What Was Asked of Us Read online

  Copyright © 2006 by Trish Wood

  Introduction copyright © 2006 by Bobby Muller

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  The Little Brown and Company name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: November 2006

  ISBN: 978-0-316-02320-7

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER 1: Winners and Losers

  “It went on the whole night”

  “How did it come to this madness and chaos?”

  “The first suicide bombing”

  “Three Kings”

  “The Word of the Day”

  CHAPTER 2: Bringing Them America

  “They don’t have a security or reconstruction plan to implement”

  “Our mission was at odds with itself”

  “It was just a dog, another casualty of the war”

  “They thought we were bringing them America”

  “Just get me out”

  “I didn’t pray for the Iraqis”

  “Indirect fire is really good at finding me”

  “There’s going to be an uprising here soon”

  “Someone’s going to fucking pay”

  CHAPTER 3: Don’t Look Away

  “Don’t worry about it, we’ve got him”

  “If I died, I died”

  “For a split second . . . I thought I understood it”

  “It is gruesome to just beyond the realm of a horror film”

  “I just had a hatred for the Iraqis”

  “They were sending us out there in pieces of crap with no armor”

  “Definitely not California”

  “In war, the best of you shines”

  “Killed in action”

  “I was an American soldier”

  “Some of these people are the lost generation”

  “Shot in the head”

  CHAPTER 4: Nor Fear the Dangers of the Day

  “Walking through the graves”

  “Just a matter of luck”

  “You don’t want to look at your friend who has just been shot”

  “I am changed”

  “This is what happens when people speak to each other with rifles”

  “It’s the cold, blunt truth. There was a little girl that died.”

  “We just killed a bunch of dudes who were on our side”

  “And then I hear the explosion”

  “The next generation of insurgents”

  “Nor dread the plagues of darkness

  “War turns you into what your mother wishes you would never be”

  “I didn’t get my happy ass blown up . . . That is what winning is now”

  “Hopefully I provided some relief”

  “What the fuck is wrong with that guy? . . . He’s an Iraq vet.”

  “I’m glad you’re doing it and not me”

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For the families of the men and women who served in Iraq

  and for Thomas and Truman . . . my own

  “We live in wartime with a permanent discomfort, for in wartime we see things so grotesque and fantastic that they seem beyond human comprehension. War turns human reality into a bizarre carnival that does not seem part of our experience. It knocks us off balance.”

  — CHRIS HEDGES, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

  “Then he began to cry. He kept looking at us as the tears went down his face. He did not wipe them away, blow his nose or cover his face. He did not seem to know he was crying.”

  — GLORIA EMERSON, describing an encounter with Mr. Joseph Humber, whose son Teddy was catastrophically wounded in Vietnam, in Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins from a Long War

  INTRODUCTION

  It is almost forty years ago now, but 1969 seems like only yesterday. Though I could not have known it that January, 1969 was to be one of the most important years of my life. The Paris Peace Talks were under way. The United States and the former Soviet Union signed a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and for a short time at least, it seemed as if the Cold War would cool off. Mario Puzo’s epic, The Godfather, was published in 1969 and became a bestseller. The U.S. space program launched Apollo 10 and then Apollo 11—and people watched in awe as men walked on the moon. In 1969, Richard Nixon was inaugurated president, and a music festival called Woodstock was held on Max Yasgur’s farm in New York state. And in April 1969, while I was serving as a marine infantry officer, a North Vietnamese bullet went into my chest, forever altering my world.

  At the time, my unit had been involved in an intense firefight on a hill in the northern part of South Vietnam. It was to be my final day “on the line,” and this was to be my last time in combat. The bullet ripped through my chest, collapsed both of my lungs, and severed my spinal cord. With the bad luck went some good. Indeed, if the tumblers of the universe had not somehow clicked exactly into place, I would not be here today. Before being shot, I had called for helicopter evacuation for others who had already been wounded, and on that day the hospital ship USS Repose just happened to be offshore. Within an hour, I was receiving the best trauma care in the world.

  The first sensation I had after being hit was that of falling through a kaleidoscope world. I felt that my body had shattered into a thousand pieces, much like the windshield of a car in an accident. Then I realized I was lying on my back, looking up at the sky. There was no pain; instead, I felt calm and relaxed, as if surrounded by a warm glow. Then I realized I was about to die. I cannot really describe what it feels like to experience dying. My last thoughts were about the finality of it, the aloneness of it, and the absolute helplessness to stop what was happening. The calm was there, but so too was a sense of things slipping away, of a curtain going down. As I felt myself losing consciousness, I was convinced it was the end of my life.

