Discussion Two: Women in the Infantry

A topic of discussion that I seem to always find myself embroiled in sooner or later once people learn that I am in the Army is that of women in the infantry. My feelings on the subject are very conflicted. Actually, that's a lie. I know exactly how I feel, it's just that I wish I could say that I felt differently. Here is a correspondence I've had on the subject recently:

Scott M. wrote:

I mentioned offhand to my 16-year-old (who's been raised on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate SG-1, various incarnations of Star Trek, Lara Croft and other action-y shows where the girls kick ass) that women were not allowed combat units of the US military. She was outraged. She was indignant. She almost-shouted "WHY NOT!". I did my best to explain the 'official' reasons, the unofficial ones as I understand them, my personal objections and how the line between 'combat' and 'noncombat' is increasingly blurred, but she was not mollified.

This is not a writing assignment, but I would be very interested in your take on the issue and your experiences with the female of the military species.

My response:

Yes, it's true, women cannot be infantry.

The topic of women in the infantry is a very tricky one and is the one thing in my personal philosophy that I am sexist about. I see that there are two reasons why women are not allowed in the infantry (or most other combat arms jobs). The average grunt is fairly in touch with his primal self and therefore wants generally only two things: to fuck and to fight, in that order. And the main reason they fight is to be tough and therefore attract more women with which they can fulfill their desire to fuck. As soon as there are any women within spittin' distance, prime directive number one kicks in and all things, especially job discipline, go straight to hell. Anyone who thinks this is stupid is right, but is also retarded if they think this will ever change. Grunts are grunts. The thinking man finds meaning through some sort of higher pursuit. The grunt finds meaning through fucking. And if he can do some fighting between coital sessions, that's cool too.

The second reason women are not (and should not) be in the infantry is as equally based in the primal side of human existence as the first. Women can't do a grunt's job worth a shit. I wish I were wrong about this because it goes against all my notions of gender-egalitarianism, but it's the truth. I have trained with women on many occasions and I can only say that it completely alters the training environment. Not only are the guys distracted for reason number one, but also the intensity level of training is shot all to hell. Your average female will not push herself in training the way a man will. I've seen guys literally push themselves in training until they have died. I saw a guy finish a PT test two-mile run then collapse and die from a burst aorta. I've seen a guy march in the sun until he collapsed from heat stroke and brain damage. I've seen guys march despite broken bones, dislocated joints and torn ligaments. Dying in training is dumb, but it is testament to the degree that a soldier is willing to push himself. In all my experiences training with women, their common-sense gene (that guys seem to lack, thankfully for the military) kicks in and they say, Fuck this, I'm not gonna kill myself doing this. I know there are women out there who probably are like this as well, but in a society where men have been raised being expected to perform because of the incredible force of the macho peer pressure, men that will push themselves like this are much easier to find than women who will. And I haven't even gotten to the fact yet that your average man is much stronger physically than your average female. And even if female humans were as strong as men and willing to push themselves to the same extent, there will always be Reason One. There are, like, four women at my little base. The other night the quick reaction force had to move out and we couldn't find three of our guys. We ended up leaving them, including a .50 cal gunner. Turns out they were asleep in the room with one of the girls who lives near the QRF staging area. [note: The QRF staging area has since been relocated.]

Anyways, I know this is probably the last thing your daughter would want to hear. There may be a time when these factors don't matter as much and women will be in the infantry. In the meantime she can always join the MPs, what they call the "chick infantry". In combat, they end up doing most the same stuff as the infantry, at least they do in Iraq.

Then as an afterthought I wrote in a second email:

Other issues with women in the infantry:
-menstruation and vaginal health-- Living conditions can be very harsh and having to deal with, say, a yeast infection while going without a shower for several months can be very difficult I imagine.
-rape (especially if captured)
-pregnancy-- no time for prenatal care in the field
-breasts-- of they are large enough to get in the way of wearing gear, body armor, low-crawling and the other physicalities of soldiering, you are totally ineffective as a grunt.

I wish I had more things positive to say about women in the infantry, but there are so many things that make it not a very good idea. Women deserve equal opportunity, but equality in certain combat jobs may not make the best tactical sense.

I hope I haven't crushed your daughter's hopes or made myself to sound like too much of a sexist jerk.

Scott's reply and addition:

you wrote: Now the topic of women in the infantry is a very tricky topic...

You got that right.

you wrote... and is the one thing in my personal philosophy that I am sexist about.

I have to agree. Well, maybe one or two things...

