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Spare Parts

Page 32

by Buzz Williams


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  rounds as they moved from crate to ready box. We learned to use prefire checklists, the way pilots did, to make the weapon ready. In addition to gun-specific training we became turret mechanics, optics techs, communications specialists, machinists, and electricians. We learned how to override sensors and jury-rig switches. We cleared jams by daylight and flashlight, at rest and on the move, from the gunner’s seat and VC’s seat. For the first time we understood how to align the sights with the main gun barrel and the machine-gun barrel. All this before firing a single round.

  Once the firing started, we learned a whole new set of skills. No longer was success measured by simply getting rounds downrange; we had to hit targets . . . all sorts of targets. Armored vehicles with AP rounds. Trucks with HE rounds. Troops with the machine gun.

  We fired while stationary, moving forward and backward, accelerat-ing and decelerating, at slow speeds and high. We fired under the cover of tank ditches and berms and through the concealment of smoke. And we destroyed everything in our sights. Cpl. Ryder and I became born-again gunners.

  There were many more mistakes, slaps to the helmet, kicks in the ass, and hard lessons learned in the desert that summer. The hard work paid off at the end of ATD, back at Upshur, during the final formation. Capt. Downes promoted me to corporal and Staff Sgt.

  Nicholson presented me with a certificate of commendation for duty as the company master gunner. After the ceremony Staff Sgt. McGraw, the new Headquarters platoon sergeant, introduced me to Major Celeste, soon to be our new CO. It was my first salute and handshake with a major.

  “Good afternoon, sir.”

  “Congratulations, Cpl. Williams . . . Master Gunner.”

  “Thank you, sir. If you ever want an orientation to the LAV, I’m your man.”

  Staff Sgt. Nicholson smiled at my confidence. “You know, sir, in the fleet the master gunner is always the CO’s gunner.”

  Major Celeste concurred. “That sounds like a good policy to me.

  How about you, Williams?”

  “A damned good policy, sir.”

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  AUGUST 1993

  The platoon sergeants and commanders looked at me strangely when I entered the boardroom for my first predrill meeting. It had taken me three years, but I had finally made it to the central command where decisions are made that trickle down into the barracks, Ramp, classrooms, and ranges. At last I would see behind the curtain and get the unfiltered scoop.

  Major Celeste stood when I entered, greeting me with a handshake and personal escort to my seat.

  “Everyone, please welcome Cpl. Williams, our new master gunner.”

  Sgt. Krause looked at me particularly hard, and I smiled back, placing my notes in front. Staff Sgt. McGraw, our new company gunny, walked over and shook my hand. Although in the fleet for eight years he looked no older than I, and showed me respect I had never experienced from a staff NCO.

  “I’ll expect a personal gunnery lesson, Cpl. Williams,” he said,

  “when you have time.”

  Major Celeste gave each Marine the chance to react to the training schedule for the drill—rotate platoons through admin for record book checks . . . supply for new issue . . . medical for weigh-ins . . .

  the big classroom for MCI classes . . . everything but crewmen training . . . nothing about gunnery.

  My reaction turned heads.

  “Well, sir. This is a great training schedule for a headquarters company . . . but we’re a light armored infantry company.”

  All eyes and ears were on me.

  “Vehicle maintenance is listed as the default activity in between all our admin responsibilities . . . and gunnery training isn’t listed at all.”

  The room hummed from sidebar whispers.

  “Honestly, sir, I feel our priorities are ass-backward. . . .”

  Sgt. Krause pushed himself away from the table, offended.

  “Sir, we all agreed to the training schedule last month,” he said.

  “It’s fine the way it is.”

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  Major Celeste looked Krause in the eye. “I believe the master gunner has the floor, Sgt. Krause.”

  Taking full advantage, I stood up and addressed the group.

  “I need each platoon sergeant to identify their best gunners, and free them to work with me . . . they’ll be our platoon-level master gunners.”

