Kaboom (8 page)

“Damn it,” he continued, stalking over to the barrel where the family huddled around the fire for warmth. He shooed them away and doused the flames with water from his CamelBak hydration system. Smirking, he reached a burly Midwestern hand into the barrel, pulling out a very charred, but still recognizable, homemade wooden rifle stock. I shook my head in disbelief as Suge started grilling the grandmother. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

“A mother protecting her son?” I asked the terp.

“Yes,” he answered. “Crazy female.”

I instructed the Gravediggers to start policing up the hut and blindfold the two detainees while I inventoried our bounty; SFC Big Country walked back to his Stryker to update Bravo Troop headquarters. As Staff Sergeant Boondock and Sergeant Axel led the two men away, I snuck a glance toward the family left behind. The grandmother stared stonily into the distance, seemingly oblivious of her departing son, his friend, and the strange Americans. Two of the younger women fought back tears, while the third walked back inside, nursing the youngest of the children. The other three children wept openly, and one of them tried to run after our detainees before the women collectively scooped him off of the ground.

As we walked back to my Stryker, the sniper rifle and accessory parts in hand, I looked over at Suge. “I feel kind of bad, you know? These guys
are probably just stooges, trying to make some money.” I nodded back at the women and the children. “I mean, it's not like this is their fault. How are they going to support themselves now?”

He looked back at me in a blizzard of skepticism. “Do not feel bad, LT. They should not have bred with stupid mother fuckers.”

One didn't always have to use big words or utilize profound analogies to articulate a philosophical known.

The army divides
its officers into three categories: company-grade officers (lieutenants and captains), field-grade officers (majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels), and general officers (the top dogs with stars on their collars). Concurrently, there are three levels of warfare: tactical, operational, and strategic. As a junior officer who spent his entire time of service in the tactical function, my dealings with general officers were minimal, but I often interacted with—and took orders from—field grades.

I respected many of the field-grade officers I served under or encountered and found them to be men of honor, strength, and great wisdom. Men like our brigade commander, whose strict adherence to the counterinsurgency principle of precision targeting set the tone for our brigade for the entire deployment. Men like my first ROTC instructor, a devout 101st Airborne loyalist and pupil of General Petraeus, who back in 2002 convinced me I had the swagger required to be a combat-arms officer. Men like our unit's first squadron commander, who had established the cavalry in the middle of the historical infantry land of Hawaii with as much Stetson-wearing, spur-sporting pizzazz as the ghosts of Teddy Roosevelt and Jeb Stuart and George Patton demanded.

And then there were the other field grades.

For whatever reason, these other field grades always seemed to outnumber the quality ones. And they were seemingly everywhere in Iraq, intent on riding the bureaucratic beast in all its protectionist glory. As with any professional organization, the army taught me to respect the rank, if not the person. And so I did. Unlike other professional organizations though, the army mandated that I carry out these men's orders successfully and without complaint, even when they directly assaulted all known logic and experience.
And so I did, hiding my concerns from my subordinates as much as possible in a combat environment, because I was just a lieutenant and just a platoon leader and probably didn't understand the bigger picture. While I was often frustrated, I was never defiant.

None of that changed the truth, though, that inept careerists were as much a part of the military fabric as the camouflage pattern and liquid eggs for breakfast, and my experiences in Iraq in this regard were certainly nothing new in the annals of war. The players never changed, only their names.

Major Moe was the most prevalent type of other field grade. Major Moe wasn't so much a person as he was a trend; nicknamed after the character in the classic
Three Stooges
films, Major Moe could be found, in multitude, on any FOB in Iraq. If a field grade didn't grasp the nuances of counterinsurgency doctrine, didn't subscribe to the application of decentralized warfare, believed that all of the war's issues could be quantified into a PowerPoint presentation, spoke vaguely of concepts like standards and discipline but never applied those same banalities personally, and consistently displayed a clueless obtuseness about day-to-day operations, he qualified as a Major Moe. In short, Major Moe made the war for line soldiers more difficult—the exact opposite of what qualified as purpose for a deployed army officer—by focusing on irrelevant regulations and out-of-date procedures. Did it really matter that some soldiers wore fleece caps during the day when they were cold, when the Iraqi police still weren't hiring Sunnis in Saba al-Bor or anywhere else in the Taji region? It did to Major Moe and his noncommissioned officer (NCO) equivalent, Sergeant Major Curly. They didn't know any better, though, because they rarely left the FOB. And when they did . . . it got ugly.

One brisk winter afternoon, a certified Major Moe from our squadron visited Saba al-Bor. It was his first trip to our outpost, and our troop's artillery lieutenant, Skerk, gave him the tour. Major Moe picked up a bundle of
Baghdad Now
newspapers stacked at the top of the staircase and asked what they were.

“Those are copies of one of the Iraqi national papers, sir,” Skerk responded.

Major Moe was confused and let it be known. “Why are they here? Why aren't they being distributed?”

“We do distribute them, sir. Every patrol that goes out picks up a stack and distributes them to the locals and to the Iraqi security checkpoints.”

“That's excellent to hear.” Major Moe responded in classic Major Moe fashion, lips puckered, chin protruded, arms crossed, nodding the all-knowing nod that was supposed to convey male dominance. He continued speaking. “I assume you're gathering the atmospherics of this distribution?”

Skerk replied like most well-informed individuals would in such a circumstance. “Huh?”

Staff Sergeant Boondock and I were sitting nearby, at the computers, and could not help but openly eavesdrop at this point.

“Why, yes, of course,” Major Moe continued. “Atmospherics. We need to check on the local-nationals and ensure that they are all reading the newspaper.”

Staff Sergeant Boondock arched his eyebrows and turned to me. “Can most of these Iraqis read?” he whispered.

