Thursday, December 30, 2010

Generation Y-Babies

We were missing the boat again. Another generation X but much more stimulated. Our music faded into corporate tone, it started in 1998. Television had captured it all, everything. Reality TV hit it big in 2000 and all of the naked women in the world drifted from playboy to a computer screen, our pornography Mecca. We don’t protest the war because we don’t care, turn the channel and let them deal with it, but oh the war ratings of Iraq the reality show circa 2003, have blown away with the sand and we turned this hourglass over and called it the new Afghanistan. I remember when my battalion heard the first rumors of Fallujah and laughed, they wouldn’t do that to us, somebody else and that troop transport nosed down and dropped us off at home, welcome to Camp Fallujah the sign read.
I listen to the radio and some old lady is an expert on Gen-Y, she can’t quite place the time-frame but these poor youngsters are going through a quarter life crisis and I laugh. Twenty somethings call and cry about the dormant college degree because they thought the world owed them something, maybe a tour in the sandbox where children don’t play would help them along with it, the kids were dying when I learned the world is not fair, and your jobs were outsourced over thirty years, don’t call the radio call your congressman and what the fuck is a congressman? We don’t care change this channel.
Can someone find my attention span, quote the boy I’m special again. Who are you to write me a parking ticket? I reply I am because you let me. Played this video game since there was memory but I lost the reset button or maybe it got stuck. You sneezed and ignited a hurricane I watch that corporal in half a uniform staring at his little American flag, watching it shred in the wind with the eyes of a hungry wolf, his buddies died in a helicopter crash and there becomes his quarter life crisis. And for those who wake up tomorrow becomes the same, mine and someone still owes me. Someone forgot to teach you about soul, there was an old way of living it gave meaning and it has gone before and will come back again, like all things. Time is yours dock this boat and tie it off, when you called it a day it was your choice and that is why you are not special, quote the man.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

The Jihadi Who Tried to Blow Up Christmas

Shouting the famed “God is great”, the nineteen year old American kicked at FBI agents as they apprehended him in Portland Oregon’s Union Station. He was pressing a cell-phone key, maybe you can hear it in your head, pick a number one through five. The teenager is the same age I was in the second Battle for Fallujah Iraq. Reporters question his neighbors, lurking for the tell tale signs of a terrorist and there were none. The neighbors claim him to have come from a good family and seemed shocked but not quick to condemn. This is Portland Oregon USA, a bastion liberal thought and liberal arts, it is difficult for people in this land to hate anyone, even one intending to detonate an explosive device as the Christmas tree is lit in front of thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children who, when questioned by undercover FBI agents, the nineteen year old now very screwed Mohammad claimed to care less about.
I have heard nineteen year old American servicemen, including myself; express the same nonchalance toward dead foreign civilians. The story is almost always the same, “Fuck ‘em they shouldn’t have been there.” When these words escape the mouth of a young man he is saying, “You before me,” a policy I still subscribe to. For the young Mohammad there is no coming back, I would not want his poisoned brain near me or mine. If cruel and unusual punishment was the law of our land we would throw the kid in a cell with any of my brothers from the Battle of Fallujah and the work would be quick. My heart breaks at the thought of this darkness that has become us, and warms when I hear his neighbors waiting for the verdict. We are trapped in a box when the answers are so black and white. My brain says a bullet in his brain and my heart asks if this could have turned out different?
A strange thing about the strange city of Portland is that we remain the only major city in America that is not a member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The FBI intercepted emails from the accused to Pakistan that Mohammad had sent expressing a yearning for Jihad. The FBI played a game with Mohammad, gave him the outlet he was searching for and watched him run with it. A mosque Mohammad had frequented was burned down after his story broke on the news, because someone is very scared of Muslims. Now many Muslims are very scared of Portland and this circle of fear must have been anticipated by FBI officials. I wonder if there could have been a different approach to dealing with a young man searching for the radical, if instead of playing games, what affect could have been produced by confronting him after intercepting the emails and trying to flip him back into the world of sense. Instead of talking to undercover pretend Jihadis, could he have seen the light by being set up with an influential Imam who might have brought him back to the path of virtue? Who knows?
Now everyone is scared and as far as Mohammad goes, the way that I know him now instead of how it could have been…”Fuck him, he shouldn’t have been there.” If we are going to keep playing these games of fear, where will this get us other than where we have already been? The key to the case of Mohammad for me is the first interview that the FBI claims was recorded but that the recording had been too damaged to replay. All of the other recordings will be available for review. The scary part about that is when the nineteen year old is approached by people he thought were legitimate Jihadis, we don’t know if they told him once he began this there would be no turning back. But fuck him he shouldn’t have been there, I hear us talking about dead civilians, people who had real lives ahead of them, just like the Christmas tree people. Maybe someday there will be another way.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Rambo and Me got PTSD

I was making fun of him, a fellow Marine I had fought with in Fallujah. I called him a “pussy”. I told the younger Marines to disregard him, my brother. When he left I became the only Marine in third platoon who had served in Fallujah with 3rd, “the dirty third”, or the “third herd”. I knew I could take it, if everyone was gone than I had become god, the only untouched. No Marine could tell me what to do regardless of rank because I had been there; Fallujah Iraq, biggest battle of the war, survived, and came back for seconds. My mind slipped in seconds after we landed in Afghanistan, I had made a MISTAKE, I should have declared myself for mental illness but the illness makes you want to die, to stand on the line, maybe kill the wrong person to show them what they had done. And if this reads like too much to handle, it is. The smart Marines raise their hands and tap out before more permanent damage is done. He was a good man, he was my brother and I cursed him when I should have hugged him.
I was ready for Afghanistan, ready to thrive in my old madness to give it another go and hope for the worst, corpses littering the street and the sun blacked out in the thick smoke we made like Vikings, when the bad guys know we mean business. I went and Rambo stayed and my paranoia ate at my brain…I had been too lucky to live through Fallujah, better men than me had died before me and I was not going to see my twenty first birthday. After I survived Afghanistan I went to war with my mind. My last year in the Marine Corps is a drunken haze of anger and confusion, and then I went home. There was no purpose at home even though I was productive. My discharge was honorable but I felt like a bad person and I waited to be recalled by the Marines. At some point I decided to join the National Guard, not because of patriotism or because I didn’t have a job, but because I was scared of getting recalled by the Marines and I had read that a local Guard unit was deploying back to Iraq. After I joined the National Guard in December 2007, the stress of the impending Iraq deployment sent me back to 19 when I had swore to myself that I would not go back to Iraq, that I had survived, that I would survive, my most recent memory of hope.
Somewhere back there was Rambo, early in the battle of Fallujah, casings falling from his automatic machine gun, he loaded another belt, he killed bad guys, helped me survive. He was never a pussy and I might have said such harsh words in his moments of glory and would have wished I didn’t like I do today. My brother a hug for you. Later on we caught a virus, it made us hate us and life. Happiness is a glass house when you have seen the world for what it is. I go up for a medical discharge on Monday and for the first time I get to tell a story that has been bothering me for too many years.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

