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Chapter One: George Bush Had Better Be Fucking Right
If you don't like obscenity, you don't like the truth. If you don't like the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. -Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
George Bush had better be fucking right.
That's how I began my journal on April 3, 2003. Writing in pencil on an Army-issue notebook with mint green pages, leaning in on deliberate, hard letters, I underlined "better" and penciled over the words again and again until they wore through the tactically-colored paper.
On March 19, just two weeks earlier, the US had launched the first air strike of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Troops on the ground had invaded Iraq the next day. And now I was off to war for reasons that I feared were bullshit.
I reclined in the first-class section of a civilian 747 bound for Kuwait with an M-16 wedged between my legs and my gut firmly stuffed with all the Krispy Kreme doughnuts I could scarf down in twenty minutes, courtesy of the old Red Cross ladies who saw us off at Hunter Army Airfield, Fort Stewart, Georgia. It seemed a bad omen that the Red Cross was the last organization to see us off to war. The Red Cross sends emergency notifications to deployed soldiers when something urgent happens back home-like when someone is in a car accident or a grandmother dies. Everyone shuddered whenever word came that a Red Cross notification was on the way. It was the soldiers' equivalent of the knock at the door.
Sitting in a cracked faux-leather seat with In Flight Magazine's glossy pictures of Hawaii poking out the seat pocket in front of me, I considered the absurdity of the situation.
"Gentlemen, please ensure your seatbacks are in the upright position," an older woman's voice crackled over the PA system.
What? We were geared to the teeth with the essentials of combat. Bullets, grenades, rifles, knives, rucksacks, scowls, Copenhagen, cigarettes, hatred, the Penthouse March 2003 edition with Lilly Ann on the cover-the whole Army deal. I was cranked up and ready to run through hell, already bracing myself for incoming explosions, and going over indoctrinated checklists in my mind. And I had to worry about the seatback being upright?
I was going to war, with the greatest military force the world had ever seen, on a jet snagged from a recently bankrupted airline. I wondered if we'd get the little bag of peanuts.
I slid my CD headphones over my ears. I tried to shut out the endless cacophony of yelling, farting, gear rattling, spitting and snoring with headphones streaming System of a Down, Linkin Park and Jay Z. The emotional oasis of a temporary musical vacation helped all of us forget we were constantly surrounded by thirty-eight other men.
Funny. These headphones were just like every piece of equipment issued to my platoon: old and held together with nothing but hope and some twenty-mile-an-hour tape (green Army duct tape). I hoped these suckers wouldn't break before we got there. I needed my music to keep me sane-to buffer me from the men, if only for a song or two. Where the hell do you get new headphones in Iraq?
My men and I were National Guardsmen, attached to First Brigade, Third Infantry Division, also known as 3ID. * Shouldered with the task of taking over a foreign country, yet disallowed from smoking in the lavatories of the plane. Since the days of Troy, soldiers have pushed the limits of what little they are allowed to do-especially in pursuit of a vice. The Army has a saying: "Ask for forgiveness, not for permission." I was pretty sure that on this seventeen-hour flight one of the many chain-smokers in Third Platoon would test the FAA to see if it would really fine a soldier $1,000 for smoking a cigarette in a latrine on the way to die in Iraq. Sure it would be ironic, but not outside the realm of possibility.
I looked across the dimly-lit aisle at one of my SAW gunners. I'll call him "Gunner." Think the most Johnny-All-American-Homecoming-King kid you ever met. With a white-blond flat-top, blue eyes, perfect teeth, a chiseled jaw and about 5% body fat, Gunner was straight out of a recruiting commercial. Perfect uniform, immaculate weapon, and always followed orders without being told twice. He didn't bitch, and maintained perfect military bearing.
Gunner was big on two things: God, and his beloved girlfriend. On the left side of his stomach, just above his kidney, was a meticulously scripted tattoo in flowing cursive letters: "Andrea." He'd proposed to her just weeks before we left. He probably spent everything he had and then some to buy her the ring.
