Just Another Soldier

by Jason Christopher Hartley

  The escapist impulse in me was strong when I was in Iraq. I wanted so badly to just get fucked up and leave my mind and body behind. I would daydream about this bar in New Paltz that plays eighties music on Thursday nights, and I wanted more than anything to be drunk on cheap beer and nostalgia. I fantasized about going to Amsterdam for my leave and spending two weeks in a state of perpetual intoxication from various combinations of absinthe, hash, vodka, mushrooms, mescaline, and ecstasy.

  Speaking of which, my second day in Barbados, I spent the afternoon at the beach with my ex, Stasy. I thought it would be fun. The few times I’d hung out with her in the past were always really good experiences, but this time it went all sideways. I was a mess of repressed anxiety, and she brought it out. The beach was near the flight path for the airport, and every time a plane approached the island, I was certain it was going to explode and bloody bodies and aluminum would rain into the ocean. People at the beach looked soft and fleshy and delicate in their bathing suits, and I couldn’t stop wondering what their guts looked like. I wanted them all to be torn apart where they stood, each rendered into a bloody mound of flesh and bone. Would the woman in the bikini still seem beautiful if she were split apart so you could see exactly how much of her appeal was a yellow layer of fat or the deep red color of muscle tissue? I’ve always wondered if I could recognize someone by their skull. If someone you loved was killed, do you think you know their face and body well enough that you could identify their skeleton? It wasn’t fear that I felt; it was a desire for there to be no fear. I didn’t want to worry about the people or the planes. I just wanted to see them all dead and everything destroyed. I couldn’t take the anticipation, I just wanted the beach to be littered with entrails and carrion and everything on fire. I was covered in a cold sweat and I thought I was going to implode or at least spontaneously combust. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move, and I was certain everyone around me knew I was seething. There was a Rastafarian speed-walking back and forth across the beach in front of me. I couldn’t stop staring at him. He was happily speed-walking through my nightmare, completely unaffected by the horrors of life on earth. He smiled at me and put his arms in the air like he was cheering for having won an award. This cheered me up. I learned something that day: it’s not a good idea to hang out with your ex, Stasy, right after having been in a combat zone.

  I was flipping through the Lonely Planet guide to the Eastern Caribbean when I read about Saba. It is a tiny island, only five square miles, with a population of about twelve hundred. It has no beaches and little tourism. It sounded gorgeous and quiet. The more I read, the more I liked the sound of it. I decided to spend my last week there. I immediately called a travel agent and arranged tickets.

  I had paid for my room at the guest house in advance, and I hoped the woman who ran it would refund me the rest. When I went to her house that night to talk to her, her husband answered the door. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He didn’t wear shirts ever. I had seen him on various occasions during the week, working in the yard or washing the car, and not once was he wearing a shirt. He was a good-looking guy with long, dark, wavy hair, a hairy chest, a perfect tan, and a great physique. He belonged on the cover of a romance novel. The fact that he never wore a shirt, didn’t speak English, and was always doing chores screamed eighties porn. He was the gardener, the pool cleaner, and the cable guy all rolled into one. His aging wife was not exactly a catch and had to be at least twenty years his senior. She was old and sagging, but she had money and a beautiful house on the beach. And a pet husband. It’s fucking hilarious that people like this actually exist. She denied my request for a refund.

  The ticket agent at the Barbados airport told me I couldn’t fly to Saba without a passport. I should never have been allowed in the country without one, or at least not without my birth certificate to prove that I was an American, but now leaving for anywhere other than the United States was not going to happen. I’d never bothered getting a passport because I’m not exactly the world traveler type. The ticket agent advised me that I’d need to go to the United States embassy to get a passport or emergency travel orders if I was to be allowed to go to Saba.

