This is the most realistic, general account I've read of what Iraq was like. It's a bit long for a forward so, of course, read only if you have time to spare. It mentions Muqdidiyah, the biggest town near where I was for the first two and a half months as a platoon leader and executive officer, as well as Lake Hamrin and the villages that dot its shore, where the fire base that I was in charge of was situated (on a hill, less than a kilometer from the town of Hamrin). After I moved from that job I was a "fobbit" at FOB Warhorse. But enough blathering. As I said, it's good if you decide to give it a read.
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Comforts Of Home Amid Perils Of Iraq U.S. soldiers confront chaos daily, then take refuge
By David Zucchino, LA Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD — The war in Iraq is the first American conflict in which a GI on patrol can risk evisceration from artillery shells rigged to a cellphone, then return to base in time for ESPN's "SportsCenter," a T-bone steak, a mocha cappuccino, a gym workout, an Internet surf session, a hot shower and a cold, if nonalcoholic, beer.
In Iraq, there is the "fob" — the forward operating base — and there is life outside the fob. A soldier's existence in Iraq is defined by the fob, and by the concertina wire that marks its boundaries.
The war beyond the wire is so draining that the more than 100 fobs in Iraq are fortified refuges for the nearly 150,000 U.S. troops here. Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, a 3rd Infantry Division commander based at the Baghdad airport's FOB Liberty, calls them "little oases in the middle of a dangerous and confusing world."
This is a war with no front but plenty of rear. Many soldiers spend a year in Iraq without ever leaving their bases. Others may never even meet an Iraqi. A soldier may patrol for months without ever seeing the enemy, yet risk death or disfigurement at any moment.
Almost each day in Iraq will end with an American on patrol losing an arm, a leg, an eye or a life to an earth-shattering detonation of high explosives. That these bombs are embedded in the most prosaic emblems of Iraqi life — a car, a donkey cart, a trash pile, a pothole — only intensifies the dread that attends every journey outside the wire.
Inside each fob lies an ersatz America, a manifestation of the urge to create a version of home in a hostile land.
The three vast airport fobs, home to the 3rd Infantry Division and 18th Airborne Corps, have the ambience of a trailer park set inside a maximum-security prison. Soldiers live in white metal mobile homes piled high with sandbags. They have beds, televisions, air conditioning, charcoal grills and volleyball courts.
At the flat, dusty airport fob called Liberty, there is a Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop and an Internet cafe. TV sets in mess halls and gyms blare basketball games or Fox News, the unofficial news channel of the U.S. military. A sprawling PX sells CDs, DVDs, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" caps and T-shirts that read: "Who's Your Baghdaddy?"
Every need — food, laundry, maid service — is attended to by a legion of workers from non-Muslim nations, mostly Indians, Filipinos and Nepalese.
They are a chipper, efficient lot who, combined with soldiers from places like El Salvador and Estonia, give the fob the breezy cosmopolitan feel of a misplaced Olympic Village.
The mess halls are like shopping mall food courts, with salad bars, taco bars and ice cream stations. Cheeseburgers and cheese steaks hiss and pop on short-order grills. The aisles are clogged with M-16
automatic rifles and flak vests set aside by soldiers. Fit young men and women in combat fatigues mingle with civilian contractors, some of them beer-bellied, bearded and well into middle age.
Administrative specialists who never leave the fob are known, with some condescension, as fobbits. Like every soldier here, a fobbit could be killed at any time by a random rocket or mortar round. But on
most days the greatest danger to a fobbit's health are the three heaping, deep-fried daily portions of mess hall food.
From the relative safety of fobs, U.S. commanders deliver calm, reassuring accounts of progress — insurgents captured, weapons seized and Iraqi soldiers trained to one day fight the insurgency on their own. Some commanders plot strategy in marble-walled offices inside Saddam Hussein's former palaces, beneath massive chandeliers and tiled ceilings.
For staff officers billeted at fobs, the war sometimes has all the glamour and drama of a doctoral dissertation. Maj. Tom Perison, the future operations chief for the 42nd Infantry Division at FOB Danger in Tikrit, likes to joke that he is "at the pit of the spear" — a play on the "tip of the spear" analogy used by combat commanders. Perison spends much of his time in one of Hussein's palaces analyzing local political currents and worrying about the state of the regional oil industry.
The measure of military success in Iraq lies not in cities taken or enemies killed.
"The key is learning who has control of the local population — the imams, tribal sheiks, local council leaders — and turning that to your advantage," said Maj. Doug Winton, a planner with the 3rd Infantry Division.
This is a war in which soldiers must also be politicians, diplomats, engineers and city planners, as familiar with municipal budgets and sewage capacity as M-16s and Abrams tanks.
Their daily schedules are consumed by initials.
The typical BUB — daily battle update brief — lists attacks by roadside bombs and raids on insurgent hide-outs. But the briefings devote far more time to trash pickups, mosque sermons, road paving, school attendance and repairs to electrical substations. Many officers spend more time with Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations than in armored Humvees.
They preside along with local officials at DACs and NACs (district advisory councils and neighborhood advisory councils). They work with civil affairs officers in CMOCs (civil military operations centers)
and with Iraqi police and municipal workers at JCCs (joint coordination centers). Each meeting requires a perilous round-trip patrol.
Not even an armored U.S. patrol equipped with 21st century weaponry is guaranteed safe passage on Iraq's roads. To leave the blast walls and sandbags is to virtually guarantee American casualties — without forcing the face-to-face firefights that U.S. troops are certain to win.
If the defining mission of the Vietnam War was the jungle foot patrol, the defining mission of Iraq is the vehicle patrol. There are hundreds a day involving thousands of GIs. There is no such thing as a "routine patrol" in Iraq. Every patrol, whether to raid an insurgent hide-out or deliver the mail or attend a meeting, is a combat patrol.
"We're fighting the hardest war this country has ever had to fight," said Brig. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, who finished an exhausting year in Iraq late last month.
Each journey begins with a pre-combat review, a weapons check, a map session and a grave discussion of how casualties are to be handled. There are medics on every trip. Soldiers scrawl their blood types on their helmets and boots. Aspirin is banned — it promotes bleeding.
In this war, face-to-face combat is rare. It is a war of stealth and cunning and brutally effective means of shredding human tissue. The signature weapon is the IED, the improvised explosive device, a lethal fusion of ordinary combat munitions and the electronic signal of the ubiquitous cellphone. It is the single biggest killer of U.S. troops, 1,524 of whom have died so far.
Every trip outside the wire is also, by necessity, a mission to search for IEDs. Soldiers on patrol are constantly scanning the roadside. Their radio chatter focuses on the endless places to hide an IED, and on divining the intentions of approaching drivers, vegetable-cart owners and grinning little boys. Every car is a potential bomb, every pedestrian a possible suicide bomber.
For soldiers on patrol, every Iraqi is the enemy until proven otherwise. All Iraqis are known as hajjis, which actually means someone who has made the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Often the terms "hajji" and "the enemy" are used interchangeably.
Some children smile and wave and try to cadge candy or coins from passing convoys. Most soldiers wave back but keep one hand on their weapons. Most Iraqi men, particularly the young ones, offer only baleful stares. Women are distant, spectral figures in black.
