Chapter One: Grunt Work

September 21, 2006
It was quiet.
Laying on a cheap Iraqi mattress, all I could hear was the sound of rubber boot soles on the tiled catwalk, the nervous but quiet chatter of nervous Marines in other rooms, and the soft rattle of tactical gear bouncing on body armor as they moved around. A grunt or two as men threw on sixty plus pounds of gear to head out on patrol.
It was discomforting, the silence. Intelligence briefs displayed figures of violence in this region of Anbar province that trumped the rest of the country three-fold. Squads were getting hit just outside the base, at their patrol destination, and on the way back, at the very least. Just yesterday, a Marine was killed a hundred yards from here.
A hundred yards from the fucking base.
An insurgent fighter—a “raghead,” a “hajji,” as we called them—detonated an 82mm high explosive dual-purpose mortar shell buried under six inches of soft dirt on the side of the road just as Miller stepped over it. The blast cut right through his groin, the earth funneling the force of the explosion upward, tearing through the flesh of his thighs, his femoral arteries. There must have been a lot of blood, flesh torn asunder and scattered over the dirt. By the time he was on a stretcher, he was already dead.
Behind him was Lance Corporal Paul Denison. Fox Company, 2nd Battalion 3rd Marines—my company—sent him on ADVON, the advance party to learn the ropes from Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, the company we were to relieve in place. Denison was shook up already. Six months or so he’d spent with us in the rear, training for war, listening carefully to his NCOs about counterinsurgency operations, military operations in urban terrain, honing his battle skills to take overseas. Yet there he was, broken without his NCOs and fellow Marines from Fox Company for support. Out on patrol with men he didn’t know or care about, and one of them was killed. He’d lost morale before the rest of the company even arrived in country.
Marines from Miller’s squad traced a thin pair of wires from the explosion to an abandoned motorcycle battery about thirty yards away, inside a construction project, stones cemented together with mortar, forming the outline of a small home in the glare of the bright Iraqi sun. It was too late to find the man who killed Miller; he had fled, weaponless, in civilian dress, without a trace. That’s how it was. We were in their country, they had the upper hand, and we were fighting a losing battle. When the enemy hides amongst the people, everyone becomes suspect.
When every moment might be your last, time slows to a halt. Every day was excruciatingly long, requiring full attention to every detail, every movement, every sound. As if a day were stretched to a week, a week stretched to a month. The deployment was going to take a long time, and I already knew that everyone wouldn’t make it home.

“Perna,” Lieutenant Brusch, my platoon commander, called. Brusch was Ivy League educated at Cornell, an African American 2nd Lieutenant straight out of The Basic School when we first met back in the rear. This was his first combat tour. Though I had already cut my teeth on truck loads of Taliban deep in the Hindu Kush mountains of eastern Afghanistan the year prior, we had a lot of new men, including Brusch. Most of the squad and fireteam leaders were combat tested — hard, decisive, brave.
Most of the lieutenants were new, their gold bars shining like a beacon on their collar, worrying experienced sergeants and NCOs about how “gung-ho” they would be.
“Yes sir?” I answered.
“This is Corporal Roberts,” he said, beckoning a tall, slender Marine I had never met before. His eyes were sunk and hollow, his cheek bones gaunt. He hadn’t showered in weeks, there were layers of fine dirt and crusted sweat, the salt stains like puddles of white, making his uniform stiff in some places. He was a field Marine, and the look in his eyes was death, fear, uncertainty. He wanted to get the fuck out of there. “He’s going to lead you on a terrain familiarization patrol so you can get a feel for the city.”
“Roger that, sir. You coming with us?” I asked. I figured Brusch would want to get outside the wire and commence killing as soon as possible.
“Negative. In addition to learning the lay of the land, your mission is to establish an observation post on the northern edge of the city. Keep an eye out for insurgent mortar teams making a move on the base,” he said, pointing to a location on the large, ragged map of Barwanah tacked crudely on a chalkboard just outside the Combat Operations Center (COC), the headquarters of our company’s Forward Operating Base (FOB). “The LCMR popped out a grid the other night roughly around this area in the wadis and open desert just north of the city.”
“LCMR?” I asked. Yet another military acronym to remember.
