Packed for the Wrong Trip

by W. Zach Griffith

  “Anyone who has been in combat conditions for any length of time—certainly a year is plenty—will develop behaviors that are adaptive, that are healthy, within that environment. And anyone transitioning from that environment to a normal, peacetime environment is going to need considerable time to readjust his or her responses. Furthermore, that readjustment is going to be unpleasant. It’s going to hurt.

  “What the returning soldier needs, more than anything,” Gibson emphasizes, “is time.”

  Ours is a nation in which the military is controlled—thankfully—by an elected civilian government. Yet we are encouraged in the widespread and dangerous illusion that the violence and bloodshed of America’s wars have nothing to do with our ordinary lives. Thus, even if the war in Iraq, or any war, represents the spiritual and moral problem of human violence, it isn’t really our problem. We fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.

  Those who like vicarious thrills can watch Brad Pitt or Kiefer Sutherland injure and kill people in dramatic and stylized slow motion, and those who like to think of themselves as followers of Christ or Muhammad or Buddha can find ways to justify or deplore violence without ever having to consider the ways in which they are served by it.

  Relatively “few” of the hundreds of thousands of American troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan lost their lives as a result. A “mere” 1–4 percent, depending on how you count it, actually died in combat or of combat-related injuries. The number climbs when you account for veteran suicide. This cannot be directly attributed to a combat deployment, though PTSD significantly raises the risk of suicide in an individual.

  What people hear is that more troops survived wounds, and they regard “not dead” as a synonym for “returned home safe.” More than thirty-five thousand Purple Heart medals have been given to those injured during the war in Iraq. No one can return to a life of normalcy after such experiences as being shot or blown up.

  Injured or not, many, and perhaps most, of the troops who served in combat in this generation’s wars, as in past wars, came home changed into someone else. If you talk to combat veterans or to their loved ones, positive changes may be noted.

  “He grew up over there,” fathers of young combat veterans might say. “He takes life seriously now.” Still, a father must wince when he says this, as if his son’s maturity, however welcome, is a benefit that came at a cost too high to calculate.

  “I am not who I was,” Dizl and Turtle declared to one another, and they couldn’t even have said whether the change was for better or worse, only that it had happened, was huge, and would prove permanent.

  Deliberate, organized violence has a long pedigree as a maturational rite of passage from boy to man, but presumably President George W. Bush did not attack Iraq so children of this generation would have an opportunity to grow up, any more than the Vietnam-era draft was in place so that the boys of Bush’s generation would have an opportunity to become men.

  The varied effects of combat on the people who have served, been wounded or maimed, been changed, or who died in the midst of a war are immaterial. They are no more the point of the exercise than the death of Saddam’s infant daughter from an American bomb, the destruction of a baby food factory, or the looting of Iraqi national treasures. The point of a war is to accomplish by force some aim that cannot be accomplished in any other way. If a nation is, or at least aspires to be, a moral nation, then the aim must be legitimate, and important enough to justify the material and moral cost. We must acknowledge and pay the high costs of war.

  “Don’t die,” the small boy wrote, and none of them did. The men of the 152nd came home, all of them, with hearts, brains, guts, spines, and balls all still more or less connected. Some had come very close to death, a mere turn of the head or the shifting of weight from one foot to the other being the difference between living and dying.

  Many had friends from other units who had not been so lucky.

  Chiclets couldn’t save the life of his friend, a Marine who had been too close when an IED exploded outside the prison gates. The combat medic held his friend’s head together with his hands, trying to keep his dear and necessary brain from falling out, and watched as the life left his friend’s face. He has to live with that.

  This gentle young man was, however, able to save the life of the Iraqi who had detonated the improvised explosive device, then been subsequently injured and captured by retaliating US soldiers. That man killed Chiclets’s friend. He has to live with that, too. In this one act, in saving the life of the man who killed his friend, Chiclets showed a love of humanity that would humble Christ himself. He, too, was a hajji lover, and there is now one fewer Iraqi family with a justified hatred of America.

