The sharp crack of an explosion shattered the midday quiet of our company area. The blast came from right

next to our company commander and First Sergeant’s quarters, in which a meeting had been taking place. The platoon nearest to the blast scattered towards any available cover. A second or two later, the officers and NCOs in the meeting ran out in full battle rattle; armor on, weapons ready, fear and fight in their eyes. We in my platoon, Ambulance, remained seated. We did not flinch, but watched the unfolding action with mute acceptance.

     It was a hot desert day and a group of us had grown a little bored over lunch. Our lunch had consisted of MREs, which are the military food rations. MRE stands for Meal, Ready to Eat and they taste about as good as they sound. The greatest thing about an MRE is the heating pouches. Each MRE contains a pouch full of iron, magnesium and table salt. When water comes in contact with the pouches, it dissolves the salt, forming an electrolyte solution in which the iron and magnesium function as thousands of tiny galvanic batteries, heating your food while splitting the water into hydroxide and hydrogen gas, which rapidly expands in whatever confines they are placed. Since heating up the food in an MRE in no way improves the flavor, many soldiers preferred to use the heater packs to make bombs.

An MRE bomb is made by placing the heater packs into any empty, resealable plastic bottle, the bigger the better, into which one adds water, seals the bottle and chucks it towards some target, usually another soldier. The resulting explosions are harmless but satisfyingly loud and shocking. On this particular day, Corey had packed an impressive nine heater packs into a one liter plastic bottle, for the intended purpose of throwing it over the perimeter security fence. Given that we were in a notionally active combat zone and, only having been there a week or two, were still fairly jumpy, expecting at any minute a full-scale assault on our post, this would have been a bad idea even if it had worked.

     The nine heater packs boiled the water before Corey had the chance to throw it. The temperature of the bottle went instantly from comfortable to searing and Corey’s hand spasmed, reflexively jerking away to avoid the heat and sending the bottle tumbling on a misguided course straight into the wall of the command quarters, where it immediately burst from the pressure of the gas. The source of the blast was quickly discovered, as was the perpetrator, who received a potentially record-breaking six weeks of Kitchen Patrol, or KP, which is army slang for washing dishes.

     Our commanding officer (CO) and first sergeant (1SG) each berated us, telling us that they expected better from all of us and that we, as a team, had let them down. I can’t really argue that with a straight face, but at the same time, I don’t think that many of us felt terribly crushed by their disappointment.

     Few things unite anyone so well as a common enemy. For us, our common enemy was the command team of our CO and 1SG, affectionately known as Ace and Gary. We viewed them as the ultimate bureaucrats in uniform. Each took over their post in our company very close to the other one. Once they were in place, anything resembling ‘army’ training came to a halt. The command team that preceded them had a philosophy of training first as a soldier and then as whatever your job specialty might be. In this, we tended to agree with them. Every week during ‘sergeant’s time’ training, we would alternate between small unit tactics that every soldier should be familiar with, to specific medical tasks like managing MASCALs and accessing and extracting patients from challenging situations. Those training tasks were great. They consisted of doing the sorts of things that I had hoped to do while in the Army.

     Under the regime of Gary and Ace, our sergeant’s time training was frequently reduced to tasks like taking inventories and filling out forms. Basically, things that could be done during normal working hours. So we were pretty thrilled to deploy with them to war.

     We didn’t appear to suffer alone in our distaste for our ambiguously commanding duo. Little love was lost between our battalion commander and our CO. On occasion, we would see the battalion commander walk away from an interaction with Ace without bothering to return a salute, leaving Ace standing in the middle of the desert saluting the departing officer’s back. Even if the salute has never been a part of your life, you can imagine the level of disrespect conveyed by this action.

     During a nighttime session with the contents of one of our illicit care packages one night, the conversation turned to our beloved company commanders. Grievances were aired, jokes were made, accusations leveled. Someone got up to pee. I really don’t remember who started it, but what followed sounds like something that I might have instigated.

     “I’m gonna piss on the door handle to their quarters.”

     Laughter, followed by encouragement. Then,

     “I’m gonna piss on Ace’s seat in his hummvee!”

     “I’ll piss in their clean laundry!”

     “I’ll piss on their toothbrushes!”

     We all proceeded to make good on each of our boasts. Even, incredibly, the mechanic who made the toothbrush bet. There was really no way to one-up that one without pissing on their faces and our liquid courage was not yet up to that.

