Tough as They Come

by Travis Mills

  Kelsey flew back home, and I flew to Atlanta to connect with another flight that would take me overseas. In Atlanta, I was unexpectedly delayed for one more day. I was missing Kelsey something fierce already, so I called her and asked her to turn around and meet me in Atlanta for a few more hours together. I bought her another plane ticket, and she flew straight back.

  That was pretty incredible right there. I mean, you don’t turn your travel plans around like that for just anybody. I think that’s when we both articulated to the other person that we’d be together forever.

  In Atlanta, we said our goodbyes for the second time. She flew back to Dallas again, and I flew back to Afghanistan. I went straight to Zales.com, bought her an engagement ring, and had it shipped to Dallas. I asked her mom to pick it up then hide it from Kelsey until the moment could be right. The next time I Skyped with Kelsey, I told her I loved her and wanted to marry her. She was all smiles, and so was I. Near the computer on her desk sat her dad’s hat. I told her to look underneath the hat. Inside was the box with my ring for her.

  I said simply yet sincerely, “Kelsey, I love you. I want to be with you forever. Will you marry me?”

  She nodded, then smiled again, one of those deep, deep smiles where she closed her eyes. And there was that type of shining wetness in her eyes when she opened them. Same as there was in mine.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  —

  Kelsey’s mom had always told Kelsey to marry someone who made her laugh. And I definitely made Kelsey laugh. She knew I was for real, and that I loved her with all my might. Nothing would keep us apart.

  The army, however, didn’t see things quite that way.

  The moment I got back to FOB Salerno, I was told to report to my commander immediately. The person who told me let it slip that it was rumored all over base that I was in trouble for something big, but he couldn’t say for what exactly. I went to the office and waited and waited. Eventually the story came out.

  When I’d been in Mexico, I’d been dumb enough to post pictures of the trip on my MySpace page, which was set to “public.” The whole world could see those pictures—including my sergeant major and battalion commander. I wore earrings and had grown a small chinstrap beard while away from Afghanistan, and these were apparently infractions of regular military appearance, even while on vacation. When Kelsey and I had hung out with that other couple, there were pictures of us and them taken on the dance floor. One picture made it look like I was dancing with the other guy, even though I wasn’t.

  This was in the era of the official U.S. military policy called “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which prohibited gays and lesbians from openly serving in the military, but allowed them as long as they didn’t reveal their sexual orientation. With my colorful holiday clothes, my earrings, my ultra-cool chinstrap beard, and my apparent dancing with another dude, the story was that some higher-up corporate paper pushers felt I had edged too close to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” button. The paperwork was presented to me in black and white, signed, dated, and stamped. An Article 15: nonjudicial punishment. It was official. I was in big trouble.

  This was serious. An Article 15 meant I’d broken the rules of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I wouldn’t go to jail, but I’d be disciplined somehow and likely stripped of my rank, which meant a cut in pay. Not to mention the incident would be in my records file forever, which could affect any future promotions I might get as well as my future army career. Man oh man, my stomach was in knots. How could I be so stupid? The future had been looking so bright with Kelsey, and now all this.

  Hour after hour passed, and I awaited my fate. Four hours. Eight hours. Twelve hours. I was a nervous wreck. They made me sit in a conference room while more paperwork was filled out. Then they let me out of the room for a while to take a couple of deep breaths. I went back to my billet, to the cot where I’d normally stayed. They were already storing some old rusty gun mounts on my cot, like I wasn’t even in the army anymore. I was sure to get shipped somewhere else thanks to my demotion. Then they took me to the sergeant major’s room and had me answer a slew of personal questions about my sexual orientation. In the room along with me for part of the time was my team leader, my LT, the colonel—and a bunch of other NCOs and officers I’d thought I’d known well. I thought we were all part of the army brotherhood. We were all on the same side together, weren’t we? Twelve men in all. Their voices were all stern. No one was smiling.

