The aroma of Saba al-Bor that we wore and brought with us did not match the scents of the FOB. Not that I could smell the distinction anymore, but I could still see other soldiers avoid the Gravediggers as we walked.
“Man, we must smell,” SFC Big Country said, laughing. “Either that or the females found out about Van Wilder’s intentions for his time off.”
“They should be so lucky,” PFC Van Wilder said in response. “And three hours? What am I, a fuck machine? I’d spend most of that time napping.”
We split up, destinations and priorities separating as naturally as a banana from its peel. I moved with a group of my junior soldiers to the chow hall, shielding my rank insignias. I hoped to deceive a nemesis of mine—a certain fobbit warrant officer, he of the pristinely pressed uniform and dirty weapon, who waddled rather than walked and enjoyed lecturing my soldiers about their filthy uniforms while they waited in line to eat. He served as the complete antithesis of my men, who stalked even here, clearly uncomfortable with their surroundings, gaunt and pale and strung out on Rip-Its, and whose weapons were the only thing on their person to have received delicate attention in many days. My ambush, though thoroughly planned and well laid due to my boyish face and slight stature, did not lure in the transgressor, as we were left alone to eat and joke in peace.
“Maybe next time, sir,” Specialist Cold-Cuts told me, noticing my obvious disappointment.
We headed to the post exchange (PX), where my soldiers bought a healthy amount of unhealthy tobacco products, and I purchased a box of Cocoa Puffs. While standing in the checkout line, my Joes basked in a favorite FOB sport: smelling the perfume and other pleasant fragrances of passing females. The combat outpost lacked sensual reminders like this. A group of FOB soldiers, both males and females, passed us, and their conversation became a source of ire for my men.
“Can you believe it, Prime? Those fobbits are bitching about their paperwork,” Sergeant Big Ern (recently promoted) drawled to Sergeant Prime (also recently promoted), his voice saturated with disgust.
Specialist Prime shook his head in disbelief. “That’s pretty unbelievable.”
One male’s statement lingered with Doc. “Did he actually just say he’d rather be out there? Is he talking about outside the wire? What the fuck? He makes it sound like it’s a different planet.”
I interjected and said what an officer was supposed to say in these circumstances: “Easy, guys. It’s the army. Everyone has something to bitch about, and someone has to be back here.” When I finished the last sentence though, I realized my voice lacked any vitality whatsoever. I agreed with their sentiments—the mix of jealous resentment and repulsive aversion we had for anyone who wasn’t one of us and hadn’t experienced exactly what we had tended to flood the canals of rational empathy while we were back at the FOB. No one ever claimed we were fair with our castigations.
Specialist Haitian Sensation stepped in, gracefully allowing my lifeless lecture to end. “Yeah, you’re probably right, sir. I wouldn’t want to be back here anyway. Too much crazy bullshit.”
As we left the PX, I bumped into the two squadron supply NCOs, who patted me on the back and asked if the platoon or I needed anything. They were good men and better supply sergeants—if I’d told them I needed a yellow school bus, they would’ve said, “Sure, no problem. Just give us a couple days to track one down.” They weren’t fobbits, I justified, because they actually worked and worked hard. This led me to think of all the cooks and mechanics who slaved away at the outposts to support the combat soldiers but very rarely received appreciation for such; every soldier fought his or her own battles over the course of a fifteen-month deployment. I needed to remember that.
Some time and a quick haircut later, salvation arrived in the form of splashing drops of lukewarm water. All things savage swirled away, certain to be replenished another day, but not on this one. No extra baggage or weight followed me into the shower stall; I stood starkly naked and drowned in a fairly bearable lightness of being. I was clean. I was warm. I was content. I felt like me again, and that proved enough to get me through another few weeks.
I checked my watch a few minutes after that. It read 1415. It came too fast, I thought. Maybe. But my soldiers strode right along with me, not sparing a moment back here at the FOB.
“I hate it here, sir,” they said. “We always get bitched at for garrison bullshit.”
