The Shooting Gallery at the Iraqi State Fair
A muddy memory from Iraq's deadly highways
J.J. laughed and shook his head. Through the rain-spattered windshield of his truck, down the road in the dark, we were watching two mud-caked rigs from the 1052nd Transportation Company fighting for position, backing, turning, hesitating, deferring, dancing the dance of the incompetent and confused, succeeding only in throwing the entire convoy into disarray as trucks and Humvees scattered to make room then tried to find their way back in line and in the right order.
In the middle of this muddle were a couple white-painted rigs like J.J.’s, like the one I was snuggled in, all marked “KBR” and seemingly stoic in the midst of the military half-panic that, I was learning, was typical of the 1052nd.
The unit was like a bunch of forlorn mules in a thunderstorm. After managing just one short mission on the day of my arrival, the day the rain had started, they’d cowered in the barn, refusing to venture into the weather. Today the rain had let up enough that the Army had been able to coax the 1052nd outside. But they were still nervous, skittish; while lightning flashed overhead, they bolted and danced around the stalwart KBR trucks.
This, needless to say, was not what I had expected for my combat debut.
KBR was Kellogg, Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, Dick Cheney’s private engineering army, 30,000-strong in Iraq alone, intrepid drivers behind the wheels of unarmored trucks, pulling in a hundred grand a year lugging supplies on Iraq’s lethal highways.
Tonight the 1052nd was hauling beans and bullets to the 1st Infantry Division in Tikrit, 50 miles up the road, keeping their battalions in towns like Baqubah fat and happy in the run-up to the Jan. 30, 2005 elections.
J.J. and the other KBR contract drivers were tagging along hauling mail, tons of it, bagged, bundled and palletized, bearing, I imagined, love letters and Dear Johns, tedious long-hand gossip from Aunt Edith, patriotic diatribes from fathers and favorite uncles and pound upon redundant pound of candy and junk food.
As if soldiers weren’t getting enough junk food at KBR’s chow-hall bacchanals.
I’d been at Anaconda just a few days, killing time mostly, waiting for the weather to clear up some so the trucks would get back on the road and, hopefully, I’d find something to write about. I’d managed just one quick convoy on that first rainy night before the 1052nd had sought shelter.
Without convoys, there wasn’t much to do but hang around my heated trailer, sleep and eat. Already I’d slept until my head hurt … and gained like five pounds. The food was that good, yes sir.
The dining halls were these nonstop Southern-style buffets, albeit buffets tended by Pakistani KBR contractors with inscrutable expressions and paper hats. They served your fried chicken with yellow smiles and, when you thanked them, muttered, “You are welcome,” like they’d learned the phrase rote in some indoctrination course. Which they probably had.
On the radio, the 1052nd convoy commander, Staff Sgt. R. McC, a good-ol’-boy from deep deep South Carolina, was uhh-ing and ahh-ing in response to pissed-off comments from drivers and vehicle commanders, sergeants in the company headquarters and officers at battalion. The trucks were still in the wrong order and we were already hours behind schedule.
It was a clusterfuck—and we hadn’t even left yet. I felt queasy and realized, Hey, this is what dread feels like.
J.J. guffawed. I glanced at him, searching his broad black face for some explanation why.
Maybe somebody had told a joke last week … and he finally got it. Or maybe he was remembering an episode of Frasier he’d seen on the Armed Forces Network the other night. Surely—surely—he didn’t find the 1052nd’s sloppiness funny.
On Iraq’s neglected, potholed and now rain-eroded roads, sloppiness meant mistakes, mistakes meant delays and delays made you a target. If you made yourself a target, sooner or later some insurgent, jihadist or pissed-off local was going to take the bait.
This wasn’t dramatic posturing on my part. This is what the 1052nd’s redneck truckers and poor black mechanics had told me a dozen different ways over these claustrophobic recent days. And public affairs had confirmed it, albeit in their sterile Pentagonese: “Iraq’s main supply routes present daunting tactical challenges” or some such shit.
At Anaconda, a sprawling trailer city built around an airfield outside the town of Balad, there were a dozen National Guard truck companies, each with a couple hundred men and tens of rigs. Every night hundreds of those rigs convoyed to every corner of Iraq delivering the airfreight that fueled the war machine. Every night, there was at least one attack on the convoys.
Most attacks were pretty lame: kid chucking rocks, jokers placing fake roadside bombs, farmers firing antique rifles and missing by a mile. But once a week or so, the professionals stepped up, planted an old Soviet anti-tank mine, remotely detonated a wagonful of South African artillery rounds or shot a couple of rockets into a tanker.
So I’d been told.
Almost every truck company had lost somebody. The unlucky ones had lost three or four somebodies. The 1052nd had suffered just the one casualty: Staff Sgt. Jerome Lemon, killed by a motorcycle bomb in October 2004.
Lemon’s death had hit the company hard. For a long time, apparently, there’d been a lot of long faces around the company’s block of trailers on a crowded side of Anaconda. His death had changed the 1052nd, but as far as I could tell, it hadn’t change their ways. To hear the KBR drivers talk, the 1052nd been sloppy before Lemon died. And they were still sloppy—that much I could see for myself.
