Telescope Eyes

Today my platoon suffered our first KIA this deployment. Sniper hit him through the side of the head as he was giving some Iraqi kid a soccer ball. Some of those children even cheered as the platoon loaded him into the PL's truck, his blood spilling everywhere. One his best friends, the RTO (radio-telecoms operator), had to hold parts of his brain in while he was escorted back to the COP to be stabilized and then airlifted to surgery. He died on that flight out of the COP, but everyone knew he was dead as soon as he got hit. You don't survive that kind of a shot.

The guys cleaned themselves of blood as much as possible, and then four hours later had to go on another patrol. The 21-year-old RTO had to sit in the back of the same bload-soaked Stryker that he had hours before just held his dying friend.

Tales of a Scorched Earth

Stress is an ignorant state. it believes that everything is an emergency.

-Natalie Goldberg

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An IED (improvised explosive device), possibly an EFP (explosively formed penetrator), tore through a Stryker in my platoon today on Route Tampa West, Baghdad. Some 100 pounds of explosives burned the fucker to the ground, but nobody got hurt.

Stryker soldiers will tell you that they'd rather ride in a Stryker than a humvee. Strykers are faster and have more armor. Outside of EFPs and deep-buried IEDs, nothing can touch Stryker passengers. But everyone else talks about how Strykers get torn up left and right, how Strykers piss off the locals because they're so huge that they demolish the streets and rip up the power lines and phone lines they roll through. Non-Stryker soldiers criticize that Strykers are nothing more than big rolling targets.

Yesterday an IED blew up a block away from one of my buddies on patrol, hitting another Stryker. No casualties--in fact, the Stryker just rolled through the kill zone. The 82nd Airbone cats I'm with right now, they laugh at my unit because when the 82nd gets hit with an IED, they dismount, cordon off the area, question bystanders on the streets, and dare the bad guys to come fuck with them some more. Maybe that kind of courage comes with experience, because I can only imagine 3rd platoon's green PL shitting his pants when an IED goes off and screaming at the driver to de-ass the kill zone.

We've been in sector for a minute, and we've already been blown up 4 times. And now I hear rumblings of a massive, squadron-wide 3-day-long mission that will almost certainly become a 2-week-long mission.

The cats from Arrowhead Brigade that trained us up in Taji weren't kidding. Once operations begin, things get heavy quick.

Welcome to the Jungle

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It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

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Mixon desperately screamed, "Stop! Stop!! STOP! STOP!! STOP!!!"

The PL (platoon leader) and the driver couldn't hear Mixon over the Stryker's internal comms (communications system), so our Stryker kept backing until we all felt metal slamming against the Stryker's birdcage slat armor. Mixon is a rear air guard--he stands in one of the rear hatches and he watches the backside of the Stryker with his 240 Bravo machine gun.

The PL ripped off his CVC (combat vehicle communications) helmet and furiously demanded, "WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T YOU SAY SOMETHING?"

"He did!" the senior sergeant said. "You just weren't paying attention."

The PL was already in a panic. He'd ordered the driver down a few wrong turns and had gotten all four vehicles of 3rd platoon lost. At 1124 hours, we'd hit a dead-end and were backing out of the street when our truck knocked over a light pole.

The PL just couldn't catch a break: an hour later, I heard him screaming over the comms, "Remount! Remount! I say again, you just stopped a funeral!"

Our presence patrol was just two hours of doing snap TCPs (traffic control points): roll out in our Strykers, stop at random locations in our sector, dismount, pull random civilians out of their vehicles, and search them for guns, explosives or any other contraband. It's our commander's way of announcing the arrival of Strykers in Sadr City and showing the population that we're taking every possible step to keep the neighborhood safe for Ramadan, the holy month of Islam where Muslims worldwide abstain from eating and drinking during daylight hours. (Supposedly, it's also the month where holy warriors will go straight to heaven for dying in battle against the American infidels, so we've braced ourselves for a month-long festival of carnage and car-bombs.)

Rolling up a funeral convoy, of course, will not win the hearts and minds of Iraqis.

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Sadr City is a 16-square-mile district in Northeastern Baghdad home to some 2 million Shi'a Iraqis. It is the safe haven of the JAM (Jaysh al Mahdi, or the Mahdi Army), a militia numbering in the thousands loyal to the warlord Muqtada al-Sadr. JAM has used Sadr City as a portal to distribute weapons--like the EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) that will rip through the toughest of tank armor--and money from Shi'a Iran. JAM operates with near-impunity in Sadr City, running its own laws, courts, and executions, since it enjoys popular support and because no one outside of SOCOM (Special Operations Command, e.g. Special Forces, Delta, SEALs) would dare run a mission into the heart of Sadr City. It is an inner dungeon of hell that would make Jesus's pussy tremble.

