The problem was garbage— too much of it. Now, there is nothing funny about pulling guard in a compound in the middle of the Green Zone, other than the fact that it’s a complete joke. The most memorable event of my deployment to Iraq wasn't tragic or traumatic. But, there was a moment where my friend Nick put his problem-solving skills to the test and proved his ability to be completely brilliant yet utterly stupid at the same time. The previous two guard shifts had left all their Styrofoam plates containing enough food waste to feed the next six guard shifts. It was in the fourth hour of our six-hour shift when we realized we couldn’t be held responsible for this mountain of waste in the battle position. Nick’s first great idea was to get a huge trash bag from one of the trashcans down below. He returned, and we stuffed it full, making it larger than a small elephant.
“Man,” he says. “How are we gonna get this down those tight, rickety-ass stairs?”
I told him I didn’t know.
He slowly rose and homed in on the other side of the roof to a food delivery system constructed by a previous generation of soldiers. He picked up his enormous bag and carried it like James and the Giant Peach across the roof, and I followed. There, he examined a device that we used to bring up chow to bypass the stairs. It was essentially a clothesline with a bucket with a rope attached to it. Nick saw this as a great opportunity. From his vest, he removed a climbing-grade carabiner and managed to rustle up enough of the trash bag to tie it shut. All of this was happening, mind you, while we were supposed to be monitoring the street for potential terrorists. He attached the carabiner to the top and mounted the bag on top of the ledge.
I didn’t have a protractor, but I’d say the clothesline was at about a thirty-five-degree angle to the ground. Nick clipped the bag to the clothesline-turned-zipline. He looked at me straight in the face and said, soberly: “High risk, high reward.” I say nothing, enamored by his bravery and brilliance. He released the bag to its unpredictable fate. What happened was beyond our expectations. The weight of the bag, combined with some laws of physics, allowed it to quickly achieve an unbelievable speed. In an instant, it broke the sound barrier. Imagine this enormous bag of trash hurling down a zipline at Mach 3, heading right for this damn bucket with a rope on it that we forgot about.
It was when they met, bag and bucket, that Nick’s pride and hope were swallowed whole. Oh, it was an unsightly thing, this explosion. It was as if, amidst all the excitement, Nick had misplaced a hand grenade in the bag, and in that moment it detonated. Rice and French fries and piss bottles and Styrofoam were sent in all directions at high velocities in a violent explosion. Broccoli florets spewed forth into half-eaten cheeseburgers and to the ground. The food-gore of rice and chicken was left to fall upon the stone at the base of the Tomb of Michel Aflaq. The radius of the affected area on the ground was certainly greater than ten meters.
The funniest part of it all was the noise my dear friend Nick made. I don’t know if it was the shock of the garbage carnage, or if it was the realization of his complete and utter failure, but he let out a tumultuous wail that was full of emotion and disappointment.
I laughed so long and so hard that I had to loosen my vest while I sat in the battle position while he cleaned up his terrible mess below. I’ll never forget that sound he made when his plan failed in such a dramatic way.
The funniest part of it all was the noise my dear friend Nick made. I don’t know if it was the shock of the garbage carnage, or if it was the realization of his complete and utter failure, but he let out a tumultuous wail that was full of emotion and disappointment.
I laughed so long and so hard that I had to loosen my vest while I sat in the battle position while he cleaned up his terrible mess below. I’ll never forget that sound he made when his plan failed in such a dramatic way.
But that was about as good as it got. I didn’t laugh through my contract, nor my deployment. More accurately, I burned like a coal fire, mad at the world, mad at myself. I wasn’t alone in that, though.
I learned a lot in the Army. Mostly things that are overwhelmingly useless in the real world. But the thing that I learned very well was how to hate people. Not people of a race or minority, but people in power—people in charge. I learned very quickly how to hate almost everyone with an ounce of rank over me. So much so that I can’t even mouth the word authority without gagging. It became so natural that the more stripes I saw on their chest, the less I regarded them as a human being. There were a few good NCOs out there, but for every one of them, there were ten others who wore their stripes like it made them God.
