The End of Fear

On the drive between Atheria and Coos Bay, the forests show off a thousand different greens. The trees’ canopies drape over the highway like protective bunkers and they sparkle. The clouds cover the sun a lot, and that makes me want to be outside, to see the forest that glows with all the water dripping off the green leaves, so I drive from my home to Coos Bay and back. Some of my favorite things about this route are the pullouts and lookouts along the side of the road. I know I could just stop and stare at the foliage forever. Iraq’s weather and flora looked slightly differently from Oregon. Iraq was a totally different clime: a colorless and beige place, like coffee and milk that has been left out too long. Oregon remains green all the time. But Iraq shines dull with all the khaki dust, and the heat in Iraq could kill glaciers. Every day by noon, the air became angry and melted things. That kind of intensity doesn’t go away. Even these days, among the green and dripping, I can sometimes feel the heat and the tickling of dust in my throat. At times like this, I pull over, shut off the engine and stare out the window. It helps a little. But the really bad times when it I just can’t stand I, I open a bottle I have in the glove compartment. Those nugatory pills help a lot. They take away the heat.1

I like it when the clouds cover the sun and the air feels cool and damp on my skin. In Iraq, the heat burned our faces from above and our feet from below. No way around it. The desert of Sunni Iraq blazed every night from early March to December. One night, in early May, around midnight, me and Baker and Diaz drove around, all alone in the moonlight, but the moon had eclisped. Later, the moon’s redness even left but I stayed. After the attack killed Bker and Diaz, Captain McConnell gave me some other men to replace them. He took Baker and Diaz away and gave me new men and laughed, like a villain in a melodrama. He might have twisted his mustache between his fingers too; I can’t really remember.2

For weeks when I lived in Iraq, everything we did was hopeful. Actually, we didn’t do much at all except hand out propoganda leaflets to adults and candy to children. At first, we just patrolled and met people and handed out what we could. We lived well and treated people well. It may have been a little bit boring, but boring felt good, as we found out. It took time for it to get really bad. We only got afraid after several months. Thankfully, these days, I have ways to deal with the fear and heat: they sit in a bottle in my car. I didn’t have the pink pills in Iraq, because in Iraq, I didn’t know I would need them. I anticipated safety. For the first six months in Iraq, we felt safe; we had walls of humvee armor and kevlar vests and helmets and three-inch thick bullet proof glass, and those things guarded us. But after a while, safety left.3

When I am home, Daley lives with me, and that seems okay, but, honestly, she doesn’t help me as much as other things do. Before the army, I had a friend who was important to me. She still has a place high on my list of people I love. She helps the most. Before the army, I didn’t panic, not at all. But now, I drive and I leave and I sometimes visit my friend and sometimes not. Sometimes I take the pink pills and sometimes not. The green helps too. Did I mention that? The drenched green helps. 4

In late April and early May, we drove around Ar Ramadi on patrol and got attacked a lot. Every night we went out the gate. And every night, we all made it back inside. The first time they attacked us, it was during a patrol along the river. That day was brutal. But the nights after that day, the nights when we people would fire at us and try to kill us, those nights grew to be way more intense, like a boxer in the 12th round, who can barely stay conscious for the beating.5

On one particular day in early May, we got ready for our all-night patrol by doing the things that soldiers do in Iraq: we watched TV. We listened to iPods. We called girlfriends. We cleaned weapons so that later we could fire off a few rounds. We collected just the right size rocks for civil defense. We stood in front of the air conditioning. We stockpiled booze. We listened to our patrol briefing. We ignored everything. And then, we exited the base camp and began our first half of the night.6

Usually, we spent these patrol nights doing things in two parts: The first part of the night we drove alongside of the river and the second part of the night, we sat in the woods. There really were forests there. We found this little place where we would go to spend the second half of the night. We called it the Garden of Eden, for obvious geographical reasons, and because it wasn’t a shithole. To get there, we had to drive down a road separated by a middle median in the. We would turn left, towards the river, and drive through somebody’s back yard to get to this place with bushes and trees and the river right in front. We would park facing the river and no one could have possibly seen us, except maybe from directly across the river. We went there to get away. Even in the middle of the day, you could take a shit and no one could see you. 7

In the middle of the night, the second half of the night, we would go to the Garden and sit on top of our humvee hoods and listen to nothing. After midnight, when all the tracers had stopped and we knew we could safely pull off our body armor and drink, we would sit and listen and wonder how a war could go on just on the other side of the bushes. The days fiery heat burned us. But it got cooler late at night, and we liked that. 8

So this one night in early May 2004, when an eclipse schedule took place that no one told us about happened we patrolled through the first half of the night. No one briefed us that darkness would completely surround us. We didn’t know, so we just drove out of the gate and went on patrol for the first half of the night. Baker and Diaz and I left the gate but only I stayed out all night. They came back early, but I stayed out all fucking night. I carried everyone else in the humvee that night, which I’m not happy about, because if Baker would have been driving, he’s the one who would have had to figure out how to deal with a dead friend, but he didn’t drive; I did.9

We drove down the streets that night and my right leg roasted because it rested against the engine. I remember that. My right leg blazed. These days, when I drive, I never turn the feet heat on because my legs get too hot. Daley has cold feet, but she has no idea. Let her have cold feet. I’m the one who wants to die when it gets above 80 goddamn degrees outside. 10

