Mid-February, a decade back. Remember it like yesterday. My local, East End of Long Island. Beer cold, tempers hot. Just back from Afghanistan, where it was raining iron. By way of London, where I hounded Ahmed Chalabi, Iraqi invasion booster and the fellow who put the confidence in "confidence man."
Now, at the bar, three guys, all of military fighting age. Tough guys, wanting to go all medieval on the Baghdad towel heads. Voices rising, each shouting, more vociferous than the next, their tone as ugly as an exit wound. Iraq an insane idea? What am I, a hippie or a pinko? Or maybe a pussy? Their arguments: what about Saddam? 911? WMD? Didn't I even listen to Colin Powell at the UN? Mobile laboratories. Pilotless drones. It's General Powell, for chrissake.
"What, a uniform means he won't lie like the chicken hawks?" Cheney. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. "How 'bout first we finish the job in Afghanistan?"
They want dukes at that. Beer courage. Not me. I' ve just seen three months of real fighting. Real dying. Khodja Bahauddin. Chagatai Ridge. Dasht-e Qal'eh. American B-52s dropping fodder for horses attacking Mazar-e Sharif.
Throw up my hands. Peace, brothers. But, final question. Any of you enlisting? Crickets. I thought not.
I imagine you had your fill last week of all the Laptop Hussars who sat out Iraq and decided to use the ten-year anniversary of Shock and Awe to grovel about beating the war drums. Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy. My favorites were the "I can do more for the country on the home front" crew--take a bow, Romney fils. True, there was some awful good stuff buried among the dross of the Iraq Apology Tour. Pierce was, as ever, piercing. Fallows looked forward. Larison behind.
Still, enough already. Samuel Johnson was wrong. Obviously not all men feel meanly for never having been a soldier. And if all my visits to Bethesda and Walter Reed have taught me anything it is that we sent the wrong people running to the sound of the guns in Mesopotamia. So, instead, thought I'd commemorate the anniversary by dredging up some good memories from my three trips Downrange. Good memories of good kids. They were all kids to me. Even the grizzled Gunnies.
Like Specialist Elizabeth Shrode, a member of the Army's 54th Medical Company out of Washington State's Fort Lewis. A pretty woman made even prettier by the eyeliner she wore into combat. "Keeping that feminine mystique," she'd said with a laugh as we choppered to a firefight not far from Balad. Moments later, after we'd lifted the dead Marine into medevac, his torso cut in half at the waist, the eyeliner mixing with the tea rs streaming down her cheeks.
Like the Navy SEAL team outside of Fallujah. Blasting Whitesnake, emptying cans of Red Bull and Rockstar, honing K-bars. Pumping themselves for a midnight snatch-and-grab. Their instinct is to kill-kill-kill. Instead they capture. Helo landing four hours later with 16 handcuffed prisoners. The SEAL Team Leader winking at me as he parades them by. "No dead," he said. "Now that's courage."
Like the burly GI turret gunner from the California National Guard--his face peppered with shrapnel, his front teeth blown out, his lips swollen--whose hand I held while an orthopedic Doc sawed away at his shattered leg. Told him I'd get him on the cover of Men's Health, all he had to do was find the will to live. "No way, man," he mumbled just before the Valium IV kicked in. "Ain't got the abs."
Like the non-com Bill Cullen, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, squatting beside me on the Baghdad LZ when the Russia n-made Katusha rocket hissed and keened and finally ka-whomfed into the runway so close I felt the heat. "Jesus," he said in a Kentucky twang, a broad smile creasing his sunburnt face. "It's like they're mad at us or something."
Like the exhausted Air Force surgeon Elisha Powell IV offering me a Cuban on the roof of "The Swamp" beneath a starless canopy after 16 straight hours of emergency room triage and sighing, "Didn't lose one today" . . . and then warning me to, "keep the glowing end cupped in your hands."
Like the Navy Combat Engineer out of Texas by way of Annapolis hunched over a coffee pot in a godforsaken FOB somewhere out in Anbar Province and telling me, "course we'd rather blast 'em to fuck-all. But if sharing a cup of coffee with an Iraqi sheik means saving even one American boy's life, hell, break out the Maxwell House."
Like the Army medic who noticed my sciatica acting up and told me to drop my pants so he could bang me up with cortisone hypo and the Marine Cobra driver who offered to trade hootches with me because he was afraid mine was too close to the wire and might get mortared and the Navy SEAL who gave me a lecture about smoking cigarettes as the subsonic boomlets of AK-47 fire whizzed past our heads.
Bad war. Good kids. All effects and no causes. These are the memories I choose to recall. How I must remember it. Otherwise I'd go crazy.
See you in Iran.
Read more from Bob Drury and his thoughts on the new Pope Francis.
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