I thought of that tattoo as I glanced at him. It was buried beneath his BDU top now, but it stuck in my head. A lot of guys in the Army have tattoos around the same area-but a few inches higher, and in a much different design. Soldiers call them meat tags. A meat tag is a copy of the Army dog tag you wear around you neck, tattooed on your torso, just below your armpit. A meat tag isn't just a hard-core status symbol. It's a way to identify a body if the torso is all that remains after it's blown apart. Name, social security number and religious preference (if any). Call it thinking ahead. Prep for combat. Another safety measure, like an extra pair of socks.
As I scanned away from Gunner to the other faces of my men, time spun in slow-motion. From the moment I got the call to go to Iraq, I felt like I was in a movie. Everything around me was a scene I was watching, rather than a moment I was living. When I walked with my men behind me, I felt like Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, wearing sunglasses, smoking cigarettes, walking toward the camera.
Sitting upright in my seat, I panned left to right across the cabin of the plane, taking in the pre-game swell of fear, rage, anticipation and urgency. I zoomed in on a foot tapping nervously inside a desert combat boot still wet with red Georgia clay. I cut to eyes darting, closed, or squeezed shut tightly. I could hear a soundtrack in my head that would amplify the emotional effect of the moment. My head bopped. Bass guitar thumped and drums pounded as I panned down to my lap, where my thumb tapped on the thick plastic buttstock of my rifle. "I'm feeling mean today...Not lost, not blown away....Shut up! Shut up! Shut up or I'll fuck you up!" The maniacal screams of Korn's Jonathan Davis assaulted my head through half-broken headphones.
Maybe I saw everything cinematically because I was a part of a generation of soldiers who assumed war would be just like in the movies. Combat was etched in our heads as a series of slow-motion scenes featuring brave men firing guns and screaming triumphantly, with "Adagio for Strings" swirling around them. American combat classics like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter and Saving Private Ryan. Violent and inspiring underdog stories like Glory, Gladiator and Braveheart. Movies with characters who fought the good fight. Movies with heroes.
I wanted to fight the good fight. I wanted to be a hero. When I was growing up in New York in the 1980s, most kids I knew dreamed of being Phil Simms or Don Mattingly. What I really wanted to be was a noble warrior who fought bravely for the good side. I wanted to be the ultimate American badass. I wanted to be Jed Eckert.
Played by a young Patrick Swayze, Jed Eckert was the lead character in the horribly fantastic modern American classic Red Dawn. If you've served in the military in the last twenty years, you've seen this movie. Jed, a former quarterback, drives a pick-up truck and wears a baseball cap. He's an ordinary, straight-talking American kid until the morning the Soviets invade America and enemy paratroopers drop into his Midwestern town.
At the dawn of World War III, Eckert leads his little brother Matt (Emilio Estevez) and a rag-tag bunch of high-school kids in a daring escape to the mountains, where they hide for the winter and survive by hunting deer and eating canned soup. After a covert mission back to town, they learn that their families have been killed or imprisoned in brutal work camps, and emerge from the hills with a vengeance. The film's tagline is "The invading armies planned for everything -- except for eight kids called The Wolverines."
Jed and his band of guerrillas courageously take on the evil army of occupiers. They ride horses into battle against attack helicopters. With nothing left to lose, they rebel, inspiring others and giving birth to an insurgency that is emulated nationwide. They use creative asymmetrical tactics against a superior military force and incredible odds. And in the end, they win.
Red Dawn was entered into the Guinness Book of Records for having the most acts of violence of any film up to that time. When I was ten years old I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever seen. The first time I watched Red Dawn, I lay awake in my bed for hours. My thoughts raced. With total specificity, I laid out in my head how I would lead my little brother, our dog Sugar and the McGuiness boys if the Soviets ever made the fatal mistake of invading Peekskill and coming onto Arden Drive. We would be ready. Hiding in the big tree at the end of our block and on the roof of old Mrs. Hertz's house, we would set up ambushes and kill those bastards with rocks, BB guns and M-80s. The next day at school during recess, I ran around the playground carrying a stick like a rifle, climbing trees and screaming "WOLVERINES!"
Now, with the roles reversed, I was on my way to invade and occupy someone else's country. America could soon create thousands of Iraqi Jed Eckerts in places like Mosul and Baghdad. We were going to kill Saddam and break his army. Dogs of war and all that shit. Ready to be unleashed. Grrrrrrrr. Warrior killers, steeled for death.
