That One Time That One U.S. Army Officer Almost Kicked an IED to Defuse It
Another memory from Iraq
After much scrounging, I’d secured a single-serving container of Froot Loops and an eight-ounce box of this brand of sweet Kuwaiti milk that never went bad, either because it had been seriously pasteurized or because it wasn’t really milk at all. Who cared? It was wet and white and it made the stale Froot Loops soggy enough to eat.
I was fucking starving and seriously tired. And I knew my body well enough to know that I could endure only one of the two—hunger or fatigue—for long. It was just after midnight on election day in Iraqi in January 2005 and we were expecting a spike in bombings, drive-bys and rocket attacks for the next 24 hours.
Combat was likely and sleep was out of the question. So I had to feed myself. At the Task Force 82 safe-house outside Kanan, where I’d holed up on short notice, that meant digging through cardboard boxes of age-brittled energy bars, mummified beef jerky and kids’ cereal for something edible that all the U.S. Army omnivores around here hadn’t already eaten.
I considered the Froot Loops find a major coup. And when I scored the near-milk and a mostly-clean plastic spoon to boot, I wondered what I’d done in a past life to warrant such good fortune. I settled my weary ass on a pile of Kevlar vests and savored every lukewarm spoonful of ancient cereal and mysterious sorta-milk.
I managed three or four bites before karma caught up to me. There was a long stitch of gunfire that sounded like it had originated from, oh, the next room over. I flopped onto the ground for cover and spilled my Froot Loops. Fuck.
From down here all I could see were boots and ankles as soldiers ran up to grab their armor from the pile I’d been sitting on. People were screaming at each other, in English but not in Arabic—which was funny because there were more Iraqi soldiers in this compound than Americans.
I scrambled to my feet, grabbed my gear and found that, since the Peace Day bombing a week or so ago, I had gotten much better at strapping on my armor under duress. I followed frantic soldiers down some stairs and into the walled courtyard where we’d parked the Humvees.
There wasn’t a single Iraqi soldier in evidence anywhere. Recalling the Iraqis’ magical disappearing act at Peace Day, I formed my first and most racist generalization: Iraqis are cowards.
Never mind that a bunch of them had just shot up a compound full of American soldiers. That took guts.
I dove into a Humvee and got tangled in the feet of the gunner standing in the roof cupola. He kicked me out of the way then charged his .50-caliber machine gun. It made this ka-chunk sound and spat out a quarter-pound shell that bounced off my helmet and rolled under the boots of the soldier sitting in the other back seat. He ignored it and nervously fiddled with his rifle.
The driver revved the engine. The vehicle commander sitting next to him clutched the radio handset and chanted, “Come on come on come on come on,” in an increasing pitch. Three minutes after the shooting, maybe four, we were ready to go—and if we were going to catch the shooters and kill them, we needed to go now. By now the bad guys were blocks away if not already underground.
“Come on come on come on—shit!”
Shit meant it was too late. Killing requires orders, and no orders had come, probably because the commander thought there was little chance of catching the shooters in Kanan’s dark alleys if they had a five-minute lead. All five of us in that Humvee groaned in unison. I imagined the soldiers in the other Humvees doing the same.
To think, I had abandoned my Froot Loops for this.
Somebody in the chain of command decided that the shooters were likely to return—and that we just might catch them if we stayed in our Humvees, engines idling, ready to roll out on five seconds’ notice.
For the first 10 minutes we were alert, tense. The next 10, we started to sag. At 30 minutes, the gunner shoved aside some boxes of ammo and made space to squat, then lean, then sprawl, one leg resting on the radio rack up front and the other laid across my lap.
Somebody snored and heads turned to see who. It was the guy in the other back seat. He was fast asleep, seated rigidly upright, his rifle pinched barrel-down between his knees and his hands folded on its stock. If not for his snoring, his closed eyes and the way his jaw dangled open, he’d have looked wide awake.
Somebody snickered. I’d have laughed too if I hadn’t been nearly delirious with fatigue. Turning away, I mashed my face against the three-inch-thick bulletproof window, feeling the Iraqi’s winter cold against my cheek and forehead.
From the neck down I was hot and sweating from the Humvee’s industrial-strength heater. The tickle of sweat trickling down my legs into my boots made me want to squirm, but the tight quarters, the gunner’s leg on my lap and the camera and Kevlar strapped to my chest under my stiff Swiss Army-surplus wool coat clamped my ass to that hard flat seat and my boots to the sandbags (in case we hit a mine) on the floor.
My left butt cheek hurt. I was pretty sure I was sitting on a bullet.
From here, all I could see outside was a corner of the compound lit by an angle of orange light from some distant streetlamp. Bugs swooped and hovered; otherwise the corner was still and featureless—the world’s least interesting still-life study.
