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  He laughed. “It’d be easy if things were simple enough to boil down to just two families.”

  Rather than go all the way into our sector to the combat outpost, we stopped off at one of the outlying eastern villages for a meeting with one of the local sheiks. We dismounted, handed out some Beanie Babies to a swarm of overly friendly and undernourished children, and began to move into the sheik’s house. The terp (soldier slang for interpreter) explained to us the source of the children’s excitement—the accompanying Strykers, which locals referred to as ghost tanks due to how quietly the engines ran. Strykers aren’t tanks, technically speaking, but no one felt compelled to correct the Arab children.

  Inside the house, I met a group of Iraqi leaders, did a lot of listening and nodding, and drank my first glass of chai—nothing more than a hot shot of sugar. The other lieutenant received a call on his radio shortly thereafter, though, which cut the meeting short. We were needed for something a bit more kinetic in nature—a raid on a purported sleeping spot for a known insurgent.

  He slapped his radio antenna. “I fucking hate fragos,” he said, bitterness dripping off his words like hot icing. Over the ensuing weeks and months, the Gravediggers would become very familiar with this reactionary and fluid operational tempo. Change was the norm, and this norm was called a frago, short for fragmentary order. Trying to understand the whims and reasons behind the frago was like drinking from a fire hose: Fighting it only made things worse.

  The raid turned up nothing but an empty room, a pack of wild dogs, and an old man holding his piss bag, but later that evening, only a few blocks away from where we handed out Beanie Babies, one of our brother platoons received some bursts of AK-47 fire from a rooftop during their initial patrol. No one had been hurt, and the squadron’s operations staff determined it was nothing more than harassment fire meant to test the new sheriffs in town. I bumped into Sergeant D-Wizzle, one of the men on said patrol and another former Gravedigger who had left us when the other platoon came up short a team leader. It was sometime after midnight. I strolled out of our troop’s headquarters with a mug of coffee in one hand and a near-beer in the other (alcohol of all types, along with most other enjoyable vices, was banned in theater by General Order No. 1), while he smoked a cigarette on the sidewalk, still looking a little flush in the cheeks.

  He just snickered when I told him the staff officers said it had been harassment fire and not a planned, direct attack on their patrol. “This is my third time over here,” he said. “You don’t ever get used to getting shot at. Doesn’t matter what kind of fire it was.”

  “Fair enough,” I responded. I didn’t know what else to say.

  As I walked into the darkness back to the platoon’s lodgings, machine guns crackled in the distance, which only disturbed me when I thought about how it should be disturbing me. The steady crooning of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters arriving at and departing from the nearby airstrip soon drowned out the gunfire. Under a midnight blanket, the distant countryside of Iraq offered an odd sense of tranquility. With the scattered lights of various townships all dotting a high desert landscape, it reminded me slightly of rural Nevada. Shortly thereafter, though, the subdued lights from Camp Taji’s Burger King and Pizza Hut restaurants came into my vision. The FOB is a very strange place, I thought. This sure ain’t Bastogne. Five minutes later, I fell asleep on a mattress in an air-conditioned room.

  The first day of my new life was over.

  THE REAL WORLD: SABA AL-BOR

  Anyone looking at a map of Iraq, pretty much any map made after T. E. Lawrence and the British came at least, would find a tiny dot just northwest of the Baghdad Gates. This dot was nestled close to the southern shore of the Grand Canal, which poured into the dirty, timeless waters of the Tigris only a few miles to the east. If the map was very old or very detailed, there would be a name next to the dot: Saba al-Bor, a town of 60,000 or so, gilded in sandstone and bathed in sectarian wars, too barren for even the scorpions and the camel spiders, a convenient crossroads for travelers and the displaced alike, with the Anbar madness in the deserts to the west, the war machine hub Camp Taji situated to the northeast along Route Tampa, and the infamous Abu Ghraib prison due south. This dot was impoverished. It was brutal. It was modern Iraq, permanently soaked in a blood-red-sea past it would never be able to part, let alone escape.

  The combat outpost in Saba al-Bor, located in the northwestern fringe of Baghdad Province. Home to over seventy American soldiers, it also served as an Iraqi police station and as a local governance center.

