Utilizing the methodology of poetic ethnography, the current article presents a U.S. soldier’s narrative of his experiences during the second Iraq war in 2003. The study provides a methodological, ethnographic platform through which remembered lived experiences of the Iraq war from the perspective of one U.S. soldier can be presented for examination and reflection. This political, critical ethnography attempts to offer a counterweight to prevalent rhetorical constructions of the Iraq war and its participants. The study follows the development and psychological contortions of one soldier as he moves through and expresses his remembered experiences and raises serious questions about the ways in which this soldier was positioned and manipulated and his response to these nearly incomprehensible events. This poetic ethnography aims to add to the growing literature on the very real complexities of what war actually means to all those who participate in it.
Political, Critical Ethnography in Times of War
Rhetoric in times of war is quick to define the world, its actors and events in terms of dichotomous opposites: aggressor and defender; oppressor and oppressed; terrorism and self-defense; victimizer and victim; guilty and innocent; moral and immoral; and good and evil. But war is very rarely as simplistic as the rhetorical construction of this divide implies. When people are involved and caught up in broad geo-political events, variation of position and behavior is inevitable. This becomes apparent when ethnographic methodological tools are utilized to elucidate the experiences of the people actually involved in war (Bassett, 2012; Hanauer, 2013; Hicks, 2011). The realities of life and the ways in which individuals are positioned and manipulated create situations in which simplistic dichotomies are difficult to uphold. The present study deals with one such case—a U.S. soldier’s narrative of his experiences during the second Iraq war in 2003. The basic aim of the study is to provide a methodological, ethnographic platform through which remembered lived experiences of the Iraq war from the perspective of one U.S. soldier can be presented for examination and reflection by a broader public of readers and researchers. More broadly, the aim is political and attempts to offer a counterweight to prevalent rhetorical constructions of the Iraq war and its participants on all sides of the conflict.
Denzin (2003) addressing the aftermath of 9/11 and the beginnings of the Iraq war has pointed out that against the backdrop of “troubled spaces” critical performance ethnography can allow a “radical democratic imagination” to emerge and engage with nationalist discursive manipulation (p. 259). In this approach, the aim of the ethnographer is to connect “varieties of personhood to the experiences of racism, violence, oppression and injustice” (Denzin, 2003, p. 260). Thus, private, personal experience is brought back into public discourse as a way of countering large narratives designed to erase individual difference. Hanauer (2003) has argued that poetic representation is particularly useful for this purpose as it “provides its readers with specific insights into individualized, personal human experience” (p. 69). Poetic form facilitates emotive interaction and imagistic response to events allowing engagement and understanding to develop (Hanauer, 2010). Poetic representation of narrated life experiences has the ability to make someone else’s experience accessible and it is the closeness to lived experience with all its paradoxes, details, pain, joy, and contradictions that elucidates and counters the simplistic, dichotomous notions of the meaning and essence of life propagated by political bodies interested in armed conflict.
Being a U.S. soldier in an unjust war following the unprovoked horrific attack on civilians in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and within the context of a broadly disseminated patriotic discourse of vengeance is by definition a paradoxical situation. It is easy for ideologues on different sides of the conflict to define a soldier who volunteers for active duty in the U.S. military in dichotomous terms as good, a protector, a fighter for freedom and patriotic or as evil, an occupier, a murderer, and an oppressor. But as stated above, the realities of lived experience are just never this simple. At the point of joining the army, as a young man straight out of high school, do you really have access to full information concerning the duties you will be involved with? Do you have the possibility of refusing orders or countering commands that you deem immoral? Do you have the ethical reasoning abilities and experience to really differentiate quickly unfolding events and what they mean in moral terms? Do you know how you will respond to life-threatening experiences? Ethical decision making is much easier in the safety of your own home and when you are dealing with the hypothetical as opposed to the life threatening. It is not surprising that Department of Defense medical data finds that between 20.3% and 42.4% of all soldiers returning from Iraq suffer from one or another form of clinical trauma and require mental health treatment (Hoge, Auchterlonie, & Milliken, 2006). The horrors and abuses of war are not just physical but delve directly into the ways in which soldiers and civilians are placed in impossible ethical and psychological situations. The aim of this article is to provide access to the war experiences of one U.S. soldier situated within the death, chaos, trauma, and ethical dilemmas of armed conflict in Iraq. This study gives access to the development and psychological contortions of one soldier as he moves through and expresses his remembered experiences and raises serious questions about the ways in which this soldier was positioned and manipulated and his response to these nearly incomprehensible events.
