April 2, 2003
I came across his name unexpectedly, while scanning a list of the war dead online during a slow afternoon at work. It was nearly a year after the fact. Whatever my wife might say about my obsessing on Iraq, this reading of names wasn’t something I did on a regular basis. It happened occasionally when one link led to another, and I found myself scrolling down, looking for the names I know. This was a particularly good list. It was organized by date. It included each dead soldier’s hometown, age and the circumstances of his or her death, when available. That was how I discovered who U.S. Navy Lt. Nathan D. White was, and realized I had witnessed his death.
I turned in my seat to see who was around to whom I might say, “Hey, I know this guy. I saw this happen.” I saw one reporter staring intently at his screen. Another was on the phone. I turned back. They all thought I was crazy enough anyway for wanting to go back there. They didn’t need to know I was killing time with the names of the dead.
The column moved out around mid-morning on the 2nd, leaving that familiar patch of desert for the last time. The entire brigade; miles of Abrams tanks, Bradleys, 113s, fuelers, ammo trucks, Humvees, moving north up Highway 9. We stopped for an hour or so around mid-afternoon south of Karbala, as usual for reasons most of us did not know. Someone had bounded ahead of us. There was a fight going on in Karbala, but it was someone else’s, and I think we were only vaguely aware of it.
I uncranked the Bradley’s rear hatch, hopped out. Smitty followed me out and Baxter appeared from his hatch around front. Each of us pissed against the side of the track. Then Baxter, Smitty and I shared a butt, talked and walked around a bit, never straying more than a few feet from the track. I used my binocs to scan a village hidden among the date palms on the other side of a berm about 100 yards to the east. It was quiet, except for a braying donkey. No one else in our part of the column seemed to be paying much attention to it, though it looked to me like the kind of place from which, let’s say, for the sake of argument, an RPG might suddenly come screaming out. An old man walked up a path from the west side and stood by the road, gesturing politely for permission to cross our line of armor. The GIs waved him across. A couple of young men in gym suits, with haircuts, straight backs and well-developed pectoral muscles, one in flip-flops, the other barefoot, came walking along the road. They passed right by our vehicles, eyes straight ahead, studiously ignoring us. The LT and I mulled whether these guys were checking us out, or were just deserters. We guessed deserters.
“Good. Go home. Take your friends with you,” Kauffeld said.
Smitty was goofing on the one guy’s bare feet. I told him to cut it out, that it’s not polite to laugh at people when you’re sitting on an armored vehicle, holding a rifle, in their country.
“He don’t know what I’m laughing at,” Smitty said.
“Everyone knows when he’s being laughed at,” I said.
The word was passed along that it was time to go. We climbed in, buttoned down the hatch, and were gone. In the late afternoon, we rolled through Karbala, scene of Islam’s great and tragic battle for the succession of the Caliphate in the 7th century, source of much trouble ever since; just this afternoon the scene of bitter street fighting between the Saddam fedayeen, Republican Guard, and elements of the 3rd Infantry and the 101st Airborne divisions. Karbala was quiet and unremarkable, at least the part we were rolling through. I saw snatches of it through the Bradley’s periscope blocks. A dust-colored gas station and some dust-colored shops. Some of those shops had cigarettes, which we were very low on, and Baxter began hoping out loud the column would stop near one of those shops. When I pointed out he didn’t have any Iraqi dinars, he said he figured they would give him cigarettes because he was liberating their country.
At sunset, we stopped again, back out in the desert. Someone in the column had carelessly allowed an AT4 anti-tank missile to fall, and it was half buried and half flattened in the roadside grit where someone had rolled over it. Nothing right about any of that, and we reported it up the line so the engineers could deal with it. I trotted out a short distance off the road to squat. We all were accustomed to doing this in front of each other.
Around midnight, a longer stop, again in the desert. We got out, pissed at the side of the track. We decided to do some housecleaning and threw some empty MRE boxes off to one side of the road. Baxter, Smitty and I shared a couple of butts by the track. We heard some gruff noise as Sgt. Maj. Oggs came walking down the column and found our trash. He did what sergeant majors do, which was to get pissed off that anyone would dare throw trash in his desert. This was the first time since the start of the war we’d seen Oggs, the battalion sergeant major, who was wall-eyed and freaked everyone out because they were never sure who he was bitching out. This time, he was bitching out everyone. The stuff was picked up, to be ditched again later when Oggs wasn’t around.
