Just Another Soldier

by Jason Christopher Hartley

  I signed a sworn statement where I explained briefly what I did and why. Then I met with my commander. He told me he wanted to say a few things and that he didn’t want to hear what I had to say; in fact he didn’t want me to say anything at all—it was not to be a discussion. He was relatively calm this time as he explicated in great detail how I was the world’s biggest piece of shit. This was the second time I had listened to him insult me at great length. Once he was finished with the insults, he told me he was going to give me a freebie—without asking any questions, he would allow me to revise my sworn statement before he submitted it to the battalion. This was probably the biggest insult of all. I don’t know if he actually thought I was hiding some huge secret or if he just wanted to see how I’d react, but I graciously declined the offer. Before I left, my first sergeant asked the commander if he wanted me to take the blog offline. He thought about this for a moment, then said he wanted me to keep it online so battalion could investigate it. This seemed a little strange but, whatever, the irony that I was now being ordered to keep the blog online was humorous.

  I was a little surprised at how well my commander was taking the news about the blog’s being up again. He was mad, but not like he was the first time. When he came back to my bunker later that night, I understood why. The printed-out pages he’d read earlier were only the most recent entry I had posted. He assumed this was the only thing online and nothing else. I assumed he knew there was an archive of the entire fucking blog online. Now he was back, after battalion had done a little further reading, and he was incensed. I had thought I’d already witnessed the most livid my commander could get, but I learned there were several more levels he was capable of reaching. He was now using words like “lied” and “deceived” when he referred to me. He commanded that my laptop be seized, along with my external hard drive and anything that looked computery that might have aided in this perpetration. I was to be immediately relocated to the headquarters bunker, so I packed my bedding, shaving kit, weapon, and some other items into a sort of overnight kit until I could move the rest of my belongings. He did his best to do this with a minimal amount of lights and sirens, but when you have your platoon sergeant, platoon leader, first sergeant, and company commander all standing next to your bunk as you pack up your shit, it’s going to attract a lot of attention. I was treated like a perp.

  The next day, I was called to the battalion TOC, where I signed a statement they had prewritten for me; it read that I would agree, without being coerced, to voluntarily remove the blog from the internet. Our battalion intelligence section had already printed out a copy of the entire blog to conduct their investigation.

  For the next month, until we left Iraq, I did almost nothing. My commander told me I was never to go on another mission, and the next time I left the base would be when we all left for good. I pulled some late-night shifts where I manned the company’s radio, but that was it for work. Typically when a soldier is punished, he is given extra duty. This was horrible. The worst thing you can do to a soldier is to not let him work.

  I was living in the same bunker as my commander, and my bed was next to the main meeting room, so getting sleep was virtually impossible. And it was humiliating when there were operations briefings going on in that room well within view of me in my pajamas lying on my bed reading a book or trying to sleep. And without a computer, I was bored out of my mind. I had only a few books left I hadn’t shipped home and I spent most my time reading them. I borrowed a CD player from Matt and listened to CDs John had burned for me from his mp3 collection. It was miserable.

  I had no idea what was going to happen to me. After a week of wondering, my commander sat me down and explained to me what would come next. He told me he had requested that I be given a court-martial. But he said that after seeing the story in the news about the soldiers who had refused to go on a fuel convoy mission and how they were not convicted in their courts martial, he changed the request to a field-grade Article 15 to be sure he could “see me punished.” He also told me that if I fought the Article 15, he’d “make it his business” to see that I got convicted. Along with all this advice, he gave me another extensive serving of insults with regard to me and my writing. This insult business was really starting to wear on me. He was passionate, emotional, creative, and comprehensive with the insults. I have never in my life eaten so much shit. There was nothing professional about it anymore. Including the first tongue-lashing he gave me at Fort Drum, this was the fourth time I had to listen to a variation of the same scolding. (He seemed obsessed with the photograph I’d posted, taken of me and Willy one freezing day back at Fort Drum, where we both had our pants pulled down and were sitting on shitters in a latrine at one of the ranges; he brought it up every time.) All I could do was stare into his eyes while he delivered his screed. I took it all without saying a word until he said, “You know why you do this? Because you just don’t care. You just don’t give a fuck,” his head thrust forward, lips tightly pursed. I had had enough. My blood was boiling. I interrupted him and said, “I don’t like it when I’m told I don’t care.” I would have continued by saying the entire fucking reason I write is because I care, but before I could say any more he fired back with, “I don’t give a fuck what you don’t like!” From this point on, I ignored everything he said.

  The unit replacing us was on our base now and they were put in the bunkers our platoons were living in. Some bunkers that weren’t being used at the far end of our base were cleaned out, and most everyone from my company was moved into them. Space was tight, and the temporary bunkers were filled with soldiers. I was moved from headquarters into one of these crammed bunkers. Not having anything to do and not knowing exactly what was going to happen to me next was taking its toll on me. I was in a perpetual state of anxiety and I had a pain in my stomach that wouldn’t go away. My laptop had been returned to me, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than three seconds, and it was impossible for me to write. After sixteen days of doing nothing but smoking, chewing gum, listening to CDs, and watching DVDs, I was called to the battalion TOC to be read the results of the investigation.

