Page 3 of Dove
I hadn't had time to do anything but react. There was a voice in my ear telling me sharply to get the hell out of there. Get the men in the still viable vehicles, turn around, and head back for the border. Get back to Iraq. Save the men I still had.
But I had three vehicles down, two of them burning, and I could hear the men screaming inside them. Hear the shouts and pleas for help, the men calling me by name. And those were soldiers I'd known for years–friends and colleagues who had seen me through the roughest days and learned everything next to my side.
They were men under my command.
My responsibility.
And I hadn't been willing to leave them behind.
I'd grabbed the two men out of my own vehicle and run for the burning trucks, shouting instructions as we went. Within seconds men from the other trucks had joined us, all of us fighting to break the glass of the burning trucks and grab for the men inside them. We worked as a unit, each of us taking a different window an maintaining constant communication. And we pulled man after man from the burning trucks. Each one out, I sent back to one of the whole trucks with a soldier, screaming for them to hurry and get to cover with the wounded.
Because above us, the planes were dropped down and getting as close to the desert as they could. Buzzing us as they flew over, and I had no doubt we stood out like fucking nightlights in the flames around us.
I didn't know what they were waiting for. They could have been shooting at us right from the start, and instead they were flying around up there like we were some TV show they were watching.
Like they were enjoying our fight. Taking joy in our struggle to get our men out.
I'd put all thought of them to the side and organized my men to focus on the truck that had the largest flame, and we'd broken one window, then another, trying to get to our men. I'd gone into the truck itself, seeking the man I heard screaming, and had found him against the back wall, cornered by flame with his legs stuck under a stack of ammunition. It had taken me too long to get him out, and by the time we emerged, we were both singed and coughing.
But he was alive.
I sent him back to the whole trucks with one of my soldiers and turned toward the final truck–the only one we hadn't cleared out–ready to finish this up, when I heard something. Thewhine of wind on a steel body, the roar of something that wasn't an engine but something else.
It took me three steps too long to realize what I was hearing.
And then the truck in front of us exploded into a ball of white-hot flame, pieces flying skyward as it came apart.
"Missiles!" I screamed, diving to the side.
My men came with me, each of us seeking shelter in the dunes of the desert, but that was no good, either. Within moments bullets were falling from the sky, hitting the sand around us like tiny explosions, and we were driven out of the safety of the dunes.
"Back to the trucks!" I shouted.
We ran, ducking behind the remainder of the vehicles we'd left and sprinting in between, each of us no doubt praying for the pilots above to lose focus for a single moment. And when I reached the truck I was aiming for, I paused to look around me, trying to see whether we'd all made it.
Half of us hadn't.
For all I knew, men were in the sand, hit in the leg or arm and bleeding out.
And if I'd had time, I could have saved them.
But the voice in my ear was screaming to get my men out of there–as a direct order–and that I'd already disobeyed multiple demands to stand the fuck down. And I had men to save and equipment to get out of there.
Men to save.
That thought finally drove me into the trucks and forced me to give the command to retreat, and moments later we were tearing down the road back toward the border, all of us hunched over as if that would keep the pilots from firing on us.
They didn't.
We were allowed to escape unscathed.
But I would never forget the men I left behind. And I would never stop wondering whether they were actually dead, or if they laid in the desert for hours afterwards, waiting for me to come back for them.
I knew I'd damn well never forgive myself for leaving them there.
So head, I"d disobeyed orders that night, intent on saving my men. And I would have disobeyed more, if it wouldn't have put my remaining men in direct danger.
I shake my head and come back to myself, the space behind my eyes still echoing with flames against a midnight sky and the screams of men trapped inside burning vehicles. Around me, the airport is still empty and dim, the people sleepy and sort of fuzzy around the edges during their middle-of-the-night trek through the airport.
