Thanks to Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and to Ruth's nagging I had assumed responsibility for our dirty dishes, our laundry, our grocery shopping, recording our checks, mowing the lawn and, my favorite, shoveling snow. My cheerfully doing what many still considered women's work, the dishes and the laundry, amazed my wife's sisters and mother, but the pride I began to take in it Ruth demolished by reminding me that no one had ever praised her for doing those chores. Even more important, in the twenty-five years since my tour of heaven, not only had I not saved the world I had so far as I knew not saved one soul. I had become neither famous nor rich nor outside of one little Iowa town of two thousand people even notorious.
Bob who?
I knew now that in that same spring when I had celebrated the end of the war and the return home of the last American soldier from Vietnam and had spent one full year staggering from wonder to awe to joy and back again Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had murdered two million persons in Cambodia. The record of Haing Ngor—A Cambodian Odyssey—sobered me. While I had imagined the imminent coming of the peaceful and harmonious world commune, the prisoner Ngor stared at the dead fetuses cut from the abdomens of pregnant women and hanged by their necks. This was the reality of communism on the other side of the world.
Ngor:
[The guards] brought a new prisoner down the line of mango trees, a pregnant woman.... She begged them to spare her life.... They tied her wrists around a tree not far away from me, then tied her ankles and left. Later a new interrogator...walked down the row of trees holding a long, sharp knife.... He cut the clothes off her body, slit her stomach, and took the baby out. I turned away but there was no escaping the sound of her agony, the screams that slowly subsided into whimpers and after far too long lapsed into the merciful silence of death. The killer walked calmly past me holding the fetus by its neck. When he got to the prison, just within my range of vision, he tied a string around the fetus and hung it from the eaves with others, which were dried and black and shrunken. Each tree in the orchard had its prisoner, and each prisoner had a different means of punishment or death.
"It requires great trust," Billy added. "Trungpa said it has to be like falling in love."
Hmm.
"So it is dangerous."
Hmm.
"You are my main living authority on the subject of devotion to the guru," I replied.
I thought.
"I defer to you on it."
Would a guru ask for unquestioning obedience?
I wondered.
"That I would not give," I told Billy.
Not even if my teacher performed miracles for me. That's what I liked about Socrates and Krishnamurti. As a teacher myself—teacher with a lower case "t"—there were times when I could see clearly that a student would learn faster if he would shut up, stop asking questions, and just do what I said.
But I did not really want my student to do that. My teacher if I had one, I added, would invite and welcome my questions. If he did not, I explained, I would look for a guru who did.
"I agree that we should never violate the truth that we see in our heart of hearts," Billy replied, "and I think a real teacher would not require that."
Our talk of teachers evoked again in me questions of ethical conduct. It was the precepts that had been of most help to me in my practice. I had begun with nonviolence, dedicated myself to telling the truth, then given up or tried to give up the desire for wealth, and so on. It had been the precepts also that seemed of most assistance to me in evaluating teachers.
Jesus—
Why had Jesus condemned deluded sinners to eternal torment in hell?
Trungpa—
Why had Trungpa been addicted to tobacco and alcohol? Even Billy thought it was that combination that killed him just as it had killed our dear friend and mentor O'Malley.
Gaskin—
Why had Stephen Gaskin smoked pot and arranged two-marriages and four-marriages and more? Gaskin had suggested that so long as we were totally honest about it we could enjoy free love and marijuana and still be enlightened. Though in part it had been this suggestion that first attracted me to his teaching I had come through painful personal experience to understand this permissive creed to be a mistake. I had fallen in love and I had remained in love. In our marriage Ruth had at least twice considered leaving me, but I had never once seriously considered leaving her. Still in love with her, I was a monogamist—and although I smoked marijuana for years and loved it my interest in it dwindled, I finally quit and, though I was not judgmental and supported its decriminalization, in retrospect I did believe that it, too, and Gaskin's encouragement of it to have been a mistake. My days of getting drunk and stoned and chasing women were over. I was certain. In a book I had read—I forget which—a Buddhist had listed the five precepts he said were most important.
No killing................... reverence for all life.
No lying..................... honest and open.
No stealing................. respect for property.
No adultery................ ethical sexual conduct.
No intoxication.......... lucidity.
I understood that they were not absolute.
Except for two or three minor instances even as a child I had not been a thief and as an adult I had been too much a Marxist to steal or even to consider cheating on my taxes.
On the other four precepts I scored less well.
Killing—
Though I could not imagine myself bombing a city I had failed as a vegetarian and now did again eat meat. More than once I had required the service of an armed policeman.
Lying—
For years now I had tried every day to speak the truth but I knew that honesty and sincerity were not necessarily truth. I could only try my best to be honest and—when I and others failed—to be quick to apologize and quick to forgive.