  It’s pretty pathetic when you actually look forward to being punished. I had started to wonder if anything was going to happen at all. I was eager to get the show on the road. The officer assigned to the investigation was a captain and coincidentally was Johnny-O’s brother. When we sat down, he asked if he could get me some coffee. I appreciated the gesture but felt supremely uncomfortable with the idea of my investigating officer serving me coffee. He was friendly, and the first thing he told me was that he really enjoyed reading my writings. He was professional and polite. He told me that everyone steps in shit at least once in his military career. And that I had really stepped in some shit. He explained to me the issues he found with what I had written. The biggest concern he saw was that some of the things I had written could be seen as violating operational security. He wanted to know what I thought about this. This was the first time I was actually given the opportunity to speak. I told him I knew that OPSEC was a concern, and explained what I had done to protect it. I didn’t want anything I wrote to be “news,” so the stories I wrote about Iraq were two to three months old before I emailed them out. I didn’t write anything you wouldn’t find in a newspaper. I never used last names, I never divulged what company or battalion we were a part of or the name of the town where we worked. But he had a counterargument for everything I said. His logic was sound, but the response I wanted to give to each of the items he listed was “So?”

  “You wrote that the last round in each of your magazines was a tracer.”

  “You wrote, ‘Tomorrow we leave for Louisiana.’”

  “You wrote, ‘We flew to Kuwait by way of Shannon, Ireland, and Sicily.’”

  “You divulged the name of Operation Salt Lick.”

  In addition to violating OPSEC, he determined I had violated the Geneva Convention by posting photographs of detainees and that my conduct was unbeco
ming a noncommissioned officer for posting a photograph of myself sitting on a shitter. I then signed the “Rights Warning Procedure” document, which stated that I had been questioned about “offenses of which I am suspected/accused: OPSEC violations, conduct unbecoming an NCO, Geneva Violations.” I verified with him that these were the three things I was being accused of, and he agreed. Then he added, “Your commander probably feels you violated a direct order as well,” but this was not listed in his investigation.

  He explained that the next step was to meet with the battalion commander, who would decide what my punishment would be. The information my battalion commander would use to base his decision on the appropriate punishment would come from this investigation. This did not paint a very flattering picture of me, so he asked me if I wanted to make a sworn statement to better explain my side of it. I wrote out a statement reiterating how much “I love soldiering,” why I felt my writings were a positive thing, and that what I had done “may not have been appropriate or legal” and that for this I was “remorseful.” I felt good about everything I wrote in my statement, except for stating that what I did “may not” have been right. “May” was the most important word there. I was hedging my bets at this point. I knew the battalion commander was a fan of patriotic writing, and it was a well-known fact that he didn’t get along with my company commander. I was hoping to use this to my advantage. I felt shady and manipulative for thinking like this, but I had little else to work with.

  I had hoped that my meeting with the battalion commander would happen in the next few days, but it didn’t. At least I knew what I was being charged with now, but I still hadn’t met with JAG ( Judge Advocate General) and I had no idea how the Article 15 hearing worked.

  I always tell people that if there is only one thing they remember about me, remember this phrase: Only slaves are happy. Keith Wood, my tenth-grade English teacher, told me this, paraphrasing Tolstoy or Dostoevsky—I forget which. I know that this may seem like a cynical and depressing thing to tell people, but it’s an idea I ponder regularly. This corporeal dispensation we call mortality is all about choice, about volition. This is how we define freedom: the ability to have choice. But there are times, oddly, when choice is what causes us so much pain, and the release from choice a relief. How often have you heard someone explain their actions by saying, “I had no choice,” expressing an apparent release from accountability? It’s often that only once circumstance dictates how we must choose do we seem to be happy. We spend so much time passively making decisions, listlessly wandering down the path of least resistance, until we no longer have any meaningful choice other than survival.

  For years I’ve wondered if the idea would be better described by changing the word “slave” to “prisoner.” If lack of choice is what creates this false happiness, then “prisoner” may be a more precise word to describe it.

  Being a soldier is like being a happy slave. You always have something to do—a purpose, a duty—and little choice as to whether you should be doing it or not. In addition, this purpose is often considered righteous and noble. (The soldier: a noble slave?) And in combat, where the importance of survival is a very literal reality and not just some philosophical exercise, being a slave hardly seems like slavery at all because survival is the most basic of necessities. But after spending a month as a virtual prisoner, under house arrest and confined to my base, I was no longer allowed to perform the tasks of the noble slave. This taught me that prisoners are miserable. Without any doubt, I now knew that “only slaves are happy” was the correct wording. Resolving this question of which word was more correct ended something I had been philosophically struggling with for years. It was the only positive thing that came from my final month in Iraq.

