Black Knights, Dark Days Read online

  This bit of knowledge is actually a two-edged sword for me. On one hand, I will have to bid a bitter farewell to the life I love. On the other, I can escape this ravenous war dog that I am becoming before it is too late to go back. At least, I so dearly hope that it isn’t too late.

  Amid the babble of Arabic actors emoting on TV, I close my eyes and run a different movie in my mind. It opens with a platoon of soldiers preparing for their first combat mission in Iraq.

  

  “Fisk! Get over here!” I ran to the front of the convoy where the leader of each vehicle had gathered around a map laid across the hood of the Lieutenant’s High-Mobility Multi-Purpose Vehicle, pronounced the world over as Humvee. Sergeant Lovett had his Kevlar helmet off and didn’t look at all pleased. What now? I wondered. It was April Fool’s of 2004, so I was wary of a prank. Two days ago, Sergeant York had filled Sergeant Bourquin’s mouth with cheese-in-a-can as he slept while we waited to leave Kuwait and drive into Iraq. College fraternities drew their inspiration from Infantry guys, so I wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Specialist Fisk, you are going to be the L-T’s recorder.”

  Had to be a joke. I stood there blinking for a second, waiting for the punch line. ”You mean he wants me to be his flute-like wind instrument?”

  “No, smart-ass, you’re going to be the L-T’s battle-buddy. Wherever he goes, you stick with him and write down whatever he tells you to. Can you handle that, Grandpa?” I had just turned 31 in Kuwait, making me his senior by five years. I was older than most of the guys in the platoon. The senior citizen jokes just came with the territory.

  “Yes, Ser-gent!” I peppered his title with a little extra basic training lilt at the end, grinning all the while.

  “All right, then. Grab your gear and move to the lieutenant’s vehicle. Step it out, Gramps—we roll in five mikes.”

  I double-timed to the third vehicle, grabbed my helmet and water bottle, and slugged Deaver in the shoulder. “Catch ya later, ol’ bean. Big daddy’s movin’ to the head of the class.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sergeant Lovett ordered me to babysit the L-T. Let me know how that tan’s coming.” The two vehicles in the middle had no top and very little in the way of armor, so the crew got baked by the sun. The gunner stood in the vehicle’s bed behind a makeshift Mad Max-type gun turret. The vehicle in the front and rear were M-1114 fully armored Humvees with tops that could withstand a fair amount of punishment. I felt a momentary twinge of guilt for leaving my buddies out in the open while I rode in a veritable armored Cadillac.

  Lieutenant Aguero was still talking to the Track Commanders, so I took a moment to check my gear in one of the vehicle’s side view mirrors. I was just over six feet tall, so I had to stoop a little. My canteens were full. The MOLLE vest, which was the platform for all of my equipment, held 180 rounds of M16 ammo, my compass, an improved Israeli field dressing, a small pair of binoculars, and another pouch containing Night Vision goggles. In addition, I had attached a small fighting knife made by my Uncle Jerry, widely considered the world’s best blade smith. Two Kevlar plates covered my torso front and back, adding to the weight I carried. It was welcome weight, something an infantryman learns to respect and then ignore when he has worn it for a while. The poor-quality mirror couldn’t tell me honestly if I had shaved well, so I rubbed a hand over my face to make sure that I had knocked all the hair off of it. I had missed a little spot under my unimpressive chin. I pondered using Uncle Jerry’s razor-sharp knife to get what my initial effort missed, but that would likely result in a severed jugular, so I decided to leave it alone. My glasses, framing the blue eyes my grandfather gave me, sat askew as usual on my crooked nose as I straightened them for the bazillionth time and mopped beads of sweat from my bald head as the Iraqi sun beat down upon it.

  “Fee-isk.”

  I slowly raised my eyes to find the owner of that oddly accented deep voice. “Yes, Sergeant Chen?”

