Eight Sketches from Kuwait & Iraq

Sgt J. D. Garner, USMC

Sgt Garner served as a corporal in Operation Iraqi Freedom as part of Marine Logistics Command (MLC), augmented from the 2nd Force Service Support Group out of Camp Lejeune, NC. He and his unit were flown over to Kuwait on February 14th, 2003, and he returned with a detachment on August 15th 2003, just about six months later. During that time Sgt Garner volunteered for convoy security duty with Marine Security Detachment 1 (MSD-1) based at Camp Coyote and running to all points in Kuwait and many in Iraq. What follows are various essays which he wrote while in country -- soon after the events described -- prior to, during, and just after the war itself.

Early March 2003, Camp Fox, Kuwait

As I happen to have quite a bit of time on my hands at the moment, and the opportunity, I will now paint for you a picture in detail of my experience here.

I am on a base with no real permanent structures, and while I am not permitted to tell you the location or name of this base, there's really no need. If enough wind blew by here for long enough, and Marines weren't as tenacious as we are, there wouldn't be a base here at the end of a day. Fortunately, more than half of us are accustomed to training out in 29 Palms, California, which as you know is smack in the middle of the Mojave and no slouch of a desert itself. We're very good desert survivors. In fact, I'd say we're a lot better than our counterparts in the Army (I know...you're not surprised). The Army's got themselves a few bases around here, and are known to have the plush stuff, like real buildings, a PX, ATMs, and even phone booths. Those things I've listed are about the only significant conveniences that we really lack, or miss here. All told, the facilities aren't bad. We sleep in tents provided by our host country, and labeled in Arabic with various gibberish. In English, a couple proclaim to be made in Pakistan. Who am I to argue with where they say they're from? They sure keep the sun and wind off. We have actual wood floors in these tents, which I'm guessing were made by the engineers we have with us. In there we have actual bunk beds, which really surprised me. Pleasantly. I came out here anticipating that we'd be sleeping on cots on a dirt floor. Instead we have these floors in tents with bunk beds, mattresses, and pillows, all provided by our hosts.

Here I'll digress on the pillows. Both pillow and mattress are stiff, and by stiff I do not mean firm. When an American goes out to Wal-Mart or wherever to buy a 'firm' pillow or mattress, what they receive doesn't begin to approach the brick of bedding that we sleep on here. The mattress I can deal with easily, but the pillow seems stuffed to bursting with grapenuts or something equally unforgiving. It's impossible to comfortably lay one's head on one without suffering whiplash come morning, provided one doesn't first beat the living hell out of it on the side of the rack. That's what I did, and when the pillow finally began to bend double every time I thrashed it, I found that it was a little more inclined to act like a real pillow and be comfortable. Of course I was curious about what was inside these things, and at last my curiosity got the best of me. I stabbed my pillow with my ka-bar, and found that inside it's a mass of solid foam. That surprised me, since I never thought I'd see foam that hard in bedding. I guess I was expecting camel hair or something, but they could use this stuff for space shuttle tiles.

Early March 2003, Camp Fox, Kuwait

The other day I was picked to go on an augment for the MPs which patrol and watch our perimeter to keep out intruders, of which there are quite a few potential ones. One must remember that al Qaeda is very alive and active in this country. The funny thing is that I never realized al Qaeda was so genuinely stupid. At various points on our perimeter, which is immense and stretches for miles, and at any given day, we get at least one or two reports of a pickup truck rushing up, some guy getting out with a rifle, firing off some shots, then getting back in and taking off before certain death in the shape of a humvee (complete with top-mounted automatic grenade launcher and several armed, bored, and therefore highly dangerous Marines) can come get him. Myself and one of my lance corporals were at chow the other night listening to another one of these MP-augments (I don't remember his name, but I'll dub him Smith for purposes of the tale) tell a story of what he went through, which illustrates this:

They were out on their post, being bored, keeping watch, when some vehicle pulled up about 2500 yards away. A speck of a man got out, and they heard the unmistakable popping of rifle reports from that directly. The corporal with Smith took a knee and sighted in with his M-16, muttering, "If he comes any closer I'm gonna drop him." Now this corporal doubtlessly meant business, but his threat was pretty empty. The maximum effective range of an M-16A2 service rifle is 800 meters for an area (large) target. That's probably something like 1000 yards, but it's less than half of the distance needed to reach out and touch that idiot from the pickup truck. Fortunately it also meant that there was no reasonable threat to them from the idiot, since there's little chance that he could get hold of a rifle finer than an M-16. Anyway they called in the roving patrol (previously mentioned bored and dangerous Marines in humvees) and watched as the speck with a rifle got into his truck and took off, predictably.

