Part 63 (1/2)

As the day went on, we started taking fire from AKs and rocket-propelled grenades. The conflict ratcheted up quickly. The RPGs began tearing holes in the loose concrete or adobe walls, breaking through and starting fires.

We decided it was time to leave and called for extraction:

Send the RG-33s! (RG-33s are big bulletproof vehicles designed to withstand IEDs and equipped with a machine-gun turret on the top.)

We waited, continuing the firefight and ducking the insurgents' growing spray of bullets. Finally, the relief force reported that it was five hundred yards away, on the other side of the soccer field.

That was as close as they were getting.

A pair of Army Hummers blew through the village and appeared at the doors, but they couldn't take all of us. The rest of us started to run for the RG-33s.

Someone threw a smoke grenade, I guess with the thought that it would cover our retreat. All it really did was make it impossible for us to see. (The grenades should be used to screen movement; you run behind the smoke. In this case, we had to run through it.) We ran from the house, through the cloud of smoke, ducking bullets and dodging into the open field.

It was like a scene from a movie. Bullets sprayed and plinked into the dirt.

The guy next to me fell. I thought he'd been hit. I stopped, but before I could grab him, he jumped to his feet-he'd only tripped.

”I'm good! I'm good!” he yelled.

Together we continued toward the trucks, bullets and turf flying everywhere. Finally, we reached the trucks. I jumped into the back of one of the RG-33s. As I caught my breath, bullets splashed against one of the bulletproof windows on the side, spiderwebbing the gla.s.s.

A few days later, I was westward-bound, back to Delta Platoon. The transfer I'd asked for earlier was granted.

The timing was good. Things were starting to get to me. The stress had been building. Little did I know it was going to get a lot worse, even as the fighting got a lot less.

CHIEF PETTY OFFICER KYLE

By now, my guys had left al-Qa'im and were at a place called Rawah, also out west near the Syrian border. Once again they'd been put to work building barracks and the rest.

I got lucky; I missed the construction work. But there wasn't much going on when I arrived, either.

I was just in time for a long-range desert patrol out on the border. We drove out there for a few days hardly seeing a person, let alone insurgents. There had been reports of smuggling across the desert, but if it was going on, it wasn't going on where we were.

Meanwhile, it was hot. It was 120 degrees at least, and we were driving in Hummers that had no air-conditioning. I grew up in Texas, so I know warm; this was worse. And it was constant; you couldn't get away from it. It hardly cooled off at night-it might fall to 115. Rolling down the windows meant taking a risk if there was an IED. Almost worse was the sand, which would just blow right in and cover you.

I decided I preferred the sand and IED danger to the heat. I rolled down the windows.

Driving, all you saw was desert. Occasionally, there would be a nomad settlement or a tiny village.

We linked up with our sister platoon, then the next day we stopped at a Marine base. My chief went in and did some business; a little while later he came out and found me.

”Hey,” he told me, grinning. ”Guess what-you just made chief.”

I had taken the chief's exam back in the States before we deployed.

In the Navy, you usually have to take a written test to get promoted. But I'd lucked out. I got a field promotion to E5 during my second deployment and made E6 thanks to a special merit program before my third deployment. Both came without taking written tests.

(In both cases I had been doing a lot of extra work within the Team, and had made a reputation on the battlefield. Those were the important factors in awarding the new ranks.)