The Things They Cannot Say

by Kevin Sites

  Thomas Saal’s is the kind of bittersweet success story that is common for combat veterans willing to confront the demons of their past. Dr. Jonathan Shay wrote in Achilles in Vietnam, “If recovery means return to trusting innocence, recovery is not possible. Recovered survivors of severe trauma adapt their own lives, including their limitations, with passion and existential authority. These veterans can become profoundly valuable human beings, even if their accomplishments in the world are often limited.”

  Saal also belongs to a support group called Warriors’ Journey Home, founded by psychologist Edward Tick, author of War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Part of Tick’s practice involves bringing Vietnam veterans back to Vietnam to confront the war they left physically so long ago but that has never left their psyche.

  In October of 2010, Thomas Saal went back to Vietnam on a trip with Dr. Tick and visited the site of his most traumatic experience: the place where his men crucified the NVA officer. He sent me this e-mail response to my question of whether he was able to find his soul:

  The trip was absolutely wonderful and yes, I did find my soul right where I left it 42 years ago… I was also able to read my poetry with North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers… In addition, I handed out over 50 Beenie Babies to children of the school which my officer class built 10 years ago… My picture was plastered all over the front page of Vietnamese newspapers while I was passing out the dolls to the kids and also for writing a poem from the point of view of a Vietnamese child suffering from the effects of Agent Orange… In addition, I attended an AA meeting in freakin’ Hanoi while the city was celebrating it’s one-thousandth anniversary… What a trip that was!

  Upon his return from Vietnam, Saal wrote the following poem, which he considers the culmination of the recovery work with which he’s been involved. This is an excerpt.

  COMING HOME

  As the soft breeze of the East Sea blows over this land of peaceful people,

  as the sun shines down on this land of plenty,

  as the moon rises up to lighten the night time shadows,

  as our group of pilgrims prepares to leave for home

  following a new and wonderful journey of rebirth,

  I can only be ever so grateful to those who helped me on this path of healing,

  this holy and spiritual path which has returned my soul to me.

  There was a time when I felt as if the world had deserted me,

  that I had no one on which to lean.

  Darkness had enveloped me, surrounded me,

  sucking the life from my veins as does a sponge soak water.

  There was a time when I thought my heart would never be at peace,

  when nights were sleepless and days were dark,

  when death’s graveyards were constantly in my thoughts,

  when dying children, wives without husbands,

  when spirit-lacking, disillusioned soldiers wandered the tunnels of my dreams.

  But today, I feel this way no longer.

  The past is now the past—done, finished,

  a part of my life which has been put away

  as one does a completed novel.

  Today, I can once again breathe the cool, refreshing air of springtime.

  Today, I can reflect on my life and accept myself

  as one who has made mistakes and rectified them.

  Today, I have found peace of mind.

  Today, the grave is open and my soul and I are reunited.

  Tom Saal, November 2010

  Postscript

  Today, Saal continues to work at Freedom House in Kent, Ohio, as a case manager for homeless veterans. He is still heavily involved with Warriors’ Journey Home and still frequents the psychiatric and detox wards of Saint Thomas Hospital in Akron. He says he no longer goes to bed sad, angry, miserable and depressed and that he certainly doesn’t wake up that way. Today, he smiles, laughs and even cries, things he never did in years past. He says he’s even happy once in a while, as he believes happiness is like a butterfly, something he heard from a counselor and friend years ago. It comes and lands on one’s shoulder from time to time and then flits away. However, today Saal is okay with himself, and that is something he could never have said during that first thirty-five years after his return from Vietnam.

  Part IV: Deadly Honest Mistakes

  What’s It Like to Kill Your Own Men or Civilians?

  …all warriors and erstwhile warriors will need to understand that, just like rucksack, ammunition, water and food, guilt and mourning will be among the things they carry. They will shoulder it all for the society they fight for.

  —Karl Marlantes, lieutenant, U.S.M.C. (Vietnam), author

  From What It Is Like to Go to War, Karl Marlantes (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011)

  Chapter 7: Unfriendly Fire

  If we had just come across them and the terrorists shot them up, it might not have affected us so much. But we were the ones who shot them.

  Specialist Michael “Casey” Ayala, U.S. Army (left)

  1st Battalion, 327th Infantry

  The War in Iraq (2006)

  Southwest of Baghdad in the cooling dusk of late November, a blue, Korean-made Bongo truck, commonly used by Iraqis to haul everything from goats to cinder blocks, was barreling toward Specialist Michael Ayala’s four-Humvee convoy. Though two football fields away, Ayala felt the vehicle was accelerating with bad intentions. His thoughts were confirmed when he saw muzzle flashes from the back of the speeding truck. His body and mind went through the natural physiological responses to imminent battle. His central nervous system’s hardwired “fight or flight” response was activated: adrenaline was released into his bloodstream, and he began breathing deeply to provide more oxygen to his body’s vital organs while blood was shunted away from the digestive tract to the muscles, providing them with the fuel for physical reaction. Ayala’s pupils dilated to give him a broader range of vision, his senses were heightened and his threshold for potential pain increased. This is the point for a civilian where the rational mind subsides and instinct takes over, but Ayala was a trained soldier. While biology could amplify his physical response, he couldn’t let fear overtake his mind. The thousands of muscle-memory repetitions of his training had to now give him the confidence to make rational choices even while his body was focused only on survival. He steadied himself and readied his weapon.