I lusted for sleep with an intensity that was nearly erotic, but I wanted to be awake if and when the shooters returned, so I fought to keep my eyes open. They kept losing focus, turning the world outside into an orange blur that gradually faded to black as my eyelids surrendered to gravity.
When the darkness was nearly total, I’d grunt and blink hard and—snap—everything was sharp and clear again, at least for a few minutes. Meanwhile motors thrummed, soldiers snored and the numbness that had started in my left buttock spread north and south.
So it went for five minutes or a hundred years: snap, fade, thrum, numb … God I’m so hungry … snap, fade, thrum, numb … stupid insurgents … snap, fade, thrum, numb … what I wouldn’t give for a --
Ratatatatatat!
Now I was wide awake and so was everybody else. The gunner was on his feet and the snorer was already mid-sentence: “—so let’s go!” The vehicle commander had the radio handset pressed to his ear; over the driver’s shoulder I could see his hands flex, unflex, flex on the steering wheel.
Ratatatat!—someone on the wall shot back.
Return fire: ratatat tat-tat-tat! We had ourselves a regular shootout here, but still, our idling bunch of Humvees kept idling. We waited for the right voice on the radio speaking just three or four words, words that would unleash us to run down and gun down the sniping assholes outside the walls.
But no voice came. Seconds ticked, then minutes, days, weeks and years. There was no more shooting.
Somebody screeched, “What the fuck are we waiting for?” I was a little surprised at such an undisciplined outburst until I realized it had come from me. The snorer giggled and the driver muttered something about “the fucking reporter.”
I mumbled that I was sorry and settled deeper into my tall wool collar. With a massive sigh, the gunner cleared his space again and sat. The snorer wasn’t snoring yet, but his eyes were closed. The commander tossed the handset onto the dashboard and the driver relaxed his grip on the wheel.
God, I’m so hungry.
I slept—or I thought I slept. The night was a montage of blurry orange images, scuffling boots and numb sweaty limbs. When a black cat darted by outside, it might have been a dream or an hallucination or it might have been real—and the first cat I’d seen in Iraq.
Morning came like bad hangover. I figured it was safe to leave the truck when I saw soldiers with raccoon-eyes stumbling around the courtyard yawning and scratching their crotches. The door creaked when I pushed it open; my knees made a similar sound and my numb limbs tingled. My spine and every joint popped when I stood on wobbly legs and stretched, inhaling morning air that smelled of wet sheep, garbage fires and unwashed Americans.
On the wall there was an alert, well-groomed Iraqi soldier who’d obviously gotten a good night’s sleep. He smiled down on us wanly and I fantasized about some insurgent sniper putting a bullet through his happy mug. Of course, if there was anything that I’d learned since last night, it was that insurgents couldn’t shoot worth shit, so my fantasy was unlikely to come true.
All four Humvees in the courtyard were unbuttoned now and the entire platoon was milling around or pissing in corners. My vehicle commander, the lieutenant platoon leader, was crouched atop our Humvee with a cardboard box at his feet, rooting around and pulling out granola bars, juice boxes and sticks of beef jerky.
He’d call out, “Yo, jerky!” and some soldier would say, “Here!” and raise a hand. The lieutenant would softball-toss the jerky with one hand then dip it into the box for another prize. Meanwhile he’d call, “Apple juice!” and toss that with his other hand. He had snacks and drinks flying in every direction. I laid claim to some jelly beans and fumbled the catch. I chased after the prodigal package and nearly collided with a sleep-deprived private pursuing a rolling can of V8.
The jelly beans were stale and chalky, but my body needed calories and it didn’t care where they came from. I finished the package in time to bid for the last granola bar from the box. I was two bites in when, as if they belonged to some hive mind, the soldiers in the courtyard wordlessly converged on their Humvees and mounted up.
Everybody understood: it was just after dawn on election day. Polls opened in three hours. We had work to do.
We linked up with the Capt. Scott Holland, the company commander, and his crew outside a poll in Kanan. The town was all but deserted. Dog barks echoed in empty buildings. A solitary child darted between buildings. The people of Kanan had gone to ground, perhaps knowing something we didn’t.
The platoon split into small patrols and set out on foot to search the area. I glommed onto the commander and his guys and followed them down a muddy street ringing the poll. Holland was ignoring me, but a lowly lieutenant trailing him had been casting sympathetic glances at me, so I sidled up.
“There was rocket attack here earlier,” Lt. Matt Addleman explained, gesturing at an unfinished brick warehouse down the road. Me and the L.T. stayed outside while the captain went in. The L.T. peered through his rifle sight at random points in the distance. I took pictures of some raggedy-ass chickens picking at some garbage at our feet. One of them beaked my boot and I yelped.
“What’s wrong?” Addleman said.
“Fucking terrorist chicken, is what!”
