This is the first of two items I wanted to post from my writings back in the day. This first one is from 2004 and is centered around the rocket attack that wounded Brian Kolfage, but also discusses my time in Iraq in general. Later, I will post something I recently re-discovered which was my “final” thoughts on the war from November of 2006 (which is basically when the war ended for me). I’ll also utilize my footnotes to reflect on, or add to, these memories.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2004
I've never in my life have gone from the deep recesses of slumberland to complete alertness so quickly. The impact was by far the loudest (and closest) I'd heard yet. In about .02 seconds I barrel-rolled from my bed and slammed flat onto the floor. I only peaked my head up long enough to reach up and pull my body armor and kevlar off the top of the bunk and let it fall to the floor. I strapped it on while staying low.
The second hit scared me even more than the first, because it was the first time I'd ever heard the mortar “zip in” as it hit (it actually turned out they were 107mm rockets). Not like the long whistle you hear when they fly over your head, but the sound of it tearing the air just an instant before impact. I could tell these were hitting inside Tent City, and I quickly realized that I'd finally joined the “under the bed” club with the Charleston guys (who said they only got scared enough to hide under their beds once since they were here – the same attack that killed 3 people at the BX).
When you get to talk with Special Ops, like you do in my job, it gives you some insider information that you eventually come to regret having.1 Like the knowledge that when the insurgents are hitting a juicy target like Tent City with such accuracy, that usually means somebody has marked these spots ahead of time. Usually you know they are just shooting blind, so you just kind of ride it out without much worry. But this time I just knew that I should be afraid, because we were under their radar.
So I curled up and laid on the floor as flat as I could. I think I said a quick prayer, but I don't remember. After some tense silence, I realized my left elbow was stinging. Apparently I skinned it when I hit the floor.
As the silence lengthened, I started to feel calmer, so I sat up a little and grabbed the hand sanitizer from my wall locker and put it on my elbow (since I knew the floor was probably covered in germs). It stung like a bitch too (I started imagining myself letting out a Rambo scream as I treated my “wounds”, then I started laughing to myself). I slid on some shorts and got comfortable, but stayed on the floor. Everyone was quiet except for the one guy who talked too much (even now). I noticed the power was out again (which happens often). “Did they knock out the power?” I asked. “No,” the chatty guy answered, “It was already out.”
In the silence that followed, I could hear someone yelling nearby. I heard a man saying something I couldn't decipher. They sounded distraught. Something that sounded like moaning. Then I was able to make out a woman shouting, “We need some help over her!” Shortly afterward, there were some sirens from responding emergency vehicles. “Do you think someone got hit?” I said to my tentmates. No one said anything. We were still under “Alarm Red” status, and everyone just stayed on the floor and waited.
It took a while before we went into “All Clear”. I took off my stuff and went out of the tent quickly, wondering where the rockets hit, and more importantly, if anyone was hurt. As soon as I walked out the front “door,” I could see the emergency vehicles and a group of people gathered up in between tents G-7 and F-7 (about 40-50 feet from my tent, directly up the aisle). I wanted to go check it out, but at the same time I didn't want to be a "gawker". Then I saw some other people just to my right, talking amongst themselves. They seemed to know what had happened. As I approached, I saw Truitt out there as well. There was an officer who said the first impact was right up there by G-7 and F-7 where everyone was gathered.
“Did anyone get hit?” I asked him, but just as soon as I finished my question, the Alarm Red siren started wailing again. Everyone just fuckin' scattered, especially those (like me) who didn't have their armor on.
I ran into the tent, grabbed the armor off the bunk again, and threw it on the ground. Again, I strapped it on while I laid down. Another tense several moments of silence went by before another (really close) impact shook the tent. I curled up and laid flat on my side again, but this time I decided to wedge up between the sides of the tent (by the sandbags) and the wall locker behind me. I suddenly had this uncomfortable feeling that the bed would just give the concussion of the rockets something to hurl against my body if I laid underneath it.