You wrote: The other night the quick reaction force had to move out and we couldn't find three of our guys. We ended up leaving them, including a .50 cal gunner. Turns out they were asleep in the room with one of the girls who lives near the QRF staging area.

All of them? Damn. (My ex-Navy friends tell me stories about the California hookers who join the Reserve so they can turn tricks aboard ship during drills. The girls have a captive audience, especially at sea, and a line forms outside the door.) What happened to your post-coital snoozers after that? Disciplinary-wise, I mean. That's pretty much against the rules, isn't it? [note: for the record, there was no Caligula going on, or so they claim.]

You wrote: I know this is probably the last thing your daughter would want to hear.

Thanks for your honesty. I very much agree with your premises. Actually, my daughter needs to hear this stuff or be rudely and unpleasantly surprised. Also, your word carries a little more weight than mine on this subject.

My objections are a little less primal, and also difficult to square with a strictly egalitarian worldview.

1. The young, strong and healthy make the best soldiers. Women are the only humans that can bear children. A woman is much more than a womb, but do we really want to put our young, strong, healthy wombs on the firing line? (See the short story "Down Among the Dead Men" by John Campbell.) Also, it is not solely a woman's responsibility to raise the children, but I think the well-being of dependents should be a higher priority than, say, career advancement.

There's a kid that goes to our church whose single female parent just finished a year in the sandbox and is now in Germany. He is staying with another family from the church. He's a bright, happy kid, but he's also pathetically desperate for attention and approval. We give him all the love and support we can, but I gotta think - no dad and Mom spent his early adolescence deployed abroad; it'll be a miracle if it doesn't screw him up good.

2. The history I've read tells us that women can fight ferociously and well, but the minute a coed unit takes female casualties, men (Westerners, at least) fall apart. It's that primal thing again; the ingrained duty to protect the female (when you aren't fucking her, that is). If GI Jane gets even a little blown apart, GI Joe feels like a he's a failure (and acts and fights accordingly). Not good.
The only way to overcome this would be to create a society, and subsequently an army, where the men are as tolerant of the suffering and death of women as they are of the deaths of other men. Not only would I not want to live in that society, I'll actively resist its' creation.

3. Of course, the elephant in the room when it comes to women-in-combat has to be spelled in capital letters: RAPE.

The sexual abuse of women in wartime is a sad and ancient story. In the West, we've gone from "lust, loot and liquor are the soldier's pay" to rape in wartime being a captial offense under the UCMJ. (It still happens, but making it a major offense is progress.)

Of course, ancient is the operative word in the sentence above: most of the cultures we'll be 'interacting' with in the forseeable future are tribal cultures where the sexual abuse of the enemy's females is a routine, if not mandatory, way of demonstrating one's power and humiliating the enemy. (I mean, what kind of animal would sodomize an unconscious woman with a broken pelvis?) Plus, I bet the only blond girls GI Achmed has seen were in porn of some description... ("But Colonel, the infidel harlot probably *enjoyed* it!").

As I write this, it occurs to me that the chance - for now - of a female soldier being raped by a fellow US serviceman is actually higher than then chance of her being captured and raped by enemy personnel. On the other hand, if she *is* captured, her chances of being raped are about 100%. I suppose it's her business if she wants to volunteer for that, but....

I seem to remember a medevac helicopter pilot from Gulf War I who got shot down, captured and repeatedly molested in spite of having two broken arms. (Her enlisted crew chief kept trying to protect her and kept getting beaten senseless for his trouble. Since she was getting raped anyway, she had to order him to stop trying because she was afraid they'd kill him.) She was released and soldiered on. She *didn't* go on TV or write a book; I suppose she told her husband, her chaplain and her shrink, but the story didn't become public until she was forced to testify at a Congressional hearing.

As Mr. Lawrence found out (to his regret, I'm sure) the Ottoman-of-action is not above sexually abusing a male captive, but that's by no means certain and, in any case, another subject.

"Chick infantry". Heh. I also seem to remember that the lady captain that was decorated for bravery in Panama was an MP....

Thanks for shooting straight.

Scott

I Love Dead Civilians

The man in the passenger seat lay slumped against the dashboard, a massive wound to his head. Kirk pulled the body upright and cut his pockets open looking for ID. When he was done and let the body fall back against the dashboard, he said what was left of the man's brain fell out of the opening in the back of his head and onto the ground. He could handle the guy with the brain and both the dead women, but it was the three-year-old-girl, he said, that got to him.

