“Have you heard of Iraq veterans against the war?”
The wineglass nearly fell from my hand. The pleasant face attached to the friendly voice smiled, not knowing it had just shorted my circuits.
“I mean … I am one of those.” It was nearly a year since I’d returned from my final deployment, and I had yet to meet any Iraq veterans against the war who were not my friends or me. Was this a trap?
“Yes, but the group—Iraq Veterans Against the War. Have you heard of them?”
Invisible sparks burst as my neurons exploded. “There’s a group?”
This was not a conversation I’d expected to be having backstage. I glanced up at my new boyfriend, whose California jam band was the reason I was standing in this greenroom in Falls Church, Virginia. He had just introduced me to a friend of his yet again as “an Iraq veteran.” Before I could prepare to mask my annoyance at the inevitable “Oh … ooh?” accompanied by a look of panicked confusion, this new acquaintance had changed the script as casually as she’d told me her name. Sonia. Had Sonia just said there was a whole group of Iraq veterans who were against the war?
A broad grin filled her petite face. “I can bring you some literature if you want! Will you be at the show on Thursday?”
Thursday night in a Bethesda guest room, as the band after-partied with our hosts, I stared at a pile of papers spread out before me on the bed. Words jumped off the printed pages—illegal … unjust … occupation—that I’d rarely heard other soldiers say out loud.
The War on Terror had come along as my young brain was still forming. I was barely nineteen when I enlisted, a few short months after 9/11. I wanted to be a journalist, so I became a soldier. My recruiter, like all good recruiters, made it make sense.
“Look, you want to go to journalism school, right?”
“Right.” I’d been getting myself ready for morning classes at Onondaga Community College, hastily applying makeup, when my mom had handed me the phone. I cradled the receiver between my ear and shoulder. The voice introduced itself as Sergeant Brown. He said he’d gotten my number from the college, and asked what I was studying. Reflexively, I told him. Nobody at home had shown much interest in my plans for the future. Sergeant Brown was interested, though—and he had a plan.
“But you can’t pay for journalism school, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, what if I told you I could get you a journalism job in the Army?”
I allowed his words to flutter around my mind for a moment before letting out what I thought was an uninterested “Oh?”
He couldn’t see my raised eyebrow over the phone, or my smirk. But he could spot an open door a mile away, and in he strode.
“Not only can I get you a journalism job in the Army, and all the training, but I’ll also guarantee you can still go to journalism school after you’re done—for free. You only have to sign up for five years!”
By now I’m not too proud to admit I heard only what he wanted me to hear. I was a reform school dropout who had enrolled in community college with a GED and a distant journalistic dream. I wanted a way out of my parents’ house, a way to live my own life and get job training for something resembling a respectable writing career. Instead of taking my parents’ orders for free, I could take the government’s for pay. I thought I’d be fighting terrorists, if anyone. I had no idea I’d be sent to Iraq even once, let alone twice. I took the offer I was given, signed on the dotted line, and prepared for five years of active-duty adventure.
War to me was only a concept, a heading to be memorized in history class. It meant olden days and long-ago people. My grandfathers had been in the Army, but not in any wars. They never talked about it. War is brutal and bad, my conscious mind would say, before interrupting itself. I mean, the Vietnam War was bad. World War II was good … except the nuclear bombs were bad … and the Revolutionary War was good … but the Civil War was bad … except the slavery side lost, so that’s good.… Wait, when was World War I? What was that one about again? I decided I’d have to wait and see for myself. Isn’t that what journalists do? Look around and find things out?
My recruiter never brought up the war. I didn’t notice. My mind was busy entertaining me with visions of myself as an intrepid reporter. The only thing I tuned out more effectively than the questions I should have asked was the irony of never having asked them.
Six years later, I was released from that “five-year contract,” and I no longer wanted to be a journalist. Neither soldiering nor war reporting had turned out to be anything like what my teenage brain had been led to believe as I rushed to my community college US history class. That morning felt like a lifetime ago, and in many ways it did belong to another life. I’d stepped into a camouflage skin and learned to blend in, to stay alert and alive, to watch my six and keep my head down. I’d been trained to fight in a war—to die in one, even—but not to live through one. Now, Sergeant Brown nowhere to be found, my admittedly damaged but at last fully formed adult brain had to somehow make it make sense.
