My recruiter’s name was Spicer. He was Army, but I don’t recall his rank. He was average-looking in every way, and I remember little about him or his office in Richmond, Virginia. It was July 2001 and I was in a tough spot, having just failed out of college and gotten word from my father that there would be no help from him if I wanted to try again in the fall.
Working two minimum-wage jobs and feeling pretty down on myself, I was ripe for the picking. Spicer left a flyer on my windshield while I was at work one day, offering full tuition at any state university and a stipend for books and living expenses, all for the low price of one weekend a month and two weeks of annual summer training for six years. The Virginia Army National Guard was hard up for combat engineers that year, which meant Spicer was able to sweeten the deal with an $8,000 bonus. Truth is, the bonus wasn’t really necessary. I would’ve paid to get out of Richmond right about then.
I was an easy recruit: I didn’t need any medical or physical waivers, I had no criminal record, I passed the military aptitude tests with flying colors, and, best of all, I was desperate. Looking back, I can’t remember asking any questions at all when I visited Spicer’s office to go over the enlistment paperwork. I didn’t even bother to tell my family until it was already a done deal.
My parents were supportive—thrilled, in fact—because they were worried about me. They hoped, as I did, that the military would straighten me out. It had worked for my dad when he was a wayward youth. He’d flunked out of college, too, then went to sea at nineteen as a deckhand on a merchant marine ship. This led to an appointment to the US Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, and then a career as a naval aviator and eventually a Navy surgeon.
I didn’t have a grand vision for a military career of the kind my dad had found at Kings Point. But I was in a hurry to redeem myself, and I remember thinking that what had worked for my dad just might work for me. What none of us knew that summer was that two wars were looming just out of view—wars that would require unprecedented deployments of reservists, including members of the National Guard. Those wars would consume my life for nearly two decades, first as a soldier and then as a civilian journalist. They would galvanize my opposition to existing US foreign policy and cause me to question the foundations of my identity as a citizen and as a veteran.
Hardly any aspect of my worldview has been left untouched by the wars. I’ve seen what relatively few Americans from my generation have seen—the fear, injustice, poverty, and violent death that accompany war. I’ve also seen the marks that grief leaves on the faces of parents who’ve lost their sons. Some of their sons were my friends.
My military service and my years as a journalist covering the Middle East, Afghanistan, and veterans back home have given me rare insight. Yet this insight has come at a heavy price. It’s a price that wasn’t worth paying—not for me, not for our country, and not for the countries that we left in ruins.
I WAS FOLDING clothes in the stockroom of the Banana Republic at Regency Square Mall in Richmond—one of my two jobs—on the morning of September 11, 2001. There was a little radio in the back and I was listening to some dumb morning drive-time comedy show. The hosts started talking about a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. At first it seemed like a simple accident. My shift ended at nine o’clock, and by the time I got home, the second plane had already hit the South Tower. My decision to enlist suddenly seemed a lot more serious. A month later, I was on a flight to Missouri to begin basic training.
The Soviet Union was a decade in the grave by the time I showed up at Fort Leonard Wood, where the Army trains combat engineers. But we were still training to fight the Soviets in the Fulda Gap, or at least that’s what it seemed like to me. On the rifle range, we shot plastic silhouettes with red stars on their chests nicknamed Crazy Ivans. It was the twenty-first century, but barely. Some of my drill sergeants had been stationed in Germany or Korea, and most of them had deployed to the Balkans or to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. They taught us how to blow up an obstacle with Bangalore torpedoes, just like the engineers in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, which had come out only three years earlier.
It’s weird thinking about it now, but even though the last big war had been Vietnam—a brutal counterinsurgency fight against an often invisible enemy—we mostly trained to fight conventional forces in set-piece battles. We learned how to build eleven-row concertina wire fences to stop speeding tanks, how to sweep for all different kinds of mines and probe for them on our bellies. We also learned about explosives, from shape charges to cratering charges and C-4. I loved all of it—especially the range days, like the time we set off so much demo that car-sized chunks of mud flew fifty feet in the air and clods came thumping down on the roof of our observation shack a couple hundred yards away.