Roughly an hour earlier a convoy of fuel tankers and Humvees came to a halt a little north of our forward operations base when what looked like an improvised explosive device was spotted on the side of the road. Since the suspected IED was spotted mid-convoy, the vehicles were split, part to the north and part to the south, leaving an area open around it to avoid any of the trucks being destroyed. Our explosive ordnance disposal team was being called in and our quick reaction force was going to escort them. I was in the QRF and CASEVAC staging area that day, but I was on neither detail. We were listening to the radio in a Humvee as one of the officers in the convoy was communicating with our headquarters about the IED when they started to take small arms fire. They took contact from multiple directions. Then the mortar rounds started to fall. The people that attack convoys and FOBs seem to have no end to their supply of mortar rounds, a common means of attack and the primary charge of the IEDs they leave for us like Easter eggs. Thankfully they don't know how to aim them any better than they do their rifles.

When our QRF made it to the scene, shots were still being fired, so they laid down suppressive fire the best they could. Even though this attack took place in daylight, there was much difficulty pinpointing the location of the enemy assailants. There was a building and a parked vehicle in the distance and the guy on the ground calling everything up on the radio was unsure if fire was being taken from these locations. Restraint was exercised and fires were directed toward less collateral damage-inducing areas.

But to the north, another QRF also responded to this ambush, an active duty unit newly in-country. This was their first mission.

Since the other QRF was on a separate communications net, the response attacks were not coordinated. This isn't particularly important other than it's anyone guess what the communication was like between them and their battalion leadership. They also spotted a vehicle, this one on the move apparently, but less restraint and less positive target identification was exercised.

The vehicle was a white pickup, a small Toyota, one like most Iraqis stack their families into the back of, just as this one had. Everyone has these trucks in Iraq, it's like the national vehicle It's also the preferred vehicle of the ICDC and insurgents alike. I can imagine that the man driving it, most likely the father of those on-board, just wanted to get his family out of the area of the fighting as quickly as possible. I can also imagine that the other QRF got word that a fast moving vehicle was our attackers' likely means of attack and escape, a completely plausible and reasonable possibility.

>From what could be gathered afterward, the Humvee gunships engaged the pickup with a SAW, M240B and a M2 .50 cal., or in other words, a shitload of machine gun fire. The truck contained six people. Two men, two women, and two young girls. As is the custom in Iraq, the men were in the cab as the females huddled together in the bed of the truck. Among the dead were one of the men, both women, and a three-year-old girl, apparently smothered to death by the two women's bullet-riddled bodies, apparently trying to shield the girl from the fusillade of gunfire, the tragic irony being that this ultimate protective act was the very thing that killed the youngest. The man driving was still alive when CASEVAC (comprised mostly of members from my squad) got there, but he was probably on his way out. Matt, our platoon medic, a member of my team and a paramedic out of Poughkeepsie in real life, said the man had numerous wounds to his legs and a gunshot wound to the scrotum, an entry wound to a round that had no visible exit and was most likely lodged in his pelvic or abdomen since it entered him from a seated position. As he held a pressure dressing to the man's bleeding thigh, he felt the shattered pieces of femur grind against each other. The only one who seemed certain to survive was an eight-year-old girl who had gunshot wounds in both of her upper arms. The man and the girl were medevac'd via Blackhawk, along with another girl from a separate location nearby who took a round through her cheek and leg. Stan and Kirk had the grisly duty of stacking the bodies in the back of a truck to be moved to the aid station at the FOB.

As I try to fathom what it must feel like to be a poverty-stricken eight-year-old Muslim girl and experience the epic pain of having your family suddenly and violently killed in front of you, I have to pause and ask myself, Now what am I doing here again? I know this kind of thing happens in combat and I kind of expected to see it, but jesus, the record is pretty bad so far. Since I've been in Iraq, in situations that my platoon has responded to there have been three dead bad guys, two wounded civilians (one critically), and seven dead civilians to include four women, one three-year-old girl and one mentally-unstable homosexual man on a moped. Hell, if you count the suicide of the latter's lover-- an excellent two-for-one dead civilian deal-- and the de-familied guy who got his balls blown off who even if he lived will wish to Allah that he was dead, that makes the tally 3 to 9, a 1:3 ratio of dead evildoers to innocent and ridiculously poor Iraqis who couldn't care less who leads their country just so long as they are able to feed themselves. Now that I think about it, there have actually been more civilian casualties in our area, but these are the only ones that I remember very well right now. Thank god none of this carnage has been carried out by anyone in my platoon or even my battalion for that matter. My battalion has sustained only one casualty of its own so far, and there has been at least one engagement by another company that netted a few dozen dead bad guys, so the numbers are at least decent in that regard, but still, I'm having a hard time being okay with all the dead civilians. It's like we should have bumper stickers that read, "I {heart} dead civilians".

