The Battle of Khafji

I was a clean-cut Burlington boy who had joined the Marines to get money for college. I could run faster with a pack on my back than anyone else at boot camp that month, so they sent me off for recon training to be the best of the best and all I could be as the son of a tax-killed dairy farmer whose land is now suburban homes you could park a B-52 in, and for which he got shit. Recon is an elite group of soldiers. We are the guys who get sent behind enemy lines to take a look-see around before the real action starts up. We have a 90 percent casualty rate during wartime, of which we are supposed to be proud.

My Third Force recon platoon was sent to the Saudi about 12 hours after Saddam entered Kuwait. We were flown over on a C-140 transport with other assorted personnel from San Francisco and didn't even know where the fuck we were heading until we were in the air. This one old gunnery sergeant was throwing ammunition around the plane like it was candy at fucking Mardi Gras. Marines normally treat ammunition like the gold in Fort Knox--you don't just throw the shit around--but it was like a party: We were finally going to get some trigger time. No one in my entire recon platoon, including our leader, Captain Beck, had ever seen any action.

A lot of us were wearing face paint, as if we were going into a hot LZ. Maybe that and the general confusion accounts for this weird shit. You need to know this about Sergeant Packer right off: The man wasn't one of us. No one noticed when he answered during roll call to the name of Sergeant Packer. We figured it out midflight, and he told Captain Beck he was in fact Sergeant Packer, and then showed this stamped official TAD--temporary additional duty--order. So there was some kind of computer screwup, and we got this Sergeant Packer, and our own, real Sergeant Packer, a 6'6" guy from Macon, Georgia with a 42-inch vertical leap, was who the fuck knows where.

You would think Captain Beck would have set it right when we landed in the Saudi, but when he found out he just wouldn't believe it. It was like it wouldn't get in his skull that the computers had fucked up. He wasn't angry yet, just laughed like there is no fucking way this shit is really happening. The thing you have to know about Captain Laurence Beck, the man was seriously hung up on the high tech. He had been a brain on the fast track at Quantico, serving as special liaison with the Department of Defense or some such shit, when his uncle--a congressman-- got the idea he needed a few combat stars on his chest before he moved up to flag rank. So they sent him to us. He was one seriously squared-away Marine--I mean he looked like a recruiting poster with his square jaw and ice-blue eyes--but he was a real prick who hated to spend time with his men and read weapons manuals like some of the men read Playboy.

We landed in the Saudi on this two-lane road up near Ras-al-Mishab, about 20 klicks south of Khafji. People figured Captain Beck would report the screwup ASAP to Marine Expeditionary Force Headquarters, and soon we would have our old Sergeant Packer with us. But Captain Beck didn't report the screwup to MEF-HQ, he couldn't deal at all. It was like at first he couldn't see this Sergeant Packer--who was so ugly, people right away started calling anything ugly packer. Yeah, he was that ugly. Only thing we got out of this Sergeant Packer at first was that he was in transportation--a rear job filled with dumb shits driving buses. He was so totally unprepared for our line of work it was comical.

In our first days in the Saudi, this Packer was in and out of the mess in two minutes. He was like a ghost--you never saw him except for those two minutes. I left my tray and followed him out one day and asked him if he had notified MEF-HQ about the situation. His little eyes went out of focus, and he looked at his feet and mumbled some shit about not interrupting the chain of command. I told him not to give me that shit, and we stood there and then he reached in the pocket of his cammies and took out this photo that was all crumpled up. It was of this not-bad-looking babe with two blond kids. One was maybe two years old and the other maybe 12. He told me he had been an asshole and walked out on them a few months earlier and the little kid had grabbed some wires in their unfinished apartment and electrocuted himself, and then his wife had hooked up with this fucked-up Marine who stole a Humvee and drove into a head-on. His wife and the 12-year-old died in the Humvee crash. What do you say to that? He took the photo back and looked around at the desert and I understood, This Packer doesn't give a fuck anymore.

That night at chow I told the platoon what I knew about how this Sergeant Packer walked out on his family and how they all got killed. People nodded at this, but shit like that happened all the time. People were more interested in Corporal Maclean and how he and some of the others had noticed this Sergeant Packer had a weird effect on mechanicals. Corporal Maclean said that morning he was cleaning his M-16 and Packer walked by and the thing jammed with sand. He said he cleaned out the sand and saw Packer go into the shitter. When Packer came out of the shitter, Corporal Maclean said Sergeant Packer looked at the M-16 and the thing jammed again, jammed so bad it took him all afternoon to get it working cleanly.

