The Infantryman

We are the United States Army Infantry. We pull the triggers, kick the doors, walk the roads and climb the mountains. We own the night and fear the day. We carry the load, bear the burden and take the fight to the enemy. If you truly knew us, you would be appalled. We chew tobacco, drink until we pass out, chase women and swear like it was an art. We go weeks without a shower, days without changing socks and shit in plastic bags. In any other setting we would be the scourge of society. But this is OUR society. And we only share it with those who have been there with us, the brothers that know what it means to be a “grunt”. It’s the oldest fraternity in America, established in 1775. You can look down upon us. Say that this is all we had. Stereotype us as lower class or not worthy of higher education. The truth would surprise you. Most Infantrymen score higher on the entrance exam than any other Military Specialty, a large number have a college education. They usually come from middle class to upper middle class families. They are the men that joined for a higher purpose than just a steady paycheck. They could have had your life but they wanted more. They wanted purpose. In any other context, if you met an Infantryman, you would scoff and turn away. He doesn’t follow your social norms. He doesn’t believe in political correctness, in equality or anti-discrimination. He knows that a man needs to earn respect among his peers. Whether he is white or black, gay or straight, no one is entitled to equality, he earns it by fighting for his brothers during times of adversity. In our world, you earn your right to belong. Some of my closest friends are people that I would never have met on the outside because of our differences. Now I would die for them. When you join our society, you will be ridiculed, taunted, hazed. Any weakness will be attacked. If you take it in stride you will become one of us. We will still give you shit until you are blue in the face but it’s because we love you. If any outsider ever so much as gave you a dirty look we would defend you until our death. This is a brotherhood that very few can join. America will never truly know its war fighters. As soon as a reporter embeds with us, we change our ways. We censor ourselves to fit the norms… the best we can. This is the way it needs to be, we do a job that involves closing with and killing another human being. As evil as that enemy may be, it is still unnatural to kill another. We need this culture to protect us from the mental chaos that results from our deeds. This is a task that we have not yet perfected. All of us will spend our lives trying to bury the demons that will forever haunt us. Less than 1% of America has served since 9/11 and 6% of that have been Infantrymen. The vast majority of Soldiers cannot even join our ranks. They are great Americans but will never share the hardship, the tears, the sweat, the blood that brings us together. Decades from now, this will all be a faint memory to most. The men that gave their all; that earned their Combat Infantryman Badge under fire will still have vivid memories of the days that they lived for one another and saw men die for their brothers.

This is it...

By LTC (RET) Dave Grossman, author of "On Killing."
Honor never grows old, and honor rejoices the heart of age. It does so because honor is, finally, about defending those noble and worthy things that deserve defending, even if it comes at a high cost. In our time, that may mean social disapproval, public scorn, hardship, persecution, or as always,even death itself. The question remains: What is worth defending? What is worth dying for? What is worth living for? - William J. Bennett - in a lecture to the United States Naval Academy November 24, 1997

One Vietnam veteran, an old retired colonel, once said this to me:

"Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident." This is true. Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one another. Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year. Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably less than two million.

Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the situation: We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin's egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without its hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers, and other warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful.? For now, though, they need warriors to protect them from the predators.

"Then there are the wolves," the old war veteran said, "and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy." Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.

"Then there are sheepdogs," he went on, "and I'm a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf."

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero's path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed

Let me expand on this old soldier's excellent model of the sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. We know that the sheep live in denial, that is what makes them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is evil in the world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kids' schools.

But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police officer in their kid's school. Our children are thousands of times more likely to be killed or seriously injured by school violence than fire, but the sheep's only response to the possibility of violence is denial. The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their child is just too hard, and so they chose the path of denial.

The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, can not and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheep dog who intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours.

Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that there are wolves in the land. They would prefer that he didn't tell them where to go, or give them traffic tickets, or stand at the ready in our airports in camouflage fatigues holding an M-16. The sheep would much rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray paint himself white, and go, "Baa."

Until the wolf shows up. Then the entire flock tries desperately to hide behind one lonely sheepdog.

The students, the victims, at Columbine High School were big, tough high school students, and under ordinary circumstances they would not have had the time of day for a police officer. They were not bad kids; they just had nothing to say to a cop. When the school was under attack, however, and SWAT teams were clearing the rooms and hallways, the officers had to physically peel those clinging, sobbing kids off of them. This is how the little lambs feel about their sheepdog when the wolf is at the door.

Look at what happened after September 11, 2001 when the wolf pounded hard on the door. Remember how America, more than ever before, felt differently about their law enforcement officers and military personnel? Remember how many times you heard the word hero?

Understand that there is nothing morally superior about being a sheepdog; it is just what you choose to be. Also understand that a sheepdog is a funny critter: He is always sniffing around out on the perimeter, checking the breeze, barking at things that go bump in the night, and yearning for a righteous battle. That is, the young sheepdogs yearn for a righteous battle. The old sheepdogs are a little older and wiser, but they move to the sound of the guns when needed right along with the young ones.

Here is how the sheep and the sheepdog think differently. The sheep pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, most of the sheep, that is, most citizens in America said, "Thank God I wasn't on one of those planes." The sheepdogs, the warriors, said, "Dear God, I wish I could have been on one of those planes. Maybe I could have made a difference." When you are truly transformed into a warrior and have truly invested yourself into warriorhood, you want to be there. You want to be able to make a difference.

There is nothing morally superior about the sheepdog, the warrior, but he does have one real advantage. Only one. And that is that he is able to survive and thrive in an environment that destroys 98 percent of the population. There was research conducted a few years ago with individuals convicted of violent crimes. These cons were in prison for serious, predatory crimes of violence: assaults, murders and killing law enforcement officers. The vast majority said that they specifically targeted victims by body language: slumped walk, passive behavior and lack of awareness. They chose their victims like big cats do in Africa, when they select one out of the herd that is least able to protect itself.

Some people may be destined to be sheep and others might be genetically primed to be wolves or sheepdogs. But I believe that most people can choose which one they want to be, and I'm proud to say that more and more Americans are choosing to become sheepdogs.

Seven months after the attack on September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer was honored in his hometown of Cranbury, New Jersey. Todd, as you recall, was the man on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania who called on his cell phone to alert an operator from United Airlines about the hijacking. When he learned of the other three passenger planes that had been used as weapons, Todd dropped his phone and uttered the words, "Let's roll," which authorities believe was a signal to the other passengers to confront the terrorist hijackers. In one hour, a transformation occurred among the passengers - athletes, business people and parents. -- from sheep to sheepdogs and together they fought the wolves, ultimately saving an unknown number of lives on the ground.

There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men. - Edmund Burke

Here is the point I like to emphasize, especially to the thousands of police officers and soldiers I speak to each year. In nature the sheep, real sheep, are born as sheep. Sheepdogs are born that way, and so are wolves. They didn't have a choice. But you are not a critter. As a human being, you can be whatever you want to be. It is a conscious, moral decision.

If you want to be a sheep, then you can be a sheep and that is okay, but you must understand the price you pay. When the wolf comes, you and your loved ones are going to die if there is not a sheepdog there to protect you. If you want to be a wolf, you can be one, but the sheepdogs are going to hunt you down and you will never have rest, safety, trust or love. But if you want to be a sheepdog and walk the warrior's path, then you must make a conscious and moral decision every day to dedicate, equip and prepare yourself to thrive in that toxic, corrosive moment when the wolf comes knocking at the door.

For example, many officers carry their weapons in church.? They are well concealed in ankle holsters, shoulder holsters or inside-the-belt holsters tucked into the small of their backs.? Anytime you go to some form of religious service, there is a very good chance that a police officer in your congregation is carrying. You will never know if there is such an individual in your place of worship, until the wolf appears to massacre you and your loved ones.

I was training a group of police officers in Texas, and during the break, one officer asked his friend if he carried his weapon in church. The other cop replied, "I will never be caught without my gun in church." I asked why he felt so strongly about this, and he told me about a cop he knew who was at a church massacre in Ft. Worth, Texas in 1999. In that incident, a mentally deranged individual came into the church and opened fire, gunning down fourteen people. He said that officer believed he could have saved every life that day if he had been carrying his gun. His own son was shot, and all he could do was throw himself on the boy's body and wait to die. That cop looked me in the eye and said, "Do you have any idea how hard it would be to live with yourself after that?"

Some individuals would be horrified if they knew this police officer was carrying a weapon in church. They might call him paranoid and would probably scorn him. Yet these same individuals would be enraged and would call for "heads to roll" if they found out that the airbags in their cars were defective, or that the fire extinguisher and fire sprinklers in their kids' school did not work. They can accept the fact that fires and traffic accidents can happen and that there must be safeguards against them.

Their only response to the wolf, though, is denial, and all too often their response to the sheepdog is scorn and disdain. But the sheepdog quietly asks himself, "Do you have and idea how hard it would be to live with yourself if your loved ones attacked and killed, and you had to stand there helplessly because you were unprepared for that day?"

It is denial that turns people into sheep. Sheep are psychologically destroyed by combat because their only defense is denial, which is counterproductive and destructive, resulting in fear, helplessness and horror when the wolf shows up.

Denial kills you twice. It kills you once, at your moment of truth when you are not physically prepared: you didn't bring your gun, you didn't train. Your only defense was wishful thinking. Hope is not a strategy. Denial kills you a second time because even if you do physically survive, you are psychologically shattered by your fear helplessness and horror at your moment of truth.

