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Brad and the boys watch as a whole bunch of little kids and old ladies get their asses blown up for no reason. Again. Brad's attempt to cheer up Poke means he starts missing his kids, which informs his behavior throughout the rest of the mission. Casey Kasem has been talking mad shit about Nate to anybody who will listen, which causes Encino Man's attempt to make nice with Nate even more uncomfortable than it sounds. Ray makes some cookies from his own special recipe, then pimps the well-worn picture of Evan's girlfriend to noted masturbator Wasik in exchange for pec-9 batteries.
Logistically, we're moving toward the staging area east of Baghdad, Al Kut, by way of tiny, vicious little Muwafaqiyah. A seriously terrifying clusterfuck of Humvees at the bridge into town nearly kills everybody in Bravo Two, but Brad's magic powers once again save the day. Pappy gets his ankle shot -- we'll miss you! -- but the only other casualty is Q-Tip, who takes some shrapnel in the leg, tourniquets himself, and keeps going because he is totally rad.
Take two: Bravo Three gets cornered, which means Captain America drools all over everything and Encino Man and Casey Kasem prepare to fuck things up yet again. Awesomely, they are saved by Eckloff (formerly known as the Young Battalion Guy), who takes away their radios and then gives Encino Man a speech that hearkens back to the last time he had a point, which was college football. Encino Man's pupils turn into tiny little hearts like a Tweety Bird cartoon and he is completely awesome for about three seconds.
So like who were the guys that ambushed them fifteen times in a row? Ba'athist extremists, you're assuming, but you'd be wrong. You know how in high school you would tell like five people you were having a party and then a billion random junkies from neighboring half-houses and detention centers would somehow show up? It's like that, but with the extra bit of crazy only God can provide. In this case the party is the US invasion of Iraq, and the uninvited guests are random Syrian college-student terrorists who got into Iraq on passports that said things like "Purpose of Visit: JIHAD." Dated after the invasion. Nate and Brad connect the creepy dots but don't really go into detail about how, once again, America is the fucking problem. Although I will grant you that when American college students get restless it usually means less suicide bombing/more vegan meals and experimental cocksucking.
Bravo drives past about a billion bad guys with more ammo than you've ever seen without shooting them, because battalion is retarded, then bravely enters the almost empty Muffaletta in time to watch civilians flee. Then they blow up the only school in town. Nate and Brad get into a fight about suicide bombers and how you should tell them you're going to shoot them because sometimes they're not suicide bombers. This goes relatively well, but then one of Walt's warning shots goes a little pear-shaped and he gets a random guy in the eyeball. Brad hugs him better and they head north once again for a 30 km trail of total death to Al Kut.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Ray's doing something odd while Espera, Brad and their respective gunners lay spread-eagled, sighting something over the top of a berm. Brad's in the usual giddy mood he gets in whenever he sees little kids; it's as disheartening as ever considering what happens to little kids on this show. "One, two, three, four little people outside." Espera also counts three old ladies, and Walt and Gabe are quite taken by the fact that they're playing "hajji soccer." I wish I knew Arabic so I could make some kind of linguistics joke or pun about that, but I don't know. Apropos of nothing, Garza mentions being beaten as a child with a 2x4. Walt asks, appropriately enough in my opinion, whether this was because his grandmother loved him, and wanted him to "turn out good." I like Garza, creepy Faces Of Death fascination with murder and mutilation notwithstanding, so: go Grandma. I guess. Of all the ways a kid you hit with a 2x4 might turn out, I suppose Gabe's the best option. Ray's still doing his weird thing, reclining against the Humvee, and Brad calls it in to Nate: "We've had eyes on the village for over one hour now. There are seven women and children, no adult males. No sign of the men who fired those mortars. How copy?" Nate's like, "I already knew that, okay."
Ray adds water to his concoction and starts cooking it with a lighter or something. "Ray, what the fuck is that smell?" asks Brad. Like anybody wants to know the answer. Man, it is mission critical that you not let Ray Fucking Person get bored, ever. I would keep some coloring books around just in case. Object lesson: "MRE cookies. What I did was, I saved up all those creamer packets, and all the sugars, and I mixed in peanut butter until I sort of made..." Brad's done listening, and reminds him not to blow his face off again, like he did in the first episode. Ray says, and I'm not sure what this is meant to connote: "Word to the motherfuckin' street, yo!" I don't understand the usage of that colorful colloquialism in this context. Ray points out that he was not the one who set his face on fire back at Mathilda: "I was the fuckin' victim and you know it." He goes back to cooking his foul creation, and the guys turn their eyes back on the hamlet. Evan speaks up and offers the opinion that maybe the guys were hiding in a stand of trees behind and to their left. Brad, indulgently deadpan: "Much as I appreciate Rolling Stone's tactical input, I'm confident in the birds." Gabe explains that if anything were moving in the trees in question, the birds wouldn't be singing.
So you got little kids playing soccer, old ladies standing around being adorable, and now fucking birds are literally singing in the literal trees? This is the part where the vampires come out or some shit, right? I have seen this show before. Gabe and Espera discuss Tinactin for a second, for reasons I don't really want to know, and then the little house and the little boys and the little old ladies are blown to shit.
Doc comes running up as the dust from the huge explosion clears, and Ray's like, "Did we call that?" Like maybe he would miss a huge airstrike getting called in and counted down while he was making nasty cookies. Brad is as spaced out as Brad gets, due to having just seen little kids blown to pink mist, and Doc Bryan confirms that it was Godfather who decided the little kids needed to die.
"We don't have the full picture..." Brad says, half to himself and half to head Doc Bryan off from another demoralizing speech about true stuff. "We had mortars fire at us from somewhere near that hamlet. Maybe... Maybe inside?" Wow, he's really out of it. I worry about him constantly. He doesn't need it. Gabe's with Doc: the whole point of bad guys is the "shoot and scoot": the fact that they fired from here means that they will never be here again. Brad is in the position of senior officer right this second among the witnesses. He's feeling the pinch Nate usually feels, and responds in kind: "I am not the one who asked the enemy to mix in with the civilian populace and use them as cover to attack us." But you're still the one who had to watch while they burned.
In a nearby, larger village, Captain America is shitting the usual amount of his panties. "Someone around here is hiding a mortar team! I warn you again, we will destroy your village not only if you yourself are hostile, but if you are harboring any enemy elements!" The guy talks desperately to him, trying to chill him out, and warning of death with a knife drawn across his neck. Captain America, of course, assumes the guy's threatening him, even though a rudimentary understanding of basic body language would make it clear that's not the case; Eric Kocher's none too impressed. Nate walks up, needling Meesh to get it out of the way: "He's grateful to be liberated and pleased to cooperate?" (Captain America: "These people are worse than the goddamn VC!" I love him most when he starts with the Nam shit.) Nate points out to Captain America a fact that is right in front of his face: "Dave, we've got Meesh..." ("Not that we're doing any better than the French in Indochina. I mean, we're making every French mistake, right?" Question: Which time? Answer: All of them. When he's right, he's right.)
Meesh is actually impressed with the guy's intel, and draws it out for a nearly comprehending Captain America: The guys weren't from the village, duh, and there are quote "a lot of dudes" still around, specifically on the other side of the bridge they keep talking about crossing. "Said there are men on the east side, north side, and the west side. And the men on the east side, they got the big guns." Nate and Captain America look at each other: Nate's treated to the queasy sight of Cap attempting his version of sacking up.