Sergeant Vito turned from the end of the table. Vito is this bear of a guy, drinks only milk, never says shit to anyone. I figured he'd tell Maclean he was fucked, but instead he said he was lying on his rack listening to his Walkman that afternoon, and Sergeant Packer went by the window, and bang, the batteries died. I asked him, when's the last time you changed the batteries, fucking Stateside? Sergeant Vito told me they were fucking Duracells and he put them in just that morning.

This sort of shit spreads like wildfire, and by the next evening at mess everyone had a report about some mechanical breaking down in the vicinity of Sergeant Packer. Corporal Maclean was keeping tabs on the rumors, jumping from table to table. And right then Sergeant Packer walked into the mess. I had the feeling he had been outside the door for a while, listening to this shit. He came in and he looked around the room, he looked at us, and it was like he was seeing us for the first time. He just stood in the door blinking like he was waking up from a dream, and then he ate with his back to us. But after he ate he didn't bolt from the mess. He sat there and one by one we all left until the fat little fuck was left in there all alone. I was the second to last to leave the mess. Corporal Maclean was the last, and, asshole that he was, he turned off the lights on Sergeant Packer.

For the next few days, the platoon kept talking about this weird effect of Sergeant Packer's on mechanicals. It was just starting to die out when this shit happened with Captain Beck. I figured Beck had to have heard the rumors about Sergeant Packer, but an officer who can't accept that computers fuck up is not an officer who can accept that a sergeant can affect mechanicals. Anyway, I stepped out of the mess after lunch, and right across the street was this concrete barracks where Captain Beck bunked. Down the street I noticed Sergeant Packer coming toward the mess. Captain Beck came out of his barracks with Corporal Acheson and the two jumped into a Humvee, but the fucking Humvee wouldn't start. Corporal Acheson got out and looked under the hood. At first Captain Beck was giving Corporal Acheson some shit and then he turned and saw Sergeant Packer giving the Humvee this killer stare. Captain Beck got out and looked from Packer to the Humvee and back again and then turned and went back into his hooch. Corporal Acheson sat in the Humvee and shook his head at me. There was this silence in the street, and you could hear the first bombs from our planes coming down on Kuwait.

That night I moved over in the mess and asked Sergeant Packer if he knew about the rumors about him and mechanicals breaking down. He shrugged, like who gives a fuck, and kept shoveling potatoes into his face. He stopped once with the potatoes in midair to remind me his wife and kid were killed in a stolen Humvee. It looked like he'd put ten more pounds on his fat little body in the Saudi. Right then a siren went off. It was our first biological alert and we all grabbed the rubber masks off our thighs and pulled them over our crewcut heads, and some of us--including me--freaked and plunged the antidote syringes into our thighs. We all sat there looking at one another like a bunch of insects. Except for Sergeant Packer. He didn't put on his mask, he just kept shoveling potatoes into his fat face.

•

We spent at least a couple of hours late each afternoon sitting by the side of the road behind the cinder-block barracks on boxes of M-60 ammo, watching for the rare vehicle, reading the Arabic News, counting the incoming helo-53 transports, feeling the bombs dropping on Kuwait in our feet and sipping Ed's Dressing: shoe polish filtered through four slices of bread for the alcohol. We were sitting there pretty rocked one day when we saw this Saudi bus barreling up the hardball. It was a company of Saudi marines, who got out and stood around blinking suspiciously. HQ thought our platoon wasn't doing much at Ras-al-Mishab except waiting to be sent up to Khafji and begin our infiltrations of Kuwait, so someone up there got the bright idea we should train these Saudi marines. And not just train them, but train them for the cameras from the Marine Historical Division, so there would be an official record of how Saudis and Americans worked together during Desert Shield.

First thing Captain Beck ordered was a simple helo snatch for the Historical Division movie cameras. We radioed south to Safiniya for a helo and took one of the Achmeds--we called all the Saudis Achmed or Al Wadi--out into the desert a ways. Ten minutes later the helo rotors overhead and drops a line and we hook on the Saudi soldier and up he goes dangling into the sky. (continued on page 114) Battle of Khafji (continued from page 88) The cameras are rolling, and all our necks are bent back as we watch the Saudi flailing around up there screaming like a lamb to the fucking slaughter. The helicopter took him in a circle, and then went behind the barracks, and when it zoomed overhead again the Saudi was dangling a couple dozen feet overhead and still screaming like a motherfucker.

