Shortest Way Home

by Pete Buttigieg

  I read about how World War I ended at eleven in the morning on November 11, 1918. The armistice was signed at five in the morning, but set to take effect at eleven. In those six hours, there were thousands of casualties. An American soldier was killed at 10:59 after he decided to use the last sixty seconds of the war to charge a German position. If the armistice had been agreed on the tenth of November, or the twelfth, would anyone have bothered to set a time instead of letting it take immediate effect? Did the negotiators place any weight on the loss of life required for their tidy numerology?

  By August, as my unit’s only remaining officer at the thinning ISAF headquarters in Kabul, I was told in no uncertain terms that my mission now had less to do with running our little station there than with shutting it down. The gunny sergeant, my right-hand man, went home to rejoin his wife and four boys in South Carolina, leaving me with one analyst. In the fluorescent-lit chow hall with officers from another unit, I would end meals by rising from the table with mock self-importance, saying: “Well, time to go check on my troops.”

  This was the cue for one of the others to ritually supply the punch line to that joke: “You mean, your troop.”

  But the mission, which had to do with blocking the flow of narcotics funding to the insurgency, still mattered. So even as I worked to dismantle our shop, I got busy looking for people to take up pieces of ongoing work that we could hand off—a British law enforcement partner who might still be there in a year working out of the UK Embassy, a State Department civilian whose head didn’t count against the ninety-eight hundred, some special units with a mission to stay throughout the retrograde, or one of the Afghan officials I had met who were going to wind up owning these problems anyway.

  Letting go of the mission did not come easily, but clinging to it raised other concerns. What if I was doing something wrong by pushing too hard, risking my life and others’ to keep going outside the confines of the base in order to see the mission through, while being told from on high to wrap it up? I owed it to anyone who got into a vehicle with me, and their spouses, to make sure we weren’t taking any unjustified risks. In my eagerness to finish strong, how could I be sure I wasn’t entering the grim tradition of officers—like the ones who had ordered those deadly advances that November morning in 1918 in order to get a few more inches of turf by eleven—who didn’t recognize when their job was done, their war over?

  ONE SLOW DAY AFTER CHOW, I googled “Japanese WWII holdouts.” On a Philippine island in 1945, as the war became desperate for the Japanese, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was ordered to take his three men into the jungle and come out for no one but his commanding officer. He and his men carried out raids and lived in the jungle for decades, all but Onoda eventually dying. He continued doing this for almost thirty years. Then, in 1974, as the Vietnam War was nearing its end eight hundred miles due west across the South China Sea, a Japanese backpacker found him, out there fighting World War II alone. True to his orders, Onoda refused to stand down unless relieved by the officer who had ordered him into the jungle. So the Japanese government actually tracked down the commander, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, who was now an aging bookseller in Kyushu, and flew him to Lubang Island with an official set of orders relieving Onoda. Though he had effectively murdered a number of Filipinos living on the island, he was pardoned under the reasoning that he thought he was at war. He went home, quickly despaired at the sight of modern Japan, moved to Brazil, and became a cattle farmer. He died in January 2014, as I was packing my bags for Afghanistan.

  Onoda’s war had lasted thirty-four years. Mine was less than seven months, but it was long enough to encompass the excitement and uncertainty of two rounds of Afghan elections, and a much-anticipated change of command at ISAF. I was also there during the second un-ending of the Second Iraq War. Sitting in the offices of another unit that mine worked with closely, I watched on the big screen tuned to cable news as the Iraq War went through its third beginning, and thought of the night in college in 2003 when I witnessed its first false ending, with President Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln with a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED sign in the background. A decade later, I sat unsure what to say as the soldiers next to me, most of whom had served in Iraq, too, bitterly realized that their efforts had come to this, the emergence of ISIS. It was as though, in a war without two simple sides, war itself was going to win in the end. “The whole CENTCOM AOR5 is a dumpster fire,” one sighed.

  My mind kept rotating around the question of whether there was any way at all to see the end of a war while it was being fought, or if you could only decide long afterward what had actually happened and when.

  Accompanying my commander on a visit to Camp Leatherneck, structured like a giant checkerboard in Helmand Province, I saw plot after big square plot of land emptied. Just a few areas were still up and running, the rest taken back down to gravel, like abandoned industrial sites in South Bend, only much tidier because they had been removed with the characteristic thoroughness of the Marines. There, Afghans in the on-base “haji shops,” who had been selling carpets and scarves and pirated DVDs to coalition forces for a decade, were bracing for the disappearance of their livelihoods. In the south, Kandahar had even more shops, arranged on a square boardwalk designed to make you briefly forget that you were on an airbase in a war, noshing in your downtime on pizza or ice cream. But now the boardwalk storefronts were two-thirds empty, like at a dying mall back home.

  One instinct would tell you to feel a little wistful, as you would naturally feel when seeing anything built with great effort come to a slow end. Then another instinct would smack you awake, as you sensed the wrongness of feeling sentimental about the end of a war. But this guilt would recede as you noticed that the war, itself, was not the thing that was ending. I’d sit in a meeting about how to posture our unit for the coming retrograde of troops, thinking the war was indeed pretty much over. Then I’d hear a briefing about the escalating count of Afghan National Security Forces killed that week, and wonder if our entire presence wasn’t just a phase in a continuum of warfare that, to Afghans, did not begin when we invaded and would not end when we left.

