Shortest Way Home

by Pete Buttigieg

  No one budged. Slowly and with dread, it dawned on me. I was Lieutenant Buttinger. As soon as I came to terms with this inevitable reality, I was on my feet. I stood front and center, staring dead ahead of me, getting yelled at, confused.

  “You want to argue with a drill sergeant, Lieutenant?”

  “No, sir!”

  “You realize what these guys have been through and what they do to make sure you’re ready for a combat zone?”

  I sure did. I admired the drill instructors from the South Carolina Army National Guard who spent their days showing us sailors how to function as soldiers. I also had no idea what he was mad about. But I knew enough not to reveal any perplexity, let alone try to plead my case. “Yes, sir. No excuse, sir.”

  “Get back to your seat,” he said, seeming to have unwound just a little.

  “Yes, sir.”

  A few days later, I was back under the gaze of Commander Clark, whose countenance and demeanor gave him more than a passing resemblance to Steve Carell from The Office. “Well, Lieutenant Butterig, it looks like I owe you an apology.” It turned out I had been confused with another trainee, and he had called me into his office to clear it up. I appreciated that gesture, though it would have been nice if he had done this in front of the others. (Our class division officer later took care of that at morning formation.)

  The mistaken-identity case was the final seal on the status shift I had experienced, going from a mayor in charge of a small bureaucracy to a minor figure in the biggest bureaucracy in the world. At home, I was accustomed to people being angry at me, perhaps over a policy decision, police controversy, or pothole problem. But at least that was for things that actually happened, based on who I actually was. The one indignity I never experienced at home as mayor was someone mistaking me for someone else. But here, even as an officer, I was no one in particular. At the mayor’s office, my name is printed on the door. But here at Camp McCrady, my surname wasn’t even spelled right on my camouflage uniform when it was first issued to me. The rank was all that mattered; the name was a minor detail. Indeed, the most vital piece of information on me was neither name nor rank, but the letters “O POS,” punched into the metal, below my Social Security number and above the abbreviation EPISC on my dog tag.

  “Do not guess your blood type, shipmates!” the NCO had joked as we filled in the forms to go to the dog tag maker. We all chuckled, but when they came to pass them out, it felt like we held in our hands an emblem of our mortality as well as our military identity. I was told to separate the two tags I’d been issued. “Do your family a favor,” someone had said, showing me how to lace one tag into one of my combat boots, while the other stayed around my neck. That way they could figure out who you had been even if your leg wound up in a different place than the rest of you.

  “WHO HERE THINKS YOU WON’T BE going on a convoy?” asked the admiral introducing the final round of training. He was a cheerful two-star, tall and lean, seeming to enjoy having an occasion to wear the camouflage uniform instead of the dress blues of the Pentagon. His talk had been engaging, and now he let the dramatic pause linger after his question. Like all admirals, generals, mayors, and bishops, he was a politician.

  Most of us figured out that the question was rhetorical, though it was also puzzling. Our group consisted of personnel specialists, medics, intelligence analysts. In theory, very few of us would wind up in a convoy. Still, it seemed like “yes” was not the correct answer here. Only half a dozen naïve hands went up.

  “Guess what: all of you are probably going on a convoy.”

  We all understood that our deployments were not traditional naval assignments; we would be nowhere near a ship, and should be prepared for unconventional duties. We were the “individual augmentees,” mobilizing one at a time to join other units, rather than with a company or a ship’s crew. Still, the idea that we needed to learn convoy security seemed peculiar; we had joined the Navy, not the Army. But by now it was clear to us that we needed to be ready for anything. Months later, as I counted my hundredth time outside the wire behind the wheel, I thought of that moment. We may have started our Navy Reserve careers learning about ships and cruise missiles, but right now we needed to learn about Humvees, medevacs, and IEDs.

