Unseen Enemy: The Surprising Reality of Complacency in Combat
As if the blistering heat and that afternoon’s sandstorm hadn’t been irritating enough, the red alert sirens blared through the loudspeakers. It was likely someone had paid a poor Iraqi farmer a few hundred dollars to set up a mortar tube just outside the fence and launch a round somewhere onto our base. These weren’t sophisticated, aimed attacks — rather they were sporadic wishes by the enemy that some would actually strike something. Most of the rounds, however, hit nothing more than dirt and sand.
Combat Begets Complacency
For eight years, the United States Army prepared me for a combat deployment. Having been in the sandbox for almost five months, I had seven more to go to finish my tour of duty in Iraq. Even in this short time, like many other soldiers, I had become complacent about the danger we continually faced. I was in a routine of doing my job — supervising the logistics of my unit — and just trying to survive until it was time to climb aboard the freedom flight back home.
For those of us stationed at Logistics Support Area Anaconda, it was easy to develop this complacency. The base was flippantly known as Mortaritaville, where mortar attacks were almost a daily occurrence. Most of the mortars were Russian made, left over from Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran. Now they were being used by untrained militants to wage a holy jihad against the “Western occupiers” in the land.
Mere Irritants?
A false sense of security permeated the morale of almost everyone at the base — the exception being the newbies who had just arrived. As much as the excitement of being in the war zone was initially exhilarating and scary, it didn’t take long for those feelings to fade. After the first few mortar attacks, the monotonous red alert sirens lost their effect. These attacks became nothing more than another irritant disrupting our daily routine and our pretend sense of normalcy.
The luxuries of a halfway decent meal, perhaps our only meal of the day, and an occasional phone call home, fueled this normalcy. However, when we were under a red alert, the chow hall and phone tent would shut down. To say this pissed us off was an understatement. It disrupted our routine, delayed or sometimes caused us to lose the fragments of hope that kept us going, and added to the resentment of being attacked by an enemy most of us never saw. The idea behind the policy was for us to hunker down in the closest bunker. In reality, we waited in the open for the all clear so we could get into the building to eat or use the phones.
Mission Prep
There was nothing different about this particular night. The sirens stopped sounding around 1900 hours, and the chow hall finally opened in time for us to eat a cold dinner. After eating, as my battalion’s Quick Reaction Force team leader, I received our mission orders for the following morning. Off I went to the motor pool to disseminate the orders to my ten-man team.
Military Police typically provided convoy security for units traveling throughout Iraq, but not for those traveling with fuel tankers. Commonly referred to as RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade) magnets, fuel tankers were like giant bombs on wheels. Since our battalion had fuel tankers, most of my team’s missions were escorting those tankers.
This particular mission was to convoy two of our tankers to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Duke. With the first battle of Fallujah only a few months prior, the western portion of Iraq had become a hotbed of insurgent activity. Many of the insurgent forces fled south from Fallujah and embedded themselves in the cities of Karbala and Najaf. A former ammunition depot for the Iraqi Army, FOB Duke was a desolate, flat wasteland in the middle of a seemingly infinite desert, directly between these two cities. This insurgent activity intensified the potential threat we would face.
By 2000 hours, my team gathered in and around a makeshift motor pool located in a domed concrete structure with a large opening on one side, known as a Hardened Aircraft Shelter. Placing sandbags on the floorboards of the vehicles — which theoretically would soften the blow from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and roadside bombs — and mounting salvaged scrap metal on the doors to protect against small arms fire, we prepared for the likely danger which awaited us.
Smelling of fuel, oil, and sweat, the night air was still hot, well above ninety-degrees Fahrenheit, even though the sun had set a few hours earlier. Sweat poured from our bodies. We pretended it was only from the heat, not our nerves. By now, most of us had witnessed an IED explosion or encountered AK-47 fire off base. The thought of death was consciously pushed to the back of our minds as we stayed focused on the mission at hand.
While preparing for the mission, we joked as if getting ready for a tailgate before a football game. We hurled water bottles across the pavement to catch someone off guard. Rock music was blaring from speakers inside the shelter. We refused to let our nerves show. We had a mission to do.
Around 2200 hours, with sandbags in place and armor mounted, I left my team to finish loading the ammunition, food, and water. Walking across the road to another shelter containing our fuel section, I found the small overnight crew perched inside like a group of parakeets in a cage, playing an intense game of cards.