  Seeing the rifle fire, the Humvees immediately took defensive positions, deploying like hidden bat wings; the two in the front pulled off at forty-five-degree angles to opposite sides of the road. The two in the rear did the same. It was how they trained, it was how they fought, and it was no longer a drill but a unit combat reflex. The forward vehicles prepared for a frontal assault; the back Humvees covered the unit’s six. Ayala, sitting in the rear passenger seat of the second Humvee, pushed open the heavy armored door, took cover behind it while aiming his M4 assault rifle at the oncoming truck. The soldier in the turret behind the Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun did the same, as did the turret gunner in the lead Humvee with his M249 SAW light machine gun.

  Ayala braced himself. It had only been a little more than a month since his unit arrived in Iraq, but the nineteen-year-old soldier had already seen plenty of war’s unyielding violence. A roadside bomb killed a friend of his from their mutual hometown in East Texas, ripping both his legs off in the blast. Ayala nearly lost his own life in another incident when a bomb exploded on a rooftop where he was standing.

  Now, in this moment, there was more to come. The Bongo was getting closer, with the driver showing no indications of slowing down.

  “That’s when the fifty-cal gunner on our vehicle opened up on it,” says Ayala. The M249 SAW gunner did the same. The windshield on the Bongo exploded into hundreds of shards as the thumb-sized .50 caliber rounds, able to penetrate solid engine blocks, pierced through the glass, followed by a string of 7.62s fired from the SAW, which can unload at a rapid-fire rate of t
wo hundred rounds per minute. The truck careened off the road and slammed into a nearby tree, which might as well have been a brick wall. It was an instant and irreversible stop. Ayala, with a good angle on the Bongo, aimed his M4 and fired a few shots into the smoking vehicle. Keep them contained, he thought to himself. He was feeling good, believing they might have gotten the insurgents who had been dropping mortars and harassing fire into Camp Striker for weeks.

  “But then my PL [platoon leader] started yelling, ‘Cease fire, cease fire,’ after a guy in the bed of the Bongo truck slipped over the side rails and tried to find cover in a ditch,” says Ayala.

  When the platoon leader moved to take a closer look he called for the medics. Ayala, one of the unit’s combat first responders, trained to assist in providing lifesaving medical care in tandem with medics or until they arrive, grabbed his trauma kit and ran toward the carnage. What he saw there haunts his dreams even now, years later.

  I first met Michael Ayala in early November 2005, a few weeks before this incident and almost exactly a year after Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah in 2004, in which I had recorded the mosque shooting. I had returned to Iraq as a part of my Hot Zone project for Yahoo! News and was embedded with soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division out of Camp Striker, a support base for the large Camp Victory complex near the Baghdad airport. Ayala’s unit, 3rd Platoon of Alpha Company, had just spent a week combing through the potato and onion fields just south of the airport when Staff Sergeant David Crispen saw something on the ground: a raw potato that someone had been hungry or bored enough to chew on. Crispen also noticed some loose dirt next to the potato that “just didn’t look right.” They borrowed a shovel from one of the nearby houses and hit metal with the first spadeful of dirt. Along with some belt-fed ammunition, they dug up forty 155 mm artillery shells, all wrapped in plastic to protect them from corrosive sand and moisture.

  Artillery shells like the 155 were a favorite of Iraqi insurgents, who usually daisy-chained them together for greater explosive power when building roadside bombs. Ayala and the other soldiers were pumped by their discovery. Roadside bombs caused more deaths and injuries in Iraq than any other insurgent weapon. With a little old-fashioned detective work, they found the cache, and because of it, knew they had saved lives. For me, it was a solid story, frontline grunts following their own instincts and disrupting insurgents without shedding a drop of blood, complete with video of a massive “controlled det,” military jargon for blowing up enemy weapons in place.

  Ayala and other members of Alpha Company provided security for the two members of the Air Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit and watched as the bomb experts removed the pointy tips from the artillery shells, where the detonators were, then packed the openings like snow cones with handfuls of white C4 plastic explosives.

  After plugging their own detonators into the C4, one of the EOD guys took a telescoping metal baton from his belt and threaded it through a spool of det cord, walking until the spool played out, a thousand feet away. Behind a wall the pin was pulled on the fuse, sending an explosive charge down the line toward the cache, which would create the heat and pressure necessary to trigger the C4.

  A soldier shouted the warning out loud while another recited it more calmly over the radio.

  “Fire in the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole.”

  The field erupted in bright orange and red flames, followed by a thunderous explosion. Clouds of black smoke billowed on the horizon. The finale was the whizzing sounds of small metal pieces raining down on the field around us. There were rebel yells and high fives from the men of the 3rd Platoon as explosives destroyed other explosives, all canceling out each other’s killing potential.

