All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men

Baghdad reveals itself in layers, from trash filled slums and street side markets to gated communities where men and women wear western style clothing. No two parts are the same. A piece of our mission is here is to deal with the contractors who are helping to rebuild the infrastructure of the city which means we have to travel to different areas to negotiate prices and check on the status of existing projects. One thing I have determined from this is that during the invasion we must have targeted masons. There don’t seem to be many skilled ones left. Uneven brick walls grow on the sides of existing buildings like gray stone tumors and not just in the poor areas. Most of the new construction in the city is done by hand and let’s just say that Baghdad is fortunate not to be near any fault lines. I’m a contractor’s son; I can’t help but be a little critical.

A few days back, after we had been given the full tour of the inner workings of a factory that seemed to manufacture nothing but sparks like the backgrounds in 80’s hair metal music videos, we were taken to the main hospital for the entire country of Iraq. While somewhat dated in comparison to a modern American facility, the inside of the hospital was years ahead of any building I’d been in prior. We were there to inspect the elevators that we had paid to have replaced, I think. While, as far as I know, no one in our group of was a licensed elevator technician, we eventually decided everything seemed to be in order after looking at a few different specimens. You press the button and some time in the next ten minutes the door opens, bam, progress. Like their cars, Iraqis try to stuff as many bodies as is physically possible into any moving container. In a space where 8 Americans would have stood comfortably, somewhere near 20 men and women crammed together and waited for the door to close. When the door finally closed it immediately opened again and repeated this little dance three times while the faces of its passengers looked on with something between languor and boredom. I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t hold it. Those on the elevator didn’t share my enthusiasm. Occasionally I am a truly obnoxious American.

A week or so has passed since I wrote those first two paragraphs. I wish I could say it’s been all quiet on the western front but we haven’t always been lucky. I doubt it would be worth going into much detail about the work I've been a part of but suffice to say, I wake up most mornings with the image of it staring back at me. I used to think I wanted to be the exact same person when I got home that I was before I deployed but I know now that it would be a waste. I can think of nothing worse than giving a year of my life over to get back the same perspective I had before. Adulthood, or the awkward and sometimes painful opening chapter to it, has proven to be not so much and answer to the questions of adolescence, but rather a continuing dialogue with possibility and experience. It’s sad and beautiful and you begin to understand why art springs forth from our fingers and our mouths; why we have to create. Something has to make sense when it all starts falling apart.

The Price We Pay

How do you prepare yourself to hold the lifeless body of another soldier in your hands as his blood soaked uniform is cut away? His face has been burned into my memory; I can see it as clearly as you remember your own family. From the neck up he seemed asleep, his face at peace, eyes shut but the violence of his injuries were so complete. To see this body, young and strong and lean torn and shredded, that is something I’ll live with for the rest of my life. He wouldn’t have been conscious long, which is a blessing of sorts. His skin was still warm to as I removed his boots and socks and tucked his feet in to the black body bag. On the table next to me lay his last ties to this world, a small silver chain, a platinum wedding band, a note book. I didn’t even know his name at the time.

I would like to give this experience to those left in this world who believe that hatred is still a useful expression of will. What has this solved? We won’t leave this country any sooner. This mans wife and family have lost something ultimately irreplaceable and what has this bought? Has it brought back the lives of those who we have killed? Is any one’s God pleased by this? I wish the feeling of holding this man on everyone and no one. It is a terrible lesson to have to touch the product of hate, to have your hands slick with blood and see the faces of those left behind. Is this the legacy we want to leave for our children? I don’t want to live in a country where the act of love is viewed as obscene but we don’t blink an eye at the tragedy of the evening news.

I don’t have anything for this. I can’t describe how it feels to drape the American flag another soldier lost in Iraq, how it looked; I can’t do anything right now. It just feels empty.

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A few hours later I walked with a small group of medics through a cordon of a thousand soldiers waiting to pay their respects in the cold desert night. It's unnatural to see humans like this and it was unnerving to be the focus of the attention of so many eyes you can't see. They stood on the road to the flight line at parade rest and said nothing. A full moon cast a murky shadow over the faces of the figures I passed and I thought, tomorrow night we could be standing here for any one of these soldiers, they could be standing here for me.

What It Looks Like in the Morning

I’ve learned in recent years to be satisfied with an increasingly smaller footprint of daily activity. Fifty steps from my room to the aid station, seventy to the bath room, a quick walk in through the night chill to the DFAC and back, then the gym. Everything else is synthesized. I’m more internalized. I share a little less. I’ve become a compulsive inbox checker. I worry about closing in on thirty and I don’t sleep much before 2 am regardless of when I wake up. I pick up my guitar but it feels like my rhythm comes and goes, some days I have it, some days I’m lost. There’s joy in small things, conversations and the quirk of the ego confronting corporal limits.