There's also a donkey that wanders around out here on the perimeter. It just wanders around looking for something. Probably water or food. The MPs adopted it and tied it up to an ammo dump, which come to think of it isn't really good for the donkey. I think they feed it, but hopefully not MREs. If they feed it MREs it might never have a bowel movement again.

There are British Army troops out here too, and they're quite a fun bunch, really. They like to walk around in forest camouflage here in the desert, and make great targets of themselves. For all that, they do have some cool weapons which look like futuristic sawed-off rifles and load with a magazine behind the trigger assembly instead of in front of it like on most rifles. The Brits are also ballsy, and we love that. One of them out here bumped into a gunnery sergeant and was asked what his problem was by the gunny. His reply? "Yes, you're my f-ing problem." After the gunny was done beating himself a Brit, and after we were done laughing, it was all just another story. You have to like somebody who has the guts to do something like that, because this Brit was a scrawny rail of a man, but the gunny's last name might've been Schwartzenegger or Ferigno for all I knew, that's how he looked.

As I said before, this country doesn't believe in rain. It did try to rain one day, and actual drops made it to the ground, but they were so pathetic that it took a full five minutes before I could visually confirm that there were actual drops hitting the rocks and sand. Our only clue beforehand was the sound of drops hitting the tent. Another five minutes later it ended, and I think that concluded this country's version of a thunderstorm. The sand and wind, though...wow. I've been through Mojave sandstorms, and they're no joke. They're less of a joke here. The sand really does get in everything and everywhere, and unless you wrap your head up like a haji (what we call the locals, like that Jonny Quest character) then you're going to regret it when you turn your head and it looks like an hourglass as sand pours out of your ear.

This country looks like an alien planet. Imagine Kansas, only replace the grass with sand. Then pollute it massively. Every day off to the south I can see what has to be oil fires, and is probably burnoff from wells. Black clouds billow up all the time, and at night there's a glow of fire in that direction. That's probably why there's a brown haze on the horizon and when the full moon rises in the evening it looks like a red mushroom cloud, since you can only see the rounded top with a fuzzy mass beneath it. At night you don't see as many stars as you might suspect...only the brightest, as if we were in a city. Boy would I like to show this place to some environmentalist that damns America for its treatment of nature. Our country is a garden paradise compared to this, and I'm withholding some information as regards my experience with the actual cities here. Trust me, there's more filth here than I've mentioned.

At night it gets absolutely eyeball-freezing cold right now. The daytime temperatures are actually comfortable, and I hope that President Bush hurries up and gives us a thumbs-up. The sooner we go slaughter Saddam, the sooner we can all come home, and none of us likes this nasty country, or its neighbors. And we don't really like the hajis either.

Early March 2003, Camp Fox, Kuwait

About a week ago I was in a formation kneeling with a bunch of Marines and British soldiers around a lieutenant colonel while he told us all about how not to offend the hajis out here. I’m not really sure why failing to offend them is such a concern, when you get right down to things, but he was strictly convinced that it was important…or at least put on a good show of things. Anyway there we were, happily listening to our feel-good propaganda about our gracious host nation, when the alarms started sounding.

They were gas alarms. Now we were not under attack. It was a drill. We’ve had lots of these drills where people run around shouting ‘gas gas gas!’ with excitement until everyone puts on their gas masks and goes to hunker under a bunker (thought that one up myself) until we get the ‘all clear’ signal and can come out and go about our day. The first ten seconds of one of these drills is, to understate matters, chaotic.