“I know. Lord help me, I know.”
We made the timeline and moved back into sector. Mission accomplished. Things weren’t right here anymore, I thought, as we departed Little America for Iraq. Or maybe we weren’t right anymore. I didn’t know. Either way, it was time to go. We didn’t belong here.
SUGE KNIGHT, INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY
One lazy summer afternoon, while the Gravediggers conducted security operations for the combat outpost, Captain Ten Bears borrowed Suge, as his terp was on leave. The ever-dutiful Suge, who had been boots-up in his bed watching Turkish soap operas and smoking cigarettes, needed to translate for our commander at a large Sons of Iraq meeting taking place for the Tigris communities in the Falahat area to our east. He donned his body armor quickly, loudly proclaimed himself to be the only interpreter worth a fuck, and staggered off downstairs, presumably to the Strykers staged in the front of the outpost.
Although neither Captain Ten Bears nor Suge knew about it until they arrived at the meeting, a large faction of American and Iraqi army generals were attending as well, in an effort to learn more about the Sahwa program on the ground level. Television crews from the Baghdad news stations followed, and when one of the general’s terps got sick with sunstroke, the nearest interpreter was quickly snatched up to take his place—Suge.
“It is not easy for me to hide,” Suge explained to me later that night back at the combat outpost. “I try to slide down my seat when they look for terp, but I am big and black and have smart face! I also look good in U.S. Army uniform. So they pick Suge.”
While Suge wasn’t able to escape the general’s clutches, his skin color did manage to confuse the local TV crews. On the nightly news, the local station did a report of the meeting and showed Suge in a brief clip, identifying him as an “unknown American colonel who speaks Arabic,” much to the delight of our other terps, who started saluting him and calling him “sir” around the outpost. They weren’t the only ones to tune in to the local Iraqi news that night. Not five minutes after his segment aired, Suge received a phone call from his wives, who wanted to know why he had dressed up in a U.S. Army uniform pretending to be a colonel when he was supposed to be away tending to his construction business.
Our terp maintained his cool despite being pushed into a corner by visual evidence. “Me, in an American army uniform?” he told his wives. “You are crazy women! Why would I do that?”
“But we saw you!” they said. “The news said you were an American colonel, but it was you, waving your finger, lecturing the people in the meeting!”
“You have been smoking the hashish!” Suge yelled, referring to the local marijuana product. “I am simple construction worker! How can I be American? I do not even know English!”
After he hung up the phone, he sighed, slapped himself in the face, and moaned about forgetting his mask at the combat outpost before the mission in question. Then he claimed to be in the clear. “They are good females,” he said. “They believe me.”
SFC Big Country and I weren’t so sure.
“Suge,” SFC Big Country said, “sometimes my wife just nods her head and says, ‘Okay, whatever.’ Are you sure your wives aren’t just doing that? I mean, you were on the news. It’s kind of hard to deny something like that. Why don’t you just tell them the truth?”
Suge refused to consider this. “They are women! They will be too proud of me and do the talk. I lie to them to keep family safe.” He snorted. “I did look good on news though, yes?”
I laughed and said yes, he had looked very sharp.
“You know, Captain,�
� he continued in his British-taught English as he lit another cigarette, “this is not first time I have been on the news.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I have not always been a man of family. In my youth, I was very wild. I thief, I fight, I drink the whiskey—”
“You don’t drink alcohol anymore, Suge?”
He shook his head morbidly. “My wives, they make me stop three years ago. They say that we have kids to spend money on instead. I have to do the sneak now. But, in youth, I journey to Europe in search of women and whiskey. I tell my father I look for better work.”
“Suge, what does this have to do with you being on the news?”
“It is coming. Be patience. I first go to Greece, then to the Hungary, and then to Italy. Ahh, Italy!” His eyes looked skyward at this point, and the wonder that seized his speech when he spoke of the free world returned. “Whiskey, tequila, beer . . . it was the excellent time for me. And best part is, even if you fail to find woman for the night, you go spend money on prostitute. Many beautiful prostitutes in Italy.”