  Although my unit didn’t know it when we arrived, this place was to become our very own reality show, just without the camera crews. Or the adoring public. MTV probably wouldn’t have been interested. Not enough inanity.

  Back in Kuwait, I had begun writing an online journal—a blog, really, although I detested that description—about the platoon’s experiences. For operational security (OPSEC) reasons, I came up with the pseudonym “Anu al-Verona” to describe Saba al-Bor, purloining a bit from Shakespeare and sprinkling on some local spice. Our new home was no Anu al-Verona though, and I’d learn such in time. There were ancient grudges and new mutinies to be found, sure, but civil blood and civil hands were severely lacking in this forgotten slice of the crescent moon. Perhaps most obviously, there was nothing fair about Saba al-Bor, no matter what literary nickname I gave it. No romanticism abided here. Reality endured.

  In the village center lay the imposing American castle known as the combat outpost. As part of the refined focus on counterinsurgency operations, the Gravediggers and their brother platoons in Bravo Troop resided there permanently, living with the war rather than commuting to it. This vast two-story complex, originally built as a retirement mansion for one of Saddam Hussein’s favored generals, stood in stark contrast to the slums surrounding it. On the first floor of the outpost dwelled the remnants of Saba al-Bor’s governance center, where one lone mayor worked tirelessly to install a civil government in a tribal society; dirty, hungry, and tired soldiers lived on the second floor and prowled the roof above that, waiting, some hoping, for an attack on the premises. Even here, in the flat Arab desert and attempting to blend in, the American outpost couldn’t help but be the City on the Hill. Too much electricity. Too much security. Too much activity.

  Next to this compound stood proof that, at least four years after the statement was first uttered, the Coalition of the Willing was more than just an uncomfortably titled punch line. A platoon of Estonians, a battalion of IA, and a company of IP operated out of their own rustic structures, and all, albeit in very different ways, displayed a dark cynicism and fearlessness that sprouted from growing up in the Third World—the Stones having been trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and the Iraqis, locked in Saddam’s Baathist basement. Coordinating all of these assets for the betterment of the Republic of Iraq proved a challenging task, one that too often degenerated into a walking monster of mental anguish for me and my men. Breaking up drunken fistfights between the armed IP and equally armed IA only amused the first time.

  Helping bridge the gap between languages and cultures were the terps, who lived side by side with us upstairs. Referenced more by their American nicknames than their given Arabic names, these men simultaneously provided a vital asset for communicating with the local populace and served as instant comedy. Between Suge (pronounced “Shoog,” like the hip-hop entrepreneur) Knight, Super Mario, Phoenix, and Snoop Dogg, our terps went out with us on every mission and gave us the occasional reminder of home, due to the pop-culture-related origin of their nicknames. Although the money they made was surely a primary reason for their chosen vocation and their English could at best be described as rudimentary, it was easy to forget how many of our enemies would’ve gladly killed our terps for working with us.

  Swarming the combat outpost from the town and various outlying villages were the community leaders and sheiks. Between tribal rivalries and the always-tense association between Sunnis and Shias, the township
’s relationships—from the leaders all the way down to their pipe swingers—were complicated and forever morphing, with most of the details getting lost in translation. Geographically speaking, Saba al-Bor was a Sunni donut, with a jelly Shia center—all of the town hubs and markets were located in the Shia ghettos near the combat outpost, while the slightly less poor and better educated Sunni population enveloped the village itself and the rural outskirts in all four cardinal directions.

  To borrow a failed strategy from a previous war in the American history books, the neo-counterinsurgency taught us that we may never win the local populace’s hearts and minds, but securing their pocketbooks could be enough. Money—the type of money that this Saba al-Bor had never seen before—flowed in from our side as well as from our enemies’, and it was up to the local leaders to figure out which offer(s) best suited their purposes. By the time our unit arrived, most of them had already decided we presented the better means to an end. What that end was, exactly, varied from tribe to tribe, neighborhood to neighborhood, and person to person.