Firstly, I wear glasses, so those get thrown to the ground with really more force than is necessary. This is me moving with urgency. Secondly, I tear open my gas mask pouch that is always on my hip (or at least nearby) and slap the mask to my face. Then I cover the output with my hand and blow out hard, causing the thing to flatulently seal against my face. This is me ‘donning and clearing’. It ensures that all the nasty gasses are out of the mask before I inhale. Then I pick up my stuff and I run. This is me hauling butt to a concrete bunker so I don’t get blown up by Saddam Hussein’s first-ever accurately-aimed scud missile.

In the course of this particular event, a Brit accidentally bumped into me, and my atropine ampules, which all of us keep, went spilling out. He uttered a “Sorry mate!” and then proceeded to the bunker to hide like the rest of us. Now one must recall that I have no glasses on at this point, so I couldn’t see what was going on very well, and missed the ampules falling out. When the all clear sounded, someone else had appropriated the atropine, so there I was without a much-needed protection.

To explain, atropine and its companion pralidoxime chloride (I don’t have to make these names up) are twin injectors that we keep on us in the event that we ever get hit with nerve agents. Nerve gas or spray has a somewhat negative effect on the human nervous system, causing one’s heart to palpatate and muscles to spasm until ultimately bones start breaking, or so I’m told by the guys whose job it is to train us in these things. The atropine ampules, to combat this, counteract the nerve agent by retarding our nerves (think of some REALLY strong valium) but somehow they also make the heart race. For some reason, this still works out to save your life. To let you know, though, if you were to inject yourself with atropine by itself, you would probably die. The pralidoxime chloride is supposed to keep the atropine from killing you.

Kind of gives you a warm all-around feel-good sensation, doesn’t it? Well it gets better.

These ampules are auto-injectors that you are supposed to stick in the meat of your thigh. They shoot out three-inch needles which will penetrate your clothes and get nice and deep into your body so you can get some really good anti-nerve dope. Got a problem with needles? Got a problem with injecting your body with potentially fatal chemicals that are designed to put you to sleep while making your heart slam dance with your ribs? Man, that’s tough. We didn’t promise a rose garden, as that famous Marine Corps recruiting poster says.

The only reason I keep these things with me is because VX and sarin nerve agents are far worse. They’ll kill you dead, like wasp spray for people, and Mr. Hussein almost certainly possesses scary amounts of this junk. He’s used it on the Iranians and the Kurds, so why wouldn’t he use it on a Marine like me? As much as I hate the idea of injecting this liquid nightmare into my system, I really hate the idea of dying from VX.

One of the NBC guys (NBC = Nuclear Biological Chemical) told me how he actually went in a gas chamber in Georgia on a training program where they suited up and were exposed to real live nerve agent. One of the Army instructors there drew a smiley face on the stock of his rifle with VX. Maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t be so eager to put the rifle against my shoulder or cheek while sighting in from that moment on. Guess it just proves that there are braver people than me out there.

March 2003, Just prior to the Invasion, Camp Fox, Kuwait

As I write, I just watched a TV wired into a computer and rigged to a live feed over the internet while President Bush declared a 48 hour deadline for Saddam Hussein and his two psychopath sons to leave Iraq or else watch us come and get them. I can’t tell you how much of a feeling of dread that fills me with right now, and it’s not necessarily for the reasons you may think.

The reason I have such a dire feeling of dread is because my Commander in Chief just broadcasted directly to Iraq that we’re on our way, shortly, and that the next move is Saddam’s. Call me crazy, but I don’t want him to have the next move. His next move very well might be to launch some scud missiles right toward my position so that fewer of us American Devils will be coming to get him. It might be to have a bunch of undercover Iraqi agents near my position sneak into my base at night and kill my friends, my fellow Marines, and me. It might be to suit up a bunch of his troops in uniforms just like ours so he can start destroying Iraq now instead of waiting for us to come. I really doubt that it’s going to be him catching a one-way flight with his spawn to Tahiti.

