Part 59 (1/2)

”We thought so,” said the MPs, shaking their heads. They went back over to the idiot soldier and started b.i.t.c.hing him out for lying and wasting their time.

Serves him right for getting into a fight started by his girlfriend.

I came back West with a shattered bone. The guys all made fun of me for my weak genes. But the injury wasn't all that funny for me, because the doctors couldn't figure out whether they should operate or not. My finger set a little deeper in my hand, not quite where it should be.

In San Diego, one of the doctors took a look and decided they might be able to fix it by pulling it and resetting it in the socket.

I told him to give it a go.

”You want some painkiller?” he asked.

”Nah,” I said. They'd done the same thing at the Army hospital back East, and it hadn't really hurt.

Maybe Navy doctors pull harder. The next thing I knew I was lying flat back on a table in the cast room. I'd pa.s.sed out and p.i.s.sed myself from the pain.

But at least I got away without surgery.

And for the record, I've since changed my fighting style to accommodate my weaker hand.

READY TO GO

I had to wear a cast for a few weeks, but more and more I got into the swing of things. The pace built up as we got ready to s.h.i.+p out. There was only one down note: we had been a.s.signed to a western province in Iraq. From what we had heard, nothing was going on there. We tried to get transferred to Afghanistan, but we couldn't get released by the area commander.

That didn't sit too well with us, certainly not with me. If I was going back to war, I wanted to be in the action, not twiddling my (broken) fingers in the desert. Being a SEAL, you don't want to sit around with your thumb up your a.s.s; you want to get in the action.

Still, it felt good to be getting back to war. I'd been burned out when I came home, completely overwhelmed and emotionally drained. But now I felt recharged and ready to go.

I was ready to kill some more bad guys.

CHAPTER 13

Mortality

BLIND

It seemed like every dog in Sadr City was barking.

I scanned the darkness through my night vision, tense as we made our way down one of the nastiest streets in Sadr City. We walked past a row of what might have been condos in a normal city. Here they were little better than rat-infested slums. It was past midnight in early April 2008, and, against all common sense but under direct orders, we were walking into the center of an insurgent h.e.l.lhole.

Like a lot of the other drab-brown buildings on the street, the house we were heading to had a metal grate in front of the door. We lined up to breach it. Just then, someone appeared from behind the grate at the door and said something in Arabic.

Our interpreter stepped over and told him to open up.

The man inside said he didn't have a key.

One of the other SEALs told him to go get it. The man disappeared, running up the stairs somewhere.