If there was one throwback to Vietnam that particularly stood out, besides the instruction on claymore mines, it was the class on booby traps. The ones we were shown were usually small and attached to trip wires—the kinds of things you might run into if you were crawling through a Vietcong tunnel. Some of the mock-ups I remember were clever to the point of being ridiculous, such as a little bomb embedded in a book. However, I don’t remember hearing the term improvised explosive device (IED) at any point during my engineer training. I wouldn’t receive any formal counter-IED training until years later, on the eve of my deployment. The first generation of post-9/11 recruits, we would go on to witness the rapid evolution of a weapon that would kill thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, but all of that was unknown to me at the time.
Not that there weren’t plenty of clues about what lay ahead: the 1983 embassy and marine barracks bombings in Beirut, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, and the USS Cole bombing in 2000, to name just a few. All these attacks, along with horrific domestic terrorism incidents—the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and the Atlanta Olympics in 1996—offered ominous warnings about the emerging threat of homemade explosives in the hands of guerrillas and terrorists. But the future had not quite arrived at Fort Leonard Wood in the waning days of 2001 and the first months of 2002. Instead of learning counter-IED tactics and training on the anti-mine vehicles many of us would eventually drive, we shot at Crazy Ivans and blew tank ditches, training to fight the war that never was—the Cold War.
I don’t blame my drill sergeants and classroom instructors for failing to school us on counter-IED techniques. They were simply teaching the doctrine they themselves had received. And besides, the most important thing I got out of basic training had nothing to do with tactics. For me, the payoff after fourteen weeks was that I would get my life back. I was fit and confident, ready to get back to college the next fall. More than anything, I was proud that I could go back to my family knowing that I had taken a big step in the right direction after disappointing them for so many years.
For a while after I first arrived at Fort Leonard Wood, the drill sergeants had me convinced that I would ship out to Afghanistan as soon as I graduated, and since I was cut off from the world, I had no reason to doubt them. I had a general idea of where Afghanistan was, and vague memories of watching footage of the mujahideen during the Soviet war in the 1980s, when I was a kid. But I had no idea what I would encounter if I were ever deployed to fight there. I knew nothing about the Taliban and almost nothing about al-Qaeda. At any rate, for me Afghanistan never happened. By the time I hit the halfway point of my basic training, in December 2001, al-Qaeda had been mostly chased out of Afghanistan, and the Taliban government had collapsed. My deployment would come two years later, to a new war in Iraq.
We received the alert order in late 2003 and spent January and February of 2004 in mobilization training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. It happened to be one of the coldest winters in memory, so it was almost a relief to touch down in the sweltering Kuwaiti heat en route to Mosul, Iraq. I would go on to spend a year in northern Iraq, my unit assigned to carry out a variety of odd jobs that rarely seemed to build toward any greater objective.
My platoon was ordered to an old Iraqi air base in Qayyarah, about seventy-five miles from Mosul. We ran convoy security missions, pulled gate guard, and built triple-strand concertina fences around the base perimeter. Sometimes I drove a Humvee for my squad leader; other times I manned the machine gun or grenade launcher mounted on top of the vehicle. At some point during our tour, we got a Husky—a South African–designed minesweeping vehicle engineered to absorb the blast of a land mine without injuring the driver. From that point forward, I was one of the platoon’s Husky drivers, responsible for operating the machine on counter-IED patrols up and down Highway 1, also known as Main Supply Route Tampa.
On days when I didn’t drive the Husky, I manned the turret in the gun truck that followed behind. That’s where I was when our convoy hit an IED on the way back to base one day in the summer of 2004. Fortunately for all of us, the brunt of the blast passed between the Husky and the vehicle in front of it. I remember seeing the fireball rise up from the road and passing through the smoke cloud seconds later. I scanned my sector from the turret, but there was no one and nothing to shoot at. The desert on either side of the highway was empty.
