The 2003 Iraq "Blackout" Incident

My mother made eggs the morning I shipped out and I sat at the table and couldn't eat them. The cab was already idling out front. She kept finding things to do with her hands, wiping a counter that was already clean, moving the salt shaker, holding the same dish towel over and over. When it was time, I stood up and put my arms around her and told her not to worry about me. I told her I was going to make her proud. I told her I was going over there to make them pay for what they did to us. She didn't say anything back. People didn't then. I was 19. I grew up in a small town in eastern Ohio, the kind of place where not much happens and most people are fine with that. My father had left when I was young. My mother worked at the grade school. College wasn't going to happen for me, not the regular way, and one afternoon, a man and a clean, pressed uniform came to the high school and told me the guard would pay for it and that I'd be serving my country while I did. After the towers came down, that didn't sound like a job to me. It sounded like the only thing worth doing. We thought it was them. Nobody told us any different. The sergeants said it, and the television said it. And a year before that, not one of us could have found the country on a map. We had names for the people who lived there. They came easy, the same way they came easy to everyone around me. And I used them every day without once thinking about what they meant. I'm not going to repeat them here. We staged in Kuwait in a camp of tents and gravel and parked trucks. And near the end of March, we crossed the line into Iraq. We went over in our chemical suits with the gas masks on our hips because everyone was sure they'd use gas on us once we were across. We'd practiced with the injectors the ones you were meant to push into your own leg. The alarms went off all the time in those first days and were always nothing. For a while it was almost quiet. Long flat roads, burned out trucks, pushed off into the ditches, children standing at the edge of the highway to watch the column go by. I should say that we were a support unit because people hear the word "soldier" and they picture something I never was. We hauled fuel and water and spare parts. Half the men with me had never fired at anything that could fire back. We were mechanics and cooks and supply clerks who'd qualified on a rifle one time and signed our names for it. We'd stopped plenty of cars before that day. Most of them held families or old men or boys driving their fathers somewhere and you'd hold up your hand and they'd slow down and you'd look them over and wave them on and nothing ever happened. After enough of them, you stopped expecting it too. But the alarms kept going off and there were stories coming down the line about cars packed with explosives at the checkpoints up north and none of us had slept right since we crossed the border. The storm started in the afternoon. It came up along the horizon first, a low brown line as wide as the whole sky and within an hour the light had turned orange. Then it went the color of dirt. A little afternoon it was as dark as evening and you could look straight up at the sun without it hurting your eyes. The wind pushed the sand flat across the ground. You couldn't see the truck in front of you. You couldn't see your own hand if you held it out far enough in front of your face. The convoy slowed and then it stopped and the word came down to hold where we were and waited out. What none of us knew yet was that we'd already lost the rest of them. Somewhere back in the brown, our part of the column had come away from the main body. Five trucks and the men in them stopped on a road with no number, waiting out a storm that wouldn't lift for three days. Staff Sergeant Doyle put us across the road. It made sense at the time. We were parked and we were blind and the one thing they'd trained into us was that a stopped convoy as a target and that a car in that country might be more than a car. So we spread out along the shoulder. Reyes and a kid we called PD took the far side. Doyle sent a man up the road to wave traffic down and the rest of us stood in the dark in the middle of the day and waited, getting cold and suits made for the heat with the sand working into our teeth and into our rifles. I heard the car before I saw it. There was the engine first and then a pair of headlights moving in all that brown coming on faster than they should have been. The man up the road was yelling and waving both arms over his head. Somebody fired two rounds over the top of it, a warning and the car didn't slow down. Maybe the driver couldn't see us at all. Maybe he was as blind as we were, a man trying to get his family off the open road before the worst of it came down on them. I've had a long time since to think about what he could and couldn't see. At the time I didn't think about any of it. Everyone started shooting and then all of us were shooting. I don't remember deciding to. My rifle was up and it was firing and the car came on through it and then turned sideways and stopped. And the noise kept going for a few seconds past any reason for it. Then Doyle was screaming at us to cease fire. We stopped. There was only the wind again. We came up on it the way we'd been taught, spread out with our weapons still up. My hands were steady. I noticed that they were and some part of me was proud of it. It was an old sedan and the windows