  The sheiks’ men—referred to by us as the Sons of Iraq and by the locals as the Sahwa—enforced the whims and desires of their leadership, while proving that employment is the bedrock of any nation’s stability. Most of the Sons of Iraq manned checkpoints at various intersections throughout Saba al-Bor and throughout Iraq; the American taxpayer had bought these men’s loyalties for a stipend of $300 per month each and probably didn’t even know it. The Sahwa’s elite became bodyguards, moving like the arms of an octopus, protectively shielding their respective sheiks with tentacles bearing the ultimate peasant weapon, the AK-47, while never straying too far from their secure coral reef of up-armored SUVs. We were new to their protracted guerilla war, but they were not. A litany of hard stares, prison tattoos, and deep scars were the corporeal representations of such. I doubt still that there was a man we worked with who didn’t have blood of some sort on his hands, and some of that was undoubtedly American blood. If the mass media was to be believed—a notion very few military officers subscribed to in this post-Vietnam era, as distrust for journalism was rampant and practically institutionalized in the culture—over 100,000 Sahwa members had now manacled themselves to the reconciliation process across the nation of Iraq.

  The Sunni reconciliation with the Iraqi republic and Coalition forces was in full throttle in Saba al-Bor, and the Shias had decided to hop on the bandwagon while there was still room. Muqtadah al-Sadr’s proclamation in the summer of 2007 that JAM elements would cease attacks on Coalition forces certainly helped, too. The Sons of Iraq program, more so than the surge, had changed the direction of this war and this country in general, and both the Sunni and the Shia leaders understood the importance of participating in the power shift. While being an American soldier in Iraq in early 2008 often meant playing the role of beat cop and counterguerilla in a land of roving gangs, our mission hinged on fostering working relationships with men who may have shot at us during the invasion in 2003 or emplaced IEDs during the throes of the insurgency in 2005 and 2006. Some of my NCOs struggled with this reality, and I probably would have too, had this not been my first deployment.

  No description of Saba al-Bor would be complete without mention of Mojo, the mayor’s young son. He claimed to be fifteen years old, although he didn’t look a day over eight. While the lack of a proper nutritional diet probably contributed to his runtlike stature, he likely didn’t know how old he was, as I seriously doubted a birth certificate existed anywhere in the village. A pair of striking green eyes, a rarity for Iraqis, offset his jet-black hair. He tailed our movements around town every day, out of both curiosity and a sense of security. His parents had removed him from school two years prior due to kidnapping threats brought on by his father’s cooperation with American forces. Mojo spoke excellent English, which should be enough to keep him employed for many years, be it in the backwaters of the Arab world or beyond, in the metropolises. His understanding of soldierisms, from our off-color jokes to our acronym jargon, was a bit unsettling at first. He referred to me as LT G whenever he saw me and did a spot-on impression of Staff Sergeant Bulldog strutting around with a scowl on his face.

  In addition to being a streetwise urchin, Mojo was also a budding entrepreneur, and he’d let it be known that he could provide Joe with whatever Joe desired—legal or otherwise. I never read Mojo General Order No. 1, although I probably should have when it was discovered that he pimped out whores to the IP’s and was interested in expanding his enterprise to our compound. We put a stop to that before it got started by threatening to turn him over to his father. At least, I think we did.

  This incessant obsession with money, from the sheiks to the terps all the way down to little Mojo, cannot be overstated. It was absolutely vital to the continued development of Iraq and the American military’s success in the Iraq War. While it often seemed blatantly crude, who was I, a suburbanite who had always lived in comfort, to question it? I had never known poverty or the desperation it brings. Daily, we had local-nationals come to our gates looking for jobs, and daily we turned them away, sending them back to whatever Mesopotamian hellhole they’d crawled out of. It only took a few weeks for me to grow numb to this recurrence.

  Democratic birth and the quest for financial independence seem to be intrinsically linked—freedom’s dirty little not-so-secret. I’m sure Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty would agree. And while the idealist in me—back then, I guess I still thought of myself as one of those—looked upon greed as the ultimate of vices and viewed people who talked about their finances publicly as boors and covetous tools, I couldn’t help but sympathize with the locals’ fixation. Theirs was a penury only dreams could escape. And for a while, that dream ran through the lean, tall men in body armor from across the sea who arrived in ghost tanks and smiled too much.