“Lightweight Counter-Mortar Radar system. It detects incoming rounds via radar, calculates their trajectory, and then triangulates a grid location of their launch site.”
“Well that’s fucking high speed,” I said, using the Marine colloquialism for “bad-ass”. Just next to the map was a pie graph of indirect fire attacks—mortars of various sizes—pinned on to correlate with times of the day they hit. In the last month, the base had been struck by mortar shells eighty-six times. We’re talking inside the wire, hitting the building, blowing up everything in sight type of attacks.
They were good.
Not only were they hitting inside the base, causing body armor to be a necessity when anyone was exposed to the open air, but the insurgents were coordinating their attacks between the hours of 1100-1400 and 1800-2000. Lunch and dinner. The shit food we were served wasn’t just dangerous to your gastrointestinal system. It endangered lives just to cross the pockmarked road to get a hot meal, which was usually done at a full sprint. Not that it was the cooks’ fault, but they remained on the grunts’ bad side.
“How accurate is it?” I asked.
“Very accurate,” Brusch said, though a quick look at Roberts’ face told me otherwise as he shook his head in frustration. Obviously they hadn’t found any mortar teams, or the base wouldn’t be getting shelled twice per day. Brusch continued, “Here’s the general vicinity of where we want the OP set up.” It was about a click out, a kilometer away from the FOB, though looking at the map, I didn’t know how to get there, what it would look like when we got there, nor how to get back. It was Indian Country to me. We pulled into the FOB under cover of darkness the night before—I didn’t even know what the place looked like in daylight.
I turned to my rifle squad of twelve young men. I looked them up and down, each taking a minute or two to ensure their gear was battle ready. There was Lance Corporal Jason Dunaway, my first fireteam leader. J-Dun, as we called him, was from Winnie, Texas. Has was a good old country boy with fists made of bricks and a heart made of gold. In Afghanistan, he got shot in the left arm, the bullet lodging in his SAPI plate, the bullet proof armor inside flak jackets. “That motherfucker shot me,” he said, as he unloaded a magazine at the poor bastard. J-Dun patched himself up, turned to his fireteam leader and said, “I’m better than that.” He fought on for the next four hours, tough son of a bitch.
Dunaway was a solid tactical Marine, he should have been a squad leader. Only thing was, I volunteered for the position during a training op just after returning from our combat leave  that followed a long, hard deployment to Afghanistan in mid-2005. The position stuck, and Dunaway became first fireteam leader. I could tell that he could plainly see how the responsibility was eating away at me, the responsibility of these boys’ lives. His eyes betrayed that though he wanted to be a squad leader, he didn’t want the weight riding on his shoulders. Still, there wasn’t a finer Marine.
Private First Class Ryan Finley, one of two Marines on point, was from Watertown, Connecticut. He was a short, stocky, hockey player whose mouth more than made up for his height. Make no mistake; he was a strong guy. I’d seen plenty of guys try to wrestle him down, but he took them out every time. A smart ass, but he made up for it by being tactically proficient, and having his mind right every time we stepped outside the wire.
Finley was the joker of the squad, always snapping satirical retorts and insults at fellow Marines. He definitely kept a smile on our faces, even when he was dead tired. Finley’s spirit was infectious.
Lance Corporal Paul Denison paired with Finley on point. Usually a Marine rifle squad patrolled in what was called a tactical column, or tac column. One Marine on point, then ten meters back and over in either direction, another Marine, usually the fireteam leader. Then so on with the squad leader in the middle of the column for patrol.
Not in Iraq. Hajji snipers would single out the squad leader and he’d be the first one dead. Then the radio operator (RO), a huge target with a ten foot whip antenna sticking out of his pack. Both myself and the RO would blend in with the patrol, and he would use the smaller antenna, like a six foot piece of measuring tape, strapped down to his body armor. The kid would become the antenna. The point man couldn’t come up to a four way intersection alone, he would need someone to watch his back. That’s why we would always patrol with two point men.
If one took a sniper round, at least the other guy would see or hear where it came from. Denison was a bit unsure of himself, and I was a bit unsure of him too. But, we operated as a team and he was a part of it. We’d all keep an eye out for each other. I couldn’t blame him for being jittery, considering he witnessed the death of a Marine in his first combat action. I hoped he wasn’t shook up too bad.