The only thing that made sense to me as a newly minted civilian was to get in my car and drive as far away from the military as I could, so that’s what I did. Crossing the country from east to west and back again, I celebrated my hard-won survival by making new friends, drinking away painful memories, taking every less-traveled path and earnestly offered drug, embracing all that glittered. I never suspected the road I was on would send me careening toward the past.
IN NOVEMBER 2002, I was walking across the Student Company barracks at Fort Meade, Maryland, when my senior drill sergeant barked “Soldier!” at me from across the company’s common area. I was still a new recruit—only a couple of months into wearing rank on my collar, a week or two before my graduation from the Defense Information School. I stopped in my tracks and snapped to parade rest.
“Hooah, Drill Sergeant!” The Army’s ubiquitous grunt-word that meant everything except no was the only safe reply.
“Soldier! What do you think about going to Kuwait?”
Drill Sergeant Waltman sneered down at me. I tried to determine whether his tone was sarcastic or sincere, but his beady eyes and creepily curved upper lip were set in that time-honored drill sergeant jeer face that could indicate pleasure or rage or both. Like most authority figures who take their roles very seriously, Drill Sergeant Waltman seemed to enjoy reminding me who was in charge in this relationship, almost as much as I enjoyed knowing I’d be leaving his custody in a matter of weeks.
“R-r-roger, Drill Sergeant?” I had not, in any practical sense, thought about going to Kuwait. Even if I’d had the inclination, I wouldn’t have had the time—I was too busy learning how to write “the Army’s Story” about the places where we were already at war. I had read enough news about Saddam Hussein and his undiscovered weapons of mass destruction to know that all signs pointed to Don’t Invade Iraq. I had read enough to know that invading Iraq would be a historically grievous error. I thought I had read everything, until I realized I’d somehow skimmed over the writing on the wall: whether it was justifiable or not, we were going to invade Iraq.
Looking back now, I understand that when he signed the paperwork that month assigning me to the imminently deploying 3rd Infantry Division, Drill Sergeant Waltman thought he was sending me directly into a brand-new combat zone. If he’d had his way, I would have spent my next birthday in Baghdad. But when I arrived at Fort Stewart, Georgia, I was told the unit already had enough personnel for its deployment. Instead of finding out quite quickly what I thought about Kuwait, I spent the next two years in the division’s public affairs offices, dutifully distributing news of the Army’s version of the war to soldiers who were either on their way to it or finally returning home. Waiting my turn, listening to friends who’d made it back, soaking up all the gritty details, I had plenty of time to take in the variety of accounts.
According to the Army’s official narrative, the war was always in the process of being won. There were never any mistakes, never any defeats, and certainly never any failures—a semantic lesson I learned from my boss after I’d made that faux pas while interviewing the division’s chief of staff for the base newspaper.
“We do not ever refer to failures,” the public affairs officer, Lieutenant Colonel Martin, chastised me in his thin, uncertain voice, nervous eyes darting around the room as if he were looking for hidden cameras. “That is not appropriate terminology for addressing the division chief of staff.” He twitched when he saw the corner of my mouth flicker upward. “This is not funny, Specialist.”
“Roger, sir.” It was hard to keep from cracking a smile as I imagined his encounter with full-bird colonel McKnight. The chief of staff resembled Dr. Evil in every way except fictionality and stood at least a foot taller than my boss, who had, I assumed, spent the entire conversation trembling in fear. It was his ass on the line, after all. I was a mere specialist: a lowly enlistee, junior-grade nothingsauce. It was his duty to stomp out my don’t-give-a-fuck attitude when it came to what I subsequently started calling “the other F-word.”
Failure, though, was the only word I could think of to adequately describe what was going on. Long after our commander in chief had stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and given his “Mission Accomplished” speech, my friends were still dying in the war and I was still expected to participate in it. Even in my most idealistic moments, I could no longer bring myself to give any benefit of the doubt to our ever-changing mission in Iraq or to our never-changing narrative that the terrorists were definitely being defeated. I could cover only so many memorial services, interview so many grieving mothers, photograph the dog tags dangling from so many pairs of empty boots—boots that had recently been on the feet of wide-eyed recruits just like me—without asking myself after every polished article the one question I could never ask in any official interview: Why?