As I laid there waiting to hear if there would be another hit, I started thinking, “Well this is definitely something worth writing about. Perhaps, I should make a note of the date... What is today anyway?” That's when I realized what was going on. This was the Iraqis' 9/11 anniversary celebration. A little holiday “fuck you” from the insurgents and/or terrorists. I immediately realized that this was definitely a pre-planned attack, and that this was not going to be the last one of the day. I'd be lucky if I got any more sleep tonight at all.
Several minutes later, All Clear was sounded again, and back outside everyone went (though a little more hesitant than before). I kept my armor on this time (although I did take off my helmet), and I met up with Truitt again. This time I walked over with him to the first impact site between G-7 and F-7 and decided to take a look.
They had cleaned up already, and there wasn't any noticeable signs of the crater. Some of the sandbags on the ground were fucked up, but I remember thinking it didn't look like much damage had been done at first glance. The rocks were saturated with water. I didn't understand why at first (for some reason I couldn't imagine someone had been hurt that bad), but then it occurred to me later that they had cleaned the blood off the rocks before releasing everyone from their tents (so it wouldn't freak anyone out I'm guessing). I suppose I should have known what had happened by the looks on people's faces. Some of the ones who'd been there when it happened had this look in their eyes like they'd just seen something real fucked up.2
Someone pointed out the shrapnel holes on tent G-7, and then I noticed that all of the surrounding tents had shredded holes in them from shrapnel pieces. There were a couple guys actually climbing on the sandbags to pick pieces of shrapnel out of the tents to take home with them. Shrapnel pieces were a prized memento here in Iraq – one that I've got myself – but there was something about taking shrapnel from a rocket that actually hit someone that turned my stomach.
I saw Holguin walking by, and asked him if he knew what had happened. He said he'd heard somebody was hurt, but didn't know who, how many, or how bad. He was looking for Tyloski because he knew he lived in that row of tents. There was a Chaplain standing nearby with a walkie talkie. I heard someone come over the radio. “We need people with type O negative or B negative blood to report to medical immediately. Repeat, anyone with O negative or B negative blood.” People quickly started asking around.
After that, I walked with Truitt down to the smoke pit by town hall. Menthol or not, it seemed a good time for a cigarette. We were sitting out there with a bunch of others (everyone chain smoking two or three back to back), while two truckloads of Iraqi workers were being loaded up by their armed escorts. We watched them driving the Iraqis away. It felt kind of weird, looking at them after that, and them looking at us.
I heard later from one of our ATOC guys, that one of the escorts told him the Iraqis started making noise (what he said was cheering) as soon as the Alarm Red started wailing. MSgt. Moneymaker and Cpt. Neal heard a few “Allahu Akbar!!” go out from the same crowd. MSgt. Moneymaker says that he thinks maybe they were praising Allah for being spared (since some hit real close to where they were working at over by Town Hall), but most people didn't buy that, and neither did the escort who was with them. He did not seem to get the impression that they were upset at all.
We've all heard the briefings from OSI that they believe about 4 in 10 of the local workers are probably spying for the insurgents, and we've heard about how the Iraqis helped put the sandbags up in Tent City, and then the week after they were done, Tent City got lit up like it had a beacon on it. The escort said he got pissed off because he was actually being nice to those workers. But from now on, he planned to just “treat them like prisoners” like everyone else does.
If you know me, you know that I personally consider the costs of this war more in terms of the Iraqis than I do the Americans, but just the same, you can't be too naive out here. I think back to my first days in Balad, before they started construction on the new aircraft parking area. At the ATOC building where I work, we have only port-a-potties out back and no sinks.3 That's fine when you got to piss, but I'm kind of “icky” about public toilets in general, and washing with just hand sanitizer gel is not enough for me (I've since been forced to get used to it). At the time, they had a toilet trailer set up in the open dirtfield by the flightline where the construction is now happening. Apparently, it was set up for some Army guys, but never got any use, and now it just sat there secluded in the middle of nowhere, and no one goes there – except for me. I'd make the 5-minute walk everyday just to shit on a real throne, and wash my hands in a real sink. Since no one else went there, they were always clean too. It was the most relaxing part of my day quite frankly. I looked forward to it even more than my daily masturbation.
