The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  “Not Kurt! Not Kurt!”

  Chris Frosheiser ran down the hall, and then he ran back into the living room. The lieutenant colonel asked if he could call someone, but Frosheiser was already calling Erin, and then a friend who drove him to the house of his other son, Kurt’s twin, Joel. Frosheiser banged on the window, shouting, “It’s Kurt, it’s our Kurt!” and then he and Joel drove together to the suburb where Erin lived. The rest of the day and the following days were a blur of tears and friends and wine and exhaustion.

  On November 11, Veterans Day, Kurt’s battalion, the 2-6 Infantry, gathered in formation at the American base in south Baghdad for a memorial service. John Prior was there, and so was another captain, Robert Swope, who later wrote an account of the ceremony:

  In the background are voices of people talking, vehicles passing, and helicopters overhead. Some birds intermittently fly over us. A butterfly goes by. I see one of the Iraqi translators who works in the TOC sitting in a chair reading a paper while the rest of the battalion stands in formation. At 1430 the ceremony is supposed to begin, but it doesn’t start until 1448 because we have to wait for a couple generals to arrive.

  The memorial ceremony begins with an invocation by the chaplain, and then the battalion commander and the company commander both speak. Two privates who knew the soldier follow them. One of the privates chokes and starts tearing up while giving his tribute. I look around me out into a sea of sad faces and in the very back of the battalion formation I see that one of the female soldiers attached to our unit is crying.

  A bagpiper plays a crappy version of “Amazing Grace” and halfway through it doesn’t even sound much like the song anymore. The soldier who plays “Taps” later on at the end of the ceremony does a much better job.

  After “Amazing Grace” but before “Taps” begins, the chaplain reads a few verses from the Bible, and then gives a memorial message and prayer. It’s followed by a moment of silence. Then the acting First Sergeant for the company does roll call, yelling out the names of various soldiers in the unit. They all answer, one after another, that they are present. When he comes to the private who died, everything is quiet.

  He calls out his name again, and still there is no answer. He does it a final time, using his full name and rank:

  “Private First Class Kurt Russell Frosheiser!”

  Silence.

  And then the mournful melody of “Taps” begins. Midway through the bugler begins slowly walking away, letting the music softly fade out in the distance. Jess walks over to where seven soldiers stand with seven rifles. He gives the order and they fire off three series of blanks, giving him a twenty-one-gun salute.

  When they’re finished the battalion commander walks up to the memorial, which is an M-16 with a bayonet attached and driven into a wooden stand. Resting on top of the butt stock is a helmet and hanging down are a pair of dog tags with his name, social security number, blood type, and religion on them. Directly in front of the M-16 and in the center of the memorial stand is a pair of tan combat boots. To the left and to the right of his boots are a bronze star and purple heart ensconced in their silk and velvet cases. A pair of sabers representing the scout unit he belonged to are crossed behind the rifle. Others follow the battalion commander who salutes the memorial representing Private Frosheiser, until all of the soldier’s company has saluted, and the rest of those attending the ceremony can begin …

  This is the second time I’ve had to go to a ceremony like this so far this year and I don’t feel comfortable doing it. I walk up to the memorial the way I did last April for another soldier in my company, who we did this same ritual for in a field of dirt next to the tarmac at the Baghdad International Airport. I don’t lower my head and pray or whisper anything as so many others do before me. I don’t lean over and touch the tip of his boots like the sergeant major ahead of me just did. I just salute and then turn and walk away.

  Chris Frosheiser wanted to escort his son’s body back from Baghdad. He at least wanted to meet it at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. In the end, it was enough to receive the coffin at the Des Moines airport with thirty family members and friends and see Kurt’s face one more time. At the wake, Frosheiser tried to say that his son’s courage filled him with awe, but he wasn’t able to express himself well. Kurt received a military funeral after a Catholic service and was buried in Glendale Cemetery.

