A Brosef At War

By The Germanatrix


My brother is coming home from Iraq in less than a month. He, and everyone around him, cannot quite believe it, and just writing the words “my brother is coming home” feels like I’m jinxing the whole thing. In case you were wondering what it’s like to have a close family member involved in this bullshit war, it feels like your heart took human form and decided the first thing it would do is play chicken. On a NASCAR racetrack. During a race. Without a car.

It sucks.

I won’t even try to convey what my brother has been through, because I can’t even begin to imagine it. You can watch movies and read books, but how can you possibly understand what it’s like to fear for your life 24/7? What it’s like to see people die right in front of you, ripped from an existence that by all rights they were supposed to enjoy for a very long time.

My brother had to collect and identify the body parts of his friend. He doesn’t want his family to ever go through something like that. For good reason – it’s a completely fucked up thing to have to live through. And yet, how many families, how many friends have had to claim the bodies of their dead? How many soldiers do we have over there? 100,000 and counting? So many of these brave soldiers are killed or live through their friends and comrades being killed, only to return to a society that didn’t want them there in the first place, and has no real concept of the hell they’ve been through.

In many ways, this war is a private one – the only people who really feel the effects of it (in this country, anyway) are those who have someone over there. If you’re lucky enough not to know anyone in the military, this war is about as relevant to you as an episode of Lost. A bit depressing at times, compelling, infuriatingly stupid, perhaps, but you can get on with your life without really thinking about it until it pops up again on TV or in the newspaper.

Even for me, my brother’s ordeal was on the periphery of my life. During most of the year that my brother’s been at war, I was in Germany. Everything was sparkly and new and difficult, and it’s easier to ignore your worries when Prague is only 30 euros away.

That is, until you get emails like this:

4/18/06

I don't know what to say, this has been one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. That day the captain and I attended a local town council meeting. After that meeting we joked around outside for a couple minutes before he left with one of our sections and I left with the civil affairs guys. I arrived back at Taji to see our commo guy running around the squadron TOC area. Barely pausing he yelled to me, "Ghost 6 is hit."

No way, not him, I just saw him... it must have been another vehicle in the section... I'm sure it was like all the other IEDs that have blown on us, some paint chips, cracked glass, flat tires, some bullshit... well, if it was his vehicle, I'm sure he's fine, I mean it's Ghost 6, they can't hurt him, nothing can stop him... what came out was, "What?" He paused just long enough to say, "Ghost 6 is hit, he's unconscious." I don't know if he went into the building we were by or if he stood there or if a spaceship came down and snatched him up, I was running for the TOC before he finished the last word.

I was greeted with worried faces and fear. Before I knew it, I had dragged one of the TOC guys out of the chair by the radio and was sitting in it, holding the hand mic, listening to the guys on the scene react. I've never heard pure anger and rage and hate before, but it sounds like gunshots, diesel engines, and yelling. The captain’s gunner had taken some cuts to the face and a piece of shrapnel the size of your thumb had hit his throat protector, without that piece of kevlar his throat would have been ripped out.

He and the captain's driver had been dazed by the blast, but they came out of it to the sight of the captain slumped over, unconscious, bleeding out of his mouth and nose. In seconds they had gotten his 230 lb frame with 70 lbs of gear out of the vehicle. The medic arrived and provided first aid while the gunner and driver joined the rest of the section in returning fire to some guys in a nearby trash dump that shot at them after the blast. The medevac bird arrived pretty quickly, and they drove the captain to the LZ on a litter on the hood of a humvee.

He was off to the Combat Surgical Hospital with the squadron commander quicker than we had ever practiced. Talking to the medics, it seemed like the captain would be okay. He would be back, or at least be there when we got home. The section arrived back on Taji with his gunner, driver, and vehicle within two hours of the IED strike, they brought all his gear in the TOC while the gunner and driver were treated for their injuries. I spent the next three hours cleaning the blood off of his leader's book, a big binder full of important papers in document protectors, and the two pictures he carried of his 6-month old son in a zip-loc bag.

After that I went to the gym, worked out, and beat the shit out of the punching bag. Right before I was done I got a call saying there was a meeting of all COs in the SCO's office. It was then that he told us the captain had passed away. The impact of whatever had come through the Humvee and hit his kevlar had caused too much damage, even though it didn't penetrate.

I can't put into words what came next. He was my best friend here on Taji. He has a son that he really only got a month with, if that. He's got a young wife back home. He was getting out so that he could be with his son as he grew up. He had just finished a CD for his wife's birthday. He was just joking with me this morning. No way, not him.

I was CO for a couple hours. Long enough to gather all the soldiers in the troop and tell them, platoon by platoon, that their commander was dead. I've never seen men so tough cry so hard. Every heart in the troop broke that night.

We all admired him, loved him, would have done anything for him. He was all you could ever ask for and so much more. They brought in another captain from within the squadron, a good guy for sure.

The troop is pretty messed up. They're angry, sad, pissed, torn up inside, and full of rage. We all carry the cards that the captain’s wife gave us when we deployed. They have a picture of the captain holding his son and it says "something worth fighting for." Well, we're going to fight. Jonathan will never meet his father, will never know what a great person he was, all because we can't fight this war the way we need to. No more.

In the meantime, we will always carry this with us. We will randomly think we see the captain for the rest of our lives. We will suddenly become silent while others laugh and joke because something reminded us of him. We'll never be the same because we lost our friend.

How do you respond to this? I didn’t even know my brother could write this way. I’m not only mourning this man I’ve never met, but the effect his death had on so many people—some of them now dead too. How does that quote go? “The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation?” It sounds good, but war is so varied in its influences and effects that its opposite can best be summarized as life. War is so unnatural and grotesque, so anathema to human existence, that I don’t understand how it could so often be considered the only possible solution to our problems

When it comes down to it, I don’t even care about the political ramifications of this war. I don’t care how our conduct in Iraq and on the world stage in terms of foreign policy will affect our country’s future. I just want my brother back. I want him to come home without these kinds of experiences and the trauma they have permanently inflicted in his life. He says that he doesn’t think he’s changed much, but it simply isn’t possible for him to stay the same. Even if he hadn’t been in the army, my brother would have signed up and gone to Iraq because it would have been the right thing to do. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

I could mention how fucked up it is for Bush and his passel of assholes to manipulate the post-9/11 public sentiment to wage this pointless war, but I’m trying to keep politics out of it.

The reality of the situation is this: We’ve got a whole new generation of men and women out there with a shared trauma that sooner or later is going to be dismissed just like the suffering endured by the Vietnam vets. They will most likely be told to get over it, and themselves, and to move on. Maybe some of them will.

But to this day, a lot of Vietnam veterans can’t hear fireworks without flinching because it sounds too much like gunfire. This is what life is like for a whole new group of veterans now. And it’s sad that no one will know or care but those who suffered with them.