Encino Man comes over the radio, saying nothing. Brad's slow, sad half-blink at the sound of his voice is one of the most eloquent speeches we've seen on this show yet. Trombley asks if it's true that Ray's mom put his picture up on the Wal-Mart Wall Of Heroes? That phrase, it makes me really sad. I don't know why, but ... Well okay, I do, but I don't feel like talking about. My private Pinko Poke is not talking this week because if he started he'd never stop, but "Wal-Mart Wall Of Heroes" is probably the second most eloquent and evocative thing in the series. It tells you everything you need to know; it's explanatory and screwby in competing amounts. It's awful. "Yep. My grandma did when I went to Afghanistan. I'm on the Nevada, Missouri Wal-Mart Wall Of Heroes. Even got my dress blues on." Brad chews his chaw and is awesome: "If my mother ever distributed my likeness without written authorization, I would disown her."
"Technically speaking, Brad, but didn't your biological parents disown you when they put you up for adoption?" Brad concedes this tacky point, and watches the little kids. "I was one of those unfortunates adopted by upper-middle-class professionals and nurtured in an environment of learning, art, and a socio-religious culture steeped in over two thousand years of Talmudic tradition. Not everyone is lucky enough to have been raised in a Whiskey Tango trailer park by a bowlegged female whose sole qualification for motherhood is a womb that happened to catch the sperm of a passing truck driver." He gets out while Ray grins, and Ray calls after him, "At least my mom took me to NASCAR!" Better and better. Meanwhile -- probably because he thinks it's bad ass -- Trombley's stuck on whether or not Ray's dad is actually a truck driver.
Poke's not doing so well. He hasn't been doing great for awhile, but he's got daughters, around that age, and he's just watched little girls get blown to hell. And he knows that the only actual difference between his daughters and those little girls is the accident of birth. In the book Evan talks about a letter he sent home. I don't have the book with me this week, but the letter to his wife that Evan quoted broke my heart. How he took his wife, and their children, and all the love he felt for them, and all the light they brought into his heart and his life, and stowed it deep, because he couldn't have this mission touching them, even in his head. For the purposes of this mission, his wife and children don't exist. America doesn't exist. And all that staring he's been doing lately, he's doing it twice as hard.
Brad asks if he's okay, and he doesn't look at him, or blink. Brad waves cutely at two little girls, gives them a salaam, and he grins widely. "That doesn't get you, Poke?" Nowhere he can touch right now. Brad grabs some bright yellow humrats and bops Espera with them, holding them up for the girls to see. They ask permission, and as he goes down on his knee, they come running up. At Brad's insistence, Poke drops beside him. "As-salaamu Alaikum," he says. Peace be upon you. "Here. Here you go." He tries to smile for them, so they'll know we can be trusted; he wants to put his arms around them, but they're not his daughters. They giggle, and run away. "See? Don't you feel better?" He does not. "Fuck it, Dog, you think giving them some rice and a chocolate bar is gonna fix things?" He straps his Kevlar back on; the little girls show their grownups their gifts.
Nate relays to the Team Leaders the intel about the ambush up ahead. "Well let me guess, sir. The plan is for us to drive into it and draw fire," Brad says. Nate smiles warily and tells him they're being pulled back. "RCT is pushing up some LAVs to clear out the ambush. We're staying in a wadi south of the bridge." For once.
The LAVs drive by, inciting the Marines to scream and yell. Pappy is pleased, shaving: "This is how this ought to be fought. We feel our way up these back roads, generate intelligence, and they send some real ass in to deal with it." Makes sense, doesn't it? Kocher asks if he honestly believes this one non-deadly plan of action represents a positive change in strategy, pissing all over his Cheerios, but then, he has to deal with Captain America like every day. "No reason Battalion can't accidentally make a smart decision now and then. Even a broke-ass clock is right twice a day," Pappy laughs. Brad approaches and asks them if it's true, what he's heard: Casey Kasem calling Lt. Fick a coward in front of E-3s and -2s. That is just so fucking Casey Kasem! Ugh. Pappy is bummed, and nods; Kocher's even sadder. Brad spits. Pappy says basically that he'd rather have a fake "coward" like Fick than a bona fide retard like Captain America. Brad is reminded of an abandoned plan to have Navy psychiatrists pulled forward to the combat units. "Yeah. I scoffed then, but if ever there was a candidate to be locked up in the rubber tent, we know who he is..." Pappy laughs, wondering what actual psych docs would think about Ray Person. That's the first name on a very long list, by my count.
"Need I remind you that he is the best damn RTO in the business? ...As long as you keep him away from your uglier daughters and your smaller livestock?" He spits; he wasn't talking about their guys. "The individual who needs his head examined is the man responsible for taking arguably the finest damn independent recon operators of any military in the world, and dropping us in Humvee platoons to lead a parade of POGs, officers, and heavily-armed subhuman morons like Casey Kasem across Mesopotamia." Kocher and Pappy are sad because they thought they were joking around and then Brad started saying the shit they can't even be allowed to think. And he's not done. "How much does Uncle Sam spend on us? Jump school, dive school, mountain warfare, ranger school, SERE. That's a million dollars, on average, to train up 0321s [yet another term for Recon] like us. And here we are: perfectly-tuned Ferraris in a demolition derby." Nice! Pappy is touched/impressed by this analogy, and then they all remember Afghanistan, which by comparison was actually well-fought. "Any of us had been running our teams in that A-O," Kocher ruminates, "We sure wouldn't have dropped a bomb on that village like they did this morning." They toast Afghanistan: Pappy with a metal mug, Kocher with a beaten canteen, and Brad with a Gatorade bottle full of his Copenhagen sputum.
Rudy makes his devilishly dangerous and delicious espresso while Wynn tells a group of them about Somalia. In Somalia, he tells them as though it's a legend or mythology, you actually killed legit targets, instead of waving hello and then blowing up kids. Rudy brings the coffee, and somebody tells Ray to watch out. "Yeah, it's obvious I was wrong about invading Iraq for NAMBLA. It turns out we're actually here to set up a forward Starbucks. Christ, look, we've already inserted our Fruity Barista... Thank you very much," Rays says, as Rudy giggles and fills his cup. "Now all we need is some shitty fucking music playing, like Norah Jones, a couple of high-school girls getting super fat on iced lattes, a homeless guy trying to scam the key to the restroom, and some faggot writing his novel on a laptop." T asks Gunny if he thinks Godfather's pissed that somebody else is being sent directly into an ambush, rather than them. Heh. Gunny Wynn wonders aloud what Godfather's -- and by extension, Mattis's -- huge fucking rush is about anyway. (The answer is medals, I thought we covered that.) "There is no doubt America is gonna beat Saddam's military. So why rush this shit?" And if it were only Republican Guard, he'd have a much more valid point. But we'll get there.
"Yo, Ray," asks Chaffin for no reason other than to shoehorn this conversation as awkwardly as possible, apparently, into this fucking scene: "Remember that guy that got his dick cut off and sewed back on?" Ray does, yes. "John Wayne Bobbitt." Why are we talking about this? Let's ask Trombley: "He's a former Marine." Oh, now I get it. What else? "What other famous Marines were there?" Wow, really? Not to be rude, but a little massage never hurt. We used to watch Zoom in college and laugh about how totally natural it would be to catch a group of middle-schoolers sitting around going, "So like, what do you think about cheating in school?" Turns out? Slightly more natural than this conversation. Good thing Evan's good at his chosen career.
