Free The War I Always Wanted by Brandon Friedman Page A

soon-to-be battalion commander (who wasn’t all that far from retirement) was asking the young lieutenant what combat had been like in Afghanistan. Despite that, I sensed that he recognized what lay ahead; he knew what was just over the horizon. Unlike those who’d sent us there in the first place, Ahuja had spent his entire adult life preparing for this moment. He looked me straight in the eye while we sat there, and said something to me with the expression of a guy who thought,
You may think I’m crazy for saying this, but I know what I’m talking about
.
    â€œYou know, Lieutenant Friedman, everybody keeps talking about how all the Iraqis are gonna surrender, and how this is just gonna be a walk in the park. But I’m not so sure. People don’t like being invaded. They don’t like being bombed, and they don’t like tanks in their streets—even if they do live undera dictator. That’s just reality. I think there’s always gonna be that guy who’s out to fight for his country no matter what. He doesn’t care about the politics. He just knows that we’re invading
his
country. And he knows he’s gonna to do everything in his power to stop us.”
    I thought about it and just said, “Sir, I hope you’re wrong.”
    We had moved out from Camp New Jersey the day before. It had been a day of missile exchanges and confused radio reports, but we hadn’t really played any significant part at all. I had had projectiles launched at me and then, after nightfall, I had listened to the buzz of Tomahawk cruise missiles flying directly over my head on their way across the border. For all its buildup, “shock and awe” to me had been a surprisingly soft mechanical buzz a hundred feet over my head.
    Around three o’clock that afternoon Colonel Ahuja and I went to recon the border with Iraq. We were supposed to find the general who was coordinating the division’s passage through the breach lane.
    For some reason I had pictured explosions as being part of breaching the heavily guarded border between the two countries. Perhaps some running and screaming Iraqi border guards. But when we arrived at the border, the scene was calm and businesslike. There were U.S. Army humvees parked up against a twelve-foot-high dirt berm. There were also several SUVs belonging to the Kuwaiti border patrol. On the other side, I was told, was a unit of combat engineers. They were carefully deconstructing the dirt berms and wire obstacles that marked the entrance into Iraq. There was no hint of resistance.
    My vision of tanks crashing through heavily fortified watchtowers was quickly replaced with the reality of an orderly preparation for the smooth transit of thousands of soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division into enemy territory. Everything was so
nonchalant
.
    When we returned to the brigade assembly area, I spent the rest of the afternoon taking pictures with friends and dozing. I would normally have spent the time going over the battle plan with my NCOs, but in this case no plan had yet filtered down to our level.
    The mission was simply to drive to a point on the map and once there, to wait for instructions. The point on the map was twenty miles southwest of Najaf, some 240 miles into Iraq. It was called FARP Shell—and it was simply a plot of desert destined to be used as a forward area refueling and rearming point for the division’s Apache helicopters. The name Shell came from the gas station, the FARP being our improvised desert equivalent. The two other FARPs being established in southern Iraq were FARP Conoco and FARP Exxon. Read into that what you want.
    I had been given a stack of maps and a sheet with typed grid coordinates that were supposed to keep us on track as we drove. I knew nothing about the cities and areas through which we would pass, and I knew nothing about possible enemy contact along the route. The whole