Like all my friends from the war, I don’t see Tim enough. We all got out of the Corps and scattered back home, or to cities that offered the allure of not being the Mojave Desert. Well, not all of us. Some stayed in and got shot by the Iraqi soldiers they were advising, like my friend Mike. Some got blown up, like Stern and Smitty. Some lived and went to a lot of memorial services.

March 19 - April 7, 2003

The war in Iraq started on March 19th in America—March 20th local time—but the Marines of 1st Tank Battalion had been sitting in a hardscrabble camp in the Kuwaiti desert since January. Seven weeks of battling sandstorms, prepping our tanks, writing letters to anyone who might write back, all from an environment so dull and flat and lifeless it made us long for the Mojave. We weren’t necessarily eager for war, but we welcomed something besides boredom.

America’s lasting memory of the Iraq war—aside from the misguided attempt at_ jus ad bellum_—will likely be one of IEDs and long deployments alongside the better-justified war in Afghanistan. My war was shorter and more straightforward. Reach objectives. Take Baghdad. Go home.

All of that happened to plan, except for everything after.

War going to plan, though, suggests that there’s some neatness and order to tearing a landscape apart and leaving a trail of death and MRE garbage in your wake. I may not have been deployed for 12 months, but I was in combat long enough to kill innocent civilians; in my case, "long enough" was two days. I slept 10 hours over the course of a week. I gestured apologetically to a farmer as my tank’s treads destroyed his spring planting. My friend, a fellow platoon commander, lost one of his tanks during a nonstop road march; we made jokes comparing it to The Beast, a largely forgotten 1988 film in which a Russian T-55 tank crew gets separated from its company—until we learned that the M1A1 drove off a bridge over the Euphrates in the middle of the night, killing all four crewmen. I cursed the boredom while dreading the action. I pointed my pistol at a cab driver who had the temerity to gesture angrily at my tank for obstructing the road to Basra. One of my best friends got shot in the head. I saw bodies strewn in the streets, and my brain processed them as props of war instead of newly dead people with hobbies and passions and newly devastated loved ones. The oil fires turned spring skies gray. I crossed a partially blown-up bridge that the engineers couldn’t promise would hold a 68-ton tank, and when it did, I ended up in a minefield shooting at T-72 tanks, and calling off artillery that was so close I could feel the concussive heat on my face. I prepared to lose Marines to snipers in a prolonged siege of Baghdad. I went a month without showering. I accepted my own death. I saw beautiful women in the Christian neighborhoods of the capital. I smoked tar-laden Iraqi cigarettes that made me long for nicotine manufactured in America. I parked at the magnificent blue Martyrs Monument at sunset, and smoked a cigarette while the fading light turned the pavement an ethereal roseate hue, awash in joy at the cheers that had met our arrival in Baghdad—at the amazing and profound lack of death that greeted us. That beauty is mine forever, even if it’s gone.

March 13, 2013

"It wasn’t a bad dream," I told my wife last week, and I meant it. I’d woken up before my alarm, maybe, but not in any sort of distress. "Well, I mean, it started with two of my crewmen dying, but it wasn’t bad."