At that point I’d had enough. “Look,” I said, “I’ve gotta go. If you’ll excuse me.”
The bartender saw me making my move and walked over to the table, cutting off my exit. For the first time I noticed how tall she was. She said, “You’re leaving us so soon?”
“Yeah, I gotta run. Sorry. I’d love to stay.”
Then she said, “Okay, hold on . . . let me just get the check.”
For a brief moment I thought that maybe this would be all right. I would be willing to pay for the one drink just to call it even. That would be the cost of my stupidity. She came back and handed me the slip of paper. It was a regular bar or restaurant check, and on it she’d written beside each other a one, a two, and a five. One-two-five. I thought about that for a second. Depending on where the missing decimal point was supposed to go, I had a two out of three shot at being okay. Twelve and a half euros for a glass of ouzo would be pretty steep, but whatever.
I looked up and smiled at her, reaching for my wallet. She returned the smile, menacingly. Keeping it low so none of them could see the contents, I pulled out a five-euro bill. At the same time I scanned the rest of the bar looking for any other human movement. There was nothing.
I handed her the five euros. Without moving a muscle she looked at it and laughed. “What is that?”
“It’s five euros,” I said. “For the one euro, twenty-five cent glass of ouzo.”
She stuttered condescendingly, “Wh . . . th . . . that’s a bottle of our best ouzo. And I opened it for you.” She was still halfway grinning.
I said, “Well okay . . . then you can keep the change.”
She threw her head back and laughed.
“That’s all I’ve got. Sorry. Take the five or leave it.” I wasn’t sure where I was going with this.
“Well what about a credit card?” she asked, her eyes narrowing as she began to hover over me. “You owe me one hundred twenty-five euros.”
“Nope,” I said, as I further veiled my wallet from view, hiding my two credit cards. “You think I’d walk around Athens with a credit card?” I continued to look beyond the tall woman, still trying to determine if there was anyone else in our presence. I put my wallet back in my pocket.
I looked away from her and glanced at the glass of ouzo sitting on the table in front of me. A grin began to tug at the corners of my mouth. The fat man on my left was starting to get fidgety, while the blond girl sitting on my right continued to smile at me hopefully. I figured she was probably getting a healthy cut out of this whole thing. The tall woman was still hovering over me, probably wondering if this budding smile was a good sign. What she couldn’t see—what she didn’t want to believe—was that there was no laughter behind those eyes.
I looked at the glass of ouzo again. Out of the side of my right eye, I took another notice that the seats on which we were sitting were red vinyl. Red vinyl seats in a bar are always shady. I started wondering just how serious this was—being pinned in behind the table, with my back to the wall. I guessed that my life could have been in danger, depending on how I handled the next few seconds. There is no way to know who else is in this building.
I looked at the glass of ouzo again. I noticed the dim light glinting off the ice cubes floating in the liquor. What would Jimbo do? I watched a drop of condensation slide down the side of the glass and then I made my decision. They’re bluffing. I’m all in.
I reached for the glass with my right hand and picked it up. I said, “Okay. All right . . .” I looked at the fat man and nodded, as if I were about to take a drink. He only briefly made eye contact with me—and he looked decidedly nervous. I looked at the tall woman with a full smirk now. She looked a bit relieved—and also a bit pleased with herself for potentially being able to intimidate me into taking the drink. She knew that I was about to bring it up to my lips. She blinked, and instead of seeing me, she saw a dollar sign sitting in front of her.
I raised the glass. Then, using my hips, I pushed the table away and stood up. For an instant, she wanted to stand her ground—but then she took half a step back. That was all I needed. One last look at the average-looking blond girl, and I launched the glass of ouzo across the otherwise empty room and into the far wall. It shattered, leaving a large wet ouzo mark dripping down the wall.