  Again Krause resisted, talking around me to the major. “Sir, we have a maintenance stand-down this drill. . . . We need every body on the Ramp.”

  “Not true, sir,” Staff Sgt. Jackson clarified. “Williams and I worked out a system. All we need is three Marines per vehicle for four hours.”

  Again Sgt. Krause protested. “I don’t have three crewmen per vehicle—”

  “Sir, the plan requires three Marines, not three crewmen,” I said, interrupting Krause. “Sgt. Krause separates scouts and crewmen for training.”

  “Sir, I won’t have a corporal telling me how to run my platoon!”

  Major Celeste looked to Staff Sgt. Nicholson. “How do you weigh in here, Staff Sergeant?”

  “Master Gunner is a company-level billet, sir. . . . If it involves gunnery training, it’s his job to tell the platoon sergeants how to run the platoon.”

  “Seems to me if platoon sergeants were running their platoons right, Sgt. Krause, we wouldn’t need Williams,” Major Celeste con-cluded.

  That silenced Krause for the remainder of the meeting.

  That meeting was the beginning of the end for Sgt. Krause. When his contract ended he declined reenlistment, no doubt partly because of me. Although I seldom agreed with Sgt. Krause, part of me missed him after he left. He was the last remnant of the original tribe—of the veterans. His departure marked the end of an era.

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  During the next two years Major Celeste and Staff Sgt. McGraw empowered me more and more as company master gunner. Working closely with the I & I staff, I made dramatic revisions to the policies regarding vehicle maintenance and gunnery. On the wash ramp, fire hoses replaced garden hoses. In the maintenance bay, crewmen and scouts worked side by side with the I & I mechanics to check and service the vehicles. Platoon master gunners received the same intensive training from me that I had received from Staff Sgt.

  Nicholson. They in turn trained the gunners under their charge.

  At any given time, whether on the Ramp or in the field, gun crews trained, drilled, and tested to increase proficiency. Major Celeste spread our allotment of rounds for the year over several drills, allowing us more time on the ranges, focusing more on quality of skill demonstrated than quantity of rounds expended. Seldom did our guns go down for malfunctions, but when they did I had my head in the turret, identifying the deficiency and correcting it with training.

  When all the gunners and vehicle commanders were qualified, we trained drivers . . . then scouts . . . then mechanics, corpsmen, and even admin pogues. Sometimes I patted backs and sometimes I slapped helmets off heads, but everyone in the company knew what I was about and they respected me for it. All I ever wanted to do was to improve training, improve instruction, and hopefully improve the next generation’s chances of victory and survival in the next war.

  Things were never better for me as a man or Marine than during my last year with the unit. The awards, plaques, and commenda-tions came monthly. I was happily married to Gina, up for promotion to sergeant, and at the top of my game as master gunner. No one was more surprised than Major Celeste, a lifer in the Corps, to learn I wasn’t reenlisting.

  We had shared many days and nights in the turret as VC and gunner, talking about God, Country, and Corps. Two years’ worth.

  By my last drill, June of 1995, I was as close to Major Celeste as I had been to Sgt. Moss or Dougherty way back when. Our last conversation was memorable. A handshake. A hug. A salute. One last
chance to reconsider. And the litany of reasons why I couldn’t—to 284

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  start a family with Gina . . . begin graduate school . . . add an extra weekend each month to my life. They were easy and light and true, although very much incomplete.

  There were others—difficult and heavy . . . and unfortunately true. They were buried in a place, deep within, where I seldom went. Ashamed and embarrassed, I omitted any talk of compulsive rituals, flashbacks, and nightmares. He never saw me labor over my footlocker, cringe on the rifle range, fight my demons in the trenches, or lock my legs under the seat. Occasionally, though, he would catch me, unresponsive and staring, lost in that other world of sand and sweat, smoke and fire, fear and death. Those things, I thought, at least for the time, were better left unsaid.

