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  I nodded and gave him a thumbs-up, refusing to speak. When we finally got to the spot and SFC Big Country picked up a large, metallic-yellow alarm clock, no one said anything. We simply turned around, filing down the trail, and broke back out into a wedge as we neared the trash shanties.

  I didn’t remember much of our walk back. The brain and the senses just shut down, as a means of protecting themselves. The body kept moving simply out of habit. Our four Strykers, green and powerful and humming, seized the horizon as a beaming oasis of escape. Our steps became strides. In hindsight, I’m surprised no one broke into a trot.

  As we passed the last of the paint-can buildings, Staff Sergeant Spade’s Beanie Baby still sat on the ground untouched. The little boy and a woman old enough to be his grandmother sat on a tire nearby. Feeling her eyes on me, I reflexively looked over at her. I stared at her grey, sagging cheekbones to avoid looking into her eyes.

  “Salaam aleichem,” I said, waving my right hand. I thought I saw her head nod, although the movement seemed so slight I couldn’t be sure.

  The Arabic greeting I uttered meant, “Peace be with you.” No wonder she didn’t say it back, I thought. I might as well have been speaking Greek to that woman.

  We got back on our Strykers and drove back to Tampa. No one joked; no one laughed; no one said much of anything. It took a few hours to get back into our normal operational rhythm and banter.

  SFC Big Country and I finally talked about Trash Village and its inhabitants the next morning, back in Saba al-Bor at the combat outpost. After making some phone calls to contacts in squadron, he had learned that the Iraqi government had offered to move those people out of the city dump, but they had refused, citing their direct access to the trash as their primary means of survival. We decided they were outcasts of some sort, possibly religious ones, as I remembered reading an article on the Internet some months before about a similar situation up north in Mosul. Then we sat around thinking to ourselves about all of that for a few minutes. I decided I was glad I hadn’t been to that place in the beginning of the deployment. I doubted that the earnest youth I had been could’ve brushed it aside as easily as I just had.

  “Doc said he’s not going to eat out of the garbage anymore,” my platoon sergeant eventually said.

  “Probably a smart decision.”

  “Yeah. Probably so.”

  RAMADAN

  On my last night in Saba al-Bor, I watched a man die.

  We had spent most of the day and early evening showing the new platoon leader around the city and its outlying villages. We stopped by Sheik Banana-Hands’s Sahwa headquarters, where he gave me a black-and-white Shia headdress as a thank you gift. Not to be outdone, Haydar presented me with a red-and-white Sunni headdress and a brand-new white dishdasha at his house, while we waited for the sun to set so we could begin our Ramadan meal.

  The month-long Muslim religious observance known as Ramadan honored the revelation of the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad. Every year, practicing Muslims refused to eat or drink anything from dawn to sunset, instead spending their days praying and reflecting on how to better live as Allah intended. Once night arrived, however, the people gathered for nightly feasts, replenishing their bodies for the next day of fasting.

  Suge, who also fasted for the observance, warned us that “the fucking Iraqis go crazy in the mind during the Ramadan, without food and water. Other Muslims are good at the Ramadan and keep their mind, but not Iraqis. They are loony people.” He proved a visionary later that night.

  Taking a break from packing, I walked down the stairs of the combat outpost to take a piss when I heard a vehicle come to a screeching halt outside at the front ECP gate. Loud shouting in Arabic followed, and some five seconds later, four IA jundis burst in, carrying a man in an Iraqi army uniform whose guts spilled wildly out of his stomach. A blood trail followed, dripping like red liquid from a smashed juicebox.

  Our reaction was immediate and the product of many hours of strenuous, rigid training. I yelled into my radio, and within one minute, all of the troop’s medics had opened up the aid station, carried the wounded man to the table inside, and began conducting first aid. The TOC called for a medical evacuation and reported that the helicopter would arrive in ten minutes. Staff Sergeant Spade, the sergeant of the guard for the night, ran outside and marked the landing zone for the helicopter with Chem-Lights.

