‘Fedayeen!’
The warning cry came from the man at point, a fraction of a second before the hammering of automatic weapons fire started up. The Cav troopers moved for cover as though every man had been jabbed with a stun gun. The dismounted cavalry scouts were fast and flowed like quicksilver, pouring themselves into doorways, around stone walls, and down behind piles of rubble that made vehicle movement all but impossible through the narrow streets of An Nasiriyah. The M3A2 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicles followed them when and where they could. A couple of squads of infantry with their M2A2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles joined them when they moved into the town.
Bret Melton moved with them, the instincts and experience of his own time in the Rangers, and a decade of combat reportage since, rubbing up hard against fatigue and ageing muscles. He landed next to Specialist Vincent Alcibiades, burrowing in under the protection of a massive broken beam of concrete and rebar as small-arms fire chewed up the mud-brick walls of the street, zipping less than a foot overhead.
Melton had picked up an M4 for his own protection, moments before they entered Iraq. Nobody said one word to him. After the carbine, he picked up some MOLLE web gear and some ammo pouches. He already had a matching dark blue set of Level III body armour and a Kevlar helmet. The army issued him with a protective mask and MOPP gear in case someone dropped some germs or chemicals on them, but he’d always been one of the sceptics on the WMD front.
In any case, the fighting was simply too chaotic and disordered for Melton to be able to rely on anyone else to look after him. In the labyrinthine warren of souks, alleys, cut-throughs and ragged streets of the towns and villages in which they’d been fighting, you never knew when you were going to have some asshole suddenly appear right in front of you with murder in his eyes. He hadn’t needed the carbine yet, for which he was grateful. Still, he flicked the selector from safe to semi and waited. Alcibiades let rip with two short bursts, holding his own M4 up over the cover and firing blind. The Bradleys added the hum and mechanical metal-punching beat to the chaotic audio mix, sending.25 mike-mike into buildings without a care for possible civilian casualties.
When the specialist came back down, he spat a green stream in the sand, his cheeks bulging from a wad of chew. ‘Fuckin’ ragheads.’
The volume of fire going down-range was impressive and deafening, nearly drowning out the shouts of Lieutenant Euler and his non-coms as they organised the counter-ambush with the infantry troops who had linked up with them.
Melton did his best to collect himself and commit to memory as many details as possible. He would write notes out later, when the immediate danger had passed, and his hands, hopefully, weren’t shaking too much. As always, the head rush of contact was giddy and horrifying – a glassy funnel of light and colour down which you fell as soon as you realised somebody was trying to take your life. Melton found it harder to deal with as a reporter than he had when a soldier, perhaps because he was older and wiser, perhaps because now he had nothing to distract him from the experience. Indeed, having the experience and recording it for others were his sole reasons for being there. He couldn’t shut down and get on with whatever task the sergeant or corporals assigned him. He played his part by opening up his senses to the madness of battle, letting it burn its terrors and banalities directly onto his cortex.
He savoured the taste of the dust in his mouth, the gritty, choking, dog-shit and tangy metallic diesel flavour of it. He noted the struggle of a green bejewelled bug caught in a wad of gum, stuck to the side of Alcibiades’s boot; tried to freeze in his memory the smell of the man next to him, a cloying miasma of body odour, stale farts and wintergreen Skoal chewing tobacco. He studied the contours of the street, the way the ancient biscuit-coloured buildings snaked away, slightly uphill. The yellow-green, foul-smelling stream of raw sewage and trash that flowed down-slope towards him. The soldiers themselves – some cool and frosty, others sweating but focused, most of them scared out of their minds.
Lieutenant Euler took shelter behind a pockmarked stone pillar, which may well have stood on the same spot since the time of Mohammed. He was on the radio with a map in his hand, looking at something Melton couldn’t see. The radio operator kept security, his carbine traversing along the rooftops, looking for snipers, RPG gunners or any other Iraqi in desperate need of a new weeping asshole in the middle of his forehead.
