by Piers Platt
Staff Sergeant Beale leaned over to me. “Well, I gotta say, sir – you’ve been pretty upbeat today considering all the crap we put you through.”
“I’m going home, Sergeant – it’s the only thing keeping me sane.”
I knew, however, that our presence had not gone unnoticed, and we had been stuck out there more than enough time for an insurgent to set an IED along our route back to the FOB.
“Staff Sergeant Beale.”
“Sir?”
“Where are the Kiowas going?”
“Back to base, sir – now that we’re on our way in.”
“I’m going to give you some advice, then – tell them to fly back to Mackenzie along our route. They can look for IEDs and spot anyone waiting to ambush us off the sides of the road. We were sitting out here a long time.”
“Roger, good idea, sir.”
I nodded – 13 months had taught us never to waste an air asset. The final leg home was slow and hot, the towing tank’s exhaust washing over us in the dusty night. Finally, nearly nine hours after we had left, we returned to Mackenzie. I grabbed some midnight chow and returned to our tent, where Ryan Simms was already back from his own mission.
Captain Hoffman saw me first, laughing and clapping me on my back. “Welcome back, Platt! You’re done – you’re not going out again.”
I wasn’t in an exuberant mood. “Thanks, sir.”
“What a last mission, huh?” Simms asked, shaking his head in disbelief.
“I couldn’t have scripted it any better if I tried,” I told him.
“Yeah. Let’s get the fuck out of here, man.”
Epilogue
It has been nine years, but some of Iraq is still with me. Unexpected loud noises still bother me – I jump embarrassingly when a car door is slammed or a heavy box is dropped, my body still trying to tell me that such things are threats. It took me a while to stop scanning the sides of the road looking for IEDs while I was in a car, and I still catch myself evaluating places from a tactical perspective: sizing up terrain, noting the entry and exit points, or where the most likely ambush might be.
Not all of it is bad: 13 months of having to know exactly where I was in a foreign land ingrained in me a deep, almost instinctual navigational awareness. I was in Paris on business, and after we checked into our hotel, my colleague and I decided to head towards the Champs-Élysées in search of a restaurant for dinner. I knew he had lived in Paris for a year, so I let him lead the way, but my subconscious started screaming at me immediately after we left the hotel – we were going the wrong way. After a block, I finally told him.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Why?”
I thought about it for a second, realizing I hadn’t reached this awareness consciously.
“We drove past the Champs-Élysées on the ride to the hotel,” I told him, “but we’re walking in the same direction we were last headed in the car. Plus, the Arc de Triomphe is on top of a small rise, and we’re moving downhill now.”
I have one recurring nightmare, though I don’t think it stems from any of the more traumatic events I experienced. I am in unfriendly territory, and though I am calm and confident, when the enemy appears, none of my weapons work. I pull the trigger time and again, with no effect, becoming more and more frustrated while the anonymous enemy taunts me with a silent grin. It’s not a grisly or horrific dream, just unsettling. I suppose it is a metaphor for our entire experience in Iraq, but I am too tired to appreciate the symbolism in the dark of the night.
Trying to summarize my experiences is difficult, partly because there was nothing conclusive or absolute about Iraq. I’m almost ashamed of my time in Iraq, compared to the experience of other veterans in history – it wasn’t like the accounts I have read of Vietnam, or World War II, it wasn’t epic or particularly life-changing or at all typical of the wars I had studied. I was attacked a number of times, had a handful of close brushes with death, and killed one unknown enemy from several hundred yards’ distance, but otherwise spent most of the tour bored and frustrated, and returned unscathed. That’s not to generalize for all those who have served in Iraq – I know there are soldiers who wish their experience had been a lot less traumatic, many in my own unit. I am grateful for having avoided that, but I feel unfulfilled, like a minor-leaguer who never gets his at-bat in the big leagues. I’ve been there, and I’ve done that, but … not in the way I expected.
Before we even left for Iraq, it had been fairly clear that we would have few strategic victories. Instead of going over there with the expectation of “winning,” therefore, our commanders told us that “victory” would mean doing our job for a year, and doing it without casualties. At the time, we knew the latter goal would likely be unattainable, but I still resolved to do everything I could to bring all of my soldiers home, alive and uninjured. I hope that my actions as their leader played a small part in achieving that goal in my platoons, though I know it was mostly due to luck and the professionalism of my soldiers and NCOs. We made a difference to some Iraqis, to be sure – the election was a success, and I’m proud to have had a role in that. But the personal satisfaction of safely bringing every one of my soldiers home far outweighed anything else I had accomplished.
Other platoons were not so lucky. We talk of selfless sacrifice, of duty and courage, because these concepts somehow seem to ease the pain of their passing, and in some small way seem to justify the loss. But in the grand scheme of things, we ousted a brutal but stable dictatorship and replaced it with bitter sectarian violence, and the United States is no safer now than we were before we invaded Iraq. As a soldier who fought and lost friends there, I hope their deaths will serve as a deterrent to future generations, a warning of the consequences of ill-considered foreign interventions. But as a student of history, I’m not that naïve.
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Text copyright 2014 by Piers Platt
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