Being There, Page 4

by Bartle Breese Bull

At two or three one morning, alone in the computer room filing an article for the Washington Post, I hear Nash talking to Patrick Duhon, an Airborne grad who has been in the service for five years. Duhon, who is clean-cut and squared-away in his demeanor, is Nash's squad leader. His contract is over in a year, and Duhon will not be reenlisting. His vehicle was blown up in February, and he could have gone home, but he stayed with the unit for his recovery and is rushing his return to work outside the wire. The barracks are still as he and Nash speak. They don't know I'm here, listening.

Duhon: Tell me how you feel about the army, Nash.

Nash: I don't care.

Duhon: Nash, I hate people who can do so much with their lives and just don't fucking care.

Nash: I still don't care.

Duhon: Nash, you are the lowest person on our fucking squad. No one wants to take you out with them because you're a pain in the ass. I've been trying to tell you this all year. How would you like it if I said, "Specialist Nash, here's a cherry-ass private and I want you to take charge of him and teach him how things are done," and an hour later I come back and the guy's equipment is still a mess and his pack's packed the way he wanted and everything's all fucked up? The military makes everything real fuckin' easy for you. How come you always got to make it so fuckin' hard? I'm trying to train you up so you can take some fucking responsibility, and you're always fucking fighting back. When I came up, there was none of this "be nice to privates" shit. I'm not going to take it easy on you just because you're coasting through this or I want you to like me. You don't fuckin' look like it, but you have too much potential for that.

At 3:50 one morning the platoon is getting ready to go out on a mission. The soldiers are going to go to suspected safe houses in the village of Mudiq, five miles from their base, looking for weapons, ammunition caches, and insurgents. "Cordon-and-knock," it's called -- a gentler version of a full-on kick-down-the-door raid. One or the other happens at least once every five or six days.

Soldiers are checking the sights on their carbines, strapping on their kneepads and ballistic eye gear, stuffing their pockets with beef jerky and brownies. The young guys listen to death metal by Slipknot and Coal Chamber; the old guys to Guns N' Roses.

Mounting up outside the barracks, soldiers wearing black wool caps and camouflage bandannas smoke and pack their vehicles. On the building opposite us the shadows of a returning patrol are amplified on the wall by our headlights: vehicles with giant gun turrets, enormous men with rifles swinging in silhouette across the stucco. The soldiers in the 3rd Platoon check that they have battering rams and flexicuffs.

Beneath a fat crescent moon circled by cloud, the soldiers are drinking coffee and Mountain Dew, bumming cigarettes and dipping Copenhagen, fixing masked chemlights to the long antennas of the Humvees and electrical strobes to the backs of the helmets of squad leaders.

In the vehicle, waiting to go outside the wire, Sniper Bailey mentions again that his mother is always beating on him. So is his grandmother. They are Sicilian.

Bailey: Anyone want a Kiss?

Lee Brooks (Bailey's team leader): Shut up, you fag.

Bailey: I can't believe my mom sent me this whole bag of -Kisses. I keep telling her, "Mom, I'm trying to eat right. Send me some healthy shit."

Wade (who is 25): Hell, you guys are young. Your metabolisms can handle it.

Bailey, seriously: Yeah, that's true. It's not like we're 25 or something. We can eat whatever.

It's a long, silent wait in the dark in the cold Humvee. Wade's feet are at my elbow as he stands in the turret. The other three are in their seats. Everyone has a cold. We talk about vitamins and whether large quantities of yellow dye number five can make men sterile.

At 5:20 a.m., 10 minutes before we roll, Brooks orders Wade and Bailey to "lock and load."

In the first suspected safe house the interpreter finds a false bottom in a large armoire. The space is empty save a little bit of white -powder, which smells of soap. It's still dark out and the Iraqis inside the house are disheveled and sleepy. Nobody touches them or raises his voice.

The old man of the house says his 32-year-old son is a taxi driver in Jordan and has been away for five days. The women of the house stand around, watching mutely. Krebbs says, "These motherfuckers are guilty. You know their son was here five minutes before we got here."

I mention to Krebbs that when we got to the house for our "surprise" dawn raid, there was a huge Abrams tank waiting outside. When we went in the front door, no one was blocking the back. "That's the army, man," says Krebbs. "Everything's always all fucked up."

We leave the house with half the contents of its drawers and shelves on the floor. The search was done slowly and quietly, but the place is a mess. The soldiers take a GPS reading of the house's location and -radio the names of all the military-age men in the house to base, to check against a database. Nobody checks their IDs to make sure they are who they say. The Iraqis all seem to have the same name, and sometimes it seems impossible to know who is whose brother or cousin or son or father.

By the third house the soldiers start slowing down. The 506th is a light infantry unit trained for air assault; this is not the kind of work that really excites its members. But their sector, which was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's first recruiting stop in Iraq after the invasion in 2003, is an insurgent stronghold. Since September they have taken in five times as many suspected insurgents as their predecessor unit did. More than half of these -- a high hit rate -- have been sent to Abu Ghraib for further investigation after a screening process in Ramadi.

Toward the end of mornings like this, military discipline tends to loosen. Soldiers sneak smokes down alleys. Nash, especially, gets more and more grubby. The seat of his trousers sags, and the cuffs puddle around his heels.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHAN RYDENG SPANNER/POLARIS IMAGES

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