The War I Always Wanted

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 paying me a good deal of money to look sharp and act sharp, no matter how confused I actually became. Over the previous year I’d learned that it’s best not to try and figure out what is happening or what’s going to happen in combat. This is because no one knows. You just have to go with it.

  I let Sergeant Croom do the talking. As I listened, he touched on how their job was to ride in their trucks and sit tight, while our job was to do the shooting should it come to that. He said things that all Army sergeants say at one time or another, like, “Stay alert, stay alive,” and “Make sure you square each other away.” He made no mention of catastrophic failure being an option.

  Croom walked with a limp, but it wasn’t because of a previous battle injury. He’d been in a car accident a few months before we’d come to Kuwait and had put off the surgery for the war. He’d walked that way from the time I met him, so to me, it made him seem older than he was—which was somewhere in the late thirties.

  The only things that made Croom seem true to his age were his two little redheaded girls that he talked about all the time. He had pictures of them dressed as cowgirls for Halloween. When it wasn’t them, he was talking about Arkansas. Being from there was a big thing for him. Back home his cell phone voice mail message went something
like, “Hey, you’ve reached Steve . . . I’m prob’ly out in the woods with ma rifle or in my boat catchin’ fish right now so if you’ll just . . .” and so on. In my mind, he was the guy who got killed in war movies because everyone liked him so much.

  As he spoke, trying to make everyone believe that this whole thing was going to go smoothly, the ACP soldiers seemed thankful for the fact that if the road trip into Iraq turned into a twoway rifle range, it would be someone else’s problem. They seemed to think that Croom and I had done this before.

  An hour later, while we were waiting to move from Camp New Jersey to the attack position closer to the border, the war started with an intrusive blast of sound from the air raid sirens. I am never ready for these things when they happen.

  I had left the assembly of vehicles with Sergeant Matt Krueger, one of my section leaders. On the boat ride into the theater, somehow, the flimsy door to the passenger side of my humvee had gone missing. I was determined not to ride into battle without at least the protection of thin vinyl and a soft plastic zippered window. That type of government cost-saving material generally doesn’t stop fragmentation from roadside bombs or rocket-propelled grenades, but with me, it was more of a psychological thing. I just wanted a door—any kind of a door.

  I had heard that Bravo, my old company, was leaving its only humvee behind because it wouldn’t run. Bravo was a rifle company of foot-borne infantry and, theoretically at least, they had no need for trucks. I decided to drive over to the tent section, find it, and cannibalize it by taking one of its doors with me.

  So instead of leading my men into battle, banners fluttering and swords valiantly raised, I was wandering around a nearly deserted tent city looking for a vinyl humvee door. And that was when the air raid sirens started wailing. My stomach dropped.

  I stretched a chemical protective mask over my head and continued hunting for the door. The mask muffled the scream of the sirens. There was nothing else to do really, except to keep looking. If a missile was going to hit me, it was going to hit me.

  I came around a tent and saw the humvee. I walked over to it and carefully removed the door from the hinges and carried it back in the direction of my truck. As I trudged through the sand, kicking it as I went, I gazed at the sky through the hazy plastic lenses of my mask. I was looking for any sign of a descending projectile laced with anthrax or Zyklon-B or whatever. Nothing. Not even a cloud. Just endless blue sky.

  When I got back to the truck, Krueger was down on a knee by the bumper. I could see other soldiers doing the same. He looked up at me and told me it had come over the radio that we were supposed to be in a bunker or under the trucks. “Oh,” I said. “Hey look, I found a door.” Suddenly, the sirens fell silent.

  The Voice—that detached presence of authority that guided my life and continually instructed me over my radio—said that an Iraqi al Samoud missile had been fired into Kuwait and that more were expected. The Voice always seemed to come over the airwaves with such disheartening news. I never got the call that I was headed home over the radio. Instead it was always messages like, “Send us two guys for guard duty.” Or, “Expect more incoming.” Or, “Be prepared to hold that ground.”

  I took off my mask, walked around to my side of the humvee, and slid the new door into place. Strangely enough, it gave me a warm, safe feeling—as if the door was going to make the whole invasion go well. Then I thought about why that should be, and reasoned that maybe I was losing my mind.

  The helplessness you feel when large, explosive objects start falling out of the sky around you is something that’s hard to describe. It’s a different kind of fear than when you’re at least minimally able to defend yourself. This I had learned in the Shah-e-Kot Valley of Afghanistan.

  I was around for enough bombing of al Qaeda positions in Afghanistan that once I got home, I got a queasy feeling every time a passenger jet flew overhead. It’s the idea of something falling on you, and the idea that it won’t reason with you. If it’s a person, you can try to understand what he may or may not do in a given situation. If you’re outnumbered or outgunned, you can always try to bluff him into thinking that he should mess with someone else. You can’t do that with missiles, rockets, and bombs.

