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Chasing War
19 March 2003
The invasion began in the middle of the day. I told Sergeant Colby I expected plastic pop-up Iraqi silhouettes to spring from the ground and I would be strategically placed in a foxhole with an M4 resting on a sandbag. My dominant eye would look over the sight as I aimed center mass; then I would see spurts of Al Qaeda blood spilling from the chest of my enemy. That was the war I felt the Army had prepared me for. Sergeant Colby laughed and called me a Princess, a nickname that stuck for the rest of the deployment. While other soldiers carried cans of Skoal and packs of Marlboro’s, I carried a set of Revlon tweezers for tick s and ingrown hairs on my neck and a pocketknife to pick the dirt from my fingernails.
The early spring Kuwait sun yellowed the sand around us. Temperature was expressed in degrees of hot: hot as balls and fucking hot as shit. It was hot as balls when the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division rolled through Camp New York in the Kuwait Desert. They were racing north towards Baghdad with giant American flags waving from the turrets of their Abrams and Bradley tanks. The echo of Guns N’ Roses lingered above the dust settling in their tracks. On the big screen in the MWR (Morale, Welfare, Recreation) tent, Fox News embeds were reporting live from the rolling behemoth s that had just passed. They talked about 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda and the Twin Towers.
Sergeant Colby put on his headphones and shuffled through his 64MB MP3 player. He only had twenty-four songs and settled contentedly on Creed’s cover of Riders on the Storm. He handed me the other ear bud and we sat silently and fixedly on the mechanized FLOT (forward line of troops) advancing towards Baghdad.
24 March 2003
Like a game of capture the flag, my company crept delicately across the border and into Iraq. There was no fence and I didn’t need a passport. Instead, I had an M4 with seven thirty-round magazines, and an M203 40mm grenade launcher with nineteen rounds of High Explosive, Red and Yellow Smoke, and White Phosphorous. Our seventeen-vehicle convoy of Humvee s and LMTV s stepped over the line, looked to see if anyone was watching and tip-toed across the deserted landscape. Instead of baddies, we found Bedouin tent towns and camels. Instead of combat, we found shredded lettuce-like remains of defeated armor from Desert Storm. They were preserved as iron monuments and relics of the shock and awe strategy of the United States military. The President said God was on our side, but I was thankful for the many 2,000-pound bombs carried by the United States Air Force. 29 March 2003
We heard them before we saw them, and it wasn’t until they were over us that we heard them: a staggered formation of six Blackhawk helicopters had appeared from behind a rolling stretch of sandy dunes in southern Iraq, just fifty meters from our position in prone. The engine rotors pulsed a vibrant staccato of Dolby perfection as a tsunami of dust assaulted the Pickup Zone (PZ). Rocks and miscellaneous debris were lifted into the air and then collapsed onto our necks and faces. The air-chauffeured assault into the holy city of Najaf would mark our entry into combat.
The Army’s UH-60 Blackhawk is a versatile utility helicopter that is often used for moving cargo, equipment, and troops. It has two internal passenger carrying configurations: seats in and seats out. When we got into PZ posture, we already knew which to prepare for. Our movements were swift and robotic from months of training. It took two private s to lift and swing the rucksacks through the doublewide doors. The crew chief arranged them inside until another came hurtling at his feet. The rucksacks lined every available square inch of the floor. My head rested on the cushioned part of an assault pack and a plastic rucksack frame was lodged against my right shoulder. With my legs scissored near the roof, I didn’t see any of the eight other faces during the three-hour flight, just camouflaged body parts and boots and M4 Carbines.
We flew north commanded by men far from the front lines. I unfastened the Velcro from my protective vest and took off my helmet while trying to relax in the unbearable heat. The infantry battalion commander would not let us remove the charcoal-lined chemical protective suits despite being a week past their twenty-four hour effective use. With the engine above us, the inside cabin felt like an oven. Dirty, stinging sweat dripped into my half-closed eyes. I fell in and out of sleep, distracted and fascinated with the world below. Iraq looked different from the sky and the bright yellow colors of the landscape disappeared into a low- contrast world of blackened overhead shadows. Instead of rolling hills and sandy dunes, I saw jagged windswept ridges and cavernous slashes cut mysteriously into the earth. Flocks of camels roamed listlessly across aimless herding paths. They seemed free and casual and beautiful and aware, but disinterested in the phantom shadow sprinting across the ground at 117 miles per hour. I dreamt I was a camel and could wander as they had—free to choose my own course.
I was awakened as the Blackhawk dipped low and hard right. The pilot had changed the flight pattern to NAP of the Earth (near as possible), which was employed in potentially hostile situations to prevent detection. I looked out the window and the desert was gone. Bleached-white mud brick houses were scattered across patchy green fields. Wraith-like figures robed in black looked curiously into the mid-afternoon sky and the gunner moved his finger to the trigger of his belt-fed, gas operated M240B machine gun. His barrel followed the scattering movements of laborers below. When the small green patches turned into large green farms and the small mud houses turned into villages of small mud houses, the Crew Chief motioned five minutes to landing. I thought of the words SSG Behrends had told me before leaving Fort Campbell: “No amount of training can prepare your mind for war,” he said. “But you are trained, and regardless of how prepared you think you are, you will react and I have faith your training will allow you to react successfully.”
The Crew Chief kicked the doors open fifteen feet before landing and shoved the rucksacks and MRE boxes out the door. The infantry platoon sergeant, SSG Hamblin, was mouthing, “GO! GO! GO!” but his voice was drowned out by the woomp woomp woomp of the rotor blades. Hollywood got that part right—in slow motion, I saw the crew chief close the doors twenty feet up, and the Blackhawk ascended into the safety of the sky as the gunner’s muzzle twitched nervously in every direction.
We were alone in a field of reeds towering above our heads. I landed on my feet and fell onto my elbows and knees. The vegetation was densely packed and stalks of tiny green forest were all I could see in every direction. My pulse was beating frantically and my knees trembled at the sound of automatic gunfire in the close distance. As the soundtrack to war temporarily ceased, my platoon regrouped from various points in the landing zone. My mind played back audio tracks of yelling and screaming from the rooftops of houses a kilometer away, but the ringing, imagined silence gave way to a cacophony of mortars exploding behind the reverberation of several kinds of automatic gunfire. I set up my radio and reported my location to company fire support. SSG Behrends said that Alpha Company was engaged in a firefight not far from our location. The GPS said we were in a field adjacent to the battalion staging area, and if there was a moment for joking, it was seized by a tactless young private named Taylor who said, “Holy fucking shit, we’re in ‘Nam!”
The sounds of war dissipated slowly into a fuzzed-out white noise: it was time to move. Adrenaline made up for muscle failure and lack of sleep; I stumbled onto my feet and traipsed through the fields with a 120-pound rucksack on my back. I needed a machete, but settled for parting the dense growth with my hands. I baby-stepped through the reeds, walked up and down irrigated ditches, and crossed a thin, wooden plank laid across a small canal before falling out of breath against the stone wall of my destination. Our Russian exchange soldier, PFC Lobanov, was the only man to beat me to our destination. He was short but stout and had broad shoulders shaped like the funnel of a tornado. He was already on his way back to help the rest of the platoon when he noticed me finishing the last of my canteen of water. His accent was thick and he motioned for me to quit whining about the sand in my pussy and to move on and help the others. I was fatigued and my muscles were exhausted, and I would soon find out that in war, there were no days off. |
