Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War

By Matt Gallagher

Spitting some truth about Iraq, Gallagher recounts the stories of him and his men. The day to day mundane, the ironic, sardonic and ugly reality of war. But darn, this guy can write!

"Democratic birth and the quest for financial independence seem to be intrinsically linked - freedom's dirty little not-so-secret. I'm sure Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty would agree. And while the idealist in me - back then, I guess I still thought of myself as one of those - looked upon greed as the ultimate of vices and viewed people who talked about their finances publicly as boors and covetous tools, I couldn't help but sympathize with the locals' fixation. Theirs was a penury only dreams could escape. And for a while, that dream ran through the lean, tall men in body armor from across the sea who arrived in ghost tanks and smiled too much.

They didn't all feel that way though - about us or our money. There were just enough of them out there who wanted us gone or dead, or dead and gone, the battles and skirmishes continued; thus, so did the war.

Reality endured." Pg 19

"It was the day after the great red dust storms ended, a little more than a week after our squadron lost its first soldier to a deep buried IED in the farmlands west of Saba al-Bor. I lay in my bed, staring at the wall from the top bunk, basking in the rarest of days - one in which I could sleep in. I thought about nothing and how awesome it was to think about nothing and how if life went well, nothing wouldn't be so rare anymore. The gears of my mind were just beginning to grind toward muscle movement, mainly a product of memory rather than a conscious decision, when SF Big Country barreled through the door. 

'The IA got Mohammed Shaba!' he said, staying just long enough to drop off his now empty mug of coffee. Just like that, he was gone, I was back in Iraq, and my nothingness had burst like a star cluster, illuminating all kinds of gut wrenching, hidden somethings back into plain sight." Page 47

"With nothing to lose, it was easy for them to be honest with us. The eyes told all.

The stare: history's chronic shame. To the victor goes this eternal barb, the unblinking eye of the masses." Page 59

"The sun was a hammer.

High noon. Mid-July. A patrol that required dismounting. A new contender with an old face ascended to challenge the concept of war for peace. It reigned in flares of tyranny, punishing the masses and the elite alike. What it lacked in staying power, it made up for in promises of daily rebirth, rising from the ashes of night as a big ball of phoenix. 

. . . . The personal tragedy faded away on days like this. With the heat so unrepentant, so unapologetic, no alternative existed. It was, and always had been, and would continue to be, so. Iraq was all we did, all we knew, all we remembered. Patrol, damn it. Patrol." Page 166

"It shot out of the Babylonian dust, shattering the calm harnessed by a sandstone skyline. Surrounded by a haphazard maze of tiny homes and shops lacquered in grime, a sea-green minaret sat on top of the building like a crown. It has overseen easy wars and fragile peaces that leapfrogged for untold life spans, bearing witness to humanity's tragic flaw of eternally repeating itself. The mosque stood as proudly today as on the day it first became a place of worship, many dawns ago. This was just one of those dawns.

The infantry platoon trudged on ahead of and behind me, heads scanning, rifles aching. We were hungry. We were exhausted. We could smell the stench from our own bodies. What we wanted had made that dangerous evolution into what we needed. Despite all of this, the dreamer in me - ignored for many hours and desperate for attention - seized my mind with ironclad resolve, forcing me to stare off to the easy, into the sun and toward the mosque. The soldiers contiued to walk. So did I, although not consciously but simply out of habit and because I didn't know how not to.

Clouds of red puff danced brilliantly with the violet horizon, casing the Shia mosque as aptly as winter could allow. it was so easy to get caught up in the horrors of the moment, I thought, that the most vivid beauties of existence faded into eternal loops of grey. Time to take a deep breath and capture a mental snapshot. It's what a responsible individual does in times like these. 

The now of nowness kicked. It fucking sucked carrying half of my body weight in armor plating, dripping with sweat and anger and impatience, rifle dangling at the low and ready like a forgotten ornament on the backside of a Christmas tree. Why did this country always smell literally like shit? I didn't know. How did I help the counterinsurgency today? God only knew. Those were bitches of the now. They were trivial, fleeting, and banal. And no one cared. Fuck the transient. What really mattered was how this moment survived into something beyond time and beyond me and beyond them and beyond this. Hence the clouds. hence the puff. Hence the horizon.

Hence the holy.

. . . Sometimes I felt like humanity was the stillborn carcass of what we were supposed to be. Other times I wasn't even sure we had made it into the womb.

. . . I pried my eyes away from the east and focused on the street in front of me. My thoughts, though, refused to transition back to the patrol and instead lingered on the dawn and the mosque. With the minaret crown. With the dancing clouds and the grave chants of the Salah. This was all temporary, I reminded myself, even though it felt oh so normal and everlong and permanent. Whether Stryker wheels rolled over the sands of Hussaniyah for months or years or decades more, that hallowed house would watch over many more easy wars and many more fragile peaces, standing proudly throughout. And some other rambling junior officer with dark bags under his eyes, from my country or another, would peer out at the Iraqi sunrise and wonder. 

Like I said. Eternal loops of grey.

My inner reins broke, and I kept walking mentally, joining my physical location a half mile from the mosque. One thought lingered with me, though, all the way through the patrol and back to the JSS: Fuck the transient." Pages 241 - 243

Book 6