Kaboom

by Matthew Gallagher

  While the general believed junior officers lacked discipline and openly feared for the future of “his” army and “his” officer corps, we in turn believed that the current institutional establishment lacked the creativity and ingenuity necessary to wage a successful counterinsurgency. The very top of the flagpole implored us to remain flexible and celebrated the innovative, different manner with which we approached problem sets. We were recruited and trained to make quick decisions on the ground, so that’s what we did when we arrived to combat. After the first four years of the war, it seemed overwhelmingly clear that approaching Iraq from a conventional mind-set only led to calamity.

  Nevertheless, the many layers between the Pentagon’s chosen ones and us clouded all of that. At best, our field-grade officers had served on the line in Desert Storm, a seventy-two-hour operation that failed to impress in the fifteen-month deployment era, unless they had fought in one of the great tank battles, like the Battle of 73 Easting. At worst, our field grades had spent their entire line time in garrison. The brutal reality screamed that most of that generation of officers fell into the latter category. Obviously, this wasn’t their fault, but many didn’t understand, or they chose not to understand, the circumstances of our rearing as junior officers. They thought they imparted lessons about professionalism with rules, threats, and red tape. Instead, they came across as out-of-touch has-beens who never were, with some treasuring simplicity rather than basking in complexity. Even if they had deployed to Iraq before, they had almost always done so as a staff officer—vital to the Green Machine, certainly, but still lacking in credibility for the hypermacho combat-arms world.

  I don’t want to overstate the generational divide, though. The overwhelming majority of American officers wanted nothing more than to serve their country and their men honorably. Different approaches and techniques existed for such, and sometimes that caused friction among the ranks. Due to the near-automatic promotion rate up to lieutenant colonel, age differences augmented said friction. But this was not a “lions-and-lambs” World War I situation, where the lambs of senior officers sent the lions of junior officers and soldiers off to their deaths by the thousands. But to refer to the Iraq War experience as the “brains and the bureaucrats” certainly wouldn’t be unfair.

  I never spoke with the general about his generational gap comments, so I didn’t know the exact specifics of his argument. But I believed I got a decent read on them, as various field grades regurgitated his talking points to us in the weeks following the initial e-mail chain. They wanted us to enforce the published uniform standards, stop joking around so much with the NCOs and the soldiers, and do a better job of supporting the chain of command. In short, we were told to act more professionally. Irony reared its winking face, as I wore pink boxer shorts emblazoned with pirate skulls and beer mugs underneath my pants at the time. More a passive rebel than an active radical, I just nodded knowingly during the speech, doing my best not to smirk.

  An unprecedented number of junior officers were leaving the army, despite all kinds of bonuses and perks being tossed our way, not to mention the tanking economy back home. It had a lot to do with the prospect of multiple deployments, certainly, but at least in my case, that wasn’t a deal breaker. The prospect of becoming a field-grade bureaucrat spouting thoughtless drivel to a new generation of junior officers was. I believed that many of the men at the top of the totem pole truly wanted the army to become a learning institution, but in my experience, the giant clog in the middle wouldn’t allow for it. An institution as large as the army didn’t change overnight, and the “that’s the way it was for me, so that’s the way it’ll be for them” mentality persisted. Honestly, if I could have remained a scout platoon leader for twenty years, I would have stayed in and been a careerist. But the organizational structure didn’t allow for such stagnation. Keep moving up the pipeline or jump off of it were the only options.

  Even after I submitted my separation paperwork, which would go into effect three months after we returned to Hawaii, I felt a very enticing tug to remain in the military. Every military officer worth a fuck believed the system was better off because he worked in it; looking around at some of my peers who chose to stay in the army and make a career out of it petrified me sometimes, because they would be the men leading my soldiers to combat on the next rotation. If every good officer got out after his initial commitment ended—such wasn’t the case, although it sometimes felt that way—the endless carousel of ineptitude would continue to revolve, and those members of our generation who stayed in would chase out the best and the brightest of the next batch. Further, the benefits of a military career were very real and very tempting. They’d pay for graduate school, and all kinds of unconventional opportunities existed, so I didn’t have to turn into what I hated, if it came to that. However, I resisted the urge to reup for two reasons: (1) I had life goals and dreams that I simply couldn’t accomplish if I made the military a career, and (2) if I stayed in, I’d inevitably have to order men into combat and not go myself. The inherent nature of the profession demanded such. And I knew I’d lose a significant piece of my humanity when I forced myself to issue such an order. I’d been to hell and back with my men, and I would gladly go again since I knew I could get them back. But I also knew I couldn’t order others into hell while I didn’t go myself, something a senior military commander must do, and do routinely. I knew it to be a character flaw and an emotional weakness, but I understood and accepted both.

  I considered it a personal victory but a professional sacrifice. If that meant I was undisciplined, so fucking be it. I knew I had made a difference in Iraq, both for Iraqis and for soldiers. That was all that mattered to me.

