Baghdad blues, p.1
Baghdad Blues, page 1
Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2022 by
CASEMATE PUBLISHERS
1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083, US
and
The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE, UK
Copyright 2022 © Paul M. Kendel
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-63624-172-2
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-63624-173-9
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For Alex and Sean
There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
—HERMAN MELVILLE
Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that they in turn do not become monsters themselves.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Thed Pettersson and Pia Ekasala for their friendship and support in allowing me to stay at La Rana Cansada, their hotel in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, during the beginning of the Covid pandemic where I worked on this book. To Richard Reoch for reading an early version of the manuscript and providing valuable insight. My thanks to Morgan Burnham and his family for their kindness and assistance. To Daylon Brown and Robert Sheets for their contributions to this story. My gratitude to Jorge Dorantes—general manager of La Rana Cansada—for sharing the long months of lockdown with me under the palapa. Finally, I am indebted to Dr. Samuel Kimball for his friendship, editorial work, and advice. Without his assistance this book would never have become what it is.
Prologue
Southwest Baghdad, January 2005
“Car! On the left!”
His head and torso rising from the Humvee, Sergeant Kirkland heard the alarmed voice from below. He instantly broke out into a cold sweat, beads glistening in the scorching sun. Simultaneously trying to steady his feet on the thick metal plate secured between the rear seats of the vehicle while blinking to clear his sweat-stung eyes, he jerked his head to the left and frantically cranked the Humvee’s pivot-mounted M240 machine gun. He had aimed it off to the right, alert to the surprises that lurked behind the random piles of discarded junk that pock marked the road. His adrenaline spiked at the thought of: suicide bomber! He rotated the gun, the mechanical movement agonizingly slow, across the front of their vehicle to point down the road intersecting the Humvee patrol on the left. Blinking repeatedly, he tried to make out the threat, his finger on the trigger ready to unleash a hail of bullets.
“Shoot the car!” the voice screamed again.
When his vision cleared, he found himself looking straight into the dark piercing eyes of a child—maybe two years old in the lap of a woman in the passenger seat of the oncoming car. She was beautiful with smooth brown skin and thick black hair. The driver was gripping the wheel, his head and shoulders bent forward, and eyes as big as golf balls. His own narrowing to slits, Sergeant Kirkland stayed riveted on the vehicle and its occupants. Time stopped. His heart, thumping rapidly, did not. But the finger curled around the trigger did.
Out of the blue the woman in the front of the white four-door sedan smiled at him through a large crack that ran diagonally across the windshield. She lifted the little girl’s hand to wave. The child looked shocked and disoriented. Sergeant Kirkland released his finger from the trigger, let out a heavy sigh, and leaned back against the turret of the Humvee. He smiled and returned the child’s wave. Jesus. I was a fraction of a second away from killing them all! A wave of both guilt and relief swept over him. He was still staring at the child when the Humvee lurched forward, and he was pushed hard against the butt of the gun. He steadied himself as his vehicle and the two other Humvees in his patrol moved on.
The sun was setting as the walls surrounding Baghdad International Airport appeared, the lights above them glowing brightly. The patrol passed the broken arches of a former Iraqi military headquarters and onto a paved road. Reaching a bend, the convoy drove by a small cluster of trees and homes, a handful of light bulbs dangled above doorsteps. Crossing a canal, they approached the guarded entry point into the airport. Weaving their way through a dozen cement barriers designed to impede suicide bombers, they stopped in front of the gate. As the huge metal doors were opened, he once again breathed a sigh of relief. One day down. 340ish to go!
That thought instantly vanished when he felt a stabbing pain in his chest. He winced but then recognized the symptom. Just anxiety. Relax. Talk yourself through it. You didn’t kill the child. You could have. No one would have blamed you. You didn’t. You made the right call. Sergeant Kirkland exhaled deeply and looked up at the stars. Would those dark piercing eyes haunt him? He hoped not. In Iraq only a couple of weeks, something like this would happen again. Can I live with a mistake—not seeing the innocent, only a threat? He knew he had a job to do, but he also knew a soldier has a say about his own actions, especially when they mean the difference between life and death.
Chapter One
Friends, Enemies, and those Between
Sergeant Kirkland, or Sergeant K, as everyone called him, woke up to the distant sound of mortars hitting the nearby airfield. He had another 20 minutes to sleep, but what was the point now? he thought as he sat up on his cot. Dropping his feet onto the cold concrete slab, he looked over at Staff Sergeant Calvin, his squad leader, still asleep. Calvin had re-joined the National Guard after a 10-year break in service. Three years older than Sergeant K, who at 38 was feeling pretty old himself, especially for combat, Calvin had grey hair, wrinkled skin, forlorn tired eyes from too many years of drinking and smoking. He wore dentures after his teeth had been knocked out when driving drunk. He hadn’t run a stop sign but had run into one, breaking his lower jaw on the steering wheel. Now, he had almost no feeling in it. During the Gulf War he’d taken a piece of shrapnel to his face but had no idea he’d been wounded until a fellow soldier pointed it out. Sergeant K chuckled to himself as Calvin mumbled some expletives about his ex-wife and rolled over.
