Walk in My Combat Boots

by James Patterson

  Christmas is tough. I’m watching her open presents over video chat. It’s late in the day for her, and she’s tired and grumpy and just wants to go to bed. She’s in a mood, and that’s hard for me to deal with because, since I can’t be there, all I want is to see her happy face as she opens the clothes and toys.

  In the movies, when a soldier comes home, the family is waiting outside the plane and they come running up and everyone is in tears and you’re in tears watching it. In July of 2017, I call Dan and tell him I’m coming home and what time I think I’ll be arriving. He says he’ll meet me at his mom’s house.

  Before I leave, I get dressed up and do my hair and makeup. Driving to his mom’s house, I’m super nervous—actually shaking, as though I’m about to go out on a stage and give a huge speech to thousands of people instead of going to see my two-year-old daughter.

  When I walk into the house, they’re all inside—Dan and his mom and stepfather. All I can see is my daughter sitting on the floor, playing with her toys.

  “Hey, baby.”

  She turns her head and sees me.

  “Hey, Mom.” She goes back to playing with her toys.

  Which, in a way, makes sense. For her, I’ve gone from being a face on a screen to now being a face in person. The only change is that I’m here.

  But I’ve changed. I’ve learned a lot about myself. I’ve come to value my time with my friends and family a lot more. I’m willing to drive two and a half hours to see my family for their birthdays. If my sister texts me and says she had a bad day, I’ll drive over just to sit and talk with her and share a bottle of wine. My time overseas makes me value my friendships and relationships with the people closest to me, and it makes me learn more about the people that I care about and the people I surround myself with.

  BRENNAN AVANTS

  Brennan Avants served in the Army.

  We sing “Leaving on a Jet Plane” to our spouses from the bus as it begins to pull out of the parking lot on the base in Bamberg, Germany. It’s February of 2004 and bitterly cold and there’s snow on the ground and all the wives are huddled together.

  The singing is about us banding together and steeling our nerves. We’re going on our way to get loaded up on airplanes that’ll take us to Kuwait.

  My wife is a military brat. Her father is retired from the service, and her brother is serving in the Air Force; she knows the life. Still, I know how tough this is for her. Me going off to war—this isn’t what she was expecting.

  We got married right after I got out of the Army, moved back to Northern California. I had just signed up with a military reserve unit out of the Bay Area when 9/11 happened. That day I dropped my job, put on my uniform, and reported for duty at the reserve depot. I wanted back in the action. My father-in-law convinced me that my best option was to get back in the service, so we packed up what we could into our two vehicles and drove to Texas to live with my wife’s parents. I went to the Military Entrance Processing Station in Dallas and reenlisted. I got my former job back on a multiple launch rocket system crew. I kept my job, and I kept my rank, and I was assigned and shipped out to Germany.

  I watch my wife until I can no longer see her.

  I may never see her again.

  They encouraged us to write a death letter before we deployed. Said it would help prepare us mentally for battle. I wrote mine, but I really didn’t know what to say. What can you say? How do you condense all your love for your wife, your thoughts—your last thoughts of her—into one letter? How can a letter even remotely reassure her that I died doing something I believed in—something that I loved?

  Last night in bed, I kept wondering if I would ever sleep in that bed again—if I would ever sleep next to her again. I kept wondering if she knew how much I—

  Stop, I tell myself. Just stop. I can’t think along these lines right now. I have to emotionally disconnect myself for the good of the unit, for my brothers and sisters. I have to detach myself from the real world. I have to create a wall around myself. I have to create an impenetrable shell.

  I close my eyes, trying to get my head on straight, as the bus bounces along, taking us to the airport. To war.

  Okay, this is real, I tell myself. Once we get on the ground, it’s all about the person to my left and the person to my right. I’ve got their six. I’m here to do whatever it takes to make sure they get home so we can all get home.