Bo Jaanson was doing the standard shoot, move and communicate drill, moving the soldiers, infantry and cavalry both, around the restricted battle space of the narrow street like a brutal chess master. Some soldiers would balk, while others would execute on command. With some, Jaanson calmed them with a pat on the shoulder and a few fatherly words, the way one would handle a terrified horse. With others, it was a boot imprint on the ass. Melton couldn’t help but smile, having been there himself.
He saw a bird, swooping up and away to escape the sudden eruption of slaughter, suddenly fly apart in a spray of feather and blood as some stray round punched right through its frail body. The remains dropped into the dust, raising a small puff of dirt, and the body twitched for a few seconds as dumb electrical storms raged through its shattered nervous system.
Alcibiades saw it too. ‘Fuck me, man. Not safe for man or beast in this motherfucker. I say call in Air and let them fucking hammer this place back to the Stone Age.’
‘Hooah,’ Melton said before he could stop himself. He tapped Al on the shoulder. ‘Got any dip, Specialist?’
Alcibiades pulled a can from his hip pocket. ‘Got a whole log before we left. I’m about half through it, so you’d better make me look good. Hooah?’
Melton took the can of Skoal and nodded. ‘Hooah, Specialist. Fucking hooah.’
The dip in his mouth and the can returned to Alcibiades, he tried to lock himself down on reality. But no matter how hard he tried to anchor himself in the real world, time always seemed to warp and stretch before snapping back on these moments, almost as though it too had become an actor in the conflict, constantly turning and folding in on itself to better examine the deeds of the frail, ridiculous little creatures who raged through its currents. It may have been four minutes or many hours before the Apaches arrived overhead and announced themselves with a whoosh of rockets and the industrial thumpety thump-thump-thump of their chain guns. Half the street ahead of them disintegrated, quite literally, flying apart under the kinetic hammer of high-velocity explosive ordnance. Blocks of sandstone and dried mud shattered and crumbled, releasing their mass in the form of thick powdery clouds to drift away on the warm sirocco passing over the village.
‘Apaches will do,’ croaked Alcibiades. ‘I feel like dancing every time they play my tune. Sing it, fuckers!’
Melton stayed down, rub-fucking the ground, as the fire from the soldiers of the Rock of the Marne tapered off. For a brief interlude, silence as heavy as an old coat lay over them. Then he heard the crunch of boots moving across broken masonry, through the ringing in his ears. The rattle of equipment as men darted forward. The metallic click and slide of a mag being swapped out.
Slowly, carefully, he raised his head over the cover. Their concrete beam had been badly chewed over by gunfire. Pockmarks and dark scores pitted and scarred the surface. One rusted spike of rebar glistened in the sun, a silver fang sliced out of its dull, reddish length by the impact of a single bullet. Melton let his peripheral vision take over for a second, scanning for any movement that would indicate the presence of a lingering threat. Perhaps a window pushed open to accommodate the barrel of a sniper’s rifle. Or a door creaking backwards into a darkened hut, from whence some maniac in a dynamite vest might emerge shouting ‘Saddam is great!’ before detonating himself. But there was nothing. The Apaches had cleaned up the ambush, and probably a fair number of unlucky innocents as well.
Alcibiades arose beside him like an apparition, the muzzle of his rifle sweeping through a narrow arc in front of them, covering the men who were scoping out the rubble under which their attackers had died. Melton waited for the call of ‘Medic!’
It never came. Whatever injuries the troopers had taken did not require immediate intervention. He kept his personal weapon to hand but consciously dialled back on the tension compressing his whole body into an impacted mass of nerve endings. They’d survived another one. The brigade and most of the 3rd Infantry Division had been remarkably lucky so far. Fewer than fifty KIA after days of fighting, and all of them lost in close-quarter battles like this one. Out on the desert plains, where they’d first engaged the Iraqis, it had been a pure slaughter of the foe. Nobody had any idea of the enemy’s casualties, but in this sector alone it had run into the thousands. Perhaps more than ten thousand by now.