But let's get back to the family in the truck we killed. (I tend to naturally say "we" anytime I mean the US Army or America, but this is one time that I find myself reluctant to use the first-person plural pronoun.) Like I said, I wasn't with the QRF that day and didn't see any of this first-hand and all the information I got was gleaned from the guys in my squad who were. Even though Matt said it was better that I didn't see any of it, I wish I had been there, to bear witness I suppose. So tell me, why would I wish for this?

-----

I've been stewing over this dead family thing for a couple weeks now. I've been painstakingly mulling over in my mind (somewhat cynically) the things these insurgents do and the things we, the US Army do and the unintuitive peculiarity of how the drive to act seems to precede the purpose to act and how rampant it is to meaninglessly develop one's identity through injury, but frankly I don't think I've figured it all out well enough yet to even kludge together a coherent line of thought. Introspectively, I'm blindly trying to sew together the absurd lateral progression one unwittingly goes through when pulling legs off grasshoppers as a child and how it is a precursor to compulsive sexual infidelity as a young-adult, among a million other uncoalesced thoughts. I'm unprepared at this time to write the Godel Escher Bach of my own self-loathing.

But what does any of this have to do with the dead family you ask? Well, nothing directly. It's just another one of those things I'm having difficulty reconciling in mind, I guess.

I, Jailor

This morning our battalion conducted several simultaneous pre-dawn raids. The first home my platoon hit went down in a fashion that's becoming the norm for us-- moments before the ram is to hit the door for the dynamic entry that turgid grunts salivate over, the door is unlocked and opened from the inside by a man who is probably already on his second cup of Turkish coffee. People here wake up stupid early to get a jump on the long day of chicken herding or dirt farming or whatever. Some of the intel was of dubious credibility resulting in nothing but a lot of wide-eyed and confused detainees, as was the case with my platoon's target building, and some intel is rock solid. There were RPGs and belts of machine gun ammunition found at other target locations today, not a completely fruitless morning of raids.

I missed out on this morning's soiree pulling a twelve-hour shift of gate and jail guard instead. Our forward operations base's jail (detention center?) is right at the front gate, a messy configuration where detainees, local civilian contractors and politicians along with ICDC clowns, Iraqi police officers and all the other random visitors we get are being corralled through the same small area. Anyway, everyone was back by before 0800 at which point they dumped off all the men captured to our reluctant jailor. This "facility" is smaller than my apartment and with twenty-some-odd Ali Babba (the locals' term for evildoers) bound and blindfolded, it can be pretty cramped. One of the first detainees had on his person 3000 dinars (like 2 bucks), an ID card, and a slip of paper with what looked like some sort of apparent code handwritten on it. When the lieutenant in charge of performing ad-hoc in-processing saw this, he thought he might have struck gold by stumbling upon some sort of encrypted message. Looking at it, there were two lines of alpha-numeric text, each line five groups of five English alphabet characters separated by hyphens. Scrawled underneath was what looked like the word, "Word". The code looked incredibly familiar. Then it hit me. I kinda chuckled and told the Lieutenant that at best this implicated our detainee in the crime of software piracy. It was a couple of CD-keys, for Microsoft Word no doubt.

Once everyone had their restraints cut off and was farmed out evenly into the four cells, still blindfolded and seated facing the wall, an interpreter instructed each detainee that he would stay seated, not talk and not remove his blindfold. Each man was also informed that if he followed these rules and acted like a gentleman, he would be treated like a gentleman. Then began the Parade of Piss. "Mister, mister. Toilet, toilet." Once again, Jesus made manifest his displeasure with me for leaving his church. Had I stayed Mormon, gotten married ridiculously young, settled down, made a family, and took on the inevitable tour of duty of running the nursery at church while the other adults attended various meetings and Sunday classes, I would have been able to do my time in this life of taking rascals pee pee. In lieu of this duty I thought I had successfully dodged, I was now taking rascals pee pee that reeked of the body odor only a middle-eastern diet can create. So when are you being humane letting detainees urinate (the term this Lieutenant kept using was "titrate") as needed, and when are you just plain being taken advantage of by performing an endless round-robin of urinal runs? (There isn't actually any urinal, just a tube stuck in the dirt behind the jail.) Most the soldiers I had with me had not worked with detainees yet and seemed to also be searching for a sense of what the right tone to set for a jail was. I felt myself walking a fine line between proper Geneva Convention-esque humane treatment of enemy combatants and being made a fool of by the same guys that have been making fools of us for the past few weeks by hitting our FOB almost nightly with mortars and RPGs who then always slip away into the night before we can catch them. It pretty much came down to the rule of thumb that if he did the pee pee dance for at least a half hour, he was probably legit and was allowed to go.