  Frosheiser’s ex-wife, Kurt’s mother, Jeanie, told the local paper, “He loved this land and its principles. He loved Iowa. It’s an honor to give my son to preserve our way of life.” She had become an evangelical Christian, and she said that Kurt had volunteered to fight the forces of evil. This was too apocalyptic for Chris Frosheiser, suggesting some kind of religious war, and it wasn’t how Kurt had talked. On the night of the terrible news, Governor Tom Vilsack had called to offer condolences and had said that he hoped the country’s policies were as good as its people. Frosheiser was troubled by the thought that it might not be so. He kept comparing the president’s oath of office to the oath Kurt had sworn when he became a soldier: Were they carried out with equal seriousness? In January, one of Kurt’s friends from Fort Knox wrote in an e-mail, “I don’t suppose he was in an up-armored HMMV, was he? Probably not, Uncle Sam wouldn’t give us Joe’s the good stuff.” Frosheiser didn’t know the answer, but thinking about it didn’t help a bit with his grief.

  The speed of it all, the historical vastness—his boy, in the Army, in Iraq, the Ramadan Offensive, hit in the head—was overwhelming. Frosheiser dreamed that he was in the Army with Kurt, though it was unclear whether they were father and son or friends, but both of them were sitting on the right side and when the explosion came they fell out of the Humvee together and everything was okay. The thought that he hadn’t been with Kurt that night to protect him wouldn’t leave Frosheiser alone, nor the thought that he hadn’t had time to send Tolkien’s The Return of the King, a book Kurt had requested. On his wrist he wore Kurt’s watch, still set to Baghdad time, with an alarm that still went off every day at 6:30 a.m., 9:30 p.m. in Des Moines. For weeks and months he struggled with the meaning of his son’s death, but he couldn’t reach an answer.

  Frosheiser was fifty-six years old. He was a salesman’s son from Chicago, with a flat Midwestern accent, and he had worked most of his life in insurance before starting a new career as the Salvation Army’s director of social services in Des Moines, trying to solve the problems of the hardship cases that came into his office, handing out food to men sleeping under bridges. He was a lifelong Democrat, and as a student in 1968 he had supported Robert Kennedy. He couldn’t identify with the antiwar movement, though; he thought Vietnam was a terrible waste but not a reason to hate your country. Even the Gene McCarthy campaign struck him as too elite, too unconventional, and when McCarthy said that Kennedy was “running best among the less intelligent and less educated people,” it touched the resentful nerve of a lower-middle-class kid attending Drake University. The Tom Haydens of the world were going to make it no matter how they spent their youth; the Chris Frosheisers had to be careful what they did with their time.

  He was part of Middle America, but he didn’t join the backlash of Nixon and Reagan; he remained a liberal, mostly on economic grounds. As the quality of the Democratic candidates deteriorated, he turned back to one of the academic interests of his college years, and the apartment he rented after his divorce in the mid-1990s filled up with books on Roosevelt, Truman, Acheson, the midcentury liberals who seemed wiser and tougher than the heirs of George McGovern. He read historical accounts of FDR’s Four Freedoms and the Truman Doctrine, and when the report of the 9/11 Commission was published, he bought one of the first copies. Reading it, he concluded that the ideas of that earlier generation of Democrats, who had fought wars against fascism and communism while creating an alliance of democracies, should be brought back and applied to the war on terror and the conflict in Iraq. He was uneasy with his Democratic friends who thought that Iraq was another Vietnam, and he could
n’t tolerate hearing that Kurt’s life had been wasted. When a local Catholic peace group got in touch in April 2004 to offer condolences and let him know that Kurt’s picture, along with those of the other fallen Iowans, would be on display at a weekly candlelight vigil, Frosheiser called and told them not to use Kurt’s. Condolences, he thought, should have been offered much earlier, and the spirit of the vigil was about the politics of the war, not the soldiers. But when he bought a long-life candle at a Christian bookshop and told the cashier whose grave it was for, and she said, “Thank you for your sacrifice,” that, too, sounded wrong. It had not been his choice.

