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  “This just pisses me off.” Unsurprisingly, all of this fired up The Great White Hope. “It’s like they’re coming out here for a camping trip so they can actually earn their combat patch. We’ve been making it work out here by ourselves for a year. Why change now?”

  “Things are going to change as soon as they get out here,” Captain Clay pointed out. “That’s for damn sure. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll be saluting out here and practicing drill and ceremony for parades.”

  “Could someone explain to me why we’re switching brigades too?” The Great White Hope asked. For reasons known only to the strategic-level gods, the Wolfhounds would fall under the operational control of the Fourth Infantry Division’s Third Brigade for the duration of the deployment, rather than staying with the Second Brigade of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, with whom we’d deployed and under whom we’d spent the first year. While it made sense geographically—we were the only Twenty-fifth unit stationed on the east side of the Tigris and surrounded by units of the Fourth Infantry Division on all sides—we couldn’t help but wonder why this move was taking place with about three months left in Iraq. “All of this is really starting to hurt my brain.”

  I looked around the table and, seeing only dejected and bitter faces, did what I could to inject some levity. “I’m definitely not looking forward to this place turning into Office Space: Iraq,” I said, referencing the cult film classic. “On the other hand, I heard the Buffalo Bills cheerleaders are coming here in a month or two. That would definitely not happen if it were still just the companies out here.”

  “Are you serious?” The reaction to my statement was universal—a strained blend of hope, mania, and disbelief. Most of us hadn’t seen a real woman (i.e., not a female soldier dressed in camo) for six months or more. The thought of seeing and smelling and hearing a professional cheerleader sent most of our minds into sensory overload.

  I nodded my head. “That’s what the rumor mill told me. They’re called the ‘Buffalo Jills.’ Get it? ’Cause it rhymes.”

  A few days later, well past dusk, Captain Clay, Lieutenant Rant, and I stood at the edge of the motor pool, watching battalion soldiers shuffle from the Chinook helicopters that transported them from Camp Taji to their new rooms at JSS Istalquaal. As part of the logistics of fitting an entire battalion on the JSS, Alpha Company’s soldiers, NCOs, and officers moved from the hardstand buildings to trailers next to the motor pool; our new homes soon earned the nickname “Slum City.” Shockingly, spirits among our company seemed higher than I thought they would be, given the circumstances. As the platoon sergeants kept reminding them, “Ninety days, men. Ninety days. Suck it up and drive on. And don’t do anything fucking stupid.”

  The three of us had completed our own move to the trailers earlier that day. Our company TOC also moved to that area, and our old TOC would soon be turned into a medical aid station.

  “I know it probably makes sense, big picture wise,” Lieutenant Rant said. “But this still feels like a big kick to Alpha Company’s collective nuts.”

  “Things roll downhill,” Captain Clay said. “That’s how the army works. I guess they just wanted to ensure our replacements had to do the same thing with their battalion headquarters, you know?”

  Over by the hard stand, an overburdened intelligence soldier holding his rucksack and duffle bag while wearing all of his body armor tipped over, falling to the ground in a heap. Too far away to help him up, we just watched and shook our heads as he collected himself, then his belongings, and kept moving to his new room. I didn’t feel like laughing at him since he probably felt the same way about the move that we did.

  Housing issues aside, my other concern with being collocated with battalion centered on the concept of decentralized warfare. I had already served in a unit structured on micromanagement and centralization and found it stifling and repressing. Part of the redemption I sought and found with the Wolfhounds had been the ability to seize the initiative for targeting and knowing the freedom existed for me to execute such in practice. While this battalion wouldn’t purposefully suppress that, the nature of bureaucracy insisted on stricter control and oversight. More layers and more people meant more paperwork and more red tape and more meetings and more hands in the metaphorical cookie jar of counterinsurgency. I wasn’t upset, just resigned to the fact that things wouldn’t be the same, and I longed for the lost days of the wild, wild west, be it in Saba al-Bor the previous winter or in Hussaniyah only weeks earlier.