When I say that my Stryker unit goes into Sadr City, I mean, it stays within a few blocks of the district borders because my commanders are shit-scared of us starring in Black Hawk Down, Baghdad Edition.

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After the presence patrol, the unit dropped me and the rest of the torch party off at the COP. The torch party is the group that goes in advance to set up for the unit's movement into an area. In our case, we're moving into our COP, which is right outside of Sadr City. A COP is a combat outpost. Unlike the sprawling FOBs and camps littered across Iraq, COPs are small stations embedded within the neighborhoods they overwatch. COPs can usually hold no more than a few companies--Camp Taji could and does support several brigades.p>This COP used to be an abandoned YMCA or something and has one working shower. There is no dedicated chow hall, only a microwave, a cooler of frozen pizzas, and stacks of MREs. The building itself is surrounded by an inner and outer ring of 12-foot-tall concrete blast barriers to protect from mortar attacks. Despite the blast barriers, several neighboring apartments and houses tower over the walls, providing easy access for snipers to cherry-pick American soldiers. Just yesterday, the COP came under mortar fire, and last week, an infantryman took a sniper round through the throat at a fuel point a few blocks away from the COP.

I expected as much, but I was still disappointed that life would be so rough for at least the next one-and-a-half months, when we'll return to Camp Taji for a refit of supplies and equipment. Who knows how many months of my 15 I'll be spending here....

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Once situated at the COP, we didn't waste any time holding our dicks in our hands. At 2217 hours, I was hoisting myself over a seven-foot-high gate. First squad had just gone over, and no doubt, second squad had already climbed over the secondary gate to the target's house. I nearly dropped my weapon as I landed on the inside of the metal gate. I flipped my NODs (night optic device) off of my eyes back on my helmet, and rushed towards the newly-opened doorway that first squad had breached. These guys work fast--they'd already separated the males and females into different rooms and were now clearing the second floor. The PL was pounding the man of the house with questions about the whereabouts of his son, our target. Me, I was just there to observe and make sure that no one points a muzzle at the PL or his interpreter.

We are RIPing (relief in place) with these cats from the 82nd Airborne. We're their replacements, and they were showing us how they've been holding their sector down. Left seat, right seat, ride, baby.

By the end of the night, we'd hit 5 houses, but no target, only a neighborhood of spooked Iraqis and one fucking lucky bastard who got away for the time being.

What Man is a Man...

About four in the morning, Cardigan and I were walking back to my car in an empty Midtown parking lot. I noticed a figure moving toward us from the far side of the lot -- a beggar.

I quickly let Cardigan into the passenger side, and rounded over to the driver side, but the old man had made the distance by the time I had my door open.

"Say, man," he said, "Say, can you spare a brotha' some change."

"Nah, man," I replied without even looking at the man.

"C'mon, man, help a poor man out. Can I just get a buck, man?"

"I ain't got shit for you, chief," I looked up at him. Old, black, balding, shaggy grey beard, tattered clothes -- exactly what you'd probably imagine a beggar to look like.

The beggar backed off, "Why you gotta say somethin' like that, man? Why you gotta curse at me, man, I'm human too."

"Well, 'cause I ain't got shit for you."

"Why you gotta curse at me! Treat me like I'm human, man, please!"

"Quit badgerin' me, chief," I stood behind my open car door, "This is how I talk. I talk like this to every human being out there. Truth of the fuckin' matter is, I still ain't got shit for you. Now, back the fuck on off my car, dog, I swear I'll fuckin hurt ya."

He held his palms up and backed agreeably aside. I got in the car and drove off.

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On the drive home, after having dropped Cardigan off, I replayed the encounter over and over in my head.

It could've happened differently, I suppose. The words that spew from my mouth regularly are pretty offensive. I didn't want the beggar to bother me, but he's a beggar; that's what beggars do: they beg.

"Sorry, man, I can't help you." I could've said that, instead. Why swear at a stranger just because he's homeless? Why shun a man for being poor?

I'd convinced myself that I was in the wrong.

When I got home, there was a pot of barbequed chicken, a plate of spring rolls, egg rolls, some Vietnamese seafood salad plate. It was my nephew's birthday, and my brother had thrown a get-together earlier in the day. My parents brought home leftovers.

My brothers throw get-togethers all the time -- at least once or twice a month. Birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, visiting guests -- you name it, they dole out the food.

Everytime it happens, my parents bring the leftovers home. Nobody enjoys eating that shit days after the fact, but we choke it down because it's there.

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Six in the morning, I found the old man asleep in the corner of the parking lot. He woke up from the sound of my approaching car.

I gave him a paper plate with a drumstick, a wing, and a handful of spring rolls. He doesn't have a microwave so the food will taste like shit, but for tonight, at least he'll have a meal.

And tomorrow, he'll probably have nothing. And it'll have never mattered.

But tonight I'll sleep with a clean conscience.