Ryan Smithson (13 page)

“W
hat do we got today?” asks Ryan Ludwin.

He’s poking around inside two Styrofoam to-go plates from the chow hall. They’re full of oranges, apples, and grapes. They’re full of silver-dollar pancakes and small packets of syrup. They’re full of bite-sized breakfast sandwiches and bacon and sausage. They sit beside boxes of orange juice, grapefruit juice, and fruit punch, which are all covered in Arabic writing.

It’s 5:45
A.M
., and the to-go plates sit on the hood of our Humvee. We’re all half asleep, sipping coffee and munching breakfast. Tom Skavenski, our gunner, walks across the motor pool with his M60 machine gun. Ken Renninger, my A-driver, comes by, a Marlboro Red in his hand. He
takes a drag, pats me on the back, and thanks me for grabbing breakfast.

“How are we this morning, Smitty?” he asks.

“Pretty good, Sarge,” I say. “Ready for another day?”

“Yep,” he says as he grabs a sausage-egg-and-cheese on an English muffin.

I’m the driver of this Humvee, bumper number H-105, and only I have the keys. So early in the morning, shortly after the chow hall opens, I drive down, pick up breakfast for my crew, and bring it back to the barracks. It isn’t really one of my duties, but I feel it’s important to have a full stomach before we head out.

In the middle of the day, no matter how hungry we are, it’s hard to eat. It usually hovers around 125 degrees in this part of Iraq, and when it’s that hot, your stomach wants only water. Anything else feels sickening.

There are three other Humvees in this convoy and an M916 hauling concrete supplies. They’re parked throughout the front of the barracks. Their drivers, gunners, and A-drivers are loading gear, water, and ammo. I follow Skavenski to the ammo shed, where he pulls out four OD green boxes and gives me two of them. When we get back to the Humvee, I hand them up to him as he stands on our armored roof.

“So what did you get me for breakfast?” he asks.

“Spinach quiche and a Bloody Mary,” I say.

“Nice,” he says, laughing. “Remind me to pick you up a filet mignon later.”

LT Zeltwanger rallies the briefing. We form up in a circle around him. It’s still dark out, so he holds a flashlight up to the strip map of the route we’ll be working on today. We’ve been doing this mission for over a month, so we pretty much have it down to a science. Nonetheless, outside the wire is outside the wire, and the enemy no doubt despises this mission.

The ground in Iraq is extremely hard. Not made for digging or planting; it’s a landscaper’s worst nightmare. IEDs work best when they’re buried, so that convoys can’t see them. But because of the hard earth, most IEDs are set on top of the ground.

As one goes off, it creates a small crater. As the insurgents set IEDs in the same craters over and over, the holes become bigger and bigger. Some of the holes are so big we can stand in them like we’re inside a foxhole. The problem with craters this large is that convoys passing by them can’t see the bombs until it’s too late.

Our mission is to pour concrete into holes created by IEDs. Turks are helping us, and the insurgents hate this even more. American soldiers are one thing, but Muslim “traitors” are another. The Turks are the ones on post who mix and pour concrete for barriers, bunkers, landing pads, sidewalks, and buildings. They come out with us every day
with two concrete mixing trucks.

We go outside the wire wearing full battle rattle. That’s a full combat load, about fifty pounds. It’s 125 degrees out, and we shovel debris out of the holes, pound rebar into the ground, rake the concrete even, and pull security.

In some spots whole sections of road are blown apart and degraded. A sister engineer company helps us with this. They use dozers, loaders, and graders to rip up the road, exposing the dirt underneath. This hard dirt becomes our canvas. We come in behind the sister company and pour a new concrete road.

We work in shifts. Ryan Ludwin is on the first team. I, the driver, am on the second. Tom Skavenski, the M60 gunner, is on the third. Ken Renninger, my A-driver, supervises. We take turns forming the concrete, manning the M60, and sitting in the Humvee cooling off in the heaven-sent air-conditioning system we’ve hooked up.

Two large tubes run from the trunk to the two front seats. They blow refreshing, cold air down the back of the necks of the driver and A-driver. We have a cooler with ice and water and we drink no less than four two-liter bottles of water every day.

