Illustration by Lorenzo Mattotti
Originally appeared in The New Yorker
Letters, e-mails, journal entries, and essays from Americans serving in Iraq.
These selections from letters, e-mails, journals, and personal essays, by soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines who served or are serving in the current war in Iraq, are part of a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts called Operation Homecoming, which invited American troops and their families to write about their wartime experiences. The centerpiece of Operation Homecoming was a series of fifty writing workshops, conducted by distinguished American writers, and held at twenty-five military installations here and overseas. Most of the six thousand troops who participated in the workshops had just rotated out of front-line combat. They were told to write freely, without fear of official constraints or oversight. Since Operation Homecoming began, on April 20, 2004, more than ten thousand pages of writing—nonfiction, fiction, and poetry—have been sent to the N.E.A. An anthology of the work, edited by the historian Andrew Carroll, will be published this fall; a TV documentary based on the material will air in 2007; and the entire collection will eventually be housed in an open government archive. (Audio recordings of the soldiers reading, along with their photographs from Iraq, are at NewYorker.com.)
Captain Ryan Kelly, thirty-six, Denver, Colorado. E-mail to his mother, from Camp Buehring, Kuwait. December, 2003.
The worst thing here is not the searing heat or the cold nights. It’s the waiting. Waiting for the wind to quit blowing and the sand to quit grinding against your skin. Waiting for a moment of privacy in a tent packed with seventy other men, in a camp packed with seven hundred other tents, in a base packed with fifteen thousand soldiers, all looking for a clean place to go to the bathroom. . . . Waiting for the bone-rattling coughs from dust finer than powdered sugar to stop attacking the lungs. Waiting for the generals to order the battalion to move north, toward Tikrit, where others—Iraqis—are also waiting: waiting for us. . . .
A quick look around my tent will show you who is fighting this war. There’s Ed, a fifty-eight-year-old grandfather from Delaware. He never complains about his age, but his body does, in aches and creaks and in the slowness of his movements on late nights and cold mornings.
There’s Lindon, a thirty-one-year-old, black-as-coal ex-Navy man from Trinidad who speaks every word with a smile. His grandfather owned an animal farm and lived next to his grandmother, who owned an adjacent cocoa field. They met as children.
There’s Sergeant Lilian, a single mother who left her five-year-old daughter at home with a frail and aging mother because nobody else was there to help.
There’s Melissa and Mike, two sergeants who got married inside the Fort Dix chapel a month before we deployed—so in love, yet forbidden, because of fraternization policies, even to hold hands in front of other soldiers. But if you watch them closely, you can catch them stealing secret glances at each other. Sometimes I’ll see them sitting together on a box of bottled water tenderly sharing a lunch. They are so focussed on each other that the world seems to dissolve around them. If they were on a picnic in Sheep Meadow in Central Park, instead of here, surrounded by sand and war machines, it would be the same. War’s a hell of a way to spend your honeymoon.
There’s Sergeant First Class Ernesto, thirty-eight, a professional soldier whose father owns a coffee plantation in Puerto Rico and whose four-year-old daughter cries when he calls.
There’s Noah, a twenty-three-year-old motocross stuntman, who wears his hair on the ragged edge of Army regulations. He’s been asking me for months to let him ship his motorcycle to the desert. I keep telling him no.
There’s Chief Warrant Officer 4 Jerry, the “linedog” of aviation maintenance, whose father was wounded in WWII a month after he arrived in combat. On D Day, a grenade popped up from behind a hedge grove near a Normandy beach and spewed burning white phosphorus all over his body, consigning the man to a cane and special shoes for the rest of his life. C.W.O.4 Jerry lives out on the flight line, going from aircraft to aircraft with his odd bag of tools, like a doctor making house calls. He works so hard that I often have to order him to take a day off.
There’s Martina, twenty-two, a jet-black-haired girl, who fled Macedonia with her family to escape the genocide of the civil war in Bosnia. Her family ran away to prevent the draft from snatching up her older brother and consuming him in a war they considered absurd and illegal. A few years later, the family, with no place else to run, watched helplessly as the U.S. flew their daughter into Iraq. She’s not even a U.S. citizen, just a foreigner fighting for a foreign country on foreign soil for a foreign cause. She has become one of my best soldiers.
There is William (Wild Bill), a twenty-three-year-old kid from Jersey with a strong chin and a James Dean-like grin. The day before we went on leave, he roared up in front of the barracks and beamed at me from behind the wheel of a gleaming white monster truck that he bought for fifteen hundred dollars. Three days later, he drove it into the heart of Amish country, where the transmission clanked and clattered to a stop. He drank beer all night at some stranger’s house, and in the morning sold him the truck. Kicker is, he made it back to post in time for my formation.
There’s Top, my First Sergeant, my no-nonsense right-hand man. He’s my counsel, my confidant, my friend. He’s the top enlisted man in the company, with twenty-eight years in the Army, and would snap his back, and anybody else’s, for that matter, for any one of our men. Last year, his pit bull attacked his wife’s smaller dog—a terrier of some sort, I think. As she tried to pry them apart, the pit bit off the tip of her ring finger. Top punched the pit bull in the skull and eventually separated the two. A hospital visit and half a pack of cigarettes later, he learned the blow broke his hand. He bought her a new wedding ring in Kuwait.
And on and on and on . . .
I hope you are doing well, Mom. I’m doing my best. For them. For me. For you. I hope it’s good enough.
_____
Commander Edward W. Jewel M.D., forty-eight, Washington, D.C. Journal entries, hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort. March-April, 2003.
March 27. Q: The Comfort is a large non-combat hospital ship protected by the most powerful Navy, Army, and Air Force in history. What is there to be afraid of? A: Everything. Danger is all around us. We are really very close to the action. At times we see oil fires near the shore. However, we cannot really see the combat. We are not afraid of the Iraqi military. If they try to fire a rocket at us it would be easily shot down by artillery on the ground, aircraft, or by naval gunnery/rockets. However, we believe there are mines in the Gulf. Purportedly, small boats have approached the Comfort several times. When this happens we call in a helo and launch our small boat to run them off. How can we possibly see one of these things in the dark? I think it would be very easy for a terrorist to attack this ship with an explosive-laden small boat. Very easy. Would the Iraqis attack a hospital ship if they could? Why not? In their view, they were invaded by mercenary infidels who deserve no better. A surgeon buddy of mine, Mike from Massachusetts, thinks an attack on our ship is a near-given, with a fifty-per-cent chance of success. However, he is a proctologist and a Red Sox fan and naturally pessimistic.
March 28. Sickening sight: a helicopter’s downwash blows a stack of letters overboard. Who knows what was lost? Last letter to save a troubled relationship? A fat check? Notice of tax audit? We’ll never know. That’s war.
The doctors are all bored from under-utilization, but the surgeons seem particularly restless. There are so many of them and not enough cases to fill the time.
The Army helos cannot fly patients out to us in bad weather. The visibility has been poor the last three days, with choppy seas. We were to have received twenty or thirty new patients, but they never made it because of the weather.
March 29. The old Navy jargon “belay my last,” meaning disregard my last statement, applies to my commentary from yesterday. We got creamed with fresh casualties last night, thirty new patients, both sides, all needing immediate and significant intervention. The injuries are horrifying. Ruptured eyeballs. Children missing limbs. Large burns. Genitals and buttocks blown off. Grotesque fractures. Gunshot wounds to the head. Faces blown apart. Paraplegics from spine injuries. The number of X-ray studies performed last night in a short period of time is so great that it causes the entire system to crash under the burden of electronic data it is being fed.