“So, you became a pimp in Italy?” Neither my platoon sergeant nor I could keep a straight face at this point. This was vintage Suge.
“Hah, no, no, nothing like that. In eight months in Italy, I spend all my money that I save from five years’ work in Africa! Too many whiskey and women. Worst part, my papers [work visa] ended during those months. I could not find the work even now that I actually look for it.” He shook his head again and bit his lip, recalling lost opportunities. “A friend of mine write from the Portugal. ‘Come to the Portugal!’ he say ‘Good work and you don’t need papers!’ So I hop on next train to the Portugal.”
A dark cloud came over the horizon of Suge’s face. “But they stop me in France!” His voice changed tones here, as he mocked the French accent. “They say, ‘No, Africa man, you cannot go to the Portugal. You have bad papers! You cannot go to the Portugal. You go to jail instead.’ I stay there for three months, and they put my picture on the television, saying I was criminal from Africa. But I was just trying to go to work in the Portugal, and I tell them that! They finally believe me, and they put me on the boat for Africa and tell me I can never come back to France or Italy. Not ever.”
I stared at our terp in confusion. “Suge, that story doesn’t make any sense.”
Unperturbed, Suge took a drag from his cigarette and shrugged his shoulders. “Fucking French,” he mumbled to himself, the matter evidently closed.
A few months later, after he returned to the combat outpost from a brief family vacation, Suge realized he had left his diabetes medicine at his house. Unable to think of another course of action, he instructed his wives to take a taxi from their residence to Saba al-Bor, where he met them and picked up his medication. Unsurprised to find him wearing an American army uniform, they spent their time nagging him about forgetting his pills, and afterward, even Suge admitted the gig was up.
“They are very proud of me,” he said contentedly.
RECENTRALIZED WARFARE
I had trained and studied for, and brooded over, a very specific type of war. The manuals called it decentralized warfare, a practice dripping with successful historical paradigms for insurgencies and counterinsurgencies alike. In it, small units like sections and platoons and troops functioned as nigh-independent entities, operating free of homogeneous rigidity and traditional military slowness. In this malleable, flexible world, creativity and ingenuity replaced firepower and overwhelming force as the central pillars of an army’s output. Ideally, a decentralized army struck like a swarm of killer bees rather than a lumbering elephant; an elephant’s strength and power certainly had its time and place, but since the end of World War II, an increasing number of global conflicts had called for the precision of a swarm instead. One did not simply mark time in decentralized warfare; one made it. This concept seemed a lieutenant’s dream and a general’s nightmare, with power dispersed and control scattered into a thousand corners. In conventional warfare, the order of war dissolved into anarchy as time yielded more and more blood. Unconventional, decentralized warfare was the exact opposite. In fluid theory and historical practice, victorious counterinsurgencies served as a shining inverse to said conventionality because, through anarchy and bloodshed, order could eventually be established. This was the war I trained for, brooded over, and studied.
Then there was the war I fought.
As the summer of 2008 progressed, we at the ground level of the American counterinsurgency lived the strategic shift away from decentralized warfare. I was sure very good reasons existed for this, and although I wasn’t privy to the details, it didn’t take a Clausewitz to figure out that this was the beginning of the much-ballyhooed exit from Iraq. Meanwhile, at the combat outpost, the concerted recentralization of our efforts seemed like a very odd way to thank the soldiers responsible for turning the tide of the Iraq War. We no longer fought in a neo-Vietnam black hole of Islamic extremism—the COIN era had turned the war into an isolated conflict of manageable proportions, and a lot of that was due to letting loose the initiative of junior officers and NCOs, who solved their own local problem sets. After two or three years of that, being reined back in by powers more concerned with uniform standards than electricity shortages wasn’t really a cause for celebration, despite the grander vision.
