The Road to Fallujah

The road leading up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election was marked with a great deal of ignorant and idle talk from the grunts.

One of our Marines, Gus Ruiz, wanted Kerry to win. Everybody else ridiculed him for that, and his nickname stuck: Democrat. I wanted Bush to win only because at that point I knew that if Kerry lost, it looked like we had lost Iraq, and what was very important to me at the time was winning al-Anbar Province if not Iraq.

Needless to say, bin Laden's pre-election message that essentially said Americans should vote for Kerry tipped the scales in Bush's favor two weeks before the election, and I knew in my bones that when Bush won he would send the Marines to clean out Fallujah.

My mother tried with all her might to get me to vote absentee for Kerry.

When the snipers killed two insurgents at an intersection west of Hit, third squad was 7 kilometers south at the Bronze-Uranium split, on the main supply artery from al-Assad airbase to Ramadi and Fallujah.

We had to go and get the snipers, since their kill had alerted everyone to their presence in the area.

We had inserted them into their hide site two nights prior to their kills at 3 in the morning with the Hummers, with false stops at intervals along our patrol route to mask their insertion. It was a large group of snipers for one hide site: SGTs Aifong, Alice, and their spotters, and the battalion's scout-sniper section leader, who was a staff sergeant. Aifong had the .50-caliber Barrett and Alice had the M40 .308 bolt-action rifle.

I had been writing dispatches for The Brownsville Herald back home, so when we got to the kill site I sauntered up to do some rubbernecking. By this time weapons platoon had arrived all mounted up in their Mad Max column, and were busy snapping photos of the corpses and anti-tank mines for posterity.

I arrived at the two bodies at the same time as the snipers, and they all looked grimly pleased. Alice knelt next to the one he'd killed, a young man wearing a police uniform, and peeled up his shirt. The insurgent had been shot through the chest: one shot, one kill.

SGT Aifong looked particularly happy with the old Saddam-looking insurgent he'd shot with the .50 cal.

"Good shooting," I said.

"Thanks," he said, smiling.

"Hey sergeant, engineers are gonna blow these mines up, so we have to move the bodies," the weapons platoon guide told me. "Help me move this one."

"Nah, I don't even have my gloves on," I said. "I'm not touching him."

"Come on, dog, you can have his ankles and I'll get his jacket."

I tried to talk myself out of it, but ended up grabbing the muj's room-temperature, ash-colored bare ankles and lugging him a few feet before throwing him down.

I was unmoved either way, neither disgusted nor philosophical. I was only uplifted, in a good mood.

Back at the split, I found a care package from my mother with a New York Review of Books with highlighted sentences about how the Iraq war was misguided and so on, but she'd sent me three bags of peanut M&Ms, which I ate greedily before realizing I hadn't even washed my hands.

The article killed my good mood. For some reason, my mother's total opposition to the war infuriated me to a degree of anger I've never felt over anything else.

"Shit," I said, "I should've washed my hands."