Tag: Army

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A Picture May be “Worth a Thousand Words”, but it’s Rarely Clear in the Fog of War

Please see the original posted at Small Wars Journal, October 13, 2015; by Jay Morse and Prof. Geoff Corn.

It is a tragic inevitability of war that innocent civilians often pay a price for the chaos of battle, and the unfortunate loss of life resulting from Saturday’s destruction of a hospital in Kunduz should sadden us all.  There may have been a time in history when massive civilian casualties were considered a tolerable consequence of armed conflict, but international law today demands a respect for human life that is fundamentally incompatible with any concept of “total war.”  We should be neither surprised nor dismayed that the international response to this tragedy has been so intense.  However, we should also be careful not to confuse sympathy for the victims of this incident with an assumption that the attack was in violation of international law.  Human error and the proverbial “fog of war” will always create a risk of unintended consequences, and the law that regulates war also recognizes that no military force can ever guarantee error-free warfare.

Our military is without question the most professional and well-equipped force in the world. However, while both our weapons systems and our laws have progressed, the reality is that even the very best amongst the profession of arms can only hope to mitigate the risk of civilian casualties on today’s battlefield.  It is unrealistic to expect a force to guarantee attack execution perfection, and the unfortunate casualties resulting from the destruction of the hospital in Afghanistan serves as powerful reminder of this certainty.

It is important to pause and mourn the loss of life, as it is important to conduct a thorough investigation in an effort to prevent similar events from happening in the future.  But it is just as important to ensure that American pilots are not automatically branded as “war criminals” without understanding the law and how it applies.  Some of the international reaction to Kunduz symbolizes the risk that emotion will adversely affect proper legal critique of military operations.  Assessing compliance with the requirements of the international laws of war, or humanitarian law, is distorted by the tendency to engage in “consequence based” analysis: civilians died, therefore, as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) President Meinie Nicolai asserts, the attack constitutes a “grave violation of international humanitarian law.”  Her statement is both premature and legally misleading.  Tragic images of civilian suffering naturally paints a legally troubling picture, but a force’s compliance with international law must be judged upon an accurate understanding of the law, focused on the pre-attack situation – not on post-attack effects.

There should be no debate as to what law applied to regulate the Kunduz attack decisions.  While international humanitarian law was developed primarily to regulate war between states, there are core rules that regulate all conflicts, including those against non-state organized armed groups, such as the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan.  Forces engaged in these hybrid conflicts are bound by certain fundamental international legal obligations: to limit deliberate attacks only to “military objectives” (a legitimate military target); to take all feasible precautions to mitigate the risk to civilians resulting from those attacks; and to forego any attack on a lawful military target when the anticipated civilian casualties would significantly outweigh the anticipated military advantage to be gained from the attack (the so-called “proportionality” rule).  In addition to these general obligations, one rule seems particularly relevant to the bombing in Kunduz: the extensive protection afforded to hospitals.

Though no object in the battle-space enjoys more legal protection, a hospital is not completely immune from being lawfully attacked, despite an MSF spokesperson’s assertion that “bombing a fully functioning hospital can never be justified.”  International law prohibits attacking hospitals so long as they are not being used by the enemy in a manner inconsistent with their exclusive medical and humanitarian function. Even when a commander has intelligence indicating misuse, humanitarian law requires that the commander, normally through an intermediary like the International Committee of the Red Cross, issue a demand to the enemy that he terminate his misuse of the hospital before any attack may be lawfully conducted. The only exception to this requirement is when friendly forces are actually under fire from a hospital and have no alternative other than to respond with force.

Any attack on a hospital will automatically trigger intense scrutiny by U.S. commanders, but it is invalid to immediately draw a conclusion that the law must have been violated simply because a hospital was hit. Too many variables need to be assessed.  If the hospital was intentionally targeted, an investigation must determine whether notice of the hospital’s status was conveyed to U.S. forces; if the notice was properly integrated into the planning process; if there were indications that the hospital was being used improperly; if a warning was issued by U.S. forces; and whether the hospital was the actual intended target or was rather the result of an attack on another target nearby.  If the attack was directed against a nearby target, then an investigation should determine if U.S. forces took feasible precautions to mitigate the risk to the hospital.  The commander should have assessed whether attacking a nearby target would risk damaging the hospital; what was the anticipated level of damage; and how it compared to the anticipated benefit of the attack.  Finally, and probably most likely in the bombing at Kunduz, an investigation should determine whether the attack on the hospital was the result of human or technical error, and if so, whether that error was reasonable under the circumstances.