Gavin de Becker puts it like this in Fear Less, his superb post-9/11 book, which should be required reading for anyone trying to come to terms with our current world situation: "...denial can be seductive, but it has an insidious side effect. For all the peace of mind deniers think they get by saying it isn't so, the fall they take when faced with new violence is all the more unsettling."

Denial is a save-now-pay-later scheme, a contract written entirely in small print, for in the long run, the denying person knows the truth on some level.

And so the warrior must strive to confront denial in all aspects of his life, and prepare himself for the day when evil comes. If you are warrior who is legally authorized to carry a weapon and you step outside without that weapon, then you become a sheep, pretending that the bad man will not come today. No one can be "on" 24/7, for a lifetime. Everyone needs down time. But if you are authorized to carry a weapon, and you walk outside without it, just take a deep breath, and say this to yourself...

"Baa."

This business of being a sheep or a sheep dog is not a yes-no dichotomy. It is not an all-or-nothing, either-or choice. It is a matter of degrees, a continuum. On one end is an abject, head-in-the-sand-sheep and on the other end is the ultimate warrior. Few people exist completely on one end or the other. Most of us live somewhere in between. Since 9-11 almost everyone in America took a step up that continuum, away from denial. The sheep took a few steps toward accepting and appreciating their warriors, and the warriors started taking their job more seriously. The degree to which you move up that continuum, away from sheephood and denial, is the degree to which you and your loved ones will survive, physically and psychologically at your moment of truth.

This is life or death

Hey Private, I know you're 19 and scared to shit. I know your magazine is too old and jamming your weapon but suck it up. You joined the richest poor army in the world and we can't spend $19 to get you a magazine that won't jam when you're ...3 meters from death. Hey guy, do you have oil for your weapon? Nope... Uncle Sam just spent it on something else. Don't worry, its not like we've been at war for 9 years and men are dying...If you voted democrat, please don't ask me why we don't have batteries for your PEQ-15s. Uncle Sam can't afford $75 to equip and Infantry Platoon with night capabilities in a Democratic world. Cut defense and you lose America. Kill the big projects but give the Infantry Squads the means to do our jobs. Cut our pay, I'll do it for free. Just give us basic equipment at the squad level to stay alive.

Why arabs lose wars

Norvell De Atkine, a U.S. Army retired colonel with eight years residence in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, and a graduate degree in Arab studies from the American University of Beirut, is currently instructing U.S. Army personnel assigned to Middle Eastern areas. The opinions expressed here are strictly his own.
Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers.2 Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a three-decades-long war against the Kurds.3 The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990 Kuwait war was mediocre.4 And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the military confrontations with Israel. Why this unimpressive record? There are many factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force.
It is a truism of military life that an army fights as it trains, and so I draw on my many years of firsthand observation of Arabs in training to draw conclusions about the ways in which they go into combat. The following impressions derive from personal experience with Arab military establishments in the capacity of U.S. military attaché and security assistance officer, observer officer with the British-officer Trucial Oman Scouts (the security force in the emirates prior to the establishment of the United Arab Emirates), as well as some thirty year's study of the Middle East.
False Starts
Including culture in strategic assessments has a poor legacy, for it has often been spun from an ugly brew of ignorance, wishful thinking, and mythology. Thus, the U.S. army in the 1930s evaluated the Japanese national character as lacking originality and drew the unwarranted conclusion that the country would be permanently disadvantaged in technology.5 Hitler dismissed the United States as a mongrel society6 and consequently underestimated the impact of America's entry into the war. As these examples suggest, when culture is considered in calculating the relative strengths and weaknesses of opposing forces, it tends to lead to wild distortions, especially when it is a matter of understanding why states unprepared for war enter into combat flushed with confidence. The temptation is to impute cultural attributes to the enemy state that negate its superior numbers or weaponry. Or the opposite: to view the potential enemy through the prism of one's own cultural norms. American strategists assumed that the pain threshold of the North Vietnamese approximated their own and that the air bombardment of the North would bring it to its knees.7 Three days of aerial attacks were thought to be all the Serbs could withstand; in fact, seventy-eight days were needed.
It is particularly dangerous to make facile assumptions about abilities in warfare based on past performance, for societies evolve and so does the military subculture with it. The dismal French performance in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war led the German high command to an overly optimistic assessment prior to World War I.8 The tenacity and courage of French soldiers in World War I led everyone from Winston Churchill to the German high command vastly to overestimate the French army's fighting abilities.9 Israeli generals underestimated the Egyptian army of 1973 based on Egypt's hapless performance in the 1967 war.10
Culture is difficult to pin down. It is not synonymous with an individual's race nor ethnic identity. The history of warfare makes a mockery of attempts to assign rigid cultural attributes to individuals—as the military histories of the Ottoman and Roman empires illustrate. In both cases it was training, discipline, esprit, and élan which made the difference, not the individual soldiers' origin.11 The highly disciplined, effective Roman legions, for example, were recruited from throughout the Roman empire, and the elite Ottoman Janissaries (slave soldiers) were Christians forcibly recruited as boys from the Balkans.