Intoxication and sex I had indulged for years—alcohol and marijuana even after my awakening—but that all looked different to me now. In short these precepts now seemed right to me after all, but my saying so in my typically curt and arrogant manner could not help but put my friend Billy on the defensive. His root guru had been a notorious smoker and drinker, a user and an abuser of illicit drugs, and also according to some a sexual libertine.
Billy and I had ourselves once been little different.
Dumb fuckers.
"The precepts have never been of crucial importance to me," Billy said.
Hmm.
"But for periods of time I have taken the vows as a way of watching my mind."
I understood.
Billy did acknowledge the truth of the precepts if taken properly to heart, but growing up in the Church of Christ, he explained, had made the precepts look too much like fundamentalism to him.
"My precept if I have one," he said, "is to choose to wake up."
The very next day Billy wrote to apologize for his possible insensitivity in dismissing the precepts.
I was glad he did.
His note put a stop to some endless circular cogitation in me that his remarks had inspired.
I had to admit to a sentimental attachment to the precepts. It had taken my friend John, in his version of Gaskin's version of Suzuki's version of Buddhism, four years of arguing with me just to persuade me that telling the truth—in the sense he meant it—was even possible. Then—once I committed to it—that scrupulous attention to listening, to meaning, and to honesty educated me in the power of silence; and, when the marvels of consciousness made me fear for my sanity and wonder if I might get so lost that I could hurt somebody, it was the principle of nonviolence that unlocked and opened the door to heaven.
Now in my email to Billy just the recollection and recording of these past events ignited in me a kind of hysteria in which I felt like crying and laughing at one and the same time.
Buddhist practice—my own amateurish version of it—had consisted of twenty years of my trying to regain and to maintain my ordinary beginner's mind and to let go of the wonder and the awe and the private personal subjective experience to which I had remained attached. In the years after I left Reunion I told almost no one—I learned the hard way that trying to communicate it was counterproductive because the "I" kept getting in the way—yet still on the inside I sometimes felt like the pitiful woman I had seen on television who could convince no one that she really had been abducted by aliens from another planet, transported to another realm, and then released and returned to her normal life here on earth.
At first I felt defensive and I expressed skepticism regarding Billy's own involvement first with Chögyam Trungpa and then with Ösel Tendzin. Billy briefly summarized his years of practice. First with the help of books there were eight years of practicing daily zazen on his own; then, after reading The Myth of Freedom and Way of Meditation and hearing two talks by its author, Billy had begun the hinayana path; in 1986 he participated in a dathun, a month-long group meditation retreat; he took the vow of refuge and later the bodhisattva vow for the mahayana path. In 1988 he attended seminary, a three-month period of study and meditation practice. There he received the vajrayana "pointing out" instruction and began thirteen years of Tibetan ngöndro preliminary practices—prostrations, vajrasattva mantra, mandala, and guru yoga—and in 2001 he received the abhisheka for vajrayogini practice. Billy has since completed the recitations for that sadhana practice and his current Buddhist practice, he has informed me, is the chakrasamvara sadhana.
By comparison how simple seemed Zen—
Be kind and good.
Just sit.
In 1999 I was at a loss with his special vocabulary—ngöndro, dzogczen, visualizations, color projections, mahamudra—and online when I researched these new terms and concepts I was inundated by what seemed to be numberless stages, levels, obstacles, antidotes, and techniques. The Tibetans carried a huge toolbox, I learned, and soon I suffered from a painful sense of inferiority and wasted time. Indeed, I was distraught. All right, then, I would find a teacher! For the first time in twenty-five years I was in a hurry.
We corresponded about teachers.
Gurus.
"What do you think about the idea of devotion to the guru?" Billy asked me.
I was wary.
He had been reading The Rain of Wisdom, he said, a collection of ancient poems, songs, and dohas with a devotional tone—"a crying to the guru from afar" Billy called it—and he had found it touching. In his guru devotional practices, he said, he had found himself weeping. I hardly ever cried—thanks to my conditioning by my father when I was a child—for any reason.
In 1975 I had once wept for joy.
Enough.
"Devotion shows us our loneliness," Billy guessed.
He explained.
"At the same time it gives us the courage to explore that loneliness."
The discovery, he explained, is that everything, all experience, becomes guru mind. Billy said that he had met teachers who touched him deeply but that he felt he always held something back, a reaction related to his habit of deferring to the opinions of others. Either way, he thought, there was a neurotic quality to it.
"There is no comfortable place for me to rest," he said.
Billy wondered what I thought of all this—
Of his crying, too.
Hmm.
I did not know what to think.
I had not cried but two or three times in forty years, once during my awakening and once, unnaturally forced and awkward, because I thought I should cry when my father died.
My father had taught me not to cry.
"Stop that sniveling!"
But I had known many teachers, Billy himself was one, who I knew could inspire me to tears of gratitude and love if only I permitted myself such an indulgence and many friends and family, too, to whom I felt profoundly indebted. The fact was, however, that I had no official guru, no teacher of the kind to whom Billy referred. Just his confiding in me like this, however, so openly, so honestly, was an intimacy that now brought tears near my own eyes.