     Our adventures for that night ended after the deeds were committed. The next day unfolded like every other. Medics ambled off to take their shifts at the aid station or the ambulance depot. Mechanics crossed the main field from the dining tent to the motor pool, to keep the hard desert environment from claiming our vehicles. Soldiers walked in pairs to take up their guard posts. That day and so many of the following were unremarkable, one barely distinguishable from the other, except for a knowing nod and a conspirational smile exchanged between certain soldiers in passing.

     The radio came alive during one of those dark hours of the night, before dawn tries to force itself onto the horizon. “MASCAL, MASCAL, MASCAL! All medical units gather at the battalion aid station and prepare for incoming patients.” In Army parlance, a MASCAL is an acronym for a massive casualty incident, one in which there is relatively high ratio of casualties to medical personnel.

     Nights spent at our ambulance control point, or CP, were basically sleep-overs for adults. The group present at the CP consisted of two two-person ambulance crews, one ready to take a call and the other available as back-up. As we didn’t get many calls, most of our nights were spent watching movies on DVD, playing video games or Risk and sleeping. Because the four of us were packed into a fairly small space and at least two people were expected to be awake at all times, no one ever got a full night’s sleep. Instead, we typically dozed in chunks of a few hours at a time, to the backdrop of Super Mario Brothers or Sex and the City. You read that last bit right. Someone sent us a boxed set of the entire series in a care package. Lacking access to a video store, our general policy on entertainment was ‘if they sent it, we watch it’. None of us really understood what Carrie ever saw in Big.

     We moved fast. In the span of a minute, we had our boots laced were running across the street to the aid station with our rifles in hand and aid bags slung over our shoulders. The duty staff at the station were already setting up the OR (operating room) and a triage area by the time we arrived. We were immediately grouped into teams of three or four people and assigned to either a triage station or to a bed in the OR. My team got assigned to one of the beds. We set up our station and waited.

     We didn’t know what to expect, which left our imaginations in charge. In my mind, bullets made meat of men’s flesh and bomb blasts turned their brains to mush. We trained, of course, frequently for a variety of situations. The army training philosophy can be thought of as practicing a task until your hands know what to do without your brain intervening. Nonetheless, my “real-life” medical experience was still rather limited on that night. I had seen one knife wound, the product of a fight between two drunken soldiers, cuts and bruises, some scorpion stings and a hell of a lot of cases of dehydration (easily the soldier’s single greatest enemy). All

told, nothing worth writing home about.

     Some information came through to us, concerning our incoming patients. We were told that the incident leading to the MASCAL was a traffic accident involving a vehicle rollover during a convoy. We were to expect a dozen or so casualties, with some in critical condition. We didn’t get a complete rundown of the injuries.

     The casualty that arrived at my bed was a young black soldier, who had been trapped underwater in a ditch on the side of the road for several minutes. He had been resuscitated en route, was unconscious and in an unclear state of stability. We had barely gotten a line in him, when my teammate monitoring his vitals called out that he had stopped breathing. While that same teammate administered rescue breathing, we checked his pulse and found that that, too had stopped. The medical officer in charge of our team, a tall, lanky nurse practitioner (essentially a doctor, but without the surgical training) pushed something through the IV, while we did CPR.

     The guy came back to life with a fury, fighting and screaming. Maybe he didn’t like what he saw on the other side. Maybe he was just confused and disoriented and the experience of dying twice had stripped his oxygen-starved brain down to an animal state. Even though looking at us with the widest of eyes, I felt unsure that he saw us. He screamed and struggled, fought to free himself from us. I recall his expression perfectly. I had never before and have never since seen an expression of such perfect terror.

     He thrashed and swung and each of us focused on simply controlling a limb. I wound up on his right leg. Literally on it. I’m not a big guy, but 165 pounds laying on top of a single leg should count for something. At that moment, though, it didn’t count for much. He would twist and thrash his body, lifting up both myself and Corey, who lay on his other leg. We would grab hold of a corner of the bed and muscle our respective legs back down. The struggle continued until the NP was finally able to push something through the IV to sedate him. Once sedated, a medevac was called for and a medic was left to monitor him, while to the rest of us tried to make ourselves useful elsewhere. As our case had taken longer than most others, there was little else to do but chat with the other medics until the medevac helicopter arrived.

The chopper arrived only minutes later and we loaded our unconscious patient onto it, then stepped back to watch it lift off and disappear over the low hills towards Baghdad. The NP lit a cigarette. I wished I had a beer. Think he’ll be alright, I asked. No, said the NP.

