

# the wild wild west

##

##

## By

## Jevir Gray

### This is for Lee
Acknowledgments

I am thankful for everyone who has aided and inspired me to write this book.

To Christina- Your loving embrace and passion has indeed saved my life. Thank you for all the long hours of sustenance, support, and encouragement. My wife, my one and only, I will forever love you with all of my heart.

To my mom- Without your love and constant support, this book, and every other achievement of my life would never have been possible. Thank you for saving all my letters, without which I never would have had the aptitude to piece together my choppy memories.

And to Lee Viller's mom- Thank you for being so kind and gracious to me. Thank you for trusting me with your son's story. And most of all, thank you for raising Lee to be the man that he was. He will always be remembered as a true hero.

Intruder

Thirsty. So thirsty that it's hard to suck a full breathe of air through his parched, leathery throat. His eyes open slowly and take in his surroundings. It is dark; so dark that normal vision is impossible. His disorientation is brief, almost non-existent, because he already knows the layout of his small studio apartment. Eyes or no eyes, he knows his small room is L shaped with his bed in one corner, and a sink containing life-giving water on the other end. At the foot of the bed, a cramped love seat is nestled tightly into the corner. Opposite the couch, there is a small analog television from the nineties that is perched on top of an old card table. The single window offers no light as it gives an inane view of a brick wall belonging to the house next-door. The apartment has no heat and it is deathly cold inside. So cold, that getting out from under his thick blanket is even less an inviting task. He tries to ignore his thirst and go back to sleep, but after several uncomfortable minutes, his resistance proves to be in vain. Sleep will not come. He shivers as he slides slowly out of bed. His eyes have not yet fully awakened from their groggy disposition. The darkness hanging over him like a sheet transforms his trip across the room into a blind shuffle. Upon arriving at the sink, (or where he was sure the sink was to be) he reaches for the plastic drinking cup where his meager assembly of dishes lies on the counter.

A sound!

A sound from across the room interferes his sleep-deprived body from movement as his sightless eyes jerk open. He stairs into the darkness in the direction of the unwelcomed sound as his heart beats in his chest like a great propeller that has just come to life. ..Fwump.. ..FwUMP.. ..FWUMP.. The sound of breathing that is not his own echoes eerily from the corner of the apartment where the love seat is half-hidden behind the TV. He is unable to make out more than a silhouette among a mass of shadows. As his eyes begin to slowly grow accustom to their murky environment, he can verify that one thing is clear. There is someone in the room with him. Someone is sitting on his love seat.

"You should have known you could never leave." the strangers voice breaks the silence like a switchblade, sharp, and cold as ice. It becomes clear that a response is necessary, so he speaks the first thought that comes to his mind. "Who are you?" he exclaims, with a palpable uncertainty suspended in his voice. Before he can decide what exactly is taking place, the silence explodes as the shadowy figure erupts from his seated position. The stranger leaps over the TV, which catches his left foot in the air and collapses to the floor with a crash. "You're going to die here!" screams the unknown figure as he rapidly approaches. The sudden movement of the unexpected intruder takes him by surprise, and his heart abruptly comes to a halt, frozen with fear. Before he can react, before he mentally takes control of the situation, before he can think at all, his instincts kick in and his body lurches upward. What would be expected of gravity is that what goes up, must in turn, come back down, but this time is different. His body hurdles in shock, and then, to his astonishment, he feels a power take hold of him, as if a giant has grasped his whole body and lifted him off the ground. Utterly disregarding the laws of physics, his body springs upward. Void of all mechanical apparatus, he floats higher, and higher, until he can feel the cold ceiling against his back. His lungs feel like balloons filled with helium and a queer energy pulses through his limbs with every heartbeat. The physical feeling of taking flight is so incredible that he barely notices the unwelcome intruder beneath him, grasping at his feet, leaping just out of reach. He is filled with terror and exhilarating ecstasy at the same time, but before he can wrap his mind around the state of things, the stranger has seized his ankle and is pulling him back down into the darkness in spastic jerks. Back down, into the horrible darkness...

Wake up

I woke up abruptly to Sergeant Alvarez pulling on my ankle. "GRAY! GRAY! WAKE UP! Get dressed and go wait on the road!" before his words took form in my sleepy cognizance, he was gone. Sergeant Alvarez was a short, dark-skinned Venezuelan who had the mentality of a drill sergeant and would jump down your throat if you crossed him. He was First Sergeant Purdue's right hand man and I knew that if he was in my camp, Purdue probably wasn't far. Alvarez was moving down the line to wake up the soldiers next to me, Specialist Velasquez and Sergeant Mendoza. I looked at my travel-sized alarm clock and saw that it was five thirty seven in the morning. The sun would not rise for another hour and I was still unclear on why I was being woken early. It was not uncommon for me to be roused in the middle of the night for "missions," but this was unusual. Sergeant Alvarez did not frequently appear on my side of camp, and this was a strange hour; too early for a normal day, but too late for a nighttime guard duty. For the past two months (give or take a week) I've slipped into the routine of waking at seven every morning. My section NCO (Non-Commission Officer), Staff Sergeant Delacroix, usually rouses me. On a standard day, I would quickly get dressed and head across the camp on foot to the chow hall where I would eat breakfast before beginning work. Being woken at five thirtyish was in no way in my mind ordinary. Sergeant Alvarez, being the rarity that he was on my side of the camp, only added to my insecurities. These thoughts were fleeting however, I knew full well that as usual, none of my questions would be answered. This being the state of things, I silently stood up and began a hurried version of my morning routine. My uniform was on before my eyes were even open all the way, and I sat back down on my cot while I reached for my boots. I had worn this uniform so many times that putting it on required less thought process than spreading butter on bread. I had it down to a science.

First the trousers already suited with a belt. Affixed to this were a pocketknife and a small pair of foldable pliers; both in black canvas sheathes. The knife was a CRKT, which stood for Columbia River Knife and Tool. I often thought of my knife fondly as my CRICKET, as I suppose my mind must have automatically inserted the vowels that were not there. The foldable plier set was not a Leatherman, but a GERBER. Which I found to be far superior due to it's sliding mechanism rather than a folding one. Nine tools were included in my Gerber, while only six were included in the Leatherman. The Gerber, notwithstanding it's sleek design and attractive sliding function, was equipped with a small blade, a large blade, a saw, a nail file, flat-head screwdriver, a bottle opener, Phillips-head screwdriver, a scissor, and the pliers themselves, of course. These tools were affixed to my black canvas belt, which held up my light sandy brown cargo pants. A greyish brown t-shirt was tucked into this, followed by a quick shave. I shaved dry. Not completely dry, as I used a bottle of water for lubrication, but I never used shaving cream. The PX didn't sell it all the time, and I found it better to train my face for constant torment than for temporary torture. I used a Gillette three-blade razor, a bottle of water, and some face lotion my mom had sent me. It hurt like hell, but I managed. I moved on to the next step, my boots. I pulled the seams tight on either side of the leg to the back of the ankle, wrapped a black boot blazer around the base of my trousers, and laced the boots up, tucking the laces into the boot to finish. All this was done while my M-16 rested next to me on my rigid Army cot. I threw on my dusty, camo-brown BDU jacket, (Battle Dress Uniform) and strapped on my Kevlar. This all usually took me about five minutes regardless of my level of consciousness. Today, Sergeant Alvarez interrupted me in his broken English accent after step two. "Don't get all the way dressed, you don't need your whole uniform on for this, just go downstairs! NOW!" I was even more confused after this outburst, but Sergeant Alvarez had already moved on so an explanation was not likely. I slid my feet into my cheap rubber shower flip-flops and stood up. "This had better be good," I thought quietly to myself as I made my way down the old steel ladder from the roof where I slept. The sun was not yet above the horizon, but instead was hiding just below, turning the sky a dark grayish blue, highlighted by a brilliant pink-tangerine hue that tingled, dazzlingly, through the million specks of sand that hover always in the air. It was light enough for me to see without the help of a flashlight, which is rare in the dessert, so it must have been nearly daylight. This fact reminded me of how, not moments before, Alvarez had held a bright white light unnecessarily into my eyes, rudely awakening me. This practice, among many other disagreeable tactics, was not uncommon in my unit's upper command. As I got to the bottom of the ladder, I had only to pass the rubble of an ancient barracks before I arrived at the edge of my building. My squad had been assigned to live in this; the half bombed out remains of an old Dessert Storm Iraqi Air force barracks. As I turned the corner of the building I came into view of Alvarez' Humvee parked in the middle of the road. Its lights were turned on, and there, huddled around his vehicle, were the rest of the soldiers in my squad. I felt at that moment, like I was a prisoner in a concentration camp. "How did I get here?" I wondered. The story went back all the way to when I was getting ready to graduate from high school in a tiny town called Lafayette near Denver Colorado.

### Why I'm Here

My name is Jevir Gray and I am a soldier in the United Stated Army. This all started in the February of 2003 when my battalion got mobilized to join the action in the inevitable war against Saddam and his malicious regime. I joined the Army Reserves in the spring of 2001. My parents were going through a divorce and I needed desperately to get away from my broken home anyway that I could. I had no money and no job, so at the time, joining the army seemed like a pretty good idea to me. They would send me away at a moment's notice, without much question as to why I wanted to go, and if that weren't good enough, they would pay me to do it! I had seen the boot camp shows on TV, specifically on _Maury_ , when Kid's go BAD! I wanted to prove to my friends, my brother, and most of all, my parents, that I was tougher than all of them. Not to go on _Maury_ , but to go through REAL Army boot camp in Fort Knox, Kentucky. "The school of the hard Knox."

I initially wanted to be an MP (Military Police) because I figured the only way I was ever going to see any action was to be a cop. Of course, this was before 9/11, but I never became an MP, so none of that matters. I found out that my basic training send off date was before I could graduate High School and I had to wait two more weeks. Also, not to mention to my recruiter, I was still hot on a drug test and I knew the army wouldn't accept me until I could piss clean. I had smoked pot several times directly before walking into my recruiter's office, so I knew I had to wait at least another month. I broke down and admitted to my mom everything that I had been doing; the partying, drinking, and club drugs. I knew I wanted out of that world, always looking for the next high. I thought that the Army's basic training could be sort of a rehab for me. By the time I was clean enough for proper enlistment, the MP position had already shipped off. I was left with two options: Stay in my parent's house and wait for another MP position to appear, or ship out on the day of my high school graduation as a Ninety-Two Golf, a cook. Not only did I dreadfully want to leave shortly, but also the assignment of Army cook earned an extra deposit of six thousand dollars upon completion of basic training. That already sounded lucrative, but the recruiter also sold me on the promise that learning to cook was a timeless knowledge that could offer me profitable practice as a civilian. They would send me to Fort Knox, KY for basic training. Then I would be sent directly to Fort Lee, VA for my on-the-job cooking and nutrition training, AIT. (Advanced Individual Training.)

I thought all of this was a great idea. I'd have the ability to prove myself as a man, AND travel. Best of all, when I returned from boot camp, as a reservist/civilian, I'd be revered as a badass! (Or so I thought.) That already sounded great, and what's more, I'd have bonus money coming in. As my recruiter excitedly reminded me, "when you get back, you could buy a car! That's what most guys do with their money." I was young and gullible; I believed everything my recruiter told me. This led me to make the worst decision of my life thus far: I sold my soul. My life no longer belonged to me. It was the property of the United States Government. Things weren't so bad at first. I made it through basic training in Fort Knox, Kentucky and shipped directly to my next training facility in Fort Lee, Virginia. It was near the end of the summer in 2001; just in time to begin my advanced individual cooks training in the beginning of September. And so on that fateful day, eleven days into the month, our country was attacked. I will always remember that day. I was in a classroom full of young soldiers, listening to a lecture on some mind-numbing military version of nutrition training when a drill sergeant walked into the room and quietly whispered something in the instructor's ear. A moment passed, and as will always be typical of adolescent classroom environments, many of my classmates immediately began whispering to one another. It only took several seconds before the noise level in the room had raised enough to snap the instructor out of whatever shock he was in and he called for silence. "Hey! pay attention! Yall need to take this instruction seriously and get your shit squared away! You think this is a joke? I've just been told that an airplane has flown into the World Trade Center towers! It behooves you to take this seriously! Quiet down now!" I immediately assumed that the Sergeant was either lying to keep control of his classroom, or perhaps he was exaggerating the seriousness of the situation. If so, I thought he must have been referring to a small, crop-duster type of bi-plane, and that if it were true, it could not have been a very big deal. My suspicions were snuffed out however, when the room behind us began to fill with drill sergeants and we were given the command of attention. Then, without any more explanation of any kind, we were ordered "About Face!" and marched out of the room, back to our barracks. In formation outside of our barracks, I knew that something very real was happening. The drill sergeants looked pale and afraid, like they had been shaken badly by something they had seen. Some were angry, and began to take it out on soldiers who stepped out of line or asked questions. After several privates had been dropped and knocked out their push-ups, the head drill sergeant finally addressed our formation. "Our country is under attack," she said rather matter-of-factly. "A large passenger jet has flown into the world trade center and the city is being evacuated as I speak," she went on, "all training has been put on hold, the Fort is under lock down. No passes will be given, not even to NCO's or Officers. We are staying right here and sitting tight until we get more word of what's happening." With that brief explanation, she released us into our barracks, reassuring us that we would soon be informed of our next orders. As we shuffled into the old brick building, there was a buzz in the air like electricity. We were all sure what this meant. We were all thinking the same thing: we could forget about going home to see our families. We were going to war! The next three days went by torturously slow. We were held in lockdown and kept in the dark. I didn't find out until the next day that the towers had collapsed, and even then, everything I heard was based on elusive rumors and inner barracks gossip. The upper command never allowed any of us to watch the news; it wasn't until I was released from training two months later that I finally got to watch the footage of the second plane hitting the south tower. In the aftermath of the attack, Fort Lee eventually calmed down, removed the lock-down, and allowed us to complete our training. I did get to fly back home to see my family, but I could see drastic changes in our airports. Even as a freshly trained soldier, it was a shock for me to see National Guard soldiers armed with M-16's posted throughout Denver International Airport. I still couldn't shake the feeling that it wouldn't be long until I was called to duty to do my part. After reporting to my unit, things seemed to cool off for a few months and I began to get used to my life as a reservist. Months turned into a year, and then a few more months slid by. I went to my monthly weekend drills, and tried to live my civilian life in between drills the best I could. Of course, my time did eventually come, and so in February of 2003, less than two years after I joined the Army Reserves, two days a month turned into three hundred and sixty five days a year of Active Duty. This is my story.

### Kuwait

When we first arrived on the ground in Kuwait, we had been on a commercial Lufthansa flight for twelve hours. We flew from Amsterdam, where I was thrilled to gaze out the airport windows at a city I had longed to explore for as long as I could remember. Alas, I was not allowed to leave the concourse, and we had soon re-boarded our next flight. We had our M-16's tucked under our seats, where a carryon bag would normally stow. Our firing bolts were removed and secured in our right cargo pockets along with two thirty round magazines full of five point five six millimeter, full metal jackets. It felt so strange to be on a commercial flight carrying my rifle and ammo. I can still see the look on the stewardess' face when she saw us boarding with all of our firepower. The flight was long, but it was not the first long flight I had been on; I slept through most of it. As soon as we landed and disembarked the plane, we were loaded into busses, which carted all two hundred and eighty-eight of us from the airport to the nearby Army base: Camp Victory. In the general confusion of trying to carry everything I owned in two large duffel bags, plus my rifle, ammo, flak vest, gas mask, and Kevlar helmet, I could barely take note of my environment. It was something of a chaotic jumble trying to squeeze twenty soldiers on each bus, but soon enough, we were off. The busses had shades on the windows, and after I finally settled into my seat, I started to become aware of my surroundings. Everything had a dreary look to it, as if in a cloud of dust. I peered out the windows, and saw bleak dessert outside. It seemed as though we were on the moon. I could see sand blowing about in all directions; hanging in a tumultuous cloud that stretched out forever and blurred along the vista. The sky was washed out by sand, and it was difficult to distinguish horizon from skyline. I heard one of the other soldiers jest "It looks just like Mexico!" Some of the others chuckled. Most of the rest of us remained silent, and I was one of these, for I was far too lost in my scrutiny of the frightening new world I saw out the window. It was finally hitting home that I was in the Middle East, about to roll into a war zone. This was real, not a dream, but reality. Our training had all come to a head, and we were actually doing this! I was actually part of a real war, loaded head to toe with Army gear, driving through the dessert; it had begun.

I would later learn that we hit the ground right in the middle of a sand storm, and this fun fact sponsored the thorough confusion of the afternoon. Before I knew it, I had fallen into an uneasy, but deep sleep. Something about riding in a vehicle in the hot sun has always knocked me out. When I next awoke, nearly two hours had passed and we were arriving at our camp. I could barely make out guard towers through the window of the bus and the swirls of sand and dirt. I knew this meant we were close to our destination, and I gathered my wits to debark. Sergeant Alvarez charged up into the doorway and began barking orders to unload as soon as the busses rolled to a stop. I could hear the uncertainty in his voice; I knew that nobody knew what was going on, including him. This was an all too common standard in my unit, and one that I have long since grown nauseatingly familiar with. We are a reserve unit, and un-prepared for the physical, and especially the mental duress of a real war.

The first thing we were instructed to do after being rushed off the bus, was to gather our duffle bags in an organized pile (if there is such a thing.) We were then told to assemble in formation, as we had done thousands of times before. This should have been a stress-free task, had it not been for the thrashing and whirling of the wind, which pounded sand persistently into our eyes, mouths, ears, and noses. We ended in a sort of ramshackle brigade, standing at rigid attention side by side, some of us touching shoulders, some of us well far enough apart, some faced in the wrong direction. It must have looked a disastrous clusterfuck if viewed from above, but this would have been impossible in the current weather conditions, and as thus, we were permitted the command of "At Ease" and quickly dispersed into the holding tents behind us.

They were two, large, yellow tents, both about the size of a basketball court. After piling inside, we were given no more instruction other than to prepare ourselves for the night. As my first instinct, I found a spot near the doorway and claimed it as my own by placing my rucksack at the foot of what would be my bed. The floor of the tent was built of plywood and offered less comfort than had we slept directly on the dessert floor, but this fact did not bother me. I had slept on hard wood floor before, as I had camped on hard cold earth with no tent under the night sky. I am a veteran Boy Scout, and having climbed my way to the highest rank of Eagle, I am not afraid of coarse conditions. I placed my M-16 long ways by the side of where I would sleep, and after wrangling my two large duffle bags over to my small space, I positioned them at the foot. My Kevlar was off now, and I placed this on the ground, right in the center-head as a pillow. I then moved about the bivouac to socialize and check in with my companions.

### Spooners

My unit is split up into four companies:

HHC (Headquarters

Alpha Company

Bravo Company

Charlie Company

Since my MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was Ninety-Two-GOLF, (a cook) I was a part of the headquarters company. Other MOS assigned to this company were Supply and Armory, Medics, Nutritionists, the Chaplain, Human Resources and Headquarters support, (Pencil Pushers) and so on. We also had our own squad of mechanics, which housed some of my best friends, Specialist Lee Villers, Private First Class John Kemp, and Specialist Mikhail Khorkhov, a Russian machinist. These three always hung out with each other, and I had become part of their group even though I was a cook. I was not as close with any of the soldiers in my own section. I quickly found that being a cook was not for me.

My squad consisted of nine soldiers, our three NCO's (Non Commissioned Officers) and our section sergeant and supervisor, Sergeant First Class Delacroix. There were only thirteen of us in total. We were not well acquainted with Sergeant First Class Delacroix, for he had been only recently assigned to our unit just weeks before we were deployed. Second in the chain of command from him were Staff Sergeant Jackson, Sergeant Barnes, and my personal favorite, and mentor: Sergeant Mendoza. After this, there were Specialists Miller, Baumgartner, Velasquez, Aguilera, and Privates Mason, Sims, Collins, Sanchez, and myself, Private First Class Jevir Gray.

I had made well enough friends with most this lot, but some I avoided, if not rebuked on occasion. One of these was Nicholas Sims. He was such a young boy; barely able to make decisions on his own, much less pull a trigger, yet the latter is all he wanted to do. He was your typical rebellious outcast youth, with the unfortunate mentality of a Columbine shooter. Luckily for American society, and unluckily for us, he had been accepted into the Army, and assigned to be a cook, of all things. You would think the infantry, the MP's, or even the bomb squad would have greedily snatched up a guy like this. He was literally, THAT fucking crazy. For some reason, I often feel compassion for people like Sims, and couldn't help but befriend him almost immediately. I felt I was on a higher level than him, then and now, which is probably why I associated with him in the first place. Still, it was Sims who aided me in several ways. It was he who assisted me in designing a strap suitable for carrying my M-16 at the ready, under the arm. The way the strap is designed to attach to the stock of the rifle, is upside down, which would not be to my benefit in combat. Sims helped me in many ways when it came to battle performance and readiness. Many of us, being reservists, were ill prepared for combat, and Sims, being the type of boy that he was, had watched many military training videos. His family also had a history in the Army, and he was fond of learning the practice of being a highly functional soldier. I trusted his advice on these particular things, despite the fact I considered him highly unstable in other departments of expertise. He was a good friend in the time I knew him before our deployment, as he was closest to my age and appearance. We were both average looking white guys with short brown hair and a pension for drinking whiskey and shooting guns. As I grew to know him over the months, I found that he had another skill. Sims was one of the best barbers in our camp. He would often have a line of guys waiting for haircuts in the evenings, and he didn't even charge! One thing Sims was not, was business minded. I once bought a stack of DVD's off him for five dollars because he wanted to buy candy from the PX.

Another Private whom I had grown to be friends with, was Scott Mason. Scott was a fun loving, tattooed, bleached blonde, high school dropout from Lakewood, Colorado. He was a big guy, not chubby, but barrel chested, with large muscles filling out his brown Army issue T-shirt. He looked like a football player, his legs thinner than his torso and biceps, his stout arms hanging extended from his waist, like a big, white, blonde haired gorilla. He had some green puzzle pieces tattooed on his bicep, and some other ink scattered about his upper body. Having collected several tattoos myself up to this point, I immediately made friends with Scott, the only other tattooed member of our squad. I call him Scott because he almost immediately insisted of which within five minutes of meeting him. He didn't like the distance created by referring to each other by our last names. I suppose I could agree with him on that, I never thought the sound of my own last name sounded appropriate when used as a common title. I didn't have this problem however, because I had acquired a nickname within literally minutes of reporting to my unit after basic training. As soon as I met Specialist Miller, a potbellied, fifty something, black guy, I could have sworn he was drunk. He took one look at me, squinted at my nametag, and said, "Gray? Isn't that the same color as Silver?" Ever since that day, I have been known as Silver. Miller spoke constantly in a near illegible murmur, as if inebriated. This was brought on by a lifetime of heavy alcohol abuse. However, these were the days before I crossed his path, as currently, he has traded in his whiskey for the comforting brainwash of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had heard tall tales of his drunken debauchery through mutual acquaintances, and thus had formed my own opinion of the man. It is said that Miller, on one occasion, put away a handle of Seagram's Seven Crown, over the course of a four-hour convoy, while on duty. This would have seemed almost feasible; I myself have been guilty of swilling a full pint of Jameson on more than one occasion. But I really saw what kind of person Miller was when I was told that during this convoy, he was also driving! When the Army found out, they backed him into a corner. He had to either give up drinking entirely, or he would be kicked out of the military. To a person like Miller, the Army was his whole life. To be kicked out, would be a fate worse than death. Consequently, he resigned to AA meetings, cigarettes, and over-eating. "Drinkin' is bad fo' ya helff!" I heard him babble these half-conscious words on more than one instance and couldn't help but notice a pitiful irony in hearing them stumble through the mouth of a man who's brain had long since collapsed to mush within the grasp of alcoholism. In his case, I've always felt that giving up on his habit had been a worthless effort, considering it had been done a few years too late.

Next to Sims and Mason, I regarded the rest at a distance, at least at first, being good-humored and affable to avoid confrontation. I would later grow a common respect for each of these men and women the likes of which I never would have anticipated. There was David Aguilera, a chubby, geeky fellow, of Mexican descent. He was a nerd. There was no denying it, and there was not much other way to describe him. I sat and chatted with him on many occasion to pass the time as we smoked cigarettes, and as first impressions may lead one astray, I must admit that Aguilera was actually quite a clever fellow. There was Denise Collins, our squads only female. She was nice to me if she regarded me at all. Her hair was big and bouncy in curls framing her coffee-brown face, and she carried herself with confidence. She loved to sing karaoke in the local bar in Fort Carson before we left for Kuwait. Next, there was Victor Sanchez, an introverted, soft-spoken Mexican teenager who always seemed to have a smile on his face. I liked Sanchez, but I never knew much about him. He was very quite, even more so than myself. I've always been told of how eerily quite I am from every adult who ventured making acquaintances with me, so if I thought Sanchez was introverted, it was saying something. Having been born and raised in America, Sanchez spoke perfect English; this was not the reason for his temperament. This was just the way Sanchez was, refined, and thoughtful. I went to him for wisdom several times, he was one of the easiest going guys in our entire unit. I always admired Sanchez for his ability to seem like he was having a good time no matter how dark things got for us. Another soldier who made an impact on me was Specialist Arturo Velasquez. Velasquez was a funny little guy, always full of energy and joy. There were many a day that the two of us would lock eyes, and break into laughter, for no reason other than that we needed to laugh. I appreciated this fact about him throughout my tour. Specialist Velasquez, Sergeant Mendoza and I would later move to the roof, where we would form a tight bond. I still look up at Sergeant Raoul Mendoza as a father figure, and a strong mentor for me during my deployment. Sergeant Mendoza was an old Mexican Viet Nam Vet. He was the only guy in our unit who had been in Nam, and he was respected as such. He was of a rebellious nature, and liked to do things his own way (which is why he had now found himself attached to our cooks squad in a reservist unit.) I related to him in this way because I also had a hard time looking the other way when I was ordered to do something in a way I personally deem inefficient or emphatically immoral. We both have a problem with authority. Sergeant Mendoza had remained at his lower rank of E-5 for many years due to this very nature of his nonconformity and protest. This was a fact that Sergeant Mendoza was proud of, and he boasted of this frequently. I had (and still have) the upmost respect for this man, as I share his perspective on the Army and on life in general. Furthermore, I had not thought of Sergeant Mendoza as my only mentor, but also a country boy named Helmut Baumgartner. Of German descent, and raised in Arkansas, Baumgartner was a country boy in his thirty's. He was only a specialist, despite his extensive experience in the Army as a line cook in a chow hall. This was because he also had a certain disposition that deemed him worthy of exile to our squad of misfits and outcasts. Baumgartner's attitude toward upper management was that of a revolutionary. He was at constant war with the NCO's and Officers above him, and it is because of this, that he is not by this time promoted to a higher pay grade. Despite his disposition, I hold that Baumgartner taught me everything I know about cooking on an Army trailer, holding together a shift of other soldiers, and keeping myself on schedule. He was not only a tremendously effective tutor, but lent an ear on time to time, and related to me as such on a man to man level with social or otherwise issues that I had. If Mendoza was like a father to me in Iraq, Baumgartner was like an older brother. Many didn't like Baumgartner, but I did. I held him in a higher regard than most of the others that I associated with. I had a natural inclination to be drawn to other troublemakers, outcasts, and segregated types of soldiers who more closely resembled myself. However, not all were still troublemakers. Some had long since been tamed. I've already described Specialist Harold Miller, so I'll move to the next, Sergeant George Barnes. Of all the authority figures who constantly surrounded me, Sergeant Barnes was one of the more likeable NCO's. It was hard to stay angry with him because he was always joking and trying to make me laugh. He was a middle aged black man, much older than me. A fun loving type was Sergeant Barnes, over time I came to like him more and more. I felt that he was one of the NCO's I could trust, and of whom I hoped would stick up for me if I was backed up against a wall. He was constantly joking, making us all laugh, and kept the spirits light on the darkest of days. Aside from Sergeant Barnes, I can think of only one more whom I have not described, and this is Staff Sergeant Isaiah Jackson. Staff Sergeant Jackson was an E-6, also African-American and held a more solemn approach to leadership. He seldom laughed, but he did tell jokes rarely, which made him rarely likeable. If only he would have been amiable more often, but he succumbed quickly to what can only be described as the hunger for power. I never liked Staff Sergeant Jackson much, as he never made much of an effort to relate to any one of us. It was like he was only there to do what was commanded of him, to say what was expected of him to say, and to jump through the hoops in order to move up in rank. It was not uncommon for a soldier in the U.S. Army to adapt to this nature of character, blind of opinions or mindsets of others, blind of right and wrong, incessantly climbing the ladder toward the top of the rank structure. I couldn't hate Jackson for this sentiment, I should have known by this time, as any soldier should know, this attitude came with the territory. Finally, I have come to the last man on my list: Sergeant First Class Delacroix, our squad leader and our sections only E-7. Our squad leader used to be Sergeant First Class Weaver, a tough little black woman who had a kind nature to her but commanded respect. I enjoyed her while she was my leader, but she transferred to another unit just months before we deployed. Sergeant First Class Weaver was gone, and instead, we were assigned an outsider to lead us. Sergeant First Class Andrew Delacroix was a spineless little mouse of a man. His strategy was to stay off the radar, making himself scarce, avoiding the upper command, and keeping to himself, writing letters and reading books in a quiet corner of the chow hall for hours at a time. Delacroix was weak and it showed. He didn't have it in him to take control and command our respect. Instead, he allowed us to wander aimlessly, without instruction, never seeming to notice when we talked brashly about him behind his back, from only ten feet away. He was non-confrontational, and afraid of all of us, especially the hard to handle ones, like Sims, and dare I say, myself. I had, and continue to have, very little respect for this man. On the occasion that I found myself pushed into a corner by First Sergeant Purdue, Delacroix would run and hide. He never stuck up for any of his men, and if there was ever a demand for some awful and degrading mission, we could guarantee that our section leader would tuck his tail between his legs and volunteer the cooks. I wished Sergeant First Class Weaver had been in his place instead of jumping ship and losing my respect. She did nothing wrong to me or others in my witness, but now, in her absence, I couldn't help but feel a certain indignation with those soldiers who somehow weaseled their way out of going to war with us, regardless of the justification. Another one of these was Specialist Bill Riesman. He was a big, red-faced, "Colorado redneck" that slightly waddled when he walked. When we got deployed, he apparently ran into some trouble at home and one way or another, he found his way off the deployable list.

As I finished setting up my sleeping area on the hard wood of the large tent in Kuwait, I ventured out into the center of the tent into a turmoil of army green and dessert camo to seek out my colleagues. The first person I found was Private Aguilera. He had not set up his personal space as had I, and as I approached him I observed this scene: He had thrown all his personal gear in a wretched heap on the floor, and still wearing his rucksack on his shoulders, had collapsed backward, into this heap, and remained as such, looking rather dreary eyed and bewildered about him as he sat in a lump there. I asked him "Well Aguilera, how do you like it here?" almost in jest more than as a serious question, in the effort to make banter and spread cheerfulness. The only reply I got was "I don't" (Like it) was the subtext, but this was not mentioned, as he seemed drained of energy, or the will to hold converse with me, or anyone.

### Ninety-Six Degrees in the Shade

For the next two weeks our entire platoon was allowed to rest while we acclimated to our new environment. The heat was unbearable at first, and it took several weeks to get used to it before normal tasks could be done without feeling faint. We would be in this staging base in Kuwait for as long as it took for our equipment and vehicles to arrive on shipping containers, organize our battalion, and begin the convoy north, into Iraq. These days were spent lying about in a weary disposition, the lot of us. Then, as the days wore on, we slowly began to venture out and explore the confines of our new desolate world. The camp was much too large to explore on foot, nor would anyone want to, even for the sake of exercise. Inside the camp looked just like it did outside. It was sandy dessert, as far as could see. Here and there were a cluster of large yellow tents or a motor pool of green camouflage painted Humvee's, Deuce & a half's five ton's, and Cutbacks. A "cutback" as we called them, was a regular Chevy pickup that had been painted army camouflage. The majorities of the Army's vehicles had not yet caught up with the next war, and were still painted jungle green. Rows and rows of green trucks and tanks stood out against the tan dessert like a soar thumb. Here and there, scattered about, were constellations of metal crates. We called these "Milvan's," or "conex's." They sat stacked on top of one another three high, in rows of thirty or more, columns of ten. They stood out against the dessert in a wide array of colors. Rusty red, cobalt blue, milky white, seaweed green, and mustard yellow made up the majority of them, but there must have been more colors than I can recall. In between the rows of tents were sets of bright blue and green plastic portable latrines, the kind you usually see at music festivals or block parties. Inside of these, the smell was atrocious, as you would expect of multiple donor excrement, cooking at upwards of a hundred and fifty degrees in the hot sun all day. If this was not bad enough, swarms of flies would fill the insides of the toilets, and large, scary camel spiders were known to lurk underneath the floor. Little did I know at this early stage, that I would grow to cherish the comforts of these plastic toilets; there can always be so much worse. At the edge of the dirt road that connected all the camps, sat a row of cement semi-circles, turned on their side, high enough to come to ones chest when standing, and thick as a man's thigh on all sides. These half tubes, turned on their sides, went along parallel to the dirt road, with windows on the sides every five feet or so. Allegedly, they were to serve as bomb shelters. What we used them for, was a way to keep cool in the heat of the afternoon. As soon as we awoke the first day, it was already up to ninety degrees by the time the sun came up. We would wake in a sweat, if we had slept at all, and the first thing on anyone's mind, was to seek shelter from the heat. At first, we mostly just laid around, sweating profusely, and guzzling the large bottles of mineral water with foreign writing on the labels that had been given to us in large quantities. As anyone who has camped in the summer, the inside of your tent is the worst place to be in the middle of the day. The cement bomb shelters offered little protection from the heat, but they were better than the alternative. A few of us, including myself, had sought out a PX, which was really only a small trailer with a meager amount of supplies for sale. One thing they did have was Muslim prayer rugs. They had them in all sorts of interesting designs and colors with tassels on the ends. We didn't care; we only wanted something to be used as a rug to pad us from the rigid, hard wood floors we slept on. Before long, many of the soldiers were sleeping without their hot sleeping bags, but on top of prayer rugs, naked except for PT shorts, with a handkerchief wrapped around our necks to soak up the sweat. The first week, I got two or three hours of sleep a night. The days were spent in solemn camaraderie, either shoulder to shoulder in the cement bomb shelters, guzzling water, and telling jokes, or trying to stay as still as possible on my back, inside the tent. Being inside the tent was like being in a solarium. The yellow canvas was a bad choice, inside felt as if the temperature was even higher than outside. If you felt this was too much and tried to venture out into the day, you would be blinded by the sunlight to the point of regress. Like a vampire, you could feel it on your skin, burning instantly on contact. You could smell the heat in your nostrils with every breath, and the sweat forever dripping into your eyes as if locked inside of an oven with no place to seek refuge. It reminded me of an old Reggae song I'd heard once where the lead singer wails on about how it's ninety-six degrees, even in the shade. It really was at least ninety inside the tents. Sometimes, we would play catch with a baseball or a football or a Frisbee, but it was never long before we would grow too dehydrated and winded to continue. Only a few throws of the baseball before our heat weary bodies were forced back into hiding under the cement bomb shelters that were our sanctuary. The mineral water that was supplied to us was in no way cold. There was no way to keep it cool except for once a day when we were supplied ice. There was only so much ice allotted to our unit, and it had to be shared between over two hundred soldiers. We would dump the bags of ice that were given to us in a big plastic tub and divide it amongst us until each had a rather large chunk. What most of us did with this fist sized chunk, was drop it right into our homemade cups, which we made by cutting the top off our water bottles with a pocket knife. This luxury was only provided to us once a day, in the mid afternoon, which was the hottest part of the day. Often, the ice would melt within sixty seconds of dropping it into the water in my bottle. Still other times, I would force myself to drink water that was so hot, it felt like it was burning my lips and mouth. Because it was so difficult to drink water when it is this warm, some of the other guys and I came up with a temporary solution. We started buying apple flavored TANG from the PX, and mixing it up inside our bottles of hot water, thus creating what tasted just like apple cider. This was much easier to drink, because it made a connection in my mind that it was supposed to be served warm. I was able to drink the hot water in large quantities now without risking heat exhaustion. These were long days, and even longer nights. After the sun went down, the temperature would drop to around seventy or eighty degrees. This wasn't cool, by any means, but was a welcome relief after the sitting heat of the day. The coolest part of the day was the dawn, and some of the early risers, or those who never slept at all, would commune in the early morning to chat about this and that. We would tell each other about our families, friends, and those who were waiting for us at home. We would joke amongst each other, and sometimes chat about politics, philosophy or other ideologies. Because we were reservists, many of us were still complete strangers to one another, having only drilled for two days a month before being deployed. I met many of the men in my unit who I had never spoken to before in the two years I had already been a part of them. We were all attached to the two hundred and forty fourth Combat Heavy Engineer Battalion. A mismatched team of engineers, constructions workers of all trades, truck drivers, bulldozer and crane operators, mechanics, supply clerks and cooks, we were a ragged bunch, and not many of us truly wanted to be warriors. We were all tradesmen, workers, and artisans. I met one young man who had a baby girl born back at home within three weeks of landing in Kuwait. This meant his daughter would be a year old by the time he first met her.

### Back to Work

After the first couple of weeks, our resting period was over, and those of us who had an occupation that could be made useful were put to work straight away. Being a cook, I was sent to the chow hall, which was an even larger white canvas tent in the middle of camp. Since we were newcomers, none of us were given actual cooking tasks, to which received no complaints from anyone in my squad including the NCO's. I was put to work as a server on most of my shifts. I would serve lunch to over fifteen thousand soldiers daily, and it would almost always consist of grilled cheese sandwiches and "freedom fries." Sometimes we would serve a surprise item like cheeseburgers, or chili-mac (an Army favorite, consisting of a mix of equal parts Chili and Macaroni & Cheese.) The meal was never healthy and never once was there offered any substitute from the usual greasy fair. One of the benefits of being a cook was that I had access to the large walk in freezers. I would sometimes slink off on my break to stand inside the freezer and take in the cold air as long as I could before returning to my searing reality.

As cooks, we were ostracized by all, and often elected against our will to do any manner of dreadful tasks that had nothing to do with cooking. As our shipping containers began to arrive, so did these random tasks. My fellow lower enlisted cooks and I were assigned to help organize equipment on our off shifts from the chow hall. Several minutes spent inside these metal crates would result in profuse sweat literally pouring out of my face. I remained working in the back of one for a matter of ten minutes and personally witnessed a frequency of drippings from my brow that resembled a quart of water being dispensed over my head from above. As the shipping containers came in, so did some of our hidden belongings. One of the mechanic platoons had been smart enough to hide an amp and several electric guitars inside one of their Humvees. A completely separate Battalion of Puerto Ricans who had set up camp down the road had smuggled an entire shipping crate full of Rum! They raised Puerto Rican flags, and threw parties every night until we left the camp. I myself had either forgotten or had failed to bring any luxuries at all for myself. I had a Discman, but barely any CD's to listen to, and the PX had a terrible selection of pop country to choose from. Any mail from home was stuck in transit, as we were some of the first soldier to arrive in this fresh war. The system wasn't yet established for communication on a large scale, and there were no phones at all. No Internet, no E-mail, no Social Networking. All we had was each other and ourselves, alone with our thoughts. I spent much of this time in solitude, reading literature that I could find or borrow. Writing poetry and drawing pictures in my diary was another pastime that kept me busy throughout much of my lonely hours in the dessert. One of the most memorable experiences while still in Kuwait was when we had a chance to travel to the larger port camp, at the edge of Al-Jahra, near Kuwait City. My reservist unit being of a paranoid nature, we were sent into town as if sent into battle: fully suited in body armor, Kevlar helmets, with M-16's fully trodden with ammo. After climbing aboard the back of the Deuce and a half, I prepared for the hour or longer journey that faced me. This particular story needs a little special description, as it was so miserable an experience. The water in large bottles that we had been supplied with this whole time was mineral water, not the kind of tap water that American's are accustomed to drinking. The result of this, paired with the relentless portions of greasy food being served as rations, had suddenly caused something like a explosion inside my lower intestines almost as soon as our truck had rolled outside of the front gates. There was never any option to turn back. What resulted was one of the most painful and drawn out agonizing experiences of my life. I held that vile diarrhea inside of my bowels for more than two hours with knives stabbing me in the gut the entire time. By the time we passed through the front gates of the next camp, I was doubled over in pain, and could barely speak to anyone. I'll never forget that embarrassing waddle from the truck to the porta-shitter on that hot day in the dessert. I had made it, but I might have done irreparable damage to my insides.

