Yellow Green Beret
Stories of an Asian-American Stumbling around U.S. Army Special Forces
Volume I
By
Chester Wong
Edited by Paul Mozur
Illustrated by Jeff Hsiao
for
Jasmine
—with me every step of the way for the first and last drops of ink and tears—
Contents
Introduction
Story I Tough Actin' Tinactin
Story II Korean Airlines
Story III The Ear
Story IV Wily Filipino Cell Phone Thieves
Story V The Pizza Incident
Story VI Johnnie Walker Brown
Story VII The Chow Thief
Story VIII A Stroll through Sadr City
Story IX The Expendables: The Purgatory Days
Story X The Expendables: The Moment of Doubt
Story XI The Expendables: Assuming the Helm for Horatio
Story XII Meeting the Man Named Robin Sage
Story XIII The West Point–Smith College Korean Club Love Connection
Story XIV Drunk Austrian Pilot
Story XV The Invincible Rabbit
Story XVI Hell's Address: Fort Knox, Kentucky 40121
Story XVII A Blind Puncher's Chance
Story XVIII Dr. Dre
Story XIX The Sunday Market
Story XX Selection
Story XXI The Red Beast
Story XXII Sniper School: Extending the Range of Personal Lethality
Story XXIII The Last Son
Epilogue
Introduction
I am not a war hero. This is really important for you to understand.
Even though I was a decent officer in the U.S. Army Special Forces,1 I am telling you, I was a really average one—well, for Special Forces. I was an average dude in a special group of people. I feel like I should start off with this open admission, because I am incredibly embarrassed to be publishing a book that revolves around me, when I consider myself to be so unrepresentative of the amazing people who exist in the Special Forces organization and continue to serve so selflessly. Honestly, I feel like the only people who really should be writing anything resembling a "war memoir" are actual, real-live, shock-'em, knock-'em-dead heroes. And that's not me, so I feel like I should address something about that and how this book is different. I have no illusions about who I am—if anything, my experience in the Army and combat taught me my own limitations. So, don't think of this book as a "war memoir," but more just of me musing about my own random experiences and observations of the road to becoming a combat special operator. That all being said, I'm not blind to the fact that not everybody has had the experience of being a West Pointer and Special Forces officer, and I've come to realize the value of sharing my observations from a road less traveled, whether they are well received or not.
When I left the United States Army after twelve years, I laughed at the idea of having difficulty coping with the transition from military to civilian life. For the entirety of my adult life, I had dreamed about being free of the rigid military hierarchy and having complete discretion on where I could live and how I could act and about living places other than some of the lowest-valued real estate in the United States (and other remote and austere locations around the third-world community of countries). When I chose to head off to Taipei for a year to study Chinese, I thought I'd never look back and just drown myself in Grey Goose and Johnnie Walker at the hottest nightclubs downtown in the Xinyi District.
But, funnily enough, difficulty coping did hit me. In the beginning, I have to admit, nothing felt different. I just thought I was on another extended solo trip overseas and the Army was still watching me and the length of my haircut. I still conducted myself, talked, and acted like I was a U.S. Army Special Forces team leader, despite the fact that I had virtually no contact with my former colleagues in Okinawa.
After about five or six months, when I became tired of the nightlife weekend after weekend and pretending to be friends with various people on the club circuit and grew sick of seeing the same party girls at the bars and even weary of studying Chinese, the realization of truly having walked away from the only thing I had really understood for almost the entirety of my life finally hit me. It also rudely slapped me in the face when I began noticing that I was running out of money for the first time in my adult life. As soon as I became bored with all the freedom, I panicked and suddenly realized that maybe the greatest things that I would ever do in my life were already over. And I was only thirty years young.
Prompted by an editor, my fellow classmate Paul Mozur2, who was also painfully studying Chinese at National Taiwan University, I started to write, just to record my stories before I forgot them, for my family and for myself. To be honest, over a late night of beers at a smoky dart bar in the Zhongxiao Fuxing area of Taipei, Paul asked if he could buy me a bottle of scotch and just one night have me rip through a bunch of my best war stories from Iraq and the Philippines. He would write articles in the New York Times and feature a Green Beret's trepid experiences and adventures abroad in strange lands, meeting hostile men, wild women, and rabid, disgusting, flea-ridden dogs.
Even though I wasn't that interested in having my life put out in public at the time, one of the things that immediately appealed to me about Paul's suggestion was my strong desire to leave my stories behind for my descendents. Both my grandfathers were great men in the Chinese civil war, and I feel so fortunate that one of them wrote three books in his twilight years before he passed away, which I take with me every place I move to. One is kind of a long babble about how Chinese culture is supreme and when it spreads through the world and everybody assimilates (like back in the day when the Mongols would invade), the world will be at peace. Right. Never got off the third page on that one. The second book is a collection of his best poems, none of which I can even begin to understand. I can't even understand children's poetry in English, let alone classical Chinese poetry. The third is his account of how he raised my mother and her sisters and brother. This last book is the one that shows his personality the most, his views and thoughts, and it's an amazing feeling to read his words and feel like he is talking to you from beyond the grave. While I haven't finished my grandfather's book yet, it's my fervent desire to translate it myself into English someday, so that my children and my children's children can read and understand what one of their ancestors was like and how he chose to live his life. It's incredible to discover that he actually viewed many things in life the same way I do today, despite the fact that we never really had a real conversation because I had limited Chinese ability when I was growing up.