AFGHAN "THRILL KILL"

Where do the wild things go? After childhood and the boy has made his decision to attempt to be a man, toys stored in the attic, ray guns traded for real ones and when he came home his mother said, “This is not my son.” Five U.S. soldiers based out of Fort Lewis Washington are back from Afghanistan, suspected in the premeditated homicides of at least three Afghan civilians. I watch a few of the soldiers confess their take on these “thrill kills” taking place during the early part of 2010. I was in Afghanistan in May 2006 serving as a Marine Infantryman on my second tour of duty when an Army CH-47 helicopter crashed leaving a joint operation that we had participated in. The word spread across Jalalabad Airfield and my platoon was ordered to gear up and wait for a helicopter that would take us to the crash site that we were to help recover and secure. Our helicopters arrived early the next morning and we loaded as we had practiced. I sat down and put on my seat belt. My stomach drifted like a rollercoaster ride as our CH-47 climbed into the chilly clear blue skies over farmlands and into the mountains that lead to the Kunar Province. The door gunner let off a burst into the emptiness making a chop-chop-chop noise as he tested his weapon. The enormous flying banana would dip seemingly out of nowhere, and I would think about how not special I really was. It had happened to many before. A violent vibration would creep under our seats and spread through the cockpit, that nineteen year old door gunner would shake his head at me, eyes hidden behind his tinted black goggles, signaling to me our hopeless situation and then what? Hopefully you’re unconscious when you burn to death, hopefully they can find your remains and this horrible nightmare will end. There is darkness in a combat zone; the worst part of a human becomes the part that wills his survival. I had lost some friends on a helicopter that had crashed leaving Fallujah on my first tour, I remember hearing the news ten days after the fact, and how secretly happy I was that it had not been me, and how ashamed I always feel for being grateful to have survived.
Our helicopter landed, I adjusted my goggles and ran off of the back ramp of the bird into a blinding cloud of fine glittering dust. I took a knee and began to conduct a radio check. The helicopter lifted off as the sweeping rotor wind finally died down and the dust settled I was surprised to see that we had landed in an opium poppy field. I had trained up another radio operator to replace me, and he was better, I was already tired at the ripe old age of twenty summers, but once again I found myself hauling the communications equipment that had become my specialty after a couple of years. We were supposed to have been done with our Afghanistan deployment and had been prepared to leave but the Army helicopter crashed and fucked up our schedule. I had a problem with being tasked out to recover an Army helicopter crash when I was a Marine and was outnumbered easily three to one, Army to Marine back at the airfield. I hated to be forced to risk my life off schedule; it wasn’t good luck and good for the paranoia. I needed to come home, I would walk five feet and scan and look at the good places to take cover if we were suddenly attacked. I needed to come home, this had not been like my first deployment where I was convinced that I would die, by the end of Afghanistan I was determined not to let a stupid mistake fuck up my chance at a legal drink. The Marines snaked along a goat trail worn into the side of an Afghan mountain.
We would pass through a village, and the elders would stand outside, stroking their beards covering the deep set lines their hard life has rewarded them for thirty years of fighting. He was not happy to see me. I could see the smoke coming from where the helicopter had crashed. I wondered if the elder would plan an attack while we were occupied with searching for the dead bodies? After a sharp left turn I began to see electronics hanging in the bushes, and pieces of scrap metal, some fabric, it smelled like a fried motherboard. I gave an extra pack of cigarettes to a soldier that had been from the same unit as the guys on the helicopter, he told me that he had watched the CH-47 roll down the mountain on fire. A couple of Air Force operators specialized in crash recovery were attached to us, and began their descent into the scene of the flaming wreckage. They took some Marines with them and rigged up a pulley system. At the foot of the mountain they would secure a body-bag to a skid and we would pull on a rope like a bunch of pirates on a ship until the corpse reached our lip of the mountain. It would take the better part of an hour to get one up the hill. By nightfall we had located all but two dead soldiers. I slept near the row of body-bags. In the morning the missing soldiers were located and we assembled teams to carry the bodies to the landing zone that we had arrived in. The work was challenging, the bodies were heavy and as ribs cracked through the bags I began to vomit at the smell that reminded me of how the city of Fallujah Iraq had smelled a little over a year before. I thought about the mission we were doing, and I came to peace with the Army/Marine thing, it didn’t matter, all that mattered was that we got the bodies of the dead American’s back to America.
As we passed through the village I saw the elder again. He began to smile. He was happy to see me, vomit in the corners of my mouth and maybe a little pain in my American eyes. I wanted to shoot him, to raise my weapon and rip the smile off of that cheap fuckers face. Leave him there for his son to find after he was done with his bomb planting for the day.
Let America ask why I would have wasted him, it was because he smiled and these bodies were in his ugly ass country for reasons I could care less about. But I didn’t kill him; I went home and had my legal drink to forget the bullshit. Now I am a human again and I watch the robots talk about how they lined up an Afghan man on a wall and murdered him, and I thought about it, what a long war it has been, about how the worst parts of combat were not the dangerous ones, but the times where we were doing nothing. How it felt when a buddy died and how bad I wanted to make someone feel that way. And I wonder why this is such a long war? The leader of these five “thrill kill” soldiers is my age, 25 and a Staff Sergeant, which means he probably joined the Army the same time I joined the Marines.
I can’t imagine how I would see the world if that desert deployment just became another part of life every other year another year in the desert. The 25 year old sounds like a psychopath, because sometimes people go to war and like it, they get promoted because they are good at it, and now they have influence over the junior men who want to be cool like the 25 year old Staff Sergeant with combat experience, the man who will give them what they always wanted, show them how to get away with it, to just kill people because, fuck it this has been a very long war, and not too much to say.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-soldier-describes-thrill-kill-innocent-civilians-afghanistan/story?id=11732681

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Tail of an AfGhaN DOnKEy

And you can see his sickness

Hovering there

A cloud over this room

Like the whimpering and pathetic

Cry of a child

The faces are old

And new

Different at other tables

The beer is the regulator

His protector, fortress and shield.