And served obediently by marginally attractive middle-aged stewardesses in cheap, ugly suits, with little tears welling in the corners of their overly made-up eyes. I could feel the other guys thinking the same thing I was every time the perfumed one with the long dark hair glided past my seat. We all harbored shamefully animalistic, testosterone-laden thoughts of taking her into one of the back bathrooms for a few minutes before we hit the ground. A sacrifice of sperm for the gods of the infantry. Or maybe just one last moment of fleeting happiness before I had my head removed by a sniper round or an RPG.
When you get sent to war, you think about dying. What I worried about most was how my death would affect my family. Maybe a clinician will have a technical term for this condition in a few years. It could be called Modern American Soldiers' Guilt Syndrome. It's one of the burdens of the all-volunteer army that makes this generation of American soldiers different from generations past. We are not like many of our predecessors in Vietnam or World War II who were drafted. Their numbers came up and they put their lives on the line because they had to. We who went to Iraq chose to risk our lives doing this. We volunteered for this shit. And we volunteered our families for this shit.
The Army helps you plan for your death to some extent. And plants the seeds of the guilt syndrome. Right after you get your head shaved in Basic Training, you start filling out a series of mandatory forms. One of the first forms is the one that determines whether or not you want SGLI, and who gets it. SGLI is the Serviceman's Group Life Insurance Policy-the optional government-subsidized life insurance money your loved ones get if you take the big dirt nap. Your family gets the loot if you get fragged by a careless private with bad aim on the grenade familiarization range. They get it if you fall off the obstacle course and land on your neck. Or if one of the psycho drill sergeants kills you in a fury during hand-to-hand combat training. Or if the civilian transport plane you're sitting in gets hit by a scud missile on approach into Kuwait.
The Army recruiter told me so.
My recruiter was a slick, fat, middle-aged Italian-American sergeant. He smelled like a dirty ashtray and called me "kid." Everyone in America knows that recruiters work like used car salesmen. This guy actually looked like one. He was sweaty and beady-eyed, and wore a thin mustache that looked like it was drawn on with a Sharpie. Not exactly the face of the Army I had seen in the commercials that ran constantly on MTV.
In a moment that was easily one of my dad's worst nightmares, I had walked in to a strip mall recruiting office during my senior year at Amherst College. Before the recruiter could put down the comics section and pull his fat ass from behind the tiny government-issued desk, I stood over him burning a hole in his face with my eyes.
"I am graduating from college in a few months," I told him flatly. "After I graduate, I want to be a soldier."
Sergeant Super Mario shat himself. This was 1998. A full three years before 9/11. College kids weren't exactly lining up to serve in defense of freedom. People didn't think much about patriotism, especially not in that part of the country: liberal, collegiate, Western Massachusetts. But that's why I wanted to join. I loved my country. I had been afforded tremendous opportunities in this country and I wanted to give something back. In a democracy, the military should be representative of the population. Just because I didn't have to go didn't mean I shouldn't go. I felt that if, God forbid, my generation had a war and I didn't do my part, I would never be able to look at myself in the mirror or be a good father to my future children.
I also wanted to do the hardest thing I could do. I needed a trying experience that would test my mettle. I didn't exactly wish for war, but I wanted to travel to the apex of human experience: combat. It may sound sick, but war is the oldest, and ultimate, extreme sport.
I wanted to learn to be a leader in an environment where courage mattered. I didn't care what any Human Resources robot from Goldman Sachs tried to tell me, being a mid-level manager at an investment bank is not leadership. Bond traders telling rich people what to do with their money is not leadership. Going to graduate school and pushing paper for a few years is not either. Real leadership is motivating others under tremendous adversity. True leaders are forged by leading men in combat.
Everyone was telling me that because I went to Amherst, the sun shone out of my ass. Well, I wanted to go a place where that sun didn't shine: either the Army or the Peace Corps. Both were demanding and intense. Both involved travel. Both were opportunities to better the world and participate in something larger than myself. Both offered shitty pay. The Peace Corps had women. But in the Army, you got to shoot guns, jump out of airplanes and blow thing up. No contest.
