Cook off

A friend of mine sent me this video and it sent me back to a dusty, dirty side street in al-Dora.

Back in September 2004, I was on a photo shoot, shadowing a tanker from 1st of the 8th Cavalry. We hung out in his room, played Ghost Recon, talked and got ready for a patrol through the neighborhoods of that restive area. We knew it was a bad place. Things happened there. People, a lot of them, we're turned off there. We didn't know it consciously but unconsciously. Both sides of this current sectarian war were making a very under-the-radar play for Dora. Mostly Shia but with a significant number of Sunni and Christians, the place boiled under the surface. We just never saw it for what it was. We just saw violence and wanted to stop it the best we could.

The patrol was sent out early which was unusual, the guys said. In the late afternoon sun the tankers-turned-infantrymen searched some hovels. Kids running around naked. Cinderblock walls and corrugated rooves. Dirt floors partially covered with cheap plastic rugs. Tire walls surronding the homes. Water coming from garden hoses. Poverty.

Someone at battalion radiod us. They needed us at a point down near the al-Hillah highway. Some guys had done some stuff they weren't sure what though. We bounced down there past the market full of people. Made a right and drove down a street full of people walking in our direction.

We hopped out and turned a corner. I saw the company first sergeant covering something. A faint smell of metal filled the air.

"What's up?" a sergeant asked his first sergeant.

"These two guys blew themselves up trying to fire a mortar at the camp," he replied.

"What's that smell?" I asked.

"The smell of blood when its exposed to air."

I walked up to the stiff bodies. Both were mangled but still recognizable. I started making photos of the scene. Unreal, I kept thinking.

A large crowd of civilians was up the block looking at the scene. A couple of soldiers kept them back. They talked and pointed at us. I looked behind me and saw the camp across the highway. A forest of radio antennae peaked over the wall, the roof of my barracks just beyond them.

We waited for the Iraqi Police to arrive and collect the bodies. The crowd start to dispurse.

The patrol returned to camp a while later. They dropped me off at brigade headquarters and I walked into the TOC still kitted up.

"Hey, Cpl. P, were you out there?"

"Yep, was pretty gnarly stuff."

Most of the guys here never left the war and never saw the war's results up close and personal. I didn't know much beyond that those two guys had blown up. One of the operations guys told me what happened via the battalion.

The guys had driven down from Sadr City in a cab. The placed their 60mm mortar and four rounds in the engine compartment. Somehow they managed to get through all of the checkpoints between Sadr City -- in northeast Baghdad -- and Dora -- in southwest Baghdad. Quite a trek, he said. Once there they popped the hood and set up shop. Like in this video, the guys didn't have a baseplate or bi-pod for their set up. One guy held while the other dropped the rounds. The cab driver, if he was one, watched from a safe distance. The first round went down the tube. Then cooked off and exploded. Both were instantly turned off. The cabbie took off running. A crowd had gathered after the explosion, saw the guy running and chased him down. They turned him over to the first American patrol on scene.

The ops guy explained to me that mortar rounds are inherently unstable. These rounds were rusted and dirty. Put them in a hot environment like an engine compartment after being in the hot environment that is Baghdad and you're asking for trouble. Indeed. So this video shows in one way what happened: the left of boom.

The minute I saw it, I was back on that street corner. The smell. The sound. The heat. Unreal.