The Things They Cannot Say

by Kevin Sites

  Part V: Moral Ambiguities

  How Do You Know What’s Right?

  War fills our spiritual void. I do not miss war, but I miss what it brought.

  —Chris Hedges, author, ex–war correspondent

  From War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges (Public Affairs, 2002)

  Chapter 9: Morris Versus Mo

  There are those that need killing and those that need helping.

  Colonel Morris Goins, U.S. Army

  1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry

  The War in Iraq (2006–08)

  Morris Goins had been home from Iraq for almost nine months. There had been some adjustments, even some counseling sessions, but for the most part he felt like he was doing all right. And then one day he was driving down the road near Fort Hood in Texas and he hit a squirrel with his truck.

  “I almost pulled over and called my mother,” he says. “It hurt so much to kill something. Or I’m fishing and I hook a bass in the gut and it’s bleeding. I feel the same thing, then tell myself, ‘It’s just a fish, bro.’”

  But Goins isn’t some hot mess, one roadkill away from a nervous breakdown. He’s a highly decorated U.S. Army colonel, ambitious, smart, even managing an enviable balance between work and family, despite long months away on “business.”

  Some say he’s at the top of his game, and there’s plenty of evidence to support that. When I first meet him he’s in the middle of a prestigious National Security Fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School. I wonder if he’s running for mayor or already has the job, as I watch him work the tables in the lobby area of the Kennedy School, known as the Forum, a popular spot for high-profile socializing in between classes. He smiles, waves, shakes hands and generally carries himself with the energetic jaunt of a successful entrepreneur or celebrity chef.

  Still being able to connect with people, as well as his emotions, I realize, is possibly the key to his postwar readjustment.

  After a particularly bloody fifteen-month combat deployment to Iraq, he was actually surprised he could feel anything at all. Shutting down was the default mode for so many in the military, silent stoics bearing their burdens in isolation. This was not how Morris Goins operated.

  There are twenty-eight dog tags, Goins tells me, hanging from his fireplace mantel. They belonged to the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry soldiers killed in action in and around Baqubah, Iraq, under his command. Another two hundred were wounded. When they first arrived in 2006, they were driving around in Humvees without much drama, but when they moved their outpost into an Iraqi police station, it was like the switch was turned on.

  “The next ten months were like Saving Private Ryan at Omaha Beach,” says Goins. Seventeen of his tanks, thirty-four Bradley Fighting Vehicles and thirty-three Humvees were damaged or destroyed during operations.

  “I know of only one other battalion that had more KIAs [killed-in-action incidents] than me in the entire campaign,” Goins says. “We were eating twenty-five IEDs a day. I got choked up during that time and my guys knew it bugged me. I remember one of my soldiers saying, ‘Sir, nobody wants to be you, hang in there.’”

  And then there was the mother writing to him before they deployed.

  “I need you to bring my son back alive.”

  And another writing him during the deployment.

  “I need you to bring my son home. His father is sick.”

  And during one particularly ugly stretch, the so-called lonely burden of command only got lonelier.

  “I lost nine dudes in eleven days,” he says.

  He wrote all the families personal letters, because the standard letter is BS. “I tell them this is what your son died for, this is what I remember about him.”

  At Harvard, Goins has the time to ponder those fifteen months and to try to understand who he was in war and how it has changed him.

  “I think a lot about the loss of life,” he says. Unlike many soldiers both above and below his rank, he knows the value of emotion and not burying it. While still in Iraq, he was starkly candid with Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2007, concerning a story about the loss of his men. “Sometimes you can’t keep it together,” he said. “I don’t have the strength. I am human just like you. But these dudes, they need you to be calm and thinking straight, not getting angry and wanting to kick down some doors. That does not mean I won’t come back and lock the door and cry by myself. I have eye drops on my desk to clear my eyes. I have my Bible and I do a lot of praying. Then I can go back out again and do what I need to do.”

  He remembers getting the news of two of the first casualties of his battalion. His sergeant major told him that their engineers hit an IED while out on patrol. He opened his hands to reveal a slip of paper. In it were the names of two soldiers with the letters “KIA” next to them. Goins said he sent a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) to retrieve the bodies. When the force returned, Goins said he went to the gate to meet them. He walked alongside the Bradley carrying the bodies and, touching it, began to weep. He helped remove them from the vehicle to take them into the graves registration building, where men and their body parts are reunited before being choppered out.

  Goins called the battalion together and told them “not to forget those guys, send letters to their families, talk amongst yourself, get the emotions out.” Goins said he himself was choked up. He asked the chaplain to lead them in prayer, but the chaplain deferred to him, saying, “No, you do it, sir.”

  Goins said he began the prayer without bothering to hide his grief, tears running down his face, like an old-time Baptist preacher overcome by the spirit. “Comfort the families, Lord, comfort us. Keep us strong and keep us from doing the things we don’t want to do.”

  But there was something tactical about what he was doing and saying as well. He was encouraging his men to vent their emotions in sadness now, so they wouldn’t do it in anger later.

  “I prayed to the Lord to keep us from turning evil,” Goins says, “to keep us from revenge. You can kill people anytime,” he says, “a monkey can do that. We have to do it right.”

