Guns & trucks. A summary of my time in Iraq.
I served in Iraq from 2003 – 2004 as part of the Global War on Terrorism, or GWoT. This war was briefly referred to as simply The War on Terrorism, but was changed when the spoken acronym was found to be hilarious. As a medic in the 82nd Airborne Division, my duties in Iraq were to provide medical coverage to supply convoys and to provide medical care to both soldiers and civilians in a clinic operated by my battalion. When neither driving nor attending to the sick and wounded, my time there differed little from that spent on my home post of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We quarreled, played board and video games, complained about the food, read books and fought against the constant decay of our vehicles. We sought and acquired alcohol, which although not allowed on post, could not be entirely prevented. In general, we did all that we could to stave off boredom.
I am a storyteller at heart and these are the stories that I recount when asked about the war. I enjoy telling them, but worried that they would change too much over time, as I forgot and altered detail after detail. In late 2013, while on vacation, I finally began writing them down. Since then, I’ve emailed former squad- and platoon-mates, asking for numerous clarifications. Most of the details are fairly small, such as a name, but since I write of real people, I feel that to forget their names in writing is to do them an injustice. nonetheless, some small injustices have been done. Some details are rather big and I find myself surprised to have forgotten them. Did we do CPR on that guy? Or was he alive the whole time? This sort of forgetting is actually a fairly common phenomenon, yet it never fails to amaze me.
Street vendors, somewhere in central Iraq.
The nine months that I spent in Iraq were less challenging than those experienced by many soldiers. These are not stories of battles. There are no great acts of heroism. They are not devoid of fear and danger and they do contain bullets, bombs and death. The sum of these stories however, is more Jarhead than American Sniper. I write them because they are my stories and because my time spent as a soldier and particularly my time spent in Iraq, has had a lasting effect on my identity in all the time since. Years pass, but still I sometimes feel the phantom weight of an M-4 rifle slung across my chest, or the ghostly caress of a camouflage blouse on my skin.
I don’t know to whom to attribute this phrase, but I once heard it said that every person dies in war, even though some return on their feet. It paints a grimmer picture than any of the following stories, but in many ways, the sentiment rings true. I’m no longer the kid I was before I donned the uniform, nor even the soldier that I was before deployment. The surreality of being an invader in a distant land, in a foreign culture, is as much a tattoo on my being as any that have been inked into my flesh. It colors my thoughts when I read the news and when I meet new people. It provides a sometimes jarring contrast to my post-military years spent working in a lab as a molecular biologist. Perhaps more interestingly, it is sometimes not much of a contrast at all. In the end, these are simply the stories of a pivotal moment in my life. I hope you enjoy them.
A quick note about this blog. I didn’t keep a journal, so rather than make chronologically-ordered posts that chronicle my time there from start to finish, I’m uploading posts based on the topic of the story that I tell in each one. There is a loose chronological order to the stories and if you want to read them in order, I’ve numbered them for that purpose.
The title, “Train to Iraq”, refers to a pre-deployment briefing given to us by our Command Sergeant Major, in which he demonstrated his lack of command over geography. For more on that, as well as some of his other pearls of wisdom, prepare yourself a drink and read the post titled “Iraqi Torture Techniques”.