  The embassy in Barbados was an interesting experience. With my military ID in hand, I was treated like a VIP. The waiting area inside was packed to capacity with people sitting silently on wooden benches. The room resonated with anxiety, and it was as quiet as a church. I suppose everyone there was waiting to speak to an agent about a visa permitting them to travel to America. The rules of conduct in the waiting area were strict. You couldn’t talk, stand, or sit anywhere other than on a bench. Everyone was dressed, groomed, and behaving as though they were waiting to interview for the most important jobs of their lives.

  When it was my turn to speak to an agent, my status was immediately changed from VIP to shithead. The agent was a fairly attractive young woman, younger than I was, and full of skepticism and distrust. She looked like she was a recent college graduate, probably full of ambitions in international relations, thinking it would be a good first step for her career to work at an embassy in an exotic Caribbean country.

  “How exactly did you get into the country without a passport?” she asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “I dunno. The guy at the airport just let me in. He told me there was a time when you could enter the country with only a military ID, but now you need a passport or your birth certificate. Then he let me in anyway. I wasn’t going to argue with him.”

  She then looked at my military ID, which I had passed her under the slot in the bulletproof glass and laughed. “Is this supposed to be real?”

  The IDs the Army gave us in Iraq were a joke. Our personal information was handwritten on antiquated blank ID cards and cheaply laminated. My military ID is usually the only form of ID that I carry, and I didn’t want anyone to think it was fake, so while I was on pass at the base in Qatar several months ago, I had a new one made. The new ID they gave me was the modern version, but the machine used for laminating the face of it had been broken, so the kid who made it for me put a piece of clear packing tape over it instead. It was a lot better than the one it replaced, but it still looked half-bogus. I told all of this to the agent and that if she thought this one looked fake, she should have seen the other one.

  She looked at me like I was an idiot. “So you’re basically telling me that the Army isn’t organized enough to give you a proper ID card.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Everyone thinks the U.S. military is this well-oiled machine. The truth is you would be shocked if you knew how disorganized it is. There are times I’m amazed anything ever gets done.” This was my attempt at humor, hoping to get her to relax a little.

  “Regardless, you know your military ID doesn’t prove citizenship, right?”

  “Yes, I realize there are resident aliens in the U.S. military.” Ha! I beat her to her punch line.

  “Therefore you should know that you need a passport to fly internationally. To get to Iraq you had to fly there, right? This means you must have flown through other countries.” She looked exasperated and shook her head in disbelief. “This doesn’t make any sense. How could you possibly fly all the way to the Middle East without a passport?”

  I told her, “How could the United States invade a sovereign nation without the blessing of the United Nations? The U.S. Army does pretty much whatever it wants. That’s how.”

  About an hour later, I left the embassy with a temporary passport, good for one year. Score one for the Sarcrastic Method!

  The landing strip at the airport in Saba is the shortest in the world for an international airport. The island is a dormant volcano, and the airport is located on a small flat area at the base of the island, once a pool of lava runoff. The fifteen-minute flight in a tiny plane to the island originates only from St. Maarten. The landing was the most intense experience I’d had on a plane without a parachute. You fly shockingly close to a set of cliffs, and just when you think you’re goin
g to crash into them as the plane’s proximity alarm starts blaring and the red light in the cockpit flashes, the plane drops onto the runway that has suddenly materialized. Women cry, men curse, everyone claps.

  Saba was everything that I’d hoped it to be, and more. Since the island is so steep, no matter where you are you always have a suicide-inducing view of everything. Because of the Dutch influence, every building is white and ridiculously cute with its red roof and green shutters. The roads are narrow, and so steep and winding they’d make San Franciscans nervous. The humidity is completely bearable, and the temperature is seventy degrees, twenty-four hours a day, all year. There was always a lonely cloud at the peak of the mountain, just to make sure you got the point about the island being a magical fairy-tale land. I would not have been surprised to see a unicorn. Everything was a lush green, and the air smelled so good. Iraq smells horrible. The whole fucking country stinks. It’s like one big landfill. God, I hated Iraq. I hated everything. This place was so heartbreakingly beautiful, my entire life before this moment instantly seemed shitty. I wanted to buy a house and live here for the rest of eternity. This place wasn’t actually a part of mortality. Combat was something that happened on that crappy little planet called Earth. I was somewhere else.