Clearly, Sergeant Super Mario did not know what the hell to do with me. A college kid had never walked in to his office demanding to join the Army, and he was actually stupid enough to tell me so. His eyes darted around the room, like he was afraid he was on Candid Camera.
Every person I ever knew who had worn a uniform for the United States had warned me about clowns like this. I was planning to defer a six-figure job on Wall Street to join the Army, and I was damn fucking sure that I was not going to spend the next four years of my life peeling military potatoes in Alaska. Timelines, terms of commitment, uniforms, weapon systems, training-I wanted the details, statistics, legalese and fine print for all of it.
After a few minutes of nervous paper shuffling, Mario recovered from his initial surprise. Like any soldier in a time of crisis, his training kicked in and he reverted to full fisherman mode. He had me on the line and focused on reel me in. For every topic I raised, he and the Army recruiting machine were ready with materials, talking points and a supercharged three-minute music video produced by Leo Burnett Advertising. (Ironically, I had turned down a job offer from them only two months earlier.) America's tax dollars hard at work. The presentation was perfectly designed to target my precise demographic-middle/lower class, MTV-watching, video-game-playing, Doritos-eating, action hero wannabe.
Mario advertised a multitude of jobs for enlisted soldiers, each with its own terminology and signing bonus determined by need (or lack thereof). He explained to me that in the Army, a job is called an MOS (Military Occupational Specialty). And each MOS had its own vocational follow-on school, sometimes at a different military base, with a unique curriculum called AIT (Advanced Individual Training). The schools ranged in lengths from under a month to over a year.
Each MOS was assigned a different two-digit number and letter. A is Alpha, B is Bravo, C is Charlie and so on. These fancy military-sounding names help mask the actual job specifications. So "21V/Twenty-One Victor/Concrete and Asphalt Equipment Operator" pushed a wheel barrel. "92G/Ninety-Two Golf/Food Service Operations" was a cook. "91R/Ninety-One Romeo/Veterinary Food Inspection Specialist." The Dogfood Dude.
The multimedia assault and crafty acronyms even made playing the tuba in the army band look cool.
"And check this out, kid. Follow-on school for Band is only two-weeks long!" Mario proudly told me.
I was already in the door and it was his job to close the deal. But I saw through the pitch. I didn't want to join the army to play the xylophone.
Mario was relentless. As soon as a question fell out of my mouth, he conjured the corresponding pamphlet out of thin air. Every one featured another multi-ethnic mix of Kool-Aid-smile-wearing soldiers.
And when I asked whether or not my little nephew would be paid-in-full if I were smashed to bits when my Oldsmobile stalled on the tracks and was hit by a Metro-North train full of suits headed to Manhattan, he smiled broadly and said, "No problem, kid! Happens all the time! It's covered."
So I left my SGLI $250K to my three-year old nephew, Sean. I figured he would be able to pay for college after I died in Iraq in some violent and unfortunate manner. One generation of my family would be born with some kind of financial security. As I sat restlessly on that plane to Iraq gnawing on a wad of Levi Garrett chewing tobacco, for the life of me I couldn't remember whom I designated the sorry task of the death notification to. I wasn't sure whom I had actually, formally, designated as my next of kin. I had been in the Army four years at that point. In those four years, I had changed my address three times at least. I'd signed up in September, 1998. In January, 1999, I arrived at Fort McClellan, Alabama, for Basic Training. Seven months later I was back in New York City, an Army Reservist. That fall I took a job on Wall Street. I knew jackshit about high finance, but my mom faced some big medical expenses and I wanted to help out. I figured that in the intense atmosphere of Wall Street I could make fast money, and learn a ton about business. I only planned to stay on Wall Street for a few years, then go back to grad school. At some point in there I switched from the Reserves to the National Guard. In 2000 I went to Officer Candidate School (OCS), spent some time at Fort Benning, Georgia, and got my commission. I also got fed up with Wall Street and quit. My last day was September 7, 2001. In 2002 I spent six months back at Fort Benning, completing the Infantry Officer Basic Course (IOBC), and when I saw the war looming, I volunteered for active duty and the invasion of Iraq.
