Weapons of Mass Destruction Read online

  “Why else would they live in that ramshackle trailer?” his father asked. “The foreman’s cabin is there for the asking. Always has been.”

  “You can lead a horse to water,” Grandpa said. He thought better of finishing the adage. Pete’s father could never be accused of refusing to drink, that’s for sure.

  “There must be something we can do,” Sinclair said.

  “Fact is we may have done too much.”

  “You can’t save people from themselves.”

  But something didn’t add up. Sinclair knew Pete would never shoot himself in the foot just to make a point. He wouldn’t have shot himself in the head, either, if he hadn’t been completely demoralized. They said it was an accident, but Sinclair knew better. No one handled a gun like Pete. If he were in Iraq, he’d head up the sniper squad, not Sinclair.

  It defied explanation. You tried to help people, and they lashed out. Apparently gifts were easier to give than to receive. They carried an unseen burden, a kind of backhanded slap in the face. If even soccer fields gave offense, imagine the perceived aggression of liberating a country from sectarian tyranny. In Iraq, if not in Montana, freedom translated more readily into vandalism than Saturday afternoon team sports.

  They should have seen it coming. Allegiances changed overnight in Fallujah, like shifting sands in the desert. Marines adapted to the climate, manicuring soccer fields one week, evacuating the city the next. They were in it for the long haul. There was something satisfying about pitting yourself against the region’s timeless resistance to stability. If it took fifty years to usher the Middle East into the twenty-first century, so be it.

  The evacuation was taking longer than anticipated. Sinclair started doubting whether the exodus would be over in time for the offensive. Highway 10 was still packed with people, mostly on foot by late afternoon. Car bombings and munitions smuggling had finally convinced the tactical operations center to restrict vehicular traffic. Civilians were forced to flee with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Most of the more affluent citizens were long gone anyway. According to official reports, the poor lagged behind, inexplicably reticent to leave their homes. From the vantage point of boots on the ground, they looked more resigned than reticent, too accustomed to being trapped to imagine an alternative. They lacked the resources, either emotional or financial, to escape the red tide of war. In order to flee, you have to have somewhere to go.

  A man in a bulky jacket approached Sinclair. The temperature had climbed another ten degrees, and he was conspicuously overdressed. Sinclair confronted him, his weapon at the ready.

  “Back off! Hands over your head.”

  In the heat of the moment, Sinclair forgot the few Arab phrases they’d learned in boot camp. If he had an Achilles heel, it was his phobia of suicide bombers. Improvised explosive devices were a far more pervasive threat, but he took them in stride. At least IEDs made sense, instinctively as well as strategically. Killing the enemy meant safeguarding yourself, your platoon, your country. War itself was an extension of this collective will to survive, not an excuse to indulge self-destructive impulses. Blowing yourself up sullied the ethics of war with senseless violence.

  The man looked more perplexed than intimidated. He kept gesturing toward the moving throng of refugees, repeating the same words over and over.

  “Ummi. Kalb. Kalb.”

  Sinclair trained the barrel of his automatic on the man’s head. Explosives strapped to his body could be detonated by a point-blank shot.

  “Ummi. Kalb.”

  McCarthy rushed over and frisked the man. It turns out there was nothing under his jacket but a sweaty T-shirt. An alarming number of people stopped to glower at them. Sinclair tried to reassure them that they were on their side. He used a stock Arabic phrase he’d been required to memorize, something about how searches and checkpoints were designed to protect ordinary Iraqi citizens. The exact translation eluded him. He knew damned good and well his accent was atrocious. Butchering the language had no effect whatsoever on the man’s confidence in Sinclair’s ability to communicate. He started talking the Arabic equivalent of a mile a minute, gesticulating adamantly and often.

  “La afham,” Sinclair said. “La afham, goddamnit.”