I play games with myself; I toy with the concept of freedom from behind the glass wall of my four year commitment. Is it any worse to be here than it is to live in poverty in your home town? Driving through Baghdad is a quick and dirty study is class disparity. Kids play soccer on gravel fields, women in tight jeans and fur topped boots pass women in black shawl covering their heads, a kitten steps weak and filthy off the corner and stares into nothing, a corner store advertises medical equipment. There’re so many travel agencies. How does the man steering the donkey cart find time to weekend in Morocco? There’s too much dust and not enough water. Everything is covered in a thin film of grime. A van runs into one of our trucks in the convoy and demolishes its front end. The HUMVEE is oblivious. This street could be in San Diego. I shift under the weight of my kit and look at my rifle held between my legs, I feel like I over packed.

Concrete barriers separate, c-wire cordon, check points halt, everything stops for our trucks. Men packed into minivans stare at us and wave us away with a local gesture something akin to “fuck off”, and no body spares the horn. It’s invigorating and depressing in shifts. The markets look active and healthy. I wish I could step out of my truck and take off my uniform and buy a piece of fruit and become part of the scenery. I wish I could communicate. Arabic is fascinating and frustrating. It’s backwards, complex and so ultimately foreign completely without cognates. It feels like we just don’t belong here any more. Some one wrote the schedule, put in his two week and no body took his place but we still look at the calendar and jot down our shift. It’s all relative though, there’s real danger even if it doesn’t choose to always express itself. A report comes over the net of an IED blast a few clicks north, no casualties. I hate being an outsider.

Our mission now is to fade away into obscurity, to be replaced by a sovereign Iraqi army and national security forces; a tapestry of different uniforms and prerogatives, masks and weapons. I think most of us see the writing on the wall, the gig’s up boys, hope you got your fill. Some of the newer guys still want their war the way I wanted mine when I got here a couple years back. Maybe they’ll get it still, though I hope not. It’s only something you wish for until it’s on your hands, a drunken tattoo you’ve come to realize is permanent.

Mostly though I feel like a new era is creeping in, a new President, a new vision for America where ever our hands reach. It’s good knowing you’re being replaced by something better but not without a strange feeling of nostalgia like working for the traveling carnival when Disney Land opened its doors, looking across the road with the empty passive stare of approaching obsolescence.

With a Bang

I climbed up a rickety metal latter to the roof of the aid station last night a couple minutes past midnight to get a better view of the city around the FOB. I'd walked past that latter a hundred times since we've lived here and I hadn't noticed it until then. I get a sort of tunnel vision when I'm in my routine. The entire latter wobbled and it's anchors on the wall shifted under my weight in a way that reminded me of my irrational fear of heights and I thought then that flip-flops may have been a bad choice. Actually my entire ensemble was completely unsuited for anything other than curling up in bed with a book. In a tan t-shirt and ranger panties… maybe that demands a bit of explanation. The word ranger in the Army is used in such a ubiquitous manor that I find it hard to relate it to any word I used before I joined. You ranger roll your patrol cap, ranger rig a shelf with 550 chord, anything improvised is somehow associated with rangers. Ranger panties are just really just thin black running shorts, like the ultra short kind that make people uncomfortable to be around you. How they got the name? Ranger battalion uses them with their PT uniform. I wear them to sleep because they feel less like a diaper than my normal PT shorts.

So in my silky smoothes I'm shivering in the cold standing on the roof watching red tracers fly into the air listening to the sound of an entire city literally exploding in celebration. I walked over to two other soldiers, older guys who sounded like officers, watching the fire works talking about the "old days" of the war when we would have been out there shooting off our own weapons to celebrate. All the excitement is gone now, most of the FOB is asleep at midnight. The taller of the two smiled and said "look at these guys, drunk and shooting automatic weapons in the streets, they drive on whatever side of the road they feel like, marry multiple women, and own guns that I would have to get approval from congress to have in the States, and we came here to give them freedom? Seems they already have more than us. I can't even have a beer on New Years." It was hard to argue with that. You give up a lot as a soldier and when you become more of a policeman than a warrior the frustrations only multiply.

I was happy though, standing in a cool breeze feeling the joy of so many people who have lived in fear for years. The sound of gunfire pleases me. I don't know why. It's something in the way that it reminds you of uncertain life is. How random your existence is. We try so hard to mitigate risk; we wear seat belts and paint lines in the street to remind us where it's safest to cross. Our threat advisories give us colors to correspond with our fears. Medicine and vaccines keep us healthier longer but we all die eventually. And how many of our fondest memories are of doing the things we were told we shouldn't? The stupid stuff we did as kids. Sneaking out, drinking, the things you thought you're parents didn't know about when they surely did. It's the thrill of risk that burns a memory in our mind. It's the pleasure of breaking free of convention and forging a path for yourself despite better advice. And as I looked out over the lights of Baghdad I wondered about the chances of having one of those stray bullets come down from the sky and end my life and I thought what better than an AK-47 to ring in the New Year.