There is a delicate ballet on roadways when convoys pass. U.S. forces have learned to hog the middle of the road to reduce the effects of IEDs from either side. Iraqi drivers have learned to pull off the road entirely and stop, flashing emergency blinkers to signal an absence of malice. Scores of Iraqi civilians have been shot dead by U.S. soldiers and Marines at checkpoints and on roadways.
Many U.S. vehicles display huge signs, in Arabic and English, warning drivers to stay 50 meters away to avoid possible "lethal force." Some soldiers joke that the signs should say, "If you can read this, you're just about to get shot."
It is the job of civil affairs officers to somehow mitigate the poisonous relationship between many Iraqis and U.S. soldiers. In Baghdad's Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City recently, Capt. Raul Gamble, a civil affairs officer, made a point of stopping a patrol to pass out candy, pencils and paper Iraqi flags to a group of children and
teenagers.
Predictably, the handouts attracted a rowdy throng of grasping youths. Other soldiers on the patrol, fearing the crowd would draw an insurgent attack, were eager to leave. But Gamble patiently threaded his way through upraised arms to deliver a small stuffed bear to a 2-year-old boy in his grandfather's arms.
"It's the little things that add up to big things," he said.
Other encounters are less congenial. A day after a soldier in their unit was killed by an IED outside Muqdadiya, north of Baghdad, soldiers in an IED search team discovered and detonated a roadside bomb nearby. A crowd of young men gathered to watch, smirking and snickering over the American's death a day earlier. On a concrete wall behind them was a drawing of a donkey and the word "Bush."
The risk of IEDs is notoriously unpredictable. Surviving 100 patrols is no guarantee of surviving the 101st; the first trip is as dangerous as the last.
On Feb. 4, two 3rd Infantry Division soldiers who had just arrived in Iraq, Staff Sgt. Steven G. Bayow and Sgt. Daniel Torres, rode in a patrol with members of the unit they were replacing. It was a "right seat" ride, designed to familiarize new arrivals with conditions outside the fob. Both soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb.
Soldiers on patrol say they find themselves bracing every few moments, anticipating an explosion. The stress saps their concentration, and only grows when they realize they've lost their focus.
Some say they try to think of anything except the jury-rigged "hillbilly armor" some have added to their Humvees for protection, or the military-issue "up-armor" kits that can leave gaps in the armor plating. Soldiers say they try not to imagine shrapnel or super-heated shards of the vehicle blasting through the gaps.
On his first convoy since he saw a good friend killed by a roadside bomb, Sgt. Travis Hall drove past the site of the explosion. It was a tense, taxing journey, made almost unbearable when Hall's Humvee was stalled in rush-hour traffic for half an hour.
Three hours later, Hall pulled his Humvee safely past the berms and blast walls of FOB Warhorse. He was one month into a one-year tour in which he expected to take several patrols a week.
"Made it," Hall said, stepping out to clear his rifle. "Only 200-some more to go."
Like any war, the one in Iraq is defined by long periods of excruciating boredom punctuated by intervals of sheer terror.
After hauling weapons and anti-American propaganda from an insurgent hide-out on the shore of Lake Hamrin near the Iranian border recently, a patrol from Task Force 1-30 of the 3rd Infantry Division spent a listless afternoon on futile searches of surrounding hillsides.
Then, in rapid succession, they watched another unit chase suspected insurgents through a village across the lake; listened to U.S.-fired 155-millimeter artillery shells whistle over their heads toward an insurgent redoubt a few miles away; and stumbled across the ingredients of a powerful roadside bomb on their way back to base.
A soldier in Lt. Brian Deaton's platoon noticed a pile of rocks at the edge of the roadway, halting the convoy. Insurgents often leave markings to warn civilians about IEDs. A search of a culvert revealed a pair of 9-foot-long, 122-millimeter rockets tucked under a riverside roadway.
As the patrol radioed for an ordnance-disposal team, Deaton noticed several men standing on a far ridge. Fearing they were spotters preparing to detonate the rockets by remote control, he ordered a gunner in a Bradley fighting vehicle to fire a burst from his 25-millimeter main gun. The rounds thudded against the ridge,
scattering the men.
Fearing a detonation or ambush, soldiers took cover in the hills as two bomb-disposal experts, Staff Sgt. Dustin Flowers and Pfc. Forrest Malone, sent out a remote-controlled robot on wheels to investigate the rockets. Malone steered the robot, a Mars rover look-alike the size of a child's wagon, from a computer screen set up on the hood of his armor-plated vehicle.
As he guided the device toward the rockets, the robot's batteries suddenly died and it rolled to a stop. Flowers, who had taken cover behind a boulder several hundred yards away, cursed at Malone over a two-way radio. He thought the private, who was just six months out of military explosives school, had botched the remote-control operation. Flowers is a veteran of 50 ordnance disposal missions in Iraq.
He stomped over to Malone. When the private explained that the battery had died, Flowers muttered, "That robot is gonna be the death of me," and began climbing into a 70-pound bomb-protection suit. He would
inspect the rockets himself.
Even wearing the suit, Flowers said, he wouldn't survive if the rockets exploded in his face. "The suit just gives them something to bury me in," he said.
Struggling to walk in the clumsy clothing, Flowers lumbered toward the rockets, but he couldn't safely get close enough to see whether they had been wired to a detonator.
He asked Deaton to have a Bradley gunner fire machine-gun rounds into the rockets. The bullets would detonate the rockets if they had been wired to explode. The gunner fired several bursts, but couldn't manage
to hit the rockets. Finally, Flowers decided to take matters into his own hands. Sweating profusely inside the suit, he made his way down into the culvert. He maneuvered close enough to see that the rockets had not been wired.
He and Malone hauled the heavy rockets, one at a time, down an embankment. They wired several blocks of C-4 plastic explosive to them, set a fuse, then hurried back to their armored vehicle and sped to safety.
The rockets exploded with a thump that echoed off the hillsides. A black mushroom cloud rose over the river valley.
The smoke spread as the patrol raced down the roadway, still scanning both sides of the curving mountain road for more IEDs. At dusk, the soldiers eased back into FOB Warhorse, safely home in time for evening chow, DVDs and a hot shower.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Sunday, March 27, 2005
A Big Mother of a Forward
This is the most realistic, general account I've read of what Iraq was like. It's a bit long for a forward so, of course, read only if you have time to spare. It mentions Muqdidiyah, the biggest town near where I was for the first two and a half months as a platoon leader and executive officer, as well as Lake Hamrin and the villages that dot its shore, where the fire base that I was in charge of was situated (on a hill, less than a kilometer from the town of Hamrin). After I moved from that job I was a "fobbit" at FOB Warhorse. But enough blathering. As I said, it's good if you decide to give it a read.
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Comforts Of Home Amid Perils Of Iraq U.S. soldiers confront chaos daily, then take refuge
By David Zucchino, LA Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD — The war in Iraq is the first American conflict in which a GI on patrol can risk evisceration from artillery shells rigged to a cellphone, then return to base in time for ESPN's "SportsCenter," a T-bone steak, a mocha cappuccino, a gym workout, an Internet surf session, a hot shower and a cold, if nonalcoholic, beer.