  The culminating event of the three-week combat training sequence was an all-day convoy simulation, where we proceeded through a threat-filled third world village, a slice of Afghanistan (or Somalia or Iraq, if you preferred) in the South Carolina woods. Advice was dispensed along the way, with occasional reminders that we were not supposed to be in combat roles, but would have to learn these things, just in case. We learned the procedure for what to do when your vehicle is stopped, scanning the immediate area and outer radius for signs of an IED. But there was only time to learn the basics. None of us would be defusing bombs, but we needed to know how to act if we encountered one.

  “DRILL SERGEANT, is there a standard procedure for what to do if you actually see one during the walk-around?”

  “Yes: get your ass back in the vehicle.”

  The response was typical of the drill instructors, brusque enough to make sure we understood the stakes, but also marked by the camaraderie and gruff humor of frontline soldiers. Some of them had been through five or more deployments, even though many were younger than I was. They wanted us to be prepared for all of the things they had seen downrange. Our magazines were full of blanks, but the rifles we carried were the ones we would take to war.

  There was downtime in between stages of the simulation, but every minute was supposed to be for some purpose, if only double-checking your weapon and your battle buddy to make sure they were in good shape. “If-you-are standinaroundnotdoinnothing . . . You. Are. WRONG!”

  Halfway through the scenario, some sailors forgot their guidance, got ambitious, and decided to clear a building. Wrong move: the correct course of action here was to retreat to the armored vehicle and assess the threat. Unimpressed, a drill instructor pointed to the tallest, heaviest sailor in the group: “You’re dead now.”

  The rest of us, left to drag him back to the vehicle as shots rang out from all around us, remembered the lesson.

  After it all ended, we gathered for an after-action review. Sweating under our body armor, we shifted our weight from foot to foot, taking the occasional pull of water from our CamelBaks and holding on to our rifles as the instructors reviewed what we’d done right and wrong, blow-by-blow. Good job spotting the first IED. Don’t forget to talk to your gunner. You should have had all the lines of the medevac report ready before getting on the radio to call it in.

  It was clinical at first, but this last day, the tone of some of the instructors began to change from the deadpan style they had projected since our arrival. A drill sergeant got quiet and stared into the distance for a moment before naming a friend who was killed in Iraq, leaving a wife and five kids. “They have to live with that every day now.” He went on, brotherly, reminding us that we were being trained to know what to do if action finds us, but were not supposed to look for combat if we didn’t have to.

  “Remember, if you get killed, the war’s over for you. But the people you leave behind, they’ll be fighting it for the rest of their lives. So before any of you decide to go off and be a hero, think about that shit for a minute.” And we all did, uncharacteristically quiet, until the bus came to take us back to the barracks to pack.

  15

  “The War’s Over”

  As soon as my war began, I wondered when and how it would end. Hopefully in September, when my orders were supposed to conclude. And hopefully by then there would be further signs of success in the American mission. But I had only been on the ground for a few days when someone told me to leave the idea of winning and losing behind.

  Smoking Gurkha cigars around the firepit with my new colleagues, I was still finding my social bearings as we swapped stories in the light of a Weber grill filled with scrap wood. This being an intel unit, they had of course looked up the new guy
before I arrived, but by now most of the interest and amusement over my own backstory had already run its course. We were back to talking, as usual, about the war and where it was headed. I had volunteered some ideas about what it would take to win in the border regions when Rob, an analyst, leaned back in his chair and laconically interrupted me: “The war’s over, Pete.”

  For a quiet moment the words hung in the air with the cigar smoke and the dust of Bagram Air Field. My blood pressure rose as responses flowed through my mind. What do you mean, the war is over? If the war’s over, why are you here? Why am I here? If the war’s over, what the hell was that rocket attack last night? If the war’s over, then somebody should tell whoever keeps shooting rockets at us, they might like to know.