The fat man and the blond girl no longer existed as far as I was concerned. I could feel them wilt in the presence of aggression. I could sense it. In a final fleeting look at the two still seated, I see an average Iraqi father and daughter—confused and terrified after we’ve kicked in the door to their home. They look completely overpowered. They are stunned, and frozen.
Again, the woman looked as though she wanted to hold her ground—as if this had never before happened to her. She stammered quickly that she was going to call the police.
I responded, “You call the fucking police.”
Then she looked me dead in the eye. She knew then that I was serious. She stepped back, surprised and now uncertain.
I moved as nimbly as I could between the table and the woman. As I passed her, I realized that I was actually the taller one. I looked down at her without emotion. I had gone blank. I considered killing her then—right there, in front of the other two, but decided instead just to grab my coat and scarf and to be on with it.
On the way up the stairs, toward the door, the thought crossed my mind that they still could have locked me in—and that the Brute Squad in the back room, could be gearing up with brass knuckles and chains at this very second. With each step that idea concerned me a little more.
I could see daylight through a small pane of glass on the door at the top of the stairs. With each labored step I expected to hear them call for me to stop. I reached the door and turned the handle. It opened, and I walked out onto the bustling Athenian street. I quickly wrapped my scarf around my neck and threw on my black coat. With my heart racing, I walked quickly away.
For months I’d been downplaying the fact that I was a soldier. My hair was long, I had a scruffy shadow, and I liked to go on rants about how stupid the invasion had been. But I couldn’t avoid it now. Turning the tables on the near-robbers had spelled such satisfaction. I had been parched—my veins constricted and starved of adrenaline—for months after quitting the war cold turkey. In the bar it had come back in a drenching torrent, bringing back color and sound—bringing everything back to life, all in an instant. I had been completely comfortable with having had my back against the wall—literally. It hadn’t been a tourist in there that had thrown the glass and contemplated killing—it had been a soldier. A soldier alone, without an army.
As the feeling subsided, I lamented that while a part of me wanted it, they might not ever just be mountains again—that in all probability, they would always be the Hindu Kush when I looked at them. And I would probably never be the person I was before the war.
“The argument that oil’s not worth fighting for . . . or that you shouldn’t go to war for cheap oil—that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” A U.S. Air Force vet was making the case in the heart of Cairo’s old section.
Since he was of Middle Eastern descent, I thought maybe he had some sort of a moral authority on the subject. I was eating dinner at a kebab restaurant in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar with some Americans I’d met earlier in the week. After two months of traveling, I’d finally made my way back to the Arab world. And I did feel normal there—like that was where I was supposed to be.
“Oil’s pretty goddamn important if you ask me,” he continued. “Our whole fucking economy is based on it. Our whole way of life is designed around easy access to oil.”
I was skeptical and thought I was listening to an industry lobbyist. But then he made his point.
“You know,” he said, “if only a few countries had fresh water and they didn’t want to share it, or they wanted to jack up the prices, don’t you think we’d have a real gripe with ’em? Don’t you think it would be worth fighting for?”
I said, “Y
eah, but, I mean, water’s water. You can live without oil.”
“Yeah, you can live without oil, but then how the fuck are you gonna get home from here? What are you gonna to do for a living in a non-oil-based economy when you get there? No cars, no planes . . . you gonna be a farmer? And plow a field? Oil is the single most important resource we have. And it belongs to everyone. Just because it happens to be underground in a few select countries, it doesn’t make it their oil. It’s the world’s oil.”
He was on a roll. “I say hell yeah we give a hard time to the countries that want to control the market or destabilize the market.” Then he tacked on: “And I’m a Democrat.”
I wasn’t sure where his argument stacked up in current scholarly geo-political circles, but in a strange way it made sense. Oil is pretty goddamn important.
This is the world we live in. In our world, oil is pretty goddamn important.