In Iraq, there is the "fob" — the forward operating base — and there is life outside the fob. A soldier's existence in Iraq is defined by the fob, and by the concertina wire that marks its boundaries.
The war beyond the wire is so draining that the more than 100 fobs in
Iraq are fortified refuges for the nearly 150,000 U.S. troops here.
Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, a 3rd Infantry Division commander based at the
Baghdad airport's FOB Liberty, calls them "little oases in the middle
of a dangerous and confusing world."
This is a war with no front but plenty of rear. Many soldiers spend a
year in Iraq without ever leaving their bases. Others may never even
meet an Iraqi. A soldier may patrol for months without ever seeing the
enemy, yet risk death or disfigurement at any moment.
Almost each day in Iraq will end with an American on patrol losing an
arm, a leg, an eye or a life to an earth-shattering detonation of high
explosives. That these bombs are embedded in the most prosaic emblems
of Iraqi life — a car, a donkey cart, a trash pile, a pothole — only
intensifies the dread that attends every journey outside the wire.
Inside each fob lies an ersatz America, a manifestation of the urge to
create a version of home in a hostile land.
The three vast airport fobs, home to the 3rd Infantry Division and
18th Airborne Corps, have the ambience of a trailer park set inside a
maximum-security prison. Soldiers live in white metal mobile homes
piled high with sandbags. They have beds, televisions, air
conditioning, charcoal grills and volleyball courts.
At the flat, dusty airport fob called Liberty, there is a Burger King,
a Subway sandwich shop and an Internet cafe. TV sets in mess halls and
gyms blare basketball games or Fox News, the unofficial news channel
of the U.S. military. A sprawling PX sells CDs, DVDs, "Operation Iraqi
Freedom" caps and T-shirts that read: "Who's Your Baghdaddy?"
Every need — food, laundry, maid service — is attended to by a legion
of workers from non-Muslim nations, mostly Indians, Filipinos and
Nepalese.
They are a chipper, efficient lot who, combined with soldiers from
places like El Salvador and Estonia, give the fob the breezy,
cosmopolitan feel of a misplaced Olympic Village.
The mess halls are like shopping mall food courts, with salad bars,
taco bars and ice cream stations. Cheeseburgers and cheese steaks hiss
and pop on short-order grills. The aisles are clogged with M-16
automatic rifles and flak vests set aside by soldiers. Fit young men
and women in combat fatigues mingle with civilian contractors, some of
them beer-bellied, bearded and well into middle age.
Administrative specialists who never leave the fob are known, with
some condescension, as fobbits. Like every soldier here, a fobbit
could be killed at any time by a random rocket or mortar round. But on
most days the greatest danger to a fobbit's health are the three
heaping, deep-fried daily portions of mess hall food.
From the relative safety of fobs, U.S. commanders deliver calm,
reassuring accounts of progress — insurgents captured, weapons seized
and Iraqi soldiers trained to one day fight the insurgency on their
own. Some commanders plot strategy in marble-walled offices inside
Saddam Hussein's former palaces, beneath massive chandeliers and tiled
ceilings.
For staff officers billeted at fobs, the war sometimes has all the
glamour and drama of a doctoral dissertation. Maj. Tom Perison, the
future operations chief for the 42nd Infantry Division at FOB Danger
in Tikrit, likes to joke that he is "at the pit of the spear" — a play
on the "tip of the spear" analogy used by combat commanders. Perison
spends much of his time in one of Hussein's palaces analyzing local
political currents and worrying about the state of the regional oil
industry.
The measure of military success in Iraq lies not in cities taken or
enemies killed.
"The key is learning who has control of the local population — the
imams, tribal sheiks, local council leaders — and turning that to your
advantage," said Maj. Doug Winton, a planner with the 3rd Infantry
Division.
This is a war in which soldiers must also be politicians, diplomats,
engineers and city planners, as familiar with municipal budgets and
sewage capacity as M-16s and Abrams tanks.
Their daily schedules are consumed by initials.
The typical BUB — daily battle update brief — lists attacks by
roadside bombs and raids on insurgent hide-outs. But the briefings
devote far more time to trash pickups, mosque sermons, road paving,
school attendance and repairs to electrical substations. Many officers
spend more time with Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations
than in armored Humvees.
They preside along with local officials at DACs and NACs (district
advisory councils and neighborhood advisory councils). They work with
civil affairs officers in CMOCs (civil military operations centers)
and with Iraqi police and municipal workers at JCCs (joint
coordination centers). Each meeting requires a perilous round-trip
patrol.
Not even an armored U.S. patrol equipped with 21st century weaponry is
guaranteed safe passage on Iraq's roads. To leave the blast walls and
sandbags is to virtually guarantee American casualties — without
forcing the face-to-face firefights that U.S. troops are certain to
win.
If the defining mission of the Vietnam War was the jungle foot patrol,
the defining mission of Iraq is the vehicle patrol. There are hundreds
a day involving thousands of GIs. There is no such thing as a "routine
patrol" in Iraq. Every patrol, whether to raid an insurgent hide-out
or deliver the mail or attend a meeting, is a combat patrol.
"We're fighting the hardest war this country has ever had to fight,"
said Brig. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, who finished an exhausting year in
Iraq late last month.
Each journey begins with a pre-combat review, a weapons check, a map
session and a grave discussion of how casualties are to be handled.
There are medics on every trip. Soldiers scrawl their blood types on
their helmets and boots. Aspirin is banned — it promotes bleeding.
In this war, face-to-face combat is rare. It is a war of stealth and
cunning and brutally effective means of shredding human tissue. The
signature weapon is the IED, the improvised explosive device, a lethal
fusion of ordinary combat munitions and the electronic signal of the
ubiquitous cellphone. It is the single biggest killer of U.S. troops,
1,524 of whom have died so far.
Every trip outside the wire is also, by necessity, a mission to search
for IEDs. Soldiers on patrol are constantly scanning the roadside.
Their radio chatter focuses on the endless places to hide an IED, and
on divining the intentions of approaching drivers, vegetable-cart
owners and grinning little boys. Every car is a potential bomb, every
pedestrian a possible suicide bomber.
For soldiers on patrol, every Iraqi is the enemy until proven
otherwise. All Iraqis are known as hajjis, which actually means
someone who has made the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Often
the terms "hajji" and "the enemy" are used interchangeably.
Some children smile and wave and try to cadge candy or coins from
passing convoys. Most soldiers wave back but keep one hand on their
weapons. Most Iraqi men, particularly the young ones, offer only
baleful stares. Women are distant, spectral figures in black.
There is a delicate ballet on roadways when convoys pass. U.S. forces
have learned to hog the middle of the road to reduce the effects of
IEDs from either side. Iraqi drivers have learned to pull off the road
entirely and stop, flashing emergency blinkers to signal an absence of
malice. Scores of Iraqi civilians have been shot dead by U.S. soldiers
and Marines at checkpoints and on roadways.