  Despite our swift reaction, the prognosis for Nasim Abdul Qasim, an IA sergeant, was not hopeful. Doc and the rest of the medics worked quickly and ably, trying desperately to reestablish a pulse. Sergeant First Class Bisel, the Headquarters platoon sergeant and a proud Pittsburgh native, pressed down on the man’s stomach with a large gauze pad, attempting to keep his intestines inside of him. Noticing his dilemma—there seemed to be more spilling intestine than gauze pad—I grabbed a pair of gloves and my own gauze pad and pushed down on an open area. I felt a surge of blood and guts rise up from the other side.

  “We’re losing him!” Doc yelled. “There’s no pulse!”

  I kept glancing at the man’s eyes. They didn’t blink, but his irises kept flickering from white to pale blue, like a mood ring. I’m watching life fade out, I thought. This is fucking weird. My skin prickled.

  “Don’t do that, sir,” SFC Bisel told me. “Trust me. Concentrate on the stomach and leave the face alone. You don’t want that sticking with you.”

  I nodded, gulped, and reestablished firm pressure on my gauze pad.

  Somehow, the medics restored the man’s existence. Just as we received the report that the medical chopper would arrive in two minutes, they detected the faintest of pulses. We tightly wrapped as much of his core as we could, intestine slop covering the floor, and loaded him up on a stretcher. Four American soldiers lifted the wounded Iraqi and carried him out to the helicopter. The four IA jundis stood in the hallway, pacing back and forth.

  Ten minutes later, as our soldiers mopped up the floors and cleaned up the aid station, we received the report that Sergeant Nasim Abdul Qasim had died on the helicopter en route to a Baghdad military hospital.

  The jundis originally claimed that a group of insurgents had driven by and shot at them with AK-47s, hitting Nasim Abdul Qasim in the process. When SFC Bisel and the medics pointed out that three different bullets had entry points in the lower back and that the stomach served as the exit point for all three, their story changed to a negligent discharge burst going off while one of them cleaned his rifle. They blamed the fasting effects of Ramadan for the carelessness. The running theory among the American soldiers revolved around rebellious jundis disliking an order their NCO put out and shooting him from behind. The IA major I spoke with said he’d look into that possibility.

  After that, I walked upstairs and finished packing. Across from me, one of my NCOs did the same.

  While my shift out of the platoon was an inevitable known, Staff Sergeant Boondock’s was not. We learned about it only two days before the IA sergeant died, with no explanation beyond “because Sergeant Major Curly said so.” Staff Sergeant Boondock moved to another troop in our squadron, and Staff Sergeant Spade replaced him as our second section sergeant. While no one understood the purpose of Staff Sergeant Boondock’s reassignment at the time, I later learned secondhand that it had occurred because Lieutenant Colonel Larry and Sergeant Major Curly felt he and I were “too close.” While this revelation filled me with guilt, it also proved to me one last time that our squadron leadership was hopelessly out of touch with what it took to be a leader on the ground in Iraq and more interested in protecting their careers and soothing their own egos than helping soldiers. Platoon leaders switched out in combat routinely. Section sergeants did not. Staff Sergeant Boondock, easily one of the squadron’s most tactically proficient NCOs, had developed ten months’ worth of standard operating procedures and technical procedures with his section—taking him away from them after all that, and failing to anticipate a serious decrease in combat effectiveness as a result, was akin to putti
ng an octopus on land and still expecting it to swim.

  My replacement and the remaining NCOs were certainly up to the task of reshaping the platoon, but that didn’t change the fact that their having to do so was completely unnecessary. Further, the fact remained that Staff Sergeant Boondock had been punished for my actions. It wasn’t my fault that our leadership was so petty, but it was my fault for pointing that out to the greater e-world. Staff Sergeant Boondock became a section sergeant in his new troop, but being the new guy, he wasn’t able to talk his way into the senior scout position he treasured so much and had so rightfully earned.

  In the following months, thanks to the hard work of Captain Ten Bears, the Gravediggers, and the other men of Bravo Troop, Saba al-Bor cemented itself as central Iraq’s preeminent COIN success story. Enemy attacks and activity plummeted, while civil projects skyrocketed. Reelected as the mayor, Rahdi oversaw these improvements; meanwhile, Mojo’s business expanded to include cell phone plans. According to the brigade’s numbers, over 30,000 displaced personnel returned to Saba al-Bor during Bravo Troop’s time there. In February 2009, a JAM recruiter arrived from Sadr City, looking for fresh enlistees and promising young men the opportunity to kill Coalition forces. Not only were there no takers, but a bakery shop owner, tired of waiting for the slow-arriving Iraqi police, shot him dead in the street on Route Swords. A year prior, none of the people in that area would even talk to us for fear of JAM’s believing them to be informants. Saba al-Bor had certainly come a long way since our arrival. A place in Iraq that assorted, though, always sat perched on the cliff edge of sectarian warfare. Only time would show the true effect of all of our efforts and whether they could last.