The Rhetoric of the Second 2003 Iraq War
War, among other things, is a rhetorical act. The justification, initiation, and ongoing handling of the Iraq war was carefully constructed within a much broader and deeper frame of reference within U.S. discursive structures. As analyzed by Hoogland Noon (2004), President Bush reconstructed the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers and the Iraq war as a reincarnation of the Second World War. In this rhetoric, the attack on September 11 was the Pearl Harbor of our generation, terrorist attacks on civilians was 21st-century fascism, Osama Bin Laden was Hitler, the removal of Saddam Hussein from control of Iraq was parallel of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation, and the support of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair was the historic alliance of Roosevelt-Churchill.
More importantly, a basic argument based on historical precedent was activated and used to initiate and justify war. As articulated by President Bush in the months leading up to the Iraq war, the attack on the Twin Towers was a wakening call in which the United States as “innocent, vulnerable and aroused to powerful anger” would respond to the terrorists who are the “heirs to fascism” (Hoogland Noon, 2004, p. 353). The United States was constructed as the attacked nation and justified in its response and empowered even required to fight for freedom as it had done in World War II (WWII). This rhetorical argument was furthered through the dichotomous differentiation between nations who support the United States and those who harbor evil. Without the presentation of any reliable evidence Saddam Hussein was constructed as an evil dictator who plotted “chemical, biological and nuclear terror” and was an active ally of Osama bin Laden (Hoogland Noon, 2004, p. 353). Finally, completing the WWII analogy, any attempt at diplomacy was reconstructed as Chamberlin’s policy of appeasement with Hitler and discounted out of hand. Within this rhetoric, war with Iraq was a historical necessity that drew directly on the legacy of the United States in WWII as a liberator. Not by chance, the official name of the war was Operation Iraqi Liberation.
The rhetorical construction of the Iraq war did not end with political positioning. A consistent finding of studies of media coverage of the war was that media reporting relied on White House sources and broadly portrayed the war in a bloodless and sanitized fashion (Aday, Livingston, & Hebert, 2005; Dimitrova & Stromback, 2005). In the initial months of the Iraq war, U.S. media sources tended to support military action and take a stand that opposition to White House positions would be unpatriotic (Allan & Zelizer, 2004; Dimitrova & Stromback, 2005; Thussu & Freedman, 2003; Tumber & Palmer, 2004). Accordingly, protests against the war were not given any prominence in U.S. media (Aday et al., 2005). Importantly, stories and visuals dealing with military or civilian causalities were underreported leading to a perception of a clinical war devoid of human suffering (Aday et al., 2005). Military operations in the Iraq war avoided portraying war as injuring the human body and propagated the illusion of warfare as a necessary and even compassionate activity involving bringing freedom to the long-suffering Iraqi people and safety to U.S. civilians at home (Anden-Papadopoulos, 2009).
It is a common place assumption that official and public media outlets in the 21st century are mediated through the multiple options of individual blogging and the prevalence of video recording options. U.S. military personnel of active duty in Iraq had access to and made a series of video recordings of ongoing conflict. These video messages and blogs often uploaded to YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, LiveLeak, and military.com and sometimes sent to family members contrasted with the official version of events in the Iraq war. These videos included violent encounters with Iraqi soldiers and civilians often set to heavy metal or hip-hop music (Anden-Papadopoulos, 2009). The more controversial of these videos portray “troops entertaining themselves by demeaning Iraqi children or abusing pet animals” and “taking part in aggressive and seemingly indiscriminate killings of Iraqi citizens” (Anden-Papadopoulos, 2009, p. 18). This counter representation of the war from U.S. soldiers on active duty was soon shut down by Pentagon who began to closely monitored what soldiers posted online and in 2005 initiated a policy that limited who and what could be communicated (Greene, 2006). This effectively limited the number of unauthorized direct portrayals of the action of troops in the Iraq war. Control over the rhetorical framing and understanding of the Iraq war was important not only to politicians but also to the military and seen as a war effort in its own right. Broadly, the desired rhetorical frame was to present the war as a necessary outcome of aggression toward the United States, as an action of preemptive self-defense against a state dedicated to the promotion and support of terror, as the need to free the Iraqi people from an oppressive dictatorship, and as a continuation of the glorious history of U.S. military action as exemplified during WWII. The aim was to present the war as a bloodless conflict directed along compassionate lines and designed to help the long-suffering Iraqi people.
Method
The poem presented below results from a process of participant interview, transcription, and poetic rendition. The guidelines for this research follow Hanauer (2010, 2012, 2013) and find their source in the seminal work of Richardson (1992a, 1992b, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2003a, 2003b). The process of research consists of the following three stages of research:
Narrative elicitation: As an initial stage of this research, a face-to-face interview was conducted with the participant. The interview was recorded and consisted of asking the participant to think and name ten significant moments of his war experiences. Following the naming, each of these significant moments was discussed in detail with the interviewer requesting detailed imagistic and emotive memories through the prompt to “relive and tell” the events as they were experienced. The outcome of this process is an interview protocol that provides detailed narrative information on ten lived life experiences that the participant deemed significant to him.
