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Chasing War
26 September 2001
I had no idea what I got myself into; I just wanted to marry my girlfriend and have a place to live. Four years of the Army seemed like a bargain if Uncle Sam was going to pay for my college later on. If it wasn’t for my roommate Dan, the Army thing would not have happened.
Everything started on 9/11. I received an early morning call from work, several hours before I was scheduled to go in. The scheduler said Disneyland would be closed for the day, something about it being a potential terrorist target. I had no idea what the lady was talking about and mumbled something about being half-asleep. She told me to turn on the TV and I sat glued in front of it for the next ten hours.
Dan had a morning shift and had already left for work. He didn’t answer his phone and he didn’t come home for two days. On his voicemail, I told him I would kick his ass if he did something stupid. Specifically, enlisting would be stupid. I had no reason to think he would, and he had never mentioned a desire or previous interest, but I felt it was something crazy and random that only he would do. A lot of people didn’t understand Dan. He wasn’t terribly formal and often rubbed people the wrong way. He was abrasive and foul-mouthed, but was also gentle, sincere, and sappy--a hopeless romantic. When Dan finally came home, he said hadn't enlisted yet, but that he'd been talking to a recruiter and wanted to go to Korea.
“Jay—I can’t just let those fucking towel heads get away with that bullshit. I want to do something about it… the recruiter is coming over tonight to talk to us.”
“Us?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I uh… well—you don’t have to sign up, Jay. You just have to listen to his pitch, that’s all.”
I pondered the thought. My parents had put me through private schools my whole life so that I could do something with my life. As it turned out, I dropped out of high school my senior year and was slaving in food service to pay the rent. I didn’t even own a car and often rode my bicycle to work. Still, Dan was going to bail on us and work was already cutting hours. I wasn’t exactly doing anything with my life and wasn’t in a position to go to school. Of course it seemed we were doomed from the start—the fucking recruiter lived across the street! He brought over beer and Mexican food, and we stayed up all night playing video games. In a sense, I felt that I was better than the Army. Only barbaric football players and wrestlers and the uneducated joined the Army. My parents had raised me to stay away from that kind of life and I had never expected to be presented with an offer into it.
Dan was the first to go. He went to Basic Training at Relaxin' Jackson in November. He wanted to learn how to cook and had follow-on orders to Korea. Robyn and I got married and enlisted on the same day—like it was a box to check on a grocery list. She was eighteen and I was nineteen and we left a week after Dan. Robyn went to Fort Jackson also, but I was sent to Fort Benning—Home of the Infantry. It would be five years before I saw Dan again, and six months until I saw my new bride.
6 February 2003 I graduated from Advanced Individual Training (AIT), at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in June 2002, to become a 13F (Fire Support Specialist), “the most efficient killer on the battlefield.” Only a Forward Observer can use an FM radio to fire someone else’s guns and kill dozens of enemies and destroy their equipment. When I got to Fort Campbell, I learned that no one was more badass than a fister. They were arrogant and proud, and I learned that most people would not even test high enough on the ASVAB to be offered the job. Many of the men I worked with were educated and socially conscious of the rhetoric we were being fed about an impending war, and that was comforting. In my small platoon of fisters, I felt like I belonged.
In the summer of 2002, the 82nd Airborne was fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and the 101st Airborne was training for an invasion of Iraq. With the 82nd Airborne’s training ammunition redistributed throughout the 18th Airborne Corps, my battalion fired more artillery that summer in training than they had in the previous decade. We lived in the field that summer—one week or two with the infantry, the next week or two with the artillery. When the infantry played “bang-bang” in the forests with lasers attached to their peashooters, we trained with them. When the artillery needed observers to “call for boom-boom,” we trained with them as well. Through the changing seasons, we endured rain and snow and didn’t stop training until the holidays.
CNN announced the story in early February: the famous 101st Airborne had been ordered to deploy to Southwest Asia for what would soon become Operation Iraqi Freedom. It had been expected, but it was still shocking. I saw the army as a four-year job, not as a fighting force. I learned how to kill people, but I didn’t want to actually kill anyone. I didn’t even know what we would be fighting for and was dismayed by the fact that one man would order hundreds of thousands of soldiers from his country to fight hundreds of thousands of soldiers from another country because he didn’t agree with another country’s leader.
That evening, close of business formation was more of a mood killer than CNN. The artillery battery was made up of several smaller platoons of medics, radar, communications, and various support and artillery command staff. Half of the battery was comprised of three platoons of forward observers who didn’t fit anywhere else. Several senior-ranking sergeants took turns parading in front of the formation. They stuck their chests out and held their chins high; their excitement for war was like a mutiny on common sense and I didn’t share their enthusiasm. They promised death and action and said “Hooah” after every remark, anticipating a returned “Hooah” in agreement. I always thought war was a game with a deck of cards, not something advanced civilizations conducted in the third world. I looked around the formation and saw the faces of men and boys who looked like they were ready for a drink. When I was dismissed, I walked away with darkened eyes that stared into the ground, and was distracted by thoughts a young man full of ambition and life should never face. I was not going to selflessly give my life for a cause I didn’t believe in, and I was not going to celebrate that achievement in others.
After formation, I walked into the barracks with a friend. PV2 Michael McAlister lived on the third floor with the rest of the single fisters and was known as a boisterous and obnoxious career Private. He was an animated storyteller who had a flair for embellishing the heroic and the profane into his nightly exploits at various downtown bars. He was also a veteran of a six-month deployment to Kosovo the previous year and knew the rigors and demands that would soon be asked of us. On most days, the third floor was filled with drunken noise. Rank disappeared when each evening’s agenda consisted of finding new ways to get smashed. But there would be no eight-player Halo LAN -party linking xboxes that evening. There would be no bar hopping either. Instead, each man quietly retreated to his room.
Mac walked over to his stereo with the giant Bose loudspeakers and dug through a book of CD’s. He pulled out an old favorite and turned the volume all the way right. Iommi’s opening guitar riff wafted slowly into the air and bounced off the painted white-brick walls like an expanding cloud of thick, black smoke. Geezer’s bass thumped in time with the slowing beat of our writhing hearts. As the wailing sirens climaxed into a crescendo of anticipated silence, the indelible shriek of Ozzy’s vocals exploded down the fist hallway. A procession of defeated and half-dressed warriors had stumbled lethargically into the room in anticipation of the sonic annihilation. Mac looked at me and mouthed words I’ll never forget:
“Dude, we’re gonna fucking die.” |
