Crazy is as Crazy Does" when a couple of our more boisterous customers were seen climbing onto the roof of their flat-topped pickup. The rest of us tried not to laugh and not to pay attention as we listened to those on the roof whooping it up and cheering each other on as they scaled the wall to the roof. There were five or six "roof rats," as we called them. They'd pull their boots out of the air intakes on their truck's side panels and climb up in an apparently straight line. They'd hold on to each other's arms and jump off. When they were done, they would all climb back down as a unit, pull their boots out of the intakes and do it all over again. I thought I saw their leader do a pull-up on the air intake during the last leg of their trek back to the ground. It didn't look to me like he did any more than four or five reps before he'd jump off. Still, I kept thinking, if you can do pull-ups, you can do pull-ups. That's how it went for hours and hours. We had a good time on the roof. It was great watching those whooping, screaming, laughing, cussing, drinking types go from level to level as if on a zipline. It was a little boring just watching them do it. If they had been sober and in the mood to party we might have had a little more excitement up there. But we didn't. They got tired and had to quit. The roof had a limit, although the limit wasn't far off what it was up to at the start. But it was a good limit. Sgt. Gale, whose job as the Company's supply officer was to make sure we had ammo, food, and water, would have given a thumbs-up if he had been there to see all those boots coming off the air intakes and back onto the ground. I have no doubt, though, that he would have given the opposite thumb if he had been there to see them get a bunch of guys up there together. He was known to be a little hard on his soldiers, but he did his job well. He knew what the word meant—what was the best way to get rid of a platoon's supply of weapons was to let the soldiers shoot each other. I was one of the lucky ones that didn't get busted that night for leaving my unit. I watched them come and went for days. I watched them do their thing. I had fun. I had a story to tell. They told some funny stories. I did not do my share of the drinking or the cussing—it wasn't the cussing or the drinking that scared me. If I had been on the roof, there would have been nothing to hold me back. On that particular rooftop, everybody saw what was going on, so nobody could have said I wasn't there. It would have been easy to get the guys to tell stories. It would have been easy to see what went on. But that wasn't the reason I didn't go up there. It was because I liked the feeling of knowing that I had my mission to accomplish. I was a member of the company, and we were a Company. We had a mission to accomplish. We did it our way, with a mission that I thought important and a mission that we did right. It didn't matter to me whether they did it their way or mine or our way. I cared about the mission. That is why when you are in the field, fighting the enemy, you want to do what you have to do, because it is important. You do what you have to do for the right reasons. You do what you have to do because you know you can, because you know that it is important to get done what you know you have to do. That night when they were all gone and I was all by myself, I said to myself, "God is good." I knew it was a platoon of good guys I'd seen that night. THE MEN OF Company B were all in the same boat, or so I thought. I thought of the platoon as having been born in the middle of the night on the day we were to be dropped off in Kuwait. It was after midnight, February 27, 2003. The other guys went into their units—Company A, 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division; or Company C, 2nd Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. They went to the company they belonged to for the rest of the war. They went to their company for the rest of their lives. We did not go to our company because we were not a company. It wasn't our company. We were a platoon. The unit that we belonged to was the 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, which was one of the brigades of the 1st Infantry Division, which is the oldest division in the U.S. Army. We knew from history class that the 1st Infantry Division was nicknamed "The Big Red One," and the 3rd Brigade was known as the "Triple Nickel." Those nicknames meant that the brigade, and, we assumed, the unit to which it belonged, had an edge. The guys in Company B had never belonged to the 1st Infantry Division before they went to war. We knew, even though we didn't know it, that the fact that we had gone to war with them when they had not gone to war with us meant that we were not the Big Red One, not in the sense that we had been assigned to them, anyway. We were born that night in Kuwait. When we left Kuwait, we were a platoon that was the same size as the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division. But we weren't the same size as the Big Red One, and the way it had turned out we weren't even the same size as the Triple Nickel either. The 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division was a brigade of more than ten thousand men. The Platoon-sized Company B of the 2nd Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment was made up of about one hundred and sixty soldiers. The platoon that was born that night was all we would have for the rest of our service in the army. It was enough men to do the job we needed to do, as small a platoon as it was, at least in my opinion. It was as if that platoon's size was only a minimum requirement, like a requirement in grammar school, to write a paper. If it couldn't get to the part of the page where it had to go, it could do so if it had only the minimum number of letters in it. What made it a platoon was the fact that there were more soldiers in it than letters. It was my platoon. I didn't know how long it would last. I thought that if it was only a platoon, and not an army, we would last forever. We felt the same way about those tanks that the Army called Bradleys. It is funny, but those tanks and trucks they call "Bradleys" that went to war with us got a lot of attention from people on the way to and from Kuwait. People like to see them. The Army used to give those guys to the units that were going to war. They called them training tanks, but that was not really true. They were not training tanks. They were tanks that the Army was keeping for its own use. They were not used for training or for anything else but as a way to get into war. But I don't think many people, Army personnel or anyone else, really understood why the Bradleys we had were so great. Even the soldiers who used them often did not really know why they were such great tanks. That is because, as I saw it, they were not great tanks. I was in them on the way to Kuwait, and I knew what they were. The tanks we went to war with were not like the ones the Army had when we were at home. I didn't want to make trouble or anything. But it turned out that the difference between those tanks and the Bradleys the Army called "training tanks" was like the difference between a tank being on fire or one that was on fire, but you couldn't see it because there were a few flames and smoke coming out of it. When the men in the Bradleys got to the end of their service in the Army, they went to the Army National Guard. There, they were used to teach other soldiers who were going into other units how to handle those Bradleys. In Kuwait, the 1st Armored Division—the division the Army brought over from Europe to go to war in the Persian Gulf—brought with them a few Bradleys from its own fleet. The 1st Armored Division also had a lot of Abrams tanks, but the Bradleys they had were not the same Bradleys that they used in Europe. Those Bradleys the Army sent over to us were light-armored, unarmored, high-tech Bradleys, which the Army called tanks, Bradleys. We would have a Bradley platoon. They would be our Bradleys. These were the Bradleys that would do their work in Iraq and destroy that country's tanks and truck convoys. But there were a few things about those Bradleys that needed fixing. Like the guns. They were not like those guns that we had when we left home. Those Bradleys didn't fire