Transcription, thematic organization, and poetic rendition: The second stage of research consisted of transcribing the interview protocol and carefully considering the themes, images, events, and emotions that arise. This process involved extensive reading and rereading of the protocol with note taking. In parallel, extensive literature was read on soldiers’ experiences, outcomes of exposure to conflict and processes of military socialization. Following approximately two months of interaction with the interview protocol, a provisional set of events and their associated meanings was mapped out. This provided a series of headings for particular sections of the poem. Based on this outline, the interview protocol was rearranged in poetic format. The poetic technique of lining was used to create the poetic text. The core principle for this rearrangement consisted of using line endings, line beginnings, and line length to provide emphasis and reflection on specific aspects of the participant’s descriptions and explanations. The initial process of analysis directed the choices made as to what to emphasize and at which points to make the reader reflect on particular aspects of the soldier’s experience. All the words used in the poem are the direct words of the participant but were arranged poetically by the researcher. Some sections of the interview protocol were not used in the final poem.
Member checking and poem revision: The final stage of this research process was to present the poem to the participant and make sure that it accurately represented the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the participant. A version of the poem was sent to the participant and a meeting was arranged to discuss the poem. At this meeting, the poem was carefully discussed with the participant. All comments and requests for revision were discussed and taken under careful consideration. Revisions were made to the poem and final version was approved by both the participant and the researcher.
Being in the Iraq War: A Soldier’s Poetic-Narrative
I. A Different Way of Being
Um just a total different culture shock.
Different, like total—like everything, like it’s a new planet.
You go from school
you know doing school,
go to basic training.
And you know you’re going through it,
it was still peacetime
and then towards the end it’s war,
and then everything changes.
So that is pretty much where that kicks in.
Um I guess a difference would be
Like the way of looking at things,
the way, a way of being.
Um shutting, shutting who you are off.
Or shutting off the parts of you that don’t mesh well.
And turning on other parts you didn’t know were there
to make a new you.
literally a whole ’nother life.
It’s almost like going to jail for life.
Like you had to change.
Um and I only had from war,
from from walking off the stage
with the diploma to going to Kuwait,
I only had about three weeks of life,
you know,
other than the four and a half months in Kentucky, in Fort Knox.
But that ain’t life man,
so I had like a week, two weeks before and then like a week after and I’m gone.
So that’s huge to me,
it’s like I don’t even know what,
you know, like a normal life would be.
Cause you go from school which is nothing,
to being something for two weeks
to go do nothing
and then you come back
and you’re never gonna be able to regain whatever,
whatever you were.
II. The Secret List of Persons Going to War
I thought everyone just went through hell.
Um and I was um on duty one late night,
it was like three in the morning
I was buffing the floors,
and my buddy was over there doing something,
The drill sergeant that was on duty was uh,
either he was in the office sleeping
and you know trying to hide out
or sleeping at the desk
he was making his rounds—
I don’t know, he wasn’t there.
And I was next to the captain’s office,
and then next to the captain’s office they have a briefing room.
I went in the door,
I told my friend I was like “I think I’m gonna go in here,”
and they were like
“don’t do that,
don’t do that,
don’t do that.”
And cause you were, you were scared to do anything.
It was weird, and they always said “we’re getting you ready for war, we’re getting you ready for war, we gettin’”—and I’m like, “c’mon dude,” I guess you’re in the army right, yeah it makes sense,
I went into, went into this room.
Um so I opened up the door and on the on the white board,
it was the briefing room,
or their meeting room,
and on the white board I see you know a list of names in categories,
it was uh posts,
and they say Fort Stewart, Fort Carson, Fort Hood.
And then under them would have names.
Private Blank,
Private Blank,
I believe that there is no chance,
it’s like I think you should go there.
Cause different posts do different things.
Some are rapid deployment,
some aren’t,
some are mechanized,
some are not, some are light,
some you know never deploy.
I was there,
I got into the room and seen it,
the first thing I seen in those three seconds
I was real scared to even open the door,
and then once I opened it,
I almost passed out cause I seen my name
under Fort Stewart
and they were,
they were marked to go to war first.
Whoever was writing it said they’re going first.
And we didn’t even know we were going to war,
Bush never even said anything yet.
So I’m like looking at this thing,
and I’m like Oh my God.