Right now I sit inside of a shelter listening to Larry King yammer at politicians and ‘experts’ while I also listen carefully for our alarms to go off…the alarms that signal a scud attack. I wonder if I’ll hear them from here and resist the urge to go outside and listen there, because I have a post to man inside of here. I man my post like a good Marine doing what he has to do instead of going outside so I can be afraid. I wonder if in a second my shelter is going to be hit by a lucky missile, and whether I’d know it if it even happened. Would there be a flash? Would I survive the blast, even if for an instant? Or would I just suddenly find myself floating there bodiless wondering what just happened and waiting to see whether I go spiritually north or south depending on the way I’ve lived my life and whether God agrees with the merits of my choices? My wife would be $250,000 richer, but I guarantee it’s money she’d rather never see. My family, for all that I see them so rarely, would agree with which they’d rather have, I know. I’d become a news story, a blurb on CNN. My name would be withheld ‘pending notification of next-of-kin’. I might be mentioned once, assuming hundreds of others weren’t killed along with me, and then I’d be forgotten by all but my kin. I’d get a six-foot-deep berth in Arlington, possibly, and from then on History will remember me as a ‘hero’ with a white cross over my head until the United States declines or falls an age or ages from now, and that’d be it. I’d be a hero who signed a contract and then got atomized while manning his post in a shelter in the desert, and did…not much else of note than that.

Got job stress?

I’m not exactly afraid, but I’m certainly tense. Ready is a good word. Worried is a better one. I know I’d much rather be north of here, ready to jump over the border and shout as I demand the enemy surrender before I turn his head into a modern art sculpture. Then I’d be Doing Something. It’s not that I want to hurt anyone, but when the choice comes to him or me, too bad for him. As it is, here I’m vulnerable. I can’t shoot the one that can shoot at me. I can’t look him in the eye. I don’t even know his name, since the only name I know wouldn’t be the one pushing the last crucial button. And while I’m here, worrying selfishly about myself like thousands of ‘heroes’ like myself in the past, I know that privileged people, many of them younger than me, back in my country for which I’m standing this watch tonight, are drinking their beer or jello shots and sharing the opinion that their country is wrong, or an evil empire, or some other such foolishness. Hey, my boss just gave the enemy a clear, honest warning that we’re coming to get him! At least he’s got honor. If we’re evil, at least we have the honor to be honest and fair, and that’s what good guys do. I always thought good guys were…good guys, not evil.

So with honor, I sit here and write my thoughts and feelings, and stay at my post instead of going outside, and I don’t fault the President for giving the enemy a chance to kill me, because at least now I know that because of him, I’m a good guy.

April 2003, shortly after the start of the war, Camp Fox, Kuwait.

This morning I left my work area and walked to my hooch to catch some sleep while the unmistakable sound of bombers roaring north pounded the air from overhead. As happens when one hears aircraft go over, I looked up and tried to catch them with my eyes. What I saw instead was this:

To the north, black clouds belched up from the distant horizon. These were from the oil fires just inside of Iraq (near al Basra) that the Kuwaitis haven’t put out yet. Being a Texan, I can’t help wishing Red Adair were here.

On the ground, there was a sprawling complex of tents and vehicles. These were the Marines and British, which make their home in my position. The Brits here are great, and we’ve come to like these guys. I think I wouldn’t want to go to war with anyone else if I couldn’t go with other Americans.

In the sky, there was nothing. The bombers that I heard were invisible, lost in the haze of the desert sky and the black clouds they were flying toward and likely through. We hadn’t had a lightning incident (incoming fire) for a full day, so the air strikes have obviously done some good. As an aside, we have since had one lightning incident, but that’s actually not too bad. The first day of this war we had something like twenty or more calls for lightning. I only remember losing count, not how many we had.

After getting back to my hooch and stripping off my cammies, putting on my sweats (it was chilly, believe it or not), and reading a book for a bit, a sergeant I know came in. It turned out he’d heard some news that I hadn’t yet. According to him, there were quite a few more casualties up north than had been reported so far. I hope he’s either wrong or misinformed. It’s not just because I care that Marines are getting killed, but also because it would mean that there’s a very good chance they’d pull augments from a rear position, like mine, to fill up their losses. I’m a communicator, and they’re already short on communicators. This is the source of quite a bit of conflict for me, since a large part of me wants to go forward to where the fighting is, but I also have a problem with dying.

Shrugging off this news, I laid down to go to sleep. What else could I do? I’ve become a person of practicality. Why dwell on a thing or worry myself sick over it when there’s no action I can take to fix it? In my mind I tell myself that I might as well not worry about anything, because if I’m going to go forward, I’ll go forward. I’ll probably survive. Most Marines do. The reality is I’m just putting it off and not worrying about it because the alternative is to be miserable for probably no reason.