"The path of devotion seems to require letting go completely of your own thing," Billy wrote, "but how do I let go of my own 'precious' opinions without letting go of the direct intuition of my heart of hearts?"
I did think the religious or mystical experience required total surrender to something.
“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.” — Cormac McCarthy in The Road
On March 21, 2003, a U.S. and British-led coalition force invaded the country of Iraq. During this time I was a twenty-year-old Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps. This is my eyewitness account of what took place for Fox Company Second Battalion First Marine Division during the first week of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
March 16, 2003, marked my twentieth birthday. I spent this day standing in a hole dug chest deep in Kuwaiti sand thirteen miles from the Iraqi border. I lit a cigarette and thought how had I gotten here. I grew up in a small town in Kansas, spending the early years of my life as a normal child and later as a relatively normal teenager. Nearing the end of high school I had gotten in trouble with the law. This caused me to look inward and decide if I didn’t soon choose the path I would take as an adult I would rot away in this town self- medicating. I thought about college and decided that I had had enough of school so I looked at the military. I talked to my dad and got his thoughts on my decision. Since he had been in the Navy during Vietnam I guessed he would give me some insight. At first he wasn’t very keen on the idea. He told me about his own experiences and those of his father and uncle who had fought during World War Two, the latter being killed in the battle of Guadalcanal. Being a teenager I had already made up my mind before talking to my dad, and he must have seen it.
“Son, I’m going to tell you what your grandpa told me when I decided to enlist," he said. “You’re a man and you can make your own decisions so you can make your own about this. Just make sure you don’t make it lightly.”
I soon graduated from high school in May of 2001 and enlisted in the Marine Corps on September 9, 2001. Little did I know that just two days later a perfect storm of events would ensue in New York that would start me on the fast track to a place with people trying to kill me and I them.
March 19, 2003, the air campaign against Iraq began. We had been told to gear up and stand by. I met with my squad leader Sgt. Lupton and my squad mates to go over the plan one more time. Over the last two years I had gone through some of the best and hardest training the U.S. Government had to offer with these men. Our battalion was part of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Force. My unit, Fox Company, was attached to a British commando unit tasked with taking the town and shipping port of Umm Qasar, which had an estimated population of forty-five to fifty thousand civilians and from a company to a brigade of Republican Guard. Fox Company was an amphibious raid unit trained to sneak onto beaches and into shipping ports in order to secure them for the landing force to follow. The plan up to this point had been for us to be airlifted by British helicopters out to sea. After being dropped off we would load onto Zodiac inflatable boats and travel through the night to a staging area one thousand meters outside the port. After everyone had arrived at the link-up point, the scout swimmers, which included myself and nine other men who had been to Combat Swimmer School, were to get into the water and ready ourselves for the hopefully undetected swim into the landing zone. After making the swim in, we were to eliminate any guard force there and signal the rest of the raid force to come ashore with the boats. Since I had been to Designated Marksman School earlier in the year I carried an M16A4 rifle with a magnified ACOG scope attached. I was expected to find a good overwatch position for myself and a machine gun team that would be coming in with the boats to watch for any reinforcements. The British Commandos were to come in by helicopter and seize the rest of the port area. It was a straightforward plan and one we were trained to do. Little did I know at the time the powers that be would squabble amongst themselves and change the plan so many times that when we crossed the border into Iraq it was completely different.
“Listen up,” Lupton said. “Plan's changed.”
I listened as he outlined the new plan. We were to load onto the back of five-ton military trucks and cross the border in the predawn hours of the next night. Our first objective was to take and or destroy a radio tower located three miles south of Umm Qasar. After this was done we were to move into the city and secure the southeast side of the port facility. During this time British Commandos with a Polish GROM team would be assaulting the rest of the port in order to secure the shipping lanes. My team leader Corporal Travis Eliott, a big muscular guy from Texas, spoke up.
“What sense does it make to have guys trained in beach raids ride to war crammed in the back of fucking trucks?”
“Hey, I don’t make the orders, dick! Now if anyone else has anything to say, wait till after I’ve given the brief,” Sgt. Lupton shot back.
He continued the briefing, pointing out rows of buildings first on the map, then on satellite photos we had been given.
“Second and third squad are going to move to secure these buildings here with one of the Abrams. We’re going to be here with the other one oriented to the east.”
He pointed to a set of train tracks.
“Second platoon will be in reserve and third will deal with any EPWs. Strother, I want you to set up with Thomas’s gun team here to cover this road. If they send any reinforcements it’ll come down that road,” he said looking at me. “Don’t worry about any vehicles. The tank’s going to be pointed in that direction, too. Just worry about people.”
I also learned that Navy divers sweeping for underwater mines had found an island which turned out to have forty to fifty artillery guns pointed toward the border. The rest of the battalion was tasked with assaulting this island before we crossed into Iraq.
