Just Another Soldier Read online

  The nighttime iteration of the exercise was the most interesting. The building we hit had a few surprises. Since Dan and Peter had to stay with the truck as driver and gunner, respectively, my assault team was a little shorthanded, consisting of me, Matt, and Yanko (a seriously cool cat from weapons squad). Our squad quickly bounded building by building until we had the target building in sight. There was a small set of stairs leading to a door—a very convenient entry point. The stack order was Matt on point, then me, then Yanko. The plan was once we entered the building and cleared the first room, Chris would come in with the second team. We started to take fire from a window, which Matt suppressed by returning fire. For the sake of haste, Matt was to open the door, and he and Yanko would enter on my lead. We ran across the open area to the stairs—the entire time returning fire to the window—and stacked on the stairs. Matt opened the door, and I was already starting to barrel in when…what in the hell? The other side was boarded up! I kicked the crap out of this thing, and made marginal progress. Between the booms of my boot hitting the board we could hear a woman screaming inside. I think I must have kicked that thing a dozen times. Matt finally yells, “No go! Let’s go around!” In retrospect, I should have made this call myself after the second kick. I was just so hell-bent on getting through that board. I won’t make that mistake again. The next door wasn’t much better. This one was also boarded up, but I was able to get it down after a couple kicks. Once inside, I see the screaming woman sitting in a chair in my sector of the room. The next thing I know, I’m taking fire from a guy who has stepped out of a dark hallway. Matt already had his barrel on the hallway, and he returned fire the second the guy stepped out. By the time Yanko was in the room, a guy in the rafters opened up on us. All three of us returned fire on him. This is where things started to get very third grade. Since none of us, enemy included, had put batteries in the receiver part of our MILES gear (retarded Army laser-tag equipment), there was no good way to determine who’d actually been hit. By the time Kirk’s team was in the room, rafterman decides he’s not dead and he unloads more rounds into us. We all fire back with what would have been over a hundred rounds. Chris was infuriated. “OH, YOU WANNA PLAY MILES GAMES, HUH?” I think Chris would have stuck his bayonet in him, had he been on the floor. Before things could totally degrade into “You’re dead! No, you’re dead! No, YOU’RE dead! NO, YOU’RE DEAD, YOU DICK!” the observer-controller guy stepped in and pronounced rafterman killed. We cleared the rest of the floor, then headed for the basement. The stairs were strewn with chairs as apparent obstacles. Still heated about the bulletproof Quasimodo incident, we summarily defenestrated all these chairs via the window at the top of the stairs. The rest of the operation went off without incident, other than Kirk’s aggressively manhandling the detainee during the search before realizing she was a woman.

  My squad has been developing very well. Generally, I can’t stand Rangers and their high-and-tight dress-right-dress mentality, but I have to attribute the success of my squad to our squad leader, Chris, formerly of Second Ranger Battalion and the Tenth Mountain Division. He’s a funny and fairly easy guy to work for, but there were times when I found his obsessiveness about training to be annoying, especially when it came to CQB, but now I regret having ever felt this way, because it’s really starting to pay off.

  A lot of our training has been going through scenarios—or “lanes,” as they’re called—squad after squad. Almost every time the instructors go through the after-action review (AAR) with us, they say things like “You’re the best squad we’ve seen so far” or “You were the only squad that actually camouflaged yourselves before the ambush.” The members of our squad are excellent soldiers, but it’s Chris who makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. He definitely knows the job of an infantryman. And, okay, so the guy is an equipment buff. He personally could keep the tactical gear industry like Blackhawk and Lightfighter in business, and normally this is the kind of guy I love to make fun of, but let me just say how relieved I am that he’s leading my squad.

  Our squad’s proficiency at CQB has garnered us a fair amount of recognition in our platoon, and even our company. This means, in my humble estimation, that when it comes time to kick in doors for real, our squad is the most likely to be the initial assault element. Our battalion commander has decided to create an air assault quick-reaction force (QRF) with one platoon from each company. Word around the campfire is that our platoon is most likely to fill that slot for our company. It’s funny to think, “Yay, we did good! We’re being given the cool job!…Hey, wait a second. QRF does what? Jumps in every time we get in a scrap?! Now, how exactly did seeing extra combat become a reward?”

