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By Root 815 0

lethal combat matériel. To shock to life the plodding, war-making golem of the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division, you need toothpaste and shoelaces and sunscreen. As a supply sergeant, Matt Novak’s mission was to procure enough toilet paper for five hundred soldiers to wipe their asses for a month. He bought video cameras, flight suits, reams of paper, heaters, computers, crates of a luminescent liquid soldiers paint on vehicles so other soldiers wearing nightscopes don’t mistakenly aerate them with .50-caliber cannons. It’s a free-for-all spending spree when it’s time to go to war. He rang up about $200,000 on his government credit cards at OfficeMax and Home Depot and army-surplus stores, and that’s not including the supplies he procured through normal government supply channels. Often, the hard part wasn’t buying the stuff but making sure you got it. He’d fill out a form for six desk chairs, and by the time the shipment got to the dock there were four; when they got to Matt there’d be two. That’s how crooked the system is; that’s the nature of the beast. So he learned to use unofficial channels to get what he needed. To be a good supply sergeant, it paid to be resourceful, flexible, acquainted with people who had somewhat pliant morals. He bartered, appropriated, and occasionally helped certain items fall off the truck before they were delivered to their rightful owner. There’s a joke in the military: There’s only one thief in the army; the rest of us are just trying to get our shit back.

[While this story is told from Matt Novak’s perspective, italics indicate actual words spoken by Matt during a series of interviews last November while we drove around northern Wisconsin in his ex-wife’s white Dodge Durango. There’s constant background noise on the Novak tapes that gives them a wandering feeling. You can hear stuff rattling around in the backseat—his nine-millimeter, his medical records and written confession, a bottle of Celexa, an antidepressant he’s just started taking again. At night he rolls the Durango down into the woods behind his parents’ house because he doesn’t want it to get repossessed, though he knows it’s only a matter of time.]

The system only got more perverted once they got to Kuwait. Matt’s unit was stationed at an assembly area—Camp New York or Camp Pennsylvania or whatever they named the colonies of tents they’d thrown up in the middle of the desert. The unit didn’t have a lot of the equipment it needed: bullets, M-16 magazines, fluorescent lights, VCRs (the tactical purpose of a VCR was unclear to Matt, but his was not to reason why). They needed a generator and light sets, so Matt and some other guys drove into another unit’s compound at two in the morning, backed up to a generator unit with light sets, fastened them to their trailer, and just drove right by the guards and out into the middle of the desert.

The Third Infantry Division was the first to blow the gates at the Kuwait-Iraq border; the front prong of the longest, fastest combat maneuver ever attempted; the heroic conquerors of Baghdad. There’s a book, Thunder Run, about their daring assault. Matt wasn’t part of that, though. He was attached to a battalion of combat engineers who drove into Baghdad a few days after the initial assault in a convoy of historic proportions that stretched backward to Kuwait, a huge snake in the desert stretching as far as the eye could see. Matt’s unit reported directly to the palace complex, what would later become known as the Green Zone. They were sent to an out-building near Uday Hussein’s house that had been gutted by American ordnance and were told to stay put for the night because the area was not yet secure. Get some rest. Do you really think we were going to sleep? Come on. Let’s get realistic.

Matt’s job was to find useful stuff, and that night alone he broke into fifty, maybe a hundred buildings in the palace complex. It was his first foray into the place that over the ensuing weeks would come to be his domain: from the bulrushes on the Tigris to the four-headed palace, from the zoo to the