Let me tell you a story you won’t understand

The faces now quiet

Eyes like stricken children

He has pounded his fist again,

And all of that excitement

All of that excitement

May he never forget

Those things that never happened

The day he didn’t

Fight like a brave.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Punk Rock War Child

I was in a Southern California music store and fourteen years old in 1999 when I picked up the Dead Kennedy’s album, “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.” In the year before Napster’s big boom, the only way for a young suburban adolescent on a search for a new music genera to buy an album was to present it to the father faculty and hope for acceptance. I was among the last of the paying for music world. My father looked at the CD, the cover was a black and white frame of cars on fire. I must have had the puppy dog eyes on because he looked at me and knew this was important, he bought the album that changed my perspective on life. We took the back road home, through the Angeles Forest Highway, a long and winding road that is the spine of Los Angeles County to the rolling desert of Palmdale, my home. I looked at the cover, wrapped in cellophane, and could not wait to return to my home, I had a feeling something I was looking for was locked inside the disc on the floor.
At the time the music was twenty years old, I heard it and a shockwave ripped my soul and spoke to my adolescent need for subversion and growth. I started going to punk shows, and bought every album I could beg my parents for. In school I met a friend whose uncle had been in the LA punk scene in the eighties. His uncle supplied my friend with an endless collection of punk, and my friend and I embarked on a new way of thought.
I loved the way people fought fair in the punk mosh pits of my youth. We were moved by the music, so we moved, and kicked the shit out of each other but if somebody fell down we picked them up and none of the violence of my scene was in hate. The music of twenty years before was political and complained of the arrogance of modern American society and many times prophesized a fall from grace through our own arrogance. The music of the proceeding generation echoed the same themes but seemed lost in recognition from a commercial market, which is what kept the music pure. Many of us throughout my city started punk bands and continued the tradition, mine was Out Of Ammo.
I would go to school with my “Dickies” pants, different colored “Chuck Taylor” high tops and the most offensive shirt I could find. My usual was from my favorite punk band “Bad Religion”, a white shirt with a red and black depiction of two nuns kissing. The most appealing part of the scene was the never ending narration of the disillusioned American, that this country had not lived up to its expectations, and I listened and heard it but felt compelled to put this hypothesis to the test.
I fell in love with a punk rock girl, we shared the same ideals until I joined the Military. And I left and went away to war. I listened to my music and met a friend in The Marines who shared the same music and values. I asked him in Kuwait what he thought about maybe going to Iraq and he said that he hoped we would not go. We both loved the punk scene before we joined the service. My last show was shortly before I graduated in 2003. My friend and I joined his Uncle in Hollywood for a “Circle Jerks” show. We drove up after school, ate junk food and when the LA skyline appeared I knew I was at home, with the people; the people who questioned authority and were smarter than the morons.
Soon after I signed my Marine Corps contract and met my friend who was my leader, he was killed and the music sings the pain. We tested a system and both got bit by the thing we never believed in. That is the shame, we always knew better but had the guts to go and see if we were right. Pat Tillman did the same. I stayed in my dead friend’s room after the war. A “Black Flag” poster still hung on his door and I remembered a man with a better hope for the future. I slept in the room and recalled a trip I took with my Father and Sister to John Steinbeck country in Monterey California. The year was 2000 and my sister and I explored Monterey by ourselves. I read John Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and then my little sister and I hit the music shops. We walked into my future as I picked up a “NOFX” album and Bad Religion’s “New America” and I knew that I knew it all. Me and my sister walked into the dawn of a new country, and I paid the price when I knew better. This is the shame and the message that needs to be sent to my future children in a new America.

For C.J. and Michael Cohen

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The Pullout Method

Dear soul, you were sacrificed… for what? And same for the natural sense of security and of purity, this all happened and it was not a dream, and in the end it meant nothing. A government dismantled and reconstructed far too incomplete and we leave a people to find their own way, no weapons of mass destruction anywhere, wasted days and wasted day. We sat on a hill concealed in tall grass, playing war games in Hawaii, months before we had any clue we were going to Iraq. The platoon commander, a twenty seven year old Staff Sergeant looked at me, face covered in green and black, “Do you think we are going Anderson?” He asked, he knew I was a news junkie. “Yes Staff Sergeant.” I answered. “I think so too.” We sat in the tall grass and waited for a storm gathering not so far off of the island. The rain would come and turn the red clay to mud and we would be born amphibious again.
The body armor is very good now; we can take refuge in this technological advance. We can surely construct better bases faster, equipped with fast food favorites in days now and not months. Johnny got gun will not go longer suffer the losses of thousands on a beachhead because war has become friendlier and much less conventional. From now on the third world can clearly understand that opposition to U.S. policy or control over natural resource may subject you to a regime change similar to Iraq, when we are done with you the government will begin again at less than zero. We will be sure to fly no mission accomplished signs because there never was a mission. When I was nineteen, near the end of the battle of Fallujah, I shared a cigarette with an Iraqi National Guard Soldier who spoke descent English. I asked him if he was happy about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and he explained that he was, because the country was going to have a chance after Saddam. I asked him what would happen if we pulled out and left? The soldier smiled at me as if I was foolish and he said, America would not do that. I didn’t reply, amazed at the optimistic outlook of the Iraqi Soldier. Now we will leave and never before, this is what we tell the parents of war. I say good luck to Iraqi’s, I wish the people of Iraq much love, and luck…on repeat until I am ashamed again.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Semper Fi Mom

Even drill instructors have mothers. Mine are better than yours, that’s right I have two, my biological Mother Susan and my stepmom Marie AKA, “The Other Mom”. This article will primarily feature my biological mother, as she gave me the inspiration for this piece. I had originally embarked on my take of the Bradley Manning situation, but while interviewing family members it occurred to me that I have never attempted to tackle a subject in writing that I had always thought about while in combat.

My mother birthed me when she was twenty one, my understanding of her youth at that time had not hit me until I recently turned twenty five and happily childless. Despite the horror of it all I believe motherhood is more difficult than combat. We were a team early on; my first memories are of us playing the original “Mario Brothers” at home in 1989. I remember her cooking from when I was very young, the smell of it, something I hung onto in war. I remember blasting ducks with a plastic orange gun in 1989. Bang bang went the piece, a 2 bit duck would fall from a 2 bit sky, my gun 2 centimeters from the television screen, and I would ask my mom to look at it, what I had done, my victory.

As I grew up, she constantly reminded me that she did not want me to join the military. I joined anyway, and sacrificed the world of women for four years as a U.S. Marine Infantryman. We had a final dinner the night before I took off for boot camp and I could feel that it was over, the childhood, the girlfriend, the old life that I had known so well, but didn’t know how good it was until it was gone. This becomes the common cry of the suburban teenage Marine Corps recruit. In boot camp we would all scream, “Kill!”, whenever the group or an individual succeeded at a task. If recruit so and so did twenty pull-ups the drill instructor would declare, “Give him one!” The platoon would in turn ecstatically and simultaneously shout, “Kill!” It was at this point of my “enhanced training” that I realized I would never be able to explain any of this to my mother in a way that would make sense to her.

The same idea became a theme in combat. I lied to my mother after we had moved into Fallujah Iraq, a very hostile zone, and continued to tell her that I was in Kuwait, a safe zone. The Infantry Marines had no mother’s to cry to, only each other to lean on, and a mother needed to be as far away from that death trap as possible, even thinking of your mother in that place felt like a sin. My girlfriend was long gone and for many of those unfortunates that were married, so were their wives.

