The Great Divide
Tim volunteered to go to Iraq for a second tour in October 2004; he kissed his fiancée goodbye and arrived in-country the following March. We began exchanging e-mails. I wrote: “Remember when you said I’d have to see things firsthand over there to understand? How would you feel about me coming over to report on what you’re doing?” His reply arrived within minutes: “I’ll have a helmet and cot waiting for you.”
And so on a mid-August night only a few months later, I was on a Marine Corps chopper flying into Anbar Province, the “Wild West,” to see Tim. What looked like fireworks was streaking toward my helicopter. The Marines at the bird’s machine guns sat stoically. I felt like I was going to puke.
Intact, Driftwood 41 settled on the LZ — landing zone — of Camp Blue Diamond, a small Marine installation in central Iraq, on the eastern edge of Anbar. Stepping from the chopper’s rear hatch into the 103-degree night, I tugged at 50 pounds of body armor to reassure myself it was in place. Waving light sticks, a Marine escorted me from the LZ into a flakeboard shed. Inside, among a crowd of exhausted-looking troops waiting for birds to carry them to God knows where, I saw Tim, dressed in his brown-and-tan fatigues — 33 years old, with fair skin and intense dark eyes. His height is average, and his build is slight. He wasn’t made to carry a world on his shoulders. But you can’t tell him that. After graduating from the Prep, I racked up student-loan debt for a liberal-arts school in western Pennsylvania, while Tim enrolled at St. Joe’s University, lived at home, worked part-time as a grocery clerk, and joined the Marine Corps Reserves. He joined because, as he put it, he believed “it was important to serve,” and, hey, his old man was already working a construction gig on top of his regular cop job to pay for the Prep; Timmy didn’t want to lay the pressure of college tuition on him. While working part-time at a supermarket and training with his Reserve unit, Timmy got a bachelor’s degree in food marketing and rose to a management position in a supermarket chain.
Now he greeted me with “You all right?” I walked through his words and hugged him. He squeezed back hard, for only a second — he was, after all, surrounded by Marines. “So did you get shot at?” he asked. He must have seen it on my face. I explained. “Yeah, you were getting shot at,” he said, laughing. “Green tracers are bad. You had Soviet-made machine guns firing at you. The bad guys use the Russian stuff.” He speculated that my helicopter didn’t return fire because the crew didn’t have permission; air support must already have been present. “Welcome to Al Anbar,” he said.
By now, most of the U.S. has heard of Anbar, the largest and most dangerous of Iraq’s 18 provinces. It’s an ocean of sand and rocky hills sprawling from central Iraq some 300 miles west to Syria and Jordan. Most of its towns and villages are on the banks of the Euphrates, which snakes along the province’s northern and eastern borders. The vast majority of Anbar’s 1.2 million Iraqis are Sunni Arabs, which is to say, Saddam loyalists. The province is loaded with mujahideen, or in Marine-speak, “muj.” In and around Baghdad, coalition forces are playing a lethal game of whack-a-mole with the bad guys, but as a colonel who directed all Marine Corps combat operations in Anbar told me, “The war has moved out here.” And it hasn’t left.
After I dropped my gear in our quarters — a small air-conditioned room inside a trailer, with a set of bunk beds — Tim and I sat outside. The Diamond wasn’t Tim’s home base; he was stationed at Al Asad, a U.S. installation about 30 miles to the northwest. He’d flown in to escort me the rest of the way, and also to meet with brass to discuss the logistics of getting CAG home. After six months in-country, Tim’s unit was wrapping up its tour. He had one mission left, and the plan was for me to tag along.
“We’re making progress,” he told me. “You’ll see.” I lied and told him I believed him.
