It's My Country Too
Page 36
When I taught martial arts classes, I did speak up. And our Marines listened, spreading out across an eighth-acre sand pit. We warmed up to earsplitting whistle blasts. While I demonstrated ground-fighting moves, I felt sand work its way down my shorts, and thought of nothing but the class. I needed to tire them—and myself—out.
So we grunted and punched and kicked as the Predators droned overhead. We did bull-in-the-ring drills, where one person took turns fighting everybody, because—if ever we needed this—the enemy wouldn’t pair up according to size.
During the monotone of knife strikes and punches and timing bouts of wrestling, I sometimes looked up at the star-pricked sky. Our Land of the Free was eight thousand miles away. I wanted to teleport up and away. Instead, I taught men to throw each other’s solid weight. I only came up to their shoulders, but my low center of gravity worked to my advantage. They orbited me, watching, learning.
And in the moments that weren’t bogged in the slow-time of attacks or repairs, they could afford to be kids again. The Marines continued their wrestling carnival after we shut off the floodlight. They clowned in their tents, wrapped legs around necks, body-slammed each other on cots. One busted a cauliflower ear on the wooden deck. Marines hung off Dyjak, our maintenance platoon’s Polish giant. He laughed, still able to move. He could carry refrigerator-sized air conditioners a hundred yards across our compound. In a slight Polish accent he called me ma’am. Someone snaps a picture of the two of us flexing our biceps. I’m a foot shorter, a hundred pounds lighter: the dwarf.
My Marines reminded me of my brothers and their friends, of the roving packs of kids at the lightly supervised day camps and after-school programs of my suburban childhood. I could play and rest with them.
A buddy sent me a skateboard, and I spent evenings trying to ollie on a piece of plywood. Two of our Marines rode unicycles. We recited scenes from Homestar Runner, the data platoon’s favorite web comic, and acted in the radio sergeant’s video parodies of Budweiser commercials. Hashimoto danced, raving with Twizzlers up his nose. Was my youth or my rank or my gender the key to my entrée, or the fact that I didn’t have a need to prove my brass balls like some males felt they did?
I may have indulged them too much. I pretended not to notice the porn rife on flash drives, instead focusing on the spreadsheets also saved there. When the maintenance Marines taped up Playboy and Maxim girls, I joked about getting my own corner for David Duchovny and Heath Ledger. I have three younger brothers in real life; in Iraq, it felt like I had over thirty.
One of the lance corporals had a birthday that summer, after we got the switchboard back up. Our wire platoon finagled a chocolate fudge cake from the chow hall. They smeared icing on the birthday boy’s cheeks: streaks of war paint. In the dark, they knifed open green chemlights, and sprayed each other with neon, laughing.
Until the next round of fireworks, we were safe.
Sylvia Bowersox
(1965–)
U.S. Army
Sylvia Bowersox first deployed to Iraq in 2003–2004 as a broadcast journalist with the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul. Her assignments took her around the country, but much of her time was spent in Baghdad, at Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters. She deployed twice more to Iraq as a press officer assigned to the U.S. Embassy Baghdad public affairs office, and later to the Special Investigator General for Iraq (SIGIR). She holds a BA in English Literature from San Francisco State University and a master’s degree in creative writing from California State University, Chico, where she lives with her veteran husband and her black Labrador service dog, Timothy. The essay below was originally published in O-Dark-Thirty, the literary journal of the Veterans Writing Project.
This War Can’t Be All Bad
This war can’t be all bad. We sing karaoke on Mondays and Wednesdays and sit by the pool behind Saddam’s Presidential Palace after work and smoke cigarettes. By midnight we are watching others smoke cigarettes and drink and jump off the high dive naked. Jokes that any teenage boy would roll his eyes at explain the meter-wide butt-shaped flattening of the sand bags behind your buddy’s trailer. It’s another episode of “Operation Green Card Get Me Out of Here Sex,” and today the happy contestant was the Kurdish woman who works in his office. By dawn KBR, that American multinational corporation providing support services to our war, is doing our laundry and by day we go to meetings where the Iraqi employees cry with fear over the sentence of death imposed on them by the insurgents for the crime of working for us here at the Embassy.