Private First Class Joseph Patishnock was from Jersey. He was a fighter. He could work a pair of nun chucks like Bruce Lee, and he threw a hell of a haymaker. His brother was a professional mixed martial artist. Joe was a mean shot with his M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, the 5.56mm light machine gun organic to the Marine Corps fireteam. He carried the requisite 600 rounds of ammunition for his gun, a self-sustained killing machine. With the machine gun weighing in at 22 pounds fully loaded, plus carrying the gear everyone else had to, Joe was the perfect choice. He was a good man to have at your back, even if he did throw a little attitude every now and then. Hell, I wouldn’t trust a Marine that didn’t have a bit of an attitude.
Lance Corporal Cade Cooper, who would later became 2nd fireteam leader, was also from Texas. He had a passion for cheap beer and women, like every Texan I’d met. Sometimes his carefree attitude got to me, but he was tactically superior and crazy enough to walk into hell with you, if not before you. He was always pushing the boundaries on the grooming standard, growing his hair too long, an out of regulation mustache. He was a field Marine, for sure. He was more at home in faded cammies, mud, and MREs than scrubbed boots, clean chevrons, and perfectly rolled sleeves in the rear.
Cooper didn’t even know how to roll his sleeves neatly. They’d always be down around his elbows, loose, with creases in them rather than the tight cuff we all strived for. Barwanah was the perfect place for a guy like him.
Private First Class John J. Redmon. Honestly, I didn’t know what he was doing in a war zone. Redmon grew up watching Star Trek and eating peanut butter and jelly with the crust cut off. The boy’s umbilical cord was still wet. Redmon ended up bearing the brunt of the squad’s jokes, he seemed to be set up for failure. However, he was the first one to tell me he was afraid of coming to Iraq. No one else did, but I could see it in their eyes. I respected that kind of honesty. Shit, I was afraid. Not so much for myself, as I had reconciled my fear of death in Afghanistan, but for making decisions that could lead to the death of one of these boys. What if I ordered a kid to take down a house and there was a machine gun set up to hack down intruders? What would I feel if I made a wrong decision and walked one of them into a landmine? What if I couldn’t see a suicide bomber coming and he hugged one of the Marines to death?
Private First Class Ernesto Chavez. He was the quiet guy who got the job done. He didn’t open up to anyone until he knew them for a while. When he first came to the fleet, I found a package of Oreo cookies in his wall locker. I crushed them on his floor, and trashed the rest of his junk food. He had a bit of a spare tire going, and I was intent on making him lose it. He was chubby but proved himself during PT. The boy could run faster than half the squad. He was what we liked to call “skinny-fat”, a gut but his arms and legs were normal. I still didn’t know much about him, but he never questioned orders and I’d never had a problem with him.
Lance Corporal Anthony Adams, leader of 2nd fireteam team. Adams was a tweaky little fuck. I swear he had undiagnosed ADHD. He was a wiry dude that would beat anyone wrestling, though he’d never worked out a day in his life. He was a great artist as well, and had just gotten married to a girl who seemed to be a great fit. At 20 years old, I told him to wait to get married, wait to she if she would still be there when he got home from Iraq. Then she would be golden. The increase in pay for most Marines was more than enough motivation, hence the extreme failure rate of military marriages.
Adams could get on your nerves, he seemed to thrive on it. Not too many people knew more than that about him, but he was as loyal and unselfish as could be. He would do absolutely anything for a fellow Marine. Often he was dismissed as a joker, but his friendship meant the world to me. He also got his purple heart in Afghanistan, getting hit with some shrapnel from a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG). I remember the look in his eyes when I was ordered to tell him he was getting on that medevac bird with the other half of our squad. He was heartbroken. He didn’t want to leave his friends on the battlefield. We didn’t want him to leave either, as half the squad was wounded during the first thirty seconds of that battle, and we were down to six men. I’d seen Adams give up his water to the other wounded, collect and redistribute ammo and food, bravely darting from cover to cover as a Taliban fighter tried to pick him off during a lull in the battle.