  Finally the verdict was passed. One of the NCOs ripped off my rank and threw the patch on the ground. He reassigned me to another platoon. He told me to go stand in the hallway.

  I did.

  While out there, I thought I heard a chuckle.

  I did. I definitely heard a chuckle. And then another. And another. Then an all-out gut-busting chorus of laughter.

  The door opened wide.

  “Mills, get in here,” someone said. I walked in, my face still ashen. My sergeant major was grinning ear to ear. “Corporal Mills,” he said. “You’ve just been punked.”

  Punked?!

  It was all a joke.

  A huge, elaborate twelve-hour joke, the kind of joke only your friends in the army can pull on you. They were all howling by now, rolling around, falling over themselves, all laughing hard at me. I was still shaking in my boots. This was the best joke they’d played in years, and they all did it because they loved me and cared for me and considered me a brother and friend.

  Slowly the blood came back into my face and I croaked out one small chuckle. Before long I was laughing along with them, and threatening payback big time—even to the officers, although I said this cloaked in a barrage of “sirs.” Hey—I was just glad it was all over.

  When I walked outside, forty soldiers were waiting. They all pointed and cheered, whistled, and bust a gut. Everybody in the whole command center had been in on it. I called them all names. I threatened payback. It was game on. Never, for the rest of their days, would any of them be safe.

  —

  It took a while before Josh fully accepted that his sister and I were getting married. He wasn’t angry or furious or not my friend anymore. He didn’t even have any strong words with me. But I could tell something was wrong.

  Normally, he and I spent a lot of our days together, both when we were on security detail and when we were just hanging out. But I guess a number of the guys had been giving him crap about me dating his sister, and now that Kelsey and I were engaged, the crap went through the roof. Poor Josh got it from all angles. We argued about a few inconsequential things and he even swung at me once, as only army guys can do, and hit me in the shoulder. But I wouldn’t fight back. Not with Josh. Not then. He was going to be my brother-in-law whether he wanted to be or not. Eventually he got over it and welcomed me into his family. Family is everything to me, and I could tell it was the same with him.

  The deployment continued, pranks notwithstanding. We still went out on daily patrols. There were still threats and rumors of threats.

  One day we went out to a district center (sometimes called a Point of Origin site) with the ANP, the Afghan police. The center was basically a four-building compound in the middle of nowhere with a wall around it. The ANP had been getting mortared at the district center, and they wanted us to check things out. Sure enough, as darkness began to fall, mortars began to scream in and explode near the base. We calculated where the mortars were coming from, then got orders to go out the next night and check things out.

  The next night we rolled out in our Humvees in blackout conditions with our lights off. When we got to the base of the hill where the mortars were being shot at us from, we hiked up the hill. It was nearing midnight, and before we reached the top, we got orders that the mission was over. We shrugged, hiked back down, got into our trucks, and headed back to the FOB.

  When I got back, I started making a plate of food. It was rice and beans and meat, sort of a weird stew thing that I’d thrown together. I’d just
got it heated up and was sprinkling on the salt and pepper, when more mortars started falling. We were in our FOB now, not out near the district center, and we’d been mortared before at the FOB, but these were falling really close to us. I could hear the whistle and the boom as each fell. The compound shook.

  I ran to the trucks and jumped on my gun, prepared to shoot back if the order came. The mortars died down pretty soon after that. I sat for a while, then we heard the incident was all clear. That was it. As I headed back to my stew, I wondered if Kelsey knew what her fiancé actually did for a living. I wasn’t going to tell her about incidents like this, because I didn’t want to worry her. But getting mortared twice in two different locations in two days did give me pause for thought. Kelsey wasn’t marrying an insurance salesman or a dentist. She was marrying a combat soldier, no stranger to taking mortar fire.

  Shortly after the mortar incident, we had a bad day for our battalion. A dump truck full of explosives rammed into one of our district centers and killed three of our men. I didn’t know the men well, but I was tasked with taking one of the bodies back to Bagram Airfield in southeast Afghanistan, in preparation for transport home to the States. It was a sobering assignment.