I closed the door,
and I freaked out,
and then obviously he’s curious so he ran up to me,
he’s like
“what are you doing?
what did you see?
what did you see?”
And I was like “nothing.”
Cause I seen his name on another place too,
which gives me the chills as I’m talking to you right now,
and I felt bad for him,
cause I didn’t know who I should feel bad for,
me or him.
III. A Good Unit
I ended up going to Fort Stewart
First day there were three sergeants like sitting
obviously trying to scare me
I came in greens.
And they said that’s no good anymore.
And they came up to me in the DCU uniform,
the desert uniform,
and I was like “oh my God”
like it’s crazy how people know before everyone else knows
And it’s messed up, it’s messed up.
So I say they treat you differently cause they know where you’re going,
And the one drill sergeant
he always hounded me.
He was like “you know where you’re going, right,
you know where you’re going, Private?”
And then he whispered in my ear one day,
he’s like you think “you’re going,
you’re going to a good unit,
I hope you know that.”
And I didn’t even know where I was going.
Um which was crazy cause I ended up in a BRT, which is a brigade reconnaissance troop.
It was very weird,
like we were trained um with special forces overseas and stuff like that.
And I remember a lot of times we would do things
and they would come up behind us
and would ask us different questions
cause they were behind us,
and I was like “why aren’t you in front of us,
you’re special forces,”
and they were like “why not,
you’re in the front you’re a scout,
I’ll stay behind you.”
And I’m like “well this is crazy.”
So that’s the kind of unit,
it’s not like a huge unit,
it was, it was crazy.
It was really crazy.
Saw me some crazy things.
And now they don’t even have it anymore,
They dis, disbanded it
cause it was too dangerous, yeah.
IV. The Heat
You come off that plane
and that heat
is like opening,
like checking your cookies down in the oven.
I can’t, I can’t I’ve never felt it again,
it’s like really dry.
I went to Las Vegas it was kinda like that,
but add 30 degrees.
The heat was just crazy.
And I, couldn’t really take it for a while.
I never—I didn’t sweat much.
It just disappeared, so I never noticed.
I would have white stuff all over,
the salt deposits everywhere,
and it would itch in your skin if you’d take a shower.
Uh it would hurt after it itches for too long.
I think the heat makes people angry over there.
Like, it’s so hot. It was like it was like a 130 like nothing, and I’m wearing all this crap on.
I hate that heat.
V. Overcoming the Language Barrier
When I was over there,
I didn’t really go over with anything in my mind,
I don’t, I don’t know anyone other than outside of where I grew up.
And I know English and Spanish.
So I was like okay,
I can meet you know, other people,
they’ll just teach us a little Arabic
teach us this is how they’re going be.
I know it’s just stereotypes and assumptions.
And I’m like well I gotta figure it out,
I started talking to the people,
you didn’t even need to know the language,
like you can just feel what someone wants,
if they want water,
they want food,
they want safety.
If they want to tell you something
but they don’t want that guy to see
’cause he’s gonna cut their head off later if he sees you talking to
so they like, like come back around, you
As a gunner, I picked up on a lot of things,
like different things,
language is nothing.
Like once you can understand people
if you can’t understand people then you’d be screwed anyway
VI. A Girl
There’s even a girl
that I met over there
and we protected um,
we used to visit her.
I had my guys visit her,
take me there, visit her,
visit her after hours,
like maybe one in the morning,
two in the morning,
sometimes eleven at night.
In the darkness.
And she would tell us where, different news that she knows.
About the area in Baghdad,
and different bad people and this and that.
So that was a crazy area too um.
And she’s actually, here
she went to Syria
she went to Canada,
and now she’s in Milwaukee in college.
I still talk to her.
VII. Eating Dog
And they liked me.
They would be happy when I come around,
just give them food,
that food was nasty anyway
but to them it was probably like five-star sometimes,
I’d just give them everything.
Like that crap.
And I would just have my family sending packages once in a blue moon.
Or I would just buy stuff if I can,
like I’ll buy off the street.
I think one time we ate dog.
I don’t know if they did it on purpose,
but we thought we were eating lamb.
We ordered up a lamb,
and this was right after we hit the city.
And I had like,
uh millions of dollars in their money,
because we broke into a uh big safe,
this refrigerator-sized safe at a horse race track.
We were there looking for the pilot that disappeared in ’91.
but then they took him out,
we were told by the neighborhood
that they took him out.
So we were there anyways,
so we just blew up the safe and took all the money.
And I gave it to the people.
There was people crying,
I give them a hundred thousand dollar bills.
That’s all I had.
I didn’t have a dollar.
I don’t know what a dollar was.