After I cleaned myself up the best I could with single ply toilet paper, I was able to venture into the heart of the camp to meet the rest of my friends. In Al-Jahra, there was a much more lucrative PX. They had all sorts of items that we hadn't seen in over five weeks. One of the first things that caught my eye was a dusty, but brand-new Harley Davidson motorcycle. It was black, with racecar orange racing stripes on the gas tank. I had always wanted a Harley, and seeing one out there in the dessert was an intense reminder of where I was, so far from home. I walked into the little makeshift office that the Harley was parked outside of, and found out that the Army has a program for young soldiers who want to buy a motorcycle. The execs over at Harley Davidson must have realized that every young teenage soldier wants a Harley when he gets home, and why not pay for it while serving overseas? They had finance plans set up so that you could have your brand new Harley parked in your garage when you got back home. It seemed like a pretty sweet deal to me, and for this moment on, my dream bike became my inspiration during my tour. I spent many hours planning what kind of bike I would get, dreaming about color options, ride height, engine size, and custom handlebars. I wanted my bike to be the meanest bike on the road. I could already see myself roaring down the road in my old neighborhood, turning heads of everyone I passed, rugged and war-torn, tattooed like a bad ass! I don't know why I always wanted to be a hardcore, scary biker, but this was probably a big part of my inspiration for joining the army in the first place. My desire to own a Harley fueled my drive throughout my time in Iraq. Scott and I used to sit around and talk for hours about our dream bikes. We would plan every spec, ever color, every part, down to the handlebar grips, imagining what our life would be like on the other side.

I exited the Harley finance office in Al-Jahra for now, deciding to think about the bike some more before I committed to anything. Besides, I had other things on my mind. I had basically one mission: find the PX and buy more music. I had lasted almost a month at this point with less than ten CD's that I had bought at the PX in Fort Carson before I left. We had been promised that every weekend was our last in the weeks that lead up to our ship off date, and as a result, every weekend had been a party like the world would end on Monday morning. When that last party really did end up being the last party, it was unfortunate that I had somehow managed to leave my entire book of CD's at my brother's house. The only two CD's I had found at the new dessert PX that weren't country were _Think Tank_ by Blur, and _Beautiful Garbage_ by Garbage. Both of these were bands that I used to listen to in high school but hadn't listened to either in several years. I had become drawn into the world of hip-hop and inner city gangster rap by the age of nineteen, and hadn't paid much attention to rock music ever since the whole "rap-metal" thing started. I guess I lost interest in metal, and started looking for rap that wasn't terrible. Anyway, I hadn't much experience with post-grunge early two thousands rock music and the new Garbage album was not a very good representation. It had been released two years before I ended up in Kuwait, in 2001, but it was new to me. It sounded like a cross between techno and bubblegum pop; at first I found it intolerable. The Blur album on the other hand, _Think Tank_ , proved to be worth the money. After solid hits like _Song #2_ and _Coffee & TV_ during my high school years, Blur was actually a band that I had respect for. The album was filled with just the right kind of morose, dreamy melodies that I needed when I was in Kuwait. I used to lie in the intense heat on my back inside our tent with a wet towel over my face and my headphones in my ears. I could listen to songs like _Caravan_ over and over with my eyes closed. It was some of the only peace I could find. As Damon Albarn's smooth voice crooned me to sleep, I could dream about floating into the air and flying over the dessert. I dreamed that my spirit would float up out of my body and I could fly all the way home...

Caravan's lost, In the sun and the dust  
No-one loves you, When you are lost  
Yeah I'm a clown, Pulling my world down  
I believe I was strong, But you are the one  
And when it comes, you'll feel the weight of it,  
The weight of it  
The day will come when you'll get away from it,

Away from it...

I was really feeling the weight of it now, and I could only dream of the day when I would finally get away, back to my home in America, surrounded by friends and family, I could barely wait to get out of here, and yet my adventure had only just begun.

### Rollin' Out Heavy

We had been in Kuwait for over a month by the time all of our equipment had finally arrived at the port and had been hauled by truck to our camp. All of our vehicles had been "battle readied," which consisted of removing all of the canvas on the Humvee's in some kind of reverse logic that assumed we would be safer with fewer obstacles between our potential targets and our guns. We had nothing that was bulletproof. Many of the active duty infantry units had fully armored Humvees, complete with bulletproof glass and a heavily armored gun turret on the top. Our convoys looked more like something out of _Mad Max_ , thrown together with whatever we could find. My position on top of the gun turret was much like being perched on top of a semi truck with nothing to hold onto but the handle of my .50 Cal. I felt so vulnerable, I might as well have painted a target on my chest. Being an undersupplied reserve unit, we hadn't even been issued proper body armor. We were forced to wear hot and heavy flak vests that had been recycled from Viet Nam. They had no bulletproof ceramic plates inside them, and all they were only meant to protect from shrapnel. A direct hit from anything would go right through our old green vests, and the camo pattern didn't even match our dessert camo uniforms. My biggest fear was that Hadji would string up a sever cable across the road at neck level and I would get beheaded before I even knew what hit me. Still, as the day grew near when we would be moving into Iraq, I began itching to get moving. I was quickly growing bored with the long days in the chow hall, working with hundreds of soldiers from different units who were all strangers to me. I couldn't wait to get further into Iraq where I hoped there would be more action. At the very least, I thought it would be better to be running our own chow hall out of our kitchen trailer. I was sick and tired of serving food to thousands of strangers like some never ending homeless shelter. I wanted to do my mission as I had been trained to do, set up the MKT (Mobile Kitchen Trailer) and start serving up homemade chow to my friends and familiar faces of the soldiers I was used to.

Kuwait hadn't all been bland; there had been a few fun days. June fourteenth was the Army's two hundred and twenty-eighth Birthday, and of course the chow hall had to find some way to celebrate. We prepared a huge feast of grilled steaks, BBQ chicken, BBQ spare ribs, and fried potatoes. We even built a huge nine by six foot birthday cake with the famous Iwo-Jima "raising the flag" photo printed on edible icing. Being the artist in the group, I was tasked to draw a welcome poster and menu that was posted on the front door. As part of filming for an episode of TV's _Mail Call_ , actor R. Lee Ermey stopped by for a meet and greet. A retired marine, Ermey is most famous for playing the role of the tough as nails drill sergeant in the film _Full Metal Jacket._ I was a big fan of his show _Mail Call_ and the Stanley Kubrick film that he is most famous for, so I was excited to meet him. When I saw him walk into the chow hall while I was drawing my menu, I had no idea that I would actually get a private meeting with him. While the doors were still locked and a line formed outside, I was able to talk to the actor and get a picture with him before anyone else got inside. After the Army's birthday was over, life in Kuwait went back to being monotonous and boring. I would spend my days sitting in the chow hall dining tents, waiting for the meal to be prepared and reading a book or writing in my journal. When it was lunchtime, I would take my place behind the serving counter beside the other Army cooks and serve grilled cheese sandwiches and freedom fries to long lines of hot, sweaty, hungry soldiers. Specialist Collins and a female from another unit, Private First Class Morgan, asked me to draw red, blue and yellow Superman Shields on their aprons. We would joke with the soldiers in line, making hasty small talk, trying to break up the monotony of the day. "What unit are you with?" "Where are yall out of?" "Puerto Rico huh? Wow, that's a new one!" At night, we would all head back to our large yellow tent with wood floors and seek out any refuge from the heat we could find. Often when we would return to our tent, we would find many of the other soldiers in our unit relaxing and talking about the easy tasks of their days. I quickly became so bored with the cooks life that I began asking my commander how I could transfer into the Mechanic section. I knew a thing or two about working on cars, and I wanted to be closer to my mechanic friends. Any changes made in the Army happen VERY slowly, so I knew that a change of MOS mid tour was far fetched. My Captain told me he would see what he could do, but in the mean time wanted to know if I was ready to do my first job in the Army, to be a killer. He was looking for two young, battle-ready privates to be Major Caldwell's personal bodyguards on our trip into Iraq. Hungry for action, I wasted no time in volunteering. I told the one other soldier in my cook's section that I knew would want the job, Sims, and it was a done deal. Private First Class Sims and I would be the bodyguards for one of the highest officers in our unit, riding in the second Humvee in the convoy. And so, on a sweltering hot evening in late June, Sims and I reported to Major Caldwell's vehicle with all of our battle gear. When we arrived, we were both issued three magazines full of ammo and asked by a gruff sounding Sergeant Alvarez, "You two aren't afraid to pull the trigger are ya?" We both shouted, "Hell NO Sar!" I was ready to take Hadji's fucking head off if I got the chance, and I knew for a fact that Sims wouldn't hesitate to do the same. We were both excited to be given the opportunity to ride in a real vehicle, rather than sit in the back of one the cook's deuce & a half truck's, pulling a bulky MKT behind us.

Orders came down from above that we would wait for the cover of nightfall before mounting up and moving out. In all the preparation, it was beginning to feel like the longest day of my deployment yet. We were all jittery with anticipation and I'm sure not a one had slept the night before. We were allowed to remove our Kevlar helmets and BDU blouses in the heat, and I was feeling much cooler in my t-shirt with a flak-vest over it and a boonie cap on my head. I slung my rifle over my shoulder and paced back and forth up the line of vehicles while I waited. Scott and I snapped a few photos of each other in our new battle fashions; we felt we looked like real gung-ho warriors at this point, (we hadn't been allowed to wear boonie caps and t-shirts like this ever before.) With cigarettes hanging out of our mouths and our free hands gripped the handles of our M-16's, we calmed each other with our boastful behavior. Acting like I was a character in a movie, joking around with the other soldiers my age, it always helped to remind us of home and calm our nerves. It must have been around eight 'o'clock by the time we finally got the orders to roll out the gate. I ran back to Major Caldwell's Humvee and jumped into my seat on the left side, behind the driver. Major Caldwell sat shotgun next to his driver, Specialist Pritchett, and Sims sat next to me in the back right seat. Between Major Caldwell and Pritchett was a big green radio, and in between Sims and I was our cooler, bungee corded in and filled with water bottles and soda pop. Sims and I had come up with a system of "seat belts" that we could strap onto the back of our belts. This way, we could literally hang out the side of the vehicle without falling, (or getting pulled out.) It felt like slow motion as we crawled out the gates, followed by all the huge construction vehicles and trucks in our heavy engineering unit. I still don't know why we decided to wait for nightfall to begin our journey. Not only was there a complete lack of action so close to the Iraqi border, but we couldn't make it very far before we needed to pull over for the night. I had only been sitting in the Hummer for a few hours before I heard voices on the radio telling Major Caldwell that we were pulling over soon. I hadn't been able to see much from the backseat at night, and I wasn't sure if we had even crossed into Iraq yet. When we pulled off the highway, it felt like I was in a huge truck stop in one of the middle states like Kansas or Nebraska. I saw long rows of civilian oil tanker trucks parked in the dark and many more military vehicles filling up the rest of the lot. Beyond the edge of the asphalt was a twenty-foot high wall made of cement barriers with concertina wire at the top. After all of our vehicles had pulled in, the engines were cut and Sims and I were given orders to set up our Army cots on the ground beside the Humvee. After all the excitement and anticipation of the day, we hadn't even made it into Iraq yet. We were spending the night in a secure parking lot on the edge of the border, and so I set up my cot, took off my boots, and curled up next to my M-16 to get some rest. I didn't know what the next day would hold, but amazingly, I was able to drift off to an uneasy slumber almost immediately.

### Into Iraq

I awoke to the smell of diesel fuel and the sounds of engines coming to life. I hadn't been in that deep of a sleep, but it had been fairly comfortable sleeping outdoors as opposed to the large, hot, yellow tent that I had grown accustomed to. I immediately remembered where I was and sat up to pull on my boots. Other than my foot ware, I had stayed fully dressed, so I only needed my flak vest and helmet before I was up and ready to move. It took me a few minutes to fold up my cot and load back into the Humvee, but I was soon scarfing down a quick MRE breakfast. When I saw Major Caldwell walking back to our vehicle, I signaled to Sims to saddle up. We were on the move again within the next several minutes and began rolling out the gates of the truck stop. Now that the sun was out in full force, I was able to survey my new surroundings. Outside of the parking lot, I could see the sandy desserts of Kuwait fading into the hard, arid dirt of Iraq. In between the two countries, lied a berm as far as the eye could see in both directions. On the Iraqi side of the berm, was thick concertina wire, and in the distance, I could see the wreckage of old tanks and trucks in charred piles beside the highway. It was finally happening. We were heading into Iraq.

After the initial border crossing, the berm disappeared into the distance and the rocky dirt gave way back into flat, bleak, sandy expansions that seemed to last forever. For hours we traveled over dirt roads that were barely distinguishable from the dessert around them. Many other units were moving north at the same time as us, and before we knew it, several other convoys were traveling side by side down the same dirt highway. In the confusion, many of our vehicles became mixed up in different convoys. I could hear confused voices yelling into the radio, begging for assistance or direction. The sheer level of traffic on that dirt road began kicking up so much dust that no one could see very far in front of his windshield. I had tightened up my handkerchief around my face, and lowered my ski goggles over my eyes, but I still felt like I was swallowing mouthfuls of dirt. I was thankful not to be driving because I couldn't see anything. All I could do was breath in short, shallow breathes, and hold on tight to my M-16 as I peered into the dust storm around our Humvee. We rumbled down that dirt highway for at least another hour before the other convoys either passed us, or got left behind; we were finally on our own again. It seemed as though we were only out of the dust long enough for me to get a few swallows of water out of my canteen before I heard a loud pop and our vehicle started bouncing hard up and down as we veered off the road. I could tell right away what was wrong; we had a flat tire. Our mechanic teams were trained for events like this, and it went surprisingly smoothly on our first breakdown. Major Caldwell was on the radio promptly, ordering the rest of the convoy to pull over in formation. The first response mechanic team pulled up along side of us and performed a pit stop on the Humvee while the rest of the soldiers in the entire convoy (except for the officers and drivers) jumped out to provide security. I was on my feet as soon as our vehicle came to a stop and shouldered my weapon as I looked out into the dessert. At first, we were all alone; our huge convoy a mere speck in a vast expanse of nothing. The really strange thing about Iraq in situations like this is that you are never truly as alone as you think you are. Within seconds of our convoy coming to a stop, tiny specks on the horizon grew into the shapes of men and women, wandering toward us out of the dessert on foot. Minutes later, there were Iraqi civilians all along the side of the road, trying to sell us things and begging for food or water. I had been trained that Iraq was a dangerous place, and not to trust any of the locals. Even though they seemed harmless, I was afraid of their true intentions. When one Hadji came too close to me, I locked and loaded my charging handle and pointed the barrel of my rifle right in his face. He smiled at me and gave me a curious look, almost as if to say, "what the fuck bro?" and backed away. Most of the civilians just wanted water or candy, but many more were simply curious about Americans. They wanted to talk to us, find out where we were from, and get to know what we were like. To the Hadji's, America is the city of wonder on the shining hill. They think we all come from places like New York City, and Las Vegas, and San Francisco. Most of them don't have any interest or knowledge of the Midwest, the South or any other part of America. I was amazed at how brave these people were. They would look right past my M-16 into my eyes as if they were unafraid of death. I soon realized that all of them had most likely grown up with fully automatic machine guns pointed in their faces and bombs going off in the distance. This world seemed new and frightening to me, but they were used to it.

Minutes later, the wheel was replaced, and we were on our way again. The locals waved as we pulled back onto the road, and I stared back glumly as they slowly shrunk back into little black specks in the distance. For the next several hours, we were all alone again. We passed farmlands, rivers, and eventually made our way into marshy meadows. The air grew more and more humid, and I noticed that Iraq was a much more fertile land than I expected. Date trees along the riverbeds give it an almost rainforesty feel. We had been driving all day, and we were beginning to hit some heavy traffic jams on the roads south of Baghdad, so we began to plan on stopping for the night. Our next stopping point was a camp and refueling station that is hidden under thick tree cover and surrounded by what I can only describe as a swamp. The place was called "Scandia," and it was utterly disgusting. The mosquitos were so thick here that it was impossible to sit still without being eaten alive. When we finally arrived in Scandia, we had been stuck in gridlock for over four hours, and the sun was quickly on the decline. My first sight of Scandia was a big crowd of Hadji's lined up at the edge of the camp. They were selling all sorts of things to the soldiers, trying to make an American dollar any way they could. Their Iraqi Dinars had pictures of Saddam Hussein on them, and because our Coalition Forces had overthrown his government, the Dinar had lost its value. The Iraqi's would sell us their old Dinar's as souvenir's and I bought a stack of ten's, fifties and hundred's for a few American bucks. I also bought myself a beautifully woven Iraqi flag, which is one of the only souvenirs I brought home with me. Other than souvenirs, the Hadji's sold us necessities like Cigarettes, Soda, and large blocks of Ice. The ice was frozen from the rivers, so we couldn't drink it, but it was still nice to have a piece of ice to throw in our coolers. The Sodas were sealed, so we could safely risk drinking them, and the cigarettes were not great, but any of us would smoke whatever we could get our hands on. Cartons of Hadji Marbloro Red's were cheap, and even though they tasted like crap, they got the job done. One of the Hadji kids was smoking something questionable out of a hookah and asking me, "Mistah, mistah! Smoky smoky?" before blowing big puffs of smoke into the air. He must have been about nine years old. I would have taken him up on his offer if I weren't standing next to Major Caldwell at the time, but instead I just laughed and snapped a picture of him with my disposable camera. One of the Mexican soldiers in our unit bought a red and white Al-Tikriti scarf, and a black, red, and green soccer shirt. When he put on his new outfit, you couldn't tell the difference between him and a Hadji! After laughing about this, and getting our fill of the Hadji market, we got back into our vehicles and moved into the camp a little further to find a place to rest for the night.

Camping in Scandia was a much cooler temperature than I was used to. The shade provided by the large trees may have provided us with shelter from the heat, but the marshy lands only offered another impediment: Mosquitos. There was absolutely no refuge from them. Many of the drivers tried to sleep in the cramped cabs of their trucks. Still others held up inside their sleeping bags, overheating, but safe from the bugs. I decided to stay clothed, covering my face with my handkerchief, and wrapped a wet towel around my head. Despite my efforts, I got eaten alive by mosquitos that night.

### Beggars and Choosers

We didn't leave as soon as we woke up the next day. It was our second day in Iraq, and our first day in a camp without plastic portable latrines. We were all miserable on that second day, every one of us covered in mosquito bites, but what was worse, was that I was on shit burning detail. Scandia smelled terrible, and I was now finding out why. Soldiers before us had built small toilets out of plywood. Each wooden stall was just big enough to sit down inside and had a hollowed out space under the bench where a metal basin could collect excrement. Every morning, this had to be burned. Next to the smell of rotting flesh, burning shit is close to one of the worst smells on the planet. On that morning, it was my job to drag the basins out of the back of the toilets, douse them with gasoline, and light them on fire. I then had to stir the burning mixture until it all turned to ashes, trying to avoid the plumes of thick black smoke the whole time. You can actually see Charlie Sheen get stuck on this same detail in the movie _Platoon._ After this, I didn't much feel like eating an MRE, so I skipped breakfast and suited up to head out. We still needed to refuel, so we waited in long lines of other military convoys in front of us. The sun was out in full force, and as I watched the refueling soldiers drag big hoses of petrol and diesel across the sand, I could see the distortion of heat waves rising out of the ground. It reminded me of some old Arabic movie, maybe _Ben Hur._ Finally, in the late morning, we rolled out the gates of Scandia, and back on the highway just south of Baghdad.

Baghdad was a mess of chaotic traffic jams, spiraling on and off ramps, and mazes of highways that reminded me of an American urban sprawl. The third world influence, however, was greatly apparent. I could see towering mosques nestled behind mazes of tan houses and shacks all crammed on top of each other. People were walking in throngs through crowded marketplaces and brightly colored Arabic lettering was everywhere. We moved through Baghdad in a hurry, we had no mission there and it is a dangerous place for American soldiers. I could see blackened area's surrounding the highways where battles had been fought or bombs had gone off. I snapped as many pictures as I could, but the most attention-grabbing photo of them all, was of graffiti under a highway overpass. It simply read: "Leave Our Land!" I remember being truly shocked at this at first, up until that moment I had been under the impression that these people were happy we were here. I had naively assumed that we had liberated these people from Saddam's evil regime, and that they were grateful of our presence. I was rudely awakened by this graffiti as I rolled through Baghdad, the belly of the beast. They didn't want us here, they didn't even care whether we won or lost. To them, it was out with the old boss, in with the new. We were just another dominating superpower. We may have been taking the place of Saddam, but to them, it was all the same. If they stepped out of line a year ago, Saddam would have them tortured or killed. Now that we had come rumbling through their land, uninvited, destroying the statues of their old leaders, bombing the hell out of their military bases, shooting anyone who stepped out of line or even happened to be holding a weapon, and kidnapping their father's and brothers in the middle of the night; they were still living in a nightmare. They were not afraid of the muzzle of my M-16, nor were they wary of my .50 Cal's wrath. These people were used to being pushed around by heavily armed soldiers. We were no better than the Republican Guard in their eyes. We were killers; we were not their friends. I knew I had to watch my back.

As quickly as the city had been on us, it was behind us, and crowded city streets gave way to open farmlands and long beautiful highways lined with tall trees on both sides. We drove for miles, sometimes passing through large archways, impressively constructed with magnificent designs and old Arabic architecture. We passed herds of camels and sheep, and sometimes rolled right through the middle of small towns, being chased by children who would wave and shout, "Go America!" and "We love George Bush!" The smart ones had figured out that these phrases would get them bottles of water, maybe even a candy bar or a stick of gum. I assumed they were lies, but who am I to say. Maybe they really did love George Bush. I've never felt any love for the man. In America, we weren't forced to proclaim our love for our leaders. We wouldn't be tortured or killed for failing to announce our allegiance to the president. In any case, I was raised in California and trained by my father never to give so much as a penny to a bum. To me, these Hadji's where no different from the bums back home. They were only trying to grease the wheels and it wasn't going to work on me. Besides all this, I've seen other soldiers throw MRE's to the Hadji kids several times only to have them tear it open, tossing bland crackers and freeze dried bags of tasteless food aside, finally finding nothing of interest and gazing back up at us with a questioning look, as if to say, "What is this shit? You call this food?" I couldn't help but agree with them on the taste of MRE's.

### Hotel California

Eventually, we found ourselves in the middle of another vast empty expanse of grasslands. I could see what looked like the wreckage of telephone cables expanding for miles, every tower broken and toppled over in a mess of twisted metal. Somebody didn't want somebody else to be able to communicate anymore. This was the first time I would notice this landmark, but I would see these toppled towers many times over the next year. These landmarks would tell me that I was near what would be my new home base, Camp Speicher. We were roughly twenty miles outside of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown. As we approached the front gates of F.O.B. Speicher (Forward Operating Base), I could see what looked like a military jet taking off. As we got closer, I could see that it was actually a real jet cleverly attached to a long piece of metal jutting diagonally out of the ground to simulate the motion a plane of raising off the runway. This sculpture was positioned right in front of the main gate. Camp Speicher used to be the Al-Sahra Airfield, which housed Saddam's now defunct Iraqi Air Force. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in ninety-one, our boys had pretty much rendered Iraq's Air Force obsolete, and when we invaded again in early 2003, just a few months ago, coalition forces had taken the Al-Sahra Airfield and dubbed it F.O.B. Speicher. Despite the fact that the runways were salvageable, many of the buildings had been hit by our bombs and were in shambles. I was not surprised to find that the cooks who had gone ahead of me had been assigned to live in one of the buildings which had been hit the hardest by our own artillery. Our barracks were a long line of connected buildings separated by a covered, porch like walkway. These long buildings were set up in rows, with a dirt street connecting them to a bigger paved road that lead to our units HQ. The Headquarters had been established inside a large building that was attached to an old coliseum. The walk to HQ from our barracks was a twenty minutes trek, and I'm pretty sure it was not an accident that we were placed so far from everyone else. To make matters worse, each of the buildings in our row were in degrading condition, and ours was the worst of all. The end of the building, right near where we slept, had been completely turned to rubble from a mortar blast and was un-inhabitable. Large chunks of rock and cement hung precariously from steel rebar's still partially attached to the cement roof that was caved completely in on one side. Hidden in the rubble were various relics of the past, dusty old AK-47 magazines full of ammo, old Iraqi gas masks, and even what appeared to be unexploded ordinance. I opted not to ever venture back there after my first investigation.

The cooks who had gone ahead of us had already set up one of our MKT's in front of our building. All cooking was done on the trailer, and we had set up a makeshift dining room in the part of the building that we didn't use as barracks. Carpenters from Charlie Company had built tables and benches, and the dining room had been soaked with bleach to ensure cleanliness. At one end, we had two very large metal coolers, which had been left behind from the airfields previous occupants. In these, we kept our daily allotment of river ice blocks, and hundreds of bottles of water. We also had a limited supply of strawberry and chocolate milks that we kept hidden in the coolers. At the opposite end, was the entrance to the dining room, which opened up into the covered porch and into the connecting barracks and sleeping area. At the far end of our barracks, was the bombed out portion of the building, and beyond that, was a row of three porta-shitters, and three piss tubes. Piss tubes were a revolting innovation that basically involved drilling about six feet into the ground and jamming a PVC pipe in at an angle. Male soldiers can then piss into these tubes, which are right at dick level. The idea is for the urine to soak into the ground, which in theory is not as hard and barren if you drill a few feet under the surface. The only problem with this is that the urine doesn't soak into the ground at all, and after a while, the tube fills with piss and starts to stink. I can tell you, given enough time and hot enough sun, urine begins to smell FAR worse than shit, even when it burned. This is the set up that we had for a chow hall, and these were my new living arrangements, so I had to make the best out of what I had. I found it ironic that someone who had lived here before me, maybe as far back as desert storm, had scrawled graffiti onto the outside wall next to the front door. In cursive writing, "Hotel California" had been chosen as the name of our barracks. The lyrics to the old Eagles song made more sense then ever before, attached to this old building. "Welcome to the Hotel California..." I thought as I looked at the words on the old adobe wall. "Relax," says the night man, "we are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave"

There were no phones when we got to Iraq. In Kuwait, there had been a single tent on the other side of camp, which housed a solo satellite telephone. We had to take turns on this phone, shared with my entire company of over two hundred and fifty soldiers. I rarely called home even then because it was too much of a hassle. Not only would I have had to wait until the middle of the night in order to call someone back home during the day, but even then, after waiting in line, you were lucky if the family member or friend back home even picked up the phone. Even when I did finally get a hold of my mom, it was almost impossible to talk to her while fighting a five second time delay. After that, I decided to stick to writing letters. Because I had grown accustomed to evading the phones in Kuwait, it came to no real surprise to me that I would no longer have the option in Iraq. The loss of phones was not the only difference between my previous home and my new surroundings. Iraq was a very different environment than the vast, sandy desserts of Kuwait. In Iraq, there were trees, plants, and a harder more fertile soil than the loose, sandbox that I was used to. There were still dust storms to be wary of, but the terrain was much less moonlike than Kuwait. I felt a little better to know that I was at least in a place where plants and animals could live. It was also nice to be living in a building instead of a tent, but it was still just as hot inside. At first, we kept the doors and windows closed at all hours of the day and night in an attempt to keep out the bugs. There was also a much more diverse abundance of insects and animal wildlife in Iraq. In Kuwait, all there was for miles in every direction was sand. Nothing could live out there. In Iraq, however, the dirt was fertile in many areas, and trees, bushes, and all sorts of other life were able to thrive. I found out the hard way that small dessert scorpions were no strangers to my living area. One night, I awoke in a sweat to find that my water bottle was empty. I was sleepy, and didn't want to wake myself all the way up to venture to the cooler at the opposite end up two buildings, but after trying to ignore my parched throat for several minutes, I had to give in. I opted out of sliding on my difficult Army boots, and attempted to tip toe barefoot through the darkness with my flashlight in hand. Flashlights don't do much good when you're eyes are closed, and because of this, I didn't notice the little scorpion that was happily sitting right in the middle of the floor. When I stepped on his stinger, he let me know he was there. I shrieked so loud, everyone in the bay woke up with a start. I felt flashlights shining on me from all around and voices calling out for acknowledgement. When I turned to my right, I was horrified to see that Nicholas Sims had sleepily grasped his fully automatic SAW Machine gun, and had it locked and loaded, aimed right at my head. I knew he was quick and kept his machine gun battle ready, but I never thought I would be his target. That night, I got stung by a scorpion on my heel, and nearly turned into Swiss cheese by Sims.

Scorpions weren't the only new wildlife threats. We also had wild packs of dogs to worry about. Snakes, lizards, rats, and even bats were common pests in Camp Speicher. I thought I was a tough soldier, but by my fifth day in Iraq, I had been chased by a wild dog, nearly walked right over a snake, and seen a camel spider as big as my hand. It was now nearly the fourth of July, and although I knew, ironically, there would be no celebration, I was still happy that this meant I was nearly three months into a six month tour. At the halfway mark, I thought I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

### Speicher

I had only been in F.O.B. Speicher for a single day before being thrown into the cooking rotation, which I had no problem with. I was glad to be working with my own squad in our own element in our own cooking trailer. There was something seriously unnerving about living in a giant sprawling camp with millions of strangers. I had only been in Speicher for about twenty-four hours and I was already beginning to feel much more at ease. I felt I finally had somewhere I could call home, a place where I could keep my things and set up a familiar living area for myself. Our sleeping bay was a long building with big metal doors on both ends and windows lining the walls on either side. In between each window was a small cubby, which was used as a makeshift closet by the soldiers in my squad. We had set up our cots in rows on either side, with our feet facing the center of the room, and our heads against the walls, each cot next to a closet and a window. The room was plenty long enough for thirty soldiers, fifteen cots on each side, but we only had thirteen soldiers in our section, so we had extra room. We had set up our cots on the end closest to the rubble of the bombed out end of the building. The other side of the room, which was left empty, was closest to the next building, which housed our makeshift dining hall behind a metal doorway. Our barracks were spacious and surprisingly comfortable for the standards we had grown used to in Kuwait. With my extra space, I had set my cot up next to my folding camping chair, which sat in front of a plastic footlocker that I used as a coffee table. This is funny, because this is roughly the same exact set up that I have had in every place I had ever lived. It was what I needed, (and will always need) in order to feel at home. I am a true born, couch potato. Whatever objects were left on my "coffee table," may have appeared to be a mess, but the truth is, I leave things on display. Everything has a purpose, even if it is only for a reaction. I am a true artist at heart, and so many of my belongings that I kept on display were art supplies. No other soldier in my unit could draw more than a stick figure, and so I knew that I could leave these things out without risking theft. Besides, I didn't have access to any expensive art supplies. All I had were several packs of Crayola markers, some 2B pencils, a block eraser, a ruler, and a big collection of Sharpies. The Sharpies did get stolen sometimes, but I was ok with that. I had stolen each and every one of them, and so I didn't really see the true value. I also had many drawings and sketches scattered about the top of my footlocker, the best of which had been taped or tacked to the walls inside my closet and above my bed. Most soldiers pin up photos of girls ripped out of Maxim magazines, (Playboys aren't allowed.) I didn't rip pictures out of magazines; I had a vivid imagination and the skill to draw. I had covered the walls around my living area with hand drawn pictures of girls that I had seen in these magazines. I was single, and had nobody waiting at home to speak of, so my pictures were all I had. Along with the art supplies, I had several of my prized belongings on display on top of my table. One of these was a small, portable fan that my mom had sent me in a care package. I loved this fan, because not only was it a fan, but it was also equipped with a small water spraying nozzle that sprayed mist into the fan blades, releasing a very refreshing cool mist bath on my face. I left this out on the table for anyone to use. Another of my prized possessions was my Discman. I have owned many Discman's, and this one was not special. In fact, this was the third Discman I had owned since we had landed in Kuwait. Sand kept getting into the sliding laser mechanism, and Discman's were easily broken in the dessert. I went through my first two CD players in the first two months I spent in the sandbox. Now that I was in Iraq, I had bought a new Discman, and so far, it was working just fine. I had a collection of CD's in a big black leather book, which I kept locked away inside the footlocker. One thing that I knew would definitely get stolen was my music collection. CD's were hard to come by, especially now that we were in a newly set up F.O.B. in Iraq. The PX in Speicher was slightly larger than the trailer in Kuwait. It was set up inside of an old warehouse with high ceilings, which dwarfed the meager selection of items making the selection seem even more sparse. Most of what they had for sale was food. Nothing very good was every sold at the PX, but one of my favorites was the small can's of Vienna Sausages. I used to hate those things, but now that the alternative was Army chow or an MRE, I had grown quite fond of cold Vienna sausages. They also had several CRKT knives for sale, along with a single row of CD's. I had purchased a Columbia River Knife and Tool before I left home, so I steered clear of the overpriced pocketknives. Most of the soldiers in my unit were all sporting brand new knives, it seems that when people get bored, spending money on worthless trinkets is apparently therapeutic. The majority of the CD's for sale were pop-country albums put out by hick artists that I'd never heard of. Besides the pop-country, there were usually a few rock or metal new releases, which were all crap. I prefer most rock from the ninety's era and back, but most of the new stuff is terrible. The only CD's I'd been able to find at the PX that were worth listening to, were an Aerosmith greatest hits album, a Rolling Stones anthology, and a live Led Zeppelin collection titled, _How The West Was Won._ I found this to be ironic to listen to while I was currently playing cowboys and Indians in the new wild wild west of Iraq. I had never before been very into classic rock, but I liked Zeppelin, and I liked Aerosmith enough... Due to the selection at the PX, I was becoming much more open minded to the music my dad used to listen to. Being from the city, my favorite kind of music was hip-hop and rap, what the hicks in the army called, "Urban music," (black people music.) It was impossible to get any decent hip-hop music in any PX in Iraq. Luckily, I had recently received a care package from my mom that included several of my own CD's from back home. By this time I had a collection of at least thirty CD's that I listened to on a regular basis. My favorites were a collection of underground hip-hop artists (mostly white guys from the suburbs.) I listened to Atmosphere's _God Loves Ugly_ several times a day. When Slug, (the lead vocalist,) would snarl out the lyrics of the title song, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It pumped me up so much, and if I closed my eyes, I felt like I was back home again with my friends, drinking beers and smoking weed, relaxing and boasting about my war stories. It was my anthem...

I wear my scars like the rings on a pimp  
I live life like the captain of a sinking ship  
The one thing that I can guarantee  
I'm like a stepping razor, I suggest you stay fair with me  
I'm pushin' on the hammer, to trigger the brain  
Embrace how I live it cause, god loves ugly...

Although I loved hip-hop from all artists and all era's, I held no prejudice to suburb or hood, but at the time, I felt I could relate to white artists such as Slug and Eyedea more than anyone else. I had dreams of becoming a rapper myself, and despite my embarrassment, I had begun writing an extensive collection of my own lyrics. I hoped to find a DJ/Producer to collaborate with when I returned home and pursue my dreams of turning my poetry into song. I had no prior experience in music, so it was a long shot, and I knew it. My back-up plan was to publish my lyrics into a poetry book. I wasn't sure what I really wanted to do with it, but I loved listening to music, and I figured my lyrics were pretty good. It might as well be published one way or another. I had filled up at least thirty pages by now, and I had plenty of time on my hands. My method was simple. I didn't try to write poetry as I was taught in high school, according to a strict formula: A, B, A, B, or A, A, B, B, C, C, and so on... I wrote more according to my own plan. I tried to explain it to someone once, and it went a little something like this: I try to rhyme the same word as many times as I can, without it sounding ridiculous, and then, I find a clever way of switching the rhyming word, and then I continue again at step one. It was pretty simple really, and as I found out later, a great way to write really bad poetry that can't possibly be used realistically as rap lyrics. I would spend hours slaving over my journal. My fellow soldiers would constantly see me hunched over my journal and ask, "Are you writing a book about us?" I always denied this, saying no, I only wrote poetry. I thought I would never be able to keep a true diary, and furthermore, I had my doubts that anyone would ever care to read a story of us sitting in the dessert. All of this didn't matter to me at the time, I was just happy for something to take my mind off where I was.

### Fireworks for the Fourth of July

It wasn't long before the luxury of Iraq became the same tedious production that I had grown weary of in Kuwait. The only trace of action that we ever got, were the occasional mortar attacks that basically consisted of a series of explosions in the distance followed by a rumbling of Bradley tanks in pursuit of the suspects, (whom they NEVER caught.) Every once in a while, the explosions would be so close that you could feel the ground shake. By now we had all grown rather accustomed to these blasts because we all knew, they were fired at random. Iraqi mortar men would set up outside of our F.O.B. and haphazardly lob mortars over the perimeter fence. They had no idea what, if anything, they where aiming at. Because of this, they rarely ever hit anything at all. Most of what they did hit, was a whole lot of dessert dirt, which kicked up into it's own little dust storms and sprayed shrapnel into a whole lot of nothing. It was important for this very reason that we set up our bases with plenty of space in between buildings. There were no clustered structures; it was nothing like a college campus or a city. This was why every time I had to walk to chow or our company HQ, I had to leave at least thirty minutes before I needed to be there. It was roughly half of a mile in between everything in Camp Speicher.

One morning, around 11:00 AM, we had finished our breakfast meal, and I had a few hours to relax in the middle of the day before starting preparations for the dinner meal. It was typical in those days to wake up early, cook breakfast for the soldiers in our unit, give them an MRE to eat for lunch, and then start working on the dinner meal around two thirty in the afternoon. We would be up at five every morning to cook breakfast, and stay up until ten o'clock or later. We still had to break down and clean up after dinner and make preparations for the next days breakfast. Being a cook was hard work, but most of the other soldiers only noticed us when it was lunchtime. They begrudgingly eat their MRE's while watching us relax between the hours of eleven to two thirty. Many evenings, several of us would have to stay up through the night for guard duty. I was always tired, and the afternoons where usually the only time I ever got to recuperate. Sometimes I would try to take a nap, but it was usually too hot to sleep in the afternoon, and I've never been much of a day sleeper. Usually I would write in my poetry notebook or sketch on my sketchpad while listening to one of my favorite CD's in my headphones. Today, I was outside, behind our barracks messing around with Sims. We were playing with a puppy that we had found, (or he had found us.) Iraq is full of packs of wild dogs. Seeing these ragged bands of dogs roaming the dessert looking for food always reminded me of some Disney movie. When you think of a gang of wild dogs, you usually would imagine that they all look the same, like a pack of wolves. This is not the case, at least not in Iraq. These packs of wild dogs looked like some suburban neighborhood in California had all released their pets at the same time. There were little ones, big ones, skinny ones, fat ones; some had fluffy, matted coats while others were shorthaired. The sad part was that these dogs could become rather vicious in the wild, and they acted almost exactly like a pack of coyotes. Every time we would attempt to dump our trash in a big landfill on the edge of camp, we would be confronted by snarling wild dogs guarding their territory (our trash.) Many times while on radio duty, I would hear the familiar words on the air.

"GRIZZLY THREE TO RAPTOR MAIN: REQUEST TO OPEN FIRE ON DOGS," and then, "RAPTOR MAIN TO GRIZZLY THREE. READ YOU LIMA CHARLIE: PROCEED AS DIRECTED. OVER. REQUEST TO FIRE ON DOGS GRANTED. KEEP IT SIMPLE. DON'T USE ANYTHING BIG. OVER. RAPTOR MAIN OUT." After this, I would hear a few single gunshots echo in the distance and I knew that Baloo, Pongo, Chance or Goofy, had just met their end at the barrel of an M-16. Not all the dogs were bad though, and the soldiers in camp had even taken some in as pets. On this particular morning, Sims and I were playing fetch with this little shorthaired, yellow puppy. I don't know if anyone gave him a name, I'd never seen him before, but he was friendly and wasn't trying to bite either one of us, so we started tossing a stick for him. I had taken my disposable camera out of my cargo pocket to snap a picture of our cute little friend, when all of a sudden, BOOOM! A huge explosion rocked the ground we stood on. I could feel a shockwave hit my body all at once. Somewhere on the edge of camp, something big had detonated. I was already holding a camera, and the explosion was directly in my line of sight, so I snapped a picture. Immediately a giant black cloud filled the air like a shadowy hot air balloon. I could see the intense heat of the blast inside the smoke as it billowed upward into the gray sky. I don't know what blew up, but it was big. This became a common occurrence over the next few months. I found out later, that when the bomb squad finds an IED, (Improvised Explosive Device), they will first clear the area, and then they will typically approach it with extreme caution, cover it with TNT, then back off and ignite the whole thing. It's called a controlled blast, and usually no one gets hurt. The messed up thing is, they would never warn any of the other U.S. Army units in the area, on the radio or otherwise. We would just be walking along, and BANG! "Whoa! what the fuck was that?!" The thoughts would swarm into my head, uninvited. Sometimes the blast would be within a mile of me; other times it would be far off in the distance. I would always wonder, was that a controlled blast? Or did some poor soldier just get blown to smithereens, involuntarily cremated and dusted across several miles of dessert.