"Lee Harvey Oswald," Ray obligingly informs us via pretending not to talk to the camera -- something Ziggy's not that great at anyway -- "That old children's television show host Captain Kangaroo, he was one. And uh, the guy who climbed the University of Texas clock tower and shot sixteen people." Chaffin's like, "No Presidents?" And Ray's line pretty much justifies this whole ugly, hamfisted scene: "Closest we got was Oswald."
Evan speaks up, finally: "I met John Wayne Bobbitt... I interviewed him when he was trying to be a porn star. He, um, did this movie where he fucked a midget." Chaffin is, for some reason, totally excited about this whole story, like, he's really happy to have knowledge of what old JWB did after his dick got cut off. I don't get Chaffin. Gunny Wynn just takes the midget story as proof that Marines really will fuck anything, but Evan protests that she was a nice girl. Rudy hands Wynn his coffee, and Ray -- of course -- notices Rudy's nipples. Sigh. "Oh no. Looks like we're in for a cold night by the way Zoolander's nipples are twisted." Heh. I wish you could always tell the weather by Rudy's body parts. Fauxhawk says 20% chance of rain. 2xist man-panties say: Plant flax.
Rudy gets gay all over Pappy, to the delectation of everybody else. Not even the exceedingly married Ray and Brad are as married as Pappy and Rudy, and I love it when they do it front of people. Not as much as the people do, though. He cleans up Pappy's shaving job and then wipes the cream off his face, to Ray's total jaw-dropped amazement. "Let me hook you up, my backwoods brother... I always gotta fix you up, Pap. Looks like you've got some chafing here from your sapi plate..." Gunny Wynn stares like he's heard about this but never actually saw it before. "I've got some emollients in the Humvee. I'll get the Neutrogena..." They, I think, notice that they are completely dinner theatre of gayness at this point, and Rudy goes twice as hard at it: "Am I pushing you, my man? Am I going too far?" Even Chaffin laughs. In the desert of the real everybody needs reminding of love. "Pappy, you know I love you, brother."
Right about the time Rudy's popping out their second kid and sending it to college, Ray asks him for more November Juliet. Evan, of course, asks how they arrived at that name for coffee, and I have to admit that it took me a second to figure it out. I feel like I wished it had taken longer, like this show is doing something to my brain. Ray is only willing to answer the question so far -- "It's like, military phonetic alphabet?" -- and Evan keeps pushing. Ray just makes a sour face and sips his coffee, and that was when I went, "...Oh." Even Chaffin is nervous and quiet, looking to Holsey, who is awesome: "...Nigger Juice." Chaffin is thrilled that they still have ways to fuck with Evan, who is like whoa. And soon enough, RCT's casualties start driving back past them: bloodied men, hasty saline, groans of pain.
Godfather explains to the Platoon leaders that they're now being denied food not because of his own assheadedness but because 95% of the central Iraq supply train is now hauling artillery rounds to the front. Like, literal guns for actual butter. There is no irony in war. "For us tonight, gentlemen, this is good news. We're on a new map sheet, the last for phase three of our mission." The explanation for map sheets in Nate's book made me laugh because it's so totally like some tabletop role-playing game in the '70s: get to the edge, find new places to blow up. "I can reveal to you tonight that the CG's objective since pushing through Nasiriyah has been this: Al Kut. Here, to the east of Baghdad, Al Kut holds the only major bridge crossing the Tigris. Since the inception of phase one, CENTCOM has felt the need to control this eastern route to Baghdad. Phase four, the assault on Baghdad, cannot begin until Marines own Al Kut and its bridge." Godfather makes a little joke to which Sixta nods ever so seriously, because he is a moron: "Three words: tempo, tempo, tempo."
Lest we forget the awesomeness of Godfather above all men, "The swiftness of our advance has succeeded in outpacing the Iraqi military's efforts to organize large-scale resistance. Tonight, Ferrando expects our tempo to increase. This afternoon, Bravo Company exploited the willingness of locals to provide intelligence regarding an enemy ambush. That was good work." Captain America, of all people, looks around all proud. Because screaming at some random villager about fucking Ho Chi Minh is totally what Ferrando was talking about. "No doubt many of you were disappointed when division sent in the RCT's light armored units to clean them out. By all rights, that should have been our task." Nate is so, so tired. "But it turns out the CG hasn't forgotten about us." As usual, he starts bouncing around on his fucking heels just because he got to say his secret boyfriend's rank, and share with them how he got to wear Mattis's pin at the sorority meeting this week.
"We have reports that increasing numbers of paramilitary forces are moving into this area south of Al Kut. Tomorrow morning, the RCT will begin its final push to Al Kut on the east bank of the canal. Our push begins tonight. We are to advance along the western side of the canal starting at approximately 2300 hours local time. There's a town here, Muwaffaqiyah. It's about four kliks north of our current position. Soon as we pass Muwaffaqiyah, we've got thirty kliks of highway to Al Kut. This, gentlemen, is our happy hunting ground." Nate is, as usual, not happy with that phrase; assuming Patterson's not feeling it either. "The CG has given us free rein to initiate contact all along this MSR." And because we can't end a meeting without some unnecessary drama flourishes: "There's not a Marine on the planet who wouldn't want to be in your shoes tonight, gentlemen."
Encino Man, fastening his Kevlar, invites Nate aside to have what is sure to be a hideously awkward little chat about fucking nonsense. "Looks like we're the quarterback again..." Nate nods and waits for it to end. "Look, Nate, as far as executing this play, are we gonna have any... uh..." Nate fills in the blanks: "Personal issues, skipper?" Encino Man nods, worried and dim. "Not on my part, sir," but then of course bitchface Casey Kasem walks up at the worst moment. "I do however have an issue with unprofessional conduct of senior enlisted personnel in this company..." Casey Kasem starts some officious bullshit speechifying and Nate cuts him the motherfuck off, cold as ice: "Gunnery Sergeant, you do not come up on a discussion between the Captain and myself and speak unless you are spoken to. And nobody fucking spoke to you." It's like, how many fucking unasked-for machetes does the guy have to juggle? "Aye aye, Lieutenant," Casey fakes, and Nate ignores his imminently ignorable ass.
"Sir, I want to be certain that senior enlisted personnel are not speaking for you when airing derogatory opinions about the command of my platoon. If such opinions are yours, I would ask that you share them directly with me in private." Nate, sometimes he uses language as a weapon. He's erudite and gifted with words, but sometimes it's a choice. You could talk to Encino Man in tiny little words and phrases, or football metaphors, or you could go another way with it, and use the way you speak to exert power Encino Man barely understands. Not a completely honorable strategy, but going about things the proper way has gotten him exactly zero far, so fucking smoke 'em if you got 'em. "Opinions?" is Encino Man's idiotic response, but you can tell by the deep furrows in his brow that another Swamp Thingy thought is bubbling to the surface as slowly as possible. "Anyone who says I ... have opinions ... like you said, Nate... he's not on my team." Nate's like, "Fucking fine, great, later," and Encino Man looks at Casey Kasem so that he can explain what just happened.