The platoon looked up at the screaming Saudi in the sky, and one by one we started to crack up. But Captain Beck wasn't laughing, and you could see on his face that the Saudi soldier disgusted him. Just before the he-lo set down the Saudi and he started kissing the sand, I saw Captain Beck eyeballing Sergeant Packer, and that was when I noticed Sergeant Packer wasn't laughing either. I went over and stood next to Sergeant Packer and he said to me that for the last couple of months he had dreamed about dangling just like that from a helicopter. I didn't ask him, he just told me, and then he turned like he was heading back to the barracks, and that was when Captain Beck yelled out for Sergeant Packer to lead the Saudis in a rifle drill.

Everyone in the platoon turned to look at Captain Beck. First of all, we all had the idea Captain Beck didn't even know Sergeant Packer was on the face of the planet. Second, here he was asking the fat little bus driver to lead a rifle drill for the Marine Historical Division cameras when our own Corporal Zellman was once on the Presidential Honor Guard. Then the rest of the platoon started to snicker, figuring Captain Beck wanted to make Sergeant Packer look like an asshole. I wasn't laughing because I had the idea Captain Beck didn't want just Packer to look like an asshole.

Sergeant Packer ran out in front of the cameras. It was the first time I had seen Packer move faster than a dead man's walk, and you could see the rolls of fat under his uniform. Sergeant Packer took a long time organizing the Saudis into three rows and then all of a sudden some Saudi soldier started to yodel off on a dune and the Saudis had to take a break to get down on the sand on their knees and pray toward Mecca. The way he was looking at the Saudis, I had the idea for a split second Packer was going to get down on the sand and pray right along with them.

Finally the prayers were over and Packer got the Saudis in line and stood in front of them, looking kind of confused, and had them affix bayonets. He slowly thrust his bayonet toward us as the cameras from the Marine Historical Division rolled. The thrust was kind of weak, and the Saudis behind him were waving their bayonets all over the fucking place. Someone started to laugh, and then Sergeant Packer took another step toward us, and from then on his routine started to get crisp. His eyes opened wide, and he looked almost as if he didn't know what was coming over him. Behind him the three rows of Saudi marines were like Abbott and Costello in their attempts to mirror him. The Saudis tried to scalp one another, but Sergeant Packer was suddenly making these razor cuts with his bayonet, like he was cutting through the skin of time. It wasn't just me, I heard Corporal Zellman, who as I said was on the Presidential Honor Guard, whisper, "He's fucking beautiful, man. Packer's speaking the language, man, loud and clear. Hardly nobody speaks that language anymore."

One who didn't like the language Packer was speaking was Captain Beck. I looked over at him and he was looking at Packer like he wanted to rip his head off. He saw me looking and he turned around and headed back to the barracks. The rest of the platoon stood looking at Sergeant Packer, knowing for a fact we had just seen someone do something far better than should have been possible, and then Corporal Zellman tried to high-five Sergeant Packer, but the little man just looked at him with a look like get fucked and walked out into the desert.

•

The next day the call came from Marine Expeditionary Force HQ that we were to proceed up the coast to the Persian Gulf beach resort town of Khafji. We dropped off some of our extra gear in a condo in Khafji after Corporal Zellman shot off the lock like in the movies, and then moved right up to the goddamn Kuwaiti border. Saudis had a big sand berm 20 feet high that ran the whole border with Kuwait, with big concrete fortresses every 1000 yards or so that we called the Alamos. Saudi border guards called the salaladud were in the Alamos in normal times to keep out the infidels. No sign of those Saudi fuckers now. We sat around that first night spitting chew on the sand rats' oriental rugs in the downstairs tearoom of one of the Alamos, listening to the echoes of the bombing, maybe thinking about you all back home trimming your Christmas trees and singing hallelujah. We were at the head of the spear now. Nobody else was this close to the Iraqis in the whole Desert Shield operation.

It was out of the Alamos that we would run our recon patrols into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, but first we ran a couple of warm-up missions along the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. We were on our way back to one Alamo after one of these missions when a black cloud rolled across the barrier plain between us and Kuwait. You could see it coming, this thick black fog. In the distance you could hear some serious explosions. We bombed the shit out of them over there, night and day, from Kuwait City to Baghdad. We walked on, but in a couple of minutes it was lights out, total darkness in the middle of the fucking day. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. There were six of us in the patrol, including Sergeant Packer, who Captain Beck had insisted come along with us.

Sergeant Zabrinski started going on about how they hit the oil fields big time, and Sergeant Vergil Anderson, who was some sort of born-again freak, started in about how this was the end of the world and how the Lord was coming to judge us. Nobody said anything to that because it was like the end of the world. Zabrinski broke the silence and gave Vergil Anderson some shit like, What if your man already came, realized he couldn't do shit and got the fuck out of here? Vergil Anderson started to freak out, and that's when Sergeant Packer said sort of out of nowhere, Nobody's coming. It was weird to hear Sergeant Packer speak, but weirder still in the fucking darkness. Everyone shut up and thought their own thoughts and listened to our bombs raining down over there in Kuwait like it was the Fourth of July.

