Crossings

by Jon Kerstetter

  The next day, Saturday, I phoned Collin and told her about my new orders. I started the conversation by saying how much I loved her and appreciated her, then dropped the bomb about my extended tour.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this, but my tour has been extended. I’m going to be here another six months or more.” There was no good way of saying it, so I just tried to get it across without much emotion. Collin was silent when I finished. I wondered if the line disconnected. When she responded, her disappointment was evident.

  “We had all counted on you to be home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Doesn’t the Army have other doctors?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s a shortage of flight surgeons.”

  She replied in a dry, unemotional voice that matched my own. “What do you want me to tell the kids?”

  “I will call them and talk to them,” I responded.

  We talked about the details of the extension, as many as I could give her, and she told me she would change her plans for the holidays. She didn’t cry, but I could tell her chin was quivering. Her conversation, or at least her words, didn’t leave the impression that she was angry or hurt, but I supposed she was at least a bit of both.

  “Please be careful,” she said, emphasizing each word.

  “I promise I will. You going to be okay?” When I said it, I knew it was a stupid question. Extended tours were never okay, not for soldiers or their families.

  “I’ll be fine,” she answered. “It’s just a little tougher than I expected.” I could hear her quiet sniffles through her words.

  “I know, honey. I appreciate you. Hang in there a bit longer. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” she said.

  Her voice cracked as we said goodbye. Years later, she would tell me that particular phone call was her lowest point in all my deployments and that she felt so alone and empty, as if I had abandoned her; but she also felt obligated to be stoic and supportive, even though garnering that support meant stretching her emotions near a breaking point. From her perspective, my extended deployment was like a dark hole without a bottom and there was no way of knowing if I would ever come back and what she would do if I didn’t.

  I phoned my children and told them the new plans. They all voiced their disappointment and were concerned about the back-to-back tours. As in my first tour, they all promised to watch after their mom as best they could and to pray for me and the other soldiers.

  Jordan was especially upset. She cried and told me she was going to call the president or whoever was in charge of the Army.

  “Oh, honey,” I said. “I love you so much. You can call whoever you want and I will be proud if you do, but I still have to do the mission.”

  “Dad, let somebody else go! I don’t want you to get hurt.” Her voice cracked and she spoke faster and more forcefully than she usually did.

  “I know, sweetheart. I promise I’ll take care of myself.”

  “But you’ve done enough,” she insisted.

  I didn’t answer. I just listened and let her cry. She had questions about where and how long I would be gone. I didn’t have the answers. I told her how proud I was of her and that I needed her love and prayers. She promised to pray for me every day and to write and encourage her mother. As we talked, she became less upset, but when we finally said goodbye, I could tell she was choking back tears. I was too. I wished I could have said “I’ll be home soon,” but I knew that wasn’t true. I also knew I was looking forward to my mission.

  As ordered, I stayed at Doha and joined an Army National Guard aviation unit headed to northern Iraq. Within a few days of their arrival, we moved from Doha to Udairi Army Airfield, at Camp Buehring in northern Kuwait, where their Apache pilots did a series of range fire exercises. The pilots and gunners were excited about the prospects of finally using their flight and combat training. I was excited too, because my new mission was exclusively in the role of a combat flight surgeon, which I had spent the larger part of my military career preparing for. During the two weeks of training and range firing at Udairi, I made myself known among the pilots and staff and worked with my medics and section sergeant to prepare for forward operations. I was the only physician and flight surgeon assigned to the battalion and felt the need to excel at my assignment. At night, I spent extra time in the gym to get myself into peak condition. When I could, I reread the flight surgeon regs as well as pertinent chapters in the NATO handbook, Emergency War Surgery. I rehearsed medevac procedures and aviation ops with the battalion medics. The time at Udairi infused me with the kind of excitement that I had had as a young college graduate getting my first real job. There was passion and enthusiasm, and I demanded perfection of myself and my medics.

  In the first week of October 2004, days before we left for Iraq, the Udairi chaplain held a special early-morning prayer service for units crossing the berm into Iraq. He offered the service several times a month and kept a log of all the units that attended. We had talked a few times, and he told me that for a voluntary service it was the most popular one, with the exception of Christmas Eve.

  The chapel was simple: one large room with a plywood floor, hundreds of folding metal chairs, and a large map on the wall with colored pushpins that marked the locations of forward operating bases in Iraq. A table with free literature about faith and hope rested slightly off balance against the back wall. Gray metal bookshelves filled with Bibles and pocket-size New Testaments stood near the entrance. A single wooden lectern with a hand-carved cross on its front stood on a slightly raised platform.

  A little before dawn, the chapel began to fill. As soldiers entered, they piled their weapons and Kevlar helmets at their feet. Soldiers released their load-bearing harnesses and their personal body armor from their shoulders. The unavoidable thud on the floor and the clanging on the metal chairs signaled the start of the service. It occurred to me that enemy soldiers probably held a religious service of their own sort, at the exact same time, with their own variety of weapons thumping on their own temporary wooden floor.

  After leading the congregation in singing “Amazing Grace,” the chaplain delivered a short sermon about courage and trusting God for all of our needs in the coming months ahead. He read from the 27th Psalm. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” The fumbling and stirring of the congregation ceased immediately.