In January, 2003, the Army obliged, and shipped me to back to Georgia, to Fort Stewart this time, where my men and I waited and trained and waited some more. Now it was April, and we were finally on our way.
Before I was called up for the war, I was crashing with my girlfriend in Brooklyn, but I didn't get mail there. I had a Post Office Box back home in Peekskill because I had moved around so much. So Lord only knows which one of my "homes of record" the Army had listed in its jacked-up "notify if killed" files.
I wondered which of my parents they'd reach out to first. By 2003, my parents had been divorced for over ten years. It was a messy divorce; they fought over everything. But in all the fights between them, over custody and property, I was pretty sure that they never discussed who got dibs on my death notice.
I hoped it was my dad. He was the more stable of the two. And he had been drafted in Vietnam. True, he'd been really pissed when I told him I'd enlisted, and even more pissed when I told him I'd volunteered for combat. A foreman for Con Edison, he'd always hoped my brother and I could avoid going into the service. After all, I was the first in our family to go to college. And not just any college, but one of the "Little Ivies." I worked the whole time to help pay for it--as a bouncer at local bars, working security, jobs that suited a six-foot-two, 240 lb. football player with a take-no-shit attitude. And then, in my Dad's eyes, I went and jeopardized my college payoff by joining the military. "I just don't understand why you want to turn down a great job on Wall Street, and all that money, to roll around in the mud with a bunch of rednecks down south."
As mad at me as he was, my dad would be devastated to get my death notice. But he would multi-task like a motherfucker letting the family know. That would be his way of coping. My grandmother (his mom) was one of eleven children in a huge Italian family from the Bronx, so I had a dozen aunts and uncles, and throngs of cousins named Vinnie and Marie who would need to be notified.
But there was no guarantee that the Army would call my dad. It was entirely likely that they would call my mother first. And that would not be pretty. My mother has never exactly been a pillar of emotional stability. When I left for the war, she sobbed inconsolably for days, and sold her TV to a pawn shop because she couldn't bear to hear the news coming out of Iraq. I thought about how she would react in the moment she saw the two fabled Army men, uniformed impeccably, in her doorway. My stomach curled into knots just thinking about it. Would she be alone? Would she faint? Would she attack the poor officers delivering the news? Who would she call first? My brother? My dad? Her psychiatrist?
Maybe if I died the Army would totally fuck up and call my eighty-six year old grandmother. She lived alone and could barely even walk. I could already see it unfolding in my head.
"Stop ya bangin! Stop ya bangin!" she would holler from behind the triple-locked steel door. "Hold ya horses! I gotta get my walka! I don't get around so good at my age. Hang on...I'm comin'!"
My grandmother has always been a rock of stability. She kept the coolest head of anyone through my pre-deployment. When I told her I was going to Iraq, I expected her to be a wreck. But she was very matter of fact.
"Okay," she told me in her scratchy New Yawk old lady accent. "I figured dat was comin' soona or lata. Ya know honey, I've been t'rough dis before."
Twice.
World War Two: Her husband, my grandfather, was one of the oldest guy on his block in the Bronx. At 32, everyone thought he was too old to be drafted. Of course, he was the first one. Perfect Army-dictated irony. But that wasn't the best part. My grandfather immigrated from Germany at age seventeen, and spoke German. It would make too much sense to send someone who spoke German to help fight the Germans. No, the Army sent him to the other side of the world, where his background would be totally useless. He ended up in the Philippines, New Guinea, Luzon. Drafted three years after getting married, he spent three years away from my grandmother. He called it his "all expenses paid world tour." He stood in the rain for hours one cold day waiting to be addressed by General MacArthur, and got sick with Dengue Fever. He sent my grandmother rent money from his poker winnings, and ashtrays he made out of artillery shell casings.
Grandma's second helping of war came during Vietnam. This time it was her son, my dad, who got the call. They hoped and prayed his lottery number wouldn't come up. My grandfather told him, "If you get an envelope from the government with a subway token in it, you're going to Vietnam, Paulie."
