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  “You read my mind,” I yelled, relieved that I’d thought of a tactically sound maneuver, albeit about five seconds late.

  “I got you, sir,” he responded, giving me the Aloha shaka’. I could have sworn he had winked at me from behind his black sunglasses too. This was his third deployment, and having experienced more than one man’s fair share of combat, he adopted a relaxed posture in an attempt to settle down his young lieutenant and the three soldiers he had stacked up with him, most of whom were experiencing two-way live rounds for the first time.

  I radioed back to SFC Big Country to relay to Captain Whiteback that we were maneuvering half the platoon north and keeping the other half in cordon because, if arbitrary gunfire was any clue, it sounded like Steel was still in contact to the south, too. While the IA dismounts refused to budge from the safety and cover of the building, Sergeant Axel and his team bounded over to our position without incident. That brought our dismounted total on the ground to ten, including Suge. Behind my Stryker, driven by Specialist Flashback and gunned by Sergeant Spade, we gradually plunged north into the unknown, like a needle in search of a vein. The T-72s to our left and right continued to exchange machine gun and rifle fire with something that was about three hundred meters directly to our front, rounds pinging off of the tanks’ armor and the surrounding buildings. Corporal Spot and Sergeant Axel assumed the wings of our impromptu staggered column, scanning every window and peering down every corner. The area we moved into offered little concealment and even less cover; we had trampled straight into hell’s garden, where fountains flowed with raw sewage and a soil-bed of refuse and broken glass gnawed on itself below our feet.

  As we pressed forward, the rounds fired in our direction tapered off considerably, until the only fire I could identify came from the T-72s. My men showed considerable restraint throughout our movement, ignoring the temptation to begin firing rounds under the guise of harassment fire, waiting to positively identify not only a target but an enemy target. I was sure I hadn’t been the only one, though, who had been stroking his safety trigger as we walked, hunched over, attempting to minimize our own target silhouettes.

  The Stryker stopped at some residual miscellany of concrete in the center of this no-man’s-land. I took this opportunity to radio back to my mounted elements and exchange situation reports with them, while the soldiers spread out, finding cover, rifles and machine guns oriented in a half-moon shape bowing north. The T-72s now turned around and headed south, out of our view.

  “White 4, this is White 1,” I said.

  No answer.

  “White 4, this is White 1,” I repeated.

  No fucking answer. Nothing but radio static.

  I broke into a profanity-laced tirade, which culminated in my beating my hand mic against my helmet. Despite the tenseness of our situation, my rambling antics cracked a few of the guys up. Still nothing more than a very serious mind doomed with a clown’s soul, I thought. Then I remembered Sergeant Spade still had radio communications from the Stryker, and I had him relay our update. Deep breath. We still had commo with the outside world.

  “4 copies,” Sergeant Spade yelled down from his hatch. “The section in cordon is still in position and reports that the IA are the only ones shooting now. Also, Steel still reports receiving contact in the south.”

  I looked over at Staff Sergeant Boondock, who just shrugged his shoulders. “Keep moving?” he suggested.

  “Roger,” I said, signaling to the soldiers to resume their column positions behind my Stryker. No more than twenty meters after we continued our movement, though, my Stryker came to a halt. I heard Sergeant Spade’s voice rise in pieces above the engine and other extraneous noise.

  “LT . . . a bunch of guys . . . waving . . . civilian clothes . . . they might be Sahwa . . . armed.”

  While I didn’t have the sights Sergeant Spade did in his hatch, a quick glance around my Stryker confirmed his report. There were definitely Iraqi men to our front who were definitely waving at us and definitely armed to the fangs with foreign rifles. The problem was, we couldn’t walk behind the Stryker all the way north until we could confirm that these men were indeed Sons of Iraq. A series of shabby huts canalized the maneuverable terrain ten meters in front of our current position. The civilian world referred to this as a stalemate. The French called it an impasse. American soldiers knew it as a clusterfuck.