So, when I started writing, I wanted to do the same. However, it was still hard for me to start writing, mostly because of the embarrassment. There's an unwritten rule in the military that the only kinds of people who normally write about themselves are some kind of amazing war heroes who were shot ten times in the chest and then carried twenty people out with one arm while slaying the Persian horde as they came at them. My contributions to the war efforts in Iraq and the Philippines were average-to-good at best; I certainly never had any personal acts of heroism, and maybe even guys I led would say that I was a barely passable commander. For these reasons, it took me awhile to get off the ground and up and running with writing because I didn't feel like I deserved to write anything. Oddly enough, it was actually when I went back to Los Angeles to meet up with some of my old running crew from my days as a young buck lieutenant in Korea that I really started writing at a faster pace and eventually put out enough material for a book (actually, I have enough for three books and am just putting out one volume initially).
When I was in the Army, I caught on to the Xanga blogging craze, along with my Asian friends, and started writing quite a bit to stay in touch with friends back in the States in this pre-Facebook era. It was just a blog, but I always tried to put a lighthearted spin on daily life. I guess my life was a bit more interesting because I was doing Army stuff at the time and traveling all over the world. Because I wrote with a humorous twist on all my blog entries, I actually ended up garnering quite a large following and would receive random messages from strangers about how funny they thought I was, how interesting, how many children they'd like me to spawn with them, stuffed "furry" animal fantasies…you know the drill. And one of the guys who loved my blog was hanging out with my old running crew from Korea back in Los Angeles! A guy who wanted me to spawn children with him! Just kidding. Alexander Won is a hilarious guy, and we had a great night meeting over some of Los Angeles's best Korean barbecue and drinking that omnipresent crappy soju liquor in the little green bottles available at all Korean restaurants. He was so energetic and emphatic about how much he liked my old Xanga blog, when I got back to Taipei, I decided it was just the inspirational ticket from a stranger for me to get over my post-Army blues.3 So, I started writing and found it to be an incredible gateway for me to transition back into normal life by crystallizing my thoughts and experiences into words.
At first, it was easy. I have some key stories I continuously tell over drinks, meeting new friends, anything—I call it a holdover from my days doing anything I could to schmooze foreign military generals and commanders when I was working my Green Beret voodoo magic on them in faraway lands. I just wrote the funniest stories that I normally told. I wrote the ones I used on the girls in the bars and clubs to get their attention and the ones I used with the guys so they wouldn't be so hostile and let me talk to their girls. But as I continued writing and began to run out of these popcorn-type stories, I started recalling some of the more serious things that I'd experienced and maybe some of the deeper lessons I'd learned, and that also came out in my writing over time. Maybe you'll agree with my observations, and maybe you'll be offended. At a minimum, I believe that I've explained clearly why I've steeped myself in certain beliefs from my experiences, and you'll just have to take that at face value. In any case, this was an intensely cathartic experience, and it was a great process to really break down key watershed events and observations in my life and see how they shape what I believe in today.
I should also admit something…I never wrote sober. That probably makes me sound like an alcoholic, but I'm actually not. Of course, my writing has been edited the hell out of, but it's all borne out of downing a small bottle of scotch or wine and then drunk-writing to myself. Better than drunk-dialing ex-girlfriends or even worse for today, drunk-Facebooking people on their wall, right? It's too embarrassing for me to set a time during the day to sit down and begin writing about myself. It's literally a feeling of shame for me to do it—again, the feeling of being undeserving to say anything at all. But, with a good bottle of wine, drinking straight out of the bottle, which was wrapped in a brown paper bag, like a hobo, like how I rocked it when I was working in Kurdistan, I could tell my stories and share my thoughts and viewpoints.
Being Asian American is a core theme in my writing, and I've prominently called attention to it in the title of the book. Is it because I'm so racially self-conscious? Maybe. Or it could also be that I realized how racially unaware I was until I left my Asian bubble in California and experienced how the mainstream American and the international community really views Asian Americans over my extensive travels and experiences around the world. And having had a chance to live all over the United States and in nine countries around the world as an adult, I think I have a few thoughts on the matter of being Asian American that maybe not everybody has, and it might be value added.
When I was growing up, the stereotype of Asian Americans was that we all were super smart and were going to be doctors and lawyers. We even believed it ourselves. To me, it seemed like that was the destined peg for all of us eager and ambitious young Asian kids, and we all generally pushed and struggled in that direction, competing with each other for the limited number of slots available for Asians due to the negative effects on us of affirmative action. Out in the Bay Area, when we reached high school and discovered how difficult it would be to compete against all the other Asians trying to get into pre-med and pre-law programs, most of us less-talented Asians realized the best option maybe was becoming computer engineers. It was safe. Meanwhile, our counterparts out on the East Coast were getting the jump on finance and trying to climb Wall Street in New York.
I suppose what I'm getting at when I talk about publishing this book to raise awareness of the increasing diversity of Asian Americans is the sense of just trying to call attention to an Asian guy who doesn't fit your classic brainy stereotype of a banker, lawyer, doctor, or computer programmer—we can be pretty dumb as well! And we are also varied and starting to spread out and be part of American society in more than just a few niche professional areas. I've called this book Yellow Green Beret, but don't think that I'm the only one. There are more than a handful, and I hope that nobody takes my book title as a claim that I represent all the Asian-American special operations guys out there. The title is just how I view myself. So, there are more of us out there—a scary realization that there are other Asians who actually do more than these typical white-collar high-education professional jobs.