In 1965 that one-way fare arrived, and my dad was out of the Bronx and off to Uncle Sam's School for Boys. Thankfully, he got lucky and spent two years in Germany instead of Vietnam. Unlike my grandfather, he didn't speak German, but was sent to Germany anyway. He didn't see combat, but he did his time in uniform. He paid his citizenship dues.
After two wars, I guess my grandma was used to this routine. My little tour of the Middle East should be no problem. We weren't a rich family, so my service seemed like a part of the contract. For generations, the deal was this: If you were American and working-class, you served in the military.
And after all, this war was going to be short and easy. Just like the Gulf War in '91. All we had to do was take out Saddam and everything in Iraq would crumble like a house of cards. Vice President Dick Cheney said "we'd be greeted as liberators." I'd be home by summer. That's what they told me. But I knew the Army didn't know how long we'd be gone. The Army did to us the same thing we did to our families. They gave us a date to shut us up so we'd stop asking.
I told my girlfriend to prepare for three to nine months, but I had no idea. I just wanted to give her a date to look forward to. I couldn't tell her that we could be gone for two years. I just couldn't put that in her head. It didn't seem fair.
I worried enough about counterattacks on New York City. I expected our enemies to try something, and I told my girlfriend to avoid the subway if she could for the next few weeks. This was truly a global war now, and my friends in Manhattan might be in more danger than I was in the Middle East.
A few hours into our flight, Sergeant Lee stood in the back of the plane and addressed the men. Sgt. Lee was a real character. He had red hair, freckles and a deep Southern drawl like Foghorn Leghorn. He was my second in command, my Platoon Sergeant.
"Men!" he boomed. "Get used to bein' gone! Get used to this shit. We gone be gone a long-ass time. We already dealt with Afghaneestan. Now we goin' to Eye-raq to take care of this mothafucker! After that, we goin' to Sy-reea! Than we goin' to Kor-eea! The President ain't fuckin around, men. Now that we got started, we gonna be kickin' everybody's ass from now on!"
Sergeant Lee was almost always full of shit. But I knew that what he'd said could happen. We all knew that once we got to Baghdad, the order could come down from the Pentagon to make a big left turn and keep on going all the way to Damascus. Or a big right turn to Tehran. Our president was arrogant and single-minded, and that made anything possible.
I never thought America would make this mistake again. The Iraq War sounded too much like the Vietnam War. It had all the same flaws at its foundation: an unclear rationale, a guerilla enemy that was virtually indistinguishable from civilians, a culture we didn't understand at all, and tenuous public support. Millions of people all over the world were protesting the looming war, and nobody had even died yet. In his book The Long Gray Line, Rick Atkinson describes how, after Vietnam, Ross Perot once proposed building a war memorial that could be seen from the White House that bore this inscription: FIRST COMMIT THE NATION, THEN COMMIT THE TROOPS. How would the American public respond if things got bad?
I really could not believe this was happening: American infantrymen on a plane to a foreign land to execute the will of our President, and supposedly the will of our people. I guess I was out of touch with "the people," because a lot of people I knew were not gung-ho about this war-especially people with family members going to fight. If the President was going to take America to war, I thought he should have a bit better than fifty-one percent of the public behind it.
Using the 9/11 attacks as a justification for this war just didn't hold water in my opinion. The President had failed to prove to me that the Iraqis were in any way connected to the attacks on the World Trade Center. Yet he continued to use the emotional power of 9/11 to gain support for his controversial war-and tons of guys bought the rationale. More times than I can count, soldiers in the battalion would say something like, "Hey, L.T." (That's pronounced Ell Tee, for Lieutenant.) "Maybe they sent you down here from New York to get some payback for your city. Maybe they sent you with us so that you can be up front when we take out Baghdad. They'll roll you and the other New York guys just in time for the pictures. It would make a great front page for the papers!"
The men had lots of conspiracy theories about why I was the only guy from New York in Bravo Company. A Yankee officer in a Florida National Guard unit made up almost entirely of deep-fried Southerners, with a very light sprinkling of African-Americans, Hispanics and a few other ethnicities. There were only four New Yorkers in the whole battalion. The best theory went like this: When the decision was made to send National Guard units into combat for the first time since the Korean War, the spin doctors in D.C. thought that the first honor should go to Guardsmen from Florida, where President Bush's brother Jeb happened to be the governor. Having some guys along from the 9/11 state was a publicity bonus. I had volunteered for combat, making it a no-brainer.
