by Larry Minear
—Maj. Matthew Currier Burden*
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“We always had access to phones and the Internet where people could e-mail home,” confirms one New Hampshire guardsman. “I could e-mail home multiple times a day. A lot of people had digital cameras. This is probably the most photographed conflict and the most communicated conflict there has ever been. I know if something happened to me, people already knew about it quickly, which is good and bad. It’s good to stay in contact because you see the news on TV and it’s negative, negative, and negative. All you see is just the bad stuff happening.” In an example of the potential of communications from the field to correct information otherwise available, he shared with his e-mail network his personal elation that, despite threats, 70 percent of the Iraqi electorate had turned out to vote. “To me that made it all worthwhile and told the world, ‘Guess what? The Iraqis do want us here.’”31 For Army Capt. Ryan P. Aument, the use of a Kevlar helmet as a ballot box for a 2003 election for the council in a town near Kirkuk is a symbol of constructive change—and the military’s role in it—that he took pleasure in sharing with his Listserv.32
Communications such as these had overwhelmingly salutary results among those on the receiving end. Internet-based telephone calls kept families in touch with the day-to-day lives of loved ones, even though soldiers often sanitized what they shared. Regular contact is particularly important for children, psychologists report, who are bearing the burden of having one or, in some instances, both parents absent and in harm’s way. Cyberspace also gives soldiers an up-to-date sense of what is happening at home, although sometimes the news is unsettling. “The constant communication makes for fewer unpleasant surprises after couples reunite, though there can be a downside,” observed one reporter. “It brings the anxieties of the living room into the war.”33
Sgt. Todd B. Walton of the Nebraska National Guard found it stressful to learn from his wife, at home in Kearney with his thirteen-year-old daughter and fifteen-month-old son, that “there was moisture on the bathroom floor.” He maintained that the stress he experienced as a medic accompanying convoys around Fallujah was minimal compared with his home-related stress.34 Soldiers worry a lot about their families, Army Lt. Col. Rick E. Mayes points out. “I was able to call home almost every day. If all of a sudden your son or daughter gets in trouble, gets involved in a fight at school, or gets hurt, you want to know it as soon as possible. You feel helpless over there because there’s nothing you can do.”35
Instant communication links between soldiers and their families offer a coping mechanism of enormous potential. “We went over there,” recalls Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Samuel Main of his deployment to Iraq, “thinking I was going to be able to call home once a month.” Two months after arrival in Iraq on September 11, 2003, however, and aware for the first time of how dangerous his posting was, “I didn’t think I was going to come back home. So I told my wife, ‘This is worse than we had planned for.’ So I promised I’d call her every chance I get. ‘If I have an hour of sleep and I can make it to a phone, I’ll call you.’ Once I came to terms with that, everything got easier for me. Once I realized that I’m a goner and may not make it back and I would call home more often, my attitude changed. I was sleeping better and I was eating better because I had come to terms with, ‘My, we’re going to die.’”36
From the standpoint of military officialdom, direct communications between the war theater and the home “theater” were a mixed blessing. While e-mail access 24/7 represents a tremendous boost to morale, notes one officer in the New Hampshire National Guard, it posed “a huge challenge” for him as commander. There were occasions when word of injuries or deaths spread among families back home before the authorities were prepared to release it, leading officials to close down Internet access until affected family members could be notified. Such interruptions in information flow themselves created anxiety. “If we’d had a tough few days,” recalls Main, “I might not call home,” alarming his family with his silence.
On one occasion, the authorities, concerned lest news of a unit’s departure for the United States leak through cyberspace to the enemy, kept the particulars from the soldiers themselves. Officials were also concerned that domestic issues—the health of a parent, the moodiness of a spouse, the latest temper tantrum of a child—might interfere with demanding task of soldiering. Liabilities notwithstanding, concluded a National Guard official, the communications potential of the Internet was “excellent and allowed people to communicate back and forth and stay in touch.”37 Tyler Mueller, an Army tank driver whose unit served as a leading element in military maneuvers in Iraq, noted the unusual difficulties of keeping in touch precisely because their forward position prevented them from calling home.38
Sgt. Tina M. Beller, a U.S. Army reservist stationed in Baghdad with a civil affairs unit, lived through a mortar attack on the Green Zone in September 2004 that killed a number of her cohorts. In the evening, she e-mailed her parents in Pennsylvania, anticipating that they would have seen pictures of the attack and be alarmed. They received her communiqué on September 11. “I am just writing to let you know that physically I remain unharmed. Emotionally and mentally, is a different story.” Her superiors, she explains, “told me not to write home about it. ‘We don’t want it all over the Internet.’ But even talking to all the right people isn’t helping the heavy weight I am carrying on my tightened chest. And somehow, writing usually does.”39
In 2005, the military tightened operational security regulations to limit veterans’ access to the Internet and avoid transmittal of sensitive information. Unrestrained blogging and the posting of photos and other material on websites, the Pentagon said, “needlessly place lives at risk and degrade the effectiveness of our operations.”40 In May 2007, further restrictions prohibited access by the troops to thirteen communal websites, including You-Tube, “to protect operations from the drain on computer capacity.”41 Even so, information flow remained far more regular and rapid than in earlier conflicts.
