Kassabian - The Hooligans of Kandahar: Not All War Stories are Heroic

I was lying on my back under the hot Texas sun with a cheap cigarette in my mouth waiting for a massive convoy of school buses. That was how the army chose to shuttle us to the airport. All around me, young soldiers were yapping, excited about getting to go fight in a war, but a lot of it was uncertainty and fear.

I call them young, but I was only twenty-two. When youve been in the army since you were seventeen and have spent your formative years bouncing around the world, you tend to age fast. Soldiers joked that we aged in dog years. My aching joints didnt make it feel like much of a joke, though.

We were waiting in an expansive field with our bags piled up in front of us. Soldiers families milled about, hanging off their kid, husband, or whoever was about to go to Afghanistan. My family wasnt there. I didnt want them to be. It all just seemed so weird and awkward.

We all stood around baking in the hot sun. Never mind that the only reason we were there so early was that no one in our chain of command knew when the buses were supposed to show up.

God forbid a group of leaders who were expected to take this unit into combat could figure out how to wrangle a few fucking school buses together on time. So the soldiers and their families just sat there waiting. What are you supposed to talk about in that hours-long span while you wait to be shipped away?

I really hope you dont die, son.

Aw, thanks, Pa.

The married men held on to their women for dear life. Army wives were notorious cheaters. The men knew as soon as they let go, as soon as they got onto those buses, their women would run into someone elses arms. Even if it werent true, it would be the only thing the deployed soldiers would be thinking about over the next year.

It was around this time the tall, gangly figure of my squad leader, Slim, sat down next to me. His family wasnt there either. A few weeks earlier hed sent his wife and kid back to Florida so he could spend his last couple of weeks in the States getting shitfaced with me and a couple of the others in our squad.

Did you call your mom yet, fool? he asked.

You would think that was something a decent person would have done months ago. It turned out I was not a decent person. That wasnt a shock to me anymore, though. Still, Slim always found a way to make me feel guilty about it.

There I was a few hours away from deploying and I hadnt even told my mom.

I tossed my cigarette into the grass and pulled out my phone. As soon as I started dialing, I realized she was at work. I left a voicemail. Im sure that learning through voicemail that your youngest son is going off to war yet again isnt the best thing to hear when you get home from a long day at work.

Slim and I wandered over to where our soldiers were hanging out. None of their families were there either. Our squad always had an outcast aura. It was something Slim and I embraced.

Slim was our squad leader: a man who nearly finished his college degree in radiological sciences and whose every other word was fuck.

One day he woke up and decided he was through with schoolor as he put it, Fuck that book learning shit, I wanted to kill terroristsand enlisted. I served with him during my last deployment to Afghanistan where I learned he was bat-shit insane but also the best combat leader a soldier could want. He was the one who tagged us the Hooligans in the first place.

After taking over our squad from some totally incompetent jackass, he quickly saw the only thing we were good at was shooting at shit and getting arrested. Yall mother fuckers are some hooligans. The name just stuck after that.

My team, Charlie Team, was composed of me and two teenagers, Dirty and Urkel. Both were fresh out of basic training and both were married. And in true military fashion, both were already headed to their first divorces.

Dirty was a goofy kid from Florida who wore skinny jeans and was covered in tattoos. Urkel was a tiny black kid from Georgia who wore glasses that were nearly as big as his face. He called the death metal that Dirty and I played crazy white people music.

They were the first soldiers I had ever been put in charge of for anything serious. They looked up to me for guidance and leadership, and I sincerely felt sorry for them.

Alpha Team was led by Grandpa, the oldest guy in the squad and the closest thing we had to a voice of reason. His soldiers were Cali and Machete. Cali was young and generally way too serious about everything. He was also the only guy in the squador possibly the entire goddamn U.S. Armywho really believed in our mission in Afghanistan anymore. He was the kind of guy who would wave an American flag and blast country music from his lifted pickup truck on his way to Wal-Mart.

Machete was a massive bag of shit. His uniforms always looked as if hed stolen them off a homeless guy. For some reason, his hands were always covered with mysterious stains, and his fingernails were brown. No one liked Machete. We actually decided whose team he would be on by a game of rock, paper, scissors. Grandpa lost.

Bravo team was led by Kitty, the only female in the platoon and a lesbian with a receding hairline from years of pulling her hair back into a tight bun. She was a joke of a leader.

Her soldier Perroan older guy who left a job that made him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to enlistdid nearly everything for her. I considered Perro one of the best soldiers in the whole platoon. He was supposed to be my gunner, but because she outranked me, Kitty was able to steal him.

Her gunner, Guapo, so named because he was so overly groomed and because he could pull massive amounts of ass even though he was married, was only added to our squad about a month before deployment.

Kitty had an extra soldier named Nan whod spent a few years as a firefighter in some middle-of-nowhere town in Iowa and seemed way too smart to be in the army. One second he would be talking about how the repercussions of the invasion of Iraq affected national security and the next giggling at a dick joke.