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  “Hey, dude, you almost ready?” I looked up at the screen door where Lieutenant Demolition, one of my housemates and a fellow platoon leader deploying for the first time, stood. “I just finished loading all my stuff into Rufus.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.”

  He nodded and shrugged his shoulders, yelling, “Bring on the Suck!” to no one in particular while he walked back inside. At least someone had freed himself from the quicksands of doubt.

  I reached into my front pocket, pulled out a journal, and wrote a short passage. “Today is December 7, 2007. The anniversary of Pearl Harbor. I keep looking to the skies over Kolekole Pass, but the Japanese planes haven’t come. I guess when you’re bringing the fight to the enemy, the twisted romance in it all changes somewhat. Preemptive conflict may make sense, but it sure feels hollow.”

  I closed my journal and drank the last of my Guinness. Dusk had already blinked away into the dark, and if the sea was still out there, it now bled black. I stood up and grabbed my duffel bag from the corner.

  Then we left for war.

  THE GRAVEDIGGERS

  “Sir, over here. We saved you a seat.”

  SFC Big Country stood up, waving me over to the table that he and the rest of the Gravediggers platoon had already secured. It was Christmas Eve, and I had raced down to the chow hall after yet another meeting of the squadron officers. At the meeting, I learned that after days and days of weapons ranges and packing and unpacking and repacking shipping containers, we were finally going to leave Kuwait the next day—on Christmas—but telling my men could wait. It was time for family dinner with the soldiers.

  It had been unnecessary for SFC Big Country to stand up to get my attention; I’d recognize the pride of Iowa anywhere. A corn-fed giant brimming with competence, military bearing, and a no-nonsense brand of Midwestern keenness, he had taken great care in training and shaping this cavalry scout platoon in anticipation of our deployment. He was a veteran of Afghanistan, and we were polar opposites both physically and temperamentally—something that allowed us to play off each other’s personalities and leadership styles with ease.

  “How was the meeting with the brass?” he asked, using a blanket term for anyone above the rank of major. “Any motivating speeches, or was it just another PowerPoint presentation?” We shared a deep-seated resentment for grandiose mandates and regulations that failed to pass the logic test at the ground level, a requirement in most of history’s armies. Too often, as a platoon leader and a platoon sergeant, we found ourselves playing dance, monkey, dance for the grand camo circus, and we attempted to shield our men from this bureaucratic part of the army. We weren’t always successful. Militaries need parades even more than they need wars.

  I set my tray down and looked back at him, shaking my head. “The standards for the fleece cap have changed again. What constitutes ‘cold’ is no longer up to the individual; it can now only get cold when the sun is all the way down and the moon is all the way up, weather be damned. And yes, that somehow took forty minutes to explain.”

  My platoon sergeant didn’t bat an eye. “Good to know they’re worried about the important things the day before we go into Iraq.”

  Closest to the entrance and exit doors, we were at the near end of the table, and as I glanced down, howls of laughter erupted from the far side of our gathering. Staff Sergeant Bulldog, the platoon’s senior scout, shook his head in mock disgust at the antics of Staff Sergeant Boondock, our other section sergeant. Sergeant Boondock was doing a not-so-flattering impression of a fobbit bitching about the perceived hardships of life in the rear. A fobbit was another comprehensive label that lumped together all noncombat-arms soldiers who tended rarely, if ever, to leave the safety of the FOB, or forward operating base. Other, older wars knew them as rear-echelon mother fuckers (REMFs), and POGs, people other than grunts (pronounced like “pogue”), terms that still found their way into soldier speak. As line guys, my platoon roared in approval as Staff Sergeant Boondock clowned his way through the parody. Even Staff Sergeant Bulldog broke down when his counterpart began to wail on about the horrors of a three-day laundry turnaround.

  These two NCOs led through sheer power of persona, something they may have learned while serving together in Afghanistan as team leaders. A battering ram of raw power, Staff Sergeant Bulldog was revered by his soldiers for his straightforwardness. He legitimately scared soldiers—and officers— who didn’t know him, but we all knew there was a teddy bear underneath the gruff exterior. A very wild and very burly teddy bear, but still a teddy bear.

