Sunrise Over Fallujah Read Free Page A

got around to making up my mind or getting out. I feel good about defending my country, about being in Civil Affairs. You know, we bring a human face to war. I feel good about that.”
    I couldn’t tell if Captain Coles really felt good about it or not. He didn’t share much with us.
    â€œYou think we’re going in?” Evans asked.
    â€œAs you say, Saddam’s backed himself into a corner.” Captain Coles nodded as he spoke. “He understands power. If he backs down now, every gunslinger in the Middle East will be after him. So he might as well stay and fight it out.”
    â€œStay and get wasted, you mean.” Harris did seem anxious.
    Captain Coles stood up. He looked uncomfortable. “I’m going to go speak to Sessions,” he said. “She was talking about us pulling guard duty, but I think I can talk her out of it.”
    â€œTell her that Sergeant Harris will take a shift by himself,” Kennedy said. “They won’t need the rest of us.”
    â€œYo, woman, you got a lot of mouth for a chick!” Harris said.
    â€œGlad you noticed it, Sergeant.”
    Captain Coles left and Sergeant Harris started flipping through the television channels, seeing if any of them came in clearly. I knew the military channel would, but I didn’t want to watch another rerun of the latest speech from the White House. I got up and went out into the clear spring air.
    Before arriving at Doha I had imagined being on a desert with camels wandering by and palm trees swaying in the wind. It had taken seven hours to fly from Newark, New Jersey, to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, and another seven to reach Kuwait. The place blew my mind. The whole city of Doha was squeaky clean and beautiful. Almost everything was new or nearly new. I arrivedon a Saturday morning and went with a bunch of guys into the city. There was every kind of department store you could think about and the street hummed with SUVs. When I saw the Grand Mosque with its golden dome, it took my breath away. One of the guys I was with, a civilian contractor, told me that I would never get used to the architecture in the Arab countries.
    â€œIt changes your whole perspective about the people over here,” he said.
    Nine o’clock this morning we marched to the CENTCOM theater and saw a film about Saddam Hussein. There were at least a thousand guys there, most of them 3 rd Infantry dudes and a lot of Marines and Special Ops. Saddam looked like a sweetheart of a guy. Always calm looking, distinguished. In most of the pictures there was no change of expression on his face. In the film he was always seen either shaking hands or shooting a pistol into the air. Then the images changed to the Kurds who were gassed. A woman still had her arm out toward her child. The whole scene looked unreal, as if it had been staged. I wanted to turn away from the bodies lying on the ground. Some looked as if they might move at any moment. Just get up and walk off. I didn’t want to see these people lying dead. I tried to get myself mad, but I only managed to feel scared.
    The thing was that nobody else seemed scared. A lot of guys acted as if they were pissed and were anxious to get the war thing started. A guy from the 3 rd Infantry, kind of small, with almost a baby face, kept talking about facing the Iraqis.
    â€œWe need to think about winning this thing and checking ourselves out to see if we really want it. You know what I mean? Because if we really want it we can make it happen,” he said. “Those people, the Kurds, laying on the ground, they didn’t have a chance. We got the chance. We got to do a gut check and see if we got the will to win.”
    I didn’t know if I had the same will to win as the guy from the 3 rd . What I did know was that I wanted to do my part. The officers let us sit around and talk up the war and I thought that they did it on purpose. It was like being in a locker room before