The War I Always Wanted (23 page)

Now I could see that the victory we had achieved in the aftermath of 9/11, all of the good will that we as a nation had garnered, was slowly going to be ground away in the streets of Iraq.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. We were young. We were invincible. We were the good guys. Or so we had thought.

When Garvey and Jordan were killed, it sent a shockwave through the battalion and the community. Iraqis brought
flowers and laid them at the front gate of the TOC. The caretaker of the oil company village at Ayn Zalah came around the next afternoon to offer his condolences on behalf of the Iraqis that lived up there by the lake. The response by the people was somewhat of a surprise to me, but after I thought about it, I could see that it shouldn't have been. We had been working with them on the reconstruction for two months and had earned their trust. Now, in a way, the citizens of Tal Afar and its surrounding communities seemed almost embarrassed at the way their “guests” had been treated.

During the time after the attack we moped. I had always thought that when a soldier from my unit died in combat it would come with a sense of inevitability—a sense that that kind of thing was
supposed
to happen. Being an infantryman, I thought it would be not only normal, but also easy to deal with. I had seen too many fucking movies.

The reality was a slap in the face. The sense of loss and failure was palpable across the unit, the fear of dying rekindled. We had become so complacent after a long string of anticlimaxes. But now the landscape had changed. Now everything was suspect. From that point on, every time I left the perimeter, I would see an insurgent behind every bend in the road; in every ditch, a possible ambush point.

It turned everything sour. Driving around rural northern Iraq every day, I was used to seeing the shepherds herding their sheep in the open fields. The thing was, they always wore red turbans wrapped around their faces the way you always see Palestinian terrorists wear them in videos and on posters. In the beginning, it was disconcerting to see that every day. The media had conditioned my brain to think terrorist whenever I
saw the red mask, not shepherd. But sitting on their donkeys, the teenagers underneath the red masks always waved at us when we drove by. They seemed happy every time one of us waved back to them. Seeing people who looked the way I had been trained to think terrorists looked, and having them wave at me, taught me something about perception and reality.

That progress was ruined by the attack. Whether or not anything else ever happened again in Tal Afar, the trust that we had built within the community during those two months was gone. Now, in the fight-or-flight part of my brain, they were terrorists again. If it came down to it, and I was put in a bad situation, those who looked the way I thought terrorists looked would not get the benefit of the doubt.

I was too afraid of dying.

Driving outside the wire on the day after Jordan and Garvey were killed, nothing had changed from the time the ramp had lowered in Operation Anaconda—except the landscape. The nausea in the pit of my stomach—the fear itself—had not dimmed one bit. It had just been on hiatus. It was back now and I could not subdue the intensity of the feeling that death could come in the next few minutes. In my case it always seemed to manifest itself as an external coolness that masked an internal panic. I was convinced that if I were hit, there would be no warning—I would simply be snuffed out. I knew it would be complete, and had no doubt in my mind that I would return to the state in which I had been before my birth—a state of oblivion. I realized that everything taught to me while growing up was in fact nonsense—nonsense devised to assist people in coping with death. I now realized—I knew, in fact—that if I were killed, I would cease
to exist. This sentiment never waned when death was near. Not once.

Guerilla warfare is perhaps the most psychologically damaging to soldiers. It's what made Vietnam so bad. It is much easier for the human mind to deal with the extreme violence of something like Iwo Jima or Normandy. There, the soldier knew when he would have to fight and when he wouldn't. He knew when it would start and when it was over. His mind could compartmentalize. In combat, he was afraid. When it was over, he no longer had to be afraid. Those soldiers had front lines. In Iraq, the soldiers live in a constant state of fear, because there is no “battlefield.” They are always being targeted, whether it's driving around in a city, standing in a chow line on base, or sleeping in their racks. There is no safe place in Iraq. Over the course of months, this constant medium-level stress, with a few spikes to higher levels, can wreak havoc on the mind. And when men in your unit start dying at the hands of shadowy assailants, even if it's only two of them, the unit is basically traumatized by the fear of the unknown. You realize that you are always being watched.

