Issue #102

The Second Iraq War

by: Beowulf

Inter arma enim silent leges. In time of war, the law falls silent. - Cicero

I am a soldier in the Army Reserves. I served in Operation Iraqi Freedom for four-hundred and ninety-two days, three hundred and sixty-five days in Iraq: Nasiriyah and Baghdad. Like everyone who joins the Reserve and National Guard, I thought nothing would ever apply to me, that I would never see wartime service. I was wrong.

January, 2003, St. Petersburg, Florida -

The news hit us like a blow to the chest. Rumors of war had been in the air for weeks but none of us were emotionally prepared. We had been called in for a special drill, an ominous event in itself, and everyone in the command had been strangely tight-lipped about the reason for this unusual meeting. We were called to formation in the main courtyard of the St. Petersburg Reserve Center. The commander of our unit strolled out in front of us and told us with almost comic gravity that we were all being activated for the operation in Iraq and that we had eight days to settle our affairs at home and report to Ft. Stewart, Georgia. The news rippled through our massed ranks, some began to tear and then quietly to weep, others had a look of hungry anticipation. I stood absolutely still, unable to fathom just how far off-course my "routine" Reserve duty had gone. Once he judged the news had resonated sufficiently, our commander (whom we later began to refer to as "Uncle Fester") launched into a mock-Patton speech about serving our country, being honored to be chosen as the spearhead, make the other bastard die for his country, etc. It was the first of many government-sponsored snow jobs we were to receive and still stands out in my mind as a monument to military hubris and the unchecked ego of our commander. What could we do? The order had fallen, we heard reports that they had to drag a member of our unit bodily from his house to get him to report. Others were being recalled from states as distant as New Mexico and Arizona to fill the muster. This was the real deal, "the dance" as they call it, when a unit goes to war.

So it was. In eight days and nights, well into the morning, we packed up every article and provision of war: sixty vehicles, rifles, machine-guns, grenade launchers, tools, tents, medical supplies, cooking equipment, radios, handcuffs, computers, printers, pens, paper, uniforms, aspirin . . . everything we would theoretically need to live on our own for a year in combat. It was a hectic time, all of us meeting and getting rapidly acquainted with the new members of our unit who had been called from inactive status or other units to fill our ranks. The stress and the anticipation rapidly pulled us together, and we worked like devils fueled by excitement, jitters and limitless black coffee from our mess hall. We often worked till five in the morning, or later, before having to go home and report for duty the next day at nine. It was nothing short of a miracle of labor and guts that four short days later we had packed every essential into eight enormous steel shipping containers, loaded our vehicles onto flatbed trucks and were ready to board the bus that would take us to our deployment base in Georgia. The last day had been given to us. To prepare, the commander said, and to say goodbye to our families.

The morning of the ninth day was very cold and windy. My friends and girlfriends had all awoke at the crack of the dawn to drive me down to the unit and give me one final send-off. We arrived early, it was still dark and people were just beginning to filter into the Reserve Center. I felt more miserable, frightened and alone than I ever have before or since as I hefted my two large duffel bags and prepared to give my farewells. One brief round of hugs and a kiss for my girlfriend and I turned and walked away. I didn't want to be drawn into a long farewell. All that day we waited for the busses to arrive, and I saw family members, wives, children, and girlfriends hanging around the center like moist-eyed ghosts clinging to the sleeves of the departing soldiers. I was glad that no one had stayed with me because it would only have made the goodbyes harder. Just after noon, two long grey busses pulled into the center and we were told to make our final farewells. A few minutes later we were all aboard and the busses pulled out of the reserve center leaving behind the crowds of weeping family and friends that had come to see us off. We were all nervous and excited and it showed in our jittery small talk, soon the bus' atmosphere became more jovial and took on an air of celebration. The goodbyes were over, the journey had begun, we were off to Georgia and the next leg of our long round home. No more than six months the command had told us, the war would probably be over in a month or two, and we'd be back for the Fourth of July barbecues. Probably.

