July 29, 2008
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This is deep thoughts. it gets to be a mess. meaning that it is allowed to be a mess I scratch what i want in my usual frenetic mode, so nothing is misspelled or poorly chosen, in a place where those things don’t even exist. In other words , dont’ waste your time criticizing my spelling or grammar. I usually don’t proof-read, so it’s probably best to warn you of the potential slog.
3:33 A.M.
It was shortly after midnight in the COC on the second but top floor of the battered and crumbling Government Center of Ramadi. There are only officers and NCOs in here, as usual, with the occasional exception of some young Devil Dog pushing the door open and saying what he has to say, respectuflly and relatively quietly. As usual, I wait to record tragedy, drama, personality, explanation, emotion, truth, truth, truth.
This room is the center of coffee. It exists for coffee and the minute by minute evolution and execution of the battle for Ramadi. The giantt map of the sity on the wall, coverind plastic, constantly, often by the minute, updated. changed each mark a point of enemy or death or battle or explosion and all the other information of battling Al Qaeda in a city in Iraq that it onsiders to be its capital, its epicenter of the power to control about half of Iraq so far. An urban insurgent battlefield is just like any other battlefield, but the combatants live with each other, pass each other on the streets, wave and even eat and drink with each other. But in each such instance the insurgent knows the Marine’s loyalties, intentions, and lethal nature. The Marine almost always does not.
The radio crackles, a familiar voice speaks to us all. He simply informs that the Army is going to be driving a couple platoons of soldiers in the new iraqi army. We hear the word “bongo truck”, and as quick as lightning everyone’s face scrunches up and turns toward the radio, lasered in on it, except for the occsional furtive eye to eye glance at one anothers. “Why did he say bongo truck, they can’t possibly have put these Iraqi soldiers into non-miitary trucks, a sort of mini-cooper version of a pick-up truck, as they transport them 15 minutes down Ramadi’s main drag, literally about to pass our front door, a front door which sits on what may be the world’s most heavily IED’s road , at its most heavily IED’d spot.” The Marine Corps and the Army look at each with contempt, which is good, because such contempt is the bedrfock of the kind of competition necessary to produce the finestthe world has seen. I don’t clearly hear the Marine ask the young soldier on the other side of the radio, if he did indeed say the Iraqi troops were all travelling in bongo trucks, completely uh-armored, in tin cans that leave no other outcome but massive death, the rain of body parts and blood and an overrun attack on the Govefrnemnt Center which looks and feels like it died and was buried in the ground to rot away as quickly as possible. The Government Center for all of Al Anbar Province. The soldier confirms the abusrd and chilling news, the convoy’s location, a few hundfed meters away. “Who and why” everyone thinks a, “who …..and why…could be other so stupid or in a rush, to authorize maybe the riskiest maneuver since the battl for the city began a couple years ago.” Everything got quiter than I’d ever heard it, besides a couple
“wjp tje s” “Stupids” , “crazies” “the FUCKIN Army” “who the knows, maybe they had no choiocde, it’s not like we have anytthing and everything at the snap of a finger.” and as we hear their fairly quiet buzz in the near distance, the whole upper deck just goes dead silent, even amognst all the young Devil Dogsinin the hallway…you can feel the silent prayers…the trucks are crawling by…the buzz of those trucks with an American tank at the front and rear..it’s slow, but it’s going, those 67 iraqi soldiers, crammed into a helpless suicidal place…man, it just felt impossible they could make it past us unmolested by explosive force and all it brings, so tens, in that room. They inched closer to safety boom booom boom bang, heads drop, men jump up doors fly some strange sounds, slightly unearthly punctuate the room as the explosions and screams continue from the street right in front of us, the explosions, the explosions, the screams as the ied’s pound and rip and tear at the unforgivably chosen tin cans of conveyance of fragile human life that can not be protected by nothing. I looked through some sandbags on the stairs. I remember for the first time in my life, with so many flames and bodies living and dead burning, thinking that I was looking at hell. A piece of it that had metaphysically seized a piece of land of our own. Those soldiers were dying, dying by maybe even the dozens, Jesus Christ how many IEDs so close, some daisy chain haven saed for a moment such as this. , goddamn, those screams.
