How To Speak about the Secret Desert Wars

1. Begin with an Unclassified Story

We marched from the bus up the front steps of a modular classroom and sat stiffly on hard chairs, waiting for the staff sergeant to speak. He was only a few years older than us and smiled kindly, perhaps because we would be officers. He told us, “Never point a weapon at anything you don’t intend to shoot.” It was ridiculously hot—this was San Antonio in summer—and his starched battledress uniform slowly wilted as he explained to us the importance of weapon safety. I remember that on the walls of the dim trailer, he’d hung posters showing Saddam and the Ayatollah posed behind imaginary target circles.

Eventually, the sergeant told us to find a seat among the workbenches at the back of the room, and once we had our places, we signed for our weapons. “The M9 Beretta,” the sergeant said, holding up his personal sidearm with great affection. It was a black semiautomatic revolver weighing about 2.5 pounds with a full magazine, and what was cool about it, he told us, was “its short recoil and double action.”

He showed us how to take the weapon apart, and how to put it back together. When it was our turn to practice, he worked his way through the rows, watching our progress, praising our efforts or giving us pointers. “Yep—just like that,” he said, or “Careful with that slide assembly, sir. Bend it and you’ll shoot the bubba next to you.”

Once we had a little practice, the staff sergeant led us through a collective drill. “Slide!” he said, and we slid the top half of the barrel from the bottom half by depressing the slide stop, and then engaging the disassembly button while rotating the disassembly lever. It was a complicated operation if, like me, you’d hardly touched a real gun before. And with the top of the gun’s barrel out of the way, the sergeant called, “Spring!” and we poked into the weapon and picked out both the recoil spring and the spring slide; then he said, “Lock!” and we wiggled out a cylindrical piece called the locking barrel assembly. And then, as a group, we chanted the names of the parts as we lined them up neatly on the workbench in front of us. Then he had us work back through the assembly, but this time with us calling “Lock! Spring! Slide!”—and then we said, “Slide! Spring! Lock!” and we got so good at pulling apart our weapons and putting them back together that we sounded like a bunch of chanting monks, and our teacher smiled proudly.

Next, the sergeant showed us how to clean our weapon, how to keep it lubricated, and how to hold it tightly against our bodies for better aim. There, in the hot classroom, we heard how we might make a useful cover out of the corner of a building, a vehicle—even learned how, in a pinch, we could protect ourselves to a certain degree with a simple two-by-four pounded vertically into the dirt. But we also learned how to draw our adversaries from their protective places, how to maim them, and, of course, how to kill them, quickly and cleanly.

What kept my classmates jazzed about these rote exercises was the thought of getting out of that stuffy trailer and onto the actual range. The excitement buzzed around the room as cadets imagined aloud what it would be like to load live 9mm rounds into our magazines rather than these practice slugs. What would it be like, the man to my right asked, “to clip 15 rounds of death” into our Berettas, to feel the hot, spent shells of the pistol rolling off the backs of our hands?

I was formulating questions designed to extend our classroom time, but I was too nervous to ask them. What are the chances, I wanted to say, our guns would jam and maim us instead of our enemy? How high is the statistical probability of death at a military firing range...