The first time I went over there, I came down the gravel path and saw 15 or so Iraqis sitting together eating lunch by their trucks... and that was all I saw. No escorts, no guards, in fact nobody as far as the eye could see. Just me, 15 Iraqis, and dirt. They all just sort of stopped and looked at me as I casually went into the bathroom. I had just arrived at the base, and my mind told me, “These are the struggling Iraqi people – the ones we fight for!” But another part of my instincts were saying, “Hmm... I come here alone everyday, at about the same time to take a shit, and every day there is no one for miles around but these shifty looking Iraqis.” Even for a newbie I should have realized that anyone could calculate that I was a hostage-taker's wet dream.
Well anyway, after two cigarettes with Truitt at the smoke pit, I went back to the tent and found the power was back on (they fixed it much quicker than usual). I went ahead and went to the shower trailer to brush my teeth and shave (since I was still kind of awake), then I got back into bed at around 4:30pm, and tried to squeeze in a few more hours sleep before the next attack.
The second round was nothing. It hit about 7:00pm-7:30pm. The Alarm Red siren woke me up this time, not the actual rockets, which was a bonus. Due to the enemy's previously uncanny accuracy, I suited up and stayed on the floor again, but I didn't hear a single impact, and the attack passed without much fanfare. After that, I just called in for accountability, crawled back into bed, and passed out again.
Number three hit about 9:00pm, and by that time I'd gotten so worn out from the go to bed, wake up, go to bed, wake up routine – that I was just pissed off to be rousted out of bed yet again from another deep sleep. I knew that by this time it was gonna be too close to my shift to go back to bed after the attack was done, so this attack got categorized under the more common label of “nuisance” rather than threat.
The mortars (I think they were 60 mm mortars this time) started hitting close and loud again (but not nearly as close as before), and I laid on the floor and just tried to sleep through it. I even pulled my blanket off the bed and wrapped up in it on the floor. Guess my Mom was right, even a bomb won't wake me up when I'm tired and grumpy. I suppose I just had a feeling the worst of it was already over.
After the All Clear sounded, I got up, showered, and went to work early to call my family (making sure not to mention this incident, and hoping it wouldn't be mentioned in the news in the following days). On my way in, I saw a C-17 parked out on the flightline by itself. We generally send the injured out on C-141's, but something inside just told me that the injured Airman was on it. I eventually pieced together the whole story of what happened to him later on in the evening:
Apparently this Airman, named Brian, was an Air Force cop who worked down in the customs area of the A-2 tents with this civilian worker I know named Wayne. Wayne is a really solid guy, and he comes up by our office all the time (he's the PAX guy for all the non-Air Force passengers). He gave me most of the details that he got from the guys in Brian’s unit.
When the rocket hit, Brian had just stepped out of his tent. Nothing could have helped him at that point. It was just wrong place, wrong time. Everyone heard the concussion, and a couple people got scraped with shrapnel, but thankfully, nothing real serious. The people in the nearby tents took cover like the rest of us until they started hearing Brian calling for help. Tyloski heard him too, and went out to see what was happening. Ty said he actually saw him lying there on the ground, his legs all fucked up, and one arm dangling by a thread. He said that at that point, there was already more than enough people around him, so he went back inside his tent. “I really didn't need to see that shit anyway,” he told me.
