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aren’t tanks, technically speaking, but no one felt compelled to correct the Arab children.
    Inside the house, I met a group of Iraqi leaders, did a lot of listening and nodding, and drank my first glass of chai—nothing more than a hot shot of sugar. The other lieutenant received a call on his radio shortly thereafter, though, which cut the meeting short. We were needed for something a bit more kinetic in nature—a raid on a purported sleeping spot for a known insurgent.
    He slapped his radio antenna. “I fucking hate fragos,” he said, bitterness dripping off his words like hot icing. Over the ensuing weeks and months, the Gravediggers would become very familiar with this reactionary and fluid operational tempo. Change was the norm, and this norm was called a frago, short for fragmentary order. Trying to understand the whims and reasons behind the frago was like drinking from a fire hose: Fighting it only made things worse.

    The raid turned up nothing but an empty room, a pack of wild dogs, and an old man holding his piss bag, but later that evening, only a few blocks away from where we handed out Beanie Babies, one of our brother platoons received some bursts of AK-47 fire from a rooftop during their initial patrol. No one had been hurt, and the squadron’s operations staff determined it was nothing more than harassment fire meant to test the new sheriffs in town. I bumped into Sergeant D-Wizzle, one of the men on said patrol and another former Gravedigger who had left us when the other platoon came up short a team leader. It was sometime after midnight. I strolled out of our troop’s headquarters with a mug of coffee in one hand and a near-beer in the other (alcohol of all types, along with most other enjoyable vices, was banned in theater by General Order No. 1), while he smoked a cigarette on the sidewalk, still looking a little flush in the cheeks.
    He just snickered when I told him the staff officers said it had been harassment fire and not a planned, direct attack on their patrol. “This is my third time over here,” he said. “You don’t ever get used to getting shot at. Doesn’t matter what kind of fire it was.”
    â€œFair enough,” I responded. I didn’t know what else to say.
    As I walked into the darkness back to the platoon’s lodgings, machine guns crackled in the distance, which only disturbed me when I thought about how it should be disturbing me. The steady crooning of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters arriving at and departing from the nearby airstrip soon drowned out the gunfire. Under a midnight blanket, the distant countryside of Iraq offered an odd sense of tranquility. With the scattered lights of various townships all dotting a high desert landscape, it reminded me slightly of rural Nevada. Shortly thereafter, though, the subdued lights from Camp Taji’s Burger King and Pizza Hut restaurants came into my vision. The FOB is a very strange place, I thought. This sure ain’t Bastogne. Five minutes later, I fell asleep on a mattress in an air-conditioned room.
    The first day of my new life was over.

THE REAL WORLD: SABA AL-BOR
    Anyone looking at a map of Iraq, pretty much any map made after T. E. Lawrence and the British came at least, would find a tiny dot just northwest of the Baghdad Gates. This dot was nestled close to the southern
shore of the Grand Canal, which poured into the dirty, timeless waters of the Tigris only a few miles to the east. If the map was very old or very detailed, there would be a name next to the dot: Saba al-Bor, a town of 60,000 or so, gilded in sandstone and bathed in sectarian wars, too barren for even the scorpions and the camel spiders, a convenient crossroads for travelers and the displaced alike, with the Anbar madness in the deserts to the west, the war machine hub Camp Taji situated to the northeast along Route Tampa, and the infamous Abu Ghraib prison due south. This dot was impoverished. It