6:34 A.M.
7:25 A.M.
There are reasons why I’m quiet…there are reasons why he’s quiet.
7:33 A.M.
Marines not around. Two deployments, then a brand new war…
2:19
In no way comparable, but strangely enough given the top post about a nasty winter’s night in the “the most dangerous city in the world”, as it was known at the time, I get a call from a friend of this chick I, uh, spend a lot of time with, go out with, whatever, and I gotta run out and deal with that. Where I been. Staying away from moving vehicles for the rest of the day. Oh , one more weird story. Awhile back, Welsh and I are driving to get smokes at the ass-crack of dawn, really before it at like 4 am. We’re gonna go to Wal-Mart. We ‘re jamming at an upward angle onto the Interstate, when all of a sudden boom boom flash boom flash boom at the side of the road, feet in front of the vehicle and as we pass it, I’m back like just a few weeks, Welsh awhile longer, and as my body’s everything has switched into full combat under fire/Ied attack mode, even though the explosions were too ridiculously tiny to worry, still their suddenness and similarity to the real thing just flipped all our switches and as we exchanged stunned looks and laughing “what the s” I realized that the aging dirtbag-looking white van in front of us had thrown out some strings of M80′s that had popped off with just enough sound, look and location to just change my entire physiology and psychological state etc. that I learned something right then and there that I didn’t notice or contemplate in Iraq, that there is an entirely separate state of mind and body, including brIain chemistry, when you are living under and often battling daily threats and realities of death and combat and and when, well, not being under or even close to, any such threat. And I learned this because as we went into the Walmart I caught myself unconsciously moving through it as if we were clearing a seemingly-quiet house, looking rapidly around every corner of every aisle, and over the tops of the pastry and deli squares and up above and constantly ahead for any threat. Not like I’m crazy and think it may be there, but just because one becomes conditioned to moving through any place like that, indoors or out, when one is in that combat state of mind. I realized my body and brain were doing it all for me, that a natural state of being had been created within me that could be flipped on at any time by the right triggers. I’d never thought about it in Iraq because I hadn’t slipped into such a contrasting environment and such a lowered level of threat, as America. I remember how as I left even the first time, all I wanted more than anything else was to finally again have a living space where I didn’t have to worry about having a mortar come crashing into it. Two kids died in the hootch right next to mine once. Asleep they didn’t hear the first one, and by the time the second one hit, it was far too late anymore. The second one was theirs, it was like it always was to us, “just their time. When it’s your time it’s your time, there’s nothing you can do about it.” After Walmart, nearly two hours later, in an apartment I knew so well that I’d stopped noticing things about it, everything about it was brighter, my eyes still darted around, and I noticed every little detail of every spot I walked through, every doorway was crossed with unnecessary but auto-pilot caution, and my eyes darted past literally everything that could possibly hold someone behind it. Not a flashback, and I had no worries, but the Combat State of Mind flip had been switched, and even though me and circumstances had flipped it off the electricity of it’s purpose still pulsed powerfully through me, as it slowly drained away, until, I knew for certain, I was back in my second home again.
And I forgot one detail. As we drove after the little M-80′s went off, I felt a little disturbed, uneasy, sick, angry, and a couple times had the sensation that I wanted Welsh to pull over, and just start running for a long, long time, for no reason I could discern. I just wanted to run. I’d never felt that way before, even after being hit, thrown, and wounded by the real thing several times. But at home, unattached to any unit of new friends, no job to be done, no duty to be fulfilled – after some tiny m-80′s pulled me back to the ugliest place I’d ever been, that’s what I felt like doing. And at the same time, from the moment I was leaving Iraq, tp today and every day in between, I have wanted to return. to be there or Afghanistan, with a unit of new friends, a job to be done, a duty to be fulfllled. A place to run to.
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