My Diary In A War

“It’s three in the morning and it‘s still over ninety fucking degrees, how can it be so damn hot? it‘s only March!” I was thinking to myself. While in the background our Lieutenant continues his mission brief.

We all know what we have to do, when and where it’s going to go down, and who we are after. “Just like we trained for.” is what our Lieutenant always says to calm us. We are going to raid a house, a big house by Iraq’s standards. Most homes are one or two rooms, this one is around ten rooms. I sigh upon hearing this, I know my team is the entry team. I look at Dean, Loren, and Etchie, my brothers who will go in with me, and I see the same look on their faces as I have on mine, grief. Entry teams on large houses usually lose a guy, we are all too aware of this. I can tell we are all thinking of worst case scenarios but we are still listening to our briefing. The target: some hajji, our source of information: unknown, armament of the home: unknown, number of inhabitants: unknown. “At least they got an address” someone would say, or “Fuck M.I.” (military intelligence) is also popular. We all know the risks, and we all know that the home we are about to raid is, probably, full of innocent people. Innocence…that’s what makes this job is so hard.

A raid like this will take about 35 men (a platoon) to complete. My team will enter, clear and secure the building and the target. Once it’s clear more men will come in to search the house and take the prisoner away. At this point my job is done. To get there we will ride in the back of a lightly armored pick-up, eight men in full gear on the roughest ride ever. I hate these trucks. The armor on the sides of the truck bed is so short that your back and head are exposed, we are a prime target for a roadside bomb. I day dream during these rides, we all do something to keep our minds off of how vulnerable we are. I am forced from my dream into the now as the truck stops two miles from the target, we dismount. Time to earn our pay.

My squad is split into two teams of four men, my team will enter and secure the house while the other team secures the perimeter of the house. We line up close together, to one side of the door. Nut to butt close, stealth is our only wild card in this game of poker. All the unknowns on the other side of this door give the inhabitants a royal flush over our pair of deuces. Two men from the other team have the door ram at the ready. Loren is our lead man, Dean is number two, I am third with a machine gun, Etchie is last man. The third man in a stack is always in charge, so that is me. I nod and the ram swings and drops the door to the floor. The entire team is inside the first room before the door hits the ground. Room by room we search for our target and clear each room as we pass through it to the next. We find our man still asleep in his bed. How anyone can sleep through a door being knocked down amazes me. Dean searches him for any explosive devices as Loren cuffs him. I radio the others so they can enter and Etchie interrogates him to make sure we got the right man. Nine times out of ten military intelligence will send us to the wrong house. Today we were right, a text book example of a raid. No one got hurt and nobody had to shoot. Etchie, our token black guy, always raps “I didn’t even use my AK, I gotta say, today was a good day” as we leave a building that we never had to shoot in. The rush of a midnight raid is almost unbeatable. If a fire fight broke out then it would be the ultimate rush.

The Lt. was right, just like it was in training. In the months before the war we rehearsed these raids so many thousands of times. It makes it instinctual. Only a minute elapsed from our entry to now. So fast, so smooth, I feel like a part of a ballet, a part of beauty, we don’t charge through the house, we flow like armed water from a broken pipe. Silent and harmless but ready to drown those who will stand in our way. There truly is such a thing as an art of warfare. Nowhere on Earth feels as safe as being in a stack before the entrance, you’re covered by your brothers and you are covering them. What beauty and serenity one can feel from being a part of a masterpiece, our own Rembrandt of destruction and perfection.