were gone. There was a man behind the wheel who wasn't a soldier and had never been one, leaned over hard against the door. There was a woman in the seat beside him. In the back, there were children. I stood at the side of that road with my steady hands. Whatever it was, I'd come all the way around the world to make pay for what had been done to us. It wasn't in that car and it had never been anywhere near it. Then one of the small shapes in the back seat moved. It lifted its head and it looked at me. I reached in through where the window had been, got him under the arms and pulled him out across the seat. He came out without much weight to him. I laid him down on the road away from the car and up close I could see he was a boy, younger than me, 16 or 17 and that he'd been hit low on the left side. The others were up at the front of the car by then, looking in through the gone windows and none of them were saying anything. There was nothing to say. The man and the woman and the smaller ones in the back were dead. This one wasn't. The wheel came over and looked down at him, then looked back at the car and said we couldn't stay on the road. He was right. We were blind and we were stopped. And there was a wrecked car in front of us full of people we'd just shot. And if anything came down that road behind us in the storm, we'd do the same thing again. Off to the side of the road, there was a building, a low house of concrete block with a wall around part of the yard. The kind of place where they kept animals or stored feed. We moved our gear into it and set up inside and we carried the boy in too. I carried the boy. The inside was one big room with a smaller room off the back, a floor of dirt and broken concrete, a little gray light coming in around a shuttered window. We couldn't call anyone. The radio gave back nothing but noise in that storm. And even if it had worked, there was no one who could have come for us. Not on the road and not in the air, not until the weather lifted. So we were going to sit in that house and wait it out. And the boy was going to wait with us because there was nowhere else to put him and nobody coming to take him. I put him in the back room, on the floor, on a blanket out of my own kid. Animals came in and looked at him for a second and said he wouldn't last the night, that there was nothing you could do for a wound like that out here, and that we had bigger problems. He was right about the bigger problems. He went back out to the others, and that was the last time anyone else paid him any mind. The thing we'd crossed to the world to fight, and he was a kid bleeding on my blanket in a back room, and he was mine to deal with. I worked on him by feel, and by the red lens on my flashlight, because we were keeping the white light off. I got his shirt up and found the wound and packed a field dressing onto it and held my hand there like they'd taught us, and the blood came through anyway, slower after a while. He didn't scream the whole time I did it. He watched my face. When I was done, I gave him water from my canteen a little at a time, so it'd stay down, and he took some of it. After that, I pointed at my own chest and told him my name. "Danny, I said it twice so he'd have it. He looked at me for a while, and then he said a word back, and I didn't catch it, so he said it again, slower. Some ear. I said it back to him the way he'd said it, and he gave a small nod like I had it close enough. There was a photograph half out of his shirt pocket where it did work to loose when I moved him. I pulled it. the rest of the way out so it wouldn't fall, and I looked at it, which I had no business doing. It was people standing in front of a house, squinting into the sun, a man and a woman and a few children lined up in their good clothes. I folded his fingers around it, and he held it against his chest. I sat with him after that, because I wasn't going to sleep anyway. He breathed slow and shallow with his eyes shut, and every so often his fingers would move against the edge of the photograph. His hand was cold when I checked the dressing again. Everyone's hands were cold by then. The heat went out of that country fast once the sun was gone, and we were sitting on a concrete floor in the dark with the wind going against the shutters. I'd been told for a long time who these people were and what they'd done, and I'd believed it, all of it, and none of it had anything to do with the boy on the floor in front of me. I sat there in the dark and watched him hold the picture. In the front room, Doyle was working out a count and a plan. He counted us once, and then he counted us again, and the second number wasn't the same as the first, and it put something in his voice that hadn't been there before. He made us go around the room and say our own names out loud, every one of us, and after that he counted heads a third time and got it right, and he said out loud that the storm was getting into his head. We'd been awake going on two days, that part was true for all of us. The wind kept up against the shutters most of the night, every so often it would drop for a second or two, and in that gap you could hear something underneath it. Reyes said it was the wind moving through the wrecked car out on the road. He said it the first time like he believed it, and the second time like he wanted to, and then the wind would come back up over the top of it, and you couldn't hear anything at all. I took a