Many U.S. vehicles display huge signs, in Arabic and English, warning
drivers to stay 50 meters away to avoid possible "lethal force." Some
soldiers joke that the signs should say, "If you can read this, you're
just about to get shot."
It is the job of civil affairs officers to somehow mitigate the
poisonous relationship between many Iraqis and U.S. soldiers. In
Baghdad's Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City recently, Capt. Raul Gamble,
a civil affairs officer, made a point of stopping a patrol to pass out
candy, pencils and paper Iraqi flags to a group of children and
teenagers.
Predictably, the handouts attracted a rowdy throng of grasping youths.
Other soldiers on the patrol, fearing the crowd would draw an
insurgent attack, were eager to leave. But Gamble patiently threaded
his way through upraised arms to deliver a small stuffed bear to a
2-year-old boy in his grandfather's arms.
"It's the little things that add up to big things," he said.
Other encounters are less congenial. A day after a soldier in their
unit was killed by an IED outside Muqdadiya, north of Baghdad,
soldiers in an IED search team discovered and detonated a roadside
bomb nearby. A crowd of young men gathered to watch, smirking and
snickering over the American's death a day earlier. On a concrete wall
behind them was a drawing of a donkey and the word "Bush."
The risk of IEDs is notoriously unpredictable. Surviving 100 patrols
is no guarantee of surviving the 101st; the first trip is as dangerous
as the last.
On Feb. 4, two 3rd Infantry Division soldiers who had just arrived in
Iraq, Staff Sgt. Steven G. Bayow and Sgt. Daniel Torres, rode in a
patrol with members of the unit they were replacing. It was a "right
seat" ride, designed to familiarize new arrivals with conditions
outside the fob. Both soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb.
Soldiers on patrol say they find themselves bracing every few moments,
anticipating an explosion. The stress saps their concentration, and
only grows when they realize they've lost their focus.
Some say they try to think of anything except the jury-rigged
"hillbilly armor" some have added to their Humvees for protection, or
the military-issue "up-armor" kits that can leave gaps in the armor
plating. Soldiers say they try not to imagine shrapnel or super-heated
shards of the vehicle blasting through the gaps.
On his first convoy since he saw a good friend killed by a roadside
bomb, Sgt. Travis Hall drove past the site of the explosion. It was a
tense, taxing journey, made almost unbearable when Hall's Humvee was
stalled in rush-hour traffic for half an hour.
Three hours later, Hall pulled his Humvee safely past the berms and
blast walls of FOB Warhorse. He was one month into a one-year tour in
which he expected to take several patrols a week.
"Made it," Hall said, stepping out to clear his rifle. "Only 200-some
more to go."
Like any war, the one in Iraq is defined by long periods of
excruciating boredom punctuated by intervals of sheer terror.
After hauling weapons and anti-American propaganda from an insurgent
hide-out on the shore of Lake Hamrin near the Iranian border recently,
a patrol from Task Force 1-30 of the 3rd Infantry Division spent a
listless afternoon on futile searches of surrounding hillsides.
Then, in rapid succession, they watched another unit chase suspected
insurgents through a village across the lake; listened to U.S.-fired
155-millimeter artillery shells whistle over their heads toward an
insurgent redoubt a few miles away; and stumbled across the
ingredients of a powerful roadside bomb on their way back to base.
A soldier in Lt. Brian Deaton's platoon noticed a pile of rocks at the
edge of the roadway, halting the convoy. Insurgents often leave
markings to warn civilians about IEDs. A search of a culvert revealed
a pair of 9-foot-long, 122-millimeter rockets tucked under a riverside
roadway.
As the patrol radioed for an ordnance-disposal team, Deaton noticed
several men standing on a far ridge. Fearing they were spotters
preparing to detonate the rockets by remote control, he ordered a
gunner in a Bradley fighting vehicle to fire a burst from his
25-millimeter main gun. The rounds thudded against the ridge,
scattering the men.
Fearing a detonation or ambush, soldiers took cover in the hills as
two bomb-disposal experts, Staff Sgt. Dustin Flowers and Pfc. Forrest
Malone, sent out a remote-controlled robot on wheels to investigate
the rockets. Malone steered the robot, a Mars rover look-alike the
size of a child's wagon, from a computer screen set up on the hood of
his armor-plated vehicle.
As he guided the device toward the rockets, the robot's batteries
suddenly died and it rolled to a stop. Flowers, who had taken cover
behind a boulder several hundred yards away, cursed at Malone over a
two-way radio. He thought the private, who was just six months out of
military explosives school, had botched the remote-control operation.
Flowers is a veteran of 50 ordnance disposal missions in Iraq.
He stomped over to Malone. When the private explained that the battery
had died, Flowers muttered, "That robot is gonna be the death of me,"
and began climbing into a 70-pound bomb-protection suit. He would
inspect the rockets himself.
Even wearing the suit, Flowers said, he wouldn't survive if the
rockets exploded in his face. "The suit just gives them something to
bury me in," he said.
Struggling to walk in the clumsy clothing, Flowers lumbered toward the
rockets, but he couldn't safely get close enough to see whether they
had been wired to a detonator.
He asked Deaton to have a Bradley gunner fire machine-gun rounds into
the rockets. The bullets would detonate the rockets if they had been
wired to explode. The gunner fired several bursts, but couldn't manage
to hit the rockets. Finally, Flowers decided to take matters into his
own hands. Sweating profusely inside the suit, he made his way down
into the culvert. He maneuvered close enough to see that the rockets
had not been wired.
He and Malone hauled the heavy rockets, one at a time, down an
embankment. They wired several blocks of C-4 plastic explosive to
them, set a fuse, then hurried back to their armored vehicle and sped
to safety.
The rockets exploded with a thump that echoed off the hillsides. A
black mushroom cloud rose over the river valley.
The smoke spread as the patrol raced down the roadway, still scanning
both sides of the curving mountain road for more IEDs. At dusk, the
soldiers eased back into FOB Warhorse, safely home in time for evening
chow, DVDs and a hot shower.
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Comforts Of Home Amid Perils Of Iraq U.S. soldiers confront chaos daily, then take refuge
By David Zucchino, LA Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD — The war in Iraq is the first American conflict in which a GI on patrol can risk evisceration from artillery shells rigged to a cellphone, then return to base in time for ESPN's "SportsCenter," a T-bone steak, a mocha cappuccino, a gym workout, an Internet surf session, a hot shower and a cold, if nonalcoholic, beer.
In Iraq, there is the "fob" — the forward operating base — and there is life outside the fob. A soldier's existence in Iraq is defined by the fob, and by the concertina wire that marks its boundaries.
The war beyond the wire is so draining that the more than 100 fobs in
Iraq are fortified refuges for the nearly 150,000 U.S. troops here.
Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, a 3rd Infantry Division commander based at the
Baghdad airport's FOB Liberty, calls them "little oases in the middle
of a dangerous and confusing world."
This is a war with no front but plenty of rear. Many soldiers spend a
year in Iraq without ever leaving their bases. Others may never even
meet an Iraqi. A soldier may patrol for months without ever seeing the
enemy, yet risk death or disfigurement at any moment.
