Walk in My Combat Boots Read online

  On Friday, September 7, 2001, I’m out to dinner with my wife and in-laws at TGI Fridays. Our conversation somehow turns to the subject of the Middle East. I tell them about an interview I heard the other day that the quickest way to shut down the American economy would be for terrorists to attack our airports.

  “You’re full of shit,” my father-in-law scoffs. “They could never attack our airports.”

  On September 10, I work the midnight shift. I’m dead asleep the next morning when my wife calls.

  “Turn on the TV,” she says.

  I look at what’s going on and say, “I told you so.”

  My wife thinks I’m heartless, but she’s wrong. It’s just that I’m not surprised.

  “I’m signing back up,” I tell her. “I’m not gonna sit this fight out.”

  “Obviously.”

  I can tell by her tone that she’s not okay with it, but she understands. She knew what she was getting into when she married me. When something like this comes along, a guy like me, with an extreme alpha personality, is not going to sit on the bench. Put me in, coach, I’m ready. I trained for this—went to Ranger school for this.

  My wife gets pregnant right before my unit gets activated. On March 6, 2003, the day I deploy to Iraq, my wife is nine months pregnant with our daughter. It’s weird thinking about how I’d spent the previous ten years wanting to go to war and now, at the last minute, I don’t want to leave my wife or miss my daughter’s birth. It’s a kick in the balls, spending your entire life planning to go to war and when war finally comes saying, “I’m not ready.”

  My daughter is born on March 12, 2003. I miss her birth by six days. For the next year, I watch her grow up in pictures. For the next year, my wife raises our daughter by herself, as a single mother, while her husband is in a war zone.

  We deploy from Fort Stewart into Jordan. Our mission is to leapfrog into Iraq from the western border and disable all the airfields. The US is afraid that Iraq, in a last-ditch effort, will launch a few SCUD missiles into Israel. If Israel responds and gets involved, every other Islamic Middle Eastern country is going to join the fight—which is exactly what Saddam Hussein wants, this coalition. I think the other Middle Eastern states are smart enough not to want any part of that, but once Israel’s involved, all bets are off.

  We’re trying to figure out how to best take out the Iraqi airfields when a notice goes out that a SCUD has been launched. The gas alert blares as everyone scurries to get into mop suits and gas masks. It’s the scariest moment of my life, sitting in this Conex, sweating my ass off in this suit, and unable to fight back. I’m a sitting target.

  I just got over here to fight, and now I’m gonna die in a chemical attack? This sucks.

  Ten hours later, we get the all clear—there’s nothing here. The SCUD never made its way to Israel—a bad launch or something. It got about halfway out to the western desert.

  I’m picked to represent the infantry on a recon. There’s a staff sergeant from 5th Group, a comms guy. The other guys are in jeans and T-shirts. They don’t say where they’re from, but I can tell they’re the heavy hitters or the muscle of the group. I’m pretty sure they’re CIA. Our job is to figure out a way to drive into Iraq from Jordan.

  One of the CIA guys says, “Hansen, you pack any civvies in your gear?”

  I nod and he tells me to go change. I come back wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and boots. “Hell, no,” the CIA guy says. “No boots. I don’t care if you have to beg, borrow, or steal. Go find a pair of running shoes or something.”

  The two white SUVs have TV duct-taped on the windows. That’s our cover: we’re going in as TV reporters. And because we’re TV reporters, the only thing we’re carrying is Berettas. The guy who I think is CIA is an American citizen, Iranian-born, and speaks Arabic. He’s our interpreter, and our driver.

  Jordanians stop us at a checkpoint right before we’re getting ready to go into Iraq. Our interpreter does all the talking. One of the Jordanians starts screaming, and then they’re screaming at each other. Our driver-interpreter is screaming back. They pull their M4s on us.

  I look at the guy sitting with me in the back seat, the staff sergeant from 5th group, and I say, “Dude, I don’t want to die in this car. You want to shoot our way out?”

  “Yeah, you ready?”