  We do a month or so of train-up at Camp Buehring. The Marines are getting slightly hardened doors for their Humvees while we’re getting canvas. Everything is stuck in Conex boxes and inappropriately labeled at the port. We can’t get them released, and we need armored doors if we’re going to make it to FOB Summerall in one piece.

  Corporal Malasko, one of my soldiers and a good buddy, and I travel around at night snagging any kind of fuel products—oils, lubrications, and greases. We use them to trade for slightly up-armored doors.

  We make it to the FOB unscathed.

  The 4th Infantry Division is cheering when we arrive. They look like something from a war movie about Vietnam—ghillie suits made out of their old uniforms, their living conditions very, very austere. We get them new uniforms so they’ll look really good when they arrive back home.

  We’re ready. Motivated.

  The enemy is, too.

  We sometimes think the Iraqis are out of the Stone Age—a bunch of Neanderthals who don’t know anything. But they do. They’re not dumb. They clearly don’t know our intel, but they’ve made a careful study of our units. They know when the new guys are in town, and when the old guys are leaving. They know when best to strike.

  My battalion is actually FOB security, which means we’re locked inside the base, manning all of the OPs and listening posts on the various locations. The enemy immediately starts “probing” the base with mortars, and sometimes rockets. The first time I take an incoming mortar, hear the sound of the ordnance hitting the cement—I’m terrified.

  We quickly learn that the enemy is using the large, inoperable Iraqi water tower on our base as an aiming marker. Our engineers tear it down.

  The more we’re attacked, the more I realize the enemy’s aim sucks—they miss us over and over again. We can figure out, in a relatively short amount of time, the mortar’s point of origin and return fire from our own mortars. At night, it’s hard to know the difference between incoming and outgoing mortars. I need to use a little bit of Tylenol PM just to help me try to get some sleep.

  Reports of soldiers getting mild electric shocks in the showers start filtering through the base. The hot water tanks, installed by the local national contractors, are faulty, and command orders us to unplug them. We do, but some soldiers plug them back in, pranking someone with a little shock.

  The 5th Artillery Battalion conducts presence patrols. They drive around in their crudely armored-up Humvees. They do security and try to initiate contact with the enemy while my battalion does base security. As the months pass, things start ramping up. There’s a lot more IED activity, and Muqtada al-Sadr and his band are becoming very prevalent around the base.

  I know they’re preparing an attack. I can feel it.

  The day it happens, I’m on the base, but I’m not working security at our main gate. I hear a large explosion. I turn, and as I see clouds of smoke coming from the front of the base, voices start screaming all around me, all over my radio. I run to the front gates. It’s utter chaos.

  A shocked NCO mumbles something about going to bed.

  “What did you say?”

  “VBIED,” he replies.

  Now I understand him—and what happened. The explosion was caused by a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or a car bomb.

  “Contractors were all lined up outside the gate—lined up with their gravel trucks and dump trucks, you know, waiting to be processed through base security,” the NCO says. “There was this white BMW riding really low to the ground and it wouldn’t stop at the checkpoints. I was trying to get an interpreter to tell th
e driver to stop when the vehicle exploded.” He looks at me, blinking, trying to process what just went down. “I saw an engine block fly past my head.”

  This event will go down as the first large VBIED attack on a US installation in Iraq.

  Luckily, none of the soldiers are hurt. Two get Purple Hearts for their thankfully minor injuries—blown-out eardrums, that kind of stuff. The toll on the local nationals and on some of the Iraqi forces working with us, though, is crazy. Week after week working cleanup crew, we find hands and feet, charred flesh, and other human parts that similarly traumatize us.

  I’m sitting on my bed, about to head to the shower only ten feet away, when my buddy Frank says, “Here’s the new newspaper,” and hands me a month-old Stars and Stripes. I flip through it as he heads off to the shower.

  Someone screams. I don’t react—it happens a lot, guys dumping cold water on each other. Frank comes back, wide-eyed. Pale.

  “I need your help,” he says.