Once the initial shock and fear among the herd subsided, the chatter and blindfold fidgeting-with began. I'd say that most these guys were model detainees, but just like any Army platoon or company, there's always one or two problem children. First, two guys wouldn't stop whispering to each other. So I put them in separate cells. Then one kept pulling down his blindfold claiming allergy-beset eyes. We compromised and told him we'd loosen the blindfold if he faced the wall and shut up. He only partially complied. He was warned and re-warned by the Lieutenant and the interpreter. But like a child, he kept pushing the limit. The Lieutenant left as did the interpreter. More chatter, more blindfold-slippage. He started eyeballing me and some of the other soldiers. (If I were in East L.A., I’d be compelled to proclaim, "Why you mad doggin' me, yo?!") I yelled at him to shut up and pull the blind fold back up. He just smiled and gave me the thumbs up. I've said that the thumbs up in Iraq is a way of simultaneously telling someone both "okay" and "fuck you" at once, a trick this little bastard was now turning back on me deftly. Something I have to express here is that this childish way of pushing the limit and seeing what you can get away with is a pet peeve of mine. More last warnings, then I got fed up. I removed him from the cell, took his blindfold off and put on tightly a huge one made out of a first-aid cravat. I also flex-cuffed his hands, behind his back, also tight enough to be uncomfortable. A half hour later he had pulled the blindfold down with his teeth somehow. Last straw.

Everyone knows that duct tape can fix anything. In the Army, we have six-inch wide green duct tape that we call hundred mile-an-hour tape, a moniker apparently due to its ability to mend tears in the canvas wings of Wright Brothers-era planes, good up to one-hundred miles-an-hour. I put dickhead on his knees in the middle of his cell, removed the blindfold that he was now wearing as a dashing olive-drab scarf and wrapped the top half of his head with about ten layers of 100 MPH tape. Then one last piece across the bridge of his nose and around his head again to seal off the small gap that invariably is present at the bottom of ones field of vision when one is blindfolded. I tried to create as much drama as possible with the event. Our S-2 (intel) Master Sergeant happen to be present at the time, a mean-spirited quasi-sadist, the fulltime El Capitán of the jail, a job that he seems to relish, and was in the process of systematically interrogating the detainees. He kept saying, "Okay Sergeant, that's enough tape. Okay, that's enough. Okay, that's enough Sergeant." The distinct sound of duct tape being applied directly off the roll was loud and satisfying as it reverberated off the six cold concrete planes of wall, floor, and ceiling. I tried my best to seem stern and to disguise the fact that my heart was pounding. One layer or fifty layers, I figured it wouldn't make much difference as far as adhesive blindfolds go, I just wanted to give the impression of an excessive and final response to his juvenile game of tit for tat. I felt like my disciplinarian pious father (a relationship I'll never reconcile); I felt like I was on the wrong side of recurring anxiety dreams I've always had of being imprisoned; I felt stupid and petty and cowardly. I fucking loathe loathe loathe treating people like that. I'd rather be working with exceptional people, not dealing with troublesome people. Antagonistic relationships that have some constructive end or transparent layer of camaraderie, like the relationship a soldier has with a drill sergeant, I have no problem with. I actually endorse this sort of thing openly. But having to assert my assumed authority in front of my prisoners and my peers to make an example of this ne'er-do-well has no positive product as far as I'm concerned. There's a darkly intoxicating aspect to this kind of thing though. I'm over-armed with my rifle and grenade launcher and the veritable ammunition dump that is the vest over my body armor. Because of this my power over these men is near-absolute, especially if I were to consider spending life in Fort Leavenworth immaterial. I can see how the bully feels, how one could grow fond of this darkly amusing massive imbalance of power. I tried to keep in mind that even simple playful mockery of the detainees could easily be perceived as cold humor. I wanted to maintain order, I wanted to assert a measure of authority that was little to ask considering the situation, but most importantly I did not want to perpetrate something on others that I am deeply phobic of myself, to be imprisoned and tormented.