I jerk forward, ducking my head, arching my shoulders and drawing my knees towards my chest, as though trying to dodge something. I am momentarily speechless, because it feels like my balls have jumped up into my throat. I look at Dustan in the driver’s seat and the look on his face tells me that he knows exactly how I feel.

     The shockwave had gone through our vehicle, through us, so quickly that it was a memory before it even had time to be a thought. The radio erupted with chatter, voices asking us if we were alright, if everything was ok. As our insides unwound, we understood that we were uninjured. Improbably, the roadside bomb that had exploded next to our ambulance injured no one, damaged not one vehicle. From our side view mirrors, we saw the cloud of dust and smoke from where it detonated and further afield, in the desert sand across the highway, we saw smaller wisps of smoke from what must have been shrapnel. There was no point in investigating to be sure, but it appeared that the bomb that was meant for us had been some kind of claymore, designed to blast shrapnel in the direction of one’s enemies upon detonation. This particular claymore had been set backwards. We lucky bastards.

     Moments later, we reached the spot on the highway, where we needed to turn off onto a desert track that would carry us back to our base at al-Taqqadum, or TQ, as we called it. In order to get off the highway and onto the track, the convoy needed to make a left turn across the entire breadth of the highway, which involved stopping oncoming traffic while we made the turn. A scout vehicle with a mounted 0.50 caliber machine gun placed itself in front of oncoming traffic to act as a roadblock while the other vehicles in the convoy passed on its other side. Traffic was light, consisting of a few cars and an oncoming 18-wheeler, whose cargo section was a long cylindrical fuel tank. By the time we realized that the 18-wheeler wasn’t going to slow down, it was too late to have deterred it even with the 0.50 cal. Those vehicles that hadn’t crossed the highway yet pulled forward to get out of the truck’s path. The scout humvee that had acted as a roadblock jerked off to the side. The 18-wheeler veered sharply away from the scouts and slammed into the aluminum divider in the shallow ditch that served as a median, sending bits of aluminum flying through the air like matchsticks that had been struck with a sledgehammer. The slope on the other side of the ditch helped to push the cab of the truck to an angle just shy of perpendicular to our side of the highway, but its momentum kept it going forward into our line of vehicles. As the cab of the truck came surging out of the ditch and onto the road, its long cylindrical fuel tank tipped violently and slammed forcefully into the ground, half in the ditch and half on the pavement, pulling the cab over with it. The truck barely slowed, despite now being on its side, as it continued towards our line of vehicles.

The entire convoy was in a state of panic. When the 18-wheeler first went into the ditch, the driver of the forward vehicle made the quick decision to throw his or her truck into reverse and everyone behind them started doing the same, only a second behind, leading to a collapsing accordion motion going back through the convoy like a shockwave. In only the few seconds it took to see that the 18-wheeler’s trajectory had changed and we now had to drive forward and off to the side to avoid it, Dustan & I were jammed too tightly between our flanking vehicles to move more than a few inches in any direction. The two or three trucks ahead of us were doing their best to move out of the way, but by the time the one directly ahead of us had cleared enough space for us to maneuver, it was too late.

     It was a scene ripped straight from an action movie. I clearly recall hearing the convoy commander’s voice over the radio. All he said was “Uh, medics…?” I clearly remember my response, given while staring at several tons of onrushing death. It consisted of one word. “Yup.”

     For the second time that afternoon, though, luck favored us. The crashing truck didn’t quite make it as far as our vehicles and came to a rest just a few feet from our ambulance. Fuel gushed from the bowels of its trailer, creating a small lake around the truck. We pulled forward and put some distance between ourselves and the truck, then grabbed our aid bags, got out of the ambulance and walked cautiously towards the monumental crash. As we walked, we began trying to plan how we might access the truck’s driver, when a small boy of maybe 11 or 12 climbed out the driver side window, now facing towards the sky, and clambered to the ground. The boy was followed immediately by a middle-aged man and in the span of a few seconds, the two of them stood in the middle of the pooling fuel, surveying the wreck of their livelihood.

     Dustan and I tried to hail them, waving and motioning to ask if they were alright, but they resolutely ignored us. Amazingly, we saw no obvious wounds on them, nor any sign of bodily damage. We stopped walking towards them when the man finally made a motion of resigned disgust with his head and shoulders, sat down and lit up a cigarette.