The desert was shaking under our feet. I don't know how much time passed, but the acrid smoke started to lift, and then we saw lights moving toward us from the direction of Kuwait. Sergeant Zabrinski hissed, and we slipped to the sand. There were voices speaking in Arabic, they were walking right toward us. The Iraqis fell to their knees and threw up their hands, crying "inshallah" when we moved on them. We pushed them to the deck and tied their hands behind their heads with 5-50 parachute cord. Some were shaved bald and others had freaky kinky hair. (continued on page 179) Battle of Khafji(continued from page 114) We marched the Iraqis back to the Alamo. These were only the first of the Iraqi deserters. As time went by they would come across the barrier plain by the hundreds. When we got back to the Alamo, Captain Beck told us to take their boots for infiltrations. We took the Iraqis' boots so we would leave their treads in the sand when we slipped over the border and walked around Kuwait. When we took off their boots, we saw their feet, which were all seriously messed up with sores and blisters, in part because only one of them had socks. There was a lot of oozing yellow pus, and their feet stank up the Alamo. Later that night the Marine POW translators showed up along with an intelligence officer, and the Iraqis were brought into a back room of the Alamo and questioned one by one. I was in there, and the Iraqis told a consistent story of an army without food, supplies, means of communication or the desire to fight. They told how they saw whole platoons of Iraqi soldiers buried alive under the sand by our bombs. One of the Iraqi prisoners looked about 12, and was too scared to speak. When I came out with the last prisoner, there was Sergeant Packer sitting in the center of the floor of the Alamo cleaning the feet of the 12-year-old. He had a bucket of water, and by his knee was a bottle of peroxide, and in his hand a gauze pad. The kid's feet were seriously fucked up, and strewn around were crumpled gauze pads with yellow secretions and bloodstains.

Captain Beck came out of the back room with the translators and stopped in his tracks and stared at Sergeant Packer's back. He told Packer to ready the prisoners for transport, but Packer went on wiping the Iraqi kid's feet. Captain Beck went over and kicked over the bucket of water. It spread out under the asses of the Iraqi prisoners, but they were looking at Captain Beck's pissed-off face and didn't move a muscle. Sergeant Packer went on cleaning the kid's feet, but now the kid was scared and pulled his feet out of Packer's hands and scuttled backward across the floor yammering in Arabic. Then all the Iraqis started yelling at Sergeant Packer, waving him off. The Iraqis settled down finally, the translators went outside, but Captain Beck kept staring at Sergeant Packer's back like he wanted to take out his sidearm and pop a round into his head. Captain Beck finally went outside, and the prisoners just stared at Sergeant Packer, who took out a candy bar and opened it up and offered it to the 12-year-old Iraqi, but the kid kept shaking his head. He probably figured Sergeant Packer wanted to poison him. It was only later I remembered Sergeant Packer's own kid was about 12 when he died in the Humvee wreck.

We had a bunch of supersnooper and night-vision scopes set up all in a row on the roof of our Alamo and could look right over and see Iraqis beyond the mines and concertina wire of the barrier plain. When you looked through the scopes at the minefield, the first thing you noticed were all the camel parts strewn all over. The Bedouin left them and the mines blew them up. So we were up on the roof, and Captain Beck was adjusting one of the scopes and turned to me and said, "So, who do you think we should send over there first?"

My first thought was, You motherfucker. I was right, he was thinking of sending Sergeant Packer. After the thing with the Iraqi's feet, Packer was on his shit list. But the whole idea was fucked. It was one thing keeping Packer around as a mascot, it was another to send him on a night infiltration of enemy-occupied territory. I pointed out Packer was from transportation and a fat fuck and that we had all had specialized training in the Mojave, but Captain Beck didn't hear a word. He went off on how the satellites could get a chimpanzee through that minefield, how the satellites could get a fucking Iraqi through the minefield, how the satellites could certainly get fucking Packer through the minefield. An F-18 flew over on the way to bomb Baghdad, and when he started giving me a lecture about how fucking beautiful the plane was I pretty much left him up there talking to himself.

Six Marines, including the bus driver, Sergeant Packer, set off that night for a 48-hour infiltration of Kuwait. There was some talk of how fucked it was to have Packer along, but no one was ready to go over Captain Beck's head. The six Marines were all wearing night-vision goggles and one-piece tan desert flight suits that Corporal Fallow had scammed from the quartermaster. Sergeant Zabrinski held the global positioning satellite unit, and all they had to do was follow the directions on the glowing readout from the little box in his hand. The GPS unit would guide them through the Iraqi minefield. They would be led by a satellite in the sky.

