The day before crossing the border from Kuwait into Iraq, we assembled for a battalion-wide briefing. The invasion had begun only slightly before we arrived and our job was to establish supply lines in the wake of the initial forces. Although all of our top commanders addressed us during that briefing, the only speech that sticks in my memory is that given by our Command Sergeant Major (CSM), the battalion’s senior non-commissioned officer. He began with an anecdote about a group of soldiers from our battalion who had crossed the border several days earlier, had been attacked and had fought back bravely and successfully. He began to tell us what we could expect upon crossing the border and as often happened during his speeches, his words (mind, perhaps?) veered from the safe shores of sanity and into more hallucinatory realms.
A bunch of us hanging out in Kuwait’s national forest.
All of us had, at one point or another, questioned the sergeant major’s grip on reality. He had given one particularly memorable briefing to us on the eve of our deployment in which he attempted to prepare us for when we boarded “that train or that submarine, or whatever” that would presumably ferry us to Iraq. In his briefing the day before we drove into Iraq, the madness began with anecdotes of grenade-lobbing Iraqi children being sent into groups of soldiers as deadly little gift-bearers.
“Don’t let any children approach your vehicles!” He told us this with a grave sincerity that should have been an easy target for parody had he not been addressing a thousand young untested soldiers, all armed and in their hidden fear, willing to believe in the depths of our enemy’s depravity.
“If a child steps in front of your vehicle while you’re driving, don’t stop!” the madman cried.
The invasion had only just begun. The Iraqis had not yet employed any suicide bombs and I had not heard of them ever using children in combat. I did, however, recall seeing grenade-bearing children in movies about Vietnam. I briefly wondered if the CSM and I were currently fighting the same war.
He continued, detailing what the Iraqis would do to us if we allowed ourselves to be captured. To judge by his stories, the Iraqis had an unhealthy obsession with our balls. The CSM was adamant that should we be taken prisoner, our captors’ first action during the interrogation would be to connect our balls to a car battery and electrocute us to get us to tell them our secrets. “What are you gonna do, Airborne, if The Iraqi hooks your balls up to a car battery to make you talk?!”
In a second, I realized that this was not only not a rhetorical question, but that the CSM was staring my friend Dustan and I both in the eyes in only the way that a madman can stare at two people simultaneously. And in the moment’s silence that followed the question, I also realized that he was expecting an answer. In an instant, Dustan and I were now fully alert. We exchanged a brief glance of disbelief and panic, before replying in one voice; “Sergeant Major, I would tell them everything!”
Our response stopped him cold. I don’t know what response he actually expected, but that was clearly not it. For a good moment, he just stood there slack-jawed, eyes wide. Then he swore, his whole body shaking, but the only response he could muster was “Alright Airborne, I got something for you later!”
The briefing ended quickly thereafter and we all shuffled out of the tent. The Sergeant Major must have been caught so off-guard by our honest response that he forgot to find out who we were, therefore never making good on his vague threat. Maybe he was busy. Maybe he had a train to catch.