turn on watch near first light by the door, looking out at the road. The trucks were gray shapes in the brown, and not much passed that. Out beyond them, at the far edge of what I could still make out, there was a person standing. Just standing, turned toward the house, not coming closer and not going away. I called it out low, and Doyle came and stood at my shoulder, and the two of us looked at it together, and right then the wind dropped, and there was nothing out there at all. Doyle looked at me for a moment, and then he went back inside without a word. I told myself it was a fence post, or the dark, or my own eyes after two days awake. I didn't call out the next one. The storm didn't lift the next day or the day after. We sat in that house and waited, and the waiting was harder in some ways than the firing had been. There was nothing to do, but watch the door and listen to the wind and count the hours until somebody said it was a different day. I spent most of mine in the back room with Samir. He took less water as the time went on, and by the second day in the house he wasn't taking any. I told myself his body was resting, that it was doing what it needed to do, that the bleeding had slowed, and he only had to hold on until the weather broke and we could get him out. I changed the dressing when I could. I kept the blanket up around him. I talked to him, even though he didn't have my language and I didn't have his, because the talking was as much for me as it was for him. When I talked, he'd open his eyes and look at me, and then he'd close them again, and I took that for listening. I told him about the town I came from. I told him about my mother, and the eggs she made the morning I left, and the things I'd said to her in the kitchen. I lit one of my cigarettes once and put it between his fingers, like you would for a man who couldn't lift his own hand, and it burned all the way down without him drawing on it. I figured he was too far under to want it. The car was still out on the road where it had stopped. We couldn't move it, and there was nothing to be done about the people in it, so it sat there in the brown about 100 feet from the house, and we kept our eyes off it when we went out to the trucks. Water was getting to be the real problem. We had what we'd carried in, and no way to get more, and Doyle put us on a ration. I kept giving mine to Samir even after he stopped taking it, tipping a little against his lips and watching most of it run back off. I looked at his photograph again while he slept. There was a man and a woman, and there were children, and one of them was a girl about the age of a cousin of mine back home. They were standing in front of a house and clothes they'd put on for the picture. For a long time I'd been told what these people were, and I'd said it myself without once thinking about it, and here was a boy on the floor in front of me who had a mother and a sister and a house, the same as anybody I'd ever known. I didn't have anywhere to put that, I just sat with it. We'd been in that house three days by then, or four. We'd stopped being able to say for sure. Out in the front room, the others were coming apart in their own ways. PD stopped talking first. He sat against the wall with his weapon across his knees and watched the door and wouldn't eat what we had. Cooms talked too much about nothing at all. Doyle kept us together as best he could, but I could see what it was costing him. He ran the head count more and more, and one night he came up one short, and for a few minutes there it was bad. All of us calling names into the dark until we found Reyes asleep in the cab of one of the trucks. After that Doyle made a rule that nobody went anywhere alone, not out to the trucks, not even to relieve himself. The radio never came back, but it wasn't quiet either. Down under the noise of it every so often, there were voices. You couldn't get any words out of them. Reyes said it was other units on the net, carrying a long way, and maybe it was. It didn't sound like our guys to me. I stopped listening to it after a while because there was nothing in it I could use, and listening only made it worse. I saw the standing person again that night, and this time there were two. They were outpast the trucks in the same places before, turned toward the house, not moving. Cooms saw them too, and his voice went up when he called it out. Doyle came and looked for a long time and said he didn't see anything out there, and maybe he didn't. But he kept his weapon up after he said it, and he stayed by the door the rest of the night. It happened the way the car had happened. It was somebody on watch, late, and a shape out in the brown, and then a single shot, and once the first shot went, the rest of us came up firing without deciding to. We put rounds out into the storm at the place where the shapes had been, magazine after magazine, because the dark was the only thing out there to shoot at, and shooting was the only thing we had left to do. Doyle got in among us, screaming to cease fire, the same as he had on the road, and one by one we quit. In the morning, when there was light enough to see by, two of us went out to the place where they'd been standing. There was nothing on the ground, no bodies, no blood, nothing dragged off. The only brass out there was our own, scattered back toward the house from where we'd stood when we fired. I went back inside to check on Samir. The whole house had been