About one week later, late April 2003, Camp Fox, Kuwait.

There was a meeting the other night which consisted of every NCO (all Sergeants and Corporals, which includes me) where we were getting a talk from the battalion Sergeant Major. Now there’s no real point in sharing much of this meeting with anyone, except for one point which made an impact upon me.

The Sergeant Major held up a list. On this list were just ranks, a short sentence, and three letters on each entry. No names. The three letters were either WIA or KIA…Wounded In Action or Killed In Action. After our meeting I stayed behind to count the entries on this list. It was three pages long, and included Marines of every rank from Lance Corporal to Lieutenant Colonel. There were exactly ninety entries, thirteen of which were KIA’s.

That’s ninety purple hearts. Thirteen letters home. You know what, though? For all the tragedy of that list, those aren’t the kind of numbers I was expecting. Speaking for myself, I expected to hear of hundreds of deaths by now, all American. That’s not what I’m seeing, and for that I’ll always be thankful. In spite of this, though, I still kick myself every single day that I’m not helping out more. I feel guilty for not being up there helping protect those other Marines and for not helping them put down the enemy that’s sending some of our boys home in bags.

Don’t I live a hard life? My worst source of emotional distress right now is that I’m not getting shot at and that I feel left out somehow. I hope Mom doesn’t see this before I get back home, because she might think she raised a fool.

As I stayed back, the Sergeant Major talked to me and told me something that I can’t forget, simply because it’s wise. I couldn’t give you a word-for-word quote, but the gist of it went like this: Those Marines up there need us back here doing what we’re doing in order to operate. Without guys like me, they can’t communicate…not with their command, not with their supply line, not with home, not with anyone. Without guys like me back here, they’re lost up there, and sometimes we need to buckle down and do the not-so-glorious job of day to day work that needs to get done so the real heroes can take care of the action up there.

Now I feel like G.I. Joe, only I’m one of the little action figures with the radio on his back that gets left behind at the base while all the ones with the big guns go out to fight Cobra. Every kid wanted to get that particular G.I. Joe just to have, though, because what’s an operation without communicators?

Of course as I write this, two of the Marines I work with are blowing bubbles with a toy bubble-gun they bought at the Army PX. We’re a bunch of manly warriors, I tell you.

Just prior to the declared end of major hostilities, Camp Viper, near Nasiriyah.

My first convoy into Iraq was to a base codenamed Viper. As I understand it, it's no longer there, so I have no problem naming it. My driver was a Saudi Arabian who somehow thought it important to show me his passport when I asked him what his name was. I wasn't looking for proof, being willing to take his word for it. What did I care if he lied about his name to me? He could've said 'Bob', and I'd have called him Bob.

We drove up north to the breach in the border between Iraq and Kuwait, which I must tell you is an amazing site in its own way. Looking left and seeing concertina wire rolls literally as far as your eye can see, and then seeing the same thing to the right...it's like an Escher drawing come to life. Similar I guess to standing between two mirrors and beholding the infinities reflected between them. Right over the border to Iraq lies Safwan, which is a pathetic little spot that convinces me it is indeed possible to be poorer than folks from Mississippi. These people are Poor. They stand by the side of the road and beg to you, waving Iraqi money (now worthless, since America has 'redefined' who's in charge there) in exchange for food or water. We Marines on the convoys were told explicitly never to throw anything out to them for any reason on pain of court martial. They didn't say anything about our haji drivers, so I intentionally ignored my Arabian driver as he tossed bottles of water out to the kids in Safwan. How could I NOT let him help these pathetic people? I'd be a pretty poor human being in spirit if I had a problem with giving water to thirsty children in the desert, which was exactly the situation.

I won't say that I handed him bottles of water to toss out either. I would never disobey an order, no matter how callous and inhumane I believe it to be...

We drove north on the highway for a few hours, me taking pictures the whole time. Pictures of people on the side of the road begging, pictures of tanks blown up in craters, pictures of what could only be the scars of aircraft fire on the highway and such, and pictures of bombed out houses, buildings, and general garbage. We arrived at Viper and went to load up cargo on the trucks, which in this case happened to be explosives. They weren't just any explosives either. My truck was loaded down with boxes and boxes of C-4. The truck in front of me had detonators. The truck in the rear of the convoy had white phosphorous. Another truck had AT-4 rocket launchers.