Home had become a strange, foreign place to me, but I didn’t really have a choice in whether or not to go back. My parents couldn’t understand why I was staying away; my friends couldn’t figure it out either. I had tried so hard to make it home in one piece, and now I was voluntarily avoiding it. I didn’t know what I was doing. Even when I remembered the times when I would have given anything to be home safe, it didn’t register. When I thought about going home my head filled with static. I didn’t know how to allow myself to be safe anymore. I couldn’t let the damn thing go.
But outside a shady street café in Cairo one afternoon, I realized that if I were going to live like that, then the RPG might as well have flown off the launcher in Tal Afar. The bomb might as well have exploded in the valley. The result would have been the same.
On the long, westward flight across the Atlantic I started dozing and thinking, in that uncomfortable, half-asleep, upright position. I was thinking about the person I had once been. Leaning my head on the window, officer school started replaying itself on a reel in my head.
I look up from my bunk where I’m polishing my boots and roll my eyes. Cadet Moore is yelling for us to get outside for a formation. He’s screaming the order, red-faced and disheveled. He looks like he’s just gotten the smoking of his life. I wonder what he did. I wonder why this looks like it’s going to involve me.
Ten minutes later I am still in the push-up position, sweat rolling down my nose and forming a dark spot on the dusty ground, when the sergeant calls the platoon to attention.
I close my eyes and exhale before popping to my feet smartly.
Master Sergeant Taylor is glaring at us. “Cadets, you are out here for one reason.” He pauses for effect. “Your peer has left his weapon unattended. And I found it.” He is trying to make eye contact with as many cadets as he can.
After his gaze passes mine, I roll my eyes.
“This is why you are being punished,” he continues. “This group,” he says, referring to us, “does not seem to understand the significance of this act—this negligent care for your personal weapons.” He pauses again. “This weapon is the single most important thing in your life. One day . . .” he stops abruptly, as if he has just remembered something, his gaze becoming distant. “One day . . . one of you standing here will have your life saved by this weapon.” He holds it up in front of him.
I think to myself, yeah right, Mister Desert Storm/ Mogadishu-man.
He’s from a different era. He’s such a hardass that he doesn’t realize none of us will ever actually get the chance to use a weapon in self-defense.
Then he repeats himself, measuring each syllable out carefully. “You mark my words. One day, one of you will have your life saved by this weapon. And you will thank me for teaching you how to use it.” He is eyeballing a cadet in the first rank. I am still sweating, my arms still tingling from the push-ups.
I see that he is in earnest and I almost feel bad for him. He’s not talking about our future—he’s talking about his past. He is somewhere else, in some far-off land—talking about situations that will never come about again in our lifetime. And it means something to him. I see now that this man can in no way relate to us.
I am a cadet. It is 1999. And I know that it will always just be a misguided, boyish dream—me saving my own life with a gun, in a war.
Epilogue
A man’s got to know his limitations.
Sometimes I think everything I’ve lived since the war is a dream. Like I’m watching my life from the outside, as if it were someone else’s. There are days when I think (know) that the bomb that landed on my platoon really exploded, killing us all. It makes me think that what I’ve lived in the time since is just something my mind has conjured in that instant between the detonation and the void.
Because of this, I hold on too tight. I am too controlling, too serious. There is an urgency and desperation in everything I do. I am trying to do as much as I can in this extended split-second before that bomb bursts. I wish this moment would last forever.
Killing is wrong, war is miserable. I miss being a soldier. I cannot reconcile these things.
O’Brien explained it best to me over the phone about a year after we got back from Iraq. He was in Boston, I was in Dallas, and we were both out of the Army. He had despised the job as much as anyone—the two deployments, the combat, the infantry, everything. He always said that he’d wished he’d just stayed in the landscaping business. But in the end, on the phone, I asked him if he was still bitter about the whole ordeal.
He said of course he was. And then, in his Boston accent, he added, “Yeah, it was miserable . . . ya know . . . prob’ly the wust period of my life. I wouldn’t eva do that shit again in a million yea’s.” I agreed.
Then he paused. “But ya know . . . we did have a pretty good time, didn’t we?”