I felt like I had to explain all of this after I told an acquaintance that I was publishing a book. He asked, "Oh yeah? What's it about?" And I responded, "Uh, it's about me." He looked at me like I was the biggest douchebag ever, and I pretty much felt like one. I mean, it sounds intensely douchey. Try telling somebody that someday. That is why I've written so much about the specific reasons why I've published this. It's not because I thought I was badass—far from it, as you'll see in the stories. And it's definitely not for the attention, as I've published under a pen name and referenced all people by pseudonyms and acronyms and changed up years and months in an attempt to preserve some measure of anonymity.4
On the topic of anonymity, one of the other reasons I decided to write under a pen name is because I felt like I could share everything with the public about my experiences that I wanted to with my family and myself without fear of repercussions. There's a strong sentiment in the military officer culture to stand behind your word—if you do not have the courage and guts to put your name behind a statement, you don't deserve to make it—and I completely agree with it professionally. I hope to be able to claim that I was one of those guys who used to put my face and word out there to stand for what I thought was right for the most part. But in terms of sharing so many aspects of my personal life, I just didn't want myself hanging out there. I'm still a young guy with an unknown future career, and I don't want to walk into interviews and job environments where everybody has access to so much of my background and controversial private thoughts.
But maybe even a deeper reason is that I feel writers who put their name out with military writing either hold back on opinions, or even more commonly, they go overboard. They try too hard to stand behind their name and take an even more extreme or biased stance on an issue that they were possibly kind of ambivalent about just to take a position for taking a position's sake. Sure, as you'll find in this writing, I make some bold statements and accusations during my recounting of a so-called special operations life, and I leave myself open to criticism that I did not even have the balls to put my real name behind these strong words. But, in this sense, I feel that writing behind a pen name allows me to be as honest and transparent as I can be about my experiences in the military and my personal thoughts and observations. If you don't like or question the pure veracity of the material—well, to be honest, I do not care. I wrote this for myself and my family, not for you.
Also, just to add another wrench into my adversarial stance to the reader right now, some of the stories I've altered slightly by adding a very small element of "nontruth" to help alleviate any concern about revealing classified information. This is not a history textbook, and any discrepancies can be attributed either to my poor memory or to my purposely altering small details. I think my points and the message of the stories are all unaffected by the slight changes. When my editor Paul was asking about this issue, I told him a story about a funny experience with classified information in Special Forces. When I was in Baghdad, I was having trouble teaching one of my Iraqi counterpart lieutenants to calm down and stick to some very basic tactical ideas during our raids against insurgents. So, I sat down, got onto PowerPoint, and built an instructional briefing on slides that I planned to present to him in a one-on-one class. When I finished it, I printed it out and felt like it was that time of the month to kiss my boss's ass, so I showed him the slides.
When he finished reading the slides, he said, "Chester, this is brilliant! I'm going to forward this to our headquarters as an example of the innovation we're doing down here…oh, but wait…crap, this is classified. We can't show this to the Iraqis!" When I had made the PowerPoint presentation, I had forgotten to delete the header "SECRET" on the top of the slides because I had opened a secret PowerPoint presentation to use its formatting as a template. But nothing I had written in the presentation was secret. I had just made all that shit up in the last ten minutes. Despite my explanation, my boss became wrapped around the axle on this point and said that we had to submit the presentation up several channels to some kind of intelligence approval authority, and the turnaround could have been weeks. Annoyed at this sudden complete obstacle to my objective of trying to teach my Iraqi counterparts something very simple that I had personally just thought of out of thin air, I just went back onto the computer, deleted the word "SECRET," reprinted it, and then took it to the Iraqis and taught them what I had originally planned to teach them. I never submitted the presentation to my commander again, and he forgot about it.
That's how I generally feel about classified things. It's so arbitrary and subjective sometimes. I know what is sensitive and what is not, and I've taken great pains to exclude things in my writing that I think would affect anybody with great harm operating today. For instance, my sister asked if it was classified that I admitted I had done a mission in Kurdistan. Well, if it was, then I guess all the residents of the neighborhood that we resided in, all the Kurds we worked with, and all the hundreds of Iraqi Army guys who knew we were a Special Forces unit must have all had U.S. secret level security clearances as well. So, I don't find talking about general missions and things going on in Kurdistan as greatly harming anybody, since the mission was already in the open to the people who were there with us. Anything I knew to be highly damaging and clearly classified, I have talked around. And anyway, all these stories are observations and opinions from a civilian, not an official representative of the U.S. government. For all you know, I've made all of this up and I'm actually an Asian computer programmer for Apple who has a wildly detailed imagination from playing way too much "Call of Duty: Black Ops."
Since my stories span quite varied experiences (all pertaining to things I thought were unique to military life), please don't hesitate to skip over a story if it's uninteresting to you. Each chapter and each story is a self-contained unit, and you don't need previous information to read any of the stories. I've also kept things in a nonchronological order because I think it's more interesting to notice how I thought about things at different times and how previous or future events related to each other. Also, since I'm self-publishing, I really encourage feedback, and you can contact me at chesterwong@yellowgreenberet.com. I promise I'll try to respond in a timely manner, and I may change things in future editions based on your feedback if it contains questions relating to things that are unclear or things you wish could be illuminated a bit more. And if you are easily offended, well, I hope you realize you picked up a book centered on how an Asian-American Special Forces commander thinks, because you're going to get two shotgun barrels worth of it shortly, but I'll read your criticisms too.
I guess to wrap up my introduction, Yellow Green Beret is just my take on how things went down during my brief time in the military, and I hope that my stories provide you a few laughs at my expense and maybe help you pass your day.