“Fuck no,” I whispered back. “Not here.” There were many hot, dusty towns between the two rivers of the Euphrates and Tigris, and none of them contained a very educated populace anymore; most of the learned had escaped to the cities or fled the country entirely. The global media called it the Iraqi diaspora. Saba al-Bor was no exception. Unfortunately, the newspapers we distributed were intended for a very distinct minority.

Skerk eventually sputtered out a reply. “Why would we . . . may I ask why, sir?”

“Because it's important to find out if they are reading them, that's why. Like this article here—” Major Moe's fingers slammed down onto the newspaper and pointed at Arabic words—“what is this article about? If we read it, then we can talk to the local-nationals about it when we're on patrol. Then we can gather those atmospherics and send them up to brigade.”

Skerk leaned over and looked at the newspaper. “Sir, that article is about dinosaurs evolving from birds.” An awkward pause followed. “And, sir, truthfully, I'm not sure that the papers we give out are really being read right now. I think most of the people use them to stay warm at night.”

“What?” Major Moe was outraged. “That's absurd! Like for blankets?”

An even longer awkward pause followed, as Staff Sergeant Boondock tried in vain to stifle his laughter.

“Uhh, no, sir. For their fires.”

This caused Staff Sergeant Boondock's snickering to turn into an all-out howl, while I slowly attempted to slide down my chair and out of Major Moe's view from the top of the staircase.

Our interactions with Major Moe weren't always so harmless. As the months of our deployment passed, these incidents became less hilarious and more and more maddening.

Just because a field grade wasn't a Major Moe, though, didn't mean he automatically qualified as the quintessential leader of men we all wanted to
follow. As a generation of men raised by single women and without fathers—as most of the junior officers and enlisted soldiers were—we didn't give our senior leaders much beyond the basic military courtesies demanded of us. Anything else they had to—and we wanted them to—earn. And we hoped they would, although it didn't always turn out that way. Like with Lieutenant Colonel Larry.

In all fairness, Lieutenant Colonel Larry was usually a hard worker and tactically competent. Though not as common as Major Moe, he still derived from an ideology and, thus, was embodied by multiple persons. All Lieutenant Colonel Larrys were bona fide Cold Warriors though—a derisive term used by junior officers of the global war on terrorism (GWOT) era to describe the senior officers and senior NCOs still hopelessly devoted to Cold War-era doctrine and techniques. Iraq, like most nonconventional counterinsurgencies that aimed for success, was fought on the ground level by small units, like squads and sections and platoons. Company and troop commanders became local gods who controlled civil works contracts and the electricity for entire townships; platoon leaders and squad leaders became their apostles, wandering the desert, spreading the good word, fighting battles for public perception one person at a time.

Field grades and senior NCOs had grown up not in this environment but in a far more rigid, structured army whose mission was simply to act on and destroy the enemy. Some thrived on this change and embraced the fluidity of a counterinsurgency, others had spent their careers on the strategic level planning for just this sort of war, but still others on the operational level seemed to have a very difficult time adapting and struggled to find purpose in our current operating environment. In these situations, friction tended to arise between the respective layers of leadership.

An incessant micromanager, our squadron's Lieutenant Colonel Larry often led through intimidation. It seemed like there wasn't a leader in his unit whose job he didn't threaten over the course of our fifteen months in theater. He claimed throughout the summer and the fall that Bravo Troop was the most undisciplined outfit he'd ever seen, which might have had an effect if he hadn't already said the same thing about the other reconnaissance troops in the squadron before and after that.

Clinical misery ran rampant through our squadron commander's staff, and some of his troop commanders had to take antianxiety medication in order to deal with his constant tirades. He routinely arrived unannounced
at the squadron's combat outposts—usually during banking hours, in the middle of the day, staying just long enough to chastise us on uniform standards and a loose piece of trash, but arriving back on the FOB in time for dinner. The outpost was our home, where we lived twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was more than natural for us to relax there when we weren't on patrol or on security, it was a necessity.

Behind his back, the Joes often whispered, “Do you always walk around in your full uniform back at your comfortable commander's pod on Taji,
sir
?” But due to NCO intervention, any thoughts of mutiny were instantly crushed. Most of the enlisted soldiers never spoke to Lieutenant Colonel Larry, on a personal level or otherwise, unless they had gotten into trouble for something like negligently discharging a round into a clearing barrel. Needless to say, those conversations were not conducted as teaching points, no matter how young the soldier was or how extenuating the circumstances were. All of this led to recurring, hushed comparisons to Mussolini: True, he made the trains run on time, but at what cost? It wasn't just his way or the highway; it was his way or the gallows.

I swore to myself every day that if I stayed in the army, I would never lead like this. I also swore to myself every day that if I decided to get out of the army when my tour of duty was up, I would never treat people like this.

A military unit is structured to mirror its commander and his leadership style and priorities. During my time as their platoon leader, the Gravediggers had a reputation for being tactically skilled and mission oriented, if a bit rough around the edges and (sometimes too) opinionated—certainly a reflection on both myself and SFC Big Country, for better and for worse. Concurrently, 2-14 Cavalry ultimately degenerated into a one-party fascist state. As one prominent senior NCO in the squadron often stated, “If this command were a marriage, that man would be in jail for abuse.” My eventually standing up to Lieutenant Colonel Larry after I was threatened, and then writing about it, would change nothing. Through words and actions, he made it clear that he viewed me as a rebellious punk lieutenant easily discarded for my unruliness—as I would eventually be, traded within the brigade to 1-27 Infantry Battalion and away from the platoon ten months into the deployment.

But that was still many months and many passages through the wilds away.

I couldn't see the makeshift
dip cup Private Van Wilder spat into, but I heard his deposit splash into the pool of tobacco brown before he answered my question.

“No worries, sir, we're doing fine.”