Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice

223 Pages·2015·13.45 MB·English

by  John A. Nagl

ALSO BY JOHN A. NAGL
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and
Vietnam

PENGUIN PRESS
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Photographs courtesy of the author unless otherwise indicated.
eBook ISBN 978-0-69817635-5
FRONTMATTER MAPS BY JEFFREY L. WARD
Version_1
In Memoriam
AL ANBAR, IRAQ 2003–4
PFC Jeremiah D. Smith
1LT Todd J. Bryant
SPC Joseph Lister
SGT Jarrod Black
SGT Uday Singh
SFC Gregory B. Hicks
SPC William R. Sturges
SPC Jason K. Chappell
SGT Randy S. Rosenberg
CPT Matthew J. August
1SG James T. Hoffman
SGT Daniel M. Shepherd
1LT Neil A. Santoriello
2LT Brian D. Smith
PFC Brandon Davis
PFC Cleston Raney
SPC Michael Karr
SGT Sean Mitchell
1LT Doyle Hufstedler
SPC Roger G. Ling
2LT Jeffrey C. Graham
SSG Sean G. Landrus
SGT Travis A. Moothart
Ghost Stories
I have put them away kept them inside
the ghosts of the lieutenants and the Captain
and the First Sergeant their bodies torn by shrapnel or a sniper’s bullet or gone
just gone
into hundreds of shards of flesh the size of my still living hand but they have been standing watch
over my dreams and now they will not go away.
If you have been to war if you have held a microphone in your hand begging for MEDEVAC
with the blood of your friends on your hands pouring out your soul over the airwaves to keep your
friends from becoming ghosts from joining the shades in an unholy company of men who have given
limbs and eyes and hearts— If you have held that bloody hand mike then you will never forget that
day that day when time stopped and life stopped and never really started again no matter how hard
you try to make the ghosts go away.
Here, bullet.
Here.
Take me.
So that I can join the ghosts so that my company will again be complete armless legless eyeless a
company of memories a company of shades.
Take me again to the land of the Two Rivers where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet where the
elephant grass grows man-high in the irrigation canals.
We will return to the warren of Baghdad streets where the women wail and the children beg and
Bulldog Six will issue commands and Apache Red One will take point and Bulldog White One will
grin again that wonderful grin he had full of joy
back when he still had a face.
We will join the company of ghosts who were our enemies who waited for us in alleys and in canals
who wore sandals and man-dresses and spoke in a language we could not understand and fought for
reasons we could not understand but they fought well these men we turned to ghosts.
They fought us
and we fought them
and now we are all together what is left of us
in the halflight shadows inside my head where I see ghosts
ghosts
that will no longer leave me.
Adapted from the author’s review of Brian Turner’s Here Bullet*