Just Another Soldier

by Jason Christopher Hartley

  He seemed to be okay, and Jeff was doing his best to help him out. I looked at Rich again and said, “Tell the Humvees to get up here now. Tell them to get a tow strap ready, and the second they pull up to use it to pull the LT out of the water.” Almost all the Humvees had either a tow bar or a tow strap, items that could be used to tow other Humvees or vehicles if they broke down.

  I kept looking back up toward the gate where we had fired. I wanted so badly to maneuver, but knew I couldn’t with only two other guys and with the lieutenant possibly in the process of drowning. I cautiously moved a little closer to the gate.

  It was several minutes before the Humvees got to us, but once I could see them approaching, I brought Rich and Jimmy up with me to the gate. One of the Humvees had stopped at the canal and was helping Jeff with the lieutenant. I came up to the gate and saw that it was locked with a chain and padlock. There were a couple houses on the other side of it, and I wanted in. I considered shooting the chain, but was concerned about shrapnel from the bullet. As I was contemplating this, Dan was flying up the road in his Humvee then stopped next to me.

  He yelled, “Do you want me to ram it?”

  Ram it? Yeah, that sounded good! “Yeah! Go, go, go!” I yelled back to Dan. I stepped aside, and he hit the gate. It burst apart and collapsed. Dan drove over it. As soon as the Humvee stopped moving, I yelled for his dismounts. I now had four guys, enough to at least start clearing the structures on this side of the gate in front of us. Sean was in Dan’s truck on the .50-cal, something that gave me a lot of comfort. As we passed him, he told me, “I’ve gotcha covered, Jason.”

  The first building we came to was smallish and had an open door. It looked like nothing more than a pump house. It was empty, other than a few pipe joints coming out of the ground. We moved on to the next building.

  This one looked like a home, a typical mud-brick house. It was on the other side of some dense brush and a small canal. We slowly circled around to the far side of the house and down the dirt road that ran alongside it.

  As we came around the corner of the house, we saw what I expected to: an enormous family. By now the rest of the dismounts were behind us, along with my platoon sergeant. We found a walkway that crossed the small ditch and began searching the buildings. There were two men and more women and children than I could count, probably a dozen or more. The men were immediately pulled to the side while we searched the area. All we found were animals and more kids. As we searched, we consolidated all the women and children into the open area in front of the buildings. There were some makeshift tents in the same area, with more sleeping children. How children could sleep through the explosions was beyond me. One of the women was holding a child who looked dead. I tried to ask her if the baby was okay. She didn’t understand me, and I didn’t understand her. I pointed to the baby, and all she did was hold it out for me to take. I didn’t want to take her baby; I just wanted to be sure it was okay.

  For the next two or three hours we searched the area around the house extensively. There were vineyards everywhere. We had mortars set up at the location where the Humvees had been staged, and they were prepared to fire if we needed them. This would have been an excellent opportunity for them to fire high-explosive rounds, but our engagement was too close and too brief. So as we searched, we asked them to fire illumination rounds over our area. Rich called the fire mission in, since he was the one on the radio. The first shot was perfect. In radio communication, you never use the word “repeat” if you want someone to repeat the last thing they’ve said. You use “say again.” The reason for this is “repeat” means “shoot again.” Since the first shot the mortars fired required no corrections, I told Rich, “Look, you gotta say ‘repeat.’ The mortar guys must love that. It’ll make them so happy if you just say it. Go on, say it.” Rich called the next shots in by only saying, “Repeat.” Maybe mortar guys don’t think this is that big a deal, but I thought it was cool as hell to finally get to hear “repeat” used appropriately.

  We searched the canals, up the road, the path the men would have to have used to get away—we searched everything. We didn’t find any weapons, no RPG, not even any blood. One of the illumination rounds had started a small brushfire, but it didn’t burn the entire country of Iraq to the ground as I had hoped it would. It was so frustrating. There was simply too much to search and too few guys to do it properly. We had already spent way too much time on the objective, and we needed to leave.

  The lieutenant had been pulled out of the water and was fine. He spent probably ten minutes treading water before someone with the tow strap came to him. I have no idea how he did this, I would have sunk in five seconds. I now have a greater appreciation for why Rangers make it a habit to carry rope with them on missions.

  I asked Rich and Jeff what exactly they had seen. They told me there was a group of guys standing around near the chain link gate, smokin’ and jokin’, one with an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) and one with an AK-47. Something we all have dreamed of is finding someone with an RPG. There is absolutely no good or legal reason for anyone to have an RPG, and it is one of the few situations where you have advance permission to kill whoever is holding one. So as soon as they saw this guy walk by while we were waiting to be picked up, they moved into a better position to engage them from. They said the guy with the AK-47 returned fire briefly before he bolted, and that they hit at least one of the guys because he spun around like he had been hit in the shoulder.

