The War I Always Wanted (2 page)

As he spoke, trying to make everyone believe that this whole thing was going to go smoothly, the ACP soldiers seemed thankful for the fact that if the road trip into Iraq turned into a twoway rifle range, it would be someone else's problem. They seemed to think that Croom and I had done this before.

An hour later, while we were waiting to move from Camp New Jersey to the attack position closer to the border, the war started with an intrusive blast of sound from the air raid sirens. I am never ready for these things when they happen.

I had left the assembly of vehicles with Sergeant Matt Krueger, one of my section leaders. On the boat ride into the theater, somehow, the flimsy door to the passenger side of my humvee had gone missing. I was determined not to ride into battle without at least the protection of thin vinyl and a soft plastic zippered window. That type of government cost-saving material generally doesn't stop fragmentation from roadside bombs or rocket-propelled grenades, but with me, it was more of a psychological thing. I just wanted a door—any kind of a door.

I had heard that Bravo, my old company, was leaving its only humvee behind because it wouldn't run. Bravo was a rifle company of foot-borne infantry and, theoretically at least, they had no need for trucks. I decided to drive over to the tent section, find it, and cannibalize it by taking one of its doors with me.

So instead of leading my men into battle, banners fluttering and swords valiantly raised, I was wandering around a nearly deserted tent city looking for a vinyl humvee door. And that was when the air raid sirens started wailing. My stomach dropped.

I stretched a chemical protective mask over my head and continued hunting for the door. The mask muffled the scream of the sirens. There was nothing else to do really, except to keep looking. If a missile was going to hit me, it was going to hit me.

I came around a tent and saw the humvee. I walked over to it and carefully removed the door from the hinges and carried it back in the direction of my truck. As I trudged through the sand, kicking it as I went, I gazed at the sky through the hazy plastic lenses of my mask. I was looking for any sign of a descending projectile laced with anthrax or Zyklon-B or whatever. Nothing. Not even a cloud. Just endless blue sky.

When I got back to the truck, Krueger was down on a knee by the bumper. I could see other soldiers doing the same. He looked up at me and told me it had come over the radio that we were supposed to be in a bunker or under the trucks. “Oh,” I said. “Hey look, I found a door.” Suddenly, the sirens fell silent.

The Voice—that detached presence of authority that guided my life and continually instructed me over my radio—said that an Iraqi al Samoud missile had been fired into Kuwait and that more were expected. The Voice always seemed to come over the airwaves with such disheartening news. I never got the call that I was headed home over the radio. Instead it was always messages like, “Send us two guys for guard duty.” Or, “Expect more incoming.” Or, “Be prepared to hold that ground.”

I took off my mask, walked around to my side of the humvee, and slid the new door into place. Strangely enough, it gave me a warm, safe feeling—as if the door was going to make the whole invasion go well. Then I thought about why that should be, and reasoned that maybe I was losing my mind.

The helplessness you feel when large, explosive objects start falling out of the sky around you is something that's hard to describe. It's a different kind of fear than when you're at least minimally able to defend yourself. This I had learned in the Shah-e-Kot Valley of Afghanistan.

I was around for enough bombing of al Qaeda positions in Afghanistan that once I got home, I got a queasy feeling every time a passenger jet flew overhead. It's the idea of something falling on you, and the idea that it won't reason with you. If it's a person, you can try to understand what he may or may not do in a given situation. If you're outnumbered or
outgunned, you can always try to bluff him into thinking that he should mess with someone else. You can't do that with missiles, rockets, and bombs.

As we began to move out from Camp New Jersey, my new door firmly in place, I thought about these things, still so fresh in my memory. I thought about them and I thought about the dreams they induced—of bombs and bullets and people falling all around me. Then I tried to focus on the present. But that never works when memories and dreams of combat are clawing at your addled brain. I kept trying though, and eventually it just made me think about the dreams I'd been having recently. They were dreams of Nikki, the girl who'd stayed with me through the Afghanistan deployment, only to leave me before I came to Kuwait. One night I'd dream she was with another man (which she was), another night I'd dream she was pregnant (which she wasn't), and another night I'd dream she needed my help (which she didn't).

During the buildup for the coming invasion, I'd spent Christmas with Nikki in Dallas, where she was working. All that week she'd made me turn the channel every time there was a story on the massing of troops in Kuwait. The day I left Dallas to return to Fort Campbell, she was a wreck. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she alternated all morning between crying, sniffling, and crying again.

We were in her bedroom and she was sitting cross-legged on the bed. I was standing in front of her, holding my bags in my hands. I was about to leave. She had started crying again. Through the tears, the last thing she said to me was, “I can't do this again.”

I guess one war was enough for her.

* * *

As we passed through the gates of Camp New Jersey, never to return, I contemplated that she had at least had the decency to do it between the wars and not right in the middle of one.

Half a mile down the road from New Jersey's front gate, I was ordered over the radio to stop. I was too antsy to sit in the truck, comforted by my new vinyl door, so I got out to stretch my legs. Then, off in the distance and coming from within the camp, I could hear the wail of the air raid sirens again. The Voice over the radio announced an inbound al Samoud missile, this time barreling directly toward us. I just stood there in the bright desert sun beside my truck. This time I didn't bother to even look at the sky. I was a man standing in a drenching downpour without an umbrella, shoulders hunched and dejected-looking. Just standing there and taking it.

