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likely didn’t know how old he was, as I seriously doubted a birth certificate existed anywhere in the village. A pair of striking green eyes, a rarity for Iraqis, offset his jet-black hair. He tailed our movements around town every day, out of both curiosity and a sense of security. His parents had removed him from school two years prior due to kidnapping threats brought on by his father’s cooperation with American forces. Mojo spoke excellent English, which should be enough to keep him employed for many years, be it in the backwaters of the Arab world or beyond, in the metropolises. His understanding of soldierisms, from our off-color jokes to our acronym jargon, was a bit unsettling at first. He referred to me as LT G whenever he saw me and did a spot-on impression of Staff Sergeant Bulldog strutting around with a scowl on his face.
    In addition to being a streetwise urchin, Mojo was also a budding entrepreneur, and he’d let it be known that he could provide Joe with whatever Joe desired—legal or otherwise. I never read Mojo General Order No. 1, although I probably should have when it was discovered that he pimped out whores to the IP’s and was interested in expanding his enterprise to our compound. We put a stop to that before it got started by threatening to turn him over to his father. At least, I think we did.
    This incessant obsession with money, from the sheiks to the terps all the way down to little Mojo, cannot be overstated. It was absolutely vital to
the continued development of Iraq and the American military’s success in the Iraq War. While it often seemed blatantly crude, who was I, a suburbanite who had always lived in comfort, to question it? I had never known poverty or the desperation it brings. Daily, we had local-nationals come to our gates looking for jobs, and daily we turned them away, sending them back to whatever Mesopotamian hellhole they’d crawled out of. It only took a few weeks for me to grow numb to this recurrence.
    Democratic birth and the quest for financial independence seem to be intrinsically linked—freedom’s dirty little not-so-secret. I’m sure Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty would agree. And while the idealist in me—back then, I guess I still thought of myself as one of those—looked upon greed as the ultimate of vices and viewed people who talked about their finances publicly as boors and covetous tools, I couldn’t help but sympathize with the locals’ fixation. Theirs was a penury only dreams could escape. And for a while, that dream ran through the lean, tall men in body armor from across the sea who arrived in ghost tanks and smiled too much.
    They didn’t all feel that way though—about us or our money. There were just enough of them out there who wanted us gone or dead, or dead and gone, that battles and skirmishes continued; thus, so did the war.
    Reality endured.

SNOW PATROL
    I staggered toward the latrine, delirious with too much caffeine in my system and not enough sleep, weaving like an indolent zombie. PFC Cold-Cuts bounced into me with a large smile plastered across his face, and the sound his throat emitted would be considered a giggle in most circles outside of the U.S. Army.
    â€œIt’s snowing, sir!” he said.
    â€œCold-Cuts,” I said, “it’s too early for that shit.” I brushed my teeth, put on deodorant more out of habit than concern for what I smelled like at the combat outpost, and checked up on the status of my novice attempt at a war moustache—still pathetic, wispy, and a general affront to facial hair everywhere. I walked back into the main hallway and spied Staff Sergeant Boondock across the way, hard rock music blaring out of the headphones wedged into his ears.

    â€œWe still leaving in an hour?” he yelled, speaking over the lyrics of the band Rage Against the Machine’s “Calm Like a Bomb.”
    I checked my watch and