  AND THEN, ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER, the dust, noise, beauty, and danger of Afghanistan were all in my past. A C-17 lifted me and about a hundred other Americans off Afghan soil for the last time. As our graytail eased up from the Kandahar tarmac, there was no applause, no jubilation from the tired men and women aboard. I tried to work myself into some emotion about it, to savor the moment or something, but it was just a flight.

  The next day I sat with Lieutenant Jason McRae, my friend and battle buddy from training, in a surprisingly nice air-conditioned trailer made out to be a coffee shop amid the bleached bonescape that is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Some six months earlier, I had walked at his side toward our barracks after the last hugs of the friends-and-family send-off at Camp McCrady. We both kept our eyes forward, but I could feel the restraint on Jason’s part as he avoided looking back at his bewildered two-year-old toddling after us, not comprehending why his father was walking away, crying and confused as his mother scooped him up to carry him in the opposite direction.

  Now our war was over; it was time to go home. But time had no real meaning at this stopover base, washed in sunlight and jet lag. We all carried our personal time zone around us. You might be on your way to breakfast at the twenty-four-hour chow hall and pass by a couple airmen on crew rest drinking beer in the morning sun before they go to bed. You might wake up uncontrollably at three in the morning and go to the running track to blow off energy—and find a dozen others working out there. Everyone on our side of the base had some combination of Germany or Iraq or Bagram or America standing twenty-four to forty-eight hours in their past and future. But the Navy had its way of signaling that time still existed, and that our war really was now finished: starting today, Jason reminded me, we no longer drew imminent danger pay.

  Thumbing through his iPhone, Jason read a headline aloud: suicide attack in Kabul. Over
there, when I heard an explosion, the quickest way to learn what was going on was usually to search #kabul on Twitter or “Kabul attack” on Google, so I did the same now. I learned that it was near the ISAF compound where I’d lived and worked, possibly on the road to the airport. Two Americans dead, no names yet. I quickly emailed the people I considered most likely to have been driving there at that time, and they promptly wrote back to confirm they were alive, and bored. It wasn’t until the next day that they released the identities of the casualties—and their pictures.

  Major Donahue had been with me on a trip to deliver clothing and school supplies to an orphanage. It was a volunteer mission, and everyone involved was motivated by a desire to do good but also, at least in my case, aching for more real encounters with regular Afghans even if it meant extra trips outside the wire. When we arrived a contingent of Afghan Boy Scouts came to unload the supplies, and we spent the morning with them, a group of orphans, and the NGO workers at the site. The orphans were like any schoolkids, playful and lively and noisy. I gave them my camera to play with and by the time I had it back it was full of photos. The Afghan Scouts, who were older, polite, and a little reticent, showed us the facility and explained their scouting program. Old enough to observe Ramadan, they quietly refused the candy we had brought before agreeing to pass it out to the little kids. Not having actually spoken to anyone under the age of eighteen in months, for me it was a rare taste of normalcy, the best day of the deployment.

  Someone took a photo of me and Donahue standing in a classroom with a group of the kids, relaxed and smiling as one of the scouts uses the wrist of another to show us how to tie some elaborate knot they had learned. Nothing about the photo (other than our uniforms, of course) suggests that it was taken in the context of a war. Now I looked at that same face, squared toward the camera in the serious and dignified look of a standard service portrait, alongside the text of a news story announcing his death. His war and mine had both ended, very differently, just one day apart.

  According to the customary recipe for a war story—baked with facts but leavened with bullshit—I ought to say that he and I were close, that he was the finest soldier I knew, a friend whose loss drew all of us who knew him closer together. In truth I neither liked nor disliked Mike Donahue. He was a coworker, a good soldier as far as I could tell. He spoke of being a father and I believe he was good at that, too. I knew him well enough to be confident volunteering to ride in his vehicle, not well enough to confide in him or ask much about his life back home.

  So why was his death the casualty that affected me the most? I saw General Greene more often, admired him for his down-to-earth style, and was as shocked as anyone when he was shot and killed during a graduation of Afghan troops at a training academy. I knew Senior Chief Hockenberry much better than either of them, and, having talked with her earlier about things ranging from Navy life to her teenage son, I could vividly picture the lifelong impact of the serious gunshot injuries she sustained in that same incident. So why was the loss of this almost casual acquaintance the one my mind couldn’t stop turning toward?

  Perhaps it was the timing, the knowledge that the war took him just as I left it behind. Amid the drawdown, I left a few days earlier than originally planned. Otherwise I would have heard the explosion, so close to our quarters—assuming I was not out on a convoy myself. That must have been it: as different as he and I seemed, and as little as I really knew him, I could very much picture myself in his place. He drove vehicles around Kabul, just as I did. That day, he would have put on the same kind of body armor, waved goodbye to the same gate guard, signaled a turn onto the same road. So he died the way I probably would have, if I hadn’t made it: the brutal luck of being chosen by an IED, never knowing who or what hit you.