I can't even hate Encino Man anymore, because there is a certain kind of stupid person that always gets Peter Principled based on the fact that whoever is talking to him is right. And the people that decide your fate are invariably present when they're talking to you, which means they're always right when they're interacting with you -- and the people in position to decide your fate are always happiest when they're right. So for this moment, Encino Man understands what Nate means, and feels ashamed about things getting to the point where Nate feels -- and is -- justified in questioning his decisions. Except in the moment immediately following this moment, Nate is walking away, and leaving him in Casey Kasem's care. And what happens is that whatever Casey Kasem says, that's the new correct state of things. And Encino Man spends a hell of a lot more time with his Gunnery Sergeant than he does with Lt. Nate Fick.
Walt's all out of LSA, so his gun's fucking up again. Brad tells him to accept the fact that the only dependable weapon he has is his SAW. And as we'll see, he's like Rain Freak Trombley with that thing. Ray comes running up doing a spot-on Foxxy Love ("Hey hey hey!") and tells them he's just done something "really dirty." Oh, great. "You know that picture of Rolling Stone's girlfriend?" Brad admits that it's safe to say they all know her, pretty intimately, at this point. "I got it back from Bravo Three and I swear I was gonna give it back to him, but I ran into Wasik on the way over here..." Wasik, you'll remember, managed to get off to Pocahantas, a pen-and-ink drawing. "I traded that bitch for some pec-2 batteries!" Brad clarifies that in fact Ray has become a pimp, and Ray calls her a "dirty little hoochie," and this is troubling in that they don't know her either. If you cut a picture out of a magazine, right, it's safe to say that men would masturbate about it; but think about how much just knowing she's real, that they know somebody who's actually touched her, that she in a sense belongs to somebody they can see and talk to, physically, and that makes her hotter? Men are gross.
Brad asks, optimistically, if he got thermal batteries too, and Ray's realistic: she's real, which is better than not-real, but nobody's as real as a celebrity. "Jesus, dude. It's a picture of a reporter's girlfriend, not of J. Lo's cum-dripping twat." Evocative! Brad agrees with this logic, which is inviolate because men are, by the way, gross, and goes through the batteries. He absent-mindedly reminds the very phased Walt to get some sleep, for not the first time this week, but Walt wants to keep playing with his gun. "Brad, you get some sleep." Brad agrees, and hands off the phone to Ray in a well-practiced move, taking off.
Less than an hour later, at sunset, there are explosions in the night. A figure comes out of the tall grass, and Christeson demands the challenge and password. "Diamond," shouts Q-Tip, "Blue diamond, asshole!" He holds some kind of beastie up and Christeson asks him WTF he's up to. "I had to get medieval on his ass!" What is it? "I don't know, but it's got fur and four legs and a little bit of meat!" Even Christeson is not hardcore enough to be completely unaffected by Q-Tip's bizarreness yet.
Evan and Brad sleep in the light of mortar fire; Ray's bored as hell in the truck above them. Gunny calls for the Team Leaders on the radio and Ray shakes Brad awake. "56 minutes. I've been asleep for 56 minutes," Brad says immediately. "56 minutes and just one dream." Ray points out that at least he got a dream. "I dreamt I was in Iraq," Iceman almost complains. "Were you naked?" Wouldn't be surprising.
"North of our position is the Wild West," Nate tells the team leaders. "We all know we've killed a lot of bad guys already..." Espera, still worse for wear: "Sure. Must be some bad guys in all those women and children we've been stacking along the roads." This whole time I've been mighty touched and intrigued by the "bad guys" and I keep thinking about it, but like: it's the simplest means to an end. We're the good guys, they're the bad guys. Whoever they turn out to be. It's like kids building a fort when they say it, it makes me sad. "Those who remain are going to take their last stand here..." meaning south; Brad arrives and Nate looks at him. "Bad news is, we don't sleep tonight. Good news is, we get to kill bad guys. In six zero mikes, Bravo Company and Charlie Company are maneuvering onto the western side of this canal. Our orders are to set up positions as we see fit along the MSR and hunt for paramilitaries operating in the A-O. Our goal is to terrorize the Fedayeen. And this platoon will be on point."
Lovell notes that it's better for them to do it than Captain America, but Nate's still not interested in playing that particular game. "The point is we are taking the initiative. And they're letting us do it at night, when we have the advantage." Brad's voice is still sleepy as he reminds Nate that there's not a single working set of thermals in the entire platoon, and without those the "advantage" of nighttime activity is questionable at best. "Brad, we've still got our NVGs, pec-4s and 17-bravos." Why does nobody get that this is officially Don't Fuck With Fick Day?
Pappy asks if it isn't true that the Regiment's remaining on the canal's east side, and that Alpha Company and H&S are staying behind. Nate spins: "We're going lean. We're hunters tonight." Pappy's like, you know that's not my question: "How do we get around this bridge and the town up to where the LAVs was fighting?" Oh, see, because they're not going around it. Team One (Brad) is leading everybody across the bridge. Tiny narrow little enfilade space, tiny little trucks, tiny gorgeous little Walt up on top. I am not liking this plan.
"Sir, is my team to do a foot patrol to get eyes on the bridge and make sure that the enemy ambush has in fact been eliminated?" Nope. Doc Bryan's like, "Reconnaissance Marine: noun. Of or having to do with reconnaissance, not trip-trapping across the bridge of all trolls with thumbs in mouths." Of all the people in the world, though, the person I think would be least convinced of Don't Fuck With Fick Day is Doc Bryan. Nate appeals to the timetable, which doesn't allow for that: "The chances of a serious threat are very low. We've been hitting those ambush points hard all night." (I am assured of this!) Pappy starts to ask how, then, if the fucking monster truck rally that is the LAV assault is coming back covered in horrible blood, they are supposed to survive five seconds in Humvees, but Don't Fuck With Fick Day is finally declared a national holiday. "Frankly, gentlemen, I'm not hearing the aggressiveness I'd like." The end.
Everybody's like whoa, and he tells them to get it together, and takes his leave. Brad calls out to him, and is ignored. Pappy sums up: "The people running this war can fuck things up all they want, and as long as we keep getting lucky and making it through alive, they'll just keep repeating the same mistakes." Brad stands alone. It had to happen, Nate had to make this point that he's in an interminable spot and can't be Brad's knight and never could, but man it's no good to watch happen. It's good to be the best platoon leader and you do it by being Nate, but make enough compromises, or get forced into them by competing pressures from above and below, and you're cornered.
Gunny says his name, just once, but Nate's not up for chatting. "Our orders are clear. I would not help this platoon by questioning him, or hesitating in any way. The CO reached out to me. I have to honor that, right?" Gunny nods, reluctantly. Out in the dark, Rudy tries to get moto: "Brother, we're going hunting."
NVGs with fresh batteries, everybody gets loaded up. "What's our TAD with our Cobra escorts?" Brad asks, but of course there is none. "We don't have comms... That would be too easy? I don't know. No one's rogering up on the tads." Brad nods and tells Evan to stay with HQ, saying it's going to be a short mission. What it is, is going to be horrific, and he knows that. Ray looks Evan in the eye and nods, more serious than we've seen him, maybe ever. Evan looks at Brad and Ray and gauges whether they mean it, then agrees. Brad is relieved. Evan makes ready to exit the vehicle, but Espera runs up and nixes it. "Reporter ain't gonna leave, Brad. He skips town on us now, might change our luck, and that could adversely affect our ability to survive and complete this mission." As nice as it is, to be a civilian bullet-magnet with mascot appeal, Evan can't actually believe it. "Are you kidding?" Poke asks if he really wants to "make our luck adverse and all," and Evan agrees that he does not. It's intense. Brad agrees, because Espera's not backing down. I had to wonder: how much of this is just wanting a witness for what they're being asked to do, and the way it's inevitably going to go? Espera knocks the side of the truck: "See you on the other side, sucka." Evan feels some serious feelings about the ambiguity of that phrase.
