After returning home in February, 2008 from a month-long embed with a U.S. Army Stryker Brigade (1st
Battalion, 21st Infantry, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry
Division, to be exact) operating in the farmland northwest
of Baghdad, I kept in contact with several junior officers I had met.
One of these soldiers—a West Point-educated second Lieutenant stationed
at a small company sized combat outpost—would later complain how his
company was ordered back to Camp Victory, the sprawling Forward
Operating Base (FOB) in Baghdad to serve out the last few months of
their tour. This
meant a life surrounded by the bureaucratic-minded “Fobbits” who never
left the security of the base, and worse, that the mostly
self-sufficient adventure of life outside the wire was all but over,
replaced with the drudgery of garrison life.
For infantry grunts like this lieutenant, whom I
had seen arrest suspected insurgents, roll up a significant cache of
weapons and explosives, deal with the deadly aftermath of a suicide
bomber, and work through and with sketchy local Iraqi allies, to be
ordered back to a place like Victory was a special kind of punishment.
But orders are orders. I was reminded of this kind of Big Army logic
while reading a book written by another young lieutenant who served with
the Strykers of the 25th Division’s 2nd Squadron, 14th
Cavalry Regiment in Iraq during the “Surge” years of 2007-2008. Lt. Matt
Gallagher was a platoon commander who, writing under the name Lt. G,
launched a blog during his deployment to keep family and friends updated
on what life as a grunt was like in Iraq. Dubbing it "Kaboom: A
Soldier's War Journal," the blog quickly took off and attracted a
readership among the milblog community and beyond, and as such,
eventually drew the ire of his commanding officers. After Gallagher
turned down a promotion that would mean a move to a desk job away from
his men, he blogged about the dressing down he received from his
commanding officer, calling it “an illogical backlash from higher,
acting like a spurned teenage blonde whose dreamboat crush tells her
point-blank that he prefers brunettes.”
That got the blog pulled, and guaranteed that the
next “bullshit tasking” that came up had his name on it. And that
tasking came down the not long after, sending Gallagher to a desk job
back at Camp Taji, the large FOB his unit officially called home. Out of
the Army since 2008, Gallagher has now written a book about his 15 months in
Iraq.
Gallagher’s smart, honest,
and introspective book joins the best of the literary output we’ve seen
come out of Iraq, up there with Nate Fick’s One Bullet Away and Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War as essential reading for
anyone who wants to read superlative first-hand accounts of life on the
ground. (Filkins of course isn’t a soldier, but still captured many
ground truths during his extensive reporting from Iraq in 2003-2008.)
Gallagher’s book stands apart from those memoirs however, in that it
is—from start to finish—laugh out loud hilarious. This isn’t to say that
it is more or less “real” than any of those other books, but Gallagher
brilliantly captures the pop-culture-infused profanities, practical
jokes and gallows humor shared by grunts in the field better than any
other book of the post-9/11 era.
Like his blog, the book is stacked full of the
weird mix of tension, comedy, absurdity, loyality, boredom, frustration,
and fear that makes modern American conflict what it is. But for all
the comedy that Gallagher is capable of slinging, (his men took to
naming a stun gun “Cultural Awareness,” and dubbed an Iraqi with
unusually long fingers “Sheik Banana-Hands”) there are also moments of
prose that light up the page:
“The
flowers and hugs and cheers from the liberation only lasted a few months
before one stare became ten stares, became one hundred stares. Suddenly
the stare was the norm, house by house, block by block, and town to
town, and all the flower petals dried up, and we suddenly recognized
that those cheers of gratitude were actually pleas for salvation. There
were thousands of them, and they were everywhere. This pattern of
starbursting degeneration, roughly translated from Arabic, meant
occupation.”
Wars—even
insurgencies—are titanic struggles fought by large, impersonal groups,
but to the combatant there is nothing impersonal about the experience.
Everyone’s war is different. Everyone’s war is their own. Gallagher’s
book shows that while Big Army will always win the battle of wills,
every soldier, even the most obedient, is an individual, and this might
be one of the Army's greatest strengths in the first decade of our new,
confused millennium.
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