When the time came around for me to go to war, I had already been casually calling it an “occupation” for nearly a year. Saddam was gone. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There had been no Iraqi attacks on US soil, or that of any other nation. We were staying in Iraq, said both the journalists and the generals, to “bring democracy” to … the cradle of civilization? We were there to “liberate” Iraq … by taking over? The longer it dragged on, the more the knowledge that my job was to tell a story I couldn’t believe in incessantly nagged. I couldn’t help knowing I was one of the bad guys before I’d even set foot in Baghdad. A more conscientious person would have refused to go, but my conscience couldn’t convince me to break my contract.
They say if you end up in quicksand, struggling to free yourself will only make you sink faster. Joining the military to be a journalist had given me a job making PR look like news and an unwinnable war look like a victory. The Army was sucking me down into its moral void, and it seemed the only way to eventually extricate myself was to make peace with being stuck in it for a long while.
When I was seven, my favorite movie was Disney’s Little Mermaid—the story of a teenager who signs a contract that requires her to give up her voice in exchange for a chance to escape her frustratingly constricting world. It was one of the few films my homeschooling evangelical Christian parents would allow in the house, so I watched it at least twenty times as an impressionable child, memorizing the songs and singing them passionately to any unfortunate soul who happened to be in the room. By the time I reached the age of the eponymous heroine, I hadn’t watched it in nearly a decade, but I related to the misunderstood sixteen-year-old even more—desperate to escape my surroundings and unaware of how much I was willing to give up to do so.
As it turned out, I was willing to give up not only my voice but all the rest of my autonomy too. In basic training they’d sat us through hours of classroom lectures about what we were and were not allowed to say and do, now that we had volunteered to “defend freedom.” There were rules and red-tape mazes for every aspect of our lives in the military—body, mind, word, and deed. With every violation of those regulations came a broad swath of potential consequences ranging from symbolic to severe. Even the mildest wrist slap could mean lost pay, but at the furthest end of the spectrum were dishonorable discharges and jail time. Our health care, college money, and veterans’ benefits hung in the balance between the ability to play the game and the ability to resist being played. At the end of training, every new baby soldier could see in high definition what all our recruiters had handily glossed over: we were now government property.
Offered an escape hatch from my constricting world, I’d taken a cursory look before eagerly leaping, only to hear the door lock behind me as my recruiter disappeared with a nearly audible cackle. His lies had been a tiny taste of the military’s version of truth, the version I’d soon be hard at work telling. It truly was a world of new possibilities—but then, once you’ve leaped from the frying pan, so is the fire. And unlike a Disney movie, there was no guarantee of anything remotely resembling a happy ending.
BY THE TIME the Army got around to sending me to Iraq, I was more than ready to go see for myself what the real story was. For two years I’d waited my turn as nearly every other soldier I knew left and, if they were lucky, returned to tell me their tales. The ones who hadn’t come home took up residency in my head, their voices quietly nagging me: pay attention. As challenging as it was to keep from being swallowed by the monstrous job of crafting morale-boosting marketing for my fellow soldiers and calling it news, it was easy to stay skeptical when I could feel the emptiness of the spaces where my friends used to be.
The first day my boots were on the ground in Baghdad—February 23, 2005—I slept through a mortar attack on our base, the optimistically named Camp Victory. It became such a regular occurrence that I promptly forgot about that initial incident until reviewing my journal years later, recalling all the ways one could be hunted down by death while keeping calm and carrying on in a combat zone. Over the course of that year, as all the sidewalks and concrete slabs around our base were shattered and pockmarked by incoming explosives and scattering shrapnel, it became discomfortingly clear that if I got out of the war alive, it would be due just as much to luck as to skill. My life was government property, and I’d been a soldier long enough to know that the government is notoriously bad at taking care of its property.
