Black Knights, Dark Days

by Fisk, J. Matthew;

  Fort Hood, Texas – 2005

  I had my own demons to confront in the early part of 2005 after completing my first combat tour. I didn’t see them at first. In fact, I was feeling downright euphoric. Our unit was home and the Army’s 10th Mountain Division was dealing with our former AO in the Sadr City Shiite hole. My wife and I were getting to know each other again, and I had big plans for the future. We were moving back to Columbus, Georgia where I planned to complete my college degree and then move on to officer training. I was so caught up in plans that I failed at first to notice that there were some not-too-subtle changes in the way I confronted life’s little problems.

  There were nightmares, but I shrugged them off as just a fleeting legacy of my combat experiences. And it didn’t seem at all odd that I spent time scanning the Wal-Mart rooftop for snipers before I entered to do some shopping. My heart-rate soared every time we drove along a crowded street, but that didn’t seem too weird. Everyone is irritated by traffic, right? I was simply feeling what people are supposed to feel as far as I was concerned and any lingering doubts were erased by the booze that I was consuming at great rates. The booze was a celebration of survival and when I had a bellyful, I could ignore how little I felt about anything.

  I was mentally numb and physically deteriorating. My two-mile run time slowed from 13 minutes flat to 14 and a half, but I put that down to the Iraq experience. Our FOB was so small that a guy couldn’t really run far enough or often enough under regular rocket and mortar fire to stay in top shape. The Motrin I ate from a Pez dispenser every day numbed the painful twinge in my spine, a result of that close mortar round that should have killed me.

  The possibility that I might have something more than a few physical problems occurred to me one evening when I offered to whip three dudes’ collective asses if they didn’t apologize to my wife for some snide comment made at a local watering hole. The details are blurred by the shots of Cuervo I’d been slamming, and it might be my wife had a hand in the confrontation, but that’s not the point. I went from happy drunk to raging bull in a heartbeat. Not only was I demanding unconditional surrender by three pissed-off yahoos, but I recall hoping they would refuse my terms. Fortunately, my wife defused the situation and kept me from serious injury or possible jail time. Pondering the situation the next morning, I wrote it all off to the tequila and forgot about it. Nothing to see here, folks, just move on and ignore the drunk. So, I moved along and shoved Sadr City way down deep in my mental footlocker.

  Fort Benning, Georgia – 2006

  Two years have passed since that first deployment to Iraq. I sit staring into a glass of Jack Daniel’s whiskey and note the tremble in my hands. The whiskey is supposed to help with that, but it doesn’t. What I see reflected in the liquid is a man I can scarcely recognize anymore. What happened to that jovial, wise-cracking soldier that patrolled Sadr City with Lieutenant Aguero and Sergeant Chen and all the other soldiers in his infantry platoon? Where’s that guy with such an appetite for knowledge and such a zest for life?

  He’s sitting here toasting the dead; thinking about good men gone too soon. And this is the second year that he’s done that, always on the same day, April 4. And on this night, unlike so many others since he came home from Iraq, this is the only drink he will have. Debauchery is now strictly for weekends. This guy needed to do well in his studies and that demanded a semi-clear head. Like it or not, this guy is me and I’m bound to finish my degree, get a commission, and get back to war. That’s a goal and a promise I intend to keep—to myself and to those good men.

  The first time I took a shot at getting an education, it was mainly to please my parents; maybe get some kind of degree and some kind of acceptable life. It didn’t go well and that eventually led me to the Army, to war in Iraq. That was nearly a decade past and this time I had a goal, a mission, a purpose in passing my class requirements. Despite the motivation I didn’t have on the first foray into academia, it’s been tough sledding. I struggled every day to focus, to forget—at least for short periods—what happened in Iraq. The irony of chasing a degree in order to obtain an Army commission that would take me back to war wasn’t lost on me. I simply ignored it.

