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Edited on Mon Jul-31-06 01:42 AM by shadowknows69
“I’ve been in the military for about five years of eight and I’ve done one tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan and I have two more combat tours to do before I get out. It’s Russian roulette. They just keep sending you and maybe you don't get shot this time but it's like Russian roulette."
"You can't think of it like that", I said.
I was going to launch into a tirade about how he has to have confidence in his ability and his experience to bring him through safe again but he cut me right off and said,
"My time will come eventually. It's Russian roulette"
My heart sank like a rock. That this young man who had survived hell twice was still so certain that war was going to take him someday. The inevitability in his voice was horrible. The saddest thing is there is a better than fair chance he will be right.
This column was originally meant to be my first upbeat taxicab report. It was supposed to be about the joy of homecoming. Yellow ribbons coming off trees, men and women longing for their lovers and being fulfilled, vehicles with all of their windows painted with proclamations of welcome and children with a light in their eyes that has been absent for a year or more.
I feel like the media now, constantly accused of showing none of the “good news” from the war on terror. I tried, I swear, but every story of happy homecoming I found kept being haunted by the underlying facts of:
A) It was temporary and soon those who were reunited would soon be parted again, and in war perhaps permanently. Or:
B) The homecoming that should have been welcoming heroes, standing strong, adored by those they left behind, is instead one of broken bodies, broken homes and broken wills.
The men and women getting back are very happy to be home. Luckily for my wallet they are also very willing to spend the year’s worth of paychecks they didn’t have much cause to spend while getting shot at. The car dealers in town are loving life as much as the bars and the cab drivers.
Despite their release from hell the specter of redeployment is ever present. Some of these troops won’t be home six months before they’re asked to go to distant lands again and maybe die this time. Our base is the most deployed unit in the army and many are on third tours already.
I haven’t encountered too many wounded soldiers, mostly limps and minor shrapnel wounds. I can only assume that the more serious injuries are still undergoing treatment and rehabilitation at a hospital elsewhere. The wounds to their souls are sometimes more noticeable. As I’ve said in previous reports there is a vibe of culture shock. The time zone difference from Baghdad alone has to fry their internal clock. How’d you like about nine hours of jet lag? I try to be friendly but tactful, acknowledging where they’ve been without forcing them to think about it too much. I made the comment to one GI, who asked me if he could roll down his windows because he hadn’t been able to ride with windows down for a year, that it must be nice to take a ride and not have to man a machine gun too. I thought I may have crossed the bad taste line for a second but he laughed and agreed whole heartedly.
The ones that just came back are rejoining their country in the ways you might expect. Many are hitting the strip clubs down south, No one in this city has been able to keep one open despite its potential as a gold mine. Some are checking into hotels alone for unknown purposes, Some are looking for a fight, some are looking for drugs and many are coming back to heartbreak. Stories of wives breaking things off in emails, cheating with brothers, cheating with others are very prevalent. I’m sure it goes both ways, gender wise, but in my limited experience I haven’t had a decent enough sample of women’s stories to come to an informed conclusion about their side of it.
Thankfully I’m seeing fewer overtly disturbed soldiers than I thought I might but then the scope of my audience with them is only dozen’s of minutes at best so I’m not getting the big picture there. The ones fighting the big demons you can usually spot. The ones getting out of the military for good are ecstatic. The ones who remain to be sent again deal with it with the gamut of emotions from fear and inevitable doom to frightening, impatient bloodlust and everything in between. Many still tell me how bad it is but sometimes I gleam more from the conversations they have among themselves.
We fill the cabs right up when we get them even if they’re going in different directions and sometimes you’ll see this fascinating event of recent vets of the same shit meeting each other for the first time. Stories aren’t exchanged much, mostly just pleasantries like “where’d you serve?”, “What unit?”, “Wasn’t it your unit that suffered the most casualties over there?” They speak of places and events alien to me but most of the answers are met with a palpable grim recognition from their fellow troops.
I still have no sense that any of them feel that this will be over any time soon or that we even have that as an eventual goal. I’ve been told the words “Iraq is just a base for us.” A lot of them getting back realize the next theater they go to could be Iran, Syria or Lebanon. Most future orders are fluid from what I’ve been hearing. I was able to approach the subject of the cancelled homecoming of the 1st Cavalry recently and there is definitely a universal disgust at this move. I’m sure any vet on here will tell you that “short time” is nearly a sacred thing in war. Our soldiers start that countdown from the minute they’re “in country” and they agree that to renege on that is just about worst blow you can deal to a soldier’s morale.
I’ve heard my first stories of soldiers going AWOL from Iraq. One group of guys one night were talking about one of their friends who never came back from a two week leave in Greece I think it was. They said it doesn’t happen often but they knew of a few. I wonder how many do it once they get back to the states? On a lighter note I’ve had to feel really bad for a lot of these guys that are looking for a lady friend to spend some time with after being without for a year. I think three peckered Billy Goat would be an appropriate if crass description of how horny these guys must be. Sadly for them, even before most of the troops got there, our town had a bout a 6 to 1 male to female ratio. That goes up to about 10 to 1 with the boys being back so needless to say not all of them are getting welcomed home as well as they’d like. Two of them last night wanted me to find them a hooker, but I had to tell them that the only ones I knew were the random and obvious crack whores on certain streets and that I couldn’t in good conscience recommend them to our honorable fighting men. One protested but his friends saw the wisdom of my refusal to play “pimp for a day” and talked him down.
In closing let me say that overall I think the most overwhelming feeling I get from these returning soldiers is one of eerie calm actually. A realization that despite having a happy homecoming now, it is fleeting. That this will never really end. Whether they greet their next deployments with utter dread and doom like our first subject, or a simple will to do the job they feel they need to do, they all seem to have a calm certainty that this is now their routine. These soldier’s only true home anymore is their base, their unit, their platoon, and their bunker. Their family?. The brothers and sisters around them. Home is a nice place to visit, but they’re no longer allowed to live there. Shadow out.
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