Salute to veterans 2024: A war zone question

(Author’s note: This modified piece first appeared as part of a master’s thesis. The author, who spent nine years in the Arkansas Army National Guard, served on active duty as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom from November 2007 through January 2009. Prior to that deployment, he served on active duty as part of Operation Enduring Freedom attached to Joint Task Force Guantanamo at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from August 2003 to July 2004. He is now editor of the Southeast Missourian.)

Eight-thirty p.m. local time. I wasn’t tired, but morning comes early in Iraq, and I needed to keep working on getting to bed at a reasonable hour. The two weeks we had spent in Kuwait finishing our training and the few days we’d been in Iraq hadn’t yet gotten me off my internal Arkansas clock.

I sat up in my bunk and started to take off my shoes, as my roommate, Applegate, did whatever he was doing on the other side of the room, our hooch being a 10-foot-by-12-foot metal shed with a fake wood linoleum floor and a decent air conditioner (when the power was on). I couldn’t see him, because our lockers split the room down the middle to give us something kinda/sorta approaching privacy. He was probably watching a movie. He watched a lot of movies, headphones on and oblivious to the outside world. We made it as homey as we could, but without much space or access to furniture, all we could really do was wrap into the little cocoon of our own space, enjoying those brief respites from our work, which often ran from sunrise to sunrise.

As I dropped my second shoe to the floor, I heard the first explosion.

The next 30 seconds seemed like a lifetime. Time slowed to a crawl as the future — my future — slipped into that infamous fog of war.

Whoom.

Hmm, guess they moved the Paladins over to this side today.

At Talill air base in southern Iraq, the folks in charge had at their disposal a pair of Paladin tanks. Huge tanks. Huge. They sling shells up to 15 miles. When one of those things cranked off, it sounded like The Devil himself banging on the door. Artillery fire and rockets/mortar explosions sound exactly like huge concussive fireworks at chamber of commerce Fourth of July events. Small arms fire sounds exactly like those little things people shoot off in their backyard. (Those facts are the reason many veterans don’t care much for fireworks.) The Paladins at Talill were offensive weapons, used to target enemies in the area. And they fired quite often. The base command kept the pair close together but moved them regularly, lest the bad guys target them.

Whoom!

The second explosion was closer, with enough distance between the first and second for me to notice.

That’s odd. They usually park them side by side. I wonder why …

WHOOM!

The third explosion was much closer and shook the ground. In that instant, it dawned on me what was happening.

That’s not outgoing fire. It’s incoming!

I had never been shot at. I might have gotten angry if there had been time.

There wasn’t.

As the concussion fell away, I heard the whistle of the next Kaytusha rocket coming. It sounds a lot like bombs do in the movies. A downward spiral of doom, falling upon its hapless victims with neither familiarity nor sympathy. I was certain I was hearing my rapidly impending death. I sat there on my bunk, waiting for what I assumed was the inevitable. I didn’t try to get to my body armor or kevlar helmet. I didn’t have time. My fate was what it was going to be.

I’d like to say I had some sort of epiphany or fond thoughts of loved ones, memories to cling to as my life was about to end. But I didn’t. I had one simple thought that came in big, bold letters. Filled with disgust more than anything.

I'M GONNA DIE. RIGHT HERE.

And then it hit.

I can’t adequately explain the fury of the fourth explosion.

I thought the hooch was going to cave in upon itself. I can still see the dust and sand particles taking over the air, shrouding the room in a brown haze. The sound was trying to split my head apart. I heard shrapnel scraping against metal and concrete like screeching rusty nails on a blistering tin roof.

The concussion jostled me to my core. Felt like it moved my organs around inside. But I didn’t feel the searing heat of shrapnel tearing into me. I didn't feel warm blood cascading down my abdomen or legs. I didn’t hurt.

That was a good thing, I figured.

Then, as quickly as it came, the monster was gone, save the ringing in my head. Applegate jumped to the door, faster than I’d ever seen him move, and peeked outside. I have no idea what he thought he was going to see.

The rocket had hit nearby but didn’t hit our hooch.

WHOOM!!

The fifth rocket landed further past the hooch, outside of the blast wall, probably a hundred yards away.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the way the Iraqis or Iranians or whomever was shooting at us lined up these rockets and mortars, the ordnance landed in a generally straight line. So, if the explosions were getting closer and then were past you, you were most likely safe. I wouldn’t have minded having that bit of information that first night, though I don’t know that I could have processed it in time to really matter to my mental wellbeing.

Whoom!

Whoom.

Two more rockets exploded down the way, and then the attack was over.

Just. Like. That.

Its residual effects, though, would hang around for a while. A long while.