  When the 306th MP Brigade arrived in January 2005 to take over the Sixteenth MPs’ duties, Abu Ghraib could still, without a doubt, be described as dirty and dangerous. The insurgency was still going strong, and the prison was still smack in the middle of it, geographically and symbolically. The facility retained most of its strategic disadvantages—no one had moved the highways, for example—so mortar, rocket, and sniper attacks remained a common feature of daily life.

  But the prisoners were now housed in the clean, well-organized, and relatively secure Camp Redemption, sorted among the holding areas with their air-conditioned tents by age, health, and the level of risk presented.

  The troops, meanwhile, now had a gym, a BX/PX (a shop where personal items might be purchased), a KBR laundry unit, volleyball and basketball courts, and an Internet center.

  Abu Ghraib now was home to the 115th Combat Support Hospital with doctors, nurses, operating theaters, and an intensive-care unit where, among others, Ahmad al-Shayea, the suicide bomber, was treated after he survived the December 2004 detonation of the VBIED he was driving. “I came to help the Iraqis,” he told American researcher Ken Ballen. “But when I needed help … the Americans were the ones who helped me.”12

  Rumsfeld was right back in May of 2004. The detainee abuse photographed by Graner, England, and company did not represent America. It did not represent American values and it certainly did not represent the values of Colonel Quantock’s Sixteenth MP Brigade at Abu Ghraib. However, this is not true merely because the secretary of defense declared it to be. It was, instead, a truth lived out by the men from Maine and their comrades from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico, the Americans inaugurating the long work of redemption through the blood, the shit (actual and metaphorical), the ambiguity, and the excruciating physical, psychological, and spiritual pain of Abu Ghraib.

  Who are you? asked the eyes of the detainees, who watched as Shirley, Sugar, and Dizl shielded the child’s body with their own.

  We are Americans. This is how we roll.

  Concussive injuries of all kinds are cumulative. Dizl’s original traumatic brain injury was exacerbated by repeated exposure to explosions in Iraq. To this day, he has problems with memory, with mood, and with maintaining the coherence of his thoughts. These are normal manifestations of the underlying injury, yet when Dizl first went to the VA hospital to have his war wounds treated, he was asked whether he could provide proof that his injuries were, in fact, sustained in Iraq.

  “Do you have any witnesses?” the screener asked.

  “Well, there’s the lieutenant,” Dizl replied. “But he’s still deployed. And Parker was there, but … he’s …”

  The claims officer looked at him expectantly.

  “Well, he died,” said Dizl. “Parker died. Not then, I mean. Later.”

  “Well, sir, you’ll need to get some sort of documentation to support your petition. A statement from your living witness would be helpful.”

  The idea of trying to navigate the VA bureaucracy with an injured brain and a heart sick with grief is appalling enough to make suicide among war vets seem explicable.

  The indignity of having to prove your own wartime injuries was only exacerbated when Dizl talked to civilians about his deployment.

  �
��Oh, you were in Iraq?” they ask to this day. “Where did you serve?”

  “Abu Ghraib.”

  “Really. How many Iraqis did you torture?”

  Since the 152nd’s return, Abu Ghraib—the prison, not the town—has been closed, but the pain of Abu Ghraib continues, and will continue until it finds itself and loses itself in love. This is what happens with wars, especially those that are ambiguous even beyond the essential ambiguity of any war.

  Some of Dizl’s pain is expressed as outrage, as the anger that is the voice of love, frustrated: How could you, Donald Rumsfeld? How could you, Lynndie England? How could you, insurgent on the overpass? Why wasn’t Kamal, or Shriek, or Young Elvis—even just that one, smiling, innocent boy—worth enough to stay your hand?

  Before the Americans arrived at the Abu Ghraib prison, many thousands drew their last, tormented breaths there. Their bodies were discarded and turned to bones in the sand, bones for Dizl to later collect and attempt to reassemble.

  Then other Iraqis died, right in front of him, blown to pieces by insurgent bombs, and he and his comrades helped gather up the pieces of men and boys whose names they had known. Now Dizl sits on the shore beside a cold sea, watching the water wash the stones.