This war can’t be all bad. We get visited by senators, representatives, and university professors who arrive by night to write books, collect hazard pay, and earn their sand cred. We acknowledge their positions and provide thank you notes for the well-meaning people in their districts who send us collections of the worst books and magazines ever published. We get mail from the trailer behind the palace and buy paintings from the PX whose creators rarely sign their work. We buy rugs made by children imported from somewhere else and purchase Saddam Hussein watches at the Hajji Mart from the smiling man in the washed out dishdasha until the whole thing was blown up by that suicide bomber on the same day that other suicide bomber blew up the Green Zone Café and all the people in it. We always get our hair done in the palace by three liberated Iraqi women in tight jeans and a KBR employee from San Diego. We play piano and guitar for parties and eat Chinese food at the “Bad Chinese Food” restaurant until it was closed because of the chickens hanging in the toilets and that guy who got hepatitis. Nobody notices the massage place above the kitchen but everybody knows that there are no happy endings there. And yesterday afternoon the general’s translator told us over lunch that the young female translator who helped us in Mosul was shot dead outside the gate on her way home from work.
This war can’t be all bad. We get good food, except for that week when the delivery trucks were delayed by too much death, that week we ate MREs and multi-use potato dishes. Now we get yummy food; we get mint chip ice cream and avocado salads and made to order omelets and lattes by our Pakistani cooks, and catered parties with martinis at noon and beer and wine and music under the awning and pizza in the parking lot and steak and crab on Thursdays. We only have to hide under our tables and desks when rockets land in the courtyard.
We get to hang out of windows celebrating football and soccer and gossip about who is doing what to whom and how. We go on dates at the Blue Star Café and talk to friends a million miles away on our cell phones and have screaming debates about fixing the country. We watch the Academy Awards and the Grammys and the Daily Show and we get up early to watch the election and stay up late to watch the game and I got cake on my birthday and flowers when I sang, and I always haggled over prices with the black clad ladies minding the bathrooms and everyone always politely listens when an old Iraqi man tells us he is afraid for his life. Two weeks later someone asks me if I have seen him.
This war can’t be all bad. I got here by showing up at my Army Reserve center in California in time to jump aboard the Baghdad bus with my unit and here I am, a thirty something Army broadcast journalist with an M16 on my back and a Sony Video camera in my hands doing television stories for the American Forces Network and the Pentagon Channel. I live in a trailer behind the palace, take a Blackhawk to work and get to hang out with reporters from the western and Iraqi media. Members of our group operate cameras at press conferences with Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor and military spokesman for the Coalition Forces General Mark Kimmet, and when we were under a credible kidnapping threat we got to walk around the office with our M16s loaded.
This war can’t be all bad. We watch DVDs on huge TVs and roll over and go back to sleep during alerts. We get to eat at the outpost restaurants in the Green Zone and laugh at that guy in the gorilla suit and buy toys and jewelry from the locals and feel good about ourselves for spreading shoes and pencils and candy and democracy and by sending emails and keeping blogs and taking pictures. Sometimes,
one of us, in a fervor of hopeful, democratic consumerism, jumps the fortified fence to go shopping in the Monsour district. And sometimes the shopper even comes back and sometimes that shopper even shows me pictures of their field trip and feeds me sweets from the shops. And the music at the Embassy memorial services is always beautiful and the deceased always looks so happy in their memorial pamphlet picture.
This war can’t be all bad. Because of it, all of our resumés look great and will find us high-paying jobs back home and everyone here thanks me personally for giving them their freedom and everyone at home thanks me for my service and I get to mourn in silence. We get to drive cars and pick up journalists at Checkpoint Three and every American wants a pet Iraqi and every Iraqi wants a pet American and it is not even strange anymore when you know someone who has been killed, kidnapped, or kidnapped and killed.