  The real challenge these days on a college campus in 2006 was suppressing the urge to kill the people who pissed me off. There were a lot of them, and my temper ran hot all the time. During the 20 minute drive to school every day, I imagined myself back in Sadr City behind the trigger of a heavy .50 cal, ready to use it on the idiots sharing the road. And every day it seemed like some slack-jawed snob in one class or another ran his mouth about “that unjust war in Iraq” which led me to daydreams in which I used the bastard’s shaggy beard to scrub out an Arab toilet. Some days, the pressure was so intense that I had to just leave to avoid blowing a very violent gasket.

  A detonation like that would mean the end of my ROTC scholarship and an insurmountable roadblock to the commission I wanted after graduation. I had to maintain and survive at least eight hours every school week in close proximity to young Americans who couldn’t be bothered to occasionally stir the mush in their skulls. And, God help us, a number of those people were also pursuing military commissions. There were just two of us in the ROTC unit who had prior service. The other guy had never deployed, so I was the only one with combat experience. Since I’d spent an Iraq deployment in an infantry platoon, the NCO in charge of our campus unit often tapped me to assist in training the other cadets. I taught familiar stuff like squad tactics and tried to give the cadets—male and female—the occasional motivational lectures in between battle drills. Most of those inspirational talks began with “pay attention” and ended with “or you will die as a horrible failure.” They seemed to get the message and I was proud of that. Maybe I had that rare leadership gene.

  Other than that, I mainly behaved like an antisocial asshole. The stupid students in my regular classes just made me angry or elicited my sympathy for their ignorance. The men and women in my ROTC unit were mostly just as ignorant, and they made me fear for the soldiers they might lead someday. They were clueless about the sacrifice and bloodshed involved if and when they ever got onto a battlefield in charge of a unit. When I taught them or just talked to them about military service, I wanted to scare them; to get them to re-think the whole deal. When that failed, as it usually did, I was proud of them for ignoring the manic combat vet and sticking to the program.

  I struggled to stay focused on the goals, the degree, the commission, the return to war as a leader in the mold of soldiers like Lieutenant Aguero. That required an effort so intense that I had no time for my wife, my parents, old friends or new acquaintances outside the ROTC unit. When I thought about my lonely life—and I didn’t do it very often—what I really missed were my Army buddies from my platoon in Iraq. They were either dead, wounded, scattered to the winds chasing a life after the Army, or preparing for yet another combat deployment while I was safe on a college campus.

  Sometimes I went through my notes and the tape recordings I had made in Iraq with the intention of writing a book about my combat experiences. My mother made good on her promise to have the tapes transcribed, and I had a pile of papers that contained lots of thoughts and memories about war. The problem was that I couldn’t bring myself to begin writing, to turn those notes into something that might be useful or moving for others to read. I always seemed to be too busy with other things or just unwilling to resurrect the memories, free the ghosts, and try to make sense of it all. On the rare occasions when I promised myself that I would try, that I would just get started, I wound up frozen like a cliff diver staring down at surf breaking on deadly rocks. There was bound to be serious pain if I stepped off that cliff, so I procrastinated and justified my cowardice.

  And then staring into that glass of Jack on the second anniversary of that April 4 ambush I decided the coward reflected in the whiskey needed to suck it up and honor his buddies by telling their story. “Here’s to you, buddies,”
I whispered and chugged the drink. And then I settled down to write.

  Columbus State University, Georgia – 2007

  I sat in my car on a cool spring morning in Columbus, Georgia after an hour’s worth of pushups, sit ups, and a brisk run listening to two journalists talk about the battle of Black Sunday—and lie about me. Martha Raddatz was the guest on some morning show where the host wanted to know all about her new book, The Long Road Home

  I tuned in halfway through, mesmerized to hear familiar names coming at me in Dolby surround, “…rocket-propelled grenades are coming from everywhere. So they decide they’ll get back in Humvees. Before they know it, two of the add-on armor Humvees are disabled. So they find an alley. Shane Aguero, the platoon leader, leads them into the alley. And they turn this small band of soldiers, nineteen soldiers and one Iraqi interpreter, and they walk down this alley. The alley’s about ten feet wide. Concrete houses jammed together. And they look for a house to take cover. So they basically break down the door, go in, and they go to the roof. They put the remaining Humvees forming a box in front of that door.

