Jonathan Shay warns about what happens, to both soldiers and society, when those stories are never told. “We can never fathom the soldier’s grief if we do not know the human attachment which battle nourishes and then amputates,” he says. “Failure to communalize grief can imprison a person in endless swinging between rage and emotional deadness as a permanent way of being in the world.”
But I knew there would be some resistance from these warriors to talking. After all, as a journalist, I was just a few rungs above pond scum in the military hierarchy of value and a few rungs below lawyers in the military hierarchy of trustworthiness. Compound this with the fact that I was also that guy who marred the American triumph in the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004 when I videotaped a U.S. Marine corporal summarily executing a wounded, unarmed insurgent in a mosque (more on this later). The silence that met my inquiries became deafening.
But even with the soldiers and Marines whom I knew and in whom I had engendered a degree of trust, it was still a difficult process. Fear, I found, was the greatest barrier to the honest sharing of their wartime experiences: fear of reliving the experience, fear of judgment, fear of consequences, and fear, as psychologist Tick pointed out, of seeing oneself through a prism of innocence lost.
In many cases, after I contacted soldiers and Marines some would initially respond to an e-mail or two from me before slipping away. In other cases I actually began lengthy dialogues, before I lost them to concern about my intentions or the pain our conversations were reigniting rather than mitigating.
In one case, I interviewed a former soldier for two months. Let’s call him Nate. Nate had been deeply scarred by burns following a roadside bomb incident in Iraq. He spoke with me openly and honestly until a conservative businessman and a financial patron of a program that assists wounded veterans mentioned that a journalist like me might not be Nate’s best confessor. But eventually it was the rebellion of Nate’s own subconscious that ended our dialogue. He had been in Iraq for a very short period of time before a roadside bomb blew up his convoy. Aside from that incident, he had almost no exposure to combat and its consequences. Additionally, while he remembers portions of the actual incident, because of the severity of his burns much of his early recovery was spent in a medically induced coma or so heavily drugged that he was barely aware of his surroundings. The upside to his post-trauma haze was an almost total lack of nightmares or other symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). However, after I called him one final time to ask him to reconsider being part of the book he explained that our extended interviews were beginning to trigger an anxiety he had not felt before. He said he had begun to dream that his hand was on fire and that he couldn’t put it out. Prior to our conversations, he said, he never dreamed of fire or the incident. At that moment, I realized the limitations of my knowledge. Sharing had helped me with my PTSD but perhaps there were, to use a medical term, contraindications for talk therapy as well. Dwelling too long or too deeply on past trauma forced someone like Nate to live repeatedly in that traumatic incident, rather than just visiting and moving past it. Now I was even more uncertain about the nature and direction of my work.
Another case that nearly derailed my convictions about the purpose and importance of this book concerned a soldier whom I’ll call Henry. I embedded with Henry’s unit at a dry, dirty and remote combat outpost in southern Afghanistan in the summer of 2006. There are usually two pronounced reactions when a solo journalist embeds in a platoon-sized infantry unit (thirty to forty individuals): some of the soldiers avoid you at every turn, assuming, sometimes correctly, that you’re just as dangerous as any other battlefield booby trap; others seek you out, whether for your satellite phone, to bum some cigarettes or even just for conversation with someone from the outside. Henry was one of the seekers. We would sit on sandbags, smoke and talk in the heat of the Afghan summer night. Henry had a fascinating story, which he told me in great detail, about his life as a teenage gang member, a white kid who joined a set of the Crips on the East Coast. He was selling drugs at twelve and went to jail at fourteen for stabbing another gangbanger. He was heading for a bad end, he told me, until a sympathetic judge gave him a choice: prison or the Army. The choice was obvious and in the Army he had found a purpose for his unfocused energy and penchant for trouble. In boot camp, he told me, he learned discipline from a drill sergeant who had also been a gangbanger and saw through Henry’s rebellious nature to his potential. He was thriving doing his job, making friends, until he was deployed to Iraq. There, Henry said, while in a patrol convoy, his best friend, a kid named Moreno, was killed by a roadside bomb. Henry blamed himself because he was the vehicle’s turret gunner and should’ve seen the IED (improvised explosive device) before their vehicle hit it. Henry says he was devastated by Moreno’s death and wanted payback. He told me that on the next patrol out, when a ten-year-old boy tried to throw a grenade at their convoy, he lit him up with the 50 cal. He didn’t stop there. He then trained the weapon on the people lining the road, threading them with the muzzle of the large-caliber machine gun. When he stopped depressing the trigger, nine other people lay dead or dying. “Most of them,” he told me softly, “had nothing to do with the attack, but fuck it, right? That’s war.” He shrugged.
As journalists we love these kinds of stories of trouble, redemption and then trouble again. Where would it lead, I wondered. Would Henry’s experiences in the Army mess him up more than if he had simply gone to prison instead? When I returned home, I interviewed his mom and his girlfriend for the story. But as I began to dig deeper, I became concerned. While some of what he told me checked out, his troubled teens and stabbing another kid, there were also a lot of exaggerated details and some outright fabrications. Henry said that after the stabbing he was put in an adult prison, but in the state he’s from it’s against the law to hold a juvenile in an adult facility, regardless of their crime. Other more important elements also began to unravel. Most disturbingly, when I tried to find a record of his friend Moreno’s death, I had no luck. I e-mailed Henry asking if he had mixed up the name or the year of the incident. No response. I checked the death records for the entire war and there was no record of this soldier, period. He existed, I discovered, only in Henry’s world. It took months to get him to respond to me by e- mail. When he finally did, I asked him why he didn’t just come clean with me, rather than wasting my time with this elaborate lie. He told me it was because he was afraid I would be angry with him. His response provided greater insight than the entire made-up story. Henry’s need for attention and approval from an “authority figure” was so great, he felt he needed to lie to get it. I see it as a small, anecdotal signpost for the long-term consequences of sending eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds to do our dirty work in war. Infantry grunts, like Henry, are more often than not man-children who are asked to kill and die before their own sense of right and wrong has fully matured with years and non-war-related life experiences. For me, in writing this book, my time with Henry also reinforced the concept that a war story that sounds too sensational to be true likely is.
While the obstacles in gathering the material for this book and deciding what, if any, purpose it would serve were substantial, I decided that society as well as the soldiers would be better off for the
A society “protected” from the reality of war can rewrite the narrative, shaping and forming it into something less terrible and costly by emphasizing only the heroism and triumphs rather than the dark, ugly deeds that occur with much greater frequency than we care to imagine or discuss.
More positively, the warrior who does share the descriptive and often disturbing narrative of his own war experiences reconnects himself to his community while simultaneously reminding them of the responsibilities that they also bear for his actions by sending him to fight and kill on their behalf. It’s rarely an easy message to hear but it’s essential to the positive evolution and enlightenment of the postconflict society. As Tick writes in
Stories are a way for societies to share in the burden of war. They provide knowledge necessary to better understand the warrior’s experience and help them find meaning and sometimes forgiveness for their actions. Warriors, I’ve learned, become collateral damage too, killing a little of their own humanity every time they must pull