  The small hotel where I stayed was in an area called Hell’s Gate. This made me love the place even more. The hotel was run by a French couple; he was a chef, and she a wine connoisseur. My room was small and sunny, and the view from my window made me want to kill myself, it was so perfect. I wasn’t given a key to my room because there was no need for one. There isn’t crime in Paradise! It was quiet and secluded, tourist-free, and I saw almost no people. Exactly what I needed. But the best part was the food. I would wake up with the sun, stare at my watch until it was breakfast, have eggs, coffee, a fresh chocolate croissant, and a freshly squeezed glass of orange juice, then stare at my watch all morning until it was lunchtime. My favorite lunch dish was a seafood couscous thing. I ate it almost every day. Then I would stare at my watch all afternoon until dinner. I ate lamb, lobster, venison, duck, foie gras, escargot, and drank wine so good I wanted to cry. With a gut full of food and wine, I would pass out immediately after dinner and repeat the process again when the sun came up the next day. I had found heaven at Hell’s Gate.

  I wasn’t apprehensive about returning to Iraq. I enjoyed every moment I was in Saba without thinking about the next, and I was prepared for it to end. When that day came, I packed, paid, waved goodbye, and got on the plane.

  December 28, 2004

  ONLY SLAVES ARE HAPPY

  A few days before I went on leave, Matt and I were sitting at the table we shared between our bunks. We were both on our laptops—I was writing, he was watching Alias DVDs, and together we were clandestinely imbibing smuggled Jim Beam. I love the Jim.

  We were at the chatty level of intoxication when Matt asked me if I was ever going to put the blog back online. I told him I was thinking about putting it back up just before the end of our deployment, or maybe just after, if I wanted to play it safe. Then I figured, Fuck it, why wait? I said, “Whaddaya say I put it back up right now?” Matt was always the rational one and any harebrained idea he didn’t put the kibosh on could be considered copasetic. “Fuck it man, do it,” he permissed. The blog was already technically online, but hidden and therefore not publicly accessible. Putting it online was basically just a matter of flipping a switch—or twiddling a bit, as programmers like to say. A few clicks and keystrokes later, www.justanothersoldier.com silently went online. I was in the Caribbean a few days later.

  The D.I.E. Decision Making Process:

  Drink Jim Beam

  Intone “Fuck It”

  Execute Decision

  I didn’t dread returning to Iraq as much as I thought I would. In a perverse way, it kinda felt like coming home. Everything was so familiar: my platoon’s Humvees lined up the way they always were; the noisy door to our bunker; the stupid tail of an old Iraqi bomb stuck in the dirt we used as a urinal. I had missed Wazina. It felt good to hold her again. I loved how she looked, I loved how she smelled. It’s funny how attached you can get to a weapon. I wanted to keep her after we returned to the States. I wanted to put her on the wall over my bed. An assault rifle is the ultimate security blanket. The Marines acknowledge this the best with their “Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless” thing.

  I knew we were a month away from returning home, and I figured it would be easy to coast through the rest of our time in Iraq. There was a time when I was considering asking to stay for another tour, but I had ditched that idea long ago. I’m not one to get homesick and I don’t usually miss people, but I was getting excited at the idea of returning home. Being on leave gave me a much-needed taste of freedom. I was ready to dispense with my duty as Uncle Sam’s kill-bot and I was eager to return to a place with fewer explosions and more college girls.

  It was late when I walked into our bunker, and most everyone was asleep. I dropped my bags next to my bunk and saw that there was a stack of stapled papers on my bed. It was a printout of my most recent blog entry. My stomach sank. On the back, in handwriting, it read, “I need to talk to you ASAP—Jeff” Fuck. Oh well. I knew this could happen, but this was fast.