From the moment the combat began November, 2004 until the last one on October 31, 2006, friends around my young age began dying in what seemed a nonstop cycle. It was an old story, sparkly eyed young men who were as funny as you began to disappear. I would see them one day and we would share a smoke and a story, a week later I would bump into a friend of his who would tell me the gory details of how the guy I used to know died. Trapped in a house and shot to death, friendly fire, vehicle accident, explosions or coming home and making a bad drunken decision that could not be taken back. While many of my friends in “the world” were in college or getting knocked up, The Marines were stuck in a corner of hell that would not translate to mothers.

My experience was not foreign to the eternal mothers of the planet, who have dealt with the blood of their children spilt since the first war. Other than the pain of it, the only thing I feared of death was the devastation it would have brought on my family. I felt that my mother would never understand why I threw my life away, and that my father would rationalize it. With their ancient divorce there would have been no forgiveness as my mother considered my father’s Army hitch and pride of service in peacetime as the primary motivator for my service during war. When I came home after my Marine hitch from the ages of eighteen to twenty two, I cannot imagine what I must have seemed like to my own mother? There were dozens of dead friends stuck on rewind in my recent memory and a youth’s lust for alcohol as she chanted the mother’s mantra, “What have they done with my child?”

I had recently turned nineteen in Okinawa, Japan when the first Marine that I had been friendly with died. He marched to death on a company hike, walked until his brain was overwhelmed by heat, his core was too hot to process normal function, which leads to the organ failure and I heard that he had tried to quit the hike but was encouraged to continue by his brother Marines, who had no idea that their peer was dying. It was a shame, and I wondered what a person would tell their mother before they died if given the chance? When we landed in Iraq I was sure of my death. I remember thinking to myself that it was important not to consider living, as it would be a real bummer to expect to go home when you were bleeding to death and full of holes that could not be repaired.

I was twenty two and near the end of my contract when I learned that a good friend of mine had been accidently killed in Recon tryouts when someone from the opposing force of a training exercise accidently loaded live rounds into his gun instead of blanks. The Marine had always been one of my favorites; he had the physique of an asshole, a million mile smile and the heart of a monk. A Marine told me my friend had been shot in the head that his mother had given birth to. These were stories I did not keep my mom up to date with, how would you? We were trained to abandon the nurturing side of life, this training was necessary for all who survived and added time to the ones who did not. War is a sick and ancient dance but the fundamentals of the mental preparation for it have remained the same since its inception.

For those who have not experienced it, we cannot imagine what it must be like to exit this world in a violent fashion. Modern American’s are not equipped for demise of any kind, never mind the always avoidable death of the volunteer. There was something I was always trying to remember when I was in war. The feeling of security in my mom’s house, the way she called my name in joy and in anger. I wished I could explain my gratitude before I died, we all did.

Last week I called my mother after a month without contact and interviewed her. I wanted to understand what my close family understood about the war. I asked if she could place Afghanistan on a map and she could. I asked if she paid attention to the news on Afghanistan and she explained that she avoided the subject on purpose due to my service. A symptom of post traumatic stress disorder, a condition which myself and many I served with have been diagnosed. My questions focused on Afghanistan and not Iraq because of current media attention in that country which I also served. We had never talked much about the war and her voice began to crack as we went back in time. I asked what she would tell the family of a serviceperson killed in action. She wept as she replied, “I hope that they have lots of pictures and I am sorry.” My mind stopped and I had asked too much. I thought of her photo albums that I had helped her preserve after nearly losing them a dozen years ago. My heart was breaking and I felt for the first time a dash of the pain my mother never talks about.

Somewhere we lost contact, six years and this war still hurts too bad to try to put my old family back together. When I was in junior high she encouraged me to participate in an essay contest. I placed in the first and continued to place in these contests until I graduated. I remember being very young a million years ago, wrapped within in the safety of a normal American childhood and upbringing, there was a world she did not know well enough to warn about. My mom would listen to my writing and I held that feeling, the mom feeling, close to my soul in a dark world.


Gunfire and smoke locked in my mind reminds, that someday all face death, for most a distant reality. During combat we remembered our mother’s voice, her cooking, long gone summer road trips, her discipline, smile, and her embrace. First memories and last memories are for her and we will be a team forever,
I will always be young with her too,
and I can
explain
the pain

the same
as
she

can…




For the war mothers of all countries.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Corporal "Kurtz's" Dry Jungle

The character referred to as “The Bandito” is a real person. The following is a factual story, EXCLUDING THE LAST PARAGRAPH, which is a day dream.


I had not talked to my friend, The Bandito, in five years. The last time that I saw The Bandito, he pinned his medal on my chest and walked into the sunset. I thought as a military man and knew that I would cross paths again with my war mentor. I had just turned twenty when he left. In a week I will be twenty five. Years fly and come back quickly and the memories are clearer than yesterday. I met The Bandito on the first day that I had arrived to my duty station on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. My roommate and I stood at the position of parade-rest as he entered our room for the first time. He spoke English with a very calm and thick Mexican accent. Due to the low volume of his speech, he could raise the hair on the back of your neck.

The Bandito was our first look at a real Marine as official Marines who had most recently graduated boot camp and The Marine Corps School of Infantry. He was an immigrant from Mexico and participated in brutal iron man styled marathons for fun. My roommate and I were now professional infantrymen, our company’s mission statement was a bit more eccentric than your average realty firm, the mission of the Marine Corps Rifle Squad is…”To locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver and to repel the enemy’s counter attack by fire and close quarters combat.” If you break it down, our mission is to meet the enemy and close the distance between us. All new infantrymen memorized this passage through the guidance of the more senior Marines. The guidance we received from such Marines started hard and stayed that way for a year, in my platoon, if you forgot the passage or another of the thousands of Marine Corps knowledge passages, they… (Senior Marines) would sick themselves on us… (Boots), a nickname handed down to the new guys from the old guys who have retired their boot status upon our arrival. Now they get to dish out the pain that was their boot life and so the process has operated for 234 years.

The Bandito was more than meeting a real Marine, he was our first look at what our life in the platoon would be like, which we were nervously anticipating as nothing in the journey had been any less than the most difficult day of my life stuck on repeat. I stood my parade rest as stiff as I could force the position, demonstrating extreme obedience to the scariest looking human being I will have ever seen enter a battlefield. A real life killing machine, he looked like an angel of revenge flying around with a sword and armor on a religious candle, a lean muscular build, fair skin and soft empathizing eyes that he would look at you with after making a mistake, as if he would weep with you after slitting your throat. I was eighteen years old and full of bravado, which led to me volunteering to carry a burden across a desert some call a radio, others call a PRC 119F. The Bandito told me before our first training operation in Hawaii, that I was going to lose five pounds in sweat and that I would get tired and hand off my radio. I was eighteen years young and I looked him in the eye and told him that I would never hand off my radio. I went another two and a half years before I did once in the mountains of Afghanistan because my feet were melting off, I wanted to cry when I thought about failing The Bandito who had since disappeared into the sunset.

