June Trip to Marine Country

A few months ago I took a trip into the area west of Baghdad. It’s an area that is controlled by the Marine Corps. My mission was to find some equipment that my unit in Taji needed, and ship it to back to us. I was pretty excited to be taking a trip out to where the Marines were. I packed my bags and headed for the helo pad. Most of the business was to be conducted at a Marine base called Camp Taqqadum. It is only about 30 km west of my base, but our helicopter had to make several stops in and around Baghdad first.
As we flew over the eastern and then southern outskirts of the city, I couldn’t help but marvel at what a lively and interesting place it was. Two and three-story concrete houses the color of earth. Walls and courtyards on the rooftops with chairs and tea tables and drying clothes. Running kids carrying soccer balls and pointing at us. Men looking at cars, learning to be home mechanics. Winding markets shaded by colored tarps. Stalls and corners stuffed with vases and rugs and housewares. A place full of vigor, commerce, and life… and a place full of lurking death. Around the corner from the market—a martyr; a car trunk full of primed explosives and the wait for the sweating push of a button. Plastic explosives… Semtex, packed with metal bolts and shards of glass, coiled back to unleash a torrent of guts and limbs and women’s cries. Preparing to sever dreams and pour blood into children’s memories.
Baghdad below me was a dirty place, but it was so different, and alive with exoticism and history. I wished that I could go down from the air and experience it as it was meant to be—free of flying metal. Free of killers on the corners; devoid of things that would forever separate me from my loved ones. Free of families making their last walk in a market. Free of the price of searching for freedom. I looked down at the passing buildings and streets and the blurry swishes of striped awnings. And I thought to myself that in my entire life, I might never be able to walk safe and free in Baghdad. Maybe nobody would, not even Iraqis. We banked right, and headed into the blistering sun and toward the western deserts, shaking and swerving in the hot wind. I was sitting in a target. It was black and winged and poisonous. Elements of the beautiful culture below were flinging a death wish at me through the air.

After spending a few days at Camp Taqqadum (“TQ”), near the banks of Lake Habbaniyah (about 40 km west of Baghdad), I had to fly over to Ramadi to take care of some more business. Ramadi is a city on the brink of disaster. Not much of the city is considered under our “control.” If anything, just one main road that runs straight through the middle. The rest of it is chaos. But before we went to Ramadi, I had a buddy of mine that works at the TQ air terminal list me and the guy I was traveling with as "high priority" passengers, and we flew from TQ to Camp Fallujah. The battle for Fallujah in 2004 will one day be remembered as one of the Marine Corps' famous battles. A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to get the chance to walk the ground of another sacred Marine battleground in Vietnam, in Khe Sahn. But I didn't know if future Marines would ever be able to safely walk in Fallujah. So I felt lucky to be going near the place where those Marines fought.

At TQ we parked our humvee and trailer in a dirt lot near the airfield tower, locked it, and grabbed our gear. A sergeant checked off our names, and we were led off into the growing darkness. We stood on a row of glowing chem lights, at the edge of a vast sea of red, blue, and green runway lights. A few minutes later the two long CH-46 twin-rotor helicopters set down in front of us, and the Marines waved us onto the "frogs" with their chem lights. (The helicopters look like a sitting frog when you look at them head-on.) As we sat down and buckled our belts, a detainee (suspected insurgent) was led on to the helicopter by his escort. He was a big man, almost ape-like, with his large, rough, and dark hands flexicuffed in front of him. From his cuffed hands dangled a plastic bag full of what looked like white clothing. His eyes were covered with a red blindfold and he wore a heavy orange prison-style jumpsuit. As we took off, I could see his sillhouette in the porthole window directly across from me. Beyond his thick, almost frizzy hair, I could see the greenish lights of Habbaniyah begin to pass right to left in the window. For a moment, I thought he seemed restless, nearly like someone with Parkinson's. Then I realized he was praying. "How great is Allah now?" I couldn't help but think. I began to wonder if he had planted any IEDs that killed Marines. Irrationally, I wondered what would happen if I smashed him in the face with the bottom of my rifle. I wondered which of the Marines and soldiers around me would restrain me. Then I wondered what he must be thinking. Blindfolded as he was, did he even know he was being put on a helicopter? Was it his first ride? Had he ever shot his AK-47 at a passing helicopter? Not a minute later I heard a THUNCK! behind me. I looked behind men but didn't see anything. Some civilians that were sitting across from me later told me that they had seen some sparks outside the windows. They thought that someone had shot at us, but I told them it was just the helicopter shooting off some flares.