  I take out the Beretta, switch off the safety, and cock the hammer back. We’re going to fling the doors open and basically try to shoot our way out of the situation.

  “We’ll go on three,” I say.

  He nods. My heart’s pounding out of my ears as I start to count.

  The Jordanians lower their weapons and wave us through.

  Holy. Shit. I’m trembling all over as I stick the Beretta in my front waistband.

  I’m trying to process what just went down when we start driving down bumpy roads.

  “What just happened?” I ask the driver.

  “They could hear my Farsi accent,” he replies as we bounce in our seats. “They thought I was an Iranian spy.”

  When people think desert, they think sand. But here, in Jordan, it’s old shale lava rock and there are these ravines that come up out of nowhere and drop thirty, forty, fifty feet.

  The shale rock flattens our tires. We take out the spares, change the tires, get back into the SUV, drive, and flatten our tires again. It’s not until then that I realize the whole time we’ve been driving across these bumpy roads, my Beretta’s been pointed at my balls—and the hammer’s still cocked. My balls could’ve blown off.

  Instead of exchanging letters, my wife and I send cassette tapes to each other. During the middle of April, I’m at the airfield, trying to find a quiet place to make my tape, when a jet flies in and then quickly flies back out.

  I start recording, giving my wife an update as to what’s going on, when I hear another jet approaching. It lands, refuels, and then flies out.

  This happens four times in a row.

  I wake up the platoon sergeant and squad leader as another jet flies in.

  “Get everyone’s shit together,” I tell them. “I’m pretty sure the invasion just started.”

  We start going over all the equipment. Sure enough, I find out jets are basically doing touch-and-goes—touching down, refueling, rearming, and taking off. This goes on for well over twenty-four hours. It’s nonstop. All you hear are jet thrusters throughout the entire base.

  For the next three days, we bomb the shit out of Baghdad.

  Next comes the push into the city. Our battalion gets split. Some go to help support the 3rd Infantry Division (ID). I belong to the unit that comes in behind them. We take over a palace compound near the airport. The compound contains about five palaces, each one as huge and ornate as an upscale Las Vegas resort.

  All the fighting positions are basically abandoned. As we clear the foxholes, we find bayonets, gas masks, AKs, even helmets and uniforms. It looks like these guys hauled ass right when we started rolling into town. Anytime we encounter the occasional sporadic gunfire, the Bradleys—troop carriers with heavy guns—make short work of the shooters.

  That changes when we get to Ramadi, a city in central Iraq.

  Hurricane Battalion confiscates a compound right on the Euphrates River. There are three palaces. One belongs to Saddam Hussein, and each son got his own palace. There’s no indoor plumbing, so we have to make do with these makeshift portalets that have the fifty-five-gallon drums you cut in half. We take turns pulling ’em out, pouring in diesel, and stirring it all for a good hour before lighting it on fire. If you don’t stir, it won’t burn off, and you’ll wind up with a big turd cake.

  We swim, bathe, and do our laundry in the river’s crystal clear water. The chaplain says he’ll baptize anyone in the Euphrates—which is pretty cool, given its Christian significance in the Bible. A lot of us do it.

  The guys in Ramadi used to be military. Now they have no jobs and no prospects, and they decide to stay, dig in, and fight. They’re more organized with their IE
D attacks, and they hit us with mortars—a lot of mortars. Every night, for forty-five days straight, they mortar the shit out of us. It gets to the point where we stop caring.

  I’m not scared. The attacks don’t get close because they’re using 60mm mortars, and the insurgents really suck at targeting. Still, the chaplain regularly reads from the Bible, especially Psalm 124: “Had it not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us alive.…Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us to be torn by their teeth.…Our help is in the name of the Lord.”

  We sleep near the Euphrates. It’s summer, unbearably hot. Most of us sleep naked. The flies and fleas—they’re killing us. I’m getting eaten from head to toe. I can’t take the sand fly bites anymore.

  “That’s it,” I say. “I’m going to sleep on the roof.”