Our patients are mostly Iraqis. Along with their combat wounds, they are dirty, undernourished, and dehydrated. One rumor says that we will treat all the wounded Iraqi E.P.W.s (enemy prisoners of war) for the duration of the war and these are the only patients we will see. If true, this would, in effect, make the Comfort a prison hospital ship. The corpsmen on the wards have to guard the prisoners and keep them from communicating with one another to prevent rebellion. As medical people we are trained to care for the sick; it is difficult to stay mindful that these patients are the enemy and could fight back against us.
April 5. The Saturday entertainment is karaoke. I usually like it, but tonight it’s not for me. The room is hot and crowded, and the whole event just too loud. I step out for air. On deck is a different world. For safety we are on “darken ship” status now. This means no external lights and all windows are covered to block light transmission. The goal is to make the ship invisible or nearly so to evildoers trying to locate the ship in the dark. It does actually work. The night is moonless, skies only a slight haze. It is very dark outside. So dark my eyes need ten minutes to fully accommodate. There is a magnificent display of stars tonight, reminiscent of what you see in Utah. The night has a misty, Impressionist feel. People moving about in the night are just vague dark shapes. Voices are low. Boys and girls being what they are, couples are forming on Comfort. They drift into obscure corners. Ghostlike green blobs of fluorescence rise and fall in the water. Jellyfish. Thousands of jellyfish drift and bob around the ship. I watch the stars until my neck hurts. Someone is singing in the dark in a beautiful, strange language. He tells me it is Hindi, and he is actually practicing for karaoke. I hope he wins.
April 7. The prisoners are kept on a separate ward, deep in the bowels of the ship, for security reasons, and the location is kept obscure. There is concern for the security of the prisoners. Lawyers run everything now, and we actually have a lawyer on board whose primary job is to insure we comply with all tenets of the Geneva Conventions. There are press on board all the time.
Most of the Iraqis show real appreciation for the care rendered them. I would love to talk to them about family, etc., but we have been firmly warned not to do this. The prisoners are a sad lot. I feel for them. Most were not real soldiers, just conscripts forced to fight for the Big Lie, Saddam Hussein. Some of these guys, however, were the feared fedayeen suicide commandos. In general, the prisoners are badly wounded. They look defeated and glad to be out of combat.
April 11. The number of patients coming aboard Comfort is simply out of control. Like the doctors on “M*A*S*H,” we have grown to hate the rumble of helos on the flight deck, since it usually means another load of Iraqi patients. Today we received at least thirty-five more patients. New in the last twenty-four hours is a big influx of sick and injured children. We have only one doctor with residency training in pediatrics. Some of the kids are very ill. One was D.O.A. from drinking kerosene. “They” are sending everyone here. We don’t know who “they” are, and no one seems to have a handle on where these patients come from, when they are arriving, or who is sending them. We take them all and do our best.
There is no long-term-care plan for all these patients, and the ones who survive will need long-term care. Where will they go? Who will care for them after we leave? We have become deeply involved in a humanitarian crisis that we will not be able to extricate ourselves from.
April 15. Civilian Iraqi patients are being allowed to move around the ship more (with escorts, of course) as their conditions improve. I saw a teen-ager today smiling and shaking hands with everyone. As he bent to tie his shoe, his sleeve slid up. I saw he had a tattoo on his upper arm. A fresh Marine Corps “globe and anchor.” Wow! Hearts and minds, indeed.
April 17. We began in earnest to discharge stable E.P.W. patients from the Comfort. Close to thirty sent back today. Sent somewhere. Sadly, these guys don’t realize they are not being repatriated. For security reasons, they cannot be told where they are really going. Looking at these pathetic-looking fellows, it is easy to forget that they were the enemy, and many probably still wish us harm. According to an I.C.U. doctor, one of the most timid-looking teen-age patients is actually an identified terrorist. Another patient awoke from surgery disoriented to place; he asked if he had been sent home to Syria!
April 21. Comfort receives a visit from centcom, the name for the headquarters group for the entire war. A group of their medical-admin bureaucrats, primarily Army, are on board to give us an overview of the medical situation in Iraq and Kuwait. We hope to hear something concrete about our own status: what is planned for us, how can we offload our patients, and, mostly, when can we go home? Instead of insight and clarity, we got more obscuring mud in the eye. The formal presentation is tiresome, trite, and uninformative. It takes fifteen minutes to get the PowerPoint working. The speaker uses too much Army-specific jargon. He admits that the Comfort is the most stable, established, and productive medical unit in the theater. The hospitals in Iraq have been looted and are barely functioning.
A Q&A session follows. The discussion is as overheated as the room. Pointed questions regarding why we got stuck with so many patients go ignored or glossed over. It is explained that the Iraqi casualties were put on helicopters by well-meaning, altruistic U.S. troops, even though they were told not to do this. They offer no explanation for why all the Iraqis ended up in our hospital. They thank us for all our hard work, tell us that they “feel our pain,” and say that war is hell. It is not convincing or reassuring to us. These guys all look rested, tanned, and pain-free to us.
_____
Staff Sergeant Parker Gyokeres, thirty, Howell, Michigan. Personal essay drawing on letters to friends and family from Tallil Air Base. November, 2003-March, 2004.
I know a number of you have been curious about what it’s like over here, so we are going to take a small mental voyage. First off, we are going to prepare our living area. Go to your vacuum, open the cannister, and pour it all over you, your bed, clothing, and your personal effects. Now roll in it until it’s in your eyes, nose, ears, hair, and . . . well, you get the picture. You know it’s just perfect when you slap your chest and cough from the dust cloud you kicked up. And, no, there is no escape, trust me. You just get used to it.
O.K., pitch a tent in your driveway, and mark off an area inside it along one wall about six feet by eight (including your bed). Now pack everything you need to live for four months—without Wal-Mart—and move in. Tear down the three walls of your tent seen from the street and you have about as much privacy as I have.
If you really want to make this accurate, bring in a kennel full of pugs; the smell, snoring, and social graces will be just like living with my nine tentmates. Also, you must never speak above a whisper because at all times at least four of your tentmates will be sleeping. That’s where the flashlight comes in handy; you are going to use it to navigate a pitch-dark tent, twenty-four hours a day.
Time for hygiene. Walk to the nearest bathroom. In my case, it’s a thousand-foot trudge over loose gravel. Ever stagger to the john at 0400? Try it in a frozen rock garden. Given the urges that woke you at this hour, taking the time to put on your thermals and jacket might not be foremost in your mind. But halfway there, it’s too late. So dress warmly. It gets really freakin’ cold here at night.
I don’t even feel like talking about the latrine experience. All I have to say is that, after the first time, I went back to the tent and felt like either crying or lighting myself on fire to remove the filth.
I am somewhat limited in my ability to say how, when, and why we do what we do. Essentially, my unit escorts third-country nationals (T.C.N.s) and local nationals (L.N.s) who work on base. We handle their passes, and we also watch over areas in which they work and, in some cases, live. I currently work in the control center for those escorts and workers. I handle radio traffic and communication between the people coming in, patrols and posts controlling or containing escortees, and the police who search their vehicles. I am nearly always speaking through my Iraqi translator with Iraqis, Koreans, Italians, Dutch, and countless other nationalities while tending to multiple other duties.
