Hi Folks. Here's the first installment of this expert interviews of soldiers and contractors who have been involved in the US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan in these last nine years. The intent of these interviews is to shed some light on the policies and events carried out by our country and the effects the people who've been enacting these decisions, those with their "boots on the ground" if you will, have had. Most importantly though, these interviews are about learning what it is to be a citizen of this country. What it means to be part of a nation that has been involved in a non-stop series of national and international conflicts and wars since our founding over 250 years ago. Maybe these insights will help us discover more about ourselves as individuals and as part of a democratic nation, and maybe they'll help us decide what kind of personal identity and legacy we want to leave behind when we're gone.Please feel free to comment with your any thoughts, questions, or opinions you might have about these interviews, but keep it civil. Personal
Tell the readers a little about yourself. What branch were you in, how long did you serve, where, why did you join, was it worth it? Would you do it again if you knew then what you know now? What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned from being in the military?
I’m currently an AH-64 Apache pilot in the AZ National Guard. Prior to this, I was regular army from 1995 to 2006. Besides stateside postings, I was in Korea twice, and did a tour in Iraq in 2005. I originally joined the National Guard in Massachusetts in 1993 to help pay for college, but after I got bored with mechanical engineering I went full-time Army. In 1998 I went to flight school and became an AH-64 Apache pilot.
Regrets? None. While there were some things that truly sucked about military life (rolling out of a warm sleeping bag at 3:30am in a freezing Korean rainstorm to pack up our tent springs to mind), I volunteered knowing full well what I was in for. I can also say I’ve gotten to do some pretty damn cool stuff, and met some extraordinary people and friends.
There were a lot of lessons I took away from the army. Picking one is tough, but maybe it’s a sense of perspective. I’ve been to a lot of places and seen a lot of things, good and bad. I can say I’ve learned from it all.
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| Iraq 2005 |
What unit were you in and what was its primary goal in Iraq or Afghanistan?
I was in the 3-3 Attack-Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division. Our job was to patrol the area in and north of Baghdad, looking for rocket and IED teams, and to provide air cover for our own guys. We’d also occasionally escort Blackhawks carrying VIPs to various parts of Iraq.
What, in your opinion, has been achieved by our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan?
I’ll speak to Iraq, since that’s where I was. The biggest thing I saw is that they have a chance now for the kind of prosperity that some of their neighbors have. I passed through Kuwait City on the way to Baghdad, and it was like going from downtown San Diego to a New Jersey slum. It wasn’t the war damage and it wasn’t because of a lack of resources. Saddam’s government was spending the money on things like their own palaces and wars with Iran. With Saddam and his sons gone, maybe the new government can do better.
How would you define those policies, from your experience and the missions you were involved in?
While I was there in ’05, the policy was simply to get their country back together and get it to where they were running things themselves again. Well, the concept was simple, but of course the actual execution was a bit more complicated.
One of the main things we had to stand up their government, army, and police force. For us, that meant including the area around the Green Zone into our round-the-clock patrols, and escorting convoys carrying things like voting ballots or concrete barriers with which to protect the polling stations. On actual election days we’d be overhead somewhere, but we’d avoid hanging too close to the polls unless we had to, so we wouldn’t have the appearance of trying to influence anything. I saw quite a bit of the Iraqi police, but had no way of working directly with them unless they had US guys with them. Late in my tour, we saw the Iraqi army doing more patrols. At first they’d do joint patrols with us. It was something to see, their older Soviet-made tanks and APCs alongside ours. In the last month or two, we handed entire sectors over to them. I couldn’t talk directly to them, but if nothing else pressing was going on, I’d sometimes loiter close by and keep an eye out for trouble. I can only hope that they understood my intent; I’m guessing a few of them may have bad experiences with Apaches in their past.
What our day-to-day drudgery, though, was keeping the infrastructure running; roads, gas stations, public works, that sort of thing. The roads, especially, is where I spent most of my time. That’s what our ground operations centered on; setting up checkpoints or static observation posts, and driving up and down the roads all day looking for IEDs. And that’s how most of our casualties were happening.