They get the truck started, and Ray's singing some country music song which takes about second to get completely on Brad's nerves. "Pass me some of your Ripped Fuel. And I fucking mean it about the country music." He downs them. "You know Brad, you're right. Now isn't an appropriate time for country music. I was thinking a little more old-school R&B. Because look, I'm Stevie Wonder!" He puts on his crap NVGs and sways back and forth: "Blind as a motherfucker in my piece-of-shit NVGs!" he sings a snatch of "Ma Cherie Amour" and they roll out.
They drive approximately forever in the dark: road, then giant rocks, then nothing. There's enough light that it's affecting the NVGs; blinder than them, Evan sits quietly in the back. "We have the bridge four kliks ahead to the west... There will be a right turn toward the bridge abutment..." Ray asks Brad if he's looking at a guardrail on the side of the road, and Brad gets pissy. "It's the shoulder. It slopes. I know you've got no depth perception in those NVGs but use some common fucking sense in your situational awareness." Ray answers his pissiness with pissiness. "It's the way that the fucking ambient light is slanting in, I can't tell if dark areas are ditches or walls." Brad radios Espera that somebody in his truck has somebody lit up. Infrared lasers are twitching off to the side; Evan still can't see anything. "Yeah, it's me, Dog. I got a foot-mobile, possible tango, about one o'clock, 200 meters out, crouched on a berm." Lasers swarm the object; Brad immediately recognizes it as a trash bag caught on scrub brush. Evan starts freaking out because he can't see any of this happening; Brad reassures him. "I don't even have a plastic bag to shoot," Trombley whines, and Ray puts on a weird voice: "Oh, now remember James, once you fire a bullet, you can't take it back..."
Planes fly over; Evan stares blindly in the dark, all around. A missile drops on a stand of trees, then another. The light from the explosion freaks out Ray's NVGs, and the truck slows down. Brad asks if anybody knows why the Cobras are shooting, and the answer is of course no, because there's no comms with the Cobras. More and more explosions, and Ray getting freaked out by the intermittent blindness, which causes Brad to get weird too, and the whole time Evan is getting more and more weirded out. It's very claustrophobic and scary, even though you see it from three different perspectives -- somehow they all add up to total blindness and chaos. Well done. Nate tells Brad again to keep going, directly into their blind spot. They come in under the Cobras, which drop red-hot spent casings directly on them, burning Walt and the other gunners when they touch them, like fire raining down.
Ray turns to avoid something strange in the road; Walt confirms that it's not a ditch, concave, but something like a box or drainpipe, convex. Ray can't tell the difference. When you're looking in monochrome it doesn't really matter. They're close to the bridge, with the rest of the teams behind them, and no way to get out: stuck. "We need to peel. Ray, I need us to egress immediately. We're in a kill zone here." Ray tries to turn around, a three-point untrained turn with four Humvees lined up behind him, in the dark, and half the comms schitzing out. Evan starts to get scared, finally, as they try to coordinate over the comms, with Baptista screaming in Portuguese and everybody talking at once, trying to back out. It's very loud, and then suddenly very quiet as Brad looks out with his gunsight, chillingly meditative: "There are men in the trees."
Shots everywhere, Brad taking just everybody out, NVG's dropping out left and right, total firefight, I don't even know, M19s and SAWs going crazy, everybody screaming IRL and on comms, "contact right" and "dismount 12 o'clock" and all of this, and the whole time, nobody can move. Brad finally takes a sec to ask Ray how their egress is progressing, and Ray's like, "All Hitman Victors, this is Two One. Is it at all possible for any of you to back up?" There's another huge explosion, really close, and Baptista's still yelling. "God damned Baptista! How the fuck would you like it if I joined the Brazilian Marines and only spoke English?" Evan gets more and more freaked out, and the fighting gets more and more intense; finally Ray gets out of the truck to yell at people in person: "Lilley! What the fuck? Would you please! Back the fuck up!" Lilley and Garza try to figure it out, and nobody can see anything.
Elsewhere, Kocher's like, "This is going well, innit." Which is just long enough for Captain America to start shouting crazy nonsense, of course. "Holy Mother of God! We got a slaughterhouse up there, men! Eric, watch for infiltrators. Be prepared to fire. On my command!" He runs off back to Crazytown and Kocher's like, "He gives an order to shoot, we'll end up schwacking Bravo Two. Hot-mic the radios, Dirty." Dirt Earl does something and the comms go screechy with noise. How awesome!
More screaming and explosions, an RPG shows up, so that's awesome, Walt is screaming moto, Evan gets a casing in the eye from his M19, Brad radios in about how they can't move in any direction whatsoever. Pappy calls in a man down, and Rudy -- sitting to him -- asks who it is. It's Pappy, whose ankle and foot are now hamburger. Rudy leans down to take a look; a bullet takes out his windshield, right where his left eye should be.
Which is awful on many levels. Firstly because it's Rudy, but also because one of the most intriguing and lovely pictures in Evan's book is this: Rudy Reyes, sitting in a Humvee, with one bullet hole where his left eye should be. I kept going back to that picture when I was reading the book the first two times, because it's so scary and there's no explanation, and Rudy looks so tired, and it's so obviously staged for whatever reason. I thought I wanted to know what it meant, but I didn't really.
This assignment is weird. The war is real, the ultimate reality show, and we don't get to watch it, because we forgot to create checks and balances on the cooption of the fourth estate, because in the days of the framers we didn't have journalism, we had a half-crazy nudist vegetarian with a printing press and illegitimate children all over the place. Fast-forward a few centuries, and you have a war that's been going on since my college graduate sister was in junior high, without a single body on TV, because reporters can't ask or tell about the war, or else they won't get access to anything else. You've got Evan Wright, for whom this enterprise is a career-maker, and... that's about it. Half the guys in the original article got discharged for talking about real shit. But there's the filter of memory, and then the filter, of Evan Wright telling about this. And then the filter of words on paper, into a book, which is taken and filtered through the dramatic sensibility into a TV show whose only mandate is to match up to the original Xerox as well as possible. From all accounts, it feels the same even if the facts are different, which is the only important thing if you're the original article, the book, the script, or the performance of the show itself.
And then there's me, trying to recap the drama of the book of the story of the story of the thing that happened. Postmodernity is all well and good, but I think the point where you actually masturbate to the idea ends somewhere around sophomore year of your finer liberal arts universities and institutions. It's an infection you eventually burn out because Eco and Foucault and Calvino and Baudrillard are not the story: they're the story about the story. At the end of that particular hall of mirrors, there's beautiful Rudy who is either dead or alive, in a second you can point to with your finger and say: that is real. I mean, I triangulated on Nate by reading his book, and I do love Brad Colbert, but all that is just looking through a lot of layers of obfuscation that's not even purposeful: we're all trying to tell the real story, all down the line. Not often you could say that about something that's come through this many hands. So imagine what it would be like if one of the people along that line, from Evan to David Simon to me to you, who had an agenda that wasn't at least trying to be about telling a greater truth? I'm not setting myself up as a storyteller at all, that's not my intention: I'm saying my intentions are to say what I think honestly happened, based on looking at what somebody else thinks honestly happened. But if it got dirty administration hands on it? Even one layer? Much less all the ones we casually accept now?