In an average exchange, I’ll be speaking with an Arabic translator who is speaking pidgin Turkish to a man who is trying to tell me he needs to get in touch with a person whose name he doesn’t know, but whom I still need to contact, while some Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Filipinos are trying to steal back the knives I confiscated from them, as the Koreans bring fifteen kids in to their hospital for medical attention. Meanwhile, the guy in the corner is making threats against my control team because he is sick of waiting for somebody on the base and the screaming kid just stopped screaming, because he puked on my weapons/contraband searcher who now wants to shoot the Korean escort for letting that sick kid loose. This goes on for twelve hours. Reminds me of a really stressed-out, low-budget version of “ER”—with automatic weapons—in Arabic.
Rule No. 1: Not speaking English is no excuse for being stupid. I think I’m going to get a card that says that in Arabic and flash it to every person who attempts access to our facility. Don’t even try “I don’t understand” on me, all I asked you to do was sit down and stay there while I work on your issue. I then had to get the interpreter to tell you. Twice. I then had to post one of the troopers on you to babysit. If I have to tell you again, I’m going to kick your butt out and you might be barred entry permanently. And stop asking how long it will be. I told you twice we are waiting on your rep and he will be here when he feels like it. Ask me again and I’m going to start yelling.
Rule No. 2: Making me yell will get you in trouble. If you don’t stop wandering slowly (like I didn’t see you get out of our paddock) toward your truck, I’m going to yell. If you don’t get off the cell phone in my yard, now, I’m going to yell. (No weapons, communication devices, cameras at all on base for T.C.N.s or L.N.s, and we mean it.) If you don’t tell me about the sharpened tire iron I just found under your floorboard (and don’t worry, my guys will find it, I assure you), I won’t yell when I take it, but I will yell loudly when you have the stones to ask for it back. You have got to be shitting me. What do you mean to tell me that your sharpened eighteen-inch piece of bent angle iron is a family heirloom? You go. Now.
Rule No. 3: If you don’t stop after I tell you once, yell at you twice, and physically attempt to stop you from being terminally stupid or, more to the point, doing something that could be potentially threatening, I’ll go the last step, and it always works, regardless of language, nationality, or I.Q. We call it “the exclamation point” or “shacking one.” As in: “That damn idiot wouldn’t stop, and when he started reaching into his bag again, after I had told him so many times not to, I had to shack one on him.”
“Shacking one” means you grab your rifle’s charging handle and as quickly as possible (to make as much noise as possible) yank back till the handle stops and your fingers break free. As soon as your fingers clear the handle, the spring tension, from the pull, slams the bolt forward and chambers your first round. It sounds like a very quick sliding/slapping shlack! It’s the loudest metallic noise in the world when it happens. And, for at least three seconds, the only sound you hear, as the crowd unpuckers, is of your own heart trying to break out of its rib cage, one pounding thump at a time. Once you’ve heard both the noise and its effect, you’ll never forget it. I’ve never had to do it myself (except in training), and, again, it’s really for cases when you believe there is a genuine security issue.
Shacking one is the international symbol for “Conversation over.” Shacking one tells the individual that this is not a game and we are not going to allow it to continue. From that point, amazingly and without exception, people do what they are told, immediately. They suddenly understand everything we have been trying to tell them. Whaddaya know?
Please don’t get the impression that all we do all day is run around and act like Storm Troopers. We all know our guns should never come off our shoulders, and, if they do, that’s the very second we need to be calling in the professionals to assist us. The guns are for our self-defense as an absolute last resort. Nothing more. Thankfully, events like these aren’t common. Most days pass by smoothly with only funny stories to break up the monotony.
A week ago, for instance, Geraldo Rivera came to Tallil to do a report for Fox. As he was going into his shtick, just as the camera zoomed in on his face, a troop in the crowd, positioned just over Geraldo’s shoulder and visible only in the midsection, “adjusted himself,” on live, national television. In prime time. This is the same troop who got kidney stones, was shipped to Baghdad to have a CT scan, and whose convoy was attacked while he was there. When he came back, the Army doctor informed him that he had two more stones, which he then painfully passed over the next two weeks. If there’s a lightning storm, I’m running away from this kid, ’cause he’s cursed.
Or blessed, as he’s still here, still alive, and didn’t lose a stripe after the Pentagon called the base commander the next day and wanted to know why reporters in the morning national press briefing were asking about an airman at Tallil A.B. being obscene, live, on prime-time Fox News. The kid had to scratch, for God’s sake. He had no idea that the camera was zooming in at that exact moment. And, yes, he’s one of my crew, God bless him.
I was just told that today he received a letter of reprimand for (and I quote directly) “an immature, childish, and obscene gesture that intentionally defamed the USAF.” Was it bad timing? Yes. Was it bad manners? Probably. But was it, as the reprimand further stated, “a deliberate action, known as a ‘package check’ ”? Ahh—no.
This place truly never ceases to trip me out. Last week I met a man who came through here to visit his wife, who was in hospital. He spoke O.K. English and, it turns out, he was an American citizen, from Dearborn, Michigan. His home was less than ten miles from where I lived before joining up.
I’m standing there in all my body armor, wearing a helmet and holding an assault rifle, looming at least a foot and a half taller and a hundred pounds heavier than he, talking about restaurants in Detroit like an old friend. He told me that eight of his friends from Dearborn have died in the service of the new Iraqi Army in the past few months. I had no idea that so many of those guys were U.S. citizens. He brought his kids in to meet me, and they looked like American kids, in their Spider-Man jackets and Nikes. These kids go to American schools, they watch “SpongeBob,” and now they are swatting flies and getting the metal-detector treatment for hidden weapons. I wonder often what they think about all of this.
_____
Captain Donna Kohout, thirty-two, Dillon, Colorado. Letter to members of the Dillon Community Church, from Misawa Air Base, Japan. April, 2003.
I’m still praising God for the opportunity to spend five months in the Middle East both to serve in the largest conflict of our day and to witness the wonders He was working at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, where I lived. I don’t know how to describe the feeling that there was a spiritual element to what we were doing. When I first arrived, I did a double take when I looked at the maps in the back of my Bible and recognized the locations of the cities we were flying over. Tallil had been Ur of the Chaldeans, the birthplace of Abraham, who was the father of the Israelites. When God punished the Israelites with exile from the land that He had given them, they were taken to Babylon, near present-day Al Hillah. This is also where Daniel survived his famed bout in the lions’ den. During their years of exile in the Babylonian Empire, the Israelites camped out near Nippur, or the current Al Kut.
I wish I could describe the feeling of flying across what we called the T.E. (Tigris-Euphrates) Line in the months prior to “Night 1” of Operation Iraqi Freedom (O.I.F.). The T.E. Line, which marks the edge of the settled area, is just south of the Euphrates River. South of the line is barren desert. At night, there are no lights there, but to the north bright collections define the towns CNN made famous—Tallil, As Samawah, Basra, Al Kut, Al Amarah, Karbala, and, of course, Baghdad. One clear day, I looked down at the rich greens of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates and pondered over the fact that these were the Tigris and Euphrates that I’d learned about in church and school my whole life. Genesis describes the Garden of Eden standing at the headwaters of four rivers, two of which are the Tigris and Euphrates. That places the Garden just north of Basra, within sight of where I flew almost daily.
Abraham, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, the whole displaced Israelite nation, and perhaps even Adam and Eve all trod the ground I was looking down on daily. And I was living in the same desert where the Israelites wandered. We complain about being there for three months—it’s so barren, flat, windy, hot, sandy, and dry—it’s no wonder the Israelites complained during the forty years that they followed God around the Sinai Peninsula between their exodus from Egypt and their entrance into the Promised Land, near Jerusalem.
