I Lost My Love in Baghdad by Michael Hastings Page A

passenger compartment about ten feet above the ground. There was allegedly air-conditioning, but the whole cabin was hot air and steam and my eye protection fogged up. My body armor and helmet were soaking with sweat. The point of the trip was to find bombs, or as one officer described it: “You’ll be driving around at five miles per hour looking at trash.”
    Trash is everywhere in Iraq. It is the most distinguishing feature of the landscape. The trash defies description. There are huge piles of it outside homes, on doorsteps, in street corners, filling any vacant lot. No triple-canopy jungle or endless dunes, just pile upon pile of twisted and discarded junk, plastic, scrap metal, empty bottles, tin cans, cardboard boxes, gasoline containers, decaying fruit, a stunning collection of random shit. It is mind-boggling, as if every family in Iraq decided to toss their garbage cans out the front door at the same time, and when they figured out that no one was going to come pick it up, just proceeded to cover the trash with more trash.
    In all that trash the insurgents hide their deadliest weapons, the IEDs. The IEDs are camouflaged as trash. They look like almost everything else on the ground. Very clever, very scary, very hard to see.
    â€œWhat are the chances of finding bombs?” I asked the driver.
    He looked at me. “We’ve been doing daily sweeps since April,” he said. “So far, we haven’t found a single bomb.”
    â€œOh, okay. Why is that?”
    â€œThe Buffalo makes a lot of noise. The fucking insurgents can hear it coming a mile away and take their bombs someplace else.”
    â€œOh, okay.”
    The patrol inched along. I tried to take notes, capture some dialogue. We were the middle vehicle, sandwiched between a tank and a couple of Humvees.
    There was a flash a few hundred yards back. I didn’t hear any noise. A call came over the radio—a local national had driven too close to the convoy, so the machine gunner opened up. The LN was apparently drunk and had driven in by mistake. The bullet had hit him in the leg, and the car went off the road into a ditch. The Iraqi police would bring him to the hospital. The machine gunner was twenty-one years old. One of the soldiers in the Buffalo with me said, “He’ll be saying he’s sorry now, but I bet he’ll fucking brag about shooting the guy later.”
    The patrol continued, on to Sadr City and back for about four hours. Iraqi families stared up at the colossal machine as we passed. We did not find any bombs. The captain who was running the patrol confronted me afterward. He was worried I was going to write about the shooting.
    â€œThis is a twenty-one-year-old kid. Are you going to ruin his life?”
    I hadn’t planned to write about the shooting, figuring it wasn’t really news. An American accidentally shooting an Iraqi was a common occurrence, and the story on how the military didn’t release statistics on the frequency of accidental shootings had already been told.
    â€œI was praying,” the captain continued. “I thought when that car went off the road it was going to blow up.” He leaned closer to me to make his point. “These kids,” said the twenty-five-year-old captain, “are making split-second decisions to save our lives.”
    I didn’t disagree. Any driver of any car on the street, any asshole with a bulky sweater, could be a bad guy waiting to detonate. I took very few notes that night. It was too overwhelming. If I’d had more experience, I probably would have written a piece about the shooting. It was one of those things that happen in war, and would’ve made a great on-scene story for the Newsweek website.
    With all the threats, all the varieties of bombs, shooting first made sense. You or them? Kill an innocent by accident, or risk letting someone blow up you and your buddies?
    In addition to the IED, there was the VBIED, or