Kaboom (49 page)

Lieutenant Mongo, on a patrol with another Pennsylvania National Guard platoon, radioed us two minutes later, telling us that the shots emanated from a National Police memorial service. Apparently, two of their men had been killed a few days earlier in a car accident on Route Dover. Just a twenty-one-gun salute, Iraqi style, spraying AK-47 rounds across the dismal Hussaniyah skyline.

Our last night passed uneventfully. The next morning, the remaining Gunslingers—Captain Frowny-Face, Lieutenants Rant, Mongo, and Dirty Jerz, Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull, Specialist Gonzo, and myself—gathered in the motor pool, saying our goodbyes to a few Iraqi security forces and our interpreters. Lieutenant Anwar swung by and insisted that a photograph of the two of us be taken on his digital camera for his daughter. Eddie wept openly as he said goodbye to Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull, promising to visit
us when he returned to the United States. The guardsmen waited around impatiently, as they should have. It was their show now, and they were ready for it—we were now relics of another time and era. They drove us back to Camp Taji, and I was a helicopter ride, a C-130 plane ride, and a charter flight away from somehow surviving this fucking war.

When we turned in our rifles and our ammunition, I felt like I'd lost an appendage.

Two days after we departed JSS Istalquaal, the camo grapevine informed us that an RPG had been fired at the Pennsylvania National Guard along Route Crush. Rather than reacting to the attack and conducting a movement to contact, the platoon continued moving back to the JSS. Some of our soldiers mocked them when they heard the tale, although I never learned whether the rumor was true or not. Captain Frowny-Face, however, reminded us junior officers that they'd learn, just as we had. The insurgents would test them because they were new, he reasoned, just as they had with us. And then they'd adapt and start figuring out how to crack the COIN walnut.

They were American soldiers. They'd learn, and learn quickly. No other option existed.

On February 23, the day we left Iraq for Kuwait, small-arms fire killed the first Pennsylvania National Guardsman on the west side of the Tigris River, near Camp Taji. I didn't learn about it until three days later, when we landed in Hawaii, and my dad showed me a printout of the article. I nodded my head and hugged my parents. Then I got drunk that night on mai tais at Waikiki Beach with my girlfriend, Captain Demolition, and The Great White Hope. We laughed and toasted each other and got really tired really quickly.

As I drank down my third mai tai that night, starting the inevitable postwar bender, I realized that my relief tasted like guilt. Guilt for being here when others were still there.

I took another gulp.

—T. E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I drove away
from Schofield Barracks—and the army and the Green Machine and Uncle Sam and the Gravediggers and the Gunslingers and everything being a soldier and an officer and something bigger than myself encompassed—for the last time, I did my best to make the moment feel surreal. My honorable discharge paperwork sat in my lap, and like
most members of my generation, I had watched too many movies and craved clarity in moments of perceived transcendence. Instead, despite my best attempts, I felt only exhaustion as I peeled my car onto the freeway. I wanted to feel like a titan who had just dropped a great boulder of burden. Instead, I felt like a naked man locked outside of a clothing store.

It felt weird. Not surreal. Just weird.

The Hawaiian summer afternoon blared with tropical joy, mocking my detachment. The preceding three months had passed in a blur. Due to a plentitude of stored-up leave and finances, my inevitable postwar bender had spanned the globe, from Hawaii to Australia to Las Vegas to New York City to North Carolina and back again. I had definitely taken years off of the backend of my life, but I didn't give a damn. It was worth it. I found my mental and emotional bearings during the international wanderings, somewhere between Kangaroo Island and Alphabet City, and now knew I could resign myself to a somewhat normal existence.

Somewhat.