  “You still don’t look any prettier.” The muscular Asian behind the .50 caliber machine gun smiled slyly as he stared down at me. I always remember him smiling, but I can’t remember if he ever laughed. The effect was a little unsettling. It was as if he understood a perpetual running joke that no one else got.

  First Lieutenant Shane Aguero was irate. He mumbled some profanity to no one in particular and continued to outline the intended route to his assembled vehicle commanders. When he felt confident that his instructions were understood, he dismissed the gathering to prepare for departure. It was time for our first patrol as a platoon in the real deal. We had trained for this moment together for over a year. I scrambled to my seat behind the driver and plopped my Kevlar on my shiny dome. I was pumped.

  Lieutenant Aguero, a slightly built, wire-tough man, slid easily into the shotgun seat beside the driver and began to organize the radio handsets, maps, and documents that clutter an Infantry Platoon Leader’s life. Soldiering was all that he ever wanted to do. He had already served 10 years in the Cavalry Scouts, achieving the rank of Staff Sergeant before crossing over to the dark side to become an officer. He was experienced, highly intelligent, and loved his job. He also had very little patience or tact with bureaucratic types. He took a deep breath and affected his most detached and courteous radio voice, failing only slightly to convey respect and admiration for senior officers in the Combat Operations Center. “Lancer Mike, this is Comanche Red 1 requesting permission to exit the FOB, over.”

  Moments passed. I rubbed my right thumb against my weapon’s safety. Then we heard a faint, static-riddled response. Garble, garble. The teacher from the Charlie Brown cartoons giving final instructions to our band of warriors. “Roger, Lancer Mike. Leaving the FOB…time now…with four Humvees, twenty-four U.S. Personnel, and one translator, over.”

  “That’s a good copy. Comanche Red 1, out.” Aguero slung the mike against the dashboard as if it felt great to get it out of his hand and waved Riddell forward. He continued to vent his frustrations as the National Guard artillerymen manning the gate opened up to let us pass. As the vehicles left FOB War Eagle he gave the order to lock and load. The familiar and extremely motivating—at least to me—sound of live bullets entering rifle chambers filled the cab. Above me I heard Sergeant Chen haul back on the charging handle of the M-2 .50 caliber machine gun. CHA-CHUNK! Just knowing that this weapon was hovering over me like a heavy metal guardian angel was a comfort. The Ma Deuce, as she is affectionately known, is a weapon so deadly and effective that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers had used it in wars long before our time. A few years before, I had attended a small-arms repair school and was astounded to see that they were still using the M-2 repair manual from the late 1940s. None of us had ever used it in combat before, but the general consensus was that it would tear a mo-fo up. Now we were heading out the gate into wild territory as green as we were and ready to put ourselves to the test. We were warriors, heirs of a long tradition of valor and honor, ready to take our place among the long line of soldiers who had fought before us.

  The Iraqi countryside slowly rolled by as we made our way down a road that paralleled the low wall surrounding the FOB. A deep, stagnant canal lay to the right side of the road, and it reeked of human waste. Ahead, the dirt path fed into the only paved road connecting Forward Operating Base War Eagle—our quaint new home—to Sadr City. According to the lieutenant’s map, it was called Route Silver.

  “Where are we going, Sir?” I asked.

  “Didn’t your squad leader give you the mission, Specialist?” Aguero stared out of his bullet-proof window distractedly.

  “Yes, Sir. He did. I just wondered what our first stop was. And, while we’re at it, what exactly do you want me to do as your recorder?”

  His eyes never quit scanning his surroundings as he answered. “Look, it’s real simple. Write down whatever I tell you to. It’s that easy. Our Area of Operation is on the far west central side of the city, and we’re going to different inst
itutions in our sector today to introduce ourselves.”

  “Winning hearts and minds, Sir?”

  “Whatever. You speak a little Arabic, right?”

  “I’m learning, Sir. I can ask if you like Arabic food and where to find the toilet.”