I’d just give ’em a hundred thousand at a time,
and they would just be crying.
And I was like I just don’t want them to kill me.
The language barrier’s always gonna be there,
you need to find the ways around it.
And it, it brings out that they’re human too.
But if you don’t you know,
some people don’t see,
some people go over there
and don’t give a shit about it.
I think, that the way you are can be more protection than your own gun.
Some respect for each other.
VIII. Crossing the Border
I was just just out of high school.
Sure, I shot some guns in basic training
and then I get there
and I’m, we’re on the border looking far out
because obviously we’re scouts so we just keep looking.
Then these helicopters would come over.
It was cross-time.
We had a time to cross,
and the Marines went right before us.
They opened up the doors.
We followed them.
The helicopters were going over right before all that.
Right before all that, we called out,
I see something.
And he took the binoculars from me,
my sergeant.
He looked at it,
and he was telling me that uh there was old tanks out there like balloons,
that they did it in ’91,
It didn’t have heat,
It didn’t have a heat signature.
And I was like, but it’s cold.
And whatever happened, he was geared up.
Man he got on the radio different things like that
and do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-pffoo
hellfire missile all up on it,
gone.
Didn’t know what it was.
But we seen it.
When I finally got crossed,
it was a blown-up tank.
From the last time, and they just keep ’em there.
They just keep ’em from the Iran-Iraq war, from Kuwait.
And as you’re going forward,
you see all the buildings that were just
demolished from the bombs from up above.
That can only be from up above,
I was in a hole the size,
as high as this building is,
I was in a hole.
It was the TV station,
and now it’s a hole that deep.
And people would go in there,
and it was madness.
Madness.
Like like ants when you moved
their ant hill.
They just,
they were like everywhere,
just running around.
What do we do?
And that’s how it was,
that people were just there,
stealing stuff.
They were just stealing stuff.
From every every building that was blown up.
Or every building, didn’t have to be blown up.
They were just draggin refrigerators.
It was just sparking on the bottom.
These people were just out of control.
It was it was a sight to see.
To see things,
to really see things like blow up in front of you,
not in a game,
a movie.
It’s just like that’s gone forever now.
IX. Monuments of War
Like the tanks I was telling you,
different things that were there.
Monuments that were built with old remnants.
In Baghdad,
they have like this cross sabers monument,
and there they have real helmets
that were on men that died in the war.
And that made the base of it,
I mean you could just touch them.
The whole place is creepy
because of the old past war remnants that were there.
It’s usually in the south where the fights were,
in the desert.
In the city not so much other than monuments
and praise to this guy for doing that.
But it’s important to me,
I’m going to war to fight in a place where it’s still not real to me.
I mean they go to war,
I mean in hindsight we go to war all the time too,
but nobody invades us.
You know,
they probably say these guys gonna fight.
They’ll fight all day,
fight before we even get there,
and so I thought the same for them.
They don’t care,
hey don’t care,
and then the martyrs is a whole new, ’nother subject.
Like what?
These guys do that?
Aw, man.
That the past was there, and it was very obvious.
And uncomforting for me.
They fight,
they’re groomed to fight people with war.
I think that was just Saddam.
That was just Saddam,
like uh and then Bush like
“let’s go to war with ’em, buddy.”
X. First Contact
The first contact I had,
which was someone shooting at me.
It was one it was like a pop shot.
Oh it was, Pop!
And I’m like “what the hell was that?”
We didn’t even know what it was.
I didn’t know what it was.
And I remember my sergeant saying,
he was laughing at me,
I hear him like “you better figure out someone’s shooting at you.”
And we’re on the highway.
Um we just left the desert
and now we finally met our first road,
and someone’s taking shots at us
and we can’t see where they are.
Nobody’s even ready for war,
like we didn’t have any contact.
We were like what are we doing here,
it’s hot.
And it just, that was the beginning.
That made it real,
and he’s laughing at me
because he’s obviously been to war,
Somalia, and some other place.
So he’s been in a lot,
almost twenty years by the time I met him.
He was laughing at me,
like it’s nothing,
He said “just make sure your windows up though.”
And “let’s get ’em.”
And finally we kept going.
That first one
it wasn’t it wasn’t scary,
I think because I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
But we just kept going.
We were like we’ll let someone else deal with him,
We gotta keep moving forward,
everybody else’s behind us anyway.
XI. Karbala Gap
It happened in the Karbala Gap,
I think we called it a gap
because we were in this desert
and then there’s a huge cliff
driving up to it,
and like it’s up here,
and it’s just a cut.
We’re just drivin drivin drivin drivin
and over the radio, right around here,
he told me,
he said “get ready.”
And right when we got up here,
it was nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing,
chaos.
