The battalion had finished with Ad Diwaniyah by lunchtime, having no casualties of our own but killing at least ninety-two Iraqi soldiers and taking another fifty-six as prisoners. The actual butcher’s bill could have easily been three or four times what was reported, but we were intentionally lowballing the numbers, minimizing enemy casualties instead of maximizing them to avoid the Vietnam body-count habit that created unrealistic numbers and expectations.
Once again back at the Main, I was gulping water and washing some of the thick dust off my skin when a Marine stopped by to tell me the security platoon had picked up some prisoners over in the area by the bridge, including a guy who had been hit by what appeared to be sniper rounds. The Panda and I headed for the prisoner pen and found the wounded man sitting on the ground with his legs crossed and plastic flexcuffs shackling his wrists.
He was no more than twenty years old, and his cheeks were bare, as if he were just starting to shave. He had taken one bullet in the left arm, and the second had penetrated his back and emerged out of the top of his left breast. Somehow the big slug went through without ripping out his heart or hitting anything major. He was not even bleeding hard.
I checked the wounds, and they looked about the right size. Was this the guy I had shot? I grabbed a nearby interpreter and asked the boy how he had been wounded. The Iraqi refused to talk, and his dark eyes flashed in anger, but I saw some fright, too. I put on my war face, leaned close to let my own eyes pierce his, shouted a few choice expletives, then had the interpreter ask again. The kid was growing pale, and this time he answered, saying he had been trying to surrender when he was shot. Bullshit. He still had on his boots and had been carrying a rifle while he was running. “Where?” I wanted to know, and he described the area. Same place.
He said the first bullet hit his left arm and sent him stumbling forward, off balance. Then another shot went through his shoulder. I asked why, if he wanted to give up, he didn’t throw down his rifle and take off his boots. He said if he tried to do that, then his own people would have killed him. I decided to ease up on him. I had the interpreter tell the prisoner that I was the one who had shot him. The Iraqi soldier glanced at my big M40A1 rifle and nodded.
Weird, conflicting emotions swept over me. I was glad that I had not missed a target, but I was also strangely delighted that this guy had survived. Never had I felt personal responsibility for the safety of an enemy combatant, so this sudden kinship was unexpected, and it was kind of cool.
The fighting was over for the day, so I didn’t want him to die. I felt he had earned a new lease on life. I called him “Achmed,” because I didn’t know his real name. By doing so, I crossed the invisible line of humanizing my enemy.
Next, I had Achmed carried to the front of a long line of other wounded Iraqi soldiers at an aid station, and I told the doctor, an old friend, to patch him up. “He’s the only one I’ve ever shot that lived through the experience,” I said, and the doc balked.
He apparently thought that I wanted to make sure the kid didn’t survive much longer in order to keep my record intact. No, I explained, just the opposite. This new patient was one lucky bastard, so I wanted him to receive special treatment. The interpreter explained to the soldier, “You’re hooked up, man. You’re a celebrity.”
He began to lose that defiant look. As the doctor removed the shirt, pumped in some anesthetic, and started to work, I stood there, talking quietly to the boy.
GAS… GAS… GAS!! The dreaded warning roared through the area in a hasty echo of shouts, and Marines dropped whatever they were doing to put on their gas masks. Achmed, flat on his back but not unconscious, grew frightened when we covered our heads with the big hoods and goggles, and we must have looked to him like a bunch of unworldly, blunt-nosed elephants. I called out to the Panda, my words muffled, to bring in one of the masks we had taken off some dead Iraqi officers earlier in the day. He was back in moments and tossed me the mask; I worked it down over Achmed’s face, seeing a look of pure gratitude. The other wounded Iraqis had no protection.
I removed the mask when the “All clear” was given after the false alarm. When the doctor finished working, the kid was moved to a cot. I knelt beside him and had the interpreter explain that he was going to be all right and that I would be back to see him later and bring him some food. He was woozy but never took his eyes off of me.
I went back to work at the Main for a while, then grabbed some coffee and rations and returned to the prisoner aid station. Achmed was gone, having been taken by the military police to another prisoner cage in the rear, so I tossed aside the MRE rations and dined instead on fried Spam with my friends. It was disappointing, but it was war.
After chow, I was briefed on where we were going the next day, cleaned my weapons, and settled in to get some sleep on another cold night in Iraq, banishing Achmed from my mind. He was a onetime thing, and while I was glad that he survived, my job was not to coddle enemy soldiers but to kill them. If we ever faced each other again on a battlefield, I would shoot him again without hesitation.
I now had ten kills in Iraq. Then there was Achmed, who was blessed and protected by his merciful Allah. Should have been eleven, but things had not been going quite right all day.
Earlier, I almost got my foot shot off by accident, and Casey almost committed suicide by RPG.
Gunny Don Houston and I were on patrol along a canal when a gunshot snapped out. The round impacted right at my feet, punching up a small column of dirt an inch from my boot.
“Oops,” said Houston.
“Oops?” I yelled at my buddy. “What the fuck do you mean,
“OK. Oops, sorry.”
That broke the tension, and I cracked a smile. He had accidentally pulled the trigger on his rifle, but it had been pointed at the ground. I told him to forget it-after all, shit happens in war-but I came out of the incident knowing that I was one lucky sumbitch.
Meanwhile, Casey and some of the boys had cleaned out a bunker in which they had found a cache of AK-47s, machine guns, plastique explosives, and about fifty rocket-propelled grenades, enough to arm a whole platoon. They stacked the weapons and set about destroying them with a thermite grenade, a big-league weapon that generates as much heat as a welding torch and melts through anything. Casey unwrapped the grenade, then handed it over to a sergeant who wanted to toss it.
They jogged away when the grenade was thrown, and we heard the quiet
“Were you really trying to shell your own troops?” I asked the unusually sheepish Casey as he was dusting off.
He gave the only appropriate response, “Fuck you.” The lieutenant had just endured another embarrassing lesson about how, in combat, even doing the right thing can go wrong.
Achmed, the murdered donkey, a bullet that almost took off my foot, and Casey’s attack on the rest of us made a weird kind of sense later that evening, when I realized that we had been fighting on April Fool’s Day.
16
We pulled out of the rancid Ad Diwaniyah cloverleaf, which Casey accurately likened to “a camelshit amusement park for flies,” at ten o’clock on the morning of April 2 for another road march that moved us closer to Baghdad. It was another day of just getting into position to fight. All across Iraq, other Coalition troops were doing