  Sinclair kept repeating that he didn’t understand, a phrase he spoke much more fluently than any other. Finally he radioed Radetzky to request an interpreter. The man talked nonstop until the terp showed up. Sinclair asked why he was dressed for a blizzard in the middle of a fucking heat wave. The interpreter was trained to edit out expletives and wildly inappropriate figures of speech. His delivery was still less than cordial. He was Syrian and had a hard time disguising his distaste for Iraqis, not that Sinclair or anyone else in the platoon noticed. Terps were increasingly hard to come by. Most of the Iraqis they used in Baghdad quit when they found out the battalion was headed for Fallujah.

  “You must be dying of the heat in that get-up. The corporal wants to know why you’re all bundled up like that.”

  “I’d rather be hot now than freezing to death tonight,” the man said. “The camps are already full. We’ll be sleeping out in the open.”

  “Did you approach the corporal for a reason?”

  “I wanted to ask if he’d seen a woman in a wheelbarrow. I’ve lost my mother.”

  “The one with the greyhound?”

  “Actually, a saluki.”

  Sinclair couldn’t believe it. There they were, in the middle of a war zone, sorting out dog breeds. Two soldiers and an interpreter had been tied up for ten minutes because a man couldn’t keep track of his own mother. The US Marine Corps was being transformed into a global babysitting service. Next thing you knew they’d be changing diapers. Good thing McCarthy had already resumed his post on the other side of the highway. No doubt he would have launched into one of his tirades about squandering military resources. McCarthy never needed an interpreter. He was a gifted communicator, fluent in the universal language of outrage and obscenity. Without necessarily understanding a word he said, Iraqis knew exactly what he meant. After editing out invective, there was nothing left to translate anyway.

  The evacuation dragged on well into the night. The steady flow of foot traffic finally ebbed, but there were still stragglers when the platoon was ordered to report back to the base. Only five hours remained before Operation Vigilant Resolve was scheduled to begin. Sinclair and Logan lay on their cots, resting but too excited to sleep. Sinclair tried to relax by concentrating on the relative comfort of his mattress. Even if they bunked in abandoned houses during the offensive, there wouldn’t be enough beds to go around. Just as well. Beds were a security risk. Insurgents could hide under them.

  Their watches beeped almost simultaneously. Sinclair jumped up and started strapping himself into the hundred pounds of gear that would sustain and protect him. Logan knelt down to perform what had become a combat ritual. He extracted the crucifix lodged between his body armor and his chest, and they both kissed it. Sinclair didn’t share Logan’s faith in icons, but soldiers were even more superstitious than ball players. Rituals helped them believe they would survive.

  “Lord Jesus, mighty warrior and prince of peace—”

  Logan grabbed his automatic. There wasn’t time to finish the prayer on his knees, but God would understand.

  “—grant us the strength to fight the good fight.”

  “Amen.”

  Platoon after platoon boarded Strykers bound for East Manhattan, where they would dismount and split into squads. It was the first time they’d been in armored vehicles since their arrival in Fallujah. The effort to normalize their presence in the city included traveling in Humvees rather than Strykers and tanks, leaving them vulnerable to roadside bombs. There had been talk of forgoing body armor, but Radetzky had drawn the line there.

  Rucksacks were lashed onto racks to make room for more men. Sinclair was wedged between McCarthy and Trapp. Their lower lips bulged with enormous plugs of Skoal. On campaigns they rationed cigarettes,
alternating between fags and chew. Sinclair passed their spit cup back and forth as they waited for the signal to mobilize. By the time the Strykers finally lurched into motion, the cup was half full.

  “Now this is what I call riding in style,” Trapp said.

  “Break out the party snacks,” McCarthy said.

  They bumped along Highway 10, which was now closed to all but military traffic. Scattered palm groves dotted the desert on either side of the road, silhouetted against the rising sun. Once they were under way, a boom box blared AC/DC so loud nobody could think or talk. They played the same CD before every major offensive, to help them get into the zone. The first disc had been incinerated by a grenade. Trapp’s sister sent them another one. If “War Machine” wasn’t your favorite song when you enlisted, it would be by the time you shot your way out of a few firefights, shoulder-to-shoulder with sixty-one other grunts who swore by AC/DC. They sounded like a karaoke band on steroids, clutching guns instead of microphones. Real heavy metal. Sinclair was tone deaf, not that it mattered. Wolf was the only one with anything approximating a singing voice, and he was usually half hoarse from shouting out orders. What they lacked in pitch they made up for in volume. Fists pumped in unison every time they reached the chorus.

