[miclo18d]

Continued

A. left his unit when his commitment was up the following year, then spent some time in Afghanistan as an unarmed contractor before coming home. He said he didn’t miss it much. Granted, the nighttime raids were “pretty awesome.” “But you gotta remember,” he said, “your opportunity to do that is really small. Everyone got spoiled, because we had an unprecedented decade of two wars.” A. said he had a hard time relating to the average American, especially armchair patriots who didn’t join the fight when they had the chance. He said he felt more kinship with the Iraqis. He also drew a distinction between Special Ops guys who joined up when he did and those who enlisted during peacetime. “Pre-9/11, there were probably guys who didn’t even want to go to war — they just wanted to go on cool trips,” he said. “It’s just a different mind-set when you join up knowing you’re gonna get it on.”

A. was the kind of soldier even soldiers looked up to. Fred called him “the ghost” and “the invisible man” and their “special friend.” Sometimes A. played along, telling tales about blood-splattered Iraqi swimming pools and war-zone pranks that inevitably began, “So there I was. . . .” But more often than not, he seemed uncomfortable with the attention. “These are just competition teams,” Brian sniffed one afternoon. “A.'s not a competitor — he’s a killer.” A. gave a halfhearted smile and looked away.

On the third day, the Warrior Competition staged a pair of night events. A full moon hung low over the mountains, and the parade ground was illuminated by spotlights. Team America waited its turn at an event called Hostage Rescue, outside a big, Abbottabad-like compound in the center of the base. The objective was to blow a door with an explosive charge, rush inside, shoot some targets and escape with the hostage; basically what A. had done in Iraq.

A. was lying in the dirt with his eyes closed, using his helmet as a pillow. I asked if being here felt surreal — the desert compound, the moonlight, all the shooting. “Nah,” he said. “This is theater. It’s totally contrived.” Then he told a story from his time in Iraq. Members of his unit were hunting one of Saddam’s executioners, and an Iraqi civilian they were working with offered to help. A. said the Iraqi told him: “I know this guy. Give me a gun and a car, and I will kill him!” A. said he responded: “Dude, I hear you. And it sounds like a good idea to me on so many levels. But my government will put me in jail.”

As the men checked their helmets and body armor and loaded magazines into their M4s, Fred called them together to outline a battle plan. Moments later, Eric shouted, “Fire in the hole!” and blew the door. They moved through the building, clearing each room by firing two rounds into 3-inch-by-5-inch paper targets. From outside, you could track their progress up to the second floor by the steady pop of rifle fire.

A. grabbed the hostage — a 180-pound dummy — and the team raced back downstairs. Outside, in the glow of the spotlights, they whooped and high-fived over their score: zero misses in just over three minutes, the fastest time so far. Someone joked that they should change their name to the International Death Squad. Their daring night raid had been a success; all that was missing was the film crew.

In the van on the way back to the armory, A. struck up a conversation with the Jordanian driver. It turned out that he had worked with the Americans in Iraq. A. asked where.

“Ramadi,” he said. “2003 to 2006.”

“Oh, man,” A. said. “You were getting it on! Did you go out with them?”

“Sometimes,” the driver said. He didn’t elaborate, and A. didn’t ask.

For the first few days of the competition, friendships formed along geopolitical lines. The Americans hung out with the Canadians. The Russians hung out with the Kazakhs. The French kept to themselves, and the Chinese really kept to themselves. But as the days went on, people started to loosen up. The Greeks and the Palestinians played soccer together. The Americans and the Iraqis talked about Tupac. The Arab teams started rooting for each other, cheering, “Yalla, yalla!” — Let’s go, let’s go! The Canadians, inspired, added their own twist: “Yolo! Yolo!” (which is slang for “you only live once”).

One afternoon, the Swiss Skorpions were basking in the sun, sipping hot chocolate from a paper cup. “Not bad,” one said. He checked the back of the packet and smiled. “Nestlé. It’s Swiss.”

A few tables over, Brian swapped his American flag patch for a Canadian one. “We’re gonna need ‘em when the North Koreans come,” he said. Next to him, Carey was showing off pictures on his iPad: there he was with his Marine unit in Nairobi after the 1998 embassy bombing (“We were hunting Bin Laden before he was Bin Laden”), and there were his three kids dressed up for Halloween (one as a soldier). “Hey, want to see a picture of me and the president?” he asked. He swiped to a photo of President Obama and the first lady at an event in Virginia. “So there’s the president,” he said, then zoomed in on a tiny black dot standing on a rooftop, “and there’s me!”

Sitting nearby was an officer named Mohammed, who described himself as a commander in the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Force. He was bald underneath his black beret, and his eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. On his arm was a patch bearing the unit’s symbol: an eagle perched on a skull. He joined Saddam’s army as an M.P. when he was 17 and stayed until the second Iraq war. He enlisted again in 2004, after the regime’s collapse and now was fighting groups hostile to the Americans and to the new Iraqi government.

The I.C.T.F. is based in Baghdad, where there were more than a dozen bombings in the previous month alone. A wave of attacks on the 10th anniversary of the American invasion had left 60 people dead in the week before the I.C.T.F. team came to Kasotc. “It’s a dangerous job,” Mohammed said. “But the pay is very good. And what we have faced before is much more difficult.” He said they wanted to win the competition like everyone else. But mostly they were here to learn new tactics. “This is not a vacation for us, like it is for some of the other teams,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the Swiss.

Mohammed said he had seen friends die, but he stayed in the army to provide his wife and children with a good life. He had four children; the oldest, a boy, was 15. I asked if he hoped his son would join the army someday. “No,” he said. “I lived the life of a soldier. I know how hard it is.” Instead he hoped his son would grow up to be a pharmacist or an engineer.