This war can’t be all bad. The pundits should know that God is taken care of here. We have church on Sunday, synagogue on Friday, prayer groups on Tuesday, witness services on Wednesday, a Muslim prayer rug lives behind a screen in the chapel under the ninety-nine names of Allah. Buddhists meditate alone and the Wiccan stays indoors on Saturdays with her boyfriend. Someone said to someone in the bomb shelter next to the parking lot during an attack that Mormons do their best work in war zones, and I believe it. The fun of it all is that we all get to boss the Iraqis around and feel important by telling them what we are going to do for them and what is good for them and we never have to take no for an answer and we always assure our diplomats that we have Iraqi buy-in and our diplomats always assure their secretaries that they have Iraqi buy-in and their secretaries always assure the President that they have Iraqi buy-in and the President always assures the American People that we have Iraqi buy-in and the American People don’t care. And the Iraqi who works in your office and thanks you personally for granting him his freedom from Saddam Hussein plants IEDs on the roadways by moonlight while the movie theater downstairs plays Oceans Eleven six time a week and Breaker Morant twice and later in the Big Office someone important takes notes for the eventual PowerPoint presentation as a man pleads for us to do something about the Christian genocide and mentions in passing that there are only eighty-five Jews left in the country.
This war can’t be all bad. Big men growing weapons from their armpits give us protection when we go on missions in the Red Zone and we get to feel like celebrities in large white SUVs as these hunks and their guns open our doors and scan sectors while we gather phrases for government documents from obsequious Iraqi officials who become glorious resistance fighters after we go home. On our days off we play volleyball and horseshoes and Marco Polo and on the 4th of July we eat too much and feel good about ourselves, sing in the chorus and tape together empty water bottles for the “Empty Water Bottles Taped Together” raft race. We also hide in the basement or under our beds or not at all during rockets attacks on those days. We can’t be the ones to die, not on those days.
This war can’t be all bad. The President’s plan for success in Iraq is working and we don’t even need to know what that plan is this week and Zal once stopped me in the hallway to tell me he saw me perform last night in the Baghdad Idol semi-finals and what a talented singer he thought I was and I shook hands with Colin Powell, Condi Rice, John McCain, Senator Barry Obama, Senator John Kerry, Governor Jeb Bush, a beauty queen, Geraldo Rivera, an actor who used to play Superman on TV and some folks with earnest smiles that I had never heard of. I also exercised in the same gym and ran on the same dusty track behind the palace with Dave Petraeus and waited in line to see President Bush when he came to Baghdad and the soldiers assigned to AFN, who had to clean the blood off of Kimberly Dozier’s cameras, didn’t know who she was.
We all had cameras and took pictures of people around the palace and Iraqis around the rubble and ordered clothes from Gap.com and condoms from Drugstore.com and DVDs and yoga mats from Amazon.com and partied at the British Embassy, enjoyed Pizza Night at the Italian Embassy, danced with the Ukrainian ambassador and laughed at the Iraqi women who wore all the makeup ever made all at the same time all the time, and men who thought we were in Washington and wore dark grey and black wool suits and went to redundant meetings and car bombs went off in the middle of Iraqis waiting in crowds to get in to see us and the pictures of dead Americans hanging from a bridge frightened little children alone at night watching television.
This war can’t be all bad. Once you’ve been there you’ll be back again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and then Iraq will live in your dreams and be the most exciting horrible thing to ever take over your life and then you will have the right to declare with a clear conscience and a steady mind and the moral sense born out of 9/11, and YouTube video clips, and statements from the Dixie Chicks, and Sean Penn and Ted Nugent’s guitar and Cindy Sheehan’s campground and the Occupy Movement’s rants, and Obama’s mother and my mother and your mother and all mothers, whether or not, all and all, with all things considered, in the conflict between good and evil, lock, stock and barrel, under the eyes of the Global War on Terror, the mind of God, Osama Bin Laden’s ghost and the sinking economy, this war can’t be all bad.
Brooke King
(1985–)
U.S. Army
Brooke King, from Tampa, Florida, deployed to Iraq in 2006 and served as a wheeled vehicle mechanic, machine gunner, and recovery specialist. Wife of a fellow veteran and mother to twin boys who were conceived in Iraq, King began writing about her unique experiences as a way to cope with PTSD. She has a bachelor’s degree from Saint Leo University and an MFA from Sierra Nevada University. Her work has been published in the Sandhill Review; O-Dark-Thirty; Prairie Schooner; and War, Literature, and the Arts and has been anthologized in Red, White, and True: Stories from Veterans and Families; in WWII to Present; Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand; and in the Hudson Whitman Excelsior Press Anthology Retire the Colors. King has also been a featured veteran on the KPBS radio literary series Incoming, on which she shared this essay.