In O.I.F., I flew only nights, except for the occasional late-evening or sunrise flight. At night a person can see every bullet and missile launched, near and far away, with the aid of night-vision goggles. Thankfully, most of what the Iraqis shot was unguided and too small to reach the altitudes at which we fly. However, it is still nothing shy of a miracle that given the sheer number of airplanes in the sky, they didn’t shoot down a single fighter, bomber, or tanker with all the projectiles they launched over those three weeks.
Praise God for the safety He has provided so many of us over the last several months. And please continue to pray for the Iraqi people and the soldiers over there now. There is a long and unconventional road ahead of them still.
_____
First Sergeant Richard Acevedo, thirty-eight, Staten Island, New York. Personal essay based on diary entry. June, 2004.
Manuel Ernesto [not his real name] was a soldier assigned to the famous Fighting 69th, a National Guard infantry battalion based out of New York, which is where I call home. The unit has a history of being one of the most decorated outfits in the Army, boasting a lineage that goes all the way back to the Revolutionary War and with a fair number of legends in its ranks. Men like the famed poet Joyce Kilmer; Father Duffy, the Army chaplain whose statue graces Times Square; and “Wild Bill” Donovan, who would go on to start the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services), the predecessor to the present-day C.I.A. Today’s members of the Fighting 69th are true New Yorkers and come from all walks of life. Manuel Ernesto probably represented that better than anyone.
Perhaps the best way to describe Ernesto is to say that he’s a simple man. At the time, he looked to be in his late thirties, though it’s hard to tell exactly. He was kind and had a childlike innocence about him, but he had difficulty understanding easy, straightforward tasks and directions. There was also something about him that seemed awkward and out of synch. My many years in the Army have taught me to be a quick study of men, and my initial impression of Ernesto led me to believe that he would not fit in very well within the spartan, testosterone-driven world of the infantry.
We spent four months at Fort Hood, Texas, preparing for our deployment to Iraq. My first real observation of Ernesto in action was during one of our early-morning P.T. sessions. I always started off the day’s training with a gruelling workout. I had to get these men in shape and help them shed the pounds that their comfortable civilian lives had packed on them. Combat in Iraq would be unforgiving on these citizen soldiers, and they would have to tote around as much as fifty pounds of gear every day in the brutal hundred-and-twenty-to-hundred-and-thirty-degree summer heat. Usually I began with jumping jacks, and on this one morning as I was jumping along and leading the company, I could hear the men break out into a roar of laughter. I scanned the ranks looking for the reason. Lo and behold, there he was, in the last row, rear left-hand corner of the formation. It was Ernesto, jumping around in spasms of unsynchronized, discombobulated movement. He looked like a fish that had just landed on the deck of a boat, flapping around waiting to be clubbed.
At first, I thought it was an act and began to get angry, thinking he was trying to get laughs during my P.T. session. I watched him for a couple of seconds more and came to the conclusion that this was no act. The harder Ernesto tried to get in synch with everyone else, the worse he looked. One of the guys next to him started to mimic his movements, and instead of Ernesto catching on that he was being mocked, he looked at the prankster with a quizzical expression on his face and shouted to him between labored breaths: “Are you . . . having . . . a hard time . . . with this . . . too?” This caused the whole group to convulse in laughter. That was who Ernesto was.
Days turned to weeks and Ernesto wasn’t making any progress. It was time to come up with a game plan for him or he would get himself or someone else killed. I decided one day to have a discussion with our battalion sergeant major in reference to Ernesto. As soon as the topic was broached, the sergeant major began to smile. Ernesto, it turns out, had been in his company some years back when he was a first sergeant. During training, Ernesto started to squirrel away food from the mess tent and keep it in his backpack in anticipation of some unknown impending famine. One day, he took three little containers of milk from that morning’s breakfast. Most of the time, the Army’s milk is processed in such a way that it has a very long shelf life. But on that day, the mess tent had served fresh milk, and Ernesto, not realizing the difference, stuck the containers of milk in his duffel bag. A few days later, people heard screaming in the middle of the night from somewhere inside the patrol base; Ernesto was on the ground writhing in pain and clutching his stomach in agony. The cause of his illness was consumption of spoiled milk.
After hearing the story, I became angry and asked the sergeant major, “If everyone knew this guy was so screwed up, why was he ever placed in my infantry company for this dangerous deployment?” The sergeant major assured me he would find Ernesto a job as a gofer somewhere safe within the battalion. But there was something else he said that stunned me: Ernesto, prior to this deployment, had been homeless and living in a city shelter. This was why he had been squirreling away the food, and this was why he had been saving the milk; these were habits he had cultivated from being homeless for so long.
A few days later, I was informed that Ernesto would be transferred to the headquarters company to work in their supply room. Essentially, Ernesto would get a job that would not require him to leave the camp to go out on missions. Problem solved, case closed.
Some weeks went by, and, one night while working late in my office, I heard a soft tap on my office door. Ernesto shuffled quietly into my office, shy and apologetic for disturbing me. I told him to come in, sit down, and tell me what was bothering him. He sat down wringing his hands and looking all around my office, studying every nook and cranny and every object in the room.
I gently asked him what was on his mind. He finally looked me in the face timidly and asked if he could come back to the company and be with the men. I was a little surprised by his comment, and I asked him if he was unhappy where he was. He said that the supply sergeant was taking very good care of him and that he liked the work he was doing and the hours he kept.
He had the hardest time looking me in the eye, and I finally told him, as nicely as I could, that I didn’t think he was cut out to be an infantry soldier. I don’t think Ernesto took this as a surprise, and I felt he knew the truth deep down inside. He quietly stated that he knew the men would be risking their lives soon in combat and that he wanted to be with the men and would do anything he could to help them—even if it meant picking up the dead and filling body bags.
We were weeks away from deploying to Iraq, and the newspapers and cable channels were rampant with stories about people getting their heads cut off, convoys being ambushed on a regular basis, and U.S. service members getting killed by the constant onslaught of bombs hidden on the roads.
I realized that his comment was not just an idle or morbid statement. For all his awkwardness and childlike qualities, Manuel Ernesto showed more compassion for his fellow-soldiers than they ever showed him. I felt ashamed at that moment, especially considering that some men in my company were trying to do everything in their power to get out of going off to fight. Here was Ernesto, a guy who was homeless and shunned by the rest of civilized society, and, in the end, he turned out to have more heart and guts than most.
I told him that if the day ever came when, God forbid, I had to pick up my fallen soldiers, it would be an honor for me if he could help in any way. He smiled and tears welled up in the corners of his eyes. He quietly got up and saluted me in an awkward manner, and I saluted back, not having the heart to tell him that I was a sergeant and only officers get saluted.
_____
Sergeant Timothy J. Gaestel, twenty-two, Austin, Texas. E-mail to his father, from south of Baghdad. September 21, 2003.
Hey, Dad, this is your son. I finally get to write y’all a letter. First off: let me tell you we made it here safe and so far, but everything is going very good. Now, Dad, I know that you have already received a phone call that tells you I am O.K., but I want you to know exactly what happened. . . . We were heading south down Highway 8 and I was gunning for the second truck. Byrd was driving and my chief was the passenger. We got off Highway 8 onto Ambush Alley, the route we didn’t take going up there. I was in the back of the truck with my 240B machine gun, and the S2 [an intelligence officer] wanted to ride in the back of the truck with me, since I was the only one back there. We were at the end of the convoy at this point so we were really hauling ass, driving down the wrong side of the road and all that, just so we could get to the front of the convoy. My buddy Eddie was a badass driver and kept us from getting in wrecks a few times. But still able to get the mission done. The X.O. [executive officer] truck was behind us and needed to get in front, not to mention the fact that I had his Gatorade I was supposed to throw to him the next time they passed us.