Soldiers everywhere.
There—it looked like there was a line in front of us,
of soldiers
that somehow got there before we did,
it was weird.
And they got in contact with an Iraqi army force.
And when I got there,
it was just chaos.
Like there’s soldiers here,
Iraqi soldiers there.
Some with guns,
some without guns.
I mean
I didn’t know what was going on,
I thought it was a joke.
And um I remember seeing this line,
it was maybe ten,
give or take a few,
Iraqi soldiers in,
walking in a line.
Not being held, nothing.
They had no weapons,
they were in the uniforms,
they were just walking in line following
an American soldier.
He was looking back at them
walking backwards.
There was another one in the back.
Then these guys just went everywhere
they dispersed,
they just ran away from the soldiers.
There were dudes going crazy.
A few hundred feet the other ones see it
and then they started running.
You can’t just shoot them.
We took their weapons away.
They’re just running.
So everybody’s just pissed off.
We can’t call our family.
We don’t have cell phones.
And we’ve been in the desert for weeks.
I’m pretty sure someone got shot just running away
XII. The Huge Hole
Driving in the desert there was nothing.
Then there is this huge hole.
This huge hole is lush green.
And a house.
There’s someone who lives in the desert who has a house in the ground with green.
And we couldn’t get in there.
Like I don’t know how the hell he gets in there,
and gets out.
And we were just at the top with our guns
“Get out!”
cause you know everyone’s crazy.
We just see these guys doing nothing.
They could be soldiers who ran already
or they could, do somethin!
We can’t have people walking around right there.
So we’re like putting out guns at them,
telling them to come out,
because we can’t get there.
And then they come out
Immediately, immediately my sergeant
I don’t know if attack
is the right word
but goes after the man and slams him.
And starts yelling at him.
And it goes back to the language barrier.
If you don’t consider them human
you’re never gonna get to them.
If you don’t know their language,
you’re just looking at a body that’s alive.
He’s goin’ crazy on the ground.
On the, on the sand shaking,
and then screaming.
He’s like,
“where’s the fucking guns?
Where’s your fucking gun?
Where’s your shit?
What are you doin’ motherfucker?”
Calling him like crazy names like
sand nigger
I’m standing there with my gun.
It’s a father that he’s yelling at,
and the son is there.
He’s about fifteen, sixteen.
He’s definitely pre-adult,
like like teenager.
And he was so confused.
And the look on his face.
It’s like emotionless,
but not really.
It’s like the only emotion he had
was extreme super fear.
Like I’m done.
I’m done.
And it reminded me of how I felt
when I crossed.
I thought I was dead.
Literally, I was like I’m just done.
Mine fields,
I looked at mine fields,
I was a private.
When you’re the youngest,
you’re the weakest link.
The lowest on the ladder.
I felt for him.
cause that was how I had felt,
how he was feeling,
but I didn’t put my gun down,
I was looking at him.
The dad’s on the ground.
The truck commander looks,
he looks over at me,
he looks at the boy
and he goes
“Get the fuck down.”
And he throws him on the ground.
And I look at my gunner, I was the driver at the time, and that was my truck commander
There’s really there’s no one else,
There’s no one to stop us from what we do
unless they find out
and then we deal with it later.
But there’s no one to say stop.
We are who we are.
And he slammed him and I’m like “oh, shit.”
And the chaos is still going on,
and I look at the gunner
and he looks at me like,
like he’s out of control,
like our guy’s outta control right now,
he’s freaking out.
And then he puts his gun,
he takes his M4 and he puts it
right in the dude’s,
um right at the dude’s face.
And he’s still screamin at him,
the guy’s screamin at him,
and I’m like I don’t know what the hell you’re doing.
Like I don’t know what’s goin on,
“please stop.”
He says “put your fucking hands up”
but the people don’t understand.
They’re like, they just stay there.
And then,
he told me,
he said,
“put your gun in his mouth.”
He said, “put your gun in his mouth.”
And I felt sick to my stomach
and weak.
The gun almost fell out of my hand
and I almost collapsed.
Who says that?
And I’m a new soldier so it’s not really in me.
And then I like realize that I’m at war
I’m a soldier.
I definitely went to basic training.
This guy could be an enemy.
He’s really obviously not.
And I, I stuffed my gun in his mouth.
I put, I put it on his forehead.
This much away, about a half inch, inch.
And he said,
“No press it against his forehead.
I want to see the white circle on his forehead.”
I looked at him,
and I said Sarge “I can’t do that.”
He said
“Fuckin’ do it.”
I just pushed down a half inch.
And I remember looking at the dude.
And his eyes were just, sooo open.