  The chaplain emphasized these words: “The Lord is the stronghold of my life.” The stronghold, he said, was a place, both physical and spiritual, where warriors could stand and maintain their strategic advantage in battle. He also read from the 23rd Psalm, lingering on the part where God anointed David with oil, a symbol of blessing and preparedness. The oil of anointing had a special meaning for soldiers. It set soldiers apart from all other people. The sermon included a historical reference to Spartan warriors who, when preparing for war, rubbed olive oil into their skin and hair as protection against the harsh environment of war and as a symbol of their readiness for battle.

  As I listened, my mind drifted to other battle sermons I had heard during my first tour. I recalled the armory prayer in Iowa City on the eve of deployment, the prayers before boarding transport aircraft, and the prayers offered in makeshift chapels in tents. Military chaplains called on God to lead us into battle and keep us safe. Soldiers said “Amen” and made the sign of the cross knowing that everything they were about to do blatantly defied any notion of holiness or safety.

  When I heard a chaplain pray for blessings as we embarked for war, I always hesitated yet I always said “Amen.” I had no doubt that soldiers needed the stronghold of faith and that sometimes prayer was all you had to hold yourself together, but I also knew of soldiers who prayed and were injured or killed in battle. Blessings didn’t always make sense when it came to going into battle. Beyond my own weakness in faith, I figured my enemy sought the same blessings as I did and prayed for strength and courage and victory in just the same way. Did they feel the stronghold of faith and the assurance
of the anointing? Did they feel blessed?

  When the chaplain finished, he asked if anybody wanted to stand and pray. A skinny infantry soldier stood and asked the chaplain permission to pray. It struck me as peculiar—asking permission to pray, but the soldier was young, eighteen or nineteen and a private, the lowest ranking soldier in the Army, so he probably felt intimidated. The chaplain encouraged him. The soldier prayed: “God, my battalion is crossing the berm tomorrow morning. Can you make it so we all get home in one piece? Amen.” Two short sentences, then “Amen.” Then silence. Nobody else stood to pray. The chaplain closed the service by leading in the Lord’s Prayer. Soldiers gathered their weapons and left the chapel.

  I lingered a moment thinking about the service. The unsophisticated prayer of a private in the U.S. Army had cut directly to the heart of the issue of faith at war—control. It was central to military doctrine and command. Somebody always maintained control. No matter how small the duty or the sector of battle, some soldier always held control over a mission or a geographic slice of war. Control equated to combat victory and individual survival.

  When the soldier prayed for God to control the outcome of war, I saw it as asking God to deliver the blessing of control so we could all get home in one piece, in essence, a prayer for God to stack the odds in our favor and against the favor of our enemy. The prayer stopped me cold. It made me hesitate and doubt my faith. I wanted to believe in my heart that what the soldier was asking would come true, but I harbored a sort of practical cynicism that it would not. I had seen the countless body bags of several different wars, and I knew the outcome in Iraq was not going to turn out quite the way the private was asking. When I heard the prayer, I realized the simplicity of this soldier’s trust in God, and I wished I could trust so simply and powerfully. I admired the soldier. I did not think for a moment that his faith was baseless or that it rendered him weak. Rather, I feared that I had let my own faith harden, that I was no longer capable of pure faith and trust. His prayer gave me the sense that I had come to rely more on my own military instincts and medical skills rather than on the strength of prayer and the power of faith. I stood near the front lines of a battle and saw two sides, the side demanding faith and the side demanding control. I wanted both, but it was hard for me to comprehend how God allowed one soldier to die and another to live, or that some should lose limbs or eyes or sanity and some should lose nothing. Everything I knew told me that war distributed pain and death more like a game of roulette—a dealer spins the wheel and a ball falls on your number.

  —

  A soldier with a neck injury lay in a combat hospital during my first tour in Iraq. He had manned the 50Cal on point in a convoy proceeding west, near the Baghdad zoo. As his vehicle approached an overpass, he glanced to the sides of the concrete abutments to scan for threats. He caught a glint of sunlight that spanned across the road. It reminded him of how a nylon fishing line would catch a glint of the morning sun, as it did when his father took him fishing in Minnesota.

  As the Humvee approached the overpass, it became clear that the glint was a trip wire stretched across the road to trigger an IED. In an act of last-second thinking, the soldier threw himself backward on the top of the Humvee. The wire caught him at the top of his sternum. It scythed the skin from his neck, starting from his clavicles, then upward to the point of his chin. It ripped his neck open so his trachea was exposed. A ground medevac delivered him to a field hospital where surgeons stopped his bleeding and repaired his neck.

  The soldier told me that his grandmother prayed for him back home in Minnesota. He said how fortunate he was to have a grandma like that, and how prayer helped him survive. I agreed with him that it was good to have a praying grandma. I added that his training and his quick reaction time also helped save his life.

  I often thought about that incident whenever I went to chapel. It brought to bear the notions of fate and faith, my beliefs about control and circumstance. To me, it defined the precarious balance between the certainty and uncertainty of war. You could prepare for all the contingencies and feel like you were ready for anything, and then in a single moment, fortuitously, a wire could take your head. In the balance between faith and control, quick reactions seemed to be the key to survival—reactions in skill and reactions in faith.

