...The Man in White...(taken down)

16 JULY 2010

A guy we call ‘Body Bags’ is filling in for one of our drivers on this next mission. He’s a talker, full of shit mainly. He really did deploy with us in 2003, and spent as much time in Ramadi as the rest of the old boys, but that’s about the end of it, all else fades to fiction. He goes on about the time we took Blackhawks into Syria, to work with Special Forces. Really it was Al-Qaim, and though SF was there, their involvement with our unit was limited; say, if we raided a house and found a high-valued target, we ‘hooded’ them and passed them off. So it isn’t complete fiction, but it is stretching the yarn a little thin. There’s something contagious about a good story, and once you get your mind set on it, it’s hard not to play out what it was like from the days you can still remember.

It was the first time I had ever seen a real AK-47 up close. And it was the first time we had ever conducted a Traffic Control Point too, about a week after we’d taken over the city. The rifle was at the floorboards on the passenger side of a car I had halted. I yelled, “Gun” or “I need some help” or whatever it was, in the next moment an entire platoon had swallowed the area. They were pulling weapons up to the high ready or searching the car on hands and knees and then there were the few who decided to rough up the two nationals we’d snatched from their seats. The search produced nothing but a handful of loaded magazines. And the two men proclaimed to love Bush and our army and our country. Our platoon leader—the rest of us probably too—was still new to war, still naive, still lacking that cynical touch that often proves well in battle. After manhandling them a bit, we gave them back their rifle and sent them on their way. Maybe it was coincidence that we were ambushed moments later. I don’t know.

The ambush started after we had all piled onto the back of a deuce and a half, an out-dated military truck, a troop carrier. We were at our most vulnerable, all huddled together and filling in a tight little bull’s eye of a target. Two or three RPG rounds came at us from right to left. They were poorly aimed, one passing a foot or so from the engine block and the other just above our heads. Then came small arms fire from the same direction. We fired back some but our truck came to a quick stop and most of us flew forward tripping over one another. The platoon was divided when we hit the ground—a squad to assault, another to lay perimeter to the north and the last to complete the perimeter south.

The moment I took to my fighting position along the hasty perimeter, headlights from another motorist grew into the outline of a car, and the outline became bigger and clearer, and the car was just about on top of us. Someone yelled, “Warning shot!” But one bullet became many until the squealing brakes silenced everything. The man stepped out of his car with his hands held high. He was wearing a white dishdasha. He was my father’s age, I imagine. And he had a good scruff of beard growing, it suited him. A Joe named Parker was next to me on the line; he and I rose up and moved in on the surrendering driver. His clothes were white. I thought, when he collapsed, maybe he was in shock, or maybe, he was having a heart attack. There was a single bullet hole in the windshield. I don’t remember which of us called for the medic. His clothes were still white and clean because the bullet had torn into his lung, and what would have become bloodstains was slowly drowning him instead. There was nothing in his car and he had been on his way home from work, I imagine.

I think of that man every time one of the Joes from this deployment complains about the new and strict Rules of Engagement. The guys want to ‘light up’ anything that comes within a hundred meters of us, but they can’t. The most harmless pyrotechnic we have is a pen flare. It’s a small cylinder with a thumb depressor controlling a spring-based trigger. The flare is a tiny blasting cap that, once charged by the spring, will fly at a slow rate of speed for a few hundred meters or so, until it burns out and falls from the sky. The newest addition to our ROE advises that we may no longer use pen flares to warn off local traffic. Any time we fire one of these flares, an incident report must be filed, and an investigation to ensure its proper use will be conducted by an external unit’s officer.

It’s hard to justify the implementation of these new rules to young soldiers, soldiers who still have the means to sleep well at night. Even I have trouble keeping my index finger relaxed in times of high stress or questionable situations. I must try and remember the man in the white dishdasha, who laid at my feet swallowing back his own blood, and the countless other noncombatants, as there were many to follow him, who suffered the fate of being too close to war. And when I think of them, the elderly the women and children, the innocence lost, I must take a small measure of comfort in fighting with one hand administratively tied behind my back.

- The Exodus