  I had been psychologically prepared for combat. But I was in no way prepared for this house arrest bullshit. What made it truly horrible was not knowing when I would be released from active duty. I was confident that if I refused to accept the Article 15 and demanded a court-martial, I could win. But this meant I would be kept on active duty, possibly for months. I was so utterly burned out now that the idea of spending an indefinite period of time at Fort Drum through a court-martial hearing was killing me. There was also the possibility that I could be kept in Iraq for the court-martial. I had permanent butterflies in my stomach. Eating made me nauseated. Then smoking started making me nauseated. I constantly felt the urge to gag, like having an itch I had to scratch. I wasn’t nauseated, there was no need to gag, but the physical impulse itself was almost impossible to suppress. Then the butterflies turned into something worse. I felt like my body was digesting itself from the inside out. Every day I woke up wondering if this would be the day when I’d be called to the battalion commander’s office to begin the Article 15 hearing. I doubt the delay in execution was being done spitefully, but if it was, it worked. I was a fucking wreck.

  Since the new guys were taking over our missions, everyone had a lot of time on their hands. Our leaders were gone most the time, riding with the new guys on the missions, helping them get familiarized with the operations. This meant there were a lot of bored soldiers without much supervision. If it could be smashed, burned, run over with a Humvee, used as a sled, or used to get drunk or high, it was. It was pretty bad. But I was being accused of violating the Geneva Convention for chrissakes. As long as there were no crimes being committed against humanity, who was I to judge how guys chose to blow off steam?

  Every new day was just as miserable as the one before. One of them was Christmas. Then I was informed that my Article 15 would be handled at Fort Drum, when we got back to the States. A few days later, after my stomach had successfully digested several years of life, we finally left FOB Orion via Chinook helicopters.

  Home

  January 8, 2005

  “AWESOME!”

  Our first stop was Kuwait, and after a few days of out-processing and briefings, we went through customs and were put in a holding area awaiting our flight out of the Middle East. This small holding area, which you cannot leave for any reason, is called the “freedom area.”

  The flights back home were long. I took sleeping pills. There was a pillow fight in the cabin of the plane at one point. I threw pillows at my commander and first sergeant when they weren’t looking. This made me feel better.

  We landed at an airport in Maine, fifteen minutes into the new year. As we got off the plane, we were greeted by dozens of people who live in the area who regularly come out to greet the returning troops. The majority of these people were vets themselves. It was touching that they had chosen to spend the new year shaking my hand. Some of the people had done this hundreds of times. I wondered how they knew in advance the exact flight we were on.

  The layover was short. Willy and I and several other guys clandestinely maneuvered on the hotel that was connected to the airport, found the bar, had a few quick beers (against the express wishes of our first sergeant), then got on the flight to Fort Drum. For a week we went through briefings, medical screenings, and an insane amount of paperwork. In the evening almost everyone would get drunk. My anxiety was at an epic level. My birthday was in a few days. I had decided I would demand a court-martial. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, and as much as I didn’t want to spend another birthday in uniform, I hated that I was being bullied. I knew that demanding a court-martial would keep me at Fort Drum while the rest of my unit would return to their homes.

  Violating OPSEC wasn’t the real issue. Everyone has a vision of how they want to remember their combat experience, and particularly how they want others to view their combat service. Most soldiers, and especially infantrymen, want to realize all their Jerry Bruckheimer–fueled fantasies with macho military fervor. In my writing, all I did was include some details in hopes of providing a more honest and humorous perspective on what soldiering is typically like. I could have written something like “We went on a raid tonight. We smashed the gate down and cleared the house, but the guy we were looking for wasn’t home
,” and I probably wouldn’t have gotten into any trouble. But instead I’d written something like “Tonight we went on a raid. It wasn’t till 3:00 a.m., and I couldn’t sleep, so I masturbated before we left. On the way to the raid we got lost, but after driving around for a while we finally found the house. We tried to breach the gate of the outer wall, but in the process accidentally ended up knocking the entire wall over. After clearing the house, we realized it was the wrong house. Actually, we hit the house we were supposed to, it was our intel that must have been bad. We asked the man of this house where the guy we were looking for lived, and he pointed out another house. We then raided that house, but the guy we were looking for wasn’t home. He was at work—at a U.S. base. As I was pulling security on an alley, I realized that the chow we had for dinner wasn’t agreeing with me and when I tried to fart, I ended up shitting my pants a little. Once we finished searching the house, we hopped back in our Humvees and took what we thought was our planned egress route, but instead found ourselves on a dead-end canal road. While turning around, one of the Humvees got stuck in the mud. Most raids do not go this badly. We eventually made it back to our base safe and sound. My ass had started to chafe from when I “sharted,” so I took a shower, masturbated, and went to bed.” (This, by the way, is a true story.)