Brian's tentmate and co-worker, Cortez, had apparently gone out and tied off his limbs to prevent him from bleeding to death (I heard this from Wayne). He basically saved his life. They got help as soon as they could, and had to take him out on a truck and immediately into surgery. The CASF (medical) people told one of our Lieutenants that he looked worse than they'd ever seen. He lost tons of blood and it was miracle he even survived the impact itself. His legs were both amputated (pretty far up on his thighs too), and the one arm was chopped off as well. Basically, there was nothing they could do for him here at Balad but watch him die, so a flight mission was re-cut to Med Evac him out to Germany for medical care at a real hospital.
Wayne told me that as far as he was concerned, “It would've been like if you, or one of your guys, got hit. I work with him every day.” Unfortunately, he was not allowed to go see him, since he was just a civilian and not directly connected with Brian or his unit, but he took himself out to the plane to see him off (even though Brian was pretty much unconscious). He said the entire unit was out there, and they were all pretty messed up by it.
The fucked up thing is that in the military, the spouse and immediate family is everything, but otherwise, you're not even a concern. Well, Brian had a fiancé... but not a wife. Therefore, the military had no obligation to tell her anything, so now it would be Cortez's job to do it, and he had no idea what the fuck he was gonna say.
Even if this guy lives (and it's a big “if” at this point), he's got no legs and one arm. Will his wife stick by him? It's a hell of a test of love. I think I'd almost rather just bite it myself. Wayne was saying, “What if he pulls through and then blames Cortez? Y’know: ‘Why didn't you just let me die?’” It's too fucked up to even think about. His life is over no matter what. Not that he can no longer exist as a human being, but his life – the life he had before this happened – is over. All because he had to take a piss or go get a bottle of water. By all accounts, he should've still been asleep in his bed when the damn thing landed.
Wayne was pretty well affected by the incident (as was I... as was everyone). It's one thing to have this happen at the end of your stint like me, but most of these guys were our replacements that had just got here. My replacement and about 15 others had arrived that day. Now they start off their time with this on their minds. It gives you a different outlook on your job to say the least. Two days after it happened I was sitting with another guy waiting to get on the public computers, and I looked over and saw that he'd written his blood type onto his helmet. You never saw that shit before that attack. No one really worried about it that much. I mean, it affects everyone differently of course. Some people were noticeably shaken, some people wanted to shoot the Iraqis who were cheering in the back of the head, some want to get more involved in the war, some just want to say “fuck this war” and go home – but then there's also guys like our Lieutenant who simply said of the whole thing, “Jeez, one guy gets blown apart and everybody freaks out.”
A month before, a rocket hit the sandbags of tent D-12 (I'm in D-6). It was a dud. It slammed against the sandbags, jolting everyone inside, and then dropped into the ground where it just layed there... smoking. Everyone in Tent City was rushed from their tents and had to take shelter on the other side of the area. I was (again) in a deep sleep and the person who came in and got us up was so fuckin' panicky – “Everyone needs to get out of the tent NOW!!” – that I ran out in my boxers and bare feet.4 I also had a helmet in hand that I put on, because I generally use it to cover my balls when I'm laying in bed during the Alarm Red's. No one seemed to notice that I was in underwear and a helmet at first except my tentmates (who just laughed), and I had to sit on the ground under the concrete bunker with boxers and a helmet. I actually messed up my feet pretty bad running on the rocks though. Got a bad cut in one of my toes. Along with my elbow, those were my only two war wounds.
The reason I bring that incident up is because up until the 9/11 anniversary attacks, that was the closest call I'd had here at Balad. But that incident was just a topic of conversation. This thing with Brian was more than that. People didn't just talk about it, they thought about it (although there was still plenty of talking). It changed everything. Even for guys that had just got there. I didn't really want to see that guy squirming with his limbs hanging off of his body, but I do think it's important to see the emotional impact of what happens here. One night, I had to take three Special Ops guys out late at night to load the coffin of one of their boys into a C-130. There's something about a bunch a big, bad-ass mutha fuckers with their dusty beards and fat tattoos, wiping the tears from their eyes, that puts it all in perspective.5
Wayne said that it actually made him think twice about leaving his job in Iraq. “My wife doesn't like that I'm over here, but she understands that at the same time it's just something I feel like I have to do... I just want to see every one of these guys get on a plane out of here.”
