1
WARM SPRING DAY
With the soft earth pressed into my back, I gazed up to the sky. The sun shone down all around on what was just another warm spring day.
I turned to my friend after hearing the buzz of a bee cut the air between us. We smirked and shook our heads, eventually working each other up to an audible laugh.
No words were exchanged. No words needed be exchanged; we were both thinking the exact same thing.
We are completely fucked right now. There’s no way we’re getting out of this alive. We’re going to die right here, right now, wallowing in this fucking garbage.
I hadn’t even finished the thought when three more bullets streaked by, inches from my face, each one again sounding every bit like an angry insect.
Micro-explosions of dirt splashed around randomly, each subsequent impact punctuating just how close we were to death’s door. I shimmied to somehow bury my body even deeper in a shallow pile of trash. It reeked in the sweltering heat.
There was nowhere to run. This was all we had for cover.
The day started off worse than the others, but not all that much differently. Instead of bugles greeting us with reveille, we were roused from our slumber by more than two dozen mortars that had been lobbed at our base.
It wasn’t a wake-up call so much as an open initiation to meet them out on their turf.
It worked. Multiple skirmishes broke out in the streets before noon. Five outstanding Marines were already dead, including a man I respected and admired as much as any I had met in my entire life.
Hundreds of insurgents had mustered in this apocalyptic wasteland-in-the-making—a shithole called Husaybah that sat on a no-man’s border loosely separating Iraq and Syria.
And now they were finally going for it. This was the day they had chosen to execute a ruthless desire to overrun our base.
While they had gathered and planned, it was a battle no one on our side saw coming. Well, nobody but me and my little crew, and no one else seemed all that interested in hearing what I had to say on the matter until it was too late. Clearly.
Our adversaries were fanatics—a different breed from the ragtag Iraqi nationalists and Saddam loyalists that we’d pummeled into submission here just a year earlier. This new enemy was thrilled to sacrifice ten of theirs just for the slightest chance that they might butcher one of ours.
At the time, they were little more than an unidentified scourge—“al Qaeda in Iraq” before we knew there was an al Qaeda in Iraq. Hell, al Qaeda in Iraq before they knew there was an al Qaeda in Iraq.
ISIS waiting to be born.
Earlier in the day, I sent countless rounds of precision fire downrange from our base to slow their advance. But rather than sit in place and wait to get Alamo’d, we chose to strike back. We moved outside the wire in order to beat them to the punch—take out their headquarters before they got ours.
It was audacious but, unfortunately, not unforeseen. Again, there they were, just waiting for us. Minutes earlier, I watched as more of my fellow Marines were cut down by hostile fire. They had been just yards ahead of me in the patrol—the first of us to walk into this latest ambush.
The only response available to those who didn’t get stitched by hot lead was to drop into the garbage before they dropped us in it.
As we did, the city opened up on us. Machine-gun fire ripped relentlessly, coming in long bursts and from multiple directions.
Too much blood of my blood had already spilled that day. It seemed unavoidable a whole lot more—including my own—was about to flow into that flood.
Hopelessness threatening to overwhelm my senses, a new thought firmly took hold in my mind:
Time to make these bastards pay.
Copyright © 2017 by Jason Delgado
