Just Another Soldier

by Jason Christopher Hartley

  The unit who was going to relieve ours would be moving into our base soon, and the process of handing our workload over to them would be in full swing by the time I returned. I knew when I got back I’d have to tag along on certain missions as our unit trained the new guys, but I had convinced myself that there was a slight possibility I wouldn’t have to. I rarely thought about my upcoming leave date, and the idea of getting killed or hurt was something I never worried much about either, but this changed when I realized I had only seven days left before going on leave. Given that this was possibly my last week of combat, the idea of getting hurt made me just as nervous as if it had been my first week.

  For the first mission of worry week, I was in the lead vehicle of a convoy into town to set up concrete barriers around the police station. After a massive car bomb had detonated in front of the city council building the day before, it was decided that barriers would be put up around important structures. The explosion had left a deep crater in the street and collapsed a large portion of the outer wall surrounding the grounds of the building. An Iraqi National Guard soldier who had been guarding the front gate was killed in the blast, as were a few civilians who had been on the street when it happened. Most of the car bombs we’d seen were remotely triggered and usually destroyed only the car, doing minimal damage to the road and buildings. If the attacker was lucky, the blast sent enough shrapnel outward to damage a coalition vehicle and kill or injure a few people in the area. But this most recent event had been a suicide car bomb, and the explosion was tremendous. The bomber’s body was scattered everywhere in messy pieces that were mostly unidentifiable, except for a section of his ribs and spine in the street, and his head, which had landed in the backyard of a nearby home.

  The mission was pretty straightforward: we were to escort some flatbed trailers carrying the concrete barriers and construction vehicles into town and protect the engineers while they set up the barriers. Being in the lead vehicle, I had the job of scanning the sides of the road for bombs. This is the job of everyone in a convoy, but especially so for the first vehicle.

  We were just outside of town, on a road with little traffic, when I noticed off to the side a cinder block with a wire going into it. My heart rate instantly doubled. This wasn’t something typical of IEDs, but wires going into anything on the side of the road were never a good sign. I called over the radio to halt the convoy, trying unsuccessfully to not sound jittery. Whiskey was part of the convoy and had gotten out of his vehicle. I pointed out to him the wired cinder block. Then we noticed on the opposite side of the road an identical cinder block and wire. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, but I sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere near them. Whiskey crept closer to check it out, despite my suggestion that he not do so. He discovered that it was a power line that went under the street and to a nearby house. The cinder blocks had been placed there to protect the wire where it came out at the shoulder of the road. I felt relieved that it wasn’t an IED, but now I was really on edge.

  Once we got into town, the engineers went to work putting the barriers in place. We established a security perimeter around them while they worked, then we waited. Our company had done more than a hundred missions like this, but for the first time, I was actually worried. I knew this day was no more dangerous than any other I’d spent in Iraq, but just when I had almost gotten myself calmed down, intelligence was received that there was a high likelihood of another suicide car bomb attack in town, this time with two cars. We were given descriptions of the cars: one was white and the other black. Great. More suicide car bombs. I’m standing around here on a small city street and I’m supposed to defend myself against exploding cars? We knew it was common for suicide car bombers to use dead-man triggers where the detonation occurred when a button or lever was released, as opposed to pushed. This meant that if a carful of explosives came barreling down the road toward me and I shot and killed the driver, not only would the car still be coming right at me, but when his dead hand released its grip on the trigger, the bomb would go off.

  I hated how helpless I felt defending myself against a car bomb. Normally I would never load a grenade in my M203 while in town due to the high density of civilians, but I knew a 5.56mm bullet was no match for a car bomb, so I loaded a grenade anyway. I knew a 40mm grenade probably wouldn’t be much help either, but I was determined to use all available force to defend against an attack, even if it improved my chances of survival only marginally.