  The morning following the Ramadan death, after I got big hugs from both Suge and Bulldozer the IP, the Gravediggers and their new platoon leader dropped me and Staff Sergeant Boondock off at Camp Taji. I still didn’t know what my next job would be; I had orders to report to the squadron headquarters the next morning to find out. I left the platoon in my replacement’s capable charge—the new platoon leader proved himself both skilled and patient in the months to come, and believing such would be the case ahead of time certainly put my mind at ease during the transition.

  Staff Sergeant Spade (near), Staff Sergeant Axel, and PFC Stove Top walk through Trash Village in the summer of 2008.

  As we pulled up to our FOB room pods, I shook my successor’s hand. “Just get them home,” I told him. “Nothing else matters.”

  He nodded. “Don’t worry, man. I will.”

  I said my farewells to the NCOs and soldiers, all of us promising to stay in touch and to hit up the bars together when we got back to Hawaii. Then Sergeant Tunnel, Specialist Haitian Sensation, and PFC Smitty helped me carry my bags to my room.

  “Thanks, sir,” PFC Smitty twanged. “For everything. You’ll always be our platoon leader.”

  I felt myself tearing up, so I told them to stop shamming and to get back to work. I closed the door to my room, locked it, and collapsed on my bed. For the first time in a very long time, I felt completely empty and completely alone. I had no idea what to do with myself. I stared at the ceiling in total silence for many hours.

  IV:

  ACROSS THE RIVER AND FAR AWAY

  (OR REDEMPTION’S GRUNT)

  AUTUMN 2008

  I wanna stand up, I wanna let go

  You know, you know, no you don’t, you don’t

  I want to shine on, in the hearts of men

  I want a meaning from the back of my broken hand

  Another head aches, another heart breaks

  I’m so much older than I can take

  And my affection, well it comes and goes

  I need direction to perfection, no no no no

  —THE KILLERS, “ALL THESE THINGS THAT I’VE DONE”

  [FOBBIT INTERLUDE]

  Hello. My name is Matt. I’m here for that meeting thing.

  (Hi, Matt.)

  I had to come here. Don’t think otherwise.

  (Hi, Matt.)

  My name is Matt, and I have secrets.

  (We all have secrets.)

  My name is Matt, and this secret is that I was a fobbit for ten days.

  (Tell us more. That’s why we’re here.)

  I don’t want to. Leave me alone.

  (Tell. Us. More.)

  Will you leave me alone then?

  (Yes.)

  Can I leave afterward?

  (Yes.)

  Fine. That’s all I ever wanted, anyway. To be left alone.

  (Hi, Matt.)

  So, like I said, I was a fobbit for ten days. And it felt good. Smooth. Simple. Safe. Nightly showers, scheduled mealtimes, a basic sense of security, all in the bubble of Little America. Not like the line. No strange, unexpected things happened on the FOB, but strange, unexpected things happened out there. Especially if you spent too much time out there. Not like the line at all.

  (Where?)

  Where? Out there. Crazy. Where stuff occurred. Where things happened. Where all of it felt real.

  (Hi, Matt.)

  Existence as a staff officer was like being a self-licking ice-cream cone. Sure, it tasted good at first, if a bit vanilla. But it quickly turned into a self-destructive pattern of melting purpose. In theory, we existed to support the squadron’s main efforts, the landowning troops. In practice, we survived by satiating Higher with graphs and charts and talking points and other digital excess venerated by the corporate camo culture. Nothing could have been more obscure and fake.

  (And?)

  Crashed over facade.

  (And?)

  Well, our lives were nothing more than a PowerPoint circle jerk, with the yes-men and the careerists and the listless laze all fighting to eat the cum cookie in the middle, because eating it garnered them attention. Attention meant positive OER bullets. And OER bullets . . . well, they weren’t like real bullets.