Besides the near constant rumble of explosions in the distance, there was not much to keep my mind from wandering to home. I was addicted to the memory of America. It was funny to think that the Fourth of July, America's independence day, had come and gone and no one had said a word about it. Even the Army's birthday had been made relatively a big deal in Kuwait, but the independence day of the country we all called home was left unnoticed. I guess they thought it would make us look weak to be celebrating in hostile territory. The enemy may have seen it as a chance to catch us with out pants down. There may have been no room for celebration in Tikrit, but one thing did not go missing. The explosions and tracer rounds that would streak through the sky every night were all the fire works we needed to remind us of what we were fighting for. To this day, I will never again appreciate fireworks on the Fourth of July. I've had enough bombs go off above my head.

### Contraband

I took a sip from my army drab green canteen and tried hard not to make a face. The Southern Comfort hidden inside was harsh after a four-month dry spell. We weren't allowed to drink beer, whiskey or any alcohol whatsoever. The U.S. Army always plays it safe, following the laws of the land and enforcing them on their own soldiers. Iraq is a Muslim country, and Muslims don't drink; therefore, I don't drink. I always thought this was a preposterous farce when it was obvious that Iraqi men LOVED to get drunk. Some of them would even run along side our convoys, shouting out to me in the gun turret, "Mistah! Mistah! You want buy Whiskey!" Despite the fables of a dry country that were constantly spread by the higher ups, I could tell that there was no shortage of booze by the mounds of empty cans scattered about outside men's night clubs and houses as we rolled by. The villages were full of imported Turkish Whiskey, and the men drank large quantities of Turkish beer as well. I heard stories from Infantry soldiers about drunken Hadji's causing trouble at night. Many of those guys would confiscate the booze they found and bring it back to camp with them, (not letting any go to waste, of course.) It sounded fun, but we were an attached engineer unit, and I was a cook. I never got my hands on any beer, Turkish whiskey, or anything else. I was not allowed to talk to Hadji's and it wasn't my job to guard them or keep them in line. Needless to say, I never got a chance to befriend any of them, and I never got the opportunity to confiscate anything. Being the young troublemakers that we were, it didn't take long until we began finding ways around the Army's strict No Drinking policy. We would sometimes sit in our folding camping chairs on the roof of our barracks in the evenings, drinking N/A beers and smoking thick Cuban cigars, trading party stories from back home, reminiscing of the drunken nights we had spent in our hometowns before joining the Army. One thing that was easy for us to procure, were good Cubans. Most of us young kids had only heard stories about the legendary cigars, and we were all avid cigarette smokers. Being in the Army makes you want to smoke a pack a day, and that's exactly what we all did. The PX's would sell us cartons of Marbloro Reds, Marb Lights, and Menthols. Those were the only choices. When I first started smoking cigarettes in high school, I was a Camel Filter kinda guy... but when you're sixteen and aren't allowed to actually purchase smokes, you'll take whatever you can bum. I wasn't too keen on smoking Marb Reds, or "Cowboy Killers" as we called them, but what choice did I have? I wasn't about to attempt quitting my habit in the middle of a war, so cowboy killers it was. Every now and then, we'd come across a good cigar for sale in the PX, or even from the small Hadji Bazaar's we rarely encountered. It was one of these evenings that we began talking about how we could smuggle some booze through the mail from back home. We thought about brewing our own, but setting up a distillery was too dangerous, and we would surely get caught. Then there was your non-distilled, trash bag of fermented fruit pulp method, but jailhouse hooch didn't sound that appealing to any of us. It was Scott who had the clever idea to have his mom send him a huge, Costco sized box of dry laundry detergent powder, cut open, with liquor bottles hidden inside, and resealed with duct tape. We were lucky that his mom would oblige, and with his sister's help, the package was in the mail before very long. This was all wrapped in cellophane and packaged in a cardboard box and shipped to us, halfway around the world. On the night the package arrived, several of us who were in on the secret climbed up to the roof and lit up some Cuban's that we'd been saving. The big PX in Kuwait City had a rather large arsenal of cigars, and many of the smokers (all of us) had purchased one or two of these prized possessions and tucked them away for a special occasion. Tonight was indeed a special occasion, because tonight we were not drinking non-alcoholic beer. This was our first time receiving one of Scott's mom's care packages, and we were all ready for a little buzz. We all agreed that when the package arrived, we would split up the booze into our canteens, and bury the bottles in the sand underneath the porta-shitter. No one would ever look there, and we had no intent on getting caught. Being in the Army in a war zone, in my unit anyway, was like being in a prison camp. To me, in my young age, it was just like an extension to high school. I hated it, just as much as I hated high school. My first sergeant loved to act like he was a drill sergeant, and he treated this whole deployment as if it were an extension to boot camp. He was always creeping around, watching, trying to catch me doing something I shouldn't be doing, like smoking a cigarette on the roof. I had watched movies like _Platoon,_ and _Hamburger Hill,_ and I always thought I'd be allowed to explore, drink, and even smoke pot on patrol just like in the movies. Apparently, as I heard from my mentor, Sergeant Mendoza, this was exactly the case when in Viet Nam. But now, in Iraq, roughly twenty-seven years later, the rules had changed drastically. If I was caught in any kind of inebriated state of mind, drunk, high, or otherwise, I would most likely find myself court marshaled. I didn't want an Article Fifteen in a war zone, because I knew they wouldn't send me home. They would never go that easy on me. I would probably get my rifle taken away, lose the privilege to leave F.O.B. Speicher on convoys, they could even take away my phone and mail privileges. I knew that if my upper command wanted to make my life a living hell, it was not beyond them. After we split up the booze, Scott volunteered to go dispose of the bottles. (Two pints where hidden in the box of laundry detergent: A bottle of Southern Comfort 101 Proof, and a bottle of Jack Daniels.) The JD was the more popular choice, and since I wasn't that high on the social chain, I didn't get to choose what I got. There where five of us who were in on the secret. Scott Mason, Sergeant Barnes, Sergeant Jackson, Sergeant Dixon who was a truck driver from Bravo Company, and myself. I was the lowest rank, so all I got was about three shots worth of So-Co in the bottom of my canteen. After taking my first sip, and smoking the better half of a Cuban, I was already feeling fairly dazed with the intense effects of the cigar. Usually they tell you not to inhale cigar smoke. You're supposed to just puff on it, savor the taste of the smoke in your mouth, and then exhale. Me, being young, and in Iraq, felt it was necessary not to waste any buzz I could get, even a nicotine buzz from a cigar. It made me feel vaguely sick to my stomach, but with the added calming effects of the So-Co, I was pretty high. I began to feel overwhelmed with my buzz, and even felt like I might be sick. It was lucky for me that two of my peers were NCO's in my cooks section, but I knew they didn't have my back if I got busted. I decided to go lay down by myself on my cot and listen to music in my headphones to calm my nerves. After precariously climbing down from the roof, (back then, we were using a tree to get up and down) I slowly made my way to my cot, took off my boots, and laid flat on my back with my headphones pumping _Journey_ into my ears, and closed my eyes. Even though my home was technically Boulder, Colorado, I felt that my true home was the magical city of San Francisco. My dad had moved my family to California's Bay Area when I was five, and I'd grown up right outside of the City. Because I was so young, I rarely got a chance to go into the City, but I was occasionally brought over the bay with my mom to visit a museum or go shopping for Christmas. It all seemed so mysterious and beautiful. When I turned ten, my dad decided it was getting too pricey to live in California, and we moved to Colorado. I always vowed that when I was old enough, I would move back to San Francisco. When I listened to Steve Perry belt out his passionate love song to the City, I felt like it was my anthem; my promise to San Francisco that one day, I would return to her.

When the lights go down in the City  
And the sun shines on the bay  
Do I want to be there in my City, ...Ooh, ooh  
So you think you're lonely  
Well my friend I'm lonely too  
I want to get back to my City by the Bay, ...Ooh, ooh

I felt so peaceful; I could almost feel my body slowly releasing all of its tension. I could feel myself gently drifting away; sleep was coming to take me away from all this; away from the Army and Iraq and the war. And all of a sudden, all hell broke loose. I heard a loud smashing sound and lurched to a sitting position. My headphones had fallen off and clattered to the floor from my rapid motion, and as I looked around to gather my bearings, I could see all the other soldiers in my unit running franticly for their gear. The smashing sound was the window on the far side of the building, next to the door that led to rubble. I could see broken glass all over the floor, and just as I realized what had happened, the door flung open, and in ran Scott, Sergeant Barnes, and Sergeant Jackson. Scott was first through the door and did a wild leap over the broken glass, landing in a bit of an unsure swagger, but piling toward his cot where his M-16/203 Grenade Launcher lay. Behind all the clatter and clamor of everyone else in the room, I could hear a high-pitched whistle in the distance that was growing swiftly louder as it approached. Before I could even jump to my feet, the second mortar hit a few clicks to the rear of the building, right where the piss tubes were drilled into the ground. This one was even closer, and it knocked me down to my knees, my hands shielding my ears from the impact as I ducked for shelter. Shrapnel once again kicked up in all directions and I could hear gravel and bits of plastic pelt against the walls. No windows broke this time, but I was already up, pulling my boots on. No time to lace them up, I turned and reached for my flak-vest and Kevlar helmet. I didn't want to get hit in the eyes so I pulled my dust goggles down over my face. As I picked up my rifle, I ripped the duct tape off the stock, tore off one my emergency thirty round mags, and slid it into place. I couldn't see very well at this point because my dessert goggles were shaded like sunglasses and weren't made for nighttime use. I was in a rag tag uniform, but I had my weapon and my armor. I figured that was the important part for now. Most of the other guys in my barracks had half suited up in the same ragged fashion, and as we readied ourselves, First Sergeant Purdue barged in to the other door, at the far end of the building near the dining hall. I don't know where he came from, or why he was all the way over near our building at night, especially after just moments before, we had all been sneakily drinking forbidden alcohol and smoking cigars on the roof, but now was not the time to worry about these things. This was also not a great time for remarks on how my uniform looked, but First Sergeant Purdue wasted no time in doing just that. "GRAY, WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF UNIFORM IS THAT? YOU'RE WEARING YOUR SUNGLASSES AT NIGHT? WHY AREN'T YOUR BOOTS LACED UP, YOUR GONNA TRIP AND FALL ON YOUR ASS! GET SQUARED AWAY RIGHT FUCKING NOW! WE ARE UNDER ATTACK!" I thought all of this basically went without saying, but I went ahead and ripped my goggles off my face and threw them on the floor. I bent to tie my boots, but was interrupted again by a third whistle followed by another loud WHUMMFFFF!!!! More shrapnel dusted the walls and roof, and with that, first sergeant charged through the middle of the building, past me, and aimed his attention on my section leader, Sergeant First Class Delacroix. "Get your men squared away Sergeant! Battle positions, now! We've got a breech in the perimeter! We're on a camp wide lock down!" And with that, he walked out the other side of the building through the open door while the two-way radio attached to his shoulder squawked something about the coordinates where the mortars had hit. I could hear the engine of a Humvee outside, First Sergeant Purdue spinning his wheels in an over glorified burnout as he sped off. What an asshole. I quit the notion of tying my shoes, and took my post next to the window next to my cot. I had no clue what First Sergeant thought he was talking about with that "battle stations" comment; I had never been told we had battle stations. I made do with what I had. There was a gun hole about waist level where the window always stayed open a few inches and I could stick my muzzle out without breaking glass. I couldn't see a thing outside through the darkness and the dust that the mortars had kicked up. There had only been three mortars, and then the assailants had most likely thrown their equipment in the back of a small car and raced off into the darkness, mixing in with the other Hadji's on the highway into Tikrit. I knew they would never be caught. I also had a strong suspicion that first sergeant Purdue's comment about our perimeter being breeched was total bullshit. I was still braced for the worst, but I hoped my assumptions were correct. I dreaded the thought of some elusive band of Iraqi renegades running toward my barracks out of the darkness, screaming a blood curdling Arabic battle cry, blasting away at us with AK-47's and RPG's. My imagination was playing tricks, and even though I knew it was only my fear getting the best of me, I couldn't shake the image from my head. The loud roar of a U.S. Comanche attack helicopter drowned out the sound of the radio briefly as it passed overhead. I looked to my right and saw Mason, bent to one knee like me, shouldering his rifle and taking aim into the night. To my left, the door swung back and forth in the wind creating a maddening metal on metal clanging as it banged against the doorframe. Behind me I could hear Sims muttering things under his breath like, "Bring it on fuckers! I'll blow your fuckin' heads off!" He was entirely too excited about the whole ordeal and I was half expecting him to start popping off rounds from his squad auto machinegun. It seemed like an eternity, but about five minutes later, we got the all clear. The perimeter breech was indeed a scare tactic by our First Sergeant, and the "attack" was merely another random mortar lobbing by amateur renegades who, of course, got away with it. We got the all clear by Specialist Pritchett, (who had been promoted to be the commander's personal driver,) swaggered in through the open door in full battle-rattle with a radio on his shoulder and night-vision goggles mounted on his Kevlar. I still couldn't understand why first sergeant Purdue was dressed in his full battle gear, parked in his Humvee right outside our building, and now, seeing Pritchett dressed this way as well, I was beginning to feel like the cooks really were completely ate up. I even pondered the idea that maybe the whole thing was a hoax, a deception to test my section and see how we would react to a real attack. Despite my suspicions, I was left with a sweaty upper lip and my heart pounding out of my chest. I sat down on my cot; still wearing my K-pot and flak-vest, I made sure my rifle was switched to Safe, and sat it down next to me on my sleeping bag. I took a deep breath and raised my hand in front of my face, palm to the floor. I could see how hard my hand was shaking and realized for the first time how honestly terrified I was. For the first time in my six to seven months preparing for war and pushing into Iraq, it had just hit home for me. I wasn't camping. This was not an exercise. I was in a real war zone, and at any moment while I slept, I could be killed. That first mortar had hit close enough to break a huge tree branch off of the tree I had just used moments before to climb down from the roof. The branch had swung down and smashed through the window. A direct hit would have caused the roof to come down on top of us, and I was supposed to feel safe inside? The building I was living in was halfway demolished! How was it ever supposed to protect us? It was the true illusion of safety, not unlike our old worn out Viet Nam era flak-vests that didn't even have bulletproof plates in the fronts or backs and our canvas covered vehicles that wouldn't even protect us from shrapnel. I wanted to write everything down that I was feeling, but my hands shook too hard to hold a pen. I hoped that mortars were like lightning, hitting the same place only once. I cleared my rifle of the round I had charged, removed the magazine, and laid back down on my side. This time, I left my boots, flak-vest, and Kevlar all on, curled up into a fetal position, and fell into an uneasy sleep.

### Aspirations of a Writer

Mail always seemed to take forever to get from me all the way back home to my mom, but that never stopped me from writing her incessantly. I knew she worried, and furthermore, I felt like she was the only person back home that really gave a shit about me. I wrote my brother a few times, and I wrote my cousins maybe once each, (there are four of them.) My dad had separated from my mom when I was seventeen and was living in New Orleans with his new girlfriend, who was a nice girl, but was half his age and had a seven-year-old kid. I barely ever talked to him the whole year I was in Iraq. I will always regret it, but that's what happens in times of war. My brother Dakan, four years my senior, was living his life in Denver. He was popular in my eyes. He had plenty of friends, and it seemed to me that girls were always interested in him. I had only had a handful of embarrassingly brief relationships with girls, and there was only one who I'd gone all the way with. I had a very shaky relationship with my high school girlfriend, and besides, I wasn't trying to worry about her while in Iraq, so I didn't write her much. I had no other romantic interests, and most of my friends were too immature to write a letter, so I pretty much only wrote to my mom. I knew my mom would relay all information in my letters to my friends, relatives, and anyone else who cared to listen. My mom is an old fashioned, southern, gossip-girl, that's just the way she is. Although I was writing to very few people back home, I still found that my writing skills weren't up to par. I couldn't find the words to describe what I was feeling and seeing in Iraq with my limited vocabulary, and my spelling was atrocious. Since I had so much time on my hands, I began brushing up on my Basic English skills. I'd never considered being a writer, but this was the first time I'd ever had a reason to write more than a few sentences. I'd always sluffed off any challenging homework assignments in high school and many of the papers I had turned in were blatantly plagiarized. I'm lucky to have even graduated high school at all, but with the help of about five very special teachers, I managed. My graduating high school, Centaurus, had technically kicked me out. I had ditched so many classes to smoke weed with my friends, that one day I got a pink slip in the middle of my most hated class, Journalism. I was getting an F in Journalism, and I honestly don't even know why I had bothered to show up that day, but there I was, with a pink slip from the office telling me to go see the principal immediately. Usually the slips given in class are yellow, which mean that you're supposed to go to the school office AFTER class. A pink slip means you need to see the principal immediately. The pink slip was serious. If the school administrators actually tell you to miss class, it must be pretty bad. When I sat down in front of the principal, he took one look at me, sizing me up, and said, "I'm not going to argue with you, I don't want any excuses. We both know you've been missing a lot of class lately. I'm going to give you two choices. You can either drop out, or you can go to an alternative school that they run out of a doublewide trailer extension on the Arapahoe Ridge Campus. It's called Chinook, and if you decide to go there and try hard to succeed, I'll let you graduate from Centaurus." I took all this in, and realized that I really did not want to drop out. I'd seen the kinds of kids that don't finish high school. They were losers... working dead-end jobs at Blockbuster video or one of the many fast-food restaurants in the area. They had no future, and they may not have known it, but I did. I knew my parents didn't have any money, and I knew they couldn't support my broke ass even if they wanted to, and they didn't want to. I was not looking forward to telling my mom about getting kicked out of high school for... well, for not going to school. I had been lying to her for the past year or so, pretending to go to school when I would really just wait around the corner for her to go to work, then I'd go back home and watch TV. I'd still go to school for classes I liked, sometimes. Other days I'd just go to school for lunch, to hang out with a pretty redhead named Lexi that I had a crush on. I barely ever showed up to class, and if I did I was high. All I wanted to do was smoke cigarettes behind the cafeteria, kick it with Lexi, and then dip out and catch the bus to my Auto Mechanic class at Vo-Tech. I already felt I was destined for blue-collar life, so I was taking these auto shop classes across town in the Vocational Tech College, which happened to be on the Arapahoe Ridge campus. When my principal at Centaurus offered me the opportunity to attend an alternative school in a trailer on that same campus that was tailor made for losers like me, I jumped at the idea. I was sad that I wouldn't see Lexi anymore, but that wasn't really going anywhere, and I knew if I spent all my time on Arapahoe Ridge Campus, I'd be closer to the expensive alternative high school, September School, where several of my best friends went. I ended up finishing out the year at Chinook, and it changed my whole perspective on high school. I had only five teachers, each who taught a different subject, one on one, with their students. I was only expected to show up three days a week for a few hours, sit down with one of these instructors, and discus what I had learned in the homework. The homework was almost ALL reading assignments, and I would be expected to write, from the heart, how I felt about it and what it meant to me. This was my first experience with writing that I actually found enjoyable. I wasn't pressured with an intense grading system of F's and D's and A's and B's. I was simply expected to try. And try I did. I ended up graduating from Centaurus, through Chinook, and when I did, I decided not to walk down the stage in a cap and gown with the other Centaurus students. Instead, I went to a private Chinook graduation, along with my five instructors and about six other students who were graduating. It was a deeply personal experience, graduating with only a few close friends and mentors who all knew my name and really knew and appreciated me. I have always felt that most high school graduations are a very impersonal experience. It's almost as if the graduates are herded through the gauntlet like cattle, they are handed a fake diploma that is merely a prop, an overpaid photographer will snap a photo, and then somebody nobody has ever heard of or cares about will give a speech, followed by a yawning audience, cameras flash and then it's over. For me, I had people around me that I cared about, and I knew they cared about me. I was handed a very real diploma, and my instructors gave me a very personal graduation gift. They handed me a book of poetry by Walt Whitman, _Leaves of Grass._ Inside the front cover, was this inscription:

Jevir,

Congratulations! Keep writing while you're sweating at Boot Camp – It will make the time go by more quickly. Make your future full! -The Chinook Staff

I had followed their advice, and I had never stopped writing poetry. I was still not a very good writer, and I knew it, but I didn't know how to improve. While in Boot Camp, I had written a small amount of poetry, and a good amount of letters to my mom, but that was about it. There wasn't enough time to write in basic training, the Drill Sergeants make damn sure you don't have any down time. When I had returned from training, I had been thrown back into my new life as a reservist very quickly. The recruiter had lied about my six thousand dollar bonus; it turned out it was really given to you in three separate checks, and taxed. I wouldn't even receive my first nineteen hundred dollar check until a month after I got back from Fort Lee. Buy a car when I get back huh? Yeah right! I had no place to live, my dad had moved to New Orleans, and my mom had sold the house and moved in with a roommate who she knew from church. With no house to come home to, and no money, I ended up having to crash on my brother's couch. Dakan lived with a roommate in a small house in Denver, so when I was released from training, I slept on his couch for a month and a half while I tried to get on my feet. I was eighteen then, and the only job I could find was waiting tables, pulling the graveyard shift at an all night diner. I got paid primarily in tips, so at the end of the month, I had a shoebox full of one-dollar bills that I had to take to the bank like a stripper. Fortunately, Denver was not one of the more expensive cities to live in at the time, and I was able to move into my first place by myself by the end of two months. A Mexican family had built a fence dividing their yard into two parts. The second part, in the far back, was a very small yard, with a garage that had been converted into a very small studio apartment. I had private access to my yard from the alleyway in back, and the rent was only four hundred and fifty dollars a month! For that price, having my own washer and dryer, my own yard, and no roommates, I was sold. I could also appreciate living in a Mexican neighborhood because I wasn't too fond of cops poking their nose in my business, and one thing about living in a Mexican hood, they will never call the cops on you. I knew I could play my music as loud as I wanted, have people over at any hour of the night, and nobody would care. This was a dream come true for any eighteen-year-old kid, and I was fresh out of boot camp so it was even better. What ensued after moving into this "dream house," was not as dreamy as I had expected. I was young, and naive. I trusted the wrong people, and I was robbed several times. I struggled to keep a job, fought to pay the rent every month, and within the first semester, I had dropped out of college. I was living on canned corn and Ramen noodles for months and I began to grow exceedingly depressed. That part of my life was like a black hole, there are no pictures of me in my "bum house," but it was my first attempt at being truly independent. I ended up getting evicted; the Mexican woman who owned the property had taken a peek through my windows and seen the large black cigarette burns on the carpet, the motorcycle tracks in the yard, the shattered window where someone had broken in... it was enough to prove to her that I was not fit to be living in her property. She posted a notice to my door that said, "we are sorry but you will need to vacate the premises permanently at the end of the next month due to renovations." I decided to do the right thing, paid her the last months rent, and got the hell out of there. Amazingly, the poor lady even gave me part of my deposit back. I moved to another crummy apartment on Capital Hill and started working. My dad had offered me a temporary gig as an outside contractor for his Jewelry business, and I was planning on getting a second job to pay the bills. The jewelry gig sounded pretty easy. All I needed to do was solder links of bracelets and necklaces together, sand them clean, and send them back through Fed-Ex to New Orleans, where they would be finished, have diamonds set in them, and sold. These pieces were high fashion jewelry; everything was fourteen karat gold. Sometimes I would even work with platinum, or pieces with diamonds already encrusted on the sides. I was always sitting on a couple thousand worth of gold and stones. It made me feel big, but I wasn't making much money. I worked many short-term jobs during the next two years, struggling to pay the bills, living week to week. I worked as a bar-back, a table busser at a busy lunchtime restaurant downtown, a library supply clerk, and even temporarily for my mom's new husband, installing washing machines and setting up Laundromats. Not surprisingly, my two favorite hobbies had fallen by the wayside during the hustle and bustle of trying to keep my head above water. I had dropped out of art school after a single semester at the Art Institute of Colorado, and even that one semester had burned me out. I wasn't drawing anymore at all, I had artists block. The majority of the art projects I had turned in my first semester had been recycled projects from high school, or thrown together collages of cut and pasted pieces of my portfolio. I had pretty much given up all hope that I would ever be a successful artist. I felt like the only good stuff I had was copied and I couldn't come up with anything original. I hadn't had time to read or write anything since boot camp, and to make matters worse; I didn't even feel like the interest level was there anymore. I honestly don't know where my life was headed, but it didn't seem good. Luckily for me, the Army had a solution. I got deployed. Before you actually get on a plane to Kuwait, deployed soldiers must go through a rigorous pre-deployment exercise that lasts anywhere from two to five months depending on when the orders come down for you to leave. Every single soldier must be fully capable and pass skills tests in many different fields before being ok'd to deploy. I was stuck in Fort Carson for almost four months before we finally got to leave. At the time of course, I wasn't very much looking forward to the day when we would actually have to get on the plane that would take us halfway around the world to a war zone. After a while, it got so boring and dreary that by the end, I was itching to get on the plane. I just wanted to get it over with. I knew that my deployment was supposed to be for one hundred and eighty five days, that's what it said on my orders. The only problem with being stuck in Fort Carson waiting to leave was that I knew that a hundred and eighty days wouldn't start counting down until I actually touched the ground in Iraq. My days in Ft. Carson were spent doing all of the same things I had to go through in boot camp. We had refresher courses in basically everything from target practice to marching into gas chambers filled with CS Gas (Tear Gas times four.) In basic training in Fort Knox, the drill sergeants had made us take our gas masks off inside the gas chamber, count down from ten, and then clear our masks before marching out. Ten seconds turned into fifteen, then into twenty, because the other soldiers in the gas chamber were panicked and unable to cooperate. If one soldier failed to make eye contact with the drill sergeant in the middle of the room, he would start over at "ten, nine, eight..." When I put my mask back on, I was supposed to clear it by blowing hard to force the gas out of the inside of the face shield, but by the time I was allowed to put my mask back on, I had no air left in my lungs. In desperation, I took the biggest breathe of my life. Everything I breathed in was CS gas trapped in the mask, and I started choking so hard I could barely breath. I could feel my skin burning like it was in an oven, and my sinuses liquefied instantly, pouring out of my nose and mouth. Immediately my vision started to go, I could feel the tunnel closing in and darkness started to surround me. I knew if I passed out, the drill sergeant would just leave me in there, and the idea of suffocating slowly on the floor of the gas chamber while unconscious thoroughly horrified me. I decided that I would refuse to allow my body to fall apart. I started jumping up and down and screaming at the top of my lungs while beating on my chest with both hands. I didn't pass out that day, but nobody talked to me afterword. They must have thought I was a crazy bastard. On my second round of the CS chamber in Fort Carson, I opted to leave my mask on. The rest of the time in Ft. Carson was spent in long lines, waiting for my turn to get a smallpox shot, or an Anthrax shot, or some mystery shot that I would never know what it was. Sometimes we would wait for hours in military medical waiting rooms, all holding our medical files, going from doctor to doctor getting checked out for this and that. Vision, hearing, dental, allergies, mental tests... you name it, they made us do it. All this gave me plenty of time to start reading and writing again. Boredom will do amazing things for your creativity. All of a sudden, I couldn't get enough of books, I was drawing again, and I had even started writing poetry for the first time since high school. I still didn't have as much free time as I would have liked, and it was hard to keep art supplies around when I was on the move all the time, (I moved barracks every couple of days in Ft. Carson, they would never let me get comfortable anywhere.) The one thing I could easily do though, was keep a small paperback book in the cargo pocket of my BDU trousers and read every chance I got. I started reading small paperbacks that I could buy at the PX, mostly Stephen King. When I was younger, I had been a fan of Goosebumps novels, which were a collection of corny, childish, horror fiction novels written for kids. Stephen King seemed like it was the adult version of the same. I'd also seen plenty of the movie adaptations of his books, and I knew the timeless truth, that all movies made from books pretty much suck compared to the book it was based on. I decided, what the hell, I might has well read a bunch of these books that everyone else has read and I've already seen the movies. My first one was _The Green Mile,_ which turned out to be an incredible read, so I was off to a good start. I had also become a huge fan of an author named Chuck Palahniuk who had written a novel called _Fight Club._ Of course, this had been made into a movie, and I had seen the movie in the theater with some friends before ever having heard of the author or the book. The two guys I saw it with wanted to walk out, I honestly don't understand why. The movie changed my life. I watched it over and over again, five times in the theater, two of which I was alone. I loved the idea of throwing away everything and running away to become something else. Breaking yourself down, giving up all of your meaningless material possessions, only to rebuild yourself into something greater than you were. I think what really attracted me to the idea of _Fight Club_ was the whole insomnia thing. I was definitely an insomniac when I was a teenager, I could never sleep, and even if I did, I would be awake early, before the sun broke the dawn. I could never understand how people could sleep all morning; some of my friends would even sleep till four o'clock PM! I would often stay up all night, drawing, reading, and writing. The night time is my time to catch up on everything I missed out on during the day. While doing my time in Ft. Carson, I had read every one of Chuck Palahniuk's books. He had a certain kind of grimy writing style that focused on the dirtiest, scummiest, bottom of the barrel type of people. I felt so drawn to it because it felt so real and raw. It reminded me very much of my own life, living in squalor, eating flavorless noodles, too young to even buy a beer, but old enough to go to war. I had read _Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke, Fight Club_ (Several times,) and most recently, _Lullaby._ The latter, was about a spoken spell that would kill whoever listened within ten minutes of hearing it. After it became widespread, it created an epidemic, because news reporters on the TV and the radio would repeat the spell in an attempt to warn others, and un-knowingly kill everyone in front of their TV's. I read this book in a foxhole in the middle of a rainstorm in the mountains of Colorado Springs. The foxhole kept getting deeper as the rain filled it with mud and it began to flood. I was soaking wet, but managed to keep my M-16, my face, and my book, fairly dry. There were a few big drops of muddy water in between the pages, but I was addicted, and so I read on into the night with a rain poncho over my head and a flashlight aimed at the pages of the book.

With all the "Hurry up and Waiting" I'd been doing, I'd had plenty of time to read. I got on the plane to Kuwait with two Duffel bags, a rucksack, and my battle gear. There was no room for books, so I had only brought one. This was a book that my dad had given to me on one of my last times seeing him. I'll always remember what my dad said to me when I left. He hugged me for a long time, and then, pulling away from the embrace with watery eyes and a shaky, but firm voice, he told me one thing, "Be Big." Those last words sunk in. His words, "Be Big," will always mean a lot to me. I had and still have the upmost respect for my dad. I know now that what he meant by that was that it didn't matter if I went to war. It didn't matter where I went in my life. I had to be as big as I could be. I had to try to do the right thing and be strong enough to deal with the consequences. Whether I lived or died, I knew my dad wanted me to rise above, and do what I knew was right. I had written those words in the front page of this book, and I read it religiously. The book was _The Rainbow Stories_ by William T. Volleman. It was my first time being exposed to that sort of Gonzo style journalism that Hunter S. Thompson made so popular. William T. Volleman was a guy from San Francisco who followed around skinheads and hookers, pimps and crack-heads, and wrote down everything he saw. After becoming addicted to Chuck Palahniuk's grimy, _Fight Club_ –esque setting, this low-down rugged and raw writing style was the reasonable next step. If I wanted something real, I was going to have to quit reading fiction, and so _The Rainbow_ Stories became my first large work of non-fiction. Volleman was just a guy, like me, and all he did was write down what he saw. I found this very inspiring, and my love for the alluring and mysterious city of San Francisco didn't hurt. I felt I was reading about the true underbelly of a city I wanted to know everything about. On the cover, there was a small photo of Volleman's skinhead friends, standing at attention in their black cargo pants tucked into black combat boots. One of them is hailing Hitler with an evil smirk on his face, and of course, all of their heads are shaved, white and shining against the black and grey backdrop of a city brick wall, covered in rainbow graffiti. The cover was misleading; the book was not in any way a racist manifesto. In fact, the skinheads were only the subjects of the first several chapters. I was in no way interested in becoming a skinhead myself, and I have never felt there was any good to come of racism. I wasn't raised that way. If there was one thing I could thank my parents for, was that they raised me in a completely non-prejudice world. I never knew that there was a difference between people based on the color of their skin or where they are from. Now that I was in the Army, it made even less difference to any of us what color or background we came from. We were all green now, as they say. No, I was not interested in William T. Volleman's _Rainbow Stories_ for it's skinhead references. I was drawn to the book for it's realistic, raw form of journalism. I'd never read anything like that before, so honest and genuine, no matter how degrading and depraved. Volleman didn't write about skinheads because he agreed with their ideology either; he wrote about them because he found them interesting, in the same way he found crack heads, hookers and pimps interesting. I'm not sure why, but I found these things interesting too. I've always found myself drawn to the dark side of things. I wanted to live in the heart of a big dirty city and wander the streets. I wanted to be just like William T. Volleman. And so I read, and studied, and practiced my writing style. As an aspiring writer, the best advice I could give, is to read as many books as you can stand. I found the experience I received through reading gave me a voice of my own to say whatever I pleased.

### From My Ashtray To The Zero-Hour

At this point, I had received several care packages from my mom, and one of the first things I requested, were a collection of dictionaries. I wanted to learn as many words as I could, I felt this would broaden my horizons and make me a better writer. I would spend hours studying my dictionaries, just discovering new words and learning their definitions. I had three paperback dictionaries, each of which I could fit in my cargo pocket and keep on me all day. One of these was a regular Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, which was the one I spent most time with. My next dictionary, was a Slang and Euphemism Dictionary of oaths, curses, insults, ethnic slurs, sexual slang and metaphor, drug talk, college lingo, and related matters. This was much more fun, and thumbing through the pages was always good for a laugh. My third was a Rhyming Dictionary. I'd never even heard of a thing like this, but my mom found it in a bookstore and it was quickly becoming my favorite book. I began using it to create poetry that transcended the average vocabulary. One of the underground rappers who I'd listened to in high school was named "Gift of Gab" and rapped with a group called Blackalicious. There was one song where Gift of Gab begins rapping slowly, using only words starting in A, he then begins to speed up as he moves through B words, C words, D words, and so on. By the end of the alphabet, he is rapping so fast, you can barely hear what he is saying. I loved the idea, but I thought I could do it better. Using my rhyming dictionary, I set out to write my own unique style of complicated Alphabetic poetry. I named my masterpiece: _From My Ashtray to the Zero Hour._

### From My Ash Tray To The Zero-Hour

Arrogant ashes fall from my ashtray

Aggravating, anticipating the aftermath of adolescence

I'm teaching lessons to these peasants

To break the bullshit and bring you something brand new

A bastard's belated birth for a belligerent beacon that shines through

Creating a collective capital on this cremated culture that can't save itself with a clue

The deranged deviate of todays youth, headed down the direction of disaster

Dilating, deprecating, creating a dull despondence used as an excuse

Educated to end this evil, effortless and efficient retrieval of

Ecliptic ecology, encouraging the endeavor to immigrate environments,

Gain entrance to the escalator, escape this epidemic

Estranged and evaporating, essentially elevating the edge

Inch by inch, eliminating my grip on the ledge, and so I fall...

Forever fading farther into fantasy

A feeble feather fluttering through forecasts of formality

Forget the famished fellowship that calls itself my family

To falter with the fake, females that I fucked, for a fornicated proof of life

Geology grants me gullible guidance

So I gather my grammar and go forth in silence

With grief to the grave, and a grimace on my gaze, I glorify the gutter with a graphic display

As a guest in this grime, I'll confess: I'm your guide, given I'm gratified with the truth

Go to hell, or hightail it to heaven is today's answer to deaths hold

Heathens clutch their hollow heads in both hands like grenades with pins pulled

Our habitat is half a hornet's nest and half a handicap

I tip my hat to hibernation; a hero's hinge is hesitation

When humanity hangs in the hostage hour,

I grip for my hip to tip back the hammer of the gun I hold in my holster

The intro to indecision isolates a thin invasion of impassive indo realism

That interests an idolized illustration inside my illuminated stare

The Jurassic jest is just a mess and the jury's best will never confess

The joke is this, jealousy won't jog or jaunt the memory without judges consent

What's in the kettle will boil over the top of the metal and kiss cement

With a Karate kick to kill, my kingdom, in a pill

Letters lunge from left to right and the lights last until their lost behind the night

Ladies in red lights beckon from the level ladder alleyways

And lust lingers loftily through liquor heavy eyelids

The rest is less inviting than her lazy love filled cherry lips

So meditated mockery makes less meaning day by day

Melancholy maxes out the monarchy of the mental

Manically I march my route, mounting what malice I can muster

My memory moves faster and mesmerizes me

The disaster goes unnoticed, and new neurology narrows the mind of the master

The necessary nemeses, never found inside her nest, now resides inside my chest

Often odyssey is oddly ostentatious, such an awful outburst needs containment like a virus

The on or off switch is obstinate which forces observation obsolete

I test the obsession of omnipotent opportunity while I'm groveling at your feet

All who oppose the openhearted opiate gain an optional opinion

With patience these will sever the partition with a passage way

And penetrate the pestilence with a can of pepper spray

My prophecy performs with personality, a pessimistic plainspoken reality

With quality I'm qualified to quarrel with a quaint hint of morals

Religion is so real that it's radiant and righteously redundant

Rapidly, rebellion resumes its reclusive random tactics,

Receding to the rear where it reflects on re-deliverance

Reverence is irrelevant, repentance lies in retrospect

The sacrilegious sacrifice sings out until it's sanctified

I've taken samples of the sarcasm and I'm satisfied with secondary

So don't scar my false security with senseless acts of sorcery

The superficial souvenir will lose its splendor shortly

And when I wake up from my testament?

I'll transmit two-handed tyranny and twitch for twilight's talisman

The truth is hard to tantalize, the tastelessness between these eyes is taken by temptation

In a temperate zone, the tension sets in with tactful retaliation

Underneath the unabridged, un-assured I'll scratch that subtle itch

Uncertain I can understand the utmost urgency of man to grow rich

The dollars value is a variable; vaporous and intangible, so vague my vertical vibrates

A virgin view of my vicinity is verified and virtue visits a vivid voice without vulgarity

The wage of welfare warps my ways, warrants me to walk away

Weakened by a wayward wealth of waste that weighs me down

The wedlock of my weary wheels and the wholeness that I wield,

Withdraws from my wordless appeal. It's a wrap on my world

In exchange for excess knowledge, I'm exonerated the expectation of experience

I express the excruciating explanation in hopes to gain extraction, but I am in vain

I yammer with a yardstick, and record yesterday in a yearbook

Still I yearn for something yielded, yet I'm young and yield my yawning

For a zealous zero-hour, I'll hold back my zest with no less

And reveal my zeal against these zombies

### Casualties

The mail continued to take its sweet time turning around. I kept getting letters from my mom saying things like, "I never hear from you, I hope you're ok..." It began to feel like I was talking to myself as I wrote letters that she never received. I imagined that all my letters were most likely sitting in a warehouse in Kuwait somewhere, waiting to be delivered. I still wrote, but answering my mom's questions had begun to feel hopeless. I was sitting on the roof writing a letter when I first heard the news. I had been expecting my friend Villers to come up to the roof to hang out with me that afternoon, we didn't get very many opportunities to see each other. He lived in another part of the camp inside of the motor pool with the other mechanics. As soon as he showed up, he wasted no time in unraveling the story that he had just heard. One of our convoys had been hit. He didn't know all the details yet, but we both knew it was bad. Apparently what had happened, was a regularly scheduled convoy from Alpha Company had been on its way to deliver supplies to some of our detached soldiers who were working in the small village to the north. No one knows how, but some rebels had planned on an American convoy coming through a certain stretch of thick jungle brush, north of the village of As Suaydat. On August twenty-ninth, at around two forty-five in the afternoon, RPG's and small arms fire ambushed our convoy from both sides. Of course it was too early to know the full list of casualties, but we did know one thing, we had lost at least one of our own. An Alpha company NCO, Staff Sergeant Mark Lawton, had caught a bullet in the neck while trying to save a young private from hostile gunfire. He was killed instantly. Villers had known Sergeant Lawton personally and his voice cracked when he told me the story. I could tell that he was having a hard time holding his emotions back. I waited for it to hit me, for reality to sink in that someone had actually died. I hadn't known the man, but I'd seen him around, sat with him in the chow hall, and maybe even heard him tell a joke or two. We were all so young, but now, to know we had lost someone that we all looked up to as a leader and a mentor. He was gone forever. We would never see his face or hear his voice again. Death is a strange thing to take in at any age and in any circumstance, but for us, in our naïve adolescence, the thought of choking to death on your own blood alone on a dusty street in Iraq was almost too much to bear. As I let the feeling of sadness and fear envelop me, I began to feel as if I was already dead. I felt as though I was trapped in purgatory, on death row, just waiting for my number to be up. Here I had been, sitting on the roof writing a letter and listening to music, thinking everything would be ok, and just like that, everything had changed. I really thought up until this point, that a random mortar strike was my worst fear, and I foolishly doubted that anything bad would ever happen to me. The feeling of losing someone you started the journey with was what we all needed for a wake up call. We were in a real war, and not all of us would be going home to our loved ones.