I let this guy sit and think about what he had done wrong. Isn't that how our parents used to put it? He finally broke his macho stoic silence after about forty-five minutes. "Mister. Mister. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." I was furious at this asshole. Not only was he apparently contrite now, but his English was getting better too. But mostly I was furious that he "made" me do this. I yelled some nonsense at him about how it was too late to be sorry, that he would continue to be sorry before I did anything for him. Not my words, just rhetorical crap I was regurgitating from a lifetime of being caught in a punishment-lecture-punishment-lecture cycle for serial rule-breaking. Working with me at the time was a medic, this forty-somethingish Hispanic specialist with an improbable number of vowels in his name and a thick salt-and-pepper moustache that seemed to exude an avuncular warmth. He had a pleasant and attentive demeanor and looked like he could be a dentist or a good-natured washing machine salesman at Sears. All day he had been eminently respectful to me, everything was a snappy Yes Sergeant, No Sergeant, something that always makes me uncomfortable when coming from someone so clearly my senior. He looked at me now like he had been suffering along with this guy the whole time, maybe empathetic because he's a medic or because he knew it would probably be his job to help separate tape from eyebrows in a few minutes. I assured him that I'd only let the guy stew for five more minutes tops, but after hemming and hawing for about five more seconds I finally just said Fuck it, let's just give this jerk his reprieve. >From his knees again we unwrapped tapehead and I absurdly lectured him in an unavoidably paternal (patronizing?) way in a language I knew he couldn't understand but a tone that I knew he would. He looked up at me, his eyes red and watering (had he been crying or were his eyes actually irritated?) and he reverently uttered, "Thank you". After we locked the cell door (padlock on a grille-like door, not quite totally archetypical for a jail), all inside either sat or slept quietly, unmoving.

Hours later it was the problem child's turn to be interrogated and was escorted by several soldiers to an out-of-sight location by the Master Sergeant. I sat outside by the front gate, eating an MRE. My knife, a beloved Spyderco Delica with green handle and black blade, slayer of MRE packages, lay in front of me as I shoveled beef and mushroom into my mouth like the engineer fed coal into the furnace of his engine in the old Popeye cartoon. As the were walking, the Master Sergeant stopped for a moment to talk to someone. My favorite detainee now stood in front of me. He eyed my knife, then eyed me. I looked back at him and he didn't look away, or should I say he wouldn't look away. Honestly I couldn't tell if he was trying to read my eyes like I was trying to read his or if he was just trying to memorize my face, or maybe he just plain hated me and was indulging his fascination with the object of his hate, a thirst a you can never really slake.

Truth be told, I paid little attention to how he looked, not nearly as much attention as he seemed to pay to how I looked. If I saw him on the street right now, I probably wouldn't recognize him. Shame on me I guess. The first step is to remove the person-ness from your enemy. Once you remove his humanity in your mind, distance him from you, the human, it's easier to kill him if it comes down to that. He wore a green camouflage jacket making him stand out from the rest of the white and gray man-dress wearers. In the back of the jacket on the bottom there was a buttoned flap. Ever since the advent of the man-dress (dish dash or pish posh or whatever they call them, I forget), when it came time to go into combat you'd reach between you legs, grab the back hem and pull it up into your belt in the front, creating a big man-diaper. My seminary teacher in junior high said this was called "girding up your loins". My guess is the flap on the back of this jacket was made for the same purpose, to turn the flowing man-dress of would-be fighters into MC Hammer pants. His hair was neat and short-cropped. I only know this really because I had to pull all that tape off his head. He was probably in his early twenties. I'd say if it came down to hand-to-hand, this guy, being most likely in the same weight-class as me, would give me a run for my money. But most non-farmer Iraqis are in absurdly bad shape, so I'd probably prevail. If not, I'd at least bite his nose off or something really dirty like that. So there he was, staring me down again, who knows what machinations going on in his head.

Bricks Without Straw??!!

Iraq right now is not unlike the early American wild west and all of my Indiana Jones-fueled boyhood fantasies have come true for the most part. We live a pretty primal existence. We have to be creative when it comes to everything. We build what we need by hand from available materials. Even when it comes to combat readiness, we have to use a lot of ingenuity and elbow grease to make things work. Humvees are being kept together with bubble gum and bailing wire half the time, weapons are covered in duct tape to keep pressure switched in place, and recently a slim jim was constructed out of a wire oven rack taken from a home we raided to open a car the owners could not seem to produce keys to. And despite all the high tech bullshit we carry, personal defense is still the most primal act. Everytime we leave our forward operations base (FOB), we lock and load. In the old west, gunslingers went everywhere strapped because they never knew when they'd be in their next gunfight. There is nothing different about being in Iraq. It's an oddly exhilarating way to live.

