So what happened with al-Zawba’i and his daughter, that was at first easy to forget. And had things turned out differently, or perhaps if Natalia hadn’t been pregnant, I can see a very different life that would have unfolded for me. Special Forces, which was supposed to be the unit of warrior-diplomats, of language and culture specialists who could learn the cultural terrain, build up host-nation forces to fight so Americans didn’t have to, was already becoming more and more a direct-action unit. Raid after raid after raid. Over the next ten years, the “diplomat” portion of the “warrior-diplomats” would wither, FID missions where you were trying to build up local institutions would be seen as a waste of time, and a dark kind of pure warrior, “see you in Valhalla” mentality would grip more and more of us. I could have been that kind of soldier, and that kind of leader.
But then, after a long stretch of working with a not particularly competent Iraqi police unit, we got word we were finally heading out on a raid, hitting a target with foreign fighters, no less, the kind of mission where you can expect to get into a gunfight. I was less excited than relieved. Yes, this is what I’m here for. And then, right before we stepped off, Ocho brought up the coming baby. It was almost like he was trying to screw with my head, or knock me off balance just to see how well I recovered.
“Listo para ser padre, maricón?” Ocho asked me in the ready room, smiling, as the air filled with the metallic sound of magazines slamming home. Since I was one of the white guys in 7th Group and didn’t grow up bilingual like all the Puerto Rican and Mexican dudes who’d been funneled into SF’s Latin America–focused group, Ocho liked to fuck with me in Spanish.
“No, hijo de puta. But it’s happening.”
“If the kid pops out and you think, shit, that sort of looks like Ocho . . .” he said, putting his hands out as if to say, don’t blame me.
I sighed, and picked up an M9. “So,” I said, “are you suggesting to a man with a weapon in his hand that you impregnated his wife?”
Ocho chuckled. He was the senior medic. Theoretically, I was supposed to be learning from him, but mostly he just told me stories about having sex with Colombian whores back in the Cali cartel days, teaching me lessons I didn’t want to learn. He was in his thirties, looked like he was in his fifties, and talked about sex like he was still a teenager.
“I would never disrespect Natalia like that,” he said. “I’m just saying, maybe you spending all this time around a man of my potency did something to your balls. Put the man back into you.”
Jefe looked up, caught Ocho’s eyes, shook his head, and went back to prepping his kit. The rest of us followed suit. There was a quietness to Jefe, a dignity that could even sweep up Ocho in its wake. His fingers moved methodically, dismantling and then reassembling an M4, moving on to his IFAK, checking the placement of ammo pouches, a choreography identical each and every time, regardless of mission. You wouldn’t know from his movements we were preparing for a raid, that there were three Jordanians holed up in an apartment filled with guns and explosives, that people were about to die and that we had no way of knowing if some of those people were in this room. Whether it was a raid or a convoy or a MEDCAP, the movements never changed. And the last thing he did, the very last each time, was to fish a small crucifix out from around his neck, where it hung with his dog tags, kiss it, and tuck it back inside.
Jefe got up the way he always did, slow. It made him look old. He was old, and seemed calm. I was young, and thinking about death. I wanted to be more like him and less like myself.
He walked to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Pretty sure we’ll get home in time. You think Iraq is hard, wait until you’ve got a newborn.” And then we stepped out.
It’s jarring, the transition out of those deeply private seconds when you’re preparing your kit and your body for what’s to come. When the work begins, and you’re rushing down the backstreets of Hilla or just below the ridge line of a mountain in the Hindu Kush, private thoughts recede. Ideally, you disappear and the team’s collective will takes over. It’s true that sometimes, especially at the beginning of my career, thoughts of death would sneak in. When I was starting out, not enough of us had died yet for it to become normal, and we were still more accustomed to killing than grieving, which requires different muscles, muscles my father knew well, having seen violent death in the mines, deaths where the body was crushed or severed or in some way made inappropriate for display in a coffin.
At first the raid was anticlimactic. Our supporting element, a group of bozo National Guard guys, took it upon themselves to open up on the bad guys with a couple of AT-4s. If you’ve got serious firepower, I suppose they figured, why not use it? Besides, rockets are cool. The gunfight was over before it began. Then we heard screaming and
