The War I Always Wanted

by Brandon Friedman

  It turned everything sour. Driving around rural northern Iraq every day, I was used to seeing the shepherds herding their sheep in the open fields. The thing was, they always wore red turbans wrapped around their faces the way you always see Palestinian terrorists wear them in videos and on posters. In the beginning, it was disconcerting to see that every day. The media had conditioned my brain to think terrorist whenever I saw the red mask, not shepherd. But sitting on their donkeys, the teenagers underneath the red masks always waved at us when we drove by. They seemed happy every time one of us waved back to them. Seeing people who looked the way I had been trained to think terrorists looked, and having them wave at me, taught me something about perception and reality.

  That progress was ruined by the attack. Whether or not anything else ever happened again in Tal Afar, the trust that we had built within the community during those two months was gone. Now, in the fight-or-flight part of my brain, they were terrorists again. If it came down to it, and I was put in a bad situation, those who looked the way I thought terrorists looked would not get the benefit of the doubt.

  I was too afraid of dying.

  Driving outside the wire on the day after Jordan and Garvey were killed, nothing had changed from the time the ramp had lowered in Operation Anaconda—except the landscape. The nausea in the pit of my stomach—the fear itself—had not dimmed one bit. It had just been on hiatus. It was back now and I could not subdue the intensity of the feeling that death could come in the next few minutes. In my case it always seemed to manifest itself as an external coolness that masked an internal panic. I was convinced that if I were hit, there would be no warning—I would simply be snuffed out. I knew it would be complete, and had no doubt in my mind that I would return to the state in which I had been before my birth—a state of oblivion. I realized that everything taught to me while growing up was in fact nonsense—nonsense devised to assist people in coping with death. I now realized—I knew, in fact—that if I were killed, I would cease to exist. This sentiment never waned when death was near. Not once.

  Guerilla warfare is perhaps the most psychologically damaging to soldiers. It’s what made Vietnam so bad. It is much easier for the human mind to deal with the extreme violence of something like Iwo Jima or Normandy. There, the soldier knew when he would have to fight and when he wouldn’t. He knew when it would start and when it was over. His mind could compartmentalize. In combat, he was afraid. When it was over, he no longer had to be afraid. Those soldiers had front lines. In Iraq, the soldiers live in a constant state of fear, because there is no “battlefield.” They are always being targeted, whether it’s driving around in a city, standing in a chow line on base, or sleeping in their racks. There is no safe place in Iraq. Over the course of months, this constant medium-level stress, with a few spikes to higher levels, can wreak havoc on the mind. And when men in your unit start dying at the hands of shadowy assailants, even if it’s only two of them, the unit is basically traumatized by the fear of the unknown. You realize that you are always being watched.

  During this time, my window in which to decide whether or not to stay in the Army was quickly closing. I had to choose. I could either leave Iraq in the middle of October or stay in the Army for at least another two years, risking further stop-losses.

  I could no longer justify continuing to push my luck. I thought about my family. An irrational part of me even wanted to try working things out with Nikki even though I knew she’d moved on. I loved the Army, but I could hear Collins’ voice inside my head: A man’s got to know his limitations.

  I’d wanted out before, but this—this was it. I guess I just didn’t have the stomach for it anymore. Maybe the stupidity of the war in the broadest sense just kind of got to me. Or maybe the politics. Maybe it was just that the whole thing had turned out to be something other than what I’d thought it would be. I don’t know. I did know, however, that my fun meter was pegged.

  And I’d never felt guiltier.

  As July turned to August, and August to September, the insurgency began rapidly metastasizing in areas further south. By the middle of September, the roadside bomb made its first appearance in northern Iraq, wounding two guys I knew in Delta Company. When I was first told they had been hit with an IED on the way to the Mosul Dam, I wasn’t sure I even knew what the acronym stood for. A week later a Brigade convoy got ambushed on the road into Mosul. The whirlpool had begun slowly sucking us in.

  As September drew to a close, I was preparing to leave. I went to Delta Company’s compound on an October afternoon in order to say goodbye to Sergeant Croom and the guys.

