stop pretending there is a plot.

❝ Aside from insects and plants, I'd killed one living thing in my life. While mowing my parents' lawn as a teenager, I'd accidentally wounded a chipmunk with the mower blade. Gritting my teeth, I'd cut off its head with a shovel. Even this mercy killing had bothered me. I'd never been hunting and had no desire to go. Now, shooting grenades at strangers in an unnamed town, I was kind of enjoying myself. ❞

❝ [. . .] I saw a young man crouching in an alley. [. . .] He held an AK-47 and sighted down its barrel as he fired at us. [. . .] I lobbed a grenade at him and the round exploded against the wall just above his head. I watched him fall over the rifle. We flashed past the alley, and I reloaded, firing more grenades into windows and open doors. ❞

❝ [. . .] Ahead of us, the Iraqis dropped an overhead power line onto Colbert's vehicle, knocking Corporal Walt Hasser from the turret. He sprawled backward across the roof. I watched a pair hands reach up and pull him upright. For an eternity of two or three seconds, we sat almost motionless. In the lull, I heard a Mark-19 roaring behind me as Corporal Jacks tore a building in half. [. . .] When enemy fire erupted from a mud-brick building to our left, Jacks stitched it with dozens of grenades, collapsing three stories into two and silencing the fedayeen guns. When Hasser sat up, we jumped forward again. ❞

❝ With a sickening crunch, Colbert's heavy-armored Humvee cracked through the field's dirt crust and sank to its frame in tar. [. . .] The wind had picked up, and blowing sand turned the sky orange and cut our visibility to a few hundred meters. Patrick crept forward to the edge of the sobka and hooked a winch to the rear of Colbert's Humvee. Rudy threw the vehicle into reverse, whining, straining, not moving an inch. It was futile. [. . .] I called the battalion on the radio and requested Goodwrench, the mechanical support team. [. . .] Five minutes after my call for help, Staff Sergeant Brinks came chugging up the highway in his hand-me-down five-ton Army truck, oblivious to the bullets snapping past. [. . .] Hopping down from the cab with a grin, Brinks said, "Howdy, sir. What's up?" I was so strung-out on adrenaline I could hardly speak, and I wasn't sure if his cheeriness was heroism or folly. In time I would learn it's simply the best way to get the job down. ❞

❝ [. . .] Every fight is refought afterward. Sometimes quietly, sometimes boisterously; sometimes with laughs, sometimes with tears. The telling and retelling are important. Platoons have institutional memory. They learn and they change. [. . .] Some officers squelched the stories, considering them unprofessional and distracting. I encouraged them, as psychological unburdening and as improvised classrooms where we sharpened our blades for the next fight. ❞

❝ Combat is a form of vertigo. I was trained to thrive on chaos, but nothing prepared me for the fear of doubting my own senses. Frequently, I found that my memory of a firefight was just that — mine. Afterwards, five Marines told five different stories. [. . .] The domed mosque was burned into my memory, but only Colbert and Wright could remember seeing it as I described it. Person was adamant that we had driven across a bridge during our sprint to the highway. Not one other person in the platoon remembered a bridge, but there it was on the map. ❞

❝ [. . .] Watching Jacks clean his gun before eating, sleeping, or cleaning himself, I saw a bit of the essence of the Marine Corps, the spirit that has sustained young Marines in bad places for more than two hundred years. This was no idle patriotic reverie on my part, though. It was the kernel of a growing unwillingness to watch these Marines mistreated or wrongly employed by those with more power than experience. [. . .] ❞

❝ Colber's Humvee had also been shot up. There were twenty-two bullet holes in it, including six in the door next to Evan Wright's seat. When I walked up, he was studying them with a kind of awe. "How you feeling, Evan?" I half-expected him to say he had enough information for his story and wanted to leave on the next resupply helicopter. "Embedded," he replied. "More embedded than I'd ever thought I'd be." Espera put an arm around his shoulders. "But he's staying with us. Dude's got balls." ❞

❝ At the crossroads stood an enormous stop sign, more than three feet across. It was the customary red octagon, but the word STOP was written in Arabic. I thought it would be perfect for our roadblocks; it might even keep us from killing someone. "Christeson, cut that stop sign down and put it in the back of the truck." He looked at me in disbelief. An officer had never before ordered him to commit vandalism. ❞

