The War I Always Wanted

THE ILLUSION OF GLORY AND THE REALITY OF WAR

A SCREAMING EAGLE IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ

BRANDON FRIEDMAN

For Mom, Dad, and Colby,
For Grandpa Brady, an old Marine who never got to hear these stories, And for the men of the 1st Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, past and present, who gave their lives while serving in Iraq

Prologue

Part I. Fear

1. Western Kuwaiti Desert

2. Fort Campbell, Kentucky

3. Jacobabad, Pakistan

4. Bagram, Afghanistan

5. Shah-e-Kot Valley, Afghanistan

Part II. Knowledge

6. The Desert

7. Hillah, Iraq

8. Baghdad

9. Northern Iraq

Part III. Recovery

10. Amrika

11. The Mediterranean

Epilogue

Acronyms

Acknowledgments

First there were mountains. Then there was a desert. And now, sometimes, there are flashbacks. Not full-blown flashbacks, I guess. They're more like super memories—and they creep up on me. Stopped in Dallas traffic
(behind one of the gun trucks)
I glance out of the window of my car and see business people
(Iraqis)
standing on the street corner
(wearing dish-dashas)
talking
(waving at me)
on cell phones. My eyes instinctively scan for weapons. Listening to a commercial on the radio, I hear a man's voice
(one of my squad leaders)
selling
(“1-6, he's gone down again, over”)
new cars. I come home to write, and the chair
(green army cot)
on which I'm sitting makes a familiar creaking noise as I shift
(toss and turn)
, and it reminds me of trying to sleep. Other times it is the craggy earth at nine thousand feet under my worn combat boots. The weight of a Kevlar helmet on my head. The barrels of burning shit. It all sort of blends together.

Sometimes when I look back, I think, “Man, I spent over two years dealing with those fucking wars, and I never saw any
real
combat—not the way I always envisioned it as a kid at least.” I never stormed a beach. I never ducked tracer fire while parachuting onto an enemy-held airfield. And my best buddy didn't die in my arms talking about his mom and his girl back home, either. Where I was, everything was so much more
vague
than that.

But I did watch a two-thousand-pound bomb strike the earth less than thirty yards from me and my platoon. In army-speak, that was what we would call a “significant emotional event.” And I did shoot some guys—even killed one of them. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it was a pretty big deal to me. I saw soldiers bending under the stress of guerilla war in mountains and in cities. I met Iraqi translators who walked the thin line between patriotism and treason every day, for months on end. I ate in their homes. I watched their neighbors call them traitors. I could have easily died at least half a dozen times that I know of. I was scared that I was going to die a hundred times that number.

The idea that war changes people is clichéd, but it's true. Going into it, I always thought I'd be above that—immune to it, too well trained for it to affect me, too
professional
. I thought we were beyond all that Vietnam/posttraumatic stress shit. But now I'm in on it.

I have been enlightened.

Now I fear that part of me will always be there—and that that part of me is never coming home. Ever. I'm sure my body will be here, and I'll walk around work or school talking to people, smiling and telling them what it was like and what I'll
be doing this weekend and so on. But I'm just not really here.

Instead, I am somewhere else. I'm wearing what has now become old-fashioned desert camouflage. I am thousands of miles from home, in a strange, dusty land where the people speak a language I don't understand. And I am carrying a gun.

I wonder if it will always be this way.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Part I
 

FEAR

The images of war handed to us, even when they are graphic, leave out the one essential element of war—fear. There is, until the actual moment of confrontation, no cost to imagining glory.

—Chris Hedges,
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

1
 
Western Kuwaiti Desert

March 2003

Failure is always an option. People rarely talk about it, but it's always there. It's the giant shrapnel-slinging elephant in the theater of combat that most guys try to put out of their minds. Unfortunately I was never so successful at this, and after I'd been in war for a while, the prospect stressed me out more and more as I went along.

We stood beneath a clear sky in the cream-colored Kuwaiti desert, several miles from what was to become the boundary between sanity and chaos. I was preparing to brief the soldiers I was going to lead across this boundary in the next thirty-six hours. My veteran platoon sergeant, Steve Croom, was next to me. We'd both been in combat before, but neither of us had ever technically invaded a country. Sergeant Croom had been in Iraq in the first Gulf War, but hadn't stayed all that long. I had been to Afghanistan, but in that case I hadn't really
invaded anything. I'd more or less just shown up one morning on a transport plane, confused as hell about what the plan was once I walked off the ramp.

Our platoon had been assigned to the 101st Airborne Division's assault command post (ACP). The ACP's commander, a relaxed junior lieutenant colonel named Ahuja, was going to rely on our platoon to get his people three hundred miles inside Iraq during the first two days of the invasion. As far as I knew, there was no plan beyond that.

We had gathered the ACP's officers and senior noncommissioned officers for the briefing. Surrounding us were several dozen yellowish tents that made up the barren outpost known as Camp New Jersey. Several feet away from me was a door flap that made a slapping noise every time a wind gust caught it. In the harsh glare it gave everything a ghost town feel. The already eerie feeling was made even stronger by the way you had to speak up when talking to groups like this. When there was no wind to carry the sound, the sterile land could dull noises, even mute them. It was as if the desert just absorbed them.

Huddled around us, the leaders of the ACP stared intently. They were more bewildered by the whole idea of actually invading a country than we were. The confusion on all sides didn't concern me, however, as the government was paying me a good deal of money to look sharp and act sharp, no matter how confused I actually became. Over the previous year I'd learned that it's best not to try and figure out what
is
happening or what's
going
to happen in combat. This is because
no one knows
. You just have to
go
with it.

I let Sergeant Croom do the talking. As I listened, he touched on how
their
job was to ride in their trucks and sit
tight, while
our
job was to do the shooting should it come to that. He said things that all Army sergeants say at one time or another, like, “Stay alert, stay alive,” and “Make sure you square each other away.” He made no mention of catastrophic failure being an option.

Croom walked with a limp, but it wasn't because of a previous battle injury. He'd been in a car accident a few months before we'd come to Kuwait and had put off the surgery for the war. He'd walked that way from the time I met him, so to me, it made him seem older than he was—which was somewhere in the late thirties.

The only things that made Croom seem true to his age were his two little redheaded girls that he talked about all the time. He had pictures of them dressed as cowgirls for Halloween. When it wasn't them, he was talking about Arkansas. Being from there was a big thing for him. Back home his cell phone voice mail message went something like, “Hey, you've reached Steve . . . I'm prob'ly out in the woods with ma rifle or in my boat catchin' fish right now so if you'll just . . .” and so on. In my mind, he was the guy who got killed in war movies because everyone liked him so much.