Table of Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Title Page
Dedication
INTROLOGUE
I: - THE RED, THE WHITE, AND THE EMO
AMERICAN UNTITLED
BACK TO THE BEGINNING
THE GRAVEDIGGERS
OUT OF THE WIRE
THE REAL WORLD: SABA AL-BOR
SNOW PATROL
SHEIKAPALOOZA
PHANTOM EMBERS
THE GREAT DRAGUNOV JIGSAW PUZZLE
A DIFFERENT WORLD
GRAVEYARD SHIFT
MOHAMMED THE GHOST
MOVEMENT TO CONTACT
II: - EMBRACE THE SUCK
A COLD SPRING
JUST ANOTHER FRONT
OLIVER TWISTED
PAYDAY
DEAR JOHN
DOMINOES
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
SADR’S SPRING JAM
WISDOM FROM THE HOME FRONT
UNDER THE CRESCENT MOON
ROCKETS AT THE SOCCER FIELD
THE BROTHEL
THE MOSQUE RAID
III: - iWAR
IN A LITTLE PLASTIC BIN
THE BON JOVI IED
A STAR-CROSSED RECONCILIATION
SHOOT-OUT ON MAIN STREET
ON MARTYRDOM, SUICIDE, AND PRESS COVERAGE
THE HOT WHEELS INCIDENT
THE RUNDOWN
ALL BECAUSE OF A POPSICLE STICK
HELL
BACK TO THE FOB
SUGE KNIGHT, INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY
RECENTRALIZED WARFARE
MERRY MEN AND MICROGRANTS
TRASH VILLAGE
RAMADAN
IV: - ACROSS THE RIVER AND FAR AWAY
[FOBBIT INTERLUDE]
WELCOME TO THE WOLFHOUNDS
THE GOLDEN HOUSE
THE DESTRUCTORS
THE SUN, A SCORPION, AND SECOND CHANCES
THE PORTA-JOHN CHRONICLES
A NIGHT WITH LIEUTENANT ANWAR
MASTERS OF WAR
ALL HALLOWS’ EVE
THE AMERICAN ELECTION
FUN AND GAMES
INVASION
V: - STEPSONS OF IRAQ
HOLY, NOW, PENDING
THE OATH
HOW TO JOINT-PATROL
MERRY FUCKING FRAGO
KILLING AN ARAB
THE DAY OF ASHURA
AIR ASSAULT
SETTING SONS
A GENERATIONAL GAP
THE IRAQI ELECTION
MASKS
ACOUSTIC WAR HYMN
THE LAST PATROLS
EXIT STRATEGY
Acknowledgements
INDEX
Copyright Page
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
What follows is a memoir, a personal account of my time and experiences in Iraq. It is to be read accordingly and not mistaken for a military unit’s official history. Further, some names and some physical characteristics of persons depicted in this book have been altered, and in many cases nicknames have been utilized in lieu of the real names of soldiers I served with and Iraqis I encountered.
For my mother,
Deborah Scott Gallagher
MAP OF IRAQ
MAP OF BAGHDAD AND SURROUNDING AREA
INTROLOGUE
“White 1, dis, uhh, White 2.” Staff Sergeant Bulldog’s deep Southern drawl crackled over the platoon radio net, stirring me out of my early-morning haze. Our senior scout’s distinctively dry twang was laced with undertones.
“Send it, 2,” I responded.
“Dere’s . . . well . . . I don’t really know how to say this, so I’m just gonna say it. Dere’s a dog at the car dat blew up last night. And he’s licking at something, all crazylike. Prolly whatever’s left.”
“Huh?” I was still fighting through sleep-deprived grogginess.
“Yep. My gunner’s confirmed it. Da dog be eatin’ Boss Johnson. Or at least what’s left of him.”
Staff Sergeant Boondock’s voice now boomeranged across the net, ringing with hysterics. “Holy fuck, Bulldog, this is straight mafia shit!” There was a brief pause, and then he continued. “Think I’ll be able to bust Cultural Awareness out on one of the hajjis now?” he said, referring to the stun gun he carried on his ammo rack. He hadn’t yet found an opportunity to unleash it on anyone but bored soldiers back at the combat outpost, and we were all waiting for the day that some Iraqi did something to warrant its electric kiss. As was often the case, Staff Sergeant Boondock’s words were as accurate as they were profane: This killing belonged in a Chicago mob war, circa 1929, not here, in whatever this was, circa February 2008.