Nice, safe stuff like that.

The convoy sat parked for a long while while our convoy commander was working out something with paperwork or such. All told, it might've been about five hours we sat there. As Marines do, we got out of our trucks and began wandering around on this base, which was basically a lot of 'secured area' and not much else. No real facilities, just a bunch of tents and a road running through it. I noticed some reservists poking around at the truck right in front of my truck, and wondered what was going on, so I walked up to them.

"Hey, what's up here?" I asked.

"Oh hey, Corporal. Check out what I found." said one of them. He had been crouching underneath the rear of the truck's trailer and digging at a round object there.

I looked at said object. "That's a tank mine." I said, somehow without any panic or excitement in my voice. It was about a foot and a half in diameter, made of metal, and looked like a really big frisbee with a hole in the middle. It was a tank mine.

"No way! Really?" said the reservist. He wasn't being sarcastic.

It was a tank mine.

"You should get out from under there." I said. I noticed that it looked disarmed, since the center actuator post on the mine was missing. Without a post, you couldn't set off the ignition or whatever passed for an ignitor and thusly, no boom. Right? I was hoping so.

"I hope there's no more here..." he said, not moving from underneath the truck, and thus technically disobeying what really was an order from me. I wasn't going down there to get him, though. There's such a thing as too much pride, and I've got way too much sense to worry about whether he was doing what I wanted more than whether I was going to suffer from a stupid mistake of his.

"Yeah me too. Here, come out and I'll show you this Iraq book I have. I think there's a picture of that mine in there..." I said. Incentive, you know? I went to get the book, not waiting for him to get out of there. After I got the book, I noticed he hadn't emerged from under the truck, which at this point I will add was neatly stradling the mine, with tires on either side of it. It was as if the driver saw it and tried to drive right over it evenly spaced between the tires. Since I was standing there alone, I decided to go talk to a captain that I'd observed riding with the MPs in the rear of the convoy. I went up to him with the book and opened it to the page with a very familiar-looking mine in it.

"Hey, Sir...ever seen one of these?"

"Nope. Why?"

"Just wondering, because there's one underneath the truck up there. You know, the one with all the detonators on it."

I'm an evil person, because inside I was laughing at the look on his face. He went straight from disbelief to belief to discomfort to thinly-veiled panic all in about two seconds.

"Where was this again, Corporal?" He had to come see. So I showed him. By the time we got up there, the genius reservists (there were two now) had excavated it more. Now they'd used a ka-bar to dig a little trench all around the thing, immensely proud of themselves. Unfortunately they didn't understand why there's no on-the-job training for explosive ordnance disposal.

"QUIT MESSING WITH THAT THING!" That wasn't me that said that. It was the guy with two silver bars on his collar that was seeing his career (and much of his life) flash before his eyes.

"Aye sir!"

I made sure to take pictures of the reservist next to the mine, and then another of my truck loaded with C-4, just to punctuate what was going on here, then I got in my truck and sat easily, or so I thought. The captain had gone back to his humvee, after he stopped hyperventilating.

There was a knock on the door of my truck. "Hey Corporal?" I heard a voice say. "Check this out."

I was ready to see that little genius holding up something else, like a grenade sans-pin or such. Instead he was holding up the top plate of this tank mine. Just the top shell.

"That's all there was! There wasn't no mine there after all."

I felt relieved, and a little stupid for that. At the same time though, I decided I don't want anything to do with reservists. All it really told me was that had there been a real mine there, and had it been ready to blow, I wouldn't have heard him telling me about it. We'd have probably been picking up pieces of each other instead. And this is in spite of me and a captain telling him to quit poking at it. And it's also failing to consider what the detonators, ensuing diesel-fire from the trucks, and tons of explosives on the trailers would've done.

On the drive back to Kuwait we got shot at by mortars. I know they were mortars because it's the only thing they could've been, since they exploded right within sight of the highway and I could feel the explosions in my stomach. Five shots I counted, and my driver was going wild-eyed. I motioned him to keep driving and watch the truck in front of us. Later on our command lied to us and said it was British EOD detonating ordnance. Right...that explains why the Brits supposedly shot their ordnance at us five times in succession right next to the highway, and why there wasn't a Brit in sight.

