Tom Trumpinski

I had no sooner sat down than the sunburned man at the next table asked me about them. We talked, like only nerds can, about what they changed and what they left alone, about great games we had been in, and about how the hobby wasn’t what it used to be. He then said, “You ever play World of Warcraft? I played it all the time when I was in Iraq.” I nodded and let him talk for the rest of the meal.

I told him that I was a writer, but that didn’t scare him off. He had done two tours of duty in Iraq and had been all over—from Basra to Tikrit and from Baghdad to the Syrian border—all attached to his Infantry Division. He was counter-insurgency, which perked me right up. He was exactly the kind of person I wanted to talk to about the war. As we were finishing up our breakfast, he suggested that we get together in the afternoon; I begged off, since I was working on a new short-story, but countered with a proposal for drinks in the evening. Eight o’clock at the Esquire it was.

I couldn’t figure out his age, nor did his girlfriend help with that. If I was to guess, I’d say that he was forty, but the leathery look of his skin could have made my estimate high. His girlfriend, maybe better called his lady friend, was the kind of good-old-gal that makes going to stock car races and rodeos fun—smart, funny, and very protective of her man. She was in her early forties, with streaks of blonde in her dark brown, small-town salon hair. I was drinking Erdinger’s non-alcoholic brew and they were buying me round after round as the evening progressed.

He wanted to talk and talk a lot about the situation over there. His lady stopped him before he got too far and said to me, “You’re a reporter, right?”

I said, “Yeah, technically—for the internet. We need to get things straight, I think, before we start. Is this talk on the record, off the record, or in-between?”

He said, “On the record, but you cannot use our names—everything else, I want people to know.” I agreed. I want to mention, in passing, that he’s an enlisted man—I think that’s important for perspective on the viewpoints he expressed.

His job over there was to counteract IEDs (improvised explosive devices). The enemies of our soldiers use them to destroy vehicles moving along roads, often with devastating results. The creation of such traps is a long and intricate process, with different enemy teams for each of the steps in their construction:

First a survey team, often with the help of locals, finds a likely location for the bomb. Then, the necessary ordinance to construct it is moved there under the cover of darkness. The explosive materials are hidden within a few hundred meters of that location. Over the course of the next month, a digging crew digs the hole for the munitions—little by little, so observers don’t notice the displacement of soil. Finally, when the hole is large enough, the bomb is assembled inside of it by a new team of explosives experts. At long last, perhaps six weeks after they started, an assault team waits in a secure place for an American target and then blows the device up at the proper time to inflict the maximum number of casualties.

He was full of ideas on how to counteract these enemy soldiers. One suggestion that he made was a high-tech one (not surprising from a geek)—locate cameras on telephone poles along the roads with a wide-field of view. If the views are overlapping, then no one could either set up a bomb or remove a camera without someone knowing. Rapid response teams would be made available if suspicious activity was noticed and the danger to troops would be minimized.

This sounded great to me. I asked him if this was going to be implemented and if so, when. He sadly shook his head. “The problem is the mental state of the officer corps. They’re still fighting the last war and they’ve got this battle plan and they are going to follow it. I couldn’t get anyone to listen, to even take me seriously.” He ordered another round.

“So,” I said, “things aren’t going well?”

“Look,” he replied, “what people don’t understand is that they live there. See, you and I get an appliance and the cord is wrong for the plug, right? What do we do? We go out and get another plug. You know what they do? They cut the plug off and stick the wires directly into the socket. It sparks everywhere, but it’s not a problem because there’s nothing to burn there and they know it. See, this is the difference—instinct, base knowledge of the turf. Even after years of occupation, we’re still strangers there. They’re got a permanent advantage and, worst of all, they don’t have a timetable.”

“And this means?”

“We can’t win. See, the British thought they had the solution in Basra—the enemy was all in the northern part of the city. The Brits moved a majority of their troops there and engaged the enemy. The thing is…the enemy…is not…stupid!” His fist hit the table. “They moved to the south side of town so that all the Brits disrupted were civilians and their lives. Now, the British have gone home and you know what? All of the enemies are still there. Nothing was accomplished.”

“So,” he said, “no matter what we do, no matter who we fight or where we go, when the day comes that we leave, the enemy will still be there. It’s their country.” He looked down at his drink. “In the meantime, things have gone to hell here.” He waved his arms from one side to the other.

We talked for a while about the gas prices, about rising food prices, and about speculators. “What is it going to take to wake people up about their government?” he asked.

I told him about boiling a frog alive—you put it in water and turn the heat on. If you make the rise in temperature slow enough, the frog never notices it until it’s too late. He smiled at me. “I’m not going back, you know, new policy about maximum time served there. She wants me to be a recruiter.” He pointed his thumb back at his lady friend.

We talked about other things for a while—he was going back to his stateside base in ten days. I hope he stays safe; bombs are a hell of a thing to have to deal with at work.