“Ha, I’ve heard I look like him.”
“I knew it! The guns and the tits that I like. The freedom blanket! This is great!”
“All right, dude, keep your voice down. And let’s not be telling the guard force about this, okay?”
“Yes, sir. I play it cool. Like your videos.”
My team member just threw his gloves down and started laughing.
“Really, Mat? Are you fucking kidding me?” he chuckled.
As my notoriety continued to grow on these military installations, it became abundantly clear that I needed to find a way to lower my profile when I was deployed. In a place where secrecy and security are the Adam and Eve of standard operating procedures, I wasn’t doing anyone any favors by drawing attention to myself like a public figure. I just wanted to fly under the radar and do my job.
One day I was at the chow hall and I got approached by a dude who wanted a picture. Of course, that’s totally cool. I’m still flattered that people want to put in the effort to capture their interaction with me. So I get up, the dude pulls out his phone, and we take the picture. No big deal. Up, snap, handshake, down. It’s like a fame burpee. I didn’t think anything more about it until later that night when I went back to my room and opened my computer. Right there on Facebook, under the “Notifications” tab, I saw that someone had tagged me in a photo. It was the guy from earlier, of course. I clicked on the notification and read the caption:
In Kabul, hanging out with Mat Best!
Now it was my turn to sound like my team leader. I messaged the guy right away:
Really bro? Are you fucking kidding me? We’ve got beards, working a secret job, and you just told people where we are. You can’t tag my name and our location in a fucking picture on Facebook!
Unbelievable. This isn’t the Teen Choice Awards. I get it, the competition for “Choice Hissy Fit” is always a battle, but it’s not an actual war zone like the place where we were living and working.
If this was any indication, it was only a matter of time before innocent pictures like this one began to jeopardize OPSEC, PERSEC, InfoSec, triple sec, every other “Sec” you could think of. From that point forward on this deployment I made the executive decision to spend less time in the chow hall and start locking myself in my room after work. It sucked, and I hated to think that all these great guys who liked what we were doing might feel like I was big-timing them. But the less attention I attracted, the better off we all would be.
The one that really put it over the top for me, though, was my second-to-last deployment as a contractor, when I ran into the two highest-ranking members of 2nd Ranger Battalion—my former unit—in the chow hall on a base in Afghanistan. They were there networking with some of our personnel who they worked closely with on various operations. When I saw that they were all done eating, I went over to introduce myself. I barely got two words in before one of them made it clear he knew who I was.
“Keep doing great things,” he said as he shook my hand. “You’re a 2/75 guy, is that right?”
“Yeah, roger that, Sergeant Major.”
“My son’s a big fan,” one of the officers said. “Can we take a picture?”
Can we take a picture? You’re the brass of 2/75. You can take my anal virginity if you think it’ll help. Obviously I didn’t tell him that, since he already knew, I just stood next to him and put on my best “this isn’t totally awesome” face. Knowing these pics would be in the hands of a hard-ass Ranger, I didn’t have to worry about them ending up fucking geotagged on Facebook, so we whipped out our phones and snapped away right there in the chow hall.
When we were done, I ran back to my room and immediately texted Jarred to tell him what had happened, because, make no mistake, this was a big deal. When you’re active duty, you never see the battalion brass unless someone fucks up or something really bad happens. In all my time in the 2/75, I don’t think I ever materially engaged with my command sergeant major or a battalion officer. And if I did, I definitely didn’t do it as a peer, like I just had as a contractor.
But more importantly, the command sergeant major’s words made it clear to me that what we were doing with these videos wasn’t just goofy and fun. It was important and had value to the community. It always feels good to make people laugh, but when it reached people in that environment, where there isn’t a whole lot to laugh about, it gave everything we were doing a sense of deeper purpose. It also confirmed for me something I would barely allow myself to think and would never verbalize to others: I might actually be able to do this full-time, for a living. It was scary and liberating at the same time. Up until then, my primary concern wasn’t whether the video stuff could be successful; it was whether I was gradually fucking up both possible career paths—contractor and whatever this was—by splitting my time and attention between them.
I was about to find out.
Chapter 17
Shirts & Shots & Shows & Service
I will be the first to admit that for most of my adult life, if it didn’t involve weapons, war, or women, I had no fucking clue what I was doing. I was just faking it until, fingers crossed, I was making it. I was throwing shit at the wall hoping something would stick. Now that these videos were sticking, I started to think a little bigger about what they might be able to accomplish.
Jarred and I had already started to come up with all sorts of grand plans for the YouTube channel and the Facebook page, but it was about more than that. It was about building a platform to convey a larger message. The one thing I kept coming back to—an issue that had become really frustrating to me—was the way people in our society talk about veterans. All you ever heard about in the news or on TV shows were things like the destructiveness of PTSD or the crippling nature of survivor’s guilt.
And while some veterans do suffer from those issues, if Law & Order did an episode where a soldier killed someone, it was never because he was an evil prick who happened to be in the military (the Marines, obviously), it was because he’d done a tour in Iraq and he saw his best friend die in an IED attack and it broke his brain and then he came home and everything was different and he couldn’t sleep and it made it hard for him to hold down a job and then he got evicted from his apartment and then his girlfriend fucked his best friend and took his dog. Blah blah blah blah blah. Every veteran story was just this endless parade of horribles. What they failed to show, time and again, was my experience, which was the same as the experience of the hundreds of veterans I’ve known and served with who loved their time in the military and to this day view it as one of the most important, meaningful, enjoyable periods of their lives. No matter where you looked, there was no appetite for our stories anywhere. It felt like the forces that controlled the culture, that attempted to shape how we reckon with war and the warriors who fight it, had not built enough tolerance into the system, or put enough slack in the line, to accommodate the powerful notion that there are men and women out there who put their lives at risk to fight for others, to fight for an ideal, not because they had to but because they wanted to, they needed to. These were the forces that convinced civilians to thank us for our service on airport concourses all across America, in solemn, guilt-riddled tones, like we must have been compelled, reluctantly, to sacrifice our freedom, when in fact we had proactively exercised it to enlist and do something we loved.