"Incoming...incoming...incoming..."
This is the second time this has happened at breakfast. I stop and pull my chair back from the table. Best thing to do is to stay put, but you want to have contingency plans. I sit and wait for it.
"Whump...whump...boom!"
At the last one, the building shakes slightly. Still distant though.
"Boom...boom...boom..."
These last few bracket the building, but still a safe distance away. It's a scattered volley, not very accurate. But of course, we were between the two groups. Any one of those shots could have hit us.
I finish up and bus my tray. Outside, people are moving with a bit more hurry in their steps, as is usually the case after an attack. No visible damage. So I head to work to report in.
"Hey LT," Staff Sgt. Murray says, when I walk in. "I thought you were off."
"Just letting you know I'm alive," I say. We're supposed to report in after any such attack to make sure everyone is accounted for. Having done that, I headed back out of the building. As I did, I ran into Dave, a contractor I've known since Kuwait. He tells me a couple of rounds may have hit the trailer park where we both live.
"Hope they didn't hit your trailer," I tell him. As I walk away, an odd feeling strikes me. What if it hit mine?
The question would turn out to be eerily prescient...
I work 12-hour days most days, but on my "day off" I only work six. Finishing up around breakfast time, I usually have time to kill before meeting up with a friend from my unit back home for some chow. Isaac works a slightly longer shift than me, so I've got about 30-45 minutes to spare. Usually, I spend the time reading a book in the lobby of the palace, relaxing in Saddam's throne. But on this particular day, I didn't have a book with me. So I had decided to go home and read in my trailer until it was time to meet up with my friend.
At that point, you might say, fate intervened. Actually, it was my stomach.
Halfway out the palace door, I stopped myself. Man, I think. I am really hungry. So I change my plan. Rather than go all the way back to my trailer, and then all the way over to the dining facility, I decide to head to the chow hall and eat anyway. I could wait for my friend there.
The decision may have actually saved my life.
For while I was in the chow hall eating breakfast, and not sitting on my bed in my trailer reading a book, one of the mortars or rockets (I'm not saying which it was) fell apart from the rest of the group and struck the concrete barrier...five feet from my trailer. The round exploded, sending shrapnel in every direction. Had a person been standing there, they would almost certainly be dead.
Most of the blast was dissipated by the concrete wall - exactly what it's there for - but debris blew back towards the trailers behind it. One of them was mine. The same trailer that I would have been in, had I not gone to breakfast early.
By the time I arrived, the emergency personnel had come and gone, and in their place, the investigators scoured the scene. A line of yellow tape stretched across the walkway to the side of my trailer. My door was unlocked. Emergency personnel had used a crowbar to pop it and check inside - to make sure no one was home and injured. I opened it up and surveyed the scene.Two dozen small holes - most no bigger than a dime - were splayed across the upper part of the room. Sunlight flowed through them from them.
One piece of shrapnel had even crossed the room, narrowly missed my books, and punched through the wall on the other side. Something had struck the light fixture, and pieces of it lay broken on the floor. Amid them, a shattered fluorescent bulb. The front face of the air conditioner had been blown off by the mere concussion of the blast.
To my relief, I thought at first, I would have been perfectly fine had I been in there. All of the holes were towards the top of the wall. Had I been there, I would have likely been sitting on my bed reading, and all of the shards of metal would have passed above me.
But then I looked down and noticed something that gave me pause.
There, on a low part of the wall directly in line with the place I normally sit, something was lodged in the wall. I took a closer look. An inch-long, twisted chunk of steel was embedded in the wall. The fake wood paneling around it was singed from the heat. It narrowly missed my Texas A&M 12th-Man towel, which hangs at the head of my bed.
I pulled out my multi-tool and extracted it with the care of a surgeon.
Had I been there, I guess, nothing would have changed. The wall, perhaps, would have stopped the steaming-hot shard of steel then just as it had now. But the fact that this deadly piece of steel was in a direct line from the impact to where I would have been was startling. And sobering.
Outside, a couple of people suffered minor injuries, or so I heard. Most of them were further away. My suitemate, however, got the fright of his life. Or someone he knew did, at least. At the time of the attack, he was on his Voice over Internet Protocol phone with his fiancé. There was an audible explosion in the distance.
"Honey," he said. "I'm going to have to go now, there's an attack."
At that very moment, the line went dead. The round had exploded right outside our trailer. His room is in the same building as mine, but fortunately none of the shrapnel made it there. Still, he spent the next two hours frantically trying to find a phone to call home and soothe the nerves of his fiancé.
It had been a sobering experience, but when it all comes down to it, it changed nothing. The most dangerous moment in my life remains that time when I was an 18-year-old student pilot, caught in a thunderstorm while flying solo. And I've still never been more terrified in Iraq than I have been on I-35 in Austin, sandwiched between 18-wheelers on the lower level. Sure, this is different because it's deliberate. Somebody out there planned this thing for weeks, picked a time, picked a location - probably threatened a homeowner with death for not helping - and then shot his weapon at me.
Here on base, most days are quiet, deceptively peaceful. Of course, it's a strange thing that passes for peaceful here. Every day, you hear gunfire off in the distance as you walk to work or to the gym. It comes when a "pop pop pop pop" breaks the silence. It's never the constant fire of machine guns in the movies. Our soldiers are more disciplined than that, and the enemy's usually firing and running.
Sometimes when you hear the gunfire, you wonder if a stray round will come over and hit you as you walk. It happens, and it can kill. Other times, you're sleeping at night and a boom shakes you awake. You open your eyes and listen. Sometimes it's followed by another, but usually not.
The fact that it's nowhere near you doesn't stop you from being concerned. It could be an American Humvee that hit an IED. Or it could be an IED that a local citizen pointed out to us and we blew up with no incident. You never know.
The odds are overwhelmingly in your favor.The reason I don't worry all that much is the same reason I never play the lottery. Essentially, that's what this is - all one big inverse lottery. Sure, rather than the odds being millions to one, they're only in the thousands, but hey, that's pretty good, and I'll take them.
Despite all that, death and danger are not ever-present here at Camp Victory, and to portray it as so would be far from the truth. Certainly, for the folks who spend every day "outside the wire" that is another story. But even then, the vast majority of convoys go out and come back with absolutely no contact with the enemy. Small comfort, I'm sure, but comfort is in short supply in Iraq. The best you can do is hope...and pray. I'll have a little more to say about that next time.
* * *
Some of the holes in my wall. The pics are kind of limited. I'm deliberately not including any of the outside shots, for security reasons.
The crecent-shaped piece was kind of interesting. As I was cleaning up in the room, I found a small piece of metal that fit perfectly - like a jigsaw puzzle. It was white aluminum, and it took me a second to realize it was from the outside wall of the trailer, not from the shrapnel itself.