Answering these complex questions requires a thorough investigation that recreates the situation that confronted the U.S. commanders and pilots who executed this mission.  Nonetheless, President Meinie Nicolai almost immediately condemned the attack as a “grave violation” of international humanitarian law.  Her reaction – that because a hospital was attacked, it must be a violation of international law – is an unfortunate outgrowth of the incorrect assumption that modern professional militaries are capable of executing error-free operations.  This assumption is completely at odds with the reality of warfare, no matter how “precision” our weapons. Furthermore, even President Nicolai’s assertion that the U.S. committed a “grave violation” – the most serious category of war crimes – is legally impossible, as a grave breach may occur only during an international armed conflict – a conflict between states. Whether President Nicolai is misinformed or simply misspoke, her statements illuminate the gross misunderstanding the public has of the laws as they apply to armed conflict.

Nations have attempted to set rules for war for surely as long as there has been warfare itself, and continuing efforts to both improve and implement the law are essential to advancing the aspirations that always motivated these rules: to strike a balance between the need to allow states to wage war while limiting, as much as possible, the inevitable human suffering produced by conflict. Condemnation of attacks based purely on results not only distorts this balance, but applies the law erroneously and sets a dangerous precedence.  Of course, none of this means mean that U.S. military personnel operate with impunity, and President Obama’s order to conduct a thorough investigation is correct (though certainly redundant).  There is a robust and clear body of law that proscribes actions while simultaneously giving military personnel a structure to determine not only what is a legitimate target, but also, just as importantly, when and how you can attack that target. If an investigation concludes that the law was violated, accountability for that violation is essential.  And not to assuage international public opinion, but to reinforce the essential link between complying with international humanitarian law and legitimately claiming status as a professional armed force.  The reality is that armed forces of the United States are regularly trained on whom and what constitutes a legitimate target.  The personnel involved in the targeting process not only understand the law, but also the strategic and political implications of attacking a typically civilian facility such as a hospital.  Only a comprehensive investigation will reveal whether the attack was the result of human or technical error, or perhaps even (though highly unlikely) malicious intent; only this determination will indicate whether there was in fact a violation of the law.

The bombing of the hospital in Kunduz certainly aggravates the tragedies of more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, and will only make US efforts to stem ISIS and a resurgent Taliban that much more difficult.  But the fact remains that war today is, as it has always been, a brutal endeavor, and no matter how precise our weapons or thorough our analysis, human error will lead to tragedy.  This doesn’t make it a war crime.

Jay Morse is retired US Army lieutenant colonel and is a partner in the law firm of Corn, Jensen & Morse.  He can be reached at jaymorse.org or jay.morse@cornjensenmorse.com.

Geoffrey Corn is a retired US Army lieutenant colonel and is a Professor of Law at South Texas College of Law in Houston, Texas.  He can be reached at gcorn@stcl.edu.

 

 

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Third Beach to Hoh River

We sit on giant driftwood bleachers in the morning sun, peanut butter and rice cakes in hand and the protruding cliff face of Taylor Point rising in the distance a mile in front of us, up from the Pacific Ocean at the south end of Third Beach, space and fog lazily obscuring the sea stacks of Giants Graveyard.  I am on the Pacific Northwest Trail at the western edge of the Olympic National Park at my older sister’s urging, and though she intends a three-day hike from Third Beach to the Hoh River to be bonding for her and her oldest son, it is quiet therapy for me, an opportunity to perhaps accomplish something visceral and palpable after fifteen months of spinning my cubicled professional wheels.

