March 20, 2003
The war started quietly just before dawn. I woke up in my sleeping bag on the Bradley’s lowered ramp and looked at my watch. It was 0429 hours local time, about half an hour after George Bush’s deadline elapsed. Col. Perkins had said we’d be parked under the air corridor the cruise missiles would pass through enroute to Baghdad. They’d be 350 feet overhead.
Ten minutes later, still lying in my bag with the night’s chill creeping in, I heard them. Small whiny jet noises, accompanied by a odd waffling sound of air turbulence. One after another. Voom, voom, voom. I counted 20, about $30 million worth, and thought, “Someone’s in for a rude wakeup.”
The international press in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad would capture some spectacular shots of those missiles blowing the crap out of the Palace District across the Tigris in about 45 minutes. And, over the next few weeks, though we didn’t know it then, we would follow the missiles to exactly the same place they were going now, where we would fight and then camp among the bodies of the men we had killed, amid the ruins the cruise missiles had made there. I say “we,” because by then a lot of the distinctions between us, reporter and soldiers, would have become less distinct and we would all be inescapably part of the same thing, very dirty and very tired and somewhat different than we had been before.
When the last of the cruise missiles had passed, I dozed off for another half hour.
“This is so weird. The war just started and we’re just sitting here,” the LT said later, as we lounged around the Bradley. It was warming up. We were on another patch of Kuwaiti sand, near the Iraqi border, amid low rolling dunes and hills of the wadi country. All around, GIs lounged on their vehicles. Abrams tanks, Bradleys like ours, boxy M113 armored personnel carriers, M88 tankhaulers, Humvees, deuce and a halfs, and farther back in the column, lines of fuel tanker and something weird I had never seen before, a number of massive arch-shaped tracked vehicles, folded back on themselves. Rolling bridge sections. All waiting for the word to start our flanking move through the western desert that would place an army outside Najaf and then Karbala in a few days, poised to cut east to Baghdad.
“I’m just pissed they waited until it got hot to start the war,” Smitty said. “Let all those people who don’t want to kill people … what do they call them?”
“Peaceniks,” I said.
“That’s right … Let all those people come here and sit here for six months. They’ll want to kill people, too,” Smitty said.
In the early morning cool, Baxter had been full of energy, dancing happily as he blasted Outkast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad” on Coleman’s boombox. They wanted me to hear it, their anthem for what we were getting ready to do.
“Don’t pull the finger, unless you plan to bang!” Baxter and Coleman sang. Don’t need to bang unless you plan to hit somethang!”
In the midday heat on our observation post, Baxter was getting irritated.
“It fucking sucks,” Baxter said. “I want to blow shit up. I’m tired of sitting here, We’ve been sitting here for four months. This shit gets old.”
Several explosions sounded, maybe a couple of miles away.
“Are we supposed to be digging holes or something?” I said. We were all still lounging around the Bradley, entirely exposed if anything dropped in.
“If anything falls around here, I’m jumping in the Bradley,” Kauffeld said.
“I come from a religious family,” Baxter said. “I believe when your time has come, your time has come. I’m not going to dive in a hole or nothing. If God wants me, he’ll take me.”
Word came across the radio that the explosions we heard were in fact incoming Iraqi missiles, and the order was issued to go to MOPP 4. Mission-Oriented Protective Posture 4, gas mask and full chemical protective gear, rubber boots, gloves and everything. Baxter the fatalist led the charge.
“MOPP 4! MOPP 4! Let’s go!” Baxter shouted.
We ripped our masks out of their Velcro-fastened bags and slapped them on, glad we had taken the time to baby-wipe the desert grit out them in the morning just like Sgt. Will said we should, so they wouldn’t rip our faces up. We dragged out our J-List suits and started crawling into them, fumbling with the thin rubber galoshes and gloves. Then we stood around sweating, helping each other adjust our suits. Sweating and swearing.
“How’s your war going now?” I asked Smitty.
“What war?” Smitty said. Our voices were distorted by the masks. We all sounded like Darth Vader.
“It’s a white man’s war,” Smitty said.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:00 am on Tuesday, March 20, 2007
4 Responses to “March 20, 2003”
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March 20th, 2007 at 2:30 am
“Someone’s in for a rude wakeup.”
March 20, 2003 Critter Crittenden The war started quietly just before dawn. I woke up in my sleeping bag on the Bradley’s lowered ramp and looked at my watch. It was 0429 hours local time, about half an hour after
March 20th, 2007 at 2:33 am
“Someone’s in for a rude wakeup.”
March 20, 2003 Critter Crittenden The war started quietly just before dawn. I woke up in my sleeping bag on the Bradley’s lowered ramp and looked at my watch. It was 0429 hours local time, about half an hour after
March 20th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
[…] whom I respect very much (yes, even though I don’t always agree with him), to publish this post. Jules supported the war when it started and continues to do […]
March 20th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
The JLIST is a lot more comfortable (and easier to put on-even allowing for the crotch strap) than the previous suits, but you still don’t want to spend too much time in one in the desert heat. This is still great stuff Jules-I hope you are planning a book.