  I follow him into the shower. My good buddy Corporal Marco Malasko is on the floor, unconscious. Unresponsive.

  That scream I heard a moment ago—that was Marco.

  I find out later the cause of death: electrocution. Someone plugged in one of the faulty hot water heaters, and Marco died.

  A few months after the VBIED attack, we’re assigned a mission: doing convoy and VIP security all over the northern part of Iraq. We form into personal security detachment units with our semi-up-armored Humvees. I’m assigned rear .50-cal gunner. I’m up in the turret of a Humvee driving in the back, my head literally on a swivel, looking for bad guys while we drive.

  I develop code words with my wife, so she’ll know when I’m on the road. I don’t tell her where I’m going or that we’re constantly encountering IEDs. I don’t share how exciting it is to break the wire for missions nearly every day, being on these four-to-six-hour convoys, the roads strewn with potential threats—and everything looks like a threat. I don’t share any of these details with my wife because I know how hard this is on her. Every night she goes to sleep with the computer, waiting for me to ding her over Skype or Yahoo Messenger so we can talk.

  Today’s mission runs later than usual. We’re on base at Camp Speicher, outside Tikrit, escorting a VIP as part of his personal security detachment. The sun’s going down as our convoy of six armored gun trucks leaves the base, heading back to FOB Summerall—an hour’s drive, provided we don’t encounter anything, or anyone, along the way.

  We own the highway, head straight down the middle. It’s like driving on I-95 during rush hour. If any drivers intermix with us, we find creative ways to push them off to the left or right. There’s always the threat of somebody with a VBIED getting intermixed in our convoy and exploding. As rear security, I have a standoff distance of a couple hundred meters, and I have to use whatever signaling device I have to get vehicles to stay back, and that means shooting at Iraqis, whose attitude is We own this road, too.

  The car I’m watching is doing this weird thing where it suddenly guns its engine and tries to approach the convoy…and then falls back. The driver does it again and again, which kicks my already tingling Spidey sense into high gear. I stomp on the ground—the code to let my vehicle commander know I’m going to fire a few warning shots—and prepare to shoot a tracer round from my M16 into the sand. Because I’m facing the rear, I can’t see what’s in front of me, so I look over my shoulder to make sure there aren’t any kids with their little stands of soda, candy, and fruit.

  I fire the tracer into the sand on the side of the highway.

  The driver guns it, coming right at me.

  He’s fifty, maybe sixty meters away when I see his face.

  I unload my weapon directly in front of his vehicle. It swerves and spins out.

  Doesn’t move.

  Did I kill him?

  Did I do the right thing?

  Twenty minutes later, we roll back into our gate. I’m in complete and utter shock.

  Staff Sergeant Rob comes up to me. “You all right?”

  “I…I don’t know what I just did.”

  “You did good,” he says. “You did good.”

  It’s still bothering me later. I have no idea what happened to the driver, what his fate was, whether he was a real threat or not. But to me he was a threat because he was harassing the tail end of our convoy.

  When you’re deployed to Iraq, you’re constantly rotating through base security missions, through protective and service detail (PSD) missions, securing ammo dumps.

  And the enemy…I’m surprised at how fast the bad guys evolve.

  Someone hides a makeshift IED inside a pack of cigarettes left on the ground. Fortunately, it doesn’t go off, but it’s a reminder that the enemy can be anywhere, at any time. It’s fatiguing, living with that heightened awareness all the time. It wears you down. So you stop looking at things closely.

  Which is exactly what they want us to do. Threats become so commonplace that when you do encounter something out of the ordinary, your attitude is, Whatever. If it’s going to happen, it’s gonna happen. If you don’t, you’ll go insane.

  I put on a false persona when I talk to my family back home. “Everything’s good here,” I tell everyone. “Everything’s all right.”

  My wife is smart. She sees right through it.

  “I told you not to sugarcoat things,” she tells me. “If it’s bad, tell me what you’re allowed to tell me—and you need to tell me. So many servicemen and -women call home and say everything’s rosy when it’s not.”