Not everyone proved as fortunate as I upon our return to the old world. The standard amount of postdeployment divorces and domestic abuses and DUIs struck our brigade. Hot Wheels, a corporal now due to his taking leadership charge of his fellow soldiers in the hospital, remained in Texas at the Brooke Army Medical Center, still receiving treatment for the burns from his horrific accident. A 2-14 Cavalry soldier I knew got locked away in California for allegedly molesting his younger stepsister. He had seemed a harmless boy. A military intelligence soldier I worked with closely in Saba al-Bor got drunk one night and shot himself dead. He had been a sweet kid. Nothing shocked or surprised anymore. We all had changed in ways that we didn't understand and could never comprehend. Civilization didn't seem to understand or comprehend it, either.

Comparatively, I got lucky. The worst thing that happened to me blew up every Friday night, in and with the weekly fireworks display at the Hilton Hawaiian Village across the street from my apartment. Loud booms and bright lights spawned transient panic, no matter how many times I steeled myself for their inevitability.

Many of us, myself included, found interacting with civilians more complicated upon our return than we remembered. Normal conversation sounded like idle prattling; the chores of daily existence felt like tedious waste. I spaced out during conversations with my peers about politics or pop culture or gossip, nodding and smiling, and realized that I identified now more as a
veteran than I did as an American. More often than not, talking to young women only aggravated my impatience with the inane, while talking to young men only exacerbated my disgust for the soft. I still loved my family and my friends, but the truth was, I looked forward to nothing else quite as much as I did nights with other soldiers, when we could swap war stories and relive our respective times in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Even in a spiraling economy, a fair number of my peers joined me on the annual junior-officer exodus out of the military, Captain Demolition and The Great White Hope among them. We all looked forward to an acronymless existence. Captains Virginia Slim, Clay, Pistol Pete, Rant, Mongo, and Dirty Jerz all still owed more time on their initial commitment, so their eventual decisions were pending. The Hammer, now a major, and Captains Whiteback, Ten Bears, and Frowny-Face all remained in the military, and all promised to avoid the purported lobotomy administered at major school for new field-grade officers.

SFC Big Country returned to Iowa to teach ROTC cadets at the university level, something I told him he'd be perfect for, after putting up with my antics for so long. Staff Sergeant Bulldog headed to drill sergeant school, while Staff Sergeants Boondock and Spade remained in Hawaii, preparing soldiers for the brigade's next deployment in 2011. Both moved up to the position of platoon sergeant—Staff Sergeant Spade as the new platoon sergeant for the Gravediggers. Most of the Gravediggers remained in the army in one form or another, with the notable exceptions of Staff Sergeant Axel, Doc, and Specialist Haitian Sensation. All three returned to their respective homes and to civilian life. As for the Gunslingers, SFC Hammerhead moved to Indiana to help train reserve units for combat deployments, while Specialist Gonzo swore up and down he'd finish out his remaining year of commitment before getting out for good. He thought that President Obama's plan to get rid of the stop-loss program would save him from another deployment.

After leaving Iraq, I never heard from Suge, Eddie, or any of the other terps again. I left my e-mail address with Suge, but I somehow doubted he spent much time on the computer. According to the rumor mill, he planned to open a bar and restaurant somewhere in the capital with a few of his interpreter buddies. We all knew who would fill the role of storyteller and spreader of cheer at that bar.

After I got back to Hawaii, I tried to follow the news in Iraq, but it became harder and harder the further removed from that world I became. It reminded me that I had been there, while simultaneously reminding me that
I was no longer there. When American forces pulled back from the cities fully in June 2009, the Iraqis celebrated with fireworks. I found their choice of festivity slightly ironic, yet fitting. A few months certainly hadn't changed their love for all things that blast and go boom.

Some people thought we were tiptoeing our way out of Iraq. Others thought we were doing the only reasonable thing in a world gone mad, walking the thin line between conquering and fleeing. I honestly didn't know. After dedicating myself to the counterinsurgency effort for a full fifteen months, I knew only enough to know that anyone who said he or she definitively knew the answer to the Iraq impasse was full of shit.

A savage war of sticky. I truly hoped peace followed. I waited for Sadr's next move.

