So a month ago, I got an email asking if I’d like to read Matt Gallagher’s book, Kaboom: embracing the suck in a savage little war. I remembered him as one of the more literary milbloggers, and I’m a whore for books anyway, so I said “sure.”

The book sat, accusingly, on the dining table for the past three weeks, and finally I sat down to read it tonight.

I just finished it, and – gosh. Really, gosh. What a great book.

I’ve read most of the books from the front of this dragged-out, messed-up war. It’s much like my efforts to sit down and talk to Iraqis or people who’ve lived there or people who’ve fought there – to try and get some glimpse of the reality that is hidden in the abstraction of the books about history, or policy, or strategy.

And I’ve read those books. Lone Survivor. Not A Good Day to Die. My War. Assassin’s Gate. One Bullet Away. Imperial Life Inside the Emerald City. This Man’s Army. The Unforgiving Minute.

This is a better book than those. Really.

It’s a better book because it isn’t a journalist’s retelling of the bloody minutiae of battle a la Black Hawk Down. It makes no pretext of being a sweeping strategic view of the war. It is not a journey of personal growth (not explicitly). It’s not a historian’s view or a policy wonk’s or a weapons and tactics fetishists. It is, simply, a very talented writer’s telling of what he saw and felt and did in two years of combat in Iraq with no point of view except honesty.

From the fragments I’ve gotten from my son and from parents of other sons, it is what I imagine they would tell us if they wrote down their experiences. It reads – real..

And it reads so damn well…

Attitude

If looks killed, there would be far more than 4,000 American ghosts trapped in Babylon’s sand spunk.

I had heard it before – the Hawaiians have a term for this visual hate. Da stinkeye, bruddah-man, bettah stay in Waikiki, haole, ya dig? I had seen it before – drunk college boys in pastel polo shirts with fat wallets should be more careful where they venture in the slums of the dirty South. And I had felt it before – scarecrow tourists with cameras and smiles and perfect white teeth didn’t penetrate into the seedy backwaters of Dublin unless they wanted trouble. Have you ever knifed another man just to feel his very essence pour out of him in pools of running red and guts of unidentifiable slop onto the sidewalk?

Ummm. yes, we did. And no, no I have not.

Still, though, This was different. 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.

and action…

“White 4, this is White I,” I said.

No answer.

“White 4, this is White I,” I repeated.

No fucking answer. Nothing but radio static.

I broke into a profanity-laced tirade, which culminated in my beating my hand mic against my helmet. Despite the tenseness of our situation, my rambling antics cracked a few of the guys up. Still nothing more than a very serious mind doomed with a clown’s soul, I thought. Then I remembered Sergeant Spade still had radio communications from the Stryker, and I had him relay our update. Deep breath. We still had commo with the outside world.

“4 copies,” Sergeant Spade yelled down from his hatch. “The section in cordon is still in position and reports that the IA are the only ones shooting now. Also, Steel still reports receiving contact in the south.”

I looked over at Staff Sergeant Boondock, who just shrugged his shoulders. “Keep moving?” he suggested.

“Roger,” I said, signaling to the soldiers to resume their column positions behind my Stryker. No more than twenty meters after we continued our movement, though, my Stryker came to a halt. I heard Sergeant Spade’s voice rise in pieces above the engine and other extraneous noise.

“LT … a bunch of guys … waving … civilian clothes … they might be Sahwa … armed.”

While I didn’t have the sights Sergeant Spade did in his hatch, a quick glance around my Stryker confirmed his report. There were definitely Iraqi men to our front who were definitely waving at us and definitely armed to the fangs with foreign rifles. The problem was, we couldn’t walk behind the Stryker all the way north until we could confirm that these men were indeed Sons of Iraq. A series of shabby huts canalized the maneuverable terrain ten meters in front of our current position. The civilian world referred to this as a stalemate. The French called it an impasse. American soldiers knew it as a clusterfuck.

I felt compelled to instigate some course of action and remembered the first thing they taught us at the armor officer basic course: It was better to execute a shitty plan quickly than to wait around for the perfect plan. Well, I could do that. To hell with it, I thought, these bastards can’t hit anything they shoot at anyway. Stepping around the side of the Stryker, I started walking toward the group of armed, faceless Arab men and told my guys to stay put. I took three steps, then felt a firm hand grab me from behind, at the neck collar, yanking me backward.

“No way, sir. Let me go first,” Specialist Haitian Sensation said. He was nice enough to say it like I had a choice in the matter, as he had flung me back with the chiseled ease of someone who regularly benched twice my body weight. I regained my footing, smirked to myself, and followed, waving and loudly yelling all the friendly Arabic I could think of. The rest of the dismounts wedged out behind us.

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