  Half of them were out on a patrol when I got there, including Croom. And Mohamed was on a four-day vacation in Baghdad. I had his email address, but it still kind of disappointed me that I wouldn’t get to say goodbye in person. I did find Ammar, however. He couldn’t wait to see me. He wanted to show me what he’d bought with all the money he’d earned translating since April. We walked out front where several vehicles were parked. One of them was Ammar’s new car. He wanted to show it to me, inside and out. While he was doing that, he told me of how on his way back to Tal Afar from Baghdad, he’d accidentally run an American checkpoint in Mosul and almost gotten killed for it. We took some pictures of each other standing by the car and then walked over to the kebab stand and bought French fries to take back to his room.

  The sandbags in his bedroom window weren’t there when I had lived in the same building. With no more natural light shining in, the room he shared with Croom was given a weak, eerie glow by a single fluorescent lamp. Slathering his fries in ketchup, Ammar asked if I wanted to see a movie. I told him sure, as long as it was a good one. He popped some cheesy 1960s Western into his new DVD player.

  After a few minutes, he looked at me with a ketchup-covered French fry in hand and said, “Isn’t this movie great?”

  When Croom finally returned, I didn’t have much time left. We talked about me leaving the Army, and he said that if he were in my position, he’d do the same thing. As things were, Croom was only two years from retirement, so he was going to try to make it. We rechecked our email and phone numbers for when he got back to the States, and that was it.

  I walked down to the Delta Company supply sergeant and turned in my ammunition and magazines.

  I went back to Bravo Company in Tal Afar next. After meetings with the battalion XO and the battalion commander, there would be nothing left to do but wait for my ride down to the airfield. Once there, I was to simply wait a few more days for another ride—this one to Mosul. From there, I would fly to Kuwait—and then home.

  I was no longer Bravo Company’s XO and I was no longer responsible for anything but the weapon I held in my hand. My only job now was to turn it in to Specialist Shields, Bravo’s armorer. It was the strangest feeling I’ve ever had. A war was going on around me, a war that I had been a part of from the beginning. It had been two years and twenty days since my dad woke me that morning while I was on leave and told me we were under attack. Now, for the first time since September 11, I had nowhere to be, nothing to do.

  I had always envisioned that when I quit soldiering the final “turning in” of my weapon would be somewhat ceremonial and somber. Now I figured that I would just give it a good brushing and hand it to Shields in the morning. That would seal the deal. Where I thought there would be nostalgia and a bit of sadness, there was only the overwhelming desire to leave as quickly as I could.

  By the time I got out of my meeting with the XO, it was nearly eleven o’clock at night. I walked into Bravo Company’s TV room and sat down next to Captain Jones. He was ready for bed, wearing a brown t-shirt, PT shorts, and flip-flops. Fox News was on, and one of the hosts was trying to make a witty comment about the weather.

  First Platoon was supposed to be back to pick me up in the next fifteen minutes. They’d waited around for me, but when the battalion commander had delayed our talk by an hour, their newest Lieutenant, Mike Gerasimus, decided to go ahead with the
ir patrol for the evening. Gerasimus was another former West Pointer who had only recently taken over the platoon from Bandzwolek.

  For ten minutes Jones and I sat there making small talk. Specialist Peter O’Brien, his days of cricket formations and droning long behind him, came in for a minute and stared at the screen, completely uninterested, before leaving. At five minutes to eleven, O’Brien stuck his head in and said they were back. I looked up from the TV and noticed I could hear the humvees rumbling outside the back door. I stood up, and after a final handshake with Captain Jones, threw on my vest, grabbed my stuff, and walked out to meet my old platoon.

  They were rolling with four trucks. Lieutenant Gerasimas was in the lead truck and Sergeant Collins was in the second. I walked up to Gerasimas, thanked him for the ride, and then asked if he cared which truck I rode in.

  “Nah, you can jump in here with me if you want,” he said.