The Role of Culture
These problems notwithstanding, culture does need to be taken into account. Indeed, awareness of prior mistakes should make it possible to assess the role of cultural factors in warfare. John Keegan, the eminent historian of warfare, argues that culture is a prime determinant of the nature of warfare. In contrast to the usual manner of European warfare which he terms "face to face," Keegan depicts the early Arab armies in the Islamic era as masters of evasion, delay, and indirection.12 Examining Arab warfare in this century leads to the conclusion that Arabs remain more successful in insurgent, or political warfare13—what T. E. Lawrence termed "winning wars without battles."14 Even the much-lauded Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973 at its core entailed a masterful deception plan. It may well be that these seemingly permanent attributes result from a culture that engenders subtlety, indirection, and dissimulation in personal relationships.15
Along these lines, Kenneth Pollack concludes his exhaustive study of Arab military effectiveness by noting that "certain patterns of behavior fostered by the dominant Arab culture were the most important factors contributing to the limited military effectiveness of Arab armies and air forces from 1945 to 1991."16 These attributes included over-centralization, discouraging initiative, lack of flexibility, manipulation of information, and the discouragement of leadership at the junior officer level.
The barrage of criticism leveled at Samuel Huntington's notion of a "clash of civilizations"17 in no way lessens the vital point he made—that however much the grouping of peoples by religion and culture rather than political or economic divisions offends academics who propound a world defined by class, race, and gender, it is a reality, one not diminished by modern communications.
But how does one integrate the study of culture into military training? At present, it has hardly any role. Paul M. Belbutowski, a scholar and former member of the U.S. Delta Force, succinctly stated a deficiency in our own military education system: "Culture, comprised of all that is vague and intangible, is not generally integrated into strategic planning except at the most superficial level."18 And yet it is precisely "all that is vague and intangible" which defines low-intensity conflicts. The Vietnamese communists did not fight the war the United States had trained for, nor did the Chechens and Afghans fight the war the Russians prepared for. This entails far more than simply retooling weaponry and retraining soldiers. It requires an understanding of the enemy's cultural mythology, history, attitude toward time, etc.—demanding a more substantial investment in time and money than a bureaucratic organization is likely to authorize.
Mindful of walking through a minefield of past errors and present cultural sensibilities, I offer some assessments of the role of culture in the military training of Arabic-speaking officers. I confine myself principally to training for two reasons. First, I observed much training but only one combat campaign (the Jordanian Army against the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1970). Secondly, armies fight as they train. Troops are conditioned by peacetime habits, policies, and procedures; they do not undergo a sudden metamorphosis that transforms civilians in uniform into warriors. General George Patton was fond of relating the story about Julius Caesar, who "In the winter time ... so trained his legions in all that became soldiers and so habituated them to the proper performance of their duties, that when in the spring he committed them to battle against the Gauls, it was not necessary to give them orders, for they knew what to do and how to do it."19
Information as Power
In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books, training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature. On one occasion, an American mobile training team working with armor in Egypt at long last received the operators' manuals that had laboriously been translated into Arabic. The American trainers took the newly-minted manuals straight to the tank park and distributed them to the tank crews. Right behind them, the company commander, a graduate of the armor school at Fort Knox and specialized courses at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds ordnance school, collected the manuals from the crews. Questioned why he did this, the commander said that there was no point in giving them to the drivers because enlisted men could not read. In point of fact, he did not want enlisted men to have an independent source of knowledge. Being the only person who can explain the fire control instrumentation or boresight artillery weapons brings prestige and attention. In military terms this means that very little cross-training is accomplished and that, for instance in a tank crew, the gunners, loaders, and drivers might be proficient in their jobs but are not prepared to fill in for a casualty. Not understanding one another's jobs also inhibits a smoothly functioning crew. At a higher level it means there is no depth in technical proficiency.
Education Problems
Training tends to be unimaginative, cut and dried, and not challenging. Because the Arab educational system is predicated on rote memorization, officers have a phenomenal ability to commit vast amounts of knowledge to memory. The learning system tends to consist of on-high lectures, with students taking voluminous notes and being examined on what they were told. (It also has interesting implications for foreign instructors; for example, his credibility is diminished if he must resort to a book.) The emphasis on memorization has a price, and that is in diminished ability to reason or engage in analysis based upon general principles. Thinking outside the box is not encouraged; doing so in public can damage a career. Instructors are not challenged and neither, in the end, are students.
Head-to-head competition among individuals is generally avoided, at least openly, for it means that someone wins and someone else loses, with the loser humiliated. This taboo has particular import when a class contains mixed ranks. Education is in good part sought as a matter of personal prestige, so Arabs in U.S. military schools take pains to ensure that the ranking member, according to military position or social class, scores the highest marks in the class. Often this leads to "sharing answers" in class—often in a rather overt manner or junior officers concealing scores higher than their superior's.
American military instructors dealing with Middle Eastern students learn to ensure that, before directing any question to a student in a classroom situation, particularly if he is an officer, the student does possess the correct answer. If this is not assured, the officer will feel he has been set up for public humiliation. Furthermore, in the often-paranoid environment of Arab political culture, he will believe this setup to have been purposeful. This student will then become an enemy of the instructor and his classmates will become apprehensive about their also being singled out for humiliation—and learning becomes impossible.
Officers vs. Soldiers
Arab junior officers are well trained on the technical aspects of their weapons and tactical know-how, but not in leadership, a subject given little attention. For example, as General Sa‘d ash-Shazli, the Egyptian chief of staff, noted in his assessment of the army he inherited prior to the 1973 war, they were not trained to seize the initiative or volunteer original concepts or new ideas.20 Indeed, leadership may be the greatest weakness of Arab training systems. This problem results from two main factors: a highly accentuated class system bordering on a caste system, and lack of a non-commissioned-officer development program.
Most Arab officers treat enlisted soldiers like sub-humans. When the winds in Egypt one day carried biting sand particles from the desert during a demonstration for visiting U.S. dignitaries, I watched as a contingent of soldiers marched in and formed a single rank to shield the Americans; Egyptian soldiers, in other words, are used on occasion as nothing more than a windbreak. The idea of taking care of one's men is found only among the most elite units in the Egyptian military. On a typical weekend, officers in units stationed outside Cairo will get in their cars and drive off to their homes, leaving the enlisted men to fend for themselves by trekking across the desert to a highway and flagging down busses or trucks to get to the Cairo rail system. Garrison cantonments have no amenities for soldiers. The same situation, in various degrees, exists elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking countries—less so in Jordan, even more so in Iraq and Syria.
The young draftees who make up the bulk of the Egyptian army hate military service for good reason and will do almost anything, including self-mutilation, to avoid it. In Syria the wealthy buy exemptions or, failing that, are assigned to noncombatant organizations. As a young Syrian told me, his musical skills came from his assignment to a Syrian army band where he learned to play an instrument. In general, the militaries of the Fertile Crescent enforce discipline by fear; in countries where a tribal system still is in force, such as Saudi Arabia, the innate egalitarianism of the society mitigates against fear as the prime motivator, so a general lack of discipline pervades.21
The social and professional gap between officers and enlisted men is present in all armies, but in the United States and other Western forces, the noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps bridges it. Indeed, a professional NCO corps has been critical for the American military to work at its best; as the primary trainers in a professional army, NCOs are critical to training programs and to the enlisted men's sense of unit esprit. Most of the Arab world either has no NCO corps or it is non-functional, severely handicapping the military's effectiveness. With some exceptions, NCOs are considered in the same low category as enlisted men and so do not serve as a bridge between enlisted men and officers. Officers instruct but the wide social gap between enlisted man and officer tends to make the learning process perfunctory, formalized, and ineffective. The show-and-tell aspects of training are frequently missing because officers refuse to get their hands dirty and prefer to ignore the more practical aspects of their subject matter, believing this below their social station. A dramatic example of this occurred during the Gulf war when a severe windstorm blew down the tents of Iraqi officer prisoners of war. For three days they stayed in the wind and rain rather than be observed by enlisted prisoners in a nearby camp working with their hands.
The military price for this is very high. Without the cohesion supplied by NCOs, units tend to disintegrate in the stress of combat. This is primarily a function of the fact that the enlisted soldiers simply do not trust their officers. Once officers depart the training areas, training begins to fall apart as soldiers begin drifting off. An Egyptian officer once explained to me that the Egyptian army's catastrophic defeat in 1967 resulted from a lack of cohesion within units. The situation, he said, had only marginally improved in 1973. Iraqi prisoners in 1991 showed a remarkable fear and enmity toward their officers.
Decision-making and Responsibility
Decisions are made and delivered from on high, with very little lateral communication. This leads to a highly centralized system, with authority hardly ever delegated. Rarely does an officer make a critical decision on his own; instead, he prefers the safe course of being identified as industrious, intelligent, loyal—and compliant. Bringing attention to oneself as an innovator or someone prone to make unilateral decisions is a recipe for trouble. As in civilian life, conformism is the overwhelming societal norm; the nail that stands up gets hammered down. Orders and information flow from top to bottom; they are not to be reinterpreted, amended, or modified in any way.
U.S. trainers often experience frustration obtaining a decision from a counterpart, not realizing that the Arab officer lacks the authority to make the decision—a frustration amplified by the Arab's understandable reluctance to admit that he lacks that authority. This author has several times seen decisions that could have been made at the battalion level concerning such matters as class meeting times and locations requiring approval from the ministry of defense. All of which has led American trainers to develop a rule of thumb: a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army has as much authority as a colonel in an Arab army. Methods of instruction and subject matter are dictated from higher authorities. Unit commanders have very little to say about these affairs. The politicized nature of the Arab militaries means that political factors weigh heavily and frequently override military considerations. Officers with initiative and a predilection for unilateral action pose a threat to the regime. This can be seen not just at the level of national strategy but in every aspect of military operations and training. If Arab militaries became less politicized and more professional in preparation for the 1973 war with Israel,22 once the fighting ended, old habits returned. Now, an increasingly bureaucratized military establishment weighs in as well. A veteran of the Pentagon turf wars will feel like a kindergartner when he encounters the rivalries that exist in the Arab military headquarters.
Taking responsibility for a policy, operation, status, or training program rarely occurs. U.S. trainers can find it very frustrating when they repeatedly encounter Arab officers placing blame for unsuccessful operations or programs on the U.S. equipment or some other outside source. A high rate of non-operational U.S. equipment is blamed on a "lack of spare parts"—pointing a finger at an unresponsive U.S. supply system despite the fact that American trainers can document ample supplies arriving in country and disappearing in a malfunctioning supply system. (Such criticism was never caustic or personal and often so indirect and politely delivered that it wasn't until after a meeting that oblique references were understood.) This imperative works even at the most exalted levels. During the Kuwait war, Iraqi forces took over the town of Khafji in northeast Saudi Arabia after the Saudis had evacuated the place. General Khalid bin Sultan, the Saudi ground forces commander, requested a letter from General Norman Schwarzkopf, stating it was the U.S. general who ordered an evacuation from the Saudi town.23 And in his account of the Khafji battle, General Bin Sultan predictably blames the Americans for the Iraqi occupation of the town.24 In reality the problem was that the light Saudi forces in the area left the battlefield.25 The Saudis were in fact outgunned and outnumbered by the Iraqi unit approaching Khafji but Saudi pride required that foreigners be blamed.
As for equipment, a vast cultural gap exists between the U.S. and Arab maintenance and logistics systems. The Arab difficulties with U.S. equipment are not, as sometimes simplistically believed, a matter of "Arabs don't do maintenance," but something much deeper. The American concept of a weapons system does not convey easily. A weapons system brings with it specific maintenance and logistics procedures, policies, and even a philosophy, all of them based on U.S. culture, with its expectations of a certain educational level, sense of small unit responsibility, tool allocation, and doctrine. Tools that would be allocated to a U.S. battalion (a unit of some 600-800 personnel) would most likely be found at a much higher level—probably two or three echelons higher—in an Arab army. The expertise, initiative and, most importantly, the trust indicated by delegation of responsibility to a lower level are rare. The U.S. equipment and its maintenance are predicated on a concept of repair at the lowest level and therefore require delegation of authority. Without the needed tools, spare parts, or expertise available to keep equipment running, and loathe to report bad news to his superiors, the unit commander looks for scapegoats. All this explains why I many times heard in Egypt that U.S. weaponry is "too delicate."
I have observed many in-country U.S. survey teams: invariably, hosts make the case for acquiring the most modern of military hardware and do everything to avoid issues of maintenance, logistics, and training. They obfuscate and mislead to such an extent that U.S. teams, no matter how earnest their sense of mission, find it nearly impossible to help. More generally, Arab reluctance to be candid about training deficiencies makes it extremely difficult for foreign advisors properly to support instruction or assess training needs.
Combined Arms Operations
A lack of cooperation is most apparent in the failure of all Arab armies to succeed at combined arms operations. A regular Jordanian army infantry company, for example, is man-for-man as good as a comparable Israeli company; at battalion level, however, the coordination required for combined arms operations, with artillery, air, and logistics support, is simply absent. Indeed, the higher the echelon, the greater the disparity. This results from infrequent combined arms training; when it does take place, it is intended to impress visitors (which it does—the dog-and-pony show is usually done with uncommon gusto and theatrical talent) rather than provide real training.
This problem results from three main factors. First, the well-known lack of trust among Arabs for anyone outside their own family adversely affects offensive operations.26 Exceptions to this pattern are limited to elite units (which throughout the Arab world have the same duty—to protect the regime, rather than the country). In a culture in which almost every sphere of human endeavor, including business and social relationships, is based on a family structure, this orientation is also present in the military, particularly in the stress of battle. Offensive action, basically, consists of fire and maneuver. The maneuver element must be confident that supporting units or arms are providing covering fire. If there is a lack of trust in that support, getting troops moving forward against dug-in defenders is possible only by officers getting out front and leading, something that has not been a characteristic of Arab leadership.
Second, the complex mosaic system of peoples creates additional problems for training, as rulers in the Middle East make use of the sectarian and tribal loyalties to maintain power. The ‘Alawi minority controls Syria, East Bankers control Jordan, Sunnis control Iraq, and Nejdis control Saudi Arabia. This has direct implications for the military, where sectarian considerations affect assignments and promotions. Some minorities (such the Circassians in Jordan or the Druze in Syria) tie their well-being to the ruling elite and perform critical protection roles; others (such as the Shi‘a of Iraq) are excluded from the officer corps. In any case, the assignment of officers based on sectarian considerations works against assignments based on merit.
The same lack of trust operates at the interstate level, where Arab armies exhibit very little trust of each other, and with good reason. The blatant lie Gamal Abdel Nasser told King Husayn in June 1967 to get him into the war against Israel—that the Egyptian air force was over Tel Aviv (when most of its planes had been destroyed)—was a classic example of deceit.27 Sadat's disingenuous approach to the Syrians to entice them to enter the war in October 1973 was another (he told them that the Egyptians were planning total war, a deception which included using a second set of operational plans intended only for Syrian eyes).28 With this sort of history, it is no wonder that there is very little cross or joint training among Arab armies and very few command exercises. During the 1967 war, for example, not a single Jordanian liaison officer was stationed in Egypt, nor were the Jordanians forthcoming with the Egyptian command.29
Third, Middle Eastern rulers routinely rely on balance-of-power techniques to maintain their authority.30 They use competing organizations, duplicate agencies, and coercive structures dependent upon the ruler's whim. This makes building any form of personal power base difficult, if not impossible, and keeps the leadership apprehensive and off-balance, never secure in its careers or social position. The same applies within the military; a powerful chairman of the joint chiefs is inconceivable.
Joint commands are paper constructs that have little actual function. Leaders look at joint commands, joint exercises, combined arms, and integrated staffs very cautiously for all Arab armies are a double-edged sword. One edge points toward the external enemy and the other toward the capital. The land forces are at once a regime-maintenance force and threat at the same time. No Arab ruler will allow combined operations or training to become routine; the usual excuse is financial expense, but that is unconvincing given their frequent purchase of hardware whose maintenance costs they cannot afford. In fact, combined arms exercises and joint staffs create familiarity, soften rivalries, erase suspicions, and eliminate the fragmented, competing organizations that enable rulers to play off rivals against one another. This situation is most clearly seen in Saudi Arabia, where the land forces and aviation are under the minister of defense, Prince Sultan, while the National Guard is under Prince Abdullah, the deputy prime minister and crown prince. In Egypt, the Central Security Forces balance the army. In Iraq and Syria, the Republican Guard does the balancing.
Politicians actually create obstacles to maintain fragmentation. For example, obtaining aircraft from the air force for army airborne training, whether it is a joint exercise or a simple administrative request for support of training, must generally be coordinated by the heads of services at the ministry of defense; if a large number of aircraft are involved, this probably requires presidential approval. Military coups may be out of style, but the fear of them remains strong. Any large-scale exercise of land forces is a matter of concern to the government and is closely observed, particularly if live ammunition is being used. In Saudi Arabia a complex system of clearances required from area military commanders and provincial governors, all of whom have differing command channels to secure road convoy permission, obtaining ammunition, and conducting exercises, means that in order for a coup to work, it would require a massive amount of loyal conspirators. Arab regimes have learned how to be coup-proof.
Security and Paranoia
Arab regimes classify virtually everything vaguely military. Information the U.S. military routinely publishes (about promotions, transfers, names of unit commanders, and unit designations) is top secret in Arabic-speaking countries. To be sure, this does make it more difficult for the enemy to construct an accurate order of battle, but it also feeds the divisive and compartmentalized nature of the military forces. The obsession with security
can reach ludicrous lengths. Prior to the 1973 war, Sadat was surprised to find that within two weeks of the date he had ordered the armed forces be ready for war, his minister of war, General Muhammad Sadiq, had failed to inform his immediate staff of the order. Should a war, Sadat wondered, be kept secret from the very people expected to fight it?31 One can expect to have an Arab counterpart or key contact to be changed without warning and with no explanation as to his sudden absence. This might well be simply a transfer a few doors down the way, but the vagueness of it all leaves foreigners with dire scenarios—scenarios that might be true. And it is best not to inquire too much; advisors or trainers who seem overly inquisitive may find their access to host military information or facilities limited.
The presumed close U.S.-Israel relationship, thought to be operative at all levels, aggravates and complicates this penchant for secrecy. Arabs believe that the most mundane details about them are somehow transmitted to the Mossad via a secret hotline.This explains why a U.S. advisor with Arab forces is likely to be asked early and often about his opinion of the "Palestine problem," then subjected to monologues on the presumed Jewish domination of the United States.
Indifference to Safety
In terms of safety measures, there is a general laxness, a seeming carelessness and indifference to training accidents, many of which could have been prevented by minimal efforts. To the (perhaps overly) safety-conscious Americans, Arab societies appear indifferent to casualties and show a seemingly lackadaisical approach to training safety. There are a number of explanations for this. Some would point to the inherent fatalism within Islam,32 and certainly anyone who has spent considerable time in Arab taxis would lend credence to that theory, but perhaps the reason is less religiously based and more a result of political culture. As any military veteran knows, the ethos of a unit is set at the top; or, as the old saying has it, units do those things well that the boss cares about. When the top political leadership displays a complete lack of concern for the welfare of its soldiers, such attitudes percolate down through the ranks. Exhibit A was the betrayal of Syrian troops fighting Israel in the Golan in 1967: having withdrawn its elite units, the Syrian government knowingly broadcast the falsehood that Israeli troops had captured the town of Kuneitra, which would have put them behind the largely conscript Syrian army still in position. The leadership took this step to pressure the great powers to impose a truce, though it led to a panic by the Syrian troops and the loss of the Golan Heights.33
Conclusion
It would be difficult to exaggerate the cultural gulf separating American and Arab military cultures. In every significant area, American military advisors find students who enthusiastically take in their lessons and then resolutely fail to apply them. The culture they return to—the culture of their own armies in their own countries—defeats the intentions with which they took leave of their American instructors.
When they had an influence on certain Arab military establishments, the Soviets reinforced their clients' cultural traits far more than, in more recent years, Americans were able to. Like the Arabs', the Soviets' military culture was driven by political fears bordering on paranoia. The steps taken to control the sources (real or imagined) of these fears, such as a rigidly centralized command structure, were readily understood by Arab political and military elites. The Arabs, too, felt an affinity for the Soviet officer class's contempt for ordinary soldiers and the Soviet military hierarchy's distrust of a well-developed, well-appreciated, well-rewarded NCO corps.
Arab political culture is based on a high degree of social stratification, very much like that of the defunct Soviet Union and very much unlike the upwardly mobile, meritocratic, democratic United States. Arab officers do not see any value in sharing information among themselves, let alone with their men. In this they follow the example of their political leaders, who not only withhold information from their own allies, but routinely deceive them. Training in Arab armies reflects this: rather than prepare as much as possible for the multitude of improvised responsibilities that are thrown up in the chaos of battle, Arab soldiers, and their officers, are bound in the narrow functions assigned them by their hierarchy. That this renders them less effective on the battlefield, let alone places their lives at greater risk, is scarcely of concern, whereas, of course, these two issues are dominant in the American military culture, and are reflected in American military training.
Change is unlikely to come until it occurs in the larger Arab political culture, although the experience of other societies (including our own) suggests that the military can have a democratizing influence on the larger political culture, as officers bring the lessons of their training first into their professional environment, then into the larger society. It obviously makes a big difference, however, when the surrounding political culture is not only avowedly democratic (as are many Middle Eastern states), but functionally so. Until Arab politics begin to change at fundamental levels, Arab armies, whatever the courage or proficiency of individual officers and men, are unlikely to acquire the range of qualities which modern fighting forces require for success on the battlefield. For these qualities depend on inculcating respect, trust, and openness among the members of the armed forces at all levels, and this is the marching music of modern warfare that Arab armies, no matter how much they emulate the corresponding steps, do not want to hear.

