Fort Benning, Georgia – 2006

Two years have passed since that first deployment to Iraq. I sit staring into a glass of Jack Daniel’s whiskey and note the tremble in my hands. The whiskey is supposed to help with that, but it doesn’t. What I see reflected in the liquid is a man I can scarcely recognize anymore. What happened to that jovial, wise-cracking soldier that patrolled Sadr City with Lieutenant Aguero and Sergeant Chen and all the other soldiers in his infantry platoon? Where’s that guy with such an appetite for knowledge and such a zest for life?

He’s sitting here toasting the dead; thinking about good men gone too soon. And this is the second year that he’s done that, always on the same day, April 4. And on this night, unlike so many others since he came home from Iraq, this is the only drink he will have. Debauchery is now strictly for weekends. This guy needed to do well in his studies and that demanded a semi-clear head. Like it or not, this guy is me and I’m bound to finish my degree, get a commission, and get back to war. That’s a goal and a promise I intend to keep—to myself and to those good men.

The first time I took a shot at getting an education, it was mainly to please my parents; maybe get some kind of degree and some kind of acceptable life. It didn’t go well and that eventually led me to the Army, to war in Iraq. That was nearly a decade past and this time I had a goal, a mission, a purpose in passing my class requirements. Despite the motivation I didn’t have on the first foray into academia, it’s been tough sledding. I struggled every day to focus, to forget—at least for short periods—what happened in Iraq. The irony of chasing a degree in order to obtain an Army commission that would take me back to war wasn’t lost on me. I simply ignored it.

The real challenge these days on a college campus in 2006 was suppressing the urge to kill the people who pissed me off. There were a lot of them, and my temper ran hot all the time. During the 20 minute drive to school every day, I imagined myself back in Sadr City behind the trigger of a heavy .50 cal, ready to use it on the idiots sharing the road. And every day it seemed like some slack-jawed snob in one class or another ran his mouth about “that unjust war in Iraq” which led me to daydreams in which I used the bastard’s shaggy beard to scrub out an Arab toilet. Some days, the pressure was so intense that I had to just leave to avoid blowing a very violent gasket.

A detonation like that would mean the end of my ROTC scholarship and an insurmountable roadblock to the commission I wanted after graduation. I had to maintain and survive at least eight hours every school week in close proximity to young Americans who couldn’t be bothered to occasionally stir the mush in their skulls. And, God help us, a number of those people were also pursuing military commissions. There were just two of us in the ROTC unit who had prior service. The other guy had never deployed, so I was the only one with combat experience. Since I’d spent an Iraq deployment in an infantry platoon, the NCO in charge of our campus unit often tapped me to assist in training the other cadets. I taught familiar stuff like squad tactics and tried to give the cadets—male and female—the occasional motivational lectures in between battle drills. Most of those inspirational talks began with “pay attention” and ended with “or you will die as a horrible failure.” They seemed to get the message and I was proud of that. Maybe I had that rare leadership gene.

Other than that, I mainly behaved like an antisocial asshole. The stupid students in my regular classes just made me angry or elicited my sympathy for their ignorance. The men and women in my ROTC unit were mostly just as ignorant, and they made me fear for the soldiers they might lead someday. They were clueless about the sacrifice and bloodshed involved if and when they ever got onto a battlefield in charge of a unit. When I taught them or just talked to them about military service, I wanted to scare them; to get them to re-think the whole deal. When that failed, as it usually did, I was proud of them for ignoring the manic combat vet and sticking to the program.

I struggled to stay focused on the goals, the degree, the commission, the return to war as a leader in the mold of soldiers like Lieutenant Aguero. That required an effort so intense that I had no time for my wife, my parents, old friends or new acquaintances outside the ROTC unit. When I thought about my lonely life—and I didn’t do it very often—what I really missed were my Army buddies from my platoon in Iraq. They were either dead, wounded, scattered to the winds chasing a life after the Army, or preparing for yet another combat deployment while I was safe on a college campus.

Sometimes I went through my notes and the tape recordings I had made in Iraq with the intention of writing a book about my combat experiences. My mother made good on her promise to have the tapes transcribed, and I had a pile of papers that contained lots of thoughts and memories about war. The problem was that I couldn’t bring myself to begin writing, to turn those notes into something that might be useful or moving for others to read. I always seemed to be too busy with other things or just unwilling to resurrect the memories, free the ghosts, and try to make sense of it all. On the rare occasions when I promised myself that I would try, that I would just get started, I wound up frozen like a cliff diver staring down at surf breaking on deadly rocks. There was bound to be serious pain if I stepped off that cliff, so I procrastinated and justified my cowardice.

And then staring into that glass of Jack on the second anniversary of that April 4 ambush I decided the coward reflected in the whiskey needed to suck it up and honor his buddies by telling their story. “Here’s to you, buddies,” I whispered and chugged the drink. And then I settled down to write.