I know it may sound like I must have been tortured on a daily basis, like I was forced to do pushups as punishment all the time. But that’s not it—well, part of it. I did pushups every day, I didn’t really mind that so much. It was the oppression, the uneasiness of being someone who was the subject of someone else’s will every moment of every day. You don’t get to punch the clock at 4PM and be totally free of your labors when you’re in the military. You get to go home when Sergeant Whoever says you can. And Sergeant Whoever probably hates his wife, so he has no desire to go home, which means you have to stay. And he doesn’t like a bunch of privates and specialists sitting around doing nothing, so he is going to make up some ridiculous, utterly pointless tasks to keep you all busy. And just because he feels like it, he’s going to line you all up in front of your rooms in the barracks and go through your rooms one by one and toss all your shit around and tell you how disgusting you are because there is some toothpaste on your mirror and make the subject of your uncleanliness the defining feature of your character and treat you like a sack of old garbage because your bed wasn’t made and there is dust building up on your doorframe. Then he is going to have you up at zero-five-hundred every morning to make sure your room is spotless before the day can begin. Then, yes, he is going to make you do pushups because you didn’t know the answer to the random, trivial question he asked you about the maximum effective range of an M320 grenade launcher, because that, he thinks, is how you teach.
There is a machine gun called the M249: the Squad Automatic Weapon, SAW for short. It is the infantryman’s worst enemy. Unloaded, it is ten pounds heavier than the standard issue M4 rifle that everyone else carried. You see, the most experienced member of a fireteam—other than the team leader—was supposed to carry this weapon since it was the most casualty producing weapon, meaning the most important. That’s not ever how it went down. The new guy was always the SAW gunner, because it was a big, heavy, malfunctioning piece of shit. So, naturally, I was assigned this burden when I got to my unit.
The first part of a training cycle is the weapons qualification. Machine gun qualifications were much different than the regular rifle qualifications, so all the machine gunners in the company went to a separate range with a handful of NCOs in charge, no officers. This was in upstate New York in the winter, so there was two feet of snow on the ground and it was hovering around -16°F. Some of the privates, myself included, weren’t doing very well on the range because we had never shot the SAW before; it isn’t part of basic training. These NCOs decided the best course of action to get us shooting well was to smoke us into an oblivion.
Smoking, or the act of being smoked, is an Army term for being forced to do physical exercise as punishment—that drop and give me twenty crap you see in movies. But in real life, it’s a lot more than just pushups. We were out there in the middle of the night in the subzero cold doing burpees and mountain climbers and pushups and laps around the range for hours, and I mean hours. Then after we started to freeze to death because we were sweating in the freezing cold, they brought us inside the sleep shack and worked us for another hour or so. That’s what they thought was best. Instead of laying down with us out there and teaching us how to properly use the weapon or teach us anything at all, they thought they’d just smoke us until they got tired. There was no officer around to tell them otherwise.
But that wasn’t my biggest problem. What really made me miserable was falling in love. I was home in Ohio on summer leave when I went to a party that I didn’t want to go to. I found myself in a jacuzzi. There was a girl asking me about my tattoos when I noticed that across the jacuzzi a red-headed beauty had emerged to sit on the edge. I realized in that moment that I was keen on marrying that girl, and I eventually did. Though, we had to get through hell first.
By hell, I mean Iraq. It was hell for many reasons, but being some violent warzone wasn’t one of them. I can’t help but think of the film Jarhead, where Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Swofford, and his comrades go through Operation Desert Shield without ever firing their weapons. That was us. It’s a funny thing, signing up for the infantry. You join wanting… expecting to experience combat. It’s something most people would want to avoid, but there we were hoping for a deployment that wasn’t boring. Fortunately, or unfortunately, boring is what we got. We had spent years training and learning tactics. I learned all the different ways to kill people, but I never did. I could name people who were disappointed by that conclusion.
Our enemies were boredom, the desire to sleep, and restlessness. How can you make a six-hour guard shift interesting when you’ve been doing the same six-hour guard shift for seven months now? You’ve already read all the books you brought and all the ones your platoon brought. There’s no point in bringing your phone because it doesn’t work on Iraqi cellular. You’ve already had every conversation you could possibly have with everyone in your platoon because you’ve already had guard with all of them at least ten times by now. You begin to pray for events like zip-lined garbage.
My platoon’s rotation to the gate was a welcome change. Checking IDs and vehicles and patting down Filipino kitchen workers was a lot more entertaining than staring at the same vacant lot across the street every day. The gate also had interpreters who we could talk to about what it’s like to live in Iraq and talk about how nice it is to live in the States. A couple of them were really good guys, others weren’t. Some we were convinced were terrorists, and for some we thought of ways to smuggle them to America, since it was nearly impossible for them to immigrate.