The longer I settled into my role as one of thousands of disgruntled little cogs in identical camouflage, all doing our damnedest to avoid death together, the smokier the constantly exploding skies became, and the clearer it became that a significant number of Iraqis wanted us in their country even less than most of us wanted to be there. My job was to create a newspaper filled with the news of our victories, but on the last page of every issue, I typed a list of deaths. The official term, casualties, never felt sufficient to do justice to the growing number of names that had so recently belonged to so many living faces. The font size shrank in every issue, the list stretching into two and then three columns as the months heaved on.
As directed, our public affairs team never used the word failure in print, never hinted at the possibility that every victory was actually a loss, and never, ever technically lied. Military public affairs is a propaganda of omission. We, the government’s very own uniformed “journalists,” didn’t overtly fabricate. We just diligently told only the news deemed appropriate for team spirit. We painted only the pictures the generals wanted the troops to see. Resistance was not entirely futile, but it was swiftly punishable. Any attempt at sketching even a minimally accurate portrait of the daily chaos that we observed would be censored, at best. Instead, we adeptly performed the moral contortions required to maintain a semblance of sanity while spinning the yarns of winning we wrapped around our battle buddies’ eyes, at times not even noticing we’d gotten ourselves tangled up in them too.
As instructed, anyone we detained became, in print, a detained insurgent. Our ever-expanding presence in Iraq was officially the theater of operations. Our actions: combat operations. Our mission: Iraqi freedom. We never used the word war—at least not outside the safe confines of its bookends, Global and on Terror—because we had already won the war. What we were now engaging in was reconstruction. It would last as long as the commander in chief deemed necessary, we were told, and as long as it did, our team’s task was to tell the story of victory.
I wasn’t often permitted to venture outside the base. This was due partly to my admittedly lacking tactical prowess but also, according to every single one of my superiors, my inability to keep from letting a little too much truth make its way onto the printed page. Although I knew better than to try to print photos of children playing in sewage thanks to our destruction of Baghdad’s infrastructure—or to run images of lines of unnamed detainees sitting cross-legged in the desert sun, their hands bound and eyes covered—the articles I wrote did more than dance around my increasingly hard-to-disguise dissent with the mission.
“Watch for Low-Flying Sheep over Latifya” read the headline of what I considered to be a sufficiently positive news story I’d written after returning from one of my infrequent trips outside the wire. My mission: accompany one of the generals to a combat outpost south of Baghdad in the so-called Triangle of Death, fully cover the momentous occasion of his visit, and “see if you can get a light human-interest story while you’re out there.”
My story had come from an enlisted soldier on a rare off-day from regular patrols, who’d chuckled when I asked him if anything funny ever happened in such a dangerous part of the war.
“Yeah,” he said, and grinned. “The other day I saw a sheep fly.”
I sat down on one of the cots in the dank, cramped structure that served as living quarters for some soldiers, with others sleeping outside under camouflage netting. “Oh?”
A couple of weeks earlier, he told me, his team was out on what was an abnormally quiet patrol, compared with the area’s usual volatility. The most action they saw that day was an unexploded bomb they’d found on a bridge, so all they had to do was radio the explosive ordnance disposal team and wait. They even had interpreters with them to warn any Iraqis who happened by that they should keep their distance. For a while the danger seemed to have been dodged.
That was when the sheep showed up.
“It was a whole herd!” His voice grew more animated as he described the animals slowly moseying their way down the road, no shepherd in sight. The soldiers had looked on dumbfounded as the sheep moved toward the bridge … and then up to it … and then onto it … and then …
“What could we do?” He shook his head. “You can’t tell sheep to back up! We just had to let it happen. Then I heard this BOOM—and all of a sudden I see this fluffy, legless thing flying over my head!” The soldier emitted the kind of guffaw that seemed to say he couldn’t believe he was laughing either. “I don’t know if that’s funny. But it’s the funniest thing that’s happened here. After the weeks we’ve had out here, we’re just glad nobody died.”
My boss just shook his head when I handed him my article back at the headquarters building. “No. Really? No. Why would you even—?”
“It’s good news, Sergeant! Nobody died!”
He’d already turned back to his computer. “I’m not even going to show this to the colonel. Get back to work on the layout.”
