The War I Always Wanted by Brandon Friedman Page A

music down when Phil leaned in, his arm resting on the hood of my truck. I looked up and greeted him. “Sup, dude?”
    â€œWell,” he started, “I guess we’re ready to go. Everything’s lined up.”
    Lips pursed and eyebrows raised, I nodded under the glow of my hanging green flashlight.
    Then he continued. “You know, dude . . . tomorrow is ahh . . . tomorrow’s a pretty big day for us.”
    I grinned up at him. There was no talk of getting killed or maimed or fixing bayonets to go building to building. There was no talk of failure. It was just going to be another day. A big day.
    â€œYeah,” I replied. “Yeah it is.” Then I asked him if he was nervous at all.
    â€œYou know, I can’t say that I am,” he said. “Maybe anxious to get going, but I’m not really scared. I guess maybe I should be. I don’t know.”
    I knew what he was talking about. I was headed into urban combat in less than four hours and I wasn’t even scared. It was like the moment just before the helicopter touched down on the mountainside during Anaconda.
    I was neither happy, sad, scared, nor angry. I don’t even remember thinking of my family. I just remember the music before Phil walked over. I didn’t think of my parents or my brother or Nikki. There was only the music.
    I used it to dull my senses that night, but I knew that in reality I was hooked up to a low-dose adrenaline drip. I was becoming numb. I was becoming a thinking husk with a gun.
    When I had eventually called in mortar strikes on non-American targets in the Shah-e-Kot Valley there had been no fear, no anger, no glee. I was a cyborg on a ridgeline putting steel on target. “
Left 100, drop 50. Shot, over . . . Shot, out. Splash, over . . . Splash, out
.”
    Calling in the strikes became like ordering a pizza. You place an order over the radio for what you want—the type of ordnance you want used, where you want it to land, how much of it you want. “Yes, I’ll have four high-explosive mortars on such and such a building in the valley, please. Oh, and can I get two white phosphorous rounds also?” The Voice comes back with something like, “Of course, sir. Would you like smoke rounds with that? Or anything to drink?”
    It’s times like that, I figure, and times like the fast-approaching morning in Hillah that you become emotionally dead. It is adrenaline. Overdose. Addiction. Your personal weapon becomes the needle, and every time you charge the handle to lock and load before a mission, you inject the adrenaline, which over time will become like heroin to you. You let yourself drift into an emotional coma. If you didn’t, you would go mad.
    With just over two hours until the attack, Phil left me to my music and my thoughts. I started thinking about my grandfather. He was short and of a slight build, but he was one of the meanest people I’d ever met growing up. He had also been a marine sergeant in the infantry in the Pacific theater during World War II. As he’d gotten older, he’d mellowed outa bit and started carrying around a pocketful of peppermints to hand out to people he liked, but he never lost the edge the Marine Corps had given him. Before I’d received my commission, he’d bought a marine dress uniform so that he could render me my first salute as an officer during the ceremony. Everybody had talked about how cute the old man looked in a dress uniform with tattered ribbons from World War II.
    Sitting there listening to the music on low volume, I remembered how before the commissioning, I figured that he’d be impressed when I told him that I too had joined the infantry. To my surprise, he’d just kind of shrugged and shaken his head. A year and a half later, over conversation about my experience in Afghanistan, he’d looked at my grandmother quizzically and said, “I never understood why the boy went and joined the