But when something does happen, there is excitement. If you are there for the event, there is a certain intensity and elation. If you weren't there, you absorb every word of the recounted stories. I feel like I need to apologize constantly for enjoying myself here. They say that morale is incredibly low in Iraq among soldiers. That sucks for them. I'm having the time of my life.

And I'm not enjoying myself just because of the G.I. Joe factor. The culture here is fascinating. I feel like I'm in one big Bible story. When I was four years old living in Spanish Fork, the shittiest hick town in Utah, my recently adopted father would read me these illustrated bible stories. Add AK-47s and shabby cars to those stories and you have Iraq 2004. As a child I didn't understand Charlton "I loves me some rifles" Heston when he cried out to Pharaoh, "Bricks without straw??!! How can we make bricks without straw!!!" Bricks need straw? I had never seen bricks containing straw. Well, I have now. And the story about the temple that needed the exposed bricks of its exterior wall mended? I've seen that wall. Men's fashion hasn't exactly improved over the last three millennia either. They still wear man-dresses, just like they wore when Jesus was still a teen hangin' out at the local Haji-mart and later in his life when people were touching the hem of it. I've seen kids on donkey-drawn carriages in place of bicycles and men wipe shit off their asses with their bare hands in place of toilet paper. I also was perplexed as a child by a Bible story when someone washed Jesus' feet when he came to visit them. Never having worn sandals in my life, this seemed like a totally random thing to do. Now I understand it.

This place is so harsh and backwards and perpetually stuck in the fucking stone ages in most ways, but you just have to love it for it. There are no shining new strip malls or housing development here, no Super Target, no Starbucks, no Jiffy Lube. It's full of people that will die twenty years earlier than Americans and who can't help but understand that life is survival first and owning a Playstation second. Although there's nothing special about people that live in poverty and squalor, there's something genuine about these people and their life that I can't help but admire. I wish to god I spoke Arabic because I have a thousand questions I want to ask them. Tyler Durden would love Iraq.

But I'll have time to write the tour guide to Iraq later. Let's get back to the soldier's update. We agreed we like the dangerous and gritty, right? So here's an overview of what's gone on in my AO over the past couple weeks:

The first firefight goes to second platoon who went on a night raid in a small town near our FOB. An intel guy and an informant from Baghdad said an attack on a very large FOB in the area was going to be perpetrated by men from this village that night at such and such time. While they were approaching the town and before they even made it to the house to be raided, they took fire. It was an ambush. Ray and John were both on the mission. Ray spotted some guys using night vision devices and infra red lasers. Some guys returned fire immediately, some wailed away on the enemy with their SAWs, but mostly there were a lot of confused soldiers that took some prodding to kick into gear. Here's a quick scorecard from the stories I heard:

Friendly dead: 0
Friendly wounded: 0
Friendly shoulders dislocated from jumping behind cover: 1
Friendly dislocated shoulders self-relocated: 1
Enemy killed by Ray and Socky: 0 (maybe next time)
Overall enemy dead: 0
Enemy wounded: 0
Directions of fire received: 3
Soldiers' pants pissed: 1
Soldiers with pissed pants who pushed on with the fight: 1
Soldiers who refused to fight and returned to the Humvees: 2
Soldiers who fell asleep on the objective: 1 confirmed (most likely more)
40 mm HE grenades John fired: 2
40 mm HE grenades it took to convince the enemy to stop fighting: 1

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Three men of Arab descent and unknown allegiance drove by an ICDC building in my AO and threw an explosive at its front gate, apparently in hopes of baiting them into a vehicular pursuit. The ICDC did what they do best: nothing. This time it probably paid off. In their car the three men had an AK-47 and an RPK, a Russian machine gun. Frustrated that the ICDC did not give chase, the three hooligans drove alongside and opened fire (probably impulsively) with the AK on an up-armored Humvee with its window open. The soldier behind the driver was killed and two others were wounded. Immediately, a .50 cal and a M240 in the Humvee's convoy showed the three men the flames of hell. Two of the men were shredded by the gunfire and the third, the driver as I understand it, ate a self-administered 9mm round. This put all three with rounds taken to the head. Two female bystanders were killed in the crossfire. One took a round to the back of the head, removing most of her face. Not a good day for heads. I feel horrible about the women. I have several close-ups of these dead assholes, but I've decided not to post them. We all know combat is fucked up and I figure me self-righteously showing you the end result of patriotism, religious fervor or whatever it is you choose to motivate you to kill is unnecessary. However, I found myself fascinated by what the dead guys were wearing. It was very Western: jeans, Dickey-like blue pants, white t-shirt, blue plaid button-down shirt, black t-shirt, brown leather belt, and all three had well-groomed hair and facial hair. And it's not that I expected to see them wearing traditional garb. You know when you're driving and someone on the road does something stupid and you get pissed off and you have to see what they look like, as if you could collect a mental catalog of how assholes look? Well, it's like that. I can't help but want to know what my enemy looks like, how he dresses, how he does his hair.