My point is, there have been a few moments throughout that made me feel like we were seeing something real: Doc Bryan's line to Brad a while back, when he asked what he could do. That hit me in the face. "November Juliet" and Evan's total adrenal breakdown this week. That wandering shellshock guy that Brad tried to feed. Trombley's... everything about Trombley. It's scary shit. But looking at actual Rudy looking through that hole in the fictional windshield, and seeing superimposed over it the well-rehearsed image of actual Rudy looking through the actual hole in the actual windshield? I've been trying to ignore the weirdness of this assignment, because I don't really feel up to grasping the fact that those little fictional kids were very real and are very dead. They didn't get married or have kids or join the army or have a job or anything little kids get to do. They just died.
And I know it's so very liberal and pansy-assed and "what about the children" to talk about the children in this kind of instance, but: These are people, bro. You know? War makes you crazy and adults have choices to make: they could be good guys here in this town doing bad things, just like us. Kids don't choose, but they still die. And it's like, if you spend your day crying about dead kids in some other country, you've wasted your day. But if you go Kill and just ignore it, or laugh at it, you've also wasted your day. And at this point in the recap is where I should say "screwby" because that's ultimately where you have to leave it, but I mean: actual Rudy's actual head. IRL. That's fucked up, right? I'm not weird for focusing on it?
Because you know what, I think -- at this late hour -- that I should have not read those books, or cared about Brad or Nate, or watched The Wire and loved old Ziggy so much, or any of it. These guys should have been allowed to be either real or fictional, but not both at the same time, because it's queasy and weird and it makes my stomach hurt. I should have avoided all of the extraneous shit, the interviews and the constant HBO onslaught of stuff, and just watched the fucking show and made some jokes and called it a day. My advice to you is: don't care. Screwby. Because this makes a much better TV show than it does real life.
Captain America looks like he's falling in love for the first time, firing on anything he can; Nate begging Wynn to get the clusterfuck unfucked, and things are getting worse and worse, and Q-Tip gets hit, but keeps shooting. "Christeson, hold your sector!" Nate goes walkies up and down the line ("Don't shoot, LT is foot-mobile") begging them to fucking figure it out, and they slowly get it together and roll back to HQ.
Brad stares blankly as Ray parks, just completely blown. They breathe. Brad tells Ray to check the tires and they jump out, leaving Evan and Trombley alone. Evan is shaking like an old sick dog, like hypothermia. "Jesus Christ" is all he can say, wildly. "Did you know people shiver when they have an excess of adrenaline? It cuts the blood flow or something. They taught us that in SOI." Trombley grins at him; they are sharing something. As is usual with Trombley, nobody quite knows what it is that this moment of sharing is about. Evan takes a stab, through chattering teeth: "Is that what happens to you?" No. Trombley gets a woody. Evan ... doesn't have time to deal with that.
Rudy puts Pappy's hat on him. Or whatever you call it. Pappy, Jesus that's terrible: strapped across the hood of a Humvee, like cargo. Rudy's so sad that Pappy can't stick around, that he's being taken away from his purpose. Pappy just wants his Copenhagen. They drive away with him and Nate notifies Rudy that he's the TL now. Just like that. Rudy stares; Nate heads on down the line, running into Christeson and Q-Tip. They look like brothers, with their arms around each other, like everything's fine. Doc Bryan explains that what's really going on is that Stafford has refused to be evacuated. "I don't want him here if he's ineffective," Nate says, but even Doc's impressed: "I took an inch of shrapnel off his thigh, but it missed the femoral artery." Christeson nods: "He tourniquetted himself, sir. Got back up on his weapon and returned fire." Q-Tip, giddy and crazed, grins wildly at Nate: "Boom, boom. I was taking niggas out with a flurry of buckshot!" ...Sir." Nate looks at him, and Doc, and just walks away. Christeson mutters, "Screwby, sir." They dap.
War Pig lurches past, pouring fire forward into the dark. "The great destroyers," mutters Brad, and Ray sings the praises of LAVs, which are pretty awesome. They're like something out of Jodorowski's head, but real. "Pouring down hate and discontent like a motherfucker," Poke says. Wow. "When they finish fucking shit up there might not even be a bridge," Ray hums; Espera wanders off again. Everybody gets back in the truck and they start to move: "I want fifteen meters between their last Humvee and ours," Brad tells Ray. Evan asks why they aren't sending tanks over the bridge first, which is a question with several answers, all of which Ray is happy to provide. They don't know how strong the bridge is, or if it'll even hold tanks; they don't want to risk five million dollar tanks if it turns out to be mined or booby-trapped when they could just send POS Humvees; officers are retarded. That last one is implied, of course. They start to move and Evan, having had his baptism of fire and become for all he knows a Recon Marine, shoves Trombley roughly: "Wake up, Trombley!"
Take two of the bridge crossing takes ... about five seconds to go to hell. The bridge blows up right after Kocher's Humvee gets across, but nobody notices right away because of the great amount of fire, and the fact that the vehicle gets stuck in some kind of pothole while randoms open fire on them all, plus an RPG team. So you've got Kocher rolling into town and suddenly noticing his team's all along... And Captain America, pissing his panties as only Cap can do, on the other side of the bridge. Oh, and Encino Man is up in the motherfucking mix too. Because, I think, even God finds the Iraq war to be retarded.
"[Something something] Tet Offensive! Bullshit! Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I got some good men dying in there!" I'm serious: I love this man. Eckloff (Young Battalion Guy) arrives just as both Encino Man and Captain America are talking total freakazoid BS into their comms and totally goes, "Give me your radio." Captain America keeps screaming as Todd collects their radios one at a time: "...there's one thing I learned in ranger school, it's that we must seize initiative! Keep your eyes on those reeds! They could be massing a suicide RPG team as we speak, we don't know! Any movement in there, you..." Todd takes his radio away, and kneels near Encino Man.
"What the hell is going on here?" he asks Encino Man calmly, and Encino Man tries to figure out what the hell is going on so that he can tell Eckloff what's going on here. "We were, we're... The stuck vehicle, it... Stuck." Nice. Meanwhile Captain America is doing his whole can you believe this routine: "I got my best Marines cut off in that town, dying in there!" Todd, wisely, ignores him. "Craig? Godfather needs to unfuck this clusterfuck now. We need to think of this as a defensive line, and a goal-line stand. And you're the offense, Craig. You need to be a hard charger here. Put some fuckin' muscle into it." Encino Man falls in what a higher mammal might call total gay love, but I'm willing to call "vague understanding of WTF is going on." Casey Kasem ... sucks, whatever. I hate them both. He's like a less-cool Sixta, if you can possibly wrap your fucking brain around that idea.
"Men! Over here!" Encino Man beats on the hood of the trapped Humvee. "Two-minute warning, guys, two-minute warning!" I don't even ... whatever, it's Encino Man. I'm just glad he's not eating his hair right now. They grunt and groan and get the truck out, and Encino Man goes completely balls-out awesome, doing an end-zone dance and screaming WOOOO! "Sir, you did a favor by taking my radio from me," he says in an aside to Todd (the fuck you say?) and then screams his version of a speech. "Gentlemen, this is the end zone! Woo! Woo! Yeah! Go Yellowjackets!"