  I felt compelled to instigate some course of action and remembered the first thing they taught us at the armor officer basic course: It was better to execute a shitty plan quickly than to wait around for the perfect plan. Well, I could do that. To hell with it, I thought, these bastards can’t hit anything they shoot at anyway. Stepping around the side of the Stryker, I started walking toward the group of armed, faceless Arab men and told my guys to stay put. I took three steps, then felt a firm hand grab me from behind, at the neck collar, yanking me backward.

  “No way, sir. Let me go first,” Specialist Haitian Sensation said. He was nice enough to say it like I had a choice in the matter, as he had flung me back with the chiseled ease of someone who regularly benched twice my body weight. I regained my footing, smirked to myself, and followed, waving and loudly yelling all the friendly Arabic I could think of. The rest of the dismounts wedged out behind us.

  The group in question turned out to be Sahwa, as we had hoped. Actually, they were Colonel Mohammed’s Sahwa and had somehow ended up in a massive gunfight with the IA in a bizarre turf war instigated by a routine traffic checkpoint. I talked to Colonel Mohammed—as a retired Iraqi air force helicopter pilot, he still felt entitled to such a title, an assessment all of his people readily agreed with—and he was clearly rattled by the exchange, livid with the IA, and shocked by our being there. He also quickly claimed that groups of armed, masked men, unknown to him and unaffiliated with his Sons of Iraq, had joined the firefight soon after it began. They had been located near the Sahwa headquarters and had also been firing south, both at the IA and at us. He stressed that any bullets sent our way came from these men—not from the Sons of Iraq. No one knew where these armed, masked men had dematerialized to now.

  Had the Sahwa intentionally been firing at us, hoping to kill an American in the midst of the chaos? Did the unknown masked men armed with AK- 47s actually exist? Had the IA used a sledgehammer to swat a fly? Questions, questions, questions, and no amount of talking would yield anything resembling a coherent answer in the hours and days and weeks to come. To be blunt, though, my platoon didn’t really give a fuck about the whos, the whys, or the hows of what had just happened. They were content with being able to go back to the combat outpost to squeeze in a few hours of sleep before our night patrol.

  Personally, I had a hard time sleeping. My left leg kept twitching like it used to do the night before a big test. So I bought some cigarettes from Mojo and went out to the back porch. Staff Sergeant Bulldog was already there smoking. We nodded at one another but didn’t say anything. Then I took a long drag, listened to the austere Islam prayer chants being broadcast over loudspeakers from a nearby mosque, and waited for the next frago.

  II:

  EMBRACE THE SUCK

  (OR NARRATIVE OF A COUNTERINSURGENT)

  SPRING 2008

  COIN [the military acronym for counterinsurgency] presents a complex and often unfamiliar set of missions and considerations. In many ways, the conduct of COIN is counterintuitive to the traditional U.S. view of war—although COIN operations have actually formed a substantial part of the U.S. military experience.

  —U.S. ARMY FIELD MANUAL NO. 3-24 (2007),

  COUNTERINSURGENCY FIELD MANUAL, 1-148

  A COLD SPRING

  The pale curtains of the desert sun opened softly every dawn. Spring arrived, bringing with it a heat eager to oppress.

  Everywhere we went, it was always the same. The same tired mixture of anger, sadness, and hope. The same matching black pools of the browbeaten. The same bottled mistrust of a foreign people to whom the concept of trust was
foreign. A people caged by their prisons of origin but hell-bent on survival, nonetheless. It wasn’t like back home, where the homeless glared at shadows and backs and ideas. Over here, the poor cast their antipathy openly, in the light and at faces and ideals. I found it less jaded but more vacant and more hostile in intent—more like a junkie just realizing he already has injected his last life-fix.

  With nothing to lose, it was easy for them to be honest with us. The eyes told all.

  The stare: history’s chronic shame. To the victor goes this eternal barb, the unblinking eye of the masses.

  Telling them we knew what was best and that they needed to start relying on their own government and police so we could leave, that everyone would win that way and any help we could and did provide in the meantime at least offered a new spring in a land of endless, destitute winters, often didn’t have the effect I thought it would. Or should.

  Whether I thought we were there for something other than oil didn’t matter when they thought we were. Open up the freedom present and treasure it, Iraqis! That’s a bow of independence. . . . Pretty, isn’t it? Give us back the wrapping paper; we’re trying to recycle our democracy exports.