I wondered if the GWOT-era leaders and soldiers raised in counterinsurgency actually could change the institution, instead of the institution swallowing them and their experience whole. It'd be too easy for people who hadn't really been there and who hadn't studied the trends of irregular warfare after World War II to write Iraq off as an anomalous brushfire. I walked away from that fight, though. It needed a flag bearer, not a martyr.

The old men would return, as would the old ways. Tradition demanded it.

The unconventional spirit of the young would awaken again when needed once more by their country. Honor demanded it.

I knew I'd miss it. I knew I wouldn't really miss all of it, but memory had a nasty habit of rescuing the worthy fragments from the garbage disposal of the mind. As I neared my apartment building in downtown Waikiki, staring out at the crashing Pacific blue like I had done some two years and a lifetime before, I pinpointed the one thing from my time in the army that I treasured the most.

The answer was easy: Iraq.

Then I pinpointed the one thing from my time in the army that I despised the most.

The answer was just as easy: Iraq.

We lived in a twisted world.

We live in a twisted world.

So much for clarity.

Some might find it odd
that I've dedicated a war memoir to my mother. If you fall into such a category, you clearly have never had the pleasure of meeting Deborah Scott Gallagher. Her iron will is matched only by her Southern sense of propriety, and it is she who taught me to love my country, to talk to God openly and honestly, and to trust that buzzing voice in the mind that serves as our conscience. I owe everything to her.

My father, Dennis Gallagher, has been a steadfast rock throughout my life, and only demanded that I seek out the new and explore. He has done his utmost to expose both of his sons to the best of our Irish heritage, while shielding us from the rest. If any of the latter has shown through in this book, I assure you it is through no failure of his, but simply the blood telling.

Luke, my brother and oldest friend, has proven to me time and time again that bravery is not just something we exhibit in moments of passion or adrenaline. Rather, real men wake up with the day and display a humbler sort of courage, intent on getting out of life everything it gets out of us.

My grandfathers, war veterans Rear Admiral Jack Scott and Hospital Corpsman Vincent Gallagher, in their own ways, exhibited to me the importance of honor and the significance of being a leader of men. Every time I issued an order to my soldiers, I felt them with me. With them, I must also credit the women that kept them grounded and resolute, my grandmothers, Velma Ramsey Scott and Dee Hastings Gallagher.

Of course, I must mention Anne, who continues to stand beside me, as we figure out the beautiful madness of it all, together.

This book would have never come into being were it not for the men and women of the United States military. Without a doubt, they are our best, our brightest, and our nation's greatest hope in the future. In particular, the cavalry scouts and infantrymen of the Gravediggers made my time in the service worthwhile and memorable. So, to Chris Henning (SFC Big Country), Torri Caldwell (Staff Sergeant Bulldog), Chris Mason (Staff Sergeant Boondock), Chris Ford (Staff Sergeant Spade), Steven Rose (Staff Sergeant Axel), Aaron Cabrera (Sergeant Fuego), Robert Marin (Sergeant Cheech), Nick Richmond (Sergeant Tunnel), Nathaniel Spoltman (Sergeant Spot), Joe Dougherty (Sergeant Prime), Richard McCracken (Sergeant Big Ern), Boyd Samuelson (Sergeant Flashback), Daven Pantohan (Doc), Matt Wheeler (Corporal Hot Wheels), Philippe Dume (Specialist Haitian Sensation), Trey Coleman (Specialist Cold-Cuts), Matt Stover (PFC Stove Top), Kenneth Smith (PFC Smitty), David Ranger (PFC Das Boot), Joel McClure (PFC Van Wilder),Yancarlo Casanova (PFC Romeo), and Suge Knight, I say simply, Scouts Out! I hope you all remember our times and exploits together as fondly as I do. I'll never be able to repay what I learned from serving in Iraq with you, but feel free to try and make me through various bar tabs over the upcoming years.

Of the Gunslingers, Aaron Kletzing (Lieutenant Rant) deserves special mention, for his dedication to duty and for his friendship.