Being There, Page 2

by Bartle Breese Bull

The 3rd Platoon is quartered in Soviet-style Iraqi barracks from the 1960s located on a disheveled base called Camp Manhattan. It was once a leafy, well-tended Royal Air Force outpost during Britain's four-decade raj in Iraq. Amenities include a small room with four wired computers, a television area with a loveseat and a table where people clean their weapons, and a little balcony for smoking. There are four porta-potties outside. Camp Manhattan is an infantry base, so there are no women among the 700 men. Food, institutional stuff -- broiled chicken and rice, stews, pastas, bologna, pork chops, and ice cream -- is trucked into this small forward outpost three times a day from a larger camp outside the wire. The Joes sleep about 10 to a room, with camouflage ponchos strung up between their beds. Most of the few windows are blacked out, because a day here ignores the rhythms of light and dark, and the soldiers grab sleep whenever they can. Everyone has a laptop and games, music, and movies. T&A covers the walls like a dusty mosaic from some lost spring break civilization. The byways are choked with cartons of Pop-Tarts, Kool-Aid, and Oreos; the mothers and kindergarten classes of America see to it that the 21st-century Joe fights on a wicked sugar high. A package of videogames or digital camera equipment ordered on Amazon will arrive here in just 10 days.

With new missions constantly coming down from the battalion command, and one day in three spent sleeping with their boots on as the base's Quick Reaction Force, the platoon members find that the six or 12 hours of downtime each day are usually as precarious as the uptime is boring. In barracks or in sector, the weird, uneasy boredom passes by on a stream of talk. Appropriately for young men involved in a nation--building project, philosophical and cultural issues are frequently addressed in a political context, as in "Shut up, you Democrat fag" or "Fuck off, you redneck Nazi." In a month of listening to soldiers make extraordinary confessions and talk about how much they wanted home (for sex, for their parents, for a drink), I never hear a word about wanting out.

One afternoon I'm with Rodriguez, Wade, Nash, and Jonathan Bailey, a 20-year-old from upstate New York, on the smoking balcony off the second floor of the barracks. A gunner like Wade, Bailey was wounded in November. He was concussed, an eardrum was destroyed, his cheek was scarred permanently, and he was almost blinded by a wound to his right eye socket. The platoon used to have three Baileys: this one, known as Sniper Bailey, and College Bailey, and a third who was switched out of combat duty.

Sniper Bailey: I stopped smoking last year, but then I got blown up and started smoking again. They flew me out, and the doctor set me up with a satellite phone. I got through to my mom. "Mom, I got wounded in combat, but I'm okay." Then the line died: click. When I got through again 10 minutes later it took me three hours to calm her down.

Rodriguez shows me a piece of shrapnel from an IED, a crude roadside bomb. The metal is jagged, and its edges are sharp enough to cut your finger. One side is striated from the explosive it held. It's the size of a Hershey bar. The scars on Bailey's cheek and eyebrow are from one of these bombs. The 3rd Platoon has suffered 27 percent casualties since September, mostly from bombs like this. The IED is a lethal, disfiguring enemy, but a wholly unsatisfying one: Its targets can't kill back and don't get to prove their mettle to themselves or their friends, and if they survive they don't remember a thing. "IEDs, man, these things are our kryptonite," says Rodriguez. "They are so simple, but they are the new technology of our war." As we speak, there is an explosion in the distance.

Bailey: When I was in the hospital and wanted to come back to the platoon, my parents told me I was being foolish. I just didn't feel right going home with the injuries I had. In the hospital there was only one other infantry guy. Me and him -- the only combat guys in the hospital -- we were the only fuckers there who wanted to go back to the war.

The 3rd Platoon has been in Iraq since August. Before that it was based in Korea. The average soldier in the unit has spent only two or three weeks in the States over the past two years. Out of nine wounded soldiers in the platoon, one is still an invalid, four chose never to leave the base, three returned home, and four are trying to get back to the unit.
Nash chimes in: "I could have gone home too. I was in Germany recovering from pneumonia, and they said I could go home. I told 'em, 'Fuck you, I'm not going home. I ain't leaving my friends.'"

His comment seemed tacked on, an afterthought to a conversation among tougher, more willing warriors. A minute or two earlier Nash had been talking about how war was a waste of time. We should, he said, be devoting more resources to space travel, not the war.

Apart from leaving behind the patrols and IEDs and late-night conversations, going back home to Louisiana would have meant Nash's missing a fair amount of one task at which today's ghetto-redneck-dork-jock infantryman truly excels: watching TV with his friends. The central lobby of the 3rd Platoon barracks has a few metal chairs and a sofa made from two wooden freight pallets facing a big satellite TV so cheap that the subtitle function is often turned on for English-language broadcasts. The unit is highly skilled at that essential mission of the stoned and the hungover: watching nature television with sunglasses on. Sometimes it is more like the television is watching them: This Mexican free-tailed bat is one of over a million in the cave. The noise is deafening. It is no wonder the young bats in the cave want to get out.... When it comes to togetherness, there's no doubt about it: The wild scrubland of Africa has the cutest little carnivores.... These flamingo chicks have no trouble attracting attention on the great, predator-rich plain....

But most of the flamingo chicks Nash and his colleagues see are on Fashion TV. In fact, most of the people they see are on Fashion TV. The channel plays on the platoon's television like an endless runway show. These soldiers have probably seen more of Milan than they have of Iraq. As the models saunter up and down the far-off runways, the soldiers scan the screen as vigilantly as they do on Mad Max duty. Wade, a valued lookout in his post as an M-240 gunner, has spotted 11 breast popouts in a single hour of Galliano.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHAN RYDENG SPANNER/POLARIS IMAGES

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