I later heard that another friend of mine from Boulder, CO, Specialist DeMarcus, had lost his leg to an RPG explosion in the same attack. He was my age, young and still wet behind the ears. Another soldier, Private Morris, a driver on that ill-fated convoy, had watched helplessly as an RPG came hurtling directly toward his face. With no time to react, the last thing he saw was that rocket smashing through his glass windshield before his lights went out. He thought he was dead, but he woke up with nothing but a few scratches in an Army hospital tent in Baghdad. What had happened was the luckiest break of his young life. The rocket had struck him right in the top of his Kevlar helmet, ricocheted off at an upward angle, tore through the canopy of his truck cab, and exploded safely overhead, just fractions of a second after knocking Morris unconscious! It was the K.O. that saved his life. Six other's were wounded, but Staff Sergeant Lawton was the only fatality, and Specialist DeMarcus' lost leg was the second most severe. Villers had to go back to the motor pool, and so I was left alone with my thoughts. One of us had died, and even worse, a kid my age had his leg blown off. For the first time in my deployment, I was scared. Not so much scared for my life, but scared of being blown up, afraid of the pain and the humiliation of disfigurement. I had never thought that something like that could happen to me, but now it all seemed very real.

### Temperature Rising

Not even a whole day went by since the attack before another of our convoys ran into trouble. August thirtieth, while Camp Colorado was still reeling from the death of Sergeant Lawton the day before, an HSC convoy was rolling through a small village on their way back to Speicher. Private First Class Felipe, one of my friends from the same mechanic section as Villers, was the first to notice a suspicious group of Hadji's standing around a car at the edge of town. Before he even got the chance to alert the others in his vehicle, two of the Hadji's pulled out an RPG and began to aim it at the convoy. Felipe did what he was trained to do, and opened fire on those bastards with his M-16. As soon as Hadji realized they had lost the element of surprise, they bailed in a hurry. The gunshots sent them all scrambling to escape. It was not our job as Engineers to chase down the enemy, so Felipe's convoy kept right on rolling and got the hell out of there. No RPG was ever fired, no bullet found it's target, and no one was hurt that day. Felipe had saved the lives of everyone in his convoy, and everyone made it back to F.O.B. Speicher in one piece. We needed a win, and this helped many of us shake off some of the depression and sadness of the day before, but nothing could bring Sergeant Lawton back, and now we were preparing our final goodbye's for his memorial service.

Things were heating up in Iraq, that much was obvious. These were the hottest days of summer, and as the temperature was rising, so were the frequency of attacks and the increased hostility of the locals. Everyday I would hear of some convoy getting attacked, some explosions would pound away in the distance, reminding me that I was an unwelcome visitor in this ancient land. Terrorists from all over the Middle East were coming to Iraq to fight the American infidels face to face. The way I saw it, this was part of George W. Bush's master plan: to draw terrorists out of hiding so we could fight them on an even playing field, in the dessert of someone else's country. I was merely an expendable pawn in a massive game of chess. All this to keep the American people safe, and despite my anger at being chosen to be the martyr of sacrifice, the plan was working. We were being attacked more and more everyday by insurgents who weren't even Iraqi nationals.

### The Bum Shack

By the sixth of September, I had already been living on the roof for about a month. It had gotten way too hot to sleep inside, and after my experience with the mortar attack, I didn't feel any safer in there than I did outside. I decided to go for comfort over false security, and moved my cot up to the roof with two other guys, Specialist Velasquez, and Sergeant Mendoza. I guess even in Iraq, I'm more comfortable living with Mexicans. At first, the three of us simply dragged our cots up to the roof, left the rest of our equipment down in the bay below, and used the roof only for sleeping under the stars with nothing but our mosquito nets to cover us. During the heat of the day, the sun beat down on the roof making it unbearably hot. There was no way any of us could lie down to rest under that sun. This made it difficult for Velasquez and I to find anywhere to relax during the hot afternoons when we didn't have anything to do. Sergeant Mendoza didn't seem to have any trouble, as he would always mysteriously disappear when he didn't care to be found. Velasquez and I would wander around the cooks bay, socializing with whoever wasn't asleep, trying to pass the time. When this got too boring, I would either cross the street to the neighboring barracks where the medics and supply team lived, or just sit on an old bench out front, mindlessly chain smoking Iraqi cigarettes until my throat began to swell, my mind fixated on the memory of home. One day, as I was chewing on the filter of a cigarette butt and trying to decide if I wanted to light another, an idea came to me. Bravo Company lived in the barracks to the north, roughly a hundred yards from us; the toilets and piss tubes were stationed halfway in between our buildings. Bravo Company was made up mostly of Engineers, vehicle operators, and construction workers. Over the past several days, I had been hearing the sounds of hammers tapping and saws buzzing, so I knew they were building something. I'm not sure what exactly they were working on, but it didn't matter. It reminded me of growing up in the suburbs of East Bay Area, California, and then again when my family moved to the suburbs of Broomfield, Colorado. I was used to living in an area next to a construction site, the suburbs I lived in were always in startup communities where half the neighborhood is not yet built. As a kid growing up, I used to find endless entertainment in the abandoned construction sites after the workers would go home in the evening and on the weekend. My friends and I would explore the empty shells of houses, riding our bikes through the hallways, climbing through the walls and up to the rafters until it got dark, or until a construction worker caught us and sent us home with a gruff warning. I never broke anything on the construction sites; my aim was not to vandalize, only to explore. I did, however, steal from the construction companies on several occasions. I would steal things like scrap lumber, nails, screws, and scraps of metal. Nothing big, and nothing that seemed necessary to the assembly of the houses, only left over parts, trash, and the occasional box of nails or roll of electrical tape that a careless worker had left behind. I meant no harm, I only wanted to use these supplies to build skateboard ramps, and that's exactly what I did. As I sat outside my barracks in Camp Speicher, my nostalgia began to kick in, and It occurred to me that I may be able to procure a couple of pieces of lumber. Maybe some nails and a hammer could be borrowed, and perhaps, with a little work, I could turn my cot on the roof into my own little private shelter! Not only would this provide me with enough cover from the sun in the afternoons, but it could also give me something that I hadn't known for the five months of the deployment. Something I craved much more than shelter from the sun: privacy. I hadn't been able to sit alone and spend a little un-interrupted time by myself in so long, the only alone time any of us ever got, was spent in the shitter, holding your breath or trying not to breath through your nose, swatting at flies, and trying not to touch anything the whole time. I was not going to let those disgusting moments be the only time I could spend alone. My mind was made up. I would wait for nightfall, creep over to Bravo Company's construction site, and see what scraps of lumber I could find.

I waited until dinner chow was over and the dusk had crept through the dessert, wrapping us all in darkness. This was a covert mission, and I was having some fun with it, so instead of using a flashlight, I had signed out a pair of night vision goggles from the supply room. I told them that I needed night vision for an upcoming convoy and they were given to me without any questions. After planning my crime spree carefully, I had already found exactly what I wanted. I would do this in true "kid in a construction site" fashion. I wouldn't take anything that was being used, I wouldn't vandalize or destroy anything, and I would try to be in and out as quickly as possible. I didn't want to draw any unneeded attention to myself, especially since I knew the next day would bring plenty of sunlight to expose me on the roof with whatever I had taken. I had my eye on two large pieces of plywood that had been discarded in the dirt for unknown reasons. I made it seem as though I was headed to the toilet, suited up, threw my rifle over my back, and walked out. No one noticed I was holding the night vision goggles in my hand. I walked quietly down the slight hill to the porta-shitters, passed them and slipped into the darkness. When I got to Bravo Company's barracks, I made my way down the outside of the building, and with the help of my night vision, I wasted no time in finding the board I'd planned on stealing. I picked it up on it's end and dragged it back to my building, then returned and snatched up the second board, hiding them both behind my building to deal with in the morning. The operation was a success! (Although I had tripped and fallen hard on my left wrist, I was mostly unscathed, and more importantly, I didn't get caught.) The next day, I borrowed a hammer, found a few old nails scattered around, and went to work. By this time, we had replaced the old tree with a rusty old ladder that would clang against the building in the night, making a noise as if someone was walking up and down. It made traveling to the roof much more manageable, but it did keep me up at night. I could have sworn that our building was haunted. Anyway, I dragged my two borrowed boards up to the roof, along with a wooden bench that the engineers had made and I had taken from the chow hall. It only took me about an hour in the cooler hours of the morning to throw together a ramshackle lean-to shelter out of my scraps, nailed and duct taped together. It wasn't perfect, but it would do. I ducked my head under the roof of my shack and sat on my cot to take it all in. I now had shelter from the sun over my head, a barricade on both my right and left sides for a small amount of privacy, and the bench above my head even provided me with a small shelf to keep my things. I brought my hard plastic shell foot locker to sit opposite my cot as sort of an end table when closed, and my blue canvas camping chair was set up next to this, facing out over the edge of the roof with a view. It was like living in my own private little veranda, and I felt better already. I decided it was only missing one thing: artwork. Like everything in my life, I had to decorate. At the suggestion of Velasquez, I decided to draw a mural of the three of us who lived on the roof. I borrowed both Velasquez' and Sergeant Mendoza's military ID's for a reference and sketched out all three of our faces on the side of my shelter. Using some Crayola markers I had bought at the PX, I colored in the mural of the three of us, proudly standing there in full uniform, with our M-16's thrown over our shoulders and solemn, heroic looks on our outlined faces. We would live on forever now, permanently affixed to the side of a structure in Iraq, like a billboard, on display for soldiers that would come after us.

### They Took Our Jobs!

Our homemade chow hall had been empty for over a month. Our cooking trailers had been packed up and parked behind our barracks next to stacks of MRE's. Halliburton had finally caught up with us out here in camp Speicher, setting up an enormous white circus tent and turning it into a large-scale commercial chow hall. Truckloads of workers from India were brought in to fill the kitchen, and most of the managers were white guys from Australia and the U.K. As a cook, my only job was to observe. I watched the Indian's prepare our food, I offered advice, and most importantly, I made sure everything was done in hygienic fashion to the standards of the U.S. Army. As part of the Army training to be a cook, we had all been given extensive training in hygiene and nutrition. It was our job to make sure Halliburton did everything according to code. This was not a real job; it was mostly just standing around and waiting. Halliburton's employees were fully capable of running the chow hall on their own. Our presence there was truly just for show. It was really just a way for First Sergeant Purdue to keep the cooks busy until he had another job for us to do. I still got orders to accompany many convoys on a weekly basis, but they were usually only day trips. I continued to find myself pacing the empty chow hall, watching the Indian's cook, and waiting for something, anything, to happen. There was however, one occasion that I do recall being of some instruction in the kitchen. One afternoon, while standing on a far wall of the kitchen tent and fighting the urge to go outside for my fourth cigarette of the hour, I witnessed a group of men accidentally dump a large pot of chicken on the ground. They took a quick look around to see if anyone had seen them but they missed me standing at a distance behind a row of ovens. Assuming they were not being watched, they began to shovel the chicken back into the pot, right off the floor! Luckily I intervened before they mixed the meat back in with the rest of the food. I commanded them to throw it out and start over. That was one time that I felt reassured that my job there was worth doing. However, I rarely ever ate the meat supplied to us by Halliburton. It was not only because of that specific incident, but also because of the general taste and quality. Often times, I couldn't tell what animal the meat came from, and none of it tasted very good anyway. The vegetables could have been good if they weren't always over done and soupy, burned to the edges of the pan. My favorite part of the new chow hall, was breakfast cereal. At all hours of the day, the chow hall offered individual cold cereal boxes, and coolers lined the sides of the dining hall, filled with milk, juice, and soda. In the mornings I would eat fresh fruit and cereal. In the evenings, I would skip the mystery meat and mulched veggies, and go straight for the cereal. I lived off lucky charms and raisin bran, with the occasional toast or salad if the timing was right. Many soldiers would see me during a meal, standing off to a corner inside the air-conditioned tent, and they would say, "It must be nice to be a cook!" I would laugh and nod, but I secretly knew better. Contrary to popular belief, I still had to eat the same slop as everyone else.

### Bad News

My days at the Halliburton chow hall had become long and wearisome. One day began to bleed into the next, and before I knew it, a whole month had passed. By now it was already halfway through September, and rumors were buzzing around camp Colorado. It had been nearly five months! We were all hoping to hear good news any day about our go-home date. Many of the soldiers were beginning to show their excitement openly, shouting, "one more month!" to each other every time they passed on the road. I wanted desperately to join them and share the excitement of going home, but I could tell something wasn't right. None of the NCO's or officers in the headquarters battalion offices would say a word when I asked, but it was obvious that none of our gear had been packed up. Many of our vehicles were broken down in the motor pool, our conex shipping crate had not been organized, and even worse, our battalion was still spread thin over the entire country of Iraq. Most of Charlie and Bravo company were split up into several details, some stationed up north, some to the east, on the border of Iran, and some even further south in Baghdad. Still more and more of us from HSC Company were going on missions every day to supply the rest of our troops in other parts of Iraq. No order had come down to pull our men back to Camp Speicher, and camp Colorado was beginning to seem like a ghost town. As far as I could tell, there seemed to be no end in sight. I would see my best friend, Villers, on occasion. Either he would come over to my barracks, or I would borrow one of our deuce and a half trucks and make a trip over to the motor pool where he lived. The mechanic's lived in a field tent that they had set up inside the back of an old airplane hangar. The hangar provided ample cover from the sun during the day, but it didn't keep out the cold at night. The rest of the hangar was used as a mechanics garage. Every time I came over to see my friends, there would be auto parts strewn all around in various states of disrepair. We had no lifts, so all the auto work was done on the ground. When I came over on that afternoon, Villers was on his back on a creeper working on a five-ton truck's engine from underneath. When he rolled out to greet me, his coveralls were literally saturated with slimy, black diesel motor oil. None of us kept very clean out here, but the mechanics had it the worst. We had all been issued only two sets of uniforms; wear one, wash the other. As hot as it was in the dessert, it was not uncommon to see a soldier's uniform covered in white, powdery, salt spots from the sweat that would build up over time. We had to do our own laundry with liquid soap and bottled water, so nothing ever really got very clean. "Damn dude, how are you gonna get that out oil out of your BDU's?" I asked him with a chuckle. He looked down at his pants to inspect the damage before replying, "I don't think that's ever coming out... I gotta get over to your hood and ask Sergeant K for another pair of pants." Sergeant K was our unit's supply sergeant. He was Polish. His real name was Kaczynski, but none of us could read it or pronounce it, much less remember it. The medics and the supply sections were set up in the building adjacent to mine, and we had a pretty good relationship with everyone in our neighborhood. The cooks would usually share our goodies with the medics and supply, while in return, the doc's would hook us up with pain killers, or "Ranger Candy," as we called them. Sergeant K would make sure we got the supplies we needed as long as he got his hot coffee every morning without having to walk all the way to the chow hall. I knew he didn't have anymore BDU pants right now, but I didn't even want to be the one to tell Villers that, so I kept it to myself. He was off work for the afternoon, so we retired into his tent to get out of the heat. By this time, many of us had acquired air conditioners. The mechanics tent had a large A/C unit duct taped into one of the windows, and it felt amazing inside. Villers took a seat on his cot and drank for a long time from a water bottle before speaking again. "So there's something I have to tell you man, and you're not going to like it." I didn't know what he could be referring to, but I braced myself for the worst. The last time Villers told me some bad news, our convoy had gotten ambushed and a man had been killed. "What is it this time?" I prodded. "Well, the other day, we were called out to Baiji on a broken down Humvee, and you'll never guess who's it was." I had a pretty good idea where this was going, so I took a guess. "I know there's no fuckin' way it was Purdue, OUTSIDE the gates of Speicher?" Villers didn't even let me finish before the look on his face told me I had guessed correctly. First Sergeant Purdue, despite consistently acting like Captain America, was infamous for being a giant pussy. He had commandeered our company's only armored Humvee for himself, and even with the added protection of bullet proof glass and inch thick steel plates, it was extremely rare to ever see him leave the safety of F.O.B. Speicher. Villers continued his story, "So, while we were fixing his tire, he was saying that all the cooks are worthless and how much he hates you guys..." I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I had long since had suspicions that my First Sergeant had it out for my section, but to find out that he was openly slandering us behind our backs was almost too much to bear. How could a man in a position of leadership stoop to such immature and inappropriate behavior? "What the fuck? Are you serious? What did you say?" I asked my friend, in hopes that he had at least called Purdue out on his bullshit. "I stuck up for you man, I told him that you're the one cool cook, but he was like, GRAY IS THE WORST ONE! DON'T HANG AROUND HIM ANYMORE!" I heard his words and imagined First Sergeant Purdue's high-pitched, weaselly voice griping to my friend. I could feel my face turning red, I didn't want Villers to know how much this had gotten to me, but I couldn't help that I was embarrassed and hurt. I couldn't believe how low someone had sunk to turn my friends against me. Not only were my own feelings hurt, but to hear Villers say that he thought I was "the only cool cook," meant that First Sergeants dirty rumors had even affected my best friend. He may have stuck up for ME, but clearly he had taken to heart whatever gossip he had heard about the others in my section. I tried to push these thoughts out of my head for the time being. "Did you hear that Johnny Cash died?" I asked, steering the conversation down a different path. "He was seventy-one. Died from diabetes in Nashville. It's crazy, I can't believe he's gone." Villers was not as much of a Johnny Cash fan as I was, he was more of a Pantera kind of guy, I could tell he wasn't all that concerned. I had never been much of a fan of country music myself, even though I was born in Texas. I did however revere mister Johnny Cash as a personal hero. Not only were his lyrics beautifully and poetically written, but also his deep, resonating voice came across in such a gritty, authentic way. He was known for being a troublemaker. The way he walked to his own set of rules; he was the original punk rocker in my eyes. I looked up to him like a role model. "What have you heard about our go home date?" Lee asked, breaking the silence and my thoughts of the late Mr. Cash. I pulled out a wrinkled up, worn out piece of paper with my orders printed on the top. "NOT TO EXCEED ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE DAYS..." I read aloud to Villers, who just made an annoyed groaning noise as I folded my orders up, putting them back inside a zip-lock bag in the breast pocket of my BDU's. "I think it's all a lie," he said. "We're not going anywhere... Remember how long it took us just to get all our equipment together to leave Fort Carson?" "Yeah," I replied, "it was three, almost four months... but that was before we even knew if we were coming over here in the first place!" Back in January when we all got the phone call to report to duty, our unit had not been guaranteed any specific mission in Iraq. In my opinion, the entire deployment was the product of my Battalion commander's ambitions to get promoted to "full-bird" Colonel. Most of the lower enlisted men in my company agreed. It seemed a little too suspicious that we wasted almost four months in Fort Carson in the snow and cold, training for the hot dessert, and didn't even get official orders handed down to us until two weeks before we got on the plane. I would have been willing to put money on the guess that we never had orders to go overseas until our BC had begged and pleaded with the higher ups for months on our behalf. He was hell bent on dragging his meager little reserve unit behind him into war to earn the respect and hubris of a wartime commander. We had always been promised that our tour would not be longer than half a year, we were a reserve unit after all, not a heavily trained combat infantry unit that belonged in a war zone like this.

Almost as an answer to our quandaries, Villers' section sergeant, Staff Sergeant Torres ducked his head into the tent to address the two of us. "We just got word on the radio that Captain Spaulding called a formation at headquarters at sixteen hundred hours. That's less than an hour Gray, so you better get your vehicle back to your barracks." I said my goodbye's to Villers and headed back across camp to where I lived. Despite my previous doubts, my hopes were high. I imagined my company commander walking out proudly in front of his men and smiling widely as he announced that we would be going home soon. I wouldn't have to worry about my First Sergeant's rude and unprofessional comments anymore. It would all seem so trivial after only a couple of weeks back home. I knew it was a long shot, but my heart filled with a surge of homesickness as I drove into the dirt lot behind my building and put the truck in park. After going inside and alerting the cooks, (no one had even told them yet, of course) several of my battle buddies piled into the back of the truck and I hopped back into the drivers seat. As I made the drive over to HQ, I could hear the guys talking and joking in the back, their laughter was just barely heard over the rumble of the engine. I could tell that tensions were high; everyone knew good and well what this formation was about.

We rallied into formation at exactly sixteen hundred hours, four o'clock in the afternoon, just as the sun had begun to hang low on the horizon. Everything was shining gold; the dust in the air was illuminated like from within. A dead silence hung over us for what felt like hours as First Sergeant Purdue stood with his back turned to all of us and whispered silently to Staff Sergeant Alverez and Captain Spaulding stood solemnly with his arms crossed and his chin down, nodding to whatever it was Purdue was telling him. Finally, Captain Spaulding stepped forward and began his speech.

"I'm sure you are all speculating about one thing. When are we going home? Well I'm here to tell you, you need to wash those thoughts from your mind. We are in a war zone, and we need to focus on the mission. I don't want to hear any more speculation about whether or not we are going home. I know you have orders that say not to exceed one hundred and eighty five days, but let me tell you, that number is variable and is apt to change at any time. Don't be mistaken! You are here to do a job, and we will not leave until that job is done!" I gulped hard as he paused to collect himself. "We will stay here as long as it takes. I've just received word from up above that our unit has been extended. You will all receive a new set of orders." There was a hushed murmur and a shuffling of boots that could be heard uncomfortably growing throughout the crowd of disparaged soldiers, and First Sergeant Purdue saw this as his cue to spring into drill sergeant mode. "YOU MEN ARE AT ATTENTION! EYES FORWARD! DID YOU FORGET WHERE YOU WERE? STAND STRAIGHT AND SHUT UP!" Captain Spaulding continued, "Like I stated before, this unit has been extended. We have been doing a great job, and the higher up's want to keep us in country a little bit longer. You should all be very proud of your accomplishments. We have been a strong force here in Iraq, and I have personally told the Battalion Commander that we are all ready to serve as long as we are needed. That being said, with us all staying in country longer than expected, I'm going to implement an R&R rotation, effective immediately. You'll have the option to go to Qatar, or to spend a weekend in Saddam's palace in Tikrit." There was an undeniable sneer from the audience, but this time, Purdue kept his mouth shut. Captain Spaulding finished strong with a, "Hooah!" but not a single soldier in the entire company said Hooah back. As the formation was discharged, there was a hopeless silence in the air. Some disheartened mutterings could barely be heard over the sound of boots kicking sand. "I fuckin' knew it man..." someone grumbled, "...It's such bullshit! What the fuck..." My mind was racing. I was thinking of everything I was going to miss, the birthdays, the holidays, even my dad's wedding. Just as I began to count ahead another six months, I heard someone say just what I was thinking: "there goes Christmas..." He was right, whoever he was, and I gulped hard as I tried not to tear up. Not only would I miss Christmas and New Years Eve, but I realized there was even a chance I may miss my own twenty-first birthday. I was heartbroken, and worse, I had already been at my whit's end before getting this news. I wasn't sure if I could take another seven months in the dessert. I had truly doubted that we would get extended. It was late 2003, and 2004 was an election year. With George W. Bush prepping to run for his second term of office, I had naively assumed that the Republicans would try to keep this war in Iraq short, as unpopular as it was. As I saw it, the Democrats would push this issue, demanding the troops be brought home, and the American people would be in full support behind them. This war was widely unpopular; I could see so in the news when I rarely got a chance to watch in the chow hall. Another point of view, was that this war was costing my country so much money, how could it possibly last this long? Furthermore, I truly doubted that there was any possibility that we would ever catch or kill Saddam Hussein. The friendly locals who hated Saddam would always tell me that he was far too smart to get caught. I agreed with them because I had seen how long this war had been going on. Saddam had played a game of cat and mouse with America for so long, I didn't think there was any chance he would be stupid enough to get himself caught. We were in his town after all, and had been for several months. If he were still here, he'd be captured or dead by now. I collected my thoughts as I walked back to my barracks where my bum-shack was built on the roof. I left the deuce and a half for Sims to drive back so that I could clear my head. He didn't seem to mind that we'd be here longer, in fact, Sims seemed almost excited for a chance to further play Army. His gung-ho attitude had become rather cumbersome for most of the rest of us to deal with.

### Breakdown

That night in the privacy of my bum-shack, I did something that I hadn't done since leaving my home five months before. I buried my face in my hands, I allowed the desperation and angst sink into my soul, and I had a long hard cry. I felt so overworked and bitter towards everyone that I had begun to fall apart mentally. There was nothing anyone could have done to make me feel better, nothing anyone could have said. I put on my headphones, listened to music, and allowed myself to be selfish. I felt sorry for myself, and it was all that I could do. I had nothing left. I felt physically and emotionally drained. I had no strong leader or father figure to talk to at this point. Sergeant Jackson's daughter had been stricken with a severe case of asthma and had nearly died, so the Red Cross had made the necessary arrangements and shipped him home to be close to her. Sergeant First Class Delacroix's teenage son had become so wrapped up in his own mental turmoil that he had attempted suicide. Fearing that his father would be killed in Iraq, and overcome by the pressure of being the man of the house, he had slit his wrists in his bathroom. Once again, the Red Cross had made sure that Sergeant First Class Delacroix's deployment was over. He had been flown back home to be with his family, and he had left the cooks behind in Iraq without a leader. We had no one to stick up for us, no one to fight for our rights against the cruel and clearly biased commands of the First Sergeant. Sergeant Barnes was easy to get along with when I spoke with him face to face, but I had the feeling that he was spineless behind closed doors. He was only interested in his own well-being, and he would never cross First Sergeant Purdue. I knew he didn't have the balls to step up and be a leader. The only other NCO we had in the cooks section was Sergeant Mendoza, who despite his brash defiance of First Sergeant Purdue, was of no good to us. He had long since been placed in the cook's section for precisely this very reason. It was the Army's excuse to keep him useful, but to shut him up. It is easy to overlook an old, Mexican cook. No one ever listened to anything Sergeant Mendoza said, and he usually left the serious discussions to the other NCO's and drifted into the background to be by himself. It was rare than anyone in my unit gave the man the proper respect he deserved. Not only were the cook's short staffed and without a leader, but we didn't even have a job here anymore. Halliburton had taken over all the cooking duties, and I felt I no longer had a purpose. My team of cooks was scattered over Iraq, half of our leaders were gone, and morale was already low. The news Villers had told me earlier in his tent had come as no surprise, but it didn't help my mood as I thought about my gloomy state of affairs. My own First Sergeant admittedly disliked me, and constantly berated me like a passive aggressive boss trying to bully an employee into quitting. If quitting the army and going home were ever an option, I would have gladly done so. I wasn't the only one in the cook's who was targeted by 1sg. Purdue. He viewed us all as lazy, sorry excuses for soldiers, and he never wasted an opportunity to bully us. He would talk about us behind our backs to other soldiers in our unit, spreading rumors and smearing mud on our image. I would often see the other soldiers who lived in the same barracks as the First Sergeant on missions outside of Camp Speicher or at the chow hall for dinner. I could tell the rumors were working by the way they looked at me differently. People would sometimes ask me strange questions about my past, or inquire about my private matters, revealing information that only First Sergeant Purdue and the other upper command should know about me. As if the stress of being in a war zone isn't enough for a twenty year-old kid, the man was running around behind my back and attacking my character as if he were an adolescent high school thug. I couldn't take it anymore. Besides Villers, I felt I had no real friends in my unit. The cooks were torn apart from the inside because of the added stress of being ridiculed and overworked. We had all turned against each other. We would bicker and argue on a daily basis; none of us could stand to be in the same room with each other, much less work together. There we were, fighting in a deadly war zone, and still we couldn't even get along. Every day had begun to blend together, and I was losing focus on reality. As I finally began to come to terms with my depression, I made a silent pact to myself. I would no longer live in fear of death. I would take my life into my own hands in the only way I knew how; I would volunteer for any missions I could. I decided on that night, that I would do whatever I could to stay away from Camp Speicher, and therefore from First Sergeant Purdue. I knew there were plenty of soldiers from my unit that had been stationed all over the country of Iraq; we were stretched from Kuwait, to Tikrit, and even further north, as far as the border of Turkey. We even had missions going out east, near the border of Iran. I knew my chances of being ambushed were much higher on the outside of Camp Speicher, but I also knew that my chances of having anymore run-in's with First Sergeant Purdue would be slim to none. I felt as though I had nothing to lose at that point in my life. I had no one back home except my mom and my dad and one brother. I wasn't very close with anyone in my family, and I had no girlfriend back home. I was young, and had no children that depended on me. I didn't even have a pet dog or a cat that would miss me if I were killed halfway around the world. I figured that if nothing else, I would at least get to spend my last days in action, rather than sitting here twiddling my thumbs in a forward operating base, getting yelled at by a despicable little bully with a napoleon complex. My decision was made.

### Quick Reaction Team

Early the next morning, I woke up with the sun and wasted no time in putting my plan into action. I had been working out more often to take my mind off the stress, so I put on my PT uniform and pulled on my old running shoes. We were still in a war zone, I couldn't just go walking around without my M-16 and my Kevlar, so after throwing my weapon over my back, I strapped my K-pot on my head and climbed down the rusted old ladder from my shack on the roof. Some of the guys in the building next door had built a set of weights out of used water bottles filled with sand and duct taped together to sticks. It was our own DIY weight room, complete with a reclined bench press, a large barbell made out of a tent post, and several different sized weights for various upper body workouts. We would take turns spotting each other, and then someone would stand guard while the rest of us ran laps around the building. Having been raised a vegan I was still extremely skinny. I had only been eating meat since I was fourteen, and my young metabolism had not allowed me to gain much body fat in the six short years I'd been eating whatever I wanted. Lifting weights still felt good, and running was a great way to clear my head of whatever stresses I was feeling. After my short workout, I made my way directly to the source of my misery. I squared myself away in my cleanest set of BDU's, prepared myself for what was sure to come next, and I approached Sergeant Barnes to tell him what I had decided. It didn't matter what Sergeant Barnes had to say about it, but I needed a section NCO to accompany me to headquarters if I was going to confront the First Sergeant. Sergeant Barnes drove the truck over to HQ with me sitting shotgun. He didn't say much on the drive other than his usual joking banter. He told me a story about how the day before he had been talking to a cute blonde soldier at the chow hall who was only wearing her Army brown t-shirt un-tucked while she was eating. He said she looked so good sitting there with an un-tucked shirt, it reminded him of girls who dressed back home. Sergeant Barnes didn't need much assistance in painting this picture for me, I could remember just fine on my own. Back home, where girls dressed sexy instead of wearing the same ugly uniforms that we all wore everyday. Sergeant Barnes was a funny guy, always trying to make people laugh. He wasted no time in chatting up the cute blonde, breaking the ice with one of his favorite anecdotes about how he never appreciated water splashing back on his ass on the toilet until he had to go to the bathroom in nothing but plastic porta-shitters in the dessert. She giggled when he told her this and the flirt seemed to be going fine until she got finished eating, stood up and put back on her BDU blouse with the shiny captain ranks on the collar... Sergeant Barnes was speechless when he realized he'd been talking to an officer the whole time! I laughed at this story, but I couldn't help but feel the burden of what I was about to do. I was about to throw myself at the mercy of lady luck. I was done hiding in the chow hall, passing my days in boredom, waiting to die. It was my time to meet fate head on.

### Machine Gun 101

It was a brisk morning in late October and I was doing a final PMCS on my Browning M2 machine gun. Whenever a convoy rolled out the gates, it was my responsibility to check out my M2 from Supply, lug the eighty-four-pound assembly back to my vehicle, and prepare the weapon for battle. It came in two pieces. First, the barrel, which had an easy removable carrying handle in case it became too hot to touch with your bare hands. The main assembly was the heaviest portion; a giant mass of iron parts, finely tuned and meshed together to form the perfect killing machine. I asked Mason to help me with the dead lift up to the top of our truck and slid the mount into place. Sometimes I was fortunate enough to ride in an armored Humvee, but today I was not so lucky; I would be riding in deuce and a half, perched high atop the cab in a steel ring, in plain view of sniper fire and vulnerable to razor wire strung up at neck level. After securing the barrel into the main assembly, I had to go through a careful procedure to make sure the timing was correctly set. This was imperative to keep my weapon from jamming on me in times of need. The M2 is a belt fed, fully automatic, .50-caliber machine gun. Attached to the side of the mount was a large ammo box containing one hundred rounds of huge full metal jacket rounds. My Browning M2 was a trusty old machine gun that had been depended on by U.S. Soldiers since even before the Viet Nam war. The power you feel when you are sitting behind an M2 machine gun is tremendous. When I gripped the wooden handles and rested my thumbs gently on the butterfly trigger in the middle, I could almost feel the energy of past battles pulsing through the iron into my hands. I wasn't the best shot in the world with my M-16, but behind the M2, I was a surgeon. On the range, I was able to put three rounds through the same hole I'd already made in my target. When the training sergeant checked my exit holes, he thought I'd missed the target in all but one shot. I reset my sights, aimed for a spot right below the old hole, and tore the paper target in half with a downward cut. After that, I was made the lead .50 Cal gunner in my unit. Now that I had volunteered to be a part of the Quick Reaction Team, I was stationed on the M2 for almost every mission. I had just finished setting the timing on my M2 when I heard the rumble of Bravo Company's First Sergeant Lynn rolling down the dirt road toward my barracks in his armored Humvee. I knew he was coming to tell us it was time to go. Several of the cooks had followed my lead and volunteered for extra service. We had been selected to support Bravo Company in a mission in northern Iraq, somewhere south of Kirkuk in a place called Tuz Khurmatu. Sergeant Barnes would be in charge, which was a relief for me. He was always enjoyable to be around and it was rare that he would ever overstep the boundaries of his authority to make my life difficult. Only four more cooks would be going on this mission beneath Sergeant Barnes. Besides me, there was the young and restless Nicholas Sims, the burned-out old lush, Miller, and my best friend in the cook's section, Scott Mason. Not only was Mason coming with me, but Villers and his entire squad had been chosen as the mechanics for this mission. That meant I would have lots of friends out in Tuz. I was in a good mood, even though I knew death could be around the corner. Not only would I be surrounded by my close friends, but I would be free of First Sergeant Purdue. Headquarters Company, along with Captain Spaulding and the rest of my malevolent unit would be far enough away to give me a comfortable buffer zone. Bravo Company was primarily Heavy Engineers, which consisted of truck drivers, forklift operators, bulldozer operators, a few carpenters and soldiers trained in various other engineering skills. Headquarters Company consisted only of support trades, like cooks, mechanics, supply, and medics. We would be accompanying them on a mission to Tuz, where they would be building a new F.O.B. from the ground up. Normally on extended missions like this, the soldiers would have to rough it, eating nothing but MRE's the whole time. Since we had volunteered to join them, they would be eating two hot meals a day. We were bringing our MKT, (mobile kitchen trailer) and cooking up a daily breakfast and a dinner every night. We would be feeding all of our engineers from Bravo Company, and another Company of Infantry guys who were stationed out there to keep us safe. It was expected to be much more hostile up north, and although we were all trained to be soldiers first, the infantry boys were better qualified for combat. I was excited to be on the road again, and this time, I knew I wouldn't be back to Speicher for at least a month, maybe longer. We had been preparing for the past couple of days. The cook's section was bringing two of our three vehicles. Our only remaining truck was broken down in Villers' motor pool, but we were only leaving three cooks back in Speicher and they would not need a vehicle. I was riding in our best deuce and a half, complete with heavy, one inch thick steel plates affixed to the sides for added protection. We were a reserve unit, and after six months in country, we still had not been given any real armored vehicles. The mechanics and machinists had done the best with what we had, and many of our vehicles now looked like something out of _Mad Max - Road Warrior_. Some had large plates of steel welded to the outside, while others were armored with eight-inch thick planks of wood on the inside, leaving little room to sit or store supplies. I would be riding in the passenger seat of the cab, below where the M2 was mounted on a ring. I would spend half the journey standing up with my knees slightly bent, swaying and rocking with the bumpy roads to keep my balance. The other half of the time, I would actually climb up onto the ring perched high above the truck, prop my feet onto the metal rig in front of me, sit precariously on a nylon strap that hung down, and hold onto the double grip on my weapon for dear life. I called this the suicide seat. It sounds terrible, but the alternative was standing up in a vehicle for days at a time while constantly preparing myself for the hard jolts that would come from bumpy and unpredictable terrain. I had been on a mission earlier in the year that lasted only two days, one day of travel to get to our destination, and another day for the return trip. I was inexperienced and because it was a highly intimidating area of the country, I felt more comfortable standing the whole time. When I finally arrived back to Camp Speicher, the bottoms of my feet were literally black and blue. I couldn't walk for three days after that, which meant I ate MRE's and temporarily had to quit smoking. That had been a miserable three days, so I wasn't going to repeat that mistake.

This would be a slow moving convoy; we had many large pieces of equipment that needed to be transported, as well as all of our cooking supplies. Our second deuce and a half had our MKT attached to the back of our truck, and another Bravo company truck would be towing an M149 water buffalo with five hundred gallons of drinking water. There was another large flatbed truck in the convoy that would be hauling a refrigerated cargo crate full of food and provisions. The cooks weren't the only ones with slow moving equipment; many of the big bulldozers, ground tillers, and other large construction apparatus would need to accompany us on this mission if we were to build a proper forward operating base. This F.O.B. would be the home of a new specialized infantry division called the Stryker unit. The Stryker tanks had a new design that was better tailored for the environment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of cumbersome, heavy tank tracks, they would roll on eight big tires. Not only was it covered in heavy armor, but it was also protected by an added mesh, chain link, fence-like barrier, about a foot and a half from the outside of the vehicle. This was meant to "catch" RPG's, causing them to explode safely outside the perimeter of the Stryker tank. Only shrapnel would remain, and the heavy armor could handle that just fine. If that wasn't enough, the gun mount was even controlled by a virtual reality style computer visor that could be worn by a machine gunner safely inside. I didn't have that luxury, so I made sure the timing was set precisely on my weapon.

After all of my companions had suited up and taken their seats in their vehicles, we were ready to roll out by eight o'clock in the morning. I had been up since before the sun in preparation. Being the convoy .50 Cal gunner is a big responsibility and I wanted to prepare myself mentally as well as physically. All convoys out the gate had to have at least one M2 gunner, and one Mark19, (belt fed, full auto grenade launcher.) This convoy would have more than that; I was one of three M2's, and there were two Mark19's. Every soldier who wasn't manning a machine gun was expected to fill any available seat, keep their eyes on their sector, scanning for hostiles, with their M-16's at the ready. Usually, the two big guns are mounted in the lead vehicle and the rear vehicle, but today, since there was an abundance of firepower, there would be a third .50 Cal in the middle of the convoy. Miller was driving our truck, which would be the convoys rear vehicle. I was standing in shotgun/suicide seat, and Mason would be riding in the back with his M-16 sitting on a big stack of MRE's. Sims was driving our other rig, pulling our cooking trailer with Sergeant Barnes sitting shotgun. Everyone was accounted for, and the long line of vehicles had lined up on our staging road. Miller pulled into our position in the rear and First Sergeant Lynn's hummer kept going, racing up the side of the convoy to his position in the lead. I couldn't even see his vehicle from my perch on the gun mount as he plowed through the dirt next to our long line of trucks. The energy in the air before a convoy rolled out the gates was always intense. It was a penetrating anxiety that was reminiscent to the butterflies I used to feel before taking my driver's license test at the DMV, or give a speech in front of a class. My heart was beating rapidly and I could feel the sweat already forming on my brow, even in the early hours of the morning. Still inside the gate, it was ok for me to sit down, so I took advantage of this luxury as I waited for the procession to creep forward. The rattling of machine gun fire broke the air sharply as I stared out the window, wiping more sweat from my forehead as I anticipated our exit. I was not alarmed; I knew that the gunfire was only a normal part of procedure. As convoys roll out the gate, the M2's and SAW machine guns usually do a test fire into a berm that had been set up right inside our gates. This was supposed to be a short test fire to make sure that your weapon wasn't jamming and you had set your timing right; technically, M-16 fire is not necessary, and consequently is not allowed. Eager soldiers however, had taken the test fire situation as optional, and almost every soldier who passed through the gates would line up, take aim into the dirt, and let loose anywhere from five to ten rounds. The rest of the soldiers weren't alone in this practice; I loved this part just as much as anyone. After all, it was rare that I ever got a chance to fire my .50 Cal, and that was an experience that I could never get enough of. This was the reason it took so long to get out the gate, and much to the irritation of our convoy command, there was no stopping this practice of ammo wasting. We were mostly young boys, and to us, it was a rare chance to have some fun. Before too long, our truck was approaching the gate. I heard from behind me, "Yo Silver! Let me shoot the fifty!" It was common that I would hear this plea; the other soldiers were always jealous that I got to fire the big gun. It was fun I admit, and it did carry with it a certain respect of power, but the other guys had no idea how much work came with being a machine gunner. There was no way I was letting go the only perk of the job. "Sorry Mason, this one's all mine!" I replied with a big shit-eating grin across my face, I braced my back against the steel ring, gripped the black wooden charging handle in my right hand and yanked it back, hard. Making sure to prepare for the back blow, I got a good grip on the handles and pressed my thumbs down on the butterfly trigger. BOOM!! BOOM!! BOOM!! BOOM!! The gun hammered away, every round blasting through the barrel like a cannonball, tearing through the mud at the end of the berm. My ears were screaming into my brain for the pain to stop but I wouldn't listen. My heart was rushing with the surge of energy that coursed through the iron of my machine gun, into my palms and up into my arms, persistent into my lungs and every last inch of my body, filling me with an unbelievable power. I only allowed myself a single long ten round burst, but it was enough. When I fired my M2, I felt invincible. Scott burst off a few rounds with his rifle, and that was that; we rolled through the gate, out into the open dessert. It had been quite sometime since I'd been through the gates of Speicher. It felt good to be free of the long, uninteresting days of boredom. I could only look forward to whatever adventures the future had for me up north.

