Read Online Kaboom by Matthew Gallagher - Free Book Online Page A

grilling the grandmother. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders.
    â€œA mother protecting her son?” I asked the terp.
    â€œYes,” he answered. “Crazy female.”
    I instructed the Gravediggers to start policing up the hut and blindfold the two detainees while I inventoried our bounty; SFC Big Country walked back to his Stryker to update Bravo Troop headquarters. As Staff Sergeant Boondock and Sergeant Axel led the two men away, I snuck a glance toward the family left behind. The grandmother stared stonily into the distance, seemingly oblivious of her departing son, his friend, and the strange Americans. Two of the younger women fought back tears, while the third walked back inside, nursing the youngest of the children. The other three children wept openly, and one of them tried to run after our detainees before the women collectively scooped him off of the ground.
    As we walked back to my Stryker, the sniper rifle and accessory parts in hand, I looked over at Suge. “I feel kind of bad, you know? These guys
are probably just stooges, trying to make some money.” I nodded back at the women and the children. “I mean, it’s not like this is their fault. How are they going to support themselves now?”
    He looked back at me in a blizzard of skepticism. “Do not feel bad, LT. They should not have bred with stupid mother fuckers.”
    One didn’t always have to use big words or utilize profound analogies to articulate a philosophical known.

A DIFFERENT WORLD
    The army divides its officers into three categories: company-grade officers (lieutenants and captains), field-grade officers (majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels), and general officers (the top dogs with stars on their collars). Concurrently, there are three levels of warfare: tactical, operational, and strategic. As a junior officer who spent his entire time of service in the tactical function, my dealings with general officers were minimal, but I often interacted with—and took orders from—field grades.
    I respected many of the field-grade officers I served under or encountered and found them to be men of honor, strength, and great wisdom. Men like our brigade commander, whose strict adherence to the counterinsurgency principle of precision targeting set the tone for our brigade for the entire deployment. Men like my first ROTC instructor, a devout 101st Airborne loyalist and pupil of General Petraeus, who back in 2002 convinced me I had the swagger required to be a combat-arms officer. Men like our unit’s first squadron commander, who had established the cavalry in the middle of the historical infantry land of Hawaii with as much Stetson-wearing, spur-sporting pizzazz as the ghosts of Teddy Roosevelt and Jeb Stuart and George Patton demanded.
    And then there were the other field grades.
    For whatever reason, these other field grades always seemed to outnumber the quality ones. And they were seemingly everywhere in Iraq, intent on riding the bureaucratic beast in all its protectionist glory. As with any professional organization, the army taught me to respect the rank, if not the person. And so I did. Unlike other professional organizations though, the army mandated that I carry out these men’s orders successfully and without complaint, even when they directly assaulted all known logic and experience.
And so I did, hiding my concerns from my subordinates as much as possible in a combat environment, because I was just a lieutenant and just a platoon leader and probably didn’t understand the bigger picture. While I was often frustrated, I was never defiant.
    None of that changed the truth, though, that inept careerists were as much a part of the military fabric as the camouflage pattern and liquid eggs for breakfast, and my experiences in Iraq in this regard were certainly nothing new in the annals of war. The players never changed, only their names.
    Major Moe was the most prevalent type of other