Almost each day in Iraq will end with an American on patrol losing an
arm, a leg, an eye or a life to an earth-shattering detonation of high
explosives. That these bombs are embedded in the most prosaic emblems
of Iraqi life — a car, a donkey cart, a trash pile, a pothole — only
intensifies the dread that attends every journey outside the wire.
Inside each fob lies an ersatz America, a manifestation of the urge to
create a version of home in a hostile land.
The three vast airport fobs, home to the 3rd Infantry Division and
18th Airborne Corps, have the ambience of a trailer park set inside a
maximum-security prison. Soldiers live in white metal mobile homes
piled high with sandbags. They have beds, televisions, air
conditioning, charcoal grills and volleyball courts.
At the flat, dusty airport fob called Liberty, there is a Burger King,
a Subway sandwich shop and an Internet cafe. TV sets in mess halls and
gyms blare basketball games or Fox News, the unofficial news channel
of the U.S. military. A sprawling PX sells CDs, DVDs, "Operation Iraqi
Freedom" caps and T-shirts that read: "Who's Your Baghdaddy?"
Every need — food, laundry, maid service — is attended to by a legion
of workers from non-Muslim nations, mostly Indians, Filipinos and
Nepalese.
They are a chipper, efficient lot who, combined with soldiers from
places like El Salvador and Estonia, give the fob the breezy,
cosmopolitan feel of a misplaced Olympic Village.
The mess halls are like shopping mall food courts, with salad bars,
taco bars and ice cream stations. Cheeseburgers and cheese steaks hiss
and pop on short-order grills. The aisles are clogged with M-16
automatic rifles and flak vests set aside by soldiers. Fit young men
and women in combat fatigues mingle with civilian contractors, some of
them beer-bellied, bearded and well into middle age.
Administrative specialists who never leave the fob are known, with
some condescension, as fobbits. Like every soldier here, a fobbit
could be killed at any time by a random rocket or mortar round. But on
most days the greatest danger to a fobbit's health are the three
heaping, deep-fried daily portions of mess hall food.
From the relative safety of fobs, U.S. commanders deliver calm,
reassuring accounts of progress — insurgents captured, weapons seized
and Iraqi soldiers trained to one day fight the insurgency on their
own. Some commanders plot strategy in marble-walled offices inside
Saddam Hussein's former palaces, beneath massive chandeliers and tiled
ceilings.
For staff officers billeted at fobs, the war sometimes has all the
glamour and drama of a doctoral dissertation. Maj. Tom Perison, the
future operations chief for the 42nd Infantry Division at FOB Danger
in Tikrit, likes to joke that he is "at the pit of the spear" — a play
on the "tip of the spear" analogy used by combat commanders. Perison
spends much of his time in one of Hussein's palaces analyzing local
political currents and worrying about the state of the regional oil
industry.
The measure of military success in Iraq lies not in cities taken or
enemies killed.
"The key is learning who has control of the local population — the
imams, tribal sheiks, local council leaders — and turning that to your
advantage," said Maj. Doug Winton, a planner with the 3rd Infantry
Division.
This is a war in which soldiers must also be politicians, diplomats,
engineers and city planners, as familiar with municipal budgets and
sewage capacity as M-16s and Abrams tanks.
Their daily schedules are consumed by initials.
The typical BUB — daily battle update brief — lists attacks by
roadside bombs and raids on insurgent hide-outs. But the briefings
devote far more time to trash pickups, mosque sermons, road paving,
school attendance and repairs to electrical substations. Many officers
spend more time with Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations
than in armored Humvees.
They preside along with local officials at DACs and NACs (district
advisory councils and neighborhood advisory councils). They work with
civil affairs officers in CMOCs (civil military operations centers)
and with Iraqi police and municipal workers at JCCs (joint
coordination centers). Each meeting requires a perilous round-trip
patrol.
Not even an armored U.S. patrol equipped with 21st century weaponry is
guaranteed safe passage on Iraq's roads. To leave the blast walls and
sandbags is to virtually guarantee American casualties — without
forcing the face-to-face firefights that U.S. troops are certain to
win.
If the defining mission of the Vietnam War was the jungle foot patrol,
the defining mission of Iraq is the vehicle patrol. There are hundreds
a day involving thousands of GIs. There is no such thing as a "routine
patrol" in Iraq. Every patrol, whether to raid an insurgent hide-out
or deliver the mail or attend a meeting, is a combat patrol.
"We're fighting the hardest war this country has ever had to fight,"
said Brig. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, who finished an exhausting year in
Iraq late last month.
Each journey begins with a pre-combat review, a weapons check, a map
session and a grave discussion of how casualties are to be handled.
There are medics on every trip. Soldiers scrawl their blood types on
their helmets and boots. Aspirin is banned — it promotes bleeding.
In this war, face-to-face combat is rare. It is a war of stealth and
cunning and brutally effective means of shredding human tissue. The
signature weapon is the IED, the improvised explosive device, a lethal
fusion of ordinary combat munitions and the electronic signal of the
ubiquitous cellphone. It is the single biggest killer of U.S. troops,
1,524 of whom have died so far.
Every trip outside the wire is also, by necessity, a mission to search
for IEDs. Soldiers on patrol are constantly scanning the roadside.
Their radio chatter focuses on the endless places to hide an IED, and
on divining the intentions of approaching drivers, vegetable-cart
owners and grinning little boys. Every car is a potential bomb, every
pedestrian a possible suicide bomber.
For soldiers on patrol, every Iraqi is the enemy until proven
otherwise. All Iraqis are known as hajjis, which actually means
someone who has made the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Often
the terms "hajji" and "the enemy" are used interchangeably.
Some children smile and wave and try to cadge candy or coins from
passing convoys. Most soldiers wave back but keep one hand on their
weapons. Most Iraqi men, particularly the young ones, offer only
baleful stares. Women are distant, spectral figures in black.
There is a delicate ballet on roadways when convoys pass. U.S. forces
have learned to hog the middle of the road to reduce the effects of
IEDs from either side. Iraqi drivers have learned to pull off the road
entirely and stop, flashing emergency blinkers to signal an absence of
malice. Scores of Iraqi civilians have been shot dead by U.S. soldiers
and Marines at checkpoints and on roadways.
Many U.S. vehicles display huge signs, in Arabic and English, warning
drivers to stay 50 meters away to avoid possible "lethal force." Some
soldiers joke that the signs should say, "If you can read this, you're
just about to get shot."
It is the job of civil affairs officers to somehow mitigate the
poisonous relationship between many Iraqis and U.S. soldiers. In
Baghdad's Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City recently, Capt. Raul Gamble,
a civil affairs officer, made a point of stopping a patrol to pass out
candy, pencils and paper Iraqi flags to a group of children and
teenagers.
Predictably, the handouts attracted a rowdy throng of grasping youths.
Other soldiers on the patrol, fearing the crowd would draw an
insurgent attack, were eager to leave. But Gamble patiently threaded
his way through upraised arms to deliver a small stuffed bear to a
2-year-old boy in his grandfather's arms.
"It's the little things that add up to big things," he said.
