Minus the restriction on blowing things up—breachers gotta breach—that’s what it was like during my fifth deployment as a Ranger. I was coming into the final year of my enlistment contract. I’d made E-5 (Sergeant) on the previous trip. All my buddies were either team leaders or squad leaders. And best of all, unlike high school, I didn’t have to graduate if I didn’t want to. This deployment could be a victory lap of sorts, or I could run it back and do another four years with a few signatures on a set of reenlistment papers. Coming into this fifth deployment, I was leaning toward the latter.
Intentionally or not, the Army made that decision very difficult when they sent us to Balad, Iraq, in June of 2008. The operational tempo on this deployment was similar to previous trips, and we were getting into TICs (troops in contact) nearly every night. Rarely would we hit a dry hole. And since this was late summer into early fall, there were no cold weather quitters, either. There were only fighters. As a result, we had most of the base’s aerial assets at our disposal, and we did the majority of our missions as HAFs (helicopter assault force), serious Apocalypse Now “Ride of the Valkyries” kind of shit.
The whole thing was like a gift from the war gods. All that romanticizing of war that Fulton and I had been flirting with in our first couple years had steadily grown into a full-on love affair, and we were super excited to get our fuck on. When it came to combat, Fulton and I saw eye to eye on everything. Cutting off a guy’s head will do that to a relationship, but I also think that in the two years since Brehm and Barraza had gotten killed, a lot of their leadership lessons had encoded themselves into our DNA. Those guys were always first through the door because their number-one mission was to make sure their teams made it home to their families. If anyone was going to get shot breaching a door or clearing a building, it should be them. That’s how they saw it. Fulton and I didn’t really talk about it directly, but we had an unspoken understanding on this trip that we would be the first through the door, and while we didn’t want to get shot, if we did…well…so be it. We just wanted to kill as many bad dudes as we could and make sure that our men got home.
When you come to that kind of understanding, with a brother or just with yourself, it is one of the most freeing sensations you will ever have in your life. I felt ten times lighter, a hundred times faster, a thousand times stronger. At the time I thought this state of mind was unique to the war experience, and it made me want to live each day, each mission, over and over again for as long as I could. Like an endless summer. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that you can have this feeling, or something pretty close to it, outside of war too. You can have it in art and in relationships and in business. All it takes is giving yourself permission to take risks and allowing yourself the freedom to fail.
Part of what made this epiphany so potent was that Balad was the best base I’d been stationed at since joining the Army. I had my own pod (private living quarters are something special in the military). There was a fucking pool, with sweet chaise lounge chairs. Imagine going to summer camp and while you were gone some rich kid moved into the neighborhood and his dad built a brand-new skate park and hired Tony Hawk to give free lessons every day. It was like that.
And the food options, sweethomealabama, they were glorious: Peet’s Coffee, Cinnabon, Taco Bell. Because the majority of my deployments were spent on forward operating bases, I was used to living out of a rucksack and eating MREs (meals ready to eat) and shit chow that bound you up like geisha feet. Peet’s and Taco Bell weren’t just delicious, they set the clock to my morning and evening shits. I’d never felt so regular in my entire life. I never understood why people got enemas or colonics, but if they make you feel anything like my first week at Balad, well then, consider me converted.
Walking onto the base in Balad really was like moving into an episode of MTV Cribs. There are two ways to respond to this kind of abundance after experiencing such scarcity: You can slowly savor it, appreciating every bite, or you can gorge yourself on it until you want to throw up so you can make room in your stomach for more.
I wasn’t sure which type I would be until one day, chilling in the pool, I decided to swim up to one of the hottest girls I’d ever seen OCONUS (outside the Continental United States) and say hello. This girl was not just “deployment hot.” I’m talking real-life, on the streets of New York hot. She was the Wendy Peffercorn of the pool, and she was there every day.
“Hi, I’m Mat—”
“Are you Black Ops?” Wendy said in a stern but intrigued voice.
Oh, Wendy. You know the answer to that question. And you know that I know that you know.
When you’re deployed and strolling around a big base like Balad, the service branches are distinguished by the different colors of the shirts and shorts people wear. The Army has gray T-shirts and shorts that say, you guessed it, “Army.” The Air Force, which, judging by the revolving door of its uniform styles, is sponsored by Benjamin Moore, has whatever color pattern they picked that day that says “Air Force.”
Special Operations units really try to not stand out. We wear black PT shorts, tan T-shirts with no insignia, beards, tattoos, and 5 percent body fat. We blend right in.
Wendy, this beautiful, wonderful young woman, knew exactly who and what I was. It’s long been understood that Special Operations carry a certain allure. Overseas, the women knew it too. They knew you were most likely the guys out there killing Terry Taliban at night in defense of the American way of life and then coming back to base and waking up the next day like nothing ever happened. You were seeing and doing real war—the kind people tell stories and make movies about. A lot of people wanted to know those stories so that they could brag to all their friends once they got home. I’d even venture to say that some of them needed those stories. Sleeping with you was almost like sleeping with the cover of a romance novel:
There was still blood on his shirt, and he had this steely look in his eyes like there was something he wanted to tell me, but couldn’t. In that moment, I had never felt so vulnerable in my life. I wanted to comfort him, nurture him, and be the woman he was missing in this world….
By asking if I was “Black Ops”—a term no one inside the military even uses unless they’re fucking around—Wendy let me know that she was looking for the Special Operations deployment fantasy. She didn’t have to say another word. I was happy to oblige. Still, I had to play it cool if I was going to lock this down, because I had my entire platoon staring at me from across the pool, waiting for me to fail so they could dive in and take their own run at her. If I chunked it and she got out of the pool, I might not get a second chance.
That’s when the mortar alarms went off. Mortar alarms are a base-wide radar system that is supposed to alert you to incoming mortars that have a likelihood of hitting inside the base. Half the time the thing malfunctions and goes off at random, but everyone still has to follow protocol, which in this case meant getting out of the pool and taking cover in a secure location or getting down in the prone position.