The War I Always Wanted

by Brandon Friedman

  This was our destination. He told me that my platoon was to form the southernmost sector of our perimeter and that I was also responsible for setting up and securing the LZ for the incoming Chinook. At the time we had an hour remaining.

  In order to set in the company, Captain K. wanted to conduct a reconnaissance of the area ahead. He picked me to go with him since it was going to be my area. A minute later we set out.

  During the march, high ground to our right had prevented us from seeing the Shah-e-Kot Valley. It was on the other side of this high ground from which we had heard the sound of constant thunder as bombs devastated the valley and the villages of Serkhankel, Marzak, and Babulkul within. Captain K. and I walked briskly up a rise, and up ahead I could see an area where it appeared the high ground was tapering off. When we reached the break, I got my first look at the valley I’d come so far to see.

  What I saw was fire and brimstone. It was Dante’s Inferno. Less than eight hundred yards away from me, bombs were raining down on the valley. The sky was falling on those who had brought war to America. Entire payloads of gravity bombs fell and exploded in fantastic bursts of orange, yellow, and white. Two-thousand-pound satellite-guided bombs struck, reverberating throughout the valley. Cluster bombs fell, detonating on contact like a hundred hand grenades. Shrapnel was swirling like confetti. The air became metal. For a moment, Captain K. and I just stood there, taking it all in. On the edge of the abyss, we gazed down into a churning sea of fire. The attack was strangely hypnotic; the fury and intensity—overwhelming.

  It was a vulgar display of power. It was unrestrained collective rage. But if anyone, anywhere had ever deserved such punishment, then this was the time, this was the place.

  Whether the number of al Qaeda terrorists in the valley was large or small, I would never know. But I do know that the ones caught in the crossfire picked up the tab for the ones who weren’t there. Whether or not they had been involved in the planning for 9/11, whether or not they thought it had been a good idea, they paid. That night, thousands of pounds worth of iron fragmentation and concussion rendered them square with the house.

  It was payback. And I was okay with that.

  For some reason I seem to remember turning and running even before I saw the brilliant flash. Either way, before the sound and shockwave reached us, we had turned and were running back in the direction of the company. Neither of us had said anything. Our movements were reflexive. The sound was earsplitting and, like in nightmares, I felt I couldn’t move rapidly enough. As we ran with bursting lungs, I heard within feet of me, the sound, fffth—as searing hot metal sliced into the earth.

  This was the edge of the kill zone.

  We finished marking the LZ with only minutes to spare. When it was done, Sergeant Collins sat next to me and, shivering together, we watched the deconstruction of Takhur Gar continue. I could no longer see directly into the valley, but I could still see the flashes of light and hear the thunderous booms from within. The planes above pummeled the mountain and valley without respite. Sitting there wide-eyed, I didn’t see how anyone on the receiving end of the onslaught could survive.

  Slowly starting to freeze, I sat back and watched the show. I thought of the movie The Big Lebowski. In it, John Goodman’s character, Walter Sobchak, is smashing his nemesis’ Corvette with a crowbar.

  I hear him yelling at the top of his lungs, “Do you see what happens, Larry? Do you see what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass?” He brings the crowbar down over his head and onto the windshield of the pristine car, crushing it. “ This is what happens, Larry!” He strikes the hood of the car. “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!” He swings the crowbar squarely into the driver’s-side door.

  Yes, Walter, this is what happens. This is what happens. I listened in the cold night air, as bombs, a few football fields away, continually found their marks.

  Minutes later I heard the faint thumping of rotors echoing through the mountains. Shortly thereafter, the Chinook landed on our LZ. I sat motionless, with my back to my ruck, watching through my NODs as grainy green figures exited the back of the bird. With the night vision, I could see the two infrared targeting lasers used by the door gunners, as they anxiously scanned the surrounding terrain. The bird remained there, rotors spinning, for less than three minutes, while the last of 3rd Platoon’s troops shuffled off the ramp. Once the last man cleared it, the Chinook’s rotor blades deepened in tone. At that point, wind, dust, and pebbles were scattered through the air in a blast of wind as the bird rose into the night sky. Seconds later everything was quiet. Even the bombing had stopped.