My Love

The price we've paid for the war we've won...

Its May 1st 2010, seven years and some change from the start of the war in Iraq. Seven long years that have cost us the lives of over 4,300 American men and women. Over 35,000 have received Purple Hearts for injuries received in combat against our enemy, including death. We are on the verge of a victory in Iraq. The elections were a success and according to the security pact set forth by the Bush administration, all combat troops will be out of Iraq by September. We will leave 50,000 in Iraq until 2012 to advise and assist the Iraqi Army.

The majority of our Army is hardened by the years of brutal ground combat with a vicious, heartless enemy. For those like me, all we know of the Army is war. The Global War on Terror has been carrying on for 8 1/2 years now. Even the young Soldiers, some not yet old enough to drink, carry the physical and emotional scars of war.

We were young and innocent once. Naive to the horrors than man can bring to himself. We've seen things that can burn into your memory a forever haunting image. The fear and uncertainty that even the bravest cower to. We've returned home and battled the demons, only to return to their doorstep and face them again. Iraq, to many is a second home. All too familiar and all too real.

We may leave this god forsaken hunk of earth, never to return again. Some may get out and leave the Army and this war long behind them. Chalk it up to a youthful misadventure. We may never step foot on Iraqi soil again, and that may be too soon. We will however, always cherish the memories of the men that we fought beside and those who fell beside us.

We were young and innocent once. Until that first shot fired or that first sight of human carnage. We are aged well past our years. While our civilian peers went off to college and their frat house lifestyle, we went off to war and the untold battles that ensued. We numbed ourselves to death and the fear of mortal danger. We lost the emotions that repel us to human violence and replaced it with a tough outer shell in hopes of protecting that innocence.