Chester Wong
May 20, 2011
Lake Matheson, New Zealand
Story I
Tough Actin' Tinactin
Circa October 31, 1997
Plebe year at West Point is rough. After suffering through "Beast," a boot camp for cadets at West Point that starts just after high school graduation and runs for eight weeks, freshmen Plebes face months upon months of hazing from the fearsome upperclassmen. As a freshman, you naturally think that life is going to get better once summer Beast training is over, but at West Point…think again. During Beast, there are ten Plebes for every upperclassman, so there's a limit to the pain they can inflict. But when unsuspecting Plebes return to start school, all the upperclass cadets have returned from summer training, and suddenly, there are three upperclass cadets for every Plebe. To put it bluntly, life is bad during Beast, but life quickly becomes hell when the academic year starts. There isn't a lot of breathing space, and upperclassmen are all collectively God as far as you're concerned. They can stop you at any time in the hall and harass you in whatever way might amuse them. For a total of eight months, you basically just eat poo and tell upperclassmen that you like it and want more. The hazing sucks, but what's worse is that you're nearly powerless to fight back.
On top of the torture and the newfound lack of freedom, I had the great fortune to land a position in company B-3, better known as "the Bandits," which was a famously "hot" company known for its hard hazing over the two-hundred-year history of West Point. In fact, the entire Third Regiment was known to be a harsher haze environment since the barracks faced the outside of the cadet area and was under greater scrutiny by visitors and officers at West Point. We lovingly referred to it as the "Third Reich." Cadets are assigned in companies at West Point, and it's essentially a fraternity-sorority of about 130 men and women. As Plebes, you become really tight with the other Plebes in your company as you all try to band together to survive the hazing and pressures of West Point. But through all the crap you have to take from upperclassmen, there are a few instances when Plebes get to fight back, and one of those days is Halloween.
At most colleges, on Halloween, simple-minded young guys like me would be excited to check out the girls all dressed up as sluttily as possible, to get drunk at some party, and hopefully to grope some other equally drunk girl and maybe get laid. Well, at West Point, there's a different kind of "party," since drinking, sex, and fun are frowned upon and generally forbidden. On Halloween, Plebes are unofficially "allowed" to gang up in mobs and basically attack upperclassmen. Yup, it's as simple as that. Attack them. It sounds really barbaric (and weird), and it pretty much is exactly that. Normally, "attacking" upperclassmen consists of bum-rushing them in their room, tying them up, trashing their room, and then basically all running away. The key is to do it in a big group so that they can't really pinpoint one particular Plebe for extra hazing. The upperclassmen essentially eat the collective wrath of sexually deprived freshmen cut off from any semblance of a normal college life as payback for the hazing meted out thus far. This is considered really wild fun at West Point.
That week, I had just returned from a two-day stay at the West Point hospital for getting knocked out in a mandatory Plebe-year boxing PE class, having been diagnosed with a mild concussion. I was lying on my top bunk with an enormous headache, pathetically trying to "learn" Chinese by reading the translated Japanese manga Dragonball, when my Plebe homeys came in on a Saturday night to recruit me for a mission. They excitedly said that they wanted to go get Big Barry, a particularly nasty Cow, or junior, who had been really rough on us that first semester in Banditland. I was feeling really weak from the concussion and the ass-stomping I'd received at the hands of this Filipino dude in the boxing ring, and I wasn't particularly interested in doing anything except lying on my bed and celebrating my non-girl-filled Halloween weekend by reading Dragonball in Chinese.
After a great motivational speech from one of the leaders in our Bandit Plebe crew, I realized that I was frustrated as hell and it would be awesome to beat this dude up. I was a really crappy and low-performing Plebe, and I got hazed all the time because I was so bad at general military duties. Even though it was my own fault for being such a crappy Plebe, it still sucked getting hazed all the time, and I was angry! So, I jumped out of bed, tried to shake the cobwebs out of my head, and along with ten other plebes, got ready to go and beat some ass.
Prior to rolling out of our rooms, we got geared up and tried to talk out a scheme of attack, but there wasn't much to talk about. I mean, how detailed of a plan can you come up with? Guys, we are going to walk over to his room, run in, and beat him up. I was nervous as hell, but our crew's leader seemed like he knew what he was doing, so as soon as he gave the word, we moved out on the first combat mission of our young careers. We each marched out of our rooms in the stiff, hyperfast manner we were required to do at all times, and then one of the leaders of our Plebe crew gave the battle cry, and we assaulted.
One of the leaders kicked the door in, and we all burst in behind. But before we could even get to him, we jammed ourselves in the doorway like assclowns. After all the helter-skelter and jostling in, somehow, I popped out as the first guy into the room. Big Barry was sitting behind his desk. His eyes got real big, and he just immediately jumped up and yelled a thunderous warrior: "Bring it, motherfuckers!" (In retrospect, that was pretty badass of him. Two years later, I just got really scared and tried to run away down the hallway when something similar happened to me.)
Well, I was like, Yeah, I will bring it to you, sir, indeed I will! And I did this weird jump-and-tackle thing and put him in a useless headlock. The sheer volume of our collective Plebe weight drove him into his own bed, and since I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I just squeezed his head repeatedly in a headlock, like I was trying to make milk squirt out his nose or something and not really sure what was supposed to happen next. As other Plebes were kind of messing with the rest of his body, somebody shoved a can into my hand and yelled at me to spray it at him. So, without glancing at the can and overwhelmed in my adrenaline-saturated state, I just started full-on spraying this can into Big Barry's eyes, nose, mouth, and throat—everything in the general head area—in a deliberate and slow circular motion. After I emptied what seemed to be at least half the can, I rotated it and noticed that it was Tinactin, the medicine for athlete's foot! What the hell! Literally as soon as I noticed that I was basically spraying poisonous medicinal shit into this guy's face, the leader Plebe yelled for everybody to leave, and everybody just jumped up at the same time and hauled ass out of the room.