❝ [Captain America gives Fick an order to clear a building under unnecessary risk ] Command relationships are built on trust. My CO was right about one thing: this wasn't the time for debate. It was the time for my trust in him to override my questions and concerns. It was the time for that trust to translate into instant obedience to orders. But I had no trust, not in him. His poor decision making since before the start of the war had sapped every bit of the natural trust Marines are taught to have in their chain of command. He was a nice, hard-working guy but tactically incompetent, and that's all that mattered. [Fick point-blank refuses to comply with the order] He shot me a glance without saying anything, and I walked back to my Humvee. I was upset that some of my Marines had been within earshot of the argument. It was unprofessional to discredit the captain in front of them, but circumstance hadn't allowed me many options. Besides, feeling sand regulations came in a distant second to winning battles and keeping Marines alive. We started moving forward, passing the concrete building without seeing anything amiss. ❞

❝ Pausing for the first time all day, I remembered the prisoner in the back of the Humvee. He sprawled face-down on the truck bed with his hands tightly zip-cuffed behind him. Christeson stood over him with a rifle. "Cut him free and give him some food and water," I said. Christeson looked at me as if I'd suggested letting the lions run amok in the San Diego Zoo, but he cut the cuffs off. [. . .] I didn't know whether to believe him, but he had struck a nerve. Al-Khirzgee was about my father's age. [. . .] I remembered my field interrogation at SERE school and thought that, for al-Khirzgee, this was real. He was afraid we would kill him. [. . .] "Drink this water and eat some food. Do what we say, and you won't be harmed. If you fight or try to get away, this Marine will shoot you." I turned to wink at Christeson and mouthed "Don't shoot him." Christeson nodded and fixed his sternest guard face on our prisoner. ❞

❝ Approaching another crossroads, we passed a field of brilliantly green grass. Two men firing AK-47s popped up from a hole in the field, and a machine gun knocked them right back down. One of the men wore a green shirt and khaki trousers. A .50-caliber bullet, almost as big around as a dime and moving at supersonic speed, blew off the back of his skull. The round hit him so hard that it drove his body backward through the air. It neatly removed a piece of bone bigger than my hand, and as the man fell, his brain spilled onto the dirt. He crumpled five feet from the pool of blood that marked his place of death. I felt the elation you feel at the fair after winning a stuffed animal for popping a balloon with a pellet gun. ❞

❝ Tradition had not been consulted in drafting our role in the upcoming war. After a lot of walks across [Camp Matilda] for morning and evening meals, we settled on a modified plan. Sergeant Colbert's Team One would be divided into Team One Alpha and Team One Bravo, each in its own Humvee. Sergeant Espera would control Team One Bravo, operating effectively as a fourth team within the platoon. Colbert's armored Humvee would carry four Marines. Espera would have five Marines riding in his open Humvee. Sergeant Patrick's team, trimmed by one, would consist of five men in a vehicle. Sergeant Lovell's arrangement was the same. Navy HM2 "Doc" Tim Bryan, our corpsman, was one of Lovell's five. Wynn and I would ride in the only Humvee without a heavy machine gun. For protection, we relied on Corporal Evan Stafford, nominally the platoon communicator, and Private First Class John Christeson, our nineteen-year-old special equipment NCO, who was not an NCO and had no special equipment. ❞

❝ Mish, a Kuwaiti civilian, had volunteered to put his hatred of Iraq to positive use by helping us as a translator. [. . .] Mish always looked as if he wanted to sell me a joint. [. . .] "aaGuf Lo iR-Meek. Stop, or I will shoot." In unison: "aaGuf Lo iR-Meek. Stop, or I will shoot." "iH-Nah iH-Nah HuT-Ta iNSaa' a-Dek. We are here to help you." "iH-Nah iH-Nah HuT-Ta iNSaa' a-Dek. We are here to help you." I expected the Marines to lose interest. [. . .] But [they] listened, and they learned. In the coming days, I heard Christeson speaking more Arabic than English. ❞

❝ Exercise was one of my few reprieves from the frustrations of life in the camp. We had early mornings, late nights, no privacy, and no escape from the grind of preparing for war. Talking about war. Thinking about war. War equipment. War maps. War plans. For fifty minutes on the gravel road around Matilda, I was somewhere else. ❞