The War I Always Wanted (27 page)

I was in such a daze that I might have even said this to someone in my family. I can't remember.

For six weeks back at Fort Campbell I went to work in the morning, came home in the afternoon, and started drinking around early evening. It was during that period that 3rd Platoon got ambushed. Then one morning after a run, Nick Bilotta, the Charlie Company guy who'd been wounded that day in Baghdad, told me that Heidelberg was KIA. Several weeks after that, the car bomb exploded at the TOC. I sat there on my bed, beer in hand, watching the report about the car bomb on the news. They even interviewed the guy who had replaced me as XO. I sat there wondering just what in the fuck I was doing in Clarksville, Tennessee, while all this was going on in my company.

Finally, on a blustery but sunny December day on Fort Campbell, I signed out of the Army. I had no job lined up, graduate school didn't start for another eight months, and Nikki was in Dallas with an architect. I had nowhere else to go, so I went home.

In 2002 I spent nine months in the United States between the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Besides the growing gap between Nikki and me, this is what I remember about that period . . . .

Sergeant Collins is sponsoring another keg party on the deck at his house. I'm there fraternizing, though, as far as I'm concerned,
the idea is laughable after you've gone to war together. By nine o'clock the keg is floated and we're completely wasted
.

By ten o'clock the party has moved to the Lighthouse down on Riverside Drive. By eleven I'm standing in a corner of the club with Kamauf and Smerbeck, no women for miles. The three of us are slurring to each other about how important going to Afghanistan was. And how at the time, we didn't think Anaconda was such a big deal, but that it really was a big deal. How it was the real shit
.

By midnight, Kamauf and I have been tossed out of the bar. Everything is spinning and I can't remember why we got bounced. Maybe a fight, maybe too drunk. Neither of us drove so we decide to hump it back to Jimbo's house to sleep. It's four miles away, but our infantry egos and the alcohol tell us that that's not such a big deal
.

A mile down the road I'm peeling Kamauf up off the concrete. I stumble in the process and we end up helping each other back to our feet, laughing like idiots. Kamauf suggests we get off the sidewalk and move along the river side of the barrier so that we don't attract any cops. I agree
.

His good intentions don't take into account that the barrier is there in the first place to prevent cars from taking the curve too fast and hurtling into the river. By one o'clock he is trying to pull me out of the brambles on the side of the hill. He goes down with me, and together we slip farther toward the river. Red Bull and vodka has intensified the earth's gravitational pull to the extent that this slight incline overlooking the river might as well be a sheer rock face. I come close to gaining a foothold and then tumble farther down. I can hear the water. I can hear my own laughter. In the faint streetlight coming from the top of the hill I can see that the branches and thorns in the brush have cut my hands
.

We claw our way back up to the top, away from the river. Back on the sidewalk, we can't stop laughing at each other. My khakis have been torn to ribbons; my right leg is bleeding through what's left of them. In a marble-mouthed haze, Kamauf asks me if I have my cell phone on me. He says we should call somebody. I manage to say yes, unless I lost it, unable to recall why I hadn't thought about that sooner
.

It is time to radio the QRF
.

I thought maybe the homecoming would go smoother the second time around. I made it a point to see Nikki when she was in town around Christmas. It was nearly a year to the day since I'd walked out of her apartment. We talked briefly over lunch at a restaurant. She said she was happy. After that I never spoke to her again.

I never drank around my family during the day, but the short temper and the mood swings did enough damage. One night after I couldn't find something of mine that my poor mom had unwittingly moved, I blew my top. When I calmed down fifteen minutes later, I realized just how stupid I looked and sounded. It made me laugh. I was becoming a stereotype. Johnny had come marching home just like the rest of the infantry.

Hanging out at home with Mom and Dad, trying to function just after the war, I could tell, just wasn't going to work out. It was after I yelled at my parents for touching my shit that I decided to leave. I'd had enough of my family, my hometown, all the superficial news stories about the war, and the plethora of “support the troops” stickers on cars. I was tired of everyone's shallow patriotism. Everyone around me had an opinion about what we should do to “the Iraqis”
and the “terrorists,” but nine out of ten of them couldn't tell the difference between the two. I was surrounded by supporters of the government—often those closest to me—who had no knowledge of history or insurgencies; no sense of real patriotism. In my mind, flags and stickers did not count as patriotism. To them it was a fight to defend freedom and that was all there was to it. We
love
freedom; they
hate
freedom. We must defend
liberty
. From the safety of their cozy bedrooms, watching other people deal with REAL PROBLEMS on the TV from ten thousand miles away, that was the attitude. There was no depth of reflection, no critical thinking. There was no respect for the true nature of a bloody life-and-death clash of human cultures and ideologies. There was no empathy for Iraqi families. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd called this kind of mentality “the bravery of being out of range,” and he wrote a song about it.

I just felt like I didn't belong there anymore. America had somehow become
Amrika
, as the Iraqis say. I was on the outside looking in, and I needed space.

So I took the money and ran—using the cash I'd saved during the two wars. In army-speak I “beat feet.” I “popped smoke.” Less than ninety days after setting foot back on American soil, I caught a military hop headed for Europe. I figured that would be far enough away. All I carried was a single backpack with clothes, some photographs, a camera, and my passport. There were no plans for returning home. The first lesson I'd learned on returning from a guerilla war was this: Get your fucking head on straight before you speak to anyone.

11
 
The Mediterranean

Winter 2004

On the Spanish island of Mallorca, an explosion tore through the cold night air. We had been drinking up on the roof of the place I'd been staying. I was with two other lone travelers. One was American and the other a French Canadian. Sitting in lawn chairs that overlooked Palma harbor, we had been staring at all the twinkling lights on the hundreds of yachts down below. For three days I had told neither of them that I'd been in the American army.