The combat veteran thinks differently than the non. There were people who would really die for you, the world we had known had become distant and unreal, as if it had never happened. He stood there, before we were combat veterans, when we were his students, and he said, “My name is Corporal… It is good that you are standing at parade rest because if you were not, that would not be good.”He wept after slitting our mind throats and I had my answer; the Marine Corps was going to continue to be the most difficult trial to endure seven days a week and twenty four a day. Our unit reached Kuwait before we had even considered a deployment to Iraq as we had been on ships that were supposed to be bound for the Philippines but the ships had taken a detour and there we were. On the ship The Bandito taught me the basics of knife fighting, an art that he had learned on the streets of Mexico. His brother had raised The Bandito to be a great warrior. He spoke often of Mexico, he had crossed illegally when he was young, and he prepared himself for his big brother’s prophesized destiny as we grew closer to the “Second Battle of Fallujah”. The Bandito explained his life outlook to me once, “If God wants to strike me down, he will take me, I can walk into a hail of gunfire and if it is not my time, I will not die.”
I watched The Bandito enter a hail of gunfire. I had seen him shot before and the second time there was no armor, only bone, and a bullet had broken his leg. Another Marine was dead in the house and The Bandito howled as the Marines carried him to the street corner. There were flies in Fallujah, big black ones that carried off less fortunate children. The Bandito held a video camera on his face and read his last rights to his parents on the ride to Bravo Surgical. Still on scene I picked up The Bandito’s helmet, stuck inside I found a prayer picture of The Virgin Mary. The Bandito was a devout Catholic and I a devout atheist; I stuck the prayer picture in my helmet to remember my teacher.

The Bandito survived his hails of gunfire and left The Marine Corps to walk into the sunset with a cane. I had heard that he had returned to Mexico. We breathed war and it burns to exhale, some of us never leave. He called me for the first time in five years, we spoke over a weak line and he told me his story. He said that he was attending University but that the violence was getting to him. He said that it was worse than Fallujah and that children were being murdered and women raped. He said that there is no justice in his land. I could hear a crying baby in the background. My heart sank for the good hearted Bandito who could have remained in the United States after completing the citizenship process…post having taken a bullet for the country. He asked about the book I am working on and wanted to know if I remembered our first fire-fight together? I asked him to refresh me. The following situation is covered in more detail in a future publication.

The gunfire erupted. We were breaking into empty houses, this had become our life. Kick in the front door, move in, search the residence and repeat the process until every building in the city of Fallujah had been cleared. As the ambush unfolded, the Marines caught in the front yard of the hostile house fell back to the house next door to consolidate and seek cover. The Bandito watched an enemy wearing black, sight in on two Marines and rake their legs with fire from an AK-47. One Marine remained on his feet and continued wounded to the house next door. The other fell to the ground and held his hand up for help. The Bandito said that he had frozen up for a second. I asked why he continued on? He replied that as he saw the Marine hold his hand up, The Bandito thought of the Marine’s parents and of his own family, he saw his probable death rescuing the fallen Marine as an honorable death. The Bandito recalled dumping two thirty round magazines from his M-16 but not the seven others he had found empty after the fight.

I watched The Bandito deliver the wounded Marine to the fall back house. Next he had a gun fight with thirty one terrorists and lived to tell the tale. His kill count was a platoon high score. The nineties west coast rap scene had nothing on third platoon. Those of us who survived Fallujah deserve a safe life at the least. Not for the Bandito, he said he returned to Mexico to help build it.

It was a dream, I flew into Mexico City, and a driver met me at the airport holding a sign with my name on it for the first time. We drive into the mountains; I see things I have never seen. The Bandito and I catch up and we get to important matters. He tells me about the murdered children, and the raped women, he explains to me how destiny has not given him a break since he went to war. Maybe it was before that and that was why he had returned to Mexico after discharge from the Marines as a combat wounded infantryman. He hands me the gun, tells me to load the first round slow, to think of the children who had been murdered. That night we drank beer and posed with guns, cleaned our guns, remembered our guns and our old young lives as professionals of arms. In the morning we found them all, unloaded magazines, the smell of hot gun oil and smoking barrel’s symphony as we shot our way to peace and for the rest of time, everything became alright and that was the dream and we never hurt again.

Monday, July 5, 2010

TerrorUSisTHEM

Trying to capture one’s past is always a futile effort because once the time is gone… As the wise time traveling philosopher Kurt Vonnegut used to say and says again…”So it goes.” After catching an NPR interview about the final season of the television show “24”, I finally decided to partake in the real time set drama I somehow missed over the past nine years. I am on the first season, shot in 2001 and am watching the main character “Jack Bauer”, or the mentally unshakeable star of 1986’s mullet-vampire period piece “The Lost Boys” Kiefer Sutherland, attempt to figure out what this bullshit is. So far I have nailed the nail biting suspense scenes before they happen. Slap on the back for me. All I have to do is ask myself, “What is the worst possible outcome while still preserving a continuing story,” and there it is…If you are hiding a phone from a captor, the phone is going to run out of battery and compromise you, if someone you don’t know is coming to save you, they are not coming to save you, they are coming to kill you. Nine years later and I relish in being a guy who writes. To watch a television show shot in 2001, I have to send myself back in time, to a sixteen year old kid who was waiting to see what happened. The worst case scenario was becoming the drive for the United Sates in Jack Bauer’s freshman year as a television star. As we explore the character, we explore mainstream opinion of the time, which I find to be much different than the opinion of today. There are many writers on a television show, they sit on panels and discuss outcomes, discuss popular opinion and manipulate your senses until ten writers figure out how to make you want more. So it is fantasy! Not real, created by people who have a magnificent ability to narrate their wildest dreams. Compared to myself and a fair number of my closest friends, Kiefer Sutherland has more than likely never been shot at, nor has he had anything more serious than a pile of money to deal with for, who knows how long? But in America, who knows what how? Maybe there was a divorce, maybe his father beat him in ways mine never did, maybe I’ll do some more research at the lab here and get back to you. Either way, compared to some poor Iraqi born within the past seven years, I’ll put money that Mr. Sutherland has done alright for a lifetime and good for him because he is a hell of an actor.
These days, America is not the shining beacon of hope it was when my immigrant relatives crossed Ellis Island. That is of course, unless you are a hungry, poor and tired Mexican crossing the border again because fascist Arizona doctrine really separated you from your wife and kids. This would be a foreign concept to Mr. Sutherland and not to Mr. Bauer, who is a fairy tale. In the first season Jack protects the first black presidential candidate. The more I watch what ten writers write the more I understand that our 2010 time has become prophecy. The white racists are going to make Obama look like a fool. They will twist his character until he ceases to be the future and we can say hello again to real politics. The 1990’s of my youth are a distant memory, some clouded vision returns to me, something about an intern sitting on a President’s face and there was an impeachment hearing. The next President marched off to an illegal war, and no impeachment hearing.
Nine years ago becomes today and we have gone too far forward to make it out clean. Two wars and many good dead men the majority of the American public knows nothing about and cares not to research. So where are we in the land of Jack Bauer? Ten writers could have never predicted naked Muslim prisoner piles of Abu Ghraib. I had this dream the other night, a cold sweat drenched, violent winner of my emotions. We had drilled into the center of the earth on accident and it rained oil.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