  But I held my peace, trying to mimic the affect of the others, that tired ease and casually annoyed humor of resting soldiers, as we sat and smoked and glared at the fire. I got up to fetch more firewood from our pile of chopped-up old pallets. I wasn’t prepared to argue with the most respected analyst in our unit, bearded and world-weary so that it was easy to forget he was my age, possibly even younger, and who had been working on the Haqqani network for years. Besides, he wasn’t wrong. His point was that America wouldn’t confront Pakistan over ISI support to fighters wreaking havoc on the Afghan side of the Durand Line. The U.S. wasn’t going to endanger its strategic, sixty-year relationship with Pakistan over some little thing like the Afghanistan War. It was 2014, and we might still be getting rockets shot at us from time to time, but there was only so much America could or would do about it. If winning the war meant sinking our relationship with Pakistan, then yes, the war might as well be over. And yet, here we were on a cold night in dusty Parwan Province, because wars like this one don’t just end. I would spend the rest of my deployment wondering exactly what it means for one of today’s wars to be truly over, and how anyone would be able to tell.

  BY APRIL, AS THE SNOW was melting on the mountains over Bagram, I had been moved to Kabul and was starting to feel like I had my feet on the ground as an officer. As the admiral had foreshadowed, I got out more than you would expect for an intelligence analyst. I might have planned to spend my time behind a sophisticated computer terminal in a secure area somewhere, and sometimes that’s just what I did. But it turned out my services were more often needed as a driver or vehicle commander on convoys moving people or gear in and around Kabul for my unit. In a ritual to be repeated dozens of times, I would heave my armored torso into the driver’s seat of a Land Cruiser, chamber a round in my M4, lock the doors, and wave a gloved goodbye to the Macedonian gate guard. My vehicle would cross outside the wire and into the boisterous Afghan city, entering a world infinitely more interesting and ordinary and dangerous than our zone behind the blast walls at ISAF headquarters.

  On the streets that spring and summer, I obtained the strange mental balance required of anyone operating outside the wire in a conflict zone. In order to figure out how to conduct yourself, you must hold two contradictory truths in your mind. Truth number one: The vast majority of people you see through the windshield are just regular people, just like at home, trying to get through their day, out to shop and work and study and do all the things people do. You have a moral as well as a strategic obligation to respect them, to drive carefully so you don’t hit a kid on his way to school or a widow begging in the street or someone’s uncle carrying home a watermelon, to act in such a way as to help or at least not harm them in their daily routines. Truth number two: With your rifle, your gear, your vehicle, and your passengers, you are quite obviously an American soldier (or sailor, in my case), and accordingly you must recognize that a small but nontrivial number of the people you see around you are spending their every waking minute figuring out how to kill you and your passengers, and will do so if given the slightest opportunity unless you avoid them or kill them first.

  My first couple times out, I had prepared by practically memorizing the regular driver’s briefings, page after page of information on the latest threat streams, the suspicious vehicles, the rumors and reporting. But soon I gave up on trying to understand the details of the threats. The warnings on known VBIEDs (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices) usually boiled down to this useless advice: watch out for the white Corolla. In Kabul, pretty much everyone drives a white Corolla. So I fell back on my training from Camp McCrady, eyes out for the known signs that we were about to get blown up. A suddenly empty neighborhood. A nervous-looking lone driver of a vehicle with a heavy trunk load. An obviously male hand coming out from underneath a woman’s blue burqa.

  Quickly, I learned how to drive at war. But what I saw through the windshield didn’t look like a war. It looked like a city. A lively, energetic, smelly city full of children and merchants hawking things and students and businessmen with papers under their arms hustling to wherever it was they were going. Children were everywhere, and I wondered how it came to be that this boy was herding a flock of sheep grazing on piled garbage near a busy intersection, while that one was in a crisp blue oxford shirt in his own flock of identical blue-shirted classmates, charging across a four-lane road toward school. I wondered what was on the minds of the girls in black dresses and white headscarves, holding their notebooks to their chests like so many twelve-year-old girls do, never seen on the streets except in these little groups in their school uniforms.

  Inevitably, I also thought of municipal services and scanned Kabul with a mayor’s-eye view. I gauged what seemed to be done well (curb painting and lighting), poorly (trash pickup), and not at all (animal control). I thought of home, where people would be crisscrossing South Bend with no thought at all given to how they might obtain clean water, whether trash would ever get picked up off the side of the road, whether there were any bombs nearby.