  Thanks to the heroism of other soldiers, the navy corpsmen, the medevac crews, the nurses, and the doctors who operated on me for hours, I survived. When I woke up, I was disbelieving. I was ecstatic. I know I should have died on that hilltop, but I didn’t. I was given a second chance at life.

  In May 1969, I arrived outside of New York City aboard a military transport plane and was transferred to an ambulance. I was taken to the Long Island Naval Hospital in the dead of night. The first time I would be outside the walls of that institution was weeks later when I was transferred to the VA Medical Center where I would spend the next year in physical rehabilitation. I was not far from where I grew up.

  June is beautiful in New York, and the day was bright and sunny, and millions of people were on the highways, going to and from work. I watched them, cocooned in their own worlds, listening to their radios, crawling at a snail’s pace along the Long Island Expressway. It was another world for me, and I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. At that moment in Vietnam, ambushes were being triggered, patrols were engaging in firefights, and young men were dying. Just weeks before, I had been there, heading into battle. Now I was here. And people were leading normal lives, as if nothing else mattered.

  I wanted to scream: Don’t you people know there’s a war on?

  War is a unique human experience. For those involved in the business
of killing or in witnessing it, the experience is life altering. In my work with veterans, hundreds of them over the course of the last thirty-five years, I have come to appreciate these transformations. There is a certain numbness of mind that occurs in war. One of the doctors who attended me on the Repose was a psychiatrist. One day he asked if I wanted to talk about what had happened. He was concerned that I was wondering how I would live my life as a paraplegic. Instead, I asked him about my reactions to what I had seen in combat. Why, I asked him, wasn’t I more upset about what I had seen and done? The doctor explained that the human mind contains defense mechanisms that protect us in extreme circumstances, altering our feelings and allowing us to endure the horrific. After I had spent some time at home, he said, those protective mechanisms would melt away. I would react in just the same way as regular civilians do to life’s traumas.

  When you read the stories told by the soldiers in this book, you’ll read about veterans who went through what I went through, and who are still trying to comprehend what they did and saw, and what it means. While Vietnam and Iraq are different wars, in a fundamental sense all wars are the same. We go to war for one purpose—to kill other human beings. So for the soldier, there is always an attempt to understand and give meaning to that experience. Everyone in this book, and everyone who has seen combat in Iraq, will need more time to sort through and understand their experiences. Many will do so successfully, but others will not.

  This is not an antiwar book or a prowar book. It is a book of stories about people who have been in combat, who have served their country. Some of those here are confident that the war they fought was just. Others are not. But these accounts are not about the politics of this war; instead they are a simple recounting of experiences that are very personal. That is the way it should be. In all of my time in Vietnam, I don’t remember having one conversation about whether we were right or wrong to be fighting in Southeast Asia. It simply didn’t matter. Young men fight because they’re ordered to fight, because they believe it’s their duty to fight, and because they are committed to those they are with. This isn’t about politics; this is personal.

  It’s a slow process sorting through the experiences of war. It takes time to leave the mind-set of a combat zone and a military way of life. It takes time to clear your head, to take in the views of the society about the war, and to learn more about what you were a part of—and why it happened the way that it did. Most of all, it takes time to “communalize” the experience of war, to end the isolation that so many feel when they return to civilian life. There is no representative story of what it means to go to war, no monopoly on the truth. Learning to respect the experiences of others is a lesson many from my war have yet to learn. Each soldier’s account is like a single frame of a feature-length movie.

  Still, in reading these stories, I have an overwhelming sense that the veterans in these pages experienced what I experienced. I am not talking about just the direct participation in war, the being wounded, or coping with the brutality of combat. There is also the challenge of separating from the battlefield, the sense of disconnectedness that occurs to all of those who return from war. When we remember that all of those who serve our country in Iraq represent less than 1 percent of our population, it becomes easier to understand this disconnection—and the deep bitterness that can result. The wars our country fights are our wars. We, as a people, are responsible for them. The failure of many Americans to appreciate what’s involved in fighting a war is a source of frustration and alienation for those who have served—a frustration and alienation that cannot be salved by yellow ribbons.

  Veterans are famous for not opening up when asked about their war experience. This is partly because they learn quickly that folks really don’t want to hear the whole gruesome, depressing, and complicated truth—they can’t handle it. For most veterans, it’s a lot simpler to give a short dismissive answer than to try to bring someone into an alien realm that needs so much explaining. When I came to Washington, DC, to start Vietnam Veterans of America, I was shocked to learn that the overwhelming majority of Vietnam veterans never talked about their war experiences at all. What makes this book so important is that it breaks that isolation: it tells those who fought that others feel as they do, and it tells those who didn’t fight what their returning family member feels, the personal toll war takes.

