Free The War I Always Wanted by Brandon Friedman

watched the show. I thought of the movie
The Big Lebowski
. In it, John Goodman’s character, Walter Sobchak, is smashing his nemesis’ Corvette with a crowbar.
    I hear him yelling at the top of his lungs, “Do you see what happens, Larry? Do you see what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass?”
He brings the crowbar down over his head and onto the windshield of the pristine car, crushing it. “
This
is what happens, Larry!” He strikes the hood of the car. “This is what happens when you
fuck a stranger in the ass!”
He swings the crowbar squarely into the driver’s-side door
.
    Yes, Walter, this is what happens. This is what happens. I listened in the cold night air, as bombs, a few football fields away, continually found their marks.
    Minutes later I heard the faint thumping of rotors echoing through the mountains. Shortly thereafter, the Chinook landed on our LZ. I sat motionless, with my back to my ruck, watching through my NODs as grainy green figures exited the back of the bird. With the night vision, I could see the two infrared targeting lasers used by the door gunners, as they anxiously scanned the surrounding terrain. The bird remained there, rotors spinning, for less than three minutes, while the last of 3rd Platoon’s troops shuffled off the ramp. Once the last man cleared it, the Chinook’s rotor blades deepened in tone. At that point, wind, dust, and pebbles were scattered through the air in a blast of wind as the bird rose into the night sky. Seconds later everything was quiet. Even the bombing had stopped.
    We still had a little less than an hour before daylight. Curled up and trying to retain warmth in any way possible, I began to doze. For the second night in a row, I lay on the ground with my teeth chattering. I wasn’t aware of the existence of any plan past sunrise. All I knew was that I would live for another night, and at dawn, in some form or fashion, we would take the fight to the enemy.

Part II
 
    KNOWLEDGE
    â€œThat’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.”
    â€”Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse-Five

6
 
The Desert
    March 2003
    I awoke with a start in Kuwait, covered in sweat. I had been napping in the front seat of my humvee. I decided to step out onto the desert floor and stretch my legs. The constriction of my chemical protective suit was bothersome, but I was being forced to wear it anyway. At the time apparently, someone thought Iraq had chemical weapons.
    I leaned over the hood of the truck, resting my elbows on it. I scanned the area briefly before settling my gaze on the western horizon. The road stretching out before me was blacktop. It disappeared in the distance some miles before it reached the horizon. I’d never before stood on land so flat. Besides the thin strip of black there were only two other colors in the landscape to my front. One was the haze color of an empty sky that was neither blue nor gray. The other was the light beige, almost off-white, color of the endless desert. The two colors met at the horizon, nearly blending. To look in that direction was to squint.
    To my back was a silent armada of vehicles. Some were gun trucks and some were command trucks. Some were troop transports and others were refuelers. In all, they represented the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division—the Rakkasans.
    Before us, at the still unseen point where the sky met the land, was the Iraqi frontier. Behind us was Afghanistan and everything else.
    Having decided to take a walk, I ended up sitting with Lieutenant Colonel Ahuja in a humvee, where we discussed the merits of invading versus not invading—and what we thought we could expect. Ahuja was a former Rakkasan on the division staff, still several months away from taking command of his first battalion in the 101st. In our conversation, the roles were oddly reversed—the