Andy Weins grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, called Menomonee Falls. He served for fourteen years in the Army Reserve as an 88 Mike, motor transport operator; a 31 Bravo, military police; and a 31 Echo, corrections and detention specialist. Andy is currently a sergeant first class, his MOS 79 Victor, Army Reserve career counselor.
As a truck driver hauling fuel in Iraq, I’ll always be a big, slow target. There’s a damn good chance I’m going to die.
I grew up in the burbs, on a quiet street. I always wanted to join the military because, to me, the idea of becoming a man revolved around going to fight for your country—kill or die, if need be. I grew up loving that mindset. When 9/11 happened, it reignited my conviction to join.
Unfortunately, I needed two medical waivers. I’m fructose intolerant and I have really screwed-up elbows, and the military, I was told, allowed you only one waiver. I tried joining the Army in 2001, but they wouldn’t let me in. In 2002, when I graduated from high school, I tried the Marines. No luck. I went back to the Army in 2003, tried again, and got rejected. My luck changed in 2004, when the recruiting standards dropped, and I’m able to get into the Army with two medical waivers.
I couldn’t do infantry because of my fructose intolerance, so I asked the Army about the minimum amount of schooling I would need in order to get closest to the front lines.
“Go be a truck driver,” the Army told me. “Those guys are getting blown up all the time.”
Cool, I thought at the time. I already knew how to drive a truck.
But I never researched the job. I was so green I thought that you did whatever the Army told you to do. I went reserve because, at the time, I was told they were slotted to go to Iraq—and they are. It’s February of 2006, and I’m flying on a C-130.
When I land at the Al-Taqaddum Air Base in the early afternoon, I’m hungry and kind of disoriented. It’s hot and I’ve got motion sickness from the flight. They show us where we’ll be sleeping, and after they give us all the basic supplies, we go to a convoy brief, where I find out I’ll be going on a convoy the following night.
I go through rehearsal of concept (ROC) drills, learn that each vehicle in the convoy has its own job. I’ll be one of forty vehicles hauling fuel to a Marine Corps base in Fallujah. The Marines protect the roads, and we deliver fuel to them since they don’t have the necessary supply trucks and tankers.
We run at night, so we head out of the base at dusk. I’m all geared up—neck plate, all the different pieces and parts to my Interceptor Body Armor—and ready to get out there and kill the bad guys. The guy I’m with has been here for months. He’s wearing a T-shirt and a soft cap. His uniform looks like shit. He’s got this scowl on his face because he is so done and ready to leave this place and go home.
And now he’s got to deal with me, the eager new guy. “Just drive the truck,” he says wearily. “If the truck in front of you stops, don’t hit it. And don’t fall asleep. If you think you’re gonna fall asleep, say something. I’ll talk to you.”
As we head out of the wire, I try to take in everything I can see while there’s still enough light. Once it goes dark in Iraq, if you have a full moon unobstructed by clouds, there’s tons of ambient light, and you can see forever. But if there’s no moon, you can’t see anything because there aren’t any lights in the distance.
Because we’re carrying fuel, we can run only on a hardball, which means we drive only on asphalt. It means that we can’t use any bridges that aren’t rated. It means that we can’t take the shortest route: we take the safest route. The shortest route would be forty minutes. The safest route is four hours, and we may or may not get killed by insurgents along the way.
We arrive at the Marine Corps base at two in the morning. I’m exhausted.
“What do we do now?” I ask the guy driving with me.
“You eat or you sleep.”
I fall asleep outside, between two tires. I learn to sleep that way for the rest of the year.
When I return in September of 2006, things are really heating up. During Ramadan, we get hit by IEDs in seventeen out of nineteen missions. When Ramadan ends, we get hit basically every time we go out on the wire.
I get hit.
Here’s how it happens.
