Thank You for My Service - Mat Best Page 0,27
before he went through Ranger School, and now he was paying it forward to me.
His gesture and the confidence that he showed in me really buoyed me as we arrived in late October 2005 and headed toward a border region called Anbar Province, renowned as a major artery for the inflow of foreign fighters from Syria. Our area of operation had just seen a major American offensive clear through it. We were tasked to find the remaining fighters and kill or capture them, which wound up being easier than I had anticipated.
Once we got situated and fully operational, we conducted raids every night for weeks on end without finding ourselves in any kind of major engagement. Partly that was because the offensive that preceded us had done a pretty good job. But I suspected that the primary reason we were coming up empty-handed was because it was getting into winter and the fighting season over there is during the warmer months. You don’t go to Aspen in July looking to ski, right? Well, you don’t come to Iraq in December looking to fight.
As the deployment dragged on, we’d go out on an operation, get on target, and any bad guys who were still there would surrender immediately. (I called them cold-weather quitters.) The cadence of it all during this period of the fighting in Iraq became so reliable that, even if we were in a particularly concentrated area, we could blitz through multiple targets in a night—sometimes up to a dozen. It was like old-fashioned blitzkrieg, but with smaller units and bigger beards. My platoon was not unique in this regard—it was happening to special operations units all over the country—it just pissed me off maybe more than the others because I wanted to get in gunfights, not earn a merit badge in zip-tie knots.
Even though coalition forces were bagging some big players in the Global War on Terror at the same time, that offered me no solace, because my interests were not geopolitical. They were visceral. I wasn’t obsessed with winning; I was obsessed with the act of war. That’s what I was there for, and that’s what I wanted to be good at.
This wasn’t some kind of fucked-up bloodlust, but it was very primal. At its most basic, war is a mano a mano fight to the death in service of something much bigger than yourself. General Douglas MacArthur called it “Duty, God, Country” in a speech to cadets at West Point near the start of the Vietnam War. Shakespeare called it a “band of brothers.” Whatever you want to call it, to fight in its defense is the ultimate test—a test I was desperate for the opportunity to face and anxious to pass. As a nineteen-year-old kid, I wasn’t smart enough to understand why this drove me so hard, and to a degree I still don’t fully get it, but what I do know is that I was not alone. Humans and other mammals have engaged in some version of battle in defense of territory, family, the pack or the tribe, for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Today, “educated people” like to think we’ve evolved beyond this fundamental instinct, and they look down their noses at warfighters as primitive or regressive (whatever the fuck that means), but all you need to do is spend two minutes on Twitter to realize that this ancient animal impulse is alive and well.
Still, there is a danger in giving yourself over too completely to the thrill of war, and I was coming very close to crossing that line before I’d even fired a fatal shot. The danger is not that you will lose yourself, though that is always possible, but that you will lose sight of the greater purpose of each mission. On this second trip there were times when I didn’t fully appreciate the danger of some of the situations that we were inserting ourselves into night after night, what with our crazy high operational tempo. I was never reckless, but there were times when I wasn’t necessarily seeing the full field, and when that happens, bad things can follow.
Those first few months, we were blowing down doors and dodging bullets nearly every night, but it never really felt like we were being tested too badly—at least not beyond what our training had prepared us for—so it never felt like I’d been able to take my training wheels off to see what I was really