Lieutenant Leo Euler appeared beside him, handing back a receiver to his radio operator. ‘D’you get all that, sir?’ he asked the reporter. ‘Gotta keep the folks at home informed.’
It was an attempt at light banter, but the young officer’s eyes were too tired and far away to carry it off. ‘Sleep when you are dead’ became a soldier’s unofficial motto.
Bret Melton nodded absently and spat onto the ground, the nicotine slowly infiltrating his wired nervous system. ‘Any casualties, Lieutenant?’ he said.
Euler shook his head. ‘Nothing serious. No sucking chest wounds or lost limbs, so I’ll count myself a happy man. Worthless Fedayeen fucktards. Sometimes I think they shoot high and wide, praying to get fucking captured.’
Saddam’s volunteer militia had borne the brunt of the fighting in the crossroads towns and although they’d handed out some grief here and there, as a fighting force they seemed to be tasked with holding up the Coalition forces and making them ‘waste’ ammunition and lives. The Coalition didn’t have the troops to provide POW facilities so without an order per se, the higher-ups let it be known that there would be no quarter. Some units in 3rd ID had taken up the old practice of flying a black flag from an antenna. It didn’t take long for the Iraqis to figure out what that meant.
As a tactic, Melton had to admit that sending your worthless troops forward as bullet-catchers made some sense. Everyone knew they weren’t pushing on to Baghdad now, that’d be insane. The British and US forces executing Operation Katie in southern Iraq were planning to leave the whole leprous mess to fester on its own when they were gone. That was assuming they could kick the Kuwaitis and the Saudis off so they could actually get the hell out of Dodge. The tiny Polish and Australian special forces contingents were already gone, what missions they’d originally been assigned now irrelevant. And Saddam was openly mocking them from Baghdad, whipping up a perfect storm of pan-Arab hysteria at his ‘defeat’ of the infidel crusaders. Well, not openly – not since the Americans dropped that JDAM on Uday.
Saddam still made appearances in the open, but they were never televised live, and they never lasted very long. They did hit the mark, though. The allied air campaign went forward pretty much as originally planned, from what Bret had heard the Air Force liaison say, in an attempt to decapitate Iraq’s command and control systems. The only difference was that Coalition air power had destroyed bridges they’d originally needed. But as long as the fat little fucker survived to taunt them, his stature only grew. He was openly comparing himself to Saladin now, declaring himself the reborn leader of the faithful.
The crackle of gunfire drifted in over the rooftops of the surviving buildings from somewhere to the west. It was another element of 3rd ID conducting sweep-and-clear ops to make sure that everyone – ladie dadie everyone – could withdraw through this shithole without getting nickel-and-dimed to death by snipers, suicide bombers and the half-assed incompetents tricked out like Arab ninjas who called themselves the Fedayeen Saddam.
Euler’s men were moving towards one of the remaining intact bridges three blocks away, in tandem with another platoon taking a parallel route two streets over. Apaches from the squadron’s air cav component buzzed about high overhead, waiting to pounce on any resistance. When Operation Katie went into effect, the rulebook was thrown out along with it. Melton remembered Captain Lohberger saying, ‘Fuck the rules of engagement’ before he buttoned up his Bradley so many days ago. Somebody seemed to have handed 3rd ID’s commander, Major General Blount, an open chequebook.
No one took any chances. If a building needed to be swept, soldiers tossed frags through the door, then the M-249 SAW gunner sprayed the room before they went in. If the Iraqis decided a mosque prayer tower made a pretty good forward observation post, an MPAT round from one of 5-7’s M-1 Abrams tanks chopped it down. If they used a school or a hospital for a fort, the division’s artillery hammered it with 155 or MLRS rounds. No one took any chances anymore.