During my year in Iraq, the relative post-invasion calm would be shattered by the emergence of a ferocious insurgency. In April and November 2004, the First and Second Battles of Fallujah destroyed any hope of a simple exit from Iraq for the United States. But all of that seemed far from Qayyarah, where things stayed eerily quiet except for the occasional rocket or mortar attack. That one occasion when an invisible IED triggerman fired on my convoy and missed was the only time in Iraq when I felt as though my life was immediately threatened. Not everyone from my unit was so lucky.
On December 21, 2004, a suicide bomber sneaked into Forward Operating Base Marez in Mosul, where my battalion was headquartered, and detonated his vest in the chow hall. The blast killed twenty-two people, including two young soldiers from my company—Nicholas Mason and David Ruhren. They were both twenty years old. I wasn’t there that day because I was in Qayyarah with my platoon. We learned what had happened later that evening when our company commander called us down to the command post to break the news. I remember the withering intensity of that moment. And all these years later, I still have no good answer for why it was them and not me. I have no good answer for why any of the deaths in Iraq or Afghanistan were necessary either. They didn’t buy us more national security, they didn’t avenge any of the 9/11 dead, and ultimately they didn’t improve the lives of the people on the ground.
The soldier’s old comfort is to think that death and sacrifice on the battlefield aren’t really about the bigger picture—they’re about love in the brotherhood of arms, about protecting the guys to your right and left. But that never got me very far. What is the meaning of personal sacrifice in foolish and wasteful wars with ill-defined objectives that hardly any of us understood even while we were serving in them? And if the big picture didn’t matter—if we served just for the guys on the right and the left, or because it was our job—then how were we different from mercenaries?
I was most of the way toward recognizing myself as a dissenter by the time my unit returned from Iraq in early 2005. I had never really believed the case for war against Saddam Hussein, and I wasn’t surprised when the canard about weapons of mass destruction fell apart. While I was in Iraq, I heard about how maybe what the war was really about was avenging the genocidal attacks Saddam launched against the Kurds in the 1980s and early 1990s. But that didn’t make much sense to me, because the United States had done nothing to stop Saddam’s massacres at the time—on the contrary, Saddam had been a US ally when he ordered chemical weapons attacks against Iraqi Kurdish towns in 1988, killing as many as ten thousand people. I read about all of this during my thirty-minute sessions on the base’s computers, in the vast recreation center that had sprouted fully formed from the Iraqi dirt.
Somewhere along the way, I encountered the phrase fraud, waste, and abuse, and that seemed to fit the grotesque outlay of resources on the large bases where I spent time. As much as I appreciated our air-conditioned chow hall, and the steak and the crab legs and the Mongolian stir-fry, I couldn’t help thinking that it was all a bit much. Sometimes it felt less like a war than a giant boondoggle to benefit the big contracting companies like Kellogg Brown & Root. I thought it was peculiar that we had Sri Lankans working in our chow hall, Filipinas doing our laundry, and Turks handing out basketballs in the recreation center. It all seemed colonial and corporate. And I definitely found it repulsive that the American KBR employees were making five or ten times my salary.
It was only after I got home that I began to learn about the multibillion-dollar no-bid contracts that companies like KBR received to provide logistics and construction services in Iraq. The debate back home about whether the war was just about capturing Iraqi oil was still simmering when I returned to college in 2005, but as far as I could see, any future oil contracts for American companies would be icing on the cake. The money was already in the bank from the logistical operations before the first boots even hit the ground. And it kept flowing for years, while more Americans died and got critically wounded, and Iraq was torn to shreds in the security vacuum created by Saddam’s removal.
I watched the chaos unfolding in Iraq from the safety of Charlottesville, Virginia, where I felt like a bit of an alien. I made friends through working at a running shop and joining the cycling team, but I was older in more ways than one. I didn’t know any other veterans. My friends and acquaintances knew that I had served in Iraq and was still serving in the National Guard, but they didn’t ask many questions. I might have opened up if they had asked. I might have told them about how much I enjoyed getting to know some of the Iraqi soldiers and how green the northern Iraqi plains were in the spring when we first arrived, before the summer heat scorched away every last bit of color. I might’ve told them that I never fired my weapon—that some days I wished I had, and other days I was almost more thankful for having never killed than for having survived.