Back at base we get to relax a bit. After a raid we always get some time to decompress in our own ways. Frank loves his computer games, Etchie loves to watch movies on his computer, Kostoff makes slide shows of our exploits beautifully timed to music, and me, I disappear. Alone time in the army is impossible, unless you really work at it. I hate crowds and people so stealth and hiding are the two ways I found to get some time without interruption. The best place to hide is in the most obvious place, the army loves to complicate simple things, so the obvious is often overlooked. In front of our house is an old concrete bunker shaped like a pyramid with a flat top. It stands about 60 feet tall and the top is large enough to park two vehicles on. There are about a dozen of these around our base, but this one is the closest to the wall. Our base is in the middle of the city and our house is hand grenade distance from the Iraqi’s. We are supposed to wear all our gear if we want to go on top of these bunkers. I never do, but I never let the danger of being up here slip my mind. Since the bunkers are remnants of Saddam’s era not many guys want anything to do with it, some for superstitious reasons but most just hate anything Arabic. After days like today I climb to the top and relax, all alone. I go inside the bunker during the day when the sun is too hot to stand, at night I go on top. I only need my gun, water, cigs, and my pipe.

After a day like this, or any that is stressful, I will spend nearly all night on the bunker looking at the stars, the moon, or at the city that surrounds me. All alone, the background noises give way to the sounds of my thoughts. I reflect, relive, dream, wish, hope, worry, but mostly I try to make some sense of it all. Pausing to load a bowl of Afghani hash, (for my glaucoma). I smoke it, then a cigarette or two, as I tune into the music on my MP3 player and drop out for a bit. Laying on my back under the beautiful night sky that only the darkness of the dessert can show I am struck by the same reoccurring thought each time: Why am I so scared to go home? It was not that long ago I was scared of war, now I am scared to show my battle hardened face in my own home town. Home has become my war and war has become my home. “How ironic. How fuckin ironic” I muse quietly to myself.

Now, I’m short. Not in height but in time left in my tour. In twelve days the war is over to me. The only problem is the twelve days. It’s been about three weeks since any major happenings and that makes me nervous. When you get short you key in on all kinds of potential threats that previously were not dangerous. Everyone is suspect and everything looks like a damn IED (roadside bomb). It’s only now that I have become enlightened with just how dangerous this job is, and how many times I should have died.

Back up on the bunker, tonight’s a party of sorts. More for necessity, I have to smoke the last of my stash since I leave in two days I won’t have another chance to smoke it. And I need it tonight. What would be my last shots of the war were fired today. A car didn’t see our check point, fearing that it’s a car bomb, I shot and killed the 13 year old learning how to drive from his dad. Maybe I did over react since I am so short, but in that moment I acted in the same manner I have twenty times before, faced with the same deal. What makes this one so hard to swallow was not his youth, most kills are kids, but his father’s non stop wailing. I felt like shit, “sorry don’t work in this line of work” is written on my helmet. How true. How god damn true.

There is always a bright side and my gunner Matt seized this one. Matt …Matt….that sadistic mutha; he ran up to the father, covered in his boy’s blood and brains, grabbed him, shook him and slapped him, then yelled in his face “THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL”. How fuckin funny is that? I’ll tell you… I have never laughed so hard in my life. EVER. But, now the humor has subsided and the gravity of that and all of the chaos and carnage of the last 12 months is on my mind now.

A few hours have passed and I am stoned to the gourd and still have some left. “Bonus” I think to my self, “It will help postpone reality a bit longer”. My mind never stops thinking, even as high as I am, I still wrestle with the thought of how to explain days, even moments like this to the ones at home. The sheltered masses of innocence. Why do I even want to explain this to anyone? I know they will not understand, most really don’t care, and I don’t blame them. War is so much like a dream, it is unbelievable, unimaginable, unfathomable, and unexplainable even to those who have tasted it, know, that we don’t try and explain it to be understood by the innocent masses. We explain it in the hopes that one day it just might be understood by ourselves. I want answers to questions raised by war. I deserve these answers. That’s why I keep trying to explain it, so maybe, just maybe, the answers I want will show themselves to me. Hell, maybe I already have all the answers I need, perhaps it’s the questions that produce these answers that I want to discover so badly. Either way, the war is over for me. I just have to convince myself that it really is over.