awake and yelling for the better part of an hour, loud enough that you felt it in the floor, and he was lying exactly where I'd left him. He was calm, his eyes were open, and he wasn't looking at me. He was looking past me at the door like he was waiting on someone to come through it. It seemed strange that all that noise hadn't stirred him, that a boy could lie through it and not so much as turn his head. Then Doyle started the morning countdown in the front room. He went down the names as he always did, and he got to Wells, and Wells didn't answer. We called for Wells a long time. We stood in the doorway with the wind coming in around us, and we called his name out into the brown until our voices were gone, and nothing came back but the wind. Doyle wouldn't let anybody go out past the trucks to look. He was right not to. A man who walked 20 feet into that storm wouldn't have found his way back to the house, and we weren't going to lose anybody else going after him. Wells had been on watch by the door. He'd been there, and then on the next turn he wasn't, and no one had heard him go. His rifle was gone with him. His kit was still against the wall where he'd set it down. Nobody moved it, and nobody sat near it either, and after a while we stopped looking at that corner of the room. By then we'd lost the count of the days. It had been four since the car, or five. The light never changed much, just a dirty grey that came up week in the morning and went out at night, and with no sun crossing the sky there was no good way to hold on to the time. The batteries and the flashlights were going, so we kept them off unless we needed them, and the dark in that house at night was total. We sat in it, and listened. The wind worked at the shutters in the door, and under it, when it thinned out, there was the radio noise with the voices down inside it, and there was PD. PD was the one I watched closest, because PD had gone somewhere the rest of us hadn't got to yet. [BLANK_AUDIO] against the wall with his rifle across his knees, and he whispered to himself, "Low and steady, on and on, and the first time I got near enough to make out the words I understood he was counting." He'd count up to our number and stop, and then he'd start again at one. He did it for hours. Doyle told him to quit, and he'd go quiet for a while, and then it would start again under the wind, a boy counting the same small number in the dark, over and over. Doyle did his own counting too, out loud, like he had since the first night. One of those nights it came out wrong in the other direction. He counted us and got one too many. He counted again and got the right number, and he said it was the dark and how we were spread around the room, and that was likely all it was. But I'd heard the first count. He'd been going along the line and touching each man on the shoulder as he said the number to be sure of it. I wasn't right myself by then, and I knew it even at the time. We were all of us past the far edge of sleep, and the water was almost gone, and when I held my hand up in the dark it shook on its own. There were stretches I couldn't account for, where I'd come back to myself sitting on the floor of the back room with no clear idea how long I'd been there. I put it down to the thirst and the heat and the not sleeping. It was all of those things. I've wondered since if it was only those things. The people outside stopped keeping their distance. The first nights they'd stood out past the trucks at the edge of what we could see, and then they weren't out there anymore. They were at the low wall around the yard. There were more of them than before, though it was hard to put a number to anything in the brown. Some stood tall and some stood low, tall ones and small ones both. They didn't come at the house, they didn't make a sound we could hear over the storm. They stood there and faced the door and they stayed, and that was the thing none of us could get used to. A man who means to rush you rushes you. These waited. In the morning they'd begun, and we'd look at the ground where they'd stood, and there'd be nothing on it, no track, no sign, just the same dirt the wind had been working all night. Reyes had been steady up until about then. He was the one who'd had an answer for everything, the wind in the car, the units on the net, all of it. And somewhere in those days he ran out of answers and stopped giving them. He sat close to Doyle and kept his rifle in his hands and didn't say much. I asked him once if he saw them out there at the wall. He looked at me and said, "Don't look at them and they're not there." Then he went back to looking at them. Something had changed between the others and the boy, and it took me too long to see what it was. Nobody went into the back room, but me. That had been true a while, but it had become more than habit. When I came out of the back room, the talking would stop, and when I said anything about Samir, that he needed water, that the dressing had to come off and go back on. They would look at me and then look at one another and say nothing at all. I asked Coombs once to help me turn the boy so I could get it the wound, and he looked at me a second too long and walked out to the front room without a word. I told Doyle the boy needed more water than the ration allowed, and Doyle said, "He's already gone, Cole." He said it flat, not cruel, like someone reminding me of a thing I already knew. I took it to mean the kid