### Nobody Likes Surprises

We had been on the road for the better half of the day when we finally pulled over. All of us were tired; it was a taxing job to continually scan my surroundings while locked and loaded. We all hoped not to see anything hostile, but at the same time, each soldier secretly hoped that if there were a threat, he or she would be the first to see it. Nobody likes surprises, and in Iraq, surprises came in the form of roadside IED's (Improvised Explosive Devices.) These roadside bombs were usually fairly obvious; someone would see a bundle of wires coming out of a box or a pile of trash on the side of the highway and call it in. If this happened, our convoy would pull over at a safe distance and wait for the Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit to arrive. When the EOD guys finally showed up, we'd have to wait for them to put on their big green spacesuits and waddle out into the blast area to investigate. This would sometimes take hours of sitting on the side of the road in the hot sun, stressfully anticipating every moment for a potential explosion to erupt nearby. Not all IED's were hidden in plain view. Sometimes our enemies would outsmart us by hiding explosives inside of a dead dog's carcass, or buried beneath the road under a thin layer of dirt. Many unlucky American convoys had driven right over a bomb only to have it detonate directly underneath their vehicles. There was no armor on the bottom of most of our vehicles, and for the soldiers unlucky enough to get stuck in that situation, there was not much chance of survival. Every time our convoy came to a stop outside of an FOB or a refueling station, there was always the fear of ambush. Needless to say, everyone immediately wanted to know what was happening. Because I was in the cook's truck, my vehicle of course did not have a radio; it was common practice to keep us in the dark. I was high up enough that I could see over the tops of many of the trucks in front of us, but the dust that got kicked up from the side of the highway had already formed a cloud that hung low over heads. I could only see for a hundred yards in front of us, so I told Mason to hop out and secure our perimeter from the ground. If there was any imminent danger, he could warn me so I could ready the M2. Almost as soon as Mason's boots hit the ground, however, I could see Staff Sergeant Lanshaw jogging down the line on the shoulder of the road. "Hold steady! We've got an IED sighting about a mile up the highway! We're holding our position here until EOD gives us the go ahead." He continued to repeat these instructions as he made his way past our vehicle and trotted off into a swirl of dust to my rear. "Well there ya go Silver. Didja get the answer you was lookin fo'? Mumbled Specialist Miller from the driver seat. I ignored his obvious rhetorical question and propped my legs up on my suicide seat, reaching down to pull up my go bag that was strapped beneath me. I pulled out an MRE and my water canteen and took a long drink. If I was going to be waiting, I might as well eat my lunch while the truck wasn't moving.

We all were antsy by the time EOD finally cleared the road of any danger and gave the all clear on the radio. We never heard any explosion, so that much was a relief. Either the bomb squad was able to diffuse the situation without any trouble, or the whole thing was a false alarm. I suspected the latter, but I didn't get a chance to discus my opinion with Miller or Mason before the vehicle in front of us was pulling back onto the highway and our convoy was on the move again. It was near three o'clock in the afternoon by now; the sun was already hanging low in the western sky, dazzling the horizon with a golden aura that seemed to marinate the skyline with an dreamlike quality as we pushed further north into the dessert. I was beginning to wonder how long we would be on the road without stopping for the night. It was dangerous to be out in the open after dark and I was in no mood to strain my eyes through the night without a clue as to where we were. I was already having a hard time seeing very far through the shaded lenses of my dessert goggles. I had rotated my gun turret by now and was riding backwards in my suicide seat, scanning the rear of our convoy. Many American troops had been ambushed by seemingly innocent civilian vehicles that had driven along side of them before opening fire with small arms and RPG's. As the rear .50-Cal gunner, it was my job to make sure that no civilian cars were able to get around me and attempt to pass our convoy. Our drivers had all been instructed to drive straight down the middle of the highway, splitting both lanes in an effort to make my job easier. Unfortunately, just like in the civilian world back home, drivers in Iraq are extremely impatient. After we had been on the road again for nearly an hour, the traffic behind our convoy had become increasingly congested. I was keeping the barrel of my gun pointed directly into the windshields of the cars behind us as a threatening gesture, but the impatient Iraqi drivers had little concern for my warnings. They would stare right back at me with an exasperated look on their faces, their lips moving rapidly as they were most likely cursing me out. Before very long, I had a long line of pissed off Iraqi drivers bobbing and weaving angrily behind my bumper. As we barreled down the highway, a small brown Toyota somehow managed to slip past me. I gripped my charging handle with my right hand, trained my machine gun directly into the drivers face, and yelled out a warning. "FUCKING STOP, ASSHOLE!" It didn't matter what I said, my voice was lost in the loud clatter of trucks bouncing down the road and the roar of the Toyota as he gunned his engine past us on the right side. I held on for dear life as Miller swerved into the right lane, managing to cut off the second car that tried to pass. I had let only one car through, but what happened next, I will never forget. At this point, I was standing on the passenger seat and swiveled my gun mount around to chase the elusive car in case of an attack. The car was speeding up, whizzing past our trucks at frenzied rate as he tried to pass the entire convoy. I could see the heads of four men through the back windows, and I dreaded the worst was about to come. Just as the car made it about halfway past our caravan, he began to lose control of his vehicle. I watched the whole thing happen as if in slow motion. As his right front tire slipped off the edge of the pavement, the car went into a spin. The driver of the car panicked, over corrected, and swerved hard to the left toward one of our five-ton trucks. Our convoy was still barreling down the road at roughly fifty miles per hour at this point, and as the Toyota made contact with the front bumper of our five-ton, it got sucked under the front axle like a toothpick into a vacuum cleaner. I had never seen anything like it before; the car vanished into a cloud of dust and smoke, and our five-ton jack-knifed, careening a good hundred feet off the highway in a trail of wreckage like a derailed cargo train. The collision was devastating. I was so far back that all I could do was watch in shock as this massive collision unfolded before my eyes. Remarkably, it appeared that only one of our vehicles had been involved in the collision, and the all the remaining vehicles had quickly pulled off the road to set up a perimeter around the wreckage. Within seconds, every soldier in our convoy had boots on the ground, scanning the highway and protecting their vehicles. I stayed on my gun turret and watched our rear while I waited for further instruction from the upper command. Many of the other's were not able to see anything as they waited, but I had my folding binoculars at the ready. I watched over the next several hours as the mechanics of Bravo Company attempted to salvage anything they could from our wrecked vehicle. The front axle of the five-ton had been impacted so hard that it had split in half. The vehicle was immobilized and could not be fixed. The cab of their truck was so high up that the car didn't even connect with the bumper and had gotten sucked under the giant wheels. The driver of the truck and his passenger were both unscathed. They were both shaken up, but they would be ok. The driver of the Toyota had not been so lucky. His car had vaporized on impact and turned him and his passengers into ground meat as their bodies were torn apart. It was a gruesome site to behold as I watched our medics laying out the bodies of three men on the dirt beside the road. One of the men had been ripped in half at the waist, and as I watched through my binoculars, I couldn't even make out a human looking body from what was left of him. There had been four Iraqi nationals in the car, and the only survivor was a teenage boy. He was alert and breathing, but his leg had been broken in several places like a zigzag. A medevac was called in to take the boy to the nearest FOB and an Apache helicopter was on the scene within minutes. As I watched from my distant vantage point, I could see a figure of a woman in a black burka approaching the wreckage from the dessert. I could tell that she was related to one of the deceased men that were laid out on the ground because she was hysterical. Her arms were waiving franticly as she ran toward the body of her husband, father, brother, or son. It took three soldiers to hold her back and her wails of anguish could be heard as far as a half-mile away where I sat. It took us over three hours to clear the road and get moving again. Not a single shot had been fired, but three men had lost their lives. I'll never forget the look on that woman's face as we drove away on that dreary evening. We left her beside the highway all alone, weeping and rocking slowly back and forth, cradling the mutilated body of her loved one in her arms in a pool of blood soaked dirt. It was so strange to kill three people, then clean up and drive on. Back home, a wreck like this would have left the truck driver in jail for involuntary manslaughter, but here in another world, we can just forget about it and keep driving, leaving our mess behind us.

### The Wild Wild West

We finally rolled into Tuz just about after the sun had gone down. It wouldn't have mattered if it had been the middle of the day; there was nothing out there to look at. The dessert spanned out dreary and flat in every direction. The only thing breaking up the horizon were a dozen large, cement reinforced, airplane hangars that were connected by a rickety maze of taxiways that were battered, and halfway covered by sand. Running down the middle of what would be our camp, was a single old, desolate, windswept runway. This place had been an Iraqi Air Force base before being captured by coalition forces in March, nine months earlier. Referred to only as "Tuz", the base was actually located about fourteen miles north of the town of Tuz Khurmatu, Salah Al-Din, Iraq. I found out later that these hangars had been built sometime in the early eighties by Yugoslavian contractors. The entire air base had been modeled after Russian blueprints. The hangars, or "Yugos", were heavily reinforced structures that were built to withstand mortars, RPGs, and small arms fire. I felt safe inside these structures and it was a great place to set up our sleeping quarters. I had been warned that the further north I went, the more hostile the response would be from the locals. On that first night, I could almost taste gunpowder in the air. There was an occasional sporadic burst of small arms fire echoing through the night from some, not so far off battle. I had seen a Bradley patrolling our perimeter as we rolled into camp, but for the most part, this was the most vulnerable I'd felt so far. There was no gate, no fence, not even a berm or a ditch between the open dessert and us. Out here, far away from any large town, there was no light at all. After our vehicles were parked and we had turned off the headlights, it immediately became impossible to see anything ten feet in front of my eyes. Setting up camp in the dark is never easy, but that night in Tuz seemed the darkest night of my life. The darkness was all encompassing; I could feel it creeping up from behind me, enveloping me from all sides and choking out any chance of light. There were not many of us on this mission, maybe sixty men in total, so there was plenty of room across twelve hardened airplane shelters for us to choose as our homes. The cooks were assigned the building on the far corner, near the end of the runway. Sims, Mason and I used our flashlights to do a quick investigation of our Yugo before returned to our vehicles to haul in our gear. The structure was a giant rectangular shape with an arched roof, low near the sides and very high in the middle. The mouth of the hangar was wide open with no trace of any doorway ever existing. At the far end opposite the large opening, was another small rectangular room that was sunken about five feet lower than the bigger room. This second room had no roof and was exposed to the night sky. In the middle of the wall at the very back, there was a small opening, about knee high. I'm not sure what this room's intended use was, but I assume it was meant as a chimney so that a fire could be made for warmth. I chose a spot near the back of the larger covered room, next to the wall where the ceiling is lower. The wide open airplane hangar left me feeling cold and exposed so the corner of the room was the best I could do for now. My companions had all found there own spots along the sides of the Yugo, Sergeant Barnes and Specialist Miller had set there cots up next to each other, halfway between me and the opening, and Mason and Sims had both ventured off alone to opposite corners. There was a cold wind blowing across the dessert and I could feel it seeping into my bones as I crawled into my sleeping bag and zipped it all the way closed like a cocoon. I could still hear the hollow whispering of the wind resonating through the Yugo around me as I drifted off to sleep.

### Way Out West

The next day came at four 'o'clock and it was still just as dark as it had been the previous night. I was awoken by flashlight and heedlessly began my morning routine. Out here, far away from First Sergeant Purdue, I could skip my painful water bottle shave and simply get dressed in the same uniform I'd worn the day before. The convoy from the day before had been a short distance, roughly sixty-five miles, but it had been a very long day. I'd saturated my uniform with sweat, and now, after drying out in the cold air, on the cement next to my cot, they had formed large patches of white salt stains. The knees of my trousers were dark brown from dirt and my gloves had holes in them. I was beginning to feel like I was in a real war now; this was no longer the clean and organized world of the Army that I had grown to despise. I actually felt kind of like a homeless bum at this point, but it still felt better than being a slave at Speicher. Despite being weathered, dirty, and tired, I could already tell that being out here was putting me in a slightly better mood. The anticipation of adventure was in the air and as I got dressed in my ragged old uniform, I was eager for a brand new day in a fresh, alternative atmosphere. Nobody seemed to be doing much except for Miller, who for some reason always seemed to be awake and toiling under some kind of Army task. He complained plenty, but he was always the first to pick up the tools and start working. Maybe it had something to do with being a recovering alcoholic, I don't know, but he was never lazy. We would be splitting into two shifts for the remainder of our mission in Tuz, but for now it was the first morning and we had arrived after dark the night before. This morning, we still needed to set up our kitchen trailer and Sergeant Barnes had not even had time to sit down and arrange a proper agenda for us to follow. I helped Miller set up our MKT while the others began pulling boxes of rations out of our refrigerated storage container. Breakfast was an easy meal to prepare but nobody wanted to get up early. There were large metal cans called T-Rations full of pre scrambled eggs, sausages in brine, and white rice, It was always the same in the field. Nothing tasted good, but the soldiers still preferred the familiar breakfast foods and hot meals to the same old flavorless MRE's that were the only alternative. After Miller had lit the stoves, I emptied several five-gallon water jugs into two giant pots sitting side by side over the flames. It would take about seventeen minutes to boil, and then I would throw in the T-Rat cans. Miller took care of the coffee, and within an hour we had a full spread ready for the waking soldiers who had already come stumbling in out of the dark. As the sun began to rise, we had a line of over a hundred men, and a few girls, shuffling in from their camps in other Yugo's on the other side of the runway. Because Miller and I had taken the initiative to cook the first meal, we were now sitting back on MRE boxes eating our breakfast while Mason and Sims served the others. I could never stomach the scrambled eggs that came out of the T-rat cans. There was something very unappetizing about the way they glowed neon green in an unnatural incandescent hue. The sausage wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. I was happy that there was plenty of cold cereal and milk, some fresh bananas, and plenty of coffee. I had never been much of a coffee drinker back home, but as I had quickly found as a soldier in the field, coffee was my best friend. I had finished eating and I decided to take my second cup outside to enjoy with a morning smoke. With my headphones on, a cigarette hanging off my lip, and my German aviator sunglasses mirroring the sun from my eyes, I reached out in front of my face with a disposable camera and snapped a self portrait with the dessert stretching out behind me. This would be my new home for the next month and I wanted to send some photos home to my mom to show her where I was now living.

After we had been in Tuz for a week, the days began to melt into each another. It was easy to get bored while sequestered so far away with no mail or communication with the outside world. We would only get mail if a convoy came from Speicher on a resupply mission, and we had brought enough supplies to last us easily three weeks. I was beginning to feel very lonely and isolated at this point. I didn't even know for sure how long it had been since we had arrived. Sergeant Barnes had set up the cooking schedule, and he had even given me some extra responsibility, putting me in charge of one of the shifts. I don't like to get up early, so I chose to be in control of the dinner shift. Miller took care of breakfast, which suited him as an early rising old man. Sims was assigned to the breakfast shift as a helper for Miller. That left Mason to be on my team, helping out with dinner. There were not that many of us up north in Tuz, so as a part of our duties we had to rotate guard duty in the middle of the night. It was so dark that we had to use night vision goggles to find the guard post. Night vision goggles don't have any peripheral vision. It's like looking through a toilet paper roll. You can only see straight ahead in a small, round, green circle. It proved impossible to drive a Humvee through the pitch-black night while peering through the goggles held in front of your face with your free hand. Our solution was to use teamwork. I would take the steering wheel completely blind while my battle buddy sat shotgun and scanned the path in front of us with the night vision specs. I had to rely fully on him for warnings. Anytime I needed to brake or we needed to make a turn, he would shout instructions in my ear, and I would try to steer the truck in the right direction. It was terrifying at first, but I soon learned to trust my battle buddy. Before too long, I began to embrace the darkness and push the pedal to the floorboard of the Humvee, bouncing blindly into the night. I knew there wasn't much to run into out there anyway. One night, I was on guard duty with Scott. We had reached our assigned guard post and were passing the time sitting on the hood of our truck staring into the blackness. We weren't talking anymore, only sitting quietly side by side. After spending many months with someone, there isn't much left to say in the middle of the night. We both wanted to go to sleep, and despite the endless supply of Red-Bull, guard duty was mostly spent in a wordless, half-asleep daze. Suddenly, I heard what sounded like an Indian war cry. The shriek pierced the silence like a razor blade and Scott and I jerked our heads to look at each other, suddenly alert; I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up. Chills ran through my whole body, like my blood was frozen. "What the fuck was that?" I finally managed to blurt out. "I have no clue, Silver. What if it was some kind of wild animal or something" I could hear the sound echo out from the darkness once more, closer this time. "Give me the goggles dude, give them to me now!" I jerked them out of his hands and strained my eyes to see through the small, fuzzy, green lens. Mason wasted no time in reacting to his loss of sight and began hounding me. "What do you see Sil? What's out there?" I didn't respond. Fear had taken over, and all I could think about was wild half naked Indians riding around on horses, whooping and hollering at me, with bows and arrows in their hands. Their blood curdling screams rang out twice more and my heart was in full panic. All I could see through the night vision was a small circle of fuzzy lines, light green near the bottom to signify the dessert ground, and a darker green fading to black on the top. I couldn't see much more with the goggles than without. The only shapes in the lens were lonely fence posts running perpendicular to the front of our vehicle. These were the only markers to let us know we were on the edge of camp. Beyond that, I knew there was a ditch, about six feet wide and four feet deep, to stop tanks or trucks from approaching at a rapid pace. I couldn't see the ditch at night, but it gave me no comfort knowing it was there. Whatever was out there wasn't in a vehicle, and it could easily sneak up on two, raggedy, sleep deprived, untrained, reservists. We sat together on edge, jumping at every sound for the next three hours, but the ear-ringing scream never sounded again. I still don't know what made that sound. It could have been Arab children, playing tricks on us. It could have been some sort of wild dog. It may have even been something supernatural, I'll never know. When our shift was over, Scott and I pointed our truck toward our camp and I hit the gas hard. We got the hell out of there, and when I reached my sleeping bag, I crawled inside and pulled the opening completely closed over my head like a cocoon. The sun was beginning to rise, and after the long night I had, I wanted to pretend I was inside a black hole, sucked away from this frightening world of dark desserts.

### All Alone

After three long weeks, a resupply convoy finally arrived. I had not been expecting it, and so by the time I found out, it was only an hour before they arrived. It had been a long time since I had received mail, or sent it for that matter. I decided it would be a good idea to send out a fresh letter on top of the stack of two or three that I'd already written. I only had a few minutes to write before I needed to begin preparing the dinner meal for the day. I still had plenty to write about, Even though I was out in the middle of nowhere. It seemed as though the days stretched out and lasted longer than normal, the sun hung low on the horizon for hours before finally slipping away and leaving us shivering in the vast, empty darkness. Rodents had become a large problem in our new camp. My fellow soldiers and I had started setting so many traps that we couldn't keep up with the mice. Every morning we would find dead mice in many of the traps we had set, and still they found their way into all of our belongings. If any of us had any treats we had been saving, and snacks, cookies from home, candy, the mice would find it. There was no safe place. Even my hard shell plastic footlocker, which I kept padlocked. I found my treats eaten, the wrappers chewed through, and mouse droppings left behind as a token of trade. I became so infuriated with the rodents that I dared my companions to catch one alive. This was the beginning of a pastime for my fellow soldiers and I over the next month. We began to set up elaborate mousetraps, using empty water bottles, rubber bands, anything we could get our hands on. I don't know why I wanted to catch one alive. I guess I just wanted revenge. I wanted at least one of these little bastards to suffer the way they were making me suffer. The most elaborate trap of all was a joint effort between Sergeant Barnes and myself. We utilized the entire lower part of the airplane hangar, in the back, where the ground drops about five feet into a smaller room without a ceiling. I assumed this was built for exhaust to escape so that they could run the airplane while it was inside the shelter. In the very back, at the bottom of the wall, there was a small opening, too small for a man to crawl through. Near this opening, I set up a large array of food as bait. There was a plate smeared with peanut butter from an MRE. Also some cheese left over from dinner, crumbled into small chunks and dispersed on the ground around the opening. Sergeant Barnes came up with a way to trigger a piece of wood to fall down, blocking mouse only entrance to the small cement room. I thought this trap would work wonders; I even had high hopes that we would catch more than one mouse. It was Mason that finally caught one. He was using a simple design. It was a large water bottle, completely in tact, with peanut butter inside as bait. The opening had been altered with a small piece of cardboard attached to some duct tape. Once the mouse had entered the bottle, it was unable to exit. Scott was always testing me, seeing how far I would go, so when he finally caught a mouse, he handed me the bottle with a smirk on his face. "So now that you got one, what are you gonna do with it Sil?" I thought about it for a second, flipped out my Zippo to light a cigarette and an idea popped into my head. "Let's light it on fire" I said matter-of-factly. I had a group of about five guys gathered around while I doused the little grey mouse with kerosene through the opening in the water bottle. I let him slide out onto the ground after he was thoroughly soaked with lighter fuel, and before he could make it very far, I lit the trail. He lit up like a Salem witch, and began running franticly, but didn't make it far. The flames engulfed his tiny body and he curled up into a smoldering ball of black sticky fur as he died. No one said a word. I don't think any of us expected it to go that far. It wasn't really funny anymore, and we all found out the hard way, revenge doesn't feel better. I had a hard time sleeping that night. Even though I had killed many mice before, this time was different. I felt like I was losing myself to the dessert. What kind of person had I become out here? Why did I think it would be funny to torture a small animal for amusement? What was next? Would I kill innocent Iraqi civilians for a quick laugh? The idea horrified me and I decided right then and there to make a promise to myself. I would remember my morals. I had to hold on to what I knew was right. I knew that I had to make choices everyday that influenced others around me. I felt the weight of great responsibility for the first time in my life, and I knew I had to be more careful with my actions and my words. The next day, I tore apart the big mousetrap in the back room and swept up all the bait that had been left scattered around. I didn't want to catch another mouse alive. There was no point in it.

The mice weren't the only casualties, and neither were they the only wildlife that was harassing us on a daily basis. An extra vicious pack of wild dogs had taken up twenty-four hour residence near our garbage dump on the edge of camp. Anytime that we drove a truck out there to dump trash, we were faced with nasty barking dogs ready to defend their treasure at any cost. We were forced to open fire on many dogs while in Tuz. I had witnessed a rather disturbing killing several days back. The M-16 fires a high velocity round which is highly accurate and incredibly fast. The weapon's mechanism is designed almost like a sniper rifle. It is highly precise, but it is not as dependable as an AK-47, the favorite weapon of Hadji. The AK can be dragged through the dirt and it will still spit fire, but the bullets spray in every which way. With an M-16, you can take careful aim and split a hair on your targets head. The main flaw with the M-16 however, is not its susceptibility to jamming, but it lacks stopping power. I found this out when I watched one of the infantry guys shoot a wild dog. We had gone out to dump trash, and were greeted as always by a malicious pack of dogs. We radioed back to local command for support and they gladly sent over one of their roaming infantry units to help us out. While Mason, Sims and I sat in our deuce at a safe distance, one of the infantry grunts jumped out of his Humvee, knelt down on one knee, and took aim. The first shot hit the dog in it's mid section. The other dogs ran off when they saw one of them was hurt, but the craziest thing happened next. The wounded dog just ran off into the dessert, bleeding from the bullet hole in slow drip. The dog didn't even know it was shot. The bullet had pierced him at such a high velocity that it hadn't even left a large exit wound. It was like he had been stabbed through with a lightning fast needle and then released. We all watched in bewilderment as the dog ran and ran in a zigzagged circular pattern for over a mile before finally bleeding out and collapsing in a heap. I felt bad, I wanted to put it out of its misery, but what could I do? Most of us weren't good enough shots to take out a moving target while the dog was running as fast as he was, and besides, the only weapon's we had were the same M-16's that failed to put the dog down in the first place. If we used anything bigger, like a .50 Cal, it would simply be inhumane and sadistic. There was nothing I could do, and so the dog died slow, another sad victim of war.

The dogs and the mice were not the worst affliction of our new frontier. Every waking hour, we were covered with big, black, horse flies. They came, seemingly from nowhere, and they came in masses. We had set up hundreds of sticky strips of orange flypaper. They hung all over the cooking trailer, and above every empty space near our sleeping quarters. Each strip only lasted day or two, and the used ones remained hanging as if a warning to future flies. They hung black, every inch covered with a sticky mess of dead and dying flies, some of them buzzing about, still trying to escape. The buzzing was the worst part. It became a habit of mine to sleep inside my mummy bag like a cocoon with my headphones over my ears. It was hot inside my sleeping bag, but it was the only way I could find any relief from the insects. It wasn't until after midnight that the flies finally were forced to find refuge from the cold air. By the time I would wake up the next day, it was usually eight or nine, and the cold morning air had still not worn off. Showering meant shivering naked into the back room where the elaborate mouse trap had been, lathering up with soap, and then dumping cold water out of a plastic water bottle over your own head while you tried to rinse off. It was rare that I would put myself through this, but even when I did, it didn't help much to put dirty clothes back on afterword. The lack of proper laundry was the worst part. After accidently spilling the sausage brine from a T-ration several days before, my trousers now had a large black stain down the front. Anything greasy had collected dirt, and my sweat had begun to show through in crusty white stains. Because I had access to the cooking trailer, I heated up water in a large, five-gallon pot, added soap, and tried to use this to do laundry in a washbasin. The results were not what I had hoped, but I still felt cleaner than I had before. My uniforms may not have smelled their best, but I looked much fresher on the first glance. The best part about Tuz was the evenings. Back in Speicher, First Sergeant Purdue would see to it that the cooks never had any off time. We were at work twenty-four hours a day. He would often sneak around our barracks in the evenings, trying to catch us smoking in the wrong place, or just searching for me or anyone else to put to work. He would always find something for me to do. Out here in Tuz, far away from my micro-managing upper command, I was actually able to relax after a day's work. We spent the nights playing my favorite card game, Spades. My dad had taught me how to play Spades when I was a little boy, and because of its close similarities to poker, I had instantly fallen in love. Out in the wilderness, we had no cash. The Army paid us by direct deposit, and most of the younger ones, myself included, had no use for this money so it just built up. Talk about saving money, we never even had anything to spend it on! Even when we did encounter something worthwhile at the PX, we only used debit cards and credit cards. It wasn't like in America, where there are ATM's on every corner. I never even saw any cash the whole time I was in Iraq. I think this is why we all loved to play Spades. It felt like gambling even though it didn't require betting money. To play Spades, you need four players. The game is played in two teams of two and you sit across from your teammate around a small square table. All of the cards were dealt out, evenly distributed into quarters. Each player gets a chance to look at his cards before deciding what to bet or "bid." After the bids are in, each player plays a card each turn, and for each turn there is a winner. Each turn won is called a "trick." However, the most tricks don't necessarily win the game. Each team of two players is meant to guess how many tricks they can collectively pull throughout the deck without going over or under. If you overbid and come up short, you go into the negative. If you underbid and meet your bid but go over, you take what is called a "sandbag." If your team collects ten sandbags in one game, you immediately lose a hundred points, so it is a good idea to bid correctly. Players are also allowed to bid "nil" before even looking at their cards, which means they must survive through the entire deck without collecting a single trick. If a player goes nil, his teammate must collect at least six tricks in order to support him. Games are played to any number, but we usually played to five hundred points. It is a game of high intellect and strategy, and it proved to be highly addictive over the long weeks spend in Tuz. We would usually play every night over my plastic footlocker/coffee table; each of us smoking cigarettes or cigars and sipping coffee like it was whiskey. This was like our happy hour. We would play this game and listen to music, joking and talking deep into the night, reminiscing of our homes, passing the time as best we could. Villers was always my partner. He was the best Spades partner I ever had. It was like we were mentally connected. Our opponents would rotate, sometimes Sergeant Barnes would play, sometimes Mason, sometimes some of Villers mechanic friends would come by. One of the mechanics that had become one of my better friends was a young Private Felipe. He was just a kid; fun to be around, even though his immaturity glimmered through his eyes and sometimes his brashness was a bit overpowering. I was only twenty myself so and eighteen year olds mentality was not that far off from my own. He was fun to play Spades against because of his funny stories and his vulgar, childish behavior. He was the only one of us that never drank coffee, claiming that caffeine had an adverse effect on him, causing him to fall asleep rather than stay awake. I refused to believe him for days until he finally proved it to me. One cup of coffee over a game of cards, and sure enough, the kid was out like a light. It was these nights around the card table, laughing and joking, throwing down cards for hours, that I truly found my groove. For the first time in Iraq, I felt at home. I felt in control, happy, and content.

One morning that I will never forget was the day that our resupply convoy had come. I had sent away a brief letter to my mom describing the frustrations of my current morning. The previous letters in the stack I had sent had already painted the backdrop of my new environment and the recent happenings. I was currently upset because I felt abandoned. When we had first come out here, I had been put in charge of the dinner shift with Mason under me. I didn't treat him like he was my subordinate; I tried to treat him with the upmost respect, like a friend. This was my first position of power, and it was also my first mistake. I found out the hard way that as a leader, you couldn't treat everyone as your friend and expect them to treat you with mutual respect. Scott was not interested in being in charge of anything. He never volunteered for any extra missions or took charge of any accountable burdens. His mentality was to simply cruise through everything, taking it all in, letting things take place in their natural order. My way has always been more that of a natural leader. I had jumped at the opportunity to lead a dinner shift, even if my only worker would be my friend Scott. He was not very interested in helping me cook dinner, and for the most part I would task him out to simple chores like lighting the stoves and boiling water. On one of the first days of our arrangement, he lit a stove without removing one of our only empty five-gallon pots from the oven. Within about ten minutes he had melted a hole right through the bottom of the pot and we were down equipment. He laughed his ass off when I found out and called him out on it, he didn't take it seriously at all. My feelings were slightly hurt when I realized that he didn't really care about his responsibilities or mine. I wanted to do a good job for once and make my upper command proud. I felt this was my chance and he was not taking the job seriously. When the resupply convoy showed up earlier in the day, I was shocked to find First Sergeant Purdue step out of his fully armored Humvee, followed by my company commander, Captain Spaulding. They had heard word from Sergeant Barnes that I was doing a good job out here in charge of a dinner shift and they wanted to see the operation for themselves. I was nervous, especially since I wasn't as clean as I would have liked to be, but Purdue must have been in a good mood because he didn't even say a word to me. Captain Spaulding came right over to me and told me that he'd heard good things about me over the radio. He said that he had asked how his cooks were doing in Tuz and heard nothing but good things about me, stepping up to the plate and running the dinner shift all by myself. I was all puffed up and completely forgot my place for a moment. I didn't know much of what to say so I just told him that I'd keep doing my best. He told me that he was going to personally see to it that I got promoted to Specialist, E-4 as soon as I returned to Speicher. I had been waiting for this for months and had begun to believe that it would never happen. I thought my commander hated me just as much as his first sergeant did, but maybe I had misjudged him. Maybe he had misjudged me, and changed his mind when he saw what a good job I could do. In any case, it was a good feeling to know that my hard work had paid off. After he finished talking to me, Captain Spaulding turned and walked back to the hangar to talk to the other NCO's who had gathered near the cooking trailer to talk about the progress of our mission. I stayed outside to help unload the new supplies that I would need for my dinner meals. I also wanted to see any of the familiar faces I could find, to ask how things were in Speicher and see if I had any mail. I also wanted to make sure that my outgoing mail was put in the right hands. It didn't take long to unload supplies. There was plenty of meat; I even saw a few boxes of steaks and a box of ribs. We would be able to have quite a feast for at least two or three meals over the next couple of weeks. I had found no cooks in the convoy; I guess Baumgartner and Aguilera were still hold up in Speicher with Sergeant Jackson. I did see my friend Private First Class Defrost from the supply squad, and asked him how things were back near Tikrit. He informed me that not much had changed as far as the monotony of our unit. I did find out that there were some new amenities that had been set up in Speicher. Apparently there was a new PX that was much larger. There were even trailers filled with pay phones that you could use twenty-four hours a day if you bought a long distance phone card from the PX. After briefly catching up on Speicher life with Defrost, I handed him my outgoing mail and told him to make sure it got sent out as soon as he returned. Many of the trucks had begun staging for the trip back so I said my goodbyes and took a step back to make room. I was still filled with exhilaration after my talk with Captain Spaulding, but my feelings of elation quickly faded when I turned back toward the trailer and saw Mason running out toward the convoy with his rucksack thrown over his back and his cot already folded up in his free hand. "Can you help me with this Silver?" He handed me the cot and his sleeping bag and threw his duffel bag up onto an outgoing deuce and a half. "I'm heading back to Speicher, I'm sick of this shit" He offered a quick explanation before grabbing the rest of his equipment out of my hands and jumping up into the back of the truck. "Really Scott? You're just leaving?" I said too low for anyone to hear over the roar of the truck's engine coming to life. I couldn't believe he was just going to jump ship on me, leaving me to run the dinner shift completely alone, cooking for hundreds of soldiers with no help. He really didn't care about his responsibilities, and despite my commanders kind words, he obviously didn't care about me either. They hadn't even sent me a replacement cook. I knew I could handle dinner alone, and I knew Miller and Sergeant Barnes would do what they could to help out, but I was still angry with Scott for deserting me like that. I had thought of him as my best friend in the cook section, but now I wasn't so sure. A rift had opened up between us and I no longer felt I could trust him. I began to spend more time away from the cooks, hanging out with the mechanics on the other side of the runway. After the convoy was gone and I had finished serving the dinner meal, I decided to wander over to the mechanics hangar. All three of the other cooks had set up a small tent near the end of the hangar, behind a wall of MRE boxes. Scott and I had opted out of cramming in the tent with the others, so we had set up our cots outside, behind the tent and next to the wall of the hangar. I didn't want to go back to my lonely cot with the empty spot next to it where Mason had been. It was depressing that I would now be living out in Tuz, behind a tent, inside a mostly empty airplane hangar, all by myself. I made my way to Villers hangar on the other side of the runway as the last sunlight faded behind the horizon. The mechanics were bored, lazily spending the evening blasting AC/DC and Led Zeppelin from their computer speakers while lounging on fold out camping chairs. Villers and I tried to find something to do. We couldn't find a third or a fourth for Spades and quickly gave up trying to talk anyone else into playing. Neither of us was really in the mood anyway. Eventually we combined three decks of cards and spent several hours carefully assembling houses out of cards. Every so often, one of us would tire of the dull pastime and take a light swipe, knocking the cards down in a collapse of red and white. Eventually, we both committed to the task and carefully constructed a masterpiece. It was a mansion. Multi-leveled, and multi-tiered, it went on for at least three feet, climbing as high as five floors. This one was worth a few shots from the disposable camera before knocking it down. It was late and I finally made my way back to my lonely little campsite with my flashlight. The other cooks had already gone to sleep and it was cold and dark. I felt the weight of great responsibility that night, and I tossed and turned until early morning, when the cold air finally forced away the pestering flies, and I drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

### Back To Speicher

Our mission had lasted another three weeks after Mason had decided to ditch out on me. I made do without him, although it had definitely caused a rift between us. I no longer felt he was a good friend who I could trust, and I kept my distance from him after I returned. Much had changed, just as Defrost had told me. First Sergeant Purdue had decided that my bum shack was unsafe, and "a waste of needed lumber." He had decreed the rooftops an illegal area, and he had taken away our old metal ladder. It was ok with me; it had gotten far to cold outside in the late part of the year to be sleeping outside anyway. My only concern was that my mural be left in tact on the roof. No one ever messed with it, and so I was content in knowing that at least I would leave my artwork behind. It was now the seventh of December and I had been back in Speicher since the third. I had moved back inside the half bombed out barracks that the rest of the cooks still lived in. Today I was lounging on my cot waiting for someone to tell me what kind of work detail I would be on for the afternoon. The punk rock music that I was listening to in my headphones inspired me to think about going to live music shows back home. I was brainlessly doodling on my notepad, sketching little cartoon characters in a band playing a rock show on stage. One of them had a big Mohawk jutting out of his head in large Liberty spikes and was holding a flying – V guitar. His companion sat behind him on a drum set with a sleeveless shirt and long hair. The looks on their faces depicted them as a grimy punk rock band, growling out dirty street lyrics from some inner city rock venue. I longed to live in a large city back in America and immerse myself in the music scene. I wanted to be a normal twenty year-old kid and go to rock shows and parties. As I drew my pictures I let my mind wander to a fantasy where I live happily in San Francisco with a beautiful, long haired, brunette girl who likes to rock out to metal bands and drink whiskey. She is my dream girl, and even though she is imagined, I wonder if I'll ever meet her. I wonder if my life will ever get better than this, or if it will end out here in the dessert. I had started to think like this more and more. I felt death around the corner and every day seemed it could be my last. I wondered if my life would end out here, far away from home, all alone around men who didn't even seem to care about me. I was beginning to feel very alone. I wondered what death would feel like. How would I die? Would I be shot to death? It would be more likely that I would be blown up. However I went, I hoped it would be quick.

Miller stood over me, but I did not acknowledge him until curiosity eventually forced my eyes upward. He had been fumbling with something above my head, and now absent-mindedly turned his empty gaze down upon me. "You don' mind dooya'?" He glumly asked my permission to be in my area. "As long as it's not pointed directly at me." I replied. "Have I ever pointed anyfing at choo?" he asked this absurd rhetorical question as he turned from me, and ambled back toward his cot. The "IT" in question is a large air conditioning unit. It is the only unit we have in our bay, and it is directly above my cot. I suddenly found myself wishing I was still living up on the roof. I had been wondering about the mysterious orders that had trickled down through the upper command that it was not allowed for soldiers to be on the roof of any building for safety reasons. I have no idea what is supposed to be safe about being at war, but I had no choice but to comply. I have the sneaking suspicion that the real reason that soldiers are not allowed on the rooftops, is because my First Sergeant has a personal vendetta against me. He knew I had built a shelter on the roof, and that I was happy living in it. First Sergeant Purdue would literally do anything to keep a smile off of my face.

The air conditioner ran incessantly, (with the exception of the event the generator was let to run out of fuel.) It was cold inside the building in my opinion, but certain people, such as Harris, still felt the need to run the AC on full power at all times. After spending long days in Kuwait in temperatures up to a hundred and forty degrees, it was hard to believe that the days had since turned bleak, cold, wet, and muddy. Only three months prior, the heat of summer had been in full swing. I recalled long hours of sweltering heat spent longing for an air conditioning unit or even a chunk of ice in my water. Now I could probably freeze a bottle of water if I left it outside overnight. It was the Army's way (or at least had been in my experience) to reward its constituency with comforts and pleasantries only after they were no longer wanted or needed. We now had a limitless supply of potable ice, yet it was too frigid most mornings and I opted for a hot tin of coffee instead.

Our days were always long, but now they were filled with ice-cold rain and thick mud, sometimes up to my thighs. I tried to stay clean but it was impossible. We had all broken out our winter equipment, which was meager and mostly dated from the Viet Nam era. Mostly what we had was rain gear and knee high rubber boots that could be worn over our regular army boots. It was difficult to pull these on and off every time I entered or exited a building, so I only took them off when entering my living area. The chow hall's cleanliness suffered a great deal due to the weather conditions, but luckily for me, the Indian contractors dealt with that mess. Lately the cooks had been tasked out to another chore. There were a great number of jobs that needed to be done on base, and rather than do them ourselves, the Army had opted to give the local Iraqi's jobs. There were hundreds of them at the front gates in those days, begging for food, work, or anything we could give them. Many different companies that were stationed in F.O.B. Speicher had begun to take advantage of the local resources for hard labor jobs on post. As long as companies provided men like me to provide security, we were allowed to go to the gates and pick up a truckload of workers for the day. Down at the gate, it was like a Home Depot parking lot. The Hadji's would crowd around our truck's bidding for the job. We had our group of guys that we liked and trusted, at least more than the others. It was my job to hang out while they worked with a magazine in my M-16, locked and loaded, watching and waiting.