An elephant could only pretend to be something else for so long before reality reestablished itself. In our case, a red, white, and blue elephant remembered it preferred trampling to stinging.
On a mid-August afternoon, the Gravediggers and I were conducting a vehicle-maintenance refit back at the FOB when Captain Ten Bears contacted me on the radio regarding a frago.
“We think we have one of our top targets isolated,” he said. “Abu Mustafa, a high-ranking member of a JAM golden group. He’s visiting his family in a village in a different troop’s area, but he’s still our priority because he operates in Saba al-Bor.”
“Roger that, sir.”
“Get the target packet from the squadron intel geeks at the FOB and start planning. The operations staff will let you know when it’s time to execute. Also, keep the other troop up-to-date. Coordinate that through the squadron TOC.”
“Roger that, sir.”
My commander laughed. “You got all that, bud? It’s a pain in the ass, I know.”
I smirked. “When is it not?”
The mission initially excited me and my platoon. First, any change in our daily monotony felt like a breath of fresh air, as we were far too comfortable with our environment by this point in the deployment. Second, this was legitimate, actionable intelligence, not just information or flimsy hearsay. It seemed too good to be true, and I should have known better. Alas, though, the hope-dope sprung eternal.
I walked from the maintenance bay to the squadron headquarters and collected the target packet. I recognized most of the details of Abu Mustafa’s packet from conversations I’d had with various sheiks, Sons of Iraq, and locals. He had worked his way up through an extreme wing of the Mahdi Army from the very bottom, rising from IED emplacer to street thug to street king to bomb maker to financier to network operator. He bounced around constantly, seemingly always on the run, rarely returning home to the village where his wife and children lived. He wielded power by evoking fear and brutally killed other JAM members who did not follow his orders quickly enough or who disagreed with him—which, through the process of elimination, also propelled his rise through the ranks. I recalled a muggy night way back in February, when a Son of Iraq informant refused to utter his name above a whisper, his words drenched in absolute terror. That memory seemed a lifetime away.
Bagging this mother fucker might make our month, I thought. And there was always the chance that he was stupid enough to try and fight back with gunfire. . . . The guys would absolutely love that.
I grabbed a map, wrote out my plan, walked over to the TOC, and briefed our new squadron operations officer on the basics. A major, he turned out to be far too gr
ounded, sharp, and fair to deserve the Moe label. I chided myself for yet again stereotyping field-grade officers before I interacted with them.
“Sir, I plan to establish the vehicle cordon here,” I said, pointing at my map. “We’ll kick out the dismounts here, moving in two sections, one for clearing the house, the other for inner-perimeter security and support. If all goes well, the target will be detained here.”
“Looks good,” he said and then added a few constructive tweaks. “We’ll let the landowners know,” he continued. “Go conduct your rehearsals and stand by for confirmation of the target’s location from the intelligence gurus.”
My platoon met me at the staging area, we went over the plan, and we only waited for five minutes before the squadron TOC called on the radio. “White 1, this is Strykehorse X-ray. The target is green. Go ahead and move out, time now.”
“Roger that,” I said and then switched over to our platoon net. “Let’s roll!” Our Strykers ripped toward the FOB’s gates, as if the sheer act of motion could somehow prevent the inevitable monkey wrench.
I went over the plan one last time on the radio as we moved. “Remember, lock and load as soon as the ramps drop, before you get on the ground. Cordon, keep the crew serve weapons oriented out. Dismounts, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. We’ve done this a thousand times. When we—”
“White 1, White 1, this is Strykehorse X-ray.”
“This is White 1.”
“We need you to turn around and report to the TOC, time now.”
Bamboozled, I asked for clarification. “Say again, over?”
“We need you to turn around and report to the TOC, time now.”
“Uhh, roger, over. I’m halfway out the front gate, heading to that raid you just told me to execute. Perhaps I can take a rain check?”
“Negative, things have . . . changed. Return to the TOC, time now.”
I sighed into the hand mic. “Roger that,” I said, my voice marinated in disgust.
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