“That fucking mortar better hit if it’s going to cockblock me,” I muttered to myself as I lay prone on the pool deck. Getting up off your face and collecting yourself to continue hitting on the hottest girl on base is not the easiest transition in the world. I had a lot of life experience, but I was still twenty-two years old and that kind of smoothness requires some red-belt-level rap.
“All clear!” someone shouted.
Of course.
I don’t remember what I said after I dusted myself off and re-engaged with Wendy, but I managed to get her email address and charm her with my emoji game. A few days later, I “borrowed” a Hilux truck from the motor pool and we had our first date outside of a broken-down Iraqi Taco Bell. I had the pink taco platter. She had the Best burrito supreme. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is. Pretty much every day from that point forward, I would go to the pool with her, we’d “fifty shades of grey” all afternoon, then I’d go get chow and prep to leave for our mission that night.
It was incredible.
In retrospect, I recognize that I was living a fantasy as a tattooed, douchier version of a real James Bond. The name’s Balad. James Balad. At the time, though, I felt far more like I was walking in the footsteps of John Rambo: a man who lived for war and had nothing left to lose.
The Rambo movies were my favorites growing up, even before I knew I wanted to join the military. Here was this guy, played by Sylvester Stallone, who was the ultimate badass. He never died. Hell, he never even got shot. But he lived with this constant mental anguish that forced him to keep going, to keep moving forward, because war was all he had left. It was Rambo versus the world. Kill or be killed. That was his mentality, and that’s what I loved about him. That’s what I wanted to be. By the middle of this fifth deployment, I felt closer to that feeling than I ever had before.
I never told anyone on my team about this, because honestly, it was super lame. Who says shit like that? The answer is no one, which is why I didn’t say it out loud, even as I was thinking it every second of every night we were out on target. The more intense a situation got, the deeper I went into the weirder parts of my brain. I would literally think to myself on missions at night, “I am Rambo. Good luck trying to kill me, motherfucker, because I don’t give a fuck.”
Don’t misunderstand: I wasn’t suicidal. Thinking you’re going to die and wanting to die are totally different things. I didn’t have a death wish. It’s just that, in my experience, the more you deploy and face the dark realities that exist in life, the more comfortable you become with the idea of death. Sometimes you don’t really care if it’s you or the people you are hunting who die, just as long as it isn’t the people you are leading. It’s hard to explain to people who have never served in this capacity. I just loved what I was doing so much, especially on this deployment, that there was nothing anyone could do—least of all some piece of shit terrorist—to get in the way of me doing it. I mean, think about it: I’d wake up at 6 P.M., show people how to build crazy charges to blow up buildings, then I’d go practice raids, eat some Cinnabon, and get a beeper page to go out in the middle of the night to shoot guys in the face before rolling home to bang one of the hottest blondes I’ve ever had the pleasure of sharing a bed with. And the next day, I would go right back after it again. I was fighting, feasting, and fucking. EVERY DAY. That is wired into the male genetic code, and I was peaking out at all levels, all deployment, in a way that I knew would stick with me wherever I went in life, however long that life might last. And the more I did it all, the more I wanted—the more I needed—to keep doing it.
That’s easier said than done, though, because ultimately, you are playing a very dangerous game, one where the key to winning is figuring out just how long you can play it while still having fun. And make no mistake: Killing bad guys is fun. Some guys get really good at the game, but then they get sick of it and bow out. Either mentally they’re over it, or physically they just check out. For me, the fun never really seemed to stop, but I did start to realize that there were other kinds of fun out there and that maybe they were healthier than the kind I was having.
* * *
—
Between my fourth and fifth deployments in early 2008, I’d finally joined the social media revolution and gotten a MySpace page. I didn’t think much of it at first; it was just a way to stay in touch with my brothers and some of my friends from high school. In Balad, I checked it every week or so to read and respond to messages. Checking it weekly instead of daily ended up being torture, because rather than seeing the trickle of daily life events, I’d see this massive accumulation of carefree fucking around from everyone in my Top 8 that made it seem like their entire existence was one long weekend. I’d be scrolling through photos of house parties and beach bonfires—everything normal twenty-two-year-olds do—and then head over to the ready room to put together charges for that night’s mission, which might be some piece of shit mud brick building full of bearded assholes who wipe their asses with their bare hands. The cognitive divide was massive, and it started really playing with my head.
What I was looking at, I realize now, was the other half of that cliché about the senior year of high school I talked about earlier. At some point, you bump into guys who graduated a year or two ahead of you and they let you in on a little secret: There’s more after high school, and it’s way better. Dominating high school is cool and all, but college? Working for yourself? Not having to do anything if you want to be a bum for a while? That’s real. That’s freedom. And it’s fucking awesome.
MySpace put a mirror in my face and forced me to look into it, and what I found was someone whose decisions had taken one hell of a mental and physical toll, no matter how much he wanted to deny it.
Then another question crept into my head: Would I ever be able to transition back into the real world and assimilate? It seemed to me that going from hunting humans with lasers to hunting for a “normal job” in the private sector would be virtually impossible. The idea of going on a civilian job interview was weirdly terrifying:
Interviewer: Do you have any management experience?
Mat: I was a team leader.
Interviewer: Great. Tell me, how did you normally handle conflict?
Mat: Usually a short-barrel M4 carbine. But sometimes, also helicopters.
Interviewer: Thanks…We’ll be in touch.
This was more than a passing concern for me, because the deadline for reenlistment was coming up fast. Until very recently, my mind had been set. I was going to sign those papers and keep doing what we were doing: living the dream. But suddenly the decision wasn’t so clear anymore. With only two days left to decide, a message popped up from one of my best friends back home who knew that my deployment was about to end.