I first arrived in Iraq in June 2004, as the insurgency in al-Anbar Province was raging. I was a newly minted Marine lieutenant leading a rifle platoon. At full strength, our platoon should’ve had about 40 Marines. Like most platoons in our battalion, we deployed at less than full strength. As the battalion we replaced got ready to rotate back to the States, a call went out for volunteers to extend their tours and bring us to full strength. Very few did. But one of those volunteers, a tall sandy-haired corporal named Bill Dean, wound up in our platoon.
When I first met Dean, I asked him why he’d chosen to keep fighting. He didn’t talk about 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction or his belief in a free and democratic Iraq. He gave me a vacant stare and with a dry, ironic wit I would come to appreciate, said, “Gotta keep fighting the GPWD, sir.”
“What’s the GPWD?” I asked.
“The Great Patriotic War in the Desert.”
The withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq this month has me thinking again about the GPWD. During our deployment in Iraq—as we waged counterinsurgency in Haditha and Hit and fought a pitched battle in Fallujah that November—when our orders didn’t make sense or we found ourselves in a tough spot, inevitably someone in the platoon would shrug their shoulders in resignation and say, “Gotta keep fighting the GPWD,” as if the absurdity of that name matched the absurdity of our strategic situation.
Read more