  Contrary to what I’d been told, the traffic had its rhythm, a sort of order dressed in chaos, as in Italy. Roundabouts had their flow and sometimes a counterflow, donkeys competed with tanker trucks, everyone beeped, and if you paid attention it all followed a certain logic. In the middle of it all, always there were street sweepers, anachronistic in neon-orange safety jackets with straw brooms, clearing the ubiquitous dust off the road between Massoud Circle and the airport, sweeping it nowhere in particular, never looking up at me or anyone else swerving to avoid them, heads down, fearless or oblivious. Did they think the war was over?

  Of course, there were checkpoints, sandbags, soldiers, a bomb site where broken glass dangled in storefronts for weeks. And the war was busy claiming lives. One day an American duty driver got caught up at a checkpoint on the airport road (as I sometimes did) and got out to argue with the Afghan soldiers (as I occasionally would), and a Talib passing by on a motorcycle or bicycle noticed him, stopped and got off his bike, cut his throat, got back on his bike, and left while the American soldier bled out. That night, the local TV news reported the killing, showing the street sweepers with their heads down as always, sweeping bloody sand out of the roadway toward the median.

  The longer I was there, unable to answer the question of how you can tell when a war is over, the more a second question rose in my mind alongside it. If you manage to get killed in a war that’s “over,” what does that make you?

  THAT MAY, PRESIDENT OBAMA finally made his drawdown announcement after weeks of rumors. The American troop strength would fall to ninety-eight hundred by the end of the 2014, to be cut in half the year after that, and then out. The gunny sergeant walked into the office, a modified shipping container he called our tuna can. He took a seat and put his feet up, inspecting his pistol while I glanced at emails and fiddled absentmindedly with my knife. “I feel sorry for the people coming in 2015,” he said. “If you’re here now and something happens to you, then fine, we’re late in the game but everyone understands we’re here for a reason. But being here after we’ve said we’re leaving? Getting shot at when everyone at home doesn’t even think the war’s going on still? Then why the fuck are you even out here, dog?”

  I
tried to figure out if the president’s announcement meant that the “real” war was to end in 2014 when “Operation Enduring Freedom” turned into “Resolute Support” (just as “Iraqi Freedom” turned into “New Dawn” in 2010) or in 2016 when the troops would (we thought) all be gone, or some other date. Most Americans get our first understanding of wars from history books, starting with the dates each war began and ended. As with a human life, the span of a war is there in parentheses right after its name. The implication is that wars, like people, go from nonexistence to being and then back to nonexistence, all at a precise time and date. We grow up assuming wars have beginnings and endings. But that date is only the object of consensus after the fact, if at all. In the days after I had announced my deployment orders publicly, I occasionally got a puzzled response from people who seemed confused or even irritated by the idea that I would be going over. “I thought we were getting out of there,” they’d say, as if I should be calling the Navy back to check if it was some kind of mistake.

  At the outset of the mobilization, I had felt a sense of purpose, maybe even idealism, that can only be compared to the feeling of starting on a political campaign. I thought back to 2004 and John Kerry’s presidential run, and then remembered that it was during that campaign that I saw the iconic footage of his testimony as the spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, long-haired and still in his twenties. “How do you ask a man,” he had asked the senators then, “to be the last man to die for a mistake?” I did not believe the Afghanistan War was a mistake. But as I weighed my place in a war most people at home seemed to think was already ending, I couldn’t stop wondering, how do you ask a person to be the last to die for anything?

  THE RHYTHM OF DEPLOYED LIFE brought busy days and slow ones. Even with the extra time I spent keeping up with the home front, carrying a laptop and a cigar up to the roof at midnight to pick up a Wi-Fi signal and patch via Skype into a staff meeting at home, there was more time for reflection and reading than I was used to back home. For every day punctuated by a rocket attack or explosion, there were five dominated by meetings, emails, and workouts. Between calls home, convoys, and meals, I sat at the computer in my tuna can and looked up the history of wars beginning and ending.