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by Forest Ray
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The red light of headlamps illuminates young faces swaddled in Kevlar, fleece beanies and brown-and-black checkered keffiyehs. A young soldier pulls his keffiyeh tight, stuffing its folds under his camouflaged lapel to keep out the chill night breeze. The novelty of war having worn thin, he shakes off lingering sleep by breathing deeply of the crisp air.
“Listen up!”
The staff sergeant calls the paratroopers to attention and a young lieutenant goes over the plan for that night’s convoy. A student only a year ago, the lieutenant now commands his first mission. Most of those he now leads into the night have been soldiers for the past two to three years. The lieutenant takes command of the situation by acting the part of the experienced leader. He will only lead his first convoy once. It must go according to plan. In speech, he mimics the mannerisms of his staff sergeant, whose superior age and experience the lieutenant both envies and adores.
The troops huddle together, partly to better hear the lieutenant and partly for warmth. Desert nights bear slim similarity to desert days and the cold air penetrates layers of fabric and armor. The mission is simple in nature: Bring supplies from one place to another, avoid engagements, and return home. The soldiers gathered in the dark form part of a logistical unit. They are not infantry but REMF – rear echelon motherfuckers, in military parlance. A war with no front lines, however, robs the term of significance.
Briefing complete, the servicemen mount their vehicles and move forward into the night. Inside the trucks, fingers pry open cans of Red Bull and jaws close on wads of chewing tobacco, each soldier fighting sleep deprivation with their own preferred weapon. “Stay alert, stay alive” is the soldiers’ oft-repeated mantra. Sleep is the only enemy that always returns to the fight. Sleep is patient and patience wins the long game.
Scouting eyes peer into the dark, trying not to focus on the reflectors of each vehicle ahead of them. At the wheel of one truck, the young soldier’s partner sees the face of a robot in the pattern of reflective tape on the truck ahead of him. A second later, he swerves over the median and then jerks back into line.
“You okay?” asks the young soldier, riding shotgun.
“Yeah. Pass me one of the Red Bulls, will you?”
In the pre-dawn hours, those moments that belong neither to the morning or to the night, the convoy nears Fallujah. Desert cities glow in the night, oases of light in the darkness, like lava squeezed from the earth. Fallujah is the exception tonight, its light extinguished by war. The few lights that do burn only emphasize the black masses of their surroundings. War makes light dangerous and Fallujah’s denizens wield darkness as a shield, to hide from invaders’ prying eyes.
The convoy skirts the edges of the city. The soldiers know the dangers of darkness and their mission lies far in the distance. There is nothing to gain by making themselves targets for the city dwellers.
The convoy reaches an intersection and a frantic voice takes to the radio.
“They have guns!”
Near the front of the convoy, the young lieutenant’s heart skips a beat, triggering a rush of adrenaline that shocks his intestines. He reaches for the radio as the world freezes into a single moment.
Several trucks back, the young soldier riding shotgun looks up and sees a group of armed men emerging from the shadows of the buildings that line the street. They wear no uniform and like him, folded keffiyehs conceal the contours of many of their faces.
Now running in a dream, the soldier’s truck creeps forward as those ahead of him begin to negotiate the turn. He locks eyes with a man directly across from him. The man has brown eyes and olive skin. His black hair is cropped short on the sides and the top is hidden under his keffiyeh. His beard is also short, although it shows scruffy signs of the razor’s neglect. He wears a grey vest over a white shirt. He is probably close in age to the soldier.
The man holds a rifle in his right hand and begins to raise it. In that instant, the soldier recalls the countless hours he has spent training with his own rifle. An act repeated thousands of times in dozens of variations; position your body, position the rifle, aim, pause, pull the trigger. Over and over, again and again, the same training repeated in swamps and deserts, wooded hills and indoor firing ranges. Hundreds of hours culminate in a single action. The soldier shifts the focus of his rifle, pointed out the window, towards the man. It is a subtle movement, requiring little thought or effort.
The soldier and the man maintain eye contact. Separated by three meters of air, the soldier’s rifle points directly at the man’s chest. From this distance, it is impossible to miss. The man continues to raise his rifle.
In that same instant, the soldier considers his friend at the wheel next to him. In the brief time that they have known each other, they have become closer than childhood friends. Their training was not easy and through shared hardship, they have formed bonds as strong as any blood brothers. In that moment, no patriotic thought crosses the soldier’s mind. He will simply fight to prevent harm from befalling his brother.
I will kill this man, he thinks and knows it to be true.
Two trucks ahead, the gunner manning the .50 caliber machine gun swivels his weapon towards the opposing armed men. Only the crunch of tires on dirt reaches the soldier’s ears, but he knows that all will change in an instant.
The man continues to raise his rifle. The soldier has often wondered whether he would have to kill and if so, what it would feel like. He expected to feel many things but not the current absence of emotion, a void interrupting the last moment and the next. An electric impulse leaves the soldier’s brain, bound for a fingertip. The soldier sees nothing but the man’s eyes.
The radio erupts in noise.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! They’re friendlies!”
The young lieutenant’s voice screams across encoded frequencies, delivering the one piece of intelligence forgotten under the stress of acting the part of the leader.
The pulse stops at the soldier’s fingertip. The soldier and the man continue to hold each other’s gaze as the trucks pulls forward, now passing. A dark-skinned young man, eyes wide and mouth agape, raises his rifle in surrender, the barrel pointed towards the stars.
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Forest Ray was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne and served in Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom between 2003 and 2004. He now works as a science journalist covering genomic technologies. After living abroad for several years, he is now based in Long Beach, California.
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