And his eyes were so watery.
I was like “oh my God.”
And then he told me,
“Stick it in his mouth.”
So I stuck it in his mouth.
And then he said “charge it.”
Which is, you know, put a round in the barrel.
I was just lookin at the boy.
Trying to connect with him,
like this isn’t happening,
like I got you just trust me,
just go with this act right now.
And he did.
I don’t remember.
I don’t remember what happened at the end of that,
But,
I didn’t shoot or anything.
I just, held off enough,
He was more annoyed at me at that point
than the people on the ground.
I was thinking in my head I have to take his attention.
He’s gonna blow these dudes’ heads off
right here for no reason.
I thought he was gonna shoot me.
He said “If you don’t do it,
you can be shot by your fellow soldier
because now you’re an enemy.
You have to do this.”
And he told me that “I guess we’re gonna be shooting at each other right now.”
That was that.
And that lasted a few minutes.
And I think towards the end when I was feeling,
it was hitting like a red line.
I’m pretty sure he turned into a terrorist, killed some soldiers after that.
And that was it,
I don’t remember anything else after that until the next major um fight.
XIII. Baghdad
Once we got to Baghdad
It was like someone told everyone,
someone was on stage,
like God said,
“Everyone run around like a chicken with your head cut off
and steal from anyone, anywhere, do anything.
Just go.”
And everybody’s runnin around.
Just people stealing from
the museums, banks, hospitals, schools, homes, cars, horses, donkeys, farms.
Everyone’s running around.
There’s dead bodies bloating up on the side of the road.
Legs.
Hands.
The dogs would be running around fighting each other.
Killing each other.
For your leg.
Just blood.
It didn’t rain.
So it’s still on the ground.
It stinks.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a real butcher shop.
That’s the same smell.
It’s disgusting.
And the fire.
Everything was on fire.
The city was on fire.
Everything was on fire.
Tanks. Cars. Trucks, buses, vans.
XIV. Calling Home
Throughout the whole time,
I just couldn’t call anyone.
I remember I paid an Iraqi
twenty dollars,
twenty American dollars
to use the phone.
My last phone call was maybe four weeks before I made this call.
The last phone call was me crying saying “I you know I’ll see you later.
I love you.
I’ll call you when I can.”
And that was in the desert
when we got the move to go.
They sent a Humvee with satellites on it.
So we had a satellite phone.
We each had three minutes.
So that’s when I called home.
I remember my grandmother’s voice.
That’s who raised me,
and once I heard her voice,
I just, I couldn’t talk.
She’s like “Hello? Hello? Hello?”
I couldn’t even breathe.
Such a great feeling to hear her voice.
And then she hung up.
But throughout the whole time,
it makes you angry.
The more you go away from your family,
you go away from those feelings of love and stuff,
so you go more towards,
yeah it’s easier for you to go towards hatred.
Cause you don’t have anything.
You’re here.
You’re stuck.
I think it’s important to be able to talk to your family
but not too much.
They’ll weaken you.
But not having that will make you insane.
XV. The RPG-7
I’d go take a shower
and just start crying
just standing there in the shower
for an hour.
Just crying,
wiping blood off of me
from other people.
Rushing to save someone
to get there
to have to open up their truck
to have their brains
splattered everywhere.
The guy’s body hanging.
It was an RPG-7.
Because it went through an armored Humvee.
It was supposed to bounce off.
But it was a French model.
It was just a grenade in the air.
It was like a missile.
And it took that guy out,
straight through the passenger side
through the backdoor.
Right in back of the truck commander.
It just blew his head all out.
It was just, Kennedy times ten.
Hanging and everything looks like spaghetti.
And the gunner was obviously standing in it
and it took his bottom half out.
And the driver was the only one that survived,
and he had shrapnel all over him.
XVI. The Lady Who Blew Herself Up
I think about the first lady
who blew herself up.
I was right there.
I was sitting there.
Watching the guard,
and the one guy’s
on the road with the other trucks
on the road blocking it.
So when people come,
stop and get down,
Check ’em out.
Let ’em go or not.
Pregnant lady.
Stops the car.
All black.
Face, you can see.
I don’t remember if she was with someone or not.
I don’t remember.
I just remember her walking up to the man.
Soldiers.
Cause they’re like “stop stop stop stop stop.
Don’t move, don’t move!”
She keeps coming towards them.
You know she’s pregnant.
She just stands up
and they’re confused,
like I guess it’s a pregnant woman
and the next thing you know,
big fireball.
And I just stared at it for a second
XVII. Going Home
You know in the military,
if you do good,
if you’re a good soldier
we need that to happen,
we’re gonna pick the soldier who knows how to do it.
