4th of July.
July 3, 2011 at 4:24 pm
(This post was last modified: July 3, 2011 at 4:27 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
I joined the service on the 4th of July, 2001. Looking back it's amusing to me that I didn't even consider the significance of the date at the time. I was broke, hungry, and I distinctly remember thinking about how good my grandfather had claimed Army food to be. Of course, I'd been watching the History Channel for years. I was completely enamored with the warrior mythos. Being a geeky kid from magnet and megsss programs, I guess a part of me just wanted to prove that I could be a grunt. I had been dating the same girl for six years, a beautiful, sweet Argentinian girl from a wealthy family that I'd met through friends whose parents could afford to send them to a private school. Like any teenage romance we'd been talking marriage since just about the moment we met. Perhaps i thought that through military service I could afford her a life of dignity, though perhaps not wealth, and that we could travel on Uncle Sam's dime to all the places we'd always promised to visit over the years. I got a nice short contract, European duty station, and more money than I'd ever seen at one time as a signing bonus. Seventy two hours from the time I walked into the recruiters office to the time I left MEPS, Military Entrance and Processing, I was in Ft. Benning Georgia. Home of the infantry. It was the second time in my life I'd ever flown.
The walls at the "welcome center" were covered with the stories of medal of honor recipients, all infantry, who'd been recognized for things that a sane human being would never even conceive of. As I'm sitting there with about two hundred other strangers, we're all reading the wall. These guys were catching grenades in midair and returning them to their rightful owners, wiping out entire platoons of the enemy, all the while taking fire, and saving the lives of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people while laying down their own. More than half of these medals have been awarded post humously since 1941. I remember thinking that this was the reason that I came. To be a hero, to be remembered forever, my story would be on these walls someday, people would want to be me. The Army at the time lacked any real sort of purpose, there were no wars, no conflicts that necessitated the hurried processing of recruits, and so we all languished in processing for months. The only activities we were allowed, the obsessive shining of our boots, which we all became very good at, and waiting in line to be fed. We woke up, shined our boots, stood in line, and went to bed. This was all. Sometimes we wrote letters that we never sent. Many of us had no one to send letters to, that was why we were here. Eventually we were processed, and we met our drill sergeants, we started our training, we ran. I've covered more miles on my feet in those months than I will cover for the rest of my life. Gradually I realized that becoming a grunt wasn't exactly the great challenge I originally envisioned it to be. You did what you were told, you kept your mouth shut, and it all fell into place. There is nothing inherently difficult in being an infantryman. If you are willing to suffer, for whatever reason, the infantry can use you.
Shortly before the end of my training cycle the entire base went on lockdown. No calls in, no calls out, checkpoints were set up everywhere. The entire place became a forest of red and yellow road cones. after a few days we were told, in no uncertain terms, that the US was under attack. They shuffled us into the d-fac, the dining facility, and turned on CNN. We all sat and watched the planes hitting the towers, we all listened to the commentary. We were conditioned to be quiet by this point, and everyone was speaking in as hushed a tone as possible. I knew, right then and there, that we would all be deployed. While my friends (infantryman are friends even if they've never met, or would have hated each other in any other setting, willing to die or kill for each other, not just in war but in everyday life, at the very least hint of provocation) puffed themselves up for battle, as though at any moment the base would come under fire, I began to have a sneaking sort of suspscion that I would regret my decision to join. I knew even then, watching the towers fall, that where ever they sent us, we would not get the chance to fight the people that had done this. They were all dead. That I would not become a hero in this conflict, no medal, no story on the wall. While everyone around me beat their chests and repeated their oaths to defend the nation, my dream for glory on the field of battle had died. It was a quiet, pathetic death. No eulogy, no wailing crowds, just the absurd bravado of eighteen year old kids, trained to fight an enemy they would never meet.
I never did get deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. I specialized in a type of warfare that made me more valuable to the service as an NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) of a training range in Kosovo. Soldiers would file through to receive MOUT training before taking the final flight into the AO. Sometimes we'd train the locals. I met a man named Touma, a member of the transitionary defense force in Kosovo who I became great friends with. A devote muslim, who gave me a beautifully embossed copy of the Qu'ran, which he translated to english for me in the margins. Cover to cover. We spent more nights than I can count talking about America, terrorists, democracy, and the women we loved. Every morning we would build a plywood city, and every evening we would destroy it. He once took me to meet his family in the mountains above Pristina. I grew to view this man like a brother, I loved him, and his family more than I can possibly express. We used to go on duty together, confiscating woodcarts from the locals (there was an ordinance against chopping firewood), a duty he loathed. There was no electricity to heat homes in the area we were in, and it was colder in those mountains than one could possibly imagine. I actually starred in a music video by Toby Keith, for his song "Angry American" and I can tell you a story about that shoot that would make you roll out of your chair with laughter if you ever wanted to hear it told. Sufficeth to say that my smiling face graced the screens of TV's back home. There was an incident that I don't care to describe involving a twelve or thirteen year old child wearing a backpack, and the shit rolled downhill, I was sent back to Germany to be out processed and discharged, I could no longer perform my duties. I was told later that Touma had been killed in a bombing a few weeks after I'd left, for "colluding with the enemy". That's how the local brand of religious zealots thought. I still have the Qu'ran, I never open it. Every Fourth of July I think about Touma. I don't think about patriotism, or freedom. I don't put on the rose colored glasses and rehash old war stories with buddies, I don't have any to tell. Al I can think about is a man who decided to stand up for what he believed was right, to make a difference. A man who was ultimately executed by the very people he was attempting to help.