At that exact moment, a loud and thunderous boom went off and pushed me all the way to the front of where my 240B was mounted. I knew something had just happened and when I turned around I could see two large smoke clouds on each side of the road. The first thing I thought was that I had just been hit in the back by an I.E.D. [improvised explosive device]. It wasn’t like I felt as if I was going to die, more like “Man, that really hurt.” At that moment, I reached around and felt my back and pulled my hand back, and it was covered with blood. Before that I honestly thought it had just hit my I.B.A. [interceptor body armor]. It turns out that it had hit my I.B.A. and gone right through it.
I lay down in the back of the truck, but this didn’t seem like a good idea and I didn’t have my weapon and had to yell at the S2 to give me my weapon—I didn’t want an ambush to happen and for me to not have my weapon. So I stood up on my knees and yelled again to him to man the 240B; he was scared, but that’s what happens when you don’t ever get any kind of training and you sit in an office all day. This guy didn’t react very well when I showed him my back—he started flipping out and yelling “Oh, G., you got hit man, oh he’s hit bad, man.” This is the last thing that you tell someone who has just been hit in the back and is bleeding. As you can imagine, I was pretty pissed off at this point, and I showed my anger toward the people in the town that we were driving through. I had my M4 rifle at the ready and my trigger finger on the trigger and was just waiting for someone to give me a reason to have me put it from safe to semi. I maintained my military bearing as well as one could in that situation. I sure wanted to shoot the bastard that had just set the I.E.D. off.
As we were making our way back to the F.O.B. [forward operating base] at that last street, I could no longer sit up straight and my back was killing me. There was a major who was our field surgeon waiting for me in the front of the gate to check me out. This guy didn’t reassure me, either. When I told him that I was O.K., he looked at me and said, “Look, son, you may have internal bleeding.” Now I was scared. They rushed me to the aid station, where I talked to some sergeant majors and the colonel. In like fifteen minutes, in my brown underwear, green socks up to my knees, and a blanket, I was rushed out to the landing zone where a chopper took me to C.S.H. [Combat Support Hospital] 28, in downtown Baghdad. The flight through Baghdad was amazing, too, you could see the whole city and all the buildings and stuff, it was very strange. The helicopter pilot was a badass as well, he had to do a wartime landing, which is really fast and quick, it was cool. Now, Dad, I hadn’t seen a female in twenty-one days, and so you could imagine I was excited when I looked down off the helicopter as we were coming in for a landing to see a very beautiful woman (it could be she was beautiful because I haven’t seen a woman in a while). Now when I landed, a female second lieutenant took me into the E.R. with no one else in the whole room except her and me. She came up to me and ripped off my blanket, grabbed my brown undies, and ripped those off too and gave me a catheter. Now that was more painful than the I.E.D. and way not what I was thinking was going to happen when she grabbed my blanket off me. Then she gave me some morphine and I was good.
One thing that bothered me is the way they treated people—just because they’re always around stuff like that doesn’t mean that they have to act like it’s nothing to get hit in the back by a bomb. They did an X-ray of my back and found that I had two pieces of shrapnel in my back. I asked the doctor if I could keep the shrapnel and he said, “Yeah, sure, forever.” They weren’t going to be taking the shrapnel out. So, yeah, now your son is going to have two pieces of metal in his back for the rest of his life. I was cleaned up and taken to patient hold. A place that is something out of a movie. It was horrible to see all the soldiers with missing legs and arms and bandages everywhere. Shortly afterward, I was given some morphine and I passed out. When I woke up, Colonel Smith, Company Sergeant Major Burgos, Lieutenant Layton, Company Sergeant Major Howard, and our chaplain came in. The first thing Lieutenant Layton said to me was “Well, me and the sergeant major were talking and you are the first person to receive the Purple Heart in the ‘Loyalty’ battalion since Grenada (in 1983).” It’s quite crazy, the turn of events that have led me here. A Purple Heart recipient—I guess all it means is that some guy got me before I could get him. We will joke about this all someday, Dad. I told them I didn’t want you all to find out about this because I’m not leaving Iraq and I don’t want you to worry. I know you’ re going to worry anyway but the reason I shared this story here was so you know what it’s like to be here and that the people that I’m with all look after one another. I guess it’s really crazy that I volunteered to stay even though I was hit in the back with shrapnel, and as soon as I can I’m going to return to my unit. I don’t want Mom to worry so don’t read her the detailed parts of this letter. i love y’all and will be home soon enough.
_____
Sergeant Tina M. Beller, twenty-nine, Allentown, Pennsylvania. E-mail to her parents, from the Green Zone, Baghdad. September 12, 2004.
I am sure by now you can read the news and watch the tube and know that we were severely attacked with a barrage of rockets yesterday morning, your nighttime.
At any rate, I am just writing to let you know that physically I remain unharmed. Emotionally and mentally is a different story. I never would have thought my day would have started out this way.
I was the first responder to a building within our compound that was hit by a rocket. I was driving back into the compound around 0630 from my usual early-morning routine when the hair on my arms stood up. I suspected something was up, but couldn’t identify it since I had just arrived from the gym and was too busy praying to Jesus that I hadn’t been nailed by a rocket at the palace parking lot, which I had been driving through just moments before.
I saw smoke in the distance and a man waving his arms above him in the universal distress signal. I thought maybe something was on fire from an explosion. From inside the well-padded palace, I never thought that any of the earlier impact rounds I heard were from down here where I lived. I thought it was just the palace being bombarded again. And for certain I never thought we would have taken casualties. Iraqi workers—three.
The first Iraqi casualty I saw came briskly walking down the street toward me. He seemed very alarmed, sort of crazy. I could tell he was in shock. He reminded me of a Ping-Pong ball, walking back and forth, talking, mumbling, although I had no idea who he was speaking to. His mandible was completely shattered inside the structure of his mouth. He made zero sense when he spoke. He just kept giving me sign language over his belly. I think he was trying to tell me someone was pregnant.
I was kind of worried. His head was abnormally larger than the rest of his slender body. The mixture of blood and spit that poured from his mouth looked really weird, like a fountain, a bright-red gurgling fountain. I later discovered he died as well—trauma to his head. Just even typing that—trauma to his head—I should have known he would pass. Yet I was so hopeful the almighty American soldiers could save him.
His buddy, who sat cross-legged with his back to me in the now demolished living room, was chanting and rocking. I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t hear me calling for him. I kept saying it to myself, and then I remember speaking out loud to myself as I scratched and pounded through the door that I couldn’t budge all the way open, “Why isn’t he listening to me, damn it? Why isn’t he getting up?” The others say because the rocket blew his eardrum out and the poor guy couldn’t hear me. The three of them were probably honoring their first call to prayer at the time when the rocket struck.
I still wonder to this moment, Why the hell didn’t I just go in through the front window since it was all blown out, but they tell me not to second-guess my actions or myself. Had I gone through the window, maybe then I would have seen the dead guy, the third casualty, camouflaged with soot and debris.
A Navy seal, a medic, just happened to be walking by after his shift at the Combat Support Hospital E.R. He took over for me, obviously, since he was much more qualified than I. He really did all the work, not me. I just ran for help, got an ambulance, and then at 0635 in the morning, I started screaming for help. “Medic, medic! I need a medic!”
The weirdest thing of all was the absolute evil feeling that hit my body when I tried to bust through the door the first time, when I was alone with the casualties, before the Navy seal came. It actually stopped me in my tracks. The Iraqi behind me kept nudging me in the doorway, but my legs were glued to the ground. A Vietnam veteran here with us explained to me last night what I felt was the presence of death. And my body didn’t like it.
