The Cats of War

I entered Fallouja with Charlie Company, 1st Marine Battalion, on Dec. 21. A syndicated political cartoonist and senior associate with the Center for Strategic International Studies, I wanted to see for myself what was happening. It sounded so confusing.

It is. Unseen mujahedin shoot three brave Marines in a sister company. Our company’s captain, Tom Tenant of Long Island, N.Y., moves his units like a chess maestro, and after a rough confrontation we count eight bodies of insurgents. The temperature is 25 degrees. Each corpse has on two or three pairs of pants and four or five shirts. Two have Pakistani passports, one a Chechen passport and, in his wallet, a $100 bill.

Charlie Company continues moving. Its snipers detect three young men climbing a fence, no doubt looking for additional clothing to keep them warm. Collected and calm, the captain, who judging by his looks could be Henry Fonda’s grandson, moves his tactical units: Two Abrams tanks block the main road from the north and south, two amphibious armored vehicles close from east to west.

Marine snipers take positions on the roof of a building that remains miraculously intact. I join troops moving toward the mujahedin, who throw grenades our way. Days earlier, I had been in New York, annoyed that my martini wasn’t dry enough.

I stop to interview a sentry while the rest of the platoon looks for booby traps.

“I don’t hear the guys,” I say, after a while.

“Neither do I,” he says.

I’m a former Israeli paratrooper, but I have no weapons. The sentry has an M-16.

“Do you have grenades?” I ask.

“Nope.”

I say I’m going to look for the others. Everything is so dilapidated that I lose my sense of direction quickly. I’m alone in Fallouja, wearing blue jeans, a brown sweater and a Marine helmet.

I’m being careful how I move because of snipers, especially ours, when I see two cats following me, watching with very unfriendly eyes.

There are lots of them -- domestic cats turned wild that live by eating corpses. They’ve become like tiny mountain lions. We’d done a body count, and one of the corpses was missing its face. A feral cat had torn off the flesh.

I clutch a long piece of concrete like a sword and throw a rock. One cat hisses. I throw more stones until they disappear.

Soon I hear human voices. I rejoin the platoon.

Capt. Tenant offers me an energy bar. I break it in half and raise a piece to Tenant: “Happy New Year.” The bar tastes a thousand times better than any martini -- and is much drier.