  The platoon was already in the zone, well before they reached the city limits. From base camp, Fallujah looked like a shimmering mirage in an endless expanse of desert sands. Straight out of a Hollywood film. Up close and personal, it was a gritty, angry city ready to boil over. Its rigid grid of streets lacked the grace of the mosques towering overhead. Too much concrete with too little architectural imagination. Even the most affluent houses looked more like fortresses than mansions. Courtyard walls jealously hoarded the lush shade of hidden gardens. Poorer neighborhoods gave the impression that the city had lost its self-esteem in the wake of one too many military occupations. But from a distance, cooled by Euphrates breezes fragrant with the scent of flowering date palms, Fallujah looked like a miracle. Its mosaic domes glistened in the bluest of skies, transforming the punishing sun into a kaleidoscope of fractured incandescence. Minarets pierced the heavens, promising spiritual transcendence one minute, vengeance the next. The City of a Hundred Mosques, most of them preaching hatred of Western infidels.

  Fallujah’s radical Sunni clerics mounted powerful speakers on minarets. Once the evacuation was announced, they commanded Fallujans to hold their ground. Baghdad had already fallen to the Americans, who were buddying up with Shiites. This wasn’t the first time barbarians had conspired against Sunnis. Broadcast after broadcast referred to the commander in chief in Washington as Hulagu II, a new millennial incarnation of the notorious Mongol invader who had challenged Sunni ascendancy in ancient Iraq. Five times a day, before and after prayers, imams called on the faithful to defend Islam against the infidel occupation.

  “They’re in bed with the Ba’athists,” Logan said every chance he got.

  “Must be awfully crowded in that bed,” Trapp said.

  “No joke,” McCarthy said. “Ba’athists, Sunnis, fedayeen.”

  “Mujahideen, jihadists.”

  “Don’t forget al-Qaeda.”

  “Sounds like a sectarian orgy,” McCarthy said.

  “What about Shiites?”

  “They’re in bed with us.”

  “No way,” Logan said. “We’re on our own, thank God.”

  “Spoken like a true celibate.”

  “Here we go again. Another sermon on abstinence.”

  “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Logan said.

  “I tried it last night. It sucks.”

  “Or doesn’t suck, as the case may be.”

  “There are other things in life.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like annihilating our enemies,” Logan said. “All we have to do is wait till they screw each other over.”

  “Then move in for the kill.”

  Logan must have thought being a born-again Christian made him an expert on sectarian squabbles. He was convinced that imams were in cahoots with local Ba’athists, fellow Sunnis excluded from the political process after the fall of Baghdad. Washington may have miscalculated, disenfranchising them so completely. A few minor mistakes were apparently fueling the insurgency. But Ba’athist fears that Americans would hand Iraq over to the Shiites were ridiculous. Americans had no intention of handing Iraq over to anyone, at least not in the foreseeable future.

  Highway 10 was deserted except for the convoy of Strykers. The emptiness accentuated the ominous beauty of the desert. Everything was double-edged in Iraq. Oases concealed deadly snipers. Pristine mosques rose from rubbish heaps. Teenagers wearing American T-shirts shouted obscenities at American infidels. One minute shepherds waved their staffs, the next they opened fire with AK-47s. Sinclair’s platoon had been ordered to assume that Fallujah’s benign side had decamped. The fact that civilians were instructed to evacuate meant that everyone left behind was noncompliant, one of McCarthy’s favorite euphemisms.

  “You know you’re in trouble when the military bothers to be politically correct. It’s a sure sign they’re gearing up to kick somebody’s ass.”

  Enemies were noncompliant forces. Offensives were operations. Tank search-and-destroy maneuvers were officially called movement-to-contact missions, though unofficially they caused the same amount of death and destruction, otherwise known as collateral damage. Before the Brooklyn Bridge debacle, marines were actually required to knock before entering family homes or insurgent compounds, as the case may be.