Private First Class Michael Goble was from Florida. He was the “metro” one. He listened to bands we’d never heard of, dressed in tight pants with studded belts, and wore tight shirts with band logos on them. He had two star tattoos, one on each wrist. Not many of us knew that one is for his fiancée, and one for his unborn child, who were both killed in a car accident. He said fuck it, and joined the Marines to go to war. He had nothing to lose. He was a good kid who fell on hard times.
Goble’s bravery was part unselfishness and part he didn’t give a fuck. His own life had been turned upside down and survival wasn’t a concern for him. He would, however, do anything for a fellow Marine.
Lance Corporal Christopher Roby. Black dude from the deep south, somewhere outside of Nashville, Tennessee. I didn’t like him at all. He was a reservist who went active to go to war. He told us he had seen combat before, some gang bangers shooting at him in Tennessee. Get the fuck out of here. When’s the last time twelve guys in a local gang set up an ambush with machine guns, RPGs, hand grenades, car bombs, and suicide vests?
I remember seeing him one Saturday morning doing dexterity drills in flak and kevlar out in the grass. Saturday morning! Roby made the best tail end charlie I had ever seen. He spotted everything moments before the rest of the squad, was as vigilant as a cat on steroids, and quick to react. Perhaps it was because he didn’t trust anyone to watch his back, so he did a better job of it.
It certainly didn’t help, how I treated him. I gave him the standard boot Marine run around, field day inspections, PT, constantly harassing him about the small details. He felt as though one weekend a month for the last two years equaled what the other senior Lance Corporals had gone through. We thought differently.
Lance Corporal Christopher Gentry was the stereotypical nerd type. He wore glasses and had a wiry slender build. Obvious choice to carry the squad radio. He studied all the ins and outs of the radio system in his spare time, and was always asking questions. He was the brains, not the brawn. He’d make a good leader once he got a little more aggressive.
Gentry had a sweetheart back home he was looking to marry one day, and I envied him. I hadn’t had a solid girlfriend in years. If a Marine doesn’t come to the corps with a girl, he’s not going to find one during the tedious monotony of standing duty, training on weekends, flying to 29 Palms for CAX (combined arms exercises), then spending over half a year in the shit. Sure, there were one night stands with drunk girls on vacation, and however sweet, they were always going to be headed home the next week, a Marine’s name now the punch line in a story about how they got “sooooo drunk on vacation”.
Private Rudolfo Booth. He deployed with us to Afghanistan as well. He was a great guy, always smiling and laughing. He was a bit of a ladies man, too. He could dance like a pro, always hitting up Waikiki night clubs and hip hop events, but regardless of how he spent his downtime, he was 100% squared away at his job. It was impressive to see him when he was at work—it was all effort. He got busted down to Private after he failed a urinalysis coming out of Afghanistan. He had been taking some prescription sleep aids to get some shuteye. They just hadn’t been prescribed, officially. Private Eduardo Lopez was busted down doing the same. Everyone in the platoon showed up to their court-martials as character witnesses, and they were both allowed to stay in the Corps. These were great guys in unfortunate circumstances. No one slept right after that deployment. Not one of us could blame them for using pharmies to get to sleep.
It seemed that it only took one night, asleep in a fighting hole, up shit creek Afghanistan without a paddle, for gunfire to forever change a man’s habits. No matter how safe, how calm, the Marine’s mind will always go back to that one moment, that one event where it wasn’t ready for the fight. Never again, it would unconsciously decide, haunting the man’s nights for the rest of his life.
Doc Ferdinand Buquing, our Navy Corpsman, was the silent type. Navy Corpsman are like medics for Marines. They are sailors, trained in combat trauma, first aid, sports medicine, and fighting. He never talked much about himself or his family, and always had his head in a book or watching a movie with headphones on. He really knew his job and looked after the Marines’ health. He was always quickest to respond when someone was wounded or injured, no matter the danger.
Everyone had full personal protective equipment, including a thirty eight pound flak jacket, two armor plates on the front and rear of their chests, two smaller plates for their sides, groin, throat, and neck protector. On top of that all had ammo, water, mission essential gear such as flex cuffs and gunshot residue test kits, a spare MRE (Meal-Ready-to-Eat), tactical flashlights, radios for intra-squad communication, radios for comm to the company and higher, maps, notepads, nomex gloves, eyeglasses, helmet, night vision, hand grenades, and first aid kits.