  Thanks for the . . . gift? mistah. Leave a blank check and go home and try to eat us away or drink us away or life us away.

  If looks killed, there would be far more than 4,000 American ghosts trapped in Babylon’s sand spunk.

  I had heard it before—the Hawaiians have a term for this visual hate. Da stinkeye, bruddah-man, bettah stay in Waikiki, haole, ya dig? I had seen it before—drunk college-boys in pastel Polo shirts with fat wallets should be more careful where they venture in the slums of the dirty South. And I had felt it before—scarecrow tourists with cameras and smiles and perfect white teeth didn’t penetrate into the seedy backwaters of Dublin unless they wanted trouble. Have you ever knifed another man just to feel his very essence pour out of him in pools of running red and guts of unidentifiable slop onto the sidewalk?

  Umm. Yes, we did. And no, no I have not.

  Still, though. This was different. The flowers and hugs and cheers from the liberation only lasted for a few months before one stare became ten stares became one hundred stares. Suddenly the stare was the norm, house by house, block by block, and town by town, and all of the flower petals dried up, and we suddenly recognized that those cheers of gratitude were actually pleas for salvation. There were thousands of them, and they were everywhere. This pattern of starbursting degeneration, roughly translated from Arabic, meant occupation.

  They told me, Lieutenant, you can’t change a culture overnight. I knew that. I wasn’t trying to change a culture. I was trying to defy the laws of existence.

  I hated being hated. Strength and hardness didn’t necessarily have to intertwine. But it sure was simpler that way.

  The Iraqis might no longer have believed our black-as-the-abyss sunglasses could see through walls, like they did back in 2003, but I still felt better when I put them on. It made it a lot fucking easier to keep walking past the hollow stares of people when I thought that they thought I wasn’t looking into their eyes. They wanted me to escape their pain without effect or a spare thought. They needed to believe I was that callous, and that was the reason I walked past them.

  I later wondered if such was ever even an option. We tucked away what hopes we could, tried to ignore the moment, and hardened our souls for the strong duration. We knew that no flowers or hugs or cheers awaited us on the far end. All we had was this spring, searing in climate but cold in nature. At least it was ours and ours alone.

  JUST ANOTHER FRONT

  This today was just like any other except for the todays that were different.

  A giant alarm clock rang with acrimony, bringing in the day far more brusquely than God intended when He designed the sluggish rising of the sun. I yawned loudly, slapped myself in the face, hopped off of the top bunk, and sauntered toward the TOC for intel updates, while SFC Big Country turned on the coffeemaker and went to the soldiers’ rooms to wake them up. When I returned from the TOC, SFC Big Country handed me a fresh cup of coffee, Staff Sergeant Boondock was staring at the wall cursing to himself, and Staff Sergeant Bulldog—a notoriously slow mover in the morning—grunted from somewhere deep underneath his blankets.

  “Time to get up, sheik,” I told him. “Your doting followers await.”

  Some mixture of profanity-laced grogginess and Southern slurring usually let me know that he was awake. Then I joined my men at the gear racks just outside of our rooms, where we donned layers and layers of cumbersome body armor, swelling in mass and bulk like the knights of yore. The three newest Gravediggers—Specialist Tunnel, Private Hot Wheels, and Private Stove Top, fresh arrivals from Hawaii—watched in confusion as Private Van Wilder emerged from his room dressed only in his underwear, rubbing his rather sizable belly.

  “Don’t act like you’re not impressed,” he cracked. And then, to a laughing Private Smitty, he said, “The FNGs [fucking new guys] keep staring at my balls. . . . They must want me. Can you really blame them?”

  All of our new soldiers qualified as certified good ole boys from the American South, and all were proud infantrymen. Specialist Tunnel, from Arkansas, arrived eager to match his twin brother, who had already earned his combat patch in theater and survived an IED-strike. Private Stove Top, a native of the North Carolinian coast, and Private Hot Wheels, from the Georgian swamps, came to us straight out of basic training, but it hadn’t taken much prodding for them to come out of their shock-shells. When Private Smitty accused Private Hot Wheels of being a redneck because of his accent, Private Hot Wheels snapped back with, “I ain’t a redneck. I’m just country. Rednecks aren’t smart enough to go armadillo huntin.’”

