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T here were lighter moments, but even some of those were shitty. Literally.
Our point man, Tommy, was a great guy but, as it turned out, a terrible point in a lot of ways.
Or maybe I should say sometimes he was more of a duck than a point man. If there was a puddle between us and the objective, Tommy took us through it. The deeper the better. He was always having us walk through the worst possible terrain.
It got so ridiculous that finally I told him, “One more time, I’m going to whup your ass, and you’re fired.”
On the very next mission, he found a path to a village that he was sure would be dry. I had my doubts. In fact, I pointed them out to him.
“Oh, no, no,” he insisted, “it’s good, it’s good.”
Once we were out in the field, we followed him across some farmland on a narrow path that led to a pipe across a path of mud. I was at the back at the group, one of the last to come across the pipe. As I stepped off, I sunk right through the mud and into crap up to my knee. The mud was actually just a thin crust atop a deep pool of sewage.
It stunk even worse than Iraq usually stunk.
“Tommy,” I yelled, “I’m going to whip your ass as soon as we get to the house.”
We pushed on to the house. I was still in the rear. We cleared the house and, once all the snipers were deployed, I went to find Tommy and give him the thrashing I’d promised.
Tommy was already paying for his sins: when I found him downstairs, he was hooked up to an IV and puking his brains out. He had fallen into the muck and was completely covered with shit. He was sick for a day, and he smelled for a week.
Every article of clothing he’d been wearing was disposed of, probably by a hazmat unit.
Served him right.
I spent somewhere between two and three months in the villages. I had roughly twenty confirmed kills while I was there. The action on any particular op could be fierce; it could also be slow. There was no predicting.
Most of the houses we took over belonged to families who at least pretended to be neutral; I’d guess that the majority of them hated the insurgents for causing trouble and would have been even happier than we were to have the bad guys leave. But there were exceptions, and we were plenty frustrated when we couldn’t do anything about it.
We went into one house and saw police uniforms. We knew instantly that the owner was muj—the insurgents were stealing uniforms and using them to disguise themselves in attacks.
Of course he gave us a BS line about having just gotten a job as a part-time police officer—something he’d mysteriously forgotten to mention when we first interrogated him.
We called it back to the Army, gave them the information, and asked what to do.
They had no intelligence on the guy. In the end, they decided the uniforms weren’t evidence of anything.
We were told to turn him loose. So we did.
It gave us something to think about every time we heard of an attack by insurgents dressed as policemen, over the next few weeks.
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