Sensing Combat: Smell

(This is part three of a five part series. Scroll down for the previous entries. And vote, damnit!)

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Some doors are more stubborn than others. A particular door in Baghdad was the bane of my squad's existence. On a routine clearing mission where every single house had to be searched and searched thoroughly, a reinforced door stood to deny the mission's success. Nothing could bring it down - kicks, shotgun rounds, the old fashioned shoulder charge. The door's metal frame rejected all modes of entry. My squad leader Lee was determined to simply pry the frame out of the cinderblock wall after all other measures failed.

In the cramped courtyard, the whole squad stood around the doorway to watch the ongoing madness of the insurmountable door. Jeun, a super quiet Korean guy from the Bronx, stood behind Lee as he put all of his weight into the pry bar and pulled back. The frame gave way and sent Lee tumbling backward. Jeun, seeing 200 pounds of Alabama fury coming toward him, gingerly stepped out of the way. Lee rolled into the corner and stepped right into an open septic tank, drenching his leg up to his shin in jet black tar. My first reaction was to laugh, but with Lee's famously short temper, I stifled my giggles. Instead I gave him a bottle of water to wash his leg off. The smell that carried off of him made me gag almost instantly.

That same sweet, thick smell of shit swirls around just about every street in Iraq. The country has no plumbing infrastructure in place, so citizens have to be clever about waste disposal. From porcelain bowls in the floor, plastic tubes filter waste into the street where it pools with the waste from other houses on the street, creating puddles and streams of liquid excrement that bake and ferment under the desert sun. It takes a while to grow accustomed to a pungent smell that mingles with rotting garbage (surprise: no modern trash collection either).

The smell, overwhelming in the first couple of months, tends to wear away as the days drag on. Digging up bodies that had been rotting in the ground for 42 days brought a smell only marginally worse than the open sewers of the street. The odors were so strong that I have not been able to smell as well since. I feel like I have a permanent head cold when it comes to using my olfactories.





Anyone up for a dip?





If only cameras could capture smell

***

Putting rounds into an insurgent's body always brought back memories of Fourth of July in my backyard. Lighting Black Cats and M80s and watching them pop in the air. Setting a pinwheel up on the fence and waiting for it to start its furious spin in an explosion of color and sound. The smell of gunpowder would hang in a cloud of lazy smoke long after the fireworks were expended. The same smell from childhood came rushing back during firefights as spent shell casings went flying through the air, ejected from the bolt in a spurt of gas and sent tumbling toward the ground.

When in the confines of a room, the sulfur smell attaches to everything: clothes, armor, gloves. It's not an attractive smell; inhaling too much of the gas coming out of the barrel will send your head spinning. But the smell is addicting. Once it permeates throughout the air, you can't wait for the next time it fills your nostrils and ignites the rest of your senses. The scent of war is remarkably the same as an American childhood in the summer, waiting for the next opportunity to set off explosions in brilliant displays of color and sound while the musk of gunpowder settles on the warm wind.