The Things They Cannot Say

by Kevin Sites

  Another case that nearly derailed my convictions about the purpose and importance of this book concerned a soldier whom I’ll call Henry. I embedded with Henry’s unit at a dry, dirty and remote combat outpost in southern Afghanistan in the summer of 2006. There are usually two pronounced reactions when a solo journalist embeds in a platoon-sized infantry unit (thirty to forty individuals): some of the soldiers avoid you at every turn, assuming, sometimes correctly, that you’re just as dangerous as any other battlefield booby trap; others seek you out, whether for your satellite phone, to bum some cigarettes or even just for conversation with someone from the outside. Henry was one of the seekers. We would sit on sandbags, smoke and talk in the heat of the Afghan summer night. Henry had a fascinating story, which he told me in great detail, about his life as a teenage gang member, a white kid who joined a set of the Crips on the East Coast. He was selling drugs at twelve and went to jail at fourteen for stabbing another gangbanger. He was heading for a bad end, he told me, until a sympathetic judge gave him a choice: prison or the Army. The choice was obvious and in the Army he had found a purpose for his unfocused energy and penchant for trouble. In boot camp, he told me, he learned discipline from a drill sergeant who had also been a gangbanger and saw through Henry’s rebellious nature to his potential. He was thriving doing his job, making friends, until he was deployed to Iraq. There, Henry said, while in a patrol convoy, his best friend, a kid named Moreno, was killed by a roadside bomb. Henry blamed himself because he was the vehicle’s turret gunner and should’ve seen the IED (improvised explosive device) before their vehicle hit it. Henry says he was devastated by Moreno’s death and wanted payback. He told me that on the next patrol out, when a ten-year-old boy tried to throw a grenade at their convoy, he lit him up with the 50 cal. He didn’t stop there. He then trained the weapon on the people lining the road, threading them with the muzzle of the large-caliber machine gun. When he stopped depressing the trigger, nine other people lay dead or dying. “Most of them,” he told me softly, “had nothing to do with the attack, but fuck it, right? That’s war.” He shrugged.

  As journalists we love these kinds of stories of trouble, redemption and then trouble again. Where would it lead, I wondered. Would Henry’s experiences in the Army mess him up more than if he had simply gone to prison instead? When I returned home, I interviewed his mom and his girlfriend for the story. But as I began to dig deeper, I became concerned. While some of what he told me checked out, his troubled teens and stabbing another kid, there were also a lot of exaggerated details and some outright fabrications. Henry said that after the stabbing he was put in an adult prison, but in the state he’s from it’s against the law to hold a juvenile in an adult facility, regardless of their crime. Other more important elements also began to unravel. Most disturbingly, when I tried to find a record of his friend Moreno’s death, I had no luck. I e-mailed Henry asking if he had mixed up the name or the year of the incident. No response. I checked the death records for the entire war and there was no record of this soldier, period. He existed, I discovered, only in Henry’s world. It took months to get him to respond to me by e-mail. When he finally did, I asked him why he didn’t just come clean with me, rather than wasting my time with this elaborate lie. He told me it was because he was afraid I would be angry with him. His response provided greater insight than the entire made-up story. Henry’s need for attention and approval from an “authority figure” was so great, he felt he needed to lie to get it. I see it as a small, anecdotal signpost for the long-term consequences of sending eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds to do our dirty work in war. Infantry grunts, like Henry, are more often than not man-children who are asked to kill and die before their own sense of right and wrong has fully matured with years and non-war-related life experiences. For me, in writing this book, my time with Henry also reinforced the concept that a war story that sounds too sensational to be true likely is.

  While the obstacles in gathering the material for this book and deciding what, if any, purpose it would serve were substantial, I decided that society as well as the soldiers would be better off for the telling and the knowing. I came to this conclusion after pondering my own experiences as well as a voluminous amount of clinical and anecdotal research about soldiers reentering their home societies. Most of it indicated the following: When a soldier decides not to share his life-defining moments in war with his wife, parents, children or community because of the accompanying guilt, shame, pain or any other valid reason, it increases the likelihood that he will feel more alienated from the society for which he was fighting, possibly to a debilitating degree. The alcohol, drugs and other self-medicating outlets for soldiers dealing with PTSD further isolate him from the normal comforts of a peacetime existence, work, family and friendships, and force him even deeper into the margins of society. Also, without the demythologized, demystified, authentic experiences of war being shared by those most directly involved in it, society itself will remain ignorant of the real practice of war, its costs and consequences.

  A society “protected” from the reality of war can rewrite the narrative, shaping and forming it into something less terrible and costly by emphasizing only the heroism and triumphs rather than the dark, ugly deeds that occur with much greater frequency than we care to imagine or discuss.

  More positively, the warrior who does share the descriptive and often disturbing narrative of his own war experiences reconnects himself to his community while simultaneously reminding them of the responsibilities that they also bear for his actions by sending him to fight and kill on their behalf. It’s rarely an easy message to hear but it’s essential to the positive evolution and enlightenment of the postconflict society. As Tick writes in War and the Soul, “Our society must accept responsibility for its warmaking. To the returning veterans, our leaders and people must say, ‘you did this in our name and because you were subject to our orders, we lift the burden of your actions from you and take it onto our shoulders. We are responsible for you, for what you did and the consequences.”