  Goins thinks he was able to do it right and keep his men focused on the mission rather than revenge, but personally, he says, it meant coming to terms with the two very different dimensions of himself.

  He literally calls them Mo and Morris, reflecting the concept of the shadow self or alter ego discussed in earlier chapters, but for Goins they were simply a way to more effectively explain the firewall he maintained between the soldier and the man.

  “Morris is the guy that is out bass fishing and gut-hooks a fish or hits a squirrel and feels bad. Morris is the guy who’s really sensitive. But when I’m operational I’m Mo. Mo makes decisions based on fact.”

  Goins provides me with a simple yet striking example from Iraq of the differences between his alter egos.

  “We’re on a mission and we’re taking fire from a house. Through our scopes we can see the shooter goes back inside. We can also see two little kids inside the house as well. We’ve got birds [choppers] flying overhead and I give them the order to take it down. But there are kids in the house! I thought about those kids for about two seconds. Take it down. Boom! That’s not my problem.”

  Goins is married, even has a son of his own, C.J. He can understand this may sound callous, but Mo’s thinking is clear, logical and without emotion. He believes—no, he knows—that he’s saving his men’s lives.

  “I’m responsible for the lives of my guys. I’m not responsible for those kids. Whoever started shooting at us was. Now, I don’t have problems living with both [Mo and Morris], but other people do. There are those that need killing and those that need helping,” he says, as if stating an obvious fact.

  Former Army Ranger Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman would likely agree with Goins’s rationale. In his book On Killing, Grossman observed that properly trained soldiers can become like reflexive weapons, able to kill quite efficiently, after they’ve predetermined the parameters for doing so. He wrote, “Usuall
y killing in combat is completed in the heat of the moment, and for the modern properly conditioned soldier, killing in such a circumstance is most often completed reflexively, without conscious thought. It is as though a human being is a weapon. Cocking and taking the safety catch off of this weapon is a complex process, but once it is off the actual pulling of the trigger is fast and simple.”

  In this context, Goins obviously knows his parameters, understanding even before he’s in a fight that his responsibility to the safety of his men and his own moral code will dictate when he will keep his safety on and when he will pull the trigger, whether Morris or Mo will be in charge. While those choices can be clear on the battlefield, Goins admits that it’s sometimes difficult to keep the man separated from the soldier in the aftermath.

  Goins recalls being out in the field during a firefight when two young Iraqi girls were wounded in the crossfire. During the incident Goins pulled up to a residential area where his medic was working on one of the girls.

  “But she’s so jacked up she doesn’t look like she’s going to survive,” says Goins. Then he heard over the radio that there was another wounded girl a little farther up. He told the medic they needed to leave the first girl behind and see what they could do for the second. When they reached the second girl, they discovered she was badly hurt as well but might survive with advanced medical treatment back at their base. When the medic picked up the girl up to put her in the Humvee, she began to cry and her parents, standing in the doorway of their house, told them not to take her away. The medic ignored them, still holding the girl, until Goins said, “Sit her down—and let’s go.”

  “The parents didn’t want her going with us,” he says, “so I tell him we can’t take her, that’s kidnapping. Put her down, we gotta roll.” Reluctantly the medic put her down in disbelief. They got back in their Humvee and drove silently back to their base. Once there Goins said he was overcome by the gravity of the decision he made to leave both girls to die. He says that when he saw his brigade commander he couldn’t contain his tears.

  “I just left two little girls behind,” he explained. For the next two hours, Goins said, the brigade commander, Colonel David Sutherland, drove him around in a Humvee, inside the base perimeter, talking him through it.

  It was an incident in which “Mo,” the trained soldier, had to make the decision, but “Morris,” the empathetic man, had to suffer its consequences. Goins knows that while imperfect, this psychological firewall has allowed him to be at peace with himself, both morally and professionally.

  Most important, though, he believes it lets him be the officer that his men can respect but also the human being to whom they can relate.

  Goins knows that when his year at Harvard is done, he will likely be sent to war again, but this time he will command an entire combat brigade rather than just a battalion.[27] With each promotion the responsibilities multiply, more lives are at stake and the balance between soldier and man becomes harder to maintain.

  “Emotionally I’m ready to deploy, but do I have enough in my well to survive? My body armor is in my garage, it’s ready to go,” he says. “But your well is not just yours as a commander. Everyone is dipping in it and everyone’s runs dry at some point.”

  But if his well does run dry, he can take comfort in the fact that there will be another Goins to take his place. His son, C.J., is currently a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

  Postscript

  After completing his National Security Fellowship at Harvard, Colonel Morris Goins was made commander of the 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division (Alaska). The brigade deployed to Afghanistan in January 2012 and is operating as Task Force Spartan in a highly dangerous region near the eastern city of Khost and the border with Pakistan.

  Chapter 10: The Quiet Soldier

  As a five-year-old boy knowing we were being hit directly by the Syrians, it had quite an effect. I remember my mom would set out clothing on a small bench in the house so that the minute there was an air-raid siren, we’d grab the pile of clothing and run down to the bomb shelter.

