The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War

185 Pages·2007·1.61 MB·English

by  Brandon Friedman

THE WAR
I ALWAYS WANTED
THE ILLUSION OF GLORY AND THE REALITY OF WAR
A SCREAMING EAGLE IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ
BRANDON FRIEDMAN
For Mom, Dad, and Colby,
For Grandpa Brady, an old Marine who never got to hear these stories,
And for the men of the 1st Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, past and
present, who gave their lives while serving in Iraq
Contents
Prologue
Part I. Fear
1. Western Kuwaiti Desert
2. Fort Campbell, Kentucky
3. Jacobabad, Pakistan
4. Bagram, Afghanistan
5. Shah-e-Kot Valley, Afghanistan
Part II. Knowledge
6. The Desert
7. Hillah, Iraq
8. Baghdad
9. Northern Iraq
Part III. Recovery
10. Amrika
11. The Mediterranean
Epilogue
Acronyms
Acknowledgments

Prologue
First there were mountains. Then there was a desert. And now, sometimes, there
are flashbacks. Not full-blown flashbacks, I guess. They’re more like super
memories—and they creep up on me. Stopped in Dallas traffic (behind one of
the gun trucks) I glance out of the window of my car and see business people
(Iraqis) standing on the street corner (wearing dish-dashas) talking (waving at
me) on cell phones. My eyes instinctively scan for weapons. Listening to a
commercial on the radio, I hear a man’s voice (one of my squad leaders) selling
(“1-6, he’s gone down again, over”) new cars. I come home to write, and the
chair (green army cot) on which I’m sitting makes a familiar creaking noise as I
shift (toss and turn), and it reminds me of trying to sleep. Other times it is the
craggy earth at nine thousand feet under my worn combat boots. The weight of a
Kevlar helmet on my head. The barrels of burning shit. It all sort of blends
together.
Sometimes when I look back, I think, “Man, I spent over two years dealing
with those fucking wars, and I never saw any real combat—not the way I always
envisioned it as a kid at least.” I never stormed a beach. I never ducked tracer
fire while parachuting onto an enemy-held airfield. And my best buddy didn’t
die in my arms talking about his mom and his girl back home, either. Where I
was, everything was so much more vague than that.
But I did watch a two-thousand-pound bomb strike the earth less than thirty
yards from me and my platoon. In army-speak, that was what we would call a
“significant emotional event.” And I did shoot some guys—even killed one of
them. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it was a pretty big deal to
me. I saw soldiers bending under the stress of guerilla war in mountains and in
cities. I met Iraqi translators who walked the thin line between patriotism and
treason every day, for months on end. I ate in their homes. I watched their
neighbors call them traitors. I could have easily died at least half a dozen times
that I know of. I was scared that I was going to die a hundred times that number.
The idea that war changes people is clichéd, but it’s true. Going into it, I
always thought I’d be above that—immune to it, too well trained for it to affect
me, too professional. I thought we were beyond all that Vietnam/posttraumatic
stress shit. But now I’m in on it.
I have been enlightened.
Now I fear that part of me will always be there—and that that part of me is
never coming home. Ever. I’m sure my body will be here, and I’ll walk around
work or school talking to people, smiling and telling them what it was like and
what I’ll be doing this weekend and so on. But I’m just not really here.
Instead, I am somewhere else. I’m wearing what has now become old-
fashioned desert camouflage. I am thousands of miles from home, in a strange,
dusty land where the people speak a language I don’t understand. And I am
carrying a gun.
I wonder if it will always be this way.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become
a monster.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Part I

FEAR
The images of war handed to us, even when they are graphic, leave out the one
essential element of war—fear. There is, until the actual moment of
confrontation, no cost to imagining glory.
—Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
1

Western Kuwaiti Desert
March 2003
Failure is always an option. People rarely talk about it, but it’s always there. It’s
the giant shrapnel-slinging elephant in the theater of combat that most guys try
to put out of their minds. Unfortunately I was never so successful at this, and
after I’d been in war for a while, the prospect stressed me out more and more as I
went along.
We stood beneath a clear sky in the cream-colored Kuwaiti desert, several miles
from what was to become the boundary between sanity and chaos. I was
preparing to brief the soldiers I was going to lead across this boundary in the
next thirty-six hours. My veteran platoon sergeant, Steve Croom, was next to
me. We’d both been in combat before, but neither of us had ever technically
invaded a country. Sergeant Croom had been in Iraq in the first Gulf War, but
hadn’t stayed all that long. I had been to Afghanistan, but in that case I hadn’t
really invaded anything. I’d more or less just shown up one morning on a
transport plane, confused as hell about what the plan was once I walked off the
ramp.
Our platoon had been assigned to the 101st Airborne Division’s assault
command post (ACP). The ACP’s commander, a relaxed junior lieutenant
colonel named Ahuja, was going to rely on our platoon to get his people three
hundred miles inside Iraq during the first two days of the invasion. As far as I
knew, there was no plan beyond that.
We had gathered the ACP’s officers and senior noncommissioned officers for
the briefing. Surrounding us were several dozen yellowish tents that made up the
barren outpost known as Camp New Jersey. Several feet away from me was a
door flap that made a slapping noise every time a wind gust caught it. In the
harsh glare it gave everything a ghost town feel. The already eerie feeling was
made even stronger by the way you had to speak up when talking to groups like
this. When there was no wind to carry the sound, the sterile land could dull
noises, even mute them. It was as if the desert just absorbed them.
Huddled around us, the leaders of the ACP stared intently. They were more
bewildered by the whole idea of actually invading a country than we were. The
confusion on all sides didn’t concern me, however, as the government was