Slow Motion Ladder

    We recently had a problem with one of our satellite dishes. Since I am in charge of communications, my section was responsible for troubleshooting the system. In the end, it took one of my NCOs, SGT M, to painstakingly move the dish 1/8 of an inch to the right and left every thirty seconds for almost 2 hours to get a signal lock. But his patience paid off. Now he’s the local satellite repairman.

     But I digress. CNN was out and people in our command center wanted to see what was going on down in New Orleans and surrounding areas. MSG R and I decided to do some troubleshooting by examining the setup of an identical dish that was known to be working in another building.

     It had been a long day, and it was now 2200. We had agreed to go take a look a few days before, but we’d been too busy. We walked across the road in darkness to our Headquarters building. The thing is two-stories, kind of like a small building you might find at a community college, except every single last window is covered with sandbags, there are bunkers and fighting positions on the roof, and dirt and grime and dust everywhere. You can’t get rid of it- it’s part of your very existence out here.  

   We went into the offices downstairs and borrowed a flashlight from the Sergeant on duty. We joked around with him a little, in the way that one might talk to his car repairman, and told him we’d be on his roof for a minute. You have to go up the stairs in the middle of the building, follow the open-air walkway around to the rear corner, and then climb up a home-made 2x4 ladder to the roof.

   It was very dark. I climbed up first and pulled myself onto the top of the roof, and MSG R followed. It’s disconcerting to be up there, because you’re close to the wire and you know there is a highway and some empty houses and buildings nearby. Your mind has a way of imagining snipers in every window, mortar men in every darkened lot. 

    We checked the dish, the wiring, and the hardware, and made our assessment. We looked around for just a minute from that vantage point: a glow from the burn pit on the other side of the FOB, HMMWV lights cutting through the dust as someone came off shift, red and blue flashlights bobbing up and down as people ran a few miles in the relative coolness of the night.

    MSG R was halfway down the ladder, and I was still standing on the roof when BOOM! A mortar fired by the enemy landed just outside the wire near the highway. Everything goes into slow motion because you never know if there will be more impacts. He turned and looked at what I had already seen: a yellow-orange explosion lighting up the darkness that was way too close for comfort. My height above the ground, the lit up desert, the sound of the explosion, my reflexes, and the distinct misfortune that I was standing on a rooftop in Iraq all asimilated into one movement - a crouch.

    I looked down and MSG R froze on the ladder for a millisecond. He gave me a questioning look that said, “Should I keep going down the ladder or get back up there and take cover?”

   “Go, dude, go” I yelled, still crouching down behind a lip of concrete.

   He did. I waited another few moments, and then scurried down the ladder myself. We stuck to the cover of the concrete walls of the building and made our way back downstairs. By this time, the big guns were shooting back at the enemy.

    A small cluster of soldiers was standing outside under cover and asking, “Incoming or Outgoing?” Sometimes it is hard to tell. MSG R said “Oh, trust me, it was incoming, we were up on the roof.”

    You could hear the retort of our powerful artillery guns fire. It made you want to cheer, and in fact some did, when you heard the actual projectile whistle overhead. And then a large explosion as our rounds impacted in the area the insurgents had fired from.

   It’s a sad day when men wish death upon other men, but that is the nature of war. Men put aside some measure of empathy when we are being shot at. Not all empathy, but some. You hear the rounds explode and you hope that they kill whoever just tried to kill you.

     This is not the Civil War. They don’t want you to see the whites of their eyes. They will never organize a thousand men in the desert and sound a horn and march up to our FOB to fight us, bugles blaring, Iraqi flags and headscarves whipping smartly in the desert wind. Instead, men in sandals will wake up at a pre-determined time and drive to a pre-determined location to drop a few rounds in a tube and run off into the night like vermin. It’s akin to leaving your pole in the water and walking away from it. You’re not actively fishing anymore - feeling the pull of the waves on your line, the snags that might be nibbles, the big fish, the fight to get him in the boat – you’re just passively trolling for a catch, like these cowards who pray to Allah before they launch each mortar aimed to kill an American.

     So we got our satellite fixed. We saw the devastation on the Gulf Coast, and we prayed for those people. We take those moments when we can and watch CNN because it’s a lifeline to home, a portal to a day when we can sit on our own couches and watch the news and judge it according to our own beliefs.

     Sometimes we see images of soldiers in Iraq projected on the international news, and when we hear some of the stories we think, “These people have no idea…”

    And some nights, even when we least expect it, mortality strikes our consciences like lightning electrocuting the endless Middle Eastern sky.

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