PART V: What it Felt Like to Come Home
CHAPTER 4: Inside the Wire
A writing exercise in several parts - this part composed in 90 minutes and posted without edits.
"Charlie didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home: death, or victory."
- CPT Willard, Apocalypse Now (film, 1979)
“And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”
- Col. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now (film, 1979)
Just as being a police officer is probably much more about paperwork and bad coffee than it is about highspeed bank robber chases, deployments are usually defined more by the size of the base you’re at, the speed of your internet, and the quality of the gym than it is about combat or danger. There are two factors to examine when you want to know something about a person’s military service: how active were they in combat and how large was their base.
On the activity metric, Special Operators and Airforce pararescue guys and Delta stay very busy. Their deployments are usually pretty brief but there’s a high ‘op tempo’. There will sometimes be months where they’re out nearly every night kicking in doors, capturing/killing suspected enemy, and rescuing hostages. After them are the elite infantry units (army rangers and force recon marines) followed closely by the airborne army infantry and then regular light and mechanized infantry and then national guard infantry. All of these units are mostly composed of people working other jobs, of course. Senior leaders and medical personnel and communications specialists might stay on the base for their entire deployment. Then there are other kinds of units: aviation (helicopters), supply, finance… they might have the opportunity to kill literally hundreds of enemy or they might work in an air-conditioned trailer.
Which brings me to factor 2: the size of your base. I started at FOB (forward operating base) Joyce and then moved to a catsle in a nearby valley for a brief period and then lived most of the deployment at FOB Hughie (all of these installations are named for military personnel killed in years past). I spent plenty of nights at Bagram, at Camp Phoenix, at Asadabad (the most profoundly hostile town I’ve ever experienced) and then many more laid up in some tiny outpost with ABP guys. These were often no more than a big hole dug in the ground with sandbags around the perimeter. The ABP guys were always thrilled to see us. If we were there it lessened their chances of being attacked greatly (much to our annoyance) and they were INTENSELY bored. Their lives had been some perfunctory basic training course and then posting to a district Kandak (company or battlion level headquarters) and then posting to some empty dirt hole on the border where they tried to stay vigilant but were often surprised by sniper fire or thrown grenades. There was little in the way of unit cohesion or morale and zero training and I never saw an officer among his men. The American army runs well for the same reason that most institutions in the US run well: we have a matter-of-fact, humanist, rational attitude towards human flourishing and we’ve moved away from pointless brutality and hereditary privilege. We see what works and we have enough meritocracy and flexibility to adopt what works and jettison that which doesn’t. The American army still uses a system of college-educated officers leading groups of enlisted men: non-commissioned officers (NCO’s, who are the professional backbone of soldier care and collective knowledge for the army) and regular enlisted (lower-ranked and usually younger and lesser paid soldiers… the rank and file). Watch a US army unit during a rest break or after training. The NCO’s are mingling among the men, asking questions, checking water and ammo. The officers are consulting with the NCO’s.
An aside: This is the great irony about the narrative of the ‘power dynamic’, that all institutions and relationships are fundamentally defined by power: on the one hand the army is certainly held together by the threat of brute force and exists to threaten others with force. But when you understand the daily workings of such an institution you see that competence has more to do with power in choosing who rises (also popularity and less quantifiable factors). People communicate and convince and discuss and it’s rare that rank has to be pulled or power deployed. This isn’t a structure of the oppressors lording over the chastened underlings… it’s a cooperative (not egalitarian, but voluntary) organization in which everyone knows and accepts their role and culture, norms, knowledge, personality type, etc, etc. have more to do with how people interact than power. Saying that all institutions (or even more ludicrously, all knowledge) is described by ‘power dynamics’ is to take a faint and core truth and then ignore the other 85% of the picture, and that larger share is much more important for understanding how and why an institution works. All property only exists in our society because if you don’t respect the property rights of others you’re liablt to end up in jail. Is all property at its core just imprionsment? In a sense… but the way this truth is blandly asserted as if it’s a profound and subversive reality (it can sound intelligent, until you consider it critically for 5 minutes) is fairly annoying to me. There are many related bad ideas floating around in groups of people who often have spent very little time in the workforce and no time running a business or serving in the military or travelling: significant racism is a systemic phenomenon, not a personal error; rape is about power, not sex; Europeans stole North America from indigenous groups; the modern United States is a patriarchy. They all sound interesting but can easily be punctured with 5 minutes worth of conversation. Before you advocate radical change for our society go to Zimbabwe or Afghanistan or Somalia and see what ‘abolishing’ institutions might get you and I think you might be a bit more hesitant about calling for revolution on Instagram.
Afghanistan is a society that is ACTUALLY built on power and privilege. Power and violence saturate every level of the country and it’s perceptible in everyday interactions. Men have a huge status advantage over women and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Tribe and parentage is largely destiny. Force is used constantly, in mundane exchanges. Officers will slap their underlings, brothers will beat their sisters for a bottle of water, humans are endlessly cruel and disdainful towards dogs. It is a very violent society in which entitlements are granted at birth or not at all…. And this is how humans have lived across the globe for 10,000 years. It was only science and a very specific religious morality and the growth of a legal system and humanism that have let us transcend that reality and when you undermine those things you undermine progress.
