Wielding an imagination as expansive as mine has grown to be can sometimes make even the simplest task seem incredibly daunting. I can’t just sit in a humvee and stare into space. I can’t just feel a certain way about something or someone. I have to dig, I’ve got to know why I feel the way I do. I’ve been digging into death since the first time I was directly involved with taking another mans life. I couldn’t just let him be dead, which would have been the simplest if not most healthy solution. I created a world where I could see each bullet pass through his skin in the slowest motion possible and continue through his insides destroying tissue, causing chaos where there had once been beautiful order. I stood there in the dark long after my real body had jumped into the rear of a Blackhawk and flown away. I watched over him as he took his last breaths, as be became another AP statistic, or more accurately as he turned into nothing at all, the butt of a joke told by men in brand new uniforms creeping through his country in the night with glowing green eyes.
He became a son and sometimes a father. He transformed into a farmer or perhaps the owner of a small shop. He was poor, that much doesn’t take any leap of faith to believe. He was afraid of us, so much so that when he heard the sound of our helicopters heading toward his home he fled into a nearby field and hid himself in a canal thick with tall dry reeds. He knew he was guilty of something that we would arrest him for, that he would be taken away somewhere far from his family perhaps for a very long time. Maybe he was a bad person. He may have been a rapist and a thief, a murderer, or he may have just been another sucker tricked into working for a group whose ideology he cared nothing about, maybe he was hungry, maybe he had no options. He had hopes and dreams and memories built from an entire life of consciousness, and all it took after a few short moments of violent action was a few moments more for the vacuum of time to fill in the space where he had once been.
Shortly after that night I was looking through a pile of confiscated items that had been piled on the floor of our tent. In it was a Sony Handi-cam Hi8 camcorder. You don’t see a lot of consumer electronics in the smaller towns in this region so it seemed out of place among the dirty AK-47 magazines and small pamphlets of Arabic writing. I picked it up and pressed the power button. To my surprise it started up and an image came to life on the small fold out monitor. The video was poor quality in comparison to the high definition I’ve grown used to, the colors highly saturated and grainy. Still it was clear enough to show two men blind folded on there knees with their hands tied behind their backs. They had been placed outside near a thick low hanging tree, the scene looked like a hundred places I’ve been in this country, sun baked reddish soil, everything sad and wilting in the mid day heat. Through the small speaker I could hear the voices of men speaking Arabic quickly, it’s replication distant and metallic, distorted by gusts of wind that occasionally overwhelmed the cameras small microphone.
I’d seen videos like this on the Internet before. I knew these men were going to die but for some reason I had to see it for myself as if to prove that I could tell the future. The unseen men’s voices became louder and more excited but the men blindfolded kneeling did not move. Their expressions never changed. They must have known what was in store for them. I wondered what it must feel like to know you’re about to die a violent and painful death. I felt that if I had been in the same position I would have resisted but I’ve seen enough of these scenarios to know how things go, eventually one just accepts that they have no choice or that’s what they make themselves believe.
In the middle of this thought two assault rifles were thrust into the picture and a moment later two fingers pulled two triggers, fire erupted from two muzzles behind a score of invisible unthinking unfeeling machined pieces of copper and steel. It’s not like Hollywood. There’s no spray of blood, bullet wounds sometimes bleed very little even minutes after they are inflicted. The body tightens in an automatic response to the trauma and falls forward following the force of the impact, the mouth pulls back in a grimace and that’s it. I turned the camera off.
I usually don’t talk about this part of my job when people ask me what it’s like here. People just don’t understand. They ask me questions like whether or not I think I have the right to choose what lives and dies. I had to think about it for a while before I had a good answer. I think I got defensive and ended up saying something like, “well, if I brought you over here and set you loose on the street in one of these towns we don’t have a firm control on and you were captured, you’d be beaten, raped, held for ransom and eventually beheaded or shot. It’s not like I just arbitrarily fire on randoms. Mistakes happen, but we have a good system in place to decide who’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’.”
If you think about the transverse who says a doctor has the right to keep someone on life support when they should naturally be dead? Doctors are given a guide to follow and based on their expertise in their field they make judgment calls using their knowledge and experience. A soldier does the same. The reason these morally ambiguous questions are still debated is because there is no black and white divide between right and wrong. Like marching in the earliest minutes of dawn we spend our days traveling through and working within continuously changing spectrum of grey.
Regardless of what the news would like to make it seem like, we are in fact professionals. Not in the sense that we’d all know how to tie a full Windsor but we are pretty damn good at what it is we do.
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Some missions absolutely nothing happens. So what do you write about? Seinfeld made millions on a show about nothing so the trick must be to find the something within the nothing. That’s what I thought anyway as I was laying face toward the stars atop a thick and brightly patterned sleeping mat I’d “appropriated” from the inside of the house we had taken over for our last two day outing. Looking at so many stars it occurred to me that I really don’t know much of shit about anything. I know a little about everything but not a lot about anything. Like I know that the light that we see from a star was actually emitted hundreds of thousands of years ago and it’s a possibility that that star no longer even exists, but I don’t know what the speed of light is or how I’d possibly be able to calculate the distance from Earth to a star or it’s approximate age as determined by it’s size and the spectrum of light it emits. Somebody out there knows that. I know that thousands of years ago some dudes got together and started telling stories using uniquely shaped patterns of stars to create characters filling in the gaps as to how these characters interacted. I know what Orion’s Belt looks like but that’s about the only one I could pick out aside from the ladle to which there is no pot grand enough. Someone out there knows them all.
