Good God, You're Dragging It Out

Ms. X called me out of the blue midday Saturday. She asked me what I'd be doing for the Halloween weekend. I told her of a club I'd be for a costume party and Seelo's birthday. She told me she'd try to get some friends to go and that we might see each other there.

I finished the conversation with an unenthusiastic, "Awesome. Hope to see you there."

I never actually expected to see her there.

-

I picked Cardigan up early in the evening and stopped at Don's apartment for some pre-drinking. Cardigan was dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood. I took shots of Goose in quick succession, and Don, Plucker, Wall, Cardigan, and I headed out to the party.

Ms. X called me on the ride out, "I don't think my friends are gonna make it, but I really wanna go. Do you think you can scoop me up?"

I had Cardigan in the passenger seat, and Ms. X was my high school girl. She's that one girl that guys always bring up when they talk about their history. The only smart and logical thing to do was to not pick her up.

"Yea," I replied, "Sure, no problem."

I don't know if it was the vodka talking, or if I really wanted to see her that bad.

-

As soon as I saw Ms. X, I wish I hadn't. She was wearing a strapless black dress, short on her thighs. Her hair had been done up all fancy the way I used to love when we were still in high school. Absolutely gorgeous.

And I honestly found myself wishing that Cardigan was not in the car.

Needless to say, the car ride was silent and awkward. I hadn't even bothered to introduce the two girls to each other. And to make matters worse, I actually missed an exit, which consequently made the ride about twenty minutes longer than it needed to be.

-

Then, I ditched her.

I didn't know what else to do, but the ride had just been too awkward. As soon as we set foot in the club, I took Cardigan and bolted into the crowd, leaving Ms. X by herself.

I found Seelo's party, and Cardigan and I spent the rest of the night around my old boys from the Wood. We never saw Ms. X for the remainder of the night. She called, assumingly to find me, but I never answered.

Ultimately, she bumped into her friends -- or so she told me -- and insisted that it would be more convenient if they take her home instead.

-

I called Ms. X the next morning to apologize. I'd been an asshole.

"I just..." she said in a soft, whiney voice on the phone, "I dunno, I just never saw you at all the whole night..."

"I know, I know," I said apologetically, "It's just that it got really hectic. You know how it is." I was lying. I did it on purpose, and I had left her stranded at the club. "Maybe next time. Next time, I'll be more ... accomodating."

"Maybe," she said.

I truly don't want things to be awkward when I'm with her. I tell myself that it was bad timing -- that I was with a girl, that I was partying with all the old boys we knew back in high school, the same guys that know what we were and what we had done. But I don't know if things can ever not be awkward.

And I find myself wondering to myself, if things had been different -- if it weren't for Cardigan in the passenger seat, if it weren't for the boys from the Wood, if it were any other night, under any other circumstances, would it have been different? Would I have manned up? Would I have been more ... accomodating?

Stabbs's Battle Update Brief

yo whats up, (if this text is fucked up, i blame the drugs)

yah i'm in germany atm. dis shit sucks, 2 months in and i'm already back here. the care here is a little too much, everyday i get 10-20 random people come in and say hi, and ask me if i need anything or blah blah. i did get to meet General Casey, and General Wallace. anyways the blast....

[identifying information removed]that shit was crazy. one minute we're all sitting in the stryker half asleep, i remember looking up at the DVE and taking note that we were moving really slow. a few weeks ago an IED blew up and put a 5 foot crater in the middle of the street. we were the lead vehicle so the driver rolled onto the sidewalk to bypass the hole, the remember feeling the small bump going over the curb, then BOOM shit kinda goes hazy, i know i was out for like a minute or two, something hit my face and knocked me out, my life WAS NOT flashing before my eyes or none of that shit, i honestly can't remember what i was thinking about, i opened my eyes and my head is spinning, my hearing's shot, everything is blurry as shit, and i have no fucking clue whats going on.

my senses start coming back to me and everyone's screaming, im in total agony for a few seconds till i calm down and realize i'm still alive. i look around me and the door is open(not the hatch but the door) i see a SFC telling me to get out, and i try and stand but i fall on my face, i crawl out. they took all of us to a house a few meters away, and i start laughing, and i couldn't stop. i was laughing and saying mother fuckers blew us up, they blew us up those fucking haji mother fuckers. a few hours later i was on a plan heading to germany.

i have a broken ankle, two other guys have broken ankles but not as bad as mine, one other guy has a broken femar and now he's slipped into a coma or someshit, his body is healing but something fucked up with his head. the other 2 guys have already gotten surgery but im still waiting. my ankle is so fucking swollen the docs won't even touch me. i gotta wait until monday for the doc to look at my ankle. i dunno how long it's gonna take to heal but i know ill be back in Baghdad b4 you guys leave.

let me know how you're doing. seriously, i'm gonna be fine, so let me know what you guys are up to.

btw the IED was command wire, they ran a wire about 1/2 a kilometer through a dirt field and into a house where they waited for us.

