The War I Always Wanted by Brandon Friedman Page B

infantry.” He said this as if I weren’t standing there next to them listening. Now, in my current predicament—about to head off into combat again—I wished that I could have talked to him. I would have said, “Okay. Now I get it.”
    I was just about to doze off when I had the sudden urge to take a shit. For a second I thought I would just hold it, but then I remembered that sometimes, urban combat could drag on for days. I figured I’d better take care of it now and worry about sleeping later. I knew I probably wouldn’t really sleep anyway.
    As I stepped out of the truck to grab my shovel and head off into the night, I noticed some guys from the company kneeling in the darkness in prayer circles. I thought that it must be nice to have something like that on which to lean when headed into a possible shitstorm. It must be quite calming to know that by praying hard, God will be rooting for yourside. Walking past them I thought about the character Ceranno in the baseball movie
Major League
, when he is discussing the link between divine help and hitting breaking pitches. “Ahh, Hay-seuss,” the big Latin American ballplayer says, “I laak him vera much. But he no help with curveball.”
    Or with RPGs and small arms fire.
    Captain K. has ordered me to go up on the high ground overlooking the valley to call in mortar strikes on suspected al Qaeda positions
.
    As I make my way up the rocky incline covered in dried yellow grass, I notice that Sam Edwards and some of his guys are already up there, watching. When I reach the top, I can’t help but stand there and stare out at the decimated villages below. My eyes are transfixed, just as they had been during the bombing of a few nights earlier. This is the closest I have come to the valley in daylight. It’s still half a mile away, but I feel as though I could reach out and touch some of the mud-brick buildings. It’s a battlefield, and I’m captivated by it. Sam sees me
.
    â€œHey, man! Get down! Shit!”
    I look at him resting on a knee several feet away from me. He looks strained, even older than I remember him being just a few days ago. It makes me realize what I’m doing. I’m standing there, in the wide open with no trees or vegetation for concealment. I’m a lone figure standing on an overlook, against the backdrop of nothing but blue sky. And I’m about to draw fire from the valley if I don’t change that quickly
.
    I duck and take a knee. Sam then tells me where the terrorists are suspected of hiding. He has already called in several strikes, so he knows. There is an al Qaeda anti-aircraft gun on Takhur Gar that I have in mind. We’ve been listening to it fire intermittently for two days, and thus far, no one has been able to disable it. But from our vantage point we can only hit the valley
.
    I grasp the hand mike from the radio and take another look at the landscape below. For the first time I see a brown horse, standing alone in a corral on the valley floor. For two days I’ve heard about this horse—through word of mouth and even once or twice on the radio. As I look down into the valley, it is the first thing to which my eye is drawn. The horse stands in stark contrast to everything around it
.
    The villages are now mostly rubble—cratered and blackened. I see firsthand what this horse has had to endure with each successive barrage of carpet-bombing, mortars, snipers, and helicopter attacks. I’ve also come to understand that people have been trying to kill it with a sense of passive cruelty. No overt efforts—just a sniper round here, a mortar there. They’ve yet to succeed, however. From my vantage point I can see that the horse is the only living thing in the valley, the only thing still moving in the open. It starts to trot to the other side of the corral, bucking its head once as it prances. It looks to be enjoying the warm sun along with the brief