Note: the following story is completely fictional. The reservist and all characters are completely made-up. I was sitting here wondering how, for the umpteenth time, I could express my anger at the criminal negligence, craven arrogance, and sheer incompetence of our president’s war of choice in Iraq. I often focus on the actions of presidents and senators and terrorists, so I wondered what it might feel like from an imaginary grunt’s perspective.
The young reservist never signed up for anything like this. “A weekend a month and two weeks a year.” He could still hear the words from the recruitment commercial. “An Army of One.” His grades were good, but not good enough to get someone to pay for college. Any thoughts he had of getting that NBA contract ended when his growth spurt from puberty ended. Only six years ago, he thought to himself, which seems like forever now. Back when presidents only lied about blowjobs and “a rack” was something he and his buddies would compliment the senior cheerleaders for having.
Now, forever and two deployments later, it’s “Iraq” and it’s the closest thing to hell this young reservist from West Virginia has ever experienced. He wiped the sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his uniform, which was already soaked with enough sweat to make it useless. This is ridiculous-hot, he mused. No wonder these people have never gotten along in 5,000 years. I’m one irritable son-of-a-bitch right now and I’ve only been here off and on for two years.
Then there’s the sand. All the god damned sand. Everywhere. Anywhere. In your weapon, in your clothes, in your food, in your eyes, in your rucksack, bivouac, tank tracks and ass cracks. I never want to see a grain of sand again, he thought. When I get home, I’m moving to Alaska. I want to live on a glacier.
He laughed when he thought back to how excited he was when the colonel announced their first active-duty deployment. Hoo-ah! By God, we have a president who is actually going to do something! Less talk, more action. Those al-Qaeda bastards blew up the Twin Towers. America wasn’t going to send diplomats; it was going to send the best damn Army in the world to go kick some Osama ass! He was scared, and he was going to miss his wife, and he really wanted to be there for the birth of his boy. But he had a duty. For once, he felt like he was going to do something meaningful in his life. He wasn’t going to be just another “weekend warrior”; he was going to actively protect the country he loved.
Now it all seemed like such a twisted joke. He was nowhere near Osama. A buddy of his, Jorge, was on that mission that captured Saddam Hussein, though. He still has that e-mail saved in his Inbox. It’s the last reminder he has of the big Mexican kid he grew up with. He remembered how they met, when in third grade he had to explain to him that the schoolyard taunt of “Jorge, are you gay?” wasn’t meant to make him laugh. Jorge got the last laugh when in junior high he matured into the biggest kid in school. It made him mad that big old Jorge got taken out by a roadside bomb, probably made by some sniveling little weasel of a coward insurgent.
Jorge was the hardest loss to take, but there were so many others, enlisted, NCO’s, even a couple of officers he had met and served under during these last couple of years in hell. He once was part of a squad tasked with cleanup of one of the roadside bombs somewhere outside of Mosul. He quickly tried to dismiss the lingering images from his mind, but they always popped up at times like these when he was standing watch, bored out of his skull, out of cigarettes and that relentless heat bearing down on him.
Two images always struck him like punch to the gut. The face of that Marine Lance Corporal. Her name was Watson. Someone must have been telling a joke right as the bomb went off, because she had a sort of smile on her face. She was pretty. She was some lucky man’s wife. His squad mate was able to find her left hand; it was blown off and under some wreckage about fifteen feet from her broken body. He was glad it was found, but when he saw that wedding band on her finger, he looked at his own wedding band and imagined what agony her husband must be feeling – and what agony his own wife would feel if he never came home again.
The other image was that Iraqi kid. His home was blown up by a mortar. The only way the reservist could even tell it was a kid was by the small stuffed toy he held in his arms. He wasn’t really recognizable as a human being anymore. Besides the destruction wrought by the explosions, fire, and cascading debris, he had been lying there for at least two weeks before his company marched through. My kid will be that old in about five years, he thought. He shook his head and smacked himself on the helmet a couple of times. If someone did that to my kid, it wouldn’t take a second for me to grab my weapon and join whatever group promised to get even.
The first deployment was hard. He’d whittled away the time counting down to the time his twelve months would be up. His dad had been in ‘Nam and he remembered his dad’s stories about “short timer’s disease”. He didn’t care; he looked forward to that magical end day when he’d get to fly home and see his wife and their newborn son, George. They decided to name him George, partially in honor of Jorge, and partially to salute their president.
But then twelve months got extended to thirteen, and then to fourteen. He stopped counting down in the fourteenth month. He figured when it was time, he would go home. In their weekly phone calls, he’d keep telling his wife to be patient; she’d keep telling him to be careful. Finally, he was able to go home. He held his infant boy George for the first time. He cried in his wife’s arms. She comforted him at night when those indelible images would haunt his dreams.
She told him how much she was beginning to hate this war. She’d gone (against his wishes) to see Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”. She was beginning to wonder if things in Iraq weren’t just a horrible mistake. It was their only fight. She kept asking so many questions. They had no WMD’s, wasn’t that why you went? Iraq didn’t bomb the World Trade Center, did they? Osama’s still running around, why aren’t you going after Osama? He kept telling her all of the things that the other guys would tell each other, all the great lines from the speeches from the platoon leaders and the company commanders about bringing democracy to the Middle East and rooting out terrorism at its source and fighting a global war on terror. He couldn’t let her know how much he was beginning to agree with her. He had to maintain the strong dedicated soldier image, as much for himself as for her.
He was ready now to start a new life for his family. That’s when the notification came that his unit would be redeployed. His wife was furious. She seriously begged him to take them all to Canada. He knew it was a possibility and he was never one to shirk his duty. He reported and was shipped back to Iraq. He wondered if his son had enough time to even recognize his face. He prayed that he’d see them both again in a few short months.