  “That’s why I asked for you. We’re going to be interacting extensively with the locals, so just pay attention.” He turned to the translator sitting behind him—an elderly man named Monsoor—and began to ask questions regarding Muslim culture. I suddenly felt foolish as I realized that the Lieutenant was trying to avoid revealing our destinations in front of a man he clearly didn’t trust.

  Gotta think about things like that, I warned myself. Even though he and I both seemed cut from a philosopher’s cloth, we had vastly different outlooks. I’m more like Ghandi with a gun; he’s more like a chain-smoking Marcus Aurelius with a migraine and Tourette syndrome.

  Specialist Riddell, the driver, gunned the engine as we approached Route Silver, turned right, and began to weave hesitantly through the bustling traffic. Our convoy into Baghdad in the early phases of the war had barely prepared us for the mad swarm of humanity that is Sadr City. I looked it up in a world atlas before I left the states and was puzzled to find in its place the name Saddam City. I asked Sergeant Fowler about that the night that we arrived at FOB War Eagle. He had been here for two weeks with the advance party and had learned a great deal of useful information. He told me, accurately or not, that the city was originally built by Saddam Hussein to house a troublesome Shi’a Muslim population as cheap labor for his factories. Saddam, a Sunni Muslim, would visit a cigarette factory on the city’s edge to shoot random Shi’a pedestrians with a hunting rifle just for sport.

  A religious man in that city from a respected family formed a nucleus of resistance to Saddam’s regime. The dictator viewed him as a serious threat, so in 1999 he had the cleric assassinated. The elderly man, Mohammed Mohammed Sadeq al Sadr, became a martyr to the citizens who brazenly began to call their town Sadr City in his honor.

  Two and a half million people lived here in an area seven kilometers, or two miles, square. Poverty and unemployment were high. Although the electricity was free to everyone, a big part of the city was without power for all but two hours most days, a technological nightmare when people began to connect their homes to the city power grid using any number of inventive and potentially lethal shortcuts. Each residential concrete telephone pole had a medusa of multi-colored wires spliced into the main line that ran through the alleys like an intricate web woven by a drunken spider.

  As we turned off Route Silver on to Route Aeros, the Lieutenant yelled out over the roar of the engine. “They call this intersection Home Depot. It’s basically an open-air building supply market.” I peeked around Riddell’s head and saw a wide open space crammed with ancient dump trucks, donkey-drawn carts sporting Michelin tires, and huge piles of gravel and sand. Bearded men in turbans wore long robes called dishdashas by the locals and man-dresses by American soldiers. The sellers haggled with all comers for materials that were used to build homes and walls and other domestic projects. Traffic was severely congested. Lieutenant Aguero gave terse orders to Riddell not to stop and to plow through the traffic jams or crowds if necessary. “Trust me,” he said. “They’ll move.”

  Riddell liberally employed his horn, emboldened by the orders, and squeezed the Humvee through almost impossibly small gaps in traffic. A fully armored M-1114 has no rear window, so I could only pray that the rest of the vehicles were keeping pace.

  As we raced southwest down the western edge of the city, my eyes darted everywhere, searching for any sign of improvised bombs that we had trained so hard to spot. Used tires dotted the gutters like large licorice lifesaver candies. Empty plastic shopping bags wrapped themselves around concrete telephone poles and waved to us in the slight breeze. Cars on cinder blocks rusted quietly in the blazing sun, their dented hoods raised in salute as we passed. Rotten fruit littered the streets along with the carcasses of dead animals. You’ve gotta be kidding me, I thought. How am I supposed to find IEDs hidden in this mess?

  The space in between Route Aeros and Route Bravo, which ran parallel, was just wide enough for a good soccer field or two. Through the right window, I could see children playing what the Iraqis called “futball” in the different fields with teams scattered according to age and size. Dirty children were everywhere playing in the dust, mud, and filth of these fields which had no grass to cushion a fall. Fine gray dust puffed up in clouds when someone attempted a slide tackle. Most of the younger children ran recklessly through the harsh, rocky ground without shoes. The older children—lean teenagers with shiny hair and beardless chins—sported new, colorful uniforms and carried out their practice with grim determination and violent purpose.