Afghan men have a very cozy relationship with hashish and a marked predilection for homosexuality. Afghanistan uses a system of social norms which include a massive emphasis on the importance of female sexual honor (not just for her but for her entire family, which leads to many tragic outcomes) and a bride price. From what I understand it takes a good 15 years of saving before a man can generally afford to find a wife and Afghan tinder is still in the development stage. Without dating, sex, relationships, or even visual confirmation of the existence of women who aren’t in your family the massive weight of male sexuality will found outlet. We strictly forbade any such activity in military outposts (especially when we were there – everyone knows that romance between coworkers can be a massive HR headache) but it wasn’t uncommon to see two bearded and gaunt men staring into each others’ eyes and holding hands. I should mention here that holding hands between men in Afghanistan is merely a friendly gesture, like placing a hand on a shoulder or walking alongside someone, but I never got used to it.
Some soldiers (most) spend their entire time on a large base… a mega-FOB. Some hardened infantryman spend 15 months in a tiny combat outpost with 20 Americans. My experiences run the gamut. Most of my time in-country was spent in modestly-sized bases (20-90 men) with weeks in the countryside and weeks at the mega FOBs in and around Kabul to refit or pick guys up or see a psychiatrist so the army could place a band aid on some obviously gaping and catastrophic psychological wound.
I want to point a few things out about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. First: much of the army’s support functions were done by contractors. When the Bush administration made the decision to invade Iraq they faced a hard choice. We didn’t have the people for 2 major ground wars and in true politician style the hard choice of imposing conscription was sidestepped and so thousands upon thousands of ridiculously well-paid contractors ran our mess halls, fixed our trucks, built our bases, updated our comms. These are all things that would have been done by uniformed personnel in years past. This change was very costly to the taxpayer (even for a fairly low-skill job $100,000 tax-free payment for a year of work was standard; God knows how much the contractor was being paid for these guys but it could have been 2 or 3 times that).
Secondly (and tied to the first): the large FOBs became little American colony towns. Military discipline can’t be enforced when there are 1,500 civilian contractors living there full-time. Many of the people in our military are not hardened battle robots, either. There are plenty of young and impulsive men who have a vague feeling of patriotism and a longing for some adventure or outlet and many of them can be molded into formidable solders who (on one level) crave the opportunity to fight the enemy and put their skills to the test. For every one of those, though, there are 5 who are young moms or prospective college students from rural Louisiana who are seeking DOD benefits or under-educated men trying to make child support. Those people do not want to be separated from the accoutrements of modern American life and they are often making more money (even at the army’s decidedly modest pay scales) than ever before.
The Mega FOBs in Afghanistan had little shopping plazas, coffee trailers where you could get sweet Starbucks concoctions, huge and well-outfitted gyms, phone and internet huts with room for 100 users. It was a jarring experience to come in from a few weeks in the countryside and encounter groups of young women in PTs, out for a night of light shopping and coffee with the girls.
Camp Phoenix even had a massage hut, where beautiful girls from Kyrgyzstan (imagine the pretty young niece of Genghis Khan and you’ve got it) would do full-body massages for $20 an hour. It was a good price and I indulged but noticed the signs on every wall warning against proposition and harassment. I really wanted to sit down and pick the brain of whichever senior military officer thought this would be a good and acceptable-risk feature for a combat military base. I still find it hard to understand why such a thing would have ever existed.
The Afghans did many of the jobs on base, too. They had to be vetted and searched at the gate every morning but thousands upon thousands of Afghan men (not so many women) supported their families for years using the money they made sweeping streets at Bagram Airfield. We poured a lot of money into that country and much (most) of it was wasted and stolen but it also enriched the lives of many ordinary people.
We usually had to spend a day or two at the motor pool for every 3 days on the road (often more). Up-Armored Humvees are light scout vehicles which had been ensconced in two tons of alloy plating and bullet-proof glass. The suspensions and brakes and transmission needed almost constant work and the trucks were usually unusable after 15,000 miles of driving.
THIS was the composition of my life in Afghanistan, far more than missions or battles: hanging out by the mechanics’ hangar smoking cheap (50 cents a pack) pine cigarettes from Korea that tasted like shredded paper; waiting for a 30 minute slot in the phone hut to check Facebook and pretend I was still a civilian; lifting in the gym.
I need to mention the gym at greater length. Depending on where we were there was a bar and some plates or the full LA Fitness-suite of Nautilus and squats racks. I lifted almost every day I was overseas and gained about 30 pounds of muscle during 2008. Toward the end of the deployment (winter) our operational tempo slowed to a crawl as the mountain passes were snowed in and there was little to do other than watch movies. I would wake up, eat a lot, lift, and take a little chunk of my one of my buddy’s Seroquel (a mood stabilizing medication with extremely sedating properties). I would sleep for 12 hours, and then repeat. He was prescribed the medication (and other things) due to severe trauma experienced in a previous Iraq deployment and it probably left him screaming himself awake at night less but wasn’t the best prescription regimen for a DRIVER who often starts missions at 5am. After getting the prescription he did seem more stable but also far less alert and lively.
I will talk more about the army’s general attitude towards medication and mental health later.
"[He] had had a pretty good day for himself. They choppered in t-bones and beer and turned the LZ into a beach party. The more they tried to make it just like home, the more they made -everybody miss it."
- CPT Willard, Apocalypse Now (film, 1979)
[End of Part V]