  In the Iowa caucuses that winter, Frosheiser supported Senator John Edwards. He had misgivings about John Kerry. When a friend called Kerry’s vote against the eighty-seven-billion-dollar war appropriation a “protest vote,” Frosheiser said, “Kind of a serious issue to be casting protest votes.” He wondered if a President Kerry would hold steadfast in Iraq under pressure from the party’s activist base. If not, what would Kurt’s death mean then? When President Bush said in a speech, “We will hold this hard-won ground,” he found the language inspiring. Kerry’s language did not inspire. Frosheiser kept remembering Lincoln’s 1862 message to Congress: “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” He longed to hear words like these from a wartime leader; politics required the art of explanation. But Bush, who had made so many mistakes, was unable to admit or even see them; with the best education money could buy he seemed to know little about the world. The war was getting worse, with no sign that anyone in leadership could turn it around. Frosheiser wanted to see a government of national unity, composed of Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton of the 9/11 Commission, and Senators Biden, Feinstein, Hagel, Lieberman, Lugar, and McCain. Iraq was too important to be left to the partisans.

  While I was away in Iraq, a letter from Des Moines arrived. Chris Frosheiser had read something I’d written about John Prior, and he was looking for some way to comprehend Kurt’s short life and death in Iraq. After I got back, we began a correspondence by e-mail. Frosheiser’s were full of the restless questions, the constant return to the same inconclusive themes, of a man who has suffered a trauma and is determined to feel every contour of it, to avoid nothing.

  April 1, 2004: Democrats need a foreign policy and a national security strategy to back it up. Now, I have gone too long and not answered your questions very well. It shows my ambivalence and the difficulty in talking beyond the personal. Sorry. May I write more later? I can’t go on now. I have re-read Truman’s “Truman Doctrine” speech and Marshall’s Harvard Commencement speech of June 1947. I admired them and those policies. I must avoid bitterness. In honor of Kurt and the other soldiers, bitterness seems inappropriate. More later, if you don’t mind.

  April 1, 2004: What would Kurt want? He is my guide. Sometimes “force protection” and the job are in conflict, but all that is possible ought to be done to protect these brave people, our soldiers. I miss my son a lot! Tears flow everyday. What’s it worth? A democratic Iraq? Our soldiers helping achieve a more free, democratic Iraq?

  May 15, 2004: Sometimes I think about Kurt being in Baghdad, Iraq as part of something called “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Kurt said he wanted to be a part of something larger than himself. He was in the middle of something so huge it nearly defies understanding. There is more to be said about this, I just don’t know what it is. My son died for something. And there is honor in simply enlisting, let alone serving in Iraq.

  May 26, 2004: I want this to be a “success.” For the Iraqis, the United States, and for the sacrifice made by Kurt and all the others. And for the pain of Kurt’s not being among us anymore. Kurt; a son, a brother to Erin and Joel, and an uncle to Colin and Madelyn. Not trying to be overly dramatic, Mr. Packer, just trying to express how it “feels.”

  July 5, 2004 [In early July, the First Armored Division finally returned to Germany after more than a year in Iraq]: Now, I’m kind of lost with them leaving, and without Kurt. This probably makes no sense but Kurt’s watch is on Baghdad time and his unit isn’t there, though he was with them there. He is not with them now, back in Baumholder. This is why it takes so long to, what, carry on? Maybe I dwell on this kind of stuff too much. But that is me and I’ll be alright.

  August 28, 2004: Next Tuesday, George Bush will be campaigning near Des Moines, in a farm community called Alleman, Iowa. Apparently, the campaign invited us as Kurt’s family to be there. Joel and I talked about it and Erin too. And we will attend. It is a tribute to Kurt, I think. It may or may not be construed as support for Bush. But, you know, I will put my Democratic loyalty up against anyone’s. As a tribute to Kurt I am entitled to shake hands with the President. Besides, it is still a bit odd I think that very little was said to me, a loyal Democrat, by leading Democrats, about Kurt’s service. I know a guy who was the State Party chair and who was an early Edwards supporter. I had expressed an interest in talking to Edwards about Kurt’s service. It was never arranged. I thought someone like Edwards should speak to someone who lost a child in combat. Is there a larger issue exposed here? About Democrats and the soldiers? Sometimes it feels like I don’t have a Party. John Kerry did send a card to both Jeanie and me, but I really think there is an ill at ease sense among activist Democrats about the “warriors” because of opposition to the war.

