It’s nothing new for the Fourth I.D. There’s a reason some grunts call themselves the No War Four. They’ve missed every conflict since Vietnam. The last time the division as a whole saw action was WWII, when they led the charge onto Utah Beach. In this installment, they were to represent the war’s northern front, until Turkey made that impossible by keeping its bases off limit. Instead, the Fourth’s convoys began rolling into Iraq just as the Pentagon announced the end of major fighting. Yet as the 1-8 Infantry Battalion arrived in Iraq last Monday, their hopes were pinned on taking Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, which the Marines hadn’t captured yet. A day later, Tikrit fell, and took the Fourth’s mood with it. Jokes about fighting the Third I.D. just for a little action evolved into hanging on any shred of news that pointed a way into another conflict.
President George W. Bush’s warnings to Syria turned rumor into fact for some Joes. “Oh, we’re not done yet,” SPC Stewart Fowler, a former fur trader from Oregon, told his track-vehicle mates during the interminable convoy. “No way. I know we’re going after Syria. The first sergeant told me so.” Some grunts’ mercenary tendencies began showing. The average Joe doesn’t care–or even know–about the politics of Syrian President Assad, and the only Ba’ath Party they know is the kind with suds and a woman that the soiled soldiers dream about. Their extent of political knowledge, for the most of them, starts and stops with the administration’s talking points, notably “axis of evil.” What they do know is that they trained for months for a dangerous mission, steeled themselves for the contingencies of instant death and imagined sewing a proud patch, the Combat Infantryman’s Badge (CIB), onto their uniforms. One soldier even penned a battlefield hymn about it, “The Ballad of the Mighty Fourth.”
CIB’s, we’re looking for some.
But if there’s no war, we won’t get one.
Some would say, we’re the No War Four.
But in Iraq, we’re looking to score
No-War Four, oh hear our cry.
We came to fight, to kill and die.
Don’t blame us because we’re late.
Turkey said no, and sealed our fate
Now, the legions of television cameras are gone, the war overtaken on the front pages of their hometown newspapers. But the Fourth soldiers on with an edge, partly out of jealousy, partly out of a need to blow off steam. They pursue their missions, looking for “technicals” and Republican Guard holdouts, searching military bases for chemical and biological weapons–and finding it all. If a sniper doesn’t get a few, stray chemical or biological weapon residue might. Just as often, though, they’ll be shooting at ghosts. Taking the Republican Guard’s Balad air base Friday, Capt. Ted Bryant’s Bradley armored fighting vehicle burst round after round into vehicles of indeterminate animation. “I think we had a lot of kills of dead vehicles,” he joked after the battalion’s hour-long assault wrapped up with zero fatalities for either side, four enemy prisoners of war and one Army company commander downed and heli-vaced out with friendly fire shrapnel wounds.
The Fourth’s desire for a piece of the action and the glory was clearest during the 36-hour convoy from Kuwait into Baghdad. This, recall, is a division that got its deployment orders Jan. 23, only to be thwarted by Turkey even as the Fourth’s gear bobbed in the Mediterranean. So it wasn’t surprising when gunners twice “accidentally” cut loose with their armor–piercing 50-caliber, turret-mounted guns during convoy gas stops–a major no-no. Finally, just after midnight, they thought they’d nailed their CIB in their first few minutes in suburban Baghdad. They stopped at a deserted rest stop along a stretch of road littered with charred tank and truck carcasses. Two local commercial truckers rolled up and told the soldiers they were just nearly ambushed. Within minutes, the Fourth I.D. was trading small rounds with an invisible enemy. When the smoke and dust storm cleared, they figured out who was out there. It was the Third I.D.
