The two were shouting and gesticulating wildly, and the man had started to get uncomfortably close to her—close enough to hit her, I thought—and I began to wonder if someone was going to put an end to it. The little girl started crying. Finally, Lt. Pappas quickly walked up and shoved the man back, “Jesus Christ, knock it off! Go! Go!” he yelled, pointing to the Strykers parked nearby. The guy backed off, but the woman kept at it, and according to the terp was accusing the soldiers of scaring the little girl. One of the soldiers turned to her and yelled “Just shut up already! You’re the one scaring her with your yelling! Fuck!” Some messages don’t need a translator to be understood and she finally stopped, and sat back down.


Come mid-afternoon, the cache had been assembled in a pit and photographed, and the Explosives Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team had been summoned to blow it up.


By this time I had fanned out to the fields behind the house with 1st Lieutenant Mark Davis to check a few other smaller irrigation ditches and reed lines, where he found a tripod that he thought might be for a the DSKA rifle. We were walking back up the dirt path toward the farmhouse when the rest of the platoon up the porch started yelling “get down!” A second later, a deep “BOOM” rolled across the farmland behind us. We turned, and saw a plume of black smoke beginning to snake it’s way skyward. Lt. Davis, struggling under the weight of the heavy, rusted tripod, ran with it for a few steps before throwing it down. We got to the porch and knelt down near the other guys, and one of the men turned to me and said. “Dude, that was fucking big. We saw the fireball before the sound hit us.” Someone else chimed in, “That looks like it was back near the base.”


As we watched the line of black smoke rise, word came from the base that a bomb went off only about two hundred meters outside the gate at the house of the leader of the local Sons of Iraq group. A few minutes later we learned that the target of the attack, Abu Zakaria, had survived the suicide car bomb attack, but that it looked like a “mass casualty event.”


Captain Higgins ordered a quick response team to load up and head back to the base, not knowing if this was the start of a multiple bomb attack. A Sergeant told some his men to load up, but a few of them had ammunition in their pockets that they had picked up in the reed line. They started to dump the ammo before getting in the Stryker but one of the guys started yelling at a buddy for throwing ammo around. An NCO stepped in and yelled “Guys, calm down.” His voice grew louder, “calm the fuck down! Calm down!” He seemed to be saying this to himself as much as to his soldiers, since they actually weren’t making too much of a scene. They finally emptied their pockets of rusted rounds, loaded up a Stryker and headed out.

I tried to go with them but they needed the space for troops, not reporters tagging along, so I stayed to watch the EOD pack the cache with thirty pounds of C4 explosive and blow it in an impressive blast. At the same time, Lt. Pappas took the suspect to a larger forward operating base for processing and interrogation.


Leaving the farmhouse with Cpt. Higgins and the explosives team to investigate the suicide bomb site, we stopped at the IED that we had identified earlier—just long enough for the EOD team to frantically tell us that were sitting on top of an IED, and refuse to go any further. We moved on while they stayed behind to blow it.


By the time we made it to the scene of the suicide bombing, the force of the blast was evident. Twisted cars were still smoldering on the side of the road, walls of a makeshift guardhouse had been knocked down, and there was a blast pit ten feet by twelve feet, six feet deep. The bomb had killed one of the Sons of Iraq as well as the bomber, with fourteen others wounded, including eight that the Americans had helicoptered out for treatment. All that was left of the bomber were a few fingertips and the front halves of his feet, attached to blackish red slop that represented what once the bombers’ legs. When I started to photograph the remains, an Iraqi moved in to the frame to pose with them, then led me over to another pile of reddish black muck. He would point to it, then his stomach, and I assumed he was telling me that this was some part of the bomber’s intestines.


Abu Zakaria, the man whose house was hit, leads a group of 395 Sons of Iraq volunteers in the area, and apparently got the job because his brother is a big political player. Still, Higgins and the other officers at IBA sang his praises, telling me he ran a tight ship, and kept his men alert and well-disciplined. A short, solidly built thirty-six year-old with a neatly trimmed beard, Zakaria was clutching a small club behind his back when I saw him, and he looked shaken, but angry. He and Higgins walked through the crumbled bricks and the still-smoking debris, with Zarakia assuring Higgins that he was committed to staying put, and Higgins offering suggestions for securing his property.