Johnny Rico - Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America

T he first thing I want you to know is that I was ordered to write this book.

The sergeant major, right after he told us at Cusher's funeral that nobody owed us anything and took back the medals he gave us, told usall of usthat it's our duty to tell our Army story. That there was a lot of negative publicity circulating out there about the Army and that each one of us has an Army story, and it was our responsibility to have it be told.

I'm not sure this is the story the sergeant major had in mind, but he didn't specify. He just told us to tell our story.

So that's the first thing I want to tell you: that I'm under orders.

I write because I want to be a good soldier.

I want to follow orders.

The second thing I probably need to explain is that I'm in Afghanistan.

I'm in Afghanistan in a small three-room concrete operations building that sits in the corner of Cougar Base, a tiny one-hundred-man firebase located near nothing. A representative modern-day Alamo complete with clay brick walls that's somewhere in the desert wasteland, accessible only by helicopter or very brave drivers willing to traverse territory thick with Taliban rascals.

At this very moment, I'm half-ass masturbating. Limp-handed, not really focusing. I need to get serious or just zip up right now. I decide to commit and intensely focus on my third-grade teacher. I empty into my hat. I just read in Jane,a women's magazine, which I'm surprised to find at an infantry base in Afghanistan, that if you look at pornography every day you're considered an addict. I realize, without equivocation, that at this point, after a year in the desert, I'm fully addicted to pornography. I've masturbated my way through the war. Three, four, five times a daywhatever it took to get the job done.

That's the level of commitment and dedication and sacrifice I'm talking about here.

I step outside the command building and smoke a cigarette, one ear toward the door for lingering radio traffic that I'm supposed to monitor. It's okay for me to smoke a cigarette now because I've quit my habit. It's okay to occasionally smoke if it's not a habit.

I'm stalling, I decide as I go and take a piss by the clay perimeter brick wall to our base that was built by a Taliban commander. I tell everyone that a Taliban commander built our outer perimeter wall, and they think, Well, that's weird. But it's not weird when you consider that he did a good job and he charged us only thirty thousand in U.S. funds. It's not like we knew he was a Taliban commanderthat is, until he was done. Well, almost done. There was no point in arresting the guy before he finished the wall.

It's time to quit stalling. I head back into the operations building and unplug the six-million-dollar incoming radar system, which, strangely, uses an ordinary wall socket despite all its casings and panels and such and which also happens to use the only wall plug that has a matching socket to allow me to plug in my laptop to finish the book. The six-million-dollar radar system shows that we've been attacked by enemy rockets eighty-three times tonight. The truth is we've only been attacked once, but that was earlier in the evening, and I've almost forgotten about it nowif I'm being completely honest.

I could've unplugged the coffeemaker. I chose the six-million-dollar incoming radar system because to do so means something. That's the level of commitment, dedication, and sacrifice that I'm talking about here.

The last thing I have to tell you is that there are places where I've monkeyed with the story.

The old axiom is that truth is stranger than fiction. Most readers will never guess the parts where I did this, thinking that I exaggerated some of the more absurd surreal moments. Let it be our secret that these are the parts that I haven't touched.

There are many reasons for why I made certain changes.

The first is that for me to tell a story, it becomes necessary to condense time lines and rearrange scenes so that you don't have the reality of weeks of nothingness except baking in the warm Afghan sun filling page after page. Necessarily, time lines and sequences of events have been rearranged and characters blended and others dropped altogether. There were over one hundred individuals at each of the three main firebases I write about, and I don't have the luxury or the inclination to include everyone.

And sometimes, it's just hard to say exactly what happened all the time. Firefights are a good example of this. When someone is shooting at you, and you are shooting back at someonejust two typical human beings trying to kill one anotherobjective perception goes out the door. What seemed an entire morning firing bullets was sometimes only forty minutes. Thinking backward, even immediately after the event to the orders of movement and the sequences of events, often produces vastly different stories from all involved, each story held and believed with a dedicated passion to objectivity and a claim to a clear and concise memory. Yet, no two accounts agree.