  Major Lior Tailer, Israel Defense Forces

  609th Reserve Infantry Unit

  The Wars in Lebanon (1989–90 and 2006)

  The conflict is only three weeks old (and will last only a month) but, at least in Lebanon, it has been spectacularly destructive. When I meet Major Lior Tailer at a western base in Galilee in August 2006, the thirty-eight-year-old reservist already looks war weary. But considering the high operational tempo of his 609th Reserve Infantry Unit, it’s understandable. It’s been mission after mission across the border into Lebanon, usually at night, seeking out Hezbollah bunkers and trying to destroy them in advance of a larger Israel invasion force currently being mounted. The unit has reportedly killed sixty fighters so far and taken ten prisoners without a single loss of their own. Part of that, Tailer knows, is because of the unit’s experience. Even though reservists like him have left their civilian lives suddenly to put on their IDF (Israel Defense Forces) uniforms again after Emergency Call-Up Order 8, they are not new to Lebanon.[28] Like Tailer, many of them have fought across the border before, specifically during the 1986–2000 invasion and occupation of south Lebanon.

  “It’s the same Lebanon, it’s the same terrain,” he says during my interview with him. “The difference is in the quantity and quality of the weapons we face.”

  According to Tailer, the most deadly weapons, for the IDF, are the broad range of antitank missiles Hezbollah has acquired, including American-made TOWs, which they buy on the black market.[29]

  “It’s complicated,” says Tailer, from personal experience. “It’s not army versus army warfare. They [Hezbollah] do have an organized fighting doctrine but it’s not based on making contact. It’s more of guerrilla warfare tactics. They want to draw you into an area where they have booby traps and they can use their antitank missiles.”

  He believes the only way to find them effectively is to outlast them in a war of nerves.

  “The name of the game is patience,” says Tailer. “You have to be methodical, moving forward slowly, and see who makes the first mistake, then capitalize on it.”

  For Tailer and other reservists who’ve suddenly made the shift from citizens to soldiers again, the process is both natural and unsettling. Here at the base, in between operations they sleep, play cards, smoke and talk about their “other” lives.

  For most of them, they’re lives they just left after getting Order 8.

  Reservists call it “flipping the bowl,” meaning that you have a nice table set with plates, napkins and bowls of food, then all of a sudden it’s turned upside down and the whole thing is a mess, as if the tablecloth has been pulled out from under the setting.

  “Emergency Call-Up Order 8, this is a rare animal that is both particular and peculiar to Israeli society,” says Tailer. “It’s understood they don’t use this for superfluous reasons. If you get one, the gravity of it makes the switch for you. It’s not an easy moment. It’s a defining moment in your life. It will be the difference between everything that came before and everything that came after.”

  What came before for men like Tailer was history, a complex set of circumstances initiated by prejudice and hatred, leading to a multinational migration here, to this place now called Israel. It’s a nation so steeped in conflict and struggle that only the very young or very old are really free of the obligation, when called upon, to kill and die to preserve it. This has also meant that for many in Israel a large portion of their lives will be spent with their identities fused. They are both soldiers and civilians, not either one or the other.

  I seek Tailer out again four years after first meeting him on the Lebanese border in 2006 while I’m reporting on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict that will become known in Israel as the Second Lebanon War. A friend who lives in Israel has tracked him down at his home in Haifa for me. I pose these questions about how his past has shaped him both as a ci
vilian and as a soldier. The story he tells is a rich but not completely unique history for many Israelis of Eastern European heritage. He says his father, Yaakov, now eighty-four, is a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family under the Nazi occupation in Ukraine during World War II.

  “My father ended up in a place worse than a concentration camp or work camp. They rounded up all of the Jews and had them walk to villages near the Ukraine border and sealed them in. They couldn’t get out so they starved to death or perished from illness.

  “My father saw his two siblings [brothers] die on the death march to this place. Later, he buried his father, mother and remaining brother when they succumbed to starvation and illness. The thing that saved him was that before the war he had been sick and hospitalized with typhus [a bacterial infection]… During the war, when everyone was dying of it, he was already immune. His childhood illness saved his life but sentenced him to witness the death of his family. He even had to dig his father’s grave with his own hands.

  “At least when you get to a camp they kill you outright. At a work camp they work you and give you food,” says Tailer. “What they did to them was to round them up and leave them to die. There was no medical attention—nothing.” Tailer’s father was there for two torturous years—from 1942 to 1944. He escaped to a Ukrainian village after his family died, where he worked on someone’s farm in exchange for lodging and food. After the war he came back to his village and found nothing left. He lived in an orphanage in Romania before deciding to migrate to Israel.

  He got there after first traveling through much of Europe, finally coming to Israel with the Irgun, or Irgun Zvai Leumi (the National Military Organization), also commonly known by its Hebrew acronym Etzel. The Irgun was a Jewish Zionist paramilitary group that conducted attacks against both Arabs and the British Mandate in Palestine from 1931 to 1948. Israel attempted to absorb the Irgun into the new national army, the IDF, but they initially refused to be assimilated and continued to operate independently.