Well, I was tangled with Big Barry, and when I tried to get up to run away with everybody else, we fell on the floor together. He was furious, obviously. After a quick scramble, we stood up, and Big Barry ended up in between me and the door, blocking my escape. I hope this doesn't come off as exaggerating (because I'm not), but Big Barry was way, way bigger than I was, and I was completely alone with him—all my buddies had popped smoke and exfiltrated the objective. I was only seventeen and maybe 125 pounds at the time, having lost a lot of weight from getting hazed at meals by upperclassmen and working out a ton. In other words, I was a scrawny, sorry excuse for a manboy and had no business trying to pick fights with anybody, let alone trained upperclass cadets at West Point. Big Barry, on the other hand, was a six-foot-plus black dude, not jacked, but pretty lean and mean and probably around 175 to 180 pounds. Well, we squared off, and Big Barry had his hands up in the classic boxing stance they taught us in our boxing PE class and actually kind of looked like he knew what he was doing. I was like, Oh shit, I have no idea what I'm doing. I just came back from the hospital because of boxing class!
After getting jab punched a few times in the face, I realized I had no chance in hell of outboxing Big Barry, so I went for the wrestling lockup that I vaguely remembered from junior high wrestling PE class, and Big Barry, who I later found out was on the Bandit intramural wrestling team, immediately hip-threw me into the concrete wall that surrounded our barracks rooms. After I crumpled on his bed, I pulled a weak Brazilian jiujitsu "guard" position on Big Barry (which essentially looks like missionary position during sex), and he started driving my head into the wall, which hurts your head, if you've never experienced this. I'm not sure what I said to get him to stop (maybe "Please stop, my brain matter is leaking out of my head, sir!"), but he finally calmed down, and as soon as he let me go, I jumped up and scampered out of the room like a rat.
When I stumbled back to my room, I climbed into my bed and slept for almost the entire weekend without eating or waking up. Don't forget that prior to my interaction with the concrete wall, I already had a concussion from boxing. Other Plebes were scared to get help because our suis esponte Halloween attack on Big Barry had gotten way out of control (mostly because I sprayed Tinactin athlete's foot medicine directly into his face), so I didn't really get any medical attention. I distinctly remember being intensely slow and dumb for the whole week and literally blinking my eyes once during math class, and suddenly a buddy was nudging me to get up and saying that class was over. Getting punched or hit in the head is definitely bad for your health.
So, in the end, Big Barry apparently was so furious at the Tinactin spraying that he kind of went "berserk" and didn't remember it was me that he basically punched repeatedly in the face and then body-slammed into a concrete wall, so I didn't really get into trouble for the Tinactin face-spraying action, which was nice. I will say that Big Barry really cooled his heels on the hazing after that, and when we were Yearlings (sophomores) and he was a Firstie (senior), he was one of the coolest supporters of our crew and helped us pull off some pretty heinous pranks and shenanigans.
In retrospect, I guess West Point is aware it creates an atmosphere of repression that results in weird traditions like Halloween beatdowns of upperclassmen (although officers would deny that West Point promotes this sort of behavior). For what purpose, I'm not quite sure. I guess one could argue that there was team-building and courage involved in rising up and collectively fighting against an all-powerful authority. While that's nice and all, I think when I was seventeen, I would have just preferred to have done the more normal Halloween sexual-fantasy-style party. But since I never had a chance to experience the American college dream, multiple concussions and spraying athlete's foot medicine into someone's face had to do for a typical West Point cadet Halloween party.
Story II
Korean Airlines: Dog-Fighting Our Way out of Kurdistan
Circa November 2007
After my eight-month trip to Northern Iraq, I tried really hard to get a "commercial" or regular airline flight out of Irbil, Kurdistan, for my Special Forces A-Team, rather than the typical cold, steel capsule military flight on a C-130. It's not comfortable on freezing metal floors; there are no hot Asian stewardesses to provide friendly service; and in general, it's just a really uncomfortable ride. The plan was to fly from Irbil to Vienna, conveniently have a connecting flight not available until the next day, fly back down to Dubai and then out to Bangkok or Manila, where of course, again, there would not be an available connecting flight until the next day (this "plane breakdown" was much more important than the one in Vienna), and then fly out to Tokyo, finally connecting back into Okinawa. That would have been so sweet. After eight months of combat missions in Northern Iraq at the height of the war, it would have been great just to party on a little European / Southeast Asian binge on the government and taxpayer dollar on the way back.
For an odd reason, the high command in Iraq put out a policy two weeks prior to our departure that no military personnel were allowed to fly on civilian aircraft any longer. This was especially bizarre since no Americans in their right minds would have gotten on any Arabic civilian airline flying out of Baghdad. I mean, there were very few civilian flights going in and out of Baghdad International Airport at this time anyway, since friendly locals were spending quite a bit of effort shooting rockets and bullets at planes. So, I'm not sure whom that policy was directed toward. But up in peaceful Irbil where we lived, there were flights all the time in from and out to Europe and Turkey as oil companies began investing heavily in Kurdistan's development, considering its relative stability.
I tried to appeal for a special case for us, as we were the only Americans out in Irbil with the option to fly out of its civilian airport, but the bosses in Baghdad rejected my proposal, as it was just easier that way for them riskwise. With the short time available, all we could find on the military flight schedules was a flight on a Korean C-130 cargo plane that made weekly runs down to Kuwait. From there, we'd hop normal flights back to Japan and try to catch a sweet layover somewhere. On the way into Iraq, we had stopped for a week in Colorado Springs, snowboarded Breckenridge, and partied in great oak Irish bars downtown. We even stopped in Frankfurt for a St. Patrick's Day out in Saxonhaus on the way into Mosul. I was eager to try to get a similarly great deal for the team and myself on the way back.
