Kaboom (2 page)

PFC Cold-Cuts continued. “Heck, we just had lunch at his place last week.”

I nodded again.

He slumped his shoulders in resignation. “I guess I just thought it'd be different, that's all,” he said.

So did I, I thought to myself. So did I. As we mounted back up on our Strykers, I tried to remember the person who had come to Iraq, eager to shed himself in the name of something as amorphous as an “authentic experience
.
” Is this what he wanted to find—a local guerilla lord blown into a potpourri of blood and guts because he did business with us, the much-vaunted and ever-present U.S. Army? I wasn't sure how he . . . how I . . . would have reacted to this situation.

I knew one thing for sure, though. He would have cared more than I did.

I spoke my platoon leader words and issued my platoon leader orders on the radio, just as I had for three months past and just as I would for many more months to come. The Strykers began to roll out. We had a mission to continue. Might as well start at the beginning of all of this, I thought, continuing my daydream to mental salvation. Fuck it, all I have is time.

Might as well.

(OR AMERICAN BOY ESCAPES)

 

I slept through 9/11.
Both towers burned to the ground while I drooled on my pillow in my college dorm. I had decided to skip class that day, after a late-night video game marathon. Nine days later, I yawned along with most of my peers as the president asked for our continued participation and confidence in the American economy. He wanted us to keep shopping. So much for a generational calling for the Millennials.

At that very moment, most of my noncommissioned officers (NCOs)—young privates and specialists at the time—were busy mobilizing for war with an enemy yet to be determined.

I was drunk when we invaded Iraq, safe and secure and carefree in my frat castle. I was even drunker two months later, when President Bush declared, “Mission Accomplished.” True, I was in the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) by then and probably should have been more interested, but the war—and by war, I mean the invasion, liberation, and occupation parts—was only supposed to last a few months. The United States didn't do protracted conflict anymore, not after Vietnam. Shock and awe and the Powell Doctrine and all that.

So while I did keg stands and waged war on sobriety, American tanks were screaming north across the sands of Iraq, destroying everything that moved, with a harrowing expertise the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would envy.

The first free elections in Afghanistan? Yeah, I don't even remember those occurring. I was gallivanting across Europe, hooking up with wild French girls and waking up in strange, ancient cities. My Puritan forebears probably wouldn't have approved.

Despite my own temporary, youthful irreverence, the conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq continued. America's brushfire wars of the early twenty-first century did not require an engaged populace, and as a result a weary but rugged warrior caste evolved. This caste represented less than 1 percent of the total population it fought, bled, and died for—deploying to combat for months, or a year, or a year plus at a time—multiple times. Soldiers died, or they didn't; their families crumbled under the strains of deployments, or
they didn't. Such proved to be the burden of the all-volunteer force. Meanwhile, the greater society followed our president's battle cry and continued to shop, squander, and flaunt. A nation at peace, a military at war—a military I joined, through a series of haphazard and bizarre events viciously under-quantified and oversimplified by the word “life,” as a young armored cavalry officer in the spring of 2005. Two and a half years later, I departed for an Iraq War preparing to enter its fifth year of blood bursts.

I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. History was happening.

I was born into a class, in a time, to a people, in a place where someone else's sons and daughters served in the armed forces. While I wasn't a politician's boy or a spurner of old money like in the fables, a child of two lawyers still qualified as a Fortunate Son in most parts of the world. I was raised in that curious subculture of Americana enslaved to emo music, new friend requests on Facebook, and lots and lots of Internet porn—part of the generation that the “An Army of One” slogan supposedly appealed to, due to our obsession with all things self. I didn't come from the breadbasket of rural America or the urban ghettos like most of my men, and I didn't seek out the military for glory or for country. I came from the West Coast suburbs, modern white-collar contentment at its most gnarled and escapist, and happened to read too many damn books about soldiers.

But we all have our own stories of how and why we ended up in Iraq. And those stories don't matter nearly as much as the simple truth that we did end up there.

What we didn't know, even though all the old soldier stories say it clear as day, is that we would always be there, even long after we left.

In the hours before we departed for Iraq,
I sat on a couch on my back porch overlooking the sprawling Pacific blue, feet up, Guinness in hand. A bleeding orange sun cut a casual retreat across the sky, while the shadows and lights of dusk danced together in a fading embrace. If war was both hell and my immediate future, Hawaii had served as a tropical purgatory—a twenty-month stopgap wedged neatly between my youth and whatever it was that came after.

My immediate surroundings symbolized this stark juxtaposition between past and future rather pointedly. Sure, there were five or six empty kegs, pretty much guaranteeing that my housemates and I wouldn't get the deposit back—but there was also a too-full army-green duffel bag, stuffed with equipment and supplies, rigidly posting guard in the near corner. My baby blue 1974 Volkswagen hippie van—known as Rufus the Love Bus—was still parked in the driveway, but in the passenger seat lay seventy pounds of state-of-the-art body armor, augmented with a weapons rack holding seven rifle magazines, a Kevlar helmet, and a pack of rock-hard Skittles.