  So I tell her what I’m allowed to say, and then I flip a mental switch and go back to work.

  When I come home, it’s not the easiest switch to flip back.

  I’m a different person now. Mentally and emotionally. I’m distant, and when I get angry, I have these outbursts. I can’t trust people, places, or things. All I want to do is spend time alone. And drink.

  Prior to deployment, I was very outgoing and spontaneous. Now, if things aren’t planned and structured, I don’t want to go out. Not that I want to go out anyway. When I do, which isn’t often, I don’t enjoy myself. I don’t have fun. The soldiers who died over there, the impact of their deaths on their families—those people aren’t going out and having fun anymore. Why should I be able to go out and have a good time? How am I even still alive?

  I think a lot about the loss of my close friend Corporal Malasko. It makes me so angry, thinking about how he went out. He didn’t die on the battlefield. He got electrocuted. In a shower.

  And that could have easily been me.

  Eric, another military buddy of mine, became a mentor to me when I returned home. I told him I wanted to go to flight school, and Eric counseled me on the transition from being an enlisted multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) soldier to being a warrant officer flying Black Hawks. I had lunch with him at a Korean restaurant outside Fort Hood, and he gave me great advice about the application process.

  Later that night, in bed, I texted him, thanking him and wishing him good luck with his advanced training while sirens wailed a few blocks outside my house. Hearing those sirens put me back on the rear attachment of the convoy, manning my weapon, looking for the enemy.

  The next day, I find out Eric is dead. He got in a motorcycle accident the night before and was decapitated. Those sirens I heard belonged to the people responding to Eric’s accident. As I was texting him, he was already dead on the side of the road.

  I find out another soldier I deployed with died of an overdose in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Another mentor of mine, this huge, massive sergeant first class with a heart of gold, was on Active Component to Reserve Component (AC-RC) duty and on his way to PT when his car somehow ended up in a culvert overflowing with rainwater. For some reason he couldn’t get out and drowned.

  Why are all these things happening around me?

  I’ve never lost anybody to combat. I feel blessed, feel very thankful for that, and yet all these people I know, and love, and re
spect, are dying—and it makes me so fucking angry. I don’t want to feel that—can’t afford to feel that or anything else. I’ve got to lock away all my emotions. Joy can too easily spiral into absolute, utter grief. If I love people, I will lose them. I’ve got to protect myself. My career.

  This new me, the way I look at life and interact with the world—I know the impact it’s having on my wife and my family.

  “You can’t keep these emotions bottled up,” my wife tells me.

  We’ve had this conversation before. I know what she’s going to ask me to do.

  “You need…” she begins.

  “No. I told you. I’m not going to do that.”

  “Brennan, you need to try to get back that piece of you that you lost over there.”

  I clear my throat and take in a deep breath.

  “I can’t.”

  “You need to try,” she says.

  She persuades me to go to the VA.

  I end up meeting some great counselors.

  They tell me I’m allowed to feel my own emotions. I’m allowed to feel how I want to feel about anything because everybody is different. Own the emotions, feel them, they tell me, but don’t keep them bottled up.

  I tell them how I feel guilty doing normal things and how wrong I feel when I’m having a good time—and they tell me it’s okay, it’s perfectly acceptable and healthy to feel love, and happiness, and joy. It’s okay to enjoy fun things on the spur of the moment. It’s okay to enjoy life. Everyone has their own process, I’m told, but you have to go through your emotions. Not around them but through them. I have to go through the process.

  And I do. I go through the process.

  It leads me to humanitarian work.

  Right now, I’m a disaster program manager for a chapter located in the Hill Country of Texas. We support eighty counties, over 6.8 million people. We respond to local disasters, like Hurricane Harvey, and national disasters, like the fires in Southern California. A lot of the people on my team are retired veterans as well. I’ve got back that camaraderie and brotherhood.