It’s 0630 in the morning, and the streets of Eastern Baghdad are virtually deserted.  Birds twitter from the dusty fronds of the palm trees.  The city is bathed in the yellow veneer of the dawn, and it is cool, quiet....peaceful.  A little blue compact van, Korean made -- what we call a Bongo truck -- drives slowly down the mahallah road, and eases to a stop. 

It's just a little thing, this truck.  A common sight on the streets of Sadr City, or any city in Iraq.  The bed of this one is piled high with big white plastic bags, clearly marked with blue lettering: SUGAR.  The man in the cab of the truck pulls the parking brake, gathers his things, and steps out, his burkha fluttering in the early morning breeze. 

He checks the bags in the back of the truck, glances towards the big building a few hundred meters away, and then totters off towards one of the stores that line the thoroughfare.  Scratches his butt for a second, checks something in one of his pockets for the last time; maybe looks over his shoulder.  Just another hadji going about his errands, getting an early start.

That's what he wants you to think.

I am inside the building that Hadji glanced at, along with somewhere around 600 other American soldiers.  Like most of them, I am fast asleep.  It's that early morning sleep, the kind that is deep and dark and dreamless, full of the quiet bloodrush of your heartbeat as you glide soundlessly towards the waking moment, something like a submarine sliding through black and silent depths.  Relaxed.  Calm.  Nice, in all the homespun ways that nice can be.

Beneath those pristine white bags of SUGAR is something that does not have a sweet tooth, something that really is not nice at all, although it is silent, at least for the next second or two.  There are actually a lot of somethings beneath the bags, and no one but Hadji knows about them.  There are somewhere between eighteen to thirty rockets in the bed of the truck.

Big ones.  107mm.  Brand new, right out of the box.   Pointed right at our building.

The explosion is immense, the loudest I have ever heard.  It seems to go on for an impossibly long time.  I am blown out of my cot and onto the dirty tiled floor.  My first glimpse of the day is the sunlight coming down from the central skylight--or rather, the sunlight being blocked out by the massive roiling wall of dust that billows out of the darkened floors above, and down over me and my wide eyed platoon mates.  I'm instantly reminded of 9/11, and the grey death that swept over Manhattan.

I usually pride myself on my reactions to high order detonations in close proximity, but this morning is not my finest hour.  I just sit on the floor, blinking in the dust, heart roaring at a hundred miles an hour, my temples pounding, my gut full of that sick feeling from too much adrenalin.  I am positive that we have been hit by a massive truck bomb, and that the building is collapsing.  Which way do I go?  Are there secondary attacks coming?  Is anyone injured?   Where the hell are my pants?

All of this happens in about 1.5 seconds.   WHAAAAAM!  Floor.  Dust.  Shit, the building is coming down.  Pant, pant.  Cough.  You should try it some morning, see how well you do....

As the high pitched tone in my ears recedes, I can hear people calling for the medics.  There is no screaming, just yelling.  Even that isn't at full pitch.  It's as if everyone is half deaf and shell-shocked, which is exactly what we are.  I yell back into the hazy sand-filled air for my soldiers, making sure they're okay.  I get hoarse replies: they're good to go.  I report it over to my squad leader.  Our platoon sergeant comes down the aisle of cots, looming out of the shadows, checking on the accountability report.

"Put.  On.  Your freakin.  Gear."   That's all he says, a low growl in the dust.

Good idea.  We fumble around in the gloom and tan miasma of the dust cloud for our body armor, throw it on top of our PTs and sleep clothes, and then......sit around and look at each other.  A few of us venture out onto the balcony around the central courtyard, and look through the haze at the wreckage around us. 

There is a great gaping hole in the side of the building, right across from our squad bay, maybe 50 feet away.  Sunlight glares through it like a spotlight, and there are figures moving around it.  Some senior NCO yells out from that direction, telling us that anyone not needed to move the casualties is to go back to their unit areas and wait for further direction.  They don't need everyone crowding the staircases and walkways, getting in the way.

So that's what we do.  Go back to our little living areas, and sit on our cots.  And listen.

Sounds of rubble being moving out of the way, the coarse clunking sound of clay bricks being shoveled.  More calls for medics.  NCOs from other units, calling back and forth to each other, accounting for their personnel.   The distant thumping of helicopters, growing to a dull roar.  Apaches overhead, once again, too much and twenty minutes too late.  The tinny chatter of military radios, sounding like robots talking to each other.  It is all part of the military structure… that overlay of reassuring order that fills the vacuum of early morning terror.

We talk quietly to each other, trying to figure out what happened.  I ask how the hell a truck bomb could have gotten so close to the building, and my squad leader quietly rips at me--"There you go talking shit again, like you know what's going on.  It was obviously a mortar round that came down the skylight.  Jeeez!"  Other soldiers think it was an RPG, and are shot down, too.  We had an RPG attack a couple of days ago, that hit the atrium on the roof.  That was nothing.

Truth is, none of us really know what happened.  Not yet.

After a bit, the MEDEVAC choppers land outside, and then quickly whap-whap their way back into the smoke streaked morning.  We hear that there are only a handful of casualties, all guys that were sleeping close to the wall that was hit.  Doc, our medic, comes back from the Battalion Aid Station, looking tired and pale.  "One guy was really bad off; I don't see how he's still alive.  Both legs pretty much torn off," he drawls in his Virginia accent.  He looks away, and then flops down on his cot, laying back, still clad in his body armor.  He's asleep a minute later.

