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Twenty-fifth Infantry Division’s Second Squadron, Fourteenth Cavalry Regiment—had arrived on the coattails of the surge.
    â€œMost depressing New Years’ ever,” Staff Sergeant Boondock announced in the shower stalls that morning. “I should be recovering from a vicious hangover right now, swearing to God that I’ll never fucking drink again. This fucking blows donkey dick.” I was inclined to agree.
    Rolling out of the wire was what we called going outside the relative safety of the FOB for missions—where those mysterious, ambiguous terms like the enemy were found and where daily updates became bar tales. I had my nose in a map, studying our area of operations (AO), while my counterpart lieutenant—of the First Cavalry Division—briskly answered my elementary questions with master’s-level responses.
    Captain Whiteback, the Bravo Troop commander, sat across from me in the back of the Humvee, smiling wickedly. He had gotten his nickname for being the only non-Hispanic on his Stryker, which included Specialist Fuego, a former and future Gravedigger originally from Cuba. Like most officers, myself included, Captain Whiteback was just another gangly Caucasian. He didn’t have to say anything; I knew I looked the part of the cherry lieutenant with my bright eyes, skinny frame, and general life awkwardness. I locked and loaded my M4 Carbine by sticking a rifle magazine filled with thirty golden rounds of kill into it and pulling back on the weapon’s charging handle. The Humvee moved out of Little America and into the other Iraq—the one that was there before American soldiers arrived and that will still be there when we leave.
    â€œYou ever been to Mexico?” Captain Whiteback asked me over the mild roar of the vehicle’s engine.
    I nodded.
    â€œIraq is kinda like that, but with bombs.” He paused momentarily and then smirked to himself. “And Arabs too. I guess there aren’t too many Arabs in Mexico.”
    The scenery I glimpsed for the first time from the up-armored window was nothing new; it was the same Iraq I had seen on television for the past four years. With the stark atmosphere of a northeastern industrial city and
the transient wandering of a mostly jobless population, our AO was everything I’d expected—desolate and deprived, too tired to hope, but too human not to. Knowing what to expect didn’t keep my internal alarm system from blaring, however, whenever I made the mistake of remembering where I was.
    The other lieutenant continued talking as we drove, pointing out schools, mosques, and various huts, tossing out many, many Arabic names, which I wrote down in my notebook with questions marks next to them. I asked him about the sheiks, and he delved into the never-ending layers of grey involved in working with these men and the tribes and families they led, as well as the insanely complicated dynamic between the Sunni and Shia Muslims. There were capable leaders he told me, but there were corrupt ones, too. Some cared about securing peace; others didn’t. Some were motivated by money; others were obsessed with it. Much of the local violence occurred between the various groups with different interests vying for power.
    â€œIt sounds like the Montagues and the Capulets,” I said.
    He laughed. “It’d be easy if things were simple enough to boil down to just two families.”
    Rather than go all the way into our sector to the combat outpost, we stopped off at one of the outlying eastern villages for a meeting with one of the local sheiks. We dismounted, handed out some Beanie Babies to a swarm of overly friendly and undernourished children, and began to move into the sheik’s house. The terp (soldier slang for interpreter) explained to us the source of the children’s excitement—the accompanying Strykers, which locals referred to as ghost tanks due to how quietly the engines ran. Strykers