I might’ve told them about my best friend, who shot and killed a civilian at a checkpoint in a moment of confusion, and how that one story seemed to sum up the entire war for me. And I might’ve told them about the mass grave site where I worked for a month providing security while forensic pathologists exhumed the remains of Kurds murdered by Saddam’s henchmen. I might’ve told them about how the bodies buried in the dry soil of Iraq for fifteen years had become almost mummified, and how the remaining moisture in their skin filled the air with the unmistakable odor of decaying flesh. Some of the men were in their suits, as if they’d dressed up for the occasion of being thrown into the back of a truck and carted out to the barrens to be shot. The women were swathed in abayas and floral-print dresses. One of them had a baby in her arms. They all had small holes in the backs of their skulls.
As I made my way through college, I thought of Mason and Ruhren often. Both had started college before we deployed and would’ve gone back to finish after we got home. I tried to live in their memory, pushing myself to study hard and exercise like a madman. If I slowed the pace, I felt as if I were letting them down. Then, in my final year of college, my unit redeployed to Iraq. Although my contract was up, the Army could have ordered me to deploy anyway—a policy called stop-loss allowed that. But I had recently broken my arm, so I got listed as medically non-deployable, which meant I got to stay home and finish school.
It was 2007 and the Iraq “surge” was in full swing. My former unit went to Baghdad to do counter-IED patrols, and my old squad lasted only a couple of weeks before they hit a massive IED that killed two men and severely wounded three more. A few months later, another IED claimed the life of a guy I had served with during all my six years in the Guard, a soft-spoken kid from Norfolk, Virginia, named Jeremiah McNeal.
These deaths and injuries among my former unit devastated me and made it difficult to imagine a future in which I would be free from the war, even if I knew that I would never again carry a rifle in a combat zone. I started thinking about what I could do to channel my guilt, anger, and sadness into something worthwhile. As luck would have it, I happened to meet a magazine editor as all these thoughts were swirling in my head. He offered me an assignment to write about my unit’s tour in Iraq. That day, a new chapter in my personal war story began.
JOURNALISM IS OFTEN described as a vocation rather than a trade—not a job but a calling. In my case, the call came from the men I served with in Iraq, who came home to a country that thanked them for their service but had little interest in understanding what they had actually done overseas or what they had left behind. The call came from weary Iraqis whom I patted down at the gate to our base—men who couldn’t afford to pass up the opportunity to make a few dollars doing day labor for the Americans, even though the identification we issued could get them killed on the other side of the wire. The call came from the hollowed-out expression on a mother’s face as our chaplain thanked her for her son’s “ultimate sacrifice,” from the tremble in her hand as she raised a cigarette to her lips. It came from the realization that my education gave me skills to interrogate the wars in a way that many of my fellow veterans could not.
I had a desire to go back and confront what most of us just wanted to forget. I became a journalist because there were questions I had to ask, and seeking answers seemed a matter of life and death.
How did hundreds of thousands of mostly young American men and women wind up sagging under the weight of body armor and weapons in a country that many of us could not find on a map, learning to hate the very people we were sent to help? Did Americans realize things were not going as planned, that tens of thousands of Iraqis were dying in a civil war that our invasion had unleashed? How was it possible that we charged into the same kind of quagmire that killed fifty-eight thousand American troops and two million civilians in Vietnam? Would we remember this time around, so that we might avoid forcing the same tragedy onto our children?
When I was nearing graduation from college, I knew that I had to return to the Middle East as a journalist to answer these questions. I had absorbed the work of Vietnam veterans Tim O’Brien, Philip Caputo, and Oliver Stone, the Korean War fiction of James Salter, and the World War II writings of James Jones and Paul Fussell. The distance between America’s twentieth-century wars and the wars of my generation closed. Iraq and Afghanistan seemed part of a much larger “forever war,” to expand on Dexter Filkins’s phrase. That war ebbs and sometimes skips a whole generation, but it always returns with lethal ferocity, forming a bloody continuum of imperialism that extends from Wounded Knee to Manila, Managua, Hue, Mosul, and Kandahar.
