laser,” I told the combat controller. “I’ll rope them into our position.”
“Do you guys see an IR?” he said into his radio. “Four hundred meters, northeast of your position.”
“Umm, negative, we don’t have night vision.”
Oh. What. The. Fuck.
That was it. I’d had enough of this shit. If I was going to die out here from something stupid, it was going to be my kind of stupid, not this nonsense. I asked the PJ to use his radio.
“Do you see a treeline in front of you?” I asked.
“Roger.”
“Hit the treeline, then drive east.”
Silence.
“TURN LEFT.”
“Okay. Roger.”
“When you break the treeline, take a right. Then look for ChemLights.”
If you’ve never been in the military or to a nightclub in Las Vegas, ChemLights are those neon-colored sticks that you snap to activate and then they glow in the dark for twelve hours. When you see one at a club, it means “Look at me, I’m tripping balls.” In this case, it meant “Look at me and please don’t shoot.”
I reached into my bag, pulled out a green ChemLight and a blue ChemLight, and cracked them. Since the guys didn’t have night vision, I figured that this was the only way to get them to our position expeditiously. If walking out in the middle of the Iraqi desert like a fucking raver at Burning Man was what it was going to take for us to clear this target and get back to Guitar Hero, then that’s what I was going to do.
“I will have a blue and green ChemLight. Do not shoot me.”
“Roger.”
“Yeah, gonna need more on that one. What are you not going to do?”
“Shoot the guy with the ChemLights, sir.”
“Exactly. Now hurry up.”
The PJ and I made sure we had the same assault frequency on so that he could relay any relevant information coming from the Humvees, then I slung my gun behind my back and began sprinting the three-hundred-plus meters to the treeline. With the green and blue ChemLights in my hands, I looked like Tron just got caught fucking the neighbor’s wife down the street. When I cleared the treeline, I saw the white lights of the Humvee convoy. There appeared to be four vehicles. I put the ChemLights up and waved them.
“Can they see me?” I asked the PJ.
“That’s a negative.”
You gotta be fist-fucking me.
“Tell them to look straight ahead!”
You’d think that waving a couple of shiny glowsticks in the pitch black of night out in the middle of nowhere would be enough to draw the eyes of a convoy full of trained American soldiers, but clearly it wasn’t. So I started aggressively jumping up and down, doing Afghani jumping jacks basically (Google that shit), in the hopes that whatever ridiculous shapes my lights were making would grab their attention. Finally, their white lights flashed to signal that they had seen me.
As the Humvees sped toward me, my mind raced with possibilities: Which specific brand of stupid was I going to encounter behind the wheel of the lead vehicle? Whoever it was, I wanted to buttonhole them and remind them that I was a certified killing machine attached to a team of legitimate guardian angels, and if you get any one of us killed out of your own stupidity, that’s effectively treason. It was so ridiculous, the thoughts going through my head. I felt like one of those old WWII veterans who lecture kids for being soft because they get rides to school instead of walking like they had to every day in the snow uphill both ways. I’m not going to pick on any specific units in the military because if you raised your hand to serve this country, well, you have my respect. With that said, it was obvious from this Keystone Kops routine that not everyone is meant to be “boots on the ground.”
When the trucks finally pulled up, they contained a National Guard engineer unit full of poor bastards who looked like they had just been woken up from a good night’s rest. If we had anything in common, it was that neither of us knew what to make of the other. I wondered how these chuckleheads ended up outside the wire in a situation well above their pay grade, while they wondered what all that cool stuff on my kit was. There was no time for foreplay, however, so I jumped on the side of the lead Humvee and directed them back to the crash area.