On the morning of September 11, 2001, I get up early and drive south on the highway, trying to listen to the radio and keep my mind off the current state of my life, the fact that I’m a military spouse. I know I should let it all go, but I can’t. It keeps lingering. Festering.
I got screwed.
I went to work right out of high school, took a job at a plastics factory. Wasn’t a bad place to work, but I wanted to do bigger things with my life. One day in the break room my foreman said, “Nate, you and I, we’re lifers here,” and I literally said, “Fuck this,” took off my shirt, and handed it to him. I enrolled at Kent State University, and then transferred to Holy Cross and eventually Notre Dame, to study communications. The only way to pay for it was Army ROTC. I had to compete for a scholarship. Luckily, I received one that covered about 80 percent of my tuition.
ROTC was a means to an end. But the more involved I got, the more I liked it. I really got into the military mindset. By my junior year, I was so serious about the Army and my communications major that I wanted to join the Signal Corps.
The summer before my senior year, I was on my way to attend the Advanced Leader Corps (ALC) and developed a nasty cold. The Army physician checked me over, said I had high blood pressure. I told him I didn’t and to check my physical reports. He saw that I was right, and the Army let me go through advanced camp. I did well, graduated, and then went back to Notre Dame in the fall.
Then the colonel at the ROTC battalion called and told me I had to start getting my blood pressure checked twice a day, for five days in a row. I explained what had happened over the summer, but he insisted—and that stressed me out. I knew high blood pressure would disqualify me from ROTC. I went to my mother’s doctor over Thanksgiving, and the woman told me my blood pressure was in kind of a gray area—140 over whatever. I told her it was a little higher than normal because I was stressed, but she didn’t care. She sent over her report, and I got kicked out of ROTC.
Two good things did come out of it. First, they paid for my college. Second, I ended up marrying a girl from St. Mary’s College, which is right across the street from Notre Dame. She was ROTC, Army, studying to be a nurse.
Now we’re living in the DC metro area. She’s working as an Army nurse at Walter Reed, and I’m twenty-seven and driving to my shitty sales job in Fairfax, Virginia, when I should be in the Army. My ROTC buddies are out, doing great things and kicking ass, and I’m a military spouse.
But maybe not for long.
I’ve been talking to a National Guard recruiter. A lot of time has passed since college, and he thinks I can enroll in Officer Candidate School because he believes my ROTC medical records didn’t make their way into the Army’s system. If I get into OCS, I don’t have to travel. I can live with my wife, at our house in Fort Meade, and—
A breaking story comes over the radio about a plane flying into the World Trade Center. By the time I reach work, a second plane has hit, and another one has crashed into the Pentagon.
I go inside the company building and see everyone watching and then I realize what I need to do. I turn around and leave.
Highway north is a ghost town, not a single car on it. I drive 120 miles an hour. I’m not military but I need to get home ASAP and kick my wife in her butt and tell her to get to Walter Reed.
The entrance to Fort Meade is right next to NSA headquarters. It’s mayhem, like something out of a disaster movie—people running with their arms in the air. I stop at the gate, and the guards draw their guns on me.
I roll down the window as bomb-sniffing dogs approach my car. “I live here!”
The guards get me out of the car. When they eventually clear me, I pull onto the base and park. I’m about to enter my house when my wife comes out, bawling.
“Honey,” I say gently, “you’ve got to get your shit together. You need to get to the hospital.”
I’m helping her pack, wishing I were on active duty, when she gets the call. She’s going down to the Pentagon to help with recovery. As I watch her drive off, F-16s doing six hundred miles an hour fly over the house. There is nothing more chilling than seeing fighter planes flying over your house when there is no other air traffic.
I enlist the next day. I’m twenty-seven years old.
The National Guard has a three-phase accelerated program. For the next eleven weeks, during basic training, where I’m the second oldest guy (first prize is taken by a guy who’s thirty-three), I keep in close contact with my wife, who has been working nonstop treating the first responders in charge of recovering the bodies from the Pentagon. It’s heartbreaking, listening to what she and the others are enduring, what they’ve seen.