I sighed. It wasn’t that I was scared of getting attacked. Hell, I craved some action. But the kind of action I craved was the kind where good guys vanquished bad. I wasn’t interested in getting massacred alongside a bunch of incompetent National Guard truckers on some uninteresting highway. It was just my luck to come all this way and get stuck with the worst unit in the U.S. Army at the boringest base in Iraq—and in the middle of a monsoon, no less.
J.J. leaned over and elbowed me. He grinned that white grin of his. “I hate to say it, man, but your boys are having trouble tonight.”
“We might be from the same state,” I said, “but they aren’t my boys.”
Wasn’t that the truth. Half the 1052nd was poor and black. The other half was pure yeehaw country redneck. Me, I was a South Carolina city boy, as far as these things went.
And maybe I was just paranoid, but it sure seemed like the unit resented me for it. I’d met McC that first afternoon here. What he’d said was perfectly polite, but his smirk was anything but. His expression had said, “I know what you’re up to, college boy. And I think you’re full of shit.”
I addressed the patterns of mud on the windshield and the metronome wipers. “These assholes almost got me killed the other night, you know.”
J.J. harrumphed.
“Three nights ago, before the rain got bad,” I continued, “we made a convoy run to Tikrit. So we were going down the main supply route at, like, 40 miles an hour when—whump! The whole fucking convoy just piles up, dead stop.”
“Aw man,” J.J. groaned.
“So we’re all idling on the side of the road. There are these other convoys whizzing past. You can see guys riding shotgun just staring out their windows at us, eyes all wide, like, “What they fuck are they doing?”
“What was wrong?”
“Something fell off a truck. They were out there with flashlights poking around in the median. There’s, like, bomb craters and shit and they’re peering down into them.”
“Must’ve been a tie-down problem.”
“The tie-down,” I said, “ain’t the problem.”
J.J. winked at me. “A couple weeks ago, I was with the 1052nd for a run. The night before—the God-damn night before!—I’d gotten hit on this one road. I was, like, don’t go through there again. It’s bad news, I told ’em. So guess what we did.”
“The same road, huh?”
“Yup. I about lost my shit.”
“You get hit again?”
“Naw. Still … the 1052nd’s the worst, man. Absolutely the worst.”
“Christ,” I breathed. “Of all the embeds.”
J.J. was on a roll. “This other time, I was with the 1052nd and we got hit.” With his fingers, J.J. made a gesture like an explosion, fingers bunched up then feathering out. He circled his lips around a silent boom sound and opened his eyes wide. “There’s, like, tracers fucking skipping off the road and shit, rounds pinging off the truck. They’re hitting us from both sides. People are freaking out on the radio—‘What’s going on, man, what’s going on?!’”
“We got gun trucks in the front, gun trucks in the back and every rig’s got somebody riding shotgun with an M-16. We got 50 weapons on this fucking convoy, but not a single person shoots back. Not a single one! I’m like, ‘Shit! I can’t afford to get killed like this. I’m 44 years old. I got me two kids and a small business back in Jacksonville.’”
He laughed this long, hearty laugh until his eyes watered, then he sighed. “Crazy times, Dave. Crazy times.”
By now I was openly scowling at him. With this contented smile on his face he watched the goings-on outside. I stared out the passenger-side window. The night was deeper, now, darker. The rain had all but stopped. Outside, trucks and Humvees idled. There was no more panicked jockeying, no more dance of the incompetent. The radio was silent.
Doors swung open. Soldiers hopped out of rigs. “Prayer time,” J.J. announced.
What?
He pushed open his door; I did the same. Crunching over wet gravel, weaving around deep puddles, I followed J.J. as everyone converged on a lumber gazebo rising like a dark island from a sea of fresh mud. We huddled.
McC stepped into the center, used a penlight to read some reminders off a soggy sheet of paper then cleared his throat and asked somebody named Quentin if he’d do us the honors. Quentin, a tall black boy, stripped his headgear from his shaved skull and bowed to Heaven. “Let’s pray,” he intoned in a rich, powerful voice that cut through the din of gurgling diesel engines.
J.J., standing beside me, tugged off his wool watch cap, closed his eyes and tucked his chin in his chest. Fifty soldiers and civilians did likewise. I just stood there flabbergasted while Quentin begged Our Heavenly Father for forgiveness, guidance and mercy.
I was the only one with my eyes open so I was the only one who noticed the silent beads of green tracer fire that arced into the sky from the horizon at the precise moment Quentin said “mercy.”
Our enemies lie in wait. Protect us, oh Father God. Amen.
Fifty voices sounded in unison: “Amen.”
I was furious—apparently visibly—as I followed J.J. back to his truck. He raised an inquisitive eyebrow but there was no way I was going to explain myself, not here, not now. This was neither the time nor the place for an argument about free will, human agency and the nature of God.