You're Only Making This Harder on Yourself

::::::

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for... is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
-J.S. Mill

::::::

I get frustrated that this country is so broke sometimes, and I'm not talking about only the things we've broken--the rubble and crumbling infrastructure--I'm talking about the broken Iraqi people. We're here to help them... but a lot of days, I'm just like, "Fuck. Iraqis." I could live the rest of my life without ever dealing with another Iraqi.

They're unprofessional, suffer an epic sense of entitlement, and they're complete cowards.

For example, we've hired a local contractor to fix the plumbing of a school. He agreed on a generous payment, took the initial payment, and then never did any fucking work on it. He said that he did only the work agreed to, that the rest of it doesn't concern him. And he demands the rest of the money. Another guy we tried to hire, he said that he'd e-mail us the scope of labor in 24 hours, but 72 hours later, we're calling him again for the e-mail. Another guy, Abu Ali, the one who runs the little convenience shop on the COP, he'll promise to order us 7 t-shirts of very specific colors that we wrote down in Arabic for him, and a week later, he'll give us 7 black t-shirts. It's like the idea of honoring agreements is completely mystical and foreign to them.

Part of that problem might be their sense of entitlement. They expect hand-outs from us, and if we give them nothing, we are evil and selfish and greedy for it. Seems like every time I patrol the streets, Iraqi children would swarm me and demand money, chocolate, and pens from me. I tell them I don't have anything, and they harass and crowd me. They'll even try to jack my pen when I take it out to write down notes, like, say the name of shopkeeper we're talking to. It makes me nervous because it takes an incredible amount of self-control to keep myself from smacking some street rat with the butt of my rifle.

Even detainees make unreasonable demands: few weeks ago, some detainees in our holding area rejected the food we gave them. They said they wanted better food. It was the same fucking food that we eat (no pork that day), but it wasn't good enough for them. Few days ago, a detainee refused medical treatment for his diabetes unless we gave him a cigarette. YOU'RE A FUCKING DETAINEE--YOU HAVE NO BARGAINING POWER WITH ME, ASSHOLE.

I'd heard that the Abu Ghraib scandal destroyed our credibility and moral high ground, but I think if anything, it's only given this nation of career victims an excuse to beg for more handouts and make more demands from us. It's only given them an excuse to pawn the work of rebuilding this country on us.

The worst thing of all that they're fucking cowards. There are no brave Iraqis willing to fight for themselves; there are only opportunistic bullies who are ready to rob others of their possessions, opportunities, and lives. In the dark of night, they kill each other for their houses, for blood, for U.S. contracts. They are a nation of bystanders willing to watch their homeland burn instead of sacrificing to improve their own lives.

And.... that's just how the people are. I didn't come here to fix the people. I came here to fix our mistakes, not Allah's.

::::::

I know I don't really mean all the things I just wrote, at least, not all of the time. Sometimes, I almost believe that they deserve our sacrifices. But God damn, man, fucking help me help you. Stop blowing up my friends and maybe your country will get somewhere....

Closer

Have you heard about what happened to [Stabbs]? The vehicle he was in got hit by a VBIED. All the bones in one of his feet were broken. They already have him back in Germany. It is believed that he may lose his foot. Not sure exactly, but this is coming from [Regiment]. Do you know how to get in contact with him on the civilian side?

-Cowboy, Friends, 22:35 24 Oct 2007

::::::

Stabbs is a cocky son of a bitch. Got his nickname when he came to the unit last Christmas. Drunk on German brew, he got into a bar fight at the bahnhof with some grunts from another squadron. By the time he walked away, some chump was bleeding on the pavement. The other guy claimed he was stabbed, and despite beating down both the bloody schmuck and the criminal charge, Stabbs was branded with a new name.

He would've been in my unit, but my team leader at the time, SGT Daredevil, didn't want to deal with Stabb's attitude, so he traded him away for someone easier to lead.

