George Bush had better be fucking right.

That's how I began my journal on April 3, 2003. Writing in pencil on an Army-issue notebook with mint green pages, leaning in on deliberate, hard letters, I underlined "better" and penciled over the words again and again until they wore through the tactically-colored paper.

On March 19, just two weeks earlier, the US had launched the first air strike of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Troops on the ground had invaded Iraq the next day. And now I was off to war for reasons that I feared were bullshit.

I reclined in the first-class section of a civilian 747 bound for Kuwait with an M-16 wedged between my legs and my gut firmly stuffed with all the Krispy Kreme doughnuts I could scarf down in twenty minutes, courtesy of the old Red Cross ladies who saw us off at Hunter Army Airfield, Fort Stewart, Georgia. It seemed a bad omen that the Red Cross was the last organization to see us off to war. The Red Cross sends emergency notifications to deployed soldiers when something urgent happens back home-like when someone is in a car accident or a grandmother dies. Everyone shuddered whenever word came that a Red Cross notification was on the way. It was the soldiers' equivalent of the knock at the door.