  “These goddamn, mother-fucking fobbits.” Staff Sergeant Boondock had finished his impersonation and moved on to the commentary portion of his routine. “Leaf-eating REMFs, the lot of ’em. I hate them more than I hate hajjis. And that’s saying something.” George Orwell’s walking embodiment of the rough man ready to do violence on behalf of the softer and weaker, my junior section sergeant issued instructions with the deadpan earnestness of the American everyman. In addition to his time in Afghanistan, he had served as a gunner on a Bradley armored vehicle during the initial push into Iraq in 2003. Given some of the stories we had dragged out of him about the invasion, his jagged edges were more than understandable—and completely necessary given our vocation. Soldiers are trained to kill and kill well, and they tend to remember those that have tried to kill them.

  “You’re always so full of hate, Sergeant,” said Sergeant Axel, a stocky Oklahoman and another Iraq veteran. “Let the hate out! You know you’re just jealous because we don’t work with females.” The combat branches of the army—like cavalry, infantry, and artillery—did not allow women soldiers. There were various reasons for this, such as the physical demands of being on the line, but most of my single soldiers seemed to believe it was because if the female soldiers were sent down to the cav, there’d be too much sex for any war to continue.

  While Staff Sergeant Boondock and Sergeant Axel continued to crow back and forth—they routinely bantered like a married couple, on only the most trivial of matters—the platoon’s other two buck sergeants observed the exchange in amused silence. Sergeant Spade’s eyes darted back and forth like a wolf’s, always scanning, always prowling. Sergeant Cheech bit down on his lip, seemingly always on the cusp of interjecting, and pushed up his outdated army-issue glasses—affectionately referred to BCGs, short for birth control goggles due to their unsuccessful track record with the womenfolk, be they in the military or otherwise. Sergeant Spade was headed back to Iraq for his second tour, Sergeant Cheech, for his third. Like all of my NCOs—with the notable exception of the recently engaged Staff Sergeant Boondock—they all had left wives and children in Hawaii, most of whom had wept hysterically when we left the base for the airfield some two weeks before.

  Straddling the line between the sergeants and the soldiers was Corporal Spot, a baby-faced stoic from the Ohio countryside. He was so quiet it was sometimes easy to forget he was there—until you were reminded by a penetrating set of steely blue eyes, eyes trained expertly to execute the enemy from long-range distances with a sniper rifle.

  Stuck between their leadership were the junior soldiers, better known as the Joes, ecstatic to escape the rigors and demands of daily military life if only for the extent of this meal. Making an enterprise as freakishly ginormous as the military go is no simple task, and no one understands that more than the junior enlisted soldiers who bear the brunt of it all.

  “LT, I gotta question for ya.”

  Between bites of glazed ham, I looked over at a grinning Specialist Haitian Sensation, a young foot soldier originally from Haiti who also served as the platoon’s resident weight-lifting expert.

  “Send it, Sensation!” I responded, with so much fake zeal that it sent him into a fit of giggles.

  Eventually, Specialist Haitian Sensation recovered and asked his question. “Smitty here says he’s more gangsta’ than me. What do you think?” Private Smitty’s claiming to be gangsta’ was almost as absurd
as me being an authority on the subject; this native Arkansan loved huntin’, dippin’, and boozin’—in that order. Then again, Specialist Haitian Sensation read poetry by Maya Angelou in his spare time, so despite his love of hip-hop music and tough upbringing on the streets of Trenton, New Jersey, I wasn’t sure his claim to the label was exactly legitimate either. All the same, this unlikely duo were inseparable and fought like blood brothers. Private Smitty just smirked, shrugged his shoulders, and spat a wad of dip into a coffee cup.

  “Don’t be askin’ da LT stupid questions over dere,” Staff Sergeant Bulldog said from across the table. “He ain’t got time for you alls’ bullshit.” Both Specialist Haitian Sensation and Private Smitty deferred, hiding their grins between bites of food. Like all of our men, these two soldiers worshiped the NCOs—sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of respect, sometimes because they didn’t know or couldn’t remember how to worship anything else. The army was, and has always been, built on this unique brand of instantaneous compliance—after all, it is the NCOs who teach soldiers how to listen to the instincts that lead to survival and to ignore the other instincts, the ones that lead to a small hole in the dirt of Arlington.