Improvements in technology have not only accelerated awareness of developments in Afghanistan and Iraq, but have also helped knit together networks of engaged family members and citizens in the United States. The websites of groups such as Veterans for America, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Military Families Speak Out, and the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network contain a rich array of regularly updated information about pending legislation and changes in regulations, recent reports on items of interest such as protective gear, announcements of workshops and conferences being held around the country, and news about the progress of the wars themselves.
Interview
Tyler Benson (AFC2001/001/52131), Photographs (PH 07), VHP, AFC, LOC. Photograph © Linda Cullen, used with permission.
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Spec. Tyler Benson of the Minnesota National Guard’s 134th Signal Battalion, Bravo Company, answers questions from John Hines, a radio talk-show host on K102 (Clear Channel) radio in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
The interview took place in January 2005 at Camp Liberty, Baghdad, one of the largest military bases in Iraq and home to the Blackhawk helicopters that are used for combat operations and for evacuating the wounded. Seated on the roof of the brigade headquarters, Benson and Hines look out over the sheet metal that served as a barrier against incoming mortars. In the background, a U.S. military communications tower tops Signal Hill.
Hines, along with Clear Channel executive and photographer Linda Cullen, were embedded in the Minnesota National Guard unit—the first instance, to Hines’ knowledge, in which non-broadcast personnel were permitted such access. While in Iraq, they interviewed approximately 150 soldiers. As part of Clear Channel’s “Operation Northern Lights,” a promotion intended to provide phone cards to Iraqi troops from Minnesota, interview excerpts and selected photos were broadcast back home and some were transmitted live to large screens in the Mall of America in Minneapolis.
Looking back on the interview in D
ecember 2008, Benson says, “I appreciated that these civilians from our area showed their support by coming over to Iraq and experiencing first-hand what we were going through.”
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COMMUNICATION AND THE ARTS
If the pace of communication between veterans and their families has accelerated, so too has the speed with which developments in the global war on terror are being processed by society as a whole. Arts critics have commented on the “cornucopia of works being done in the United States and Great Britain that approach Iraq from perspectives both political and personal.” One such stage play, The Rhode Island Project, is an amalgam of the stories of soldiers, families, and others touched by the Iraq war, drawn from a state in which the National Guard is the fourth-largest employer and has deployed some 4,000 troops to Iraq.42
Another play, The War Anthology, premiered by Denver’s Curious Theater, is an amalgam of pieces written by eight authors, each keyed to photographic images of combat over the years. “We’re not interested in making an anti-war movie,” explains dramaturge Bonnie Metzger. “This project is about using war photography to frame the question, “What does it mean to be a citizen in this country at this moment in time?”43
A third play, David Hare’s Stuff Happens, stars President George W. Bush (“I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation”) and Colin Powell (“Politicians start wars; soldiers fight and die in them”). The title is a quotation by Donald Rumsfeld, whose other lines include, “A war on terror. That’s good. That’s vague.”44 The Guardians, a play by Peter Morris with adumbrations of Abu Ghraib, opened in London and then again in New York City. Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul opened in New York in December 2001. “I didn’t imagine when I was working on the play,” Kushner said, “that by the time we produced it, the United States would be at war with Afghanistan.”45
Meanwhile, the movie-going public has visited and savored the conflicts through a variety of films. These include No End in Sight, Generation Kill, Redacted, Gunner Palace, In the Valley of Elah, and the aforementioned Fahrenheit 9/11. In the Valley of Elah “features real-life veterans of the Iraq war playing fictional characters who give voice to reasons for supporting the effort.”46 The reading public, too, has had choices. There has been an abundance of first-person accounts of the conflict, some of them listed in this book’s bibliography and enriching the book’s narrative. One veteran credits One Bullet Away with helping his girlfriend understand his war experience. Columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who has sponsored Iraq poetry contests for several successive years, reminds his readers, “throughout history, the most memorable accounts of war—from Homer to Wilfred Owen—haven’t been journalistic or historical, but poetic.”47 DOD has contributed to the production costs of reenacting Greek tragedies for the benefit of veterans struggling with issues of pain and loss.48
Over the years, photography as well as cinematography has been an essential means for connecting the American public with its wars. But here, too, there may be some special elements. Art critic Holland Cotter has described the war in Iraq as perhaps “the most intensively photographed war in history.”49 In Afghanistan as well as Iraq, the lens has been a powerful instrument, often wielded by the troops themselves. A number of low-budget documentaries which open up key issues for viewers include, in addition to Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company, two that have provided provocative materials for this book: The War Tapes, filmed by three members of the New Hampshire National Guard, and The Fog of War, featuring veterans from World War II and since.