February, Ft. Stewart, Georgia. -

We crossed the Georgia line and pulled into base around midnight. It was startlingly cold for a Southern night and we hurriedly downloaded our gear and packed ourselves into some ratty wood barracks erected decades ago to house Georgia's National Guard on their annual training. The showers were cold, concrete and communal. The whole place felt like some nightmarish summer camp, old style wooden cabins nestled amongst towering pines on the very outer edge of the massive base-city called Ft. Stewart. We were (supposedly) there to train and prepare ourselves for combat. In truth we spent all of the next two months working frantically to repair our vehicles which were in a sorry state of disrepair. Our commander, in his boyish eagerness to go to war had reported to his superiors that our vehicles were in tip-top shape and fully ready for war. This was not the case. Virtually every vehicle in our inventory was somehow wrecked, ruined or in need of serious overhaul. As a vehicle mechanic, I and my fellow soldier-mechanics took the brunt of this burden. The months that followed I can honestly say were some of the most miserable of my life. Each day was so monotonously similar that they blurred into a single, monstrous two-month day. I remember waking each day before sunrise and groggily throwing on my coveralls to be down in the motor pool by six, there we would work all day, sometimes eating meals, other times not, until midnight or later when we would crawl back to our beds like the living dead and collapse to do it all over again. It was misery to the fullest: wind, cold, fatigue and boredom merging into a single overwhelming oeuvre of drudgery. It was there that I learned to hate MP's, the military police, the corp of which the majority of our unit was composed. Ours was a military police unit and the MP's comprised some three-quarters of our number, the rest being support staff such as cooks, clerks, medics and mechanics. They were a mixed bag, old and young, many police or prison guards among them, but they had a unifying trait of superiority. Their pseudo-police powers gave them a sense of invulnerability, of magnificence, of godhood. They walked and carried themselves like the worst stereotypes of police, far more than any archetypal state trooper or highway patrolman from whose ranks many of them were drawn. It was there that I first learned contempt for their air of superiority and it was the first signs of a rivalry that would deepen and intensify till it split our unit apart in the Middle East.

So we worked and bitched and dreaded. Just another week, they would say, our date is set, we're going. The weeks dragged on. Some weekends we had off and our families visited or we went out drinking and began to form the friendships that would define the deployment. We began to loathe our commander, a captain, for a myriad of small injustices we faced every day that gradually wore on us and tarnished his image forever. He was fat man, round and fleshy with dark circles around his eyes and bald, his head polished to a mirror sheen. It was this baldness coupled with his dark-circled eyes and his general roundness that give rise to the nickname, "Uncle Fester" and it fit absolutely perfectly. I humbly take credit for inventing and popularizing that epithet. I cannot explain it fully with words, but he was a man that upon seeing for the first time, one instantly had the sense that he was self-serving and corrupt; an egotistical cocksucker of such monumental selfishness that he frequently left us speechless with his audacity. We were often subjected to his "inspirational" speeches, painful ordeals that always left us fidgeting frantically and praying for sudden death. He spoke to us often of the great honor that was being bestowed upon us and how privileged we were to take part in an event that would doubtless become part of history. We groaned and made smart-ass remarks quietly to our neighbors. Then one day he dropped the bomb. He delivered a speech that would become legendary within the unit and defined the way we saw him for the rest of the deployment. He said, "Fuck your families." It came as the climax of a long diatribe in which he basically laid out that we were his now and he would be damned if seeing our families would interfere in his schedule. We stood there like clubbed fish, stricken mute by the mind-numbing insult. He then built upon his statement, elaborating that he would be further damned if he would tell his children that he had been "a gate guard" (stateside duty) during Desert Storm 2. To that end, he added, he had volunteered the company on our behalf to go to Kuwait and turned down the job of guarding Ft. Stewart that we had been offered.

Our fate had been sealed. We were to go to war so that one man would not have to tell his children he was a gate guard during the war. Within days of his vow, we got the official word, our plane was leaving. On March 29 we boarded a chartered airline for Kuwait, stowed our assault rifles under our seats, loaded our gas masks into the overhead compartments and took off, heading into the Middle East after the first weeks of the war had exploded across America's television sets. We touched down in Ireland to refuel and then on to Cypress. Twenty odd hours later the pilot came over the PA to tell us in a nervous voice that we had touched down in Kuwait City airport, god bless us and come home safe we'll all be praying for you. We unloaded the plane ourselves, laboring in the dank, humid underbelly of the cargo hold while armed guards surrounded the plane on the tarmac. When I finally finished helping with the bags I slid down the ramp and stepped off onto the runway. It was late and very dark outside, the normally busy airport was still and silent. We boarded small Kuwaiti busses and peered out timidly through the shuttered windows as we drove far out into the desert towards the forward base camp on the border with Iraq. The wind was keening; rising and falling in shrill peaks. It followed us all night, as we headed into the desert.

Late March, Camp Arifjan, Kuwait - next issue...