That shit didn’t last long, Billy thinks, so never mind Baghdad, let’s go right to the suck. He starts writing again.
By the fall of 2003 I was stationed in Ramadi, still peacekeeping up a storm, although sometimes by then there was shooting and the mullahs had started adding ‘death to America’ to their sermons, which were broadcast from the mosques and sometimes from storefronts. I was 3rd Battalion, also known as Darkhorse. My company was Echo. We shot a lot of target practice in those days. George and Donk were someplace else, but Taco and I were still a team.
One day a lieutenant colonel I didn’t know stopped by to watch us shoot. I was using the M40, banging on a pyramid of beer cans at eight hundred yards, knocking them down one by one from top to bottom. You had to hit them low and kind of flip them, or the whole bunch would fall over.
This lieutenant colonel, Jamieson was his name, told me and Taco to come with him. He drove us in an unarmored Jeep to a hill overlooking the al-Dawla mosque. It was a very beautiful mosque. The sermon blaring from the loudspeakers wasn’t so pretty. It was the usual bullshit about how the Americans were going to let the Jews colonize Iraq, Islam would be outlawed, the Jews would run the government and America would get the oil. We didn’t understand the lingo, but death to America was always in English, and we’d seen translated leaflets, supposedly written by the leading clerics. The budding insurgency handed them out by the bale. Will you die for your country? they asked. Will you die a glorious death for Islam?
‘How far is that shot?’ Jamieson asked, pointing at the mosque’s dome.
Taco said a thousand yards. I said maybe nine hundred, then added, being careful to address Jamieson respectfully, that we were forbidden to target religious sites. If, that was, the l-c had such a thing in mind.
‘Perish the thought,’ Jamieson said. ‘I would never ask a soldier under my command to target one of their holy dungheaps. But the stuff coming out of those speakers is political, not religious. So which one of you wants to try knocking one of them off? Without putting a hole in the dome, that is? Which would be wrong and we’d probably go to muji hell for it.’
Taco right away handed the rifle to me. I had no tripod, so I laid the barrel on the hood of the Jeep and took the shot. Jamieson was using binoculars, but I didn’t need them to see one of the speakers go tumbling to the ground, trailing its wire. There was no hole in the dome and the harangue, at least coming from that side, was noticeably less.
‘Get some!’ Taco yelled. ‘Oh yeah, get summa that shit!’
Jamieson said we should bug the fuck out before someone started shooting at us, so that is what we did.
I look back on it and I think that day summed up everything that went wrong in Iraq, why ‘we love America’ changed to ‘death to America.’ The lieutenant colonel got tired of listening to that endless crap so he told us to shoot one of the speakers, which was stupid and meaningless when you considered there were at least six more pointing in other directions.
I saw men in doorways and women looking out of windows when we drove back to the base. Their faces were not happy we love America faces. No one shot at us – that day – but the faces said the day would come. As far as they knew, we weren’t shooting at a loudspeaker. We were shooting at the mosque. Maybe there was no hole in the dome, but we were still shooting at their core beliefs.
Our patrols into Ramadi started getting more dangerous. The local police and the Iraqi National Guard were gradually losing control to the insurgents, but US forces weren’t allowed to take their places because the politicians, both in Washington and Baghdad, were dedicated to the idea of self-rule. Mostly we sat out in camp, hoping we wouldn’t end up doing protective duty while a repair crew worked on fixing a broken （or vandalized） watermain or a bunch of technicians, American and Iraqi, tried to get the broken （or sabotaged） power plant working again. Protective duty was just asking to get shot at, and we had half a dozen Marines KIA, many more wounded, by the end of 2003. The muj snipers were for shit, but their IEDs terrified us.
The whole house of cards tipped over on the last day of March, in 2004.
Okay, Billy thinks, this is where the story really starts. And I got here with a minimum of bullshit, as Up Yours would have said.
By then we had moved from Ramadi to Camp Baharia, also known as Dreamland. It was in the countryside about two miles outside of Fallujah, west of the Euphrates. Saddam’s kids used to r&r there, we heard. George Dinnerstein and Donk Cashman were back with us in Echo Company.