One thing I knew for certain: the White House was pretty damn good at creating photo opportunities. I remember when the President came in for his first big one at Ground Zero three days after the attack. I was there. For days, I worked in "the pit" alongside everyday New Yorkers trying to save their own. I worked with three firemen, a Port Authority cop and a guy who looked like a steelworker. We were all covered in a coat of fine powder that a few guys called "the dust." A combination of incinerated drywall, soot, and the dead, the dust blanketed everything in sight and covered the streets six inches deep like fine gray doomsday snow. I never in my life have seen human dedication like I did during those days. Amidst the unimaginable horror, the way strangers worked together was a thing of beauty. I witnessed Americans exhibiting a pure and selfless human devotion to help their fellow man. I was surrounded by ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances who emerged as heroes.
And we all wanted payback. But we had to be sure we were counterattacking the right country. I was personally insulted by the way President Bush had used 9/11 to propel the country to war in Iraq.
But Colin Powell was on board. And his opinion held serious weight with me. He made the case for war before the United Nations and the world. He told us that Saddam had dangerous and extensive chemical weapons capabilities. I trusted him more than any other public figure in politics. Our President may have been a draft dodger, but Powell was a guy who walked the walk. He was a Vietnam combat veteran. I read his autobiography cover to cover at least twice. Powell showed me that being a soldier was a noble and honorable thing. His story taught me to have enormous respect for the profession of arms, and to care for my men. I wished he was our President, and deemed him one of the most impressive Americans patriots alive. He knew the tremendous human cost of war. If he was onboard with the plan, there had to be good reason.
Powell once said, "We must not, for example, send military forces into a crisis with an unclear mission they cannot accomplish--such as we did when we sent the U.S. Marines into Lebanon in 1983. We inserted those proud warriors into the middle of a five-faction civil war complete with terrorists, hostage-takers, and a dozen spies in every camp, and said, 'Gentlemen, be a buffer.' The results were 241 Marines and Navy personnel killed and a U.S. withdrawal from the troubled area."
American soldiers were not designed to be buffers. I held onto the faith that Powell would never push America into another war that didn't adhere to this standard. As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after the 1991 Gulf War, Powell outlined his requirements for decisive military action, later popularly referred to as the "Powell Doctrine." Essentially, the doctrine expresses that military action should only be used as a last resort, and only if there is a clear risk to America's national security. When force is used, it should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the amount of force used by the enemy; there must be strong public support for the action; and there must be a clear exit strategy from the conflict.
America had a moral obligation to use its tremendous military power to help the helpless. And Powell got that. He gave me reason to think that Saddam might actually have WMD.
Beyond the threat of his WMD capabilities, Saddam had proven to be an evil and oppressive monster. He and his sons brutalized an entire nation into submission. The world knew of Saddam's atrocities. He had gassed his own people. Taking him out and freeing the Iraqi people was the only part of the war that I saw as fighting the good fight. And all American soldiers want to fight the good fight. Every one of us on that plane wanted to be the soldier who avenged millions by firing the fateful 5.56 round that would make Saddam's head burst like a watermelon. He definitely had it coming.
Killing Saddam was not the primary reason Bush said he was sending us, but if we made that happen, it would be a good result nonetheless. I saw the appeal of Machiavellian logic. In the end, it may be acceptable to do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
I prayed that Bush was right. He had abandoned diplomacy and essentially told the world to fuck off. I wanted weapons of mass destruction to exist in Iraq, because if they didn't, there would be hell to pay for us all. America's reputation would be irreparably damaged for generations. If Bush was wrong, thousands of Americans troops would die for a mistake, and the Iraq war would be one of the greatest foreign policy mistakes in our nation's history. The decision to invade Iraq was the mother of all poker games. Bush was betting the house on this one hand. "He must have the cards to back it up," I wrote.