‘Who you writin’ for now, anyway, Bret?’ Alcibiades was beside him, his eyes hidden behind the sliver of a pair of Ray-Bans. They gave him an insectile appearance as he scanned the blasted remains of the thoroughfare ahead, the muzzle of his rifle tracking the movements of his head with mechanical precision. ‘Army Times is gone, right? Like everything else.’
Unlike the officers, most of the grunts just called him by his first name. He didn’t have to work hard to fit in with them.
‘Headquarters is, but we’ve got field offices in Europe and Korea,’ Melton replied, not that he’d had any luck getting in touch with any of them. ‘And, worst comes to worst, there’s always Stars and Stripes, I suppose. I had some contacts from my freelance days, foreign websites and magazines – you know, British mostly. I’m filing for them now and stringing for the BBC. The war’s not nearly as big a story as it would have been. But it’s up there.’
They formed up again with Alcibiades’s scout team, picking their way through the rubble, stepping over tumble-down walls and mounds of pulverised mud brick. Melton stood on something soft and yielding, and before he could stop himself had glanced down and seen the tiny arm beneath his soiled boots. It ended in ragged flesh and a stump of white bone, just after the elbow joint.
He spat on the ground next to the remains and whispered, ‘Yeah. Fuck the rules of engagement. Hooah.’
Lieutenant Euler’s Bradley, Fiddler’s Green, was burning a few hundred yards short of the bridge over the Euphrates. One of the crew had made it out, only to be shot down from a window in one of the low-rise ferroconcrete bunkers that passed for apartments in this part of Nasiriyah. His crew-mates had not escaped.
‘They’ve got a fucking howitzer in one of those buildings, with the muzzle aimed into the street. Or maybe a T-72. I can’t tell, damn it,’ said Euler, who was blessed not to be in the Bradley at the time. The binoculars came down from his eyes as he turned away from the corner to address his squad leaders. ‘Fuck me run-nin’. Either it’s Republican Guard or someone who has got their shit wired tight.’
Melton chanced a quick peek around the corner, darting his head out and back like a nervous chipmunk. He took a sight picture of the disabled Brad. The rear troop hatch was gone and the turret missing. Rounds cooked off in the main body, one at a time, with the sound of an M-80 firecracker under a steel bucket. It made a hollow thump with each cook-off. Thick, oily smoke poured from the commander’s hatch and flames burned at the rear of the chassis.
Euler spoke quickly and privately with his platoon sergeant while Melton fell back to give the two some space. After a few words, Euler held a hand out to his radio operator for the handset of their SINCGARS.
‘Air strike,’ said Alcibiades as he spat into the ground. ‘Betcha this week’s pay the LT will call in some A-10s. Probably gonna flatten a coupla blocks.’
‘We ain’t getting paid this month,’ said Bakic, one of his buddies.
‘Still gonna be an -’
‘What the fuck!’
Euler hadn’t shouted, but the force of his exclamation had drawn all the attention back on him. He was talking on the radio, and everyone listened to his side of the exchange, which didn’t tell them much.
‘What d’you fucking mean…?’ Euler paused while the voice on the other end shouted loud enough for Melton to hear a time-honoured army phrase.
Remember your military bearing, soldier.
‘Okay, if the ALO can’t get me air, then what about…?’ Euler pulled off his k-pot and threw it at the wall across from him. ‘You gotta be fucking kidding me,’ Euler continued, obviously not impressed by the previous admonishment about military bearing. ‘How about some goddamn fucking fire support then?… Oh, for fuck’s sake…’
The handset shouted back, leaving Euler to shake his head some more. He signed off and threw the handset back at his radio operator. His non-coms pulled in closer, concern acid-etched into all of their faces. A few shook their heads as he relayed to them the details of whatever shit sandwich they’d just been handed.
