Modern Warfare

It was one of those days, in the midst of an 18 month deployment, when normalcy tries to seep into your psyche like a bad habit. The smoke and mirror mirage of safety is so very close to casting a spell on you. You work hard, you stay alert, but you don't leave the base much lately, so complacency sneaks up on you like a caricature of the grim reaper with a mortar tube instead of a scythe. Time diverges from its course through your hours and moments, dancing in the tiny mechanisms behind the clocks, taunting you. The elements - earth, wind, sky, and fire - become archetypal, teasing your mind from the deepest regions of history's bibliomancy, where the tomes have fossils for bookmarks and rivers run with blood in Babylon.

Being a soldier in Iraq means being prepared to do any mission imaginable. Your specialty is still important. That's what the Army trained you to do. But your basic soldiering skills, your tough mentality, your ability to overcome and adapt, your resilience - those things are truly vital. You never know what you’ll be called upon to do. You may be a supply sergeant who is responsible for tracking and ordering parts and equipment. You may be a Signal Officer, managing computer and tactical radio and satellite systems all day. You may be an infantry soldier out on patrols, or you may be a silent guard in a dark tower. You may be even tasked to run a dining or laundry facility.

The other day one of my commo NCOs had an unexpected experience. His morning was like many: He woke up, went to the gym early, showered, and came into work. He had any number of projects to spend his time on, both large and small, and of different levels of priority. Around 1130, we were getting ready to go eat some lunch, when he was called upon to go out on a mission.

Next thing he knows he’s in his body armor and moving to a link-up point. We're checking his radios and making sure he has food and water and ammunition. What more could a man ask for? Then he’s in a helicopter watching the Al Anbar Province sweep by beneath him. His helicopter lands, and his team begins walking towards the link-up point. A tank speeds past them, turns around 180 degrees, drops the back tailgate, and a soldier says "Get in." He’s in a Bradley tank moving at high rates of speed across the land.

Finally, he’s a member of one of many  teams that are trying to find a very bad man alleged to be in this certain area. He gets a quick briefing. He understands what is expected. He’s going into homes and sweeping rooms with his weapon. He's helping to bring the men out for questioning, and keeping the women and children safe in their homes. He’s focused and prepared to shoot if he needs to, but polite and professional at the same time. He's working with an Iraqi interpreter.

He told me about the experience, and it’s amazing. Here he is in the middle of Iraq, perfectly capable of performing any infantry mission, but he’s a commo guy – working on radios and satellites and phones and the like. He works for me. I know what he does during a typical workday, and he does an outstanding job of it. We love commo, and think that it is the most important part of any mission. After all, without communication technology, you have only hand and arm signals and your own voice. And now he is seeing, feeling, and experiencing the urban culture of this country in a very intimate way.

He’s on people’s streets, in their yards, their living rooms, their bedrooms and kitchens. He sees the frightened faces of men who have done nothing wrong, and men who have something to hide, and women and children whose homes have just been invaded by creatures from another planet with their body armor and aerodynamic sunglasses and weapons and uniforms.

He sees the look in their eyes, and he wants to say "Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you. We are just looking around, and if no one shoots at us, we won’t shoot at them." But he’s got a job to do - search for the bad guy and keep his men safe. He does not have time to explain, nor does he ask the interpreter to say the words for him. The interpreter knows what to say better than he does. He’s done this before.

SSG M sees a wooden crate stuffed with raw meat that is spilling out of the sides of it. He sees a slab of beef inside a refrigerator that is not on a pan of any sort, and has blood running from it, pooling. He sees a shower that consists of a shower head and a metal pan. He sees a home made of stones that seem to have been thrown together and then filled in with concrete where they stood. He sees these people living in filth, without shoes, and right across the street he sees a modest sized home complete with white marble floors that are six inches thick.

One scene sticks out to him as quite vivid. He was finished searching, and was with a group of other soldiers leaning against the side of a house eating an MRE. Night had fallen, and the sky was a diamond- studded tapestry. In that vast silence, distant unseen galaxies seemed to freeze for a moment - Andromeda held her breath.

He stood there and realized that this was a place where people laughed and cried, ate and slept, lived and died. These things are obvious, but the intensity of the day combined with the silence of the moment coalesced to bring this point home like an epiphany. The very spot he was standing on had been inhabited many times before by people who call that place home. A child probably bounced a ball against the wall he's leaning on. A woman probably sat in the shade and leaned her back on the wall and cried at some unknown injustice in her world. These are people he’ll never see again, but whose faces he’ll not soon forget.

Finally, 11 hours later, he was back in the safety of the FOB, lying in a bed that is not truly his bed, but that he is only borrowing while he’s in Iraq. He says he wrote about the experience in his journal. For now he’s pretty stoic about it all, but I can tell he’s proud of himself, and one day he’ll tell his family about that day with a glint in his eyes and a certain kind of tone in his voice that can only come from traveling around the globe and entering people’s homes – prepared, alert, and fully aware. Not there because he wanted to come to Iraq, but because of his dedication to the duty he swore to uphold. We're proud of him too, and all the other soldiers who put their lives at risk every day to accomplish the mission at hand.

Every soldier is a gun. Even if you're a member of a RedLeg Battalion, the Queen of Battle, every soldier is expected to be able to peform infantry tasks, or more specifically urban warfare. It's the heart of soldiering, when you can see the whites of their eyes, as when countless men have fixed bayonets and climbed out of their foxholes. But this is not WWII or the Revolutionary War or Vietnam- welcome to the modern infantry, where you may have to patrol a road filled with IEDs that could be hidden anywhere, secure a street in Baghdad, or clear a building in the Sunni Triangle. And you have to keep your head about you. You have to keep your mind pure, so you can sleep at night keep going and return to the ones you love. This, perhaps, is the most difficult part, rather than the physical actions themselves.

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse."
                                                                                                                                          John Stuart Mill

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