Daytime, for no reason, Captain America is screeching and collecting the guns from bodies. Even if they're not for him, he still only has a certain skill set. "How's it feel now, you filthy motherfuckers? Goddamn dirty hajji motherfuckers trying to fuck with me? Fuck you! That's what you get when you try to ambush Marines, motherfucker! You get dead! Son of a bitch! Raaah!" Anybody else, I would be loving it. ...Okay, I still love it.
He tosses their guns over the side of the bridge, having grown exactly one millimeter as a person, and then Godfather arrives. Just in fuckin' time as usual. They walk through a vast array of dead body parts and find one guy with the word LOVE tattooed on his hand. "Sir, get a load of this," Eckloff says. "They don't look like Iraqi regulars. Looks like he could have been a college student." Kocher kicks a random in the head, and he moans. "We've got a wounded enemy..." Captain America, heh, runs up screaming, "Shoot him!" (How can you doubt that I love him?) Godfather asks the surgeon kid if he can help the injured guy, but the surgeon's worried that he might be boobytrapped. Being a human being, Kocher offers to search him and find out. Being something less than a human being, Godfather bitches: "Because of this dying motherfucker and his dead friends, we're eight hours behind schedule." He stomps off. Right then, a herd of sexually frustrated rhinocerii with necrotizing fasciitis and scorching gonorrhea converge on him, raping him to death with their giant diseased rhinoceros penises, set what's left on fire with lighters they got from 7-11, then bury the carbonized remains in a shoebox marked "FUCK OFF."
Meesh is here, so it's time to go through the dude's pockets and steal slash destroy his personal stuff. "Look at this motherfucker..." Meesh identifies his belongings, as somebody crushes his watch underfoot for no reason other than pettiness: "Amphetamine, pretty high-grade shit. Dude, these are Syrian pounds... Syrian passport... Ahmed Al Zari, born in Damascus, age 26, entered Iraq... March 23." Nate is icked out, because that's three days after the US invasion. "His address in Iraq is the... Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Restaurant is two-star, but room service is out of this world. And if you go around the corner, there's a club where the ladies go, just... say you're a friend of Uday's... 'Purpose for entering Iraq: JIHAD.' Oh, he put "jihad" at passport control. That's some wicked shit, some evildoing shit, if you ask me, man." (Personally I think that is totally bad-ass, frankly.) "They're coming here to fight us," Encino Man says, getting precisely half the point. "I wonder if President Bush will ever find out about this." Nate and Kocher look at each other like they desperately need a hug, because wow. Just, wow. Way to miss the fucking point. "It's what the President's been talking about. With the war on terrorists. This is why we're here."
EXACTLY, you FUCKING RETARD. These guys got in a fucking time machine and travelled BACK IN TIME to BEFORE YOUR ASS invaded the country in order to provoke your invasion, then somehow got back up to 1.21 gigawatts and traveled BACK TO THE FUTURE so they could enter the country after the fact, and you could discover them having come here AFTER you invaded -- from a country that has so many fucking problems your imperialist bullshit barely registers on the radar -- so they could DIE to stop you invading a country for the sole purpose of keeping the most evil companies in the history of COMPANIES secure in their petroleum monopoly. That's EXACTLY what's going on here.
Q-Tip cooks his roast beast while somebody plays the movie quote game offscreen; Christeson offers roast beats to Espera, who is horrified, much to their enjoyment. "The fuck is wrong with you, Dawg? What is it with you white boys? Leave you alone for ten minutes, you go all Lord Of The Flies and shit." Evan, adorably, offers him a piece, and he wanders away.
Ray walks to Pappy's ride and sits in the driver's seat. "What up, yo? Holy fucking shit, dude..." He stares through the hole in the windshield: "Unreal. Rude, check it out, I'm you. Here, dead. Alive. I'm dead here, now I'm alive. I'm dead. Alive. Dead." Rudy asks him what his fucking point is, and Ray's chastened. "Just trying to cheer you up, brother." Rudy's too sad for that. "Fucking unreal," Ray murmurs.
Brad tells Walt he's trading out with Trombley; Walt protests, but Brad insists. "Trombley slept a couple of hours last night. You didn't. I want you in some shade inside the Humvee." Espera arrives to complain about the "LT's boys" eating weird-ass meat: "It's like Jeffrey Dahmer's picnic. Makes you appreciate shit." He tosses them some non-roast beast rations. "Makes you appreciate shit like ... good old-fashioned chunked formed meat patties." They smile and dig in. Espera gazes on Brad, back to something closer to his usual self finally. "Yo. That was some fucking true Iceman shit you pulled last night. Your superhuman powers of observation saved the whole platoon." Walt shivers. "Shit, Dog, they thought they were gonna get the drop on Iceman? Fuck no! The Iceman can see you before you even know you're there!" Brad semi-protests that the dudes were untrained amateurs, and course Poke's like, "So how come nobody else saw them?" True Iceman indeed: "You're not as good as me."
Brad digs through his ration and starts bitching about how they've been getting peanut butter in every MRE for ten days. "When the fuck am I going to get a jalapeno and cheese?" Walt quietly, privately mourns that he's allergic to peanuts, just as Doc Bryan's arriving. He asks how everybody is, and Espera's all, "Well? It's just the same every day now... Dig a hole, eat... Kill." Walt adds jacking off to the list, but notes the curious lack of sleep. Doc's concerns are a bit less Maszlow-oriented. "You know, funny thing is... I would done anything to save those shepherds Trombley hit. Yesterday? I musta killed two, maybe three guys. I don't feel nothing." Espera agrees. "I shot some motherfucker right in the grape, saw the back of his head bust off. I don't feel nothing." (So my question at this point would be: is this scene legit, or is it more telling/showing? It's the whole point of the title of the show, after all. So are they having a real conversation, or is this just poorly limned pointy drama? I wouldn't even ask except for the horror of "So who else was once a Marine?") "This how true warriors feel?" Brad tells him not to fool himself: "We aren't being warriors out here. They're just using us as machine operators. Semiskilled labor." (Valid; I'll stop complaining either way.) Nate calls the TLs to a meeting; Brad continues to be almost dickish with him, but not quite.
"The news on Pappy is good. This morning he was taken to the RCT shock-trauma, where they loaded him onto a bird. He's on his way to a navy hospital in Spain. Back at Camp Mathilda Pappy once said, "Don't pet a burning dog." I had no idea what he meant by that until twelve hours ago. Last night we pet a burning dog. I know it, you know it, there's no use in pretending we didn't." (This would be awesomer if the whole thing hadn't already been discussed in like the first episode, because this is actually where it belongs. I'm not going to check but I feel like I said something about that at the time, then maybe took it out; in any case it's even more true now.) "That's very astute, Sir," says Brad, still not being entirely shitty.
"We step off in thirty minutes. Our route is taking us through the center of Muwaffaqiyah, the town we almost made it to last night." I will never learn to spell that word; I acknowledge that about myself. Lovell (the one with the insane North Face Pyornkrachzark face): "But isn't the bridge damaged, Sir?" Nate mentions an alternate route. Hmmmmmmmmm. Lovell's kind of worried and Espera chews on nothing. Brad tells Nate they can take it from there, and starts finishing the brief. I hope they don't have a big fight week where everything comes to a head!