Other encounters are less congenial. A day after a soldier in their
unit was killed by an IED outside Muqdadiya, north of Baghdad,
soldiers in an IED search team discovered and detonated a roadside
bomb nearby. A crowd of young men gathered to watch, smirking and
snickering over the American's death a day earlier. On a concrete wall
behind them was a drawing of a donkey and the word "Bush."
The risk of IEDs is notoriously unpredictable. Surviving 100 patrols
is no guarantee of surviving the 101st; the first trip is as dangerous
as the last.
On Feb. 4, two 3rd Infantry Division soldiers who had just arrived in
Iraq, Staff Sgt. Steven G. Bayow and Sgt. Daniel Torres, rode in a
patrol with members of the unit they were replacing. It was a "right
seat" ride, designed to familiarize new arrivals with conditions
outside the fob. Both soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb.
Soldiers on patrol say they find themselves bracing every few moments,
anticipating an explosion. The stress saps their concentration, and
only grows when they realize they've lost their focus.
Some say they try to think of anything except the jury-rigged
"hillbilly armor" some have added to their Humvees for protection, or
the military-issue "up-armor" kits that can leave gaps in the armor
plating. Soldiers say they try not to imagine shrapnel or super-heated
shards of the vehicle blasting through the gaps.
On his first convoy since he saw a good friend killed by a roadside
bomb, Sgt. Travis Hall drove past the site of the explosion. It was a
tense, taxing journey, made almost unbearable when Hall's Humvee was
stalled in rush-hour traffic for half an hour.
Three hours later, Hall pulled his Humvee safely past the berms and
blast walls of FOB Warhorse. He was one month into a one-year tour in
which he expected to take several patrols a week.
"Made it," Hall said, stepping out to clear his rifle. "Only 200-some
more to go."
Like any war, the one in Iraq is defined by long periods of
excruciating boredom punctuated by intervals of sheer terror.
After hauling weapons and anti-American propaganda from an insurgent
hide-out on the shore of Lake Hamrin near the Iranian border recently,
a patrol from Task Force 1-30 of the 3rd Infantry Division spent a
listless afternoon on futile searches of surrounding hillsides.
Then, in rapid succession, they watched another unit chase suspected
insurgents through a village across the lake; listened to U.S.-fired
155-millimeter artillery shells whistle over their heads toward an
insurgent redoubt a few miles away; and stumbled across the
ingredients of a powerful roadside bomb on their way back to base.
A soldier in Lt. Brian Deaton's platoon noticed a pile of rocks at the
edge of the roadway, halting the convoy. Insurgents often leave
markings to warn civilians about IEDs. A search of a culvert revealed
a pair of 9-foot-long, 122-millimeter rockets tucked under a riverside
roadway.
As the patrol radioed for an ordnance-disposal team, Deaton noticed
several men standing on a far ridge. Fearing they were spotters
preparing to detonate the rockets by remote control, he ordered a
gunner in a Bradley fighting vehicle to fire a burst from his
25-millimeter main gun. The rounds thudded against the ridge,
scattering the men.
Fearing a detonation or ambush, soldiers took cover in the hills as
two bomb-disposal experts, Staff Sgt. Dustin Flowers and Pfc. Forrest
Malone, sent out a remote-controlled robot on wheels to investigate
the rockets. Malone steered the robot, a Mars rover look-alike the
size of a child's wagon, from a computer screen set up on the hood of
his armor-plated vehicle.
As he guided the device toward the rockets, the robot's batteries
suddenly died and it rolled to a stop. Flowers, who had taken cover
behind a boulder several hundred yards away, cursed at Malone over a
two-way radio. He thought the private, who was just six months out of
military explosives school, had botched the remote-control operation.
Flowers is a veteran of 50 ordnance disposal missions in Iraq.
He stomped over to Malone. When the private explained that the battery
had died, Flowers muttered, "That robot is gonna be the death of me,"
and began climbing into a 70-pound bomb-protection suit. He would
inspect the rockets himself.
Even wearing the suit, Flowers said, he wouldn't survive if the
rockets exploded in his face. "The suit just gives them something to
bury me in," he said.
Struggling to walk in the clumsy clothing, Flowers lumbered toward the
rockets, but he couldn't safely get close enough to see whether they
had been wired to a detonator.
He asked Deaton to have a Bradley gunner fire machine-gun rounds into
the rockets. The bullets would detonate the rockets if they had been
wired to explode. The gunner fired several bursts, but couldn't manage
to hit the rockets. Finally, Flowers decided to take matters into his
own hands. Sweating profusely inside the suit, he made his way down
into the culvert. He maneuvered close enough to see that the rockets
had not been wired.
He and Malone hauled the heavy rockets, one at a time, down an
embankment. They wired several blocks of C-4 plastic explosive to
them, set a fuse, then hurried back to their armored vehicle and sped
to safety.
The rockets exploded with a thump that echoed off the hillsides. A
black mushroom cloud rose over the river valley.
The smoke spread as the patrol raced down the roadway, still scanning
both sides of the curving mountain road for more IEDs. At dusk, the
soldiers eased back into FOB Warhorse, safely home in time for evening
chow, DVDs and a hot shower.
Friday, March 11, 2005
A Strange Night
I had told myself that I would cease and desist with these mass emails once I'd gotten back to Germany, but I had such a strange and unique experience last night that I thought it deserved an exception to policy. Allow me to set the scene…
Yesterday, I picked up my buddy Liz, who finally got back from her tour in Iraq. As she is without wheels for a few days and lives out in the boonies, she is staying in the guest bedroom of my apartment, which is a ten minute walk from the post. Liz, by the way, dates my buddy Chris, who was due in last night from a trip he took with some other Army buddies to Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
At any rate, after going out to eat, Liz and I went back to my apartment where I showed her "The Grudge", an American remake of a Japanese horror movie about a haunted house that I find to be terrifying (though I'm a complete sissy when it comes to those sorts of things). In the movie, a Japanese boogeywoman chases down anyone who enters the house and swallows their souls (which sounds like a retarded conceit, but really is scary, I promise). I thought it would be a great thing to scare the living bejesus out of Liz on her first night back in the world.
While we were watching, at that moment in every horror movie where one feels the urge to tell the characters on screen that they're being really stupid because they're about to be sliced and diced ("Let's go check out that strange noise down in the basement of the house where all the people seem to turn up butchered!"), Chris called. Liz freaked and jammed her claws through my rib cage, which produced a banshee-like wail and a sadly pathetic (in a four year old child sort of way) attempt to extricate her talons from my pericardium. He'd gotten back in town and he needed a ride to the airport the next morning. It was already relatively late (10:30pm or so) and he said that he'd be a little while packing before he came over. I'd told him to just come over and spend the night because we'd have to leave for the airport at four in the morning.
Liz and I finished up the movie, which I was pleased to have survived, even if I did have several lacerations and a punctured lung from her attacks on me throughout the picture. She made me stay in the guest bedroom with her until she fell asleep, at which point I went out to the living room to give Chris a call, in order to find out how much longer he'd be. He said it wouldn't be too much longer so I told him I was going to sleep but that I'd have my cell phone next to my bed so he could call when he got downstairs if I didn't hear the buzzer(so that I could buzz him in to the building).
