The Great Divide
Back at camp, before I opened my mouth, Tim knew what had happened. “We still got my mission,” he said. “Let’s grab dinner.” As we walked toward the mess hall, I talked around the word: coward. I said if he and his team members, like Wheelock, are risking their lives for this mission, it merits attention; I should’ve gone — that’s why I came, isn’t it?
“I’ll listen to you bitch about this for today,” Tim said, “But then it ends. You made your decision.”
Hours later, I learned that another convoy was scheduled to leave for Hit early the next morning, and that if I got on it I’d be in time to link up with Wheelock and the rest of Timmy’s team down there. “If that’s what you want to do,” Timmy said, unconvinced, or maybe just tired of it all. I lay awake through the night, and at 4:30 a.m. grabbed my pack and snapped on the armor. Lapsed Catholic or not, I made sure a St. Joseph card from Timmy’s mom was in my pocket. I couldn’t see Tim in the dark room; as I left, he said nothing.
Marines call the road to Hit the “Hit-Haditha Corridor,” or “Route Bronze.” CAG still travels it often, up to the far-north town of Haditha, where they’ve been working to repair and upgrade the Haditha Dam, and down south to Hit, which only recently was deemed by CAG to be a “permissible” environment, meaning safe enough to operate in. Well over 50 percent of the injuries and fatalities to U.S. troops in Iraq still occur on roads and are caused by IEDs, mines, and suicide car bombers. I attached myself to a relatively small convoy of three Amphibious Assault Vehicles, or AAVs. An AAV resembles a long Dumpster on treads. A driver, a gunner and a communications guy sit in their own cockpits on the nose. How AAVs float and why they are in the desert, I have no idea. I was riding with Marines Herlihy and Boggs, both from Florida, both soft-spoken, God-fearing kids barely old enough to drink a beer. Boggs, the son of a Baptist preacher, was engaged to the daughter of a Vietnam Special Forces vet who’s now a minister. Herlihy had a pregnant wife and was trying to grow a mustache. Boggs did the driving. Herlihy did the shooting. Because they were down a crew member, they invited me to sit up front in the communications seat. “You can see what we see,” Boggs said.
It’s about 20 miles from Asad to Hit. The first leg of the trip was on a two-lane strip of unmarked asphalt that unfurled like a forgotten ribbon blown onto the sand. In the twilight, there was nothing much to look at. When the orange sun pushed above the horizon, it instantly cooked the air and illuminated our isolation. To describe this world as a desert is an understatement. In the baked brown sea, it seemed a man’s spirit could drown long before his body dehydrated.
What Boggs needed to mind were the piles of debris dotting the roadside. An old gas canister or a trash bag could be filled with explosives and shards of razor-sharp metal, wrapped around a small embedded receiver; a muj might be hiding with a cell phone rigged to trigger the IED as our convoy passed. Suddenly, Boggs pulled over as the lead AAV stopped to inspect what could be an IED. Herlihy rotated his machine gun. Nothing. We continued on, turning left off the asphalt into the desert for the second and last leg of the drive. Boggs stayed in the tread tracks left by other convoys. In the tracks, it’s easier to detect disturbed ground that might indicate a mine. I clenched my legs together tightly, foolishly thinking that if a mine did blow up from below, I might at least be able to save my legs that way. Guess this was what Tim meant when he said he was doing fine, real good.
