Another Crazy War Story VII: The Blue Car

I left the last diary on a cruel cliffhanger, and for the kossacks who read this series regularly, I apologize for the long delay in bringing you the conclusion.  I just had to be in the right frame of mind to tell this one.  Up until now I've tried to keep some sense of levity about my war diaries, but there is no humor in this one.  This one haunts me.

We pulled away from the sight of the ambush with itchy trigger fingers.  If there is force willing to mount a reasonably straightforward attack on a platoon of U.S. Marines in a war where that tactic was not in fashion, chances are there is another waiting somewhere nearby.

That was the thinking at least.

Saying a Marine has an itchy trigger finger is truly a redundancy.  We are world renowned for being the fiercest fighting force assembled for modern warfare.  There is a reason we guard the embassies instead of the Army.  Put us in battle, and we become Devil Dogs.

So as we ride away from teaching some insurgents that fact, still in the trail vehicle, the fog of war has settled nice and thick.  We ride past a house, and somebody, I don't know who, tells LCpl McCallum "Somebody just ran in there."  

McCallum's response, as squad leader, was to let his Marines loose.  At the time it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  Anyone running into their house must have nefarious reasons for doing so if a rolling column of rabid and adrenalized warriors come their way.  Of course now I know our reaction was ridiculous.  Whoever that was running into that house, they were probably just scared.  But man, when that fog roles in, the line between who's enemy and who's not gets mighty blurry.

I don't think we killed anyone in this instance, although I could be wrong, because who knows where those bullets ended up.  All I remember in about this part of the story is the house.  It was a squat grey, stucco-looking thing.  I remember the way the bullets ripped into it, the chunks of debris that came flying off in all directions, loosened from fifteen different muzzles firing simultaneously.  I can't for the life of me remember if mine was one of them.  That part is lost in the fog.

We turned onto a dirt road, and right behind us there pulls a blue sedan.  It was a pathetic looking thing, and any car following a convoy is suspect.  McCallum ordered PFC Reynolds to fire a warning shot over the car.  Reynolds fired, but the car didn't change course or speed.  McCallum upped the ante, and ordered Reynolds to fire a grenade from the launcher attached to his M-16.  Reynolds complied, and the round landed in front of the car, far enough away to be an extremely stern warning to pound the fucking brakes.

McCallum gave the car every opportunity to stop, and rightly so.  But instead, the car sped up.  At this point, there was enough evidence to suggest that the driver might sit on enough explosive to kill everyone in our seven ton, so McCallum said exactly the right thing next, even if he said it unartfully.

"Light that motherfucker up!"

So we did.  Or rather they did.  I was three or four Marines from the back of the truck so I didn't have a shot, but the gunner in the turret and the two Marines nearest the back did the job well enough.  Holes appeared in the windshield, and the car lurched to a stop by the side of the road.  It was the right thing to do in the situation.  If I had a shot, I would have taken it without hesitation, even knowing what I know now.

We arrived at another one of our stopping points, and we regroup.  The Company First Sergeant, a big, beefy Gunnery Sergeant (who was also filling a billet above his pay grade),  came down the line and talked with all the Marines.  He was spitting mad.  Seems an Iraqi boy caught a stray round (from which side is anybody's guess) and the Gunny told the mother to get in her car and drive in the middle of the convoy, and that we would get her boy medical attention.  They never made it to the middle of the convoy.  This was the first the Marines in our truck heard about any civilian casualties, or cars supposed to be part of the convoy.  The word had somehow gotten lost along the chain.

It wasn't until years later that I put two and two together, after the fog finally lifted.  That blue car and Gunny's car were one and the same.  We killed a boy and his mother.  Innocents.  When the mother sped up, she was probably trying to tell us who she was, and all she got for it was lead.

If anything it's the Gunny's fault.  Not only did he not ensure that his word was passed down properly, but having a civilian car join a military convoy was a breach of protocol.  If the boy was hurt that badly, he should have either had a corpsmen attend to him or called for a med-evac chopper.  But Gunny didn't pull the trigger.  Hell, I didn't pull the trigger, and I still see that blue car, coming to a dead stop.  I still mourn those two people, and I didn't kill them.  But I was a party to it.

If there's one thing I've been trying to convey ever since I got back from the battlefield, it's this; war breaks everybody who fights in it.  The rationale for the war doesn't matter.  The side you fight on doesn't matter.  We all come back broken, seeing things we don't want to see and remembering things we don't want to remember.  Some of us deal with it better than others, some of us have damage much worse than others, but we're all broken to a degree.  The blue car is one of the things that breaks me.

Every once in a while I hear people who's never served fetishize war.  They like to imagine it as John Wayne  and action and noble adventure a la WWII and all manner of horseshit.  I want to wrap my fingers around their throats, squeeze, shake, and scream in their stupid fucking faces.  They know nothing about war.  The only people who do are the ones who have been there.  There is nothing noble about war.  It is ugly, cruel, scary, and horrible.  It is nothing like a John Wayne movie, or any movie.  Asking one human being to kill another is to ask them to kill a part of themselves, and you better not ask them to until damn sure it's not only necessary, but unavoidable.  Innocents will die.  It is inevitable, and it will usually be by accicdent.

But knowing it's an accident doesn't assuage the guilt.  Nothing does.  I'll have to live with it my entire life, even though none of the killing shots were mine.  There are two things that help me cope.  One is my writings and talking to sympathetic, non-judgmental ears.  The second is my anger, the little torch of indignant rage that burns inside me.  Because I am just a little bit broken, and for what?  WMD?  Democracy?  Halliburton?  I shouldn't have to feel this way for any reason except our very survival.

Nobody should.