The Warm-Up to the No Man’s Land
In 2003, I got orders to Fort Hood, Texas. I was assigned to the 303rd Military Intelligence Battalion, 504th Military Intelligence Brigade, Third Corps. At first, I thought there had been a clerical error because by then I was already military police.
See, back on September 10, 2001, I enlisted as MI and trained at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, imagining I’d be the Army’s answer to Detective Benson from Law & Order: SVU—except I’d be throwing the book at prisoners of war instead of suspects in Manhattan. Reality didn’t quite match the fantasy. Two years later, I swapped out interrogation manuals for handcuffs and joined the MPs. That’s how I ended up in Fort Hood—home to every type of soldier the Army could scrape together.
Boy, what a unit that was. The Army is a magnet for characters—the kind of people who make you question whether the screening process involves anything more than a pulse and a last name. I could write a whole book about them.
Sometime in October 2003, I was in the gym when word came down that the 303rd MI Battalion was deploying to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. We were going to war. There’s no dramatic way to say that—no swelling score, no patriotic montage. Just a gym that smelled like rubber mats and denial, soldiers pretending to stretch while secretly listening to CNN. When the words hit the TV, you could feel the treadmills slow down, one by one. Someone grunted. Someone else swore. And then everyone went back to lifting. That’s how the Army processes emotion: silence and working out.
The government gave us three months to prepare—three months to move an entire military installation across the planet. We started packing like hoarders who’d just been told the apocalypse was on a deadline. Everything went on the manifest: tents, crates, fuel, dreams, and Humvees that looked like they’d last been serviced during the Lincoln administration. Some were so ancient that if you leaned on the hood too hard, history came off in flakes.
We were handed the world’s worst Humvees—patched, rusted, praying to make it across a dust road. Our trucks had a Mk 19 and a .50; I was issued an M249, an M16, an M9, and a small body with big responsibility. At twenty-five and barely 120 pounds, I learned how to carry a war on my shoulders.
Every night someone joked, “We’re really going, huh?”
And every night someone else said, “Nah, they won’t actually send us.”
Then one morning, they did.
