My cell phone bleated out its digital alarm and I opened my eyes to the inky blackness of another morning. I clumsily reached towards the plaintative electronic wail, blind fingers attempting to find the little banshee and choke it into silence. As my hand wrapped around the little monster my thumb started mashing keys – forcing the phone back into a mute stupor. As I sat up I focused through tired eyes at the tiny screen. 0500. I wanted to lay back down on my lumpy little bed and go back to sleep. To just close my eyes and pretend the alarm never went off at all. But today was a mission day. A day outside the wire. A day that had started two minutes before when my alarm first pulled me from my dreams of home. With that thought spurring me on I walked across the mausoleum darkness of my room and flipped on the lights.
Ahhhh, another morning in Baghdad.
I started pulling on my DCUs and by time I was cinching my boots enough dexterity had returned to my fingers to tie big looping knots in the laces. As I tucked the laces into my boots I noticed the bold black letters on my boots that read “B NEG” and smiled, noticing for the first time that my blood type seemed like pessimistic shorthand for “Be Negative”. As I walked out the door I kissed my gloved hand and pressed it against a picture of my wife before shutting off the lights and softly closing the door. As I walked to the TOC I kept thinking of my rapidly approaching leave and how wonderful it would be to just bask in my wife’s presence.
I was so caught up in daydreams that I didn’t notice that the PSD (personal security detail) soldiers were lined up until I was at the doors of the TOC. I snapped back to reality and walked over to 1LT Cisco, the platoon leader of the mortarmen who were going to be the PSD. Seeing that nearly everyone looked decidedly unhappy I asked him if his soldiers had a chance to eat breakfast. He gave me a perplexed look and said that they didn’t get the chance because they thought they were leaving at 0600. I told LT Cisco to release his soldiers so they could grab a quick breakfast and then gave a quick brief on the mission in case there had been any other breaks in the flow of information.
We started some coffee and covered the finer points of the mission, by time the pot was brewed the soldiers were filtering back to their vehicles. We downed steaming cups of coffee, hit the porta-johns and linked back up with the rest of the mortar platoon. LT Cisco briefed up his troops, finished last minute checks and then we all mounted our vehicles. As I clambered into the hulking cab of the uparmored LMTV next to my driver, SPC Ghost, I had a flashback to my trip north in its unarmored twin. This metallic Frankenstein shared little with that wretched truck – it carried the same predatory bloodline as our lethal M1114s. It might be a bigger target, but this vehicle could more then hold its own.
A few minutes later we were outside the wire, accelerators pushed to the floorboard as our small convoy greedily swallowed lengths of broken road in shuddering leaps. Our destination was only a few short miles away, but to get there we had to take the worst road in all of Iraq, if not the world. I’ve been down the route a dozen odd times, but from my high perch the road took on a new malignancy. Everywhere you looked there was a reminder of the grim lethality of this tiny stretch of road. The wide median was an arboreal massacre, lined with hundreds of ugly stumps standing like wooden tombstones. The scarred strip of asphalt was little better. Every dozen odd meters we bumped through patched craters – ebony blossoms that marked the impact point of VBIED. Even the bridges carried scorched reminders of the insurgents suicidal attacks, stalactites of debris hanging from their high abutments. If there was a highway to hell it probably looked a lot like this.
Our vehicles roared through the morning traffic, drivers weaving down the road to keep civilian cars from nearing our convoy. As we made our way down the road I started telling lame jokes to ease the tension. Halfway through one of my jokes I looked over at SPC Ghost and caught a fleeting glimpse of something that sent a shudder down my spine. For a split second I tried to repaint the image in my minds eye – fighting to catch the details. I could see the ugly lines of the old sedan, the glimmering, almost painful white of the drivers shirt and his thick black beard. But that was all. It was too late to turn around but my mind whirled around that singular image trying to resolve details that I failed to capture. Were the springs loaded down? Was the vehicle idling? Was the driver chanting? Had I just seen a VBIED? I raged at myself for riding in a vehicle without a radio. I was still groping for answers when we pulled safely into our destination.
As I clambered down from the cab to clear my weapons LT Cisco ran up. Through hurried breaths he told me that a radio call had just put an APB for a vehicle along our route. Before he finished I already knew the next words that would come out of his mouth. But I was wrong – LT Cisco had seen the vehicle too and passed the details to the Battalion. His message wasn’t one of missed opportunities, but one of scarcely contained pride. When he finished I exhaled a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
Later, as the TCNs (Third Country Nationals) loaded the LMTV with cargo we gathered in a hard, tight huddle and compared notes on the vehicle. By time we finished the cargo was tied down so we loaded up and started off on the return leg of our trip.
As we made our way off base we ran into a glitch. Unlike our FOB there was only one exit – and to get there you had to pass through a long, low tunnel. A tunnel that the LMTV could easily pass under despite its considerable height. That is… if the cargo bed wasn’t piled high with equipment. As we approached the tunnel it became clear to everyone in the convoy that there was no way we were going to make it through withour ripping away our supplies. With no room to turn around we tried using the automatic inflation system to lower the broad tires, the vehicle settled a little but we weren’t even close to making it. With few options left I jumped on the back of the LMTV along with one of the other troops and started using good old fashioned muscle to unstack the cargo. In a few minutes we were able to creep under the bridge with inches to spare, the bed of the LMTV littered with poorly stacked and unsecured cargo. When we emerged from the other side we pulled off the road to let the logjam of vehicles pass by and too secure the cargo. As we worked to lash everything down I told myself that someday I would look back at this mess and laugh.
The return home was as chilling as the ride up, the only difference being the burned asphalt carried a different pattern of welts. I felt myself tensing up as we approached the area where I had seen the possible VBIED but to my relief there was no trace of that accursed vehicle. We pressed on, occasionally swinging into the dirt median to pass stalled clusters of vehicles and in a few short minutes we were home. The cargo was intact, the vehicles still worked, and everyone was safe. Not a bad day’s work. Let me rephrase that, not bad for a morning of work. After all it was only 1000 hours.