My full-time mission became the production of a biweekly newspaper full of the troops’ winningest accomplishments, distributed to them for the sole purpose of keeping their heads in the game. Their heads, of course, were fully in it already, being concerned with saving their asses. My head, on the other hand, was a mess. No matter how many pictures of smiling Iraqi children I printed in the newspaper, the images I saw in my mind were of their harsh reality: their homes and communities bombed and ravaged, regularly raided, surrounded by barbed wire and blast walls. Children using trash as toys. Children living in an abandoned theater with a hole in the stage for a bathroom, with a seven-foot pile of feces and garbage nearly reaching the top. But every story I printed was one of unquestionable success.
It was a daily feat of psychological strength to wake up to the sound of small arms fire mingled with intermittent largish explosions nearby, then spend the day dutifully producing publications cheerily trumpeting all the winning we were doing here in the reconstruction. As my first year in Baghdad stretched on, my job description as an Army journalist broadened to include teaching soldiers on our base how to speak to actual journalists. All the reporters who had access to the troops were embedded in regular units, and those units contained soldiers who had to be briefed that they weren’t supposed to tell the media any sensitive information, such as what they were really thinking. Now I was tasked not only with twisting the truth with a spoonful of sugar for my fellow soldiers themselves but also with contributing to whatever fresh narrative the powers that be had dreamed up for our families and friends back home.
I responded to the stress in the best way I knew how: by going unquestionably, obnoxiously insane. It wasn’t the kind of insanity you’re probably picturing—I did not Rambo my way around the headquarters, spraying rounds left and right in a fit of howls and shrieks, at least not unless you count my daydreams. My slow drift into madness manifested in a way that not even I could have predicted. Yes, there was the sporadic, compulsive rage that would bubble up without warning, and the steady stream of self-destructive tendencies, and the suicidal ideations, but beyond those surface-level responses, my craziness took shape as the terrifying drive to … deeply, helplessly care about the quality of my work.
My newly obsessive passion for technical scrupulosity became the bane of all my fellow public affairs peons’ existence. I had joined the Army to be a journalist, dammit, and if I couldn’t control the content I was producing, I would make its presentation as close to perfect as I damn well could. There was no point in botching the one part of the job that didn’t make me feel like one of the bad guys—even if it did turn me into the Editrix from Hell, Emotional Slayer of Sloppy Propagandists, Indomitable Fighter of Errorists. Once my integrity and morals had been thrown to the wind, all I could do was cling to the rules that remained: those of the Associated Press Stylebook. It was the only stable ground my feet could find. And it was there I planted myself, unable to accept, for the sake of my remaining sanity, that I was the only one who gave even the tip of the tail from a rat’s ass whether the propaganda we produced looked “professional.”
All I was expected to care about, of course, was getting home alive and staying there. But by the time I’d made it back, staying home was not an option. Instead, there was stop-loss.
IF THE ARMY had let me out at what I’d been led to believe would be the end of my active-duty contract, it’s entirely possible I would’ve hightailed it to the nearest Rainbow Gathering and remained there until I felt my internal balance ease its way back toward human. But six months before my terminal leave days were set to begin, the 3rd Infantry Division received orders to return to Iraq three months earlier than we’d all been told. Everyone’s active-duty contract was abruptly extended using a policy known officially as stop-loss but unofficially by its street name: the backdoor draft. Our go-getter commanding general had volunteered the 3rd ID to be part of the massive troop “surge” that would flood Iraq with thousands of additional soldiers, ostensibly rooting out the “insurgents” and making the nation much safer for us to continue occupying it. Unlike the previous deployment, which we had known would last a year, this time we were told we would be in Iraq for “twelve to eighteen months,” the precise duration to be determined sometime in the future.
I’d begun my first deployment with plenty of severe doubts about our mission and leadership but still with a degree of anticipation for the adventure to come. The second time around—returning to the same place, with essentially the same job, holding the knowledge of all I already had seen for myself the first time—my outlook started dark and descended into despair. The surge initially seemed to work, as our military’s finest minds had finally hit on the idea of simply paying or policing Iraqis so they would do what they were told—like join their national security forces, or not intentionally kill us. But it soon took a turn for the catastrophic.
