So where were we going?
Nowhere. We were going nowhere.
As in "Bumfuckistan," "East Bumfuck," "middle of nothing," "beyond the Pale."
We stayed north of the Euphrates out in the salt wastes. There was, operationally, a choke point near Ramadi between it and the Thartar which is a big shallow salt lake kind of like . . . well, Salt Lake. Our dust could easily be seen from Ramadi.
But there wasn't any reaction. It looked as if we were headed for Syria. Our basic path, except for avoiding roads, was the one I'd taken when I did my deployment as Scout Platoon leader. This was the path that the Sunnis had smuggled fighters in throughout the whole Resistance in Iraq, from all over the world to Syria and then down the Al-Ramadi trail.
But there was fuck all in most of that area. If you didn't stay down by the Euphrates there weren't any towns and hardly any roads. It was a big fucking open desert.
We lost some vehicles. I don't know how a group of reasonably intelligent Arabs could fuck up Abrams and Bradleys as fast as they did, but fuck them up they did.
We dropped four Abrams and two Bradleys on the first part of the run. And we were running. There was no ability to switch drivers. We logged and we ran, logged and ran, logged and ran until the guys were obviously becoming too punch drunk to log in movement.
It took us two days to get to the "oasis" of Abu Samak. Part of the time we spent on a road that had been laid down, way back when, for the Iraqi military. They used to perform training operations, when they trained at all, out in this area.
Problem was, the area was crossed by wadis. Wadis are gulleys formed in desert terrain by the occasional rainshowers it gets. They flood to their banks at the slightest rain then go down to dry. Arroyos is the term used in the Southwest.
Wadis can really ruin a tank or Stryker's day when they don't notice them. Oh, there were always places to cross. But when you're tired as hell and crusing along at forty knots in the middle of the night, you don't always notice an arroyo. Then you drop four feet through the air and generally slam into the far wall. Even if you climb it, you've just shaken your crew around like peas and somebody is probably injured. Especially the guys in "white daze" or dead asleep.
Taking the road kept us out of wadis. It was a chance and I took it and it never bit me in the ass but I didn't like it.
At Abu Samak we did a full stop.
Abu Samak is where the story "Stones" came from. When we left the guys wanted to just waste the place and be done. But we left it standing.
It had been a fair sized village before the Plague. Did an op there when I was Scout Platoon leader. (Not the one where I got the scars.) Recovery had been centered around three families from two different clans. Only about sixty people left. Which was why killing one of their breeders was stupid. Besides the whole thing being stupid.
But it was their culture and her choice. As long as they don't try to shove that culture down my throat, let them have it. Try to do it in my country and . . . Well the muj in Detroit found out exactly how forgiving Bandit Six is about that sort of thing.
(By the way, was she old enough to "consent" to that sort of thing in the U.S., if it had been legal at all? No. But it's their culture . . . In that culture, she was. Fundamentalist Islam is a very fucked up culture IMO, but I couldn't save the world.)
Getting away from "Stones," we did a full stop. We set up jamming, cut the phone lines, told the locals if they tried to leave they'd be shot without mercy, put out security (who tried like hell to stay awake) and got some rest. We stopped for ten hours, rotating so everyone could get some rest other than in a moving vehicle.
Then we fueled, packed and rolled. Leaving the town standing against our better judgement.
We rolled out to the west-northwest until we were way out of sight of anyone and then turned due north. We went nowhere near a town for days.
We rolled, hard, dropping vehicles along the way as they just fucking died, for three more days. Days of fighting dust and fatigue that was so bad you shook in pain. Grit in your eyes, grit in your mouth, grit in your clothes. I'd spread the formation so that nobody was in anyone's dust. Didn't matter. It got everywhere.
Two of the wounded died. The rest pulled through. They were as comfortable as we could make them in the supply trucks. The two medics we had worked like hell to keep them alive.
Short of evac, there was nothing else we could do for them.
There were more wadis up north. All over the fucking place. I put the Scouts out front and we lost one of the Scout Strykers to a totally destroyed undercarriage when it hit a fucking wadi doing well over what I told them to do speed-wise. I wasn't going to chew the driver out. He had a broken arm. And, no, we didn't know how to set it.
We rolled deep into the desert wastes. It is said that Saddam had sent one of his sons up here, just before we'd entered, with a cache of not only most of his sarin and VX gas but also cash in tractor-trailer load quantities.
If so, nobody has ever found it. We didn't, and trust me I looked. Less for the cash than the poison gas which I was perfectly willing to use.
There were wadis. There were dunes. Not like the Rub Ak Kali or the mojave, but pretty big. There were weird things like this big sort of quicksand area. It was wet. How in the hell the sand/mud/shit that it was in stayed wet I don't know. But we lost a Stryker and an Abrams to it. The Abrams dropped fast. So fast the Nepo driver barely got out.
There were "roads" out there. They were graded desert, mostly, with posts saying "Here's a road. Don't get lost or you'll be absolutely fucked!" Some of them were paved. We ignored them. There was nobody using them. You could see for miles and miles out there, most of the time. Most of what is called "The Syrian Desert" is gobi desert. That's a technical term meaning a desert of flat ground, usually clay, covered in small rocks.
Out in the big desert is a very disorienting experience, even for a guy from the prairie. You keep looking for something to get perspective on and it's never there. We were a line of boats on a flat, hard, dirt ocean. There were mirages.
You rarely see something like an oasis or a harem girl or whatever from a mirage. They're just layers of differential heat that reflect stuff. Like mountains that are hundreds of miles away.
But when you're a bit shy on water and hallucinating from fatigue, you can make up just about anything. Saw a giant rabbit that was running away from silver spears falling out of the sky. And mountains covered in cellophane.
You get the reason that most of the great world religions have been formed in desert when you're out there for a few days. It's a very good place to hallucinate. Peyote cults make sense, too. Everything makes sense in this big cosmic "Dude, I am soooo stoned . . ." way.
During the day it was hot. The sun just beat down despite a constant thin overcast we were getting used to. At night it was motherfucking cold.
We dropped the spare vehicles. Where? I'd have to give you the grid coordinates which are still classified. But we dropped them. We had to, we needed the gas. Those Abrams and Brads were gas hogs.
Day four we stopped. We put out minimum security and we racked out.
Where?
Middle of the fucking desert, that's where. But I knew that we were going to have to do the same sort of thing, under worse conditions, soon.
When we got up, we sent out "Stones" and did a regular "what's happ'nin'?" broadcast indicating we were going to try to head out through Syria.
We were less than six hour's hard drive from Mosul.