The best part of the gate was the presence of the bomb-sniffing working dogs and their human handlers. No matter where you are in the world, dogs bring much needed joy. My favorite one was a short-haired German Shepherd with no tail. Apparently, she kept banging it on things and splitting it open, so they had it removed. She was old and on her last deployment. She liked to lay on her side and accept belly rubs. I heard that her handler adopted her when they got home.
At that time, we were also assigned rotating shifts to roll around with the sergeant of the guard in an up-armored Suburban. We were to help the SOG with whatever it was that he needed, which was usually just delivering chow to the battle positions. But this was a time of contrasting different NCOs. We had to spend entire shifts in a truck with these guys, and there were such distinct differences on how they handled that. There was Sgt. B, who wore the stripes but didn’t show it. He actually treated us like humans, trying to get us to listen to his punk rock collection on his Ipod because this armored Suburban did have an aux cord. He was a metalhead that joined the Army for no reason at all. He had saggy butthole earlobes where his one-inch gauges had attempted to close back up. It was this guy who introduced me to country punk rock and Cormac McCarthy, whom I now consider one of my favorite writers. If every NCO was like him, I think far fewer soldiers would, quite literally, hate their lives.
Another like him was Sgt. M. I don’t know where he was from, but he sounded like a Californian surfer boy. It was like he was permanently stoned, though he obviously wasn’t because of our frequent drug screenings. He had two phrases that occurred at least every two sentences. Anytime anyone said anything agreeable, he hit them with the, “Heard that.” It came out in a long, drawn out way that a southern Californian stoner might put it. Then, anytime he said something that you might find agreeable, he finished that sentence with, “You know what I’m sayin’?” and there was always the faintest laugh vibrating the words. Sometimes—rather often, really—he combined the two for the mega, “Heard that, you know what I’m sayin’?” It was always a comical experience to have him as the SOG. I don’t think he was initially aware of his idiosyncrasies, but after we started mocking him by always responding with, “Heard that,” he started to catch on and look at us like we were assholes.
Then there was SSgt. C. He was a completely different kind of NCO: former Ranger Battalion type, no games, no fun, no laughing. I think I saw him smile once. Once. Most SOGs would drive the Suburban themselves, but he refused. Then he would yell and bitch and yell about every single decision you made as a driver. I’ll be damned if that wasn’t one of the most stressful parts of the deployment. He was one of those types that you couldn’t ever really talk around. Anything you said, he would reply with something that made you feel stupid, or like a child.
SSgt. F was somewhere in between. He was my squad leader and I knew him pretty well. He was a “time and place” kind of leader, only putting his foot down if he had to, which wasn’t very often. I honestly think he was just burned out. This was his seventh or eighth deployment, he had seen more war than the Roman Empire. Just a few miles to the Northeast in Sadr City, he had spent the better part of his young adult life kicking in doors and getting blown up. He met a lot of demons during that time, and he undoubtably still carries them with him. I respected him for a lot of reasons, but mainly because he rarely abused his authority. He built relationships of trust, and he trusted us to do the right thing, and we would. We were happy to behave well for a leader like that.
There was a little shooting, a few bombings in the distance, but they might as well have been a million miles away. We weren’t allowed to do anything; it was all the Iraqi Army’s responsibility. We were just there for extreme circumstances and to make everyone in the base feel better. It was an important place with important people, and the people wanted to feel safe. All we were then were uniforms—soldiers deployed to a war that was certainly over. We just had to battle ourselves, time, and our leaders.
I saw Maddy a couple more times during that leave after meeting her in that jacuzzi. I hosted a couple bonfires that she came to with her friends. I asked a friend of mine how I could better my chances with her, and he said, “You could start by not calling her Madison.” I heeded that advice and it did indeed improve my chances.
After I returned to New York, I texted her asking if she wanted to come as my date to our battalion ball. She reluctantly accepted and came to spend a weekend at a fancy ball with a guy she hardly knew. We’ve been together ever since. I would drive eight hours back home to spend every four-day weekend with her, which was about once a month. I soon fell stupidly in love with her. It became that dangerous kind of love where I was tempted to go AWOL because I was sick of only seeing her for four days a month. I had heard how long it takes the Army to find AWOL soldiers, and it was generally a very long time. I thought about if it’d be worth it.