When I wasn't doing this, I was helping the other cooks clean out our conex. We would pull everything out into the mud, pull it inside of the old, un-used chow hall connected to our barracks, and clean each item before carefully replacing it inside the conex. In the process of doing this, not only did we get everything dirtier than it probably was in the first place, but we dirtied the inside of our buildings as well, dragging plenty of dirt and mud inside. It seemed endless and pointless, but as long as we were at least trying to clean our equipment, it gave us all the idea that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Whenever it was breakfast, lunchtime, or dinner, we would drag ourselves through thick, knee-deep mud and muck to the chow hall where I would eat my regular bowls of Wheaties and Cheerios. I still lived off bread, juice, soda, breakfast cereal, and the occasional vegetable or fruit. There was the occasional treat, like steaks. I was willing to eat the steak regardless of what it looked or tasted like. Beef is beef. This is funny because I was raised a vegan. I mean, I wasn't entirely vegan, but my mom was a pretty strict Seventh Day Adventist. It is part of the religion to practice a firm diet. It all had something to do with cleft hooves, and chewing their own cud and something or other. I have no idea of the details of this because to me it is all a strange superstition that makes no sense to me. In any case, it wasn't until I was fourteen years old before I tasted my first hamburger. At first I was cautious, afraid of the texture of meat. I ordered my burgers well done, and rarely experimented with anything that I didn't recognize right away. I gradually began to expand my horizons until I was eating chicken off the bone, and before I knew it, I had graduated to steaks, bacon, and all of the other delicious meats that I had been missing out on my whole life. Within the first three years of my carnivore shift, I was eating rare pink steaks; my burgers left pools of blood on the plate, and I was no longer the least bit afraid of a piece of cooked flesh. I've been an avid meat-eater ever since. However, out here in Iraq, in the Halliburton chow hall, experimenting with mystery meat was another story. I didn't take many chances. Another favorite of mine in the chow hall was a can of Blackberry Fanta soda. They don't have that flavor in America, and for the first couple months, I thought the purple can was grape flavored. When I found out it was actually Blackberry, I was addicted. The new chow hall had one new convenience that I simply could not pass up. In the back, behind some racks of supplies, was a single electric washing machine and dryer. As a cook, I was allowed access to the precious machine, and as a result, my uniforms were in much better shape. The best part of this was that I was now able to wash my socks and underwear. For the last several months, I had been relying on purchasing new socks whenever I had worn the old ones out. Washing socks by hand had proved impossible. We also had an Internet café that had been set up in the back of a bunker. It was fun to use e-mail to contact my mom and my brother; I could even contact my dad and some of my estranged cousins, aunts, and uncles. The access to the Internet made communication much easier. There was even a new website called Myspace that allowed me to create a webpage with my profile on it. It included all my personal information and I could post a picture of myself on the front. Many of my friends back home had already made themselves Myspace pages, so after I joined I was quickly able to communicate with all sorts of old high school friends that I'd all but forgotten about. I still rarely used the phones, even though the new phone trailers made it much easier. I hated to deal with the five-second delay, and besides, I would have to wait until the middle of the night in order to catch anyone during the day. The Internet was easier. I was willing to wait for a response. I still had plenty to do, and by the time I was done with a long day of work, it was fun to drop by the Internet café after dinner and see if anyone had left a message for me. Usually, no one had, but the anticipation kept me going. My mom was still dependable with snail mail letters, and that was enough for me.

### We Got Him!

It was December thirteenth and I had been back in Speicher for almost a week. I was already growing tired of the same old thing every day. I sometimes skipped breakfast because the trek through the mud was almost unbearable. On this day, Sims was being extra annoying, muttering under his breath as usual and angrily cursing out someone that had pissed him off. He was fucking crazy, we all knew it. Something someone had said to him had set him off and he was just on a verbal warpath, blurting out curses and throwing his own belongings around the barracks for no reason. I knew it would take him a while to wind down, so I decided to brave the mud and get some chow. I had just purchased a new digital camera at the PX, and as I slopped through the muck up to my thighs, I pointed the camera down towards my feet and began snapping pictures. It was hard to believe that several months before, this was hard, arid, dessert ground. When I finally got to the chow hall's entrance, I cleared my rifle before entering. Due to the safety concerns of the higher command, all chow halls have an overturned barrel in front of the door. The bottom of the barrel is embedded into sand, (or in this case, mud.) Before entering, each soldier is meant to clear his weapon into the barrel. If for some reason, someone has accidentally left a round in their chamber, it will be dispensed safely into the ground, rather than accidentally blasting away inside the chow hall and potentially hurting someone. I was all alone this morning so I didn't pay much attention to my rifle. I knew that I didn't have a round in the chamber; I hadn't even been out the gates since returning from Tuz. Besides, I had done this so many times that it didn't even seem to matter anymore. I went through the motions only because I knew I would get in trouble if I didn't. I absentmindedly pulled back on my charging handle, blindly checked the chamber for a round, slid the charging handle back forward and locked it into place, and pointed the barrel of my rifle into the ground. I pulled the trigger and heard the dry "click" of the steel hammer striking steel. As always, my weapon was clear. As soon as I entered the chow hall, I knew something was up. Today was different. All of the TV's were turned onto the military channel as usual, and there was big news of some sort. All of the soldiers were crowded around the TV's in small crowds, some of them were cheering and high-fiving each other. I quickly scanned the room for anyone I knew, but the confusion was too great and I recognized no one. I ran up to the first group of soldiers watching the TV screen and began asking, "What happened? What's going on?" Many of the soldiers around me turned in unison, shouting over each other, "We GOT HIM!" They chanted. "We got that fucking asshole! The ace of spades! He was right under our noses the whole time!" I instantly knew who they were talking about. Saddam Hussein had been captured. I couldn't believe we had actually caught the guy that everyone was looking for. Everyone had assumed he was far too smart and had fled the country months before. We had already killed his sons who had held up in one of their palaces. I had traded pictures with the infantry guys who blasted the hell out of them with TOW missiles. I never thought we would catch Saddam, and the whole time he had been right there in Tikrit. He had been hiding under the streets in an underground hide out. No one knows who was keeping him fed, but from the looks of him, he was mostly on his own. He looked like a homeless bum on the streets of San Francisco. I'm sure he smelled about the same too. His hair was overgrown and a thick, scruffy beard was covering all of his face. He looked at the cameras with wide eyes as if he was astonished he had been found. The news kept showing the same reel on a loop. He was sitting in some dark room with white tiled walls while some female Army medic depressed his dirty tongue with a Popsicle stick and examined the insides of his ears and eyes with a flashlight. I don't know what she was looking for; did they really think Saddam had a bomb hidden in his mouth or something? One last "fuck you" to America? I was just glad it was over. To me, this meant there was no reason for us to stay in Iraq. I thought the war was over. We got him, we could go home now. A mere twenty minutes drive from the back alley where they had captured Saddam just hours before, I sat down to eat my breakfast. It was crazy to think that the dark room where they were holding him was so close to where I was currently sitting. I honestly did have a feeling of accomplishment when we caught Saddam. It made me feel as though we had done the job we had come here to do. However, the Army was true to its orders the second time around, and it was only December. If we were to be here for a full three hundred and sixty-five days, than that meant we'd have until March, or even April. My heart sank at the harshness of this reality, but I knew my chances of going home now that Saddam was caught were between slim and none. I knew I'd have to tough it out a while longer.

### Dingo

One thing we had an abundance of back in Speicher was late night guard duty shifts. We would get split up into teams of two and pull six-hour shifts sitting way out on the edge of camp, up to the north where nothing ever happens. We would take a Humvee or a Deuce and a half truck out there and just sit with no entertainment. I would often just stare out into the night with the night vision goggles. It was truly amazing how many stars you could see in the dessert sky, far away from any lights on the ground. However, there was nothing that could compare to looking into the night sky with night vision gear. The technology causes any bit of light to be multiplied, appearing much brighter than it actually is. This is why you it is blinding to wear them during the day, or in a room with the lights turned on. When I looked into the night sky, the stars I could see with my naked eye appeared ten times brighter, while the background behind them is even more miraculous. Millions of tiny stars filled in the darkness, shining through where they could not be seen before because of their vast distance from Earth. Sometimes even stargazing would get boring, and I'd start to fall asleep. Often we would play cards and talk to help us stay alert. Other times, we would take turns sleeping.

One time somewhere before Christmas, my friend Specialist Lansky asked me if I wouldn't mind pulling a few hours alone while he took a nap in the hummer. I said it was ok; I had no problem sitting alone in the dark in a foxhole. The sand bags had been made into a bunker that you could actually go inside of and sit down. Inside, halfway underground, there was a .50 Cal on a tripod mount, a few boxes of ammo, a radio that we have to check in on every hour, and a little chair made out of sandbags. I was sitting there in the dark for about an hour when all of a sudden I heard something. It wasn't much of a sound, nothing loud or alarming, it simply sounded like footsteps. I knew there wasn't anyone out there for miles but Lansky and me, so I called his name, but I heard no reply. I panicked at first, I thought for sure Hadji was out there creeping around, trying to draw me out into the night to kill me, and for the first time since being in Iraq, I was all alone! I didn't know weather to get on the .50 Cal at one end pointing out, or to aim my M-16 out the doorway facing into camp. I chose the doorway, and as silently as I could, I slid back the charging handle and locked the bolt forward with a round in the chamber. As quiet as I tried to be, it still made some racket, chalk it up to old Colt weapons... My heart was beating out of my chest at this point, I was petrified, sure that at any moment a masked Arab would appear out of the darkness with an AK-47, or worse, that a grenade would drop in the opening on the far side of the bunker. My heart was beating out of my ribcage, I felt like the sound of it thumping in my chest alone would be enough to give me away. All of a sudden, I saw movement through the doorway. Something small, and fast, darted at ground level, from one side of the door the other. I realized that my intruder was an animal of some sort, and I let out a long breath of relief. I swallowed hard in my dry throat before cautiously crouching out of the entry to investigate. I saw a small creature, about a foot and a half high, with big skinny ears like a cat. Other than the ears, it looked like a dog. I've heard of Dingo's in Australia. I don't know if Iraq has Dingo's, but I'm pretty sure that's what I saw. It looked at me with big shiny orange eyes before darted right up inside the wheel well of our Humvee. It was so small and skinny that it easily slipped right out of sight in the engine bay. I woke up Lansky to show him what was hiding inside our hood, but in all the noise the Dingo must have escaped out the other side, back into the darkness. When we opened the hood, there was nothing there. I still to this day don't know for sure if it was a real Dingo, or if I imagined the whole thing. It was entirely possible that my mind was playing tricks on me. There may have never been a Dingo at all.

### From Rags to Riches

I was lucky enough for my R&R to fall on Christmas. I wasn't going far. Saddam had an enormous Palace that sat on a private palace grounds cradled in an elbow of the Tigris River. Guarded on all sides by high stonewalls and heavily barricaded gates, the palace was right in the middle of the highly hostile city of Tikrit. The U.S. Army had renamed the place F.O.B. Danger after taking control of it in early 2003. It was beautiful inside and I was happy to be anywhere other than Speicher. Unfortunately, because of the rotation of R&R, I wasn't spending my vacation with any of my friends. In fact, I didn't even know anyone who was with me at all. I had to make new friends, and I was never very good at that, so I spent most of my time alone. After settling into our new camp, my new group disseminated to their own activities. All I wanted to do as usual was explore. I found a battle buddy, as we still were required to stay in pair of two or more, and we set out to see all of the sights of the palace that Saddam had lived in less than a year before. Private Barclay was my buddy for this vacation. He was an even-tempered young man, a year older than me, and even easier to get along with. We shared a fascination for this amazing place. There were many large palaces lining a high, two hundred foot cliff that overlooked the Tigris. I didn't even know which one was Saddam's home until Barclay pointed it out to me. We were forbidden to go inside for reasons of safety; it had been blown to smithereens by our bombs and TOW missiles. The palace was huge, sitting on a hill with a large circular driveway. Giant stone statues of men on horseback stood guard on either side of the massive front door. High above the vaulted ceilings were large gaping holes in the stone, some of the walls had partially collapsed in the hail of gunfire and explosives that had rained down on the structure. I would have hated to be inside that structure during our assault. It was after dark, and Barclay and I agreed it would be worth getting caught. We had to get a glimpse of the inside of Saddam's house. I kept watch while he climbed the chain link fence that the MP's must have put up, and then followed him in a quick leap. There was no one around, the whole place felt haunted. The two of us scampered quickly into the side entrance and were immediately greeted by such a pile of rubbish and brick and mortar that we could not continue. I backed out, found another way in, and beckoned to Barclay. The next entrance was actually not a doorway, but a blasted hole in the wall. I squeezed in between rebar's and cement and thought to myself what a fine job someone had done building this building. It really was holding together quite well after taking such a beating. We crept inside quietly and cautiously but soon found that it was too dark to see much of anything. I made halfway up a marble staircase with Barclay behind me before hearing a crash in the distance. We both froze in our tracks. I listened intently and after another few seconds we both distinctly heard the sound of shuffling in a far off room. I couldn't tell what floor the sound was coming from, but I didn't stick around to find out. I bolted from that place as fast as I could with Barclay in tow. I had seen enough.

The next day was filled with even more excitement as Barclay and I finished exploring the entire palace grounds. Saddam's palace sat high up on top of the cliff. Below, in the hills, were at least twenty more palaces of spectacular design and varying size. On the banks of the Tigris was a beautiful manmade waterfall that cascaded off the top of a rock wall with turquoise stones inlayed into the masonry. Inside the buildings, everything was marble. Large slabs ran up to high, vaulted ceilings. All of the fixtures were gold plated, even the toilet seats. The highlight of my retreat was an opportunity to swim in Saddam's crystal swimming pool. As I floated on my back in the clear chlorinated water, I could look up and see my reflection in the mirrored ceiling. The entire place was breathtaking. My only regret was that coalition soldiers had covered the walls in cheap, tacky street graffiti. Soldiers from all over America had spray painted their unit numbers and symbols on the marble walls in a show of territorial immaturity. After we had explored to our hearts content, swam in the marble swimming pool, and even snuck into Saddam's home, most of us had found comfort in the very large Internet café that was set up in a high veranda of one of the palaces. This was the recreational palace, and had been made the epicenter of the Armies R&R unit. Not only did it have the largest Internet café, but it also had telephones, a very plush movie theater, and many various sports equipment. I enjoyed my three days of relaxation, although I could still hear gunshots and explosions on the other side of the Tigris River. I was still in the thick of it. I couldn't believe that Saddam had lived in these spectacularly dazzling mansions behind a high stonewall, right in the middle of the slums of Tikrit. On my last night of R&R, I sat on top of the cliffs in a plastic chair and watched the sun go down. Off in the distance, I could hear the Arabic prayer songs of the evening faintly echoing off the buildings from loudspeakers outside of a mosque somewhere. One thing I will never forget was the penetrating beauty of the sunsets of Iraq. It had not been a conventional Christmas by any means, but it had not been all that bad. As I sat on my perch, high up above the shimmering waters of the beautiful Tigris River, I felt thankful to be alive.

### The Crystal Palace

Halfway through January I was still stuck in Speicher. Not much had changed; my work details still included late night guard duty in the middle of nowhere, going out on short daytime convoys into Tikrit or other nearby towns, and guarding Iraqi civilians while they did chores on post. First Sergeant Purdue and Captain Spaulding didn't think that their nice building was nice enough so they had work details of Iraqi civilians come on everyday to build walls, paint, and set up tanks of water on the roof for showers. We had to go pick them up at the front gates, and then get them checked out by the M.P.'s before they can come inside. We escorted them to the "CP" as my friends and the cooks have come to call it. Our nickname, CP is an abbreviation for Crystal Palace, but if Purdue or anyone else who lives there asks, we tell them it stands for Command Post. All my friends, the cooks, and the mechanics, the medics, and the supply squad, we all live in squalor, spread across the camp in old bombed out shitholes. I'm not even jealous because I like to spend as little time as possible around First Sergeant Purdue. We had been guarding this group of Hadji's all morning while they painted the outside of the CP white. I was glad I wasn't the one doing the painting, but standing around watching was getting pretty old. There were two of them that I didn't particularly trust. I kept my eye on one of these guys while he painted, but if the other one got out of sight, I'd start looking for him. I had lost him for about ten minutes at one point and was getting a little worried when I finally found him back at the HQ trailer snooping around the doorway. I locked and loaded, shouldered my weapon, and demanded to know what he was doing. "Hey, asshole! What are you doing over here?" He didn't seem very alarmed that I was pointing my gun at him, but he shook his hands back in forth in front of his face and kept saying, "No mistah, ok, ok?" I finally realized he was trying to tell me that there were more buckets of paint inside and he wanted them so he could finish his job. Maybe I'm a bad judge of character, but you can never be too careful.

At lunchtime, we went to the chow hall in shifts while the others guarded the civilians. The nice thing about the CP was that it was located very close to the chow hall. As I walked up to the dry-fire clearing barrel, I removed my magazine to clear my weapon. Absent mindedly, I pulled back the charging handle and without looking, I pointed the barrel of my weapon into the dirt and fired. BLAM! A big puff of gun smoke and dirt erupted from the barrel and my heart jumped into my throat. The soldiers behind me who were complete strangers raised their weapons toward me in alarm. At first I froze up, I had no idea what had just happened. Within seconds, one of the soldiers behind me rushed over to me and told me to take my hand off my weapon, and I realized what I had done. I had made a grave mistake when I pulled back the charging handle without looking. I had forgotten about Hadji who had spooked me, I had put a round in the chamber. Even without the magazine, that round was still there, and I had fired it into the clearing barrel. It was an honest mistake, and I wasn't the first to make it, but one of the guys behind me was the First Sergeant of a different company and he was not too pleased with my display of inattentiveness. I went ahead and ate my lunch, but I was shaken and had lost my appetite. By the time I had returned to the CP, First Sergeant Purdue had already found out what had happened and he was furious. "So now I can't trust you with a fucking gun Silver?" He continued to yell at me until my Commander, Captain Spaulding stepped in and told me to finish my job today but I was going to have to go before the Battalion Commander and see what he decided was a good punishment. He told me that there would be a written report that would go in my file for an "accidental discharge." I was just glad nobody had gotten hurt. After all, The barrels were out there in front of the chow hall for that very reason: to make sure that no one accidentally brought a live weapon into the chow hall. At least I had fired that round into the ground. I had learned from my experience even without a punishment. The whole situation had scared me half to death, and I definitely wasn't about to do it again. For now on, I knew I would be extra careful every time I took a magazine out of my weapon.

### Light at the End of the Tunnel

Near the end of January, we had begun to clean our equipment in full force, which could only be a good sign. The cooks had to pull all three of our MKT's completely apart and clean each pot and pan, utensil and grill cover. Every inch of the trailer had to be spotless before it could be put back together. This meant they would not be used again in Iraq. I guessed that meant Tuz was the last time I'd be doing any cooking. Some of my mechanic friends were prepping to go to Kuwait tomorrow in an Advance Party. Not Villers, but more than half of his platoon will be gone. This means they won't be coming back to Iraq. They will stay in Kuwait near the docks and prepare our equipment and vehicles to get on the boat. I didn't know for sure, but I had my doubts that they would send an advanced party back to Kuwait anymore than a month before the rest of us got to go. I hoped I was right because that would be even sooner than any of us had previously thought. Surrounding the old barracks that we lived in were several large pyramid shaped bunkers. Each one contained an arsenal of weapons, grenades, and ammunition. I was never allowed down inside the bunker unless I needed to check out a box of .50 Cal ammo for a convoy. The outsides of the pyramid, however, were free game. I liked to climb up the sloped walls to the top sometimes and sit alone while writing or just to see the view. The pyramid reminded me of being back home with my skateboard. If I had a skateboard with me now, I would surely be attempting to skate down the sides of this bunker, it was too big of a temptation to pass up. Once again, all I could think about was being back home.

### Bad Thoughts Swarming

By the end of January my accidental discharge report had been submitted to the group commander but no word had yet come down on when I would have to go in front of him. I hoped it would be soon because while I was waiting for this to be resolved I was not allowed to leave the base. I hated being in F.O.B. Speicher. Everyday was miserable. Soldiers who didn't know how hard of a worker I was and had no respect for me harassed me on a regular basis. Many of the engineers and truck drivers who were living in the CP had been corrupted by Purdue's influence and they acted like popular high school football players. They were good old boys, brown nosed and ignorant, it was easy for First Sergeant Purdue to sway their opinions of me. I hated being anywhere near there, but I had no choice. I wanted to go to Kirkuk, where I would be closer to danger but farther from all the people I hated. I had been scheduled for assignment out there a few days before, but after my mistake I had become locked down until further notice. Purely by chance in the chow hall one day, I ran into a young female soldier who had made a similar mistake. She told me that all she got was a letter of reprimand in her file. That was good news to me because I didn't care what was in my file. I was never planning on being in the Army for life, and I certainly didn't care about getting promoted to Sergeant. I knew better than to think that I would make a good NCO. Based on my brief experience in the military, I was pretty sure it was a good idea for me to get out as soon as possible. If they wanted to put some letter of reprimand in my file, let them do it. It was better than some ridiculous punishment, or a drop in rank, which would mean even lower pay. While awaiting my punishment, I was reserved to radio operating duty every day. It was the worst job for me because of the location of the radio: inside of First Sergeant Purdue's office. It wouldn't have been such a bad gig, sitting next to the radio all day, checking in on all the guard posts every hour, but sitting in Purdue's office for twelve hours a day, pretending to laugh at his awful jokes, it was really getting to me. I spent the whole time on edge because I never knew when he might flip out on me for no reason. The two of us had crossed each other many times, and I knew we would never get along. I had a deep and impenetrable hatred for the man. Sometimes he would take leave in the back of the office to take naps on his cot in the afternoon. After a few minutes I could hear him quietly snoring from the back, and for the next several hours I would sit in silence, staring at my M-16 propped against the wall. How easy it would be for me to chamber a round and blow a hole through Purdue's skull before he even knew what happened. I tried to push the thoughts of cold-blooded murder out of my head, but in a war zone, it had become hard to separate myself from the killer inside of me. I felt no remorse at the murderous feelings boiling inside of me. My mom always taught me to turn the other cheek, but that was Christian jargon and I didn't believe in any of it. After the past year, I honestly didn't know if I even had any ethics. The only thing that stopped me from killing that man was the fear of getting caught, perhaps even gunned down outside by soldiers in my own unit, thinking I was an enemy. The fact is many of them hated Purdue just as much as I did, but in the darkness of night, most of these guys would shoot first and ask questions later. I wanted to go home too bad to risk getting killed by friendly fire, or worse, to spend the rest of my miserable life in a military prison.

Radio duty was not my only job. I was still on the QRT, and every so often, I would be selected to go out on a convoy. Just the following day, I had been selected for an upcoming day mission. I nearly had a mental breakdown when I found out that I had to wake up and be ready for a mission in the morning early the next day after pulling a twelve-hour shift on the radio. I would be manning the .50 Cal for six hours one way, spending the night, and returning the next day, six hours back. My back would be incredibly sore after this so I was not looking forward to it. Also, being on the .50 Cal for such a long time for two days in a row wreaked havoc on my psyche. I had to stay completely alert throughout the whole ride because from the machine gunner's point of view, everything depended on me. I was already exhausted but I knew I'd have to drag myself out for a few more days. The worse part is that it had begun to feel as though there was no end to look forward to. I was up every morning at five-o-clock am, working all day, never knowing what to expect, and there was never a weekend or a day off. Every day was Monday all over again. Some of the other guys had jokingly started repeating the phrase: "its just another groundhog day" in reference to the Bill Murray movie from the nineties. Every day repeated itself and it was all a test to see if you could be a better person. I figured in my case, I'd be stuck here forever. The only thing I could hope for was the single extra hour I got to sleep in on Sunday, and even that was only considering I didn't get volunteered to roll out on a Sunday mission. ...It was killing me.

### Salmonella

I'd been riding the .50 for three days by the time I had a chance to sit still for a moment. My face was weathered and wind blasted. I was even more exhausted than I had been before leaving Speicher, but it was still a welcomed break from the monotony of radio duty. We had driven to a place way out northeast near the border of Iran called As-Sulaymaniyyah. I couldn't pronounce the name so I called it "Salmonella." It was a Kurdish town and the people there were much different than what I was used to. We usually spent time in Arabic areas, either Shiite or Sunni. The Kurds and Arabs hate each other because of Muslim religious differences. I don't know much about the politics of the land, but I knew things were very different up north. Kurdish women dressed in normal clothes instead of black hooded robes, (and most of them were very attractive as well!) Kurdish men dressed like Aladdin, with baggy pants, a big sash around the waist, and a turban on their heads. The Kurds LOVED us, and I loved them back. They were all such real, freethinking people. They were the closest thing to Westerners I had seen since leaving America. They even had alcohol for sale in shops in As-Sulaymaniyyah, completely legal. I couldn't believe my eyes! As soon as our Humvee's pulled to a stop, a crowd of fans immediately surrounded us. Most of the Kurds spoke great English, and they absolutely loved American Soldiers because we had liberated their people from Saddam's regime who used to gas them, killing millions. I let another soldier sit on the .50 Cal for a moment while I got down to stretch my legs and before I knew what was happening, a news crew and some British reporter woman immediately approached me asking for an interview. She was from the BBC, and it looked like there was no backing out, so I agreed to talk to her for a minute. As soon as I started, she asked me, "How do you feel about the war? Do you think it's a good thing that you are here?" I looked up and saw my commander, Captain Spaulding, staring grimly back at me from the edge of the crowd. I realized I'd better hold my tongue. I answered as crudely and blankly as possible so as not to get into trouble. I wouldn't have been surprised if she didn't even use the footage. After I got away from the BBC news team, an exuberant little Kurdish teenager who was translating for us accosted me (in a good way.) He had overheard that a friend of mine, Specialist Pritchett, wanted a certain Kurdish style, woven cap, as a souvenir. He immediately demanded that me and another soldier follow him into the market to purchase the hat. The Captain said it was ok and that we could trust him as long as we stayed together, so we followed him off into the crowd. We tailed this guy we had just met down some steps into a market area, and in all the confusion I barely noticed the sunlight had begun to fade away overhead as we were lead further and deeper into the market. Next thing I knew, we were underground. Everything just opened up down there into a huge under-belly of the city. It reminded me of watching the Disney movie, Aladdin, prince of thieves. A true underworld of hidden shadowy streets and alleyways lined with shops and bazaars intersected underneath the streets that ran above, like a huge network of complex mazes beneath the city. It was an incredible sight. Without our guide we surely would have been lost in an instant. It was literally a city of it's own down there, and so crowded that it was hard to move very fast. Our little guide didn't seem to mind the throngs of shoppers as he was practically flying through the labyrinth with the skill of a kid who had grown up down there. He darted ahead of us, turning this way and that, making it very difficult for us to keep up. We were weighed down with our weapons and ammo and our heavy flak-vests and Kevlar helmets. I knew that if we lost him, we would never find our way back to our vehicles. I wished that we had more time to stop and take pictures, to wander the halls of this tangled web at my leisure, perusing and browsing in every shop until the sun went down. Finally we stopped in front of a short little salesman who wore a funny looking little woven hat and Pritchett began haggling with him over the price of his wares. The boy who had become our guide beckoned for me to come over to where he was standing next to a friendly looking older man wearing a light grey blazer over a white shirt. He looked clean cut and wasn't dressed like most of the other men. After I'd come over to them, I was introduced to the older man who didn't speak any English. I shook his hand and he smiled at me widely, held my hand in his and bowed while speaking in Kurdish warmly. The guide told me in broken English that this man was a celebrity in Kurdish Iraq, he was a very popular and famous actor. Apparently he wanted to show his gratitude toward America and he was publicly thanking us for liberating his people from Saddam Hussein. I looked around and noticed that many people around us had stopped shopping and were staring at the man as he shook my hand. It was an incredible experience for me. I truly felt appreciated at that moment. It occurred to me that this guy might mean nothing to me, but to them, he was like George Clooney. They all respected him and looked up to him, but he respected me, and lowered himself in order to show this to everyone. It was such an amazing experience in the end; I took as many photos as I could, but we never stood still so they all came out blurry. It was definitely the best experience I had since being in Iraq. It really lifted my spirits. That was the type of adventure I expected to have in Iraq; not the boring, humdrum, day-to-day misery I had been dealing with so far. After it was all over, we mounted up and drove about a mile out of town to a small F.O.B. that another sparse unit had set up several months before. The men and women who were stationed out there were living in tents, braving the intense cold of the northern Iraqi terrain. I had seen mountains lined with evergreen trees on my way in. As I looked to the mountain ranges in the not so far distance, I could see white snowy peaks nestled in the dark grey clouds as night quickly fell. The soldiers out here looked visibly worn down and weary. I felt bad for them. If I had to choose between heat and cold, I'd reluctantly choose heat every time. They had one large building where they had set up HQ and their small chow hall. There was no place to eat, no tables or chairs. After collecting our meager rations for the night we took our paper plates back out into the cold to eat inside our tents. We would only be staying for one night so we had no heat in our tent. After eating, I quickly crawled inside my mummy bag and, like in Tuz, zipped it all the way closed fully clothed. I slept well that night, but was awoken early the next morning for the trip back.

We left in the morning to come back to F.O.B. Speicher, it took three days in all, and I was exhausted when I finally returned. We had traveled over five hundred miles in only three days, enough to get us all the way to Kuwait AND back. As I rolled back into the dreary gates of Speicher, all I could think about was going back to Kuwait, one step closer to home.

### Article 15

My accidental discharge report finally came down and I had to go in front of the battalion commander to accept my sentence. I had hoped it would be a simple slap on the wrist, maybe even a verbal warning. My commander had accidentally fired his nine-millimeter pistol through the floorboard of his hummer earlier in the year, and had just barely missed a grenade that was in a box under his feet. He didn't get in any trouble at all, and he wasn't the only one. My Battalion Sergeant Major, a big, stern, black man; he accidentally fired his M-16 into the air while standing next to a group of soldiers! I know he didn't get in any trouble either, but here I was, standing before the Battalion Commander for firing my rifle into a bucket in the ground that was placed outside the chow hall for that very reason. At least I didn't fire it accidentally inside the chow hall and get someone killed. There was an awkward silence after I entered the room. I tried not to let my upper lip sweat noticeably, but I didn't dare move a muscle while at the position of parade rest. First Sergeant Purdue was standing behind me and I could feel his beady little eyes staring at the back of my head. The B.C. was not an intimidating man; he stood about five foot six with light sandy grey hair cut tightly around his small face. I rarely ever saw him unless he was giving a speech in front of a large formation or happened to be running in front of our pack on morning runs. I knew when I ran my PT test that if I could keep up with the B.C, then I could run two miles in thirteen minutes. He was a quick little guy, I could keep up with him, but I could never beat him. While I stood in front of him now, I couldn't help but feel like a schoolboy in front of the principal. I was only in trouble once, and it was in the seventh grade. I was never much of a troublemaker; I just thought I was joking around. I had walked into class and seen a VHS cassette tape sitting in front of the video monitor. The teacher was out of the class room for a moment, so as a joke, I hid the cassette tape underneath the video monitor, in the far back of the cabinet, hidden in plain sight. It didn't go over as well as I had hoped. When the teacher discovered that the tape was missing, she put the whole classroom on lockdown, refusing to let anyone leave until the stolen videotape turned up. She started threatening to check our bags and the whole time I could see the tape sitting in the back of the cabinet in the shadows. I knew the damn thing wasn't stolen; they weren't going to find it in anyone's backpack. Finally after the pissed off teacher grilled my classmates for almost an hour, I felt bad and turned myself in. She sent me straight to detention and the whole thing wasn't very funny anymore. That's how I felt now. Standing in the battalion command, waiting for this un-alarming little man to decide my fate. After shuffling through some paperwork and whispering to my First Sergeant about something, he finally looked me in the eye. "You know why you're here, yes?" He asked. I assumed it was a rhetorical question, but after he continued to stare at me, I finally answered, "yes sir, I know what I did. It was an accident." He nodded, then looked back at the paper work and wrote something down. "Well Specialist Gray, I'm not going to take away rank, I think you know better than to do something like this again. I'm giving you an Article Fifteen, company grade. You'll have two weeks of extra duty as your First Sergeant here has agreed on. Do you understand?" I replied that yes, I understood, and thought that was the end of it but he looked up again as if he'd forgotten something. "There's one more thing," he said, "I'm going to have you teach a weapon safety class to the rest of your company. That will prove to us that you know how to handle your weapon, and you can teach your fellow soldiers how not to make the same mistakes you did." I swallowed hard. I would have been fine with any punishment, but teaching a class in front of the company would be embarrassing. I knew I didn't have a choice. I saluted, did an about face, and marched out of there without looking back. I was mostly pleased with the way it had turned out. Strangely enough, I was proud of my first Article Fifteen. My hero's, Sergeant Mendoza, and Specialist Baumgartner, they had both told me stories of all the Article Fifteen's they had collected over the years. I felt that true character was defined by the mistakes we made, and I wasn't at all disappointed with the B.C.'s verdict. A simple company grade Article Fifteen meant nothing to me; it was truly just a slap on the wrist. I wouldn't lose any money, and I was sure it would all be over in a few short weeks.

I spent the whole rest of the day guarding Hadji, which is what got me in trouble in the first place. This time I didn't leave a round in the chamber when I went into the chow hall though, I removed my magazine safely before the dry fire. Still, it was a long day of the Purdue giving me hell. He just couldn't wait until nightfall when I would report to him for extra duty. It was just like him to make sure my punishment was to be his personal slave. I couldn't understand him, if he hated me so much, why did he try so hard to spend as much time around me as possible?

My extra duty was basically to act as the janitor at the Crystal Palace. I had to report to extra duty after dinner, at five, then work until ten-o-clock at night when I could finally drag myself back to my old bombed out barracks. Everyday is another grueling sixteen hours of work, and every night I barely squeeze in six hours of sleep. It had really begun to wear on me after the first four days. My back had become an agonizing wreck after all of the bending over and scrubbing floors, sweeping, and mopping. I couldn't walk without suffering from severe pain in my back and shoulders. Carrying my M-16, ninety rounds of ammo, and all my other gear, including a three and a half pound Kevlar helmet on my head at all times had also taken it's toll. My neck suffered from the weight of the helmet, but I wouldn't dare take it off. Not only was my extra duty hard work but also it was humiliating. My peers would see me cleaning up after them and laugh at my misfortune, dumping their soda on the ground and tossing trash out the windows to make my life harder. I dreaded having to teach the weapon safety class to these people. I felt like the dumbass of the 244th. I was back in high school, and I was the class clown. I managed to ignore them however, and tried to laugh at their gags as if I was in on the joke. I refused to let them take me down to their level. As if that wasn't enough, Purdue never ceased to antagonize me. He acted like a non-confrontational boss that wanted to push a disliked employee to quitting rather than firing him; but I couldn't quit. He tried so hard to upset me, to break me. I decided to make him even more infuriated by smiling and laughing and singing while I worked. He didn't know what to do about that, I could tell it ticked him off that he wasn't getting to me. Inside I wanted to cry, but pretending to be happy was my only defense towards him. He was just like any schoolyard bully. After returning from a daylong convoy, I was tasked to bring my .50 Cal to his office and clean it while I babysat the radio. I spent three hours meticulously cleaning every tiny part of my weapon and carefully put it back together. When Purdue had a chance to take a look at my work, he immediately dismissed it as not good enough. "This is still dirty Silver, start over, and do it right this time!" He scowled at me, waiting for my response. "I did my best on this first sergeant. I'm pretty sure it's as clean as it's going to get." I knew my reply was only going to dig my grave deeper, but I was sick of not sticking up for myself. I hated that he still thought it was ok to use my nickname when he talked to me, even though we were anything but friends. He snapped back at me, "WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST SAY?" he raised his voice and started back across the room toward me with an aggressive look on his face. "ARE YOU TALKING BACK TO ME?" I tried to remain calm even though he was so close to my face by now that I could smell his dog shit breath as he screamed at me in his shrill, high-pitched voice. As a natural defense mechanism, I often start to laugh when I am under stress, but I tried hard to choke down the impulse to start chuckling. I was afraid he might take a swing at me if I laughed in his face. "All I'm saying, first sergeant, is that it's the story of my life. People are always saying my best isn't good enough. What more can I do?" He wasted no time in snarling back a retort to my stupid question, and I felt even dumber for asking it. "MAYBE YOU SHOULD JUST STOP TRYING THEN GRAY!" I couldn't help but throw back, "Excuse me, did you just tell me to kill myself?" At this he literally looked like his head was going to explode, the veins on his forehead stood out and his face had turned dark red. I guess this was just too much, or maybe I had actually won this battle, but for whatever reason, he just stormed off down the hallway. It was about nine forty-five by that time, so I just got my things and left. I thought it would be best for both of us if I avoided 1sg. Purdue, at least for the rest of the night.

The next day, Captain Spaulding showed up at the CP at the same time I did, right after dinner. He asked me if I'd like to go on a convoy to Kuwait to deliver some supplies and vehicles back to the docks. He needed a .50 Cal gunner, and I was the only one available right now, so he had no choice but to postpone my Extra Duty. I would still have to do it when I got back, he said, but at least I could take a break from first sergeant Purdue. Even though Captain Spaulding usually turned a blind eye, I knew he was well aware of my relationship with our first sergeant. Despite the fact that he was spineless and never stuck up for me, it seemed as though he did at least feel bad that I was being singled out and mistreated so badly. I was glad for his small amount of compassion and gladly accepted. It would be a two to three day journey down to Kuwait, and another three days back. I didn't know how long we would stay down there, but I expected to be gone for a week or two. The best news of all was that I would get out of teaching the weapon safety class to the whole company! The formation was scheduled for the next weekend, and I would be gone. Captain Spaulding wanted me fresh for the journey the next day, so he told me to go on home and that he would deal with Purdue. My day just kept getting better. I didn't waste any time standing around for Purdue to see me and drag me inside to mop the floors or something terrible, so I made myself scarce in a hurry.