For the next year, I drill with an infantry battalion and learn what’s called PMCS—preventive maintenance checks and services. I go to Officer Candidate School, graduate a full-fledged lieutenant in the Maryland National Guard, and then I’m assigned to Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 115th Infantry.
For the next four years, I do annual training in Japan for Operation Northwind, training Japanese ground self-defense force units that are getting ready to go to Iraq. My wife, now living in Maryland with our two kids, is planning on what our next duty station will be, so I know I’ll be leaving the Maryland National Guard.
At the last minute, she decides she wants out of the military. She misses her family and wants to move back to Indiana. I go there and buy a house while my wife stays in Maryland with the kids.
The beauty of the National Guard is that I can go anywhere. I start the interstate transfer to join the Indiana Guard. I’m with the kids, setting up the house, when I get a call from Brian, my former commander at Bravo Company. He tells me he just got promoted to captain.
After I congratulate him, he says, “If we ever get deployed to Iraq, would you want to go with us?”
“Hell, yeah, Brian, of course I would.”
He calls me back two days later, chuckling.
“Remember when I said, ‘Do you want to go to Iraq with us?’”
“Are you shitting me?”
“We got a deployment order,” Brian says. “Do you still want to go?”
“Absolutely. When do we leave?”
“Three weeks. But I want you down in Fort Jackson and then Fort Stewart, to get started on the pre-mobilization process.”
In a normal deployment, when you’re on active duty and receive your deployment order, you get six, maybe eight months to prep your families before you say good-bye. Brian is asking me to drop what I’m doing not months or weeks or days from now but right now. He’s hoping he can rely on me to get in my car, drive from Indiana to Camp Fretterd, in Maryland, and get the unit mobilized. He’s counting on me to be his second in command.
I watch the kids playing in their new backyard, the phone pressed against my ear.
“I’ll do it,” I tell him. “I absolutely want to do it.”
“Can you have the unit ready in three weeks?”
It’s a tall order, what he’s asking, and not to be taken lightly.
“You can count on me,” I tell him. I hang up and watch my kids.
Having to leave them right now—it’s a surprise, no question. But when you’re a leader, sometimes you have to make sacrifices.
My wife drives from Maryland. I meet her at a rest stop in Pennsylvania to give her the keys to the new house and hand over the kids. We make the best of my shitty opportunity before I leave to drive to Maryland to link up with my unit.
We fly to Kuwait at the beginning of June of 2005. It’s the middle of the night when we land at Ali Al Salem Air Base. When I get off the plane, I walk into a wall of heat so intense it instantly dries out the back of my throat.
This weird sort of quiet settles over the airfield. No one seems to talk as we shuffle from the processing center to a bunch of horrible briefings. We’re given these strange shelf-stable meals called Jimmy Deans, and then we’re loaded onto buses that will take us to Camp Buehring for two weeks of weapons training.
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br /> Coming here, I wasn’t scared. Nervous, yes, but not scared. That changes once I get inside a bus. A designated shooter sits up front, and all the windows are covered with shades or curtains with tassels. Someone says, “Keep the curtains closed since we don’t want people looking in, seeing you’re Americans.”
We drive for what seems like forever across the desert.
Dear God, where are we going? A lot of guys are dead asleep. I’m wide-awake, waiting for the barbarian horde to attack us. I’m still wired by the time I reach Camp Buehring. It’s hot and windy as I go to my tent to try and grab some sleep. The air conditioners, we’re told, aren’t working. The first sergeant tells us we can sleep in.
When I wake up the next morning, I lie there on my bunk with my arms outstretched, sweating. It’s pouring off me and there are pools of it underneath my hands because it’s probably 160 degrees in the tent. Everyone inside lies there, unconscious, probably dying from heat exhaustion.
“Holy shit,” someone moans. “This is misery.”