  Some thirty minutes later, after a quick breakfast, twenty black sunglasses bowed toward my map, listening to a plan they knew would change on the move. A background of pounding bass, coming from Staff Sergeant Boondock’s Stryker and courtesy of the rock band Metallica, provided a steady backdrop for my words about rules of engagement, the same words I said the day before and the same ones I said the day after. After I finished, I asked if there were any questions, and there weren’t. I told the platoon to mount up, and SFC Big Country barked out last-minute priorities of work to the junior NCOs.

  Staff Sergeant Boondock (right) and Private Das Boot stand in front of a pair of armored Stryker vehicles in the farmlands outside of Saba al-Bor. Providing overwatch security for the local community, while usually tedious, became a necessity in the Iraq counterinsurgency.

  “Let’s rock and roll, you stupid bastards,” Private Van Wilder crowed, as he rolled into his driver’s seat. “I got a hot date tonight with a fat Iraqi chick, and I don’t want to be late. Fat chicks love my molest-ache!”

  I climbed into the back of my Stryker, which had already been prepped immaculately by Sergeant Spade, Specialist Flashback, and Private Smitty. All I needed to do was plug in and start conducting radio calls. In the beginning, I had tried to help my guys ready the vehicle, but this had only horrified Sergeant Spade, who thought it reflected poorly on them; now I just stayed out of their way and let them do their jobs. Phoenix was already loaded up in a seat and bantered back and forth with Private Smitty, arguing about some video game fallout from the previous evening. I gave the platoon three minutes, then asked them if they were ready to begin our patrol.

  “White, this is White 1,” I said. “Report your redcon [readiness condition] status in sequence.”

  “This, uhh, White 2,” Staff Sergeant Bulldog drawled. “We redcon-1.”

  “White 1, this is White 3. We’re redcon-1!” Staff Sergeant Boondock burst.

  “This is 4,” SFC Big Country thundered. “Let’s roll.”

  “On your move, 2,” I said, watching the wheels of my senior scout’s vehicle churn forward. I let X-ray know we were departing, and then, just like every day, our Strykers moved past the gate, out of the wire, and into the enduring reality of Saba al-Bor.
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  Our stated mission for the day was to conduct an electricity assessment of one of the local Shia blocks. We weren’t supposed to use the term presence patrol anymore—some doctrinal debate fought at levels way above me had resulted in this change in policy—but pretty much anytime an American convoy of combat vehicles maneuvered in Iraq, it acted as such. At every corner and sidewalk in every neighborhood of our AO, the reactions were exactly the same—the children waved giddily, hoping for chocolate; the women dressed head to toe in black robes stared rigidly at the ground; the old men nodded with hard, empty eyes; and the young men stared back at us callously. All cleared a path for our Strykers. Somewhere over the course of this war, they’d learned not to get in the way of the armored vehicles and their machine guns.

  We turned onto Route New York, a side street off of Maples, and stopped at an empty lot across the street from a long-abandoned school. Staff Sergeant Bulldog found an open area for us to coil our vehicles. “This work, 1?” he asked.

  “Sure does,” I responded. “Let’s get on the ground.”

  Tired, dirty boots met Mesopotamian soil for the umpteenth time. SFC Big Country, ever the perfectionist, adjusted the vehicles slightly, optimizing security scans for our gunners. Like locusts descending on ancient Egypt, Iraqi children surrounded us immediately, clamoring for our attention and clawing at our pockets. “Mistah, mistah, gimme chocolata!” they screamed. “Gimme football! Gimme, gimme, gimme!” My men reacted differently to the horde, depending on their general patience disposition and the amount of sleep they got the night prior.

  “You gimme chocolata!” Private Smitty replied, picking up one of the kids, twirling him around.

  “Gotta love the effects of the welfare state. Go play in some traffic,” Specialist Flashback said, reaching for a cigarette and ignoring the children gathering around him.