Goddammit, Mumblecore Mat, get both your heads in the game!
I start to pick up the pace. Eventually, my body adjusts to the grooves of the metal door, and not only am I able to get good leverage, but I find a really good rhythm and we all start to feel like we’re moving as one—me, Meg, and the door. It’s virtually symphonic. Then, just as I’m about to orgasm, I hear a loud noise, followed immediately by a bright light. The actual garage door is going up on us.
“Oh shit!” Meg says, panicked. “I think my brother is home!”
“What do you mean home? It’s a garage.”
Now she looks at me like I’m the crazy one. That’s when it dawns on me: He really does live in this fucking garage. For a total shitbox of a house, the garage door goes up surprisingly fast. The way the makeshift bed is positioned, we’re the first thing her brother is going to see. The glare of his car’s headlights hit us right in the face. We try to grab for our clothes, but to no avail.
“Meg?”
“John, I can explain,” she says as she awkwardly pulls the comforter over her chest. As the garage door comes to a rest and the headlights finally turn off, I see two pairs of men’s legs.
“What the fuck are you doing in my room?” he asks angrily.
“To be fair, it is the garage,” I interject.
“Wait, weren’t you in that emo band?” his friend asks.
“Ha, I was.”
“Shut the fuck up, man,” John says. “Meg, get out of my fucking room.”
“Fine. Could you at least close the garage door and give us a second? God!” Meg says as she fumbles around for her clothes.
John hits the garage door remote and, as it slowly closes, I can hear his friend. “Hey, man, their band was actually pretty good,” he says, cracking himself up.
If I hadn’t already been red-faced from fucking, I would have totally blushed as we got dressed. I couldn’t believe he recognized me from my Blind Story days. I had no idea that someone might remember us. I was genuinely touched by that—even if they did ruin our episode of Casting Garage.
Believe it or not, this was the perfect way to end a week and a half of blissful, rugged sex. Getting on the plane to Tacoma, Washington, back to my unit to prepare for our next deployment, I was filled with even more purpose than I had had before the first one. I was feeling a new sense of confidence, and I was ready to get back overseas and finally get into the real combat I had been dreaming about for the last two years.
That’s the funny thing about dreams, though. The fun is in the chasing. Once you achieve them, they usually don’t give you the sense of satisfaction or gratification that you had thought they would. Sometimes you realize you were really chasing something else all along. And then other times, like I was about to find out, they have a fucked-up way of bringing you back down to reality.
Chapter 6
Brehm and Barraza
A mere twelve months after joining the Army, I was back in Iraq for the second time with the 2nd Ranger Battalion. My hope for my second deployment was to finally apply all my warfighting skills and see real war firsthand. I thought there was a good chance this might happen because my unit got surged forward ahead of standard rotation and was told that we’d be hitting the ground running. That doesn’t happen unless things are really starting to get chippy, right?
I’ll never know for sure, but I think my team leader, Sergeant Dale Brehm, felt the same way and understood how different this deployment might be for me. As we prepared to deploy, he pulled me aside one day and gave me a big piece of news: When we rotated home at the end of this six-month deployment, it would be my turn to go to Ranger School—I had made the cut to attend the combat leadership course and to keep progressing within the unit.
Brehm also gave me his Ranger tab and Ranger scroll. In Ranger tradition, you sew your team leader’s tab and scroll into the inside of your PC (patrol cap), and whenever shit gets really hard, whenever you have doubts or feel like you’re hitting a wall during the training, you can take off your PC and look at those patches as a reminder that you have what it takes to make it to the end of the suck, and that the guy who gave you those patches thinks so too. Someone had done that for Sgt. Brehm before he went through Ranger School, and now he was paying it forward to me.
His gesture and the confidence that he showed in me really buoyed me as we arrived in late October 2005 and headed toward a border region called Anbar Province, renowned as a major artery for the inflow of foreign fighters from Syria. Our area of operation had just seen a major American offensive clear through it. We were tasked to find the remaining fighters and kill or capture them, which wound up being easier than I had anticipated.
Once we got situated and fully operational, we conducted raids every night for weeks on end without finding ourselves in any kind of major engagement. Partly that was because the offensive that preceded us had done a pretty good job. But I suspected that the primary reason we were coming up empty-handed was because it was getting into winter and the fighting season over there is during the warmer months. You don’t go to Aspen in July looking to ski, right? Well, you don’t come to Iraq in December looking to fight.
As the deployment dragged on, we’d go out on an operation, get on target, and any bad guys who were still there would surrender immediately. (I called them cold-weather quitters.) The cadence of it all during this period of the fighting in Iraq became so reliable that, even if we were in a particularly concentrated area, we could blitz through multiple targets in a night—sometimes up to a dozen. It was like old-fashioned blitzkrieg, but with smaller units and bigger beards. My platoon was not unique in this regard—it was happening to special operations units all over the country—it just pissed me off maybe more than the others because I wanted to get in gunfights, not earn a merit badge in zip-tie knots.
Even though coalition forces were bagging some big players in the Global War on Terror at the same time, that offered me no solace, because my interests were not geopolitical. They were visceral. I wasn’t obsessed with winning; I was obsessed with the act of war. That’s what I was there for, and that’s what I wanted to be good at.
This wasn’t some kind of fucked-up bloodlust, but it was very primal. At its most basic, war is a mano a mano fight to the death in service of something much bigger than yourself. General Douglas MacArthur called it “Duty, God, Country” in a speech to cadets at West Point near the start of the Vietnam War. Shakespeare called it a “band of brothers.” Whatever you want to call it, to fight in its defense is the ultimate test—a test I was desperate for the opportunity to face and anxious to pass. As a nineteen-year-old kid, I wasn’t smart enough to understand why this drove me so hard, and to a degree I still don’t fully get it, but what I do know is that I was not alone. Humans and other mammals have engaged in some version of battle in defense of territory, family, the pack or the tribe, for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Today, “educated people” like to think we’ve evolved beyond this fundamental instinct, and they look down their noses at warfighters as primitive or regressive (whatever the fuck that means), but all you need to do is spend two minutes on Twitter to realize that this ancient animal impulse is alive and well.