There will be a time for all of us, some sooner than others, that will allow us to emerge from that shell. No longer afraid of what was out there or what caused us to become numb. We will emerge from that shell and try to continue our ordinary lives without the demons that still haunt us. We will seek understanding from our loved ones, understanding that will only come from those who were there or have been through the trials we have endured.

For some, we will close this chapter and move on to Afghanistan. We will fight the demons of another land and numb ourselves from their dangers. We will continue the fight until we are rid of our enemies and the hell that they wish to bring to our homeland. Some will die trying.

I picture myself on a desert island someday. No worries in the world. No gunfire, no blood shed, no flag draped caskets. A quiet place on a beach, a place that truly defines peace. I will be the closest that I can ever come to peace. Standing by me will be the memories of the men that we lost and the war that we fought, one day when we were innocent and young.

Back to the sand

We're on the eve of another deployment to Iraq. A war that should have been over in a month has dragged into a six year battle for our lives. We have lost countless American men and women in a fight that has been questioned by the public that we serve.

I do not look forward to a year away from my way of life. The heat, the dust, the horrible sounds and smells. The distance from a life that feels so comfortable. I don't want to fight for a 10 minute phone call home, dream about the simple pleasures of America. But its my time again and I can't complain, too many have spent more than I to earn the progress that we have made.

I'm not afraid of the hard living or the sacrifice of our basic pleasures. I'm only afraid of two things. First of all, I'm afraid that I will come back again to a world that I don't know. A life of waiting for the tragedy that surrounds combat. A life of cold sweats and untold fear. A life that nobody understands but me and the men that have seen what I've seen.

I am most of all afraid of coming home with fewer men than we left with. I cannot stand another body bag or another ceremony. I can't wait around with the expectation of more bad news. A fallen brother is easier to deal with in country, we drive on and complete the mission. We accept it as a cost of battle.

When the time comes to return home, that's when the cost hits us. When the fog of war subsides and the cost shines through. When we realize that they aren't coming home. That's when the worst part of 12 months from home hits us.

We drive on and do what we do regardless.

Too many bracelets

I've got a silver bracelet that I wear. It has the name, rank, unit and place of death of a guy I knew when I was in Fco 51st Inf (LRS)(ABN) at Fort Bragg NC. He was killed on 12 AUG 2003 in Iraq by a roadside bomb. I know at least 7 men who have been killed in the War on Terror and many more who have been seriously wounded. I have bracelets for all of them sitting on a shelf in my living room.

I wear this one for one reason, the circumstances surrounding his deployment and ultimately his death. He was a young kid in our unit when I knew him. A good kid that wasn't ready to grow up. He went AWOL while I was there and din't return until I had left. When he returned to the unit he was busted from PFC to PVT and was on the verge of being kicked out. He begged the Company Commander to retain him and let him deploy with his unit.

He deployed to Kuwait in February 2003 and was part of the initial push into Iraq. While conducting a security patrol in Taji Iraq, his Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb. It flipped and crushed him. I wasn't there but I have heard the story first hand from my buddies who were in the patrol.

I have too many bracelets on my shelf now. Its been over six years since we started the Iraq campaign and almost 8 years since we had boots on the ground in Afghanistan. I know all too well that my collection will grow.

As my unit prepares for Iraq in October I can't help but wonder how many bracelets I will have to buy when we return. The war in Iraq is drawing to a close but we still have a hard fight to finish. I am in a line Infantry Battalion that has a history of seeing the worst of the fighting wherever it goes. I am older now that I was when I first saw combat. I am in a position to lead men like PFC Brown and I work with men that are only 18 and 19 years old.

These men were only 10 years old when the towers fell and this war began. Hardly old enough to know what lay ahead of them. Sometimes I find myself looking at these men and wondering who will fall and who will be seriously injured. I can't prevent the inevitable, death is part of our profession.

I hope that someday, somehow, the collection of bracelets on my shelf will be complete and that they will symbolize a struggle that has brought us to a better world. Until that time, I will do my best to keep their memory alive.

War and the Superbowl

It's been over seven years since the first shot was fired in the War on Terror. We are sending men into combat that were only 10 years old when the towers fell and the Pentagon was hit. We have seen 8 Super Bowls come and go in that time.

It amazes me how far we have come in this war but kills me how much the war in Afghanistan is forgotten. Compared to Iraq, we have lost very few Americans in this conflict. We currently stand at about 572 Americans killed in Afghanistan opposed to the 4269 lost in Iraq.

The war in Afghanistan was is the cradle of the War on Terror and is unlikely to end within this generation.The greatest generation was defined by Tom Brokah as the men and women who fought the Axis powers of WWII. They defeated Hitler's Army in Europe and the Japanese Empire in the Pacific. They answered a call to duty that has not been matched in American history.

I submit a second greatest generation. A generation that has produced an all volunteer military to fight a deadly war on two fronts for over seven years. Not all can be included in this greatest generation. There are some that are unwilling to fight this war but there are many that put aside their own safety to travel the world in search of the terrorists that mean us harm.

I have sacrificed not only my own safety but I have lost a wife, much of my daughter's childhood and quality time with my friends and family. I have only questioned my decisions on two occasions, once when I broke up with my most recent girlfriend and the other when my daughter asked me why I had to leave her to find the bad guys.

I watched tonights Super Bowl and couldn't help but notice that America has forgotten the severity of the price we pay. The announcers did their part by thanking the troops overseas but that was the extent of it.During the game, I can tell you from experience, that there were hundreds of combat patrols conducted on both battle fields. During those patrols it is likely that at least two or three came under fire and a better chance that people were killed, American or otherwise.

The broadcast showed American Soldiers watching the game. Those are not combat Soldiers, they are support. Those are the people that deploy and never see combat. While they where watching the game, Infantrymen where on the streets and in the hills searching for the enemy.They are still on those patrols as I write this. Many of them will be out for days. They will know the winner of the game by the end of the week when they return to their base, tired, dirty, and damaged.

I hate to say it but Americans need to see another 9/11 to remember what is going on in our world. They need to see innocent civilians die in order to feel the severity of the evil that we are fighting. The world that less than 1% of us live everyday.

Dear Mr. Obama

Tomorrow is the day that we swear in our new president and Commander In Chief Obama. I didn't vote for the man and I did not want him to lead our military during the second most prolonged war in our history. I, as most people know voted for John McCain, a former prisoner of war and avid supporter of our military.

As a true patriot however, I know that the Constitution of the United States, the document that I swore my life upon, has provided for the peaceful transfer of authority for a President elected by the people. I am first a Soldier in the United States Army and second a private citizen with political views.

I have no negative opinions of Mr. Obama as man or as an American. I truly believe that Mr. Obama and the people who elected him want what’s best for our country. We may disagree on what the best is but I respect him for the fact that he wants to better our nation. I have high hopes that he will not let us down.Our nation has survived many hard times. Great depressions, long bloody wars, assassinations and global threats have never extinguished the light of freedom that our founding fathers lit with our independence. No one man will ever destroy this nation and I know that.

Mr. Obama has pledged to close Guantanamo Bay on his first day in office. America has become weak when it comes to it's handling of the very people who pledge to take our lives or give their own. I don't know what he plans to do with these people but the majority of them will be returned to the battle fields in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s fine; we'll kill or capture them just like we did the first time. Any American blood that is spilled during those fights will be on his hands.

Mr. Obama has pledged to pull our troops out of Iraq within 16 months of his inauguration. Think long and hard about that sir. We have lost over 4200 American lives in this conflict, injured 30,000 and disrupted the lives of every American who has volunteered to serve during a time of war. Whether the reasons for war were right or wrong, as soon as one life is lost, we owe it to those Soldiers to win the cause that they gave their lives for. End the war, we're tired too, but do it in a way that honors our dead and our sacrifice.

I applaud Mr. Obama's pledge to surge 30,000 troops into Afghanistan to battle the influx of violence that has sprouted over the last year. We have been there 7 years and will be for decades. Don't give up this fight; it is the core of our War on Terror and central to our national defense.The Bush administration has repaired a military that was dwindled under the Clinton administration. We were ill prepared to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan because of budget cuts from the mid to late 90s. We were underpaid, underequipped and unprepared until our budget was dramatically increased in the last 7 years. Do not change this. We have all volunteered to fight this war, unless you want a draft, keep us happy. We earn every benefit that we have through blood sweat and tears.

You have a huge responsibility as our Commander In Chief. You send us to war, no matter who started it. You bring us home and it is your job to take care of our wounds and our families if we don't come home. It is your job to honor our service and our sacrifice no matter how controversial our fight. We don't start wars, our government does, we just finish them.

You have a lot to live up to as a President; don't forget your responsibility to the American men and women who have put their lives on hold to defend the very Constitution that put you in office.

Moving on

I've been an Active Duty Army recruiter in Madison WI since May 2007. Now its time for me to move on and return to the Operational Army. I'm excited. I will be reporting to Fort Drum NY on January 10th 2009. I will be assigned to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division as an Infantry Squad Leader.

This is an important part of my career. I will be in charge of a 9 man Light Infantry Squad. I will be responsible for all that they do and fail to do until I leave that position. I will prepare them to deploy and within the next 6 month deploy with my Squad to Afghanistan.

Operation Enduring Freedom is well over 7 years old. I am excited to once again have the opportunity to take the finest Americans into combat to kill, capture and destroy the enemies of the United States. The Afghanistan Campaign is the cradle of the War on Terror and is currently a tougher fight than Iraq.

I am honored to have earned the Army's trust and confidence in this mission.

Warriors among us

When a man voluntarily joins the U.S Army and goes to war, he comes home a different person than when he left. The sites and sounds of ground combat are something that never leaves the back of your mind.