I felt the same way for some reason. I told him how being over here, and doing my small part, just somehow makes me want to do a bigger part. I knew it was kind of crazy, but I had even been thinking about trying to volunteer for convoy protection when I get back. I'd been thinking about it for about a week, and somehow this incident (along with meeting Jasim, the 14 year old Iraqi) only made me consider it more.6 But at the same time, Jackie needs me around, and so does my family. I need to get my life together (specifically my life after the military).
I've always known I can't make a career of this military shit, but at the same time I want to do something more with my four years than just send retirees on free flights to Hawaii.7 So who knows what the right thing to do is. But for some reason, the closer I get to it, the less I seem to fear it. Of course, I also feel like I shouldn't be trying so hard to prove something. It's complicated, and I should wait until I've settled back in at home before making any serious decisions.8
All in due time I guess. For those of us that have it...
ADDENDUM (A FEW DAYS LATER):
9/11 was apparently a hell of a festival all over Iraq this year. Intelligence reports said that during the first attack, after the initial All Clear first sounded, they discovered two more rockets on timers about ready to fire. Apparently the Army fired on their positions (from a helicopter I believe) to disable them, but instead set them off. That's when that second Alarm Red was sounded during the second part of the first attack. One of those hit nearby Tent City (the one I heard), and the other hit in an “unknown location”.9
Intelligence also reported that two Iraqi workers were seen in Tent City about a week earlier “servicing” a potable water tank that hadn't been touched in months (and I generally only see the Phillipinos working on them when I'm out there). They had a notepad with them and were writing stuff down while speaking to each other in Arabic. A troop approached and questioned the two men about what they were doing there, to which one worker replied in broken English “servicing the water”. After he talked to them a while, the troop told them not to come back to this area ever again and leave immediately, which they did... taking their notepad with them.
On the 8th, the same Iraqi worker was spotted on base giving a notepad to a KBR employee (which happens to be the same contracting firm Wayne works for). A troop approached them and asked what they were doing. The KBR employee then quickly hid the notepad behind his back, and the two said they were just talking. They were told to leave the area, which they did... taking their notepad with them.
The day after the rocket attack, the orders came down from command: All helmets and flak vests will be worn at all times when outside of your tents or buildings. Even while working on the flightline. The base went into FPCON Delta (which is basically the same status military bases were in after 9/11). No foreign workers (specifically Iraqis) would be allowed on base until further notice, which fucked me over because Wayne was supposed to be getting me an Iraqi scarf for Jackie (as a coming home present) through some guys he knew, but now they wouldn't be allowed in, and I was leaving soon. They also closed the gym and the REC center until further notice. It's all overreaction at its finest. No vest, no lack of facilities, and no amount of “safety” speeches would have kept Brian from getting blown apart by that rocket. The only thing that might have saved him is if some dumbass had decided to take away an Iraqi's notepad, instead of just giving him a stern lecture.
No biggie anyway, they reopened everything a couple days later, and then removed the rule on the vests and helmets a day after that. I'm guessing the military has now hit their targets and feel pretty confident we're back in the clear. Or they just realized there's really nothing that can be done about it – we're in Iraq after all.