  Ayala walked up to inspect the blast site. What was left was a crater thirty to thirty-five feet in circumference and at least twenty feet deep. There were no fragments left, no evidence the artillery shells ever existed, but the violent force had exposed a patch of potatoes on the left, onions on the right, and the elephant grass behind the explosion had been mowed flat.

  I snapped a photograph of Ayala, doing what he later will call his Captain Morgan pose, one foot resting slightly higher than the other on the crust of the hole. In this picture he’s smiling, but not all his days in Iraq have been as good as this one, nor will many of those remaining.

  Ayala wanted to be a soldier since he was six after watching American soldiers on TV during the 1991 Gulf War. For the adopted kid from East Texas, the soldiers seemed an unstoppable force, rolling through the desert in their Abramses and Bradleys, wearing the distinctive “chocolate chip” camouflage and striking fear in the hearts of the Iraqi invaders while signaling hope for the Kuwaitis held captive in their own country.

  “Even though I was so young I knew I wanted to do what they were doing,” Ayala tells me by telephone from his base at Fort Campbell near Clarksville, Tennessee, headquarters of the 101st Airborne Division.

  It didn’t seem quite so glamorous thirteen years later, when as a U.S. soldier himself, he was blown off a rooftop by an insurgent bomb left inside a water barrel. At the time, Ayala and another soldier were doing overwatch, assuming an elevated position, this time on the roof of a house, and providing covering fire if needed for soldiers on the ground on patrol. When the bomb exploded, his first thought was that they had been mistaken for insurgents and rocketed by their own Apache helicopters.

  “I was knocked out for a couple of minutes. My buddy shook me and said we just got hit with an IED. We were covered by rubble and I caught two pieces of shrapnel in the shoulder. I was obviously pissed off for a good while after that.” Those who saw what happened were surprised they weren’t both killed.

  His commander tried to call in a medevac, but Ayala waved him off, thinking the chopper would become a target. Later in the day, his unit captured what they thought were the two insurgents who had placed the bomb in the barrel and manually detonated it from another rooftop across the street. Despite his injuries, Ayala says he didn’t take it out on the captives; he was relieved just to able to see their faces, rather than being on the receiving end of their infuriating invisible guerrilla tactics.

  “I made them sit down but I wasn’t kicking them in the face. I’m sure their zip ties were a little too tight, but I wasn’t going to beat them up. I also wasn’t going to make them any more comfortable than Geneva Convention required,” says Ayala dryly.

  While Ayala earned a Purple Heart for the rooftop explosion, it was an incident two weeks earlier that had begun his true initiation into what kind of bloody carnage the insurgents were capable of inflicting on the world’s most powerful army.

  It was October 31, 2005. Halloween. Ayala’s unit had just arrived in Iraq in the middle of the month. The standard procedure was to go on patrols with the unit they would be replacing until they were familiar with their area of operations. This night they’d be on their own for the first time. The mission was a route clearing, to make sure the roads leading into and out of the base were clear of roadside bombs. Three or four miles southwest of Baghdad they found one—or it found them.

  “The truck that got hit was second in convoy,” Ayala says, recalling the incident. “I was out in front looking for wires and then heard a really loud blast. A cloud of smoke covered everything. I could see the front of our truck, but nothing behind it. I thought the whole convoy had been blown.”

  Ayala ran into the smoke plume, finding behind it a Hieronymus Bosch–like scene of hellfire, anguish and destruction. As the smoke cleared it revealed mangled, smoldering metal and dead and dying comrades. The men were from Alpha Company, same as Ayala’s, but a different platoon. The first man Ayala saw was a private missing a leg at midthigh and had been spurting bright red blood from his femoral artery, a bleeding emergency that could end in death within just four minutes. A medic had already applied a tourniquet, so Ayala began a head-to-toe check for secondary injuries, examining the private for contusions, hidden punctures, broken bones, anything tha
t could further compromise his chances of survival. Ayala had so much adrenaline pumping he thought his hands might have been shaking had he not needed them to help the soldier. While the private seemed stable for the moment, the condition wouldn’t last. He would die from internal injuries while waiting to be evacuated.

  Nearby, another private, the turret gunner of the Humvee that took the full blast of the roadside bomb, was already dead, and a first sergeant would die of his wounds while in the medevac helicopter heading for a CSH, or combat support hospital. But the casualty that affected Ayala the most is actually someone he knew, a specialist from the same part of East Texas where he grew up. The soldier had both of his legs blown off by the explosion. By the time Ayala reached him, the medic had already sedated the soldier with morphine.

  “There wasn’t much I could do,” says Ayala. “I just held his hand and reassured him we got the birds on the way.” The soldier, Ayala would learn later, died from his injuries. Just two weeks into his Iraq tour and Ayala had already had his first combat baptism by blood and fire. He thought that if it had been a firefight it would’ve been okay, but this was different. They were fighting an enemy who wreaked deadly havoc without being seen. How could you fight someone like that? Ayala didn’t sleep that night.

  “I just sat in my bunk,” he says, replaying the aftermath of the attack. “I thought to myself, It will be a miracle if the rest of us make it out of this [the war] intact. I was worried that it was all going to be like this.”