  As we began to move out from Camp New Jersey, my new door firmly in place, I thought about these things, still so fresh in my memory. I thought about them and I thought about the dreams they induced—of bombs and bullets and people falling all around me. Then I tried to focus on the present. But that never works when memories and dreams of combat are clawing at your addled brain. I kept trying though, and eventually it just made me think about the dreams I’d been having recently. They were dreams of Nikki, the girl who’d stayed with me through the Afghanistan deployment, only to leave me before I came to Kuwait. One night I’d dream she was with another man (which she was), another night I’d dream she was pregnant (which she wasn’t), and another night I’d dream she needed my help (which she didn’t).

  During the buildup for the coming invasion, I’d spent Christmas with Nikki in Dallas, where she was working. All that week she’d made me turn the channel every time there was a story on the massing of troops in Kuwait. The day I left Dallas to return to Fort Campbell, she was a wreck. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she alternated all morning between crying, sniffling, and crying again.

  We were in her bedroom and she was sitting cross-legged on the bed. I was standing in front of her, holding my bags in my hands. I was about to leave. She had started crying again. Through the tears, the last thing she said to me was, “I can’t do this again.”

  I guess one war was enough for her.

  * * *

  As we passed through the gates of Camp New Jersey, never to return, I contemplated that she had at least had the decency to do it between the wars and not right in the middle of one.

  Half a mile down the road from New Jersey’s front gate, I was ordered over the radio to stop. I was too antsy to sit in the truck, comforted by my new vinyl door, so I got out to stretch my legs. Then, off in the distance and coming from within the camp, I could hear the wail of the air raid sirens again. The Voice over the radio announced an inbound al Samoud missile, this time barreling directly toward us. I just stood there in the bright desert sun beside my truck. This time I didn’t bother to even look at the sky. I was a man standing in a drenching downpour without an umbrella, shoulders hunched and dejected-looking. Just standing there and taking it.

  And then, with sirens singing in the distance, it hit with a dull whoomp. It was far enough away that I didn’t see it come in; it was near enough to have gotten my full attention.

  The old pang of fear was back. I was being targeted. It is a queasy feeling, unlike anything else, and it comes in waves. Spend enough time in a war and you will become familiar with it. You’ll feel it eat slowly at your mind like battery acid, corroding it more and more each day.

  Before the wars, I had always been afraid of things like failing a test in school. Or that I’d be late. I was afraid that people at the party would think I looked stupid, or that I’d say something stupid. I was afraid that, when I left the bar, I’d find my car window broken and all my CDs gone.

  But fear in war is not like that. This is the type of fear that only comes when you know your life could end at any moment, and you’d never see it coming. This is fear in its purest form.

  And it ends up staying with you, too. Because even when the war is over for you, and you’re back at home with your family and you no longer fall asleep to the sound of cascading gunfire, that’s when you’ll notice just how uncomfortable you are when there is seemingly nothing out there in the darkness of which to be afraid.

  But in the beginning—a year and half earlier—I knew none of this.

  2

  Fort Campbell, Kentucky

  Fall 2001

  “These guys are about to find out the hard way that we ain’t the Russians . . . and this ain’t Vietnam.” My platoon sergeant in Bravo Company, a former
army Ranger named Jim Collins, spoke the words deadpan and without emotion. He was always saying things like that.

  Earlier that morning we’d been told we were going to war. The World Trade Center was still smoldering and, according to the deployment order I held in my hand, we were part of the payback plan. I had been a platoon leader for fifty-three days.

  I was torn. If not for Nikki, the order would have made me happy. I’d spent the last six years like a high school girl waiting to be asked to the prom by the football captain. I’d been waiting for the invitation to the big dance. Now, holding my invitation to the big war in my hand, I couldn’t help but think that I’d already gotten Nikki a plane ticket to Fort Campbell for Thanksgiving. And somewhere along the way, that had become more important to me than fighting in a war.

  By the time I got to college, I’d fashioned myself into a hawkish war junkie, probably as a means to punish my parents for allowing me to do whatever I wanted as a kid. My mom was an artist and ex-hippie with a rebellious streak; my dad was so passive that I can’t ever recall him raising his voice. Our family was middle class and both my brother and I had gone to a private school until we got to high school. We had two dogs and a cat and a big yard in a nice neighborhood. My parents had tried so hard to give us a tranquil, stable home environment. Looking back, I see it backfired for them.

  One day in high school I took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery—the mandatory test they give to juniors. I would have forgotten about it had a recruiter not sent me a postcard telling me that I’d done well. The military scatters thousands of these postcard seeds every year, hoping that just a fraction will catch the eyes of an interested kid and maybe take root—maybe one day sprout into a paratrooper or a fighter pilot. Before I got the postcard, I’d never even thought about joining the Army.