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I'm going to ramble a bit on how your mentality generally changes over the years in a kill-centric culture and environment (deploying to Iraq/Afghanistan in a combat platoon over the course of five years). I was rereading some older journal entries I wrote over the last half decade or so, and it kind of took me aback at how extreme some of my thoughts and feelings were. I've only been out for a little bit now (less than a year), but I've deflated a lot since leaving it behind.
When you first deploy, you have more questions than answers. You're like a sponge and are wide-eyed to everything. You're excited, nervous, uncertain, anxious...
Did I pack spare batteries? Are all my magazines fully loaded and ready to go? Fuck it, I'm not risking it; remove every single round and reload all my mags to ensure I have the right amount. Is my gun clean? Check it, seems clean... fuck it, clean it again anyway.
During the mission: Do I remember exactly where everything is in this spare medical pack I'm humping? Was my training stateside adequate? Do these NOD's have fresh batteries, or are they going to die mid mission? How long can these things actually last before they run out? Say somebody springs out of this house in front of me right now... would I react right to it? Fuck, why am I thinking so much? Pay attention to your surroundings, asshole.
The things you're certain about: you know it's in your job profile to have to shoot people, to have to kill people, to have to see people get shot. You know generally what is entailed in your profession, but you don't truly grasp it just yet.
Gradually, as you spend more time over there and get used to the new lifestyle and the tempo your new life is marching to, you start to descend into a subtle form of madness and inhumanity... you slowly go fucking crazy, becoming a product of the fucked up environment that you're in. As you get a little more comfortable with the routine of things, you begin to harden. You become more bitter, indifferent, cynical, pessimistic, and generally angry.
The initial excitement that war and the new, prospective experiences that it offers goes away pretty much as soon as your first friend and colleague gets shot. You're more pissed off than anything. The first time you have to engage with and kill enemy, you're left with this feeling of resentment for these people. You're inner monologue screams, "Are you fucking kidding me? These assholes have it in them to try and kill us? Hell fucking no." You want to kill every one of these motherfuckers. You want to shoot them in their faces until they're unrecognizable, so that the only thing on top of their neck is a lower jaw and bone-and-brain salad. You want their mothers to not be able to recognize them at their funerals.
And so you develop a certain joy and pleasure in your platoon killing these people. Might as well, right? One less of them is less of a chance for Americans and other NATO countries to be killed. You take satisfaction in seeing these people no longer as people with a life story and human traits, but as inanimate corpses. You relish that Freddy Mercury pose, where their teeth are bucked out and mouth is agape, looking similar to the late Queen singer.
You enjoy dragging their corpses. You enjoy the feeling of their limp appendage in your hand and of their joints popping as you drag them around. That tangy metallic, musty stench that emanates from them is starting to be associated with the success of putting down these dudes like the dogs that they are.
You really appreciate the destructive capabilities of the assault force. You might not be there to witness it, but you hear of the enemy being killed over a radio call and you bite your lower lip and nod in approval. The humming of the helicopters that surround the target during the assault and their destructive qualities make you feel safe and secure, like a blanket that wraps around your psyche.
Small, ritualistic actions reflect the state of your humanity. The weirdest thing I ever did was on a mission during my second deployment. My squad was the assaulting element for this house we were clearing, and two members of my squad killed a man while clearing a room. As soon as they entered, the Iraqi drew out a 9mm pistol and shot at one of them. My two friends returned fire and killed the Iraqi. When all was said and done and we began to conduct our post-assault procedures, I went to the room where this dude had died. He was laying on his back in a pool of his blood. There was something different about this guy's blood, in that it was really thick and syrupy. It reminded me of Nestle strawberry milk syrup. I was fascinated by it.
This was the first time I was exposed to a man killed indoors, so I didn't have the threat of outdoor exposure and the task of pulling security to worry about and had time to stare and study the corpse. I decided to dip my boots in this puddle of blood and cake them with it. I was able to dye my boots right up to the ankles, and carried the dead man's stains on my feet for the rest of the deployment. I went to Ranger School right after that deployment with those boots, and ended up tossing them after graduation. I kind of wish I still have them, as sort of a relic of what I was becoming those years.
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It's good to avoid bottling it up.
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Shiiiiiietttttttt.