During this time, my window in which to decide whether or not to stay in the Army was quickly closing. I had to choose. I could either leave Iraq in the middle of October or stay in the Army for at least another two years, risking further stop-losses.

I could no longer justify continuing to push my luck. I thought about my family. An irrational part of me even wanted to try working things out with Nikki even though I knew she'd moved on. I loved the Army, but I could hear Collins' voice inside my head:
A man's got to know his limitations
.

I'd wanted out before, but this—this was it. I guess I just didn't have the stomach for it anymore. Maybe the stupidity of the war in the broadest sense just kind of got to me. Or maybe the politics. Maybe it was just that the whole thing had turned out to be something other than what I'd thought it would be. I don't know. I did know, however, that my fun meter was pegged.

And I'd never felt guiltier.

As July turned to August, and August to September, the insurgency began rapidly metastasizing in areas further south. By the middle of September, the roadside bomb made its first appearance in northern Iraq, wounding two guys I knew in Delta Company. When I was first told they had been hit with an IED on the way to the Mosul Dam, I wasn't sure I even knew what the acronym stood for. A week later a Brigade convoy got ambushed on the road into Mosul. The whirlpool had begun slowly sucking us in.

As September drew to a close, I was preparing to leave. I went to Delta Company's compound on an October afternoon in order to say goodbye to Sergeant Croom and the guys.

Half of them were out on a patrol when I got there, including Croom. And Mohamed was on a four-day vacation in Baghdad. I had his email address, but it still kind of disappointed me that I wouldn't get to say goodbye in person. I did find Ammar, however. He couldn't wait to see me. He wanted to show me what he'd bought with all the money he'd earned translating since April. We walked out front where several vehicles were parked. One of them was Ammar's new car. He wanted to show it to me, inside and
out. While he was doing that, he told me of how on his way back to Tal Afar from Baghdad, he'd accidentally run an American checkpoint in Mosul and almost gotten killed for it. We took some pictures of each other standing by the car and then walked over to the kebab stand and bought French fries to take back to his room.

The sandbags in his bedroom window weren't there when I had lived in the same building. With no more natural light shining in, the room he shared with Croom was given a weak, eerie glow by a single fluorescent lamp. Slathering his fries in ketchup, Ammar asked if I wanted to see a movie. I told him sure, as long as it was a good one. He popped some cheesy 1960s Western into his new DVD player.

After a few minutes, he looked at me with a ketchup-covered French fry in hand and said, “Isn't this movie great?”

When Croom finally returned, I didn't have much time left. We talked about me leaving the Army, and he said that if he were in my position, he'd do the same thing. As things were, Croom was only two years from retirement, so he was going to try to make it. We rechecked our email and phone numbers for when he got back to the States, and that was it.

I walked down to the Delta Company supply sergeant and turned in my ammunition and magazines.

I went back to Bravo Company in Tal Afar next. After meetings with the battalion XO and the battalion commander, there would be nothing left to do but wait for my ride down to the airfield. Once there, I was to simply wait a few more days for another ride—this one to Mosul. From there, I would fly to Kuwait—and then home.

I was no longer Bravo Company's XO and I was no longer responsible for anything but the weapon I held in my hand. My only job now was to turn it in to Specialist Shields, Bravo's armorer. It was the strangest feeling I've ever had. A war was going on around me, a war that I had been a part of from the beginning. It had been two years and twenty days since my dad woke me that morning while I was on leave and told me we were under attack. Now, for the first time since September 11, I had nowhere to be, nothing to do.

I had always envisioned that when I quit soldiering the final “turning in” of my weapon would be somewhat ceremonial and somber. Now I figured that I would just give it a good brushing and hand it to Shields in the morning. That would seal the deal. Where I thought there would be nostalgia and a bit of sadness, there was only the overwhelming desire to leave as quickly as I could.

By the time I got out of my meeting with the XO, it was nearly eleven o'clock at night. I walked into Bravo Company's TV room and sat down next to Captain Jones. He was ready for bed, wearing a brown t-shirt, PT shorts, and flip-flops. Fox News was on, and one of the hosts was trying to make a witty comment about the weather.

