The Living Will Envy The Dead Read Free

th Maintenance Company, which included the famed Jessica Lynch, failed its combat test rather spectacularly, although their Iraqi opponents didn’t do much better either.  They hadn’t been trained properly and hadn’t been under fire before.  Worse, an A-10 made a serious mistake in the heat of battle and strafed a company of Marines north of the Saddam Canal.  They hadn’t been trained enough either, although one of the oldest jokes in the book covers precision weapons and friendly fire – they’re not.
     
    I won’t go through the campaign in blow-by-blow detail.  We pushed north, getting more and more hacked off at the Iraqis as we moved, and eventually reached Baghdad.  There were plenty of Iraqis who decided to fight, either through stubbornness, or through having a secret policeman holding a gun at their backs, forcing them onwards to death.  We found that if we located and shot the secret policeman, the Iraqis attacking us tended to surrender or to try to run.  Others, however, fought almost professionally.  They had balls, all right.   The worst of all were the foreign fighters who came into Iraq in hopes of killing an American.  We killed them by the thousand and the locals refused to bury them, a gesture of contempt for fellow Muslims.  We had to bury them ourselves.
     
    I spent the next two years, by and large, on counterinsurgency duty.  I didn’t know at the time – no one did – that the early years of the Occupation would be so badly mismanaged.  Remember what I said about some Iraqis having balls?  The men we needed, the ones who could have helped rebuild their country, were tossed out onto the streets when we disbanded the army.  There are so few things in life I want, but one thing I do want is ten minutes alone with the moron who convinced the President that it would be a good idea.  It wasn’t.  Oh, I do understand the political factors involved, but the bottom line was that it was a fucking stupid trade-off and one that cost American lives.  I fought in more tiny little encounters than I like to admit, and several really big fights like Fallujah…and then I was wounded.  I hadn’t escaped unscathed during the previous years, but this time…the IED exploded under my vehicle and when I awoke, I was being evacuated back to the States.  It was pretty bad.
     
    On the other hand, that’s where I met Mac.  They operated on me as soon as they could, before shipping me into a hospital to recover, basically just pointing me to a bed.  I didn’t mind.  I’d several years worth of sleep to catch up on, even if I did feel like I’d gone ten rounds with the Corps fighting champion.  I climbed into the bed, lay down, and sometime later was awoken by a voice.
     
    “Jesus Christ,” it said.  “They’ve brought us the Doctor!”
     
    I opened one eye and glared at the speaker.  All right, I did look a bit like David Tennant – who had been the Doctor for two years when I was wounded – but there was no call for something like that.
     
    “And who are you meant to be?”  I demanded.  Mac - Robert McNab, to give him his full name – was a short ugly sparkplug.  I’d call him worse, were it not for the fact that he is proofreading this book.  “Mike O’Neal?”
     
    He laughed and a beautiful friendship was formed.  Mac was an Army Ranger who’d just been returned ahead of time from Afghanistan.  Like me, he loved science-fiction and military history, while he introduced me to other kinds of fiction, including fantasy and alternate history.  We spent many happy hours chatting away while they tried to nurse us back to health and, once we were allowed out of the hospital, we painted the town red together.  I’d love to tell you some of the stories, but as I said, Mac’s proofreading this.  I’ll leave everything we did to your imagination.
     
    As it happened, both of us were too badly wounded to return to combat at once, although Mac would and did recover