  Lieutenant Rant read my mind. “Things will never be the same,” he muttered.

  “No doubt,” Captain Clay replied.

  I didn’t say anything, just patted them both on the back, then pulled out and lit a cigarette. Between drags, I thought about the Buffalo Jills and how cool it was that they were coming to JSS Istalquaal. They eventually did come, sometime in February. I proved too intimidated to talk to any of them. I just sat in the back of the cafeteria and stared while they signed autographs and posed for photographs with soldiers. Then I felt like a bit of a creep, so I left and went back to work.

  They smelled nice. Like an old world I couldn’t remember anymore.

  V:

  STEPSONS OF IRAQ

  (OR A SHORT-TIMER’S PROMENADE)

  WINTER 2008-2009

  The best way out is always through.

  —ROBERT FROST

  HOLY, NOW, PENDING

  It shot out of the Babylonian dust, shattering the calm harnessed by a sandstone skyline. Surrounded by a haphazard maze of tiny homes and shops lacquered in grime, a sea-green minaret sat on top of the building like a crown. It has overseen easy wars and fragile peaces that leapfrogged for untold life spans, bearing witness to humanity’s tragic flaw of eternally repeating itself. The mosque stood as proudly today as on the day it first became a place of worship, many dawns ago. This was just one of those dawns.

  The infantry platoon trudged on ahead of and behind me, heads scanning, rifles aching. We were hungry. We were exhausted. We could smell the stench from our own bodies. What we wanted had made that dangerous evolution into what we needed. Despite all of this, the dreamer in me—ignored for many hours and desperate for attention—seized my mind with ironclad resolve, forcing me to stare off to the east, into the sun and toward the mosque. The soldiers continued to walk. So did I, although not consciously but simply out of habit and because I didn’t know how not to.

  Clouds of red puff danced brilliantly with the violet horizon, casing the Shia mosque as aptly as winter could allow. It was so easy to get caught up in the horrors of the moment, I thought, that the most vivid beauties of existence faded into eternal loops of grey. Time to take a deep breath and capture a mental snapshot. It’s what a responsible individual does in times like these.

  The now of nowness kicked. It fucking sucked carrying half of my body weight in armor plating, dripping with sweat and anger and impatience, rifle dangling at the low-ready like a forgotten ornament on the backside of a Christmas tree. Why did this country always smell literally like shit? I didn’t know. How did I help the counterinsurgency today? God only knew. Those were bitches of the now. They were trivial, fleeting, and banal. And no one cared. Fuck the transient. What really mattered was how this moment survived into something beyond time and beyond me and beyond them and beyond this. Hence the clouds. Hence the puff. Hence the horizon.

  Hence the holy.

  The sound of a loudspeaker’s hollow echo rolled over the shadows of Hussaniyah from the mosque. I recognized the early-morning prayers of the Salah. Back in Saba al-Bor, Suge Knight translated these words for me while we patrolled out in sector and sometimes joined in to pray for us himself; admittedly, all these months later, I still felt threatened by these austere, foreign chants unleashed in Arabic. I justified this primal reaction by comparing the prayers to certain passionate sermons I remembered from the old world, spoken in words I understood but with emotions that I did not. Spiritual cadences from the heart uttered in any lan
guage sounded menacing to a stranger. With Suge’s help, however, I came to appreciate the tranquility offered by the simple repetitiveness of some Muslim prayers. Peace, love, and happiness were universal goals of all the world’s major religions—a truth forever stained with bloody irony. How did we as people foul it all up so blatantly? How did the lives of a well-intentioned majority always seem to be shaped by the actions of zealots in the minority? Why was religion the first tool utilized by the violent rather than violence being the last resort of the religious? Certainly, these complexities were not limited to just Islam. After all, Jesus served as the world’s first hippie—he preached the Good Word, traveled the land in sandals, and beat up greedy capitalist pricks—but Christianity still managed somehow to collect its fair share of misbegotten jihads. The history books simply referred to them as crusades—or colonialism.