I saw the Phillipinos walking around again, but it took a couple of days for the Iraqis to be let back on. Last word I heard from Wayne (who heard from the guys in Brian's unit) before I left, was that Brian may lose his last arm (he'd already had some fingers blown off), and that he'd actually lost some of his groin too. It was an educated guess that he was impotent. 21 years old with a young fiance, and now he'll probably end up a human stump. He was actually wearing his body armor when he got hit, and that was the only thing that kept him alive. So he could have just as easily been killed. You decide if he was “lucky” or not, but I think you know where I stand on the matter.10
BIAP (Baghdad Int'l Airport) was hit especially hard on September 11th. Thankfully, the news back home didn't say much about Balad, what with the extensive damage all around the country, and especially in Baghdad. There were seven car bombs in Iraq (two they said did not go off), and even an attack on Abu Ghraib where a truck filled with explosives was driven into the main gate (Marines shot the driver dead before he hit his target though). Much of the news was mainly talking about the Arab reporter who was killed in Baghdad when an Apache opened fire on a crowd of Iraqi people gathered around a burning Bradley armored vehicle. Apparently, a couple guys put a terrorist flag into the burning wreckage of the Bradley, and there were reports of gunfire from somewhere on the street, and kids throwing rocks. U.S. military officials said they were worried they'd loot the wreckage for weapons, so they opened fire.
I wondered if this was just another day of “fighting in Iraq” for the American news audience. This was a pretty heavily orchestrated string of attacks by the terrorists (terrorist groups Tawid and Jihad – both linked to Zaqarwai – took credit for the attacks that stretched all across the country). And the horrible incident with the Apache just made it that much more sickening. It bothered me to think that after something like this, it was more than likely that U.S. retaliation was gonna kill a lot of Iraqi civilians.
That “thinking” that I was talking about before?... I keep doing a lot of it. You know growing up, you learn certain things. You learned that WWII was a “good” war, and that Vietnam was a “bad” war. I'm inclined to believe that they were all about the same. You take that as you want it. It's not a pro-war opinion, it's not an anti-war opinion. It's just an opinion. I still greatly believe in what we're doing out here, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it.
More Al-Qaeda operatives passed through Iran's borders today carrying heavy weaponry. In Samarrah, a band of Iraqi vigilantes is terrorizing the terrorists. A young Iraqi boy turns in his father to Coalition troops, gets his mother killed, and seeks asylum in U.S. The leader of a band of insurgents responsible for several IED attacks against U.S. convoys accidentally blew himself up along with two of his men – locals now feel safe enough to reveal the location of the group's hidden weapons cache to U.S. troops. An Apache launches missiles on a crowd of Iraqi civilians in the middle of Baghdad, killing a journalist, an 11-year old girl, and eleven others (footage available online). No report on how many of the 13 were actually bad guys. An Airman at Balad Air Base is “wounded in action” when he's hit with 107mm rocket just outside his tent – loses both legs and one arm.
And then those words start echoing in my mind again: “It never ends. It just goes on and on…”11
The Special Forces guys always chatted us up because they frequently needed to cut flight missions at the last minute, so they knew being in good with the ATOC guys would ensure we’d be quick and eager to help them out whenever they needed us to (I’m sure they made fun of us behind our backs). I remember the one guy I always talked to mentioning how shrapnel is not as big a deal with the mortars as long as you can get low (because when the mortars hit the ground they generally funnel upward in a cone fashion from the point of impact), but the concussion is the big problem. Because if it hits close to you, it can rattle your insides and cause internal injuries you may not even be aware of. I remembered hearing about one guy who was in the phone tent when one landed near him and it popped both his eardrums.
I specifically remember one guy in particular who made eye contact with me and he looked like he’d just seen a ghost or something. Maybe it’s just me, but the wounded always disturbed me more than the killed. It’s kind of why I think rape is a worse crime than murder: All of us have to die, but none of us needs to suffer. I remember mentioning this to my Sergeant. I told him that assisting with loading the wounded for the CASF flights really hit home for me. He said, “I would have thought the Patriot Detail would have done that for you.” (That’s when you volunteer to be one of the ceremonial people saluting as they load the flag-draped coffins onto the planes.) “Naw,” I said, “I mean, obviously that’s impactful, but seeing those guys whose faces were peppered with shrapnel or laying on a stretcher with that gray skin look – that shit really gets to me.”