  In the end, all the enormous expenditure of human effort, along with three hundred million dollars, at last proved insufficient to overcome the strangeness of the House of Strange Fathers and Redemption. With America and her prisoners of war as its last tenant, the whole facility—Hard Site, Mortar Café, DFAC, CASH, torture cells, Redemption—all of it was razed.

  As of December 18, 2011, the American war in Iraq is over. The last American convoys crossed the border into Kuwait, armored-up and under conditions of such secrecy that the soldiers were not able to say good-bye to the Iraqis who had served with them.

  Interviewed on NPR, Michael White, of icasualties.org, said that the official American toll is 4,484 dead, with an estimated 32,000 wounded. The cost to the American taxpayer begins with what was actually authorized for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq together: $824 billion, but this does not include interest, because much of this money was borrowed, nor the long-term care of veterans. Continuing treatment for the men and women injured in these overlapping wars (many Americans are now veterans of both) is expected to cost between $600 billion and $1 trillion.

  Asked to state the number of Iraqi civilians who lost their lives in the war, White refused to give a precise answer, but “it’s in the hundreds of thousands.” Most of these, of course, died not from American bombs or bullets, but at the hands of their fellow Iraqis. Still, absent the invasion, the majority of those who were killed would probably still be alive today. The guys from the 152nd could name a few.

  “In absolute terms,” wrote historian William R. Polk, “virtually every Iraqi has a parent, child, spouse, cousin, friend, colleague, or neighbor—or perhaps all of these—among the dead. More than half the dead were women and children.” The long-term effects of warfare itself, regardless of the cause for which people are fighting, are, Polk reminds us, inevitably brutalizing.

  “War should only take place as a final (unavoidable) option; when it does the wounds run deep and scars remain,” said Captain—now Major—Philip Trevino.

  If, six, seven, or eight years after returning from Iraq, a middle-aged man from Maine still studies the shoulder of I-95 as he drives, alert for IEDs; if he has to check the perimeter of a restaurant before he can bring himself to walk inside; if he can be startled into full-alert by a suddenly slamming door, or be beset by waves of rage or grief, then we can only assume there is a country full of men, women, and children on the other side of the world enduring this, too, and more.

  While it is too soon to know, it is certainly possible that history will judge the American adventure in Iraq as a mistake. Within the existential confines of this war, there were certainly Americans who behaved dishonorably. However, many would, under conditions marked by physical danger and moral ambiguity, nonetheless manage to exemplify what is best in the American character: inventiveness, optimism, tenacity, a desire to defend the weak and champion the vulnerable, and an openhearted willingness to see a shared humanity in a designated enemy.

  The Lost Boys, out of a job and packing up, had the remaining task of “transitioning-in” the soldiers of the 361st who had arrived to relieve them. The Mainers took this seriously, as memories of the brief, dispirited, and unhelpful orientation they had received from their own predecessors were still unpleasantly fresh in their minds.

  “How much stick time do you get?” one new MP asked Dizl, slapping an imaginary nightstick against his open palm.

  “Stick time?” Dizl repeated, dumbfounded. Then he was enraged. “Stick time?”

  He had to swallow a sudden sense of despair: Oh no. Oh shit. They’re going to screw it up. They would certainly be tested, just as the 152nd had been tested. The Bad Guys were gearing up for this already. Within weeks, in fact, Al-Qaeda in Iraq would launch another major mass casualty attack on Abu Ghraib designed to take advantage of the inexperience of the new team. It would be recorded as the largest single assault on an American forward base since the Vietnam War. Thanks to Redemption’s bomb shelters and all those sandbags, at least no detainee would die that day.

  One thousand one … here it was, the last mortar attack of the 152nd’s deployment, a kiss-off from al-Zarqawi.

  Some of the new guys were in the next room when the explosions began. The Lost Boys had hit the deck by en masse instinct, and were now squashed companionably together on the floor.