### Ambush Alley

The convoy back down south was grueling. I had been told by Captain Spaulding to show up at the CP at seven 'o'clock in the morning to meet up with my driver. I knew I was riding in Sergeant Maynor's Hummer. Maynor was an arrogant fresh NCO; short blonde hair framed his squared off face, he wore a mustache in a feeble attempt to appear older but his thin whiskers grew whitish blonde mixed with a few stray red hairs. He was a good old boy who lived in the Crystal Palace with the First Sergeant. I could tell that he was trying to prove something as soon as I met him. I wasn't too thrilled to find out that I'd be riding with him all the way to Kuwait and back. My aspirations for Foster were unfortunately confirmed accurate within the first ten minutes of my day. As soon as I had mounted and set the timing on my .50 Cal, he fired up the engine of his Humvee and smashed the pedal to the medal without warning, throwing me hard against the back of the machine gun mount and bruising my ribs. Knowing well that complaining to Maynor would get me nowhere, I kept my mouth shut but made sure to hold on to something and brace myself against his bad driving. As we approached the rear of a long convoy that had already lined up, I could see the Mark-19 mounted on a Deuce and a half in front of us. I piped up, "Maynor, isn't that the rear vehicle? How many big guns we got on this convoy?" He acknowledged me and began radioing to the mission control. I could hear the squawking on the radio and barely made out the garbled exchange. From what I could hear, our vehicle was meant to be in the front of the convoy. Foster was arguing with mission control about how we were supposed to get in front of a convoy that was already staged. The road ahead was narrow; there was no shoulder, no place for us to pass. As I pondered our options, I was suddenly hurled into the rear of the gun mount again, even harder this time. Before I could brace myself for impact, Maynor had decided to drive us off the road. I guess he was trying to prove a point to mission control by gunning his engine off-road, bouncing through ditches and slamming into bumps at full speed. I was being jostled violently like a ragdoll on the gun mount, I scrambled to find footing and something firm to hold onto but it was too late. Before I could get a grip on anything, my jaw found the wooden and steel handles of my .50 Cal and made contact with the metal in a hard crack that made me see stars and taste blood. Muddy water from the ditch was flying up from the tires and showering down on my head as I sunk, half conscience, down into the back of the vehicle. By the time Maynor had made his point and charged back onto the road in front of the convoy, I was soaking wet and semi-conscience, drooling blood on the floor of the truck. Maynor didn't even apologize to me even though I screamed at him in anger. He acted as if it was my own fault for not paying attention and refused to take responsibility for his actions. I could tell this was going to be an arduous journey from the beginning. I was almost relieved to find that for the first several hours, nothing much happened. Our convoy reached a steady stride of roughly forty miles per hour, the fastest we could move in our large trucks. It was smooth sailing. We made it almost to Baghdad before there was any change in pace. My clothes were still slightly damp from the splashes I'd received from the ditch Foster had driven through. I was still getting over his emotional outburst, but despite my bloody lip, I was indifferent about my soggy clothes. I was glad for the cooling effect they had on me during the intense heat of the afternoon. We had hit traffic coming into Baghdad, and I thought every thing was normal. It reminded me of sitting on Interstate Five driving through Los Angeles. It seemed like it never mattered what time of day you drove through L.A. ...You always hit traffic. The city of Baghdad seemed to have the same problem when it came to traffic. The highways were always clogged, especially now that Coalition Forces had taken up such a heavy presence in and around the capital city. IED's and car bombs would often detonate on the streets, targeting anyone in uniform. Many times the bombs would kill only civilians, women and children. It was a gruesome sight. I had once seen the aftermath of a car bomb as I rolled through in a convoy just minutes after it had detonated. I'll never forget the sight of the suicide bombers face. His expression was timeless, panicked and wide-eyed, his mouth hung open as if he was shouting something out at the end. I could see dirt through his open jaw; his face had been torn off the rest of his skull and lay on the ground beneath my feet. The rest of his body was in pieces, scattered about in bloody piles of meat and red soaked, tattered clothing. It was like one of the video's they show you in Driver's Ed. I stared into the lifeless eyes of his detached face and all I could think was how bad it smelled. Burning flesh, hair and bone. The stench was unbearable. This had been very near to where we were now sitting. We called this area, "Ambush Alley." It was never safe for us to be sitting out in the open, defenseless and vulnerable. After traffic had come to a standstill, many of the drivers of the big-rigs had gotten out and were walking around on the street talking to each other. The distant sounds of an Arabic prayer song could be faintly heard echoing across the dessert from a loudspeaker in front of a Mosque. It seemed so peaceful and serene. The slow chanting drifted to our ears from the city, less than a mile down the highway. There are five prayer times in the Muslim faith. "Fajr" is early in the morning, before the sunrise. At noon, another prayer, "Dhuhr" is done to remind one's self of Allah and seek his guidance. The late after noon prayer is called "Asr," and is done usually around five. After this, there is a prayer at sunset, "Maghrib," and a final prayer performed before retiring for the night, "Isha." If there were a mosque anywhere in the vicinity, a speaker would always play some sort of Arabic chanting or instrumental tune to signify prayer times. When it came time to pray in the late afternoon, many of the Iraqi men got out of their cars and put out their prayer rugs in the middle of the street. It was time for Asr. Right there on the concrete, in between idling trucks and cars, they bowed low toward the sun hanging low in the sky, pressing their foreheads against the ground and silently worshiping their god, amidst the chaos of the world. This meant it was later in the day than I thought. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was already four thirty-six.

After radioing ahead, Maynor finally found out the reason for the traffic back up. An IED had been spotted a few clicks ahead of a bridge that lay in front of us on the road. We sat on the highway, in the thick of a maze of on-ramps and off-ramps, surrounded by the local men and women who were also stuck in their vehicles of all sorts and sizes. The sun slowly neared the western horizon, and there we sat, in ambush alley, for two and a half hours. Finally the radio squealed, hazed out, and then a voice fuzzed to life, "RAPTOR MAIN TO ALL CORRESPONDING UNITS. BOMB SQUAD HAS CLEARED AN IED FROM THE ROAD AHEAD. WARNING. STAY IN POSITION. ANOTHER SUSPICIOUS OBJECT HAS BEEN FOUND UNDERNEATH THE BRIDGE. REMAIN IN POSITION. STAY ALERT. OVER AND OUT." The radio fizzled and beeped before the transmission ended, and we were left with no more explanation. "What the fuck does that mean?" Maynor exclaimed, as if he expected one of us to answer. Private First Class Kopelman, a chubby little Jewish guy, was sitting shotgun. He was quick to reply but had nothing to say. "We're gonna be here all night guys. This is getting really fucked up! We're gonna get attacked if we keep sitting still in the same spot! We've been here for two and..." "Pipe down Kopelman!" I cut him off. "Nobody wants to hear your complaining. At least you're in the shade down there." I finished him off. "This doesn't need to be a god damned panic attack, ok? Just sit tight, we'll be rolling through here soon." Maynor surprisingly stayed mostly silent throughout this exchange, silently muttering under his breath about something like a crazy person. After about twenty minutes and a few MRE's had been torn through, the conversation ceased and I was able to sit up on top of the Humvee in silence. It had gotten dim, not dark, but a grungy brownish grey that usually came right before night in Baghdad. It was a mixture of smog, dessert dust, and mysterious, unknown chemicals that smelled like the deceased. I couldn't shake the feeling that Iraq smelled like death. It eternally smelled as if something had died nearby and was slowly rotting, pervading the air with the pungent odor of decomposing flesh. I did the only thing one could do in a situation like this; I began chain-smoking my way through a pack of cigarettes and went for a fresh one out of my go bag. My go bag was a small, green camouflage bag with two straps, one on either side. In the middle there was a slot to put my ID, but I didn't bother. I an extra set of my dog tags wrapped around one of the straps and secured with one-hundred-mile-an-hour tape. One hundred miles an hour tape is exactly the same as Duct tape except that it is Army green. The Army has to rename everything. Also in my go bag, is an extra carton of Iraqi cigarettes, a P-38 can opener, three extra magazines of ammo for my M-16, a bottle of LSA oil (Lubricant, small arms for my .50 Cal and my M-16,) a bandanna to wrap my face with if a sand storm hits, and two of my favorite MRE meals, (Chili-Mac, and Meatballs with Marinara.) I also had some candy and chocolate that I had saved from the chow hall, and a MAXIM magazine that I had read only three times. Along with the bare necessities, I had a few personal items, just in case. My notebook that I liked to write and draw in, Several pens and pencils, my favorite deck of cards, a disposable camera, a black sweatband with a white skull on it that my brother had sent me, my Discman and a book of my favorite CD's, and last but not least, whatever book I was currently reading. Currently, I was reading " _On The Road"_ By Jack Kerouac. Although I initially found the book to be dry and boring, I was dedicated to finishing it because of its legacy. However, after reading midway through, I had been drawn into the factitious past of Kerouac as he hitchhiked his was across America, visiting all of the Cities that had been in my own life. From downtown Denver, to the streets of San Francisco, I yearned to live the life of a free American. I quietly promised myself I would buy a motorcycle when I got home and travel across the country like Kerouac did, but in the opposite direction. I would go from California to New York, roughing it in between, camping when I had to, getting stuck in traffic jams in the hot dessert of the mid-west, just like I was now in the Middle East. I constantly filled my head with daydreams while on convoys. After more than another hour had passed, my fantasies were interrupted by the loud screech of the radio coming back to life. A tired voice sounded over the air, "All bombs cleared, traffic will progress soon. Ready your vehicles. Over and out." After our vehicles finally got the go ahead and traffic slowly began to progress forward, we had been sitting in ambush alley for over five hours. It had been the longest any of us had ever spent sitting on the side of the road, and amazingly, everyone was ok. No attacks had been made, no bombs had gone off; we all considered ourselves very lucky. After traffic finally began moving again, we soon pulled off the road into BIAP, (Baghdad International Airport) to stay the night. It had been a long day, and I was in no mood to set up camp. It was a good thing the Army had a large military presence in BIAP. Our facilities would be somewhat civilized tonight. There were rows and rows of tents set up for Coalition forces that were passing through in military convoys. I had met some interesting friends from all over the world in places like this. After our small group had eaten a good meal at the BIAP chow hall, we quickly retired to our guest tent. Everyone was very tired tonight from the long hours of staying completely alert on the road. I fell asleep almost immediately.

The next day began early again. We wanted to get an early start to make up the lost time from the day before. As soon as Maynor had filled his big metal coffee mug, we were off to meet up with the rest of the convoy and exit into Baghdad. Once again, the first half of the day was uneventful. As we travelled through the outskirts of the city and down south, into the wilderness, I watched from the gun mount as rows of clay houses faded and farmlands emerged, stretching as far as my eye could see. We were in sort of a marshy area now. After passing several small rivers, we were suddenly turning off the highway and onto a smaller dirt road. The convoy winded and coiled like a snake through the back marsh areas of middle Iraq. Progress was slow, we crawled at thirty-five miles per hour down pot-hole ridden pathways and then finding a solid piece of concrete for a mile or so and opening it up to forty-five miles per hour before slowing back down. Sometimes we would roll through small encampments and villages where the black shawled women would hide from sight and the men would stand and stare at us with unfriendly looks on their faces, arms crossed, lips sealed, motionless and uninviting. The Iraqi children would chase our convoy and wave, shouting up at me, "Mistah, mistah, watta!" and using sign language to symbolize their hunger by motioning to put food into their empty mouths with their empty hands. In one village, I was scanning the shadowing alleyways between houses and something alarming caught my eye. A group of teenage boys, probably about sixteen to twenty years old, stood leaning against a wall in plain view holding AK-47's. Their eyes met mine, and they simply looked up at me grinning, as if to say, "go ahead, and make our day." I struggled to swing the .50 around on its mount to face them, but the old ring was rusted and wouldn't budge. I had feared this could be a problem, and I had been oiling the ring ever since our departure, but it was not enough. As our truck kept rolling past the boys, none of them raised a weapon to aim at our convoy. They seemed completely unthreatening, and they also appeared to be completely unafraid of my machine gun and me. I decided it was for the best that I couldn't make my gun mount face them; they were not a threat. I don't know why they had AK's. Maybe the weapons were for personal safety to guard against criminals. Maybe they had found the weapons in a hidden cache and appointed themselves as sheriffs of their small community. Protectors of their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. There was no Iraqi Police department after Saddam had gone into hiding. Ever since the invasion of Coalition Forces into Iraq, it had become a lawless land. I could understand how some young men would feel if the need to protect their families arose. I imagined myself in America. If my land was invaded by a foreign power and my government collapsed, if there were tanks and heavily weaponized soldiers marching down my streets, I would probably be holed up in a window somewhere with a bolt action rifle, protecting my home. I couldn't blame them. As long as they weren't trying to kill me, I would allow them to keep their weapons. I must have been the only one to even notice the boys and their AK-47's because the convoy kept right on going. It wasn't our job to question these villagers anyway. We were only tasked to protect this convoy from attack. That evening, we made it all the way to Camp Cedar, about halfway between Baghdad and the Kuwaiti border.

Camp Cedar was near the southern city of Nasiriyah, and was embraced by the Euphrates River on its southern bank. It was set up around the Talil Airbase, a highly operational dual runway airport that was captured from Saddam's men in the Gulf War or ninety-one. Also located within the perimeter of Camp Cedar, are the ruins of a Babylonian city of Ur from roughly Three thousand eight hundred BC. The famous Ziggurat of Ur was visible from the front gates, towering high above the flatness of the dessert terrain. It was a large pyramid type structure, with huge stone steps leading up to the top. I was excited to explore some biblical ruins; it was said to be the birthplace of Abraham. Camp Cedar wasn't set up for guest convoys like BIAP had been, and after lining up our convoy near the edge of base, we set up our cots on the ground next to our trucks. I wandered over to the biblical ruins to explore but to my disappointment, there were high fences with razor wire surrounding the Ziggurat of Ur and the house of Abraham. The Ziggurat reached at least sixty feet into the air and at the top there appeared to be a ritualistic alter of some sort. Giant staircases made of mud bricks and stone reached down from both sides and another large staircase flowed down from the middle. I could barely make out old Sumerian script carved into the walls like hieroglyphics. The ground was covered with ceramic rubble as if someone had rained pottery down from above. Smashed fragments of old clay scattered the ground all the way up to the fence. I was forced to gaze at the ancient relics of the past through the razor wire and snap a few shots on my disposable camera before retiring to my cot for the night. The sun went down quickly and there wasn't much to see in the dark. The next day we had another two hundred and thirty miles to go before arriving at our destination in Al-Jahra, Kuwait.

Kuwait was full of brand new soldiers, fresh from stateside. None of them had been in Iraq yet. They were all fresh, wide eyed, and afraid. You could see it in their faces, and hear it in their questions. I remembered what it was like when I was in Camp Victory, it seemed like so long ago, but it had only been about seven months. I used to ask the returning soldiers from Iraq what it was like. They looked haggard and worn out to me, their uniforms were dirty and their faces unshaved. They had cold eyes and appeared experienced, road weary and tired. I could only imagine what they had been through. Cautiously, I had approached these road weary soldiers and asked, "What was it like in Iraq? Is it dangerous? Did you see combat?" Now, I was one of them, and I fielded the same questions. I could still recall what had intimidated me about those soldiers who arrived from Northern convoys. It was the looks in their eyes, and it was the way they carried themselves. The way I carried myself now must be intimidating to these greenhorns. I kept my field cap squared away, two fingers distance from my brow, my eyes down. If anyone asked me, I chose to reply with short answers, referring to them only by their rank. Up north, we rarely wore rank on our collars for safety. Officers are likely targets of snipers and suicide bombers. Saluting had also been banned, although there was the occasional run in with a headstrong young lieutenant in F.O.B. Speicher who either didn't know better or simply didn't care. As I solemnly walked from my tent to the chow hall in my dirty, worn out uniforms without rank, the young replacement soldiers began to think that I was an officer or an NCO the way that I commanded respect. Several nervous soldiers saluted me as I passed them on base. Their ignorance and fear made me sick and I ignored their presence and kept to myself. I watched them from a safe distance while smoking cigarettes and bided my time until my convoy was ready to return to Speicher. The boys acted like unruly thugs back on the block, shouting sexual harassments toward the female soldiers and being rude and disrespectful. Everyone walked around the camp in grey P.T. uniforms, their pants low-riding halfway down their asses, their military hats cocked sideways or backwards, smoking cigars and acting like gangsters. I couldn't believe the way they acted. It was like I had been transported to an inner city ghetto. I had wanted to go home, but this was nothing like home to me. I was used to the strictness of my unit in Iraq and had forgotten how American civilians acted on the streets of all of our hometowns. It was no longer only an inner city attitude. Just like I had done in high school, and again in boot camp, I avoided the bad crowd from the shadows where I glared heartlessly at their inappropriate conduct. I feared their foolishness and ill-equipped behavior would get them all killed. They were all National Guard or Reservists just like me. They didn't know what it was going to be like up north. They had no idea what was in store for them. As I walked through the crowds of fresh soldiers, I saw someone I recognized, waddling down the middle of the road. Bill Riesman, the cook in our section that had avoided deployment almost a year before! I could barely believe my eyes. After chatting with him for a moment, I found out that he had been picked up by another unit who had just recently arrived in Kuwait. They were waiting for their turn to push north into Iraq. I guess everyone eventually had no choice but to join the war. There was no escaping it. I could already see that this war was far from over. It could go on for years, more and more soldiers might be rotated into yearlong tours of duty. I dreaded the potential reality that I would be redeployed within a year of returning home. I felt that my future in the Army was bleak. I needed to find a way out.

It took another three days to get back to Speicher and the trip was every bit as wretched. We had only been on the road for one day before another incident occurred. Sergeant Maynor began driving in a confused circle while talking on the radio at the end of the first day. As we drove into a small camp on the side of the highway for the night, the sun had already slipped behind the horizon and we were losing light fast. As the lead convoy, we were supposed to stage the convoy for the next morning before setting up our cots next to our vehicles for the night. From my view on top of the truck, standing in my gun mount, I could clearly see a medium sized tree fast approaching from our front left as Maynor turned the steering wheel directly into it. Was Maynor in one of his moods again, driving recklessly to prove a point? Or was it possible that he really did not see this obvious obstacles looming impact with our bumper? Before I could call out to him, (it is doubtful that he would have listened to me even if he could have heard me,) Maynor slammed our Hummer hard into the tree. Once again, I was thrown face first into the .50 Cal's gun handles, my ribs smashing into the mount ring. I had avoided serous injury, but the front of our Humvee got a crushed in, pulverizing the bumper and warping the front left quarter panel so badly that it rubbed on the tire as the wheel turned in the wheel well. We had to tie a piece of rope around the bumper and quarter panel assembly and slowly back up while the other end of rope was tied to the same tree that had done the damage. After over an hour of flashlight work we were finally able to pry the metal away from the wheel enough that we could drive the rest of the way back to camp Speicher, but the vehicle would never be the same. I hoped that First Sergeant Purdue would come down hard on Maynor for his poor driving. I had been injured in two separate incidents, and now one of our only armored Humvee's had been damaged because of a stupid mistake. Maybe then he would learn to pay attention. He was lucky he hadn't hit another soldier walking on the ground; someone could have gotten badly injured or even killed by his stupidity. Despite the frustration I felt from Maynor's bad driving, I tried not to think about it anymore for the rest of the trip. Now that I had been to Kuwait and seen our progress with my own eyes, I knew for sure that my unit was finally on its way out of Iraq. I had seen our rugged lot of replacements, and I had seen some of our bigger trucks to the ports where they would be loaded onto ships for the states. I couldn't dwell on the day-to-day grind anymore. I could only look to the future. I was hoping that I would be home for my own twenty-first birthday, April the twenty-third.

### East L.A.

Not long after returning from Kuwait things were wrapping up quickly in F.O.B. Speicher. The only work details anymore were cleaning and reorganizing our equipment as we put it away. Deciding what is worth keeping and what we could leave behind was the basic workload of our days. After my extra duty had ended, I had effectively been able to avoid First Sergeant Purdue for a solid couple of weeks. I don't know how he hadn't noticed me but I kept myself well out of sight. The upper command wanted to consolidate all of the two forty fourth's soldiers in a central area of Camp so they forced everyone who didn't live in the Crystal Palace to move to a nearby living area. Anyone living in the CP is still living there, but anyone else who had become scattered across the camp had been relocated to a new "neighborhood" which was very close to headquarters. Although I had spent an abundance of time in my old bombed out barracks, I wasn't sad to leave them behind. It was very exciting to know that we were on our way out. The new living arrangements were much nicer than our old bombed out accommodations that we had gotten used to. Our new houses were adobe homes in rows, complete with a front yard, a private backyard. Inside, each house had a downstairs and an upstairs with two rooms each. For the first time in a year, I felt like I was living in a real house. I didn't know why we hadn't just moved in here in the first place. We still didn't have indoor plumbing. There was a section of the downstairs room that was meant to be a kitchen but we set up our cots in there anyway. We still had to walk out front to use the plastic porta-shitters, but I was used to that by this time. Most of the other soldiers called our new homes, "the Burbs" because they all looked exactly alike connected at the sides in long columns. I had grown up in the suburbs and I knew better. These adobe houses with their low fences and dusty streets, no glass in the windows, and their backyards scattered with trash, they looked nothing like the suburbs I had grown up in. My Mexican friends from Los Angeles said it reminded them of where they grew up. Consequently, they began calling it "East L.A." The nickname instantly stuck. We named our new hood after the Latin-American projects of Southern California. The Army had designed a very luxurious "Shower Tent" which was made out of nylon and had many sectioned off shower stalls inside. A system of hoses and nozzles connected to each shower on the inside, and the other end to a big water truck that was parked outside. The pipes even ran through a generator that heated the water before it came out of the nozzles inside the tent. Not only was there privacy, there was heat! It was an incredible extravagance to behold after a year of cleaning ourselves with water bottles and dribbles of Luke warm water that trickled out of the rusty pipes we had connected to a tank on the roof. The new shower tent was set up directly behind my house and all I had to do was climb the little adobe fence and walk about thirty feet. With the privacy afforded by living in an actual house and the sublime bonus amenity of the shower tent, East L.A. was the nicest living arrangements I'd had since Fort Carson in Colorado. It seems ridiculous now that for the past several months, First Sergeant Purdue had been using valuable resources to fix up his home, the Crystal Palace. Now it was nearly March and we were on our way out of Iraq. Some lucky new unit would move into the CP and have no idea how much work went into fixing it up. They'd no doubt post pictures of their loved ones on the freshly painted walls and paint over our shiny fire engine red two forty fourth logo with their own unit's numbers without a second thought about it. Back in my old bombed out digs, Hotel California, my rooftop mural would likely be taken down and used as scrap wood. My artwork will likely be painted over with something else, and our make shift showers will be refilled and used, taken for granted. The new soldiers I had encountered in Kuwait would move in and use our prebuilt showers tents. They will never realize what it was like to search the dessert for scrap metal and weld it together on the roof, positioning pipes and wooden shower stalls in order to avoid showering with a water bottle with no privacy. Maybe they will get their own shower tent right outside and our old wooden shower stall will be scrapped, added to the junk heap on the edge of camp. They will stomp through this country with even less respect than I had, their lack of candor apparent as the locals grow even more disgusted with the American presence in their homeland. The ghosts of Sergeant Lawton and all the other's who lost their lives will walk among them, haunting them at night, and it will be as if we were never here.

Unfortunately, my pleasantries were short-lived. No sooner than two weeks after moving into our new luxurious living arrangements had I come down with a terrible flu. Coughing and sneezing, my sinuses had clogged me up so bad that I could not even leave my bedroom. Not only was I feeling incredibly sick, but also my left eye had swollen shut. I didn't know what was wrong with it. I only had a small mirror that I kept in my footlocker, and with my one good eye, all I could see was a red puffy mess in the edge of the left eyeball. After the medic visited me in my room, (the medics lived next-door,) he told me that I had a sty in my left eye. It was really just a pimple, but when in your eye, it was called a sty. It was extremely painful, hidden all the way inside my eyelid facing the eyeball. Every time the swollen lump of pus rubbed against my eye, the tear ducts instinctively filled with water. As I constantly wiped away tears form my swollen eye, it became even more irritated and red. It was a vicious cycle. All of this, and I was in the midst of fighting a flu and coming down with a high fever. The medic gave me some flu medication and put me on bed rest for a week. After everything that I had been through recently, one would have thought that a week off would be a welcomed surprise. It wasn't. My sickness instantly became the worst of my life, and I drifted off into a daze of fever-induced delirium that lasted for days. I wrapped myself up in my sleeping back and tossed and turned for what felt like an eternity. I thrashed restlessly on my cot, hallucinating endless absurd and mysterious scenarios, fighting blindly through the confusing darkness. In my disorderly daydream, I was captaining a ship through a stormy night. The gales blasted hard against the starboard side of my vessel, relentlessly pounding away at my sanity. Water splashed on my face and I shouted into the storm, "Keep going! Never stop! We've got to keep on going!" When I finally came to my senses, three days had passed. My friends told me that I had hallucinated and shivered violently, thrashed about and screamed something about "keeping on going!" Funny as it must have sounded, I knew exactly what they were talking about. Strangely, I could vaguely remember my dreams. My fever had subsided, but not all of my symptoms had gone away. My cough seemed to persistently get worse. I hacked like an old man, but still smoked my cigarettes faithfully. "I was in no shape to quit smoking now," I told myself as I lit up another Iraqi cigarette from my backyard. I tried to think about the positive. While I had been sick, and as I still sat in my backyard, recovering, the First Infantry Division had arrived at Camp Speicher. Over the past year, we had been attached to the Fourth ID. The "Big Red One" as the First ID was known, was here to relieve us. The Fourth ID had slowly been transferring the workload and all of our missions over to them and their support companies. We called them the "Big Red Pussies."

Almost all of our belongings had been packed and ready to go. The cook's conex had been sealed and loaded onto a truck. I had decided to leave my footlocker full of books, handheld fans, and Maxim magazines behind for another soldier to enjoy. I didn't want to stick around after we got home to retrieve it from First Sergeant Purdue. It wasn't worth it to me, books could be replaced, and someone else could appreciate them more. I could barely focus my attention enough to read any of my books anymore at that point anyway. It was all too exciting; the packing to go home, the confusion of relinquishing all of our assignments to new soldiers, it was all very overwhelming. Everything had become surreal, it all seemed far away. I couldn't believe I had made it almost to the end. The days seemed to move faster now, even though there was nothing to do, the weight of the war felt lighter on our shoulders. There was no longer any fear of death that usually accompanied every waking hour.

One morning after I had recovered from my illness enough to be useful, I received word that I would be attending a short daytime convoy to transport two Iraqi prisoners to a small MP holding facility on the outskirts of Tikrit. They were short on bodies to fill the convoy, so I would be driving a Humvee for the first time even though I didn't have a license. I was technically only allowed to drive a Deuce and a half truck. Still, despite my anxiety, I was excited to get out of the gate and do something I hadn't done before. Tikrit was only twenty minutes away, and our three-vehicle convoy was able to move very fast down both lanes of the highway. Because I wasn't used to driving such a wide wheel based vehicle, I nearly went off the road at one point, my right side tires skidding over the edge of the median before bouncing back onto the road with a spray of greyish brown dust. My companion, Specialist Cortland, who was riding shotgun, simply turned and gave me a look. I could tell he was thinking, "oh shit... did we just put an idiot in the driver seat?" I sucked in my gut and focused on the road, making sure not to make another mistake. Everything went smooth for the rest of our journey into Tikrit. It took about an hour of standing around next to an Army MP prison before we were ready to head back. I jumped into the drivers seat and rallied my battle buddy, Cortland, to hop in next to me. As we pulled out of the gates and back onto the highway, everything seemed normal, calm, and I had the feeling that my workday was almost over. It was almost time to punch out and call it a day; our job was done. About ten minutes into our return trip, we had reached a steady pace of roughly sixty miles per hour, whizzing by small shacks and demolished, burned out vehicle skeletons. Suddenly, a loud CRACK sounded and with the flash of an eye, it occurred to me that something had penetrated my windshield. I could see a small hole, about the size of a penny, directly in the middle of my windshield, in between Specialist Cortland and I. As we both turned to investigate, we could see as plain as day, a small bullet hole with a slug wedged into the metal frame between our shoulders. Turning back to look at each other, we both stared, wide eyed with horror. Someone had just taken a shot at us. No one else in the convoy heard another shot, there had been only one, and it had barely missed my head. I had let my guard down, we all had. We thought we were almost home and that we had nothing to fear. I had made the gravest fallacy of all. I could never let my guard down in the wild, wild west.

### Happiness is Speicher in your Rearview Mirror

I waved goodbye to F.O.B. Speicher for the last time on the fourteenth of March 2004. We rolled out in three large convoys with all of our supplies and equipment in tow, heading due south towards Baghdad. We had departed at sometime around eight o'clock in the morning. The first part of the journey was always the longest; there was always a large amount of traffic congesting the highways that cut through Baghdad. By the time we even made it through the city, it was already around four o'clock, and we needed to find a camp to stop for the night. Baghdad International Airport, the local refuge of tents set up for guests, was over-run with new soldiers. There wasn't even room for us, not to mention the amount of confusion and potential problems that staying there would cause. We decided to push on through Baghdad. We finally made it to Scandia by nightfall. It was the same small, roadside, refueling depot where we had stopped for the night on the way up north, almost a year ago. I called this place "Mosquito Valley" because that was what I remembered about it. It was surrounded by swampy marshlands, tucked under heavy shade from giant trees during the day. The mosquito's thrived there. Also a popular refueling area for truck drivers, mostly from India, it was as crowded with vehicles and people as it was with mosquitos. That night, on our way back, we were a much more ragged bunch than we must have been when we were on our way north. Now that we weren't as green, many of us came up with a solution for the mosquitos. We stripped down to our underwear and rubbed diesel fuel all over our bodies before getting dressed again. As much as it stank, it did the trick, repelling the pests like bug spray. No more mosquitos bothered me that night. After I had remedied my mosquito problem, I shamelessly befriended some Indian truck drivers who shared the camp with us. The truck drivers were preparing their dinner, a live chicken they had just bought off the local Iraqi's on the edge of the highway. They popped open a little kitchen station out of a storage bin under one of their truck rigs and got to work. The turban headed Indian man introduced himself as Najid and invited me to join him and his friends for dinner. I watched him ring the chickens neck, pluck its feathers, and cook it right there under his truck. He served this feast with some spiced curry over rice. It was delicious. It was the first time I had gotten to eat anything other than Army chow in over a year. We were technically not allowed to break bread with the locals or the non-military contractors because of the risk of illness but I had been here long enough; it no longer worried me. I was willing to risk my health for a tasty meal. Stinking of diesel fuel but well fed, I slept well that night.

The next several days were slow, dismal, and sluggish. Our convoy bounced down long winding roads that never seemed to end at a painfully slow pace. The dust that got kicked up into the air by the vehicles in front of mine created large clouds of brown that hung about us in a veil. Visibility became low and our slow pace decreased to a crawl. Through my handkerchief that was wrapped around my nose and mouth, I could barely catch a full breath of air. Several times I was forced to drop down into the cab of the truck I was riding in to seek refuge from the manmade dust storm outside. We were all relieved that we received no resistance from the enemy in any way. No IED's were spotted, and despite our slow pace, we made it back to the large port camp of Arifjan, Kuwait in four days.

### Arifjan

Arifjan was not the same camp that I had visited on my recon mission. It was not as close to the Kuwait City, but further south, pressed all the way against the east coast of the Persian Gulf. Arifjan was enormous. It was nothing like any camp I had ever seen in the dessert. Our tents would not be unpacked; we would be living in large warehouses for now on. Nothing was in tents in Arifjan. It was like a small city, been built by soldiers, had sprung up out of the sand. Metal warehouses and hastily built structures stretched as far as I could see in every direction. Mountains of multicolored conexes were stacked four high in long rows behind chain link fences, and even larger portions of dessert had been turned into vast motor pools. Tanks, Trucks, and Humvees were parked, bumper-to-bumper, for what seemed like miles. The chow halls were in hard buildings and served four meals a day, remaining open twenty-four hours. The city of Arifjan never slept. At least half of the approximately nine thousand soldiers stationed there were awake at any given time. Many of the businesses never closed. The chow hall, The PX, the fully stocked Gymnasium, and many of the Internet café's and phone trailers were always open. As well as everything mentioned above, there were also several fast-food restaurants that lined the center streets of camp. If chow hall food got to be too boring, there was a choice of a burger and fries from Hardee's, a slice of Pizza from The Hut, a Subway sandwich, or even soft serve ice-cream. There was a movie theater, a video game arcade, a swimming pool, and a post office. The PX had a much higher selection of goods than any of the smaller stores we had access to in Iraq. It was fully stocked with all sorts of snacks, DVD's, music CD's, toiletries, and other necessities. Along with this, there was a Bazaar set up across the street from the PX that carried a large fair of local trinkets sold as souvenirs ranging from T-shirts, to shot glasses, to post cards. Near the main square, there was even a group of Hadji's offering rides on a camel. Soldiers lined up for camel rides and took pictures like tourists. We were sleeping as an entire company, packed inside of a giant warehouse, mixed in with a thousand other soldiers from different units. Our bunk beds sat in columns filling the warehouse with only one foot of space in between each bunk on all sides. Everything I owned was in two duffel bags and my small go-bag, all of which were tied to the poles of my bed and hung from the edge of my perch on the top bunk. I still had a nasty cough and as a result I had developed a bad case of insomnia. I spent many of my free hours sitting up in my bunk watching bootleg movies on a friend's laptop and drinking weak, over the counter cough syrup. It didn't work, and every twenty minutes or so, I'd crawl down and slip outside for a cigarette. I would tear the filters off my already rough Iraqi cigarettes and light them up, breathing deep and holding it in. The burning smoke in the back of my throat was the only thing I could do that would stop the coughing for a brief while. It seemed ridiculous to smoke unfiltered cigarettes to keep from coughing, but my fits were getting worse and this was the only remedy I could find that did the job. I never slept for very long at a time. The air was thick was anxiety and confusion. I felt like a sickly and destitute refugee, hoping for a chance to board a ship bound for the New World. To deal with the Insomnia and the coughing, I had begun to eat pills throughout the day. One of my Medic friends had given the cooks a big sampler of pain medications in the supplies bound for Tuz. Along with Mason, we had hoarded all of the pills for ourselves. It started out slow, a couple of pills a day. After the stress of being in a war zone had really set in, my dependency had grown to about six pills a day. Now that I was in this surreal world that felt like purgatory, stuck between heaven and hell, I had lost count of my pill intake. I still had plenty left, so I figured I was ok. When you develop a serious addiction to over the counter painkillers, it's not like a regular drug. It didn't affect my body in a pleasing or desirable way. The pills made my eyes sting, and my throat swelled up and dried out, like there was a marshmallow in my mouth. My nostrils felt like they were on fire, but in some depraved way, it took my mind off everything else. The pills did more harm than good, and I only continued because my skin would crawl with withdrawals if I attempted to quit. Even though we were in our final days, it seemed as time stood still.

We were still put to work, but I was definitely not needed as a cook in Arifjan. I had come here with my entire HSC Company as an advanced party. The rest of my battalion (Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie Companies,) had not yet left Speicher. In the absence of my lead NCO, Staff Sergeant Delacroix, I was assigned to Staff Sergeant Plevnik's team. Staff Sergeant Plevnik was a much better leader. He knew how to command respect without being an asshole. He could be harsh when he needed to but he didn't act like an evil dictator without reason like First Sergeant Purdue. He understood that you need to give respect to get it, and this went over well with his men. There was a good level of veneration between Sergeant Plevnik and his soldiers.

Before any of our vehicles could be loaded onto ships to go home, they had to be extensively cleaned at wash racks down by the shipyard. Our job as part of advanced party was to wash these vehicles, one by one, with large gasoline powered pressure washers. This was a difficult task because the vehicles in my Combat Heavy Engineer battalion were almost all enormous construction machines: dirt movers, bulldozers, land tillers, giant fork-lifts, excavators, and other things of that nature. They had not merely been driving through the dessert; they had been digging in it. There was a years worth of mud and dirt caked on all surfaces and we had to make them showroom clean before our unit could leave the country. I was on a team with five other soldiers, two females and four males including myself. We worked six-hour shifts in the middle of the night and rotated out with other teams when we were finished. The wash rack shifts were set up so that there were vehicles being cleaned continuously, twenty-four hours a day. My team usually only had one shift every day and a half, and we worked the graveyard. This afforded me plenty of free time to aimlessly wander the streets of Arifjan, exploring the large camp. When I was bored of exploring, I would rejoin the hundreds of strangers that were my new neighbors in the warehouse where I lived. It was impossible to sleep. The best I could do were short naps during the early morning while my headphones drowned out the sounds of machinery and loud voices and I could drift away for a few hours. It was still nice to have a day off every other day, especially because the wash rack was strenuous work that really wore us out in a hurry. We used large pressurized hoses that sprayed water so powerfully that it would knock a grown man to the ground if he got caught in the stream. Dirt, blood, gasoline, and everything else came off the vehicles surface when the hose made contact. The water we used was pumped from the gulf, which was grey and oil contaminated. The run off from the vehicles being washed got sucked down into a gutter where it got recycled back through the hoses again. As it mixed with gasoline and diesel fuel, antifreeze, transmission fluid, and whatever else wasn't strained out through the filter became reused through the nozzles of our pressure washers. The filter pretty much only caught larger items, like dirt or sand. Many times while spraying the surface of a vehicle, I would catch a fold or a lip, reversing the spray, and catch a face full of muddy, salty, ocean water. We all would get completely soaking wet during every shift. It was unavoidable. We all wore fully waterproof clothing meant as rain protection, rubber boots, rubber pants and hooded parka, and our dessert goggles were now employed as swimming goggles. We also had to wear our helmets over this whole outfit in order to be safe. It was a hazardous work site, and rather than give us hard hats, they let us strain our necks with our heavy Kevlar helmets. My face was still exposed and the salt water quickly dried out my face and chapped my skin. My nights were far from peaceful. The loud roar of the perpetually running generators and pressure washers was deafening. It made my ears ring and yelling at the top of my lungs was the only method of communication with my team. Not only was it uncomfortable, loud, and wet, but also it was dangerous work. You had to keep your wits about you and stay alert the entire time to make sure no one was hurt. Specialist Lansky was a married Jewish guy who I had gotten to know after spending many late night guard duties with him. He wore a gold wedding band on the finger of his left hand, and a Masons ring on his right. One night while working a shift on the wash rack, he slipped and fell backward while spraying down the inside of the forklift. As he flailed for purchase on top of the vehicle, his wedding ring got caught in a jagged window ledge. The ring hung on as the weight of his body fell backwards off the truck, tearing off the skin on his finger like he was taking off a glove. He was added to the growing numbers of men and women who were too injured or weary to continue work, and just like that, his nights on the wash rack were over. It was a painful process, but it was a worthy goal. We were making excellent progress and soon the rest of our battalion would join us on the ports of Kuwait.

### Homecoming

When we finally boarded our plane home, it was a misty and foggy night on the fifth of April. We had been staged in a large group of a hundred men and all day we had been waiting for our flight. We had flown commercial on our way here in 2003, but apparently our return trip would be in an Army cargo plane. When it finally came time for us to exit the staging area onto the tarmac, all of us had butterflies in our stomachs. The Army Aircraft that awaited us was enormous. It sat large and grey on the runway like a big fat bird. We shuffled into the big grey fuselage of the Army airplane after our luggage pallet had been loaded into the back. There were no proper seats; only rows of cargo straps in red and yellow that hung down along the sides of the fuselage and in another row back-to-back, down the middle. The straps formed seats in crisscrossed lawn chair fashion. We took our seats shoulder to shoulder as we came in; our only supplies at this point were our helmets, our weapons, and whatever was in our pockets. Most of us had brought the usual things: donut shaped neck pillows, headphones and Discmans, some had even brought along portable DVD players. After being instructed to pack everything we had in our duffel bags, we all wore our most basic uniforms: dessert boots with trousers tucked in, a light t-shirt with a collared, dessert camouflage blouse on top. A few guys had brought their black knit caps even though this was out of uniform, but most of us only had our patrol caps made out of light fabric. Between the rows of soldiers strapped in side by side, there was nothing. It was the wide-open spaces that really became unbearable during our long flight over the North Atlantic Ocean that night. I had never realized the level of comforts that are provided on a commercial flight. I had taken for granted the fact that commercial airlines insulate their cabins in order to regulate temperature. When you are flying at forty thousand feet, the temperature is in negatives. It feels like you are in a walk in refrigerator with nothing but a t-shirt and jeans. Our duffel bags had been piled high on a large pallet and strapped down in a big green net. All of this was everything we owned, including any cold weather gear that we had. No one had been told to hold onto their jackets, or warned that they would need them. We were allowed to get up and move around after we got to cruising altitude, but there wasn't much to do. Still, it was nice to stretch your legs and wander around. Some of the guys had curled up on the metal grated floorboards trying to sleep. There was a small funnel on one side of the fuselage that connected to a tube that male soldiers could pee into if needed. The only refreshments in this flight were bottles of water in case anyone needed hydration. There was nowhere for female soldiers to pee, and there was nowhere to go number two. After making my rounds for the first hour or so, I hunkered down in my strap seat and played my Gameboy for a few hours while listening to my Discman. I ran out of batteries but my headphones still provided warmth at least to the outsides of my ears from the biting cold. The rest of my body shivered and I tried to meditate to regain control of my body. I forced my body to stop shaking, repeating to myself silently, "Almost home, almost home, almost home..." I popped the collar of my BDU's and folded my arms, huddling over and retaining the little warmth that I could. After swallowing a couple of painkillers, I bit my lip and finally drifted off into an uneasy, partial slumber for what must have been several hours. After what felt like an eternity, there was a strong beam of sunlight penetrating the darkness, emerging from the only two circular portholes in the side of the fuselage. I stepped over sleeping bodies on the floor and made my way toward the spot where the beam of light hit the wall. The sun felt nice and warm, tingling the skin on the back of my neck, like when you first step into a hot tub after tiptoeing through the snow. There was only enough room for me to stand next to the wall where the sunlight came through; I would not be able to sleep in the warmth that it provided. I continued to follow the beam of sunlight for the rest of the flight until the pilot told us to take our seats. Within an hour of the sun coming up, we had made our way into Colorado airspace. After flying all night, we landed in the early morning of April sixth, 2004, in Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, USA! My long deployment was finally over. Even from the inside of the plane as it slowly taxied down the runway, I could taste the brisk morning air of Colorado.