The general’s driver showed up with a vehicle, and we put them in the Yukon and he made like a bandit for the C.S.H. I never did find out who came for the deceased. After somebody told me I was full of blood, I kind of thought I should go home and shower and get prepared for the next barrage of attacks. And without fail, they came, too.
They hit while I was in the shower. I had been fine until this time, not really reacting to what I had just seen and the little run I took to call for an ambulance. And that’s when I went into shock myself, or I did what they say is called coming down off the adrenaline high. It was all I could do to keep my little legs strong, but I finally just gave in to the little trembles and just sat down in the shower and cried. A few moments before, I had realized that I had now washed my body two times and didn’t know why the first time wasn’t good enough. . . .
I made it back to my room after a long heaving cry and began to dress in my uniform. They found me in my room cleaning my weapon, yet I was shaking so bad I couldn’t assemble my bolt and charging handle together correctly. I realized I needed to chill before I was going to defend us anywhere.
Since the attack, I have gone back once to see the area that was just barely lit. Partial brain remains from the deceased are still on the cement floor, except now they are pinkish with cement gristle all folded into them, and oven baked from the sun. Somebody tried to be discreet, but did a poor job in covering it up. The gate that was once there is all blown to hell. They have cheap yellow police tape around the place. Yeah, as if that’s going to keep people out.
I found several pairs of men’s sandals that were just blown about like they were nothing. And of course, pools of blood, some dark and brown, some still red and fresh, reminded me of the tragedy that occurred earlier that morning. I saw the pile of rocks that I tripped over in the morning dusk and chaos because I was trying to run and thought I was lighter than air, I guess. I saw the door that I couldn’t bust through. I was glad to see somebody had. Upon later inspection of the attacked house, we found out the object behind the door was the remnants of the rocket. No wonder I couldn’t get through. I saw all the cans of fresh paint that were stacked outside the building. The Koreans had hired these three Iraqi men to fix up the place for the Korean Embassy to move in. Guess the Koreans are going real-estate shopping, huh?
But most of all, the veterans I spoke to last night told me I will probably smell paint sometime in the future, and it will remind me of this day, this horrible event. They also told me it wasn’t my fault, and I couldn’t have saved them since their injuries were far too great for my little hands. From what they had heard, I had done the right thing, the honorable thing. “Geez, Beller, you didn’t run back to your room and hide like a lot of them did,” said one of our senior sergeants, a Vietnam veteran himself. “Just remember this, next time somebody comes up to you like they did today, asking you about your story in disbelief, you look at them and ask them with a stone-cold face, ‘Were you there? Then how would you really know what happened?’ ”
_____
Captain Ryan Kelly. Letter to his mother, from Camp Speicher, Iraq. 2003.
It’s the body bag in the back that makes the flight hard. No jovial banter among the crew. No jokes of home. No wisecracks about the origin of the meat served at the chow hall, just the noise of the flight—the scream of the engines, the whir of the blades clawing at the air, the voice crackling over the radio and echo of your own thoughts about the boy in the bag in the back.
Yesterday I was in the T.O.C. (Tactical Operations Center)—it’s where all the mission planning happens, briefings, maps on the wall, etc. Normally, after flying missions, pilots drift around the T.O.C. with an air of satisfied indifference—similar to lions after devouring a zebra. I was talking with the operations officer, complaining that my pilots weren’t flying enough, when a heavyset, three-pieces-of-cake-after-dinner man came in. Instead of the usual swagger, he was dazed. I asked him what was wrong. He told me he just finished flying one of the “hero” missions. When we pick up friendly K.I.A.s (killed in action), that is what we call it.
He told me he picked up a U.S. kid killed in a car bomb. He tried to shrug it off as just another mission, but it was obviously bothering him. A few seconds later, he left, but his look stayed with me.
Body bags must have been in the stars because later the colonel announced that the heaters in the medevac helicopters were not working that well. In response, the medics, operating on a “corn-husk theory,” started zipping their live patients inside body bags to keep them warm during the flight. It can get very cold in the back of a Black Hawk because the wind seeps in through cracks in the window seals. However, the medics forgot to explain this to their patients, who understandably freaked out. It’s kind of funny, in a twisted sort of way: I guess being in a body bag is better than freezing on the way to the hospital. Why is death always so cold?
Things have hardened into routine here, like an old artery that’s carried the same, tired blood along the same, tired path for years. Pump, return, pump, return, wake up, eat, work, sleep, wake up—back and forth, back and forth, boom! Rocket attack. Pump, return, pump, return . . . We’ve worn a trail through the gravel with our boots plodding back and forth to the hangar.
If it weren’t for the Army uniforms and the constant noise of helicopters taking off and landing, and the Russian 747-like jets screaming overhead every hour of the day, and the F-16s screeching around looking for something to kill, and the rockets exploding and the controlled blasts shaking the windows and the thump, thump, thump sound of the Apache gunships shooting their 30mm. guns in the middle of the night, and the heat and the cold, and the hero missions and the body bags and the stress, and the soldiers fraught with personal problems—child-custody battles fought from nine thousand miles away, surgeries on ovaries, hearts, breasts, and brains, cancers, transplants, divorces, Dear John letters, births, deaths, miscarriages, and mismarriages—and the scorpions and the spiders who hide under the toilet seats, and the freakish bee-size flies humming around like miniature blimps, and the worst: the constant pang of home, the longing for family, the knowledge that life is rolling past you like an unstoppable freight train, an inevitable force, reinforcing the desire for something familiar, the longing for something beautiful, for something safe, to be somewhere safe, with love and laughter and poetry and cold lemonade and clean sheets—if it weren’t for all that, Iraq would be just like home. Almost.
This morning I went to work and found a V.F.W. magazine on the conference table. On the front cover was a picture of an injured twenty-something soldier, his face and forehead purpled with bruises, his lips swollen and cut, his left eye half closed, his arm in a sling, fingernails black with dried blood, his thighs blotched with red abrasions and his leg wrapped in an ace bandage, amputated below the knee. He was sitting in a hospital bed with a half smile on his face. A blazing bold-yellow headline scrawled across his chest read “Wounded Vets Rebound.” I opened the magazine and flipped to the story and saw a second picture of a wounded amputee. This one was of a young Navy guy lying in a hospital bed. His wife was sitting beside him. She was not smiling.
The caption under the picture read, “Navy Corpsman Joe Worley visits with his wife, Angel, while recovering at Walter Reed. A rocket-propelled grenade ripped off his left leg, but he said it was ‘a fair trade for getting out of Iraq alive.’ ” The cutline continued, “Worley’s sense of humor and positive outlook make him a favorite on the amputee ward.”
Christ. What a terrible attempt at positive spin.
_____
Captain Ed Hrivnak, thirty-four, Spanaway, Washington, member of a medevac crew. Journal. March-July, 2003.
First Mission: Our patient load is 11-7+2 and a duty passenger. That means eleven litter patients, seven walking wounded, and two attendants. Some can take care of themselves, some need lots of help. All have been waiting for us for a long time and need pain medicine and antibiotics. The patients include: G. S.W. (gunshot wound) to the stomach, partial amputations from a land mine, open fractures secondary to G.S.W., head injury/struck by a tank, blast injuries, shrapnel injuries, and dislocations. The patients are mainly from the Marines and 101st Airborne (Screaming Eagles). Many were involved in ambushes.