Impact
After talking with the crew for a few minutes, I finished reviewing the daily fuel reports and started back to the Motor Pool. Then it happened. As I was crossing the road, I heard the explosive sound of a mortar round hitting a Conex storage container positioned ten feet away from the shelter I’d just left.
Diving to the ground, I heard shrapnel ricochet off the pavement. My ears rang. My body twitched. My adrenaline surged. Gritting my teeth, I pushed my face into the road, covering the back of my head with my hands. Within seconds, another mortar round impacted the ground between me and the Conex. Shrapnel covered the ground like a deadly hail storm. In my confused haze, I heard the sound of the red alert sirens blaring. Yet this time the sirens seemed faint and surreal. Thoughts of my two-year-old daughter back home flooded my mind. Too far away from shelter, and afraid another round was on its way, I lay there frozen for what seemed like an eternity.
After a minute or two, I pushed to my feet and dusted off my uniform. I was physically shaking and my ears rang. Looking down, I noticed a six-inch shard of metal that had landed within inches of where my head had been. Staring at that shrapnel, the severity of the situation overwhelmed me. Still trembling, I pulled my work gloves out of my cargo pocket, put them on, and picked up the hot piece of serrated metal.
Returning to the motor pool, I found my team casually sitting in folding chairs inside the shelter. The rock music was still playing.
“Did you hear that hit?” one of the guys asked me. “It sounded close.”
With an unsteady hand, I held up the piece of shrapnel and replied, “Yeah, it was close.”
“Good thing it didn’t hit you,” a sergeant joked. “It’d be tough to find a replacement for tomorrow’s convoy this late.”
Some of the guys chuckled at this statement. Others stared at me, unable to mentally process the reality of how close the danger had become. Getting up from their seats, the team silently went back to work.
Mission-Focused
Within a half-hour, we finished our preparations and headed to our bunks for a few hours of rest. Now was not the time to dwell on what had happened. We had a mission to do in less than six hours. We had to stay focused on that. Our lives depended on it. And yet, while now was not the time to dwell on what had happened, that wasn’t entirely possible for me. Lying in my bunk, my hand held that now cold, jagged piece of shrapnel. I stared at it trying to rationalize the callousness of my complacent attitude against the magnitude of what I had experienced. What if it had hit me? Would I have been injured, or killed? What about my family? These thoughts infiltrated my restless sleep for the next five hours, until time for me to line up the convoy and roll out to FOB Duke.
The physical preparations we had made led to a successful convoy mission without incident. But something had changed inside of me. Battling a strange mixture of emotions ranging from bewilderment at my survival to anger at the enemy who shot at us and ran before we could retaliate, I became more focused. I was keenly aware of my surroundings, and the dangers they held, on and off base.
I didn’t fault the other guys for not having the same awareness I had acquired. Although only a few feet from me when the mortar rounds hit, they had not experienced what I had. I didn’t even fault the guys who joked and laughed about the situation. I would have done the same thing prior to this experience. Laughter was often our main defense mechanism to combat the psychological chaos surrounding us. We joked about how bad the aim of the enemy was, or how much money the army wasted on concrete bunkers which nobody used, or the fact we were issued winter coats in the middle of the desert.
Back to Routine
I wish I could say my focus remained gazelle intense for the next seven months. Unfortunately, this wasn’t always the case. Routine living in a foreign land leads to feigning normalcy. And the sad truth is war begets complacent behavior, and complacency kills.
I kept that piece of shrapnel for the remainder of my tour in Iraq. Oftentimes when I was alone, I pulled it out and stared at it as a reminder of the dangers we faced daily. Eventually, I brought the shrapnel home with me as a physical sign of just how close I came to serious harm or even death.
Back Home
A person often doesn’t realize what they have survived until they are on the other side of it. It didn’t really hit me how many close calls I’d had in Iraq until I got back home to the United States. A few weeks after coming home, my mind began processing everything I had been through and witnessed. Flooded with emotions and trying to transition to life outside the war zone, I found myself still seeking the adrenaline of combat, the camaraderie of those I served with, and the focus brought on by the missions.
This transition is a challenging task as I, like many others, have taken a circuitous path back to normal, or the “new normal” to be more accurate. In effect, these experiences rewired my psyche, much like others who have experienced various traumatic events in their lives.
Perhaps nothing physically changed for me at the time. But looking back, that piece of shrapnel changed my life forever. I realized I had become callous to the dangers of war. Perhaps this was a legitimate defense mechanism. However, it was also a psychological metamorphosis — one that allowed normal people to make it through extraordinary situations, and then begin the process of returning to ordinary life with extraordinary new awareness.