  We still had a little less than an hour before daylight. Curled up and trying to retain warmth in any way possible, I began to doze. For the second night in a row, I lay on the ground with my teeth chattering. I wasn’t aware of the existence of any plan past sunrise. All I knew was that I would live for another night, and at dawn, in some form or fashion, we would take the fight to the enemy.

  Part II

  KNOWLEDGE

  “That’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.”

  —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

  6

  The Desert

  March 2003

  I awoke with a start in Kuwait, covered in sweat. I had been napping in the front seat of my humvee. I decided to step out onto the desert floor and stretch my legs. The constriction of my chemical protective suit was bothersome, but I was being forced to wear it anyway. At the time apparently, someone thought Iraq had chemical weapons.

  I leaned over the hood of the truck, resting my elbows on it. I scanned the area briefly before settling my gaze on the western horizon. The road stretching out before me was blacktop. It disappeared in the distance some miles before it reached the horizon. I’d never before stood on land so flat. Besides the thin strip of black there were only two other colors in the landscape to my front. One was the haze color of an empty sky that was neither blue nor gray. The other was the light beige, almost off-white, color of the endless desert. The two colors met at the horizon, nearly blending. To look in that direction was to squint.

  To my back was a silent armada of vehicles. Some were gun trucks and some were command trucks. Some were troop transports and others were refuelers. In all, they represented the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division—the Rakkasans.

  Before us, at the still unseen point where the sky met the land, was the Iraqi frontier. Behind us was Afghanistan and everything else.

  Having decided to take a walk, I ended up sitting with Lieutenant Colonel Ahuja in a humvee, where we discussed the merits of invading versus not invading—and what we thought we could expect. Ahuja was a former Rakkasan on the division staff, still several months away from taking command of his first battalion in the 101st. In our conversation, the roles were oddly reversed—the soon-to-be battalion commander (who wasn’t all that far from retirement) was asking the young lieutenant what combat had been like in Afghanistan. Despite that, I sensed that he recognized what lay ahead; he knew what was just over the horizon. Unlike those who’d sent us there in the first place, Ahuja had spent his entire adult life preparing for this moment. He looked me straight in the eye while we sat there, and said something to me with the expression of a guy who thought, You may think I’m crazy for saying this, but I know what I’m talking about.

  “You know, Lieutenant Friedman, everybody keeps talking about how all the Iraqis are gonna surrender, and how this is just gonna be a walk in the park. But I’m not so sure. People don’t like being invaded. They don’t like being bombed, and they don’t like tanks in their streets—even if they do live under a dictator. That’s just reality. I think there’s always gonna be that guy who’s out to fight for his country no matter what. He doesn’t care about the politics. He just knows that we’re invading his country. And he knows he’s gonna to do everything in his power to stop us.”

&nbs
p; I thought about it and just said, “Sir, I hope you’re wrong.”

  We had moved out from Camp New Jersey the day before. It had been a day of missile exchanges and confused radio reports, but we hadn’t really played any significant part at all. I had had projectiles launched at me and then, after nightfall, I had listened to the buzz of Tomahawk cruise missiles flying directly over my head on their way across the border. For all its buildup, “shock and awe” to me had been a surprisingly soft mechanical buzz a hundred feet over my head.

  Around three o’clock that afternoon Colonel Ahuja and I went to recon the border with Iraq. We were supposed to find the general who was coordinating the division’s passage through the breach lane.

  For some reason I had pictured explosions as being part of breaching the heavily guarded border between the two countries. Perhaps some running and screaming Iraqi border guards. But when we arrived at the border, the scene was calm and businesslike. There were U.S. Army humvees parked up against a twelve-foot-high dirt berm. There were also several SUVs belonging to the Kuwaiti border patrol. On the other side, I was told, was a unit of combat engineers. They were carefully deconstructing the dirt berms and wire obstacles that marked the entrance into Iraq. There was no hint of resistance.