May 2003, shortly after the declared end of major hostilities, Camp Viper, near Nasiriyah.

On another of these little missions up into Iraq, I was riding with a Pakistani. This is the first time I began to realize just how repugnant Pakistanis on a whole can be. His first offense was that he played this tape which had nothing but the same wailing repeating song in Hindi on it over and over again. This thing made such a racket that it took actual concentration AFTER I was away from it to forget the song. His second offense was that he smoked these nasty, stinking cigarette-oid sort of things and wouldn't roll down his own window. Fortunately I made him roll my window down, and made it clear to him that I needed it down in order to shoot out of should we get in any trouble. His third and final offense was the worst of all.

We were driving north through Safwan, just over the border into Iraq. The part of Safwan that we drove through regularly was a farming district outside the main town itself, peopled with the poorest folks I've ever seen anywhere. They live in huts and have fences of reeds, with what look more like gardens to me than farms. Their main form of amusement seems to be shouting and waving at Americans and Brits as they drive by, and their best form of getting food or goods seems to be in begging from the same. Now peppered in these Iraqis of Safwan are adults, men and women, and many children all the way down to infants held by their mothers on the side of the road. Said mothers are dressed like ninjas, which isn't surprising, but all the young girls (I assume before they hit puberty) are clad in beautiful red, maroon, blue, yellow, and other such dresses of such fine looks to make you wonder if they really belong around all these other poor people. The boys are in tattered t-shirts and shorts or pants and such, and the men are in much the same state.

My Pakistani driver decided he hates Iraqi kids. As we drove through Safwan, he spotted a kid waving at us from the side of the road and smiling. With an evil look, the driver swerved to hit the kid, a young boy. I shouted at the kid to get back and then shouted at the driver that he was a dickhead and not to do that again. His response went something like "ooloolooloolooloo!" and a dismissive wave at me. Less than a minute later we ran across a similar young boy, and this driver did the same thing all over again, swerving to hit. I was starting to get pissed off at this point because, frankly, I felt sorry for these kids and this jackass had no right to threaten them with his truck. He had even less of a right to get me involved by ignoring what I told him. I pointed in the driver's face and flatly threatened him (in words he didn't understand of course) that he needs to stop and he was making me mad. Once again his response was a bunch of irate Hindi gibberish and a dismissive wave.

Apparently he didn't fear the American.

Well I got to thinking because I expected him to repeat the performance and try to hit another kid, and the Rules of Engagement specifically authorized me to use force in the protection of US and British personnel, as well as all civilians. These kids were civilians, so I was authorized by the ROE to protect these kids from this smelly haji.

Naturally he did what I thought and swerved to hit one more boy, this one looking to be about thirteen maybe, although it's hard to tell as malnourished as they all are. That tore it. I drew my ka-bar (which I'd already unsnapped from its sheath in preparation) and held it up for this jerk to see. The blade is VERY sharp, and I have a reputation for keeping my knives at least nearly razorsharp. The edge gleams nice and wickedly, and I like that. I told him in English once again (not really caring if he didn't understand the words), "You hit a kid, I cut you." His eyes got wide and he slowed down as if to stop the truck. I jerked the knife in his direction and shouted, "Dawo gadi!" which is Hindi for "move truck". I kept the knife out and made sure he knew I was serious. No more kids got swerved at.

I have to admit my nerve kind of left me when I actually had the knife out though. I had an image in my head of me dumping out this bloody mess on the road among Safwan and then having to drive the truck myself the rest of the way, and that wasn't appealing to me. I couldn't just stab him in the leg or anything, because that'd have been no better. One way or another, I was going to end up driving the truck, and that wasn't something I felt up to. Not without another Marine to watch the terrain for me out the window. He didn't know any of this though. We did have more trouble along the way, but it was all in his general rudeness and disgusting habits (such as the way he pissed all over his own robe when he got out to pee, then didn't seem to care), and he didn't try to hurt anyone anymore.

I don't have a very good impression of Pakistanis.