...An Illuminating Flash...

17 JUNE 2010

The previous eight sheets of paper in my note pad are each an attempt to write about the same event. An IED—and a very specific type, meant to pierce our armor and aimed at head height—detonated on our convoy just a few trucks back from me. I’m not shaken up or anything silly like that. A close call is not a hit. And in reference to my combat history, I’ve seen them much closer—too close to consider the other night’s attack as a ‘holy shit’ experience. The trouble, and my difficulty in writing, comes in response to the tone I am accustomed to articulating my point—sarcasm, cynicism and light-hearted hoopla and so on. And whether my desensitized, nonchalant, overall attempt to remain aloof, gives a rat’s ass or not, someone’s intent—and an intent acted on—to murder or maim you is a relative serious incident. Unless you’re watching The Blues Brothers—with Belushi not Goodman, of course—or Looney Tunes, deadly explosions lack a certain amount of comic affect.

Because of the type of IED, I didn’t hear much of a bang or feel much of a shock; what did grab my attention was the illuminating flash, one I could only describe to a non-combatant as a lightening bolt crashing just a little too close. This was twenty minutes out of the gates of VBC, somewhere within the city limits of Baghdad, out in some desert country, during a war that’s managed to dwindle on well past what could be considered good sport and fun.

As the closest gun truck it fell into our hands to make the initial report and secure the impacted area of the convoy. I have always been confident in my abilities of tactical control, and the performance of my crew proved that reacting to contact is much the same as riding a bike—that I have gone the better part of a decade without blood, guts and glory but managed to find my ‘war face’ quick, fast and in a hurry.

My driver is a young private who talks about combat the way most, young privates do. My gunner is a recycled soldier from a deployment just a few years ago—a Tanker, my Uncle Joe would be pleased to hear—which is to say, this ain’t his first rodeo. And in those first few moments, these different shades of Joe had me living out some mockery of Joker’s helmet and the ‘duality of man’. Across from me I was saying, “you’re doing fine,” but up to the turret it was more like, “find that mother fucker.” I felt like two versions of a man trying to meet the same end by different means.

There were no injuries. One of the white trucks—driven by a contracted third-world national—had taken the hit. Along with the spider-webbed windshield and deflated tire, a good chunk—call it the size of a softball or so—had been blown through from one side of the flat bed to the other. That single hit would have been fatal to one of the gun trucks, but fatal in an instant, which is the way to go, I imagine—“How many licks does it take to get to the center of a…”

Earlier that day I had been talking with my new CET leader. We were discussing the latest intelligence brief and the various reports of the bad happenings all along the coming night’s route. We had questioned that the only proof of the continuing war was found in a brief or in reports handed along like in George Orwell’s propaganda war of 1984. That there was no way of telling if any of it was still real, just the trust that reports wouldn’t lie.

After the attack, the convoy was re-routed into another entry point at the far end of VBC. This new route drove us past BIAP, which is secured within the compound’s fence-line. Seeing those airfields had stripped me of some little safety device up in my brain, one that had been filtering out the bad from the good daydreams. And I thought of April 28th, 2003, and the first time I had seen those landing pads. When they still called that place Saddam International Airport. When I was a young little private, and had still thought of war the way most young little privates do. How I stepped off of a bird with my rifle and rucksack, and thought for that first time, “I have found war.”

- The Exodus