"Fear and Loathing" in DC

McChrystal is out and in comes Petraeus at the plate. I applaud the move because I viewed McChrystal as self serving and Petraeus as one of the greatest thinking Generals of our era. This move could be dangerous for several military related and political reasons. So far the great hope of the future has not materialized as promised by the Obama administration. The kind of rogue behavior expressed by McChrystal was not confined as the sole opinion of a single General, his views are held to be true throughout most of the people I know still serving. I could not go to a National Guard weekend without hearing dissent openly expressed by troops against their boss, Barrack Obama. This would constantly drive me up an internal wall because during the Bush years, some Marine would have ripped my head off for saying what I thought about Bush, but I shut my mouth, because ultimately, my boss was George W. Bush. Today the command switch will be the topic of every Obama hating serviceperson in every corner of the globe. McChrystal was a right wing pawn, his dissent was a message, his resignation, I believe to be of his own volition and the military backlash for this action may be greater than anticipated.
The military is very conservative right wing, which I have always found strange because most of the people I served with came from working class backgrounds. If Obama is going to try and take back control of this machine, he has a long road ahead of him. The reason we are not united the way that the Obama administration had hoped for is because the left is full of sack-less politician and can never back up what they say. On the right, the politicians don’t budge. The right’s policy of shooting down every idea presented by the left keeps them strong, and I believe that the right must hold this position, that they will survive, because the left let the momentum die after the presidential election of Obama.
As for the war in Afghanistan, it could not be a better move to put the General in charge that coordinated the successful troop “surge” of Baghdad 2007. The problem is that Afghanistan is very different than Iraq, a troop surge will not be welcomed by the people of Afghanistan because they are not getting their heads cut off in scores by crooked cops, religious rivals, and Al Qaeda the way the Iraqi’s were in 2006-2007. A surge will be seen as an occupation and the second that American presence is accepted by the Afghan people as an occupation, we will wish we did something else. I believe the current strategy of containment is a poor one. If there is going to be any hope of stabilizing the country the military should focus on the Pakistan border and work backward through the country instead of from the South up. General Petraeus’ doctoral dissertation was titled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era”. Iraq was not Vietnam, but I believe that Afghanistan could be, if we do this wrong.

Monday, June 21, 2010

AFTER "THE LION"

If there was ever a hope for a successful Afghanistan it would have been seen through a man of the country, a freedom fighter for his land who fought like a brave during the Soviet Afghanistan war and continued for another twenty years. I was standing post at the government compound located in the city of Jalalabad in north eastern Afghanistan. The city of Jalalabad is always a bustle of old world and new. Men with multi colored beards are always moving and watching. Afghans run small shops and some would look up at a convoy of Marines passing by with utter despise, others would wave. We would convoy out to the compound and navigate our way through these busy city streets, waiting for a sniper or a road bomb that never came. Donkey drawn carts, sleeping unemployed men, oversized trucks packed full of gear with flowers painted on them in bright colors, and a stray camel herding nomad were the usual sights. I would find myself there a few days a week and would volunteer for the work when it was needed. Life at the government compound was easy for a young Marine. We would work in teams of two, and truly had little to do at the post other than sit in a room and kill time.
I found myself in close quarters with former Taliban who had taken office and were not allowed to leave the compound for fear of assassination. There was an on grounds cook who would run out to town and return with meats and vegetables, a tall lanky man who had nicknamed himself “Snoop Dog” after the rapper. “Snoop” and I would shoot the shit in broken English and sometimes he would watch American films with me on my laptop. A junior Marine standing the post once pulled me aside and nervously explained that “Snoop Dog” had requested a porno and the Marine wanted to know what I thought we should do about this situation. Pulling him out by his collar and shooting “Snoop Dog” for requesting something easily accessible to myself seemed extreme so I explained to the Marine that even though his country forbids pornography,“Snoop Dog’s” adolescent interest in such material is a good sign for the future of democracy in the region.
I would walk the compound and marvel at the notion that twenty years ago this area was swamped with Russian soldiers. The very compound itself had once stood for something different than it did for my generation of warriors in the graveyard of empires. When I had a squad of Marines before the deployment I studied every book I could find on the Russian/Afghan War and had developed a quiet understanding that if and when the Afghan people turn on America, we will know it. When I found myself in the country I would listen to the stale wind and hatred was always the undertone.
One night I was swapping cigarettes with two friendly Afghan policemen. If you ever want information in a foreign country, gifts are essential. Smokes and porno are an acceptable and universal trade for whatever you need. That night I wanted to hear about a man. After handing over a few hard to find American smokes I asked one of the policemen if he had ever heard of Charlie Wilson? Charlie Wilson was a congressman who coordinated the funding necessary to import weapons to the Afghan Freedom Fighters in the 1980’s. The cop electrified and explained with happy intensity that he had met Charlie Wilson. I will never know if he really did but I believed him, the age matched and Wilson had made a visit to the country during the war. Next I asked about the “Lion of Panjshir”, the Afghan became more solemn and he said “Yes, Massoud.” I asked if he had fought the Russians and he replied that he had. These men are carved out of stone, they have fought too many foreigners, they have fought each other when there wasn’t anyone to fight, and now there are policemen trying to form a government. There will be more fighting and all of the American war movies made could never translate the damage done to people by people. I found myself content with the information gathered, it was not groundbreaking, but I constantly found myself staring at Afghan men, wondering if they shot down a MIG, lost their friend to a hind strike, and what hopes for the future these men can have after a lifetime of chaos. If there is one thing to pay attention to in Afghanistan it is that the people will never be conquered, and they are in a constant struggle in which their daily worries are far more serious than anything we in the states could ever empathize with or imagine. The Afghan knows struggle, the Afghan knows war, and there was a man who saw a way out…
THANK YOU FOR READING
NEXT EDITION: “THE LION: AHMAD SHAH MASSOUD”
BEFORE

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Two Documentaries and Too Much Time for Dead Men

Pt. 1 On Noam and 2002


The following is a work of fiction.