  “They’ve got wounded; they’re getting more wounded. They have one soldier who is dead. They’re in this house. They don’t know where they are. The communications, because they had just gotten there, they didn’t have GPS. They were trying to find these guys from dusty maps in the Tactical Operations Center.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Gary Volesky started dispatching men, the Quick Reaction Force, to go out and try to find them. They line up all these vehicles. Of course, what was disastrous about these vehicles was that many of them weren’t combat vehicles.

  “Troy Denomy, who is the captain who is the company commander…those were his men out there. Troy Denomy jumps in a Humvee that has a canvas top and canvas sides. His gunner totally exposed in the back. These men thought they were on a peacekeeping mission. The Army, the Pentagon, did not send all the tanks, all the Bradleys that they normally would’ve, because they wanted this to be a peacekeeping mission, but they were unprepared for this combat mission. And the moment they go, every rescue company goes down, they immediately see the same thing that the pinned down platoon saw. Empty streets, people fleeing, garbage floating by, obstacles. And there’s one point Troy Denomy said, ‘It’s going to happen now. Brace yourselves.’ Then the gunfire starts again. And then these trucks…it was as one soldier described it: ‘we were fish in a barrel.’

  “The patrol is in the alley. So many of them said to me, ‘When we were standing in that alley we just knew that we were in a bad movie and we didn’t want it to end the way the bad movies had ended we’d seen before.’

  “There were waves of citizens and Mehdi militia who approached both sides of that alley. Children in front, adults, Mehdi militia in back, teens in the middle. Old people. And they killed a lot of those people. They approached the Humvee. Lieutenant Aguero said at one point he just knew they could overrun them. A lot of the soldiers have children. And I asked him, ‘What was that like, to face children and know that you were going to kill children?” And they said, ‘In some ways having my own children, oddly enough, made it easier. Because it was kill or be killed. And if those men were so horrible to put children in front of them…’ They said there was nothing they could do.”

  One of Martha’s assistants had reached out to me long ago via email to ask if I would go on the record and provide my insight into what happened. She sent me a 20-page questionnaire to fill out and return that wanted to know what my nickname in the platoon was, and what pithy things I might have said while returning fire, and so on. I looked through the questions and pondered what response to make. On the one hand, I felt relieved that someone wanted to hear about what happened and flattered that my input could find life on the printed page. On the other hand, I distrusted journalists because of their disingenuous treatment of us during the deployment, and, unfamiliar with Ms. Raddatz world view and track record, was unsure how she would treat the story.

  Still, in a moment of weakness, I briefly toyed with handing over more than 300 pages of transcribed interviews to the professionals to do with as they pleased. Over the course of six months, I had written and erased enough material to fill two books, but the project had me in the grip of a terror so profound that I couldn’t write more than a paragraph without feeling the onset of panic. The problem wasn’t writer’s block but a simple matter of survival. My subconscious brain seemed to be shielding me from matters that it flatly believed would kill me if I tried to deal with them before their due. Therefore, every time I brought myself to the computer to write, my traitorous mind would turn on my adrenal gland to divert me from the task.

  For reasons that remain unclear, I declined her offer. Apparently, they did just fine without me, because here was Ms. Raddatz on the radio plugging her book in a seven-minute rundown. The mere fact that she was able to condense what felt like eternity plus three hours—for me anyway—into seven minutes was nothing short of genius. For three and a half minutes, I listened as she spoke names from my past: Lieutenant Aguero, Captain Denomy, Colonel Volesky. It was a roll call of heroes that had me grinning like a jackass eating briars.

  Then she lied.