When the two concrete mixers run out, two of the Humvees escort them back to the base for a refill, and everyone takes an MRE lunch. Afterward comes round two. We usually get back into base around three o’clock.

The schedule is never the same. For security, it can’t be. Moving steadily down the road from nine to five on Monday through Friday would create a pattern. We work one day on/two days off, three days on/one day off, two days on/two days off. And we jump around the route like crack-addicted rabbits.

The hardest part of a lengthy mission like this is not becoming complacent. A month without attacks can really alter your perception of danger. That’s just what the enemy wants. So we have to keep him guessing. We have to keep ourselves guessing. Every day we’re out there the danger increases.

A medic from the sister engineer company nearly loses his foot on the mission. His Humvee moves off the road to the side of the job site. He finds a great spot to pull security. The enemy is counting on this great spot. By the time they see the IED sitting in the nearby bushes, it’s too late. The medic is sent to Germany, where the doctors save his foot. The IED is small, and he is lucky.

Moments like this shatter us from our complacency. There are four vehicles, all Humvees. An all-Humvee convoy is a great way to travel because you can fly down the road without worrying about M916s or bulky concrete mixers having to keep up. The faster we go, the better the chances of throwing off the triggerman’s timing.

We receive an additional mission outside of the route
we are working on. It’s a giant IED crater on some side road. I am driving the third Humvee. Renninger is my A-driver, and Skavenski is our gunner. Ludwin, one of the concrete guys in third squad, doesn’t come. Our small convoy drives to the recon site, and LT takes photos and notes. On the way back to camp LT, who’s in the first Humvee, comes over the radio and says we’re going to take a quick detour to the route we are currently working on. He just wants to check it out and find out whatever extra details he can.

We fly down the road, jumping on and off the large patches of concrete we poured. We spray-paint the pads, the canvas, while they are still wet. This is to ensure that after we leave and the concrete is still drying, no one can come and slip in an IED. We cruise over these random spray patterns.

Someone played tic-tac-toe on one part, and the
X
s won. Someone else signed his name. I see the ’shroom platoon, our self-proclaimed nickname. The ’Shroom Platoon because we’re shit on all day and then left in the dark. It’s a joke, but not really.

We travel sixty miles per hour down the unimproved road. The roar of the diesel engine is the only thing I can hear. I watch the vehicle ahead of me, the second one in the convoy. I continuously vary my distance, trying to throw off any timing a potential triggerman may have. The second
Humvee, call sign Hunter Two, swerves drastically to the left side of the road. On the right edge of the road, clear as day, there’s a short black cylinder.

The adrenaline releases, and my mind focuses.

From the cylinder, across the hard tan earth, run two wires. One is black and the other is red.

We are too close to stop, and I slam the pedal to the floor.

The wires run for about a meter until they hit tall weeds that grow along an irrigation ditch. No one is around, but there’s no way of knowing how far those wires run.

The handheld radio crackles to life.

“Did you see that, One?” the vehicle ahead of me asks LT.

Now we are almost on top of the small black cylinder. It’s a land mine, and there’s no time to stop.

“Get the fuck down, Ski!” Ken Renninger yells to our gunner.

If I stop now, we’ll land somewhere directly before or directly after the IED, so I keep my foot to the floor and pray. I pull the Humvee as far to the left as I can, and we roar past the land mine.

That split second is an eternity. I anticipate the pop of point-blank thunder. I anticipate red pieces of Renninger flying into me. Think of zombies. There are three pictures hanging from the windshield. Two are school pictures of
Renninger’s daughter and son. The other is of the Blessed Mary. She holds her son and a wide, sunburst halo shines from behind her head. The pictures swing to the right as I swerve the Humvee, bumper number H-105, to the left. Skavenski ducks inside the turret, the left side of his lip bulging with Copenhagen. Both my hands grip the wheel, and I teeter on the left edge of the road. The speedometer on the Humvee goes only to sixty. The needle is buried.

No pop.

One more vehicle, one more target, left in this convoy.

Arthur Dodds, who’s a trucker back home, Pickleman’s dad, is the A-driver. I struggle to see Hunter Four in my side mirror. I can’t. The small armored window doesn’t allow enough room for me to see the whole mirror. Renninger has his Kevlar pressed against his window. I wait for the popping of thunder.