  I never actually saw any of these men, another thing that frustrates me. And what scares me is that the four grenades I fired were directly in line with the house with the huge family. The house was on the other side of a slight incline behind some growth and was not visible to us at the time, probably two hundred meters from where we fired. At least one of my rounds exploded about 150 meters out, not far from the house. Had I aimed any higher, I could easily have hit the family. The road we had fired down turned slightly and was not straight, as we had at first assumed. We thought the grenades were being dropped along the road and in the direction the men had run. But in reality, once they had escaped the area we were hammering with rounds, they would have been in the clear for the most part.

  Once we concluded our searches and reconsolidated everyone, we moved out. We took the two men with us to the big base up the street from ours and ran some tests. One of the men tested positive for having recently handled TNT.

  I think about that night constantly. There’s so much I wish we could have done differently, but given the situation we did what we could. Two months later another company in our battalion found in that same area a body, dead with a gunshot wound to the head, lying on a bed in an abandoned building. The medics estimated he had been dead two months. We wanted to believe that this was one of the men we shot at, but I knew someone with a head wound wouldn’t have been able to run away. Even if he was carried by the other men, why wouldn’t they have buried him immediately, as was the custom?

  Although this was without a doubt the most exciting experience of my life, recounting it has been one of the most boring. We did this, we did that, blah blah blah. I haven’t read a single book about the military in my life, unless you count Catch-22, yet here I am writing one. I’m not trying to record history or be a news source. Those both require research and fact-checking. I’m trying to record events the best I remember them, but it’s not reliable. Take for example the grenade my lieutenant threw. I was right there when it happened, and from what I saw, for a few seconds I would have sworn he had blown himself up.

  I spent a lot of time trying to decide how to tell this story. You can write the same stories about ambushes only so many times before they quickly become repetitive and dull. I’m not Richard Marcinko or Tom Clancy; I couldn’t turn this into hero-porn even if I wanted to. There just wasn’t enough action with satisfying results, and besides, it would just be too nauseating. I thought maybe I’d include dwarves, mermaids, and synchronized dancing and singing. The mermaids would have
explained how our lieutenant was able to tread water for so long, the dwarves could have scampered away with the bodies of the men we’d shot, and I could have interpreted the firefight as a musical. That would at least have made the act of retelling the story a bit more interesting. But I don’t want to make something as significant as the first time we actually directly engaged bona fide enemy something so escapist. It would have been nice to know how all the details fit, for there to be a resolution. So I decided it should include a family of women, a benevolent man with a clubfoot, and a tragic romance with a girl named Zia.

  October 13, 2004

  THE TAO OF SOLDIERING

  I. Learn to suffer

  II. You are not special, Know your place

  III. Release your attachments

  THE TAO OF SOLDIERING

  Today is the birthday of the Monastic Order of Infantrymen.

  Soldiering is difficult. But for soldiers with the proper attitude, there can be great fulfillment from this work. To find peace and contentedness from a job that may seem intuitively chaotic, you simply have to find the tao of soldiering and embrace it.

  For soldiers who are nauseated by terms like “embrace,” “peace,” and “contentedness,” and don’t know how to pronounce “tao” (it’s like “dow,” as in Dow Jones, and can be translated loosely to mean “the way”) let me put this in terms a grunt can understand. Being a soldier is to live in a world of shit. You’re constantly surrounded by assholes; you have to endure an unending amount of bullshit from your leadership, military regulations and paperwork, and stupid training missions; and in the end, you’ll most likely get shit on by your own government sooner or later when they fuck up your pay and benefits. And to top it all off, you might actually have to go into combat at some point, which also means you’ll spend a lot of time in another world of shit (i.e., Iraq) and possibly get your balls blown off by some insurgent asshole who is too afraid to fight you face-to-face so he explodes jury-rigged artillery rounds next to your Humvee while he’s outside the maximum effective range of most of your weapons systems. Soldiering just plain sucks. From the pogues who cook the food and do the laundry to the Apache pilots and the Green Berets who do all the Hollywood stuff, soldiers’ lives are in a constant state of suck. But there are soldiers who have found a way not only to endure it all, but to enjoy it. Contentment, happiness, fulfillment, reward, peace, meaning, purpose, Zen, the way, the middle path, nirvana, the big nothing—whatever you want to call it, it’s there if you are unafraid to see it.