That night after the briefing I had a dream I was shot in the chest and I was startled awake gripping the spot over my heart.
It surprised me.
I had never had a dream that vivid before. I sat there for a minute in the rut a tank had made in the sand and then lit a cigarette. One of my squad mates lying next to me looked over.
“You all right, dude?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m ok,” I said. "I just had a dream I got shot.”
“That sucks. Let me get a smoke.”
I lay there in silence looking at the night sky until my cigarette was gone, then went back to sleep. I was awakened some time later, by someone wearing a ski mask.
“Hey, man, wake up. We have to start breaking camp.”
I looked at my watch. I had slept only two hours. I sat up and started rolling my poncho liner to put it in my ruck sack when Lupton came over to me.
“Pass it down: change into the MOPP suits.”
I passed the order down, then tore the plastic packaging from the chemical suit I had been issued. I looked at it in the dark for a minute wondering why they would give us green camouflaged MOPP suits for the desert. I shook my head and put it on, adjusting my gear over the top of it. The first part of the day was spent checking and rechecking gear and smoking cigarettes. Sometime in the afternoon an incoming siren started to sound. We ran to the holes we had dug to shelter us in the case of a SCUD missile attack. I knew these holes wouldn’t save any of us, but I jumped in anyway and put my gas mask on. An hour later I was still sitting there with sweat running into my eyes.
Man, this really sucks!
I stood up, looked around, and saw someone else standing in his hole. I could tell it was my platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Nick Lerma, by the rank insignia he had sewn onto his Kevlar helmet. I tried to yell over to him, but the gas mask muffled my voice. I picked up a clump of dirt and tossed it to get his attention. When he looked at me, I held my hands up to ask what was going on. He shrugged, then looked around, removed his mask, and took a deep breath.
“All clear!” he yelled.
I took my mask off and saw others doing the same. After night fell, the platoon was brought together by Lieutenant Schellhaus, our platoon leader, and Ssgt. Lerma.
We all stood around and listened to Lerma speak.
“We’re set to step off at 0100 tonight. I know some of you have been to Afghanistan, but this is going to be different.”
We listened to him speak for three quarters of an hour, telling us of what we should expect and some of his experiences during Desert Storm. After the meeting broke up, everyone went off to talk or catch some sleep. I walked over to Lerma and we stood talking. Lerma and I had become good friends on the month-long trip from the U.S. to Kuwait despite the fact that he had been in the Marines eleven years longer than I had and seen combat during the first Gulf War and in Somalia. I stood next to him, looking at Iraq in the distance.
“I always wanted to ask you," he said with a straight face, "how did you get the name Tyrel? Isn’t that a black guy’s name?”
I laughed.
“No, seriously,” he said.
“I think my dad got it from a book,” I said.
“A book, huh?”
“Yeah, what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Was it a black guy in the book?”
“No, I think he was white. How did you end up with Nicholas?” I asked. "You’re a Mexican from El Paso.”
“My moms wanted me to blend in, Holmes,” he said with a mocking accent.
We both laughed and went off to get our gear ready and catch some sleep. I woke up sometime later. I saw Elliot and went over to see if anything had changed. Nothing had. We loaded onto the trucks at midnight and waited. I sat nervously looking at my watch. Were we ever going to leave? It was around two in the morning that I saw a huge fireball light up the northeast sky.
“What the hell was that?” I heard someone say.
I later found out it was a British helicopter that had been shot down, killing everyone onboard. We sat waiting for what seemed like a lifetime. Once dawn started to break, the word was passed around and we readied ourselves to move. We applied camouflage paint to our faces and checked our weapons. This was it, I thought, as the trucks started to pull forward. It was sometime between five and five thirty in the morning when we left friendly lines and headed to the border with eleven trucks which included two combined arms or CAT teams in armored Humvees, two Javelin anti-tank gunners, a six-man Force Reconnaissance Team, and eighty men from Fox Company, ninety-six in all. By the time we neared the Iraqi border it was mid-morning. We had taken close to five hours to drive the thirteen miles to the border, and as we neared I could see why. The border dividing Kuwait and Iraq was a ditch ten feet wide and fifteen feet deep. British combat engineers had constructed a bridge to allow us to cross, but it could handle only one vehicle at a time. After crossing the border all vehicles lined up from left to right in order to establish the order of movement.
I was crammed next to Lieutenant Shellhaus and his radio operator Jason Pichi. I was facing the rear of the truck. Everyone else from first squad was seated along the sides, facing outward. It seemed that we were sitting still for an unusually long time. I stood up to see what was going on. I could see our first objective off in the distance, the large radio tower jutting up toward the sky. Just then the engine of our truck shut off. I heard the driver trying to turn the large diesel engine over, but it wouldn’t start. Lt. Shellhaus leaned into the back window of the cab.
“What is going on?” he asked the driver.