Maybe Doc has the right idea.  There is not much for us to do, in spite of the damage around us, and it is still hours before our scheduled mission.  I lay down on my cot, as do most of us, and I stare at the ceiling.  When I close my eyes, all I see is that wall of concrete dust boiling down on me.  I don't even realize that I have fallen asleep until my squad leader wakes me up an hour and a half later.

There is something disturbing about the first time you wake up after a terrifying event.  Did you dream it all?  Was it a movie you watched last night?  Maybe it was just something you read, a particularly wrenching headline, or a scene from that Stephen King novel that squats on your bedside table?  There is that moment of blissful clarity, and then the details start filing in, and you remember that it did happen, and is still happening, and that you really are caught up in the middle of it, after all. 

I despise that rueful feeling of having been awake for less than five minutes, and I’m already longing like a heroin addict for the oblivion of sleep.  And I know that I have all day to go before I can lay my head down…

As if the desert world is answering me, the day continues to bring nice surprises -- all of the high explosive variety.  By now, the EOD guys (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) have found Hadji’s blue Bongo truck, or what's left of it.  When the rockets launched out of it, they flipped the little vehicle onto its side and set it on fire.  The rockets -- and whatever jury-rigged system Hadji and his cronies had welded together to fire them -- were, for the most part, very inaccurate.  Only nine of the rockets hit our building, but all simultaneously.  This accounted for the massive and overly long explosion.

One rocket hit the perimeter wall, and blew a four foot wide hole right through the T-wall.  The rest of the warheads are scattered across the little garbage covered field between the street and our outpost, which is a problem.  Lord knows we wouldn't want any of the local Iraqis to get wounded by one of their own toys, so the EOD crew is merrily hunting down the lethal Easter eggs, and are blowing them up with reckless abandon.

These suckers are big, though, and not conducive to mellowing out already frayed nerves.  The first 'controlled detonation' goes off as I walk to the porto-johns, and our chief mechanic and I do the ol' crouch/twirl/step-to-cover routine when the thick KA-RUUMP thunders through the building.  We look at each other and laugh grimly at each other, before continuing on our way.

The guys and I load up the trucks amid mushroom clouds of black smoke and dust.  Rocks and shrapnel rain down on us at fifteen minute intervals.  One of the controlled detonations is so close that the pressure wave makes mmy pants puff against my leg when the blast goes off. 

Cpl. Gless walks up to me, carrying half of the fuse cap of one of the rockets.  It bounced onto the ground about 15 feet away from him, after one of the blasts, tumbling out of the blue sky overhead.  It's still hot.  We touch it's rough metal edges with something like reverence, all of us thinking the same thing, unspoken.  What would it feel like to have this chunk of steel hurtle through your skin, ripping at you with its unthinking metal teeth?

Between the blasts, I talk to the soldiers about the whole morning.  We take pictures of the front of the building, marveling at the new holes gaping in its side, complete with cool airbrush-looking streak effects.  My driver looks at me as we're taking the pictures and tells me that his ears are still ringing from the blast.  I tell him that it's not so much that my ears are ringing, but that I can still feel that sensation of being blown out of bed.  He looks away, and quietly confides, "Yeah.  I'm still scared too." 

I put my hand on his shoulder, and tell him that we'll make it through, as we always do.  I feel generally traumatized, too, and I tell him so.  It's good to talk about terror, and how this stuff affects you.  I'm convinced that our brothers in Vietnam had such a hard time, in part, because they couldn't talk to anyone about it when they came back.  Anyone who had been through the same stuff, or who wanted to listen.  Best to get the shit out now, as soon as you can.

Then I lead the team in our daily ritual, the Pre Mission Prayer.  Lord knows we need His help this morning, and it helps to calm whatever it is we are feeling…

EOD is still at it, an hour and a half later, when we roll out of the gate, enroute to our IP station.  Baghdad is also still at it, gorging itself on the terror and insanity -- feeding on it like a fat, obscene leech. 

A block away from our destination, Delta Company hits an EFP, the most lethal form of IED.  Another company hits a conventional IED on a road a few blocks north, and then takes fire from rooftop insurgents.  The radio crackles with the reports, and then again on the internal frequency. My squad leader tells us that we are vectoring in on the second unit; going in to help out.

This is the start of my day.  Sitting in my truck in the TC seat, a hard plastic handset jammed under my Peltor headphones, sweating under a mass of kevlar and ammunition, staring out of a ballistic window, still frazzled from The Worst Wake-Up Ever. 

In the distance there is another blunt WHUUMP as something blows up--probably EOD still having fun, which they will keep up for another three hours to come.  Within the truck though, out in the unsecured neighborhoods where anything can happen, my mind is full of one thing. 

There is no glory in being killed by surprise.  And that's pretty much the only kind of action that Baghdad offers.  Just a sudden blinding flash, a split second of disorientation, the feeling of your legs being torn out of their sockets, and then…

Sgt Roy Batty, a frequent contributor to ON Point, is a pseudonym for a U.S. Army military policeman stationed in Baghdad.  His sleeping quarters, after the attack, is pictured above.