From Baghdad with Love by Jay Kopelman (a court of thorns and roses ebook free .TXT) 📕

As a result, convoys make great targets, and in just one easy attack the insurgents can disrupt supply runs, mangle equipment, and butcher troops all at the same time. No suicide required. In fact, they’re getting so good at setting off bombs from far away—igniting them with garage door openers, remote controls for toy cars, and beepers requiring only a cell phone call to set them off—using suicide bombers has almost become yesterday’s fashion.

The enemy dangles soda cans from trees and packs explosives into roadkill. They hide bombs in girders, vegetated highway dividers, guardrails, trash cans, and manholes. They bury bombs in underground tunnels. They drop bombs from bridges. The convoy drivers keep a specific distance between their vehicles, usually fifty to a hundred meters depending on the dust factor, so the entire herd won’t be taken down at once by a land mine.

When the convoy halts for equipment inspection or refueling, every driver stays in his vehicle with the motor running while every other eye scans the horizon 360 degrees and back again. Sometimes one of us will venture out to take a leak, but peeing on the side of the road in the middle of the Sunni Triangle isn’t very safe; your chances of being hit are about as high as those for the fat boy in dodgeball.

If you are hit while peeing, the following advice is given in our Lessons Learned handbook: “RETURN FIRE—Extremely Effective; Continue to move; Do Not Stop!! They want you to do this; Do not be afraid to shoot; . . . anyone not stopping enemy activity is enabling the activity—This makes return fire morally right.”

Usually before a convoy moves out, we gather at a staging site where the commander logs us in, the vehicles are inspected, personal items including clothes, food, and water are loaded, and heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, and other weapons are mounted, dusted, lubed, and readied to fire. The commander usually briefs us about new intelligence, the convoy route, radio call signs, and road-safety precautions, and follows with immediate action drills if the convoy gets hammered anyway. In our case we left the danger of Fallujah for the danger of the road by just piling things into the Humvees as fast as we could and exchanging good-luck salutes with the commander.

So we’re driving along to the camp on a tricky road past all these Fallujah evacuees who now live in US-erected tents out in the cold and are pissed off about it. Like, they hate our guts.

The four of us in the Humvee make jokes about the old men in dresses and the fat women behind veils and egg on Lava when he barks.

“Kill,” we say and fall out laughing, because we think it’s so damned funny. “Kill, Lava, kill.” We’re nervous. It helps pass the time.

At first, as the convoy rolls past and the evacuees see this little puppy barking wildly at them through the Humvee’s window, I expect them to give us the finger and shout nasty predictions about what will happen to us after we die. I expect any second to see one of the old guys pull a machine gun out of his robe and blast away as he’s smiling. I expect burning effigies and hordes of shouting clerics with fists high in the air.

It’s all a game really. Monopoly with bombs. Capture the Flag with grenades. See, there’s this line that’s drawn that’s just meant to be crossed, and you stand on one side with your goods and they stand on the other with their goods, and the teams lob insults back and forth—“My stuff’s better than yours!” “No, my stuff’s better than yours!” “Well, I know the Referee!” “Oh, yeah? I’m related to the Referee”—until someone finally steps over the line and play officially begins.

I guess the Ref is the only one who really knows who crossed first and under what duress, but at this point everyone’s so balled up in the name-calling—“Insurgents . . . murderers . . . terrorists . . . fanatics”; “Imperialists . . . infidels . . . invaders”—it doesn’t matter anymore who did what or when.

Imagine the old Ref up there in the North Pole being all nonpartisan and looking down on this. It’s embarrassing. No wonder he doesn’t show his face anymore.

And here we are driving by in our convoy past these people, and I can’t stop thinking about the dogs. After a couple of days walking around the bodies in Fallujah, you got good at telling which ones the dogs had gotten to—the skin was shredded off the fattiest parts of their bodies, mostly the stomachs, butt cheeks, and soles of the feet—and that, my friend, is some gut-wrenching shit.

But they just stare at us. No rocks. No mutilated American flags. No calls to jihad with weapons raised in the air. Just stares, like they don’t have energy to do anything else, mile after mile of them. After a while I start feeling like I’ve pulled off a brilliant practical joke that went too far and Lava’s rooing starts getting to me.

“Come on, buddy, cut it out.”

But he tears from one window to the other, and one of the other guys tells him to stop, and these faces stare at us through the dirty glass, but it’s not funny anymore, and Lava just keeps roo-roo-rooooing, mile after mile, face after face, until I think my head is about to explode, “Knock that shit off,” and I slam on the brakes.

Lava stares at me. The guys stare at me. The faces, the people outside, stare at me. And they’ve got that look, all of them, that look that says Caught your cool off guard, did we? so I shrug it off, you know, recompose and grin and peel off real fast, leaving the Iraqis in a plume of dust and dirt.

Except as the mood in the Humvee gets back to normal, I can still feel