  “Military etiquette,” McCarthy said. “Guess who’s coming to dinner.”

  Hospitality left something to be desired in Fallujah. Civilians seldom answered the door before squads of marines stormed into their living rooms. Rules of engagement only authorized opening fire in self-defense, a slippery distinction at best. Jumpy marines had been known to gun down hapless household pets, if not their owners, with impunity. According to McCarthy, the self-defense clause was the military equivalent of no-fault insurance. Sometimes Sinclair wished he wouldn’t kid around so much. It cheapened their mission.

  Tanks had flattened guardrails on either side of the highway, allowing the convoy to fan out across the desert. One too many roadside bombs had claimed the lives of military personnel over the past few weeks. Humvees with mounted machine guns and grenade launchers flanked the Strykers. The farther they penetrated into the interior of the old city, the more labyrinthine the urban landscape. Humvees were more versatile and could thread the needle into alleys and courtyards too narrow for tanks and Strykers. Revised rules of engagement guaranteed that there would always be extra firepower to back them up when the going got tough.

  While Sinclair’s battalion moved in from the south, two others converged on the city from the east and west. With so many units moving in from so many different quadrants, the danger of friendly fire ruled out aerial strikes until everyone dug in. Thankfully everything was relative. Insurgents didn’t have tanks and Humvees with mounted artillery. Their rockets and RPG launchers were like slingshots in comparison. It was David and Goliath all over again. Only this time the giant would win.

  As they entered the city proper, concrete compounds replaced stone houses. Each residence rose two or three stories over cement walls tall enough to conceal whole squads of men. East Manhattan was a relatively upscale district. Its homes resembled tastefully decorated citadels. Every three or four blocks, a mosque dominated the neighborhood. Sinclair noticed that Hazelit earthen barriers had been piled around several of the mosques. This didn’t bode well. Barricades were usually reserved for coalition and Iraqi Interim Government buildings. While marines were busy evacuating civilians, insurgents had been constructing defensive positions and stockpiling ammunition. Too much babysitting had jeopardized their strategic advantage.

  “What did I tell you?” McCarthy said.

  “Delay and you get blown away.”

  The other two battalions were authorized to use maxim
um firepower to flush the enemy out of the industrial sector and Queens. The Thundering Third would act as a kind of human net to catch insurgents as they fled into East Manhattan. Sinclair knew guys back home who used a similar technique, flushing deer into hunting blinds. Pete’s dad, Eugene, claimed his ancestors used to stampede buffalo herds over the palisades of the Tobacco Root Mountains. But Grandpa taught them never to resort to traps. Real hunting meant engaging the animal one-on-one, matching instinct and endurance.

  Sometimes Sinclair wished that war was more like hunting. It’s true they had a lot in common. They were both blood rituals pitting cunning and courage against fear and death. But one was in service of civilization, the other a return to the primitive. You might think a battalion was like one mighty hunter with a thousand appendages. But hunters don’t shed blood for the sake of others the way soldiers do. They don’t kill to protect the innocent and safeguard freedom. A great deal more was at stake in war, and Sinclair knew better than to split hairs over strategies that worked. Orders were orders. At least he was in the battalion that would most directly engage the enemy. They were authorized to summon tank and rocket support when they encountered terrorist cells, often hidden in basements of well fortified homes. But most of their mission would consist of point-blank combat with insurgents in close quarters.

  Commanders were equipped with aerial photographs of the city, digital images so precise every single building and back alley was clearly mapped out. Each platoon would be responsible for clearing a block at a time before advancing. To decrease the danger of friendly fire, they had to move at roughly the same pace. Straying into each other’s quadrants was strictly prohibited, even in pursuit.

  “This will require discipline,” Radetzky said. “When one of your buddies is maimed or killed, you’ll want to track down the enemy. To make them pay.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Damn wrong.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Coordinated efforts are essential,” Radetzky said. “Radio alerts to adjacent squads. We’ll nail the bastards that way.”