The engine finally turned over after a few more tries, and around this time the command came over the radio to start the attack on the radio tower. We came within about one thousand meters of the radio tower when there was a large explosion a few hundred meters in front of us. I looked up and figured it had been artillery or a large mortar.
We came to a stop.
I was looking over the cab of the truck and could see figures moving around the radio tower. Then came another explosion in front of us, this one a little closer. Lt. Shellhause was on the radio by this time, asking if that was our artillery or theirs, when the third round hit just to the left of a CAT Humvee blowing the Marine standing in the turret out onto the ground. As I watched him scrambling to get back in the vehicle, it dawned on me what was happening. Someone was spotting for artillery and was trying to walk the rounds in on top of us. Everyone else must have figured this fact out as well because the trucks started to pull back to allow the tanks to start firing on the tower. At this point it seemed like the entire world opened up on us. Artillery rounds started impacting around all the vehicles. Then the damnedest thing happened, the truck stalled and died again. The driver was franticly trying to start the engine, but to no avail, when Lt. Shellhaus yelled.
“Dismount! Get the fuck off the truck!”
Men started bailing over the sides of the truck. As I waited my turn to jump off, there was an explosion overhead. The next thing I can remember was Lt. Shellhaus shaking me. My ears were ringing and I felt like I had been hit in the head with a bat. Later others who had seen what happened told me an air bust round, which is designed to explode before impacting the ground, exploded over the truck, but the truck’s cab and smoke stack had absorbed all the shrapnel, leaving only the concussion to impact me. The Lt. and Pichi went diving over the side, with me close behind, leaving the truck behind. We ran as hard and as fast as we could until we reached the rest of the trucks that had fallen back. I turned around and got down on one knee just in time to see our truck limping its way back toward us, missing the passenger side fender. I realized the driver had stayed with the truck trying to get it started until he finally did. I couldn’t decide if this guy had balls of steel or was just dumb.
Either way he had my respect.
The tanks were hammering the area around the tower pretty hard now, but the artillery fire was still coming closer. I heard the sound of helicopters behind us and turned to see two Cobra attack helicopters. They flew over and started firing rockets into the area around the tower. This along with the firing from the tanks brought the whole tower down. Not too long after this, the artillery fire stopped. I later found out it had been coming from the island the Navy divers had found which was supposed to have been taken out before we began the attack. The British helo that had been shot down had delayed Echo and Gulf Companies’ attack because of efforts to rescue the crew. After we loaded back onto the trucks and cleared the radio tower our vehicles moved into single file with the CAT vehicles at the head of the column. We turned onto a narrow dirt road that took us through what looked to be a junkyard. My truck was positioned behind the second CAT vehicle. We pulled onto a paved road headed north. I was now seated in the very rear of the truck next to the tailgate facing out the driver’s side. If we had to jump off again, I was planning on being the first one off. One of the machine gunners, Thomas, was seated to my right with his large m240 machine gun resting on the side of the truck pointed outward.
We drove a ways in silence until I heard someone say there were solders up ahead. I leaned over the side and looked forward. I saw one waving something white, obviously trying to surrender.
Lt. Schellhaus called back:
“Don’t fire unless they have a weapon. Third platoon will pick them up.”
We drove past. Some of the solders actually waved at us, which I thought was kind of odd at the time. I noticed we were starting to get into the outskirts of the city. Suddenly a woman dressed from head to toe in a long black robe came running from around a small hut firing wildly with an AK47. I was so surprised that I didn’t fire at first. Just as I brought my rifle up, Thomas fired a long burst from his machine gun practically cutting her in half. As the rounds tore through her the hood covering her face came off. It wasn’t a woman but a man dressed as one.
The right side of the truck which was behind me started taking increasingly heavy fire. I was trying to stay focused and look for threats on my side when I saw a man step out of a doorway to shoot at the truck behind us. I brought my rifle up without thinking, centered the glowing red chevron crosshair of the ACOG on the man’s upper chest and pulled the trigger a number of times in rapid succession. I saw one of the rounds exit through the top of his head taking part of his scalp with it. This all happened in probably a span of seconds, but I think it must have been the effects of adrenaline which made it seem like slow motion. I always thought that if I ever had to shoot and kill someone for the first time it would be like it is in books or movies and I would have some kind of profound realization or epiphany, but I can’t remember thinking anything except how odd it was that I had shot him in the chest but a round had come out of the top of his head. I also think this was from the effects of adrenaline and training that included desensitizing us to death. I didn’t have time to think long, however. I heard a large whooshing sound from in front of the truck which ended in an explosion. I figured this was an RPG. I then heard a loud bang and then another explosion. I found out later that a man in a white SUV had pulled in front of our column of vehicles and fired a rocket at a CAT vehicle. The gunner returned fire with a TOW antitank missile, destroying the SUV and killing the man. We moved forward, passing the burning little truck. The shooting quieted down on my side and I started thinking. If it was getting this hairy outside of town, what was it going to be like once we get there?