Sergeant Kirkland was a member of Alpha-Company, 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry, part of Georgia’s 48th Brigade Combat Team, who had quickly gone from being National Guardsmen to full-time combat soldiers half a world away. He grabbed a towel and soap and left the small white circus style tent—one of eight belonging to his infantry company based out of Camp Striker—and headed to the shower trailer. He passed some of his guys up early and on their laptops—one can’t fight a modern war without the Internet. After showering and changing into uniform, he and Calvin walked the 20 minutes to the chow hall for breakfast, groggy-eyed and in desperate need of coffee. Sergeant K checked his weapon and gear and stood with eight other men as they all waited to load into the three Humvees parked in front of the tents. With the vehicles fueled and the radios set, the soldiers departed for their dangerous—but soon to seem oddly routine—line of work.
Following the inside wall of Baghdad’s airport—an 18-foot barrier topped by concertina and razor wire—Sergeant K once again stood behind the M240 machine gun resting against the back of the turret. Taking in the view from his elevated position, he looked out at the sprawling complex of Baghdad International Airport (BIAP)—over 10 square miles of walled in safety. But the sense of being protected was ephemeral. He watched an incoming military transport plane in a rapid descent that made him uneasy, knowing that anti-aircraft fire could erupt on any given day. For the moment he felt secure, but he’d soon be outside “the Wire,”—the term used to describe all of Iraq on the other side of the fortified perimeters of every U.S. base. Beyond these boundaries was an alien w
Ten minutes later they stopped in front of the exit control point facing two large-metal doors. The men dismounted to lock and load their weapons. Sergeant K’s job may have been dangerous, but he didn’t envy the gate guards. Sitting in a tower all day looking out at the mysterious land and people beyond “the Wire”—the real war within sight, but never experienced firsthand. A guard released the lock and pulled both doors aside as Sergeant K adjusted himself behind the gun. Pulling out a belt of ammo, he placed the rounds inside and slapped the cover shut. He cocked the charging handle back and forced it forward into place. “Locked and loaded,” he was now ready for “war,” or whatever the morning had in store for him.
Outside the walls they passed the remains of Saddam era military buildings that dotted the area as well as the palaces and villas that had once belonged to Uday Hussein, Saddam’s psychotic and brutally sadistic son. Following the invasion, the smaller roads, some paved, some not, were named after states—California, Alaska, Texas, etc. Turning onto Route Aeros—a two lane paved road that skirted around the airport—Iraqi vehicle traffic was light, with most civilians using dirt roads through agricultural fields. Aeros connected with MSR Tampa, a six-lane highway and the main supply route that stretched from Kuwait in the south to Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in the north.
Beyond BIAP for less than an hour, a white Toyota pickup suddenly turned onto Aeros in front of them. A few hundred meters ahead of Sergeant K’s Humvee, it began moving slowly off to the side of the road as most civilian vehicles did when a U.S. military patrol approached. Suddenly a burst of machine gun fire raked the ground in front of the Toyota truck. Dozens of rounds kicked up dirt, missing the bumper by inches. The sweeping spray of bullets ricochet off two local construction bulldozers a hundred meters off the side of the road. Their Iraqi drivers—unintended targets—dove for cover.
“Jesus, Baska!” Sergeant First Class James screamed, horrified. “You could have killed those construction guys!” The day before Private Baska had fired at a car to get it to move over and one of his rounds had inadvertently gone right between the legs of an innocent Iraqi bystander smoking a cigarette. Sergeant K thought he knew why Private Baska was trigger happy. He was terrified without seeming to recognize it; he felt powerful with a machine gun in his hands. He knew what that ego trip was like, the memory of the little girl at the end of his machine gun barrel ever-present.
“Sorry,” Baska said lamely. “My bad.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” James added in frustration.
Sergeant K’s first impression of their platoon sergeant was from across the floor of the National Guard armory in Valdosta, Georgia. Sergeant First Class Edwin James was a veteran of the Gulf War and a truck driver in civilian life. Although over six feet in height, he was unassuming and calm and had nothing unusual or extraordinary about him, except his unibrow—a huge black furry caterpillar napping over his eyes. When he wore glasses, the caterpillar became a hairy black spider hanging over the plastic rims. Shaving the brow would have made him look 10 years younger than his 40 years.