  Stories are a way for societies to share in the burden of war. They provide knowledge necessary to better understand the warrior’s experience and help them find meaning and sometimes forgiveness for their actions. Warriors, I’ve learned, become collateral damage too, killing a little of their own humanity every time they must pull the trigger, even though they do so at our bidding.

  Tim O’Brien wrote so eloquently, in his classic Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral do not believe it.”

  My goal here is to try to tell the true war stories, not moral ones. The ones found here are entertaining, horrifying, brutally funny and banal, like so many other experiences. But because they involve war, they bring their own insistent drama that comes with the acts of fatal violence. The warriors brave enough to share them have already lived these stories. Now the communities they fought for need to honestly hear them, wherever they may lead.

  As I mentioned, I sought out soldiers and Marines I knew and had reported on in the past, but I also found others, including those in the military service of other nations. I found them through veteran’s groups, military associations and even medical and mental health professionals. This resulted in a broad base of interviews, providing a sampling of war experiences that ran the gamut from monstrous to mundane. Only a few made it into this book, primarily because I felt either the subjects were the most candid or their individual stories were the most instructive. Regardless, for all kind enough to share, the very act of their participation gave me hope that we may eventually see through the smoky glass of myth, parable and revisionism to something that resembles the ground truth.

  On that point, these stories are recollections, oral histories from the perspectives of the men and women telling the stories. Like all who remember, they
will remember imperfectly, with omissions and additions and perhaps lost players and parts. These are not after-action reports or official historical accounts, but the kind of stories that are true to their tellers and imbued with their own perspectives and even judgments. In fact, the primary sources in them are the individuals profiled. It was, after all, their perspective as combatants that I was seeking. They are difficult stories all, and I’m both grateful and hopeful that these acts of sharing will help bring these soldiers, and those who surround them, some peace. And as we see the war in Iraq ending and the Afghan war winding down, our communities will be filled with returning veterans carrying the physical and psychological burdens of their war experiences. We must hurry, using mostly our ears and hearts, to lighten the load.

  Prologue: Me and My PTSD

  Now the war is over, my war charms lie abandoned in my bedroom, leaving me with death on my shoulder and a monkey on my back. Peace seems to allow little space for belief in destiny, fate, God or ghosts.

  —Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

  The author sitting on an Iraqi antiaircraft missile (2003)

  Here’s what happens when you come home from war: the overload of excitement, intensity, absurdity, poignancy, foolishness, depth, danger, frivolity, importance and delicious single-mindedness comes to a screeching halt. You’ve been transformed through months of overstimulation fueled by violence and the threat of it. I once believed this was a fate only for the prosecutors of war and its victims, not for those simply bearing witness. I was wrong. In war, there are no sidelines on which to sit.

  War’s most cunning trick, it seemed, was the war it seeded within me. I wanted to cling to the concept of my own goodness, but the choices I had made during war seemed to indicate something else entirely: a man who was at best oblivious and at worst heartless. It was that “Jungian thing” again, Private Joker pondering the “duality of man.” For years, this confrontation for a dominant truth where none existed left me veering between wanting to be alone and never wanting to be alone, deliberate isolation and self-medicating social inebriation. Neither was a very good long-term companion.

  But during my research I came across this quote by Virginia Woolf: “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” It resonated with me deeply. I knew I needed to tell the truth about myself to be able to do the same about others. But to do so, I first needed to learn the truth: was I a good man simply making bad choices, or had war simply stripped away that façade and revealed my dark character? I began my examination using a dry-erase board to sketch out the “case against me.” Even as a schematic, the evidence for the latter appeared daunting. When I was done, it looked like this on the opposite page.

  The case rests on three separate events that occurred in the last decade, in which I covered war almost exclusively. In general, these events represent the moral dilemmas that war poses for everyone exposed to it, even noncombatants like me. But specifically they are an ascending scale of defining moments representing the destructive and redemptive opportunities in the narrative of my own life. There were times when I wished and believed that the guilt from my choices would destroy me. There are times when I’m convinced that my life would have little significance without these events. Regardless, they are mine and I must account for them. In their full explanations they may sound reasonable, but they sometimes feel like the popgun rantings of a soul in full disequilibrium.

