly accurate.

After two exciting reserve training weekends setting up snap vehicle checkpoints at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi with real traffic, and then a March trip to Fort Hood for a rather involved live-fire exercise, things were looking up for my gamble on a deployment.
The insurgency really registered in my psyche in early April 2004, when the images of the 10-year-old Iraqi boy posing with the charred, dismembered body of an American security contractor hanging from a Fallujah bridge, less than a month before I knew I would be deploying. I visited the Marine Corps website everyday, and it become more apparent everyday a deployment was coming. I felt I might just luck my way into a war.

In mid-April, after a tiring day at work, the phone rang. I had just lain down in bed for a little nap while Lynette finished her workday where she managed the family boutique. It was my squad leader (third squad, second platoon, where I was senior fire team leader and assistant squad leader) Corporal Alvaro Escaname (es-cahn-ah-MAY). Fabian, who loved to pronounce the exotic last name with an affected Anglicized “Eska-Nammie”, gave his nickname “Nammie”. Fabian, a constant joker with a remarkable sense of humor and comic timing, shortened that to become Nammie.

“Ah, Corporal Christensen?” Nammie said, his voice tentative.

“Yeah, what’s up Namster?”

“Bad news man. You have to bring your gear in next Tuesday. All of it. We got called up.”

I was electrified. Thrilled. Bad news? Hardly. I felt like Stephen King when his editor told him over the phone that he had sold his first novel. Difference was, I doubt Mr. King felt any real trepidation. How was I going to tell my beautiful wife, who was at this point eight months pregnant, due with our third son in the middle of May? The news trickled into my soul, a cold, devilish sunshine.

Lust for Battle

2009-07-06T07:45:00.002-05:00

By the time I finished reading MacArthur’s biography, the Iraqi insurgency had begun in earnest. I read too much about Iraq in the news to let my curiosity rest. The guerilla war our troops were fighting by that point was supposed to be my war. I was supposed to at least get up close and have a good look.

I even tried an alternate way to go to Iraq, searching for job openings at newspapers, visiting the Associated Press’s webpage more than once and even putting together a resume to peddle about. I didn’t have a chance going over as a journalist, though, and the only card I had to play was in fact tied to the camouflage fatigues still hanging in my closet.

Aggravating the whole lust for battle thing was that a year earlier we had all waved goodbye to Lynette’s younger brother Robert, an old friend of mine who had joined the Marines because of me. He was a reserve Marine like I had been, but had volunteered for extra training to become a reconnaissance man. Robert’s San Antonio-based reserve recon unit received their marching orders as soon as President Bush issued Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath regime his ultimatum. The commanding general of the Fourth Marine Division—the reserve division—told Robert’s unit when they were recalled to San Antonio for deployment “the Marine Corps has no B-Team.”

Skeptical as I was of what the general had said, I told Robert not to worry, that he’d be on a plane for Camp Lejeune North Carolina to fill in for the active duty Marines who deployed.

At some point, however, the Marine Corps had in fact decided that there was no “B Team,” and Robert’s reconnaissance unit was attached to Second Force Reconnaissance. That put them in the vanguard of the invading Marine Corps Task Force Tarawa during the initial blitz on Iraq, when American and British forces seized the country and toppled Saddam in a classic display of maneuver warfare. Wel held our breath for four months, reading of sporadic casualties in significant combat in Nasiriyah and Baghdad before Robert sailed home to a hero’s welcome aboard the USS Bataan, marrying his sweetheart and settling into a good-paying, post-Marine Corps career as one who had done what I’d only dreamed of doing my whole life.

Although I cheered his accomplishments and craved his stories, I was left feeling sorry for myself. I was uncharacteristically awash in self-doubt and cemented into a leaden sense of finality in life, though I wasn’t even thirty.

That was the impetus behind my wish to have my own go at the Iraq War. I was like one of those aging, washed up athletes in movies and sitcoms yearning for some unlikely shot to don the uniform once again…

When I was ready to pick up a phone and call the prior-service recruiter, we discovered Lynette was pregnant with our third child. Afflicted by self-doubt, I had to make up my mind once and for all. I would never be truly content in my own skin, missing out on “my” war, regardless of how foolish that sounded even to me. I consulted with Lynette about re-enlisting in the reserves, seeing what was coming, and she reluctantly agreed to not divorce me if I went back in.

Before I could re-enlist, however, I had to lose 15 pounds, 10 of which consisted of those proverbial “Last 10 Pounds.” No weight waivers for re-enlistment in the Marines, either.

Married at 18, called to War at 28

2009-07-05T07:41:00.001-05:00

Some anecdote has 80% of Americans identifying themselves as “above average.” When I look around in a crowd, I have to laugh, but not out of arrogance. I have always been about as average as it gets, anywhere one could be average: average height, weight, appearance, intelligence and ability, average career, income, and number of children. In the fall of 2003 I finished reading William Manchester’s biography of General Douglas MacArthur, and suddenly my average and comfortable life as a high school English teacher looked a lot like a dead-end.

