Grandpa’s War – Part 24 – The Song in the Storm

There are some things you just never forget.

Things like the first time you meet the person you’ll spent the rest of your days with.

Or when your first child is born.

Or a night when a thousand men and then some are killed.

We’d been in Iraq for not quite forty eight hours. We were starting to see more and more remains of the battles that had been fought. At one point, we found ourselves threading through a minefield. We’d tip toe our way through a few more before the cease fire. There were a couple of burnt-out tanks in the midst of it. The minefields had been laid down by the Air Force behind elements of the Republican Guard.

The idea was, we’d push them in and through them. This would help to weaken them.

Of course, we had to go through ourselves. We were following paths cleared out by the combat engineers. First rule. Stay on the path. A deviation by even a foot could mean disaster.

The night before, we’d set up our perimeter. It was raining. You haven’t seen rain till you see it in the desert. The area gets very little water. It seemed that whatever it got on a yearly basis was delivered all in one night. I remember walking to another vehicle in the dark rain. The ground was so hard packed that the water just wasn’t seeping in.

And it was so dark. It a darkness that was almost Biblical dark. It was the kind of dark that wrapped itself around you like a cloak. It sucked up light making even light seem dark. Occasionally, the dark would split apart with bright almost lightning like flashes.

But this wasn’t lightning. This fury wasn’t natures, but the fury of men. Just a few miles away, a massive battle was being fought. We could see the flashes of the battle. Something would flash. The light would be instantly swallowed up leaving you with afterimages of the flash dancing in your eyes. Occasionally the roll of thunder of explosions as the tanks clashed, exploded, and died.

When the sun rose, the storm cleared out. Our tanks were moving forward. Having destroyed whoever they’d run into the night before, they were off seeking the next fight, and we were following. We were getting close to where the battle had been fought the night before. Billowing columns of thick black smoke rose up into the sky and we were driving right towards them.

Soon we reached a point where the ground sloped down into a small valley. There, the convoy stopped.

Scattered out in the small valley were the remains of several dozen tanks, armored personnel carriers, and trucks.  Most of them were burning. Others were just so many busted parts. I’ve seen scenes in war movies that were supposed to represent something like this. But Hollywood just can’t capture the reality of a battlefield. Indeed, if this battlefield resembled anything from fiction at all, it looked like a scene from War of the Worlds.

And we’d been the Martians.

There’s just no way you can put that across on a movie screen. The acrid smell of burning rubber and fuel hung over the battlefield, burning the nostrils and making the eyes water. And mixed in with the smell of burning fuel was a sickly-sweet odor like burnt sugar.

I’d smelled it before. As a sheriff’s deputy, I had to go into a burnt house and help recover a body. It was the remains of the occupant. He’d burned to death and there was little left of him except bones and few pieces of flesh. The smell of a burnt body is overpowering and sickening. It’s a smell, you never forget.

In the wrecks of the tanks and trucks, flames were slowly consuming the bodies of our enemies. Trucks were overturned or burnt-out shells themselves. I’m sure the drivers were still in them.

I’ve tried to find a word to describe it in my journal. Words like apocalyptic and devastating just weren’t big enough. I finally had to settle and say that there were no words for this.

What had happened was the superior technology of the M1A1 tank had killed the Iraqis.  Thanks to computer-controlled gunnery, and a superior night fighting ability, the M1s had ripped the Russian built T-72s apart.  All over the battlefield, were the bottom chassis of the tanks. Their turrets had been blown off because of the explosions. The tankers called those Catastrophic kills. Others had simply caught fire. The turrets themselves were now badly damaged from the ammunition inside cooking off from the heat.

This had been the proud Republican Guard. They called themselves the Lions of Babylon.

They’d been slaughtered like lambs by a pack of wolves.

I got out of my Humvee and looked down at the battlefield. I wasn’t the only one looking. I’d have expected jubilation at what we’d done to the enemy. Instead, everyone was quiet, trying to come to grips with something so far out of the norm. What talking there was came in low and subdued voices.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “There’s someone down there!”