What strikes knowledgeable observers of this flourishing of the arts is not simply the cornucopia of treatments of the conflicts, but the rapidity with which the artistic renditions are coming. “It takes about three years for events to shift from basic journalism to a deeper reflection on what they mean to the state of our nation and politics,” said Oskar Eustis, artistic director of New York City’s Public Theater, in April 2006. “We’ve watched in the last six months as America has awakened, not just about the war but about the administration’s attitude toward the war. There’s a greater urgency for people to grapple with, in cultural form, not just the events but what they mean.” While the Vietnam War was the subject of numerous plays, the difference, says Eustis, is that this new generation of plays is “coming faster,” appearing while the conflicts are still in progress.50
Is the media playing a more active—and perhaps a more negative—role in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts than in previous American wars? Has it been pursuing its own agenda? What effects has coverage had on the actions of the military and on public attitudes toward the Global War on Terror? More time and reflection is needed before such questions can be answered.
The unprecedented access enjoyed by the troops to Internet and phone links has given Americans an added source of information–perhaps even some alternative narratives—about what is taking place, a more up-close-and-personal sense of day-to-day developments, and, potentially, a greater awareness of the importance of the outcome. But here, too, questions remain. Why does increased information flow not result in greater public engagement in the conflicts, wider concern for their impacts on Americans—and, for that matter, on Iraqi civilians—and more assertive public demands for accountability on the part of political and military decision makers?
PART III
Reentry
Serving in Iraq, observed one veteran, represented “a fundamental transformation” of his life. Judging from the interview material, most of those on the front lines of the global war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan would whole-heartedly agree, although individuals would differ in what they identify as the positive and negative aspects of the experience and the overall balance between them. Chapter 9 examines the efforts of returning veterans as individuals to reestablish normalcy. Chapter 10 reviews the institutional resources available to them in negotiating that transition. Chapter 11 reviews comparisons veterans draw between the Global War on Terror and other American wars. Chapter 12 offers some of their thoughts on the meaning of their experience and the importance of seeing these events through veterans’ eyes.
NINE
Reestablishing Normalcy
In transitioning from Afghanistan and Iraq back to life in the United States, veterans have taken many different paths. Members of the active-duty forces have returned to military bases and surrounding communities, while those in the National Guard and Reserves have more typically repaired to their home areas. For some, the global war on terror represents the final chapter in military careers; for others, additional time will now be spent in the Guard or Reserves. For many with active-duty or reserve status, the possibility of another tour in Afghanistan or Iraq looms.
Yet however different the individual reentry trajectories and outcomes, certain elements are common to all. Virtually every veteran has found himself or herself making initial adjustments needed upon returning, reestablishing some sense of normalcy for the future, and reclaiming a sense of humanity after the in-theater experience.
FROM HELL TO HOME
The event was front-page news. “Nebraska National Guard troops returned from the Middle East this week to hometown welcomes that saw hundreds and thousands of their fellow Americans line the streets to cheer their return and thank them for their service. In Kearney and in Kimball, in Scottsbluff and Gering and Chadron, the troops were hailed by folks who wanted to shake their hands, to express their thanks and to say they were happy that most returned safely home.” The 1057th Light/Medium Truck Company of the Nebraska National Guard had been gone fifteen months and seven days, first for training at Fort Carson and then on to Kuwait and Iraq.1
Homecomings typically involved a tangle of emotions. The most common feeling was probably that of relief. Sgt. Michael A. Thomas of the Colorado National Guard, who served with a military police unit in Tallil, Iraq, described touching down in Bangor, Maine, early one morning en route home. “We were tired, hungry, and as desperate as we were to get to Co
lorado, our excitement was tainted with bitterness. While we were originally told our National Guard deployment would be mere months, here we were—369 days later—frustrated and angry.” Bitterness was transformed into gratitude by a contingent of veterans, including some who had served in Vietnam, from the Bangor VFW post, who had waited out a thirty-six-hour delay to embrace the returnees and thank them for their service and sacrifice.2
Many soldiers returned with a new or renewed sense of values, a deeper appreciation of family, community, and country, and new purpose and direction to their lives. Maj. Tracey Ringo, an African American medical doctor with the Ohio National Guard, was enormously positive about her experience in Iraq in 2004. “It’s the best work I have ever done.” Back in the United States, she finds, “The flag means so much more to me than it ever did before. I’ve always been patriotic, but even more so now.”3
For some, returning home was the mirror image of the process of deployment, which had involved progressing from the familiar to the unfamiliar almost overnight. For others, the process was more extenuated, reflecting the official view that decompression and reacclimatization should be approached gradually.
On his way back from Iraq, Petty Officer Samuel Main and his unit spent four or five days in “warrior transition” In Kuwait. “It’s so you can get used to a normal life again,” he explains. While the idea may have been a good one, he considers the actual arrangements “a total crock.” Even with the stopover in the region and an intermediate touchdown at his base in Mississippi, less than a week would elapse between leaving Anbar Province in Iraq and “sitting on my own bed in Oregon,” “It’s too fast!” he exclaims. As anxious as everyone else to get home, he would have been better off, he thinks, decompressing elsewhere and sparing his family the process.4