MacArthur was anything than average. His entire life was one extraordinary achievement followed by extraordinary luck, which in turn bumped against extraordinary circumstances, which MacArthur met with extraordinary prescience, intelligence and competence. His biography, written by a fascinating historian who was himself a combat veteran of Peleliu and Okinawa, was thrilling reading for my average mind.

The only thing not all that average about my life up to that point was my remarkable wife Lynette, whom I’d married at 18. Lynette (spoiler alert! we’re still married after all that follows!) is an intriguing woman, born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, a Pacific-coast South American resort to a strict Evangelical Baptist mother and a spoiled oligarch father. Lynette’s uncle, Leon Febres-Cordero, was the right-wing president of Ecuador in the late 1980s and a tight Reagan ally. Before we married, Lynette showed me a magazine cover with a photo of her uncle descending a staircase with Ronald Reagan, her Aunt Cecilia (her father’s sister) arm-in-arm with Nancy Reagan.

Lynette had supported me when I joined the Marine Corps Reserve in 1995, a year after we married. I spent my first wedding anniversary at the Marine Corps Recruit Training Depot in San Diego, spent six years as a drilling reservist in an infantry company, and was honorably discharged in November 2002, a year-and-a-half into my teaching career. At the time, I supposed I was finished with the Marines, and was ready to buy my “Once a Marine, Always a Marine” bumper sticker.

Like all Marines who once served, I often yearned for it. While in the reserve I had done jungle warfare training in the Panamanian jungles and taken part in counter-narcotics surveillance missions and massive amphibious landing exercises off the California coast. I had joined the reserves planning to become an officer, serving in the enlisted ranks in the reserves like many up-and-coming Marine officers do. But sometime after recruit training in San Diego and School of Infantry at Camp Pendleton, California, and during those eight ensuing years I had somehow slipped into the American mainstream, though entirely by accident.

Lynette and I, who had been so artistic and starved for life and culture when we married as kids, had sunk into something that bore a disturbing resemblance to the narcotic existence of suburban complacency. We kept a cozy home in a bayside village at the southern tip of Texas, an average home on a quiet street with one of those never-ending mortgages. Our two beautiful and healthy young sons helped counteract all of life’s frustrations, but creatively speaking we had died young, poisoned by the frenetic pursuit of dollar currency.

Traffic signs for Ramadi and Baghdad in the Iraqi city of Hit

2009-07-04T07:33:00.004-05:00

What follows is a story about selfishness, violence and death, into which patriotism at some point found its way. Since it's about combat, some reader discretion is advised.

My hope is that it is ultimately a story of redemption, if not recovery. By running the tale as a serial through this blog, you will learn how closely I identify more with those of you whom I have invited to read it than I do with some of the younger types who get themselves into combat fresh out of high school.

In some twisted way, I want this to be more about you than it was about me, because I am not sure how cathartic this is going to be. If nothing else, I get to hone my writing and stay in touch with friends, some old, some new.

If you allow me to do so, I am going to put you in a Marine rifle company and in very short order throw you spiritually and emotionally unprepared into the fray that was al-Anbar Province, Iraq (2004-2005), the way Uncle Sam did for me!

It was at my behest, however; little more than curiosity tinged with patriotism (patriotic curiosity?) got me into my combat stint. Like all the naïve kids who found themselves and continue to find themselves in various combat roles around Afghanistan now, I volunteered for it. Difference is, I thought I was a whole lot less naïve than those kids fresh out of high school.

Bear with me, and let me know what you think as we go along. If I don’t answer something fully, e-mail me your questions at bc@riograndeoutdoors.com, and I will do my best to provide an answer. I will provide a couple of resources dealing with technical aspects such as weaponry and acronyms on my website at www.riograndeoutdoors.com, which will be designed to help you get more from this chronicle.. Without acronyms and weaponry, the military would be an abstraction!

Thanks for stopping by. Semper Fi.

Digging for Fire

2009-06-20T20:46:00.002-05:00

Stand by for word.

This is a project that snapped into my mind on the flight home from a writers conference in Grand Rapids Michigan. As of July 4th, 2009, I will be writing a serialized account of my combat experiences, daily. I've begun the thing to give myself a lead of about a week's worth of material, and what I have so far consists of a short and snappy 300-500 words per installment.

If you are curious about modern combat, its perils and sights, its smells and sounds and the harsh mental hinterland where its path leads you, then check in now and again. I don't want to drag it out too long, so it won't be long before I'm describing how loud being on the receiving end of machine gun fire can be, and how Marine Sniper SGT Joseph Morales joked about wanting a purple heart for breaking his nose diving for cover.

The spine of the chronology consists of a prematurely wrought manuscript that already did the rounds a couple of years ago at David Black's literary agency in NYC -- shout out to Leigh Ann, I have witnessed true patience! This allows me to work through the experience in a manner that is authentic and more emotional than what I have sitting in my attache.

Just last night, I was going over the hundreds of photos and short video clips I gathered at the end of the tour. What a ride.

The blog format is unique. It allows me to post photos that correspond precisely with what I am writing about that particular day, and if I figure out a way to bring in the video clips, blog readers will have a front row to the blow-by-blow, cigarette-by-cigarette account of a seven-month combat tour in Iraq.

Stay tuned sometime on 4 July 2009.

Semper Fidelis.

Ben Christensen