  September 5, 2004: In follow-up to my previous e-mail about meeting Dubya, it didn’t happen. Out of a sense of obligation to honor Kurt, to receive his Commander in Chief’s offer of tribute and condolences I went. We were just part of the crowd. The former wife who received the invite from the local Republican Party organization wasn’t too happy either. We did get to hear the “stump speech,” a longer version of which he gave to the Convention. He speaks of the “war against terror” as if it includes Iraq, no distinguishing between them. Is that a “lie,” a “misimpression,” is it misleading, is it true and he knows and isn’t sharing all the information? What is a citizen to do? He received a lot of applause about lessening the tax burden and about his unwillingness to have our policy controlled by foreign governments or having our soldiers under the leadership of foreign governments. Someone made the point somewhere that Allawi exerted this control in Najaf and Fallujah. A fine point in a Presidential election I suppose, but where is John Kerry? Is it that he really can’t talk about Iraq because the “base” of the Democratic Party wants to simply pull out? This talk of the “ownership society” sounds like a tearing of the New Deal/Great Society safety net/social compact. We are in trouble. I will be happy when the election is over. I can’t take much more of the hyperbolic bullshit!

  September 11, 2004: Grandson Colin spent the night last night. We ate popcorn, visited Borders, watched Star Wars, and this morning took a dip in the pool (a bit cool). Life goes on, ready or not. I have to say that Kurt is never out of my thoughts. Ever. That may not be healthy but it is the way it is. I am 57 years old, George, I may never fully recover from this. And maybe I shouldn’t. The idea that Kurt left to “live your life, old man” and that Garrison Keillor included in his Memorial Day Sonnet, “And may we live the good lives they would have lived.” That hasn’t been defined yet. One day at a time. I have two living children and two grandchildren. I don’t know what to make of it all, yet.

  October 4, 2004: What is best for America and Iraq now? That is the question. A better Iraq? Is it possible? Why did we go into Iraq? What justifies our remaining? American lives have been lost, precious lives, for what? Can something be achieved that is worthy of the sacrifice? Are there things not known to anyone other than the President and his advisers? No one in the Senate or any of the “attentive” and “informed” organizations? That would justify the sacrifice? And how much more sacrifice can be justified? For us to turn Iraq over to civil war would be hard to take. I don’t have the right to advocate continued involvement because of my sacrifice that would lead to more, many more. What is best
for America and Iraq? What is reality on the ground in Iraq? What is possible to achieve? Can Kerry and a team of his choosing do it? It is a great leap of faith.

  And most of the time none of this matters to me. I want my son. My son.

  * * *

  THE HOME FRONT of the Iraq War was not like World War II, and it was not like Vietnam. It didn’t unite Americans across party lines against an existential threat (September 11 did that, but not Iraq). There were no war bonds, no collection drives, no universal call-up, no national mobilization, no dollar-a-year men. We were not all in it together. Nor did it tear the country apart. As soon as the war began, the American antiwar movement quietly folded up its tent and went home. The first and second anniversaries of the invasion saw large demonstrations in Europe and parts of the Middle East and Asia, but in this country, organized opposition was muted by the imperative to support the troops in harm’s way. Candlelight vigils like the one that displayed the pictures of fallen Iowans in Des Moines strove for a tone of respectful dissent.

  This doesn’t mean that the war wasn’t controversial; no foreign venture has been more so since Vietnam. At a certain level—that of elite opinion, amplified in the media—Iraq generated words as bitter as any event in modern American history. But most American citizens didn’t turn against other American citizens with a fury, any more than they joined together in a common cause. Iraq was a strangely distant war. It was always hard to picture the place; the war didn’t enter the popular imagination in songs that everyone soon knew by heart in the manner of previous wars, including the good one and the bad one. It was unlikely that a novelist would spend six months in Baghdad and come back to update From Here to Eternity or Dog Soldiers. The one slender American novel that the war has produced so far, Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker, a dialogue over lunch in a Washington hotel room between two old friends, one of whom is preparing to assassinate George W. Bush, was a perfect emblem of a political culture in which hysteria took the place of thought. Baker’s novel had nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with the ugliness of politics in this country. Michael Moore, the left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh, made a hugely successful movie in which Saddam’s Iraq was portrayed as a happy place where children flew kites. Iraq provided a blank screen on which Americans were free to project anything they wanted, and because so few Americans had anything directly at stake there, many of them never saw more than the image of their own feelings. The exceptions, of course, were the soldiers and their families, who carried almost the entire weight of the war.