The six stepped out into the dark and switched on their night-vision goggles. It is like looking through the eyes of a fly. Everything is phosphorescent green, and human beings leave hazy green trails behind them as they move across your field of vision. I pulled the iron gate of the Alamo down behind them and then went up on the roof to watch through the Quester scope as they made their way toward the mined barrier plain. We saw Sergeant Zabrinski raise his hand as the six infiltrators closed in on the minefield. He hand-motioned for the Marines to set an initial rally point: a 360-degree circle of men facing outboard. It was a moment to sit, listen, adjust gear, orient to the sounds of the night. Sergeant Zabrinski stood up, looked at the GPS in his hand, took two steps to the left, then three steps forward. The other men followed his tracks. We all held our breath, as I don't think anyone except Captain Beck had total faith in the GPS. Captain Beck didn't even come up to the roof of the Alamo. I went downstairs and found him making tea. He said to me, "Packer was in need of some attitude adjustment. Kuwait will tenderize him."

I left Captain Beck stirring his tea and went back upstairs to look through the Quester scope for the infiltrators. They were now on the far side of the barrier plain. I sat down on the roof and looked up at the sky and tried to spot the satellite that was leading them through the mines. After that I stretched out on the roof and fell asleep. I remember I dreamed about being in college, which, as I said already, is what I joined the Marines to get money for--and then I had a nightmare about Captain Beck. Some sort of commotion in front of the Alamo was what woke me up. It was Vergil Anderson. He had captured a photographer with Agence France-Presse. The photographer had broken away from a press pool that night and walked the 20 klicks from Ras-al-Mishab. He was seriously dehydrated and delusional. He wanted to walk to Kuwait and from there to Baghdad to document the effects of our bombing. Captain Beck had me and Vergil Anderson hydrate him and bind his hands with the plastic flexcuffs we reserved for Iraqi POWs and deliver him to MEF-HQ in the rear. He pissed on us all the way to MEF-HQ about our bombing and told us our hands were permanently bloodied and how it was just high-tech slaughter and all that sort of bullshit.

We did some other details at MEFHQ, and came back the next evening. When we went into the Alamo, we found Captain Beck watching the RPV monitor in the tearoom. The RPV is this remotely piloted vehicle--a mechanical bird with a camera in its gut. Captain Beck was looking through the bird's eye at the Iraqi positions just over the mined barrier plain. As I looked at the monitor I saw the mechanical bird was flying low over an Iraqi digging frantically into a sand dune, his tail up in the air. Captain Beck mimed the Iraqi's frantic burrowing, and laughed like he owned the fucking world until he saw me and Vergil Anderson looking at him. I nudged Vergil Anderson and we went up on the roof and looked through the Quester at the barrier plain. It was still daytime, so the infiltration team was hiding over there in their wormholes in the sand, and there wasn't much to see of interest.

That night the infiltration team was three hours late. In general, they were not allowed outbound communications while in-country, as that would put them at risk of detection. We tried to raise them with burst pulse, a relatively safe form of high-frequency communication we reserved for emergencies, but there was no response. We sat around the Alamo, waiting for Captain Beck to alert MEF-HQ so they would send in an emergency extraction team, but he just sat there drinking the Saudis' tea. Corporal Anderson finally spotted the infiltration team with the Quester scope making their way slowly back through the mines.

Captain Beck came up on the roof, and then Corporal Maclean, looking through a Tow sight, started to freak. He said over and over, "Shit, Sergeant Packer's walking point." Everyone ran to one of the scopes to take a look at this, and when I got my eye on a scope, sure enough there was fat little Sergeant Packer, about three meters ahead of the rest of the men. When the infiltration team came closer I noticed this: Sergeant Packer didn't have the GPS in his hand. The bus driver was leading them freestyle. When I turned from the Tow sight to point this out, Captain Beck was gone from the roof of the Alamo. The rest of us stood up there watching, expecting at any second to see the infiltration team blown to kingdom come.

The team made it back to the Alamo. It turned out the GPS and the other electronics had gone down over there, and Sergeant Packer had volunteered to lead them back. He had followed old camel tracks through the mines. You could see the other five men who went on the infiltration had no more doubts about Sergeant Packer. You put your dick on the line like that, you're one of us. Sure, the men were spooked by Sergeant Packer, about how maybe his weird effect on mechanicals had caused the GPS to go down. But no one was talking much about that right then.