was a goner, and there was no sense pouring water into a dying enemy, and it made me angry, and I shoved it down and kept giving Samir the water. I wasn't going to let go of him just because the rest of them had. The back room had a smell to it by then. I made myself believe it was the wound, an infection setting in, the kind of thing that happens to a man who can't be got to a doctor, and nothing worse than that. I kept the dressing changed and the blanket as clean as I could. I went on talking to him and I let myself believe he could hear me. One of those nights, sitting on the floor next to him in the full dark with the smell and the wind and the people out at the wall. I thought about my mother's kitchen. I thought about standing in it with my bag by the door, telling her not to worry, telling her I'd make her proud, telling her I was going to go and make them pay for what they did to us. I'd believed every word of it, and now I was beginning to understand that I hadn't known anything at all. The last night in the house came on like the others and then it didn't. The wind was up higher than it had been, hard against the front of the house and the people weren't at the wall anymore. They were in the yard. They were close enough now that when the wind thinned you could see they were people and to not posts or shadows, that they had faces turned toward the door even when you couldn't make out a single thing in those faces. Keeping my body between the boy and the rest of it as I had done for days without thinking about why, somewhere in the middle of it I looked back at him. He had moved. After all those days lying still through the shooting and the screaming and the counting and the cold, the boy had moved. He'd pushed himself up off the blanket onto one arm and he had the other arm held out in front of him. The hand open stretched past me toward the door, toward the yard, toward the people standing out in the storm like a small child reaching to be picked up. There was nothing afraid in his face. I was kneeling there with my rifle gone quiet and I understood that I'd had it wrong from the very first night. They hadn't come for us. They had come for him until the only sound left in the house was the wind. After a while even the wind fell off, it came down slow over the next hour from the hard steady push it had kept up for days to something that gusted and then rested and then gusted again. In the rest there was a quiet we hadn't had since the road. The grey around the shutters went pale and then it turned to real light, the first real light in days, coming in clean through the gaps in the wood. The storm was lifting. We sat where the night had left us and for a long time none of us said anything at all. When there was light enough to see by I turned around to the boy. He wasn't up on his arm anymore, reaching like he'd been in the muzzle flashes. He was flat on his back on the blanket, the photograph on his chest, his arm down at his side, in the exact place and the exact shape he'd been in for days. I went to him and put my hand on him to wake him or to move him somewhere safer. I'm not sure which I meant to do. He was cold. He was cold as the floor all the way through and he didn't move under my hand and when I took hold of his shoulder he was stiff and didn't bend. I knew it then. I think I'd known it for a while and had kept it from myself. He had died the first night. He told me his name and taken a little water and held onto his picture and somewhere in the dark after that while I sat beside him with my hand on the dressing, his breathing had stopped and I had gone on talking to him and never let myself hear that it had. Everything after that was me. The water I'd tipped against his mouth had run off because there was no one left to drink it. The cigarette had burned down because there was no one to draw on it. The men had gone quiet around me and stepped wide of that back room because there was nothing in it but me and a dead child and the things I was saying to him in the dark. He's already gone cold. Doyle hadn't been hard with me. He told me the plain truth days back and I just hadn't been able to hear it. I don't know how many days I'd been in there with him. Three, maybe four. I'd changed the dressing on a boy who was long past bleeding. I'd gone thirsty to save water for a boy who was past needing it. I'd told a dead child about the eggs my mother made and the whole time every hour of it. I had believed that I was keeping him alive. I had been the only living thing in that room for days and I had not known it. Doyle was in the doorway behind me. I don't know how long he'd been standing there. He didn't tell me to leave the boy and he didn't try to help and I've come to think that none of them had it in them to take away the one thing I had left, even a thing like that. The others were where the night had put them. Pety was down against the wall and he wasn't counting anymore. Cooms sat with his back to the room. Reyes was by the door looking out at a yard that had nobody in it. The people were gone. The wall was bare and the ground was empty and the light was coming up clean over all of it and whatever had stood out there through those nights was not standing there now. I picked the boy up off the blanket. He came up light as light as he'd been the first night when I lifted him out of the back seat and I took him out through the door I'd spent the night firing at into the open air. The