Proving myself an abject failure as an aspiring journalist, I wasn’t well versed in the surge strategy, nor did I know just how careless the commanders were being with our lives. But all I had to do was look around—as incoming rounds peppered every corner of Camp Victory, from headquarters to living quarters to gym to parking lots—to know for certain that no matter how many success stories I printed in our now-daily morale-boosting publication, all of us soldiers were getting screwed together in one big nonconsensual gang bang. What’s more, we were certainly still not winning the war. I watched the Democratic primary debates that year on my work laptop, my ears perking up as the smooth-talking, polished young senator from Illinois campaigned on ending the Iraq War, and I counted down the days till I could stop trying to convince myself that we were not the terrorists.
Thirteen months into what we were eventually told would be a fifteen-month deployment, the Department of Defense passed a policy that awarded two and a half days of leave per extra active-duty month to stop-lossed soldiers. Having already accumulated a full month in anticipation of my previously scheduled exit, I suddenly discovered I’d either need to get back to the States quick-fast or start my end-of-contract leave—along with a migraine-sized pile of paperwork—while still in Baghdad. The Army chose to avoid the paperwork and send me on my way. A few weeks later, on a sunny day in May 2008, I walked out of the administration offices at Fort Stewart, Georgia, with an honorable discharge, a guilty conscience, and no clue how to be a civilian. I knew I had to write about what I’d seen, and that I had to write it my way, not under the shadow of someone else’s bias … but first I needed to run away from it.
After ping-ponging my way around the country in my car from the beginning of that summer into the dark part of the fall, I let myself get swept up in a romance with a musician. He whisked me away to festivals and shows and kept me distracted from my war stories, supplying me with a life of parties, sparkly people, and plentiful psychedelics. When he invited me to join him for an East Coast tour, I hopped on a plane and met him in the Mid-Atlantic. There, almost exactly a year after my hasty return from the Middle East, awaited my first introduction to Sonia, her envelope full of literature, and Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW). That meeting started a chain of events that’s been unfolding for nearly a dozen years and shows no sign of stopping.
Finding IVAW and other dissenting veterans’ groups, like Veterans for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, was like being introduced to a team I hadn’t known I was already on. With their guidance and encouragement, I learned more and more of the truth whose surface I’d barely scratched as a miserable, demoralized soldier, and I finally allowed that truth to infuse my whole life. I used my GI Bill funds for a bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern studies at UC Berkeley; after years of helplessly observing the War on Terror, I was at last able to dive deep into its history and context, and to learn Arabic, a language I’d unconsciously associated with the conflict.
It was fellow dissenting vets who drew my attention to the Occupy movement in the Bay Area. Once I saw connections between Wall Street, the police state, and what I learned to call the military-industrial complex, I couldn’t unsee them. It felt achingly obvious that it was time to use my “journalism” training to actually inform. I would dedicate myself to seeking out truth wherever it lurks, and to staying brave enough to speak, write, and even sing it; once I learned some chords on the ukulele, I was delighted to find that if I could make my opinions about the war into catchy, rhyming lyrics, people would not only listen to me but sing along too.
Over the following years, the world of new possibilities I’d been looking for as a naïve recruit rolled out beneath my feet, bringing with it countless ways to voice my ever-deepening discontent with a status quo that convinces well-meaning teenagers to die and kill other teenagers they don’t know, on the orders of generals who will never even remember their names, for the sake of paying for an education that their taxes ought to buy—or worse, for the sake of being an upstanding patriot.
Throughout the last decade and more, I’ve written these thoughts into stories, songs, poems, prose, performance pieces, and tattoos prominently displayed on my body. I’ve told them to high school students, fellow veterans, paying audiences, angry mobs, random strangers, brutal police officers in several states, my own unaccepting grandmother, and so many more. My words have been applauded by plenty of my peers, but they’ve also been heckled, booed, silenced, and ignored. My path has been rocky, but I’m at last able to stand freely in the reality I see. Not only is it the firmest ground I’ve ever stood on, but others are always joining me, sometimes even thanking me for helping them feel seen and heard for the first time.
I can’t speak to the value of dissent in general, or even of my own, other than to compare it to the value of clean air or water. When we keep our heads down, follow orders, and allow ourselves to be killers or be killed, we lose our humanity. When we refuse—by raising our heads, looking each other in the eyes, lifting one another up, and bellowing in one voice a resounding FUCK THIS!—that’s when we reclaim it.