We hit the town fast and hard, just as we have done before, just as we will do again. Fly in on a CH-47 Chinook, secure and search the town, and get out. As soon as we dismount the helicopter and it takes off, we run towards the outlying buildings 200 meters away. This town is like everywhere else I’ve been in Iraq; it could be Baqubah, Tikrit, or Tarmiyah. Everything is tan and brown, blindingly bright, and hot. Stick-your-face-in-an-oven-hot. It’s built from mud-brick, scraps of metal, and anything else the inhabitants can find. The layout is as haphazard as the building materials; houses join at odd angles to form small alleys that dead end right before the central road. Just another random town.
My squad splits off from the rest of the platoon to clear our designated sector. Our company First Sergeant, who arrived on a different Chinook, decides to tag along with us. By midday we have moved through and secured about half the town. It’s exhausting running house to house through this heat, but as hot as it is outside, inside it’s even worse. The brick and metal soak up the sun and the walls keep any kind of breeze from reaching us. First Sergeant halts our movement near an intersection so we can rest briefly and drink some water. He tells me, “Keep your eyes down these two streets; if anyone pokes their head out of a door or alley, fire a warning shot to push them back in.”
I post up at the corner of a building so I have some cover on my left; this lets me see perfectly down the alley in front of me and still have a good view to my side. Watching the path, I take a long drink of warm water from my Camelbak—heat and constant movement are thirst inducing. After a short time, my eyes are pulled to a slight flash of color in a doorway down the alley.
Two girls, probably sisters, hold each other and poke their heads out of a doorway. The building they are in is probably a storage room of some kind; it’s tiny. The older one, who can’t be more than 14, wears a blue hijab. Even from 30 meters away I can see the sheer terror and panic in their eyes. I can see on their faces that they want to get back to their house and family.
I put out my left hand to wave the girls back, keeping my right on the pistol-grip of my machine gun. In my mind I tell them, Stay inside. I begin to wave harder—mentally trying to push them into the room. Stay in there where it’s safe! Instead of retreating into the room they edge further into the doorway, ready to run out. Oh God, please! Stay inside so I won’t have to shoot at you. I raise the machine gun to my shoulder to fire a warning burst.
Everything happens in slow motion, yet all at once.
The feel of every round leaving the gun, five bullets in quick succession, a staccato push on my shoulder where the stock joins my body.
A slight rise of the gun sight’s red dot from where a moment ago I aimed at the brown mud wall just to the right of the girls.
A flash of blue in front of that red dot, and then brown again; my stomach drops into the dirt.
The sound comes finally—the explosive crack from the bullets. The metallic chink of the linked rounds being pulled through and ejected from the gun.
A soft thud.
The younger girl is crying—screaming—before I can even stand up. She was holding her sister’s hand when they started running and was pulled down when her sister fell. I bolt down the alley towards them, shocked by what I caused. When I reach them, blood is pooling around the girl in blue. Her sister is kneeling, frantically shaking her loved one, blood soaking into her dress. Screaming at her—screaming at me. She cries, reaching a bloody hand towards me, demanding for me to help her, to know why I shot her sister. Unintelligible words I can never translate but understand all the same . . .
. . . Gasping, I wake up soaked in sweat. It takes a few seconds to realize I’m in my bedroom, years and thousands of miles away. It was only a nightmare. I had fired the warning shot, but the girls hadn’t run until after I fired. As scared as they looked, they may have run because I fired. I often replay how it could have turned out if those girls would have started to run a half-second sooner. I return to that moment in my head—often as it truly happened, sometimes how it couldhave happened. Even though they did not get shot, in my mind I have killed the girls in the alley a hundred times.
***
Andrew LaBasi is a six-year veteran of the United States Army. He deployed to Iraq during the 2007 surge with the 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment (Manchu), 2nd Infantry Division. Read his prose-poem here: Deeper than Bone
Andrew writes flash-creative-nonfiction and prose-poetry. While he never planned to write at all, he is driven to help veterans better understand their own experience while revealing a glimpse of that which can never be fully explained in words to those with no military background.
He is co-creator of the Veterans Writing Community, which holds writing workshops and one-on-one sessions to help those in the military community tell their stories. You can share your story by contacting the VWC Website.