A lot of people can’t understand a contradiction like that. But we can. We are enlightened.
Acronyms
ACP: assault command post
CP: command post
FARP: forward area refueling and rearming point; “farp”
GPS: global positioning system
ICOM: intercom; handheld radio; “I-com”
IED: improvised explosive device; roadside bomb
KIA: killed in action
LZ: landing zone
MRE: meal ready-to-eat
NCO: noncommissioned officer
NODs: night observation devices; “nods”
PT: physical training
QRF: quick reaction force
RPG: rocket-propelled grenade
RTO: radio-telephone operator
SAW: squad automatic weapon; “saw”
TOC: tactical operations center; “tock”
UXOs: unexploded ordnance
XO: executive officer
Acknowledgments
I could not have succeeded as an officer or as a writer without the assistance of a great number of people.
On the Army side, I will be forever indebted to the NCOs who taught me not only how to be a soldier and an officer in time of war, but also the life lessons that go along with that kind of responsibility. They are Jim Collins, Steve Croom, Vincent Cuevas, Chuck Nye, Rudy Romero, and Timothy Lindsey.
However, it is the soldiers who served in my platoons in combat who truly made this story possible. They were the finest soldiers I could have ever asked for, and it was a privilege to serve with them. From 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, they are: Brian Bailey, Luis Barajas, Bryce Beville, Jason Boudreau, Chad Corn, Andrew Creighton, Anthony DeGhetto, Rito Diaz, Eric Divona, Thomas Dougherty, Michael Dufault, Kwesi Hector, Kyle Johnson, Terrance Kamauf, Brant Krueger, Jose Limon, Josh Nantz, Ryan Lowe, Christopher Morton, Peter O’Brien, Roger Paguaga, Joseph Pascoe, Craig Redmond, David Reid, Michael “Doc” Rojas, Timothy Rush, John Smerbeck, Nolan Speichinger, James Taylor, Kyle Walter, and Tony Wickline.
From 3rd Platoon, Delta Company, they are: Jesus Aguilar, Nick Ashley, Alex Estrada, Thomas Hemingson, Randell Jacobs, Matt Krueger, John Lombardo, Brandon Moose, Eric Poling, Carlos Torre
s, Michael Whipple, James Worley, and Trent Wykoff.
From Bravo’s headquarters section they are: Reggie Garner, Ryan Kuykendall, Roger Shields, and Peter Sprenger.
I am also grateful to Captain B. and Mike Jones for having faith enough to allow me to lead my men as I saw fit. For their friendship I thank my comrades Mike Bandzwolek, Phil Dickinson, Sam Edwards, Shawn Graff, Rich Ince, Lauren Makowsky, Brian Payne, Clay White, Jim Willette, and Jason Wimberly.
On the book side, I offer deepest thanks to Dr. Michael Leggiere of Louisiana State University in Shreveport. Mike not only taught me the art of writing, but he has since continued to mentor me as I hone the craft. Without his urging, this book would never have been written.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my agent, Jim Hornfischer, for working tirelessly to find this book a home, as well as to Richard Kane at Zenith Press for taking a chance on it. And I’d like to thank Steve Gansen for spending more hours than he should have explaining the fine art of editing to me over the phone.
I would like to thank my friends and family for reading and rereading the manuscript. They continually offered superb advice. For any errors of fact, interpretation, or omission throughout the book, I am solely responsible.
Last, but certainly not least, I thank Sash for her unending love and support. Without her patience and understanding, this would not have been possible.
First published in 2007 by Zenith Press, an imprint of MBI Publishing Company, 400 First Avenue North, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA
Copyright © 2007, 2010 by Brandon Friedman
Hardcover edition published in 2007. Digital edition 2010.
All rights reserved. With the exception of quoting brief passages for the purposes of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the Publisher.
The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without any guarantee on the part of the author or Publisher, who also disclaim any liability incurred in connection with the use of this data or specific details.
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