  I didn’t have a chance to talk to Jeff, who was now our platoon sergeant, until the following morning. He didn’t seem overly upset but he told me the captain wanted to talk to me immediately. When I reported to our company’s headquarters bunker, my first sergeant told me he wanted to talk to me before I saw the commander. He pulled me into his room and sat me down. He seemed really uncomfortable. He told me he didn’t know why the captain wanted him to do this, but he asked me to explain why I’d done what I did.

  I asked, “You mean put the blog back online?”

  “Yes, why you put it on the internet again,” he confirmed.

  This was a good question. First off, I never felt as though I should have had to take it down at all, but an argument about this would have been a waste of time. He didn’t want to be having this conversation and he didn’t want to be involved. He wanted me to say something so he could scribble it down on the stupid counseling statement he had in front of him. Then his job would be done.

  The way I remember it, taking the blog down was a “favor,” and, at worst, I was a dick for retracting this favor. Back at Fort Drum almost a year earlier, when my commander first caught wind of the blog, I was escorted that night to his quarters by my platoon sergeant. When I entered his room, he was getting ready to go to bed. He was barefoot, in a T-shirt, and not wearing any pants. As I stood at attention, he approached me and stood in front of me, toe to toe. I never realized how short he was until he stood in front of me without his boots on. With little daggers shooting out of his eyes, he looked up at me and asked in a voice louder than was necessary, “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?!” Whenever he spoke, he would punctuate the end of each sentence by thrusting his head forward and tightly pursing his lips, his mouth a bulging floodgate forever on the verge of bursting. He berated me at length about the contents of what he had read online. The acidic spittle that flew from his mouth was burning tiny holes into the front of my uniform and plumes of sulfur smoke rose from his ears as he furiously listed transgression after transgression. To hear him tell it, my hands were holding the spear that had pierced the side of Christ. He told me he hadn’t told his superiors yet and that I needed to decide right then if I was going to take the blog down or not. I thought about this for a second, then responded, “In that case I choose to not take it down.” My first sergeant and platoon sergeant were present for this conversation, and when I said this, they both looked like they were going to faint. I think my commander was also taken aback, so he said, “I’m going to leave the room now, and these two men are going to convince you of why you should take it down.” With my commander out of the room, my platoon sergeant told me, “Look, Jason. Just take it down. Do it as a favor to us. Do it as a favor t
o me.” I didn’t feel as though I should have to take it down, but I respected him a lot and this request was enough for me. My commander was called back into the room, and I told him I would take the blog down, but I would do so under protest, clearly reiterating that I was doing it as a favor to my platoon sergeant and first sergeant. My commander could have said, “Sergeant Hartley, I order you to take the blog offline,” but he didn’t. He wanted me to take it down, but for whatever reason he didn’t explicitly order me to do it. He kinda ordered me. And I kinda complied.

  I’ll admit, I thought I’d be slick by putting it back online at the very end of our deployment. I had hoped that should it be found, no one would really care or want to bother making a big deal about it. But I know this was a lame thing to think. So you wanna know why I did it? Because I wanted to. And in my heart of hearts, I wanted to press the issue. I wasn’t violating OPSEC and I wasn’t smearing the Army. These writings were the things I saw and felt. This was my life, and it was something worth sharing. That’s why I put it back online. Because I felt compelled to. What more reason did I need?

  I told my first sergeant the reason I put the blog back online was that since we were at the end of our deployment, I didn’t think it would matter if I put it back up. I told him I understood that my commander probably wouldn’t care if I put everything back online at the end, and I thought I had basically complied with this. I really wanted to remind him that taking it down in the first place had been a favor, that I had voluntarily agreed to stifle my own right to freedom of expression, and that I had decided I was ready to start exercising that right again. But this wasn’t the time or place to make that argument, so I kept it simple. Given that I was an infantryman in a combat zone being counseled by one of my superiors, I found it not only absurd but physically impossible to utter any sentence that might contain the words “freedom of expression” in defense of my actions.