“Ha ha. Good one.”
Holland emerged from the warehouse, shaking his head, with a sour look on his face. Nothing. Always nothing.
Then a sergeant on our flank called out. “I got something!” We all trotted over like kids on Christmas morning and craned to look where he was pointing. Lying on a path alongside the girls’ school housing the poll was something metal, oblong and the size of a grapefruit. “IED?” the sergeant asked Holland.
“I don’t fucking know.” He sounded annoyed. “Let’s get closer.”
They spread out and we moved in. I stuck to the Addleman’s elbow. “As often as not these IEDs are fakes, just to throw us off,” he said, shrugging. “You can’t always tell before they go off.”
He didn’t ask if I’d ever been blown up; he apparently didn’t notice that I was deliberately keeping him between me and the bomb. At 50 yards away we knelt among mounds of dirt and bricks. Holland told the sergeant to get an angle and put a few rounds into the bomb. He darted to a low brick building, edged along a wall and aimed his rifle around a far corner.
Crack! Crack!
I snapped pictures until it occurred to me that, at this distance, the only interesting thing here was the loud report of the rifle that bounced off walls and came rippling back to us. The captain was just a stick figure on a vast landscape of mud, insurgent chickens and ugly buildings.
“Stupid question,” I said to Addleman. “Can you kill an IED?”
He shrugged. I was starting to get a sense of Holland’s command style. Addleman just arched his eyebrows.
Holland stood and waved to the shooter to lay off. Then he waved to another soldier and this one ran up hauling a huge weapons-grade suitcase. The captain and the soldier huddled over the open case for a few minutes while I strained, from a distance, to see over their shoulders at what they were doing.
They stood, revealing a compact four-wheeled robot with an extendable claw. It was maybe the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
“Watch this,” Addleman whispered as a blocky remote control appeared in the captain’s hands. He twiddled a lever. With a lurch, the robot came alive. It sped down the road, rounded a corner and bounced to a halt—the whole time making exactly the same whiny sound my remote-controlled toy cars had made when I was eight.
I watched Holland’s fingers move on the controls. Then I watched the robot’s arm extend and the claw at the end of the arm open, close, open, close.
The robot inched toward the bomb.
I had zoomed my camera as far as it would go and was snapping photos as fast as I could. At this range, with a camera this cheap, I was pretty sure none of my pics would turn out. But I had to try. Click. Click. Click. With each exposure, the image in my viewfinder froze for a half-second, giving the robot the appearance of a stop-motion special effect from a 1960s space adventure as it crept up on the bomb and prodded with its metal arm.
Come to think of it, Kanan did look a lot like Mars -- if Martians were compulsive litterbugs.
Addleman narrated. “MARCbot. Perfect for situations like this. Runs on batteries, though, so you gotta—oh.”
The robot froze and Holland said, “Shit,” in three long drawn-out syllables and shook the controller. Looked like MARCbot was out of juice. I glanced at Addleman and he was doing one of those silent suppressed hysterical laughter things, his face all screwed up and his shoulders shaking.
Then he abruptly stopped laughing and his eyes opened wide. I followed his gaze … to the captain, who had ditched the controller and was marching down the road toward the bomb and the dead robot.
“Oh God,” the lieutenant breathed. “He’s going to grab it.”
A soldier piped up. “Nope—he’s going to kick it.”
Addleman rankled. “Grab it.”
The other soldier wasn’t backing down. “Kick it.”
“Does he do this often?” I asked to anyone in earshot.
“Yes.” The reply came from all directions.
I dove behind a pile of bricks and Addleman joined me. Over the edge of the pile we watched Holland stroll right up to the bomb, stand over it with his hands on his hips and tilt his head at several different angles with his lips pursed.
He faked with one boot—“Score!” cheered the other soldier—before bending at the waist and picking up the bomb with one hand, letting it dangle like a dirty diaper. He grinned at us and Addleman said, “Told you.”
I climbed to my feet and brushed mud from my coat and armor. Through the Kevlar and wool I could feel my heart pounding. I felt silly and hollow and, like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, I imagined the chickens at my feet turning into walking, clucking fried drumsticks.
I checked my camera—I’d nearly filled my memory card in the past couple days—and touched the frayed, mangled notepad in my pocket. Any time now, for better or worse, the polls would open. I had plenty of material to write the “election day security” stories my newspaper had requested. Now all I wanted was food and sleep—in that order.
Holland had fixed some C4 explosive to the bomb and had tossed it in a nearby field. He came jogging back to us, cradling the robot, with that big dumb grin still on his face. Behind him, the C4 exploded, tossing pieces of the bomb high in the air. Addleman whooped and laughed.
“You headed back for batteries?” I asked Holland when he reached us. “Can I get a ride to Gabe?”
He shrugged. He didn’t give a fuck what I did.
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