“You past it yet, Four?” asks LT over the radio.

A couple seconds pass, an eternity, before Dodds responds.

“Yeah,” the radio crackles.

“All Hunter elements, this is Hunter One,” LT says. “Halt. Herringbone, over.”

A herringbone is a staggered formation we use when stopping a convoy on the road. The first vehicle, which is always a gun truck, parks sideways across the middle of the road; its gunner faces twelve o’clock. The second vehicle,
which doesn’t have to be a gun truck but is today parks behind the first to the right side of the road; its gunner faces three o’clock. The third vehicle, which doesn’t have to be a gun truck but is today parks behind the second vehicle to the left side of the road; its gunner faces nine o’clock. The last vehicle, which is always a gun truck, parks behind the third vehicle sideways across the middle of the road; its gunner faces six o’clock.

We immediately check the surroundings for a second set of IEDs. The enemy knows our tactics well enough to know that a four-Humvee convoy will usually blow past an IED and park a certain distance away. They’ll sometimes set up a conspicuous IED like say, a land mine trailing with wires, and plant more inconspicuous explosives a certain distance away.

All is clear in our twenty-five meter sweep, and LT radios the EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) team over the SINCGARS (Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System), the secure radio we use outside the wire to contact post command. Then he comes over the handheld radio and gives us direction on where to go in order to secure the site. He knows this route like the back of his hand. He’s sure that if we take a farming trail located off to our right and follow the irrigation ditch, it will come out on the road to a location well before the black land mine lying on the ground.

“Hunter Three, this is Hunter One, over,” he says.

“One this is Three, over,” Renninger responds.

“You follow me on this dirt trail to our right. Two and Four, secure this side. Nobody passes. Not even civilians. Over.”

“Roger, One,” Renninger says from our Humvee.

“Roger, One,” says the A-driver of the second Humvee.

“Roger,” says Dodds from the fourth Humvee.

Renninger lights a Marb Red and turns to Skavenski’s legs. “Be ready, Ski.”

“All right, Sarge,” he says. Tom Skavenski is always ready.

We follow LT out and around the weed-enriched irrigation system. We try to drive fast here, but it’s difficult on the bumpy dirt road. Nonetheless, we need to move as quickly as possible. Being on a paved road is one thing, but there’s no telling what’s hiding back here.

LT’s Humvee throws up a cloud of dirt. The brown dirt has a brick red tint to it resembling rust. The tall weeds that outline the irrigation ditch whiz by. Their healthy green color also seems shadowed with rust. We follow the tall weeds. They remind me of a lengthy row of grapes in a vineyard. The dried clay thrown up by LT’s Humvee now blocks my view. Skavenski chokes on the dust, and I have to back off.

“Still back there, Three?” LT asks over the radio.

“Yeah, we’re here,” says Renninger into the handheld, a puff of cigarette smoke blending with the dust in the air. “We’ll follow your trail, over.”

“Roger.”

We pull around the first turn. A family of sustenance farmers stands off to the side. They’re not used to seeing military convoys back here, and they give us a confused look. The children run to the edge and give us a thumbs-up. One of them motions for a bottle of water. We fly past them. There’s no time for sentiment.

We get around the second corner and fly to the paved road. Once there we set up a small box formation. We pull sideways across the road so both drivers are facing toward the inside. Tom Skavenski points his turret toward six o’clock and Jason Demarco, LT’s gunner, points his toward twelve o’clock.

We wait about thirty minutes, which is exceptionally short for this type of situation, until EOD shows up. They park in between our two box formations and break out the bomb-inspecting robot. They shortly conclude that the IED is a dud. It’s a fake, conspicuous land mine and was set up only to watch our reaction.

The whole time there is a man standing three hundred meters away. He has a pair of binoculars and is watching our every move. We can’t shoot him because of the Geneva convention. The Geneva convention is a series of
agreements about the rules of war, and they say we can’t shoot anyone who isn’t holding a weapon and isn’t posing an immediate threat to our convoy. Despite hours of self-debate we understand that it has to be this way.

Imagine if soldiers started shooting civilians without weapons in their hands. Imagine what the news media back home would do with our excuse: he was watching us with binoculars. Abu Ghraib prison torture would be a fairy tale by comparison.