  A 120 mm rocket landed on the roof, and though it did not explode—they would all have been dead—the impact was jarring, and the Lost Boys could hear the new guys screaming. They offered the traditional military comfort: Welcome to Abu Ghraib, you bastards. Now suck it up, get going. And do it the way it should be done, you hear? This is your war, now.

  On their last day, it rained. Everything—the sand, the sky, the soldiers’ skins, their boots and uniforms, the helicopters and the helo pad they crossed to reach the cafeteria where one more powdered-egg breakfast awaited them—was brownish gray, dulled by rain and mud made of the ever-present dirt and the long-decayed remains of an untold number of human beings.

  Dizl walked behind the younger members of the platoon, his feet matching theirs in the automatic rhythm of a march. An artist first and last, Dizl was meditating on the color of the Iraqi desert after a rain has fallen and the strange fact that he, a forty-year-old army reserve private from the coast of Maine, had come to know so intimately the colors and contours of so alien a place.

  Even the puddles on the tarmac were that brownish gray, reflecting the barest sheen of tarnished silver light. Gathered around the edges of these were hundreds, no, thousands of tiny, thirsty moths, their wings camouflaged in the color of the omnipresent dust, sipping the short-lived moisture while they could.

  Having spied these, Shahein opened his mouth to call out, “Hey boys, check out the moths.” Looking up, he stopped, transfixed. The boys, his boys, were walking toward their ride home, oblivious. Each time a booted foot landed in a puddle, the moths around its edge flew upward, like a slow-motion splash, and the undersides of their wings were a beautiful, shimmering blue. It was as if their footprints bloomed the blue of forget-me-nots, or as if these soldiers, all-unknowing, released with every step a thousand fragments of a Maine summer sky.

  Transport had been arranged and then—FRAGO—rearranged, as helicopters became available, then unavailable, then available again. The men of the 152nd had packed most of the big stuff into the conex boxes, so they could clamber into the open trucks for the ride out to BIAP with only what Turtle referred to as their “carry-on luggage.”

  “Hey, Dizl,” Lunch Lady called from his truck. “Hop up here. I can hold your guitar so it won’t get wet.”

  Beerboy’s mother had already sent an email, liberally laced with joyous exclamation marks, to relatives, friends, and neighbors letting every
one know that, within mere days, her son and his comrades would be back home in Maine. Prayers of thanksgiving would rise from the steeples of Lincolnville’s old country church. The men of the 152nd would be greeted at Bangor Airport by troop greeters offering chocolate chip cookies, and at the National Guard armory by their families holding bunches of bright flowers. Chaplain Andrew Gibson, whose eyes had filled with tears when they departed, would feel his eyes fill again when the roll was called and every name had a voice to answer with.

  When the Mainers returned to the United States, they were asked to fill out self-assessment questionnaires intended to reveal the actual or potential mental health effects of their service at Abu Ghraib.

  Q. Did you see any American Service Members killed in action?

  Huladog points out that they didn’t ask whether the soldier saw any Iraqis die. Space was not given on the page to describe the day that the truck with the spotter appeared on the overpass, the day that forty-one detainees under the care and control of Maine’s citizen-soldiers would be blown to pieces before their eyes, the screams of the dying mingling with urgent cries from the wounded.

  No one on the committee that doubtless created the self-assessment questionnaire thought to ask whether, in view of the Islamic desire to bury all parts of a body before sunset, the Iraqi men had used their Styrofoam lunch plates to scoop up entrails, handing them through the concertina to the American men on the other side.

  No one apparently considered the possibility that, when a desperate detainee (unshot, because the guard in the tower recognized in time that the head under his arm wasn’t a bomb) tossed the severed head of his brother across the wire, the soldier on the other side would find that the head had been threaded onto his outstretched arm like a bead on a string.

  Q. Did you lose any personal friends while in Iraq?

  Did you feel a kinship with anyone who was not your friend, or a connection deeper than acquaintance, with the detainee who read your mind, interpreted your gestures, and allowed you to help him save his friends’ lives?