Free Kaboom by Matthew Gallagher

most of the people use them to stay warm at night.”
    â€œWhat?” Major Moe was outraged. “That’s absurd! Like for blankets?”
    An even longer awkward pause followed, as Staff Sergeant Boondock tried in vain to stifle his laughter.
    â€œUhh, no, sir. For their fires.”
    This caused Staff Sergeant Boondock’s snickering to turn into an all-out howl, while I slowly attempted to slide down my chair and out of Major Moe’s view from the top of the staircase.
    Our interactions with Major Moe weren’t always so harmless. As the months of our deployment passed, these incidents became less hilarious and more and more maddening.
    Just because a field grade wasn’t a Major Moe, though, didn’t mean he automatically qualified as the quintessential leader of men we all wanted to
follow. As a generation of men raised by single women and without fathers—as most of the junior officers and enlisted soldiers were—we didn’t give our senior leaders much beyond the basic military courtesies demanded of us. Anything else they had to—and we wanted them to—earn. And we hoped they would, although it didn’t always turn out that way. Like with Lieutenant Colonel Larry.
    In all fairness, Lieutenant Colonel Larry was usually a hard worker and tactically competent. Though not as common as Major Moe, he still derived from an ideology and, thus, was embodied by multiple persons. All Lieutenant Colonel Larrys were bona fide Cold Warriors though—a derisive term used by junior officers of the global war on terrorism (GWOT) era to describe the senior officers and senior NCOs still hopelessly devoted to Cold War-era doctrine and techniques. Iraq, like most nonconventional counterinsurgencies that aimed for success, was fought on the ground level by small units, like squads and sections and platoons. Company and troop commanders became local gods who controlled civil works contracts and the electricity for entire townships; platoon leaders and squad leaders became their apostles, wandering the desert, spreading the good word, fighting battles for public perception one person at a time.
    Field grades and senior NCOs had grown up not in this environment but in a far more rigid, structured army whose mission was simply to act on and destroy the enemy. Some thrived on this change and embraced the fluidity of a counterinsurgency, others had spent their careers on the strategic level planning for just this sort of war, but still others on the operational level seemed to have a very difficult time adapting and struggled to find purpose in our current operating environment. In these situations, friction tended to arise between the respective layers of leadership.
    An incessant micromanager, our squadron’s Lieutenant Colonel Larry often led through intimidation. It seemed like there wasn’t a leader in his unit whose job he didn’t threaten over the course of our fifteen months in theater. He claimed throughout the summer and the fall that Bravo Troop was the most undisciplined outfit he’d ever seen, which might have had an effect if he hadn’t already said the same thing about the other reconnaissance troops in the squadron before and after that.
    Clinical misery ran rampant through our squadron commander’s staff, and some of his troop commanders had to take antianxiety medication in order to deal with his constant tirades. He routinely arrived unannounced
at the squadron’s combat outposts—usually during banking hours, in the middle of the day, staying just long enough to chastise us on uniform standards and a loose piece of trash, but arriving back on the FOB in time for dinner. The outpost was our home, where we lived twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was more than natural for us to relax there when we weren’t on patrol or on security, it was a necessity.
    Behind his back, the Joes often whispered, “Do you always walk around