  I spent a moment deciding what my response would be to various hypothetical threats. The obvious threat would be a single adult male driving a car fitting one of the vehicle descriptions, ignoring our roadblock, and speeding toward us. I would not hesitate to engage this vehicle. But what if there were two men in the vehicle? Or a woman? Or an entire family? I briefed the gunner in the turret of my Humvee that there was no fucking way I was going to get killed a week before going on leave by some bullshit car bomb and that he should be prepared to immediately engage any vehicle I pointed out. I told him that if I saw a vehicle coming toward us driven by a nun and full of eight-year-old schoolgirls who I suspected might be sitting on piles of explosives, I was going to blow it up.

  The engineers worked late into the day putting the barriers in place, and every time I saw a white or black car, my pulse would quicken. They finally finished work as the sun began to set. We returned to our base after a long, car bomb–free day.

  December 2, 2004

  “BUT I HAVEN ’T SEEN BARBADOS, SO I MUST GET OUT OF THIS ”

  On my last day before going on leave, I was with CASEVAC and only had to make it to the end of my shift without getting killed. With only a few hours to go, we got a call that there had been an engagement on the highway and there was a wounded Iraqi national. An IED had exploded next to a convoy of civilian contractors, disabling one of their armored Ford Excursions. The Bradley unit from our base was in the area, and when they responded to the attack, a man with a cell phone was seen fleeing the area. After repeated commands to stop, he kept running and was shot by one of the soldiers. Despite being hit, the man continued to run, so one of the Bradleys shot him with its7.62mm coaxial gun. This put him down. When they got to him, they saw he had been hit in the foot, leg, both forearms, and in the chest.

  Knowing I was so close to being home free, I had switched into autopilot mode for the day, and I refused to be affected by anything short of a nuclear disaster or an Elvis sighting. When we got to the scene, the man was still alive and had already been given first aid for his wounds, but was still in need of help to be kept alive. The combat lifesavers who worked on him had done a good job, but the wound to his chest was still a serious concern. One of the 5.56mm rounds had struck him in the back and exited just below his collarbone. Matt took over and installed in the chest wound one of those snazzy one-way valve devices for treating sucking chest wounds. (I’ve always loved the term “sucking chest wound.” During basic training, when we were taught how to treat them, I thought the drill sergeants were being funny and calling them that because getting shot in the chest really sucked. I later learned they were called this because as the wounded person continued to breathe, the chest cavity would fill up with air sucked in through the hole, eventually causing the lungs to collapse.)

  As I stood over the wounded man, it occurred to me that I had lost count of how many times we’d encountered wounded Iraqis. There was a time when seeing something like this would have been traumatizing, but all I wanted now was to see the wounded guy get loaded into the ambulance and driven back to our base so I could go on leave. I had no idea if this guy was innocent or not, but either way I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for him. If he was involved in the attack, his current condition was part of the territory that comes with being a combatant. Or maybe he was an innocent bystander who had taken out his cell phone to call his wife to let her know he might be a little late for dinner because the U.S. Army had stopped traffic on the highway again, but instead of calling her he found himself i
nexplicably drawn to the stopwatch function in his phone and on an impulse decided to time how fast he could run the hundred-yard dash. I’m a solid believer in civil liberties, and a person should have the right to wield a cell phone during spontaneous solo track events, but a person should also have enough common sense to realize that suspicious furtive behavior while using a cell phone in a combat zone is an unsafe combination.

  There was a young man kneeling down at the side of the wounded man, holding his hand and praying softly. No one seemed to know where this guy had come from, but he wasn’t in our way, so we left him alone. I tried to imagine how the man who was praying might have been feeling at that moment. If you were with someone you loved who was shot and dying, how would you remember that day? I wondered what it would feel like for this otherwise nondescript place to be part of an indelible mark left on me emotionally. It seemed strange to be near someone who was probably going through one of the most emotionally painful experiences of his life while I felt almost nothing at all.