Within the first hour of being on the ground we were marched into Fort Carson's armament to turn in our M-16's. I was reluctant to relinquish my trusty rifle after feeling the safety of its grip and the comfort of its trigger just an arms length away for the past year of my life. I had to hand it over along with all of my magazines full of ammo. Only one mag had five rounds missing from the time I rolled out the gates of Camp Victory on my way to Iraq. I had fired only five rounds from my M-16 all year. Our gas masks were the next to go. I was much happier to be rid of that terrible lump of rubber and plastic. We had never used it once in Iraq, and all the ungodly thing did for me was give me flashbacks of the gas chamber in boot camp. The rest of our equipment that filled almost all of my second duffel bag would be turned in later. It was the Army Issued Individual Equipment, called TA-50 for short. The TA stood for Table of Allowances, and these consisted of a rain poncho, cold weather gloves and jacket, Kevlar helmet, ammo pouches, and rigging, water canteen, a small first aid kit, a rifle cleaning kit, and mosquito nets. All of these were considered out on loan and were expected to be returned to the Army before we were released from Active Duty. The only pieces of equipment that I truly owned were my uniforms, my boots, and my bad memories. After this, we marched directly to a gymnasium where our families where waiting. We would not be allowed to leave Fort Carson for two weeks while we decompressed, but a homecoming celebration followed by a day-pass would be honored. Many of the soldier's families had taken up residency in the hotels and motels that surrounded the base in the Colorado Springs area. I had told my mom and my brother to stay home and wait for me to be released. I figured we all waited this long to see each other, another two weeks couldn't hurt. I was safe now, and they needn't worry. Besides, I didn't want to be tempted by a short visit with my family, only to return to lonely barracks for the night. It was a proud moment for me even though none of my own family members were there to share it. I stood rigid at attention alongside all of my brothers in arms, stone faced and rugged, many of us stank and we must have looked like we'd been camping for a year. The bleachers where filled with the families of the other men and women in my company. I could see elderly men wearing veteran's caps with patches sewn on the crown to signify where they had been. I saw wives, girlfriends, and fiancée's as they wept in joy to see their lovers standing there before them after so long. I could see mothers and fathers, awaiting their teenage sons or daughters to return home safely. There were the faces of children, some so young they had no memory of their father's and looked up into their crying mother's faces with confused looks. I saw babies in strollers and in the arms of their mothers who were too young to possibly know the significance of the day; it would be the first time they would meet their dads. We marched in as the Star Spangled Banner played on the loudspeakers and stood there at attention while my battalion commander said a few words on our behalf. After the formation was released, I took a step back and watched as families reunited. Mothers wept over their sons, couples exchanged long tearful hugs, toddlers squealed and shrieked in excitement, and babies cried loudly; it was a scene of chaos. After the revelries were over, we were released to spend the rest of the day with our families. Just as I was about to find out where my barracks were, Sergeant Mendoza grabbed my arm. "Come on Gray, you're coming with me and my family for lunch. I can't leave you here with nobody!" As much as I wanted to take a shower and a nap in a proper bed, I thought a little social interaction and a trip off the Army base might be a good idea. I decided to take him up on his offer, and besides, it hadn't sounded like I had a choice. We all piled into their minivan which was filled with toys and smelled like melted chocolate. It felt so strange to be in a non-military vehicle. It even felt strange to be around civilians and small children. I felt as if I shouldn't trust these women and children who I didn't know. I found myself reaching behind my right leg for my M-16 more than once. In feelings of paranoia and skepticism, it was always a comfort to reach back and softy stroke the trigger of my rifle with my index finger. I kept reaching behind me to rest my hand on my rifle in order to regain my confidence, but there was nothing there. It was like a ghost phone vibration. Furthermore, I knew I needed to convince myself that I could trust these people. They were my friends. No one was out to get me. At no fault of Raoul's, I was ignored for most of the afternoon. He was invested in his family, and they were devoted to spending time with him. I did enjoy the chicken fried steak that I ordered with country gravy and mashed potatoes with a side of green beans. The food was amazing. It was everything that I had dreamed about for the past year. I finished every thing on my plate in record time, and as I finished eating, I quietly documented how privileged I felt at that moment. It was very slowly sinking in that I was home; it was all over. I couldn't take for granted how fortunate I was to be alive. How lucky I was to be in one piece, with no arms, legs, fingers, or toes missing. I had two eyes, two ears, I could see, hear, smell, run, jump, and suck in deep breaths of air with my healthy lungs. My cough had finally subsided a little more than a week before boarding the flight home. I did not have Tuberculosis as I had feared. I was still in shock about the fact that I had danced with death for so long and come out of it unscathed. My only injuries were in my psyche, my only noticeable flaws in the mental. I didn't know I had developed a minor form of PTSD, but I felt the brightness of my future. Deep down, I knew that it really was over for me. I was at the end of what I imagined to be the hardest journey that I would ever face in my life. I felt like it was an uphill slope from this day on. I had been through so much in my adolescent years that my future was bound to be optimistic. The way I currently saw things, my life would only get better from here on out. I truly felt that I had been through the worst years of my life. I was only twenty going on twenty-one and I thought I had made it through the worst challenges of my life already. I hoped that the days ahead would offer many joyful days of leisure and serenity. I was not looking forward to any hard work for a very long time. Eventually our day pass was at its end and Sergeant Mendoza's family drove the two of us back to base where he said his good byes and I said my thanks. I thanked Raoul for his hospitality and we parted ways. I needed to be truly alone for the first time in over a year.

Fort Carson was just as we had left it. The snowy peaks of Mount Cheyenne jutted up in the distance, towering over the sprawl of identical buildings, motor pools filled with Army green trucks, and expansive grassy parade fields connected by a maze of black asphalt roads that were lined with evergreen trees. In the three months that my unit had spent here during our pre-deployment training, I had grown to despise this barren place. Now, after a year in the Middle East, I welcomed the bleak but mountainous terrain of the Colorado foothills. The Rocky Mountains protected me, I breathed in the cold morning air with a feeling of contentedness and shelter. I was home. We spent the next several days going through a process of updating our medical files, turning in our equipment, and sitting through award ceremonies in which an elderly General shook each of our hands and presented us with an Army coin to commemorate our service. We all had to be detached from Active Duty and this meant attending many lengthy lectures on re-integrating into society. It was common for returning veterans to sink into depression and lash out at their families and loved ones. The Army was trying to make sure this didn't happen by keeping us around for a couple of weeks while we continued normal military life while attended training sessions and talking to shrinks about our feelings. Not surprisingly, I was looking for a way out of the Army. I figured I had seen enough to know that I was not cut out to be a soldier. I felt ostracized and reviled by the upper command and the good old boys that made up the majority of my company. There was no place for me here, and if America was to continue any kind of presence in Iraq, I knew that I would be back there within a year. My best friend Villers had high hopes staying in the Army, working hard and studying until he could eventually become a helicopter pilot. I was surprised that he didn't want out as badly as I did, but I felt like I had no choice. I knew that there was no future for me in the military. I wasn't interested in gaining rank and fighting my way up the ladder. Over the course of the two weeks that we were in Fort Carson, I made it my mission to get out of the Army, one way or another. I had talked to the chaplains and shrinks, telling them that I thought I was unfit to return to combat. They weren't buying it. They had all heard the story before, and they didn't believe there was anything wrong with me. My records showed that I was a good soldier, and the Army didn't want to let me go. I tried talking to JAG about getting out, but that also got me nowhere. I was almost ready to give up when I finally decided I had nothing to lose and approached my company CO, Captain Spaulding. I began by telling him that I knew he was aware of the way his First Sergeant had treated me. I told him that it was my fault and no one else's, I was a bad soldier and I knew it. I begged him to help me to get out of the Army, and somehow, it worked. After we were finally done with our decompression period and released from Active Duty, we would be given a two-month break before returning to reservist drills, one weekend a month. Captain Spaulding told me to take some time off, show up to our company's next drill to turn in my TA-50, and then disappear. He said he was retiring soon also, and before he went, he would make sure that my file went into the IRR, Inactive Ready Reserve. This technically meant I could still be deployed, but I would no longer have to drill with the other reservists every month. It would be like early retirement. I was still a little skeptical about the whole idea, but it seemed like my only option, and it certainly sounded better than just staying in and hoping the war would be over soon. There was no telling how long American forces would be in Iraq, and from the looks of it, we weren't going anywhere. I was fragile and mentally vulnerable after everything I had been through over the past year, and the thought of having to go back made me feel downright suicidal. I could only hope that Captain Spaulding would be true to his word. He owed me that much after turning a blind eye to his own First Sergeants behavior for over a year.

### Villers

Villers called me after work to tell me he had a "fucked up day" and he needed someone to talk to. I said sure, come on over, I was just sitting at home with my brother, playing video games and listening to music. A year had gone by since we had returned from Iraq. My way of dealing with my PTSD was to bounce around the country, homeless and jobless without a care in the world. I had spent a little time in Denver, vacationed in New York, and then Vegas, where I met a girl. I had then flown up to Seattle where she was from and the two of us decided on a whim to hop in her car and drive all the way down to San Diego where we got a place together by the beach. The two of us didn't get along at all and I spent all my time in California partying like crazy. By the time I finally decided it was time to go back home to Colorado and get a job, it had already been a year. I moved into a house in Denver with my brother and his girlfriend, Elysia. Villers came over at sometime around eight thirty, I remember seeing his black Hyundai pull up outside in front of the house when the motion activated light kicked on. He had sounded a little distressed when I talked to him on the phone, but it didn't seem as though he was in a very bad mood now as I greeted him at the back door. He smiled at me when I let him in and the usual greetings were exchanged. "What's up dude? How've you been?" "Oh you know, same ol' shit..." The first thing I noticed as odd was his appearance. Villers was dressed head to tow in his Army physical fitness uniform. It's basically the Army's cut-rate version of a tracksuit. Black gym pants with a clean grey t-shirt tucked in at the waist and a silver windbreaker zipped up to the collar, with the word ARMY in shiny reflective letters across the back. His head was freshly shaved; I could even see the razor marks. I asked him, "What's going on, did you get deployed again? You look like you're ready for a PT test!" He just shrugged as if to say, "don't worry about it." So I didn't. I didn't ask again about the Army because I could tell he didn't want to talk about it and it was obvious he had other things on his mind. "What are you guys drinking? I could go for some JD, it's been a long day." Villers was only twenty and despite our service to our country, he still couldn't buy his own booze. I had turned twenty-one earlier that year, only two weeks after we had returned from Iraq. I couldn't wait for my best friend to turn twenty-one so that we could rage the bars together, but for now I was more than obliged to buy him shooters of Jaeger and Whiskey to keep in the glove box of his car. (Villers got that idea from me; we used to call them "emergency shots") When we had first gotten back home, Lee had gone a completely different route than me. Instead of taking it easy, partying and enjoying his freedom, he had taken a landscaping job where he had to drive a big truck and worked for his birth father. It seemed like every time I talked to him, he was stressed out and depressed. He hated his job and it was obvious. I kept telling him to take a break, relax, life is too short, but he was determined to make his dad proud. His birth father was an ex cop and a total dick from what I could tell from Lee's stories. He would do things like belittle his son in front of his other employee's, even going as far as to pick a fight with him on more than one occasion. He would shove Lee and say things like, "come on Soldier boy, you think you can take me?" I couldn't understand why Villers put up with it. Not only had he devoted himself to his stressful new job and his asshole dad, but he was still drilling with the Army, striving toward his dream of one day being an Army pilot. Now that I was back in Denver, we had grown close again. Even if he wouldn't listen to my advice about taking a break from the working world, I did what I could to take his mind off his job. I would take Villers to parties in Boulder with my high school friends and get him drunk, or we would often just kick it at my house, playing spades or poker. I always tried to show him a good time. One night, we snuck into the girl's dorms to hang out with some chicks we met at a kegger a few weeks before. We passed around a bottle of Crown Royal between Villers, myself, another guy named Kenneth, and two girls, Rachel and Kira. We were talking and laughing and being tough, unruly, Army boys and we didn't even realize how drunk Kenneth had become. All of a sudden he lurched forward with a sick look on his face. Someone tried to pass him a trash can, but there was no time. In a valiant but failed attempt to keep the girls carpet clean, he started puking into his clutching hands. I'd never seen anyone try to catch their throw up before, and Villers and I thought this was the funniest thing we had ever seen, so naturally we burst into laughter. As Kenneth tried to wallow around on the floor cleaning as he was still puking, Villers and I couldn't stop laughing. Rachel and Kira got so mad at all three of us that we got thrown out of the dorms. Villers and I laughed hysterically all the way down the cement staircase as we drunkenly made our escape. Villers even tried to smash the empty bottle of Crown, but it wouldn't break, and clattered loudly all the way to the bottom of the stairs causing us to laugh even harder. We were pretty much rolling on the floor laughing by the time we made it to the bottom. Kenneth lived in the boy's dorms next-door, so after we sent him home, we made the poor decision to drive back to Denver. As drunk as I was, I remember that drive home like it was yesterday. I was driving my old beat up nineteen-eighty Firebird that I bought off some soldier on-post at Fort Carson for only nineteen hundred bucks. Villers had gone out to a dealership as soon as he got home and purchased himself a brand new black Hyundai sedan. It was his sleek new import tuner vs. classic American muscle, and we were just drunk enough to street race all the way home! It was late, and the highway was a deserted. At some point, Villers thought it would be a good idea to start driving in the middle of two lanes, hitting every orange cone that had been placed there. Thump, Thump, Thump, Thump, cone after cone came flipping over the hood of his car and pounding into my bumper. My old car didn't seem to mind the abuse, but I'm pretty sure it left some lovely dents and scratches in Villers brand new paintjob. We were still laughing by the time we got off the highway, and decided to split up to see who could get to my house first. As I was racing through my neighborhood streets late at night, I could see his car one block over, keeping up with me. I took a wide screeching drift into a left turn onto my street and pressed the pedal to the floor. I could hear the higher pitched whir of Villers Korean car coming from my left, and all of a sudden, as I came into view of my front yard, I was blinded by the flash of his high beams coming up on my left side, fast! We both locked up our breaks and I went into a slight spin, but Villers new brakes came through and we screeched to a stop just inches away from each other, right in front of my driveway. It was all in good fun, and no one had gotten hurt. We parked our cars in the driveway, and stumbled inside to go to sleep. Villers slept on my couch allot, especially if he had been drinking.

There were plenty of nights like that one; we had many good times together. The night Villers showed up in his PT uniform with a shaved head wasn't one of those kinds of nights. I was starting school the next day; I had to drive down to Westminster at seven in the morning for Auto shop classes. It was a weeknight. I remember that Villers had worked that day, and he had work again in the morning. He was complaining about some Mexican guys who were bullying him at his job and trying to pick a fight over some petty argument. Although he didn't bring it up, I could tell his dad had been messing with him again. It sounded just like the Army to me, Lee's headstrong dad had taken the place of First Sergeant Purdue; I guess some things never change. As any good friend would, I told him not to sweat the small things. "Another day, another dollar, sleep it off, take another drink, it'll be ok in the morning," I offered the usual slew of apathetic, friendly support that we both knew was bullshit. I didn't know what he was really feeling that night, none of us did. We sat and talked for a few hours, passed the bottle of Jack back and forth, played a few rounds of Grand Theft Auto, and listened to Pantera, one of Lee's favorite bands. The house I lived in with my brother and his girlfriend was a big place on Federal Blvd. in west Denver. Dakan and Elysia had grown quite fond of Villers, he had become a close family friend, and so it was not abnormal that Elysia was just as concerned with Lee's safety as I was. Before Elysia went to bed, she told Villers to give her a call when he got his car home safely. She was worried he would get a DUI, or worse, drive his car off the road. I wasn't that worried about Villers drunk driving. I knew that he could handle himself behind the wheel, and besides, he wasn't even that drunk. We were just sipping the bottle that night, not slamming shots. Another reason why I wasn't nervous about his drive was that Villers also lived on Federal Blvd. All he had to do was drive a straight line for about five miles, and he'd be home. Because I had school the next day and he had to work, we decided to call it a night before too long. It must have gotten pretty late; my brother and his girlfriend had already gone downstairs to their room at least an hour before. I showed my friend out the back door, we said our goodbyes, and I watched him walk through the backyard to the fence. After he had left, I brushed my teeth, used the toilet, and curled up in bed. I had a big day that started early in the morning and I wanted to be fresh for my first day of school. Right before I fell asleep, I heard my phone start to vibrate next to my bed. At first, I was exasperated when I looked at the screen and saw Villers was calling me. I thought, "what the hell could he possibly want, I just talked to him a minute ago and he knows I have class in the morning!" The idea to just ignore the call crossed my mind, but I had a sudden change of heart. All of a sudden, something told me to just answer the phone and be nice. I picked up and said, "Hey buddy, what's up," in a sleepy voice. On the other end, I could hear his cheerful sounding voice reply back, "Hey, I just wanted to let you guys know that I got home safe!" I took a moment before I replied. I couldn't help but think how silly this seemed. My friend was a tough Army guy and so was I. Guys don't call each other late at night to tell each other they got home safe, "That's such a chick thing," I thought. Besides, Villers lived on the same street as me! I didn't see how it was such a big deal that he drove that far, and I didn't even think either one of us had gotten much more than a weak buzz anyway. The bottle of Jack was still half full after all; we hadn't even killed the whiskey! All of this ran through my head, but once again, something told me to be nice, so I kept my thoughts to myself and simply answered, "Glad to hear you're safe dude, have a good night, I'll talk to ya later?" Villers said "yeah," he'd talk to me later, and "Goodnight dude." I heard the line go dead after he hit the END button, and I laid my head back down on my pillow. That was the last time I ever talked to Lee Villers.

The next day went perfectly smooth for me. The first day of school went by in a flash, the subject matter was interesting and I was in a great mood to be back in a learning environment. Everything felt new, the air tasted fresh. After class, I was already in Westminster, so I decided to meet up with some old friends in Boulder. I met up with Kenneth and Julie, another of our female friends, and after eating some lunch, we decided to catch an afternoon matinee at the twenty-four-plex-movie theater next to the mall. I don't remember what we saw, but it was dark by the time the movie let out. Julie invited us to meet back up at her house, get some beers, and have a little party. I told Julie and Kenny I'd see them in about ten minutes and I walked alone back through the dark parking lot to my car. I used to be pretty adamant about turning my phone off in a movie. I hate cell phones, and I hate being interrupted during a good film, especially when movie theaters have become so expensive. That night, I didn't turn my phone back on until I was alone in my car. I hadn't started the engine; I hadn't even turned the key on yet. The radio was silent and as my phone came back to life, all I could hear was the sound of vibrating and familiar tones began to sound, alerting me that I had missed several calls. I could see the calls were from my other Army buddy, Khorkhov, who was a mutual friend of Villers and I. Right away, I could tell that something was wrong; Khorkhov had called me at least four times while I was in the movie. Before I called him back, I decided to check my voicemail and find out what the calls were about. My initial fears were that my unit had been re-deployed and that someone was looking for me. I thought I was about to go back to war. When my voicemail finally connected, I could hear Khorkhov's strangely calm voice telling me to call him back as soon as I could, "It was an emergency," he said. Other than that, there were not many details in the first two messages. It was the third message that made my heart jump into my throat. I could have sworn I had heard Khorkhov say something terrible. "It couldn't be real," I thought. "I misheard him, listen to the message again, I heard him wrong." I tried to calm my nerves and reassure myself it was a mistake. I tried to keep my hands from shaking so bad that I couldn't get my phone to cooperate and replay the message. After I finally managed to rewind and listen to the message again, I could hear Khorkhov's words, plain as day. "Gray, you need to call me back as soon as possible... Villers shot himself..."

NO!!!

I refused to believe what I had just heard. I refused to accept that this was really happening. I was in a brief state of denial and shock. For some reason, I couldn't stomach the sound of Khorkhov's voice. He had a way about him that was eerily calm in bad situations, so I picked my phone back up and dialed the number to Villers work friend, Ricardo. He picked up on the first ring; I could tell he had been waiting for my call. At this point, I could barely speak, so I mustered up the only words I could, "Ricky, what happened? Please tell me Villers is ok! Please, PLEASE JUST SAY THAT HE'S OK! FUCKING TELL ME HE'S OK! He's ok Ricky, right? He's ok, right?" I couldn't stop asking the question over and over because I already knew the answer and I didn't want to let him say it. I finally trailed off as Ricardo interrupted me, "Jevir, I want you to do something for Villers..." he eventually managed in a shaky voice. "I want you to do this for Lee... You need to tell him that you love him." "...And you need to tell him goodbye." The next ten minutes are a blur in my memory. I know that I completely lost it. I punched my steering wheel so many times and so hard that my knuckles started bleeding. I must have dropped my phone on the floorboards without even hanging up because Ricardo was still on the line. I was absolutely distraught; I couldn't accept the reality that my best friend was gone, I would never see his face or hear his voice again. We had been through so much together, all so that it could end like this: with me alone in my car, alone in the world. He never even made it to twenty-one years old! I would never be able to bring him out to the bars or clubs; we would never be able to experience growing up together. I cried so hard that night in my car, I felt like my heart had been torn in half. I didn't know how I could survive without my best friend. When my violent cursing and screaming finally slowed to a silent sob, I realized my phone was still connected. I picked it up to hear Ricardo crying just as hard. We tried to console each other and I asked him to tell me the rest of the details. Apparently Villers hadn't shown up to work that morning, and Ricardo was worried. It wasn't like Villers to be AWOL, and it was even less likely that he wouldn't be answering his phone when Ricardo called. It must have been a long day for him, worrying about Lee all nine hours of work. He had called at least six times throughout the day, and every time, it just rang and rang. After work, at around five-o-clock pm, Ricardo drove over to Villers house and knocked on his front door. After getting no response and trying the locked door several times, he went around to the back patio area and jumped the fence. Villers had left his sliding glass door unlocked, and Ricardo was able to gain entry through the back leading into the living room. What he found was unthinkable. Roughly four hours after Villers had called me to say goodnight, he had taken off his clothes, lay on his back in bed, put the barrel of his .50 gauge shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. Ricky didn't go into much more detail than that, but I got the idea. I didn't want to imagine the gruesome scene but still the image was burned into my mind as if I had been there. It's odd, I'll never be able to wash the memory of that sight from my mind, and it was only imagined. I didn't know why Lee had decided to take his own life. He left no suicide note, no diary, no journal describing what he was feeling near the end, nothing at all. After I finally got my emotions under control enough to drive, I made my way down that same highway that Villers and I had street raced a few months before. I made it back home, sat down on my couch and told my brother and Elysia that our family friend was dead. The three of us sat there in the room where had shared company with Villers the very night before and reminisced about times we'd had with him. We passed around that very same bottle of Jack Daniels that I had shared with Lee only twenty-four hours before. I tried to drown my sorrows in that whiskey, and when I was finished with the last drop, I wrapped my dog tags around that bottle and tucked it into my safe. It hasn't been touched since. I like to think the spirit of that last night with him is trapped inside the bottle and will live on forever in my possession; I'll never let him go.

Over the next several days, I received some of the most difficult phone calls of my life from Villers family who didn't even know me. His father was an ex police officer, and he had found out from the coroner that his son had been drinking the night that he died. After the homicide detectives were finished with the scene, they had given his dad his cell phone. All he had to do was look through it and call the last numbers that he had dialed. He told me that I was the last person that Lee ever talked to, which made me feel even more responsible for my friend's death. I felt terrible. All I could do was admit that I was his battle buddy, we had been through hell and back in the war, and yes, I had supplied my friend with alcohol. I told his dad the same thing I am writing now; I never saw the signs. His dad wanted to know what we talked about on our last night, why was I the last phone number dialed on his phone? I didn't know the answer to this, but I think it was because I was the person he wanted to say goodbye to the most. I don't think Villers birth father was ever there for him. I know now that I could never have talked him out of it. He had made up his mind, and if he wanted me to talk him out of killing himself, he would have cried for help in some sort of dramatic way. I've seen people do it before, I even had a friend in high school that swallowed a full bottle of pills and then told his dad about it who called an ambulance to come to his parent's house and take him to the hospital to pump his stomach. I don't think my high school friend really wanted to die. He just wanted to show us all that he was in pain and he needed us to know just how serious he was. Villers never once told me he was considering suicide. Putting a shotgun in your mouth and pulling the trigger isn't exactly the kind of thing you can just brush off and recover from. He knew that he wanted to die, and he didn't want anyone, especially his best friend, to talk him out of it. That's why I know that it wasn't my fault. There was nothing I could have done to save my friends life. I know now, that the only reason he came over that night, and called me after he'd gotten home safely, was because he wanted to say goodbye. I was the person in his life that he cared enough about to give me a proper farewell. I will always miss Villers, and I'll probably never get over his untimely death, but I am glad for one thing. The last night we spent together was a pleasant night. We laughed and drank, told stories, and reminisced about fun times we'd had in the past and crazy adventures we'd had in Iraq. We talked about the past, but we didn't discuss the future. We didn't scar the memory of our last night together with talks of suicide and depression. Lee kept that all locked up inside and dealt with it on his own. I guess he just didn't have anything left to give this world, but at least he gave me that last night. I will love Lee forever. He was one of the kindest, sweetest guys I've ever met. He always stuck up for the underdog, the little guy, who I guess was me. He was my friend when I needed him so much in Iraq, and I don't know how I could have made it without him.

I went to Lee's funeral a week later. His parent's had cremated his body; I can only assume that the coroner had suggested this route based on the circumstances of his grisly death. It broke my heart all over again when I saw the urn placed on a table along with some photos and framed Army awards. I knew now that I would never even be able to visit my friend's remains. I still to this day have no knowledge of his whereabouts, but it doesn't matter. He's still dead, and ashes or a grave won't bring him back. Elysia was the only person who was there for me on that dark day. She stood by my side in the back of the church and we watched as some random preacher read scripture from the bible and I cried my eyes out. I knew this kind of funeral wasn't what Villers would have wanted. He was no more a Christian than I was, and neither of us agreed with the plight of any of the organized religions. Furthermore, the military does not recognize veterans who died from suicide. There would be no flag given to his mother, no twenty-one-gun salute, and yet my unit had all shown up in uniform as a token of their respect. Everyone arrived in Class A uniforms to show veneration, but that too made me feel even worse. Villers and I had grown to be very close friends primarily for the reason that relentless bullying from the rest of the unit targeted us equally. These people were neither his friends, nor mine, and in my opinion, their presence at his funeral was a dishonor. Moreover, my commander somehow pulled some strings and got Villers promoted to Sergeant after his death. I knew good and well that neither Villers nor myself would ever have been granted that rank in our lives. I felt it was even more of a disgrace to honor him with an award in death that he never could have achieved in life. To show my respect to my friend, and to show that I was the only one that truly knew him, I showed up to his funeral wearing all black. I didn't wear my Army uniform, and I sat in the back of the church and cried my eyes out. I made it through his funeral, but I never made an appearance at my Army unit again. It simply hurt too much to see the faces of the soldiers who used to make fun of Villers and I. All I can remember is how each one of those men made the two of us feel like outcasts and rejects for years but then showed up to his funeral as if they were his friends. As soon as the service ended I ran to my car where I had been sitting when I heard the news of my friends death. The airbag was broken, jammed into the steering wheel where I had pounded my fists into it a few nights before. Hunched over the wheel, I sobbed for my friend. I missed him terribly and all I wanted to do was scream at him for leaving me. I was filled with a furious pain the likes of which I had never before experienced. When I finally pulled myself together enough to drive, I started my car and pulled out of that church's parking lot as the crowd of soldiers in Army green piled out of the front doors. I took one look at them in my rearview mirror, sullen and depressed, standing in small groups puffing on cigarettes and talking quietly. It was the last time in my life that I ever saw anyone from the two forty-fourth combat heavy engineers. I drove for a long time, and even when I eventually went back home, it was never the same again. My brother and his girlfriend moved up to Seattle, leaving me alone in the big house all by myself with Lee's ghost and my own demons. I didn't last long before running away myself; first back to Boulder for three more years, and then to California in search of a brighter future.

### Nine Years Later

On December twentieth, 2012, four days before Christmas, and the night before the last day of the world (according to the Mayan calendar,) I received a phone call from a blocked number while having a drink with my fiancée and some of our friends in a bar. Thinking it must be my boss calling about work, I stepped out of the noisy bar onto the streets of San Francisco, California, where I had been living for the past five years. Eight years had passed since Villers' death, and even longer since I had returned from Iraq. Getting over the loss of my friend and struggling with my own PTSD had lead me down a lingering and winding path that had eventually landed me on the west coast in San Francisco. I had followed Lee's footsteps, becoming a mechanic and turning wrenches in greasy, dungeon-like, auto garages for roughly five years between Colorado and California. Eventually I had lost my job and had joined the growing ranks of unemployed Californians. Strangely enough, I had met the girl of my dreams within a few months of becoming unemployed. She was astonishingly beautiful with dark features, brown eyes and long dark hair. I was instantly attracted to her when I saw her across a dimly lit bar called "Whiskey Thieves." I was there to celebrate a friend's college graduation. When I saw that the girl I was interested in was talking to another girl who I was mutually aquatinted with, I knew that I had an in. If we knew the same people, my chances to meet her without creeping her out were much higher. I was safe in the clutch of liquid courage, and so I bravely approached her and started up a conversation. After we had been chatting for only about ten minutes, I could already tell the flirt was going well. Her name was Christina, and shockingly, she too was collecting unemployment checks and living with her dad above a motorcycle shop that happened to be across the street. Her ethnicity turned out to be half Cambodian, half German-American. Her dad was the white one, and he was a gear head, a blue-collar worker, and an all around cool dude who had raised his two daughters the right way. Christina knew how to work on cars, she was into going camping, shooting guns, and drinking whiskey, and I could already tell we were going to get along. We began to find out that we had many common interests and views on the world and I could feel a mutual attraction beginning to grow so I asked her for phone number. We made tentative plans to meet up for some sort of a date the next night. It was the late Indian summer of San Francisco, (mid September), and neither of us had jobs after all. She was a student at City College but her afternoons were free so we decided to meet at a popular outdoor hang out in my neighborhood, Dolores Park. To make a long story short, we have been inseparable ever since. I fell in love with Christina, and after only two years of dating, on Halloween morning in 2012, I asker her to marry me on bended knee with a Sour Apple Ring-Pop from the top of Bernal Heights hill in San Francisco with a back drop of the foggy bay below us.

By the time I got engaged, I had almost finished a two-year Associates Degree at City College in Applied Sciences. I had plans to attend California's State University to earn a Bachelors Degree in Industrial Design. I was almost thirty, I was getting married soon, and I had a good job driving a truck for a party-planning agency in the City. Over the years, I had grown very close to my father. We even had gotten each other's portraits tattooed on our arms for father's day. I had a good relationship with my mom and her family; even my brother whom I had stopped talking to for almost two years had begun talking to me again and we were slowly rebuilding our relationship. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was truly happy. I was going to be married to the love of my life, I had several close friendships, a great relationship with all of my family members, a nice place to live, I almost never went to bars anymore, I had quit smoking almost seven years earlier, I was getting straight A's in school and I felt I had made tremendous progress with my PTSD. I had talked to a VA appointed psychiatrist who had actually helped me work through a great deal of emotional issues. I could handle fireworks without freaking out for the first time since at least 2007. I barely ever had nightmares any more, and Christina had been very supportive and a great help in dealing with my grief. She too had lost a close friend in high school to medical complications and we shared a common bond in losing a friend. Christina was the one who had inspired me to go back to school, and it was in an English class that I began to gain interest in writing again. While going through my old Iraq journal, I stumbled upon a four-page short story that I had written on a whim in 2003, halfway through my tour in Iraq. Immediately I became inspired and set out to write a memoire of my adventures in Iraq. By doing this, I began to overcome some of my painful repressed memories from the war. It felt good to get it all out on paper, and it felt even better to be writing again. By the time I got to one hundred pages, I couldn't believe I'd written that much. Before that, all I had written was ten page essays for school, or scribble bad poetry in a journal, and I hadn't even done that in over nine years. I just kept on writing and writing, but by the time I got to the end of my story, I realized I had a problem. I didn't have an ending. My memories of Lee were still extremely painful for me. I still thought about my friend all the time. I saw his face in my dreams, I heard his voice in my head; every time someone died in a movie, I couldn't help but think about how much I missed my Army buddy and I would tear up. I knew I'd probably never be able to completely get over the loss of my friend, but I did feel like it was finally time to do something I'd been dreading for almost a decade. I needed to open up a line of communication with Lee's mother who I'd never met. She didn't know me, and I didn't know her, but I knew I owed it to her to tell her what her son's last night was like. I didn't know how exactly to go about contacting a woman whose name I didn't even know, but it finally occurred to me to use technology. I typed my deceased friends name into an Internet search engine, and without much trouble found my way to a legacy page devoted to Lee Michael Villers. I posted a simple message for whoever was willing to read it. "PLEASE CONTACT ME! My name is Jevir Gray. I was with Lee on his last night. We were battle buddies in Iraq and best friends in life. My phone number and e-mail is..." I didn't know if anyone would respond, but I kept checking my e-mail just the same. And so it was, that on December twentieth, after a day of Christmas shopping with Christina, I answered a blocked number and I stepped outside onto the cold street. "Hello?" I answered my typical, deadpan greeting to a stranger with a private number. After a brief silence I could hear a woman's voice on the other end, "Is this Jev'eer Gray?" I was used to telemarketers and creditors getting my first name wrong so I normally wouldn't think twice about hanging up, but something told me to stay on the line. "Yes, this is Je-VIR Gray," I stressed the second syllable of my name to let whoever I was talking to know that I really was Jevir. The woman's voice came back into my ear, "This is Constance McDaniel. I'm Lee's mom..." Those last words made me freeze in my tracks and I couldn't think of the words to say. "Oh my word..." I finally managed, "I'm SO glad you called me! I didn't know if anyone would see my post or if anyone still managed that webpage. My name is Jevir Gray. Lee... was one of my best friends... of my life." My words came out slowly and deliberately. "Lee and I were Army buddies in Iraq. We have been through so much together. I wanted to talk to you because I was with Lee on the night that he died." The conversation that followed was one of the best of my life. Lee's mom, Connie, revealed to me the final days that he had never talked to me about. My poor friend was going through such a terrible case of PTSD that he had kept completely hidden from me and his other friends. He had so much pride, and such a passion to please others, an objective that had proved to be impossible in the end. His birth father had treated him terribly when he returned from war and Lee's stress had been never ending. His mother told me that she used to love to give him big bear hugs as he was growing up. Upon his return from Iraq, she tried to give him a bear hug and his reaction was to throw her across the room. He was touchy, erratic, and would dive for cover every time a helicopter would fly over the house. These were all things that he never talked about with me. I also found out that on that fateful night, his blood alcohol level was under the legal limit at his time of death. This was a huge relief to me because I had occasionally feared the worst; that Lee may have been drunk at the end and had made a rash decision. If this had been the case, then I was partially responsible for his death by letting him drink my whiskey. His mother reassured me that even though he was only twenty and couldn't legally drink, she felt the same as I did: A man willing to give his life for his country should be allowed to have a drink. This was not the only tragic news that I discovered about my friends final days. Over the course of the last year, Lee had made repeated attempts to seek psychiatric help from the VA hospital. They had placed him on a waiting list, telling him that he couldn't see anyone for another six months. That night, he must have felt so alone and helpless; it was simply too much for him to bear anymore. After hearing some new information and having a shared cry with Lee's mom, I felt enlightened and cleansed. I had learned so much from my experiences. Every day is so precious. Now I know the importance of moments spent with loved ones. I'll never take a single night for granted with any of my friends or family. You never know when it could be the last time you ever see someone. I will always make every moment count like it could be my last.

### Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

I used to think while chain-smoking Iraqi cigarettes in the dessert that my life couldn't possibly get any worse. I remember thinking that my life was at it's lowest point and that if I could just survive to return home, that everything would be uphill from that day on. I thought that my friends and family would look at me with a higher respect, that strangers would revere me with admiration and thank me for my service. I dreamed that bartenders would never let me pay for beers, and employers would fall all over themselves to offer me an easy, high paying job. Never again would I have to struggle to pay my bills, we would be a heroes, and everyone back home would make sure that the rest of our days were tranquil, stress-free and comfortable. I couldn't have been more wrong. Nothing could have prepared me for the apathetic reactions of American civilians who have no idea that there are still soldiers over seas, fighting a war on their behalf. I could never have known how difficult the life of a civilian in America would become over the past nine years. I watched as the country I had fought to protect fell into a recession, and millions of people lost their jobs and their homes. America became split by the two party system that was always its fate. Liberal Democrats waged war on Conservative Republicans; Families have been separated as if by civil war. President Barack Obama oversaw the withdrawal of American Troops from Iraq in December of 2011; almost a decade after our occupation there had begun, and at least seven years after the last news report that had anything to do with American Troops in Iraq. Veterans like me had faded into the background. Nobody cared anymore. Nobody ever thanked me for my service; no one bought me a beer. I had been unemployed for nearly two and a half years before finally finding a job where I worked hard labor, late at night, for long hours. My rent was still rising, and my wages were not. I could only hope that tomorrow would be brighter than yesterday. When I looked at Lee's funeral card, it listed all of the medals that he had earned while in Iraq. It was an impressive list. I had only earned a couple of medals that were given to everyone who was a part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I had never done anything worthy of extra merit. I wondered what these medals all meant anymore, now that it was all over. Lee was dead, and these awards meant more to his family than to him. However, I had learned something more important through my experiences in the Army than I ever could have learned in college. It didn't matter what others thought of me. The false image that preceded me with the stories people tell, the rewards I had earned, and the accomplishments I may have achieved; none of that will ever mean anything to anyone else. My reputation would never get me a job. It wouldn't pay my bills or buy me a beer. And it definitely wouldn't save my life. The only thing that ever mattered is what my own accomplishments meant on the inside. How they had bettered me, as a person. Our most important task as human beings is to put into action the things we have learned, and to be the best men and women that we can be for the rest of our lives. We owe that much to our communities, and to our country. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror, and I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do."

When I first returned from Iraq, I was still weak. I was freshly 21, still wet behind the ears, with no life experience to speak of. My only work history was a year in Iraq holding a machine gun. The only job this might have gotten me was on the police force or armed security, and I'd had enough of being shot at for one lifetime. I had a low self-esteem problem throughout my youth that carried into my young adulthood even after joining the Army. I was quiet, cautious to speak, and stumbling over my words when I did. People would always tell me to "Speak up son, I can't hear you!" I had no confidence, no conviction to my beliefs; I was a pushover. I would go along with anything, and it had often gotten me in trouble for hanging around the wrong crowd. When I first got home, I didn't understand the weight of the war I'd been through. I hadn't been given a chance to grow up, to let it all sink in. It is a common misconception that when a soldier graduates boot camp, he has become a man. It is even more widely assumed that when a man returns home from war, that he has grown into a strong and callous warrior, ready to take on anything. When Lee and I came home, we were still kids. We weren't prepared for the hardships of adult life in the civilian world. Furthermore, we were damaged by the things we'd seen and been forced to endure. We were indeed weak, and in a more fragile state than our friends and families could ever have comprehended. When Lee took his own life, I felt as if I'd lost my own will to live. The world seemed a dark and cold place; my future seamed bleak and empty. The pain and aguish I felt seamed to fill me, from my heart up into my throat, filling my head up like a balloon that would soon burst. My parents divorce, my failures and embarrassments as a nerdy, homeschooled, Seventh Day Adventist kid, my failed attempt at college, my brief but grueling experience in the Army, my year at war in Iraq, the loss of my best friend, it was all so much to accept. At that time in my life, it appeared as though Eleanor Roosevelt was wrong. I had not grown from my horrors. No, instead they had crippled me, shattered me. I felt like a broken man. However, with age comes knowledge, as with time comes blissful forgetfulness. I only remember the good times now. I remember playing spades with Villers around a footlocker, drinking coffee and laughing at dirty jokes. I remember the smell of eucalyptus and olive trees on the air as we rolled through the cradle of life, the green belt of Mesopotamia. I remember swimming in Saddam's crystal chandelier adorned swimming pool and gazing dreamily over the cliffs atop the palace grounds as the glistening sun dipped leisurely beneath the shimmering horizon. I don't remember the bad parts. I don't think about First Sergeant Purdue, in fact, the sound of his name isn't worth the breath in my lungs. I make no attempt to recall the heat of the dessert, the sweat on my brow, the miserable extensive hours I spent waiting to die. I don't think about death anymore. Life is too short to dwell on these things. So in a way, I have grown stronger. The Army made me flexible, and what bends, will not break. I am pliable, resilient, and will always strive to fill my mind with as much knowledge as I can discover. My inhibitions have shed away as my experience has grown. I am no longer afraid to die. I am now free to chase my own dreams, form my own hypothesis, believe my own beliefs, and build my own future. There cannot be fear, because with the painful tragedies and arduous experiences of the past, there comes great knowledge, self-awareness, and inner peace.

The End