And then, with sirens singing in the distance, it hit with a dull
whoomp
. It was far enough away that I didn't see it come in; it was near enough to have gotten my full attention.

The old pang of fear was back. I was being targeted. It is a queasy feeling, unlike anything else, and it comes in waves. Spend enough time in a war and you will become familiar with it. You'll feel it eat slowly at your mind like battery acid, corroding it more and more each day.

Before the wars, I had always been afraid of things like failing a test in school. Or that I'd be late. I was afraid that people at the party would think I looked stupid, or that I'd say something stupid. I was afraid that, when I left the bar, I'd find my car window broken and all my CDs gone.

But fear in war is not like that. This is the type of fear that only comes when you know your life could end at any
moment, and you'd never see it coming. This is fear in its purest form.

And it ends up staying with you, too. Because even when the war is over for you, and you're back at home with your family and you no longer fall asleep to the sound of cascading gunfire, that's when you'll notice just how uncomfortable you are when there is seemingly nothing out there in the darkness of which to be afraid.

But in the beginning—a year and half earlier—I knew none of this.

2
 
Fort Campbell, Kentucky

Fall 2001

“These guys are about to find out the hard way that we ain't the Russians . . . and this ain't Vietnam.” My platoon sergeant in Bravo Company, a former army Ranger named Jim Collins, spoke the words deadpan and without emotion. He was always saying things like that.

Earlier that morning we'd been told we were going to war. The World Trade Center was still smoldering and, according to the deployment order I held in my hand, we were part of the payback plan. I had been a platoon leader for fifty-three days.

I was torn. If not for Nikki, the order would have made me happy. I'd spent the last six years like a high school girl waiting to be asked to the prom by the football captain. I'd been waiting for the invitation to the big dance. Now, holding my invitation to the big war in my hand, I couldn't help but think that I'd already gotten Nikki a plane ticket to Fort Campbell for Thanksgiving. And somewhere along the
way, that had become more important to me than fighting in a war.

By the time I got to college, I'd fashioned myself into a hawkish war junkie, probably as a means to punish my parents for allowing me to do whatever I wanted as a kid. My mom was an artist and ex-hippie with a rebellious streak; my dad was so passive that I can't ever recall him raising his voice. Our family was middle class and both my brother and I had gone to a private school until we got to high school. We had two dogs and a cat and a big yard in a nice neighborhood. My parents had tried so hard to give us a tranquil, stable home environment. Looking back, I see it backfired for them.

One day in high school I took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery—the mandatory test they give to juniors. I would have forgotten about it had a recruiter not sent me a postcard telling me that I'd done well. The military scatters thousands of these postcard seeds every year, hoping that just a fraction will catch the eyes of an interested kid and maybe take root—maybe one day sprout into a paratrooper or a fighter pilot. Before I got the postcard, I'd never even thought about joining the Army.

Yet, from the time I was small, I had been attracted to violence, to guns, to
action
. Raised the way I was, these things became the forbidden fruit for a quiet and shy kid who had also liked reading books about animals. And now the recruiter had seized on this one latent passion. He was a pro at it too. What he was selling, I was buying. “They'll teach you to jump out of planes,” he'd say. And, “
Sure
, you can still be a sniper if you want to be an officer.” Reading the recruiter's postcard had been like the addict's first hit. Going to discuss my options with him in his
office was my gateway drug. I walked out with a smile on my face and then went on to study military history in school. I joined the Army. I shaved my head. I voted for Bush in 2000. I learned to shoot. I learned to fight. And I learned to enjoy it.

I stayed like that for five years. I stayed like that until I met Nikki.

It is winter and I'm browsing in the bookstore. She walks past me, heading to a section nearby. I remember her face from high school, back in the mid-1990s. I know she is younger than me. She is beautiful in her black pea coat, blonde hair falling on her shoulders, as she flips through the pages of books in the Career section. In a moment of sheer bravery, I approach her. She is kneeling at one of the shelves. I say something—something that is in all probability ridiculous. She stands up and blushes
.

I kissed her for the first time after teaching her to play chess. The first month she stayed at my apartment until late into the night—every night. Suddenly I became more concerned with watching movies at night than with going to the field or qualifying with a new weapon. I started to become self-conscious of all the Army awards and photographs from college that adorned my walls. It all seemed too harsh around her.

Nikki didn't like the Army, and she didn't like that it kept me away from her while she was still in school. Over the span of a few months, her worsening reaction made me start to question whether or not
I
still liked the Army. My loyalties became conflicted. I couldn't explain why, but a green-eyed girl in Louisiana was quickly deconstructing a fanaticism that had taken years to cultivate and mature.

Without a word I could see that she saw herself in a competition with the Army. It made me see for the first time that I had become hooked on the narcotic intensity of destructive
weapons and the sheer power of human will and determination. I was obsessed with how these things could be meshed into the ultimate war hammer for the forces of good. This is what the Army taught, and this is what I, the student, wanted to hear.

But Nikki made me realize that I hadn't been raised that way, that somewhere inside I knew that this was no way to live life. With such a mentality, I would burn out sooner rather than later. I knew on some level that I was rebelling from what I thought people expected me to do. I began to think that somehow, perhaps, I should consider extricating myself from the lifestyle. Maybe become normal—start a family, get an office job. Sleep under a roof, not trees.

This personal coming-of-age crisis couldn't have come at a worse time either. It peaked roughly two weeks before everything changed late in the summer of 2001.