That first assignment, which I wrote for the Virginia Quarterly Review, profiled the grieving parents of Nick Mason and David Ruhren, the two soldiers from my unit who were killed in the Mosul chow hall suicide bombing in December 2004, a few weeks before our unit was due to rotate home. Pulling into the parents’ driveways and walking up to their doorsteps was the hardest thing I had ever done—much harder than racking a round in the chamber and heading out on patrol. I knew I would force them to relive the most awful moments of their lives, when other soldiers had come to their doors to deliver news of their sons’ deaths. But they welcomed me, unguarded. They did not fight the tears, because four years after the bombing there were no brave faces left to put on.
I also interviewed an older NCO from my unit who had been a father figure to the soldiers who were killed. He had reenlisted in a fit of post-9/11 patriotism after many years as a civilian, stoked by American flag magnets and the repetition of video footage of the Twin Towers collapsing. He joined to get revenge—Never forget!—and now his own life had been shattered by guilt and the lingering effects of combat exposure.
With my notebooks full, I sat down to write. This was no term paper, no intellectual exercise. These people had placed their most intimate memories and emotions into my hands and given me permission to try to make sense of it all. I have never forgotten the gratitude I felt for their willingness to simply talk to me or the sense of purpose I felt when they entrusted their stories to me. They showed me how to talk about difficult subjects with openness, humility, and courage—a lesson that has informed my work ever since.
A decade later, I am still making sense of it all. The effort has taken me back to Iraq and to Tahrir Square, Gaza, Kandahar, and over many thousands of miles of American highways. Throughout that time, I’ve written about the environment, immigration, and politics—fascinating and vital subjects—but the wars always call me back.
I wrote about Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan, following soldiers and marines on patrol and drinking tea with civilians who would not get to go home after a yearlong tour. I traveled to Jalal-Abad to track down the lone survivor of a helicopter attack that left eight children dead—a case of mistaken identity that Hollywood did not dramatize, but that brought the Afghanistan War into sharp focus. In Marjah, I watched marines try to save a girl who’d lost all four limbs and most of her face to an IED they knew was meant for them. When they handed her tiny corpse to her uncle, he had tears in his eyes, and so did the marines.
But they were not Good Samaritans—they were teenagers and twentysomethings who’d been trained to kill and had been doing that job well against an enemy they didn’t understand. All they knew was that letting their guards down for one minute might get their friends killed. That was enough to go on in Afghanistan, but they often brought their hypervigilance with them when they came home, and sometimes their loved ones found themselves on the receiving end. One soldier I met in Kandahar carried the violence home to El Paso, Texas, where he killed someone in a fit of rage that may have had its origins in a blood-soaked Afghanistan guard tower. I took all these stories and put them into prose, photographs, and video, hoping these small contributions would, if nothing else, ensure that a record has been made. Most days, that seems like the best that any of us can hope to accomplish.
Of course, I think we ought to challenge ourselves to accomplish much more. Our overwhelming collective ignorance of (and isolation from) our recent wars does not absolve us of responsibility for the damage done in our names. We have a duty to reckon with the costs and consequences, and we have a duty to learn. Failing to meet this obligation will ensure that it was truly all for nothing. By asking hard questions about America’s post-9/11 wars—and by examining the experiences of the survivors at home and abroad—I hope we can do more than inform our future decision-making. I hope we can look at ourselves honestly, and in the process come to know ourselves for who we really are: a warlike nation with a habit of visiting destruction on distant strangers for reasons that have everything to do with us and little or nothing to do with them. Looking more closely at ourselves would at least address one half of Sun Tzu’s famous admonition—know the enemy and know yourself—and it might address both.
One would have to be a fool to hope that writing about the folly of the wars and the devastation they’ve wreaked could prevent the next war, big or small. I suppose I am a fool, then, because I still hold on to a sliver of hope. The questions that burned inside me when I walked up those doorsteps to the Mason and Ruhren households a decade ago remain largely unanswered. Even so, journalism has provided a path out of the tunnel of my own postwar bewilderment. It allows me to help those who have served or sacrificed find meaning, understanding, and, above all, a voice.