Turning off Route Aeros onto a dirt path they entered the remains of an abandoned former Iraqi military compound that had been bombed by American planes. Known as Observation Post 1 (OP1) to the men of the 48th Brigade, the remains of a large cement slab was used to position a regular security force–usually Bradley fighting vehicles, but often a group of Humvees–to sit and report where and when rockets or mortars were fired into the airport. At the entrance sat a statue of Saddam Hussein on a horse with a sword held high. Only the horse part greeted them, the dictator having been smashed long ago when jubilant Shia effaced every statue and portrait of Saddam they could. Alpha-Company (A-Co) referred to the group of dilapidated buildings as Nana’s Compound after the old-grey-haired Iraqi woman who looked after the three squatter families that occupied them—all displaced Sunnis. His first visit had left him with a sorrowful impression. The “homes” that had once been part of a powerful military headquarters were now reduced to a sad, crumbled, and broken caricature of its former self. The same could be said of the people that now occupied them. The families were amiable, eking out a living in part by having their kids sell cold drinks, candy bars, and other snacks to visiting American soldiers. In the evenings, they brought tea and oven-baked flat bread. Nana happily cooked chicken or beef kabobs and served hot tea on a silver platter.
Most of Nana’s teeth were missing, except for one that hung over her lower lip when she smiled. Her left eye was cloudy with cataracts. The right eye was a surprise to Sergeant K—blue—maybe genes going back to the time of Alexander the Great’s invasion, he wondered. Nana was plump, with huge breasts under her tight-fitting shawl, and every time he looked at her, he expected them to burst out and fall to the ground at her feet. She had a deep-cackling laugh. If Iraqis celebrated Halloween, she’d only need a broom to become a warm, hearted jolly big breasted witch of Baghdad. Saddam had purged dozens of senior Baath party members from the government, executing many for alleged crimes against the government—Nana’s husband among them. Her two sons had died during the Gulf War fleeing Kuwait along the “Highway of Death.” Her remaining child, a daughter, had died in the recent American invasion. And yet she held no animosity towards America, he noted in amazement. But even after so much hardship it was reassuring that many, such as Nana and the families around her, could still smile and laugh.
Nana had an adorable two-year-old grandson who rarely left her side. Traumatized from the war, Sergeant K suspected. He would hide behind her and peek his head out to watch them. Nicknamed “Booger” because he had a finger perpetually stuck up his nose, he wore a T-shirt that read Hooters: Atlanta nearly every day. Specialist Johnson walked up to Booger and held out some candy. The toddler stared at the treat and at Johnson but stayed behind Nana.
“It’s okay buddy, I’m not going to hurt you, it’s just candy,” he said.
“Maybe he’s scared of black people,” Sergeant K said jokingly.
Johnson shot him an angry look. He held the candy out like a tasty morsel for a dog. Nana smiled broadly, her single tooth standing out prominently. She said something to Booger, and he took tentative steps forward as Johnson held the candy out farther. Suddenly, with cat like speed Booger reached out, snatched his prize, and retreated behind Nana in seconds. Nana took him inside.
Specialist Raymond Johnson was from a rough neighborhood on the north side of Jacksonville, Florida. He had a tough childhood. His father and older brother were in prison. His mother left when he was 10 and he’d been raised by his grandmother. Iraq was a war zone, but Johnson had seen worse, with three scars from knife wounds and one from a bullet to prove it. Johnson had an expression of joy and satisfaction on his face.
“That was cool, Johnson. It feels good to do something nice for the Iraqis, doesn’t it?” Sergeant K asked.
“Yeah. I just wish it happened more often.”
“So do I.”
But a soldier had to be careful. An excessive show of kindness and compassion toward the Iraqis could be misconstrued as weakness. In a world of anger and aggression, even fleeting moments of generosity such as Johnson’s gift could make one suspicious. If a soldier showed an affinity for the Iraqis could he be trusted when things went bad?
For illicit items such as alcohol or pornography you talked to a young boy around 13—a native, Don Corleone. He’d asked Sergeant K during his first visit if he wanted any “Freaky, Freaky”—slang for bootleg porn DVDs. Without a chance to preview the purchase, a soldier stood a 50/50 chance of getting a video of an Iraqi wedding or a birthday party. He’d declined the boy’s offer. Today, however, he hoped for something better.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any beer?” he asked the kid.
The boy thought for a moment. “You wait one hour? I will have beer.”
“Sure,” he said, doubting him. “If you can find any Heineken, you’ll get a huge tip.” The kid disappeared.
Less than an hour later he re-appeared with a small gym bag; inside was a six pack of Carlsberg. Astonished, Sergeant K settled on a price—highly inflated—and quickly put his prize in his Humvee.