  We all know that going to war is hell, but if a fight is what is needed to preserve our freedom, our values, and our way of life, then citizens of this country will always sign up and endure the hardships of war. A grateful society will provide a form of healing to the returning veterans by acknowledging their service and their sacrifices with heartfelt welcomes home and generous assistance to help them return to civilian life. The gratitude shown to veterans by our country after World War II demonstrated that America understood and appreciated their sacrifice. But when America fails to acknowledge and respect the sacrifice made by its veterans, the consequences are devastating.

  As America comes to understand the tremendous price paid by the brave men and women who have spent time in Iraq, the magnitude of sorrow for and the tragedy of what they did and saw will become apparent. Vietnam veterans understand what it means to fight in a war that divided the country back home. Our experiences will help guide and support this new generation of veterans dealing with the ebb and flow of popularity attending this conflict. I am proud that our nation learned to differentiate the war from the warrior as a result of the Vietnam experience. But we can, and we must, do more.

  The men and women who fought and are fighting the war in Iraq have gone through and are still experiencing an extraordinary episode in our history. They have an important story to tell. That story is in these pages. We must be aware that as we live in our own individual cocoons, as we watch the news or see a play or read a book or sit idling in a traffic jam, in Baghdad and Samarra and Mosul and Basra, in the hundreds of tiny villages whose names we do not know, there’s a war on, it’s happening now. And it’s not just happening to them—it’s happening to us. We must have the courage to listen. It’s part of honoring their sacrifices, and it’s part of what we owe them.

  Bobby Muller

  August 2006

  PREFACE

  The words in this book are those of twenty-nine Iraq war veterans who served their country in a dangerous place and lived to tell about it. Most of these stories were told to me in long, emotional interviews. We sat side by side on a couch or across from each other at a kitchen table or at a cramped workstation in the corner of a forgettable hotel room somewhere in America. In Oceanside, California, where I spoke mostly to marines from Camp Pendleton, the travel gods smiled on me, and I lucked into a lovely little cottage in a compound by the beach. More than any of the other interviews, those highlighted for me the inequities of the Iraq war: young marine grunts vividly described their hellish tours of the Sunni Triangle while their surfer-dude peers hung out on the beach just outside my window.

  Some of the other guests at the complex wanted to know what the marines were telling me about the war. What was really happening in Iraq? Sometimes when a young veteran walked through the parking lot to meet me, the other cottagers would cast discreet little glances but hang back as if he were somehow breakable or contagious. Perhaps they were being polite. Maybe they didn’t know what to say.

  On the Fourth of July, everyone lined up along the boardwalk to watch the fireworks. I wondered what the young men I had interviewed would be thinking about the noises in the sky, if they would ever be able to enjoy the clap of fireworks again, or if they were running for cover from what sounded like incoming rocket-propelled grenades.

  The sheer violence that some of these young people witnessed was, as described by one of them, “beyond the realm of a horror film,” and I will always be haunted by what they told me. Sometimes they cried. Sometimes I cried. Sometimes we just sat together in silence for a while. I was told stories of unfathomable courage against terrible odds. Several Bronze
Stars for Valor and a Navy Cross have been awarded to the veterans I spoke with. But I think there is also heroism in telling the unvarnished truth about war, and if there were an award for that, I would bestow it on every person in this book.

  These veterans do not share a single view of the war they fought. They have different opinions about the wisdom of the initial invasion and about the grievous errors made once Baghdad fell. A surprisingly small number expressed anger over the not-found weapons of mass destruction, perhaps because, as war correspondent Evan Wright wrote, this is a cynical generation that believes that “the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation.” More than a few veterans focused on the good works they did personally for poverty-stricken Iraqis. I also heard over and over that beyond the patriotic slogans used by politicians, what a GI really fights for is the lives of other GIs, his brethren “on the line.” Again and again, soldiers of varied services and ranks told me about heading boldly into harm’s way, not for the sake of Iraqi democracy or Middle Eastern stability or any of the other reasons touted for the invasion, but for their brothers and sisters in uniform.

  Above all, these are cautionary stories that remind us that war is a human endeavor, fraught with error, heartbreak, and accidental carnage. I heard about many civilians being shot during confusion at roadside checkpoints. These and other regrettable civilian killings will haunt some of the soldiers for a very long time. A few of them may have crossed a line, but I think these incidents reflect the moral ambiguity that attends insurgency war fighting.

  Several veterans talked about their distrust of all Iraqis because some, for a variety of reasons including fear, enabled the insurgency. From the troops’ perspective it’s hard to understand why virtually no one ever sees the planting of the deadly roadside bombs that have killed or injured thousands of Americans. Their stories show what an effective weapon the IED has been, not just physically but also psychologically—by driving a wedge between Americans GIs and Iraqi civilians.