  —

  A few days after the chapel service, the battalion’s pilots flew the Apaches and Black Hawks to the Qayyarah West forward operating base in northern Iraq, near Mosul. The rest of the battalion flew on two flights of C-130s.

  Qayyarah Airfield was located about two hundred miles north of Baghdad and thirty-five miles south of Mosul. Soldiers called it Q-West or Key West because its real name used too much guttural throat and tongue and they couldn’t say it without hacking up a small loogie. Calling it Key West also played on the absolute contradiction in meaning and geography. Key West, Iraq, had as much similarity to the city in Florida as the “Hanoi Hilton” in Vietnam had to a real hotel.

  Key West’s only claim to fame was its status as one of Saddam’s premier Air Force bases that housed Iraq’s first Soviet-made MiG fighter aircraft. In the initial wave of air attacks, American bombers reduced the base and its runways to craters and rubble. Within months of the ground assault on Iraq, Army engineers rebuilt the cratered runways so Q-West could function as a staging base for forward combat operations. It was renamed FOB Endurance, and endure was exactly what soldiers did there. Despite the endearing play on words, it ranked right up there in the top ten shitholes in Iraq. I had flown there several times during my first tour in 2003 when it was little more than a bombed-out dustbowl.

  By the time I got back to Key West during my extended second tour, the base had undergone a transformation that made it functional and perhaps even modern compared to what it was in 2003. Still, measured next to my first tour experiences, FOB Endurance left me longing for the more structured chaos of Baghdad. In addition to my specific feelings about Key West, I had formed definite opinions about desert warfare in general. The midsummer desert brought its intolerable scourge of heat that could suck oxygen and sweat from your body and leave you drained of energy and focus, but the winter desert brought its own kind of suck that was equally draining. Winter nights brought cold and rain. The temperatures varied so widely from day to night that the ground cycled back and forth between freezing and thawing. Tracks left by military vehicles changed from frozen ruts into cold mud that infiltrated soldiers’ boots and every piece of equipment and every hooch. In the daytime, the ruts filled with the drizzle of winter rain, forming thousands of interconnected puddles. At night the entire pockmarked surface of the ground would freeze again.

  Walking or running was not easy. Soldiers fell. They broke their ankles and dropped their weapons. In a few cases a fall caused an accidental weapon discharge that injured nearby soldiers and, in one case, killed a soldier. When soldiers drove vehicles over the frozen ruts, the constant jarring could even break teeth and cause compression fractures of vertebrae.

  The winter light projected a creepy gray pall over vehicles and aircraft, buildings and earth, muting whatever natural color they contained so they all appeared as dull and smoky objects. In the early morning, fog hung in the air like a limp, dirty curtain in an abandoned house. It played tricks on the eyes of aviators and flight surgeons, fooling them into seeing things that weren’t really there or into missing things that were real and dangerous. Horizons dissolved in winter’s haze, as did wires and obstacles. Pilots fought the weather, trying to avoid crashing—a war within a war.

  Beyond the physical demands of the winter, it played havoc with time, stretching and transforming it into unwieldy blocks—four, twelve, twenty-four hours—rendering each stagnant hour cold and unbearable. And in those stifling blocks, time became as much an enemy as any Iraqi insurgent. Soldiers became bored and agitated, wanting to engage a mission when none could be engaged. They moved at the pace of sedentary breathing, working their knives and weapons over and over, rehearing
their protocols and procedures. They worked their bored and weathered minds or their dreams of home and pictures of their kids and spouses.

  If soldiers couldn’t work their minds or dreams, they worked their authority over specific pieces of war they were assigned. They argued among each other, even among themselves, often second-guessing their own actions or the actions of other soldiers. Some aviators argued over who got priority for attack missions. I argued with a doctor in another unit over use of the medivac helicopter. He wanted it under his control. “That,” I said, “is bullshit.” My platoon sergeant tried to argue with me about how to prep a rescue mission. I did a field inspection of his medic bag and when I found it packed without the surgical dressings I had ordered, I threw it twenty feet through the air. The contents went flying. I opened his bottle of Tylenol and poured the pills in the dirt. “This is a goddamned war, not a Boy Scout camp,” I yelled. “Pain killers don’t stop bleeding. Now get your shit together or reassign yourself to the DFAC.”

  —

  If winter brought extra challenges or just downright grief, it also brought an extra connection to home and family. Thanksgiving and Christmas were alive with packages: two loaves of banana bread from a ninety-year old volunteer from the VA hospital in Des Moines, Iowa; four hundred individually wrapped monster cookies from a rural church of a friend; hundreds of cards from schoolkids asking about camels or snakes or spiders. Support groups sent hundreds of DVDs, bags of jerky, and tins of flavored coffee. Magazines came in all shapes and topics: biker magazines with centerfolds of Harleys and their half-naked riders, Motor Trend, Food &Wine, and Reader’s Digest. Somebody thought it was a good idea to send a copy of Better Homes and Gardens.