The policy about the insurgency boiled down to this: capture them if you can, kill them if you have to, but don’t tear up too much stuff doing it. That’s the tricky thing about fighting an insurgency. None of the other stuff we were doing would matter a bit if we leveled a neighborhood just to get one guy with an AK-47. But if you never pull a trigger at all, they get stronger and bolder anyways. It’s a tough balance
Do you believe we have done more good than harm, or the other way around?
It could go either way. Here’s what I mean: Iraq’s at a stage right now that reminds me of Germany after the two world wars. They got the crap stomped out them both times; viewed objectively, the damage we did in Iraq barely rates as a scratch compared to it. After WWI, they lived in a state of economic depression for more than a decade. That was the catalyst that enabled Hitler to rise to power. After WWII, we helped put them back on their feet with the Marshall Plan, but they also decided for themselves they were going to be independent and successful again. If the current Iraqi government can pull their country together, they can be the post WWII Germany. If they fall apart, they may very well end up with another dictator with an axe to grind, because that’s the kind of leader that usually ends up on top out of those messes.
Do you think Bush’s policies with regards to Iraq and Afghanistan were forward thinking? Were they executed well or not so well? How about Obama’s?
In the interest of not Rolling Stoning or McChrystallizing myself, I’ll keep it general and short here.
I’ve tried to imagine a future where Saddam is still happily running things, and then when his sons take over, eager to flex their power and avenge their father’s indignities. None of what I come up with is good. I also think of past history, when Neville Chamberlain thought he had achieved “peace for our time.” He didn’t come up with anything good, either.
The execution: up to the reconstruction part, we did pretty well. After that, well… it was a lot tougher than it had to be, and I believe that it will always cloud the way the war is perceived and judged in history. The surge worked, but it shouldn’t have had to get to that point. It’s true that no war in history has gone as well as well as intended by those fighting it, win or lose. Still, we should have done better.
I think I’ll just pass on that last one.
Should we still be in either place? Should we have ever been in them?
There’s no question in my mind about Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda escalated to attacking us in our own country, and the Taliban was sheltering them. That was good enough for me. I didn’t think too much of the other ideas that I heard at the time. I couldn’t see how economic sanctions would work against a country that had already so isolated themselves. I heard some talk about treating it as a criminal matter, as opposed to an act of war; well, good luck making that arrest. Turning the other cheek had already been done, and it just got us smacked on both sides of the face.
With Iraq, I didn’t see it quite as black and white like that, but I don’t regret it, either. Going to war in the name of UN sanctions didn’t mean much to me; it doesn’t say UN on my uniform. I thought WMDs were worth going for, but that obviously didn’t pan out (note to Saddam in hell: dumb bluff, asshole). Even so, I found I had my own reasons to be there. I got to fly way up north to the Kurdish lands on escort missions, and the way they would come out of their homes and wave and jump up and down every time we flew over—damn, that felt good. I suppose that if I had family or friends that were gassed by Saddam, I’d be pretty happy too.
I didn’t always have to go that far, though. Towards the end of my tour, I took up a standing invitation from our scouts to go on a ground operation with them. It was a routine op; we followed up on some intel and raided a couple houses looking for members of the local insurgency, not more than a couple miles from our base. But also on that night, we “raided” the house of another man—for appearance’s sake, so he could talk to us and not be suspected of collaborating. He was a Shia Muslim, and in Saddam’s Sunni regime he lived in a constant state of fear, especially living in the Taji area. You see, our base formerly belonged to the Republican Guard. Many members of the Saddam’s Sunni regime also lived in that area, mostly in expensive homes along the Tigris, which ran right by the east side of our base. We sat in his living room and I just shut my mouth and listened while he talked of how much he looked forward to simply not living in fear of his own government anymore. That’s all he wanted for himself and his family, and he knew it wasn’t going to happen with Saddam in power.
