Another Crazy War Story II: Imminent Chemical Death

This diary is the second part of an ongoing series, written whenever the mood strikes me.  The previous installment resides here.

There is no doubt that the entire crux of the Iraq biscuit was WMD.  All the justifications for war we hear today, such as spreading democracy or fighting Al Qaida, is just so much cheap lipstick applied to a very ugly pig.  

We attacked Iraq because our leaders said Saddam had illegal chemical weapons and the intent to use them on us or our allies.  Now, one could ask if our leaders acted on faulty intelligence, or even whether or not they believed the dire proclamations they were making.  I, however, believed every word of it.  Once I set foot on the plane that would take me to the war zone, I thought for sure Saddam must have had the weapons.  After all, the US wouldn't start a war unless it was a "slam dunk," right?

Besides, we had been practicing chemical warfare procedures for months prior to leaving, which gave the theory of WMDs a lot of legitimacy in my mind.  My fellow leathernecks and I spent countless hours practicing putting our chem gear on in the least amount of time possible.  We did mock chem cleanups, in which we went over how to clean up the area and our gear should we get slimed.  We were given every painful detail of the effects of biological and chemical weapons.  They even gave me smallpox and anthrax vaccinations, for Christ's sake.  I still have a scar from the smallpox, because the shot leaves you with an open, weeping pustule that crusts into a disgusting pock.

So, by the time my unit set foot in Kuwait, we were all beyond paranoid.  We lived with the constant fear of imminent chemical death, an end so horrible it hadn't been used on the battlefield in almost ninety years.  We drilled relentlessly.  There were mornings were our wake up call was "GAS, GAS, GAS," the signal for chemical attack.  From sleep to alert in a gas mask in under ten seconds.

The experts tell you that if you hear the siren and it is not a drill, you have about ten minutes to put all of your stuff on or you're dead.  That might sound like a lot of time, but I promise it's not.  The chem suit is a clunky beast, made up of five parts.  Upon gas attack, the first thing you do is close your eyes, stop breathing, and don your mask.  Don't take one more big inhalation, or you're dead.  Once the mask is on your vision is limited and your breathing becomes difficult, so it's even more of a hassle to get the pants over your boots, the next step.  Clip the two suspenders, then move on to the jacket.  Zip the jacket up and pull the hood over your head.  Make sure the all of your skin is under the hood, or you're dead.  Next come the overboots, big rubber moccasins designed to slip over your combat boots but really just get stuck on the heel.  Fight them on, tie them up, and get the tops under the bottom of your overalls.  Don't forget that last part, or you're dead.  Finally, the gloves, big rubber dish gloves.  Ignore the thin cotton gloves they give you to absorb  handsweat, because who has time to fuck with those?  Make a cuff in the rubber gloves so that the nasty stuff doesn't flow down your arm into your suit and put them under your sleeves.  Forget the cuff and you're dead.

If that seems like a lot of places where things could go wrong, well it is.  Part of our fear of chemical warfare stemmed from the fact that, to use a Marine expression, "that shit don't work."  Eventually the Division Commander ordered us to wear the suit minus the gloves and boots all the time, which was stupid because we tore holes in them and got them wet and all kind of things that guaranteed "that shit don't work."  The order also  came with the advantage of adding about five pounds and ten degrees to the already heavy gear and blistering heat.  

We knew, as we gathered at the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border, that if Saddam was going to use his stockpiles he would do it then.  We knew the next time we heard the gas siren, it would be no drill.  

The siren went off as I was digging a fighting hole with the rest of my fireteam.  Panic wasn't an option, at least not at first.  Panic and you're dead.  I just put on the mask... and then I saw sand in there with me.  

Gas masks are temperamental fuckers.  The whole reason you don't see big giant beards and handlebar mustaches among the military ranks anymore is because of chemical warfare.  Facial hair fucks with the seal.  Everything fucks with the seal, really, so when I see that sand, I know I'm dead.

And now I panic.  I start gibbering about how there's sand in my mask, about how I'm dead.  It was an all consuming, paralyzing fear.  I have never known anything like it, before or since, not even under actual fire.  I thought I was going to drown in blister pus (that's how mustard gas works when inhaled).  It took Cpl Sierra (name changed) grabbing me by the shoulders to bring me back.  The fear evaporated.

We stay in our masks for ten minutes, and then sounds all clear.  The mask comes off, and the alarm sounds again.  The mask goes back on.  
This continues for about half an hour, and then I never hear the alarm again.

But that doesn't stop us from wearing that fucking suit all the time.  We didn't get to take those fuckers off until three weeks later.

There is a little known benefit to chemical warfare; it comes with pets.  The NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) guys in the division came around to every fighting hole on the perimeter and left each of us with a caged pidgeon.  I swear I'm not making that up.  They tried chickens at first, but they all died of non-airborne poison reasons.  The purpose of the bird was supposedly early warning, but I never understood that.  If the bird was close enough to breath the nasty, weren't we?  Either way, we were happy to have a mascot among the dirt and the soul-crushing boredom.  We named it "Life", a purely symbolic gesture because if the bird was alive, so were we.

Of course, all of this was predicated on gigantic fucking lies, and I think that makes me the most angry.  Those administration fucks added to the hell I was already in even though they knew, or at least had credible intelligence to the effect, that there were no WMD.  They didn't just cynically use me, they brought me to the brink of madness, terrified of non-existent liquid death falling from the sky.

I hope, when they rot in hell, they have to wear a fucking chem suit.

Keep an eye out for the next installment, in which the banality of war, especially with band folk, comes in stark relief.