  Lied like a greasy politician. Lied like a criminal on trial. Lied like every parent who ever attested to the existence of Santa Claus and God in the same breath. Her lies awoke in me a rage too great to contain—the wrath of a titan caged. How dare her! I love children. I was a teacher for out Pete’s sake. Under no circumstances would I slaughter unarmed children, piling up bodies like some barbarian king. Lies! My chest was heaving, heart pounding. I wanted to kill something, anything, to appease the death angel with the blood of sacrifice that he might pass over me. There was no way that her allegations could be true. Lies!

  Or so I desperately wished in vain.

  Fort Benning, Georgia – 2008

  Rifles thundered to my left and I froze. Perhaps a dozen or more and all M16 variants by the sound. Even as my knuckles tightened on the wheel and blood began to pound like counter-fire in my temples I listened for the reply of AK-47s and RPKs, sounds that would tell me where to shoot. My God, was my heart pounding. And yet, I felt so alive in that moment that I couldn’t restrain a fierce smile. Here we go again, I thought. It was a good day to die.

  I reached for my rifle and my foot slipped off the brake. My eyes continued to scan my nine o’clock trying to pinpoint a target, and the vehicle eased forward until I felt a bump. My hand clawed desperately all about me looking for my weapon as a drowning man for a life line. C’mon, c’mon. I committed the cardinal sin of turning from contact, but I hadtofindithadtofindit. There was no rifle—only a pile of empty Burger King wrappers stacked in the passenger seat like the skulls of vanquished Whoppers. What the-?

  I saw movement. My head snapped up. A large black woman dressed in a business suit was exiting the driver’s side of a mini-van in front of me with government-issued tags. Rifles continued to blaze away off my nine as she walked toward me without the slightest hint of hostility or evil intent.

  “Well, now,” she said as I rolled down my window. She must have seen the confusion on my face and was very kind. “Everything OK?”

  No. “Yeah, I just...I, ah, I just wasn’t paying attention.”

  And just like that the voices sprouted, fully formed like the goddess Athena from the forehead of Zeus, whack-a-memories that would pop up at the most inopportune time and drown out everything around me.

  The dust drifts and Wild calmly says, “Hey, I got a head shot.”

  That fender-bender was the first time I acknowledged that something might be wrong. The volume setting on my nightmares turned up a bit each day, week, and month that I spent at home, in school, in garrison doing mundane things in world that seemed drained of color. The adrenaline that I had marinated in for 335 days drained slowly from muscles and joints leaving me increasingly aware of injuries that I had previously ignored. I felt cut off from my wife, fam
ily, friends, and fellow soldiers by experiences and deeds that it seemed no one would understand. As these symptoms of what I knew was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder multiplied I felt that I had it under control. I had seen grown men cry, shit themselves, and devolve into madness under the conditions we endured day after day in the maniacal, bloody circus that was the Iraqi Insurgency, but I felt that I had handled it well. Was handling it well.

  Until that day on Dixie Road in Fort Benning, Georgia waiting at a red light in the safety of my car next to a live fire range. What the hell? An honest-to-God flash back.

  “We’re all gonna die in this shit-hole,” Deaver said with quiet rage faded like his eyes.

  Three weeks later I found myself in a small, windowless office on the 4th floor of Martin Army Community Hospital speaking to a counselor with a thick, black beard and a merry sense of humor. “Lancer Mike, this Comanche Red 1. We are taking fire. I say again, we are taking heavy fire. Vicinity Route Delta and Georgia!” the Lieutenant screamed over the sound of the .50 Caliber machine gun.

  The only way that I could have seen him sooner was if I had threatened to kill myself, kill someone else, or sprinted naked toward the general’s command tent—which I’ve been known to do sane and sober. I can’t remember the man’s name or what we talked about. Riddell glancing back, desperate to live, driving like hell. “Sir, somebody’s gotta get on that gun.”

  I had just commissioned as a butter-bar lieutenant and had serious concerns about what effect this trip to the shrink was going to have on my career. I saw him one more time and quit. “Sir, he’s gone,” I told the L-T.