For the Soldiers that are now at home among us, this is very difficult to live with. The ordinary day to day life of a combat veteran is much different than the average American civilian, if only in his head.

He still goes to the store, he still walks the streets with the rest of us but his mind is often in a different place than everyone else. He spends time scanning rooftops, gaining awareness of the situation around him and constantly wondering if anyone around him has any idea of what he is doing.

When he enters a crowded area his senses are at a high state of alert. The threat could be anywhere and it is everywhere. At any moment, this peaceful street corner could turn into chaos. He knows that it won't but he is prepared for it, almost wanting it. If all hell broke loose in the capitol square he would be in his comfort zone. He would know what to do and he would immediatley be in control of his life again.

Sometimes he takes a moment to calm himself down, to convince himself that this is not his old sector in Baghdad or Sadr City. This is a peaceful wisconsin town that is totally removed from the horrors of the Iraq war. Maybe it is too removed from reality for him. Maybe if more people had an understanding of how we are fighting this war, he would be better.

I tell myself that time will eventually heal this pain. It's been over two years since I left the war and I should be over this. Vietnam veterans still have sympotoms of their experiences 40 years later. Is this going to be my way of life from now on? The only combat Soldiers that are not effected by these problems were laid to rest in flag draped coffins across the country.

The VA is working in overdrive to heal Iraq and Afghanistan veterans when they return from these wars. I have been a patient at the Madison VA Hospital for a few months now. I can honestly say that they are dedicationg themselves to do their best for me and my brothers in pain. I applaud their efforts and I am proud that my governemnt is generally concerned about this issue.

If you see me on the beltline and I switch lanes to avoid a car bomb on the should, don't think that I'm a bad driver, this is what my brain does to protect myself from a roadside bomb. It work on route Irish in Iraq and it will continue to work here in Madison.

If I insist on sitting at a table that faces the door, please accomidate. My entire meal will be eaten while I have good awareness of posible threats. If my back were facing the door, I would constantly turn my head to check the door.

If I walk into walmart and stop at the door for a while, don' ask me if you can help. I'm only scanning the open areas for targets, avenues of approach and good escape routes. I need to know whats going on before we can go in. I'll never stay too long, I don't want to give them a chance to ambush me.

If I stop too far behind another car at a stop light, don't think that I'm a bad driver. I want to give my truck enough space to get out of the kill zone if we get hit by a complex ambush. I am going to need a quick escape rout if I need to move my men out of the kill zone to move to cover and reorginize.

If you see me staring at some arabs down by the terrace, don't accuse me of racism. I want to know they're age and sex make up of the group. Are there any military age males with the group. What are those males doing? Have they been taking notes, counting the crowd size or looking into out of the way places to conceal a bomb? I'll settle down as soon as I realize that they are Indian and not Iraq or Afghan tourists.

Understand that it isn't funny and its not a joke when I hear a loud noise and I spin around towards its source. The noise was made by something and I want to know where it came from and what it was. My mind tells me that we need to get over there, cordon it off and detain all military aged males in the area.

Going to and coming back from this war is hard on everyone, especially the guy that's job took him out into sector to fight every day for 12-15 months. You can't just come home and move on. You need to live with your experiences and eventually find a way to deal with it.

I have a very short temper when I talk with civilians about the war. I have a fine time when I'm talking to someone who has been there as he knows what I know. Don't engage me in a war debate that you are not qualified to participate in. I've done my time in combat and I have done some horrible things that I will never forget. I am proud of everything that I have had the opportunity to do for my country.

This is all a small price to pay for national security.

What now?

Where do I go from here?
I've traveled the world. I've been around the world and back again. I've seen war and I have survived war. I have been a part of my generation's legacy. I did all of this by my 23rd birthday. What now?
What does a man do when he comes home from war? The most thrilling, life threatening and fearful time of his life? How do you live a life that is complete without the constant threat of death?
How do you come home to live amongst people who have no idea what you have done? They will never understand the things that you have seen, the blood an gore of war. They don't need to know, thats why you did it, so they didn't have to. Still, you resent the civilians of America for not being there when you were there. Its horrible but you wish that everyone had seen what you have seen and felt the same fear that you have felt.
You come home and everything is great for a few months. You can see green grass and happy children playing without fear. Your family is overjoyed with your homecoming and you swear that you will never take it forgranted again.
Then it sets in. The men that died over there will never come home. The violence still rages on. There are still men like you fighting the same fight that you survived. The thrill is gone and all that is left is the regret that you didn't die and you are at home and that you are slowly becoming the guy that has moved on.
This keeps you from moving on. You don't want to move on. You want to torture yourself with the thoughts of bombs and gunfire and death just so you don't feel guilt. When you walk downtown you scan rooftops and you wait for a complex IED attack because it makes you feel safe. Like you are there again, in a world that you have adapted to and cannot let go. You can react to an IED because that was your life for 12 months.
You cannot adapt to everyone else being ok with their surroundings. Like they have never seen the war in Iraq. They have never dealt with the unknown or the fear of death. They have been back here in safety since 2001 and they have no idea what it means to serve in combat. And that is the key to your misery, nobody knows. You are far separated from your peers, the people that share your pain. Your brothers.....
So what now? I'm still in the Army and I think that I will be for many years to come. I love it, it is a passion for me. But how do I go on with my life, knowing that there is still so much violence against my brothers in Iraq and Afghanistan? The only cure is to go back and go back as many times as it take to win the War on Terror.

The RPG that didn't kill us

One of the jobs that I had in Iraq was part of the Quick Reaction Force (QRF). We were basically the 911 for Camp Victory and 18th Airborne Corps. If an emergency happened, we would respond. The good thing about the job is that we almost always showed up after the threat was over, almost always.

We worked 12 hour shifts on QRF. 12 on, 12 off. We would sit in a trailer near our vehicals and wait for a call. Every 2 hours we would conduct a 30 minute patrol of the perimeter.

During a daytime shift in February of 2005 we recieved a call to respond to a VBIED (car bomb) at one of Camp Victory's gates. The Iraqi Army (IA) had control of the gates and that had spared some American lives in this attack. If I remember correctly, the IA lost 4 that day.

Our responsibility as QRF was to secure the area against an enemy attack and wait for the U.S Criminal Investigation Division (CID) to reach the site and conduct the investigation. We waited too long.

Waiting on an open street in Iraq is one of the scariest things in theatre. You are in the open, for an extended period of time. In this case, Haji knew where we were because he set off the bomb. He knew that there would be chaos and he would take advantage of it.

We had been in a blocking position with our four trucks for about 30 minutes when the RPG (rocket) came screaming in. It was early in our deployment and my first RPG. It sounded like a jet landing at an airport. I had always imagined it sounding like a whistle, just like in the movies. It caught me off guard.

Before I could dip into the truck it was gone. In the chaos, I didn't even see where it went. The lead truck knew very well what had happened. The four men in that truck nearly died that day.

The RPG had hit a berm about 20 meters to the left of the lead truck. It was headed for the middle truck, I was in the rear. The berm redirected it just enough so that it slid under the front truck and into a nearby canal. It detonated 50 meters past our position and produced no casualties.

That was my first contact with the enemy in Iraq. It would not be the last. I wonder what would have happened if the berm had been one foot lower. The men in the target truck were SPC Johnson (later MEDEVACed after a non combat accident), SGT Rink and SGT Mcgrew. They could have been easily killed that day, but they weren't

Story Time

I have been keeping secrets for almost two years now. When I was in Iraq, I talked to my family by phone and e-mail. I told them stories of sandstorms and close calls with mortars. That is the worst that they ever knew of my time in Iraq.

I don't intend to change those impressions for them. What they don't know, what they don't understand, won't hurt them.

I don't know if anyone will read my blog, that isn't why I have started it. I am just telling my story to anyone that will take the time to listen.

There were a lot of crazy events that I witnessed in Iraq. I want to share a few of those stories. I want to tell the stories because I want the world to know what we have done and I want to pass our story along. We didn't do anything that will make the news or that would make a good movie. We did what we did and we made it home.

I will tell these stories in a series of posts in the near future..........

Why we fight.

Many of you who have stumbled upon my blog were looking for Anti-War postings. That was my intention, as a veteran and witness to the Global War on Terror I want you to see my side of the fight.

I want you to see the war from my eyes. To see why an all volunteer force has sustained the war against extremist Islam. For the record, I am a conservative who has voted for George Bush. This is NOT a political forum, just a way for me to vent my feelings against the anti-war movement.

Let me begin by stating that no true Soldier wants war, we only accept that it is necessary. Human nature is to fight and that will always be so. The American Soldier only fights those who intend to harm our people, nothing else and nothing more.

I did not enlist into the U.S Army to kill, I came into this career as a true Patriot. I wanted to be a servant to the U.S Government and to honor the millions of men that had fought and died before me. I signed the dotted line on 24 April 2000 as a Senior in High School. My ship date was 11 SEP 01, and I took that as a sign of my destiny.

I did not fight in Afghanistan, although I know many men who did. I spent only two weeks in Iraq during the invasion. I saw enough to speak about it with authority. I deployed to Iraq in January 2005, to be exact, it was 16 JAN 05, my 22nd birthday. I spent 12 months in the sand as an Infantryman. It was a year that will define my life.

Although many will argue this, the war in Iraq has become part of the War on Terror. Whether it started that way is up for debate, but I can honestly say that we are now fighting the enemies of America on foreign soil. Al Qaida in Iraq is the real deal, and we are fortunate enough to engage them 6,000 miles from home instead of on our home turf.