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While on guard duty I was sitting on a folding stool beside my Humvee that was parked at a position on the berm that protects our FOB. We heard the unmistakable hollow report of a 40mm grenade being fired then a second later the even louder sound of the round slapping into the berm not 40 meters from us. The sound of it hitting the soft dirt of the berm was loud, but not loud in the way a 40mm grenade exploding sounds. A MK-19 on a Humvee, part of a convoy leaving our FOB, had an accidental discharge (now called a "negligent discharge" in military parlance). Had the round been fired about two seconds earlier it probably would have hit my Humvee and I'd probably be in a world of hurt right now, another one of those stupid fratricide statistics.

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A man on a scooter was trailing a convoy entering our FOB. He was repeatedly commanded to stop in English, Arabic and the universal language of an assault rifle being pointed at him. He was unarmed. It is uncertain what he was thinking. However, it is certain that the 5.56mm round that he subsequently took to the chest killed him. It was reported that his lover killed himself the next day when he got word of his death.

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I've been on two raids now. The first was in response to three IEDs that exploded next to a Humvee as it drove down a road near our FOB. No one in the Humvee was hurt. My platoon, acting as the quick reaction force (QRF), was called to the scene. We cleared about seven buildings in the area of the attack. The buildings were all chicken farms (ranches?) and the homes of the people that ran them. We turned up a lot of weapons, but all were legit. No bad guys or IED-type materials were found, just a bunch of terrified families. As usual, I ended up with Jeff and his squad, meaning much fun was had. We trudged through canals and swamps and covered a lot of ground on foot. It was incredibly physically exhausting. Goddamned heavy-ass body armor. If it didn't protect my vital organs so well, I'd pitch that thing in a canal. The squalor these chicken ranchers lived in was sad. But I'll tell you what, clearing a building and entering a room 75 meters long and full of thousands of chickens is really bizarre.

The second raid was on a house of an apparent IED maker. The best part of this was how the location was recon'd. Kirk and Jeff were part of a foot patrol that passed by the home of the intended raid. They acted like stupid soldier-tourists and took pictures of themselves in front of everything: the approach to the house, the neighbors' homes, the target house itself and all its inhabitants who were more than happy to come outside and pose with them. I guess if the enemy is brazen enough to just drive right up and plant IEDs on the side of the road, we can walk right to their homes, photograph everything including them, then raid the home a few hours later at first light. They looked so happy in the pictures, it kinda made me feel bad about raiding their home. It was good to know that the house was cram-packed full of little rugrats though. We counted four kids in the photos, but after the raid we discovered ten. These Iraqis don't fuck around when it comes to makin' kids. All ten kids slept through the entire ordeal. The raid went off without a hitch, the smoothest operation I've been on, even in training. We were supposed to send a breech team over the wall surrounding the property to open the metal gates from the inside, but once we got to the home, the front gate was unlocked. It was kinda funny. The breech team and the raid team were lined up against the wall, waiting to go over the ladder. Mike, my platoon sergeant, tried the gate and it opened. It was unlocked. He looked back at us and shrugged and directed the raid team in. Once at the door, the man of the house was already awake and at the door and let them in. Once inside and searching the home, my platoon sergeant found hidden behind the home's AK-47 a plastic bag containing woman's lingerie and some booze. There was booze stashed all over the house actually. The man of the house was none too happy and I'll bet a big part of it was knowing what a world of shit he was going to be in not so much for having to explain the IED materials to us but having to explain the naughty items we found to his wife. Willy's platoon raided another home in the town simultaneously. They chained the front gate of their target house to a Humvee and pulled it down along with half the wall. Once again, no shots fired at either house, no one was hurt, everything was performed on time. A very successful operation. And for the concerned bleeding hearts out there, all damages are reimbursed.

Here are all the photos: http://www.justanothersoldier.com/blog040403.htm