One trooper confides in me that he witnessed some Iraqi children get run over by a convoy. He was in the convoy and they had strict orders not to stop. If a vehicle stops, it is isolated and an inviting target for a rocket-propelled grenade. He tells me that some women and children have been forced out onto the road to break up the convoys so that the Iraqi irregulars can get a clear shot. But the convoys do not stop. He tells me that dealing with that image is worse than the pain of his injury.
Back in Germany, the patients are offloaded and we clean up our mess. Then a sergeant comes out and declares that we have to sign a paper stating we will not drink and drive in Germany. We look at him with anger. Our mission from start to finish was twenty-nine hours long. Most of us were up twelve hours prior to that, minus catnaps. Forty-one hours later and someone in peaceful Germany is worried we might drink and drive.
The field where we picked up the patients, we find out later, came under rocket attack six times after we left.
Easter Day: Some come onto the plane with the thousand-yard stare. Some come on with eyes darting about assessing the new environment, maybe looking for an ambush or a booby trap. Some walk with a nervous jitter, some walk on like zombies. Some have eyes glazed over from a morphine-induced stupor. Once we are at cruising altitude, you can feel the tension drop within the aircraft.
I thought I was doing a decent job at nursing, when my medical crew discovered a cure-all on our Easter Day mission. We had collected money at our staging base and bought frozen pizzas and cookie dough. Halfway through the flight we started cooking the pizzas. I walked from patient to patient and asked them if they would like a pizza. There were many looks of disbelief. These boys had seen nothing but M.R.E.s (field rations) for more than three months. Then the smell of pizza started to drift from our aircraft ovens. (We have five small convection ovens on the plane.)
Our crew passed out the pizza. The boys did not look like combat veterans anymore. Most of them had gleeful looks like young children at an Easter-egg hunt. It was like we just gave them a little taste of home and America. They started to joke and laugh with each other. After the pizza we brought out the fresh-baked cookies (which takes a little skill in a pressurized cabin). The cookies were hot and dripping chocolate. I weaved between the seats and litter stanchions and let the boys grab the gooey cookies. You should have seen the looks on their faces.
A Mission to Baghdad: We were in bravo alert and had been told that not much was going on. A crewmate and I were passing the time in our room watching “BBC World News” when a newsflash came on describing multiple ambushes and firefights around Baghdad. Several hours later, we were alerted for an urgent mission to that very place We ended up loading thirty-eight patients, the majority of them combat injuries. The worst patient assigned to me was a Ranger who was nineteen years old, but looked to be about fifteen. He was on the litter prone, facing the two critical patients. His arms dangled over the side of the litter. As I walked by, he reached up and grabbed my calf with his left arm. He was loaded with morphine and difficult to understand. He was rambling, “Take care of my buddies . . . Take care of my buddies, don’t worry about me and are they going to be O.K.? Are they going to live?” The critical patients he was facing were his friends. When we loaded the patients, we had no time to take into consideration their relationships to one another. He was looking directly at his buddies while the ccatts (critical-care air-transport teams) worked desperately to keep them alive.
I went over to the ccatt nurse and asked him how the friends were doing. He told me, “I got one guy who is shot through the neck and is paralyzed. The other guy has multiple shrapnel wounds and a severe brain injury. These guys are messed up. I hope they killed the fuckers that did this.”
Halfway home, I looked up to see the prone Ranger waving for help. He was in pain. I gave him a touch of morphine. As I leaned into him, he lamented about his friends again. I told him they were still alive. He then vomited on me. It was the perfect capper to an arduous flight. I have no memory of the patient offloads—I was on autopilot at that point. We got into crew rest midday and I had disturbing dreams.
Faces of War: The Humvee is like the Pinto of the nineteen-seventies: it burns quickly when hit by a rocket. One G.I. told me he saw a Humvee burn down in less than three minutes. You can’t get out of the vehicle fast enough when it is hit. I was transporting a medical officer who was stuck in such a situation. He was hauling medical supplies to Iraqi civilian hospitals when they were ambushed by an R.P.G. He was burned on most of his upper body and face. The tops of his ears were burned off. His arms and hands were covered in heavy bandages, and ointment covered his red, peeling face. I sat and talked with him as we waited for an ambulance. This officer was prior enlisted, married, and has three children. He decided to become a medical officer to provide better for his family and to get out of the field. He told his family not to worry about him, because he would be serving in the rear with medical logistics. He would not be fighting on the front lines. (Where are the front lines in Iraq?)
He was not concerned about his burns, but he was worried about what his children were thinking. He said, “I talked to them on the phone yesterday. They didn’t understand why I was burned. I promised them I was going to be O.K.—that I would be safe. The kids don’t get it and I’m not sure how to explain it to them.” I stared at his face and burns the whole time he was talking. His face was an expressionless mask. I couldn’t tell if he was tired like the rest of the patients or if the burns were causing his unvaried, mask-like appearance. The tone of his voice when speaking of his children was his only sign of emotion.
Battle Buddies: These marines and soldiers are good at waiting. They see we are doing our best and rarely complain. One soldier, trying to be patient, went too long between morphine shots. He tried to gut it out. He did not want to slow the loading of the airplane. We loaded him on the bottom rack and he immediately grabbed onto the litter above him. I looked down at him and saw his knuckles turn white, with a death grip on the litter crossbeam. Tears poured down his face but he did not make a sound. I grabbed the primary flight nurse and told him to give this kid some of the good stuff. The nurse said he would get the morphine when we were done loading the rest of the litter patients.
I can’t blame this nurse. It was his first real casualty mission in the war. It is easy to lose sight of one patient and get caught up in what is going on around you. I told the nurse to toss me a syringe of morphine and I would take care of him myself. When I returned to this G.I., a battle buddy was holding his hand and talking softly to him. Their hands were locked like they were ready to arm-wrestle. I quickly pushed the morphine into his vein and apologized for letting his pain get to such a level. I felt like I had failed him. His buddy stayed with him, talking to him, consoling him, until the pain medicine took effect and the soldier’s hand relaxed. These two were not in the same unit. They were not wounded in the same part of Iraq. They were brought together and bonded by their wounds. Their injuries made them part of a fraternity, a private brotherhood I felt privileged to witness.
_____
Captain Lisa R. Blackman, thirty-two, Chelmsford, Massachusetts, serving as a clinical psychologist. E-mails to friends and family, from Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. October, 2004.
A quick word on guilt. No one ever feels like they are doing enough. If you are in a safe location, you feel guilty that your friends are getting shot at and you aren’t. If you are getting shot at, you feel guilty if your buddy gets hit and you don’t. If you get shot at but don’t die, you feel guilty that you lived, and more guilty if you get to go home and your friends have to stay behind. I have not seen one person out here who didn’t check off “increased guilt” on our intake form. . . .
Lately I have had a string of combat-trauma evaluations. Several have been Army troops passing through for R. and R.—they come here for a bit and then go back to Iraq or Afghanistan. As if this is a glamorous vacation site. But they are grateful to be someplace safe (and someplace with alcohol, which I will surely complain about at a later date). Anyway, each one presented with a different complaint. One guy wasn’t sleeping, one gal was angry about “sexual harassment” in her unit, one gal was depressed, one guy just wanted to go home. Standard stuff.
I had no initial clue that the problems were combat-related and no idea that I should be assessing for acute stress disorder or P.T.S.D. None of these guys or gals said “I was in combat” or “I saw someone die.” None connected these experiences to their symptoms. It was as if they didn’t remember how hard and unusual it is to be at war. They’re used to the danger. They’ve been out here too long. Why would a war mess with your mood, right?