  My vision of tanks crashing through heavily fortified watchtowers was quickly replaced with the reality of an orderly preparation for the smooth transit of thousands of soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division into enemy territory. Everything was so nonchalant.

  When we returned to the brigade assembly area, I spent the rest of the afternoon taking pictures with friends and dozing. I would normally have spent the time going over the battle plan with my NCOs, but in this case no plan had yet filtered down to our level.

  The mission was simply to drive to a point on the map and once there, to wait for instructions. The point on the map was twenty miles southwest of Najaf, some 240 miles into Iraq. It was called FARP Shell—and it was simply a plot of desert destined to be used as a forward area refueling and rearming point for the division’s Apache helicopters. The name Shell came from the gas station, the FARP being our improvised desert equivalent. The two other FARPs being established in southern Iraq were FARP Conoco and FARP Exxon. Read into that what you want.

  I had been given a stack of maps and a sheet with typed grid coordinates that were supposed to keep us on track as we drove. I knew nothing about the cities and areas through which we would pass, and I knew nothing about possible enemy contact along the route. The whole thing had an air of, “Fuck it. Drive toward Najaf and see if anybody tries to stop you.”

  When we crossed the border into Iraq that night there was no fanfare. There were no hurrahs or clapping or fireworks. It wasn’t even combat as I’d remembered it. It was just driving.

  At night. In Iraq.

  If anything, it had the feel of a ride at an amusement park—either a roller coaster or a haunted house. That feeling of right after you’re strapped in and you start moving—the feeling of “Oh well . . . guess there’s no going back now.” There was that and there was also the slight nagging feeling that I didn’t know where in the hell I was going.

  I stayed up all night with a little green flashlight, poring over all the maps and charts as we drove.

  After daybreak I could see that we were in Bedouin territory. Every few miles we would pass an encampment of their patchwork tents. For the first time in weeks there was vegetation. In this area the desert was dotted with fixed tumble-weed-looking bushes. It wasn’t real vegetation, it wasn’t even green for that matter, but it was plant life nonetheless. I was beginning to forget what any landscape other than desert looked like—it had been weeks since I’d seen anything other than flatness and sand.

  That night we stopped the convoy outside of Busayyah. We had been driving for nearly twenty-four straight hours and hadn’t slept. No one seemed to know the protocol for resting a convoy during an invasion, so we simply pulled off to the side of the road, made a guard roster, and then went to sleep. I stayed in my truck and just leaned over. Sergeant Croom dismounted his truck, pulled out his sleeping bag, and went to bed on the shoulder of the road.

  We spent two days making our way through the blank desert, stopping only once to rest. As a foreign desert caravan, we cautiously passed through the periphery of towns, wary of the inhabitants who stood by the roadside and stared. We sifted through false reports of enemy contact ahead and had a confrontation over the right of way during a traffic jam with 3rd Infantry Division tanks. As with all major military maneuvers since the beginning of time, this one too was defined by dust and confusion.

  When we arrived at FARP Shell after the second day, darkness had fallen. The only light visible to the naked eye was starlight. I stepped out onto the desert floor and looked into the sky. As if on cue, rockets began lighting up the distant night sky. Being so far away, they seemed to ascend slowly in a silent, upward arc, blooming and spreading in a single group—each yellow pinpoint climbing, flickering, and then disappearing. They were flying in the direction of Najaf.

  I became strangely at peace with the situation. I was neither happy nor sad, neither confident nor frightened. There just didn’t seem to be anything else. This was all there was, this was all I was: a single entity standing in the desert, surrounded by chaos that I could not touch and that could not touch me. It was Anaconda all over again: I was numb. I had no past and no future. I was in my element.

  The fear and the adrenaline—they both come together on a battlefield when the rounds aren’t landing too close yet. Surrounded on all sides by death and destruction, you are still whole. You are the opposite of dead. You feel the blood coursing through your veins, nourishing this aliveness. You sense death very near, you see it twinkling in the sky. You are as close to it as you can ever come without losing your mind—and yet you know it cannot touch you. You feel death’s proximity and it makes you alive. You feel what it is to exist. It becomes something just as tangible as pain or orgasm.

