Joseph Rush and Eddie Nakamura, two years into the Marine Corps, both wearing silver bars denoting us as first lieutenants.
“Nothing moving,” said Eddie’s barely contained voice in my earpiece, from the second Humvee. “What’s the problem?”
“This road.”
“What’s wrong with it? It’s just tar, man.”
“It’s new. Brand-new highway in the middle of nowhere. Why build a four-lane highway out here?”
My face felt like sandpaper. The landscape was hard desert, prickly hills and rocks blasted by sun in daytime, split open by freezing cold at night, as if the earth here was unable to decide how to torture you, and had become as schizophrenic as the tyrant we’d come to fight. Southern Iraq resembled 29 Palms, the Marines’ high-desert training area back in California — filled with sandstorms, winter storms, blasting heat one day, freezing wind the next.
Eddie snorted at my worry. “Why a new road? Saddam’s cousin Achmed is a road contractor. So he needed a job.”
“Then he would have built a lousy road. This is top quality, built for a reason.”
Fragmented radio reports told us that the main action was south or far north, where coalition forces blasted Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards from their bunkers. Burning Russian tanks and Iraqi corpses littered the main highway. Our smart bombs had hit the power plants and communications centers. The regime was collapsing.
Overhead, three F-16 Falcon jets shot past.
We’d taken some sniper fire from behind rocks, nothing major. An hour ago the pings of AK-47 rounds had bounced off my Humvee, and my gunner had killed four teenagers who could not have been older than seventeen, and who we’d left in the dust.
Now Eddie laughed, high on combat and victory. He was happy-go-lucky, the lone child of two San Francisco accountants who’d been horrified when he chose a military career, and his jocular surface hid a dangerous fighter who could come out if provoked by unequal odds. Back in college, where he’d been my ROTC roommate, I’d seen him wade into a street fight once, to help a small kid. I couldn’t figure the fury. Then he told a story. At age nine he’d been in a plane hijacked by PLO terrorists. He’d been on vacation with his parents, sitting next to a sixty-year-old Jewish lady playing magnetic chess when gunmen took over the plane.
The lead man had walked up to the boy and woman, spotted the Jewish star hanging from the woman’s neck, and shot her in the face.
The man had told the shaking boy, “Why sit with kike pigs? Come sit in a cleaner place.”
Eddie said now, “You’re looking for reasons, Number One? This country is a madhouse. Bridges built over desert, not water. Mansions filled with gold statues of movie stars. Mercedes upholstery of real tiger skin.”
Looking out, ahead I saw pathetic poverty-stricken architecture dating back to Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar.
Inside the boxy Humvee, I smelled men after days without baths, dirty feet, cordite, peanut butter.
I said doggedly, eyeing the collection of mud and wattle huts coming up at the end of the black highway, “No, there’s something more…”
The air was filthy orange through dust goggles, and thick with sand particles that stung exposed flesh like flies. The surface of the planet was the bottom panels of the Sistine Chapel, where tortured figures — onetime men — emerge howling into eternity.
After three days my thirty-seven guys coughed sand and spit crud out every few minutes, and blobs of heat-caked yellow phlegm marked our passage.
“Come on, man, in and out, like the other villages,” Eddie said.
This one rolled closer. I saw walls ahead, a dirt village square, a collection of huts each the size of an L.A. maid’s room, shimmering in heat that seemed to throw back the sound of our mechanized advance. The hair on my neck began to stand up.
“Be ready for ambush,” I told my guys.
“Hey, Numero,” Eddie said, “little bet. I say it’s nothing. You say fedayeen.”
We’d started the competition in college. Our race for better grades spread to everything else. Who could drink more beers on Saturday night? Who would win the motorcycle competition, the weapons competition, raise more money for the leukemia walkathon? Name it. It became a contest.
He won the best rifle shot, the push-up competition by a hair, and hand-to-hand combat, after four ties. I won the hot dog eating, beat him by one and a half seconds on the obstacle course, and I led the Red Team in war games, creeping over a forested western Massachusetts ridge in a surprise assault during a thunderstorm that captured the “general” of the Blue Team. That ranked me number one in the graduating class, hence the nickname.
We’d lost contact after graduation. Eddie went to Pendleton, I to Lejeune. And now we were rolling those final hundred yards toward Al Rassad, and the rooftops grew clear to the naked eye. I scanned the tops of walls for the glint of metal, a ducking head.
Nothing.
We stopped fifty yards short. I looked for the usual buzzards circling. The sky was an empty furnace; a lone smeary cloud seemed glued in place, almost two-dimensional.
The heat seemed to expand inside my head.
Now Eddie saw something. “Hey, man, no garbage.”
“No busted cars. And look at these tracks in the dirt. They’re from big trucks. Heavy treads.”
“Clean as a Hollywood set, One. No Coca-Cola bottles lying around, no chickens…”
“No dogs,” I breathed. “No damn dogs!”
That was the crowning touch — no yowling dogs, those big mustard-colored Iraqi canines that seem more like hyenas than domesticated pets. Dogs that make your average Manhattan pit bull look as pitiful as a Chihuahua. The dogs always stay behind in evacuations. They belong to no one. They seem to have sprung to life from rage itself, the yellow desert become flesh and hair.
We’d halted just inside a newly constructed ghost town. No creaking wooden doors left open to wind or looters, no shutters banging, no whiff of human shit marking the community ditch, not even any chicken droppings.
Just the hiss of sand scouring walls.
“Eddie, from the air, this place would look like a typical village. It’s a set!”
My guys went in, house to house, and in the very first one found that people had lived here, all right, but they hadn’t been peasants. Army cots, empty weapons racks, electrical appliances and generators, and the dirty rags of villagers hung on hooks…
“Troops disguised as villagers, but for what?”
Then, inside the third hut, we found what they’d protected, the entrance to a bunker, a steel doorway built into rock. Twin surveillance cameras aimed down on us.
“Engineers!” I shot the cameras out.
They blew the door with C4 and sent it flying. Eddie’s squad raked the entranceway with fire, and when there was no response, I told my guys, “Watch for booby traps. Go slow.”
We entered a tunnel, angling down into the earth. It was wide as three Humvees, with an arched roof fifteen feet high. The walls were blasted-away limestone. Bare bulbs overhead remained dark — but everything glowed green from the night goggles. Ahead, the tunnel turned right.
We wore bulky, tough-fibered two-piece camouflaged chemical suits. We carried M16A2 rifles, firing 5.56 mm rounds. I heard our equipment jangling. My heart seemed loud inside my chest, and my breathing was audible.
Lower, ten feet down, fifty. We shot out more cameras, dead eyes, maybe someone watching, maybe not, and after about three hundred feet we found ourselves spilled into the complex. Lights were on and bright.