  About a month earlier, I was on a mission with the QRF where two local men were killed. Another unit from our base was visiting the home of an informant who had regularly provided them with valuable information. As a show of gratitude for his help, the unit came by his home to drop off shoes and clothes for his children. The informant had a brother who was not pleased to learn that his sibling had been giving information about the insurgency to the Americans, so during the visit, while the two of them were in the house together, the brother shouted “traitor” and threw a hand grenade. It was not clear if the grenade was meant to be thrown out the window toward the troops or meant to kill his brother, but the fact remained that the grenade didn’t leave the house, and the blast wounded both men. Perceiving this as an attack, one of the soldiers shot and killed both brothers. A second grenade was found on the assailant’s body.

  By the time we got to the house, there wasn’t much left to do. There were no further attacks, and a search of the area yielded nothing significant. Normally when a civilian is killed or found dead, the body is transported to the police station to be identified so the police can inform the family. In this case, we were already at the family’s house, so there was no need to identify the bodies. After our battalion commander (who had tagged along with the QRF) had his photograph taken, posing like a hunter over one of the dead men, we asked the father what he wanted us to do with the bodies of his sons. He asked us to move the bodies to the middle of the backyard, and the family would take care of it from there.

  The rest of the family and some of the neighbors were in a group in the backyard and in a state of agony. As the bodies were carried into the yard, the group became hysterical. Most of the adult women performed the grief routine of shrieking, tearing the necks of their dresses open, beating themselves on the face and chest, then clawing the ground and throwing dirt over themselves. The pain and despair of the women was difficult to witness, but I found the cultural method in which they expressed it interesting. I had never in my life seen anything like this. What got to me the most was seeing the men cry. No dramatics, just simple weeping. It only got worse when the family got a closer look at the bodies. To have someone you love die is one thing, but to see their dead body, still warm and torn apart by grenade shrapnel and bullets, is something I can’t even begin to fathom. It seemed, in a way, an important event in my life, to witness something like this. I felt that maybe I should have taken a photograph of the grieving family, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was nothing I could do to comfort them, and I felt I was getting too emotionally involved in the situation. So I stopped worrying about the crying women and switched my focus to the men. I figured our presence was no longer welcome, and I was worried there might be a grief-driven attack of retaliation. I wanted to get out of there before someone had the chance to get their hands on an AK-47, giving us cause to kill more of the family. When we left, I felt so strange. What do you say in a situation like this when you leave? “Um, sorry about killing part of your family. We’ll just leave the clothes and shoes for your kids right here. See ya later, I guess.”

  The man with the sucking chest wound lay next to the Bradley that had shot him. When I looked up in the turret, I saw Karl in the gunner’s seat, the guy I went to Qatar with. I rarely ran into him, so I gave him a cheery hello. When he looked back at me, he put his hands up and shrugged. This seemed like a strange response to my greeting. Then I realized that he was probably the one who had shot the man. I remember a conversation I had with him in Qatar where he told me how little action the guys in Bradleys see. They have too much firepower to be useful for most of the missions in our area, and I’d venture a guess that this was the first time he’d fired in combat. It was still unclear if the man who was shot was innocent, and Karl probably wasn’t feeling great about having to sit there and watch him suffer.

  The wounded man was stabilized and transported back to our base, where one of the head medics decided to pour a clotting agent into his chest wound, which killed him.

  I decided to go to Barbados for my leave. The thought of going back to the States really didn’t appeal to me. More than anything, I wanted to relax and spend my leave doing absolutely nothing, and I knew if I went home I’d spend the entire time visiting everyone I knew. Endless social engagements for two weeks would have been fun and probably would have entailed a lot of sex, but it sounded like more trouble than it was worth. Besides, I didn’t want to go home until I was completely done with my deployment. With how often we were given time off while we were at Fort Drum, I felt like I had had a hundred “going away” parties and nights of drinking. I didn’t want to repeat this sort of thing with multiple homecomings.

  When I was trying to decide where to go for leave, my primary criterion was to go somewhere warm and quiet, and the Caribbean seemed like the logical choice. I’d never done much traveling, and I knew nothing about the islands, so I had to arbitrate a destination. I didn’t want to go anywhere named after a saint, and I didn’t want to go anywhere with a weird name like Anguilla or Nevis, so I chose Barbados because it seemed exotic and utterly random. In retrospect, I think subconsciously I chose it because of the Tori Amos song “Me and a Gun,” where she sings, “But I haven’t seen Barbados so I must get out of this.”