  I looked across the table. “Does that mean I got time for your bullshit?” I asked, directing my question at Staff Sergeant Bulldog. Smiles spread across the table like a goodwill plague.

  He laughed. “Shit, sir . . . you bettah.”

  Specialist Haitian Sensation and Private Smitty were certainly not the only odd couple in the platoon. Sitting right next to me was Doc, the Gravediggers’ medic, and across from him, Private Das Boot. Doc, a quick-witted and slightly round college graduate from Seattle and of Asian descent, and Private Das Boot, a gangly, ever-serious German American hell-bent on proving his mettle in battle, would soon be nicknamed “10” by members of the IP—Private Das Boot being the 1, Doc being the 0, so often were they found standing next to each other, planning their postwar trip around the world.

  Then there were everyone’s favorite hetero-lifemates, Specialist Big Ern and Private Van Wilder. Snippets of their reciprocating madness drifted to our end of the table, causing even SFC Big Country to grin openly. As always, Private Van Wilder’s Texan twang paced the conversation, while Specialist Big Ern’s understated Carolinian accent was far more precise in its delivery.

  “Why don’t you love me anymore, Big Ern?”

  “You are such a homo. That’s why I don’t love you.”

  “You’re my gunner, Big Ern! I got to know that you love me for me, no matter what! I don’t care how old and crusty and heartless you are, I love you. Tell me again what going to basic training with Moses was like.”

  “Shut the fuck up, or I ain’t gonna let you sleep in the tent tonight. You’ll have to sleep in your (driver’s) hole, down in the Stryker, with all the other dumbfuck drivers who don’t listen to their gunners.”

  “Can I take those fobbits with me?” Private Van Wilder asked, pointing to some overweight female soldiers sitting at another table, luckily out of earshot. “I love me some fat chicks . . . I’m going hoggin’ tonight, boys!”

  This exchange caused the table of Gravediggers to explode into laughter and applause. Eight years of college may not have yielded Private Van Wilder a degree, but it had helped perfect his ability to spin yarns of excessive debauchery.

  Sitting on the far side of this verbal smackdown, near the aforementioned section sergeants, were the final four members of the Gravediggers: Specialist Flashback, Specialist Prime, PFC Cold-Cuts, and Private Romeo. Specialist Prime, a well-traveled former trucker who knew more about the American continent than Lewis and Clark combined, was going into painfully specific detail about the machinery of a Stryker’s engine with Specialist Flashback, my vehicle’s driver and another product of Main Street USA.

  “Hooah,” he automatically responded to Specialist Prime’s prompts, using that ultimate army crutch word and unofficial motto: “Hooah” meant “yes,” “no”, “maybe so,” “fuck yeah,” “fuck no,” and “FUCK,” depending on the situation, the tone, and the user. In this case, I was pretty certain my driver was employing some subtle Iowan sarcasm, but Specialist Prime either disagreed or didn’t care. Their technical conversation continued.

  Private Romeo, a smooth-talking Puerto Rican who had adventured as a professional dirt biker in a past life, was teaching a very interested Staff Sergeant Boondock and Private Van Wilder how to cuss in Spanish. Or how to admire a passing female’s backside. I was too far away to tell for sure. Private Romeo had come to us just before we left Hawaii, and just like PFC Cold-Cuts, he had become a devoted family man very early in life. The Gravediggers’ resident joker, PFC Cold-Cuts had taken years off of my NCOs’ life spans, and the reason was simple: He was smart and capable and wanted to know the why of things. Not that that was a bad thing, but sometimes in the military there is no why, or there’s no time for why. There’s only time for mission execution. As a result, Staff Sergeant Bulldog had taken PFC Cold-Cuts underneath his very firm wing and tended to explain why as only he could: “Shut the fuck up and do what I tell ya to do. Dat’s why.” Even PFC Cold-Cuts couldn’t find any holes in that explanation.