That temptation greatly escalated a year or so after I fell in love with her. It was the same time my unit got orders for Iraq. That was the darkest, lowest period of my life. It was like being convicted of a crime and being sentenced to prison. “But, Tyler, that’s what you signed up for,” someone might have said. And if someone would have actually said that to me, I’d have replied, “I signed up before I met Maddy.” She changed everything. It wasn’t about me and my duties anymore, it was about me and her. As far as I can tell, and many would agree, love with a capital L is the most powerful thing in a person’s life. I know of nothing else that produces as much irrationality or stupidity or joy. And I was a slave to it.
“Love is the death of duty,” Maester Aemon says to Jon Snow in the first season of Game of Thrones. “What is honor compared to a woman’s love? . . . We're all human. Oh, we all do our duty when there's no cost to it. Honor comes easy then. Yet sooner or later in every man's life there comes a day when it's not easy. A day when he must choose.” Jon does abandon his duty a couple seasons later. I remember watching it with Maddy some years after our Iraq troubles. I watched him abandon his oath for a red-headed wildling, and I was like, shit, I wanted to abandon my oath for a red-headed wildling.
I didn’t, though. I took the high road, or I did in any patriot’s eyes. It felt so artificial to be choosing duty to country over love. It was like I was choosing something fake over something real. An oath to the government was just writing on paper, words in air. They didn’t mean anything. The way I felt—my emotions—those were real. I was crazy about Maddy, and I was not crazy about the Army; the thing that did nothing but abuse me for years. Why should I have chosen that fake, tormenting entity that hated me over a woman who loved me?
It may seem like there is no real choice. Someone might ask, “You wouldn’t realistically abandon the Army, would you?” I would say that I’m not sure what realistically means. Like I said, love is the most powerful thing there is. When my heart was being torn in half, I think the concept of what was realistic became a much more complicated matter. I don’t think it would have taken much for me to collect all my money, drive down to Ohio, get an apartment in her name, and live for years before anyone even attempted to find me. It didn’t then, nor does it now, sound very crazy. When you fall in love, the limits of what you are willing to do are drastically raised, while the emotional ceiling containing your actions is drastically lowered.
In the end, I suppose I chose duty. I kept my honor and did what I was told in the hopes that it wouldn’t ruin the only thing I cared about. I chose to keep loving Maddy in the hopes she would keep loving me from across the world. Maybe it was the right thing to do, but it still felt wrong and has left a bad taste in my mouth to this day. It felt like a betrayal of what I believed in. I chose something I hated over something I loved. Perhaps it was fear of consequences, fear of punishment. Perhaps it is that I don’t give honor and duty enough credit. Maybe they are a powerful force as well. Maybe I had enough pride and enough of a sense of duty to not want to be labelled as a deserter, or the guy who quit.
Being without her was certainly the hardest part of the deployment. It was difficult to find time to talk to her with the seven-hour time difference and dealing with the fact that one week I would be on the midnight shift, then the next I might be on the noon shift. It never really got easier. There was always a feeling of being comfortably miserable. It was like being fine and coping, but all you can think about is how you wish time would move faster. That’s how it feels to stretch that feeling of “let’s just get this over with” over eight months.
My company rotated back to Kuwait for the final couple months of the deployment. I was standing in the gym there—since going to the gym is the only thing to do in Kuwait—when my platoon sergeant came up to me in the middle of my workout and pulled me aside. I was alarmed because he was the NCO I hated the most. He told me in an almost bitter, angry tone that since my end of time in service date was so soon, they were sending me and a few other guys home early so we could out-process. It might not seem like much, but being told I was going home a month and a half early was one of the most euphoric moments of my life. I wanted to sprint back to the tent to tell Maddy the great news. I didn’t, though. It felt like a great opportunity to do something you see a lot of videos of on the internet. For almost an entire week, I made her believe I was still in Kuwait while I was actually travelling back to the States. With the help of some friends and family, I managed to surprise her with a homecoming after the longest eight months of our lives.
Things have been great ever since. We like to say that our relationship is so much better than everyone else’s because it was built on torture. We made it through that, so we can make it through anything. I think I even believe that. People like to ask me if I regret my time in service, or if it was worth it. I certainly don’t regret it, but I don’t think I’d do it again. I don’t think I could do it again. The only duty I owe the world now is loving my wife. That is the duty I know I can uphold. The Army never loved me like she does.
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