Gunny's like, "I just gotta use up all the juice in that phrase so that it stops being interesting and just starts being something we say over and over and over: We did pet a burning dog." Nate's like, "In more ways than one." For a second I thought he was talking about the obvious hair-pulling bitchfight he and Brad are talking about getting into, but no. "Those jihadists who attacked us? Isn't this the exact opposite of what we want to have happen here?" I so feel for Nate because that's like what Brad's been trying to say for the last fifty years, but Nate can't let him close enough to say it, because there are things that have to be respected right now because Nate's up against the wall, so it's like, "OMG Espera and Brad are right but I have to be all Sixta about it and it's driving me crazy, plus meanwhile what they're right about is also driving me crazy, because what I think is, this shit is actually crazy and no amount of me being awesome or smart is going to stop that from being true, and I can't ever admit that because of how I'm an officer. Gunny Wynn! I need to smoke some pot or something!" Gunny is sympathetic.
"It's all on that guy's passport," is what Nate actually says. "Two weeks ago he was still a student in Syria. He wasn't a jihadi until we came to Iraq." Wynn's like, that's a bummer; what's actually a bummer is the totally sad, almost crying face Nate's got right now. Because that's always going to be the thing fucking him up: he believes twice as much as any of them, in the right way and for the right reasons which is rare in itself, plus -- with the possible exception of Brad, and certainly Ray -- he's also smarter than any of them, which means his hopes have that much further to fall, but he's too smart to actually get angry about reality, so it's just sad. I wish everybody would just ... Can't we all just agree to live up to Nate's expectations? Because he's not wrong.
On the alternate route, Evan asks the obvious question: why didn't they just go this way last night? Ray's jovial: "You're not thinking military, dude. See, bypassing the ambush is just what the ambushers expected us to do." Evan laughs. "If they expected us to bypass them, why did they set up the ambush?" Ah: "Because they're not professional military." Heh. Brad tells Ray to slow down: there's a bunch of randoms on foot, wearing American clothes, laughing and waving. Walt points out that they could be/are the dudes they fought last night. "Hitman Two, this is Two One. On our two o'clock we are passing a group of foot-mobiles, all male, early 20s, definitely not from around here. I strongly request permission to set up a snatch mission on them. How copy?" Nate calls to get permission, and his answer is telling: "Our request for a snatch has been denied." Ours. Aw, like they have a little baby that is about capturing and abusing random men from the side of the road. Nate can't help but say hello even from behind the wall. Brad thanks him for trying.
Ray is amazed as they drive past the random foot-mobiles and start seeing the huge piles of ordnance they've got: guns, explosives, ammo, RPGs, all of it. Brad calls it "jihad central." So why would you do anything about that when Godfather's got his panties in a twist to hit a real, meaning fake, objective? God, see this is the thing: if Godfather actually followed his instincts and did something, he would totally rock it. I am assured of this. But instead, he's got this imaginary boyfriend Mattis on his shoulder all the time saying that what even-less-informed command wants is less important than what's in front of your eyeballs. The only time he actually does something raw or cool or risky, he clears it first with the imaginary Mattis and then the real one, and then does it. Meaning that his decisions are being made on even less intel than the tiny amount of intel available to him.
And the loop never closes, because he's the only one sending the intel back in reports, so he just plays that drama card bullshit and all he's ever really saying is, "That thing you told me to do for no reason? I told my men to do it for no reason, and they did it for no reason, and we did it awesome." So if the people that decide your fate are always right when they're interacting with you, you eventually get to command a Battalion. Because there's nobody to tell Mattis about Captain America running around like an inbred retriever with his crossed eyes bugging out all the time, or Encino Man carrying on long conversations with jalapeno cheese sauce, or Casey Kasem stealing everybody's batteries so that he can fashion them into jewelry or whatever the fuck he does with them, because that would unfortunately reflect poorly on Godfather, to whose ultimate benefit all this responsibility redounds. Which is how he got there in the first place. It's so grody.
They drive through a bombed-out town; there are random corpses and random half-corpses and some legs. Ray notes how "It's weird: We had one guy shot in the foot and another guy take a little shrapnel in the leg, and we level half the town." Trombley, who's up top because Walt desperately needs some sleep: "Hajjis gotta learn." Nate sends them to set up a roadblock in the northeast corner of Muwaffaqiyah. There are guys yelling and waving; Lilley maps their passage on film; he's got the camera working again. Later, they're staring down the road while Team Three checks out a Ba'ath military installation. Some kids approach and everybody's twitchy. Brad waves, once again, to the little kids: "Don't shoot. They're just curious." They don't wave back. Espera is still not into waving at little kids.
Team Three's at a school, wiring up explosives. "Republican Guard took over every classroom," says Holsey. Some Two Three hottie, I think Stinetorf, is like, "And so now we get to blow up a school. That is awesome." Holsey notes that the kids were there at least until February. All the art on the walls is about Valentine's Day, and shows pretty princesses. Blonde, white.
It's not a punchline, at least, but it serves the same purpose: you think it's like this when it's like this. Get them by the balls and their hearts and minds follow -- eventually; plant your cuckoo eggs in their heads before they learn to speak, and they'll never have hearts or minds of their own in the first place. They're not wrong when they say America's a disease; plenty of parasites live in common purpose with their hosts. I don't want that shit in my head, but it's a done deal: can you really blame them for not wanting it in the first place?
"Meesh has debriefed some locals who say jihadists are planning to attack us with suicide bombers," Nate tells Brad. "Soon as Team Three gets back, we're clearing the town and pushing north... What are you doing with that smoke grenade?" Brad reminds him they talked about it: a new procedure for stopping cars, blue smoke; Charlie's already using it. "I don't like this, Brad." Brad promises it'll work. Fire the smoke grenade a hundred meters away, between us and the oncoming cars. If it's bad guys, suicide guys, you still have a hundred meters to kill them. "This just gives civilians a chance." Brad makes it clear that he's not pushing this, and that he's all about Nate's authority, because Nate is awesome; Nate grudgingly lets him try it.
The first one, he fires and the car immediately turns around; Team Three blows the school. Doc Bryan opens his trap. "Why'd we leave that ordinance out in the field if we're gonna blow up the only school in this town? Am I missing something?" Yeah, the stupidity required for promotion beyond Platoon command, apparently. Another car's coming -- Walt's looking shaky -- Brad fires the smoke and the car keeps coming, swerving a bit ... Walt takes the driver out. There's a bullet hole, I mean to say, in the windshield. Right where a man's left eye would be. And on the other side of that hole in the windshield, there's a guy with a hole in his head.
The passengers stumble out onto the road and run; Brad yells at Walt the first instant after the shot, but immediately sees how shaken Walt is. He takes him gently back to the Humvee; seats him in the backseat, murmuring to him like a horse. Right in the eye. The same eye. Walt can't look away: he stares through the Humvee window. Garza and Trombley congratulate him loudly, wildly -- "That's some real Rob Zombie shit, man." -- but he doesn't hear them. Walt looks up at Brad, mute, eyes wide and full. Brad nods down at him. "We're just doing our jobs." Walt looks away. Peace be upon you; and on you be peace. Oscar Mike, again.