This is the first time I've ever written this down, my wife prodded me to do it. Maybe I just needed to tell it. It probably goes a long way to explaining why I take the stance on religion that I do. Then again I may have already held the prejudices you see me display day in and day out, and this served only to re-enforce them. At the end of the day it means nothing. To me, though, then and now, it meant everything. Hopefully I haven't soured the holiday for anyone, in any way. I've spent years avoiding people, and I suppose I'm just reaching out so that I might be able to share a part of myself, and hope that some of you may in turn share your stories with me. Funny, tragic, or irrelevant. Otherwise I'm just an avatar, at the top of a post, constantly nagging believers and raining on their parades for no discernable reason. I remember a month or so a few years back, the question "where were you on 9/11" was everywhere. For what its worth. That's where I was.
The walls at the "welcome center" were covered with the stories of medal of honor recipients, all infantry, who'd been recognized for things that a sane human being would never even conceive of. As I'm sitting there with about two hundred other strangers, we're all reading the wall. These guys were catching grenades in midair and returning them to their rightful owners, wiping out entire platoons of the enemy, all the while taking fire, and saving the lives of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people while laying down their own. More than half of these medals have been awarded post humously since 1941. I remember thinking that this was the reason that I came. To be a hero, to be remembered forever, my story would be on these walls someday, people would want to be me. The Army at the time lacked any real sort of purpose, there were no wars, no conflicts that necessitated the hurried processing of recruits, and so we all languished in processing for months. The only activities we were allowed, the obsessive shining of our boots, which we all became very good at, and waiting in line to be fed. We woke up, shined our boots, stood in line, and went to bed. This was all. Sometimes we wrote letters that we never sent. Many of us had no one to send letters to, that was why we were here. Eventually we were processed, and we met our drill sergeants, we started our training, we ran. I've covered more miles on my feet in those months than I will cover for the rest of my life. Gradually I realized that becoming a grunt wasn't exactly the great challenge I originally envisioned it to be. You did what you were told, you kept your mouth shut, and it all fell into place. There is nothing inherently difficult in being an infantryman. If you are willing to suffer, for whatever reason, the infantry can use you.
Shortly before the end of my training cycle the entire base went on lockdown. No calls in, no calls out, checkpoints were set up everywhere. The entire place became a forest of red and yellow road cones. after a few days we were told, in no uncertain terms, that the US was under attack. They shuffled us into the d-fac, the dining facility, and turned on CNN. We all sat and watched the planes hitting the towers, we all listened to the commentary. We were conditioned to be quiet by this point, and everyone was speaking in as hushed a tone as possible. I knew, right then and there, that we would all be deployed. While my friends (infantryman are friends even if they've never met, or would have hated each other in any other setting, willing to die or kill for each other, not just in war but in everyday life, at the very least hint of provocation) puffed themselves up for battle, as though at any moment the base would come under fire, I began to have a sneaking sort of suspscion that I would regret my decision to join. I knew even then, watching the towers fall, that where ever they sent us, we would not get the chance to fight the people that had done this. They were all dead. That I would not become a hero in this conflict, no medal, no story on the wall. While everyone around me beat their chests and repeated their oaths to defend the nation, my dream for glory on the field of battle had died. It was a quiet, pathetic death. No eulogy, no wailing crowds, just the absurd bravado of eighteen year old kids, trained to fight an enemy they would never meet.
I never did get deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. I specialized in a type of warfare that made me more valuable to the service as an NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) of a training range in Kosovo. Soldiers would file through to receive MOUT training before taking the final flight into the AO. Sometimes we'd train the locals. I met a man named Touma, a member of the transitionary defense force in Kosovo who I became great friends with. A devote muslim, who gave me a beautifully embossed copy of the Qu'ran, which he translated to english for me in the margins. Cover to cover. We spent more nights than I can count talking about America, terrorists, democracy, and the women we loved. Every morning we would build a plywood city, and every evening we would destroy it. He once took me to meet his family in the mountains above Pristina. I grew to view this man like a brother, I loved him, and his family more than I can possibly express. We used to go on duty together, confiscating woodcarts from the locals (there was an ordinance against chopping firewood), a duty he loathed. There was no electricity to heat homes in the area we were in, and it was colder in those mountains than one could possibly imagine. I actually starred in a music video by Toby Keith, for his song "Angry American" and I can tell you a story about that shoot that would make you roll out of your chair with laughter if you ever wanted to hear it told. Sufficeth to say that my smiling face graced the screens of TV's back home. There was an incident that I don't care to describe involving a twelve or thirteen year old child wearing a backpack, and the shit rolled downhill, I was sent back to Germany to be out processed and discharged, I could no longer perform my duties. I was told later that Touma had been killed in a bombing a few weeks after I'd left, for "colluding with the enemy". That's how the local brand of religious zealots thought. I still have the Qu'ran, I never open it. Every Fourth of July I think about Touma. I don't think about patriotism, or freedom. I don't put on the rose colored glasses and rehash old war stories with buddies, I don't have any to tell. Al I can think about is a man who decided to stand up for what he believed was right, to make a difference. A man who was ultimately executed by the very people he was attempting to help.
This is the first time I've ever written this down, my wife prodded me to do it. Maybe I just needed to tell it. It probably goes a long way to explaining why I take the stance on religion that I do. Then again I may have already held the prejudices you see me display day in and day out, and this served only to re-enforce them. At the end of the day it means nothing. To me, though, then and now, it meant everything. Hopefully I haven't soured the holiday for anyone, in any way. I've spent years avoiding people, and I suppose I'm just reaching out so that I might be able to share a part of myself, and hope that some of you may in turn share your stories with me. Funny, tragic, or irrelevant. Otherwise I'm just an avatar, at the top of a post, constantly nagging believers and raining on their parades for no discernable reason. I remember a month or so a few years back, the question "where were you on 9/11" was everywhere. For what its worth. That's where I was.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