  “You can’t sleep up there,” one of my guys says. “We’re getting mortared.”

  “Honestly, I don’t care. I’d rather get hit by a mortar than bit by another flea.”

  I go up to the top of the palace with my M16 and set up my cot on the flat roof, next to a wall. In the distance I can hear some troops in contact. Anyone on the other side of the Euphrates right now could see me, but I don’t care.

  Then I hear it—the sound of a Spectre gunship, one of the deadliest aircrafts in the US Air Force. A moment later, the sky lights up from gunfire, and I witness the gunship’s massive power as it helps the good guys on the ground.

  It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

  It’s also psychologically motivating. The bad guys on the ground don’t stand a chance. I install my bug net and go to sleep.

  I’m woken up when an RPG hits the wall.

  I’m pissed—not about getting attacked but about being woken up and knocked out of bed when I was getting my first good solid sleep in days. I jump up, grab my M16, and crank off a mag across the river, screaming, “You missed me, assholes!” I throw down my rifle and go back to sleep.

  The next day, the guys who were sleeping down by the river say it was the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. Watching their skinny little naked lieutenant cranking off rounds and screaming and then throwing his rifle down and going back to bed—they were laughing so hard they were crying.

  Nine months into deployment, and all we’re doing is presence patrols. We’re trying to turn the patrols over to the Iraqis, but these guys don’t know their rear end from a hole in the ground.

  One of my higher-ups says, “Hey, Hansen. You’re a cop back home.”

  I nod, wondering where this is going.

  “We’ve got eight, maybe nine guys in the battalion who’re cops,” he says. “We’re gonna form this super squad. We want you guys to train these Iraqis, put together, like, a three-day in-service. You’re gonna train them how to be cops and how to patrol.”

  I’m thinking that’ll go over like a fart in church, but I keep it to myself. I go off and develop a training plan that will run in three-day cycles.

  We end up training thousands in the Ramadi area. My super squad does so well, I’m told we’re going to do training through the rest of central and northern Iraq. We’ll be traveling on our own, too, without battalion support.

  As we start driving to other places, especially in northern Iraq, where certain parts are still very tribal, I’m struck by the level of poverty. I’ve seen a lot of poverty back home—I’ve seen homeless people, and I’ve been in the ghettos—but the poorest of Americans have clean drinking water. They can get clothes at a Goodwill or a Salvation Army and, if needed, walk into an ER and get medical care. Here, a lot of really young poor kids—like between the ages of two and three—run around naked.

  “I thought Muslims were supposed to be conservative and always wear clothes and stuff,” I say to my interpreter.

  “They don’t wear clothes because they don’t have clothes,” he replies. “A lot of families are so poor they usually don’t get hand-me-downs until they’re four or five.”

  The IEDs get more serious the closer we get to Syria. On the highways, we begin to encounter ten-by-ten craters that are, like, three feet deep. Every time I see one of these craters, I say to myself, You don’t walk away from an IED like that.

  Instead of mortar attacks at the base, we get rockets launched at us.

  Death starts to become real.

  We roll into Fallujah to train the police. The colonel on the nearby patrol base insists we take the same route to Fallujah every time we leave.

  “Sir, that’s against basic infantry tactics,” I tell him repeatedly. “You always leave the patrol base a different way. You enter and leave the wire a different way, every day.”

  And each time he says, “Don’t deviate from the plans.”

  I’m a popular officer with the enlisted men, but I’m not popular with officers because I do something that most of them don’t: I tell the truth. I tell the colonel, right to his face, several times, my assessment of the mission:

  “This is stupid.”

  He doesn’t care. He’s more concerned about his officer evaluation reports than anything else. OERs are all about a business model, and for this guy (and a lot of other officers), this is a business.

  I have no choice but to comply. We take the same route as we roll into Fallujah in our four vehicles—a pair of unarmored Humvees driving in front of me and behind me. My Humvee always stays in the middle since it’s a soft-skin.