All this shit weighed about sixty pounds apiece, and it was all necessary to survival.

The FOB had a wooden framed gate, covered in cloth that obscured vision into the base. It was only shoulder height, and was marked with bullet and shrapnel holes. Just opposite the gate was the clearing barrel, a broken down red barrel that was dug into the ground at a 45° angle. We aimed rifles down into it as we pulled back the charging handles on our M16s, or opened the feed tray on an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), so if there was an accidental discharge, the bullet would impact safely into the ground. A fresh round stripped of the magazine of my weapon, seating properly in the chamber. I tapped the forward assist with my palm to ensure the bolt locked forward, closed the ejection port cover, and looked towards Roberts. Into the unknown we would go.
Marines were silent, their boots crunching on the sparse gravel and loose dirt of the poorly maintained Iraqi roads. Some men shrugged to seat their body armor more comfortably on their shoulders, if that were even possible, their gear making the sound of a horse saddle being thrown onto a favorite steed. We stepped outside the gate, staggering the two column patrol. Two men up front, then one about five yards back on the left, another five yards back form him on the right, and so on until Roby and Booth pulled up the rear. Our own modified counterinsurgency tac column.
Denison and Finley would come to a break in the road, taking cover on the corner of a building, simultaneously aiming their rifles to the sides as the Dunaway covered the front. It was smooth, it was flawless, it was just as we trained. Everywhere was a threat, so every place had to be covered. Every other Marine in a fireteam would be focusing on the second and third stories of houses, watching for the telltale sign of an attack. Bombs could be buried in the road, hand grenades could be thrown from windows, alleys, rooftops, snipers could be drawing a bead on you from God knows where, well planned ambushes could be waiting around the next corner.
It was impossible to take scope of every conceivable threat, so training took over and narrowed down this sensory data—out of necessity, for preservation of our sanity—to a manageable number, which our tactics were designed to mitigate. We couldn’t stop a fight from happening, or men from getting killed. We could only be ready when those moments came.

After what seemed like an hour, but in reality was only twenty minutes, we reached our destination. The home sat on top of a small rise, offering a clear view of desert on the northern edge of Barwanah. We had a clear view of the north, to the open wadis, rocky desert, and dried up steam beds. Somewhere out in that mess was where the LCMR reported a mortar firing. I didn’t know whether to trust the equipment, or to trust Roberts.
I knew that the hajjis probably had eyes on us ever since we left the base. When we approached a window, we would have to stay back in the rear of the room, so as not to be silhouetted by the exterior light. The doors, upper levels, and windows would need to cover all possible avenues of approach to the house so they couldn’t sneak up on us.
Roberts was still alive and unwounded, as far as I could tell, so he had to be good. The home he chose for our observation point had great visibility all around, solid defense capabilities, and no kids. A woman was home, but we allowed her to leave. There was no sense having her around in case shit hit the fan.
Just inside the door I dropped my helmet, my face dripping as the sweatband let loose all the beads it had beel holding high up on my forehead. It had to be at least 120° F and I was sweating buckets. My face was flushed red and white, my splotchy Irish background showing through. It wasn’t the worst, but it was still fucking hot. The new side armor plates we were issued not only dug into my rib cage, they kept all the heat in, too. It was like wearing a sweater in a sauna. I took a large gulp of water from a bottle I had been carrying in my cargo pocket. The house had a freezer and electricity, so I collected a water bottle from each Marine and threw them on top of old frozen meat so everyone would have a refreshing drink before we left. Then I walked around the house to ensure our security posture was solid. After establishing sectors of fire, Roberts pulled me aside.
“Like six days ago we got into a firefight here,” he told me. We stepped into the living room, where the windows were all shot out. A poorly built couch of wood and cloth sat on the far side, it’s yellow cushions showing no signs of wear just yet. There were bullet holes all along the inside of the room, shattered glass on the floor. Where bullets struck the walls, the concrete crumbled, leaving a pitted appearance like the surface of the moon, or a back alley in LA. I stepped towards the window, the glass crunching under my boots. There were three bullet holes in the glass at my chest, and two just in front of my face. The glass was cracked from the stress at odd angles from the hole.