  EPILOGUE

  IT HAD BEEN FIVE years since my last nightmare, and even longer since I last looked at my Gulf War photo album, or rummaged through my seabags in the basement. After all that time I had finally managed to put my combat demons to rest. Until the around-the-clock media coverage during the buildup to Operation Iraqi Free-dom woke them again, and my nightmares returned with a vengeance.

  Sometimes they were about the trench, while others were mixtures of my personal combat experiences and the battlefield coverage I was viewing on television.

  Choosing not to watch, listen, or read the news was not an option for me. Breaking bulletins interrupted, preempted, or crawled across prime-time television shows. The radio, which once had helped me unwind during my hour-long commute, was now saturated with war hype and wound me tighter than ever. At work armchair generals would visit me in the office waving the daily newspaper, pointing, and asking things like:

  “Did you see the latest?”

  “Can you believe it?”

  “What do you think about this?”

  My reputation as a proud Marine kept me from answering honestly:

  “No, I don’t want to see the latest.”

  “No, I don’t want to believe it.”

  “I try not to think about that.”

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  In January 2003 my war-related anxiety was building momentum. There were periods in which I would stay awake for days.

  When I did sleep, it would only be for three or four hours at a time, leaving me tired and depressed. I arrived at work late, left early, and in between spent little time thinking about anything but war—not the best circumstances for the principal of a high school.

  My first bout with posttraumatic stress had lasted from 1991

  through 1998, complicated and slowed by my ignorance, embarrassment, and denial. Back then I didn’t understand my experiences in the Marines and the Gulf War, or their effect on me—at least not the way I did now. Now, I didn’t know what to expect.

  Following the Gulf War I had resisted reintegrating back into civilian mode after my drill weekends. During the twenty-eight days of the month when I wasn’t drilling, I remained locked in the Marine mindset. While many reservists allowed their hair to grow as long as possible during the month between drills, I maintained my regulation buzz cut, abiding by the rigid standards of grooming and dress that the Marine Corps requires.

  I was proud to be a Marine. Most everything I owned had the Marine logo ironed, embroidered, stuck, taped, or tattooed onto it.

  While running I listened to audiocassettes of drill instructors singing cadence. My alarm clock was programmed to wake me with the sound of a bugle blasting reveille. Dinnertime was called “chow time,” going to bed was “hitting the rack,” and ooh rah was a part of my everyday vocabulary.

  Gina was often amused by uncanny ability to identify strangers as present or former Marines. I’d approach them at the mall, movie theater, or supermarket, and strike up a conversation about Parris Island, Lejeune, their war, or mine. Our talk would usually last longer than Gina could tolerate, and she’d politely pry us apart by saying something like “OK, boys, wrap it up. . . . We have to be going now.” She thought it odd how complete strangers could have anything to talk about. But there are no strangers among former S P A R E P A R T S

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  Marines. Those chance meetings, for me, were like reunions with long lost brothers.

  Publicly, it is easy to filter out the best parts of being a Marine and show them to the world—the sense of honor, pride, and camaraderie. But there is another side of being a Marine—the side that knows the ugliness of war—and with it comes fear, rage, agony, and sorrow. I once believed it possible to ignore these feelings, which left them just beneath the surface of my consciousness, a loaded gun ready to fire flashbacks and nightmares without warning. Many triggers had awaited me in the days, weeks, months, and years that followed my return from Kuwait.

  The first month I was back, I found myself standing on Gina’s front porch in Baltimore, with a front-row seat to the Fourth of July fireworks downtown as family and friends cheered the flashes and booms. I silently cursed those fireworks, because the rockets’ red glare looked like those I had seen in my sights just weeks before, and the bombs bursting in air made me want to take cover. The Fourth of July has since become one of my least favorite holidays—

  now I go to bed after tucking in the kids, and hope to fall asleep before the sun sets and the first fuse is lit.

