My plane back to Kuwait is, as usual, hours late. I try to pass the time before the flight out, by striking up conversations with a couple of soldiers.
The Baghdad skyline, looking...
The Baghdad skyline, looking north.
The first one is a sullen young sergeant, who clearly doesn't want to talk. I finally get out of him that he is from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I also find out that he is stationed at Abu Ghraib. He is also unmoved that I have been there. I ask him a pointed question, "Who are the inmates out there? The prisoners? Or you guys?"
Slowly he answers, "That's been discussed. I mean, they can have family visits. We can't. We can't ever even go out of the compound. There are guys there who have never even seen what's outside the blast barriers. The inmates get their meals brought to them.
"They may get out someday. I don't know if we ever will." He is six months through a one-year deployment that may get involuntarily extended. He's going home, on emergency leave.
The next soldier I chat up is another guy going on leave. He drives with convoys like I have. His experience has been frightful.
"My first duty was 'Go out and clean up human body parts' at a roadside bombing. I think, 'What's up with this?' Pieces of people scattered everywhere." He shakes his head. "Why should a young man have to see things like that?"
Another time, he says he was nearly shot by other soldiers. "We're working to disarm IEDs on Route Irish, and these guys from another convoy start machine-gunning us. Who did they think we were? Insurgents don't drive M1114s. Don't wear unis. The bullets were going by so close between the medic and me, you could hear the wind snap."
His worst memory, though, involves the popular female aid worker who was killed on the way to the airport about a month earlier. Her death made all the papers. The details didn't.
"Her convoy hit an IED," he explains. He saw it. It was his convoy. "The vehicle in front of her really hit it, but the force was directed back at her vehicle. It was one of those armored Suburbans, and man, it just came apart. Blew it wide open.
"Her body was thrown out on the street, on fire. She had third degree burns over 100 percent of her body. She was just laying there in the road, burning. We just got out a body bag, and came over and unrolled it. We were getting ready to put what was left of her in there, and we hear, 'I'm not dead.' It was her. She was still alive.
"Why did I have to see that? I'll never forget that. Why should anyone have to see that?"
I don't try to talk to any more soldiers.
Just before sunset, a huge blast shakes the whole area. Insurgents somewhere out in the cane fields have dropped a mortar round into the airport. It lands near a runway. Planes continue to take off. Black smoke wafts over the compound. Though I will miss the friends I've made, I am ready to leave.
Dear Four Wheeler,
My name is Specialist Johnathan Howard. I am currently stationed in Tikrit, Iraq, with the 42nd Engineer Brigade PSD team. This is our M1114 HMMVV that was hit by a car bomb from about 3 feet away. I would like to thank Uncle Sam and the American taxpayers for providing my team with brand-new, fully armored, turbocharged Hummers to protect us. All three of us in the truck were injured, but if it had been an unarmored Hummer, we would have been toast.
Spc. Johnathan Howard
U.S. Army