I have stopped dreaming so often of the war. I can’t remember when exactly, but one night, to my relief, the nightmares didn’t come again. It was the first night in months, ever since my return from Iraq to the United States, that I hadn’t revisited the dusty streets of Anbar in my sleep. The faces of dead friends and strangers remain clear in my mind’s eye as I write, but I am no longer haunted by them. They live on with the feeling of a smooth, warm stone in the pit of my stomach: not uncomfortable, but never quite forgotten. Neither are the events of my first eight months in Iraq, for I decided early in the deployment I would make a journal entry each day to preserve the experience for myself and perhaps to communicate my daily thoughts to my family in the event of my death.
It is not that I had any particular fear of dying, because I did not understand death. Rather, a strange fascination with mortality had begun to haunt my thoughts over the past months. Previously, I’d not known more than a handful of people who’d died, but as that reality changed, so too did my youthful perception of myself as invulnerable. My friend Jon had been a member of the company my unit replaced, and just a few months before our arrival lost his life when a suicide car bomber attacked his team in the same area my team would later be assigned to patrol. After arriving at the dead men’s former base, I walked into their office in the abandoned train station at Al Qa’im and discovered a small but poignant collection of reminders that they had never returned.
Most of the three men’s personal effects had of course been packed up and shipped to their next of kin, but left behind were a few items like the heavy black power converter upon which someone had written the numbers Nine-Five-One with a white paint marker.
Nine-Five-One signified belonging to the first team, of the fifth detachment, of the army’s Ninth Psychological Operations Battalion. To the Marines or soldiers who packed up Jon’s things and forgot the converter, they meant nothing more, but to me, the numbers meant my friend had touched the object, used it to charge his laptop or his music player, and never been back to take it home with him. They reminded me of his face, a memory that would never age. Years after his death I still remember Jon as I last saw him, alive and smiling in the glow of a backyard campfire, surrounded by the friends who loved him. I think of the young family he left behind, and the arguments we never resolved. The legacy of his life, a speck among the millions death has claimed through war, one I took for granted, deserved to be counted as more than just a number. It was a life worth remembering, and the loss of it forced me to confront the keen possibility that I, too, might die.
I kept my journal not because I expected to die, but because I’d learned to accept that death came unexpectedly. I wanted to leave a record of my existence, a proof of my worth as a human being should I never have a chance to leave behind anything better than a dog-eared composition notebook. Any small effort to encapsulate the last days of my life, however pathetic, would better help me fend off the shadow of death than I could by simply ignoring my fear. While the journal remained unfinished, I could not fall prey to a deadly sense of complacent fatalism.
Writing down what happened also helped me come to terms with ideas that at the time I could ill afford to dwell upon. It was a conscious attempt to wipe my mind clean and stay focused on my daily responsibilities. But even now, reminiscing from the safety of my own home, a sense of unease remains as I thumb the notebook’s soiled pages. I’ve come to realize the memories will never fully die, and the changes in my psyche will likely never be undone.
From the perspective of its participants, war unfolds in such a brutally disturbing fashion that after one experiences it firsthand, it is hard to under stand why so often war’s slaughter is still romanticized in film and literature as an honorable expression of patriotism. There are long periods of boredom punctuated by incidents of such gut-wrenching savagery, such barbarism, that one wonders how it is that either side can ever call itself “peacekeepers” or to be carrying out the will of God.
Having seen war in its raw form, stripped of its romantic euphemisms, my perception has morphed from one of callously accepting it as a part of human nature to understanding it as an unconscionable, outdated, barbaric practice. It’s a worrisome flaw humanity has yet to overcome that in our modern age we still accept the butchery of our human brothers and sisters as a means of settling our politicians’ and religious leaders’ disagreements.
Yet, there are also reminders that life persists in the midst of such madness. Farmers patiently attempt to coax the crops that feed their families from destroyed fields, choosing to stay while their neighbors flee, whether from a stubborn denial of how dangerous their neighborhoods have grown, a fear of losing their land, or the absence of the choice or means to leave as well. Soldiers browse the shelves of their camp stores with no intention of buying anything other than a few minutes of diversion, as the only goods for sale are the same untouched stacks of tampons and wrong size T-shirts that have gathered dust for weeks. Birds sing each morning to greet the new dawn, oblivious to, or perhaps in spite of, the destruction around them. It is a nasty business, and through millennia, regardless of how advanced the tools used to do the job become or how logical the rhetoric to sell it to the public, the end result always remains the same.
Death.
We have, as a species, gotten very efficient in the art of destruction over the centuries, and even learned there are indeed a few things created through war, such as war profits, deep resentments, widows, nightmares, debt, and cripples.
I can only hope naïvely that through sharing the experiences remembered in this book, my pebble cast into the sea, I might raise the tide for future peace.