Captain Beck was interested only in the coordinates for the Iraqi bunkers and installations brought back by the infiltration team. We all went in and sat around the tearoom and listened to their report. Sergeant Packer turned to me and gave me a bite of a chocolate bar, and then out of the fucking blue he started to sing Silent Night. I had almost forgotten it was Christmas Eve. Sergeant Packer had a beautiful voice. His regular voice--though I had heard in all maybe two complete sentences--sounded like he got a tonsillectomy with a buzz saw, but when he sang it was this almost female thing, all high and sweet.

Captain Beck had his head down over his notes, and it looked like he was going to let Sergeant Packer sing. When a couple of the other men started to join in, he raised his head and said, "Shut the fuck up, Packer." But Packer didn't shut up. He just sang on and on, though he sang alone. Captain Beck looked right at him the whole time, and then when he was done Beck put on this sort of sick smile and said we'd meet back here at 0500 to complete the report.

So it was Christmas morning, six hours later, and we were all back in the tearoom. The report was over in an hour, and then Captain Beck had Corporal Fitch get on the communicator and order up an A-10 jet. I never thought we'd use the coordinates for the Iraqi bunkers and installations on Christmas Day, but there we all were, going up the steps to the roof of the Alamo. Captain Beck was the only one of us who seemed pumped up. He went chuckling over to the fun little Christmas toy known as the Mule. It stands for Multi-Utility-Laser-Engager. It's a plastic box with a laser beam inside. Captain Beck took the PRC-77 communicator handset and read in the coordinates for an Iraqi bunker.

While we waited for the jet, Captain Beck looked like he was about to get a blow job from Miss America. Six minutes later we saw the A-10 jet inbound from the Persian Gulf. The pilot called in for sparkle, and Captain Beck turned on the laser from the Mule. The laser beam would guide the bombs from the jet to the Iraqi bunker. The A-10 popped upward and then rolled over and dove toward the target. There was a puff of smoke in the desert, and the echo of the explosion in our rib cages. Captain Beck pumped his fist and yelled "Bingo." The bombs were Mark 84s, 2000 pounds of explosives in each. Four more 2000-pound bombs were dropped on Iraqi positions that Christmas morning, based on the recommendations of the returning infiltration team. I thought it was all over, and then Captain Beck said he wanted one more, and called in the coordinates. He turned to Sergeant Packer with this big smile after setting up the Mule and asked him to do the honors and turn on the laser as soon as the A-10 was inbound. He told Sergeant Packer it was like a video game. Sergeant Packer just shook his head. He then refused Captain Beck's direct order to push the red button on the Mule. The A-10 went around a second time and Sergeant Zabrinski turned on the laser.

I expected Captain Beck would send Sergeant Packer south for a court-martial for refusing a direct order, but instead he just left the roof of the Alamo without saying another word. The smile was long gone from his face, and--this is fucked--for the first time Beck even looked kind of worried. The other members of the platoon milled around confused, expecting something more, but when nothing happened they drifted downstairs. Sergeant Packer stood at the edge of the Alamo for a long time scanning the desert with the Quester sight. He looked out at that desert for a couple of hours, and then he lay down on the roof and fell asleep. He probably hadn't slept at all while he was on the infiltration. I sat up there with him with my back against the edge of the Alamo for the rest of the day. As the sun set, I thought how hard it was to believe a bunch of Achmeds were dead or dying over there in the sand because of us, and I decided they ought to call this Operation Video Game. I thought he was still sleeping, but then Sergeant Packer sat up and said to me out of the blue, Is it still a war if nobody dies on one side?

I said "what?" or "huh?" as if I didn't understand, because he was getting philosophical and in those days thinking made me feel like a faggot, and he said, "I mean, if thousands die on one side, and nobody at all dies on the other, is that still a war? Maybe we should have a new word for it?"

I said as if I were pissed, "But the war hasn't happened yet." Sergeant Packer stood up and, staring at one of our Cobra helicopters rotoring through a blazing sunset, said, "The dead are as good as dead."

Sergeant Packer and I sat up there on the roof of the Alamo long after the sun set on that Christmas evening. Dozens of oil fires were leaping 200 feet into the air across the distant Kuwaiti horizon. It was like hell was right over the border. Neither of us had spoken for hours and it was silent up there except for the sizzle of desert sand blowing against the side of the Alamo. I stood up at one point and with a scope spotted one of our Cobra helos sniffing around over the Kuwaiti border, as if curious about the day's Iraqi toll.

It was as if I were keeping Sergeant Packer company in the last hours before some sort of shit finally hit the fan. And then the shit finally did hit the fan. Sergeant Packer hadn't moved a muscle in hours, and then out of the blue he jumped up and started scanning the mined barrier plain through a Quester scope. I stood up and looked through another scope. It took me a long time to locate what he was seeing, but then I saw movement on the far side of the mined barrier plain.