  I looked in the bed of the truck. Staring back at me were Sergeant Chad Corn, one of my Anaconda vets, Specialist Jason Krogh, Pfc. Lance Lawrence, and Waseem, the hammer-thrower from Baghdad. I noticed Waseem was now wearing a vest with plates. Up front, I could see Private Jason Gasko in the driver’s seat.

  I felt naked with no ammo. I also felt like dead weight. I figured I had to ask for some, if only to make myself feel better. I reached down into the cab and tapped Gerasimas on the shoulder. “Hey, can you spare some ammo?”

  “Sure man, how much you want?” he asked.

  “I think one mag oughta do. I’ve gone through two wars without firing a shot. I think this mag’ll last me to the airfield.”

  Gerasimas just chuckled as he handed me the fully loaded thirty-round magazine. I inserted it into my M4 and charged the handle, chambering a round.

  The road directly in front of the headquarters had been blocked off at night since the attack of July 19, so we headed around the block, into the neighborhood directly west of the TOC. As we drove, I couldn’t help but think that this was the last time I would ever ride in a tactical situation with an infantry platoon.

  Sitting directly behind Gasko as he drove, I looked at the guys around me in the orange glow of passing streetlights. Lawrence was the new guy—as XO, I had picked him up at the TOC only two months ago. He had been fresh off the plane and looked like he was about eighteen years old. Now he was standing right beside me, manning the mounted SAW. Across from me were Waseem and Krogh. Waseem looked as stoic as usual, and Krogh looked only marginally more anxious. Sitting beside me was the newly promoted Sergeant Corn. We hadn’t been sitting there long when Corn and I started in on each other with the sarcastic verbal barbs we’d been exchanging for two years. Somewhere in there, we mentioned that this would be our last ride together.

  As we drove the long way around the block, I stared at the dilapidated buildings we passed. I noticed the sheet metal walls, the open sewers, and the general grime that covered the city. As usual, there were groups of young men hanging out late on the street corners and in the fronts of shops. I could see a few drinking tea. Only a couple of more days and I would be home, leaving all this in the past.

  We approached a four-way intersection and Gasko eased onto the brake as the truck neared the stop sign. The truck rocked back gently as he brought it to a complete stop. Out of the corner of my eye I saw another car pull up to the intersection, perpendicular to us. It was a blue Volkswagen Passat, identical to about a thousand other cars in Tal Afar.

  The driver of the Passat rolled to a halt. In our headlights I could see the driver, a passenger, and maybe more people in the back. I couldn’t tell. Nor did I care at the moment. But then I saw the driver and the front seat passenger look at us. Immediately, the driver floored it, and blew past us from left to right. In my mind, it registered as “noticeable,” and maybe “a little weird,” but not dangerous. For a split second, I thought maybe I was the only one that even noticed it. I thought maybe the guy was in a hurry—and that maybe the look they gave us was simply my imagination.

  I was wrong. Everybody saw the same thing. Before the blue car had even cleared the intersection, I heard Waseem say in his heavily accented, deep, monotone voice, “Something is not right.”

  Gerasimas looked at Gasko and yelled, “Follow ’em! Go! Go! Go!”

  At this moment of action, I couldn’t help but think of other things. I realized that I needed to get a good night’s rest and it was already late. Now we were going to chase some guys around Tal Afar. I knew the end of the story already: We would chase them. They would pull over. We would pull the occupants out of the car. We would kick them around for trying to evade us. We would find a couple of AK-47s in the trunk—if we were lucky. Or maybe the driver would just be drunk. No laws against that here. If there were weapons, we’d confiscate them and throw them in the bed of our humvee. And finally, depending on how suspicious the guys looked, we’d determine whether or not to put bags on their heads and take them in for questioning. All in all, I figured that it would take at least an hour to sort through the whole thing. It was another instance that reeked of wasted time just like every other raid or traffic control point I’d managed while in Iraq. I didn’t say anything, but I hoped that we would either lose them in traffic or Gerasimas would call it off. I didn’t think two AK-47s were worth my time.