“How many?” I asked.
“There was six motherfuckers in that building there,” he said, pointing to another home less than 50 yards away.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“We returned fire, I set up a SAW in this window, they broke contact. We tried to pursue, but these guys don’t have sixty pounds of body armor on. We can’t fucking run ‘em down.”
“How often have you guys been taking fire?” I asked.
“It picked up right before you got here. Ever since then we’ve been hit multiple times every day. There wasn’t shit during the winter, I guess the Hajjis don’t really like to fight in the cold. That and Ramadan starts pretty soon,” he replied. It really didn’t help clarify anything, though I acted like it did. No need to get on Roberts’ already tense nerves.
“Great,” I said. Ramadan, a Muslim holiday, is observed around September, October, or November. It starts on a new moon, and lasts for a lunar cycle, to honor the month in which the prophet Muhammad was presented the Koran. Fasting during the daytime is commonly practiced, as this is supposed to erase the sins of a Muslim. Consequently, insurgents who have declared jihad on Americans viewed this holy month as a great time to increase their attacks on coalition forces, as they would have the help of Allah on their side. Or so went the hyperbolic rhetoric that insurgent leaders spoon fed the kids actually fighting this war.
We remained in place for the next two hours, observing the land all around us. It was still quiet. Under cover of darkness we would return to base. As we geared up to leave the house, Marines starting op-checking their night vision.
“Man, I ain’t got no batteries,” Roby said.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I asked. “I got spares, man, but you need to cover your ass next time. Stock up when we get back to base, and throw a couple pair in your pack,” I told him.
“Yeah, whateva,” he said. I looked at Roby for a moment as if to say, what the fuck, and headed towards the door. There were always small things like this he was underprepared for in training, and though he had gotten better, he still had an attitude about it.
We remained in the house about half an hour after dark to let our eyes adjust, turning out all the lights in the house, and then we swung open the thin sheet metal door, exposing ourselves for a moment while we filed out. I flipped my PVS-14 night vision monocular over my left eye, it’s robotic green glow illuminating the path ahead. As I walked on, my eyes adjusted to the varying degrees of light, the right one actually adding to the image in my head, and giving me depth perception. I always hated the PVS-7B, which had two eye pieces. With that contraption over your face, there’s no depth perception. You walk like a stiff zombie, tripping in holes and kicking up rocks, making all sorts of noise and cursing God the whole patrol.
The adrenaline had subsided from our excitement before. The human body just can’t stay wired up for more than a few hours at a time. That spike had subsided, and I was clear, calm, and collected. It was like the moment just after sex, where a man doesn’t think with his cock anymore.
The sound of our boots on the gravel was excruciatingly loud. Heel down, roll to the toe, next step, to make as little sound as possible. Half way back to the FOB, I stopped the patrol just before the top of a small rise. Everyone took a knee, watched their sectors, and I crept up and down the column to get a count. In the dark, in the quiet, it would be easy for a man to get lost, not paying attention for just a moment as the rest of the squad heads around a corner. There were eyes on us, I could feel it. Just what the insurgents were waiting for was for one man to get separated from the rest, if only for a moment. If that happened, we’d expect to see him getting his head cut off by a dull knife in some internet video, forever spread around by gore enthusiasts and teens who wanted to prove themselves.
He’d have his fifteen minutes of fame alright, his screaming haunting the memories of those who’d see the video. Not tonight, though. Everyone was accounted for. With a silent wave of my hand upwards, the squad rose, and we returned to the FOB.
We hit Quiznos, the street that runs in front of the base, and followed it back. The more we traveled into the city, the more small outdoor lights and lamps would light our way. We passed in front of the Al-Bunimr mosque, a towering well lit minaret guiding the way. Iraqi homes were poorly lit with the curtains drawn, shielding those inside from the reality of what was outside. I wondered if the locals felt that the city was as dangerous for them as it was for us, and how the war impacted their daily life. They were making every attempt to live a normal life amidst all that chaos.
As we reached the FOB, we could barely see the dark silhouettes of Marines standing inside well fortified posts of plywood, sandbags, and bullet-proof glass. They nodded to each of us as we passed by. Finley stopped at the gate and counted each man as he passed. I took up the rear with Roby, determined to be the last man inside the wire on each patrol. It was my duty.