  Altogether in our brigade we had close to 3,500 soldiers. On my first deployment, 18 were killed and 200 were wounded. It hurts to lose anybody, but those numbers are considered relatively light for fifteen months of being shot at in a combat zone. I was pretty sure Kelsey knew the dangers of being married to a man like me, but still I had to wonder. Nobody could anticipate a soldier’s future, and anything could happen.

  Anything.

  —

  Our unit came home for good in the spring.

  I was so excited to see Kelsey again. I returned to the States at night on April 13, 2008. The following day was my twenty-first birthday. Kelsey had turned nineteen by then. She came to meet me right away, and she was still sure she wanted to marry me. I was still sure I wanted to marry her. Our wedding was set for June 21, 2008, in Texas. We planned for a big wedding with all of our family members there, along with a lot of great friends.

  The day of the wedding was Texas hot, and we lined up in front of a minister on the front porch of this beautiful historic mansion in Dallas—the Bingham House. Kelsey came around the corner of the house on the arm of her father. She looked absolutely stunning in a white strapless dress. At one point in the service, Kelsey had a vial of white sand, and I had some green sand, and together we both poured our sand into a glass vase to symbolize unity. Kelsey was my wife, and I was her husband, to have and to hold from that day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death parted us. We spoke those vows seriously.

  Following the ceremony, we held a reception with a lot of music and dancing and laughter. That night we went to a hotel while all our friends went back to my in-laws’ house for another party.

  Three days after our wedding, Kelsey moved from Texas to Fort Bragg. I had ten days’ leave total. We found an apartment, moved in together, and got settled into our new life. We got our tax refunds back and bought a futon and some other furniture, nothing much. One of the very first things we did was go together to get a yellow Lab.

  We named our dog Buddy, and the three of us felt right at home.

  —

  Shortly after our wedding, I was promoted to E5 (sergeant), which meant more responsibility and a bit more money. Another deployment was coming up, but it wasn’t for another fifteen months or so, and that seemed like a long way off still.

  From moment one, Kelsey and I got along well in our married life together. There wasn’t a lot to disagree about. We liked each other really well. My career was set, at least for the time being, so that wasn’t a question. We had enough money to pay all our bills. Sure, we were young, but plenty of people in the military get married young. You’re not trying to figure out your major in college or anything. You just want to get on with life.

  We talked about Kelsey getting a job, but we could manage without the added income, and I really didn’t want her to. It was a selfish wish on my part, but in the best of ways. Anytime I wasn’t working, I wanted to see her. If she was working at another job, then I knew there’d always be conflicting schedules. I wanted us to be able to spend every free moment together. For now she agreed.

  We made friends with our neighbors like married people do, and had barbecues and get-togethers and game nights. Josh and Deanna and their baby Reagan lived nearby, so Kelsey was never homesick for family. Buddy proved to be a great dog, friendly and protective, and I was glad he was around to be with Kelsey whenever I couldn’t be there.

  Orders came through, and I wasn’t with headquarters anymore. I was switched to Charlie Troop, 4/73rd Cavalry. That meant I was still infantry, still in the 82nd Division, just not pulling security detail for the colonel anymore. I was fine with that decision.

  As the time came nearer for my second deployment, I worried some about Kelsey being taken care of if something ever happened to me. We knew my second deployment wasn’t going to be as easy as the first. Our unit was set to go to the worst region of Afghanistan, and I was sure to fire my weapon this time.

  But all of that could be put on hold for now. We had a good life mapped out, Kelsey and me. This was our time of honeymooning. Our season of jubilee. When we looked ahead, we saw only hope. And when it came to our small family, we were certain the best was yet to come.

  The form looked straightforward.

  I wrote my name, rank, serial number, unit name, and date of birth at the top, then scanned the rest, filling in answers as I went. I’d filled one out before at the start of my first deployment too, but something felt different about filling out the form now that I was married.