I was awoken perhaps thirty minutes later to the buzzer, which let me know that Chris was downstairs. Groggily, I tumbled over to the front door, pressed the buzzer to let Chris in, cracked the door so that he could get in after going up the four flights of stairs, and went right back to bed. I turned on the bathroom light so that it would light up the hallway for him when he came in. As I was trying to get back to sleep, in that state in between dream and reality, I heard Liz moaning and groaning her way through a nightmare. I also heard the bump and scrape of Chris making his way into the apartment. I hollered, "It sounds like Liz is having a nightmare. Take care of it." I heard no word from Chris so I opened my eyes and looked to my open bedroom door, where instead of seeing Chris, I saw the outline of a strange woman with jet black hair. I was completely flabbergasted as my mind tried to account for what my eyes were telling it, perhaps thinking that "the Grudge" had come to my apartment as I knew that I wasn't asleep and thus dreaming. I heard a strangely recognizable whimper from the creature, at which point I said, "Julia?"
In the spring of 2003, I'd flown my brother out to live with me. Wyman, as many of you well know, is eight years older than me and was thirty two at the time. During the course of his eight month stay, he acquired a seventeen- year- old, German girlfriend, Julia. I didn't really know Julia all that well as she was fairly shy, and seemed to serve as no more than an ornament on my couch whenever I'd stroll through the living room where she and Wyman were watching a movie. After Wyman returned to the States, I was in the field preparing for Iraq for the better part of three months and then I went on Christmas leave back to SC.
When I came back, in the time when I was getting my affairs in order (ie drinking like a fish with Liz and Chris), Julia called me out of the blue. She wanted to see me before I went off to war. Now, I found that a bit odd, as I'd really not spoken to Julia privately before, but I figured that if it were important to her, then there was no harm in accommodating her. I did drag Chris and Liz along with me though (Julia was to meet me in a pub) so as to give myself an exit. We chatted for a bit and, when I made my move to leave, she hugged me and whispered into my ear, "You are very smart, and very good-looking, and I hope you get a girlfriend you deserve." I was speechless.
During my year in Iraq, Wyman told me that Julia had gotten married to soldier, a sergeant in the Military Police, though he didn't see that working out since she'd told Wyman, "I don't want to have kids and I want to go out and party; he wants kids and to stay home…and he's not good in bed."
Earlier in the week, Julia's sister, Nadine, had stopped by to visit. I seen Nadine perhaps twice in my life and maybe had said five words to her total. Nonetheless, there she was at my door, lugging her two-month old baby up the four flights of stairs. I had one of the new officers staying with me for a few days at the time, since he too didn't have wheels yet, and I told him to pretend he was taking a nap in the living room so that she wouldn't stay too long. She didn't get the hint. We made polite, though forced conversation ("Ah, your baby has a forked tongue and webbed toes…He's really cute.") before I managed to shuttle the muder and kinder home, though not before she fed him in my apartment (I thought she was going to whip it out, but, Praise Jesus, she had a bottle). Nadine had said that Julia wanted to stop by and visit and asked me what I was doing that weekend. I told her that I wasn't sure what my plans were and I didn't offer my phone number. I'd hoped that would be the end of it.
At any rate, there was Julia, A SOLDIER'S WIFE, standing in my bedroom doorway at midnight. I threw on my shorts and went up to her. She reeked of German cigarette smoke, alcohol and trouble. I could see that it was a miracle that she was still managing to stand. She raised her drooped head up and peered at me through her half- shut eyes. She hugged me before I knew what was happening and said, "You're skinny (I lost 20 to 30lbs during my year in Iraq). I like you better bigger…I need to use the bathroom." She stumbled off to the bathroom. I scuttled over to my room and typed a message on my phone to Chris, telling him that my brother's 19y.o. ex girlfriend had just shown up in my apartment. She came out of the bathroom and wanted to hug again, which I deftly sidestepped.
"Julia, it's good to see you, but it's midnight; why don't I get you a taxi? I'd drive, but I had a bit to drink tonight."
"No. I want to stay here."
"I don't think that would be a good idea Julia."
"I don't think that would be a good idea, Julia. Let me get you a taxi."
I rousted Liz, who, poor thing, couldn't make neither heads nor tails out of what I was saying for about twenty seconds. Then she thought I was joking.
"Liz, it's after midnight and I'm wearing a jacket. Trust me, this isn't a joke."
She got up, walked over, and her eyes bugged out a bit when she saw the inebriated German splayed out on my bed. We tried to wake her up, but she was sticking to the whole passed out thing. I called Wyman to get her address and phone number because I was putting her in a taxi, come hell or high water. As I was getting the information from him he added, "You know she had a crush on you." No @@#!
I picked her up and carried her over to the living room couch. As Liz and I tried to put her jacket back on her, Liz mentioned, "She's not wearing her wedding band." #@#!
I called her house and spoke to Nadine. "Oh, you're going to take care of her?"
"Oh, okay, we've been drinking a little bit. I'll wait up for her."
I managed to get Julia to admit to being conscious and we began the trip down the stairs. This was quite a chore because she was absolutely shnockered. She stopped at the first two landings to hug me. On the next four she cried and kept moaning about me being mad at her. Then she stopped, looked at me for a long moment and said, "Your hair is long (I'm growing it out for my impending release.). I like it better short. (Good to see you too, Julia)" Out of the window of one of the landings I saw a taxi pull up and Chris get out.
Yesterday, I picked up my buddy Liz, who finally got back from her tour in Iraq. As she is without wheels for a few days and lives out in the boonies, she is staying in the guest bedroom of my apartment, which is a ten minute walk from the post. Liz, by the way, dates my buddy Chris, who was due in last night from a trip he took with some other Army buddies to Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
At any rate, after going out to eat, Liz and I went back to my apartment where I showed her "The Grudge", an American remake of a Japanese horror movie about a haunted house that I find to be terrifying (though I'm a complete sissy when it comes to those sorts of things). In the movie, a Japanese boogeywoman chases down anyone who enters the house and swallows their souls (which sounds like a retarded conceit, but really is scary, I promise). I thought it would be a great thing to scare the living bejesus out of Liz on her first night back in the world.
While we were watching, at that moment in every horror movie where one feels the urge to tell the characters on screen that they're being really stupid because they're about to be sliced and diced ("Let's go check out that strange noise down in the basement of the house where all the people seem to turn up butchered!"), Chris called. Liz freaked and jammed her claws through my rib cage, which produced a banshee-like wail and a sadly pathetic (in a four year old child sort of way) attempt to extricate her talons from my pericardium. He'd gotten back in town and he needed a ride to the airport the next morning. It was already relatively late (10:30pm or so) and he said that he'd be a little while packing before he came over. I'd told him to just come over and spend the night because we'd have to leave for the airport at four in the morning.
Liz and I finished up the movie, which I was pleased to have survived, even if I did have several lacerations and a punctured lung from her attacks on me throughout the picture. She made me stay in the guest bedroom with her until she fell asleep, at which point I went out to the living room to give Chris a call, in order to find out how much longer he'd be. He said it wouldn't be too much longer so I told him I was going to sleep but that I'd have my cell phone next to my bed so he could call when he got downstairs if I didn't hear the buzzer(so that I could buzz him in to the building).