  Sometimes I felt like humanity was the stillborn carcass of what we were supposed to be. Other times I wasn’t even sure we had made it to the womb.

  I kept walking and gazing at the mosque. Huh, I thought. The only sacred building that had ever captured my attention for this long before was the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. And I seemed to recall that having more to do with a Spanish señorita standing in front of Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece rather than the church itself. Praise be!

  To God.

  Right.

  I pried my eyes away from the east and focused on the street in front of me. My thoughts, though, refused to transition back to the patrol and instead lingered on the dawn and the mosque. With the minaret crown. With the dancing clouds and the grave chants of the Salah. This was all temporary, I reminded myself, even though it felt oh so normal and everlong and permanent. Whether Stryker wheels rolled over the sands of Hussaniyah for months or years or decades more, that hallowed house would watch over many more easy wars and many more fragile peaces, standing proudly throughout. And some other rambling junior officer with dark bags under his eyes, from my country or another, would peer out at the Iraqi sunrise and wonder.

  Like I said. Eternal loops of grey.

  My inner reins broke, and I kept walking mentally, joining my physical location a half mile from the mosque. One thought lingered with me, though, all the way through the patrol and back to the JSS: Fuck the transient.

  THE OATH

  I hadn’t always been in Iraq, and Iraq hadn’t always been my only history. One time in my own prehistory, the Guinness socks felt as smooth as a hawk’s glide as I repeated the words spoken to me:I, Matt Gallagher, having been appointed an officer in the army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of second lieutenant, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter. So help me God.

  I let out a deep breath and forced my body to relax. These were serious words, and I knew it, especially since up to that point, I had dedicated my life to keeping my life as unserious as possible. A smile ran across my grandfather’s visage, as he stood across from me, having just administered the U.S. military officers’ oath of office. His right hand dropped from the air and went to shake mine, and I responded in kind, following that with a hug.

  My parents walked up, beaming, and they each pinned a gold lieutenant bar and a set of cavalry sabers onto my jacket. The dress uniform on my body felt alien, from top to bottom; the green jacket and pants felt far too crisp and rigid to be comfortable, and my black tie dug into the bottom of my throat. Even my polished black shoes seemed haughty to a set of eyes used to seeing only basketball sneakers and sandals. Those same shoes, though, hid my one act of quiet rebellion—rather than wearing the issued black dress socks, I sported a pair of black Guinness socks I had purchased in Dublin the fall before. The compulsion I had felt that morning to put them on felt natural, given the circumstances. I needed to remind myself that I could—and would—still be me.

  My mom seemed to read my mind as she finished pinning on her gold bar. “We all need our small acts of defiance to get through the day,” she whispered. “Just remember to keep them to yourself, okay?”

  A loud ruckus sprang forth from the back of the auditorium; it didn’t take long for me to recognize my fraternity brothers’ hooting and hollering. I smirked. Whereas everyone else in the room wore military dress uniforms, suits and ties, or dresses, they had shown up in pastel Polo shirts and plaid shorts and uncombed hair, still hungover from a beer pong tournament the night before. I’m really going to miss college, I thought.

  When I signed my ROTC papers on September 10, 2001, I planned to be an army lawyer. The next day changed a lot of things for a lot of people—including the life trajectory of a cocksure West Coast suburbanite. My dirty little secret from that particular day was a twisted spasm in spirit as I watched the replays of the Twin Towers collapsing into ruins. Something had happened. Something new. Something historic. Something profound. And it hadn’t been created in a Hollywood studio, either. America had been attacked, innocent people had died, and there was going to be a reckoning my children and grandchildren would read about someday. I didn’t know how, then, but I knew that I would be a part of it. Somehow, someway. I never would’ve believed in my wildest fantasies back then of becoming a scout platoon leader, but here I was, only a few years later, on the cusp of being all pragmatic and shit. On the way to becoming a genuine combat leader of men. Un-fucking-believable.