  THE IRAQI ELECTION

  The number of reports we received regarding planned attacks on Iraq’s polling sites reached a fever pitch about three days before the January 31 election. It had been a marked date for many months, due to this being the first set of national elections in the country since 2005 and the first time most Sunnis planned to participate, both as candidates and as voters. Meanwhile, the Shia voting block did not sound happy about any power sharing whatsoever, while approximately four hundred parties vied for control of the Iraqi parliament. Through all of this, Jaish al-Mahdi loomed insolently in the background, not actively running many candidates through their political wing but clearly interested in the outcome nonetheless. Most American officials believed Sadr’s power play would come a few years later, after we left, but no one really knew for certain. JAM’s powder keg could explode at any time.

  Lieutenant Mongo does not take kindly to a stuffed dancing duck in the Alpha Company tactical operations center and pulls his M9 pistol on it. Luckily, the rest of us were able to intervene before the toy was shot.

  Our role in the elections appeared and felt murky. On one hand, Higher told us that maintaining the peace for the local populace remained our top priority; thus, we would flood the urban areas with presence patrols. On the other hand, the military establishment knew how vital it was for us to stay away from the actual polling sites so as to not project the image that we were interfering with the voting process. Practically speaking, this meant that all able-bodied soldiers rolled out of the wire on election day, parked their Strykers in an isolated corner far away from the polling sites, and waited for something to go wrong.

  To patrol all of the towns and cities in our AO, Captain Frowny-Face sent the mortarmen/tanker combo platoon to Boob al-Sham and Sabah Qasar, while assigning Lieutenant Dirty Jerz’s platoon to East Hussaniyah and Lieutenant Mongo’s platoon to West Hussaniyah. Meanwhile, our makeshift Headquarters platoon rotated between the three areas, thus maximizing American presence in anticipation of the potential attacks being reported. Iraqi security forces manned the actual polling sites we so desperately avoided, their latest test of self-sufficiency and independent competence. The government had held early voting three days earlier for the Iraqi security forces and our interpreters, for which we helped provide secur
ity.

  The polls in the Istalquaal region opened at eight in the morning, so after applying typical army logic and backward planning, we found ourselves out in sector three hours early, at five. I sat in the back of Captain Frowny-Face’s Stryker, wedged in tightly between Lieutenant Rant and Specialist Gonzo, avoiding the temptation to lean on the butt of my rifle and sleep. Specialist Wildebeest sat across from us, head cocked back and eyes closed, with a creek of drool rolling down his chin.

  “Tired, sir?” Specialist Gonzo asked with a grin, while stifling a yawn of his own. More than any other of my soldiers, he had an uncanny ability to goad hyperbole out of me.

  “Yes,” I replied. “More tired than any human being ever has been in the history of prematurely ejaculating army missions.”

  Specialist Gonzo laughed, but I wasn’t even sure what my statement meant. I had only slept three hours the night before, so I didn’t really care, either.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” he told me.

  I nodded in agreement. “Think about it.”

  Our bantering stirred Lieutenant Rant out of his daze. “Gonzo,” he said, “no one wants to hear about your days as a professional knife fighter in Tijuana.”

  We all laughed. “I’ll remember that one, next time your computer breaks,” Specialist Gonzo replied. “Just ’cause I’m Mexican? I mean, I don’t make any saltine jokes about you crackers.”

  Lieutenant Rant and I stared at each other awkwardly, not relaxing until Specialist Gonzo started cackling. “I’m just fucking around with you, sir,” he said. “But seriously, I will shiv you and take your hubcaps.”

  We spent the next seven hours bouncing between Hussaniyah, Boob al-Sham, and Sabah Qasar, checking with the platoon leaders and platoon sergeants on the ground. Concurrently, the battalion TOC radioed polling-site updates every hour that the Iraqi security forces fed them back at the FOB. With nearly twenty polling sites spread across the three urban centers, we skeptically figured something—in this case an IED attack, a drive-by shooting, or an assassination—was bound to happen. But by the time high noon rolled around and the bright ball in the sky blared down on us with maximum attention, we had only heard positive things regarding both the voter turnout and the Iraqis’ successfully keeping the peace. Captain Frowny-Face asked the battalion TOC how they knew all of this. They informed him that the reports came from the various brigade and battalion leaders, who were visiting the polling sites, apparently immune to the order put out about the polls.

  “I guess I missed that paragraph in the operations order,” Lieutenant Rant quipped, “the one that granted field grades exemptions.”

  I opened my mouth to follow with a wisecrack of my own, but one look from Captain Frowny-Face halted that plan. I shrugged my shoulders instead and opened up an MRE, fishing out the sliced pears and the candy.

  After swinging through West Hussaniyah, where we found Lieutenant Mongo and some members of his platoon kicking around a soccer ball with local children, we drove south on Route Dover, linking up with the combo platoon in Boob al-Sham. They had staged their vehicles at the newly constructed burn pit, built in an attempt to bring scheduled garbage collection to the town. We all dismounted and met SFC C outside.