  The question of which song I wanted to be played at my funeral was easy. I’d thought of that before and had already picked it out—“American Soldier” by Toby Keith. I liked the way the song talked about how a soldier stands ready when a wolf growls at the door. I wrote down that I wanted to be buried along with my wedding ring and a picture of my family. I wanted to be buried in Michigan, so my parents could look after the grave. I figured Kelsey would remarry for sure, so I didn’t want to saddle her with another responsibility. I didn’t want a military funeral. It seemed too formal for me.

  A few more blank spaces stared at me from the form, but I didn’t give much consideration to the rest of the details. I signed the paper at the bottom, glanced at my signature for a moment and considered how oddly vulnerable it looked on this particular page, then went on with the next form.

  I didn’t plan on dying. No one does. Every soldier fills out these forms prior to deployment. You need to think these things through in advance. You need to get all your paperwork in line in case something bad happens.

  It’s just a formality, I told myself. That’s all.

  —

  The closer we got to deploying, the more our training ramped up. On my first deployment, I’d been a private. My only job was to take orders. On this second deployment I was a sergeant and a team leader. Now I was not only taking orders but giving orders too. I was responsible for where guys got positioned, for what happened if a man went down, for how much ammo we used and at what rates of fire. Lives were on the line like they’d always been, but now I was responsible for those lives.

  Some of that new responsibility was just funny. Once on a Friday night, I was on duty in the barracks. I didn’t live in the barracks then, but I was the CQ for that night (stands for “in charge of quarters”), which meant I was responsible for the building and everybody there. Upward of three hundred guys lived in the barracks. An older private had been out drinking, and along about nine o’clock, he staggered back to the barracks and ran into me. He was a big dude, muscled, thirty-two years old, and I asked him a few questions and he got lippy.

  “Tell ya what,” he slurred at last. “I’ll wrestle you.”

  “You don’t want to wrestle me,” I sai
d. But right at that minute he reached over and tapped the side of my nose. He wasn’t being aggressive. He did it just to irritate me.

  “Come on, Mills,” he said again. “Wrestle me.”

  So we got into it. We were ground fighting, nothing major, just arm bars and choke holds. I tapped him out three or four times, and he knew he was beat but wouldn’t take no for an answer. The last time he came at me, he came hard. I put some pressure on him. He hit the ground and chipped his tooth. I felt bad about that, even though he was the instigator. So I got him safely to his room and showed him to his bunk, then I went over to the store on base and bought him a thirty-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon to say sorry.

  “Aw, thanks, dude,” he said when he saw the beer. “This is awesome.”

  I told him to have a good night. It was all part of the job.

  As part of the ramp-up, my unit went on a month-long training exercise at Fort Polk, Louisiana, held at the army’s Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC). We practiced the jobs we’d be doing overseas by doing mock-up scenarios first stateside. One day we hiked to an area that looked like an Afghan village and held a run-through of a key leader engagement (KLE), where our leaders met with village leaders. We were schooled on cultural sensitivities and how to work with interpreters, how to find the fine line between pressing Afghan leaders for more information and holding back, letting the realities of a working relationship occur naturally.

  A fake IED went off during one of the exercises, so we jumped to respond to the blast. This meant holding a security perimeter while stabilizing the wounded and calling in helicopters to evacuate the casualties. The blood was fake, but the situation was as realistic as our trainers could design it. I tried to take it all in and do what needed to be done.

  We talked about IEDs a lot. The enemy had concluded that it took too much firepower to fight coalition troops directly, so the IED had become their weapon of choice in this war, and IEDs were responsible for some two-thirds of all coalition soldiers killed or wounded. Two-thirds! Strange, you fight a war these days and most armies have got all these huge weapons—tanks, bombs, fighter planes, warships, machine guns, missile launchers, and even access to nukes—yet something as small as an IED has become one of the most lethal and destructive weapons of modern warfare.