The Things They Cannot Say

the trigger, even though they do so at our bidding.

Tim O’Brien wrote so eloquently, in his classic Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral do not believe it.”

My goal here is to try to tell the true war stories, not moral ones. The ones found here are entertaining, horrifying, brutally funny and banal, like so many other experiences. But because they involve war, they bring their own insistent drama that comes with the acts of fatal violence. The warriors brave enough to share them have already lived these stories. Now the communities they fought for need to honestly hear them, wherever they may lead.

As I mentioned, I sought out soldiers and Marines I knew and had reported on in the past, but I also found others, including those in the military service of other nations. I found them through veteran’s groups, military associations and even medical and mental health professionals. This resulted in a broad base of interviews, providing a sampling of war experiences that ran the gamut from monstrous to mundane. Only a few made it into this book, primarily because I felt either the subjects were the most candid or their individual stories were the most instructive. Regardless, for all kind enough to share, the very act of their participation gave me hope that we may eventually see through the smoky glass of myth, parable and revisionism to something that resembles the ground truth.

On that point, these stories are recollections, oral histories from the perspectives of the men and women telling the stories. Like all who remember, they will remember imperfectly, with omissions and additions and perhaps lost players and parts. These are not after-action reports or official historical accounts, but the kind of stories that are true to their tellers and imbued with their own perspectives and even judgments. In fact, the primary sources in them are the individuals profiled. It was, after all, their perspective as combatants that I was seeking. They are difficult stories all, and I’m both grateful and hopeful that these acts of sharing will help bring these soldiers, and those who surround them, some peace. And as we see the war in Iraq ending and the Afghan war winding down, our communities will be filled with returning veterans carrying the physical and psychological burdens of their war experiences. We must hurry, using mostly our ears and hearts, to lighten the load.

Prologue: Me and My PTSD

Now the war is over, my war charms lie abandoned in my bedroom, leaving me with death on my shoulder and a monkey on my back. Peace seems to allow little space for belief in destiny, fate, God or ghosts.

—Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So

^{The author sitting on an Iraqi antiaircraft missile (2003)}

Here’s what happens when you come home from war: the overload of excitement, intensity, absurdity, poignancy, foolishness, depth, danger, frivolity, importance and delicious single-mindedness comes to a screeching halt. You’ve been transformed through months of overstimulation fueled by violence and the threat of it. I once believed this was a fate only for the prosecutors of war and its victims, not for those simply bearing witness. I was wrong. In war, there are no sidelines on which to sit.

War’s most cunning trick, it seemed, was the war it seeded within me. I wanted to cling to the concept of my own goodness, but the choices I had made during war seemed to indicate something else entirely: a man who was at best oblivious and at worst heartless. It was that “Jungian thing” again, Private Joker pondering the “duality of man.” For years, this confrontation for a dominant truth where none existed left me veering between wanting to be alone and never wanting to be alone, deliberate isolation and self-medicating social inebriation. Neither was a very good long-term companion.

But during my research I came across this quote by Virginia Woolf: “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” It resonated with me deeply. I knew I needed to tell the truth about myself to be able to do the same about others. But to do so, I first needed to learn the truth: was I a good man simply making bad choices, or had war simply stripped away that facade and revealed my dark character? I began my examination using a dry-erase board to sketch out the “case against me.” Even as a schematic, the evidence for the latter appeared daunting. When I was done, it looked like this on the opposite page.

The case rests on three separate events that occurred in the last decade, in which I covered war almost exclusively. In general, these events represent the moral dilemmas that war poses for everyone exposed to it, even noncombatants like me. But specifically they are an ascending scale of defining moments representing the destructive and redemptive opportunities in the narrative of my own life. There were times when I wished and believed that the guilt from my choices would destroy me. There are times when I’m convinced that my life would have little significance without these events. Regardless, they are mine and I must account for them. In their full explanations they may sound reasonable, but they sometimes feel like the popgun rantings of a soul in full disequilibrium.

^{“The Case Against Me” schematic on dry-erase board}

Number One starts in northern Afghanistan with a simple hesitation. It’s October 2001 on a hill in an area near the border with Tajikistan known as Pul-i-Khomri. It’s a place in which deep trench lines, reminiscent of World War I, separate the ruling Afghan Taliban forces from the Northern Alliance fighters seeking to oust them. The two sides are casually tossing mortars back and forth, taunting each other on the same radio frequency as if they were engaged in nothing more deadly than a backyard game of badminton. I’m on a mound of dirt topped with a Russian-made T-62 tank left over from the Soviet invasion, with a few journalist colleagues. We’re talking and laughing at the absurdity of it all until we hear a crack in the distance. The tank commander is peering at the Taliban lines through my spotting scope, which I bought for a few dollars at a street market in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent two weeks back on my way into Afghanistan. Through my video camera’s viewfinder, I watch him drop the scope and dive behind the tank. The ground shakes as the mortar round explodes thirty feet behind us. Bounding shrapnel tears into the thigh and glutes of a producer for National Geographic who’s standing on my left, just inches away from me. He goes down. “I’m hit, I’m hit,” he says, grabbing his leg in pain. I’ve been recording video the entire time, including the last shell impact. I swing my camera over to the producer and the blood is now seeping through his hands as he holds them against the wounds. It’s dramatic and rare footage, a seldom-captured incoming round and its casualty, the ultimate cause and effect. I know our news audience does not see this kind of thing very often. It’s remarkable and, in my mind, instructive in an obvious way. This is what really happens when hard metal meets soft flesh. I shout to the others to take cover on the other side of the tank since the Taliban will discover through their own spotting scopes that they’ve got this site dialed in. But this is just the beginning of my dilemma. As a journalist I don’t want to stop shooting, even while the producer bleeds. If the shrapnel has penetrated his leg’s femoral artery, one of the body’s largest, he will bleed out in less than four minutes unless something is done. I continue to shoot. He even prompts his own videographer, whose camera missed everything: “Hey, shoot this,” he says, still holding his leg. I feel the strange tug of something at my shirttail while I continue to roll. It’s light but insistent, probably just my conscience. I want to ignore it, but finally and with reluctance, I put the camera on the dirt next to the wounded producer but leave it on record. My own adrenaline is pumping as I begin to realize that I’m lucky to be alive myself, given the producer’s proximity to me. In fact, if he hadn’t been standing where he was to absorb the flying shards of metal, I might be the one bleeding now instead. “Give me the fucking scarf,” I say, amped by adrenaline. Pulling it from his neck, I wind it around his thigh several times and then tie it off tightly above the bleed. I pick up the camera when I’m done, point it at him and ask how it feels to have been hit with a mortar round. “It’s like a tornado that has torn through my leg,” he says. It’s only later in recounting the story that I realize, I didn’t choose him over the shot. I chose both. He will live and even bask in some media attention in the immediate aftermath, but I wonder if the same would be true if the shrapnel had hit the artery and I still hesitated before wrapping the wound to make sure I got my shot.