And so we were hanging by the track, smoking, when we saw a bright light arc up from the rear, miles back. The Multiple-Launch Rocket Systems always launched four at a time, four streaks that would burn out partway up the sky, the rockets sailing silently several thousand feet over our heads, until they lit up the opposite horizon, a big whitish-yellow glow to be followed a few moments later by distant booms, way over there where men theoretically were dying.
But this was just one streak, burning steadily as it rose way up to the top of the sky. There, it flared briefly and abruptly changed direction. Now it was streaking back in the direction from which it had come, gradually descending, becoming faint. Then it was gone, swallowed up by the vast and utter darkness of a dusty desert night. The dull noise of a distant explosion followed some time after.
“What the fuck?” said Smitty.
“That was different,” Baxter said.
There probably was not much that would have distinguished us at that moment from any Bedouin who might glance up, momentarily transfixed by a shooting star or a mysterious light in the sky heralding the birth of a prophet, then push on through this desert, having other business to attend to.
Up in the sky, Lt. Nathan D. White, 30, of Abilene, Texas, was dead, his F-18 having burned up around him. He would not be flying home to the USS Kitty Hawk tonight, nor ever in this life to his wife and three children waiting for him in Orlando, Fla.
Down on the desert road, we received word that it was time to mount up. We each took a last hit from our shared butt and crushed it in the dust. We hefted ourselves through our hatches, buttoned down and we were gone. In the rumbling, rattling rear compartment of the Bradley, Smitty and I dozed, but I was awake several hours later when someone on the battalion net reported that the strange reversing streak we had seen in the sky was an F-18 struck by a Patriot missile. Friendly fire. Shit, we said. Poor fucker. Our column continued on through the night. Those of us who did not need to stay awake were trundled back to sleep in the rocking steel cradle that was our Bradley. There was a city up ahead to be taken and more killing that would need to be done there.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:20 am on Monday, April 2, 2007
5 Responses to “April 2, 2003”
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April 2nd, 2007 at 10:48 am
Don’t feel bad about looking over the death lists Jules, I’m forever looking over the one they publish at globalsecurity.org for guys I know. I figure if someone I know has been killed I ought to go to their funeral if I can. I haven’t been keeping up for the last few months and feel kind of guilty about it-like maybe I missed somebody. You go to so many schools, and I’ve served in a half dozen different units, so it’s hard to keep track of everyone, but if someone I knew died I would feel obligated to attend their funeral.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:17 am
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.04.02
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April 2nd, 2007 at 11:17 am
April 2, 2003
Critter Crittenden remembers: I came across his name unexpectedly, while scanning a list of the war dead online during a slow afternoon at work. It was nearly a year after the fact. Whatever my wife might say about my obsessing
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:22 am
So why do so many Namvets spend time at The Virtual Wall? Can’t bring nobody back, right?
Gonna call you on something publicly so you don’t put off fixing it. Why the F ain’t CJ’s site listed on your sidebar?
April 2nd, 2007 at 3:36 pm
bdfaith,
They’re remembering, thinking of comrades lost so long ago, and wondering why the F@&) they got to come home and those other fellows didn’t.
I can still see some faces as clear as if they were beside me. Still young, full of life, still immortal, and in a sense, they ARE immortal.
It’s maudlin, to be certain. I don’t know why I look at those names the way I do. It was so long ago. Still, they were a part of my life, for however short a time, a part that still lives within me. It sounds trite, but it’s true: they gave their tomorrows for our todays, and so by remembering them, and especially one of them, I can keep him alive as long as I live.
We all lived a faster, stronger sort of life back then. Soldiers always do, whether they realise it or not. It was, in many ways, a seperate life from what we were meant to live. We lived hard, because so many died hard. We drank too much, swore too much, wasted money on frivolous things, and, yes, we loved too much. We loved eachother, even though many might not have seen it then, they do now, the love of a soldier for another. A shared experience that trancends both their lives.
It is a blessing and a curse. It’s a love no spouse will ever understand, nor comprehend. It’s a love born in the faraway, during the longago, and strengthened with time. With age.
Sorry…. I sometimes write too much.
Respects,