  “The Case Against Me” schematic on dry-erase board

  Number One starts in northern Afghanistan with a simple hesitation. It’s October 2001 on a hill in an area near the border with Tajikistan known as Pul-i-Khomri. It’s a place in which deep trench lines, reminiscent of World War I, separate the ruling Afghan Taliban forces from the Northern Alliance fighters seeking to oust them. The two sides are casually tossing mortars back and forth, taunting each other on the same radio frequency as if they were engaged in nothing more deadly than a backyard game of badminton. I’m on a mound of dirt topped with a Russian-made T-62 tank left over from the Soviet invasion, with a few journalist colleagues. We’re talking and laughing at the absurdity of it all until we hear a crack in the distance. The tank commander is peering at the Taliban lines through my spotting scope, which I bought for a few dollars at a street market in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent two weeks back on my way into Afghanistan. Through my video camera’s viewfinder, I watch him drop the scope and dive behind the tank. The ground shakes as the mortar round explodes thirty feet behind us. Bounding shrapnel tears into the thigh and glutes of a producer for National Geographic who’s standing on my left, just inches away from me. He goes down. “I’m hit, I’m hit,” he says, grabbing his leg in pain. I’ve been recording video the entire time, including the last shell impact. I swing my camera over to the producer and the blood is now seeping through his hands as he holds them against the wounds. It’s dramatic and rare footage, a seldom-captured incoming round and its casualty, the ultimate cause and effect. I know our news audience does not see this kind of thing very often. It’s remarkable and, in my mind, instructive in an obvious way. This is what really happens when hard metal meets soft flesh. I shout to the others to take cover on the other side of the tank since the Taliban will discover through their own spotting scopes that they’ve got this site dialed in. But this is just the beginning of my dilemma. As a journalist I don’t want to stop shooting, even while the producer bleeds. If the shrapnel has penetrated his leg’s femoral artery, one of the body’s largest, he will bleed out in less than four minutes unless something is done. I continue to shoot. He even prompts his own videographer, whose camera missed everything: “Hey, shoot this,” he says, still holding his leg. I feel the strange tug of something at my shirttail while I continue to roll. It’s light but insistent, probably just my conscience. I want to ignore it, but finally and with reluctance, I put the camera on the dirt next to the wounded producer but leave it on record. My own adrenaline is pumping as I begin to realize that I’m lucky to be alive myself, given the producer’s proximity to me. In fact, if he hadn’t been standing where he was to absorb the flying shards of metal, I might be the one bleeding now instead. “Give me the fucking scarf,” I say, amped by adrenaline. Pulling it from his neck, I wind it around his thigh several times and then tie it off tightly above the bleed. I pick up the camera when I’m done, point it at him and ask how it feels to have been hit with a mortar round. “It’s like a tornado that has torn through my leg,” he says. It’s only later in recounting the story that I realize, I didn’t choose him over the shot. I chose both. He will live and even bask in some media attention in the immediate aftermath, but I wonder if the same would be true if the shrapnel had hit the artery and I still hesitated before wrapping the wound to make sure I got my shot.

  In the case against me, Number Two begins with this question: “Are you going to videotape me if I shoot him?” It’s November 2004. I’m following two Marines through the streets of Fallujah during the first day of the ground offensive to take back the city from insurgents. It’s called Operation Phantom Fury, but so far, with the exception of a few bodies here and there, there don’t seem to be many insurgents left. But as we come into an opening between buildings, I see an older Iraqi man lying on the ground, a close-cropped white beard in stark contrast to the maroon stream of blood running in a little channel from his head to the curb. His shirt is open, exposing a white T-shirt underneath and a chest that is rising and falling in what seem to be agonal breaths, likely his last. His right hand rests on his chest, while the left arm is bent at the elbow and pointing up, the hand cupped open, weirdly reminiscent of the queen of England’s wave. I move closer to see the extent of his injuries but reel back when I see that the right side of his head is missing. While he looked complete from a distance, a Marine sniper had fired a round through his eyeball, taking much of his skull and brain through the exit wound in the back. Yet, it seems so oddly clean, almost surgical. After I walk back over to
the Marines, one of them asks me the question, “Are you going to videotape me if I shoot him?” I don’t think there’s any malice behind the question. It’s a mercy killing, I’m nearly certain. I respond almost automatically: “Of course I am, that’s my job,” I say, but as the words come out of my mouth, I’m wondering why I can’t just let the Marine finish the job without videotaping it. Doubtless, the man is going to die. Why not let it be without more suffering? The Marine shrugs, tells the other something along the lines of it’s not worth the risk of getting into trouble—“The guy’s going to die anyway.” The two of them walk on and leave me alone with the Iraqi man with half a head missing. I look at him. He’s still breathing, still bleeding. What’s left of his life is in my hands now. I wonder if this is the worst way to die, alone with no one who can even understand your last words, if you have any. I wonder if I should’ve let the Marine shoot him. I don’t know if he’s suffering terribly or if that sniper’s bullet removed any sense of pain or awareness along with that part of his head. I wonder how I became the final arbiter of the last moments of his existence. I look at him again and realize we are alone in this place together. The Marines are gone; there’s no one else around. This Iraqi man, dressed in civilian clothes, most likely in his mid to late fifties, has no weapon by his side and perhaps never did. He is almost certainly someone’s father, maybe even a grandfather, but there’s no one around him now, only me. He will die lying on the ground as a stranger holding a video camera looks over him. But I can’t let that happen. It’s just not right. So here is what I do instead: I walk away. I follow the path of the Marines and let him breathe his last breath alone in the street. The twinge of guilt I felt disappeared once the shooting started again, just around the corner. I left the half-headed man behind… or so I thought.