I was powering through the instant streaming function of my video game machine to locate a documentary that might spark some intellectual thought and possibly stimulate the hamster that had been napping on the exercise wheel in my head. In the future the television will become a functioning arm of the internet, I find cable to be an unnecessary expense as we figure this out. Everything moves so… in the future, no flying cars but some of the same so much faster. We are connected; I can send these words into space, on their own little mission around the world and into another computer. We have all become little presidents, ambassadors and celebrities. This may not faze the modern man but I try to take a moment out of the day to appreciate the white water of the thrashing technology wave with the momentum of a world full of human beings with different agendas behind it. Lives have been changed and lives will be changed, Time Square is no longer a bastion of pornography and Bill so and so doesn’t need it anymore because some of the beautiful women of our planet are stuck in time, twisting their beautiful bodies somewhere in Bill’s twisted computer wires. On the other end of the spectrum I can time travel, on this instant streaming function that highlights obscure documentaries from 2002.
I awoke from a sleeping off a poker game from the night before. I am twenty four years old and in a month I will be twenty five, and something is turning inside of the deep innards that twist the stomach and remind me both of being a child anticipating a favorite holiday and that feeling of darkness after a close friend dies. I think about it often, and then it becomes so vast and exciting and devastating that I find myself endlessly driven to explain a little bit of it. I began to flip through my instant streaming choices on a Sunday morning, knowing that tomorrow is my double shift and that it is going to be long and that part of me prepares for the average part of my life. When the title caught my interested eye I suited up for something else, the mission, this thing I have no control over, the reason I am an average man living an average life, so I click on the movie, “Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times” and I watch because I know Vonnegut was not the only time traveling combat veteran of these United States, and I had found my portal.
A handy-cam pans the eclectic group ranging from college students to the elderly. They are taking their seats in anticipation of the panel discussion by Noam Chomsky on the matters of our time in this year of our lord 2002. Afghanistan held much water as the topic of discussion, U.S. Special forces had made great headway in the region, fighting the Taliban and searching for Osama Bin Laden. The invasion of Iraq and total collapse of planning that followed had yet to be realized, so what intrigues me is watching a man of supreme intellectual faculties attempt a prediction while I know many of the outcomes eight years later and in 2010, I know more than the Noam Chomsky of 2002.
I must not be so arrogant; I continue watching, interested in this group of people from eight years ago. I wonder what the chatty lively folks of the audience are doing right now, if they were inspired to accomplish great things after this discussion or if they carried on as usual and apathetically created the problems of today? Most of the audience would be losing jobs and houses in seven years so I focus on the gleam of light a hanging lamp in the conference room of this hotel in the movie is casting on the top rim of the metal backseat to the chair in front of the man with the handy-cam. I feel my body begin to tingle, like an appendage that has fallen asleep, there is always the complete darkness and loss experience of time travel, experts call such things depression, so I focus on the light gleam off of the chair as I return to March of 2002.
It is a clear day on the national mall in Washington D.C. as I materialize on a park bench. I am sixteen years old all over again, I can remember some of the future because we can never fully return but most of it is gone and I am back. I watch these people walking and jogging toward the Lincoln Memorial, six months after the towers fell. I am in D.C. tagging along with my father on one of his business trips, and I only relive this scene so vividly because I wrote it down and found it in an old book of notes when I returned from the war the first time. Sixteen years old I write about what I see, a cheesy observation of a jogging America, “carrying on” with resilience, perfecting its body after a terrible blow. I write that I see strong people “carrying on” in the face of it all. The magazines of the period featured the now joining soldiers of post 9/11 as the new greatest generation, comparing them to the volunteers of the WWII generation. Looking back from 2010 I think to myself that of course we carried on, what else is there ever to do? If you are not carrying on you are not drawing a pulse.
I am sixteen years old and grounded, my grades suck, love life sucks, but I can download a free song in less than a little over an hour with my external 28.8k modem. I read that thing I wrote in 2002 after the war and I almost choked. Noam got it all wrong, focusing on turning the image of the growing seed into Vietnam when the real war began with the people sitting in the very seats he speaks to in 2010 on my television. I disrupt the audience and I have broken a great rule of time travel. I rise from my seat and howl, “You people are the reason things are the way they are now, you can blame your government but you allow them to do what they do!” Noam looking startled politely asks who I am and I reply, “I come from the future, my name is Bill so and so, and the answers you are searching for rest inside a pile of twisted computer wires.”...

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Arm Chair Debrief III (In the begenning)

http://www.fallenheroesmemorial.com/oif/profiles/molinabautistajorgea.html
You look at that for a moment and breathe in the memory of a guy you used to know. It has been five years since he was killed, in a week. Seven years ago I was a seventeen year old Karate assistant instructor, his son was in one of my classes and Ssgt. Molina was one of my recruiters. I would watch the Ssgt. watch his son, always with pride on Fridays and a Sunday tournament. Once I brought a curious friend into the office and after Ssgt. Molina went on a half hour rant about his love for his Corps, my friend signed up. I heard about Ssgt. Molina’s death after I returned from Fallujah II. When I asked what had ever happened to him another Ssgt. and friend of his looked at me sadly and said that Ssgt. Molina was killed around the time of Fallujah I. 2004 was a miserable year to be stationed in Iraq’s Al Anbar Province, the next piece will begin in the city of Fallujah Iraq January 2004. Where, at the time I am attending a New Years Eve celebration on the Las Vegas strip while on leave from Infantry training. The ball dropped, I kissed my woman, and the countdown began on dozens of lives I had been surrounded by.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Arm Chair Debrief III

The Insurgency Rant (pt. 1)