He futilely wiped some more sweat off his brow. Damn, it’s hot! Where’s my replacement? He thought his relief was way overdue, but when he checked his watch, he realized there was still a half-hour to go. He sighed and tried to adjust some of the sand out of his ass crack. A rivulet of sweat ran down the small of his back and stung as it ran down between his cheeks. A glacier in Alaska, he thought, a glacier in Alaska.
He thought about how horrendous the first deployment was, and shook his head when he realized that the events of the past few months made the first deployment seem tame. That was before the prison.
He couldn’t understand why he was chosen for guard duty over a bunch of insurgents at an old Iraqi prison. Didn’t they have active duty MP’s for that? Probably, but they’re probably as overworked as everyone else. It was a bit of relief to be working inside; it was only ludicrous-hot instead of ridiculous-hot,
It was the strangest, most horrible duty he’d ever had in the military. There were civilian agents there, trained in intelligence gathering, and they taught all of the guards the “softening techniques” they would use on the prisoners. He thanked God that there were no photos at his prison like the ones that came out from Abu Ghraib. Not because he didn’t participate in acts like the ones performed by those soldiers there – he did. He beat the prisoners, tied them, blindfolded them, forced them into painful positions, smeared them with feces, forced them into homoerotic poses, put them on “drowning boards”, placed fake electrodes on their hands and genitals – sometimes the memories would flood over him all at once like this and he had to restrain the urge to vomit.
No, he thanked God that his prison never got that attention and that there is no incriminating evidence of the things he had done. For the photos from Abu Ghraib showed techniques that were identical to his prison, and (he imagined) in many others. The agents told them this was necessary, that the prisoners had to be broken down in order to gain vital information in the war on terror. He’d never heard of any of the prisoners ever offering anything useful. He even doubted that the majority of them were even terrorists or insurgents.
One soldier asked about whether he was violating the Geneva Conventions. The agent in charge assured us that this treatment was entirely legal and had been reviewed “at the highest levels of our government.” Still, it never felt right to the reservist, but he did his duty. The soldier who asked the question was transferred; no one knows where he ended up.
One thing was for sure: the reservist would never tell anyone about what happened there. He would take those memories to the grave.
Around him, he could feel the morale and attitudes of his platoon changing. More and more began to question why the people we were there to liberate were shooting at us and blowing up our Humvees. Certainly there were plenty of Iraqis who were genuinely happy to see us. Whenever the bad images would flood his mind, he’d try to counteract those with the images of the Iraqi school kids attending the school that had been rebuilt. He tried to remember the smiles of young Iraqi women who felt free enough to remove their veils in public. He tried to recall the faces of the young brave Iraqi men who were lining up to become police or military in hopes of protecting their own families. No sooner would he conjure up this happy scene when his mind would obliterate it with a car bomb, a sniper rifle, a mortar shell. He really needed a cigarette.
More than anything he wanted to reclaim that “hoo-ah” attitude and blind patriotism he felt on that day he was first called up. But the real world would intrude, and worse, his own leadership kept knocking the hope out of him. “Bring ’em on?” He was getting sick of the insurgents “bringing it on.”
He thought of that one soldier who asked Rumsfeld about the hillbilly armor. Luckily, most of the times the reservist rode around Iraq he was in a well-armored Humvee or truck or personnel carrier, and thankfully, he hadn’t been around when any roadside bombs went off. He did know of a couple of guys from his high school that got killed, however. Their Humvee didn’t have any armor; just a few sandbags on the floorboards and a couple of scrap plates welded to the doors. The explosion tore through their vehicle like it was made of tinfoil.
So when the Secretary of Defense said, “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have,” the reservist felt that last vestige of “hoo-ah” leaving his soul. The army you have? Who’s been managing this army we have and this government that funds it for the past four years? Who decided that this army we have was numerous and equipped well-enough to perform this mission? Who told us time after time that there was an imminent threat and there was no choice but to go to war immediately? On that day he swore he would never vote for a Republican again.
He shifted in his stance again and glanced at his watch. 1355 hours. His relief would be here in five minutes. He thought about his wife and George and the fact that he only had two more months to go. Twenty-four months of Iraq in total. Twice the time his father spent in Vietnam. He wished dad was still alive so he could ask him how he dealt with the horrors of war. He laughed at himself. “You know exactly how dad dealt with it,” he said to himself softly, “booze and Quaaludes and leaving you and mom high and dry and living in a VW Microbus and a .38 to the temple around the same time Kurt Cobain killed himself.” What a coward, he thought. I’d never leave George like that. I’m stronger than that, he thought.
He hummed Nirvana’s “All Apologies” to himself, looked up, and saw his replacement approaching. It was Washington, a big black kid. He was one of the top recruited tight ends in high school football back in 2001. If he’d only had the grades, maybe he’d be at Southern Cal instead of here.
Washington asked him if he’d heard the latest. The reservist shook his head. Washington told him about how the pentagon was considering changing the active duty rules for reservists. Instead of being limited to a 24 month total number of months that could be served on active duty, they’re considering limiting active duty to no more than 24 months in a row, but no limit to total number of months. “Yeah, man, fly home for a couple of months and then it’s back to the sand pile.”
The reservist’s heart sank. He turned back to Washington and said, “One weekend a month and two weeks a year, man. What a bunch of bullshit.” He turned back around and headed toward his quarters. As he walked he pulled out the picture of his wife and child and gave it a kiss. He thought to himself, hmmm, maybe a glacier in Canada is better. And he wondered what Quaaludes felt like.
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