Five days at FOB Kalsu, south of the capital in the date groves where the dirt smells ancient, the silt bearing the riches of 3,000 years of substandard waste treatment in Baghdad. The camera team there is desperately short on people, experience and equipment, and with a huge operation on their horizon, I came down to help out for the month. I’ve been helping the young private set up her shop, turn it into a factory producing stories about Iraq and all the weird fuckers who live and work here, and get some new camera gear on order.
The Geminid meteor shower is starting to intensify, on a moonless night at a blacked-out base in a country with few electric lights and no forest fires. It’s chilly tonight, enough to keep me mostly indoors anyway. I just can’t get myself excited about the meteors. Part of wants to see them, part of me wants to stay inside this hardened structure, in this part of the country where the war is still fresh, raw and unpredictable.
The operation is a day away. I’ll be out in the war for a few days. I’ve always managed to miss the really epic battles that happen here a few times a year. This is probably my last chance, the last place we’re really going to bring it to them in steaming bucketfuls.
Five days later, out of sleep and sense and flailing wildly at fools. This always happens.
We drove through Iskandariyah, still named for its second great invader, Alexander. Through the markets with vendors hawking cold soda and grain, cigarettes and coat hangers. On the outskirts some Iraqi army checkpoints, all of them wearing armor and watching the western desert where we are headed. It’s all wasteland out there, hard and cruel.
The road west is a ten mile stretch of utter apocalypse. What at first looked like sprawling briars blanketing the earth resolved into heaps of savagely twisted scrap iron. Skeletons of once-grand buildings rise from a sea of rubble. Nothing moves there, no birds, no dogs, no old men. Trucks lie scattered and burned. Beside the road, a bull is in two hundred equally sized pieces like a disassembled toy, beside a river of red shimmering in the morning light. No flies around it.
Deep into the trackless desert, we halt at an unremarkable spot, save for a giant pit where we set up a makeshift headquarters. A fire mission comes in over the radio. The mortarmen scramble to their gun, a monster 120mm that will give you brain damage if you fire it too much. Grid mike bravo one three niner niner three eight five zero set hang it fire shot out splash and the deep crunch races back to you borne on the wings of the dead.
I unfolded a stretcher and lifted it onto the roof of an armored personnel carrier, spread out my sleeping bag and lay down. Some men slept in the sand that first night, but I had watched thousands of little black ants errand crazily around our boots as soon as we got there. Helicopters circled us periodically in the dark, little shadows over the stars. Artillery crashed far in the distance. Rockets crashed nearby.
At sunrise, fifteen men in three trucks went west to expand our perimeter, but almost immediately they hit a small IED. A blown tire, a punctured radiator, five headaches, ten ringing ears. One of the trucks towed them back, where the medics checked them out on the stretcher I’d been sleeping on. The chaplain gathered most of the platoon around him for a brief service. He spoke of the sand we stood on, how it was ancient and Jesus’ and therefore ours. All the ants were gone that afternoon.
The next morning it was my turn to go with the push west. The lead vehicle hit a big IED, the spinning pieces hurtling noiselessly forward through a curtain of black smoke before the slap and shock of the pressure wave forced its way through my own inch-thick windshield warping the horizon twisting the palm trees and the flocks of mourning doves already fleeing.
We stayed the night with the destroyed vehicle, taking three-hour turns on the machine guns in the cold wind under hard and bright stars listening to the insane laughter of a hundred jackals while the others slept in their seats. Again their rockets closed in on our trucks and our artillery from afar hunted their fire points two miles down the road. A wrecker came in the night and dragged away the shattered hulk.
In the morning, fifty grim Iraqi men and boys, all heavily armed and wearing army-issued reflective vests, walked to our perimeter to meet the ground commander. They’re all ex-insurgents, in the sense that we pay them not to blow us up, and to find the bombs left by those who won’t or can’t sell out. They approach carefully. Soldiers tighten their grip on their rifles, gunners fidget in their hatches. These meetings have erupted in sudden violence before. They agreed to search the road west and an old cemetery to the north before we go through. An hour later, they’ve dug up and defused four IEDs on the road and found two strange car bombs in the cemetery.
Maybe they defused the devices so easily because they planted them in order to justify their salaries. But it’s unlikely they would sacrifice a perfectly good sedan for that reason. The Opel had a trunk full of gray powder that completely splintered the car when the bomb squad set it off. The other one wasn’t really a car bomb – it was a pickup rigged with the ultimate anti-theft device. Pressure sensors buried on either side of the tires, connected to three five-gallon jugs of plastic explosive hidden next to the driver’s door. The enterprising group of concerned citizens pulled the bomb apart and stole the truck anyway.
That night, again on my stretcher atop the APC staring out into the dark, starting to relax when two pillars of deepest red flame leapt up on the western horizon like hell’s own amanitas. Then another, and another. Count to ten, fifteen, twenty, and the thunder rolls in deep and insistent and terrifying. Heads pop out of sleeping bags, soldiers blink in the moonlight feeling deeply mortal. Dust silently swims back and forth in the wavering wind. The retreating jets shriek overhead. Heads back in the bags.
Finally waiting for my ride out in the morning of the fifth day stretched out across a body bag finishing a novel about the end of the world, or the beginning, depending on your perspective. An ant climbs onto my ripped oily boot and pauses, sniffing the warming wind.