Each evaluation started with the typical questions: “What brought you in today?” “When did the problem start?” “Have you ever experienced these symptoms before?” “How’s your sleep?” etc., etc., etc. I kept asking questions and thinking that the symptoms did not add up. Something wasn’t right. I wasn’t getting the right reactions. Stories were incomplete. Affect was blunted. Level of distress did not match presenting complaint. Alarm red, people, alarm red.
At home I ask people if they have ever experienced or witnessed a traumatic event or abuse. But out here I ask, “Have you ever been in combat?” Apparently, this is a question with the power to unglue, because all four of these troops burst into tears at the mention of the word “combat.”
And when I say burst, I mean splatter—tears running, snot flowing, and I literally had to mop my floor after one two-hour session. In other words, I mean sobbing for minutes on end, unable to speak, flat-out grief by an otherwise healthy, strong, manly guy who watches football on the weekends and never puts the toilet seat down.
Each time, I sit there with not a clue what to say . . . offering tissues . . . saying I’m sorry . . . trying to normalize . . . trying to say, “It was not your fault that so-and-so died” and “If you could have done differently, you would have” and “You had a right to be scared.” And, even worse, “You had to shoot back,” and “Yes, you killed someone, and you still deserve to go back to your family and live your life.”
Next time you are hanging out with a friend, think about what you would do if he turned to you and said, “My boss made me kill someone, and I know I’m going to Hell for it, so why bother?” What would you say to “normalize” that?
I will probably never see these folks again. I have no idea if I have been helpful. Maybe I planted a seed of reprieve that will grow into self-forgiveness. Maybe I did absolutely nothing but sit here. Who knows?
I can’t stop thinking about the fact that these folks have lost something that they will never get back—innocence (and a life free of guilt). My heart hurts for them.
_____
Second Lieutenant Brian Humphreys, thirty-two, Santa Barbara, California. Journal, Hit, Iraq. February-September, 2004.
Bang, bang, bang. The sheet-metal door amplifies the sound of the large fist striking it. Sergeant Graham is standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the white-hot afternoon sunlight.
“Sir, we have a unit in contact, two friendly K.I.A. The platoon is getting ready downstairs.”
I throw my uniform and flak jacket on, grab my rifle, and head down a flight of stairs. The platoon is already on the vehicles, ready to roll with an ambulance.
The palm groves to our east that line the Euphrates River whip by. To the west of the asphalt ribbon are the scorched wadis used by insurgents to stage their attacks. Up ahead I see the telltale cluster of Humvees and marines. I pull up to the first vehicle and find the patrol leader.
“Where do you want the ambulance?” I ask.
“Just have it pull up, we’ll guide it in,” he replies, as if we have arrived to help fix a flat tire. The ambulance in the middle of my six-vehicle column pulls forward, and I get out to find where the casualties are.
“What the hell is that?” I ask a marine. Perhaps the explosion had somehow killed a farm animal of some sort who wandered out on the road. A sheep maybe? Or a cow. No, not big enough. Well, what is that and how did it happen? The marine gives his buddy’s name and asks me to help find his head. Fuck.
We do not want the stray dogs that occupy Iraq with us to find our brothers. The corpsmen, with their blue latex gloves and body bags, scour the bushes for the last scraps of human tissue as waves of heat rise from the desert. The Associated Press dutifully reports that three marines were killed in Al Anbar province in Iraq. Names have not been released by the Defense Department pending notification of next of kin. We will not read the two-sentence notice for several days. The Internet room is always padlocked while we wait for somebody to get a knock on the door half a world away.
At one point the casualties got so bad that it seemed the room was closed for a week at a time while notifications were made. Iraq is coming apart at the seams. Pictures of flag-draped coffins being unloaded from Air Force transports surface on the back reaches of the Internet, as if they were a grainy celebrity sex video that decent people should avoid looking at. But I think otherwise. The images of flag-draped coffins show the end of war as we are meant to see it, and as we are meant to believe it. Uniforms, flags, patriotism, honor, sacrifice. In these images we are not street fighters struggling to survive and kill in a distant gangland but soldiers in the nation’s service. They will help the families, I think. They will help us. In our own way, we, too, need to believe.
Today, the marines will have to wait to log on to their chat rooms, HotOrNot.com, MilitarySingles.com, and the online shopping sites. I myself have become something of a spendthrift in Iraq, ordering more books and CDs than I normally would. I have seen death enough times among people who had been indestructibly living only the day before. It is better to go ahead and buy the CD you have been meaning to get. There are reminders wherever you care to look. For instance, the pile of blood-soaked flak jackets sitting in the company’s combat operations center, a low-tech jumble of maps and radios. The flak jackets’ owners are either dead or in the hospital recovering from their wounds.
The executive officer reminds us that the flak jackets need to be sent back through the Marine Corps’s supply chain as soon as possible. Somewhere, somebody will wash them and inspect them for damage, filling out all the necessary paperwork. It is the banality, even more than the carnage, that shocks. Our occupation grinds on. Others will assign meaning to our lives here, noble or otherwise. For us, though, there is a close meanness to the fight. There are no flags, no dress uniforms. We are fighting a rival gang for the same turf: while the neighborhood residents cower and wait to see whose side they should come out on.
Imperceptibly, we are coming to the end of our deployment. Time has stood still for months, with days and nights fusing together in the burning-hot air of the desert. But now our deployment is being measured in finite units of time. It takes getting used to.
Returning from a patrol with my platoon, I find a blue sedan riddled with bullet holes on the side of the highway. There are a few Iraqi soldiers standing around when we find it. We quickly learn the car belongs to Captain Laithe, one of the senior men in the local police force. Connected, calculating, and English-speaking, he has collaborated with the Americans since the fall of Baghdad. I wondered since I first met him why he cast his lot with us, what calculation he made, and whether we could even understand it—what mix of nobility and venality it contained. His future, however he imagined it, ended with the finality of death in a hail of bullets on the highway less than a mile from our forward operating base.
Not long before we leave, I am awakened out of a sound sleep again, this time at midnight. The company executive officer is at the door. We have another K.I.A. I feel the same shock I did the first time, only there’s a certain numbness to it now, as if it were hitting a nerve becoming deadened by repeated blows. Our turn had almost passed, and now this. I nod, and begin collecting my gear. Lieutenant Lenz is outside in the pitch-black. It is the body of one of his marines that we will go out in the dead of night to recover. I ask Lenz if he is all right. I ask him if his marines are all right. The worst thing, he says, is that by now they are used to it. It is better and worse at the same time. I realize that we have all come to accept the loss of familiar faces, to live with it, and cross the line of departure again the next morning. It is this acceptance, rather than the thud of hidden bombs, that has finally made us veterans, and will finish the words on the obscure page of history that we occupy.
We head off in the pitch-black, navigating the highway through the grainy green glow of our night-vision goggles. We move north to a point just north of the place where we lost the two marines in the bomb explosion months before. One of the Humvees in the patrol struck a land mine a short distance from the Iraqi National Guard post the marines had been tasked with protecting.
The sun is rising above the river’s palm groves when the trucks arrive to remove the wrecked vehicle. The dead marine’s remains are loaded in another truck and driven north towards Al Asad Air Base. The remains will be laid in a flag-draped coffin, and then secured in the cargo hold of a transport plane to be flown back to the United States. We, too, will soon go to Al Asad. We will then strap ourselves into the cargo hold of an identical plane to begin our own journey home. The scrawled memorials on barracks walls to fallen buddies will stay behind for the troops who replace us. They might read the awkwardly-worded poems and epitaphs written in loving memory, and half wonder who we were. ♦