Insurgency: the rebellion of a small, ill-equipped group against a government through subversion and armed conflict
LESSON ONE:
THE GOAL OF INSURGENCY IS NOT DEATH, BUT DOUBT
The night before my GMC was bombed by Iraqi insurgents, I’d spent hours in front of a U.S.-controlled base in Baghdad. I dawdled in front of the base’s gate waiting for permission to enter while Private First Class Bob Johnson craned his neck to try and see the stars.
“I don’t mind when I get guard duty,” he told me. “It’s the only time I get to be outdoors. Except when we drive around and shoot at people.”
Johnson couldn’t see the heavens because his helmet—clunky and impersonal except for a scribble reading “O + pos” that signaled what to transfuse should tragedy strike—pushed over his eyes.
“We don’t get to go outside much,” he explained. So to pass the time crouched inside Humvees, or waiting in barracks for the next serving of mass-produced grilled cheese sandwiches, Johnson said, soldiers obsessively discussed their favorite preoccupation: how a soldier dies in Iraq. Death usually comes in an unglamorous manner, he noted, following the unexpected flash of a roadside bomb or an unluckily accurate rocket-propelled grenade. Insurgents pointlessly fire at tanks invulnerable to their attacks, they run headlong into machine-gun fire, they hold their rifles so ineptly that only one in every hundred bullets seems to hit a Humvee, much less a soldier. So when an American soldier dies, said Johnson, it seems almost a foolish coincidence.
“This is a weird war,” he continued. “We shoot at the same people we give candy to. It’s like they attack us just to let everyone know they can, just to prove we can’t kill them all. And they are proving it.”
I was passing time with PFC Johnson because I am a journalist, and although he initiated my hearsay education regarding the mechanics of insurgency, my first-hand tutorial began the next day when my GMC was attacked. We were driving down an empty street in Ramadi, a poor town two hours west of Baghdad surrounded by the lush fields and palm groves that give this crescent its fertile renown. I had caught a ride with a military caravan of two SUVs and six Humvees, seeking transport through the city en route to an interview. Based on Johnson’s advice, I chose to ride in an SUV. He’d confided that “all the politicians ride in GMCs when they visit, and you know that means they’re either safe or have free liquor.”
The SUV carried no booze, but it did contain two Americans working for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), Iraq’s interim government, which dissolved when sovereignty was...
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