The Great Divide
I handed Tim a note from his mom. Inside was a photograph of the American flag hanging in front of his parents’ Rhawnhurst twin. “That’s the flag I gave my dad,” he said, giving it a long look. Tim’s father is an Army veteran of the Vietnam War. Now retired from the Philly PD, “Big Tom” McMenamin is a truck driver for a coffee company. On his pickup he stuck this bumper sticker: I’LL FORGIVE JANE FONDA WHEN THE JEWS FORGIVE HITLER. Along with the picture, Timmy’s mom, Margaret Mary, had sent laminated St. Joseph prayer cards. “Whoever shall read this prayer or hear it or keep it about themselves,” they read, “shall not be overpowered in battle.”
During Timmy’s first tour, a pickup spouting gunfire sped toward his convoy, and he gave the order for his machine-gunner to take it out. Stopping to inspect the small pickup, he saw the body parts sliced and diced all over the front seat. “I didn’t feel bad about it,” he said when he got home. “I got all my Marines home alive.” I now asked if he’d seen similar action this time. “Not really,” he said. Just that a few weeks back, he and his Marines had come under mortar attack. Tim’s guys fired, turning the enemy into “hamburger.” He’d also been on a mission to the town of Hit when the lead vehicle of his convoy stopped short of a detected improvised explosive device. While waiting for the bomb squad to deactivate the IED, the Marines followed “immediate action” procedure: Climbing from their vehicles, they walked about the desert looking for more IEDs. For more than an hour, they tried not to step on mines while scanning the surrounding hills for snipers.
“So how are you doing?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said. “Good. Real good.” He lowered his head, spat out a stream of tobacco juice, and suggested we go in and get some sleep.
Just as I was drifting off, an explosion rocked our trailer.
“What the hell was that?” I asked from the bunk below Timmy’s.
“IDF,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What the hell is IDF?”
“Indirect fire. Probably a mortar.”
“Is there such a thing as direct fire?”
“Yeah, it means you’re dead.”
After the explosion, I lay awake in my bed enjoying the fact that we weren’t dead. I watched morning seep through the camouflage sheet hung over our room’s only window and waited to hear Tim stir above me. There was no rush. The next bird to Asad wouldn’t fly until nightfall. Flight schedules are “fluid” and kept secret. All Tim knew was that we were to report to the LZ at 10:30 p.m.
Around midmorning, two more IDFs hit the Diamond. When the attacks came, seconds apart, Tim was meeting in the Civil Affairs HQ, and I was on the other side of the small base, seated at a computer in the “recreation center” — a one-story building with a pool table, a paperback library, a big-screen TV, and a room with some phones and computers. Exactly where the IDF hit, I didn’t know. But the building shook. Books toppled. I overheard a Marine on one of the phones; the freckle-faced kid whispered into the receiver, “Oh, that — that was nothing.”
Brief flurries of incoming — mortars, grenades, gunfire, rockets — are still routine on U.S. bases in the Wild West. At least once every day, from somewhere outside the concrete walls, some muj armed with something fires once or twice onto the base. The bad guys don’t linger to recalibrate for accuracy. After taking their shots, insurgents scurry into the anonymity of darkness or meld into a village crowd, hoping that, “inshahallah” — God willing — they have inflicted death on the infidels.