In classic “lucky” Krug fashion, I managed to show up in Balad just a week or two after the port-a-potties were installed and never had to engage in the details to burn everyone’s collective shit from the toilet trenches. The more I think about, the more I feel there’s no part of combat that would have bothered me more than the public shitting.
I remember that my first thought when that person ran in and startled everyone in the tent was that it was probably a chemical weapons attack. Which is weird for me to realize that even that late in the game, the idea that chemical weapons could be used on us still felt like a real possibility.
When I was out there in the bunker in my underwear and a helmet, I started to feel uncomfortable, especially once things had calmed down and I found out the whole thing was just about a dud mortar. I coaxed an officer into letting me run back to my tent just to grab some shoes and clothes, and then I’d come right back. The information on the radio was that it would be a while before EOD would be there so we had some time (assuming the dud didn’t accidentally go off). I went back and put on my stuff and was just casually strolling back when I ran into two guys in gear, sitting on the rocks and leaning up against the sandbags. They said, “Dude, what are you doing?” I said, “Oh, I just had to get some clothes because I was—” Then they interrupted me: “Get down, man, they’re about to do a controlled detonation on that mortar, there’s gonna be shrapnel flying through here.” I said, “Shit,” and quickly scrambled over to sit next to them. We sat there for a while and listened in on the radio, but the “boom” never came. We eventually heard that they decided the dud was safe enough to cart away so they could detonate it in a safer place.
I remember that when we got to the C-130, the head guy asked me to hang back so that they could have a minute alone with their friend. I called in the necessary updates on the radio while I leaned against the truck and watched them from a distance. After a bit, the three came back (again, wiping tears from their eyes) so I could drive them back to ATOC. As the last guy walked past me, he just briefly put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Thanks.”
See the final segment of my previous post if you want to learn the not-so-happy endings to the stories of both Jasim and Brian Kolfage.
I’ve always said that I enjoyed my time in the military, but I also have acknowledged that my deployment to Iraq, along with our assistance during Hurricane Katrina (which was a year after I wrote this), are the only two times I ever felt like I was doing something in the military that mattered. And I really wish I had more of those experiences during my enlistment.
Convoy duty had become one of the most needed, and most dangerous, jobs in the war. Mainly because, at that point, the insurgents had stopped trying to ambush convoys and fight the U.S. troops head on. They now preferred IEDs and VBEIDs (car-bombs). So, I knew convoy duty would not be heroic or fun, but it felt wrong to be such a cheerleader for liberating Iraq and then say, “But you should do the risky part, not me.” And because they needed people, the Army had now started taking in and training people from the Air Force to ride convoys with them. It was only supposed to be for 2T1s and 2T3s (supply & vehicle ops) and I was 2T2 (air transportation), but I figured I could get them to take me if I asked. I had promised myself when I got home from Iraq, I would ask Jackie first if she was okay with it before doing anything; and if she said no, I wouldn’t do it. Well, she very emphatically said no, and I started asking around anyway. We didn’t stay together too long after that (for other reasons as well), although we eventually managed to become and stay friends.
Surprisingly, I asked like ten different people about volunteering for convoy duty and kept getting shot down. They would basically say, “I appreciate your enthusiasm, but it’s not necessary. We don’t need any more people.” Then a Colonel (who I believe was the Vice Commander for our Squadron) was working with us one day, and he seemed like a really good dude (one of those “hands-on” officers who liked to slum it with us plebeians). So I asked him about it and he said, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the military, if we want it to happen – we can make it happen.”
So I was on my way, and I almost regretted pushing this thing through, but I felt at that point it was more of an obligation than something I was enthusiastic about. And let’s not lie, at that point (late 2005), Jackie was gone, the war was now a lost cause, my time in the military was coming to an end, and I think I only just recently had worked up the nerve to even try stand-up for the first time – so I had no real notion of what my future prospects were, and I was probably just being fatalistic and self-destructive.