  As our convoy rolled noisily down the road, the kids stopped playing and raced toward our vehicles in waves as word that Americans were coming spread like a prairie fire. Most cheered as we past, giving us the thumbs-up sign. I had been briefed earlier that this was, in their culture, an obscene gesture. However, this was always accompanied with a hearty, “Good Mister!” so I assumed that they were merely adapting to American customs. To my surprise, I heard them sing a song as we passed that was partly in English and used a few Arabic words that I knew. I asked Monsoor if he knew what they were singing.

  He looked at me and smiled. “They sing good things,” he said in heavily accented English, “They sing ‘Good, Good Mister! Give to us the food. Give to us the water.’”

  I pondered that as I fidgeted with my loaded weapon. Were they actually happy to have us here? Did they see us as liberators or oppressors? What did they want from me? Lieutenant Colonel Gary Volesky, our Battalion Commander, had repeatedly told us that our mission was to perform humanitarian aid and restore civil services to the city. Those of us who had been spoiling for a fight since airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers began to brace ourselves for a year of boredom and subpar chow.

  Several hundred meters later, the dirt road became paved and the mud houses with colorful door-blankets became nicer houses with window panes, high walls, and metal doors. And trees—palm trees, date trees, and some sort of deciduous tree that I had never seen—sprang high over the multicolored walls that divided neighbors. I continued to watch the roads, alleys, and second-story windows for anyone full of naughty intent.

  At length we reached Route Gold, a very busy east-west thoroughfare, and turned right. On the corner was a man in a bloody dishdasha who held a knife. As I watched he flayed the skin from a small animal which dangled from a rusty metal scaffold. It must have been a sheep. Two clusters of the forlorn, doomed animals huddled nearby awaiting their turn on the chopping block. One group was marked on the rump with pink paint, the other with green. A sort of brand, I supposed. A small child held a large metal tray upon which the butcher deposited one cut of meat after another. I saw no freezer into which the meat would go, nor anywhere to wash blood-stained hands, nor shelter of any type where they would find respite from the sun.

  The Lieutenant suddenly burst into a vehement stream of invective which filled the cab of our vehicle with a bluish haze even as we slowed to a stop. I suddenly realized that words beginning with the letter F held great attraction for my platoon leader. Our current situation, however, seemed to have less to do with synonyms for ‘fornication’ or the judgment of God against fatherless children and more to do with being stuck in a traffic jam. As a game, I endeavored to record the number of times Aguero dropped the F-bomb.

  Despite the Lieutenant’s colorful encouragement, we remained securely stuck in a traffic swarm that gave no hint of dissolving. Aguero listened intently to his radio for a second and responded with a brusque “Roger.” He turned to me and said, “We’re dismounting to untangle this mess. Sergeant Chen! Bring the vehicle forward behind us. Let’s go.”

  I threw the door open and untangled my long legs and weapon as fast as
I could. The Lieutenant was moving quickly and I had to trot to catch him. We passed vehicles of every description and condition as another group of soldiers brought up the rear. French and German automobiles were common. White-robed Sheiks in brand-new Mercedes idled beside filthy merchants in beat-up Bongo trucks. Some familiar American models were also popular, most of which were GMC Suburbans. Some still had Texas license plates on them, evidence that they had come from other-than-legal markets. At times, among the unregulated, ozone-killing exhaust, I smelled something like a banana-flavored magic marker. I learned later that this was homemade ethanol, a clever way to circumvent the corrupt gas stations.

  As we passed car after car, I attempted to use my fledgling Arabic. Salaam a lechum (peace be unto you) and Minfa’adluk, ruuh (please go). People I spoke to immediately responded in kind or smiled beneficently.

  The Lieutenant glanced over his shoulder and frowned. “Where’s the interpreter?”

  I shrugged. “Guess he didn’t feel like comin’, Sir.”