The two CAT Humvees pulled off the road to let us pass. We drove forward and turned left into the port. My truck pulled up to the train tracks and access road just as the plan said. I saw the trucks carrying second and third squad along with one of the tanks head toward the other side of the port to start clearing the offices and port buildings. I jumped off the truck and headed over to the tracks to get a good spot to see down the road. I had just set up in my position next to the machine gunners when the other tank pulled up to my right, pointing its massive gun down the road. I sat there watching the road for a few minutes when an old 1960s-era station wagon ambulance turned onto the road a few yards from us, coming to a screeching halt right in front of the tank. We all sat there with our weapons pointed at the driver not knowing what he planned to do. One of the machine gunners and I started pointing at the driver, trying to tell him to turn around, but he still sat there, I figured he was panicked and didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t until the tank lowered the barrel of its main gun to point directly at the car that he turned around and sped off the way he had come.
I sat there watching that road for what seemed like an hour or so before I heard someone calling my name. I turned to see Lupton yelling and waving at me. I headed over to see what he wanted.
“Strother, grab your shit and link up with Staff Sergeant Lerma. Second squad needs help clearing those buildings,” Lupton said pointing in their general direction.
I grabbed my assault pack and headed that way. I saw Lerma standing next to a wall talking with Corporal Hollon, the platoon’s second squad leader.
“What’s up, staff sergeant?” I asked trying to catch my breath.
“Second Squad is going to move up and clear these buildings here,” he said pointing to a row of buildings on the satellite photo. “I want you to provide over watch for them.”
Hollon pointed at the photo.
“We’ve cleared these buildings here,” he said. “You can set up in any of them.”
I looked at the row of buildings and decided on the roof of a two-story building.
“I’ll take this one.”
“Ok, I’m going to send Scoggins with you,” Hollon said waving at Scoggins.
He was Second Squad's automatic weapon or SAW gunner and carried a light machine gun that fired the same 5.56 mm ammunition as the M16. We had been friends since boot camp, and I nodded at him when came over. He stood listening to Hollon tell him what he wanted and then turned to me.
“You ready, bro?” he asked.
“Here,” Lerma said handing me a Motorola two-way radio and a large neon orange tarp. “Take this and let us know when you’re set and when it’s clear to move. Make sure to put that air panel on the roof of whatever building you’re in so you don’t get a bomb dropped on you.”
I took the orange air panel and stuffed into my pack, then gave Scoggins the radio. I looked around for a minute to find the building I had picked out and headed for it. Once we got to the entrance we went in cautiously. Even though it had been cleared, we still had to make sure no one had snuck back in. We made our way to the roof. Houses built in the Middle East all have a flat roof with short retaining walls built around them. We burst out onto the roof. This building had a wall about waist high which would allow me to kneel down behind it and still use the wall as a rest for my rifle.
I craned my head up over the wall in order to get an idea of what I would be looking at. I saw a wide open paved space that looked like a large parking lot between me and a large warehouse. To the right of that was a long row of offices or a barracks of some kind. I slung off my assault pack and pulled out the orange tarp and a pair of binoculars. I handed the binos over to Scoggins and duck-walked over to set up the air panel. When I returned, Scoggins was already scanning the area with the glasses. I took off my helmet to give my head more freedom of movement and peered through my scope meticulously searching.
“See anything?” I asked.
“I don’t see shit,” Scoggins replied.
“Me neither. Apparently these guys knew we were coming.”
“They’re probably those fuckers standing on the side of the road when we came in.”
We sat for another few minutes, then Scoggins called Hollon on the radio to tell him it was clear to move forward. I was startled by what happened next. I could hear the engines of the tank some distance behind me. It sounds like a small jet when it’s at full speed. I heard a loud crash and the sound of metal being twisted and crushed. I looked over and saw the tank ramming through the large iron gate that divided that area from the rest of the port. I sat on that roof watching as Second Squad cleared building after building until they came to the large warehouse. They tried the large sliding door but it wouldn’t budge. I saw Lerma run up and put an explosive on the door, then run back to detonate it. After it went off, they tried the door again.
It still didn’t budge.
I could hear laughing off to my left and turned to look. It was the tank commander standing up in the turret laughing. I’m pretty sure this pissed Lerma off because what happened next is one of those times that even thinking about it today makes me laugh. Lerma sent one of the marines back to the truck. When he came back, he was carrying a large piece of cardboard with little grey bricks attached to it. I knew this was a breeching charge we brought in case we had to get through any armored or steel doors.
“Oh shit, is he going to use that on the door?” I said out loud as I watched him attach it.
I reached down and put my helmet back on. I saw the tank commander duck down inside the tank and close the hatch. After Lerma attached the charge, he ran back and told everyone to get behind a wall about fifty feet away. I saw the explosion before I heard it. The whole door was blown inward, caving in part of the roof on that side.