  We’re going to the field again in a few days, so it may be a while before I write. Once I get back to complaining, it will most likely be about still not having the right gear, still not getting the correct pay, and (on a personal note) personality conflicts within the platoon. Most of the other team leaders got promoted to the rank of sergeant at the beginning of this deployment and are very new to the rank. I know they’d deny it, but I suspect their need to prove themselves, now that they have the stripes, is a source of some anxiety. Although they are all very competent, there’s an infection that seems to have spread, where leading means yelling. I have not been infected yet, nor, god help me, will I ever. The major issues I’ve had with my own squad have been dealt with for the most part. Kirk and I are on very good terms now, although he still accuses me of being gay at least three times a day, and the serious issues I had with Dan were also put to rest after he and I had a little discussion. (Translation: I took him to a remote area and issued him the most intense ass-chewing of my life.) Imagine a pack of wolves in snowy upstate New York where two-thirds of the pack want to be the alpha male. That’s my platoon. Right now, as I type, these wolves are all at a strip club (I’m not kidding—an invitation I declined)—and I’m sitting in front of a friggin’ computer geeking out. I guess I’m something the pack mentality hates: different. Hell, if I were them, I guess I’d make fun of me, too.

  November 24, 2003

  We just got back from being in the field for a few days, and the weather was incredible the entire time we were out. Last night I slept under the stars. I figured I’d have to contend with frost or at least dew in the morning, but instead I woke up to an unseasonably warm day. And the training has been pretty decent, too. A little more mission-oriented toward Iraq. In a nutshell, in every exercise we would drive a few miles as a convoy of Humvees, dealing with simulated IEDs (improvised explosive devices), RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) attacks, and other various types of ambushes. At the objectives, we performed a lot of semi-permissive searches of buildings (i.e., knocking on doors instead of kicking them in). Sometimes we would end up shooting, but in most of the cases we war-gamed, no shots were fired, a lot of people and buildings were searched, sometimes yielding a few detainees or weapons. Then we’d drive back to our assembly area and deal with more ambushes along the way, sometimes doing the whole find-fix-and-destroy thing, sometimes just blowing through the ambush, guns blazing. Sitting in a Humvee while the machine gun on top is tearing a seam into hell is an experience—hot brass and links raining down into the passenger compartment like a Skittles commercial for infantrymen.

  The day before moving to the field, we were issued all our desert uniforms and gear. It was like a busload of schoolgirls returning from a field trip to the mall—no one could wait to try on all their new outfits. I found myself just as guilty of this as anyone. Posing shamelessly in front of a latrine mirror, I couldn’t decide how I liked to wear the boonie cap best—normal style, cowboy style, or Mick Dundee style. I suspect a lot of soldiers were terribly crestfallen when they learned we couldn’t wear the desert uniforms until we were one month out from being deployed. We were also finally issued our cold-weather boots to complement the pair most of us already had been forced to purchase on our own to deal with the Fort Drum cold. I can honestly say that half the gea
r I wear I bought myself. For all the Homeland Security missions we’ve done, most of us paid for our own gear (pistol belt, suspenders, ammo pouches, canteens, and covers, etc.) to avoid looking like complete dirtbags wearing all the raggedy Vietnam-era gear that we’d been issued. By the time you add in all the knives and crap that soldiers love to buy, the Army is getting a well-outfitted infantryman on the cheap. Hell, Ray even has a friggin’ tomahawk. “It’s so I can split niggaz skulls open if I have to,” he told me, completely deadpan and genuine.

  Some major news regarding my squad: Chris is no longer our squad leader. He and Ray are now the company sniper team and will be attached directly to our commander. Chris was reluctant to leave the squad (not that he had a choice) but seems to be very excited about his new job. Ray is on cloud nine and has spent the last few days stripping fiber after fiber out of sections of burlap to make his bushlike ghillie suit. To watch him work is fascinating. Completely absorbed in what he’s doing, he’ll cut bizarre polygonal shapes from a sleeping mat, then sew and glue them together to form pads for his elbows and knees in the soon-to-be-born ghillie suit to end all ghillie suits. If Uncle Sam could ever get his act together and start paying me my damn housing allowance, I could put together some money and buy a digital camera to keep a record of all this.