The night before we left Irbil, we had a blowout party with Kurdish parliamentary officials, Kurdish generals and colonels, and commanders in the secret police (the Asayish). It was awesome. We went to the only five-star hotel in Iraq, called the Konzad, drank exorbitantly expensive scotch, and ate premium caviar, all on the Kurdish government's bankroll. And, of course, we smoked the obligatory hookah pipe during the meal and drinking (no drugs, just that water fruit stuff). We did this about once a month with our counterparts as part of "building rapport" and developing our relationships, and it was a great getaway from the grind of our work as well as an interesting glimpse of the luxury and opulence in the Middle Eastern aristocratic way of life. For a party of about ten to twelve guys, the meals' price tag commonly was in the two-to-three-thousand-dollar range. Basically what I'm saying is that it was pretty pimp and a clear demonstration of something shady since there were plenty of people living well below the poverty line in Kurdistan. But you don't get to save the world all at once; there is some give and take here and there for immediate gains first. Solving the poverty-wealth gap in Kurdistan wasn't the priority at the time—that was keeping suicide bombers from blowing themselves up and trying to destabilize the country—and we needed to be in tight with these people.
Anyway, of course for the going-away party with the Kurds, my whole team gets absolutely trashed, and we have unbelievable hangovers the next morning when we board the Korean C-130 at Irbil International Airport. We take off and immediately start to climb very, very steeply to the appropriate altitude (about 30,000 feet). I think to myself, Hmm, that's odd. Normally, pilots only fly like that out of Baghdad or Mosul, which are really hot areas where there's a lot of incoming fire from the bad guys at the airports. Again, we are in Irbil, which is literally a completely safe and quiet area. As soon as we reach altitude, I think that we're just going to level off and the five-hour flight to Kuwait will be smooth sailing from there on out. I was so wrong.
Once we get to 30,000 feet, the plane immediately goes into "evasive maneuvers" like we are dodging surface-to-air-missiles during the D-Day paratrooper invasion at Normandy or something. We are dipping and jiving, and the Gs being pushed on us are intense. I hate this shit. I'm not a pilot, and I'm not used to this sort of crap and dealing with extreme motion sickness. In fact, I'm a guy who generally needs to take motion-sickness pills when I get on a boat. Sometimes, I even feel a bit sick when driving around willy-nilly in a New York City or Hong Kong cab. I always combated this weakness during crazy helicopter and airplane rides on missions by hitting all sorts of different motion sickness medication, and then I would be fine. But I hadn't expected anything like that for this normal cargo flight run, and I knew I was about to be in trouble if the pilots didn't cool it. After about five minutes, I grab a headset to talk to the pilots:
Me: Are we taking fire?
Korean Pilot: No.
Me: Well, why are we flying evasive maneuvers then?
Korean Pilot: It much danger.
Me: What danger? We are in Kurdistan and already at thirty thousand feet, well beyond any antiaircraft fire. This is completely unnecessary. We're already getting sick back here.
Korean Pilot: It much danger. No!
As the plane continues its gut-wrenching rolls and dips, I stagger back over to our row of guys. Everybody has his eyes tightly shut and is doing his best to keep from getting sick. I stumble from a particularly sharp weave and slam my head into the metal corner of a container, open a cut, and begin bleeding like a stuck pig. Kamhasamneeda, or "Thank you," Koreans. I collapse onto the row of seats and yell for Jordan, one of the fluent Korean speakers on my team, to get on the damn headset and talk some sense into the pilots and crew chiefs.
The Koreans maintained their only presence in Iraq at Irbil, Kurdistan, and constantly acted as though they were in World War III, despite the fact that there was little to no violence there at all. They had a base whose security was three checkpoints deep, with men manning tanks at all times protecting the gates. I mean, who did they think was going to attack? The Soviet Red Army? The terrorists (al-Qaeda) did not have tanks the last time I checked. Anyway, while the Koreans were holed up ready for Armageddon in their base outside the city, I lived with my fifteen-man Special Forces team in a five-house mansion complex and completely integrated into an Assyrian Christian enclave in Irbil, called Ankawa. We lived just like you would in any other city and drove around in little Toyota bongo trucks on a daily basis, only armed with AK-47s5 and pistols, in plain clothes. We commonly went shopping at the city bazaar and ate in restaurants; we actually communicated and interacted as a part of the community. We even had the mayor of Ankawa attend our Fourth of July barbecue. That's how U.S. Army Special Forces integrates into a counterinsurgency fight and wins hearts and minds—by living amongst the people (when the environment permits; other Special Forces A-Teams obviously couldn't do this in dangerous places like Baghdad).
We always joked about how the Koreans were so ridiculously overprepared, but the real background politics was that the Koreans sent a small contingent to Iraq because they were obliged due to the sixty-year strong U.S.-Korean military alliance. It's kind of hard to tell America "no" when there are still thirty thousand U.S. troops in your country just to help you fight against your crazy northern commie bros. But at the same time, the Iraq War was hugely unpopular in Korea (as in the rest of the world, including the United States), so the Korean government couldn't handle the political fallout if any Koreans died in Iraq fighting. So, after declining "owning" battlespace in Baghdad, and then Baqubah, and then Diyala, and then Mosul (all going from most dangerous to less and less dangerous places in Iraq), they finally settled on agreeing to base in Irbil, which was largely considered to be a completely pacified area even in 2003 immediately following the invasion. And then, even though it was basically a peaceful area, they acted like they were in the middle of some giant war, because it was the Korean commanding general's head on the platter if a single Korean soldier even got a hangnail during "combat" in Iraq. Go Korea! Well, nobody was there to see this and tease them except for a few American Special Forces teams and all of Kurdistan, so I guess it's okay.