  As I watched the platoon joke, clown, and ramble their way through the holiday dinner, I couldn’t help but think about the country that had produced them. These were the men in the flesh that society only celebrates in the abstract. The NCOs had served in the army long enough to stop caring about the whims of the American culture they protected so effectively; the Joes were just removed enough to not fully recognize how the same society that reared us had detached itself from us the day we signed our enlistment papers. In a volunteer military, we fought for the nation, not with it.

  SFC Big Country issued guidance for the evening’s preparations to the junior NCOs, and then we stood up and exited the chow hall. Spirits were high, I thought. So was morale. It was a good day to be alive.

  Such would not always be the case.

  OUT OF THE WIRE

  The first time I rolled out of the wire, I wasn’t as nervous as I probably should have been. I’d woken up with a strange sense of calm that morning, something I attributed to the fact that I was going on a leader’s recon and thus would be attached at the hip to the platoon leader whose unit we were replacing. It was still his show, and with the Gravediggers staying back at Camp Taji for the day under the supervision of SFC Big Country, the burden of leadership melted away like a renegade iceberg finding itself alone in the Caribbean. I was there to listen and absorb—a welcome break from my normal occupational hazards and duties. It was New Years’ Day 2008, and my unit—the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division’s Second Squadron, Fourteenth Cavalry Regiment—had arrived on the coattails of the surge.

  “Most depressing New Years’ ever,” Staff Sergeant Boondock announced in the shower stalls that morning. “I should be recovering from a vicious hangover right now, swearing to God that I’ll never fucking drink again. This fucking blows donkey dick.” I was inclined to agree.

  Rolling out of the wire was what we called going outside the relative safety of the FOB for missions—where those mysterious, ambiguous terms like the enemy were found and where daily updates became bar tales. I had my nose in a map, studying our area of operations (AO), while my counterpart lieutenant—of the First Cavalry Division—briskly answered my elementary questions with master’s-level responses.

  Captain Whiteback, the Bravo Troop commander, sat across from me in the back of the Humvee, smiling wickedly. He had gotten his nickname for being the only non-Hispanic on his Stryker, which included Specialist Fuego, a former and future Gravedigger originally from Cuba. Like most officers, myself included, Captain Whiteback was just another gangly Caucasian. He didn’t have to say anything; I knew I looked the part of the cherry lieutenant with my bright eyes, skinny frame, and general life awkwardness. I locked and loaded my M4 Carbine by sticking a rifle magazine filled with thirty golden rounds of kill into it and pulling back on
the weapon’s charging handle. The Humvee moved out of Little America and into the other Iraq—the one that was there before American soldiers arrived and that will still be there when we leave.

  “You ever been to Mexico?” Captain Whiteback asked me over the mild roar of the vehicle’s engine.

  I nodded.

  “Iraq is kinda like that, but with bombs.” He paused momentarily and then smirked to himself. “And Arabs too. I guess there aren’t too many Arabs in Mexico.”

  The scenery I glimpsed for the first time from the up-armored window was nothing new; it was the same Iraq I had seen on television for the past four years. With the stark atmosphere of a northeastern industrial city and the transient wandering of a mostly jobless population, our AO was everything I’d expected—desolate and deprived, too tired to hope, but too human not to. Knowing what to expect didn’t keep my internal alarm system from blaring, however, whenever I made the mistake of remembering where I was.

  The other lieutenant continued talking as we drove, pointing out schools, mosques, and various huts, tossing out many, many Arabic names, which I wrote down in my notebook with questions marks next to them. I asked him about the sheiks, and he delved into the never-ending layers of grey involved in working with these men and the tribes and families they led, as well as the insanely complicated dynamic between the Sunni and Shia Muslims. There were capable leaders he told me, but there were corrupt ones, too. Some cared about securing peace; others didn’t. Some were motivated by money; others were obsessed with it. Much of the local violence occurred between the various groups with different interests vying for power.

  “It sounds like the Montagues and the Capulets,” I said.