After I got the call informing me I’d been transferred to the state’s National Guard infantry brigade and would be going to Iraq, I had one simple but monumentally important question. I asked every combat veteran I could find.

“How do you live in a place where you might die the next step you take? How does your mind process that threat and allow you to function? How do you do that?”

Every one of them — every one — answered the same way.

“You just do.”

That didn’t square. There must be more to forcing your mind to turn off fear and avoid self-preservation. There had to be more to existing — to living — in a combat zone.

All those people who’d been there must be wrong. The alternative was inconceivable — to someone who hadn’t been to war.

In Iraq, I was a gun truck driver on convoy escort missions. It was my job to make sure no one infiltrated our convoy and, when necessary, get my gunner to the best firing position possible. I was also the personal security detail for the cavalry squadron commander, meaning I shadowed him wherever he went.

And he went. A lot.

We logged more than 8,000 miles on the roadways of Iraq.

Main Supply Route Tampa was the easiest of them all. Relatively, I suppose. It was the north/south interstate. We could roll up and down Tampa. For a few hours at least. Until the scouts found a bomb. Which almost always happened. Then, we would wait for route clearance units to blow it up so we could get on our way.

Route Yankee. The back way into the huge base at BIAP. Baghdad International Airport. Ditches on either side. Snaking, curling road which slowed convoys to a crawl. Perfect for an ambush I always thought. Never liked that last bit of road before we got into the secure area.

Haifa Street. Baghdad proper. Tall walls on each side. Cover for whomever had grenades, rocket-launchers, whatever. Vehicles — potential moving bombs — everywhere. Hated Haifa Street.

On my first mission outside the wire — in enemy territory — we were halfway to our fuel point when the scouts found an improvised explosive device in the road. Route clearance removed it, and we went on our way. On the way back later that night, someone found another one, and this time, when we took up our defensive position to wait for the route clearance people, my truck ended up on a bridge over the Tigris River. For two hours, in the dead middle of the night, I, the colonel and our gunner waited on that bridge, and the thoughts running through my mind the whole time weren’t about what I would have for breakfast when we got to the chow hall. If someone blew up the bridge — say, the someone who had planted the bomb in the road — would I die in the explosion or in the fall, or would I drown? I didn’t want to drown, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to shed my body armor because I’d taped up the quick-release cords so it would fit snugly.

Not a great internal conversation to have. For. Two. Hours.

But the bridge didn’t blow up that night. We safely made it home, if home is an Iraqi airbase in the middle of nowhere.

Later in the tour, I organized a mission of my own. I needed to get to brigade headquarters to work out a few things with those folks, and I was lucky enough to have my friend serve as truck commander, while my troop commander, against regulations, served as gunner. On our way to Baghdad, we got held up by another bomb in the road. (I’m sure I made a trip without coming across a bomb, but I don’t remember it.) Another convoy was behind us and asked to pass. We allowed them to. After the route clearance folks detonated the bomb, we were on our way again and were trying to make up the lost time. As we got to the last curve before the entrance to BIAP, we started hearing radio traffic of an ambush up ahead. The convoy ahead of us had driven right into a multi-pronged attack. Bombs, daisy-chained together to blow up after the entire convoy had gotten into the blast zone. Rocket-propelled grenades. Small-arms fire. A calculated and well-planned attempt to kill as many people as possible. When we heard of the attack, we — my truck — were among those responding. We came up on the tail end of the attack but weren’t allowed to go in. Apache helicopters were responding by air, and we could have gotten in their way. More to the point, we could have gotten blown to bits. We took up an overwatch position and looked for anyone trying to leave the area. We were there for hours, as night turned into day. We almost always operated in the dark, so being out in the open in the daylight wasn’t a great feeling, but we wanted to settle a score. Toward noon, we were told to stand down and continue on our way. We turned off MSR Tampa onto Route Yankee, the entrance to BIAP, driving past the burned-out shells of vehicles and several still burning — vehicles we would have been in had we not gotten stopped by a bomb in the road.

By the time our tour was over, and we were turning over our command to the incoming unit, I’d spent more time on Iraqi roads than I cared to recall. I had been through many rocket and mortar attacks and been shot at too many times to count. I’d been part of acts of war I’d never want to explain to anyone. I couldn’t, can’t, understand them myself. I knew what I’d done to survive, in the basest, most primal sense.

I knew something else, too. I wasn’t the person who dropped into that combat zone. I didn’t know then the extent of the internal changes. They would unfold over many years in many ways. What was crystal clear was that I was leaving Iraq a different person, for better and worse. War changes those thrown into it. They may have chosen to go, but war decides how they return.

So, back to the question.

How do you live in a combat zone, when you might die at any moment?

It's true. You just do.

What they didn’t say but they all knew — we all know — not all of you does.