All the Kings Men

"Halfway down the trail to Hell in a shady meadow green, are the souls of all dead troopers camped near a good ole' time canteen, and this eternal resting place is known as Fiddlers' Green."

- 17th century Cavalrymen's poem

The 2nd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division returned to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in October of 2006. It was far enough from the initial push of the offensive that soldiers weren’t sleeping in their Humvees or under loose tents anymore, but the situation was far from comfortable. Soldiers quarters were small retrofitted Conex's strapped side to side, and facing each other in long rows like an organized shanty-town of refugees. They had bunk beds and wall lockers large enough to dress a small child for a month, or a grown man for a week. Entertainment was whatever you brought. It was far from glamorous, but it was better than those that came before, and when a new company came in to relieve the acting one they made sure to labor that point. Sergeant Jason Macdonald had been there 7 months. At the beginning of his tour, during the change of command period, he followed a squad from the 4th infantry division while they showed him the ropes. It was his second tour, but the song and dance never changed.

“You shit birds got it easy. We had to dig our own shitters.”

Sgt. Sparrow had a way with words. Sgt. Macdonald just listened and took in the information. Any one piece of info could save his life at some point.

“Is that so?”

“Fucking A right it is. Y’all are pampered bitches now.”

Sgt. Macdonald knew what Sgt. Sparrow was trying to do, and he didn’t care. It was a pissing contest as old as mankind. Measuring dicks, he thought.

Sgt. Macdonald was leading a squad out of the 149 battalion, the Black Jacks. As a method of keeping soldiers from mentally and physically fatiguing, each tour was broken into several different mission sets, of which different battalions would rotate through. Every 4 months your battalion was on a different mission; something else to tire the mind and break the spirit. When he arrived he was on roving patrols. It was meant as a threat presence, but mostly it was cleaning up bodies.

The first two months of patrol were simply driving predetermined routes and waiting for the explosions. Sgt. Macdonald, or Sgt. ‘Mac’ as his men called him, had already lost 6 guys; 2 to serious injury and the rest for good. They were the kind of numbers you didn’t think about if you wanted to keep your sanity. Despite best practices, Sgt. Mac found himself up late many nights doing the math. Adding and subtracting small numbers trying to keep his heart out of the margins. It was the type of algebra that became exponential if you looked at it too long.

Several nights he found himself outside his Conex in the middle of the night staring at the sky. He tried to let the cold chill of an abated desert heat sink into his chest, crawling deeper past the gooseflesh on his back into his spine. One night he was woken from his meditation by one of his men, watching him stare blank eyed and slack jawed at nothing.

“Sgt. Mac. You ok?”

Bringing his focus to the present he turned to see Spec. Henley watching him with a measure of concern and fear. He was working extra hard to not make direct eye contact with Mac, but curiosity had gotten the better of him.

“Yeah, I'm good, I'm fine.” and as an afterthought, “Get some rack, it’s late.”

Henley walked away like a cold breeze, and as Mac rubbed his face out of habit, his cheeks were wet with tears. He felt a hard hot thing start to push against his ribs, and he coughed out loud like a reflex. There will be none of that. People’s lives are at stake, and I'm holding them in my hands.

After four long months of patrol, the 149th was moved to a deeper circle of hell: Gate guard. The entire city of Baghdad was broken into sectors, and each sector had varying levels of security. Outlying sectors were low, and left mostly to the local army to control. As you got closer to power, like the Embassy and Army bases, the security was high. In Between these sectors were control points called ECP’s, or Entry Control Points, and each one had to be manned.

Sgt. Mac’s squad was on an ECP 2 kilometers from the US Embassy in the Karkh district of Baghdad. There had been lots of talk about rebuilding Iraq to its former glory, with titans of industry like Halliburton leading the way. We tore it down, and by God, we were going to build it up again, and better than it was before. But after nearly four years it was still a crumbling pile of brick and wood.

Perched in a bunker 20 feet high off of ECP 5, Mac felt bricks in his stomach. The ECP was surrounded by half-ton square sand barriers which stood four and a half feet tall. They were wrapped in chain-link fencing for extra stability, and stacked 2 high, forming an impenetrable wall. The gate was a 4 foot by 7 foot steel plate 4 inches thick on a hydraulic piston, which could be lowered and raised into the concrete road. On either side of the gate, sand barriers created a narrow bottleneck, funneling cars towards the raised plate to await inspection. On a post just next to the steel trap gate was a simple traffic light, which only had 2 colors: red, and green.

As cars approached the steel barrier, a red light informed them there was no passing without permission. When they reached the gate a soldier would ask for their identification and entry pass, while several other soldiers checked the length of the car for contraband. It’s not easy to spot a false door, or the veneer of recent body work that would indicate possible foul play, but that’s what training is for. Even with years of training however, mistakes are made. When mistakes are made here, people don’t get fired, people die.

There had been several attempts at blowing up the Embassy since Mac had started. It wasn’t the soldiers lack of training, or even the fatigue that was to blame; it was their adversary's patience and tenacity to insistently try again, and with new methods. It was a new mission, one that promised lower stress, yet somehow they were playing the same game. Instead of driving the wild streets looking for bombs, the bombs were now coming to them.

For 10 hours a day Mac watched cars trickle through their carefully constructed spider web; moving, then stopping, flowing, then pooling up against the steel plate. Like an ocean of steel and glass, cars approached and receded. Mac was calm and patient, but everyone has their limits. When his squad found something insidious, the entire ECP was locked down and the demolition team was brought in. They cleared the area and operated on the offending car like surgical ants dissecting a dead beetle. When it was over, business as usual resumed and everyone forgot anything had happened.

But Mac didn’t forget. He couldn’t. What if they hadn’t found something? What if the driver got spooked and blew his team into the history books. Math was never his strong suit, and that math made his stomach turn, and chills break out on his neck. He found himself dreading the green light; the calm procession of cars that followed, and the sickening silence. It was only a punctuation for the chaos to come.

As he sat in his eagle nest day after day, a fever began to take hold of him. A sickly dread of the silence and the green light. He wished for the harsh angry red. Red communicated safety; all was not well, stop before something bad happens. Green was peaceful, and peaceful was death. Peace was the handshake and hug that put a dagger in your back. That green light was the harbinger of acceptance, and then destruction.

“Sgt. Mac, are you ok?”

Mac’s hands grab for his rifle, beginning a motion embedded inside which requires no thought. As he turned Spec Henley was staring wide-eyed at him, hands raised palms up in supplication. He started to back up slowly, then noticed Mac’s features return to a concise and controlled gaze and he lowered his hands. Henley looked almost embarrassed, but there was still a modicum of terror, like he just survived a wild dog attack.

Mac lowered his weapon and sat back on his stoop. He took a deep breath and realized he had been holding his breath. Every muscle in his body was tight and cramped. He had been counting, his secret tortured math, and completely disappeared into his own madness.

“Yeah Henley. I’m fine.”

Henley softened a little as he stood next to Sgt. Mac. He was a great leader, but he got in his own head too often these days.

“Ok. You just seemed a little fucked up there Sgt., sorry to say.”

Mac looked down at the ECP. A car in the front next to the barrier looked like it was held together by floss and particle board. Mac started visualizing all that crumpled rusty metal and glass superheated and moving at 3000 feet per second. Sacrosanct mathematics.

“Yeah Henley. I’m fine.” Mac sighed. “I just hate that fucking green light.”