“What’s the count?” I asked Finley.
“Fifteen, Corporal,” he said.
“Alright man, congratulations. Your first combat patrol,” I said, resting my hand heavily on his shoulder. We both stopped at the clearing barrel, removed the magazine out of our rifles, and pulled the charging handle back, extracting and ejecting the bullet from the chamber of our rifles, catching it just out of the ejection port with our left hands. We loaded the round back into the magazine, and inserted it back into our rifles.
I was the last man to hit the room, and some of the Marines were already fast asleep. I took off my Kevlar helmet and hung it off the aluminum bedpost. Undoing the velcro of my body armor made a long tearing sound, and it felt good to slump it to the ground at the side of my rack. It was like I just grew two inches and lost eighty pounds. I shrugged my shoulders—the sharp muscle pain had come back, the one that made every move miserable in Afghanistan, just below my right trapezius muscle. It was tense, hard. I rubbed it as best I could with my right hand, though it would always clench the other muscles of my shoulder and neck, creating tension headaches and distracting me from what was going on outside my body.
My uniform was soaked, the heat of it rising through my shirt and blasting me in the face with my own sweaty stench. My belt had started to cut into my waist, it’s tightness necessary to hold a bottle of water, maps, and notebooks in my cargo pockets. I gave it some slack, the blood flowing into creases that had formed against the bones of my hips. I slowly unlaced my boots. A faint smell of vinegar drifted past my nose, and as I removed my socks I saw the lace imprints on my instep, slowly regaining warmth and color as my feet uncompressed and filled with blood again.
I lay down on that cheap mattress again, the steel springs bunching up and poking at various points on my body, the dark room enveloping me, and wondered what the fuck we were doing there. I knew that the war itself was not a regular war, there weren’t going to be any decisive battles like Afghanistan. There was a massive power vacuum in Iraq, opened up when coalition forces invaded in 2003, and disbanded the Iraqi military under directive from L. Paul Bremer.
That was a mistake, and everyone knew it. We should have cut the head off and repurposed the body. In 2004, some 400,000 former Iraqi soldiers found themselves without a livelihood, and America to blame for it. Who knows how many of them were picked up by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, whom intelligence labeled Aqiz, paid to fight against the people who were supposed to be freeing them from oppressive leadership.
And who the fuck were these insurgents anyways? It was like every extremist group with an axe to grind wanted to take it out on America’s troops in Iraq. Few of the weapons, money, and logistical supplies that fed the insurgency came from Iraq itself, and of course we weren’t allowed in to any other country to hunt those people down, because of politics.
I remembered an intelligence briefing where the gunnery sergeant mentioned some of the main insurgent groups that were indigenous to the area. Ansar al Sunnah, or AAS, the group responsible for most of the resistance in Fallujah, and Jama’at al Tawhid wal Jihad, or JTJ, a smaller but more vindictive force. Not only were they fighting us, they were fighting each other for power. They fought us to show the other groups how strong and unafraid they were of US troops, knowing we would only be in the country for a limited duration.
So what the fuck were we doing in Barwanah, anyway? Haditha was the major city around here, and Echo Company was tasked with that area because they had a shit-hot company commander. Barwanah was of no strategic importance, other than the fact that it would be used to harbor weapons and insurgents if it were unoccupied. The Corps figured that out back in 2005, when the 25th Marines got seriously fucked up by AAS. Once reinforcements arrived, the Marines cleared the city, and, the command seeing it as a resounding success, left Barwanah to be infiltrated and held by the hajjis once again.
It seemed futile, unless we were here to kill all the bad hajjis, start training a police force, and find a way for the locals to take over their own security and infrastructure. The only instruction for this type of battle was a book held in high regard by Marines everywhere, the Small Wars Manual. Nothing in our training, nothing in boot camp or the School of Infantry dealt with this counterinsurgency shit, even though it was known we would end up here.
We couldn’t train police, because we weren’t policemen. We couldn’t work out the electrical grid, because none of us knew anything about electrical infrastructure. We couldn’t start a new school, because none of us were teachers.
We could, however, bring the fight to the enemy, as we were trained warriors.