  After that Fourth of July our annual family vacation in Ocean City, Maryland, became the next trigger. My first step onto the beach—with sand shifting beneath my shoes, a blinding reflection from the sun, and the heat radiating upward—took my mind back into the desert. I recall Gina’s cousins, who were only children at the time, innocently asking me to dig holes in the sand so they could play soldier. Instead I chose to focus on reading a book, which would become my strategy for coping with the beach for several years to come.

  My visits to the world of combat are never more real than when I watch war movies. Gina has seen how deeply those movies affect me, and she asks why I put myself through it. What I tell her is that I want to see if Hollywood got the details right, or that I am interested in the historical significance, or some other half-truth. The reality is that there is a part of me that needs to get back in touch with the raw emotion that those movies bring out. It’s as if my anxiety 288

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  about the war builds inside over time, like a volcano filling with pressure. I have spent many nights alone in my family room, after Gina and the kids are in bed, watching war movies and crying openly as the volcano within me erupts.

  My choice to leave the Marine Corps Reserves had not been an easy decision. The pressure to reenlist is anything but subtle. Senior Marines put guilt trips on me, saying that I was fucking the company over, letting them down, and setting a bad example for the younger Marines. Then there was the formal “counseling” from the career planners, who first tried the retirement angle, and then the promotion angle, and when neither worked, they, too, resorted to brow-beating me like the other jarhead lifers.

  While emptying my wall locker and footlocker for the last time, I had felt the emotions welling up inside me, which I had held back only because other Marines were in the squad bay. Before leaving I walked the camp nostalgically, making one last visit to the big classroom, the headquarters boardroom, and the Ramp. The LAVs rested quietly there, beneath their thick green canvas tarps, like sleeping beasts, waiting to be awakened next drill. Driving across the Upshur bridge for the last time, my mind weighed heavily with relief and regret.

  I hadn’t been sure then that leaving the Marines was the right decision. It was a relief to live without the burden of monthly drills.

  But I regretted leaving the Corps before putting the war behind me. I had thought that each drill that passed helped redefine me as a Marine. I had counted on my promotions in rank and responsibility to distance me from the war and ease my anxiety problems. It had never dawned on me that drilling each month was my problem.


  That realization, like many others, would only come in time.

  At school the lines between my identity as a teacher and Marine were blurred. After two years of running the boot camp program as S P A R E P A R T S

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  an alternative physical education class for the students with conduct disorders (the fuck-you kids), it had evolved into a Young Marines program—the official youth program of the United States Marine Corps.

  By 1995 my civilian role as commanding officer of the Young Marines program had surpassed that of physical education teacher, giving me reason to wear my Marine uniform to school more often than my gym shorts. I supervised daily routines, like raising and lowering the flag, taught military science classes, ran social-skills counseling groups, coordinated weekly community service field trips, and led outdoor adventure trips in which we climbed rocks and rappelled down cliffs. Young Marines was the most popular ex-tracurricular activity in the school—and the most effective means of touching those students who were hard to reach.

  In September of 1995 I enrolled in the master’s program in school counseling at Johns Hopkins University. The counselors at Kennedy Krieger, who’d gone through the program, told me a few things to get me started: which professors to take and which to avoid, the major counseling theories, and the pioneers in the field. But they forgot to mention an important requirement for becoming a therapist.

  Dr. Miller was the first to break the news to me, as we were all sitting in a circle facing each other on the first day of class. “The first thing to know about group therapy is what it feels like to be in group therapy,” he told us.

  The group therapy class opened my eyes to many parts of myself that I hadn’t understood in the past, especially the recurring trench nightmare. Dr. Miller encouraged me to talk about feeling unprepared, incompetent, and powerless during the war—the themes he believed were fueling my nightmares. These feelings were difficult to admit, even to myself, but by the end of the semester my conscience was purged. Dr. Miller’s theory was that such intense feelings needed to come out one way or another—consciously through talking about them or unconsciously by dreaming about them. Dr.

 

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