The night was quiet and still when we finally passed through Anaconda’s bristling gate. Inside the rig, all I could hear was the whoosh of the heater running full blast over the mumble of the Armed Forces Radio pop station. But still there was this silence, this nervous tension that seemed broadcast from somewhere over that evil horizon.
I knew it was bullshit. I knew it was just me projecting. But still …
I’d read the news. I knew the stats. Since last fall, hundreds of Army transportation types and KBR guys had died on nights like this on roads like these, and in the most horrible ways: blown to pieces, burned to toast, ground to paste in mangled rigs and smashed Humvees.
The public affairs officers at Anaconda, all fat captains and majors who rarely left the base in their entire yearlong tours, proudly called this “a trucker’s war.” They cited the number of attacks, the number of dead, like they were some kind of validation of the transportation companies’ missions, as though the drivers and gunners were proud if the risks they took and eager for attention.
They weren’t—and I was starting to understand why. For units like the 1052nd, this was a private war they preferred to fight on their own half-ass terms.
The convoy picked up speed moving through the wastes outside Anaconda’s gate. Lights were extinguished, radio chatter was at a minimum and the only evidence that a million bucks of U.S. government goods was on the move was a snaking line of red taillights visible only from behind.
Even the 1052nd could affect this disappearing act, however briefly. They may have been bad Army, but they were still Army, and in the mission’s adrenaline-charged first minutes, they were all business. It was eerie, and while it should’ve made me feel safer disappearing into Iraq’s murderous night, it only made me feel wicked, like I was part of the darkness.
I shivered. Groping for some good, for some kind of light to keep the dark at bay, I said, “The prayer was nice.” It was a weird and inappropriate thing to say.
“It’s what the 1052nd does best,” J.J. replied. He reached his right arm behind my seat and adjusted the bulletproof Kevlar curtain that hugged our shoulders. Then he focused on the road and on the red headlights of the trailer ahead of him. I stared outside at the darkness and wondered not if the 1052nd would fuck up, but how and when.
The rain came and went in cold sheets, tapping the windshield like nervous fingers. The rig’s heater tried to brush them away. Where heat met cold rain, surfaces got foggy, forcing J.J. to fiddle with the defrost.
Defrost in the desert.
Summers in Iraq were hot, dusty and miserable, J.J. said just to fill the silence. Winters were no less miserable, he added, just different. The hot nights gave way to bitter cold. Every other day there was a chilly rain. The dust that in summer hung in the air like a distant veil was washed to earth by the rain to make a frigid muddy soup the consistency and color of diseased diarrhea. It coated everything—boots, trucks, floors.
In summer, J.J. said, he blasted the air-conditioning in his trailer. In fall there were a couple weeks of reprieve. Then he started blasting the heat. Before coming to Iraq, he had imagined all deserts were like those he’d seen in pictures and in movies, with the rolling orange sand dunes, the bright blue skies, the naked sun, the dry heat. Lizards. Tortoises. Camels.
Well, there were no sand dunes in the Sunni triangle. Even in summer the sky was never blue, but a smoky dirty gray that all but obscured the sun. And there was no wildlife unless you counted the packs of feral dogs and the occasional sad stray donkey.
“Worst desert ever!” he sang.
Ahead, the taillights suddenly loomed closer, meaning the truck had slowed … no, stopped. Stopped! I sat up in my seat and reached for my camera with one hand and a notepad with the other.
On the radio, voices conferred quietly but urgently, and from the dialectic J.J. decoded a drama unfolding at the front of the convoy. Spotting what appeared to be an improvised explosive device in a pile of debris, but what could be anything really, McC had called a halt, believing it safer to idle on the highway than to tempt fate and that pile of debris.
Apparently there were explosive ordnance disposal teams on the road tonight; McC had pleaded for a speedy consultation.
And so we idled. I imagined the 1052nd troopers in their swaying rigs, drivers blinking into the inky night, gunners chewing their lips and pointing M-16s at figments of their imaginations. I imagined the gun-truck crews in their crab-like armored Humvees, .50-cal. gunners swiveling in their mounts like clockwork, probing horizons that glowed green in their thermal sights.
I imagined the other KBR mailmen, all but naked in their unarmored rigs, their minds clinging to the those reassuring six figures, the values of their contracts, lips moving just barely as they told themselves, silently, over and over again, that it was worth it, it was worth it.
Both terrified and bored, with little motion to mark the passage of time, I completely lost track. And when the EOD team raced past in their insectoid mine-clearing vehicles and antennae-trailing Humvee escorts, it could’ve been five minutes or an hour later.
In moments the EOD team had x-rayed the 1052nd’s suspected IED and declared it mere garbage: don’t get your panties in a bunch, we’re important people, so please don’t call us again unless it’s an emergency, a real emergency.
In fits and starts, like the denouement to the most poorly-written, awkwardly-blocked farce in the history of tragicomedy, our convoy pulled back onto the road and continued towards Tikrit.
“The 1052nd will drive right through an ambush without firing a shot,” J.J. said when we were back up to cruising speed. “But a pile of garbage? They’ll call EOD and just sit out here for an hour like a fucking shooting gallery at the Iraqi state fair.”
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