You’re driving and all of a sudden you hear an explosion. It’s loud and it’s quick. You don’t know what the hell happened, and you’re disoriented and if you’re the driver, you’re trying to keep your truck on the hardball. You can’t see through the thick plumes of smoke and dust and sand and debris but you keep rolling, hoping you’re not going to run into a disabled vehicle and cause a massive pileup.
If you’re the truck commander of the vehicle you’re riding in, you reach for the hand mic clipped to your armor and more often than not you can’t find it because it’s fallen off. You grab the cord attached to the mic and fish it back into your hands as people in the convoy send reports over the radio. You tell the driver to keep rolling and you call the convoy commander and tell him you’re alive and then you give him a LACE report: liquid, ammo, casualties, equipment. You’re wondering about a secondary device or a secondary attack as people radio what they see, or saw, and because your vehicle is still moving, you slow down just enough that you don’t lose the others.
Someone tries to blow you up and you keep driving. It’s not that sexy.
When you roll in, you go to a special area so the vehicle can be inspected. Usually it’s a hot mess because all the fluids have pissed out of it. You have a raging headache and your ears hurt and more often than not you have whiplash. Someone comes and picks you up and you go get breakfast and then go to sleep.
Getting hit by an IED—to me, it’s such a nothing burger. But yet I know it’s such a significant time in my life. I know people who call these days their “rebirth date” or “the day they should have died,” or something along those lines. To me, it’s just another day in Iraq. That’s it. That’s my life every forty-eight hours.
And the only thing I care about is how many hot meals I can get. I want to be the first guy in line at breakfast, every morning. I always eat a massive breakfast: an omelet, four hard-boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, waffles, and grits. Chow time is the one time throughout the day when I’m in charge. I can choose what I’m going to eat. For that twenty minutes or half an hour—that’s my time. No one can fuck with me.
What I struggle with the most is the fact that someone wants to indiscriminately kill me and I can’t fight back—I don’t even have the opportunity to fight back. It takes away the edge of war. If you shoot at me and I shoot at you, the better man wins. But to lose just to lose? That’s where I struggle. It makes it less personal, which also makes it more personal.
When I get back from Iraq, I become a tour manager for a band. I keep myself busy for the next eighteen months and then all of a sudden, in December of 2008, I lose my job. I find a bar and start thinking through my life.
I don’t have a job or a girlfriend. I came back from Iraq, and instead of thinking through everything that had happened over there, I basically partied for a year and a half. And then everything hits me all at once.
I’m a hot mess for six months.
This time, I choose to deal with my demons instead of going to a bar. I go to counselors, psychiatrists, and psychologists for nine months. I don’t get anywhere. It’s all bullshit.
Every year, I schedule my PHA—periodic health assessment. Every year, the doctor tells me I have PTSD and need to go seek help and treatment.
I don’t. What does work for me, though, is connecting with other struggling veterans on LinkedIn or talking to them on the phone. As much as I might be helping them, they also help me.
I’m very blunt and transparent. One year I tell my doctor I have homicidal and suicidal ideations every day because sometimes life sucks, and that’s where my brain goes. He puts me on restrictive duty for thirty days.
Medicine, from what I’ve seen, treats symptoms, not the problem. When you walk into the VA with your problems, you leave with the same problems. My problem is, I miss being around people that have my back, that make me feel safe every day. That’s what I miss. The symptom is, I don’t trust people. The symptom is, I’m not very good at relationships. I don’t open up to people. The symptom is, people in the civilian world will fuck you over every chance they get. How do I fix that?
I fix it by surrounding myself with veterans and people of the same mindset.
When you’re in a military unit, you get everything. You’ve got your cooks, you’ve got your maintenance guys, your line platoon that go out and do their thing. You’re self-sustaining. You’re a tribe. You don’t get that in the civilian world. You have to go out and create one for yourself—and I do. I create my own tribe. I also learn the importance of asking others for help because, as the Army’s resiliency program taught me, asking for help is a fucking strength, not a weakness.