I’m not an advocate of being the world’s policeman, or jumping in just anywhere there’s two people with a beef with each other, but when I see things like that, I don’t so much mind putting my own ass at risk. So maybe I’m inconsistent—screw it, I’m human.
I definitely couldn’t see pulling out before we’d put the insurgency down or at least down to where the Iraqis could take it on themselves. Our original intentions being right or wrong didn’t matter to me much at that point; the insurgency happened because of us. Cutting and running was the only way it could have possibly been even worse, the height of short-sightedness—leaving behind a shattered infrastructure, a skeleton government, and no security. That’s how Afghanistan was after the Soviets pulled out.
Have our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan increased national security, had no effect, or caused greater harm? Why or why not?
We haven’t had a successful attack on our soil since 9-11, so I’ll have to say our security is better. Fighting us over there is a drain and distraction on them, and we uncover bits of intel here and there that help us put together a larger picture of what they’re doing. It’s not like in the movies, where they find a laptop full of files saying, “secret attack plans.” Clues come in bits and pieces, and they’re hard to get if we don’t actively go after them.
That said, we have to expect that sooner or later, they’ll get an attack through. As long as they keep trying, the laws of chance tell me that they’ll find a way in. I’d be (happily) surprised if they don’t. What should we do with regards to Pakistan? Can we do anything that will be good for us and good for the region, or the world?
That’s a tough one. Just like in Korea and Vietnam, the enemy has a safe haven, and I hate that. I wish we could just tell them to clear and secure their borders, or we’ll do it for them. But that’s probably not politically nor militarily feasible. The interest, as in the past wars, is not making the side show the main event.
It’s a safe bet that there are things going on behind the scenes that we won’t know about for a long time. Black ops, diplomatic maneuvering, things like that—we can guess all we want, but it probably won’t come to light anytime soon.
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| Iraq 2005 |
Terrorism
Why, from your experience, have we become targets for fundamentalists of the Muslim persuasion?
I see two things, either of which in themselves would be enough to get us into this mess. The first is our friendship with Israel. Part of that is the Palestinian desire for their own country, also. In a word, it’s religion, when you come right down to it. Judaism versus Islam, but we got dragged into it because when we aid almost everybody, we’re bound to piss off somebody else.
The other thing is the 1991 Gulf War. Even without the conflict already there over the Israeli-Palestine issue, it probably would have been enough to spark its own anyways. That’s what sent Bin Laden over the edge. I’m less than sympathetic, though. First, we were there because his country invited us. All the other Arab states combined weren’t willing to take on Iraq, but they knew we would. Second, all the wealth in that region, including his, came from the rest of the world’s wallets. Okay, so it was about oil. The government does it because we buy it.
So, for the heinous evil of liberating Kuwait, keeping the world’s oil flowing, and embarrassing the living shit out of Saddam, Bin Laden and his ilk have their leverage against us.
At this point, they’re almost moot points. Their war with us has become an end in itself.
If you really want to go back to some roots, you have to go to WWI. The Ottoman Empire had owned the Middle East, but got defeated along with Germany. The Brits and the French divided up the Empire formerly known as the Ottoman into mandates (colonies, really), without regard to religious sects, clans, or anything else. That’s why you have the explosive mixes of different peoples in places like Lebanon and Iraq, and countries laying claim to parts of others (Iraq and Kuwait, 1990). T.E. Lawrence saw the trouble coming and tried in vain to do something about it, even back then. Yes, Lawrence of Arabia. Smart guy. Anyways, they didn’t take long to kick the Brits and French out, but kept the boundaries and made countries out of themselves. The place has been a powder keg ever since.
I’m sure that there are a few of them that fight solely to expand Islam and because they hate our culture, which is the antithesis of their fundamentalist interpretations. I have a hard time believing, though, that there are enough of them to make up the majority of their forces.
What can we as a nation do to eliminate this?
As long as we’re burning gas in our cars, we’re going to have a presence in the region. It’s been that way since oil was discovered there, and I don’t see that changing, no matter who’s in the White House. So that point of contention isn’t going away anytime soon.