I was awoken perhaps thirty minutes later to the buzzer, which let me know that Chris was downstairs. Groggily, I tumbled over to the front door, pressed the buzzer to let Chris in, cracked the door so that he could get in after going up the four flights of stairs, and went right back to bed. I turned on the bathroom light so that it would light up the hallway for him when he came in. As I was trying to get back to sleep, in that state in between dream and reality, I heard Liz moaning and groaning her way through a nightmare. I also heard the bump and scrape of Chris making his way into the apartment. I hollered, "It sounds like Liz is having a nightmare. Take care of it." I heard no word from Chris so I opened my eyes and looked to my open bedroom door, where instead of seeing Chris, I saw the outline of a strange woman with jet black hair. I was completely flabbergasted as my mind tried to account for what my eyes were telling it, perhaps thinking that "the Grudge" had come to my apartment as I knew that I wasn't asleep and thus dreaming. I heard a strangely recognizable whimper from the creature, at which point I said, "Julia?"
In the spring of 2003, I'd flown my brother out to live with me. Wyman, as many of you well know, is eight years older than me and was thirty two at the time. During the course of his eight month stay, he acquired a seventeen- year- old, German girlfriend, Julia. I didn't really know Julia all that well as she was fairly shy, and seemed to serve as no more than an ornament on my couch whenever I'd stroll through the living room where she and Wyman were watching a movie. After Wyman returned to the States, I was in the field preparing for Iraq for the better part of three months and then I went on Christmas leave back to SC.
When I came back, in the time when I was getting my affairs in order (ie drinking like a fish with Liz and Chris), Julia called me out of the blue. She wanted to see me before I went off to war. Now, I found that a bit odd, as I'd really not spoken to Julia privately before, but I figured that if it were important to her, then there was no harm in accommodating her. I did drag Chris and Liz along with me though (Julia was to meet me in a pub) so as to give myself an exit. We chatted for a bit and, when I made my move to leave, she hugged me and whispered into my ear, "You are very smart, and very good-looking, and I hope you get a girlfriend you deserve." I was speechless.
During my year in Iraq, Wyman told me that Julia had gotten married to soldier, a sergeant in the Military Police, though he didn't see that working out since she'd told Wyman, "I don't want to have kids and I want to go out and party; he wants kids and to stay home…and he's not good in bed."
Earlier in the week, Julia's sister, Nadine, had stopped by to visit. I seen Nadine perhaps twice in my life and maybe had said five words to her total. Nonetheless, there she was at my door, lugging her two-month old baby up the four flights of stairs. I had one of the new officers staying with me for a few days at the time, since he too didn't have wheels yet, and I told him to pretend he was taking a nap in the living room so that she wouldn't stay too long. She didn't get the hint. We made polite, though forced conversation ("Ah, your baby has a forked tongue and webbed toes…He's really cute.") before I managed to shuttle the muder and kinder home, though not before she fed him in my apartment (I thought she was going to whip it out, but, Praise Jesus, she had a bottle). Nadine had said that Julia wanted to stop by and visit and asked me what I was doing that weekend. I told her that I wasn't sure what my plans were and I didn't offer my phone number. I'd hoped that would be the end of it.
At any rate, there was Julia, A SOLDIER'S WIFE, standing in my bedroom doorway at midnight. I threw on my shorts and went up to her. She reeked of German cigarette smoke, alcohol and trouble. I could see that it was a miracle that she was still managing to stand. She raised her drooped head up and peered at me through her half- shut eyes. She hugged me before I knew what was happening and said, "You're skinny (I lost 20 to 30lbs during my year in Iraq). I like you better bigger…I need to use the bathroom." She stumbled off to the bathroom. I scuttled over to my room and typed a message on my phone to Chris, telling him that my brother's 19y.o. ex girlfriend had just shown up in my apartment. She came out of the bathroom and wanted to hug again, which I deftly sidestepped.
"Julia, it's good to see you, but it's midnight; why don't I get you a taxi? I'd drive, but I had a bit to drink tonight."
"No. I want to stay here."
"I don't think that would be a good idea Julia."
"Why not?"
"You're married Julia."
"What? I'm not going to do anything (she said as she started stroking my thigh). I just want to sleep next to you."
"I don't think that would be a good idea, Julia. Let me get you a taxi."
"What? I'm not going to do anything," she continued to plead, while she continued to stroke my thigh, at which point I reached down and grabbed her hand, "I just want to sleep next to you."
"No, Julia. I can get in trouble. Let's get a cab."
"You like men don't you? That's it. You like men."
Though my pride was quite wounded, I assured her that was not the case. I made my way to grab a jacket and she instantly stumbled over and collapsed on my bed. I came back in and tried to rouse her, but no dice. She wasn't moving. I was pretty sure that she was pretending to pass out so that I wouldn't have any choice but to let her sleep in my bed. I wasn't having it.
I rousted Liz, who, poor thing, couldn't make neither heads nor tails out of what I was saying for about twenty seconds. Then she thought I was joking.
"Liz, it's after midnight and I'm wearing a jacket. Trust me, this isn't a joke."
She got up, walked over, and her eyes bugged out a bit when she saw the inebriated German splayed out on my bed. We tried to wake her up, but she was sticking to the whole passed out thing. I called Wyman to get her address and phone number because I was putting her in a taxi, come hell or high water. As I was getting the information from him he added, "You know she had a crush on you." No @@#!
I picked her up and carried her over to the living room couch. As Liz and I tried to put her jacket back on her, Liz mentioned, "She's not wearing her wedding band." #@#!
I called her house and spoke to Nadine. "Oh, you're going to take care of her?"
"No, Nadine, I can't have her here. I'm putting her in a taxi."
"Oh, okay, we've been drinking a little bit. I'll wait up for her."
I managed to get Julia to admit to being conscious and we began the trip down the stairs. This was quite a chore because she was absolutely shnockered. She stopped at the first two landings to hug me. On the next four she cried and kept moaning about me being mad at her. Then she stopped, looked at me for a long moment and said, "Your hair is long (I'm growing it out for my impending release.). I like it better short. (Good to see you too, Julia)" Out of the window of one of the landings I saw a taxi pull up and Chris get out.
"Hold that Taxi!!!!!!!" I yelled.
Julia got angry about the taxi and started yelling, "Why is a taxi here? Who did you call? Who did you call?" She kept that up until the last flight of steps when she just kept moaning about the fact that I was mad at her.
"You're mad at me! You're mad at me! (ad infinitum)"
"No Julia, I'm not mad at you."
"You're mad at me! You're mad at me! (ad infinitum)"
Actually, the fact that I had to say that I wasn't mad, repeatedly, made me rather mad.
I lugged her out to the taxi, told the driver the address, overpaid him and chucked her in the car. The taxi driver gave me a nasty look, no doubt for corrupting such a sweet innocent German girl. It sped off into the night and I sat there a moment, in the 20 degree weather in a jacket, running shoes, and gym shorts, pondering what in the hell just happened.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)