So you’re the one always working.
Cause they trust you.
So we, as a whole, Fort Stewart were kept there
We didn’t have any sleep or any time off
We had a captain.
He told us one day in the back of a truck.
He got on the truck and, to get higher,
to talk to all of us.
And we were all pissed off, like we thought we were going home.
I’m serious about getting home,
because every every week we’d be told we’re going home next week.
So it, just don’t tell us.
Don’t tell us anymore,
because it’s just gonna piss us off more,
and then we’re gonna go crazy.
So he said,
“What I gather from my meetings is,
we will be here,
we will remain here until we are not needed anymore.
We are needed, so we’ll be here.”
And everybody’s like, “Aww, God.”
And he said—
“The only way they’ll send you home, is
if you’re hurt or you’re in a body bag.
Or if you’re crazy.”
And everybody goes “what the hell, he never said anything like that.”
And he goes “I’m not saying anything,
I just know that,
if you know we start doing a little more, of this and that,
then they’ll say we gotta get these guys out of here and get us home.”
And that’s exactly how he did it.
And he just sped it up like that there at the end
not even thirty seconds of him saying that.
And he was like, jumped to something else.
And he said, “you get that though?”
He’s like, “All right.”
Like nobody even said yeah or no.
He’s like “you get that?”
And he just left.
And then we started talking in our little groups, obviously.
Like our sections and our trucks and stuff and our platoons,
and said, it was like “oh, you heard the man.
The only way we’re gonna go home is if we’re crazy.”
And that’s when we got turned up.
That’s when bodies just started falling.
When that guy said you need to go crazy.
We would take, that guy would drop.
We would take his AK,
Put it in the back of the truck.
So if we ever dropped someone else
that would make him a combatant.
It was just lawless.
And it got to a sick point.
I was in the back of this truck.
I was sitting in the backseat.
Somebody else’s truck just going along for the ride
He looked back at the sergeant, and he said,
“Private, he said, you wanna see something crazy, man?”
He took out his nine,
and he cocked it,
and there was this dude walking on the side as we were driving,
and he started shooting at him as we passed,
we just we just kept going.
I don’t know what the hell happened to that guy.
You seen him dance.
You’d have people tied,
put them on the front of the hood
and drive
at sixty miles an hour.
Because we assumed,
thought,
or knew that they shot at us.
It’s even hard for me.
It is hard for me to even feel bad right now.
Like I do.
I know it’s not right
but it was like,
I gotta go home
I’ve had enough of this.
Something’s gotta give.
And that was the only way to do it.
And that’s why we got cut short,
and they actually sent us home in two weeks.
We got sent.
And I got sent home first.
XVIII. Drag It Out
That was crazy.
I’m like I don’t know,
I don’t want to talk through the whole thing.
It’s just, I can’t I can’t finish like if I’m not crying.
It’s just hard,
I can’t just say it in a sentence.
I have to drag it out
Or I’ll just I’ll just end up bawling,
and then tears and shit.
I just gotta drag it out.
Personal Postscript
When I started this project to elicit and poetically represent the war experiences of U.S. veterans of the Iraq war, I admit I had certain assumptions about being a soldier. As a pacifist, I have objected to the use of national violence and as such assumed that soldiers on one or another level faced a very difficult task of fulfilling their duty ethically. Through the process of this project and in particular the working with the soldier represented in this article, I grew to feel very close to the real difficulties and internal conflicts that this human being faced. Rather than a soldier erased through his uniform and national position, I recognized and met his individual humanity and the impossibility of the situations he faced. Likewise, at our last meeting designed to discuss and finalize the poem that is presented here, the participant soldier told me that the poem was very important to him and that he was shocked by the fact that someone else had actually managed to capture his experience and express it in words accessible to all. He expressed relief and to a certain degree gratitude that his story was going to be heard. We both agreed that the difficulties of participating in a war needed to be known.
The poem presented here reveals a process in which this soldier struggled to be ethical under daunting circumstances and ultimately succumbed to unethical action. I have witnessed the trauma this has left with him and his deep, sincere regret for action he has taken and has been part of. I do not doubt that every soldier has a responsibility to act ethically, but I also do not doubt that the nexus of war, chaos, uncertainty, unethical orders, unjust causes, loneliness, and longing for home can create conditions in which good judgment is impossible. My hope is that as you read this poem you will simultaneously understand this soldier, condemn some of his actions, recognize that this soldier is also a victim, reject the idea that war is ever clinical and benevolent, and censure those who promote war and put people in harm’s way for unjust causes. In this sense, this poetic ethnography aims to add to the growing literature on the very real complexities of what war actually means to all those who participate in it.