Neither of us had spoken a word but, as if they smelled something going down, Sergeant Zabrinski came up on the roof of the Alamo, followed by Captain Beck. Sergeant Zabrinski and Captain Beck both went right to a scope. Captain Beck turned away from his scope after spotting the figure in the minefield and glanced at me, and I swear he was grinning. I put my eye to one of the Tow sights again and watched the figure making its way through the mines. When I raised my eyes from the Tow sight and turned around, Sergeant Packer was gone from the roof of the Alamo. Thirty seconds later we saw him running across the desert in front of the Alamo toward the minefield. I looked over at Captain Beck, and he shook his head at me, like he now expected nothing less than this sort of crazy shit from Sergeant Packer.

About 15 seconds later Sergeant Zabrinski identified the figure out there in the mined barrier plain as a female. I looked again through the Tow scope, and it did now look like the figure coming slowly through the mines toward Sergeant Packer was covered from head to toe. Sergeant Packer was now in the minefield, making his way toward this Arab female. It was right about then that Sergeant Zabrinski picked up on his scope a Cobra helo bearing back from the Kuwaiti horizon on a definite course for this developing situation in the minefield. Captain Beck raised his hand, pointed in the direction of the oncoming helo, and said something under his breath to Sergeant Zabrinski, who started laughing.

The Cobra helo was now the only thing moving quickly out there, and soon you could see through the scope it was clearly bearing down on this Arab female. The Cobra helicopter reads human heat on its thermal sights and destroys. The only way to avoid it is to lie down on the ground and pretzel into a nonhuman shape, so maybe you get read as a plant or something nonhuman. So through the scopes we saw Sergeant Packer waving his arms like he was telling the Arab female to stop and lie down, but of course she was freaked by him, and just doubled her pace through the mines.

So Packer started waving his arms at the incoming Cobra helo. The helo didn't bear off the Arab female at his waving, and I expected it to open up on her with its nose gun at any second. Sergeant Packer must have thought the same thing, because he took out his .45 and started firing at the helo, and then the big whacking insect forgot the Arab female, who stopped in her tracks. The helo swung sharply around and bore down on Sergeant Packer. It bore down on him in slow motion, as Packer emptied his clip. It was pretty clear he was firing for effect, and not just throwing rounds up near the helo. You could hear the little pop, pop, pop from Packer's .45 over the drone of the rotor blades.

Sergeant Packer popped another clip into his .45, raised his arm again and squeezed off round after round toward the helo. The helo was about 100 yards away when it responded with a long burst from its 30mm nose gun. There were strings of orange tracers all over the night. The desert all around Sergeant Packer was being pocked up by 30-mm rounds, but he stood his ground and fired off the last of his clip toward the helo. It was right then the helo ripped off another burst from its nose gun, and I saw Sergeant Packer take a serious hit. His body shook like he was electrocuted, and he spun around and dropped to his knees, and then tumbled over face first into the sand. The helo fired again, another spray of orange tracers, and Sergeant Packer's body twisted on the desert floor as he took at least one more hit. The helo hovered in victory over his body for about ten seconds, and then banked and headed back into the dark over the Persian Gulf. With the helo gone, you could hear the desert sand blowing against the side of the Alamo.

The silence was broken by the Arab female screaming out there in the mine-field. She really let loose with her Arab lungs--it was a serious death wail she was doing out there. She was wailing and picking her way through the mines toward the body of Sergeant Packer. When she first started wailing, I unglued my eye from the Tow scope and scanned the roof of the Alamo, and that was when I noticed Captain Beck. He was not looking through a scope. He looked like the cat that finally ate the motherfucking canary. He saw me looking at him, and shaking his head said, "Not a good idea to fuck with those helo jockeys."

I didn't want to look at Captain Beck's face so I put my eye back to the Tow scope. Most of the platoon was already down there running across the desert in front of the Alamo toward the minefield. The Arab female was still making her way toward Sergeant Packer's body through the mines and still wailing. She was about five meters away from his body. It was going to be tricky extracting her and Packer's body from the minefield. It was while I was thinking about that extraction--that was when I saw little fucking Sergeant Packer out there in no-man's-land move his arm. There was no motion for another ten seconds, and then Packer's arm raised up a few inches again off the desert floor. Zabrinski, looking through another scope, saw the same motion and started to yell, and I raised my head from the Tow scope and said, "Captain Beck, better take another look."