Very good read.
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Good style, has a degree of subtlety. Keep them coming if you can, I'd like to know more about your experience.
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Partially disturbing but also incredibly interesting to read. Would read again.
gl.
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Dang I remember reading your previous blogs... very disturbingly written...
I hope you're done with the military for good and don't have to go back into that kind of environment, er.. unless you want to...
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I really enjoyed reading that. Superb writing.
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thanks for posting about your experiences. at one point at was considering joining the military (it still is a slight possibility in the back of my mind) but it's good to hear about it beforehand.
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Good blog, very gripping. Since I'm a civilian with literally zero combat experience (not even basic military training) I always wanted to ask someone like you how realistic the depiction of soldiers/war and its effects on people is in movies. And I don't mean the silly Schwarzenegger movies, I mean the rather intense ones like Hurt locker, Jarhead(?), Jacob's ladder, Band of brothers, Platoon, Full metal jacket, Apocalypse now, maybe First blood or what have you. How much stress are you dealing with after getting out, how much do your experiences affect you?
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On August 30 2012 13:28 starfries wrote:
thanks for posting about your experiences. at one point at was considering joining the military (it still is a slight possibility in the back of my mind) but it's good to hear about it beforehand.
Your experience is obviously going to vary depending on what job you end up with and, probably to a larger extent, what country you're serving for.
On August 30 2012 18:04 surfinbird1 wrote:
Good blog, very gripping. Since I'm a civilian with literally zero combat experience (not even basic military training) I always wanted to ask someone like you how realistic the depiction of soldiers/war and its effects on people is in movies. And I don't mean the silly Schwarzenegger movies, I mean the rather intense ones like Hurt locker, Jarhead(?), Jacob's ladder, Band of brothers, Platoon, Full metal jacket, Apocalypse now, maybe First blood or what have you. How much stress are you dealing with after getting out, how much do your experiences affect you?
I don't watch a lot of war movies and never really did growing up (only have seen Platoon and FMJ in your list, and I only really remember the bootcamp scene in FMJ). As far as actual fighting is concerned, Hollywood really tries its hardest to glorify and make it look sexy. In reality, a gunfight or any combat situation is handled very deliberately and the pacing is erratic. You're trained (once you've been exposed to enough situations, conditioned is the more appropriate word) to react to every situation in a prescribed, tried-and-true manner, running off the cues of the environment and your leader's orders to guide the specific parameters of whatever drill you're conducting. The fluidity and heroic maneuvering of a single dude running out in the open massacring dudes by the dozen while shooting at a full sprint is fucking retarded, as you could imagine.
As far as effects from the war experience... everybody comes out with varying degrees of PTSD. I'm not affected too much; the only major quirk l do that I can think of is sleep with a gun at night. I sometimes get caveman-rage angry and hyper-vigilante about stuff, but I don't know if I have always been like that or if those tendencies are symptoms of my old environment. I don't have nightmares or immobilizing flashbacks or any of that stuff.
The biggest thing I've had to deal with since getting out is a certain kind of guilt and angst. Reading and hearing all these stories about war veterans with severe emotional trauma repenting in public forums about the atrocities that they committed really started to get to me. Am I fucking crazy for not feeling remorse? Worse yet, just how close am I to being clinically considered a menace and potential threat to society for having enjoyed war and killing people? I couldn't see a counselor because of imagined implications (for example, if you have suicidal tendencies and see somebody about it, you're flagged immediately and locked the fuck down) that it had for my freedom to live my life. I sat on the harrowing prospect that I might be a sociopathic liability to humanity for a few months, and it raised some pretty weird and unnerving questions about responsibility, sanity, and self-worth that weighed pretty heavy on my conscience. Basically, I felt guilty about not feeling guilty. Does that make sense?
I've since learned that this is a common thing, to feel guilty about not feeling guilty. It's not the most well-documented phenomenon, but it exists and people feel this way quite a bit. Like a teenager learning that his/her heightened sexual awareness and desires are common and nothing to feel ashamed about, it lifted a heavy burden off my shoulders to learn of this. I might very well be crazy for having enjoyed what I did, but if that's the case then at least I'm crazy in numbers, and that alone is enough to put my mind at ease.
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EPT