  Learn to Suffer

  Most everything a soldier does entails discomfort. As a soldier, you will discover an encyclopedic number of ways to suffer. The suffering is physical, psychological, and emotional. It can also be financial, legal, marital, and any other word you can give the -al suffix to. There is nowhere you can go to avoid suffering. There is no reprieve, no solace. It is unavoidable and inevitable. You can either cry about it, or you can just learn how to suck it up.

  One of the first things an effective soldier learns during basic training is that physical endurance has nothing to do with physical ability. Your body gives you the illusion that you are able to do only what is within your physical limitations. Say, for example, your muscles are strong enough to do only fifty push-ups. This limitation is very convincing. You believe that you can’t do more than what your muscles and bones are physically capable of doing. In reality, the only limitation is the will of the soldier. You probably think that if you lift weights and make more muscle, you will be able to do seventy push-ups. This is true, but you aren’t able to do more push-ups because your muscles are stronger; you are able to do more push-ups because your stronger muscles are a convincing illusion to allow yourself the will to do more. The truth is, with will alone you can do seventy push-ups, or ten thousand for that matter. Accomplishing more than you physically should be able to is referred to as “using the Force.” If the Jedi metaphor for describing “will” doesn’t work for you, then use the Christian one. In the New Testament (Matthew 17:20), Jesus says that with the faith of a mustard seed you can move mountains. So whether you’re raising an X-Wing fighter out of a swamp or parting the Red Sea, the concept is the same: you simply need the will.

  It is not necessary for the novitiate to buy into any of this. But when he’s into the twelfth mile of a forced road march carrying nearly his own bodyweight in gear, a soldier learns that there is a landscape of pain he never knew existed. Once you’ve learned that there is no real limit to what you can endure, you’re on your way to understanding that you can do just about anything so long as you allow yourself to have the will to do it. And the easiest way to learn this concept is to suffer and realize you can endure it. Then, as you reach a new level of painful experiences, you are able to begin working on the next level. Eventually you learn that there is virtually no end to the kinds of pain mortality can make available to you, and you continue to learn that there is no discomfort you cannot overcome. The process of learning to suffer is always ongoing. No matter how much you’ve suffered, there is always more to suffer.

  You Are Not Special

  As Americans and Westerners, we value individuality more than just about anything else. Individuality is at the core of our concepts about freedom. The protection of the individual is vital to a free society. But while the civilian is the “individual,” the soldier is the “protection.”

  As a society, we’ve gotten really good at fostering individual development. As a soldier, the idea that individuality must be discarded is usually a very hard thing to accept at first. Because of basic psychological instincts for self-preservation and a million beliefs that have been socialized into us from the moment of our birth, we protect our “ego” more than anything. You are who you think you are. You spend your life developing an image in your head of who you are. You have a name, you live in a certain place, you have a certain profession, you have tastes, opinions, preferences. In terms of a capitalistic society, we are nothing more than consumers. So we define our individuality by what we consume. (Sometimes the consumer becomes disillusioned by this, so he simply adjusts his tastes to something that will identify him as an individual. “I’m not into Metallica anymore, they’re too mainstream. I’m into the Mars Volta now.”) There are eight million individuals in New York City. I was one of them. Like in college, where the second question asked after “What’s your name?” is “What’s your major?” in New York City the only two things anyone wants to know when they first meet you are “So what do you do?” and “Where do you live?” I was a paratrooper and a computer programmer who lived in Nolita. I doubt there has ever been anyone who could say that. So I’m an individual, right?

  One thousand years from now, no one is going to know who you were. Right now, even while you are living, you don’t really matter. You live in Ohio, you work at a hardware store, you drive a Saturn, you have two kids, you send your mom a Mother’s Day card every year, you have a beautiful lawn. You’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you have a loft in Chelsea and a summer home on Fire Island, you come from old money, every Christmas, you visit your mom, who lives in the home where you grew up an only child in New England, you were on the cover of Forbes and Out in the same month. Does any of this really matter? Someday you’re going to die, and they’ll throw dirt on your grave just like everyone else’s. Someday the sun will expand and consume every living thing on earth. Someday the universe will collapse in on itself then explode into a brand-new universe. Even these events don’t really matter; they’re just things that happen. So whether you prefer creamy or chunky is of such absurdly little consequence, the near meaninglessness of it is mind-boggling. Accept that you are of no consequence, that you are essentially nothing. In a universe of infinite universes that will ultimately return to the singularity from whence they all came, you are as inconsequential as my peanut butter preference.