When I head out of the tent, it already feels like it’s 130 degrees cooler. I need water, and all the water is out in the sun. The water I drink is hot and covered in dust, and it has this plastic taste to it. It’s terrible, not refreshing at all, and I keep drinking and drinking because you have to drink a lot of water, all day, every day, or you’ll dehydrate.
When training is over, we’re sent up to Camp Victory, a huge military city built by the good guys. My company is doing a handoff with a field artillery company that’s been doing twenty-four-hour clearance on Route Tampa, a main supply route around what was formerly the Baghdad International Airport. The unit we’re replacing—it’s clear right away that they’re beaten down, mentally and physically done. They lost several guys, and a lot more were wounded. Their vehicles are junk, practically trashed, and their weapons systems are in horrible shape.
My commanding officer wants me to go for a ride-along with the unit’s executive officer, get the lay of the land.
“I don’t have any ammo,” I say.
“I’ll get you some,” my CO replies.
The executive officer’s Hummer is covered in bullet holes and blast damage. I get into the back seat. The XO—executive officer—slides behind the wheel, looking spent. I wait for him to brief me, something along the lines of, This is a hot IED area. We’ve been hit here before.
“Hold on,” he says. “And buckle up.”
We roll out of the gate.
It’s like a movie set for Black Hawk Down. A dozen or more vehicles destroyed by IEDs sit like blackened shells in the desert or by the sides of the road.
And then it hits me: this is for real. Until this point, everything has been another drill weekend—a really well-thought-out drill weekend with good special effects. I’m in country and this is the real deal and I’m starting to shake. It’s really hot and I’m sweating, and I’ve got real bullets in my weapon. I have a round chambered. This is real.
What the fuck am I doing here?
We make a right turn, and suddenly the scene changes. The road, full of traffic, is carved through a small village, people walking everywhere. The XO drives like he’s on a speedway; he hauls ass down the road, turning violently, throwing me around the back.
“We’re going to do a snap checkpoint,” the XO says as he follows the road into a stretch of desert. “You know: set up a roadblock and check all the cars coming through for bad guys.”
He pulls up alongside a speeding Iraqi car and performs a PIT maneuver. He hits the car in the rear—
“I’m going to get there as fast as I can,” he says.
—and the car spins clockwise, directly in front of us. The XO takes a hard right and floors the gas—
“I’m going to throw that checkpoint up.”
—and I turn and watch the car, still spinning, careen off the road, into the sand.
“I’m going to be there for fifteen minutes,” he says. “Then I’m going to collapse it and go back.”
He hits and pushes more Iraqi vehicles off the road. I understand he’s doing what he has to do because he’s experienced the dangers of buried land mines and IEDs loaded along Route Tampa. He wants to get safely from point A to point B and back, but I still can’t believe what I’m seeing.
We come to a stop inside another village. I see thatched huts and some small buildings and a guy pushing an actual donkey cart. The XO gets on the Hummer’s loudspeaker: “Get out of my way, motherfuckers.”
The locals, though, don’t habla English. They ignore him and keep doing what they’re doing as we get out and set up a checkpoint. We throw out some concertina wire and block off the area, and the entire time I’m watching, in growing terror, these guys walking around—guys with M16s and M4s. They’re holding them John Wayne–style, by the pistol grip.
This is insane.
And it’s only my first day.
My unit is quickly assigned to a bigger unit—the 2nd of the 70th. Logistically, they own us. We get our beans and bullets from them. My commander, Captain Borcove, calls a meeting and informs us we’re going to secure a place called Sab al-Bour, a town of probably twenty-five thousand people. It’s considered a black town, which means you don’t drive through it, or you’ll get shot at or hit with an IED.
“We’re going to live in this government building that’s half government, half Iraqi Police,” Captain Borcove says. “It’s divided by a wall. We’ll take the government half, empty it out, and live there. We’ll rotate platoons in and out.”