So my entire role in the war was a paradox: Against the war from the beginning, I volunteered to go fight in it. I feared that President Bush's decision to invade Iraq was not in the best interest of our country, but I desperately wanted be a part of that invasion. I was torn in half, wrestling with my hunger for combat and my revulsion for the President. But I would not let doubt drive me to sit on the sidelines for the biggest game of my generation. On the contrary, I volunteered to be one of the first to fight. This war was happening whether I liked it or not. Protesting the war in Washington or New York wouldn't stop it from happening now. America was angry. And America was scared. Little old ladies in Kansas worried that Saddam would reach out and blow up their Bingo games on Friday night. When people are angry and scared they sometimes make rash decisions-especially when they don't fully fathom the consequences. I just wanted everyone in America to step back and think about it all a little harder. Once you fire that round out of the chamber, you can't take it back. Senator John McCain once said, "War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality." I just didn't understand the rush, and I thought we needed more debate.
I printed out some things to take with me to Iraq. One was a speech made by Senator Robert Byrd on the floor of the Senate in February, 2003. Senator Byrd expressed concern about the lack a debate and the rush to war:
Madam President, to contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experience. On this February day, as this Nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war.
My wife says to me at night: Do you think we ought to get some of those large bottles, the large jugs, and fill them with water? She says: Go up to the attic and see if we don't have two or three there. I believe we have two or three there.
And so I went up to the attic last evening and came back to report to her that, no, we didn't have any large jugs of water, but we had some small ones, perhaps some gallon jugs filled with water. And she talked about buying up a few things, groceries and canned goods to put away.
I would suspect that kind of conversation is going on in many towns across this great, broad land of ours. And yet this Chamber is for the most part ominously, dreadfully silent. You can hear a pin drop. Listen. You can hear a pin drop. There is no debate. There is no discussion. There is no attempt to lay out for the Nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.
But if you say something enough times people believe it's true. Saddam had WMDs and America was going to take him out. The decision was made, the war machine was rolling, and I was a part of it. I remembered a quote that hung on the wall of my high school classroom: "No one made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do little." By volunteering to command a platoon on the ground, I could at least have an impact on how things turned out. I didn't have a crystal ball, but I knew that there would be a time when the combat would settle down, and my platoon could help people. That was my mission: to ensure that my thirty-eight men made a difference, served as a positive reflection of America, and came home alive. It would be great if we could kill Saddam in the process.
So my men and I were on a plane to kill another country's sons and fathers where they lived. In their own houses. Most of the men had never been out of the U.S. Most of them had never even been out of the South.
Overhead, lights dimmed as we slid downward into milky dust and landed in the Kuwaiti Kingdom.
Nobody was shooting at us yet, but we all felt a rush of adrenaline. After months of waiting, we were in the desert. "The Sandbox." In the excitement, a few cheers and some nervous conversations broke the silence. Of course Fat Stew, the resident smart ass, piped up. He was like Jimmy Kimmel with a Southern drawl thick as gravy. Always reliable for timely sarcasm, he called from coach, "Are we there yet?"
Outside, in the darkness, a stairway rolled up to the fuselage with a bang. Footsteps clanged up to the hatch; a waft of hot air and a beefy black NCO rushed inside.
"All you motherfuckers shut the fuck up!" he shouted. The plane fell silent. Our CO was clearly not going to interrupt this dude, and neither was anybody else. Regardless of rank, he was in charge.
"When you get off this plane, you lock and load and move double-time directly to the trucks that are waiting outside. No flashlights. No cigarettes. No bullshit. Keep your pro mask with you. There could still be scuds coming in. Any questions?"
Silence.
"Okay, then. Welcome to the fuckin' war!"
[footnote] * A Division is made up of anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 troops. It is subdivided into three Brigades, and each Brigade contains three or more Battalions, with 500 to 900 soldiers in each. A Battalion is further subdivided into three to five Companies, and a Company is made up of three or four Platoons. Finally, a Platoon contains two to four Squads. Mine had four, each with a Squad Leader who was a staff-sergeant, or NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer). We were Third Platoon, Bravo Company, Third Battalion, 124th Regiment, First Brigade, Third Infantry Division.