  Gasko hit the gas and swerved onto the main road. Already there were cars between the Passat and us. Gasko accelerated and started to snake his way through the nighttime traffic. The Passat was easy to follow, as it had a broken rear taillight. This might not be so bad, I thought. We’ll catch up to him in a second. We’ll flag him down. He’ll play stupid. He’ll pull over. We may be able to wrap this thing up in twenty minutes.

  Half a second after the thought crossed my mind that this could possibly end quickly, I noticed that the Passat was weaving through traffic as well. And not only that, but he was accelerating. It didn’t take very long for me to figure out what this implied. Jeeesus. He had something in the car worth the risk of dodging cars and people at high speed.

  Gasko started laying on the horn, hitting it first in short bursts, and then in five- to ten-second ones. The Iraqis were slow to get out of the way. American soldiers were known throughout the country for muscling their way through traffic at the expense of the Iraqis. Subsequently, the Iraqis had grown weary of it over the months and were now in no mood to hurry. The Passat was having the same problem.

  As we sped in and out of traffic, Gerasimas got a call on the radio: The second humvee, the one with Sergeant Collins, was having trouble keeping up the pace. There was something wrong with the engine, the accelerator, or both. I couldn’t make out most of the conversation from the bed of the truck, but I did hear a “Fucking catch up!” from the front seat. The problem was that with the traffic congestion, the other two humvees couldn’t get around the second one, and we were thus losing all three. As we blew through traffic, I imagined the earful that Collins’ driver was currently withstanding. In an unspoken decision, Gerasimas had decided that we couldn’t wait.

  The Passat turned off the main road and drove into a neighborhood. Shops lined the street and many were still open. In the blur this chase was quickly becoming, I could see people standing on the side of the road watching. Seeing Americans speed through your neighborhood was nothing new, but this late at night, in hot pursuit of an Iraqi car was something to gawk at.

  I began to think we actually might not catch the Passat. By then though, my attitude had improved somewhat. If for no other reason, I at least wanted to see what was in the car that was so important that they felt the need to set us on a highspeed chase. I was suddenly a bit disappointed that they might get away.

  The road was bumpy and we were driving fast, so I couldn’t see much of anything clearly. But within a few seconds I could tell that the Passat was slowing down. Then it turned left at a break in the median, making a U-turn. As we made ground, no one spoke.

  The car cleared the turn and started back in our direction just as we reach
ed the cut in the median. As we passed them, I saw the driver, the passenger, and at least one other person in the back seat. Due to its lack of horsepower, the Volkswagen didn’t accelerate out of the turn nearly as fast as the humvee and that allowed us to close within fifty feet of it.

  At the first side street, he took a hard right, nearly flipping the light car. Again, we gained more ground on the turn, coming to within thirty feet of the little blue car. As the road became bumpier, we started getting jostled around. Trying to balance myself, I found it harder and harder to see clearly with only headlights and intermittent streetlights. The gap was only twenty-five feet between the speeding car and us.

  I was aiming my M4 over the top of the cab of the humvee, resting my elbows on the roof for support, when I saw movement in the back seat of the Passat. Due to the bobbing and the speed, I couldn’t really tell what they were doing, but I had an idea that they were up to no good. I held my aim as steadily as possible, no longer concerned about my cot at the airfield.

  And then they made their decision.

  From behind Waseem, Krogh screamed, “He’s gotta gun! He’s gotta gun!”

  I could see movement, but no gun. My mind was racing and I thought maybe Krogh had made a mistake. Then he spoke again. He started belting out, “He’s gonna shoot! He’s shooting! He’s shooting!” I could still see movement, but no weapon yet. If they were shooting, I couldn’t hear it in the commotion and I felt no rounds zinging past me either. But Krogh seemed very concerned that some very serious shit was coming down the pipe. I held my finger on the trigger, bracing for the worst.

  Soon the left rear door of the Passat cracked open, shut, and then swung open fully. Immediately I thought of the TV shows like Cops, or really, any high-speed chase footage for that matter. At the end of the car chase the car either slows down or crashes, the door or doors swing open, and anywhere from one to four guys take off running in different directions. I assumed that was now happening. Like many Americans, I still believed that real life was much like TV.