After spending close to two hours on the roof we were ordered to come down and rejoin our squad mates. I grabbed my gear and headed back to the train tracks and took up my original position with the machine gunners. After nightfall Sgt. Lupton came over and told us to get ready to move. We were going to where the new company headquarters had been established. As we got closer, I could see men milling around in the darkness, smoking and talking to one another. Lupton held up his hand to signal us to stop and left to find out what command wanted us to do next. I started looking around for anyone I recognized and saw a friend named Mic Bakowski who had ridden in with third platoon.
I walked over.
“Hey, Ski, what’s up?” I said.
“Hey, man, you want to see something?” he asked.
“What?”
He started walking toward Lerma's half-destroyed warehouse motioning me to follow. We walked through a door on the undemolished side and entered a large empty space. To my right I saw lights and a number of men obviously Iraqi prisoners on their knees facing a wall, their hands and feet bound with large plastic zip ties.
“Dude, check out the EPWs,” Ski said.
I counted forty-two in all.
“Where did you get these guys?”
“Some are from that ditch when we first came in, others we nabbed hiding in some buildings farther down.”
Back outside I saw Lupton heading over to where first squad was, so I told Ski to watch his ass hanging out with Third Platoon and ran over just in time to hear Lupton say in a low voice, “That’s our truck,” indicating the second one parked by the warehouse. “Grab your shit, don’t leave anything on the truck and meet back here in five minutes ready to move. Team leaders, I want a head count before we step off.”
We all moved to the truck, unstrapped our rucks from the sides, and grabbed any ammo and supplies we could find. It turns out we weren’t going far. We walked about half a mile to the north and up onto a small overpass with train tracks running underneath. Lerma and his radio operator Remmy had joined us along with a machine gun team and the two Javelin gunners. We dropped our packs once we reached the top and made out a schedule for guard duty.
I got lucky.
I didn’t have watch until morning so I laid out my sleeping bag and sat down. I suddenly realized how hungry I was and remembered I hadn’t eaten since the day before. I fished out a ration called an MRE and started to eat. Once I was finished I lay down, closed my eyes, and slept the sleep of exhaustion. I awoke the next morning to someone kicking my foot.
“Strother, hey, it’s your watch. Are you awake?”
“Yeah," I answered as I sat up. "I’m awake.”
I looked around and saw the overpass ran parallel to the road we had driven in on, called an MSR, which stood for main supply route. I stood up, pulled my gear on, and walked over and sat down next to the guardrail and started my two-hour watch. That day went by pretty uneventful. It wasn’t until the early morning of the next day that things picked up.
I looked at my watch, five thirty three. The dawn was breaking just enough to be able to see. I stood up, stretched, and walked over to where Lupton was sleeping. I shook him and told him it was time for Stand To. During Stand To everyone is awakened and told to be ready for an attack because dawn and dusk are the two most probable times of enemy attack. An hour later Stand To was finished and I was looking forward to the end of my watch. I looked at my watch again. Twenty minutes left. As I looked up I saw movement. I started looking for what I had seen and saw it again on the rooftop of a building five to six hundred meters away. I couldn’t tell who it was or what they were doing but I could see it was a person. I reached down and picked up the binos I had sitting next to me to have a better look. I could now tell it wasn’t an American but it didn’t look like it was a soldier either. I still couldn’t tell what he was doing. I called over to Lupton and Lerma to come have a look. I directed their attention to the building across the MSR. First Lerma, then Lupton stared at him for a few minutes through the glasses.
Then Lupton said, “There’s more. I think they’re setting up a mortar tube.”
I was looking through my rifle scope, but it wasn’t as powerful as the binos, and I couldn’t see what he was seeing, but I could see two more people on the roof now. I suddenly saw a glint coming from the roof. I recognized it as the glint that comes from binoculars when the sun hits them. That son of a bitch was scoping us. As I was watching him and he us I saw something behind him shudder and move, and a few seconds later I heard the thump.
Oh shit.
“Incoming!” Lupton yelled as we hit the ground.
I heard the explosion and looked up to see that it had impacted in front of us about one hundred meters out. Everyone started scrambling to get on line and take these guys out before they got a fix on us.
Another thump.
Damn it!
If you can hear it, it means the round is already on its way down. This one hit the ground a little closer than the first. I heard Lerma yelling at Remmy to get on the radio and tell the Lt. what was going on. Lupton was calling out orders.
“Two-story building to your front.”