I've known the guy pretty much my entire Army career, and while a lotta people hate his blunt arrogance, he cracks me up. People who don't know dismiss him as an immature narcissist, but he only seems that way because he's more concerned about being right than he is about being liked. Consequences-be-damned, he calls out bullshit even on those who've got rank on him, and that makes him unpopular.

Obviously, I see a bit of myself in him. He's a bit rougher around the edges--different, but still the same--in other words, a brother in arms.

I can not will not accept that he might be crippled only two months into the deployment. That this is it for him, that he might be discharged from the Army, that when I got back to Europe, I would have one less travel mate to blow paychecks with. Who the fuck am I supposed to celebrate surviving deployment with? I'm grateful that he got out of that Stryker alive, but God damn, I am angry and frustrated because there's no immediate way to reach him. I shot him an e-mail but who knows when he'll respond...

This is fucking bullshit. This is bullshit.

The Gods Must be Crazy

::::::

Word was that the target house possibly had 20 armed JAM fighters and maybe 5 Iranians. The target himself was a mid-level terrorist, and maybe his capture would help us cuff the HVT (high value target) running JAM operations in our sector.

It must've been only 0145 hours when the platoon rolled onto the target street. Our PL, Pile-Driver, would paint the target house's gate with a green laser. My Stryker, the platoon sergeant's truck, would then breach the gate, and the dismounted squad on the ground would swarm into the courtyard, shotgun breach the door, and clear the house. That was the plan.

So as we pulled onto the street, the PL's truck drove past the target house and stopped at the next intersection to seal the cordon. 1LT Pile-Driver's truck faced away from the target house. He couldn't see the target house, so he had to lean out of the hatch, and half-hanging off of the Stryker, he flashed the lazer at the target fence. He was in full body armor and tethered to the truck by only his right arm and the radio cord, so he couldn't keep a steady beam on the fence. The green dot danced back and forth, a few feet to the left of the actual gate.

"Warhog 7, I'm lazing the breach site. Do you see it?"

"Warhog 6, copy that. Breach in 3!" the platoon sergeant said over the comms. He ducked down into the truck. "Everyone hold on, we're breaching!"

Warhog 7 braced himself against the opening of the hatch. The Stryker lurched forward, crashed through the brick wall, and backed out over the debris. My ass had 2 seconds of hang time before I slammed violently back onto the bench. Almost lost control of my weapon, too. Warhog 7 ducked back down into the vehicle and told us, "OK, we're doing it again!"

Again, the Stryker shot forward, but this time, it crashed through the iron gate. Moments later, shotgun blasts rang through the air.

We got the wrong house. We scared the shit out of the FPS guards sleeping in the courtyard and raided what turned out to be an office for the Dawa Party. FPS (Facility Protection Service) guards operate under the Ministry of Interior, and the Dawa Party is Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's party.

When we asked the FPS guards if they knew our target, they said, "Mister, he lives down the street. I show you."

They walked us a few houses down the street and pointed at another house. The lights inside were out. Again, we breached the gate with my Stryker. This time, one of the corner pieces of the slat armor fell off. We dropped ramp and retrieved it. The gnarled steel still had single bricks wedged into it.

We didn't know that the SCO was watching us through the Eye in the Sky when my Stryker crashed through the first house's brick wall. Reportedly, he'd radioed our company commander and yelled, "I thought this was supposed to be a soft knock! What the fuck was that!?!" Our rationale: with potentially 25 enemies, we needed to strike quickly to avoid a costly fire fight. But of course the "20 armed JAM fighters" were nowhere to be found. In the second house, we found the target and 4 generations of his family, sleeping the dreams of villians and madmen.

It came down over the net that we were to detain every male in the house and also the three FPS guards who'd helped us out. Among the 10 men we detained, one of them was missing a foot and two others also had to be brought into the detention facility on stretchers. The interrogators didn't even talk to them because they were so old, the interrogators were afraid they'd die under questioning. My platoon left a squad to guard the detainees and then popped smoke. They returned to Taji for refit while we sat around with the Al-Janabi tribe.

But it doesn't matter because we got the target.

On his wedding night, too.

He cried and cried and cried. Through his tears, he begged me to let him go. He pointed at my feet and made a kissing motion. I'd have felt bad for the guy if he wasn't a known weapons smuggler.

