Finn slowly twists the cap back on his bottle. “And then the shit hit the fan,” he says. “The next day, four Blackwater military contractors took a wrong turn in Fallujah and got ambushed. They were driving past some kebab shops when insurgents opened fire on their SUVs and threw grenades. Poor bastards didn’t have a chance. A crowd showed up and torched their vehicles, then dragged their burned bodies out. It wasn’t enough that they’d shot them and then turned them into charcoal. They had to beat them, mutilate their corpses. They tied one of the corpses to a car and dragged it through the streets. Two of the bodies were hung from a bridge. And the whole city cheered. And do you know why they were there, in Fallujah? They were escorting kitchen equipment. Some shitbird at Blackwater wanted to impress their client, so they rushed the job and sent four men who had never trained together, without armored vehicles, into Fallujah.

“A week later, Iraq was on fire. The Mahdi Army sprang up everywhere, attacking patrols and Iraqi police stations. We had to send tanks into Sadr City. Everything was fucked, and we couldn’t unfuck it.”

Finn puts his water bottle on the coffee table and clenches his fists, then slowly opens them. “I don’t think I can explain it clearly,” he says. “The whole country was at war, all these different factions united against the one thing they all hated more than each other—us. But in the Green Zone in Baghdad, some people kept acting like everything was fine. There was beer and barbecue and movie nights, fucking salsa dance lessons and shit. Meanwhile, a couple blocks away, if you went into an alley alone to take a leak, all anyone would find of you would be your dog tags in the gutter. And the money flights kept coming in. I know it was all Iraqi money in the first place, but it felt like we were just printing money and throwing it on a bonfire. It was obscene.

“When we first went into Iraq, with all that shock-and-awe bullshit, they said Iraqis would look at us as liberators. Tell that to the Marines in Fallujah. Tell that to the guys driving Route Irish. Tell that to the four Blackwater boys. I’d like to take those CPA cocksuckers and hand them over to whoever was running Fallujah. See them burnt to a crisp and hung up on a bridge, crucified with their own guts hanging out of them.”

Finn is leaning forward in his chair as if he might spring out of it. His hands grip the armrests, and although he’s grinning, his eyes are wide with hate. It hurts to look into his eyes. I do it anyway.