We had moved out of the combat outpost to conduct an area reconnaissance in a neighborhood where a local sheik—the aforementioned Boss Johnson, nicknamed like everyone else around here to keep the litany of individuals straight and to avoid butchering Arabic names with American tongues—had been blown up the night before. Armored military vehicles were damaged, and occasionally destroyed, by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), rockets, and mortar rounds. Human beings in shabby, fake Mercedes targeted for a hit job with such weapons got catastrophically mutilated into flesh soup.
Our principal mission for the day was to engage the local populace, attempt to prevent acts of reprisal between the Sunnis and the Shias, and learn if anyone would let us taciturn Americans in on who or what was responsible for this murder. Had it been a cell of foreign al-Qaeda terrorists? A renegade band of insurgents aligned with the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) paramilitary? Another prayer bead on the death string of tribal warfare? Or had it been just another act of personal retribution, free of any grandiose political or social statements? Questions, always more questions, I thought. Never enough answers. The real problem was that in the eight hours since the explosion—so loud that our security elements at the outpost miles away had heard it—not one local individual had dared venture onto the street. This, coupled with a morning wind racing in from the south and a pale desert glow shaping the village, sparked in my mind cinematic imagery of the strutting cowboy posse, unaware of how much red needed to run before the movie could end.
After all, I thought, every good story has a climax. Even the true ones.
With the local population either unable or unwilling to help us complete our primary task and purpose, I decided to turn to our secondary mission for this patrol: information operations. We dismounted from our vehicles and poured into the trash-ridden streets and alleys of our provisional home, a village fractured by the sectarian divide in the northern limits of Baghdad Province. The locals called it Saba al-Bor. My men facetiously referred to it as Paradise. We put up posters and leaflets that stressed peace and cooperation and urged the local population to avoid the temptations of religious violence. That was Higher’s great fear: Boss Johnson’s death could possibly augment the rift between Sunnis and Shias that already sometimes degenerated into late-night shoot-outs between rival Sons of Iraq checkpoint groups, also known by their Arabic name of Sahwa and more accurately described as security gangs paid by Coalition forces. The propensity of the Iraqi police (IP) and the Iraqi army (IA) to do the same only exacerbated the incessant effort for one quiet night without violence, an objective that would likely become more unobtainable come spring when the fair-weather fighters returned.
The threat of civil war still loomed over Iraq like the ghost of an heiress bride killed on her honeymoon, haunting the lover who murdered her. And although all of the words on the handouts were written in Arabic, it was fairly simple to decipher the messages being put out. The one with a very alive and very happy Boss Johnson standing next to the Iraqi flag, with his arm around other Sahwa leaders, proved to be my soldiers’ favorite.
“This one says, ‘Figure out which one of these bastards killed me, and y
ou can have the billions of dinar buried underneath my house!’” Specialist Flashback cracked, as he plastered a poster onto the side of a falafel shop.
“That’s pretty funny,” Sergeant Axel said. “Mine says, ‘At least the guy from Scarface got to die with a mountain of cocaine on his desk. All I got was this lousy tee shirt.’”
The platoon roared in approval. “Stay on task!” Sergeant First Class (SFC) Big Country yelled, but by the inflection in his voice, I knew that the soldiers’ imitations had amused our platoon sergeant. He was just too professional to let them know that.
As we finished up the operation and prepped for a loudspeaker broadcast to be transmitted from the back of one of our armored Stryker vehicles, Private First Class (PFC) Cold-Cuts strolled up next to me.
“LT [lieutenant] G . . . I feel kind of weird.”
“What’s up?” This was nothing out of the ordinary; PFC Cold-Cuts wore his emotions on both sleeves and had looked sheepish ever since we rolled out into sector.
“I don’t know, sir, he’s . . . dead, you know?”
I nodded my head, conscious of where he was heading with this. I, myself, had been surprised that I felt no horror when I saw the remnants of the car and of Boss Johnson, even if his larger pieces had already been scooped up into locals’ pots and pans for burial in the immediate aftermath of the car bombing. I doubted anyone ever got used to the sight of intestine bits hanging like Christmas ornaments from tree branches, but I hadn’t felt compelled to express an emotion of any kind, really. There was just a nothingness, an acknowledgment of fact, an observation that my immediate environment had been altered slightly and had the potential to spiral into something more complex.
The remnants of Sahwa leader Boss Johnson and his vehicle, the morning after a car bomb planted underneath the driver’s seat detonated. The Sahwa, also known as the Sons of Iraq, proved a valuable—if tenuous—ally for American forces fighting against insurgents.
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.
I:
THE RED, THE WHITE, AND THE EMO
(OR AMERICAN BOY ESCAPES)
WINTER 2007-2008
Alright then, I’ll go to hell.
—HUCKLEBERRY FINN
AMERICAN UNTITLED
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.
BACK TO THE BEGINNING
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.
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