Well, none of this ridiculous political situational bullshit affected me until my very last day in Iraq when I got on their damn C-130 cargo plane to get to Kuwait, because some officer in Baghdad decided to randomly up and make a policy against an action that affected nobody except for the only combat unit in Kurdistan, my fifteen-man Special Forces A-Team in Irbil.
After a go with the pilot on the headset, my Korean-speaking teammate Jordan comes back, and when I give him an inquisitive look, he responds, "What the hell do you expect? They are Korean."
So true. In case you've never met a Korean in your life (you should crawl out from under your rock sometime; it must be cold and dark under there), they are somewhat known to be a teensy-weensy bit stubborn. Just a little bit.
Not to be deterred, on the edge of completely hurling, I stagger up again holding a T-shirt to the wound on my head and climb up the stairs to the pilot's cockpit. I bang on the door, and there's no response. I bang again, and no response again. I kick the door as hard as I can, which is pretty damn loud since it's a metal door. Nobody answers, but I hear a voice.
Korean Pilot: No!
Me: Open the door!
Korean Pilot: Danger!
Me: Open this door right now!
Korean Pilot: No! War danger!
After a few rounds of this, I mentally cave and give in. I'd lived in Korea for two years, and I realize that this is not going anywhere. I stumble back down the stairs still amidst a ridiculous pitch and yaw, and before I make it back to the row, I see one of my teammates puke all over the deck. I immediately puke upon seeing this. Another teammate pukes. Another teammate pukes. A guy we don't know who is catching a ride too pukes. A Korean crew chief pukes. A bomb dog attached to somebody else's unit pukes. Have you ever seen that clip from the show Family Guy where Peter and Stewie and Brian and Chris are having a competition where whoever pukes first from drinking castor oil loses, and they all just puke for like ten minutes straight repeatedly? Yeah, that was us.
Goat meat, cuscus rice, whiskey, etc., all the stuff from the big party last night was pretty much left on the C-130 in a major puke-fest. All the while, the Korean pilots continued to juke and jive like we were Maverick and Iceman in the movie Top Gun at thirty thousand feet and well out of strike range from anything. I had seen a lot of missions in my eight months in Iraq in 2007; we were conducting hits all up and down the Tigris River from Mosul down to Hawija. I remember just being very thankful that nobody was truly hurt while we were doing all these risky things, but during this nightmare of a flight from Irbil to Kuwait, we endured hours of evasive-maneuver flying from these dickheads, and I literally lost the will to live. I honestly said to God, Please, let me die. I can't take this anymore. I cannot puke anymore. I cannot do this anymore. I literally thought that. I think that I eventually passed out, thankfully. I'd lived through combat missions throughout Northern Iraq for eight months, conducting special operations missions with my life in the hands of Kurds against hard-core suicide bombers, but leave it to the Koreans to remove my will to live in less than thirty minutes. Taehamingook! Love you guys. I thought I had left Korea in 2004, but they came back to haunt me even in Kurdistan…wily bastards.
When we got off the plane in Kuwait, I couldn't even muster the strength to be mad at the Korean pilots. I still just wanted to die. And there was no way I was cleaning up the sea of vomit we had just left in their plane. We basically crawled off the plane, and there was a contingent of other Special Forces guys there to receive us and to welcome us into safety. I think they just dragged us into vans and drove us away. I was basically bedridden for a day in Kuwait, and then afterward, we suffered through the rest of our flights back to Japan. My commander in Okinawa received us at the airport to welcome us home.
Commander: Wow, what the hell happened to you guys out there? Saw some serious combat, huh? Do you need to see a psychiatrist?
Me: The Koreans happened to us, sir. And yes, we do need to see a shrink. ASAP.
Story III
The Ear
Circa February 2009
During my last trip to Baghdad, my U.S. Army Special Forces advanced urban combat troop partnered with the top Iraqi special forces unit, the most elite counterterrorist unit available in the country. Created, selected, trained, and equipped by a unique brand of U.S. Special Forces companies that specialized in urban combat (just like my company), the Iraqi special forces were a truly battle-hardened crew by the time I showed up to work with them in late 2008. They saw inception in mid-2003, and most of the volunteers in this extremely dangerous unit had literally seen over 1,500 combat missions in Baghdad over the last five contiguous years. Think on that…1,500 missions and through every major battle and conflict throughout the Iraq War. Many of these missions were to try to kill or capture the most hard-core terrorists in Iraq. But despite all their combat experience, the talent and capability we had and the training that we underwent still allowed us American special operators to far surpass their capabilities, so we spent any off-time training the Iraqi operators and teaching them when we weren't out in the streets of Baghdad—which to be honest, was not often; we were usually outside mixing it up in nice neighborhoods like Sadr City every other night.