We’re not abandoning Israel, either. So it’s not going to be up to us, actually. By some happy miracle we may broker a peace in between Lebanon and Israel and Hezbollah someday, but if the actual people on the ground don’t make it work, this will just flare up again sometime in the future. But if they somehow did, maybe all the other reasons the fundamentalists like to fight us for will just dry up and be left behind.
In your opinion, have our efforts to halt terrorist activities actually increased anti-American sentiment worldwide? Why or why not?
Probably has, at least in Muslim countries. Their efforts have increased anti-Muslim sentiment worldwide, too: Mumbai. Bali. Madrid and London. The Beslan school siege. Pan Am 103. The Achille Lauro. Munich. It goes on and on. I’d say they have more to answer for than us. We at least saved a huge Muslim population with our intervention in Bosnia in the 90s; I can’t think of how they can say so much.
The thing is, it’s irrelevant anyways, in the grand scheme of things. We both fight the propaganda war for popular opinion and it gets us an edge here and there, but unless we solve the root causes, we’ll just going to keep at each other, one way or another.
Loss and Gains
Have we, as a nation, lost anything due to our efforts in these countries? Is so, what?
Actually, there’s something I wish we had lost: our naïveté about the nature of the enemy we’re fighting. Even after 9-11, I don’t think the average citizen appreciates it.
Message
If you could tell anyone who asked you what it has been like to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan, what would you say? What message would you want them to leave with and think about?
I could probably fill volumes trying to get that across, but I’ll try to boil it down by borrowing a couple quotes. One from David Bellavia, author of the great book House to House: “The warrior class in Iraq has been painted with two brushes: that of the victim and that of the felon. They appreciate neither.” I can’t improve upon that.
The other is from philosopher John Stuart Mill. It starts, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.” After that he gets a bit more severe than is my view, but it’s essentially the core of why I do what I do. I won’t presume to speak for other soldiers, but I’m willing to bet many of them have a similar philosophy.
What else would you tell people? What do you want others to know about your experience or the role of the soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan?
A few months into my tour, a civilian cargo helicopter was shot down in our sector, but far out west, where we didn’t often patrol. There was one surviving crewmember. They stood him up on his broken leg and executed him on the spot. We know this because they sent us the videotape. Some months later, they stopped a convoy of civilian dump trucks and executed every single driver, every one of them an Iraqi citizen. I can’t tell you how many car bombs I’ve seen go off in the middle of civilian marketplaces. That’s what I mean about the nature of the enemy we’re fighting. When our soldiers go rogue like that, we prosecute, and rightly so. For them, it’s simply how they do business.
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| Iraq 2005 |
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
What are your thoughts about repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and gays and lesbians serving openly in the service?
I honestly don’t give a damn either way. The only thing I demand is that they’re there to do the job, not to just go through the motions so they can say, “look at me. I’m gay and I’m a soldier.” Big fucking deal. If I have a pilot in my outfit that lives to support the guys on the ground and can fly like Luke Skywalker, he can be a two-headed purple polka-dotted alien for all I care. Maybe I won’t hang out with them much after hours, but at work they’ll be ok in my book. If they’re there just to get themselves into a Time magazine article, I’ll probably boot them out a window; this is a wartime army, and we have other things to do.
Is there a difference between stateside garrison duty only or combat and stateside?
These days, not really. There’s probably not a unit anywhere in the military that hasn’t deployed at some point, and most likely has deployed multiple times.
Do you know any openly gay or lesbian soldiers? How about closeted?
Yes, I had a friend who was bi and closeted.
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All content copyright unless otherwise specified © 2008-2013 by Tammy Salyer, writer. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to use short quotes provided proper attribution is given.
PS: Apologies for the somberness of this post. Next time, I promise to write something funny. Funny in the way 40 Year Old Virgin would be if David Fincher or Christopher Nolan had directed it. You've been warned.