The first half of the night flew by nicely, just like old times. Around midnight, we stopped to catch the bad guys who violated curfew. We just did this curfew violating, bad guy catching thing, and then it was supposed to be on to the Garden, with the Tree of Life and the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We got out and smoked cigarettes, and we pointed out interesting things that we pretended were threats to our well being. That night, we said things like “Check it out Sergeant, 12 O’clock.” and “Fire off a couple of rounds. Let them know we’re still here!” We had heard those things in movies and thought they were cool. And they are cool. Shit. They wanted us to believe that lines like that kept us alive. 11

When we stopped to arrest curfew violators, we waited in the middle of the road. No one was around, so we smoked cigarettes and talked. Diaz talked first.12

“Check it out, Sergeant Neely,” he said, “12 O’Clock.”13

When I stretch my exposed neck, I saw the moon disappearing behind something. I shook my head.14

“It’s just an eclipse Diaz; it’s just the shadow of the Earth passing in front of the moon."15

“But its red! How is it red?” Diaz crossed himself. “That’s spooky, man. It’s like some Revelations shit.”16

“Diaz, dude, calm down,” I said, “When the shadow of the Earth passes in front of the moon…”17

Diaz interupted. “Damn, Sergreant. I know all about that. I seen the Discovery Channel. Back home though, my mother, she used to tell me that el chupacabra comes by the light of a red moon.”18

“Diaz,” I said, “Seriously. There’s nothing to worry about.”19

Diaz kept looking up at the moon and pulled out his St. Christopher medal and kissed it. Baker walked up from behind me. 20

“What’s he complaining about?” Baker said.21

“Nothing,” I said. “Just the dark.”22

I stood there for awhile and watched Diaz’ cigarette cherry flare as his helmet become less visible in the growing darkness. 23

The best thing about driving now, for me, is that, now, I know when to quit. Diaz was fucking right to be afraid, and I am fucking right to be afraid now. There’s no such thing as courage anyway. At least Diaz had the good sense to be scared. Not that he could have done anything about it, but at least he knew to be scared. These days, I can do something about it. Many days, I do. I take a drive. I take some pills. I see Liz. But I guess the problem is that it still comes back. I don’t know what to do about that.24

We vaulted back in the humvee, Diaz again on the .50 cal, and Baker in the passenger seat. I drove, going to the Garden, but never getting there. The lights of the city were there, though. We shared smokes. We traded off: the white man’s Marlboro followed by the black man’s menthol. We rounded a corner. Then we rounded another corner. Diaz loved the wind in his face and the feeling of power that the machine gun’s butterfly triggers gave him, so I left him in the gunner’s hatch while Baker and I talked. Diaz hung one hand on the machine gun while the other drooped inside. I shook my head to keep awake. There were movie lines running through my head. Things are quiet, too quiet. I pretended to chuckle at this even because I didn’t understand that the shit was about to hit, fullforce, into a desert whirlwind of a fan.25

It was night, and we were in the middle of street lights and the blood red moon of an eclipse. Diaz, Baker, and I drove through the city of Ar Ramadi looking for the quiet dark spot to wait till morning. We moved slowly with our headlights off. Even our voices were hushed, as if the diesel humvee engine wouldn’t give us away if we just talked softly enough. 26

As we were rounding the last corner, the lights from the city shone into the humvee, and then, they, like the moon before them, were suddenly gone. Something cracked and exploded in front of me. A whoosh. And the night all around me lit up again. A Scream. A Snap. Whiz. No emotion. Diaz’s arm drooped in the consuming firelight. The wind wheezed out a breath of the side of my uninjured face. A soft sob came from the passenger seat. I could hear Baker’s breath gurgling past the dark red bubbles on his lips. The radio crackled to something little more than cessation. They both went away, but I was still there. They left me, Diaz and Baker. And I am still here. 27

Soon after, the cavalry came, quite literally, in the form of six humvee’s, backed up by several Bradleys and an Abrams tank. They lined the streets firing into an industrial sector while medics raced between Diaz and Baker. I walked between the lines of fire and asked if I could do anything. One machine gunner spoke for me:28

“Just wanna fuck them up,” he said. 29

“No more than I do!” I yelled to him over the loud crack of the machine gun. He charged his .50 caliber gun mounted on the humvee and continued to yell to me, or at me. “Before they can find their way out.”30

A hand closed on my shoulder. I spun around. It was Captain McConnell.31

“We’ve got two guys who can stay the rest of the night on patrol with you, Sergeant Neely.”32

“So. Sir.” My thumb flicked the safety switch on my M16 back and forth between semi and burst. “You want me to stay out here?”33

His smile flickered in the muzzle blasts above and behind us and shouted at me. “That’s what you get paid for, right Sergeant?” He clapped me on the back and chuckled while he walked away.34

“Mother Fucker.” He couldn’t hear me. The .50 cals drowned out my words.35

They made me stay that night: the ones who make the decisions. They gave me replacement men. They made it all better; made it all go away, they gave me a heart and a brain. Fuck the nerve. They couldn’t give me that. But I did make it through the night. Eventually, the lights came back on in the city. Eventually, I looked up and the moon was back. My new crew, Smitty and What’shisname, all went back to camp, safe and sound, and when we got back, we all sighed in unison, happy that we made it, like bambi before his mother was killed, and I moved past them both, on to my barracks room, where there was air-conditioning and lights, but no pink pills, not yet.36