  The process for going on leave is a tremendous pain in the ass; it takes days of briefings and out-processing before you actually leave the Middle East. But the coolest thing I’ve ever seen the Army do was fly me to any destination I chose without asking any questions.

  For three days I was a zombie who got on and off flights. I wanted to close my eyes, curl into the fetal position, bleed pinesap from every pore, and form a hardened cocoon around myself in which I could hibernate until I was in Barbados. I got as close to that as possible. For three days I didn’t open my eyes or mouth unless I absolutely had to. I had connecting flights in Georgia and Texas, where I was respectfully ushered to the front of every line.

  It was so fucking weird to suddenly be back in America. And there were so many people thanking me, telling me they respected me and appreciated what I was doing, patting me on the back, paying for my coffee, paying for my bagel, paying for my gum and magazines. It wasn’t uncommon for people to tell me in some form, “I don’t support the war, but I support you.” The appreciation was a bit overwhelming, but it felt great. I was impressed by the respect and candor of the people and it made me proud.

  I had arranged online to rent a room in a guest house in a quiet residential area in Barbados. It was around 11:00 p.m. when I arrived at the house, where I was greeted by the middle-aged German woman who owned it along with her young Turkish husband. Her husband didn’t speak any English, and he seemed a little intimidated by my uniform, so his wife told me he wanted to know if I had flown through Turkey or if I had ever had the chance to work with Turks. I answered that I hadn’t. It was late, and none of us were much interested in chatting, so after they showed me my room, they went to their own home
across the street and I sat on the porch and drank a warm freedom beer and listened to the waves. When I first noticed the crash of the waves, I thought it was a gunshot. So typical. A soldier leaves combat and thinks everything sounds like a gunshot.

  The next morning I met the two Jamaican guys who were also renting rooms at the house. The younger of the two was quiet and reserved and probably no older than twenty. The older one was loud and outgoing and in his thirties. They had jobs working at a construction site in the area and were staying at the house for a few months. In the evening, when they were back from work, we would sometimes drink beer on the porch together. Both were nice enough guys and we got along well, but they were a little shady. The older one was dealing drugs out of the house and would get strange visitors at all hours. The younger one told me he had stolen a lot of money from a drug dealer in Kingston, Jamaica, and could never go back. When he got back from work, he’d roll two joints, smoke both of them by himself, then pass out on the couch with his thumb in his mouth.

  I spent a few days at the beach and visiting different sights, but what I was most concerned with was eating at every chance I got. I ate like a pig king. The room was cheap, so I thought this would justify spending a ridiculous amount of money on food.

  The island was beautiful, and the people were nice, but I didn’t feel like I was getting what I needed. Everyone spoke English, which was convenient, but I couldn’t get over how I felt like I was in Brooklyn. This wasn’t a bad thing, but it wasn’t the carefree paradise I had hoped it would be. I never slept deeply in Iraq, but I always slept well. Now I was getting horrible sleep. I had dreams about guns and Humvees and helicopters and explosions. I would wake up every hour. I would grind my teeth and sometimes wake up with cramps in my calves from flexing my feet all night. The humidity and lack of air conditioning made me sweat, and my sleep seemed feverish. There was a political rally one night at the fish market where a man yelled over loudspeakers about misspent tax money and the corruption of the government. Another night it rained so much the roads turned into rivers. None of this would normally have bothered me, but I couldn’t get away from this nagging feeling of anxiety and dread. I was unarmed, and it made me feel insecure. What if someone attacked me? I didn’t even have a pocketknife. I didn’t want to see people, I wanted to be alone, I wanted to escape. I didn’t want to have to worry about locking my room because of sketchy housemates. I didn’t want to be a tourist, I didn’t want to be a soldier, I didn’t want to be American, I didn’t want to be white, I wanted to be nobody, invisible, a spirit.