  I watched the glimmering lights trace across the sky for a while. (Bodies are being torn apart. Families are being ruined.) In the distance I could hear an occasional rumble; I could feel intermittent vibrations. There was (flesh, bone, pooling blood, screaming) nothing else.

  And I felt nothing.

  I awoke the next morning and found myself surrounded by the same vast emptiness that had followed us from Kuwait. Nothing had changed except the weather. Whereas I could usually see the sun creeping over the horizon, now the sky was a hazy gray. When I stepped out of my truck, the first thing I noticed was a stiff west wind.

  A few minutes later, Sergeant Croom walked over to my truck. We were talking while at the same time offhandedly watching two of the guys dig our restroom some distance away from the humvees. The wind was beginning to whip around.

  With no warning, a thunderous boom tore through the morning haze. I looked at Sergeant Croom with raised eyebrows and said, “Either that was big or that was close.”

  We stood there without moving for another few seconds, waiting for other impacts. Nothing happened. I was beginning to think that I would just ignore it, as it seemed to be gunfire that didn’t concern me.

  But that’s when the Voice on the radio alerted us of an enemy mortar strike. I was told to gear up for a counterattack. While Croom hurried back to his truck, I wondered how any-one could have found us so far out in the middle of nowhere. Beyond that, I tried to figure out how they could have maneuvered so close to us in the open desert and gotten off a mortar round. As I threw on my vest and put on my helmet, I couldn’t figure out why somebody would shoot just one mortar at us, and not start dropping round after round on us. Vaguely, I thought maybe their tube had broken.

  Sergeant Croom came back in full gear. While we waited for somebody to tell us what to do, we started digging—just in case we needed the cover.

  “At least the al Qaeda guys in Afghanistan knew how to use mortars,” I told him. They
really fucked up Charlie Company pretty bad. Nobody hurt, but still—I mean a lot of those guys are still jumpy around loud noises.” I paused to scoop a shovelfull out of the hard earth. Then I continued. “And the thing about mortars is that you can’t hear ’em coming like you can artillery shells or bombs.”

  “Aw, that’s bullshit,” Croom declared. “I’ve been on a training range and heard ’em fall near me. Who told you that shit?”

  “Go ask anybody in Charlie,” I said, “or shit, just ask Krueger. He was in Anaconda too. I’m just tellin’ you,” I said as I scooped, “that those guys said they couldn’t hear any of ’em falling. And by the way, those were 82s those shitbirds were dropping.”

  He looked at me with a skeptic’s raised eyebrow.

  A short time later I received our mission over the radio. Our mission, the Voice explained, was to stand down. The distant boom had not been an enemy mortar. It had been an American F-16. Through the crackling radio traffic, I heard the Voice say, “ . . . just fired a missile at our Patriot battery and took out a radar site.”

  I stuck my head out of the truck, looking for Sergeant Croom. “Hey, c’mere. You gotta hear this shit! An F-16 just took out one of the fuckin’ Patriots!”

  He said, “No shit? Anybody hurt?”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. “Uhh, I don’t know. They didn’t say anything about that.”

  But I was already losing focus on the current situation, now that the enemy threat was gone. My mind was beginning to drift back to another time and place. All the talk of falling mortars, and now, F-16s firing on friendly troops, was bringing back a flood of memories—memories of our first morning in Operation Anaconda.

  An eerie quiet has descended upon the Shah-e-Kot Valley and its surrounding peaks. As the sky turns from black to purple to blue, I sit, unmoved, against my ruck. I am a small, living, breathing dot on a smoking expanse of desolation. The stillness is palpable. All I can hear are my own teeth chattering in the cold air. With the light comes sobriety, and Life itself seems a bit self-conscious about its behavior during the night. Eventually I will learn that the silence and calm following butchery is directly proportional to the amount of bloodletting that occurs.