The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [45]
THERE IS a lot about the army that’s bullshit and a crock—just watch any USO show—but the teamwork and the camaraderie, the way a bunch of lost teenagers are molded into proud men and women, all of that stuff is very real. Watching it in action can be very moving. The army, in some ways anyway, is unquestionably good for young people.
Such ruminations get to the heart of why the embed process is so dangerous and insidious. A journalist who slips into the habit of rooting for a bunch of nice kids like this in a place like Iraq might easily find himself missing the overall point of his assignment. This, certainly, had happened to me. It wasn’t until my tour in Iraq was just about over that I realized I’d been conned, that I was spending far too much time watching these kids interact with one another and not nearly enough time wondering what the hell we were all doing here. But that’s the story you get when you can’t really look behind the wall for twenty-three hours out of every day. And even in that one hour, your insight is limited to turning your head on a swivel in the back seat of a Humvee somewhere, watching for pieces of trash on the road.
ANYWAY, WHEN I joined the 615th that morning, the soldiers were in their usual playful mood. Specialist Pamela Wall, nicknamed “Humboldt” for her not-infrequent spaceouts, did her Asteroids impersonation for the group, an almost completely indescribable spastic side shuffle that I guess was an attempt at imitating a floating spaceship. Squad leader Sergeant Whitman, a straight-as-an-arrow Bill Paxton look-alike, wrestled goofily with Sergeant Daniel Biederman, trying to snare him in a headlock.
I gritted my teeth nervously, looking left and right. I’d been hearing explosions all morning. I couldn’t tell whether I just hadn’t heard them early on in my trip, whether they were actually getting more frequent, or whether I was just stressing. But it seemed to me now like every one of these early premission briefings was being interrupted by IED blasts right outside the gates. The sense that the violence was increasing seemed to penetrate even the happy-worker-elf vibe of the 615th. The morning briefing continued, with the group’s laid-back southerner, Sergeant Conn, relaying the announcements of the day.
“Okay, we have a new acronym,” he said, referring to a ubiquitous insurgent weapon that had up till then been known as an explosively formed projectile. “The EFP will from now on be called an AAIED, for anti-armor IED—”
BOOM! The squad shuddered as the sound of a massive explosion rocked the compound. The blast sounded like it came from somewhere just outside the camp exit.
“Fuck!” whispered a soldier named O’Braden, who was standing next to me. He shook his head in frustration.
“Somebody just had a bad day,” editorialized Conn.
Conn was about to start up the briefing again when yet another blast rocked the compound. This one was even bigger—or seemed bigger, anyway.
BOOOOOMM!
“Damn!” said Conn.
“Jesus!” said O’Braden.
A hush fell over the squad. Everybody tried to shrug it off, but I could see it had an effect—throughout the squad you could see bugged-out eyes and wringing hands and a few involuntary glances in the direction of the FOB gates. The briefing went on. Owing to a new directive—issued in the wake of a recent incident in which a Humvee driver’s leg was severed by an EFP and stuck in place on the truck accelerator—we had to practice a new drill for slowing down the Humvee in case of such an event. We piled into the trucks, and each of the drivers practiced slumping over in his or her seat. In the truck I was in, a soldier named Schumann fell over, resting her face on the steering wheel,