  I don’t have a desire to kill anyone (for killing’s sake), nor do I wish death upon anyone. Hell, I’m against the death penalty. But I have to say that I truly hope Ray is afforded the opportunity to do what he seems to be built to do. To paraphrase studies discussed in Dave Grossman’s On Killing, it’s been said that a small percentage of people are born with a natural ability to kill without remorse, and when employed as soldiers, it’s these rare individuals who produce the majority of enemy casualties for their unit. The percentage I seem to remember is 60 percent, but I imagine that number reflects training prior to the conditioning that soldiers now receive from shooting popup human silhouette targets. Either way, I believe that Ray is one of these people. He’s completely unflappable. Imagine John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire, but Puerto Rican and with a better sense of humor. If I prayed, I would thank god every night that Ray is on my side.

  The fact that Chris is no longer our squad leader is an inexpressibly big deal. Chris is probably one of the most proficient and professional soldiers I’ve ever met, and having him as a squad leader gave me and the rest of the squad great comfort. Our new squad leader, Whiskey, is an exceptional soldier, and he is the only reason the squad is taking this potentially destabilizing change in stride, but Chris’s leadership will be sorely missed.

  My team is developing very well. Dan is an infantry wizard. He’s currently set to be the driver of the Humvee I’ll command. He is very comfortable with this job and very good at it. I also learned recently that he’s an incredible shot when it counts. We’ve spent some time in the last few weeks at the simulation center using their oversize video game setup to practice certain scenarios. Imagine Nintendo’s Duck Hunt with realistic rifles complete with pneumatic pumps attached to them to simulate the recoil of rounds fired. A reading of the stats after a simulated engagement would go something like this: “Sergeant Hartley, twenty-two shots fired, four hits, three kills. Peter (our SAW gunner), two hundred and four shots fired, two hits, one kill. Matt, fourteen shots fired, two hits, two kills including one friendly. Dan, eight shots fired, seven hits, seven kills, including four catastrophic kills.” If rank were based purely on experience, Dan would be the team leader. But since he’s not, I’d like to think I’m humble enough to recognize that Dan has an incredible skill set that I can’t touch, and wise enough not to be afraid to employ it to the team’s advantage. All I have to do now is figure out how to effectively motivate all three of these guys (unlike me, none of them wants to be on this deployment one bit), and I might actually have one hell of a team. Dan says he’s happiest when he’s blowing up or shooting things; Peter seems happiest when he’s on the phone with his fiancée immersed in insipid cuddle babble; I haven’t figured out yet what makes Matt happy, which is strange since I think he’s the one guy on the team I have the most in common with.

  It’s after 1:00 a.m. I have to get up at 5:00 a.m. and go on a five-mile company run. I have a laptop now, and I’ve been geeking on it all day and not cleaning my weapon quite as much as I should. Bad team leader. And I have a few days off for Turkey Day. I’ve opted to forgo spending it with family, just so I can sleep in my own bed and get up when I’m good and goddamned ready, preferably after noon. I just want to read The New York Times, sip a latte at my favorite coffee shop in New Paltz, have an early dinner, drink some Jim Beam with my friends, get stupid, then pass out in my enormous bed, my only real possession in this world aside from my books and Jeff Buckley CDs.

  December 10, 2003

  I had just finished packing to go back out to the field for a forty-eight-hour operation that would integrate all the various skills we’d been working on—reacting to IEDs and ambushes, traveling in a convoy, cordoning off and searching buildings, performing CQB, setting up roadblocks…all sort of motorized infantry stuff with a light infantry twist. After I finished packing my rucksack, Peter looked at it and asked, “Sergeant, why does your ruck have two right-shoulder straps?” All I could do was give a Cheshire cat smile in response to this immensely metaphysical statement-in-a-question my little grunt novitiate had unwittingly proffered me with regard to my dicked-up ruck. “Because that’s how it was issued to me,” I replied.

  So we just got back from six days in the field. Mind-numbingly boring and spirit-crushingly cold. Spent the better part of that six days sitting in cramped but heated (thank god!) rooms waiting for our firing orders to be called. Even the parts where we drove around in the Humvees shooting things was dull, to tell you the honest truth. I sat on the passenger side—oh, I’m sorry, I mean the truck commander position—of the vehicle, and called in targets on the radio as they popped up, yelling at my gunner to engage them. “One-six, this is one-five, be advised, four enemy dismount troops in the open, eleven o’clock, three hundred meters. Engaging at this time. Over.” It was the cold that made it so horrible. When the temperature gets in the single digits, even machine guns lose their fun factor.