  They didn’t all feel that way though—about us or our money. There were just enough of them out there who wanted us gone or dead, or dead and gone, that battles and skirmishes continued; thus, so did the war.

  Reality endured.

  SNOW PATROL

  I staggered toward the latrine, delirious with too much caffeine in my system and not enough sleep, weaving like an indolent zombie. PFC Cold-Cuts bounced into me with a large smile plastered across his face, and the sound his throat emitted would be considered a giggle in most circles outside of the U.S. Army.

  “It’s snowing, sir!” he said.

  “Cold-Cuts,” I said, “it’s too early for that shit.” I brushed my teeth, put on deodorant more out of habit than concern for what I smelled like at the combat outpost, and checked up on the status of my novice attempt at a war moustache—still pathetic, wispy, and a general affront to facial hair everywhere. I walked back into the main hallway and spied Staff Sergeant Boondock across the way, hard rock music blaring out of the headphones wedged into his ears.

  “We still leaving in an hour?” he yelled, speaking over the lyrics of the band Rage Against the Machine’s “Calm Like a Bomb.”

  I checked my watch and nodded.

  “Still dismounted?”

  I nodded again and bit down on my lip, remembering the details of the early-morning mission laid out to me the night before by Captain Whiteback. Maybe a glass of chai at the local market would wake me up, I thought. There’s only so much black coffee and Rip It energy drink a body can take, and I still tried to avoid nicotine this early in the deployment. I smelled bacon from a nearby breakfast plate and began to head for the chow line, when I heard Staff Sergeant Boondock’s voice sound off yet again from behind me.

  “You might wanna rock the long sleeves, sir. It’s penguin weather out there.”

  He was right. And so had been PFC Cold-Cuts. For the first time in any Saba al-Bor local’s memory, the penetrating, white precipitation falling from the sky wasn’t metal shrapnel or a downpour of civil-affairs pamphlets. It was a gift straight from Mother Nature herself, with a possible assist from her redheaded stepchild, global warming: snow
. And the kind that stuck. I was too preoccupied with mission preparations, though, to give this anomaly much attention.

  One hour later, we moved out of the wire on foot. All the joking stopped as soon as the first foot hit native ground, as did any talking above a whisper. I gave the hand-and-arm signal to stagger our columns, but a quick glance around me proved that my reminder was unnecessary: The soldiers had already moved into their dismounted positions with an expertise and confidence that only excessively meticulous military training can produce. Specialist Fuego, loaned to us for the day, automatically assumed the point position, and the rest of the platoon followed his lead. They moved fluidly, calm and crisp despite the foreignness of our environment, heads rotating like they were on a swivel. Even Private Das Boot, who loped behind me with a radio on the back of his long frame, had managed to manufacture some level of comfort.

  Our terp, Suge Knight, bundled up like a small child learning how to ski, walked in the middle of our formation, unsure as to why his American employers always insisted on working during the most miserable of times. He looked at me, pointed at the grey sky, and asked, “Why?” from behind the crooked cotton mask that covered everything but his eyes. He usually only wore the mask when we were in areas he didn’t like or wasn’t familiar with, but he wore it today because of the cold. I shrugged my shoulders and said that I’d been asking that question for twenty-four years but hadn’t received a satisfactory answer yet. I wasn’t sure if he understood, but he laughed along with me anyway.

  A middle-aged mammoth of a man originally from Sudan, Suge had earned the trust of my soldiers by admitting that he sometimes missed the Saddam era because there had been discos back then. Anyone willing to admit that to American soldiers, they reasoned, couldn’t be dishonest. Everyone in Saba al-Bor knew Suge, and Suge knew everyone. We didn’t know it quite yet, but he was to become an unlikely, yet vital, asset in the counter - insurgency fight. Even a war zone appreciated a big belly, a deep rolling chuckle, and a deviant sense of humor. He wasn’t all jokes though. As with many comedians, his humor hid a deep sadness. He had lost three young children during the bombings of the first Gulf war, and he still visited their graves every time he returned home. Further, many of us suspected he suffered from mild posttraumatic stress disorder, as he had survived multiple IED strikes in the three years he had worked for Coalition forces. He had seen far more war over the course of his life than any one man ever should.