I did nothing special in Iraq. I did what it took to come home to my Wife and Daughter. I am not a hero and never claimed to be. Heroes come home in flag draped coffins, in the middle of the night, to silent honor guards that are shielded from the public.

We, as an Army, are a secret society in America. We do things that will never be understood by the public we serve. We mourn in private for the brothers that we have lost and we never expect you to understand. The job that we do is protested by people who have no idea what it means to give your blood, sweat and tears to a country that so easily forgets.

Many Americans protest the war in Iraq and claim that it is futile. I argue that no matter what the cause, American men are dying on foreign sand, 6,000 miles from home. If they have died for a cause that is futile, then we have failed our heroes. I refuse to think that any cause that has cost American blood is futile. No American will ever die in vein as long as there stands his brothers in arms to continue the fight..........

My War...

This page has become a platform for me to vent my opinions and my feelings. I have said some things in my blog that I have never said in person. I have made this a personal memorial to the thousands of my peers that have given their lives in the Global War on Terrorism. If it seems that I am pushing my opinions on you and that you are offended, please leave my page. My opinions are strong and I am not ashamed of my words.

Every day that America wakes up and lives the American dream, there are men in the sand that take their last breath. They lay in the streets of Iraq and the hills of Afghanistan and they bleed on foreign soil. 6000 miles from the land that they protect, they think of their wives, their children and their families one last time.These men come home in flag draped coffins, in secrecy on board military aircraft. The suffering of their families is unknown except to those who watched them die and those who waited at home.

I am as guilty as well. I have been to Iraq and I have known men who died but I am not there now. My war ended in January 2006 when my American Airlines rotator flight landed in Fort Dix, NJ. I have never been the same since the day that I turned in my weapon and returned to my "normal" life. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't feel guilty for being alive, uninjured and enjoying my life in America. I watch the news and I read the official casualty reports. While I sit here and drink my beer, I can't help but think of the grunt in Iraq that is patrolling the streets and scanning the rooftops for the enemy that is trying to take his life.

He hasn't changed his socks in days; he hasn't had a chance to brush his teeth since they left the base. It was supposed to be a three hour presence patrol but they made contact and they aren't going back until they find the guy who fired the RPG. He promised his wife that he would call her today when he got back. That won't happen today because he has a sector to cover while his squad sets up a temporary Observation Post in a safe house.

His wife will be mad and she will never understand why he couldn't call.It was a good day though, the RPG slid under the front of his HUMVEE and it didn't detonate. He cherishes the day because it could have ended in his death. He didn't die today and he is relieved. He will never take life forgranted again yet he is cocky because he has cheated death.

We post our yellow ribbon magnets and we say that we support our troops. But when it comes down to giving up our comforts and our lives to join the fight, we scoff. It's not OUR job to fight, we're going to college. We assume that the only people who join our military are the ones that had no other options.

90% of our military are High School graduates, a great many of them are college graduates. I have more college than I know what to do with and I had the option to go to college instead of the Army. My parents had enough money saved up to send me to college but I wanted to serve my country.

I have a job that gives me more than college ever could. I wake up every morning and I am given the opportunity to wear the uniform that millions before me have worn. I wear the uniform of the same Army that won our independence in 1776 and defeated slavery in the Civil War.

My brothers before me landed in Normandy and jumped into St. Mere Iglise. We have defeated the Nazis, the Koreans and have fought bravely in Vietnam. My predecessors have fought in countless conflicts around the world and I have been granted the honor of wearing their uniform and standing in their ranks.

I could ask for nothing more.I'm not posting this to make you feel ashamed or for you to feel bad for us. My goal is that anyone who reads these words will know a little more about the war that few in our generation are fighting.

The most realistic description of Iraq that I have ever read...

The following is an article written by a brother. I've never met this brother but we share a bond that few will ever know. I take no credit for his words but it hits home for many of us who have kicked down doors and taken lives in the name of America.........

A few months ago, I found a Web site loaded with pictures and videos from iraq, the sort that usually aren't seen on the news. I watched insurgent snipers shoot American soldiers and car bombs disintegrate markets, accompanied by tinny music and loud, rhythmic chanting, the soundtrack of the propaganda campaigns. Video cameras focused on empty stretches of road, building anticipation. Humvees rolled into view and the explosions brought mushroom clouds of dirt and smoke and chunks of metal spinning through the air. Other videos and pictures showed insurgents shot dead while planting roadside bombs or killed in firefights and the remains of suicide bombers, people how they're not meant to be seen, no longer whole. The images sickened me, but their familiarity pulled me in, giving comfort, and I couldn't stop. I clicked through more frames, hungry for it. This must be what a shot of dope feels like after a long stretch of sobriety. Soothing and nauseating and colored by everything that has come before. My body tingled and my stomach ached, hollow. I stood on weak legs and walked into the kitchen to make dinner. I sliced half an onion before putting the knife down and watching slight tremors run through my hand. The shakiness lingered. I drank a beer. And as I leaned against this kitchen counter, in this house, in America, my life felt very foreign.

I've been home from Iraq for more than a year, long enough for my time there to become a memory best forgotten for those who worried every day that I was gone. I could see their relief when I returned. Life could continue, with futures not so uncertain. But in quiet moments, their relief brought me guilt. Maybe they assume I was as overjoyed to be home as they were to have me home. Maybe they assume if I could do it over, I never would have gone. And maybe I wouldn't have. But I miss Iraq. I miss the war. I miss war. And I have a very hard time understanding why.

I'm glad to be home, to have put away my uniforms, to wake up next to my wife each morning. I worry about my friends who are in Iraq now, and I wish they weren't. Often I hated being there, when the frustrations and lack of control over my life were complete and mind-bending. I questioned my role in the occupation and whether good could come of it. I wondered if it was worth dying or killing for. The suffering and ugliness I saw disgusted me. But war twists and shifts the landmarks by which we navigate our lives, casting light on darkened areas that for many people remain forever unexplored. And once those darkened spaces are lit, they become part of us. At a party several years ago, long before the Army, I listened to a friend who had served several years in the Marines tell a woman that if she carried a pistol for a day, just tucked in her waistband and out of sight, she would feel different. She would see the world differently, for better or worse. Guns empower. She disagreed and he shrugged. No use arguing the point; he was just offering a little piece of truth. He was right, of course. And that's just the beginning.

I've spent hours taking in the world through a rifle scope, watching life unfold. Women hanging laundry on a rooftop. Men haggling over a hindquarter of lamb in the market. Children walking to school. I've watched this and hoped that someday I would see that my presence had made their lives better, a redemption of sorts. But I also peered through the scope waiting for someone to do something wrong, so I could shoot him. When you pick up a weapon with the intent of killing, you step onto a very strange and serious playing field. Every morning someone wakes wanting to kill you. When you walk down the street, they are waiting, and you want to kill them, too. That's not bloodthirsty; that's just the trade you've learned. And as an American soldier, you have a very impressive toolbox. You can fire your rifle or lob a grenade, and if that's not enough, call in the tanks, or helicopters, or jets. The insurgents have their skill sets, too, turning mornings at the market into chaos, crowds into scattered flesh, Humvees into charred scrap. You're all part of the terrible magic show, both powerful and helpless.

That men are drawn to war is no surprise. How old are boys before they turn a finger and thumb into a pistol? Long before they love girls, they love war, at least everything they imagine war to be: guns and explosions and manliness and courage. When my neighbors and I played war as kids, there was no fear or sorrow or cowardice. Death was temporary, usually as fast as you could count to sixty and jump back into the game. We didn't know yet about the darkness. And young men are just slightly older versions of those boys, still loving the unknown, perhaps pumped up on dreams of duty and heroism and the intoxicating power of weapons. In time, war dispels many such notions, and more than a few men find that being freed from society's professed revulsion to killing is really no freedom at all, but a lonely burden. Yet even at its lowest points, war is like nothing else. Our culture craves experience, and that is war's strong suit. War peels back the skin, and you live with a layer of nerves exposed, overdosing on your surroundings, when everything seems all wrong and just right, in a way that makes perfect sense. And then you almost die but don't, and are born again, stoned on life and mocking death. The explosions and gunfire fry your nerves, but you want to hear them all the same. Something's going down.

For those who know, this is the open secret: War is exciting. Sometimes I was in awe of this, and sometimes I felt low and mean for loving it, but I loved it still. Even in its quiet moments, war is brighter, louder, brasher, more fun, more tragic, more wasteful. More. More of everything. And even then I knew I would someday miss it, this life so strange. Today the war has distilled to moments and feelings, and somewhere in these memories is the reason for the wistfulness.
On one mission we slip away from our trucks and into the night. I lead the patrol through the darkness, along canals and fields and into the town, down narrow, hard-packed dirt streets. Everyone has gone to bed, or is at least inside. We peer through gates and over walls into courtyards and into homes. In a few rooms TVs flicker. A woman washes dishes in a tub. Dogs bark several streets away. No one knows we are in the street, creeping. We stop at intersections, peek around corners, training guns on parked cars, balconies, and storefronts. All empty. We move on. From a small shop up ahead, we hear men's voices and laughter. Maybe they used to sit outside at night, but now they are indoors, where it's safe. Safer. The sheet-metal door opens and a man steps out, cigarette and lighter in hand. He still wears a smile, takes in the cool night air, and then nearly falls backward through the doorway in a panic. I'm a few feet from him now and his eyes are wide. I mutter a greeting and we walk on, back into the darkness.