But only two days or so after talking to the Colonel, I got hit with a new deployment order to Tallil Air Base (in Nasiriyah). It’s convoluted trying to explain it – but since I was at the end of my term, I would have been forced to extend my enlistment in order to deploy again, so I actually had a choice (unlike most servicemembers, especially those in the Army and Marines). And it was going to either be the Tallil deployment (which would just be office work again) or no deployment.
Now back then, I tended to believe in “signs” more than I do now, so I took the hint. It was time to leave this shit behind and move on with my life. I think it’s what also made me dive so passionately into stand-up comedy as well (I wanted to believe the “signs” were telling me something). The only issue with this was that someone had to go in my place, and I knew that would be Murphey. So I asked him about it, and he said he had no problem with it. He actually would prefer being in Iraq than being in San Antonio. Of course, a few weeks before he was scheduled to leave is when I heard he had committed suicide. He got drunk by himself on New Years Eve, wrote “I Love Myself” on his chest, and threw a DVD player in the bathtub. No word yet on what movie he was watching. My guess would be Magnolia (because that movie certainly made me want to kill myself).
Most of this information came from the SIGINT bulletins that came in every morning to the Captain’s office. I had the “secret” clearance required to read them, but generally you didn’t get to look at them unless you had a “need to know.” But the Master Sergeant knew how obsessive I was about devouring info on the war, so he let me go in there in the mornings to read the bulletins. It was my own private daily news feed. I probably should not have been sharing any of that info in my emails to friends and family, but you’d be surprised just how little anyone cared about OPSEC back then. I mean, the countless blogs written by soldiers back then were extremely candid (as were all the ones I read by Iraqis) and revealed a lot of stuff they probably weren’t allowed to. But for some reason, no one ever got in trouble for that stuff back then.
The blogosphere of the early war by both American troops and Iraqi civilians was a fucking goldmine for people like me who wanted nothing more than a real-time oral history of the war. I really wish I had just copied and pasted every single one I read into a file for posterity.
In fact, I even remember this one website where soldiers shared all their photos from the warzone and the images on there were really fucking graphic. Many even had captions filled with the kind of dark humor that veterans are famously known for, but would probably cause an international incident if they were put up online today. I remember one image of an Iraqi head laying in the middle of the road (think he’d been run over by a tank), and his scalp had ended up rather cleanly peeled over the back half of his head for some reason. I don’t really remember any of the jokes anymore, except for one where it was a two-parter: The first picture had an insurgent on a stretcher who was grimacing in pain, and the caption said, “It’s okay, man, you’re gonna be okay.” Then the next picture showed the lower half of his body where his legs were just absolutely fucking mangled to pieces, and the caption said, “Oooo… maybe not.” There were lots of images of killed and wounded insurgents on that site, and even some of dead civilians. Although, I will point out that the tasteless jokes were typically only reserved for the combatants.
I later found out that he did not lose his other arm, nor did he get castrated by the blast – which was actually very surprising to me. It’s an unfortunately common occurence, and it was always the thing that every guy who was in combat worried about the most (not kidding). I had heard years later that the military was starting to recommend to soliders / Marines that they freeze some of their sperm before deploying (in case it happened to them and they still wanted to have kids).
This quote is a callback to a story I had previously referenced by Holocaust survivor, Dr. Miklós Nyiszli, from his memoir Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. Nyiszli survived the Holocaust because the Nazis found out he was a doctor and enlisted him to help with Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments on the camp’s prisoners. The anecdote I referenced here described an incident when Nyiszli was meeting with the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz (where he was required to be deferential and never make eye contact), and I forget what they were discussing, but Nyiszli had a moment where he forgot himself and said to the commandant, “When does it all end?” And the Nazi commandant forgot himself as well and slammed his fist on the table: “It never ends!” he said, “It just goes on and on and on!”