Read Online Until Tuesday by Bret Witter, Luis Carlos Montalván - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Bret Witter, Luis Carlos Montalván
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he wore a shemagh —a traditional Arab scarf that covers the face—so that he couldn’t be identified. He showed us a water culvert where foreign fighters and smugglers were known to store weapons. It was less than two kilometers from our compound but contained twenty-four rocket-propelled grenades, six fragmentary grenades, four AK-47s, three machine guns and eighteen hundred rounds of ammunition, enough to destroy our austere FOB and do serious damage to our small platoon.
Even with Maher’s help—and with plenty of hilarious talk about juggling five girlfriends (Sgt. Willie T. Flores, a great soldier and ladies’ man) and using Army hazardous-duty pay for a penis extension (name withheld, since I don’t know if he actually got the operation)—the tour was a grind. During the day the temperature was often hotter than 110 degrees, and the sandstorms felt like they could eat through skin. Gunfire was commonly heard and more mentally draining, on a daily basis, than the Syrian ambush on November 3, which almost sparked an international incident. It’s not the fear of death that damages the mind in the combat zone. I never thought about that. It’s the constant state of watchfulness, the hypervigilance necessary to survive day after day as a small unit among thousands of possible enemies. After a while, my body stopped understanding that it was under stress and started thinking that watching for death, always, was simply the way to live. When you can laugh about gunfire and mortar rounds, instead of ducking them, your mind has changed.
Other American commanders, I know, tolerated corruption. By accepting gifts like lavish meals from corrupt officials—a huge temptation when American soldiers ate mostly cold military rations for months—they essentially condoned it. My men and I pushed against it, refusing to let any form of contraband or illegal activity slide. And it worked. When the Iraqis realized we weren’t going to chisel meekly, but were going to stand our ground no matter how dangerous or difficult the situation, it gave the honest men courage to step up beside us. It gave ordinary Iraqis reason to believe in us. And when that happened, we started making progress against the smugglers. We were tipped off to hiding places and told how Bedouin guides use the extensive wadis, a complicated canyon system not well marked on any of our maps, to move valuable contraband like foreign fighters across the border. We learned about night movements and weapons caches. When the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) started confiscating more contraband, we used it to make improvements to their woefully antiquated offices and systems, which helped them confiscate more contraband.
It took a tremendous effort. Tremendous. Everyone worked themselves ragged, seven days a week, in brutal conditions—spotty electricity, little running water, often no shower for days on end, not to mention the threat of enemy fighters, armed smugglers, and IEDs. I was pulling eighteen-hour days, easy, without a second thought. That’s why they called me Terminator. Not because I could bench press 350 pounds while bellowing near-perfect imitations of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but because I never stopped, not even in our operations base. The main road passed straight through the compound at Al-Waleed, since it was more a border checkpoint than military installation, so trucks and cars had relatively easy access to our FOB. We had a gun position on our roof and razor wire on our perimeter, but beyond that the members of the unit relied on each other. Even in our living quarters, we were always on guard, because we knew we were outnumbered and susceptible to being overrun.
But it worked. I want to state that fact again, because I’m proud of it: our efforts in the Anbar desert worked. By December 2003, word had traveled up the American chain of command that Al-Waleed was coming under control. The Iraqi Border Police and its American partners were
Even with Maher’s help—and with plenty of hilarious talk about juggling five girlfriends (Sgt. Willie T. Flores, a great soldier and ladies’ man) and using Army hazardous-duty pay for a penis extension (name withheld, since I don’t know if he actually got the operation)—the tour was a grind. During the day the temperature was often hotter than 110 degrees, and the sandstorms felt like they could eat through skin. Gunfire was commonly heard and more mentally draining, on a daily basis, than the Syrian ambush on November 3, which almost sparked an international incident. It’s not the fear of death that damages the mind in the combat zone. I never thought about that. It’s the constant state of watchfulness, the hypervigilance necessary to survive day after day as a small unit among thousands of possible enemies. After a while, my body stopped understanding that it was under stress and started thinking that watching for death, always, was simply the way to live. When you can laugh about gunfire and mortar rounds, instead of ducking them, your mind has changed.
Other American commanders, I know, tolerated corruption. By accepting gifts like lavish meals from corrupt officials—a huge temptation when American soldiers ate mostly cold military rations for months—they essentially condoned it. My men and I pushed against it, refusing to let any form of contraband or illegal activity slide. And it worked. When the Iraqis realized we weren’t going to chisel meekly, but were going to stand our ground no matter how dangerous or difficult the situation, it gave the honest men courage to step up beside us. It gave ordinary Iraqis reason to believe in us. And when that happened, we started making progress against the smugglers. We were tipped off to hiding places and told how Bedouin guides use the extensive wadis, a complicated canyon system not well marked on any of our maps, to move valuable contraband like foreign fighters across the border. We learned about night movements and weapons caches. When the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) started confiscating more contraband, we used it to make improvements to their woefully antiquated offices and systems, which helped them confiscate more contraband.
It took a tremendous effort. Tremendous. Everyone worked themselves ragged, seven days a week, in brutal conditions—spotty electricity, little running water, often no shower for days on end, not to mention the threat of enemy fighters, armed smugglers, and IEDs. I was pulling eighteen-hour days, easy, without a second thought. That’s why they called me Terminator. Not because I could bench press 350 pounds while bellowing near-perfect imitations of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but because I never stopped, not even in our operations base. The main road passed straight through the compound at Al-Waleed, since it was more a border checkpoint than military installation, so trucks and cars had relatively easy access to our FOB. We had a gun position on our roof and razor wire on our perimeter, but beyond that the members of the unit relied on each other. Even in our living quarters, we were always on guard, because we knew we were outnumbered and susceptible to being overrun.
But it worked. I want to state that fact again, because I’m proud of it: our efforts in the Anbar desert worked. By December 2003, word had traveled up the American chain of command that Al-Waleed was coming under control. The Iraqi Border Police and its American partners were
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