  For the last four days, two platoons (about seventy guys) have lived in a structure that was meant only to feed soldiers firing at the motorized gunnery range. While waiting for firing orders to come up, we sat. Or napped. Or ate. Imagine sitting in the same place for four days straight, getting up only to move a few feet to talk to someone else or to go to the bathroom or to have a cigarette. The incessant chatter and yelling produced an unbearable din. It was so bad. Then, when it came time to sleep, every square inch of flat surface had a body in a sleeping bag covering it. This included the tops of the tables. It was like living on a slave ship. John asked our commander, “Have you seen the chow hall when first and second platoons rack out? It’s like Amistad over there.” The first two nights I slept outside in a cement machine gun-firing position in sub-zero temperatures. I found a wooden pallet that I put a poncho over to make a little shelter for myself from the snow. Soldiering makes you a good bum. It’s no wonder so many homeless people are vets; they’ve all been trained to be professional bums. For six days we lived in conditions that were part central booking, part homeless shelter with a twist of male brothel. One morning, after sleeping on top of the table, Sean wakes up and says, “Dude, I can’t get out of my bag yet. I’m not wearing any clothes and I have morning wood.”

  Having to live in this kind of proximity to each other for this long can sometimes cause guys to find some really petty reasons to fight. For example, the table where the big coffee thermoses sat was covered with coffee stains. Once, when the fresh coffee thermoses were delivered, the genius sergeant who brought them decided to pour water all over the table to clean it off, covering it and the floor with water. This janitorial feat had a lot of guys up in arms. “Yo, we sleep on that floor, you asshole!,” someone yelled. Onc
e the brain surgeon had left, the guys were trying to decide how best to dry out the floor. There were two camps: those who thought we should open the doors for a while to let the water evaporate, and those who thought we should just keep the doors closed so the heat could dry it. Personally, I didn’t think the doors-open idea would do much except make me cold, and seeing as how all the sleep gear we have is waterproof, I really didn’t care if the floor was wet or dry. The dispute was never really settled. Someone would open the doors, then someone else would close them. Then someone would open the doors, then someone else would close them. At one point two soldiers almost came to blows over the most appropriate state the doors should be in. This is what soldiers fight over: the best way to dry a floor.

  December 19, 2003

  PARDON ME WHILE I BURST INTO FLAMES

  It’s been a very trying day for me. I can say I truly exploded today, something I have never done with anyone who wasn’t my father or my girlfriend. If a human being could detonate, I would have today. Deep within my chemistry is a rage gene that I think I got from my biological father, an evil superpower I have that has been dormant for quite a while now, but I’m realizing it may be reawakening with this deployment.

  We got back from the field last night after what collectively everyone agrees was one of the most miserable field exercises of our careers. In an attempt to alleviate a little of the suffering of my squad, I split up a guard schedule so that four guys could patrol for one two-hour shift, then three other guys and I could patrol on the next shift, instead of having everyone on both shifts. It was my plan to maximize our downtime, since being out in the cold was so unpleasant. But when people saw that four of my guys were on patrol and I was taking a nap, it looked really bad. In retrospect, I should have just gone out with both shifts. Hindsight. The gossip channel spread about how I was sleeping while I made my guys go out on patrol. First Kirk tells me this morning how he heard I was fucking his guys over in the field (He was not in the field, because as the platoon’s hazardous materials sergeant, he had to oversee the loading of our equipment being shipped to Kuwait.) This turned into a yelling match—the only way he and I communicate in uniform since we are the most mismatched pair of team leaders the United States Army has ever seen. (Our yelling at each other has become something of a spectator sport for the platoon, by the way.) Then I get Whiskey counseling me on the same issue a little later in the morning. By this point I was completely exasperated having to explain the same nonsense twice. In the military, once you’ve been accused of something, the issue is done. There’s no defending yourself; it’s already set in stone. The average soldier is very impressionable. This means that the first, strongest, or loudest opinion or perception stated is pretty much always the one that sticks. Case in point: it was observed that my guys were working while I was sleeping, therefore I am a shitbag. And as much as I might bitch about how much I hate this, I have no excuse, because I know as well as anyone that perception is paramount in warrior culture. As much as I loathe the idea of putting the perception of correctness before actual correctness, I know that perception is really the key. Insert here longwinded metaphysical discourse entitled “What Is Illusion, What Is Reality?” Sticking feathers up your butt may not make you a chicken, but if you can convince everyone that you are a chicken, well, by god, you’re a fucking chicken.