     “Aren’t you going to check them out, medics?” a female sergeant standing nearby asked us.

     “Sergeant,” Dustan told her, “I’m not going into that lake of fuel to have a  face-to-face with a guy smoking a cigarette.”

     I thought that Dustan had made an unassailable point, but the sergeant, one of our battalion’s mechanics, was unimpressed.

     “That’s [I forget what she said it was], not gasoline. It won’t ignite unless under pressure. Now go check him out.”

     Despite our lack of subject expertise, we remained unconvinced and managed to stall until a few more people arrived. We soon stood in conference with the convoy commander, a couple more mechanics and some others, all gazing at the smoking man amidst the wreckage. The other mechanics all agreed with their sergeant and although we made sure that our apprehension was heard, we eventually lost the argument and were ordered to go into the fuel pool to assess the driver and the boy.

     Ever since we got word of the deployment, I made it a personal goal to learn arabic. Their were no formal classes that I could have taken part in, prior to deployment, so I got hold of language learning books and a translation dictionary. In country, our interpreter was a Mauritanian guy who had worked in IT for the State Department until they asked him to consider a career change. He agreed to give me lessons and by the time of the truck crash, I could effectively do my job as a medic in arabic as well as muscling through a very limited set of other topics.

     In an act of diplomacy, Dustan and I persuaded the man to put out his cigarette and, although he would not consent to let us check him for any injuries, he did allow us to evaluate his son. This boy, the son of the truck driver was clearly shaken, but utterly uninjured. His nervous movements and visible agitation stood juxtaposed with his father’s immobility and taciturn sense of resignation. During our assessment, we got the story of the crash from their perspective. The father, it turned out, had allowed his son to drive the truck. Driving a semi is more complicated than driving your everyday passenger vehicle and the kid had lost control, trying to slow down for our roadblock. Their sudden diversion into the median had been a desperate act to avoid a rear-end, high-speed collision with the vehicles that had stopped for our convoy. The boy and his father lived in their truck and made their living from it. They were uncertain how they would recover from this crash. Although unharmed, the boy was quite shaken. His father, defying our previous diplomatic success, lit another cigarette, shifting his gaze of morose despair from the wreck of his cab to the desert horizon.

We still didn’t like standing a pool of fuel with a lit cigarette, no matter how combustible it may or may not have been. As there were no injuries to treat, we decided to leave and report back to the convoy commander. We found him on the other side of the highway, where we had set up the roadblock, talking to another Iraqi man. The roadblock had been reinstated while we had evaluated the father and son and the drivers who found themselves stopped by it were clearly agitated.

     “Ray!” the commander called out as we approached. “I’m glad you’re here. Talk to this guy, explain to him that he has to wait for the convoy to pass.”

     I engaged in my task without enthusiasm. I didn’t really know why we had maintained the roadblock during the time since the crash happened. It seemed pointless to me and allowing more cars to pile up at that spot only made me feel more vulnerable. Our luck had already been tested twice that day.

     In the moment it took the commander to speak to me, the man had turned his attention to the scout standing nearest to us. He argued and pleaded, as much with his hands as with his mouth, while the scout struck his best don’t-mess-with-me pose. As I walked to them, the man put his hands on the scout’s chest. The scout reacted quickly, talking a step back and raising his M-4, barrel towards the man’s chest. It was a motion that we had been trained to make but from an observer’s perspective, it looked ridiculous, an armed and armored man backed up by a bunch of armed and armored men who would all fight like dogs to protect each other, acting threatened by a lone, skinny, unarmed man wearing sandals.

     “I got this,” I said, waving the scout away.

     It didn’t take any special language skills to understand the guy. He was mad at being made to wait for no apparent reason. Why couldn’t he and the other drivers have just been let through earlier, so that they would be out of our way? Good questions, all, and I had no real answer.

     “I’m truly sorry,” I said, “just hang out a few more minutes. We’ll drive through and be out of your way. Please return to your car. I’m sorry.”

     With little else to say, I just kept apologizing until the man gave up and returned to his car. I then returned to my ambulance. Dustan and I asked the convoy commander if there was anything else that we could do for the semi drivers. Perhaps arrange a payment to help them recover. After all, this war was nominally about winning hearts and minds, as well as battles.

     “There’s nothing we can do,” the commander shrugged, “they’re at fault.”

     We mounted our vehicles and drove from the highway onto the dirt track that led us home, leaving behind a crowd of delayed travelers, a shaken boy and a man staring at the horizon.