I blew through a 600-page novel by the evening of the second day and I thought that finishing a good book is like breaking up with a girlfriend you really like just because you have to move away. It’s so frustrating. You feel like there should be more but you just have to accept that it’s over and move on. There’re other books in the sea, you tell yourself, but still you can’t help but think about your old book. You want to pick your book up and hold it in your hands and relive all the memories. But you realize that story’s already been told, those pages have been turned, your book is probably captivating a new set of eyes by now, spine folded all the way back, revealing all the same secrets you once thought were only yours to see. Dejected, you look for anything to get your mind on other subjects. A few cheap, easy magazines later you finally get over the worst of the pain and start looking for other ways to entertain myself as if that old book were just another work of fiction.
Some soldiers develop a razor sharp weapons grade sense of humor after enduring the mind numbing boredom and repetition of the cycle of guard duty, patrols, and convoys. You get by, by making light of how bad it can be. We talked about the state of the region after a year of our being and how the bad guys just move from one town to another and back as we focus our attention elsewhere. One soldier said it was like watching a stupid person play ping-pong by himself. The ball just falls off the other side of the table and every time he goes on a wild goose chase through a huge cluttered room to find the ball and by the time he grabs it and switches sides he’s forgotten what the score is. It’s not all funny stories and bitching though.
Some of the guys here have fallen into a twisted and sick worldview that is all but encouraged by these circumstances we find ourselves in. Labeling something an “Iraqi-something” somehow strips it of all worth much in the way I believe the Nazi’s slowly stripped away the humanity of Germany’s Jewish citizens. I’ve watched men not just kill but torture wild and domesticated animals out of nothing more than plain boredom. I don’t see why it’s so hard to make the correlation that for the locals a chicken is more than just a cartoon on the outside of a carton of eggs among a stack of hundreds at the local mega-market, it’s a food source that has to be cultivated and cared for over time and it means a lot to them. It makes me sick. Luckily I’m not the only one who feels this way but still these things continues to happen. I’d get into the particulars of the story but I really don’t want to type it all out. What I did find odd was one of the men involved, a man several ranks and years my elder, after I voiced the obvious wrongness of his actions, came up to me and tried to assuage his (modest) feelings of guilt by explaining that it was just an “Iraqi Pigeon” and there for the dirtiest and most worthless creature on Earth capable only of spreading disease.
I replied, “Sergeant, human beings are a disease upon this planet that have so far shown an almost limitless capacity to take without giving back. That by definition is a parasite. Until today that pigeon lived within natures system of checks and balances that we have chosen to disconnect ourselves from. So really who’s more worthless?” I believe also I used the transitive form of “fuck” occasionally for emPHAsis. I didn’t look at him while I said this because I was trying to look busy reading and because I didn’t really feel like giving him that respect.
To try and make my point I retold a story of a day when I was in my early teens and my friend and I were sitting by the window of his second story bedroom. We’d been shooting birds from out translucent hide for hours; this was a regular thing for us then. You give young boys pellet guns and what do you expect they are going to do with them, at least we weren’t shooting each other… that day. By then we’d decimated the regulars and so had to wait extended periods of time for more migratory prey to enter our kill zone. Looking out across the yard I was scanning the branches of a scrubby coastal oak when my eye caught a tiny abnormality. I might have missed it had it not fluttered its wings just as I passed over its position. It was a tiny green humming bird surveying its territory with obvious pleasure as it let out inordinately loud chirps for its size. I laughed and told my friend I bet he couldn’t hit it, from that distance of maybe 40 meters it looked like a hyperactive bumblebee; I figured it was an impossible shot. He took my bet and as he took aim I smiled and got ready to gloat, as I believed his failure was eminent. His tongue was sticking slightly out the front of his mouth as it always did when he was concentrating or wrestling and he slowed his breathing down to steady the plastic stock of the rifle on the top of the windowsill. Pop! The gun recoiled slightly and he looked above the iron sight to see what had happened. For a moment the bird didn’t move and I readied my barrage of insults but a third of the way through the word, “pussy” the humming birds tiny body fell from the branch and behind the tall gate that marked the end of the back yard.
I was stunned. Literally I couldn’t move. I couldn’t believe he hit it. Neither of us said a word, we dropped out guns and ran down stars to see if we could find the body of our felled quarry. After a few minutes of searching in a patch of ivy at the base of the oak tree I came across what looked like a winged emerald splayed out on the ground. There was a small hole between its shoulders but not much blood; I guessed a humming bird didn’t have much to lose in the first place. We both stared at the tiny bird for a period of time that I couldn’t really recall, it could have been 30 seconds or 15 minutes and it seemed that without saying a word. Silently something clicked that had never occurred to us before. We stopped shooting birds after that day and since then I haven’t had any interest in hunting. I think maybe it took killing something that we considered not only benign but also beautiful and somehow undeserving to teach us that he really weren’t gaining anything from what we were taking. Some people it seems never learn this. I didn’t think the story would change his mind but at least he knew where I stood and maybe it would change his behavior in my presence anyway.
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The days are starting to cool off gradually. By this I mean I don’t fear for my life when I walk outside during daylight hours. It’s one of those things where you think, hey if it was like this all the time this place wouldn’t be so bad. But it’s not like this all the time, soon it will start getting cold, or rather the temperature will start fluctuating so widely that it will seem cold at night, then it really will get cold, but we should be gone by then (extend our tour again Mr. President, I dare you).
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