Everyone started shooting, but at that distance the 5.56 mm round of the M16 isn’t very effective. I caught movement to my left and turned my head to see Lerma stand up and fire an AT4 anti-tank rocket. It landed short of the building. He called down the line for the Javelin gunners. By now the machine gunners were firing long bursts into the building, the impacts of the large 7.62 mm rounds stitching their way into windows and onto the roof. Another mortar landed raining dirt and debris down on top of us. A squad from Second Platoon ran up to join us and take up our left flank. I saw the Javelin gunners assembling their launcher. I went back to trying to pick out targets. I heard a loud pop to my right and saw the Javelin rocket launch from the large green tube atop the gunner’s shoulder and stall for half a second before the booster kicked in and shot it straight up into the sky. I had never seen one fired before and was impressed. I could see the rocket in the sky angling down toward the building and explode to the left of the building. The gunners immediately loaded and fired another. This one landed right inside a second-story window. Cheers erupted from up and down the line as the explosion caved in a section of the roof. The cheers were quickly stifled as men with assault rifles and RPGs stated rushing from the building toward us. AK47 rounds started impacting all around us. Looking through my scope I could see a man running to a large mound of dirt. I put the ACOG’s red chevron out in front of him like I had been taught to do in order to hit a moving target, just like leading a flock of birds, I thought.
Breath, trigger pressure, squeeze.
The man doubled over with the impact and stumbled to the ground. I shot him twice more as he tried to get up.
I could see a tank tearing down the road toward the building. A man ran into the road and fired a rocket at the tank but missed. He was run over. The tank started to slow and came to a stop, firing its main gun into a group taking refuge behind a large rock pile.
“Hold your fire!”
The order was passed up the line.
A truck drove to the rear of the tank. Marines from Third Platoon jumped out of the back and began assaulting the Iraqis’ right flank, killing those who did not surrender.
As it got closer to evening we started taking incoming mortar rounds again. By this time two snipers from the Force Reconnaissance Team had joined us on the overpass. They had been trying to locate the individual spotting for the mortars for nearly twenty minutes.
“I think I got him,” one of them said behind his scope. “Single-story building to right of the two-story.”
“Ok, I see the building,” the other one replied.
“Do you see that pile of trash and junk next to it? Guy with binos hiding behind it.”
“Yep, got him,” he said calmly.
I peered through my own binos to see where he was looking. I could see him. It seemed like he was looking straight at me. That’s when I heard one of the snipers chamber a round into his massive Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle.
“Sniper ready?” one asked.
“Sniper ready,” came the reply.
“I have control, 5, 4, 3, 2…”
Even though I knew the shot was coming I still jumped slightly as the rifle fired its huge 600-grain inch and a half long projectile at nearly three thousand feet per second. I watched as the man’s head completely disappeared from atop his shoulders.
The headless body crumpled to the ground.
“That’s a kill,” I heard one of them say matter of factly.
We couldn’t ever locate the mortar crew so Lerma called in artillery and leveled all the buildings in that area. The rest of the night passed without incident. The next day we were told the Company would be moving to a different part of the port away from the front lines for a couple of days. This was good news. We packed up our gear and loaded back onto the trucks for the short drive. In the early morning hours of the sixth day we were told we were going north to a town called An Nasaria. A U.S. Army convoy was hit outside and some were taken prisoner. Task Force Tarawa had gone in to pacify the town but had been met with high opposition and was taking high casualties. We loaded onto large twin rotor MH-47 helicopters. I sat on the bench with some apprehension thinking about what we had already gone through and where we would be going. We spent another month and a half in An Nasaria, leaving Iraq in mid April, taking only one casualty. I would be back less than a year later spending seven long months in Faluza during which a quarter of our company would be killed, more maimed and wounded, many of whom I called friend.
I debated writing on this topic.
When you tell someone you have gone through this, you usually get one of three reactions.
First, most people will automatically thank you for what you’ve done. Some are sincere about this, others say it just because they’ve seen it on TV or think it’s what you're supposed to do.
Second, you’ll get the person who has watched Fahrenheit 9/11 too many times and wants to hear how wrong the war is from a veteran, like this is some kind of “fuck you” to the U.S. government.
Third, and worst of all, you get the most insincere and obnoxious people who ask, “How many people did you kill?”
If someone asks, then I will tell them that, yes, I am a veteran, but I don’t go around advertising. I don’t feel the need to justify myself to whomever I meet. I had never actually sat down and thought about the events of my time in Iraq in chronological order before, and I didn’t quite know how it would affect me. I decided to write only about the first week of the war because even though I had many experiences during my time I felt those seven days were such a shock to my twenty-year-old psyche that it changed my personality and who I was forever. I titled this paper “My War” because I believe anyone who has experienced it is constantly at war even after the events have passed and wounds have healed—at war with others, at war with the world around you, but most of all at war with yourself. Early on I decided the best way to deal with it was to forget about it, act like it had never happened. This worked for a while but soon it started to resurface and I found myself becoming distant and angry toward people around me. Around this time I lost my father suddenly. This caused me to look at myself. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what, so I went about trying to figure out what it was. I knew I wasn’t mentally unstable, and I wasn’t depressed, so I started thinking about what had happened and decided that I needed to own this experience, not run from it or hid from it, but truly own it. After coming to this realization I have become a person more calm and in control.