Another night we're lost in a dust storm. I'm in the passenger seat, trying to guide my driver and the three trucks behind us through this brown maelstrom. The headlights show nothing but swirling dirt. We've driven these roads for months, we know them well, but we see nothing. So we drive slow, trying to stay out of canals and people's kitchens. We curse and we laugh. This is bizarre but a great deal of fun.

Another night my platoon sergeant's truck is swallowed in flames, a terrible, beautiful, boiling bloom of red and orange and yellow, lighting the darkness for a moment. Somehow we don't die, one more time.

We pack into the trucks after midnight, and the convoy snakes out of camp and speeds toward the target house. I sit in a backseat and the fear settles in, a sharp burning in my stomach, same as the knot from hard liquor gulped too fast. I think about the knot. I'll be the first through the door. What if he starts shooting, hits me right in the face before I'm even through the doorway? What if there's two, or three? What if he pitches a grenade at us? And I think about it more and run through the scenarios, planning my movements, imagining myself clearing through the rooms, firing two rounds into the chest, and the knot fades.

The trucks drop us off several blocks from the target house and we slip into the night. As always, the dogs bark. We gather against the high wall outside the house and call in the trucks to block the streets. The action will pass in a flash. But here, before the chaos starts, when we're stacked against the wall, my friends' bodies pressed against me, hearing their quick breaths and my own, there's a moment to appreciate the gravity, the absurdity, the novelty, the joy of the moment. Is this real? Hearts beat strong. Hands grip tight on weapons. Reassurance. The rest of the world falls away. Who knows what's on the other side?

One, two, three, go. We push past the gate and across the courtyard and toward the house, barrels locked on the windows and roof. Wells runs up with the battering ram, a short, heavy pipe with handles, and launches it toward the massive wood door. The lock explodes, the splintered door flies open, and we rush through, just the way we've practiced hundreds of times. No one shoots me in the face. No grenades roll to my feet. I kick open doors. We scan darkened bedrooms with the flashlights on our rifles and move on to the next and the next.

He's gone, of course. We ransack his house, dumping drawers, flipping mattresses, punching holes in the ceiling. We find rifles and grenades and hundreds of pounds of gunpowder. And then, near dawn, we lie down on the thick carpets in his living room and sleep, exhausted and untroubled.

Many, many raids followed. We often raided houses late at night, so people awakened to soldiers bursting through their bedroom doors. Women and children wailed, terrified. Taking this in, I imagined what it would feel like if soldiers kicked down my door at midnight, if I could do nothing to protect my family. I would hate those soldiers. Yet I still reveled in the raids, their intensity and uncertainty. The emotions collided, without resolution.

My wife moved to Iraq partway through my second deployment to live in the north and train Iraqi journalists. She spent her evenings at restaurants and tea shops with her Iraqi friends. We spoke by cell phone, when the spotty network allowed, and she told me about this life I couldn't imagine, celebrating holidays with her colleagues and being invited into their homes. I didn't have any Iraqi friends, save for our few translators, and I'd rarely been invited into anyone's home. I told her of my life, the tedious days and frightful seconds, and she worried that in all of this I would lose my thoughtfulness and might stop questioning and just accept. But she didn't judge the work that I did, and I didn't tell her that I sometimes enjoyed it, that for stretches of time I didn't think about the greater implications, that it sometimes seemed like a game. I didn't tell her that death felt ever present and far away, and that either way, it didn't really seem to matter.

We both came back from Iraq, luckier than many. Two of my wife's students have been killed, among the scores of journalists to die in Iraq, and guys I served with are still dying, too. One came home from the war and shot himself on Thanksgiving. Another was blown up on Christmas in Baghdad.

Thinking of them, I felt disgusted with myself for missing the war and wondered if I was alone in this.

I don't think I am.

After watching the Internet videos, I called some of my friends who are out of the Army now, and they miss the war, too. Wells very nearly died in Iraq. A sniper shot him in the head, surgeons cut out half of his skull -- a story told in last April's Esquire magazine -- and he spent months in therapy, working back to his old self. Now he misses the high. "I don't want to sound like a psychopath, but you're like a god over there," he says. "It might not be the best kind of adrenaline for you, but it's a rush." Before Iraq, he didn't care for horror movies, and now he's drawn to them. He watches them for the little thrill, the rush of being startled, if just for a moment.

McCarthy misses the war just the same. He saved Wells's life, pressing a bandage over the hole in his head. Now he's delivering construction materials to big hotel projects along the beach in South Carolina, waiting for a police department to process his application. "The monotony is killing me," he told me, en route to deliver some rebar. "I want to go on a raid. I want something to blow up. I want something to change today." He wants the unknown. "Anything can happen, and it does happen. And all of the sudden your world is shattered, and everything has changed. It's living dangerously. You're living on the edge. And you're the baddest motherf**ker around."
Mortal danger heightens the senses. That is simple animal instinct. We're more aware of how our world smells and sounds and tastes. This distorts and enriches experiences. Now I can have everything, but it's not as good as when I could have none of it. McCarthy and I stood on a rooftop one afternoon in Iraq running through a long list of the food we wanted. We made it to homemade pizza and icy beer when someone loosed a long burst of gunfire that cracked over our heads. We ran to the other side of the rooftop, but the gunman had disappeared down a long alleyway. Today my memory of that pizza and beer is stronger than if McCarthy and I had sat down together with the real thing before us.

And today we even speak with affection of wrestling a dead man into a body bag, because that was then. The bullet had laid his thigh wide open, shattered the femur, and shredded the artery, so he'd bled out fast, pumping much of his blood onto the sidewalk. We unfolded and unzipped the nylon sack and laid it alongside him. And then we stared for a moment, none of us ready to close that distance. I grabbed his forearm and dropped it, maybe instinct, maybe revulsion. He hovered so near this world, having just passed over, that he seemed to be sucking life from me, pulling himself back or taking me with him. He peeked at us through a half-opened eye. I stared down on him, his massive dead body, and again wrapped a hand around his wrist, thick and warm. The man was huge, taller than six feet and close to 250 pounds. We strained with the awkward weight, rolled him into the bag, and zipped him out of sight. My platoon sergeant gave two neighborhood kids five dollars to wash away the congealing puddle of blood. But the red handprint stayed on the wall, where the man had tried to brace himself before he fell. I think about him sometimes, splayed out on the sidewalk, and I think of how lucky I was never to have put a friend in one of those bags. Or be put in one myself.

But the memories, good and bad, are only part of the reason war holds its grip long after soldiers have come home. The war was urgent and intense and the biggest story going, always on the news stations and magazine covers. At home, though, relearning everyday life, the sense of mission can be hard to find. And this is not just about dim prospects and low-paying jobs in small towns. Leaving the war behind can be a letdown, regardless of opportunity or education or the luxuries waiting at home. People I'd never met sent me boxes of cookies and candy throughout my tours. When I left for two weeks of leave, I was cheered at airports and hugged by strangers. At dinner with my family one night, a man from the next table bought me a $400 bottle of wine. I was never quite comfortable with any of this, but they were heady moments nonetheless.

For my friends who are going back to Iraq or are there already, there is little enthusiasm. Any fondness for war is tainted by the practicalities of operating and surviving in combat. Wells and McCarthy and I can speak of the war with nostalgia because we belong to a different world now. And yet there is little to say, because we are scattered, far from those who understand.
When I came home, people often asked me about Iraq, and mostly I told them it wasn't so bad. The first few times, my wife asked me why I had been so blithe. Why didn't I tell them what Iraq was really like? I didn't know how to explain myself to them. The war really wasn't so bad. Yes, there were bombs and shootings and nervous times, but that was just the job. In fact, going to war is rather easy. You react to situations around you and try not to die. There are no electric bills or car payments or chores around the house. Just go to work, come home alive, and do it again tomorrow. McCarthy calls it pure and serene. Indeed. Life at home can be much more trying. But I didn't imagine the people asking would understand that. I didn't care much if they did, and often it seemed they just wanted a war story, a bit of grit and gore. If they really want to know, they can always find out for themselves. But they don't, they just want a taste of the thrill. We all do. We covet life outside our bubble. That's why we love tragedy, why we love hearing about war and death on the television, drawn to it in spite of ourselves. We gawk at accident scenes and watch people humiliate themselves on reality shows and can't wait to replay the events for friends, as though in retelling the story we make it our own, if just for a moment.
We live easy third-person lives but want a bit of the darkness. War fascinates because we live so far from its realities. Maybe we'd feel differently about watching bombs blow up on TV if we saw them up close, if we knew how explosions rip the air, throttle your brain, and make your ears ring, if we knew the strain of wondering whether the car next to you at a traffic light would explode or a bomb would land on your house as you sleep. I don't expect Iraqi soldiers would ever miss war. I have that luxury. I came home to peace, to a country that hasn't seen war within its borders for nearly 150 years. Yes, some boys come home dead. But we live here without the other terrors and tragedies of war -- cities flattened and riven with chaos and fear, neighbors killing one another, a people made forever weary by the violence.

And so I miss it.Every day in Iraq, if you have a job that takes you outside the wire, you stop just before the gate and make your final preparation for war. You pull out a magazine stacked with thirty rounds of ammunition, weighing just over a pound. You slide it into the magazine well of your rifle and smack it with the heel of your hand, driving it up. You pull the rifle's charging handle, draw the bolt back, and release. The bolt slides forward with a metallic snap, catching the top round and shoving it into the barrel. Chak-chuk. If I hear that a half century from now, I will know it in an instant. Unmistakable, and pregnant with possibility. On top of a diving board, as the grade-school-science explanation goes, you are potential energy. On the way down, you are kinetic energy. So I leave the gate and step off the diving board, my energy transformed