  “Anything going on down here?” Captain Frowny-Face asked.

  “Sir, we haven’t seen or heard shit,” SFC C replied while spitting out some dip. “Unless you count kids throwing rocks at a goat.”

  “That’s it?”

  “We’ve seen a fair amount of adults walking toward the school, where the poll site is.”

  “If you guys get bored, feel free to patrol around. Just stay clear of that school.”

  “Roger, sir. How long you figure we’re going to stay out here?”

  Captain Frowny-Face shook his head. “Division wants us out here at least an hour after the polls close, so plan on 1900.”

  SFC C smiled widely. “Good stuff. It’s not like we got anyplace else to go.”

  I turned to Lieutenant Rant. “See man, false motivation is always better than no motivation at all. SFC C is truly a pioneer in this field.”

  We continued the mission until 1930, when Captain Frowny-Face gave the word to move back to JSS Istalquaal. According to the Iraqis, the only significant events occurred in East Hussaniyah, where many local-nationals found themselves omitted from the ballot list. When told he couldn’t vote, one of them threatened to blow the school up, resulting in his immediate detention by the Iraqi police. Every one of us felt exhausted by the long, boring day, and I passed out in my bed with my uniform still on, barely getting my boots off.

  The Iraqi government released the results of the elections over a week later. A new round of threats resulted, as did another round of those threats proving false. Despite the lack of a major political protest against the elections, only about half of eligible Iraqis voted, causing Lieutenant Rant and me to observe that they had embraced the most democratic and American of options available to them—apathy. Sadrists won a minority share of seats in parliament, including five seats in the Baghdad governorate. Al-Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party, as a part of the Shia United Iraqi Alliance, maintained a plurality of seats, ensuring he’d continue to serve as prime minister. The various Sunni parties did reasonably well, especially in the Anbar Province in the far west.

  We didn’t care about any of that, though, at the time. The next day, after a joint targeting meeting with the National Police, I played a few games of helicopter and then watched the Super Bowl on the Armed Forces Network. General Odierno, General Petraeus’s replacement as commander of Multinational Force-Iraq, or MNF-I, granted us the right to drink two legitimate beers during the Super Bowl. I drank two Guinnesses and passed out in my bed halfway through the second quarter. It had been over seven months since I’d left Europe and drunk real alcohol, so I didn’t feel any shame for its quick effects on me. I didn’t wake up at all during that night, which proved a most welcome change from the norm.

  MASKS

  “Telling a terp that his country is safe when he doesn’t feel it’s safe is as pretentious as it gets,” said an army captain in Baghdad who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was criticizing his superiors. “The terp-mask thing is just the latest disconnect between what happens on the ground and what people want to be happening on the ground. We’re in full-on dress rehearsal now. I think we’re in such a hurry to get out of here, we’re wanting this place to be safer than it really is.”

  So read an article that ran in the Washington Post on February 13, written by an old acquaintance and new Facebook friend, Ernesto Londono. The article recapped a series of events that had occurred in Iraq over the previous six months with regard to a ban on interpreters wearing masks to hide their identities while on mission. The ban had technically been initiated in September, although in my experience most junior leaders ignored it openly and allowed their terps full discretion of when and where they wore a mask. Occasionally, field grades would point out the discrepancy, and if anyone of higher rank than that came around, the terps went sans mask, but 90 percent of the time, the ban meant nothing on the execution level. When the Washington Post ran an article about the ban in mid-November, citing its impracticality and the dangers posed to interpreters, Congress initiated an inquiry. The outcome led to the Pentagon’s delegating authority to battalion commanders—specifically stating that they couldn’t delegate it themselves—to lift the ban for specific patrols and in special cases.

  While theoretically this sounded like good news for the terps, it carried the adverse effect of focusing concentrated attention on the ban for all patrols, and suddenly the mask ban became a hot-button issue and was to be enforced at all levels. From November to the end of our deployment, allowing a terp to wear a mask without the commander’s exemption became the equivalent of shooting a civilian or negligently discharging your weapon, in terms of bureaucratic accountability and the ass chewings levied by Higher. At JSS Istalquaal, Barry, in particular, openly fe
ared for his life because he couldn’t wear a mask in certain areas. After determining that he needed money for his mother’s new house, though, he backed off his threats to quit as an interpreter for Coalition forces. Three other terps, one of whom had worked with us for three years, did walk away.

  As the anonymous captain quoted in the February article, I provided those words for a few reasons—none of which involved causing a fire for the sake of watching it burn. One, although I hadn’t sought out the press, I understood their power in bringing issues to the public. Nothing made large institutions change their decisions more quickly and more emphatically than public pressure. Two, I truly believed what I said—I wanted us out of Iraq too, but not at the expense of the men who had served next to us for so long. It angered the fuck out of me that some public relations fobbits ostentatiously told terps that if they didn’t like the ban, they could seek out alternative employment. And three, I couldn’t shake Suge’s voice at night, as I remembered him imploring me to allow him to keep his mask on.