  (We all have secrets.)

  At some point during those ten days I forgot I was still in Iraq.

  (Tell. Us. More.)

  I liked it. And hated myself for liking it.

  (We all have secrets.)

  Jambo!

  (And?)

  A man could have liked it forever if he remembered to turn off the pride and passion buttons.

  (And?)

  I forgot.

  (Forgot what?)

  I forgot nothing. I became the squadron’s information operations officer: Higher’s little joke with itself, having the famous blogger serving as the writing pun. En vogue, in yoke. Most of the soldiers and NCOs and officers I worked with on the FOB were good guys and wanted to contribute directly to the war effort. But the flagpole had other plans for us.

  (Tell. Us. More.)

  After all, there was a war to forget.

  (And?)

  And . . . and . . . and. I wanted to patch myself back together. Really. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Serendipitously. Really. I did.

  (We all have secrets.)

  But I kept thinking about how this escape was my escape, not our escape. They were still out there, still fighting, still sucking. This made my escape cheap and empty, and so it turned out not to be an escape at all. I guess I forgot to turn off the pride and passion buttons.

  (Yes.)

  Unless the field grades in charge of the unit staffs held combat experience on the line—a rarity, given the generational gap within the officer corps—micromanagement reached new apexes every day, and the disconnect between what was and what should be continued to widen.

  (Forgot what?)

  I forgot nothing. Out of the wire, corporals made daily decisions that held strategic-level consequences. On the FOB, majors couldn’t shade a PowerPoint slide a particular color without getting prior approval.

  (Yes.)

  Crashed under facade.

  (Yes.)

  Don’t get me wrong—life as a fobbit wasn’t easy. It wasn’t hard, but it certainly wasn’t easy. People worked hard. But with the flagpole s
o close, we couldn’t work smart. Life didn’t drain out here like it did outside the wire. It soul-sucked. Not from the inside either. From the outside. The way a pool cleaner sucks out the stomach of a little kid sometimes.

  (Hi, Matt.)

  Hi.

  (Tell us more. That’s why we’re here.)

  Jambo!

  (Forgot what?)

  I forgot nothing. Like this: Jambo! It’s Swahili. The Ugandans, who worked as contracted security guards on the FOB, said it. They were the only happy people on all of Camp Taji, so they said, “Jambo!” It wasn’t like hello. Or hola. Or salaam aleichem. It was jambo! Always with an exclamation point. I tried saying jambo! sometimes, but I wasn’t very good at it. A person can’t mimic joy.

  (Hi, Matt.)

  I saw fliers telling me to join the biweekly Camp Taji softball league or the flag-football league. The PX sold ninety-some monthly magazines, hot off the presses. The lines for the fast-food restaurants—Burger King and Pizza Hut and Taco Bell—never ended. Musicians routinely held concerts, thinking they had come to the real Iraq. They would have had better luck finding it in downtown Detroit.

  (And?)

  Where was I? I didn’t know. I still don’t know. Little America, Bizarro Iraq. That’s all I knew.

  (Tell us more. That’s why we’re here.)

  This is such bullshit. Leave me alone. That’s all I ever wanted anyway. To be left alone.

  (Tell us more. That’s why we’re here.)

  No.

  (Yes.)

  Why?

  (Because we will listen.)

  What?

  (Yes.)

  Fine. But you promise I can leave after this?

  (Yes.)

  Fine. After that, after those ten days I mean, Lieutenant Colonel Larry called me into his office and told me that they were trading an officer to 1- 27 Infantry, also of the Second Brigade of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, for another officer. The original officer they wanted to trade wasn’t mentally sound anymore because of the deployment, and so they were now trading me so 1-27 Infantry didn’t think we traded crazy people. I didn’t want to go, even after all of the drama. I had grown up in 2-14 Cavalry. Everything I knew about the army happened in that organization, and everyone I knew in the army served there. But I had no say in the matter and didn’t want to give Lieutenant Colonel Larry the satisfaction of knowing I felt nervous. “Now,” he said with a thin, leering smile, “don’t think this has anything to do with the blog.” I nodded, saluted, and left the office. I saved my smirk for later.