Matt Ufford is a big on-air/online personality and writer. You may have caught his stuff on SB Nation, the popular sports-focused website, YouTube, or on Twitter (@mattufford) where he’s very funny (our opinion, sure, but he is).
Or, you may have caught him talking about the Iraq War. It’s strange in the sports media world — for someone so successful in the cutthroat industry to have a military background — but he was a Marine, and fought over there when the White House first decided to invade Iraq, in March 2003.
Before we get into this post’s primary intent (the video), let’s read real quick an excerpt from an incredible piece he wrote on the war for GQ some years ago titled “Ten Years Gone: Remembering Iraq (or at Least Trying To)”:
America’s lasting memory of the Iraq war—aside from the misguided attempt at jus ad bellum—will likely be one of IEDs and long deployments alongside the better-justified war in Afghanistan. My war was shorter and more straightforward. Reach objectives. Take Baghdad. Go home.
All of that happened to plan, except for everything after.
War going to plan, though, suggests that there’s some neatness and order to tearing a landscape apart and leaving a trail of death and MRE garbage in your wake. I may not have been deployed for 12 months, but I was in combat long enough to kill innocent civilians; in my case, “long enough” was two days. I slept 10 hours over the course of a week. I gestured apologetically to a farmer as my tank’s treads destroyed his spring planting. My friend, a fellow platoon commander, lost one of his tanks during a nonstop road march; we made jokes comparing it to The Beast, a largely forgotten 1988 film in which a Russian T-55 tank crew gets separated from its company—until we learned that the M1A1 drove off a bridge over the Euphrates in the middle of the night, killing all four crewmen. I cursed the boredom while dreading the action. I pointed my pistol at a cab driver who had the temerity to gesture angrily at my tank for obstructing the road to Basra. One of my best friends got shot in the head. I saw bodies strewn in the streets, and my brain processed them as props of war instead of newly dead people with hobbies and passions and newly devastated loved ones. The oil fires turned spring skies gray. I crossed a partially blown-up bridge that the engineers couldn’t promise would hold a 68-ton tank, and when it did, I ended up in a minefield shooting at T-72 tanks, and calling off artillery that was so close I could feel the concussive heat on my face. I prepared to lose Marines to snipers in a prolonged siege of Baghdad. I went a month without showering. I accepted my own death. I saw beautiful women in the Christian neighborhoods of the capital. I smoked tar-laden Iraqi cigarettes that made me long for nicotine manufactured in America. I parked at the magnificent blue Martyrs Monument at sunset, and smoked a cigarette while the fading light turned the pavement an ethereal roseate hue, awash in joy at the cheers that had met our arrival in Baghdad—at the amazing and profound lack of death that greeted us. That beauty is mine forever, even if it’s gone.
The entire piece he wrote is just as good, and packed with power. There’s no atom on the emotional spectrum he doesn’t hit. And it’s brutally honest.
Anyway, last year Ufford did a nice, fun little rant on why we, as Americans, need to stop declaring war on everyday things. For instance, he cites “The War on Christmas”, “Storage Wars”, “Beard Wars”, “Cupcake Wars”, so on and so forth.
Blake Hall