The second a military loses the concept of mission, is too long, a minute means an hour, and if the conventional military goes a day without a mission, you might as well make it a year. When the mission deviates from A to B to C and evolves into the never clear quest for freedom, anything but freedom will be served, this is the time when the lies begin, and is how to know if the pot has overflowed boiling water onto an already agitated cat. At the close of 2003, after a March invasion and conventional success of coalition military forces, the troops were still in Iraq. It was eerie and confusing, and at this time that I believe the American people lost interest in the war, and when six months of lawless disorder was going to catch up to a complacent force. No signs of weapons of mass destruction. The sand was blowing through a large question mark, and soon there would be foreign fighters, and with them would come the roadside bombs, the snipers, the battles and the blood.
I have an offensive theory about the matter, and it is only that, an opinion. I think that the mission for the war in Iraq was destabilization. I think an unstable Iraq was believed to be useful in the larger destabilization of the Middle East. The more extreme spectrum of this view has to do with sending people back in time. Shut down their water, electricity, television, institute curfews, and let them kill each other. At the end of 2003 the books from the invasion began turning out, those warm and fuzzy photo collections of teary eyed journalists walking down the alleys of Iraq surrounded by children chanting “U.S.A.!”
Boot Camp was about what I expected it to be. My platoon of recruits was screamed at, could pump out a million pushups, fire an M-16 and if you weren’t me, you could even march in rank and file. Most of it was very intense, the larger lesson that was to be taken from, was that the body and mind can endure much more than a comfortable person could imagine. I continued to follow the war, on Sundays we were allowed to read the newspapers. I graduated Boot in November of 2003, returned home for a short leave and left for my next post at The Marine Corps School of Infantry outside of San Diego. Soon I would be an 18 year old professional infantryman, hypothetically trained to kill anything in my way. My super senses went off when we had a new group of Infantry Instructors fresh back from Iraq, my training platoon would be the first generation of Infantry Marines trained by OIF vets. These combat vets were different from the non combat instructors we had had before. They were very serious about everything, and I started to get a tugging at the pit of my stomach. I had been in the chow hall eating breakfast when I first heard the news of Saddam’s capture on Dec 17, 2003. I was still in training in January 2004 when I heard two of the combat vet instructors arguing over how the capture of Saddam Hussein would affect the overall mission. The instructor that I felt had the most grounded view of the situation lowly bellowed, “Doesn’t mean shit man. Something’s happening out there and Saddam don’t mean shit.” ...

Monday, May 10, 2010

Arm Chair Debrief II

Welcome to Iraq

The buildup to the invasion of Iraq was intense, The Gulf War had been a media triumph in 1991, and was about to be put to shame. Armed with new technology, the common citizen was going to have the opportunity to go to Iraq from home, prepare a fine meal and drift away with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, or the Marine Corps’ 3/1, or whatever unit was crossing uncharted territory that night. I had the added experience of having a father who was preparing to deploy to Iraq as an embedded reporter. So I would sit, sit in front of the television for hours, between homework assignments, lost in thought and CNN or Fox News, NBC, I was addicted, shooting the news junk through teenage eyeballs. I wondered what it meant? The U.S. invasion of Iraq commenced on March 20, 2003. This initial phase, thought to be the only phase, would be the conventional battle between the Iraqi Army and coalition forces. Many other phases would follow and the country would shape shift almost annually bringing with it new threats, alliances, and anticipations.
Crossing the line of departure with the coalition troops into Iraq on 20, March 2003 was a former NFL professional football player turned Army Ranger whose story I had been following since 2002 named Pat Tillman. NBC reporter David Bloom who would tragically die of natural causes with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, Jerry Vang, a soldier also attached to the Army’s 3rd ID, a friend of mine and brother to the guitarist in my High School punk rock band, who would succumb to paralysis after a car accident while home on leave from the invasion, and soon my father. I drove with Mike Vang, Jerry’s brother and only other occupant in the car at the time of the accident, up the coast past Santa Barbra to drop my Dad off at the ancient Camp Roberts, and wonder my Senior year, if I would ever see him again.
March 2003, was a slow month for me. I recall at one point exclaiming in awe at the reportedly first televised firefight while on the phone with my girlfriend. Much like 1991 the coalition forces rolled through Iraq and decimated the Iraqi Army. One of my favorite sights was the genius Marine who draped the American flag over the face of the Saddam statue; I’m a sucker for bad PR. Next, the first “uh-oh” alarm went off in my head when I was watching U.S. troops set up Camp in Saddam’s lavish palaces. Looting broke out in the streets and it was apparent to the average viewer that Iraq was slipping into some sort of chaos.
A key to the next turn of events had to do with law. I believe that if the military had policed the streets of Iraq and quelled the civilian thievery and chaos that will always result during a lack of law, that the U.S. might have been able to secure a more favorable view among the people of Iraq. I also believe that as in the case of most of our wars, we failed to understand the culture of the people whose country we were “liberating”. My father returned on the day I graduated High School, armed with Iraqi bayonet’s and stories of a far away war. I thought we would find Saddam soon, institute a quick turnover to a favorable regime and that would be that. Eight weeks after I graduated High School I left for Marine Corps Boot Camp. I thought for sure that the war was over, that I had missed it. Through most of the remainder of 2003 U.S. forces remained confused and alert as the war began its next phase. The Insurgency…

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Arm Chair Debrief

As per military tradition the debrief following a mission is intended as an educational measure to study what worked and what could be improved upon. The following commentary is an opinion piece and should not be adopted as official doctrine nor has the opinion of the writer been endorsed by any official organization. The writer of this commentary is on the way to community college so please bare with typos and errors in grammar, though constructive criticism and the time it takes out of one’s day is always welcomed. The writer was an observer of two combat tours, a lowly ranked enlisted man who served four years in active service as a U.S. Marine Corps Infantryman.

Before Iraq

The buildup for the invasion of Iraq by U.S. armed forces before March of 2003 was a spectacle to behold, if you were following such drama. It is the opinion of the writer that anytime politicians and military officials point to grainy black and white photos, explaining the imminent threat of specs of grey, that society should fly the bullshit flag and ask for proof before declarations to end human life are finalized that would at the very least hold up in a reasonable court of law.
It should be known that my family has an extensive history of service for the United States Armed Forces during both war and peace time documented as far back as the American Civil War and with an oral history touching on the landing at Plymouth Rock. I was always going to serve my country; the war was a coincidence and not a motivator for my joining. During my junior year of High School I remember studying the Vietnam War; we covered the Gulf of Tonkin incident which was verified in my history book as at least, “A bad call”. I remember asking myself if such a thing could happen in my lifetime? Months later the towers fell in New York and to my amazement, all of the dominos collapsed as America handled the devastating loss of over three thousand innocent people going to work, I tried to pay attention through fifteen year old eyes to what solution would be reached by an American people who searched for an enemy to quench a blood lust and the social need for revenge. The cup of propaganda spilled over the television and soon Osama Bin Laden was a household name.
In reality the common person did not know whether the attacks of September 11, 2001 were the foot or the summit of a mountain that was going to have to be climbed. It will be noted in history that America was immediately changed by the events of September 11, 2001. This was an odd sight to witness for a teenager and the son of a media man. I had always stayed on top of current events, and by this time was browsing several newspapers a day trying to hypothesize the next natural move. Afghanistan was invaded at the end of the year, first quietly by Special Operations troops, (Covert warriors who specialize in unconventional warfare i.e. Navy Seals, “Rambo”), and the CIA. Had we kept conventional troops out of the fight, (i.e. ground forces such as standard infantry troops and support who were intended to fight foreign conventional forces) it is the belief of the writer that the war could have been handled in a different manner that would have avoided international frustrations that would taint U.S. foreign policy for an indefinite amount of time. The war in Afghanistan will be covered in a future edition.
It was during the spring of 2002 that the Bush administration began their campaign for the invasion of Iraq as a key component to, “The War on Terror”.