‘Goddamn,’ muttered one of the sergeants, loud enough for Melton to hear. The enlisted men around him strained to pick up a few clues without being too obvious about it. They were spread out along a side street running between two shops, both of which had been cleared not fifteen minutes earlier. Euler had men inside both, and crawling around on the rooftops, denying the high ground to any hostiles. Anxiety crept stealthily down the line of soldiers, as men who’d been sitting in the dirt, catching a few minutes’ respite, picked up on the changed vibe in the leadership group and slowly began to attend to them. Eyes that had been closed now cracked open, heads turned almost imperceptibly, bodies shifted just a little bit, leaning in towards the lieutenant, hoping to catch some scrap of information that might provide a clue as to what mess they’d stepped in now.
At last the NCOs dispersed down the line, carrying the news with them. Corporal Shetty – a short, dense, African-American version of The Thing from The Fantastic Four - rumbled over, his face a study in disgust.
‘Choppers had to bug out,’ he informed them. Suddenly Melton realised for the first time that the constant droning thud of the Apaches and Blackhawks that had shepherded them through the dusty maze of An Nasiriyah was missing. He saw men craning their heads upwards all along the shadowed alleyway as they heard the news.
Alcibiades asked the obvious question. ‘Why?’
Shetty glared at him, like the absence was his fault. ‘Fucking Iranians,’ he said, as if those two words were enough. When they were found to be patently not enough, however, he continued. ‘Iran declared war on America an hour ago. Their air force is up and trying to punch through, to get to us. It is a full-on fur ball out in the Gulf. Hundreds of speed boats and jet skis. All of ‘em suicide runners. They been swarmin’ the navy. Air force and some British units are mixing it up with the Iranian planes right now, trying to keep ‘em off us here.’
‘Holy shit,’ cursed Alcibiades, his swarthy features paling noticeably.
‘Yeah, anyway. Choppers are outta here for the moment. If we want air cover, we gotta call in A-10s, and they’re only coming when they can get their own cover. It’s fucked up.’
‘Shit, what about arty then?’ Some private, he was a replacement pulled out of the division’s 123rd Signal Battalion and it showed every time he nearly shot himself in the foot with his M16. Melton stayed far away from him, because it was going to end in tears for that commo puke. He knew it in his bones.
‘They’re busy hammering a column of Republican Guard who are trying to get to us,’ Shetty said. ‘So no artillery, no air, nothing but Buffalo Soldiers and the grunts.’
Melton yawned so hard he nearly swallowed his stale wad of chew. He was exhausted but it was a nervous gesture too, one of his personal ‘tells’ that he was under pressure. He fingered the crap out of his mouth, took a sip from his camel-back and tapped Corporal Shetty on the shoulder.
‘Corporal, is it just Iran?’ he asked. ‘Do we know if anyone else is moving? Syria, Israel maybe?’
The non-com’s head swivelled like a gun turret. Back and forth, once. ‘Dunno, Mr Melton. You’d be better placed to find out than any of us, if your satellite phone is working.’
‘Battery’s dead. Went down yesterday and I haven’t been able to recharge,’ Melton said. ‘Sat coverage has gotten awfully spotty of late anyway.’
Shetty took that piece of news like a dustbowl farmer absorbing yet another month without rain. Such was life. ‘Lieutenant’s talking with Lohberger, getting instructions,’ he went on. ‘If we can’t hammer down the bad guys with air support, it makes this whole deal a lot fucking harder.’
‘But the brass still wants this bridge,’ Melton said without any real enthusiasm.
‘Yep. They still want it. Why they want it, I’ve no fucking clue, but they still want it.’
‘Man, this is totally fucked,’ said Bakic. ‘What the fuck are we even doing here? It sure as shit ain’t paying the rent anymore.’
‘What we’re doing here, bitch,’ growled Shetty, ‘is trying to get the fuck outta the ‘hood without losing too many worthless motherfuckers like you along the way. That good enough reason for you? Or would you like to just lay down your fucking arms and walk out there and tell the towel heads, “Yo, dogs, it’s my bad. I’m gonna ease on up outta here and head back to my new crib up in Alaska, yo”? Is that what you want to do, Private?’
