In retrospect, I recognize that I was living a fantasy as a tattooed, douchier version of a real James Bond. The name’s Balad. James Balad. At the time, though, I felt far more like I was walking in the footsteps of John Rambo: a man who lived for war and had nothing left to lose.
The Rambo movies were my favorites growing up, even before I knew I wanted to join the military. Here was this guy, played by Sylvester Stallone, who was the ultimate badass. He never died. Hell, he never even got shot. But he lived with this constant mental anguish that forced him to keep going, to keep moving forward, because war was all he had left. It was Rambo versus the world. Kill or be killed. That was his mentality, and that’s what I loved about him. That’s what I wanted to be. By the middle of this fifth deployment, I felt closer to that feeling than I ever had before.
I never told anyone on my team about this, because honestly, it was super lame. Who says shit like that? The answer is no one, which is why I didn’t say it out loud, even as I was thinking it every second of every night we were out on target. The more intense a situation got, the deeper I went into the weirder parts of my brain. I would literally think to myself on missions at night, “I am Rambo. Good luck trying to kill me, motherfucker, because I don’t give a fuck.”
Don’t misunderstand: I wasn’t suicidal. Thinking you’re going to die and wanting to die are totally different things. I didn’t have a death wish. It’s just that, in my experience, the more you deploy and face the dark realities that exist in life, the more comfortable you become with the idea of death. Sometimes you don’t really care if it’s you or the people you are hunting who die, just as long as it isn’t the people you are leading. It’s hard to explain to people who have never served in this capacity. I just loved what I was doing so much, especially on this deployment, that there was nothing anyone could do—least of all some piece of shit terrorist—to get in the way of me doing it. I mean, think about it: I’d wake up at 6 P.M., show people how to build crazy charges to blow up buildings, then I’d go practice raids, eat some Cinnabon, and get a beeper page to go out in the middle of the night to shoot guys in the face before rolling home to bang one of the hottest blondes I’ve ever had the pleasure of sharing a bed with. And the next day, I would go right back after it again. I was fighting, feasting, and fucking. EVERY DAY. That is wired into the male genetic code, and I was peaking out at all levels, all deployment, in a way that I knew would stick with me wherever I went in life, however long that life might last. And the more I did it all, the more I wanted—the more I needed—to keep doing it.
That’s easier said than done, though, because ultimately, you are playing a very dangerous game, one where the key to winning is figuring out just how long you can play it while still having fun. And make no mistake: Killing bad guys is fun. Some guys get really good at the game, but then they get sick of it and bow out. Either mentally they’re over it, or physically they just check out. For me, the fun never really seemed to stop, but I did start to realize that there were other kinds of fun out there and that maybe they were healthier than the kind I was having.
* * *
—
Between my fourth and fifth deployments in early 2008, I’d finally joined the social media revolution and gotten a MySpace page. I didn’t think much of it at first; it was just a way to stay in touch with my brothers and some of my friends from high school. In Balad, I checked it every week or so to read and respond to messages. Checking it weekly instead of daily ended up being torture, because rather than seeing the trickle of daily life events, I’d see this massive accumulation of carefree fucking around from everyone in my Top 8 that made it seem like their entire existence was one