It was earsplitting and close. I was out of my chair and moving for cover before the echo had stopped reverberating. As I moved in a low crouch, I turned and looked back at the two guys. They hadn't moved and looked like seated statues. The Canadian had a Heineken halfway to his lips, where it was now paused. They were staring at me.

“Wow, man. You okay?” he asked. His French accent sounded to me vaguely like Ammar's Arabic one.

A car backfire, magnified by crisp, clear night air and tall buildings set closely together, does not necessarily register as “car backfire” to skittish ears. As I thought about how to explain my reaction, I realized that I didn't even jump like that when I was in theater. Two wars, and I don't think I ever jumped like that. I guessed that it had something to do with not being around any other soldiers, being halfway buzzed, and not clutching a weapon.

I spent the rest of the night killing a twelve-pack under the stars, telling war stories.

Over sangria in Barcelona I told a psychology grad student what the moment is like right before you die. When I did that, I felt like I was using my real voice for the first time in a while. It felt
fresh
. When I spoke of the war, it didn't have that flat tone anymore.

When she finally asked me how I was doing, I paused, trying to figure out how to answer her. I'd gotten the same question from a lot of people back home. Usually they would start by asking me what the war was like. Then they'd ask how it affected me. And then, as if to make themselves more comfortable, they'd always say with a laugh, “But you're okay now, right?”

Every time I'd hear something like that, I'd hear Ving Rhames' character in
Pulp Fiction
when Bruce Willis asks him if
he's
okay. This, of course, is after the disconcerting rape scene with the red ball gags and the gimp. Rhames' character, Marsellus Wallace, responds, “Naw, man. I'm pretty fuckin' far from okay.”

To Lisa, the curious junior psychoanalyst I'd known for three days, I responded, “I'll be fine.”

In a train car, on the way to Rome, I stayed awake all night talking war and international affairs with an Australian
accountant. I'd been traveling with him and an American girl for two weeks and he hadn't really probed about the war or what I thought about it.

As the train clacked along the tracks, we played cards, and I told him about how, in the beginning, a reasoning, moral person could have wanted to do the things I'd done, and see the things I'd seen. Crossing the Italian frontier, I told him about the Iraqi people I'd met like Ammar, Mohamed, and Waseem. I tried to convey to him how awkward it was at times for the Iraqis to work with the Americans. And I recounted how Hameed had threatened to make the RPG gunner eat his own guts. After that I glanced over at the sleeping girl next to us. She looked peaceful. I dealt the stack of cards and continued on. I tried to explain to him Collins' seemingly unquenchable lust for battle—and how even that had seemed to wane, or
soften
, toward the end. I told him about Croom and what a great guy he was. And I explained to him how Croom had once told me he'd lost his faith in God on 9/11. A few hands later I turned the deck over and said, “Your turn to shuffle, dude.”

In Rome I met a sergeant with a group of American soldiers who were partying away their leave from the American base at Vicenza. Their closely cropped hair had given them away. Over the din of a noisy bar, we talked about Iraq. He'd been in Kirkuk around the same time I was there, and we talked about how shitty things were getting in northern Iraq. We tried to come up with some names of people we knew in common, but couldn't think of any.

Talking to him, I'd never felt more awkward—there with my longish hair, backpacking around a continent with no
responsibility—talking to those who were preparing to go back to war. I felt out of place again, like some hirsute hippie.

I wanted to feel
in
place again, to be comfortable somewhere. I think that's why a part of me was trying to get back to the Middle East—to the Arab world—to the only place I really knew how to
be
. I knew how things worked there and I knew where I stood there.

I took another train to the Italian port of Brindisi, this time alone. I was being pulled southeast by what was becoming a sort of tractor beam. Along the route through the Campanian countryside I talked to no one. I just let my mind drift. I thought back on how I'd done. I was twenty-five years old and I'd been a combatant in two wars already. I thought about how, as a kid, it was something I'd always envisioned—wanted, needed. But somehow it hadn't turned out the way I thought it would. I never thought that battle was something that could drive a spike into my psyche the way it had.

I always thought it would have been easier. The soul-crushing phenomenon of fear before combat had been unexpected. It had left me more afraid of dying than ever. The idea terrifies me now. It keeps me awake at night. Before the wars, the thought of not being alive had warranted no more than a detached shrug. Now I could see that it would always be in the forefront of my mind—that it would be evident in everything I did. The closeness—that
proximity
—to death, or just the possibility of it, day in and day out seemed to have invaded my soul like a creeping disease. As the train clipped through southern Italy, I stared out the window.

From Brindisi I took an eight-hour ferry ride to Greece. Halfway across the Adriatic, I started dozing. There were
Greeks sitting, lounging, and talking around me. I allowed their language to put me to sleep. They were discussing something funny because they kept laughing while I lay there with my eyes closed and my book on my chest. After a while, though, it seemed like their conversation turned serious. It was a slight change in voice tone that I noticed. They began speaking
in Arabic:

The Baghdad taxi driver won't stop yammering at me. I see he wants help for the people in his car. He is quivering anxiously, pacing and pointing for me to inspect his cargo. I see that the trunk of his taxi is half open. I walk over to it and look inside. The first thing I notice is all the blood. Looking up at me is an Iraqi man wearing shorts and a t-shirt. His eyes are as big as plates and he looks terrified. He has been shot but I can't tell how many times. His face is pale and his teeth are chattering. He is lying in a pool of his own blood
.