A staff sergeant says, loud enough for everyone to hear, “He’s going to get us fucking killed.”
I grab him, pull him out of the meeting, and tear into him.
“You don’t ever fucking say anything about what our commander plans in front of other soldiers. You do it again, I will beat your ass.”
But deep down I’m thinking, Oh, shit, he is going to get our asses killed.
We head into town wearing brand-new uniforms, looking spiffy. We National Guard are literally the first unit in the country to wear them, these ACUs, with green tabs and green zippers. The Iraqis have never seen these uniforms before and think we are some crazy new unit. Our interpreters tell them we’re Special Forces and the people are terrified.
This information operation works to our advantage. From June to early September, we do battalion and company-level quadrant searches, get our hands on a lot of weapons, contraband, and, strangely enough, drugs. We end up really securing the town.
“I need you to go out on a recon,” my CO tells me. It’s almost seven in the morning, and I’m reviewing all the confiscated weapons. “Take my truck, grab a crew—and grab someone from the MP company to go with you. I don’t care who. You need to leave in fifteen minutes.”
Sergeants Zimmerman and El Daco roll out with me, along with a sergeant from the MP company, and we meet up at the battalion. We leave with four trucks: battalion S3, JTAC team from the Air Force, scout platoon leader in his truck, and mine. We’re going to do a reconnaissance mission on a house near this traffic circle called the circle of death. We’re supposed to capture some guy named Abu Bakker.
The joint terminal attack controller (JTAC) is with us as a show of force on the mission. They’re going to drop bombs on this house, once we find it.
We do reconnaissance and drive around for hours and hours, taking pictures, looking for this specific house. Everyone is tired. We’re heading down Route Islanders when I see a canal on the left-hand side with all these palm trees and reeds growing up really high. On the right-hand side there’s a field and three large homes, and then a smaller house. A bunch of kids are playing outside it.
“Sir,” Sergeant El Daco says, “I think I saw the house we’re—”
An IED goes off and rocks our truck.
Everything seems really slow for a second. I’m aware of spit coming out of my mouth and dirt flying around us. Then I’m snapped back to the present and everything hurts.
Dri
ve, I tell myself. Keep driving. El Daco is dropping f-bombs over and over again, but he tells me he’s okay. The sergeant in the back is groaning. I glance over my shoulder, see that his armored door is collapsed on him.
I drive another three hundred meters and then stop. The S3 traveling behind me stopped before the explosion; there’s now a big gap between us. The JTAC team calls out that they’ve IDed the trigger person and are in pursuit. I see their Humvee tearing across the field, heading toward the house.
I’m on the nine line, calling for medevac, when two M1 tanks come over the horizon. They were right down the road and heard the explosion. I get out to help the sergeant in the back seat. The door is folded inward, squeezing him between the door and the bulkhead between the two back seats.
Medevac comes and gets the sergeant out. We get orders to fire at the most likely point of origin. If we do that, we’ll end up killing a bunch of kids. I’m not going to allow that to happen, so we police the area.
We find a second IED.
“Call EOD,” I say.
An explosive ordnance disposal unit arrives three hours later. I pull out some concertina wire. This little Iraqi guy in a white pickup truck pulls up to us.
I look to the interpreter and say, “Tell him to go away.”
Terp tells him to go away.
The guy doesn’t go away.
“Tell him again,” I say.
Terp gets on the mic and says it again. The guy’s still there—and now he’s getting out of the car.
I tell my machine gunner to give the guy a warning shot with his 240 Bravo. He fires a twelve-round burst.
The Iraqi is still standing there. Now I have to confront the guy.
I stand about twenty feet away, can see how old he is, and yell, “Sir! Get back in your vehicle.” Terp is telling him the same thing.
The Iraqi starts approaching me. And he’s not saying anything.
This is not happening. I’m in the National Guard. This is not happening. My day is not supposed to end with a guy wearing a bomb vest. I draw my rifle and point it at him.
Walk in My Combat Boots Page 20