First Platoon was supposed to be back to pick me up in the next fifteen minutes. They'd waited around for me, but when the battalion commander had delayed our talk by an hour, their newest Lieutenant, Mike Gerasimus, decided to go ahead with their patrol for the evening. Gerasimus was another former West Pointer who had only recently taken over the platoon from Bandzwolek.

For ten minutes Jones and I sat there making small talk. Specialist Peter O'Brien, his days of cricket formations and
droning long behind him, came in for a minute and stared at the screen, completely uninterested, before leaving. At five minutes to eleven, O'Brien stuck his head in and said they were back. I looked up from the TV and noticed I could hear the humvees rumbling outside the back door. I stood up, and after a final handshake with Captain Jones, threw on my vest, grabbed my stuff, and walked out to meet my old platoon.

They were rolling with four trucks. Lieutenant Gerasimas was in the lead truck and Sergeant Collins was in the second. I walked up to Gerasimas, thanked him for the ride, and then asked if he cared which truck I rode in.

“Nah, you can jump in here with me if you want,” he said.

I looked in the bed of the truck. Staring back at me were Sergeant Chad Corn, one of my Anaconda vets, Specialist Jason Krogh, Pfc. Lance Lawrence, and Waseem, the hammer-thrower from Baghdad. I noticed Waseem was now wearing a vest with plates. Up front, I could see Private Jason Gasko in the driver's seat.

I felt naked with no ammo. I also felt like dead weight. I figured I had to ask for some, if only to make myself feel better. I reached down into the cab and tapped Gerasimas on the shoulder. “Hey, can you spare some ammo?”

“Sure man, how much you want?” he asked.

“I think one mag oughta do. I've gone through two wars without firing a shot. I think this mag'll last me to the airfield.”

Gerasimas just chuckled as he handed me the fully loaded thirty-round magazine. I inserted it into my M4 and charged the handle, chambering a round.

The road directly in front of the headquarters had been blocked off at night since the attack of July 19, so we headed
around the block, into the neighborhood directly west of the TOC. As we drove, I couldn't help but think that this was the last time I would ever ride in a tactical situation with an infantry platoon.

Sitting directly behind Gasko as he drove, I looked at the guys around me in the orange glow of passing streetlights. Lawrence was the new guy—as XO, I had picked him up at the TOC only two months ago. He had been fresh off the plane and looked like he was about eighteen years old. Now he was standing right beside me, manning the mounted SAW. Across from me were Waseem and Krogh. Waseem looked as stoic as usual, and Krogh looked only marginally more anxious. Sitting beside me was the newly promoted Sergeant Corn. We hadn't been sitting there long when Corn and I started in on each other with the sarcastic verbal barbs we'd been exchanging for two years. Somewhere in there, we mentioned that this would be our last ride together.

As we drove the long way around the block, I stared at the dilapidated buildings we passed. I noticed the sheet metal walls, the open sewers, and the general grime that covered the city. As usual, there were groups of young men hanging out late on the street corners and in the fronts of shops. I could see a few drinking tea. Only a couple of more days and I would be home, leaving all this in the past.

We approached a four-way intersection and Gasko eased onto the brake as the truck neared the stop sign. The truck rocked back gently as he brought it to a complete stop. Out of the corner of my eye I saw another car pull up to the intersection, perpendicular to us. It was a blue Volkswagen Passat, identical to about a thousand other cars in Tal Afar.

The driver of the Passat rolled to a halt. In our headlights I could see the driver, a passenger, and maybe more people in the back. I couldn't tell. Nor did I care at the moment. But then I saw the driver and the front seat passenger look at us. Immediately, the driver floored it, and blew past us from left to right. In my mind, it registered as “noticeable,” and maybe “a little weird,” but not dangerous. For a split second, I thought maybe I was the only one that even noticed it. I thought maybe the guy was in a hurry—and that maybe the look they gave us was simply my imagination.