  It had all seemed so clear back then. And clean. I’m still not sure how or when it changed.

  After I swore my oath and our ROTC master sergeant gave me my first salute—gently reminding me that I needed to drop the salute first—I turned to face the audience. An endless barrage of flashing cameras left me feeling like a deer caught in headlights, wordlessly accepting my fate in the final seconds before escaping the bright lights through the oh-so-sweet truck grill of death.

  “Well,” I started, “first I’d like to thank the army for commissioning me the day before graduation. Considering my philosophy grade still hasn’t been posted, big ups to the Green Machine for showing faith in defiance of all things logical.”

  Laughs. I let out another deep breath. I sought comfort through humor, and once again, I found it. The rest was easy. I thanked my family, my friends, and a litany of ROTC people who had spent hours on end showing me the practical essentials of army life. Then, spurred on by the seriousness of the words I had just sworn to live by and the pure sense of pride I felt for uttering them, I hit the esoteric ramble button of my being.

  “You know, I’m here, as a lot of us are”—I pointed to my fellow commissionees—“because of 9/11.” Sleeping through it didn’t change the fact that it had profoundly affected me. “But that doesn’t really matter now. We have a job to do, and we’re going to do it. The whys will stay here in academia, as they should, I think. I’m as surprised as a lot of you are that I ended up going the route I’ve chosen. But I couldn’t be more proud or more excited. It’s going to be a hell of a ride, that much I know. Catch you on the flip side, and keep it real.”

  My brother, who sat in the audience next to my girlfriend, later told me I had spent my entire portion of the ceremony looking like I’d been punched in the gut but still managed to smirk during the whole thing. “Quite the feat,” he told me. He also said I didn’t really smile until I sat back down, when the spotlight shifted to the next new lieutenant. I guess I always hated dog and pony shows, even before I knew what the term meant.

  A few years later, when I left for Iraq, I took that same pair of Guinness socks with me. On days I wanted to remember who I had been and who I was and who I still wanted to be, I wore them on patrol, underneath my dirty, dust-covered tan combat boots. They still felt as smooth as a hawk’s glide.

  HOW TO JOINT-PATROL
/>   “Dude, where’d your moustache go?” Lieutenant Dirty Jerz asked me. “It was finally starting to fill in.”

  While JSS Istalquaal still hadn’t evolved into a salute zone since our battalion’s move there, certain outpost liberties had already been snuffed out. Like moustaches. Originally concocted by the few armor officers on the JSS as a tribute to our cavalry forbearers for morale purposes, the practice of growing a moustache had spread to the other branches and to some of the NCOs and soldiers as a show of company-level solidarity. The field grades frowned upon the so-called Ride of the Moustachioed and thus ordered our ringleader, The Hammer, to destroy any and all signs of officer upper-lip hair. Turned out, the only thing infantrymen hated more than hippies and techno music was moustaches. And so, my valiant attempt at a handlebar ended, quite prematurely. Considering that with it I resembled a child molester more than I did one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, the order couldn’t have come a moment sooner.

  A heavy orange sandstorm did not stop our dismounted patrol through Hussaniyah in the autumn of 2008, nor did it stop these sheep from eating trash.

  “It was my sacrifice to the new gods of Istalquaal,” I said smugly, “last seen at the altar of the porcelain sink.”

  Lieutenant Dirty Jerz and I walked up the slight, half-mile incline that separated the company TOCs from the new battalion headquarters on JSS Istalquaal. A chilly, early December wind swirled through the late-morning air, something not lost on the flapping American flag displayed prominently on a pole next to battalion. I needed to drop off some paperwork with the battalion intelligence gurus, while he needed to talk to the Iraqi police dispatcher, whose office was located behind battalion.