  The bridge has a guardrail on both sides. I’m sitting in the passenger’s seat, looking out the front window at a big mound of dirt on the guardrail near the driver’s side. Then I’m staring at it and we’re pulling up next to it and I see another mound of dirt on the guardrail near my side and I’m thinking, That looks just like an IED—

  Boom.

  The blast hits the forward and rear vehicles, which are unarmored. The second IED, the one near me and right outside my door, blows—boom—and I scream “Stop!” because I see someone running—or at least I think I do. I’m disoriented, so I’m not sure. All the oxygen has been blown out of the area. When I take a deep breath, I suck up a bunch of hot nitrogen gases and my lungs feel like they’re on fire.

  I get outside. Tony, a 249 gunner, says he sees the triggerman. I see him, too; the guy’s a hundred yards away, running away from us. Even though I’m still disoriented, I lock down on the guy. Tony fires as I fire a couple of rounds. The triggerman keeps running and disappears.

  Fortunately, no one is hurt. The IED on my side, the right side, was incorrectly tamped inside this big mound of dirt. The IED on the other side of the road was taped to the guardrail post. When it blew, the post acted as a deflector, and the blast blew out at forty-five-degree angles, away from my Humvee—and I know the triggerman was aiming specifically for my vehicle because it’s the only soft-skin in the convoy.

  We roll into town and pull into the police compound. The Iraqi police stare at us in disbelief—like we shouldn’t be here. And that’s when it hits me:

  These motherfuckers were in on the bombing. And now they’re looking at each other as if to say, Holy shit, how did that go wrong?

  I can’t trust any of these guys.

  I’m done with you people, I want to say. I want to go home to my wife and hold my daughter for the first time. You want to feel like you’re making a difference—and I know we do make a difference in a few of their lives—but it’s the ones who don’t care that make you jaded on why you’re there.

  The police find the triggerman at the hospital. Bullet went in the back of the guy’s head, but it didn’t penetrate the skull. Instead, it spun between the skull and the skin and ended up in the guy’s nasal cavity. The police arrest him and bring the bullet back to the police station to show us.

  The bullet isn’t deformed. I can see the rifling marks and the green paint on the tip of the 5.56-round.

  “That’s my round,” Tony says.

  “Dude, it’s my round. I took a headshot.”

&n
bsp; “Yeah, but I cranked off on him,” he says. “Totally my round.”

  “Trust me, that was me.”

  And around and around we go, busting each other’s balls while engaging in some much-needed gallows humor. It’s a great distraction to keep me from thinking deeply about the IED attack. I should be dead. My vehicle was the target; I should be dead—we should all be dead. We shouldn’t be standing here.

  Days pass and my vision is still blurry, and I’ve got headaches and stuff. I’m sent to Baghdad to get checked out and dropped off at the green zone. I’m leaving the hospital, prepared to walk the couple of miles to the next place I need to go, when a Humvee pulls up next to me. The driver asks me if I want a ride. I jump in the back, next to another guy, and the driver turns on a little radio. I hear a pop song, one I recognize: Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.”

  I shut my eyes and the sun is beating down on me and there’s this moment of normalcy. I feel like I’m back in Florida chilling out to tunes with the ragtop down on my Jeep Wrangler, just riding around in a car with a group of guys listening to music.

  And then it comes back to me: I should be dead from that blast. I think of the chaplain baptizing us in the Euphrates, and I think of that Bible verse he read about God’s protection. Our battalion hasn’t suffered a single fatality. I’m alive because God literally put His hands around my vehicle that day and protected me. I don’t know how to describe it other than that.

  MIGUEL FERRER

  Miguel Ferrer had a really strong interest in the military from an early age. Growing up in Baltimore, he played with G.I. Joes and watched documentaries on the Discovery Channel and Military Channel. His grandfather served in World War II, and his uncle, a scout sniper with the Army, served in Afghanistan. Wanting to see the world and do something meaningful, Miguel bypassed college and entered the United States Navy. He’s a hospital corpsman, second class.