I should have been contemplating various mounted and dismounted warfare maneuvers or dissecting the tactical mission details of the coming counterinsurgency fight. Those were the things good army officers were supposed to brood over on the eve of battle. My mind, however, was clogged up with all kinds of civilian pollution—typical, prosaic, and beautifully, beautifully mundane. Like the kegs. And my family. And how I still sucked at surfing.

Like how I knew I couldn't deal with all the bullshit and still be there for my girlfriend, if she disappeared halfway across the globe for fifteen months and for reasons unknown, waiting for the plane to land and our lives to resume. Like how that was exactly the situation I was leaving her in.

Like God.

Like how cocaine always seemed to systematically destroy young Holly - wood starlets' assets, which was totally selfish, because some of us were going to be relying on mental images of said assets for a while.

Like how the weekend before, getting drunk in Honolulu with the other lieutenants, I thought I was excited about all of this. “For God!” we laughed. “For country!” we cried, stumbling over one another. “For the Red, the White, and the Blue!” we howled, between the bars. We were nothing special; nor were our antics. This was the normal Friday night ritual for junior officers trapped in the tropical purgatory. Wild and free for the sake of being wild and free. I already missed it.

Like how I didn't want to die, but if I did, I hoped I could do it as a martyr, to appease the raging Celtic ghosts of my bloodline. Or as a swashbuckler, to satiate my cavalier tendencies and fantasies. Best yet, as a swash-martyr, to meet all of the above criteria.

My inner ravings continued, as I thought about pretty much anything that allowed me to escape the possibility that, give or take a metaphorical
carcass or two, I'd bitten off more than I could chew with the whole Iraq thing. This temporary distraction eventually proved to be just that.

“Hey, dude, you almost ready?” I looked up at the screen door where Lieutenant Demolition, one of my housemates and a fellow platoon leader deploying for the first time, stood. “I just finished loading all my stuff into Rufus.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.”

He nodded and shrugged his shoulders, yelling, “Bring on the Suck!” to no one in particular while he walked back inside. At least someone had freed himself from the quicksands of doubt.

I reached into my front pocket, pulled out a journal, and wrote a short passage. “Today is December 7, 2007. The anniversary of Pearl Harbor. I keep looking to the skies over Kolekole Pass, but the Japanese planes haven't come. I guess when you're bringing the fight to the enemy, the twisted romance in it all changes somewhat. Preemptive conflict may make sense, but it sure feels hollow.”

I closed my journal and drank the last of my Guinness. Dusk had already blinked away into the dark, and if the sea was still out there, it now bled black. I stood up and grabbed my duffel bag from the corner.

Then we left for war.

SFC Big Country stood up, waving me over to the table that he and the rest of the Gravediggers platoon had already secured. It was Christmas Eve, and I had raced down to the chow hall after yet another meeting of the squadron officers. At the meeting, I learned that after days and days of weapons ranges and packing and unpacking and repacking shipping containers, we were finally going to leave Kuwait the next day—on Christmas—but telling my men could wait. It was time for family dinner with the soldiers.

It had been unnecessary for SFC Big Country to stand up to get my attention; I'd recognize the pride of Iowa anywhere. A corn-fed giant brimming with competence, military bearing, and a no-nonsense brand of Midwestern keenness, he had taken great care in training and shaping this cavalry scout platoon in anticipation of our deployment. He was a veteran of Afghanistan,
and we were polar opposites both physically and temperamentally—something that allowed us to play off each other's personalities and leadership styles with ease.

“How was the meeting with the brass?” he asked, using a blanket term for anyone above the rank of major. “Any motivating speeches, or was it just another PowerPoint presentation?” We shared a deep-seated resentment for grandiose mandates and regulations that failed to pass the logic test at the ground level, a requirement in most of history's armies. Too often, as a platoon leader and a platoon sergeant, we found ourselves playing
dance, monkey, dance
for the grand camo circus, and we attempted to shield our men from this bureaucratic part of the army. We weren't always successful. Militaries need parades even more than they need wars.

I set my tray down and looked back at him, shaking my head. “The standards for the fleece cap have changed again. What constitutes ‘cold' is no longer up to the individual; it can now only get cold when the sun is all the way down and the moon is all the way up, weather be damned. And yes, that somehow took forty minutes to explain.”

My platoon sergeant didn't bat an eye. “Good to know they're worried about the important things the day before we go into Iraq.”

Closest to the entrance and exit doors, we were at the near end of the table, and as I glanced down, howls of laughter erupted from the far side of our gathering. Staff Sergeant Bulldog, the platoon's senior scout, shook his head in mock disgust at the antics of Staff Sergeant Boondock, our other section sergeant. Sergeant Boondock was doing a not-so-flattering impression of a fobbit bitching about the perceived hardships of life in the rear. A fobbit was another comprehensive label that lumped together all noncombat-arms soldiers who tended rarely, if ever, to leave the safety of the FOB, or forward operating base. Other, older wars knew them as rear-echelon mother fuckers (REMFs), and POGs, people other than grunts (pronounced like “pogue”), terms that still found their way into soldier speak. As line guys, my platoon roared in approval as Staff Sergeant Boondock clowned his way through the parody. Even Staff Sergeant Bulldog broke down when his counterpart began to wail on about the horrors of a three-day laundry turnaround.