Redeployment Packing Checklist
Pack your Army Combat Uniforms first. Military roll. Cram the black Under Armour sports bras, the tan undershirts, and the lucky convoy socks around the bottom inside edges of your green Army issued duffle bag. Tuck the laminated photo into the bag, but don’t look at it. You don’t want to look at it. It’s the picture that you held after your first recovery mission in the sandbox, where you bagged and tagged three soldiers who had burned alive after their Stryker rolled over a pressure plate IED.
Your brother’s smirk and your father’s wide grin, your look of disenchantment, the picture taken when you were on R&R, all three of you standing in front of the house, each one of you pretending that nothing had changed since you left for Iraq. It helped you fall asleep that night. You can’t help yourself. You unpack the photo to look at it once more. The corner edges are falling apart. The girl in the photo used to be you, but that’s not the face you see in the mirror anymore.
Pack your camo-covered Army Bible. The pages have to be rubberbanded shut, otherwise it opens to Psalm 23. Pack your tan “Rite in the Rain” combat notebook, another sort of bible: the name and rank of every soldier you ever placed into a black body bag written on its pages. Poems. Letters to your father that you never mailed.
Pack the maroon prayer rug you stole while raiding a house in Sadr City. Unpack the prayer rug. Kneel on it while you pack the empty M4 magazines, the pistol holster, ammo pouches, and desert combat boots. Pick up your aviator gloves, the feel of manning the .50-cal machine gun.
Pick up the shell casing from your first confirmed kill. One of six 7.62-caliber bullets that you fired into a fifteen-year-old boy’s chest. He was shooting an AK-47 at you. You shouldn’t have the shell casings. You shouldn’t have the gloves. Women weren’t supposed to see combat. Pack it all into the duffle.
Pack the hours spent in a cement bunker waiting for mortar rounds to stop whistling into base. Pack the hate and the anger. Pack the f
ear. Pack the shame and disenchantment for a job done too well. Pack the back to back months spent going out on convoy without a day off. Pack your combat lifesaver bag, your hajji killing license, and the rest of your dignity. Pack them all next to the Army Core Values and the bulls—t promise your government made to protect innocent civilians. Pack your worn copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Pack the tattered American flag you picked up off the ground outside Abu Ghraib. Fold over the top flaps. Shut it up tight. Lock it. Heave it onto your back. Carry it all home.
Epilogue
The last U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq in December 2011, leaving behind some twenty thousand American security advisers. On January 1, 2015, U.S. forces turned over responsibility to Afghan security forces and most U.S. troops withdrew. The battle over women’s military status continued back home, however, played out on the battlefields of congressional subcommittees, amendments to the defense budget, the pages of studies conducted by think tanks and commissions, and on the ground in Marine Corps exercises and the Army’s elite Ranger School.
In 2010 both the Military Leadership Diversity Commission chartered by Congress and the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS) recommended elimination of combat exclusion policies and an end to gender-based restrictions on military assignments.
The Department of Defense (DoD) understood that incremental increases in numbers of women recruited into support units over the years meant that an all-volunteer military could no longer go to war without women. And women’s service in Iraq and Afghanistan—especially in combat engagements in which, at least on paper, they were not supposed to participate—proved that at least some women could handle the rigors of combat.
The Department of the Navy notified Congress of their intent to phase in assignment of women to submarines beginning in 2011, and that the Marine Corps would open counterintelligence and human source intelligence operations officer occupational specialties to women. Congress did not object. The following year, DoD officials advised Congress that they intended to eliminate the co-location exclusion, permitting assignment of women at the battalion level. They added that the services supported establishment of gender-neutral occupational standards, but they needed time to study job-related physical requirements and their impact on assignment. And they asserted that existing assignment policies did not deny women less than equitable opportunities to compete and excel.