  Visiting the forest of white markers in the Afghanistan section at Arlington is not just for honoring the individuals lost there; it is a place to seek some reason why they should be under the headstones while the rest of us walk around on the grass. I was sorry about his loss. But my real purpose visiting his grave site and the others at Arlington is to confront the dictatorship of chance, which compounds the cruelty of loss by allocating it for no clear reason at all. To die taking a hill is one thing, but a soldier hit by an IED is basically the victim of an assassination. Like an assassin, the bomber is out to destroy a symbol, who happens to be a human being, without really knowing or caring about the most important qualities of his victim.

  Looking back, I see no good reason that can be confected for why one person and not another should die at random on a routine mission. For a mind that can’t come to rest around that question, the only way out is to construct a reason going forward. You resolve to build a life that is somehow worthy of emerging on the better side of luck’s absurd equations, because you know that by definition your luck is something you don’t deserve. Nothing that had happened during the deployment would justify the pattern by which I returned safely and some of the others did not, but I had the rest of my life to try to repay whatever debt I had incurred by coming back in one piece. It all might sound superstitious, but the search for justification was an inescapable imperative for me, and another element of propulsion for my work at home. Not that it would really be possible to ever feel like I had settled this account. But it was clear that I would have to work harder than ever to make myself useful, after these reminders of the precariousness of existence not just in war zones but in general. If this loss had happened while I was still deployed, it might have propelled me to try even harder, perhaps dangerously so, to make gains for my vanishing unit. But my war was over. If I wanted somehow to earn the luck that had brought me home safe from Afghanistan, I would have to do it from home, in South Bend.

  I MAY GO MONTHS WITHOUT THINKING about the day I came home, then some event will bring it all back, like the Vietnam Welcome Home event at a smoky dive bar called Catch 22. Nestled between houses on a residential block on Fourth Street in Mishawaka, Catch 22 is a true neighborhood bar of the old school. Even though it’s lunchtime, today I find it full to capacity, which means about thirty guests, taking every seat at the bar, the handful of high tops, and even the pool table, which has been covered for the occasion. Other than Mishawaka’s mayor Dave Wood, and a couple staff members, a reporter, and me, just about everyone is between sixty and eighty years old, wearing a ball cap or some other clothing identifying him as a Vietnam veteran.

  After Mayor Wood says a few words of appreciation, I give my little speech, something like this: “Four years ago today I landed in Afghanistan. And at the end of my tour, the reception couldn’t have been better. At Baltimore Washington Airport, people lined up to shake our hands, waving flags. When I got home to South Bend, people were waiting with balloons and gave me hugs.”

  A little choked up, I continue to the point. “Many of you did not get that welcome home. And it’s a shame. These days, as a society, we have learned how to separate how we feel about a policy from how we treat the men and women sent overseas to serve. That wasn’t true for Vietnam veterans. . . . I’m sorry that not everyone got thanked properly. I’m sorry that this is coming late. But on behalf of the city of South Bend, I hope you’ll forgive . . . that this message is coming late but maybe not too late: thank you. And welcome home.”

  Recognizing Vietnam Veterans Day has only begun in the last few years, but it quickly became another occasion for me to see how important a symbolic act can be. Some of the vets’ eyes water. It’s clear that to them the honor, however late in their lives, is meaningful. One of them tells me he was eighteen when he went, says he’ll never forget the things he saw, but dwells on the ways in which he feels luckier than others who came back unable to move on. “They called me a baby-killer when I got back,” he says, staring into the distance.

  I try to picture what coming back from war was like in the 1960s and 1970s, without the benefit of email or Facebook or cell phones, your family perhaps not sure even what day to expect you until you could reach the
m from a pay phone on your way back. One vet describes a friend whose reunion with family happened at this very bar; he returned one afternoon, found his family’s home empty, and knew that they must be at this tavern across the street.

  BY THE TIME I WAS on my way home forty years later, Big Navy had learned some things about the art of preparing a service member to return. Somewhere in between Vietnam and now, the Pentagon had realized that the day after you leave a war zone is not the best time to reunite with your family. So we were given three days’ interlude at a little base in rural Germany that amounted to a kind of no-frills resort. There was ample time for working out and sleep, and they even organized little trips into town. It almost felt like tourism, but the intent was to watch and help you respond as elements of normal life were gradually restored around you. As we wandered in small groups around the market square of a small city nearby, someone from the command was always on hand, to keep an eye on each little “first” of reintegration. They were normal things from home that we hadn’t experienced in a while, things we might not be able to handle as easily as we expected. First walk through a crowd. First time in the presence of children. First drink.

  The rest of the hours were for sessions on things like dealing with stress. As a mild-mannered captain led a session on psychological triggers, I sank into my seat at the mention of one I hadn’t thought of: politics and politicians. “Remember as you go home that this is an election year. There’s a lot of political advertising about war and military issues that we’ve found is a stressor, so you may want to steer clear of that.”