•

Sergeant Packer was up and stumbling through the minefield by the time I came down from the Alamo to the edge of the barrier plain. It was pretty clear his left leg had been clipped--he was dragging it. By hand signals he kept the Arab woman about three yards back as he picked their way out of the minefield. I played a flashlight over Packer's face when he made it out of the minefield. A 30mm round had torn horizontally across the skin of his forehead, a flap of skin was hanging down over one eyebrow, and you could see about three inches of the white of his skull. Blood was flowing steadily from the wound over his face, and he had to keep blinking to see us. The cammies of his left leg were torn up and black with blood.

With a couple of the men, Sergeant Zabrinski started to hustle the Arab woman back toward the Alamo. She was clutching a blanket to her chest with both arms and still wailing like it was the end of the fucking world. Sergeant Packer pushed past us when he saw Zabrinski and the others moving the Arab woman away, and without a word stumbled after them. Half the platoon tried to give Packer a hand on the way back to the Alamo, but the little bus driver cursed like a motherfucker when anyone touched him. Eventually the platoon fell back a few yards and just trailed behind Packer as he stumbled along. He wasn't moving too fast, and we fell way behind Zabrinski and the others with the Arab woman.

When we finally entered the Alamo, Captain Beck and Sergeant Zabrinski were standing with their backs to us in front of the Arab woman in the tearoom. Captain Beck was trying to get a baby in the blanket out of her arms, and she was giving him an earful of high-decibel Arabic. Neither Sergeant Zabrinski nor Captain Beck turned around as we all followed behind Sergeant Packer. They might not have even heard us walking toward them behind Sergeant Packer, the Arab woman was screaming that loud as Captain Beck tugged at the baby in the blanket.

Sergeant Packer fell against Captain Beck, a kind of stumbling body block from behind. Sergeant Zabrinski immediately swung around with his Ka-Bar knife out, but then backed off. Sergeant Packer reached down and took the baby in the blanket out of the arms of the Arab woman. The Arab woman just let Sergeant Packer remove it from her arms, and she stopped screaming and was silent for about ten seconds, and then started in with the waterworks. The rest of the platoon kind of melted away then. But I stood there, which is why I ended up the one to handcuff Sergeant Packer. Captain Beck didn't--or couldn't--look twice at Sergeant Packer holding the Arab baby, and came out and handed me the plastic flexcuffs, and told Zabrinski to arrange for Packer's transport to MEF-HQ for a court-martial, and then disappeared up to the roof of the Alamo.

It was with my own two hands that I put the flexcuffs on Sergeant Packer's wrists. He held out his wrists while still holding the baby in his arms. The blanket fell open as he held out his hands, and I saw that there wasn't much left below the shoulders of the baby. I heard a rumor later that the Arab woman had walked from Basra in Iraq to show the remains to us.

Sergeant Packer wouldn't let anyone dress his wounds. He just stood there cuffed, holding the remains of the Iraqi baby with blood dripping down his face. The Iraqi woman finally stopped her waterworks, took the pressure bandages, gauze, scissors and tape off the table, and wrapped his head and leg. Sergeant Zabrinski then drove the Iraqi woman and Sergeant Packer and the baby's remains in a Humvee down the hardball to Marine Expeditionary Force HQ. Captain Beck had wanted to send them separately, but the Iraqi woman wouldn't leave Sergeant Packer's side.

Sergeant Zabrinski later told me it took him and three MPs to get the Iraqi baby's remains away from Sergeant Packer when they arrived at MEF-HQ. A Colonel Herman there had Sergeant Packer put in wrist-to-ankle shackles, and had a medic inject him with a sedative that the medic said would have put down a horse. The injection didn't knock out Sergeant Packer. He just sat there at MEF-HQ in shackles with a face covered in dried blood, giving his who gives a fuck look to all the brass walking by, until they finished the paperwork and took him away.

•

A month later we won Desert Storm by driving the 20 klicks to Kuwait. Captain Beck was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. I got home and watched all the tickertape parades and instant replays of our great victory on the tube. Over the next year, my hands curled up into claws with arthritis and they tell me it's my imagination. I had a kid with this great woman, and the kid was born with veins on the outside of his face, and they say it's unrelated to Desert Storm.

I wake up every night now with my claws over my eyes. In the dream that wakes me up we're eating MREs in the Alamo when there is a biological warning. We pull on our gas masks and look around at each other like a bunch of insects. It is then that Sergeant Zabrinski, in his gas mask, beckons us outside. Riding toward the Alamo on a camel is this soldier without a gas mask. This soldier on a camel rides right up to us like a fucking Bedouin and motions for us to take off our gas masks, but we raise our M-16s and chase the soldier off into the desert.

Everyone shut up and listened to our bombs raining down like it was the Fourth of July.