The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [47]
But Biederman resisted the urge to complain too much about the obvious, although you could still see in his eyes his frustration at this absurd assignment, which nearly ended in his overpaid civilian shooting someone in the foot right in front of a goddamned reporter.
“Jesus” was all he’d said, shaking his head.
Now we were heading back to the same station. Biederman said nothing, but he looked like a man needing a nap.
We went into the station. Biederman directed some of the guys to take up watch positions on the roof; meanwhile, he and I, along with Schumann and the medic White, repaired to an unlit little room on the first floor of the station designated for use by the Americans. He took off his gear and repacked his pouches so that they fit more snugly. Like most of the soldiers, Biederman had had to pay for a lot of the stuff he carried on his body out of his own pocket. One soldier in the 615th estimated that the average tally for all the special pouches, gloves, and protective gear most soldiers in Iraq wear is about four hundred bucks. There are all kinds of ancillary costs to fighting in Iraq. Soldiers pay for their own Internet access, for their phone calls home, in some cases for their own armor. Looking at Biederman, I remembered suddenly having an aide to Bernie Sanders explain to me how a government that spends more than $600 billion a year can end up short the money needed for body armor and other equipment for soldiers in the field—congressmen tended to raid the operations and maintenance part of the defense budget for their earmark requests, specifically that part of the budget that paid for soldiers’ equipment. (They took $9 billion out of the O&M accounts alone in 2005, for instance.) The huge bloated weapons systems they tended to leave alone.
His uniform rearranged successfully, Biederman pulled up a chair and sat down. I took off my ballistic vest and lazily filmed another pair of soldiers who’d come in and taken to filling out a Mad Libs questionnaire.
“Number?” said the first soldier.
“Um,” said the second. “Sixty-nine.”
“Name?”
He paused. “Powell.”
“Noun?”
The second soldier paused. “Vagina,” he said.
“Year?”
The second soldier paused at this one. “Nineteen sixty-nine,” he said, predictably.
Suddenly there was a huge explosion.
BOOOOOOOOMMMMM!
We all jumped sideways and covered our ears. That was close, really close. From the sound of things, a car bomb not far from the station. We looked out the window; a thin plume of gray smoke wafted up in the distance. Despite the obvious proximity of the explosion, none of the Iraqi Police in the station moved so much as an inch.
“They don’t go to check it out?” I asked Biederman.
He shook his head. “We have to make them go,” he said.
“They’re scared,” said Schumann. “Wouldn’t you be?”
“Well, yes…,” I said.
“They’re not really cops, the way we have cops,” Schumann added. “They don’t, like, enforce traffic laws or anything.”
“If one of their guys is involved,” added White, “they’ll rush out there. But if not…”
The IPs sat down, nervously stirring their tea. Out the window, I could have sworn I actually heard the sounds of flames licking the air—that was how close the burning car hulk was.
A few minutes passed. The soldiers finished their Mad Lib and started reading.
“Write down in sixty-nine words or less,” giggled the first soldier, “why you think that Powell should be elected vagina of the year.”
Biederman said nothing. Somewhere down the hall, the civilian instructor from Georgia, the same one who’d nearly shot