Havoc

People forget what a tremendous success the invasion was. It took twenty-one days from the time we crossed the berm in Kuwait until the regime collapsed in Baghdad. Just twenty-one days. On the big push north, most of the Iraqis we met were grateful. People forget that too.

Because we could, our battalion commandeered a row of palaces from the Republican Guard near this pristine, manmade lake with a stock of wild trout, pathways lined by willow trees, and an island in the middle that housed a bombed-out cinema resembling the Lincoln Memorial. We set up our aid station in the villa opposite, and our triage room had a bay window that opened up onto the crumbled façade. There were no access roads to the cinema. You had to row out to it, which we did in a wooden rowboat we salvaged on the shore. An eerie fucking place, with murals of Saddam in each of its theaters: Saddam as victorious field marshal and Saddam as martyr of the faith and Saddam as a suave mafia don. It was striking how many of the portraits featured children.

We liberated a puppy and tried to tame him by feeding him peanut butter and Easy Cheese. We kicked back, played Spades, and slept in ballrooms with marble floors and crystal chandeliers. We pissed in gilded bidets. Truth is, it was all a bunch of cheap junk. Saddam couldn't have planned a better revenge—every velour-cushioned throne had legs like matchsticks.

But we didn't mind. Those weeks after the invasion were what we imagined old-timey frontier life to be like, living off the land. When we had no running water in the toilets we became plumbers, and when we needed to nail the windows shut to keep out the sandstorms we became carpenters, and when the breaker box caught fire we became electricians. From the ruins of a palace, we built a doghouse.

On the rooftop, we constructed a gravity-fed shower from an abandoned water tank, some PVC pipe, and chicken wire. We strung our ponchos up for curtains and stripped naked in the sunlight, our bodies white and soft and new in the lukewarm water. Attack helicopters flew overhead. Palm trees swayed in the breeze. Never had we felt so alive.

The line platoons set out on safari, bagging gazelle, ibex, and wild boar. At night, when we had glutted ourselves on game slow-cooked on a spit, we smoked cigars and sat out on the marble stairs leading down to the lake, our mascot curled at our feet. Tracers crisscrossed the sky in IMAX.

We never knew who was shooting, or who they were shooting at, or why, and we didn't care. Because we'd won. We belonged to history now. Corporal Holt, who was at least nominally in charge, didn't want to invite trouble. He could hardly look at the dog, let alone give him a name. So we called him Havoc, partly because we thought the name fit but mostly so that we could talk about him in code: as battalion medics, we belonged to Headquarters Company, and Havoc was our call-sign on the radio. We weren't supposed to have mascots. Or contraband. Or booze. Or war trophies. Top, the company first sergeant, normally went ape-shit if he ever found any of the aforementioned items, which of course, he always did. Booze and drugs we could understand as being "prejudicial to good order"—but a dog?

Standing in the doorway to the trauma room, Holt crossed his arms and cleared his throat in what must have been his idea of confrontation. "You guys," he said. And because he couldn't think of anything else to say, he nodded at the dog.

We nodded back.

For weeks we'd watched the locals parading their stolen wares through the streets, wide-eyed with a mixture of gall and envy as they lifted eggs from a henhouse, television sets from an electronics store, a private collection of erotic paintings from Uday Hussein's house, empty shell casings from a munitions...