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"FacebookPinterest\n\nMarch 19, 2013\n\n This fancy bottle of Evan Williams says that it was barreled on April 17, 2002, which is unfortunate for storytelling purposes. On the ten-year anniversary of the United States invading Iraq, I'm searching for meaning in the decade since I rolled across the border in charge of 24 Marines manning six M1A1 tanks, and it really would have worked better if this whiskey started aging in March 2003.\n\nBut it's a long night. I can find meaning in this bottle yet.\n\nMarch 14-April 19, 2013\n\n Tim McLaughlin's life is presently on display in the Bronx. Not his life now, but ten years ago, when he and I were Marine tank platoon commanders in the same battalion. Invasion: Diaries and Memories of War in Iraq recounts the 2003 invasion of Iraq through three sets of eyes that captured Third Battalion, Fourth Marines' march to Baghdad in different ways: the harrowing photographs of photojournalist Gary Knight, the heart-rending New York Times Magazine articles of writer Peter Maass, and every page of Tim's excruciatingly unfiltered war journal. I showed up at the exhibit on a snowy March Saturday to support Tim, but what I really wanted to do after seeing it was sit down and cry.\n\nTim and I both got out of the Corps after \"just\" one tour in Iraq, moved to cities we love (me New York, him Boston), and married women who love us despite the lingering effects of war. For me, that means insomnia and struggling to keep my cool in a crowd of people. Tim, unlike me, has the patience to navigate the VA, so his PTSD has been diagnosed and treated with medication more advanced than whiskey\u2014but, he also killed a lot more people than I did.\n\n March 15, 2013\n\n When I met Tim for drinks last Friday, I didn't know that seeing his exhibit would unnerve me almost to the point of tears.\n\nHe's been in the news a lot lately. CBS, Slate, Foreign Policy\u2014he's even scheduled to be on The Colbert Report in a few weeks. In the stories I've read about him, the default physical description is \"tall,\" but I prefer the term \"spidery\" or \"gangly Irish motherfucker,\" which is what I've thought every time I've seen him\u2014from the lieutenant who shared a tent with me in Kuwait, to the nude man drinking vodka in the bathtub in Townsville, Australia, to the married lawyer in the camel sports coat and newsboy cap who shares my tired eyes and fondness for brown liquor in a Chelsea bar at the end of New York's stubborn winter.\n\nLike 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.\n\nMarch 19 - April 7, 2003\n\n The war in Iraq started on March 19th in America\u2014March 20th local time\u2014but 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.\n\nAmerica's lasting memory of the Iraq war\u2014aside from the misguided attempt at jus ad bellum\u2014will 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.\n\nAll of that happened to plan, except for everything after.\n\nWar 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\u2014until 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\u2014at the amazing and profound lack of death that greeted us. That beauty is mine forever, even if it's gone.\n\nMarch 13, 2013\n\n \"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.\"\n\nI was standing a few paces away from my tank when a high-explosive anti-tank round slammed into the turret ring. The shape charge fired a stream of liquid metal through the armor, and the crewmen inside\u2014Sprague and Carnline, both natives of eastern Washington\u2014were killed by either the shrapnel or the explosion. There's no way to tell which effect took their lives, and anyway the cause doesn't matter. Only the death matters to the dead.\n\nI rapped on the hull, hoping my driver was still alive. He emerged, and I was relieved that someone had survived. I went to a nearby Humvee, calmly reported the casualties to my C.O., and scanned the horizon through binoculars for the enemy. Their advance kicked up rooster tails of dust, and I clicked over to my platoon's tactical net to give them orders: linear fire, left to right, fire and adjust.\n\nI woke up with the situation well in hand. (Sprague and Carnline, according to Facebook, are doing fine\u2014or are at least alive.)\n\nAfter ten years, my sense of \"mission first\" is still strong enough that I wasn't bothered by the deaths of two Marines I loved and protected in war. What bothered me was that I couldn't remember my driver's name. How could I dishonor him that way? Had a decade of civilian life really eroded something so valuable?\n\nIt came to me a few minutes later: WELLS! Philip Wells. Thin kid, 19 or 20 when he drove nonstop for two weeks without falling asleep in the M1A1's La-Z-Boy of a driver's seat, never once piloting us to a watery Euphrates grave. Outside of Baghdad, we set up a hasty perimeter next to a dead dog so sweetly putrescent I could barely breathe. I told Wells, low man on the tank's totem pole, to move the damn thing, expecting him to complain or at least barter for the next hamburger MRE we lucked into. Instead, he grabbed a shovel and moved it without a word. The dog's body left a black smear of death on the road.\n\nApril 19, 2013\n\n I'm divorced from my own memories. The images of death in my head, the memories of killing, feel so distant from my life now that it's more comfortable to think of them as implanted from someone else's brain. It's a funny thing, to be so intensely proud of something you can only see out of focus. The connective tissue is the people who were with you in war, witnesses to the chaos and death. Their memories clarify your own hazy images and\u2014more importantly\u2014assure you that you're not insane, that that shit really happened.\n\nNext month, I'm flying back to my old base in the Mojave to reunite with the Marines of 1st Tanks who invaded Iraq ten years ago, and I think it will be good, healthy. My old company commander is now the battalion C.O., and we've got a cool weekend planned: training simulators, some live ammunition, dinner and beer in Palm Springs for everyone. Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to seeing old faces that have seen the same things I have, who remember the bodies in the streets and the gray spring skies and that brief window of elation after Baghdad fell, but before the looting started. I want those Marines to know how I feel, that the Corps has a deeper and more lasting impact on me than just the \"USMC\" tattooed on my shoulder. I want to hug them tight, hold them close, and tell them that I love them, that what we did mattered, that I will never, ever forget them, even after they die.\n\nBut I won't. I'll drink some whiskey with them, and that will be enough."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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