dust was still settling out of the sky and the light was hard and low. The country went flat and paled to the edge of what I could see in every direction. I carried him across the yard past the wall where they had stood night after night and out to the road. Somebody came with me. The car was where it had stopped that first afternoon. The doors still open from when we'd checked it. They were all of them still inside. The man at the wheel and the woman beside him and the small ones in the back, and the storm had been coming in through the broken windows at them for days, and I am not going to describe them. I laid some ear down in the back with the others. I put him with his family, because that is what they were. The man and the woman from the photograph and the children lined up in front of the house in their good clothes, the girl who was the age of a cousin of mine at home. I took the picture out of his hand, and I looked at it one more time, and then I folded it back into his fingers where it had been since the first night, and I shut the door as easy as a broken door will shut. There were papers in the car, some blown down into the foot wells, some still in the pocket of the door, and I went through them because I needed to know who they were now that knowing couldn't help any of them. The boy had a card with his photograph on it. His name was printed there, spelled out, the same as he'd said it to me in the dark of that first night. Some year, he was 17 years old. There were bags packed in the trunk. The kind you feel when you are trying to get your family somewhere safer than where you are. That is all they had ever been. People on a road trying to get clear of the war before it reached them, and the war was us. The convoy reached us that afternoon, once it had cleared enough for anyone to move. There were trucks on the road, and men climbing down, and somebody talking fast into a radio that worked again, and a man I had never seen before took me by the shoulder and asked me if I was hurt, if I was alright. And I told him I was fine, and I let them walk me to a truck and sit me down. They counted us as they loaded us up, and the number came up short by one, and they wrote "wells" down as missing. I never put that card into any report, I never handed it in, I have it still. I had stood in my mother's kitchen a few months before all of it, and told her I was going to make them pay for what they did to us. A foolish boy, certainly knew the world, and what was owed in it, and which people counted, and which did not. I knew nothing. What I learned, I learned on the floor of that house with a dead child's hand in mind, and it was the smallest and plainest thing there is. He was no different from me. I had helped to kill him, and then I had come to love him, and I had done those two things in that order. They drove us back the way we had come in. I watched out the back of the truck, at the house, and at the car on the open ground beside it, until the road bent and took them out of sight. I left them there on that road. I came home that summer. They gave me a flag and a paper that said I'd served with honor. The report of what happened on that road said the car failed to stop at a checkpoint and that the force we used was within the rules, and that was the end of it. A good shoot. I'd done my duty. People shook my hand in the airport. My mother cried again, the same quiet way she had the morning I left, except this time it was because I was home, and I let her go on, believing I was the same boy she'd made eggs for. I never told her. I never told anyone, not the doctors they sent me to, not the woman I married, not my own children when they got old enough to ask what it had been like over there. I said the things you're supposed to say. It was hot. It was a long time ago. I got a job and paid a mortgage and sat in the stands at ball games on Saturday mornings, and from the outside it looked like a life, and a good deal of it was one. The only thing I kept is the card. It's gone soft at the edges now. Some nights when the house is quiet, I take it out and look at his face. He was 17, he'd be a man past 40 now if we hadn't been on that road. He might have had a boy of his own by now, about the age I was when I came for him. You are somewhere safe right now, listening to me. A warm room, most likely, a locked door. The people you love asleep down the hall. That is how it should be, and I am glad of it for you. I had all of that once, too, before I knew anything at all. And while you lie there in the quiet, it is happening. Tonight, right now, there is a road somewhere, and a car coming up out of the dark too fast and frightened young men with rifles and a family inside that only wanted to get somewhere safe. It has never stopped, not for one single night. He was a boy, he had a mother and a sister and a house and a name. He was no different from you, or from a single person you have ever loved. Somewhere tonight, there is another one just like him, and no one will ever know he was here at all. That is what a war is. It takes the people first, and then it takes the fact that they were ever people. I have one name to set against all of it. I know it isn't enough. I say it anyway every night. Some ear. Thank you for listening. The fact that you stuck around till the end means a lot. I'm dropping the next one in a couple of days as usual, so make sure to follow. I'll see you in the next one. Good night.