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“We never had any problems until you came here,” a woman told Rice’s interpreter, referring to the U.S. presence as a whole. She added, not unkindly, “Won’t you please just leave?”
September 16 was about “presence patrol”—a dirty phrase in the Army, seeing as how no one wants to drive around waiting to get blown up. But Captain Mac needed the insurgents to know that Bravo Troop was still unbowed. Still a presence.
The whole damn troop had been out doing presence patrol for the past couple of days. By afternoon, it was time to roll back. The mortar platoon led. As the road hit a Y along a canal, Thornton recognized the choke point for what it was.
Looks like a good place to die, he thought. Standing outside his vehicle and studying a map, he radioed to the other trucks, pointing out a shack shrouded in palm groves off to the east. “If we get hit, it’s coming from there,” he predicted. Then he walked back to his Humvee and reached for the door.
The concussion flung Thornton and his forward observer, John Biggerstaff, into the air. The Humvee’s gunner, Curtis Spivey, shot out of the turret and out of sight. The truck flipped end over end three times. When it at last came to rest, split more or less in half, the driver tumbled out of the front seat and onto the road. It was Brown. Skin was dangling from his hands, and his helmet was on fire. He jumped into the canal.
Thornton’s hair had melted away from his scalp. Biggerstaff was holding up his burning hands, speechless, in shock. As the air crackled with the reports of the Humvee cooking off its rounds, Corporal Cullen Dorfman pulled the chewing tobacco out of Biggerstaff’s gasping mouth, while a sergeant stood over Spivey and his mangled legs, begging him to wake up.
The following day, Major General J. D. Thurman, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, choppered into Falcon. He was not happy. He couldn’t understand why the Jab was still giving Bravo Troop fits. He demanded:
Why can’t you isolate the problem, surround it, and cut it off?
“I can’t get there,” Captain Mac replied. “I can put fifty guys out there, but I can’t protect them with the combat power we have.” He and Lieutenant Colonel Love both insisted that the only way to succeed in a counter-insurgency was to keep trying to penetrate, little by little. Establish patrol bases. Chip away at the locals.
The general pointed out that, yes, some good was happening, but at the end of the day, too many of their men were getting blown up. And, anyway, this was outside of the greater mission’s intent.
We’re supposed to be turning things over to the Iraqis, Thurman reminded them. Never mind that the Iraqis weren’t ready.
The general suggested that a new course of action needed to be taken and that Bravo Troop should be pulled back from the Jab. And so they returned to Falcon, while Brown, Thornton, and Biggerstaff flew back to the States with severe burns covering their bodies—joined by Spivey, who would die a few months later, but at least in an American hospital bed rather than on a canal road south of Baghdad, while the faceless enemy smiled.
Uncle Sam got the rest of them home for Thanksgiving. Before a packed crowd of family and friends seated in Fort Hood’s Starker Gym, some five hundred members of the Fourth Infantry Division’s Second Brigade Combat Team, including Bravo Troop, charged through a curtain of machine-induced fog with music roaring, like a home football team galloping out of the stadium tunnel and onto a playing field of inevitable glory. Then they said goodbye to one another and returned to their obscure creases of America. Or tried to. People called them heroes and bought them drinks and asked them how many terrorists they’d killed. Life seemed dull and banal. And yet at the sound of any screeching tire, any popping firecracker, danger was omnipresent. In their dreams they saw Laymon. They saw all sorts of crazy things. One scout who returned physically unscathed, Daniel Sevilla, had a dream in which he was on patrol, watching a car drive by . . . and there was an Iraqi boy sitting in the passenger seat, shooting him the bird. Now, what did
that mean?
Three months later, in February 2007, the 1-10 reconvened at the base for its cavalry ball. Dressed in prom clothes, with their girlfriends or spouses on their arms, the young men of Bravo Troop greeted one another with brotherly insults. Captain Mac had supplied each table with old wine bottles filled with ceremonial grog—in this case, tequila. Everyone got ripped in a hurry. Everyone kept on drinking.
Lieutenant Colonel Love presented a slide show to highlight the 1-10’s time in Iraq. The images were safe. Guys standing beside their unscarred Humvees. Guys relaxing in their bunkers. The kinds of images, they’d sworn to their parents in e-mails, that were thoroughly representative of their overall experience. Tonight the soldiers laughed and clapped, content with the representation. Only when the slide of Benjamin J. Laymon came on the screen did the members of Bravo Troop begin to cry.
Thanks a lot, guys, Jalone thought bitterly.
Thanks for showing us what we’re trying to forget.
At the end of the evening, Richloff—freshly decorated with both a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his bravery that day eight months ago when Laymon was killed—accidentally sprayed a can of beer into the face of a girl who happened to be the daughter of a particular sergeant he disliked. The sergeant ran over and threw a beer at Richloff, who was then dragged outside by his buddies and restrained until they were assured that he wouldn’t go back inside and pound the sergeant’s face in. A few of them shook Richloff’s hand, and he tried to smile—not wanting them to know that what he was feeling inside had little if anything to do with the sergeant.
Richloff was not the same person. After dreaming all his life of a military career, he decided he was through with the Army. At the same time, the only people he wanted to talk to were from Bravo Troop. They understood about the strange muscle pains, the headaches, the aching boredom. How he waited for some joy to appear.
Jalone was not the same person. His wife told him that all the time. He was winding down his Army career as an instructor in Fort Knox, Kentucky. There, at least, he could make use of his rage:
Look, asshole—I lost some buddies because they weren’t paying attention, so pay attention!
Plimmer was not the same person. The brain trauma had been severe. For a while, he had forgotten how to comprehend things as basic as vowels and numbers. Captain Mac visited him at Fort Hood one day, and in the middle of a nice chat, Plimmer confessed, “I’m sorry, sir. But I have no idea what we’re talking about.”
Boltz and Palmer with their memory loss, Baldwin with his insomnia and deafness, Douglas with his drinking, Ganser with the cane, Brown with the burns all over his face—to say nothing of Rice and Roush and Captain Mac and all the others in Bravo Troop who cleaned up nicely after the Jab and, for their trouble, will be redeployed to some brilliant new mission in Iraq or Afghanistan somewhere down the line.
But good news! After four years and thirteen failed missions, General David Petraeus brought the surge to Arab Jabour, flooding the zone with 1,200 American troops. Today, a permanent patrol base is stationed in the Jab. The local Sunnis have begun to join the police force and turn in the bad guys. When the members of Bravo Troop are told this, their eyes brighten. Just as quickly, the light seems to fade. They should share in this victory. It would be only fair. But really, they cannot.
Today, in his new life as a thirty-year-old wounded veteran living with his fiancée in Austin, Plimmer ponders the reasons he signed on for all this:
Am I tough enough? Would I hesitate? “At times I reacted the way I would’ve hoped,” he says. “And that was success. But I still have the same questions. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that, facing adversity, I will react to it. Maybe not the right way. But I
will react.”
Some evenings, after he’s done worrying about the future—which only makes the headaches worse—Plimmer gets on his laptop and pulls up a map of Baghdad. Scrolling down, following the Tigris, he searches for that telltale bend, for the cluster of civilization on the river’s west bank. Now he zooms, a scout peering through his scope once more. And he finds it, or thinks he does—the very spot where he crouched beside a berm and saw that goatherd stand up and lie down for hours on end. Plimmer stares and stares at it. As if it’s his own cradle or grave. He can’t decide which.