The soldier was pointing, and I brought my binoculars up. Sure enough, walking along a roadway through the maze of twisted metal and smoking debris, was a single man. He had his hands in his pockets and his head was down. He looked less an enemy soldier and more like an old man walking through a park on a cold day.

“Muniz. Bradley!” A shout came from our Lieutenant. “Go down with the medics. Bring that man back.”

“Yes, sir,” I responded. Several medics with a stretcher rushed over and got in our HUMVEEs

“I’ve got overwatch!” Greg yelled at me.

I held up a thumb. That meant we’d take the point, and he’d ride shotgun about twenty meters back. They’d provide cover for us if anything went wrong, and with luck, we’d be able to fall back..

We drove down the hill towards the battlefield. I had my rifle ready and glanced up at my gunner. He was scanning for anything else moving, his weapon moving back and forth. My driver was carefully weaving around pieces of metal. Any of them could have given us a flat, or put a hole in an oil pan or gas tank.

Then there was the ever-present threat of unexploded ordnance to watch for.

“Stop right here,” I said.

Slowly we drove towards the Iraqi.

He seemed oblivious to our presence as we closed. He just kept moving on as if we didn’t exist.

The vehicle stopped and I got out. We were maybe ten meters away from the slowly shuffling man. He still hadn’t reacted to us. The medics were getting out and were standing a looking as the man moved painfully through the smoldering battlefield.

“Hey!” One of the medics shouted at the man.

He stopped, slowly turned, saw us, and stood for a while like he was trying to think. Then with a blank look on his face, he slowly began walking to us. His hands were still in his pockets. His head was covered with blood. That he had a head wound and was severely confused was obvious.

I don’t even think it registered with him that we were American soldiers. As he approached, his knees gave way and he collapsed in front of us. The medics rushed forward. He was out cold.

The two medics quickly began accessing him. I got in front of them with my rifle, watching the perimeter. It wouldn’t do to have another Iraqi soldier out here that was slightly more online than this guy. Maybe one with a rifle. He could take out a couple of us rather quickly.

But after looking about and listening, it was obvious this poor guy was the only survivor of this incident. I wondered what he’d think of in the years to come. Would he consider himself lucky or wish he’d perished with his friends and comrades?

As the Medics worked, I heard something.

I looked around, listening, and then heard it again. It was a faint musical sound. At first, I thought that maybe there was a radio turned on that was pulling in some music.  Or an alarm on a watch that hadn’t been busted in the battle. I listened carefully to the sound.

In the dawn and in the middle of a hell even Satan would shy away from, a small bird was singing.

I walked over to where the noise was coming from. In the burnt and blasted battlefield, a small bush was standing erect, and in it, a single bird. There was a small nest with a couple of eggs that it was sitting on.

I looked at the bird and listened to its cheerful song. I wondered what terrors it had gone through the night before. While tanks exploded, and hell rained from the skies, it had sat on its nest. It did it’s very best to protect its unborn chicks.

But now the fight was over and had moved on. All that remained was the carnage of the battle. And the little bird, its nest and eggs.

Now with the dawn, it was singing a song of sheer joy at being alive. All was right with its world.

And all you need is for some vehicle to drive over you, I thought. But that’s something I can fix.

I took a length of yellow caution tape from my pocket and gently draped it around the bush. We used this tape to mark the location of potential mine or obstacles. The idea was to prevent anyone from driving over it, or in this case, over the bush.

The bird eyed me carefully as I worked. It stopped singing, watching me as a potential predator. Finished, I stepped back, and a moment later, it started to sing again.

By now, the Medics had the wounded Iraqi on the stretcher and were carrying him over to our HUMVEEs. I moved back, keeping my eyes open, and we went back to the rest of the convoy. They ended up calling in a MASH evac chopper to pick up the wounded man.

I heard he made it.

And in a burning battlefield, I learned a lesson for life from a small bird.

When life starts getting rough, I always think about that little bird. After a night in Hell, it sang for joy at dawn.

It’s the most valuable lesson I’ve ever learned.

All photographs Copyright – Richard L. Muniz