Free I Lost My Love in Baghdad by Michael Hastings

fucking Fallujah—and they would be here for at least a year.
    The next day the public affairs officer found me. He was a weird dude, a gangly forty-something man with acne scars who told me he considered himself something of a journalist, having worked for an army paper on Okinawa, and that he missed his wife, who was from some South Pacific island. He told me to speak to another public affairs officer, a young female marine lieutenant who had arranged my embed. We tried her office, and were told, since it was Sunday, she was probably at mass. We finally tracked her down in the mess hall. I sat down across from her. A marine officer sat down next to me; she introduced him as her husband. They said a prayer, which caught me off guard—I’d never seen anyone pray over KBR food. We chatted briefly about being married in a war zone; they both expressed gratitude that they were able to deploy at the same place, at the same time. Then she told me what my schedule looked like. I’d be with the 2-2 Marines, who would soon be going out to patrol a main supply road heading into Fallujah. I got a lift across Camp Fallujah in an SUV to meet them.
    Four Humvees were waiting for me, the marines milling about the trucks.
    Lance Corporal Robert Freeman was my driver. He told me to call him “Freebase.” I asked Lance Corporal Freebase what was on the itinerary for today.
    â€œDrive around and don’t get blown up,” he said.
    I wrote this down.
    â€œYou gonna put that in your magazine? Make sure you say it’s from Freebase.”
    Lance Corporal Freebase had just turned nineteen, he said. He smiled and gave me a Marlboro Red. Lance corporals, he informed me, had the lowest life expectancy of any Americans in Iraq.
    We spent the afternoon patrolling up and down a two-lane highway, pounding Mountain Dews for caffeine, kicking back a Red Bull, smoking Marb Reds in the Humvee, stopping to take a piss out in the middle of the desert. Up and down the road, thirty miles an hour, so hot your brain gets tired. It was the platoon’s usual patrol for “route security,” making sure it was clear of bombs. They did it six times a week for eight to ten hours a day. There was not much to look at—rough sand flattening out under a blue sky. I dozed off a few times, lulled by the weight of my helmet, the heat, and the slow rhythm of the Humvee.
    We stopped to move gas cans away from the road.
    â€œThey make great fireballs with the IEDs,” explained Lieutenant James Martin, who used to work in financial services in New York City before 9-11. After 9-11 he joined the Marine Corps. “I hate to do it, because that’s how those Iraqis make a living, selling the gas in those containers. But we have to.”
    There was a tree branch in the middle of the road—another possible IED. Martin approached on foot, poked at it with his boot, then dragged the branch to the side of the road. An hour later, we came upon a half-open cardboard box. Martin stepped out, raised his rifle, and gave the box a kick. Nothing. Out in the field, troops often didn’t wait for the EOD units; they preferred to walk up to suspected IEDs and check them out for themselves.
    Martin told me he once kicked a car tire inner tube, and all he heard was a thud—a 155mm mortar shell made in South Africa was on the inside. “I confirmed it was an IED.” He laughed.
    A little later, the Humvee’s radio sounded off. Another platoon on patrol from the 2-2 had gotten hit with a bomb. No one was killed, but the machine gunner on the Humvee had been hit with shrapnel. The gunner in my Humvee, hearing the news, peeked down inside the truck to get clarification.
    â€œWhat got hit?” the gunner asked.
    â€œThe right side of his face,” one marine answered. “Don’t worry about it. You don’t need the right side of your face, do you?”
    Lance Corporal Freebase, still driving, remarked over