At one point, I went up to the bars, and said to him in English, "I know you don't understand me. You're probably thinking about your new bride. Don't worry, your buddy Ali will take care of her. He says you don't deserve her anyways."

::::::

Identity

::::::

The price for my head is $10,0000 USD. I'm just an enlisted soldier. The price for an officer is $20,000. And the price for an interpreter is $30,000.

The 'terps at my COP always roll on mission with sunglasses and bandanas on. Some wear black ski masks in the 120° heat. Those things won't protect them from getting shot by a sniper, but it will protect their families. Without their masks, someone might recognize the 'terp on the street and then the 'terp's family disappears. It's such a paranoid world they work in, they don't even use their own names. They use codenames like Star, Roma, Fly, and Fox. Who knows when a dirty 'terp will blow a good 'terp's cover?

Today, one of the lieutenants, a West Pointer, blew Fox's cover. The West Point LT brought in NPs to our COP unanounced. The NP are National Police, which are like regular police, except they wear blue digital camouflage. (I'm sure they're different in other ways, but I don't see any.) The NP might as well all be JAM members with badges and AKs.

Because the West Point LT brought the NPs unanounced, Fox was walking around with his face exposed. He saw them and did an about-face for his room. He hid in there until they left. He thought about his wife and daughter. They live across Baghdad from here, and there are 7 million people living in Baghdad. But the NP saw his face and this is the second time the West Point LT has blown Fox's cover. And now he wants to quit.

The Parent Trap

Today I didn't even have to use my AK,
I gotta say it was a good day
-Ice Cube, Today was a Good Day

::::::

My first mission outside the wire, we drove around our AO and did snap TCPs (traffic control points). The idea is that you stop a handful of random cars in traffic, pull them out, search their vehicles, search their bodies, check their ID cards, and maybe you'll end up catching a white Open shit-packed with AK-47's. It's a fucking random and haphazard way of trying to nab the bad guys, but our commanders wanted to show presence in the area.

Anyway, as I was pulling security on a crossroad, a lady in a burqa, one them all-black Arabian ninja costumes, walks right through our operation with her 2 little boys. I looked around at the other soldier across the intersection and there was no reaction.

"What the fuck!?!" I said.

My buddy 5 meters away asks, "What?"

"Dude, this bitch just walked through our AO with her two kids like we didn't exist. What the fuck kind of irresponsible-assed parents are these Iraqis? I know I wouldn't walk my kids through a military operation with Strykers and soldiers and guns. Out in Sadr City like this, we're fucking RPG magnets, man!"

"I guess that's how you know we're safe. When they'll walk right through our operation like that."

That day, again and again parents would walk their kids right through our operations while we pulled people outta their cars and frisked them for contraband. Even if they weren't lying to me, even if their neighborhood is the safest place in all of Iraq, I was stunned that they acted like we don't all have loaded weapons with at least 210 rounds of ammo each.

Today, our PL (platoon leader) briefed us that now that Ramadan was winding down, we have something new to think about: this year, Airsoft replicas of AK-47s and MP5s have been an extremely popular gift for young boys. Already, some unit was on patrol when some jackasses popped off some fireworks, and when the soldiers turned around, there was a 12-year-old boy pointing an AK-47 at the soldiers. Of course the kid got shot. He was pointing what looked like a real weapon at infantrymen. The unit medevac'ed the kid outta there to a hospital, and I think he'll be OK. Better than OK, he'll be smarter--he'll know not to point anything that looks like a weapon at U.S. soldiers. And... I guess we gotta be a little more hesitant to squeeze the trigger. Maybe, but probably not.

But what the fuck kind of irresponsible-assed parents are gonna give their kids realistic toy guns to point at American soldiers?

Iraqi parents, that's who.

Fear and Loathing

Snipers can terrorize and shut down forces much larger and better armed than them. The only real way of dealing with a sniper is to kill the sniper, but in the city, it is almost impossible to catch or kill the sniper. We think there's a sniper or sniper team that's been rolling around in a van, following U.S. patrols and taking potshots at us. The guys want to torture the sniper when we find him, but I wonder if we ever will. It took the FBI a lot of coordination, a lot of time, and a lot of victims to catch the Beltway Sniper back in 2001.

We've just started with operations, and this sniper has completely changed the way we operate. Everything is speed, violence of action, and limiting exposure time. This is not how I want to roll for the next 14 months. This is not how we get the locals to like and trust us.

I don't know. I just don't know. We need to kill the snipers.