One night, we had a mission drop on a particularly heinous dude named Abu Jafar. It was a fairly routine mission: drive out to the neighborhood, assault the house, capture the dude, bring him back for interrogation—low risk of mission failure since we did these almost every night and they were essentially considered to be ho-hum, everyday business. During these missions with the Iraqis, even though I was the ground force commander for all soldiers on the ground and controlled the five or six warplanes in the sky that were circling us overhead, I allowed the Iraqi special forces lieutenant to run the show. I basically just stuck with him the whole time and tried to coach him through the missions. My team was only about eleven guys on the missions, and the Iraqi special forces usually rolled with about fifty to sixty guys, so most of the large muscle was provided by them. But our guys essentially pushed, cajoled, and coached the Iraqis to properly execute the mission efficiently, etc. Basically, "learning by doing" was the general idea, and this type of "combat advising" is a hallmark capability provided by the Green Berets. We speak your language, teach you tactics, live with you, train you, and then we'll coach you through it while we kick ass together. And our lives were in the Iraqis' hands since we American Special Forces guys were in such low numbers out on the street.
I was having a hard time getting it through my Iraqi lieutenant's head (his name was Salah) that when you hit a house, you always had to make sure to cover the backside of the house with a cell of four or five soldiers, or "assaulters" as we called our highly trained urban combat specialists. On top of the backside cell of assaulters, we always positioned another "high-side" cell of assaulters on the rooftops somewhere prior to coming through the front door with the main assault group, especially in dense Iraqi cities like Baghdad. All the rooftops of houses are connected, so you can pop out on the roof and run for quite a while on the rooftops; therefore, it was important to have a team up there to block that route of escape. These backside and high-side cells were to prevent the bad guy from being able to run away when the main assault started. It probably took us maybe one time seeing a bad guy escape along a rooftop or out a back door to realize we should put somebody there before entering through the front door.
An assaulter carries almost eighty to ninety pounds of equipment (body armor, magazines of ammunition, grenades, radios, guns, helmet, etc.), and it's a seriously fat, lazy, piece-of-shit terrorist running away for us to be able to chase him down in a foot race. We are like Juggernaut, lumbering around with all that gear, and do not move very fast in a dead sprint. So, we try to trap them in the house all quiet and sneaky like before attacking the house, by first positioning some guys at the back door and on the rooftop. These tactics weren't rocket science, nor were they "special." Just put some dudes on the roof, and in the back, so when we come through the front, they can't escape. Whoop-dee-doo.
We approached the house that our intelligence said Abu Jafar lived at, and I reminded Salah to put a backside cell in; just being nervous, or whatever, he forgot again for the fifth mission in a row and ordered the main assault group just to charge through the front door. With my supersecret planes overhead, which I talked to constantly during missions through my attached U.S. Air Force combat controller, I received word that as soon as we hit the front door, some dude ran out the back door and into another house about five houses down the street. Too bad we didn't take like two minutes just to put the backside cell in first, right? It seems so simple…because it is. Like I said earlier, this part of the job is not rocket science and why I think raids are really maybe the easiest thing to do in the full spectrum of special operations work. These are the small differences that the Iraqis (despite all their combat experience) still struggled with on missions after five years. And, to be frank, it's these differences that clearly separated the American units, which had maybe 5 percent of their combat experience but five times their talent and training.
Despite the urging from my assault sergeant, Karl (my right-hand man on the team), I decide just to let Salah run without taking over. Yeah, you run the risk of letting a bad guy go, but at some point, you have to prioritize teaching these guys how to do the job right, or you'll never work yourself out of a job. It requires a great deal of stressful patience. I don't want the American military needing to stay in Iraq for the next fifty years doing the job for these guys; I want them to learn how to do it themselves, so we can go back home to America and watch the UFC and NBA playoffs at an appropriate hour of the day and stuff. So, since I had already seen this same Iraqi special forces lieutenant just continuously make this same mistake of not putting in backside containment maybe on the last four or five missions, instead of taking over after seeing him fuck it up on the first time and running the mission in order to ensure snatching up the bad guy, I just let him run it again. I wanted him to feel the pain of failure, and then maybe he'd finally learn the lesson this time instead of having me step in and save the mission for the Iraqis. I decided ensuring the capture of Abu Jafar was less important than teaching the Iraqis how to properly run a raid.
To try to keep this story shorter, I'll just sum up Salah's activities. He hit the next house without setting in backside containment again. Bad guy runs out the back door and runs into another house. The surveillance planes above tell me which house he ran into. I tell Salah. We go down and move to the next house. Salah gets all excited and hits the house without setting in backside or high-side containment. Bad guy runs away. And so on. This happens probably about four times. Finally, the bad guy runs out of the house on one hit and decides to start hauling ass across a field away from the neighborhood, and the surveillance planes are telling me that this dude is hurtling fences, and I'm just like, All right, this dude is long gone. It's about 4:00 a.m., light is coming up in an hour or so (which is dangerous for a high-profile unit like us; bad guys like to attack a high-profile unit like us if they get the chance), and I'm tired and want to finish up the last episode of Lost, Season 5, which I ordered on Amazon.com.
I tell Salah, "Hey, the bad guy just ran across that giant field about a kilometer away, and I think we should cut our losses and go home." Incredibly, Salah, with a passion I've never seen before, pleads with me to continue the mission.
Salah argues, "We know where he is. Let's get in our trucks, drive over to where he is, and get him!" He actually kind of gives me this fire-and-brimstone speech about saving Iraq and giving everything we've got to the fight and really motivates me. I am genuinely moved and may have even teared up slightly. Salah is this really gentle, almost passive guy, and he always wore that lower-half-of-the-face ski mask some people wear on the slopes to keep their faces warm (Iraqi special forces guys always wore masks during missions because their families would get whacked at home by terrorists if they revealed their identities). His eyes are literally moist with tears, and I'll never forget the pleading look in his eyes. Arab dudes can seriously emote with their eyes. So, at the great bitching from my guys who probably want to go home and watch Lost as well, I concede, and we get in the trucks and drive over to the neighborhood where Abu Jafar is running around.