The Forever War (Vintage)
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CONTENTS Title Page Dedication Epigraph PROLOGUE Hells Bells PART ONE / Kabul, Afghanistan, September 1998 1 Only This 2 Forebodings Third World 3 Jang PART TWO / Baghdad, Iraq, March 2003– 4 Land of Hope and Sorrow 5 I Love You, March 2003 6 Gone Forever Video The Kiss 7 A Hand in the Air Blonde 8 A Disease The View from the Air 9 The Man Within 10 Kill Yourself The Cloud Mogadishu 11 Pearland Habibi 12 The Vanishing World Communiqués (1) 13 Just Talking 14 The Mahdi 15 Proteus Your Name Communiqués (2) 16 The Revolution Devours Its Own The Normal 17 The Labyrinth The Wall 18 Fuck Us 19 The Boss 20 The Turning 21 The Departed Epilogue: Laika Acknowledgments Notes Illustration Credits A Note About the Author Copyright To Khalid Hassan and Fakher Haider, friends and colleagues who were killed while looking for the truth, and Lance Corporal William L. Miller, who went first He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. —Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick PROLOGUE Hells Bells Falluja, Iraq, November 2004 THE MARINES were pressed flat on a rooftop when the dialogue began to unfold. It was 2 a.m. The minarets were flashing by the light of airstrikes and rockets were sailing on trails of sparks. First came the voices from the mosques, rising above the thundery guns. “The Americans are here!” howled a voice from a loudspeaker in a minaret. “The Holy War, the Holy War! Get up and fight for the city of mosques!” Bullets poured without direction and without end. No one lifted his head. “This is crazy,” one of the marines yelled to his buddy over the noise. “Yeah,” the buddy yelled back, “and we’ve only taken one house.” And then, as if from the depths, came a new sound: violent, menacing and dire. I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant field at Falluja’s northern edge. A group of marines were standing at the foot of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts. It was AC/DC, the Australian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled sounds. I recognized the song immediately: “Hells Bells,” the band’s celebration of satanic power, had come to us on the battlefield. Behind the strains of its guitars, a church bell tolled thirteen times. I’m a rolling thunder, a pouring rain I’m comin’ on like a hurricane My lightning’s flashing across the sky You’re only young but you’re gonna die The marines raised the volume on the speakers and the sound of gunfire began to recede. Airstrikes were pulverizing the houses in front of us. In a flash, a building vanished. The voices from the mosques were hysterical in their fury, and they echoed along the city’s northern rim. “Allahu Akbar!” cried one of the men in the mosques. “God is great! There is nothing so glorious as to die for God’s path, your faith and your country!” I won’t take no prisoners, won’t spare no lives Nobody’s putting up a fight I got my bell, I’m gonna take you to hell I’m gonna get ya, Satan get ya! “God is Great!” The shouting continued until the houses in front of us were obliterated and the firing and the music began to die. For seven months Falluja had been controlled by jihadis who had held the city in a medieval thrall. And now the marines were taking it back, six thousand of them, going into the city on foot in the middle of a November night. I was traveling with a company of 150 marines called Bravo, of the First Battalion, Eighth Regiment. Ashley Gilbertson, an Australian photographer, was with me. We stepped into the blackened streets and Bravo split into three columns, one for each platoon. We moved half a block before the mortar fire began. Big mortars, 82 millimeters, exploding in the next street over. Everyone froze but Read Omohundro, a stocky Texan and Bravo Company’s commander. Omohundro was thirty-four, which was old for a marine captain. He’d enlisted out of high school, went to Texas A&M on a scholarship and became an officer later than most. But he was a better captain for it. Omohundro advanced in the darkness as if guided by some inner sonar, sensing the location of his men, confident he knew where the shells would fall. “This way,” Omohundro said, and we crept for another block in the darkness until he stopped and put up his hand. Gunfire rang out and we scrambled for the walls on the sides of the street. The insurgents knew what they were doing; they were bracketing us with their shells, dropping them to the left and to the right. They were falling close now, exploding in titanic crashes, more closely each time. I’d seen mortars in the movies and even in Iraq but never this close and never so big. Their booms were crushing, and I imagined the shards of metal flying away from each shell. I felt sure we were going to die if we didn’t move, and I felt sure we would die if we did. We tried to back up, to retrace our steps, but there were snipers behind us, too. With the mortars crashing closer, Omohundro and his radio man, Sergeant Kenneth Hudson, were the only ones still in the middle of the street. Hudson looked terribly young. Some of the marines were grimacing, preparing to be hit. Four men stepped from the darkness. They were not part of Bravo Company; I hadn’t seen them before. They wore flight suits that shimmered in the night and tennis shoes and hoods that made them look like executioners. The four men wore goggles that shrouded their eyes and gave off lime-green penumbras that lightened their faces. With the shells exploding I got off the wall and rejoined the captain in the street, shaking in the knees, and I listened to him tell the executioners the location of the snipers. Up ahead, he said. One of the four men mumbled something but I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see their eyes through the green glowing but one of them was on the balls of his feet, bouncing, like a football player on the sidelines. Coach, he seemed to be saying, put me in the game. The four men peeled off into the blackness without a sound. Moments passed and the shelling stopped. And then the sniper fire stopped. We never saw the men again. Omohundro got off his knee and looked at his men who were hugging the walls. “Get moving,” he said. The pace quickened, a movie reel in the dark. Sailing in from above came a white flare that shattered as it descended into our ranks. Someone yelled, “Phosphorous!” and one of the marines screamed and grabbed me and threw me into a mulberry bush. I was angry at him for that, running me over. Then another marine yanked off my pack and pointed to the fist-size chunks burning through my sleeping bag. “All the way to your bones,” he shouted. I threw the pack on my back and ran to catch the marines, leaving behind me a trail of white feathers. A moment of quiet gave way to dawn. We broke into a trot, our boots thudding on the pavement like hooves, rounding a corner, to the right, to the left, up Tharthar Street, when a jeep, a blue Cherokee, entered our flowing ranks. The doors swung open. I was still running and wrenching my head to see when a bunch of men piled out with guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Suddenly I saw them: black eyes, pale skin and baggy gray suits with ammo belts. I thought they had us, they thought they had us, when the marines on the roof opened fire. I had no idea how the marines had gotten up there or when; I thought we were dead. The head of one of the jihadis burst like a tomato, the deep red of his brainy blood spattering against his clammy skin and his head disappearing. The jihadi fell back onto the street and spread his arms wide like a headless Christ. Three more jihadis died right there on Tharthar Street and two of them scampered away. A couple of the kids ran them down and shot them, and one of the wounded jihadis rolled over on the ground and pulled something on his jacket and exploded. “Fuck!” the kids were yelling, running back. “Fuck! Fucking jihadi rag- head motherfuckers! They’ve rigged themselves. Fuck!” The kids started slapping plastic explosives onto the Cherokee, taking out big cakes of it and throwing it on, and one of them said it’s going to blow, and somebody yelled, “Fire in the hole!” and we got behind a wall and the earth shook and the jeep disappeared. An axle remained in the road and a piece of engine block and some smoke. The jihadis were gone. Like the moment never happened.