Once we were all squared away, my squad slowly made its way to the squirters’ last known position. Distance-wise it wasn’t far, but time-wise you never knew how long it would take. The undulations of the Iraqi desert constantly messed with your depth perception, so when you were looking for something that you didn’t have a fixed position on, it almost always caught you by surprise when you finally found it.
Ten minutes in, we saw a flickering glow on the horizon. We’d all seen that glow before. Most of us on the squad had made that glow at one time or another. Vehicle fire. The glow guided our way, but we actually ended up hearing the vehicle before we saw it. The heat from the fire was cooking off all the 7.62 AK-47 rounds still in the bed of the truck and the noise was echoing out in all directions.
Following the sound, we crested a berm and finally came upon the burning vehicle. The fire was so powerful that it had completely engulfed the truck and nearly whited out our night vision goggles. It also did that weird thing that fire does where it illuminates everything in the foreground but makes it impossible to see anything behind it. To avoid getting clipped by one of the combatants hiding in the blind spot, we organized our assault in a linear formation. This would also reduce the odds of getting fragged by the truck firing AK rounds in every direction like a drunk Decepticon.
From the ISR footage we knew that there were six of these mangy cats that we had to herd. We found the first three right away, lying on the ground in front of the burning vehicle with their weapons beside them. They were playing dead. Their wounded breathing gave them away. Along with a couple of my squad members, we engaged directly before they could return fire or clack off their suicide vests. Play time was over. America three, Terrorists nil (that’s soccer for zero).
As we pushed past the truck, we spotted the fourth man, who had the truck’s PKM pointed at me with its 7.62x51mm hundred-round belt ready to rock. How the guy didn’t cut me in half with that thing before one of my squad members put two in his head, I’ll never know. I got lucky a lot in war. 4–0, America.
That left two more combatants to find. They weren’t dead in the vehicle, and they weren’t within the typical area of destruction you find after a meet-and-greet with an AC-130 gunship. They could be on foot, stalking us from somewhere beyond the halo of the fire. They could be mortally wounded and no longer a threat. But we didn’t know, so we couldn’t assume they were neutralized.
Finally clear of the vehicle, I crested another small berm to get a better view of the surrounding area. There were no obvious structures in the immediate vicinity that would have made for a good terrorist hidey-hole, so I knew that the remaining bad guys were probably super close. That’s when I saw the top of the head of one of them, no more than twenty meters away, as he presented himself from a prone posture to a kneeling position a little ways down the sloping berm. He was trying to aim his AK-47 up at what I imagined was my silhouette, backlit by the raging inferno behind me. Unfortunately for him, I was locked on and at the high ready with my weapon. I immediately engaged the threat with multiple rounds. (5–0, Good Guys.) As he fell, right behind him the sixth member of the Iraqi Village People finally showed himself. He was unarmed, but he was not empty-handed. Then, just as quickly as he popped up, he disappeared…in a large explosion and a blinding cloud of dust.
Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction at the beginning of “The Bonnie Situation” when Jules and Vincent are in an apartment to retrieve a stolen case for Marcellus Wallace and they forget to account for the guy who’s hiding in the bathroom? Remember when the guy bursts out with a “goddamn hand cannon” and unloads the entire clip at point-blank range and completely misses them? That’s exactly what it felt like as we stood there, well within the blast radius of a typical suicide bomber, not just alive but without a scratch on us. Final score: USA 6, Enemy Combatants 0.
Had we seen the vest before it detonated, maybe one of us would have had a spiritual awakening like Jules did, but since it happened before any of us knew what was going on, all we could really do was thank the lord that these assholes had more faith in the Prophet than they had in tactical precision. By blowing himself up against the side of a dirt defilade, at the bottom of it no less, this fucking assclown gave his bomb no room to explode. When our man hit the trigger, most of the shrapnel either blew out the back of his vest, away from us, or out the front, directly into the side of the embankment. Whatever didn’t go there sailed harmlessly up over our heads. When the sand settled and the smoke cleared, the only evidence in the immediate vicinity that this guy had even existed was the pothole where he had just been standing and the blood that coated the ground around the hole, like some kind of Salafi spin art.
For someone from the birthplace of mathematics, this guy understood angles for shit. But that’s to be expected with a lot of suicide bombers: They’re not known for being deep analytical minds who think things through completely. It’s hard to get mad at a walking Darwin Award like that, especially when he saves the U.S. government the thirty-three cents it would have cost to shoot him. Still, I managed to find a way, because now he’d made it virtually impossible to identify him.
A lot of people have this Hollywood picture in their heads of war casualties, like one second they’re lying there shaking and taking in the enormity of what has happened, then the next moment they accept it, cough up some blood, close their eyes, and die. No, sir. If I just put seven bullets in some dude’s head and he didn’t see me coming, there’s no contemplation, there’s just a mess. A mess that I end up having to clean off with the little bit of good drinking water I brought so that our photographer can get a clear(ly useless) picture of the dead combatant. There is no amount of water, no camera angle, no Instagram filter, that is going to make up for the lack of a face. And that is never truer than when you’re dealing with a walking IED who is also really bad at terrorism.
On the bright side, we did have most of the other five combatants. We lined them all up by their vehicle, which had burned itself out by this point, and began to catalog and identify them by taking photos and fingerprints. When we turned our attention to Lil’ Sammy Suicide Bomber, we discovered to my great displeasure that all we were able to find were his legs and ass. There are three people on this planet I can identify from those body parts alone: Serena Williams, Kim Kardashian, and that South African sprinter who killed his girlfriend. There was no way we were going to get anything useful from the lower half of this dude’s body.
Frustrated, I walked away from my squad over to the blast site and started pacing out into the desert on an arc where I thought the blast might have thrown body parts big and sturdy enough to survive the explosion. Maybe I’d get lucky and find a head or something. Fifty meters from the bottom of that little berm, I spotted an arm, severed at the elbow, fingers still attached. Boo-yah. The arm wasn’t just important for identifying the final combatant, by the way. It was also the last piece of the puzzle that was going to let us exfil and go the fuck home.