The chastened soldier mumbled something like ‘Sorry Corporal, no Corporal’ and devoted himself to the intense study of the dirt at his feet. Up and down the line, similar scenes played themselves out as the men dealt with the shock of losing their air cover and gaining a new enemy.
Melton checked his watch. It was late afternoon, shading towards sunset in maybe an hour or so. He wondered if 3rd ID would wait until dark, when the Americans’ night-vision equipment would return to them a significant advantage. On the other hand, the power of a unit like 5-7 Cav lay in its mobility. It was a ‘terrible swift sword’ in movement, cutting through anything that got in its way. Sitting here like this merely invited the Iraqis to gather their forces around them, especially when they couldn’t be targeted for destruction from the air.
Euler was back on the radio within a few minutes, his head bent and shoulders hunched tightly forward as though he was attempting to contain some new piece of shit news from getting free. Figuring on being stationary for a while, Melton opened a chilli mac MRE and stuck the shit-brown spoon down into its contents. He chewed on the meaty mac combo joylessly and washed it down with a drink of warm water. The other men all used the break as best suited them. Some ate, some dozed, one pissed his name up against an ancient wall. Everyone sipped some water or mixed some flavoured drink from their MREs in a water bottle. Most of their store-bought pougie bait had run out days ago.
At least the shade of the alleyway was a blessed relief from the oppressive heat of day. Even with the sun dropping towards the edge of the world, fighting in this temperature was a crippling business. Keeping the troops’ fluids up was proving as difficult as clearing a block of Fedayeen. Melton craned back his neck, stretching it far enough to work out a few kinks with a distinct cracking sound. The sky was lightly clouded and the glare had faded somewhat from its painful intensity in the middle of the day. He searched in vain for any sign of the so-called Disappearance Effect, the nuclear winter that had fallen on Western Europe with the arrival of billions of tons of particulate matter, released into the atmosphere by the burning cities of North America. Maybe it was all bullshit. He couldn’t tell. He was as cut off from the wider world as everyone else in the unit.
It was in that position, leaning back against the wall of the gutted building, squinting slightly into the hot grey sky, that he saw the dark blur of the mortar round as it dropped towards them. The cry of ‘Incoming!’ arose in his head but never reached his mouth, as another round smacked into the rooftop corner at the far end of the alleyway, detonating with a bone-cracking roar and a deadly spray of shrapnel. Men screamed out warnings and dived for what little cover existed in the narrow passageway. A few made it through a single door halfway down. A couple of others scrambled through a hole in the wall blown out by a grenade some hours earlier.
Oh fuck, Melton thought. He got down and tried to become one with the ground while he looked for a better patch of cover than nothing at all. An open shopfront across the street looked promising.
He was on his feet then, unaware of how he’d made it up off his ass so quickly. More rounds were dropping on their position with enough accuracy to suggest they’d been pre-sighted by the Iraqis, who had been waiting for just such an opportunity. Many of the rounds impacted the roofline but one speared right down into the constricted space, exploding with a terrible force that lifted Melton off the ground, turning him over and over.
He twisted slowly, impossibly, through the air. His mind, detached from the dead, stringless puppet of his body, pulled free with a discernible tug. He watched himself falling back to earth with bricks and clods of dirt, with the disembodied arms and legs of his friends, with clattering pieces of steel and burning splinters of wood.
Bret Melton, formerly of the US Army Rangers, twirled oh so slowly through clear air. Up so high he imagined he could see the entire town of An Nasiriyah below him. The savage close-quarter battles that still raged around choke points and contested streets. The ruined block where they had been ambushed in another life. Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and militia fighters running towards his position. And beyond that. He could see the deserts stretching away towards the mountains in the far north. He could see the ships of the US fleet as they raked at skies full of Iranian fighters. And perhaps, at the dimmest edge of vision and consciousness, he could see an empty realm, the burning land that he had once known as home. The lost continent of North America.
Bret saw all of these things. Or thought he did, before he fell back to earth and into darkness.