And I wasn’t even cured yet.
On what should have been my last day of Florida Phase, I stood in my “recycle formation” and watched as Trey, the ol’ bestie, boarded the graduation bus to go make his family proud. I could feel Brehm’s tab and scroll on the underside of my PC, pressing against my scalp, reinforcing in me the belief that I could get through this and reminding me not to be such a little pussy. Trey stopped on the first step of the bus and looked back at me.
“Hey, Mat?”
“Yeah?”
“I just wanted to say…tab check, bitch!” He laughed as he pointed to where his tab would soon be. It made me smile, because that’s how best friends are supposed to treat each other. Don’t you dare try to cheer me up, motherfucker. I expect you to kick me when I’m down, like a man!
By the time I finally graduated a few weeks later, I weighed 159 pounds, and my entire body was covered in bullous impetigo scars (my skin only got worse during the recycle phase). When my mom, who came to watch me get my tab, saw me for the first time, she gave me the full-on Olivia Benson. She didn’t know whether to hug me or get angry and go on a crusade to figure out who did this to her baby. But she’s a much stronger woman than I am, and she was confident that if I could survive Ranger School, I could also survive this.
“Just tell me you’re okay,” she said.
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said. And I was, more or less.
Until Florida Phase, I had such great skin that I could have been in one of those moisturizer commercials. Maybe it’s Maybelline? Maybe it’s genetics, motherfucker. Now I looked like the “before” picture in a Proactiv infomercial. I had to do something about it. So, like any rational twenty-year-old, I started getting large-format tattoos to cover up the scars. The day after my cousin—the full-bird colonel who’d magicked me into 2/75 like a boss—pinned my Ranger tab onto the left shoulder of my uniform sleeve, I set out to cover my actual left shoulder with a full tattoo sleeve.
I wanted something commemorative that combined imagery with script, something that looked cool but that was also personal and would remind me of this period in my life. I narrowed it down to two options and flipped a coin.
Heads, it would be an old-timey REWARD poster with the face of the physician’s assistant that read: “Wanted in connection with being a fucking fuck face, fuck this guy.”
Tails, it was a decorated memorial shield in honor of Brehm and Barraza.
It was tails.
Chapter 8
Head and Shoulders Above the Rest
After two deployments and eating a casino buffet worth of shit at Ranger School, I would have loved—and I mean loved—for my job as a warfighter in the 75th Ranger Regiment to begin and end with killing bad guys. Unfortunately, in war it doesn’t work that way. There is always a lot more that goes into conducting operations than “Find bad guy, kill bad guy.” There are systems and processes to follow, rules of engagement to obey, a lot of bosses to report to, and ATFATM (all those fucking acronyms to memorize). It’s so bad the Army had to create field manuals—actual manuals, like for a car—to organize all the information. More than five hundred of them. I don’t own five hundred of anything.
It was around this time that the military started to mainline Cialis and develop a raging hard-on for identifying every combatant we killed. They even created a log system into which they wanted us to integrate every EKIA (enemy killed in action). That meant once the action was over and all of our guys were accounted for, we had to stick around to make a yearbook out of these assholes: photographs, ID card, name and age (if we could find them), fingerprints, favorite color, senior quote, blah, blah, blah. I felt like saying, “Listen, Uncle Sam, I didn’t go through RASP and Ranger School and get bullous impetigo to become a fucking data entry clerk. I do invasions, not inventory.” At 4 A.M., after having successfully completed your objective, there is nothing more frustrating than having to go hunt down chunks of proof like a fucking truffle hog and then bring them back to be counted.
For a knuckle dragger like myself—even one who’d been promoted to sergeant and team leader—it was hard to accept that this information-gathering aspect of war was as important as pulling a trigger, especially when conducting direct action raids to kill or capture HVTs (high-value targets). But once you realize that you can’t just ask someone who they are and where they hid the launch codes when all you can find of them is a limb (like with my old friend the none-armed man), you begin to understand the need for inventory and intelligence gathering.
The military calls this process “sensitive site exploitation” (SSE), and certain members of our unit were trained for it and were in charge of it. They documented the scene with video and searched the bodies for maps, documents, cell phones, computers, personal effects, and other bits of information that might be useful. They swabbed stuff and did hair and tissue analysis—all that CSI shit that I was too poor or too dumb to understand when I was growing up. Because war is war, and the Army is the Army, this theoretical system always went totally FUBAR in practice. A mission would blow up in your face, or it might go better than you expected, and then you’d be out there chilling with a bunch of bodies and either not enough supplies or no designated DNA analyst, because the mission planners hadn’t thought you’d need one. If that happened, and you unexpectedly stumbled into a little game of Guess Hussein?, you were on your own.
Nobody I knew looked forward to this part of the job. The last thing anyone wanted was the delicate, precise tasks of SSE left to guys whose idea of a surgical strike was fucking as many VA nurses as possible when they were back home. Plus, the whole process got boring very quickly. You know that old proverb “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”? Well, bored hands must be the devil’s whorehouse, because that’s when things always got seriously fucked and someone ended up having to pay for it. Still, we knew this kind of exploitation and identification helped us going forward, so the general rule around SSE was “shut up and nut up.” You never knew when you’d come across very sensitive information or information that might lead to a high-value target. It was like going on Terrorist Tinder and getting an immediate match—you didn’t want to mess up that little love connection.
Down to get fucked?
Totes. ETA?
Look out your window.
I don’t see any—
pew pew pew
* * *
—
One night we got a call over the radio that ███████████ might have swiped right on some desolate road on the outskirts of Goatfuck, Iraq. My platoon had already done two direct-action raids that night. Nothing special, just the usual: kicking down doors, looking for bad guys who were already gone, getting shot at by their buddies who weren’t. We were riding in the back of a pair of Chinooks, completely smoked on the way back to base, when the initial call came in: █████ had just done a VI (vehicle interdiction) on an HVT. To most people, “vehicle interdiction” sounds like a fancy military phrase for “traffic stop,” and in a sense it is, because it usually involves stopping a suspicious vehicle and either seizing its cargo or detaining its occupants, or both. In Iraq, however, VIs can go a little differently, especially when an HVT is involved. In a nutshell, we roll up on the skid of a helicopter, smile and wave at the asshole who hates Americans, and if he’s one of the dudes who has been trying to blow up our people, we serve him with a good old-fashioned Grand Slam breakfast of 5.56 and 7.62.