We landed at Fallujah after a short flight. We waited in the dark of the parking lot, talking to a couple of contractors that were involved in the installation of a new system to protect vehicles from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). We had been told that a bus would come to take us to transient billeting--basically, a place to sleep for people that are just passing through. It wasn't until a Marine Captain happened to pass by and offer us a ride that we discovered there was no such thing as "transient billeting." The Captain, whose name was Eli, told us that he had been stranded at the airfield enough times to offer rides to people he saw standing out there. He drove us into the center of the base, taking the time to drive around a little bit and orient us to where everything was located. Finally, he took us to some tents that his unit controlled so that we had a place to stay. As long as I live, and no matter how good Marines become at conquering and killing, it will always be the little things Marines do for each other in far off places of the world that defines "semper fidelis" for me. Always faithful.

We spent a day in Fallujah, and I had the chance to hook up with a good buddy, Brian. He and I had spent the last few years together in Monterey in grad school and language school. Then we had traveled together quite a bit in Asia. We had often joked--(once, I remember, while drinking beer in Hong Kong)--that the next time we would see each other would be in Iraq. Since I was close to Fallujah and I was in charge of the travel schedule, we had stopped in Fallujah so that I could see some of my Marines from Okinawa, and hopefully get the chance to see Brian for a minute. As luck would have it, his company had the day off; they were preparing to move to another area of operations, and would be leaving soon. Brian had to go to a meeting, but we had the chance to shoot the shit for an hour or so. After that, we went over to where the Marines from my company were working. We sat around and talked for awhile and then took some pictures.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. I spent a few days at a base near Ramadi--one of the shitholes of Iraq. After my business there was taken care of, I waited late into the night to get a "space available" flight back to my base. The soldier that was with me on my trip had already flown back to Taji, and I was alone. First I had to fly back to TQ, and then I waited to board a flight that was going to Taji. I waited for the flight in the pilots' ready room. It was a room with maps and couches and televisions. The walls had the latest intelligence reports posted on them. I sat on a couch and had some beef stew from a vat that was delivered to the ready room from the chow hall. As I waited, a started talking to a Marine lieutenant. After a few minutes, we realized we knew eachother from the Naval Academy. He had been one of the freshmen from my company there when I was a senior. Small world, small war. When I finally borded the helicopter for the trip home, the Marine pilots helped me load my gear into the bird. Ten minutes later we headed out. Before going to Taji, though, we had to stop in Ramadi again. To get there we flew low over Lake Habbaniyah. About ten days earlier, two Marines had died in the lake when their helicopter crashed into it. I thought about those Marines as we flew over the exact spot they had disappeared. The moonlight was bluish and bright on the surface of the lake. In the black swirls of water below, I lost the sense of depth and distance. Are we close or far from the water? Either could be either, really. I suppose the pilots flew by their instruments, but in the darkness I was clueless about our altitude. The ring of lights of Ramadi around the lake were the only thing that anchored the lake to the earth and the sky to the lake. Ring of Ramadi. Ring of evil. Maybe the worst city in Iraq. City of green and amber and darkness and blue. Creeping cars. Unexplained explosions. Deceptive peace. Really... a city whose monsters overwhelm its children and simple people that just want to live in peace. We flew late into the night, at maybe three or four AM, enjoying the insurgents’ preponderance of laziness. I was exhausted, and I started dozing off. As I fell asleep, visions from the pilots' ready room were in my head. Maps of Ramadi and the surrounding area; grainy green photos above airfields the pilots used to recognize landing pads--POWERLINES, 15-FT! A map showing where helicopters had taken small arms fire or seen shots fired at the aircraft. The area of Ramadi and Fallujah was covered in red and yellow dots. But the chances of a bullet somehow finding its way through the night and into our shaking helicopter or into my shaking body seemed astronomically low... and so I fell asleep. An hour later I was back in Taji, just as the sun was getting ready to rise.