head around. âEveryone okay?â he yelled. He didnât seem to have heard a word Iâd said.
I patted down my legs, first doing a quick once-over, then squeezing near my groin, my armpits, and my neck for the arteries. Remembering the dick-shot soldier in Dora, I double-checked my crotch, just to be sure. All clear. I got my gear in order and found the door handle with my hand, just as a reference point. I looked over at Reaper, somehow making out his eyes burning red through the haze. He was cursing violently. âTwo months left in this bitch and then this!â And so on.
âEverybody stays in the vehicle! Nobody gets out!â Vollmer yelled at no one in particular. Then he was yelling up at the gunner, craning his neck up into the turret, asking him if he could see where the smoke was coming from. The gunner didnât say anything.
As John le Carré observed, somewhere in every bomb explosion there is a miracle.For some, it is the tiniest of details that saves a life: the shrapnel that penetrates a guyâs helmet only to exit the other side, leaving him unscathed. With every IED that went off, there were a dozen stories, some dark and some redeeming and transcendent, but all of them flew in the face of human reason. The year before, Iâd interviewed a navy corpsman who told me about a Marine whoâd been killed in Fallujah the same hour that his son was born back in the States.Our miracles were more common. The first was the twelve inches that saved Reaper, sending the force of the blast through the trunk of the Humvee instead of through his ass. The second miracle was that somehow everyone in the Humvee was deafened by the explosion except me, even though it had gone off less than three feet from where I sat.
At some point, I canât remember when, someone from the Bradley ran up to our Humvee and doused the flames with a fire extinguisher. A second later, he wrenched open the door and yelled, âYou morons, there was a shitload of machinegun ammo in the back that was on fire.â Before the soldier could get another word out, Vollmer hollered at him to get back in the Bradley before someone took a potshot at him.
This seemed to wake Vollmer up, and he yelled at the driver to put it in drive and take us back to the patrol base. The driver did as he was ordered, though Vollmer had to yell at him twice to be heard. It was then that we discovered our next problem: the IED had destroyed our right rear wheel, and when the driver floored it, nothing happened except the grinding of the wheel rim inside the remnants of the tire. It took forever, but somehow the driver, alternating between forward and reverse, was able to extract our Humvee from the blast crater and aim us toward home, toward our patrol base, which shone in my mind now like a holy city.
Somehow we got back safely, somehow the Humvee held together, somehow no one else decided to light us up, somehow we managed to not hit another IED on the way. My memories of the drive back are erratic, like snapshots in a lost photo album. There were checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers that we ignored, local traffic moving blindly through the streets oblivious to our presence, the ruined rim of the Humvee grinding on the pavement.
One memory remains clear, however. I could feel Reaperâs eyes on me, and when I glanced over at him, he let me have it.
âWhat the fuck are you doing here anyway?â he yelled. âI donât fucking get it. They must be paying you some serious bread to be here.â He turned his head away but not before I got a look at his eyes, which blazed with a sort of fury. It was like the IED had soured things between us, and whatever connection that had existed had been destroyed in the blast. There was an unmistakable tone of disgust in his words. He began again. âYouâre a reporter, man! You could be anywhere, and of all the places in the world, you chose this one. I have to be
I patted down my legs, first doing a quick once-over, then squeezing near my groin, my armpits, and my neck for the arteries. Remembering the dick-shot soldier in Dora, I double-checked my crotch, just to be sure. All clear. I got my gear in order and found the door handle with my hand, just as a reference point. I looked over at Reaper, somehow making out his eyes burning red through the haze. He was cursing violently. âTwo months left in this bitch and then this!â And so on.
âEverybody stays in the vehicle! Nobody gets out!â Vollmer yelled at no one in particular. Then he was yelling up at the gunner, craning his neck up into the turret, asking him if he could see where the smoke was coming from. The gunner didnât say anything.
As John le Carré observed, somewhere in every bomb explosion there is a miracle.For some, it is the tiniest of details that saves a life: the shrapnel that penetrates a guyâs helmet only to exit the other side, leaving him unscathed. With every IED that went off, there were a dozen stories, some dark and some redeeming and transcendent, but all of them flew in the face of human reason. The year before, Iâd interviewed a navy corpsman who told me about a Marine whoâd been killed in Fallujah the same hour that his son was born back in the States.Our miracles were more common. The first was the twelve inches that saved Reaper, sending the force of the blast through the trunk of the Humvee instead of through his ass. The second miracle was that somehow everyone in the Humvee was deafened by the explosion except me, even though it had gone off less than three feet from where I sat.
At some point, I canât remember when, someone from the Bradley ran up to our Humvee and doused the flames with a fire extinguisher. A second later, he wrenched open the door and yelled, âYou morons, there was a shitload of machinegun ammo in the back that was on fire.â Before the soldier could get another word out, Vollmer hollered at him to get back in the Bradley before someone took a potshot at him.
This seemed to wake Vollmer up, and he yelled at the driver to put it in drive and take us back to the patrol base. The driver did as he was ordered, though Vollmer had to yell at him twice to be heard. It was then that we discovered our next problem: the IED had destroyed our right rear wheel, and when the driver floored it, nothing happened except the grinding of the wheel rim inside the remnants of the tire. It took forever, but somehow the driver, alternating between forward and reverse, was able to extract our Humvee from the blast crater and aim us toward home, toward our patrol base, which shone in my mind now like a holy city.
Somehow we got back safely, somehow the Humvee held together, somehow no one else decided to light us up, somehow we managed to not hit another IED on the way. My memories of the drive back are erratic, like snapshots in a lost photo album. There were checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers that we ignored, local traffic moving blindly through the streets oblivious to our presence, the ruined rim of the Humvee grinding on the pavement.
One memory remains clear, however. I could feel Reaperâs eyes on me, and when I glanced over at him, he let me have it.
âWhat the fuck are you doing here anyway?â he yelled. âI donât fucking get it. They must be paying you some serious bread to be here.â He turned his head away but not before I got a look at his eyes, which blazed with a sort of fury. It was like the IED had soured things between us, and whatever connection that had existed had been destroyed in the blast. There was an unmistakable tone of disgust in his words. He began again. âYouâre a reporter, man! You could be anywhere, and of all the places in the world, you chose this one. I have to be
Similar Books