We drove up from Reno the day prior, my sister, oldest niece, and oldest nephew, leaving hours too late but not feeling particularly pressed, as I have embraced my pending retirement.  Or am trying to.  Shifting, on a dime, from twenty years of Army service and a largely feigned laissez faire commitment to schedule to actually living The Attitude of Meh is no simple task.  I’ve started the transition by not shaving, committing (or not. Whatever!) to developing a personal beard style I call “Spanish Moss,” which looks exactly like you think it might.  So we leave a few hours late?  Not to worry.  We turn a ten-hour drive into a twelve-hour one and, still well shy of our start point, are consoled with an extended trip to a Portland-area Wal-Mart to pick up last minute supplies.  We overnight at the Lewis and Clark State Park near Winlock, Washington, hours short of our target but exposed to a view of the indomitable Mount St. Helens to the north.  The volcano looms large both in front of us and in my older sister’s and my memory.  Though it is recently active, it most spectacularly erupted in May of 1980, exactly a month before my sister’s eleventh birthday and a year before our mother’s third divorce and our repatriation to Nevada.  We lived in northwest Washington when the mountain blew, winds carrying volcanic ash the 250 miles north to our small town of Sedro Woolley and depositing it on our family’s cream-colored Ford Galaxy 500.  The car had a big back seat and a wide, gently sloping rear window with an apartment-sized shelf above the seat that served naturally as a bed, fort, or escape pod for any road trip of longer than an hour.

We sit around the campfire, old-growth Douglas Firs towering over us, my sister and my niece and nephew, the latter two now far more adult than child so they can share in the jokes as we talk about our lives as kids.  Wistful and meandering is the conversation chain that flows around family and a campfire; a late morning start and a long drive turning from a discussion on volcanoes and ash to a Galaxy 500 and rear windows and road trips to remember that time a storm blew your bedroom windows out in the middle of the night and there was glass all over your bed and mom and dad couldn’t find you?  Though nature can be powerful, the supernatural is inexplicable and whether through the banality of chance or the magic of fortune, a storm neither sucked me out of second-floor windows nor peppered me with glass shards, as I was snug asleep at the foot of my sister’s bed in the next room, a place I frequently went as a child, driven there by nightmares.

We get up early the next morning and pack like professionals, driving three more hours through the Scrabbler’s-delight towns of Hoquiam and Quinault and Queets; stopping for coffee at one of the Northwest’s ubiquitous drive-thru coffee bars; then north along the 101 and certainly one of the prettiest stretches of road in America.  We just make our pre-arranged pick-up time at the Oil City Road trailhead.  Though most people hike from the Hoh River north, we’re doing it in the reverse, and Seth from Forks has agreed to pick us up here and drop us off an hour north at the Third Beach trailhead.  Seth is a college student in Boise, but lives here in Forks, and though he appears to be about twenty, the interior of his truck, with its coffee mugs and backpacks and work gloves and climbing gear, gives the impression that he’s already living a full life.  He shares his local knowledge, elating my sister with the good news that the coastal black bears are timid (“the inland bears are another story”); titillating her with the insider information that the town of Forks, though the literary locus for Twilight, was simply copied and reproduced en masse in British Columbia for the film because it “was cheaper and Kristen Stewart would have been bored out of her mind if she had to live here for three months” (she would have been); and entertaining all of us by calling Aberdeen, home of Kurt Cobain, may he rest in peace, “Methlaberdeen.”

Parting Shot, Hoh River

Seth drops us at the start of a canopied trail leading a mile and a half from a parking lot down through the Hoh River Rainforest, and after passively-aggressively-unsuccessfully suggesting that my sister, niece, and nephew remove their rain gear (“it’s not raining, and you’ll get hypothermia”), we head for the beach.  Google reviews of this hike promise ankle-deep mud; knee-deep and fast-water river crossings; boulder-scrambling that requires properly timing the tide; and a trail that is “more obstacle course than hike.”  So, after a peanut butter and rice cake fueling, and a second passive-aggressive-unsuccessful rain gear removal suggestion, we begin.  I have nominally prepped for the hike, my only concern with negotiating boulders around a blind corner, so I naturally assume that the first stop – Taylor Point – is where we must cross boulders only during the outgoing tide.  It is not.  It is, rather, the impetus for the first of our two “group discussions.”

Not having children is both boon and bane.  I am free to come and go as I please, and am not burdened with the demands of responsibility for a living, breathing, DNA-sharing thing.  I need not exert the inefficiencies of, to be blunt, caring.  This, of course, is theory; in practice I would be perpetually panic-stricken if I were a parent.  A scraped-knee would likely induce in me barely concealable tears and a minor case of hyperventilation.  My niece and nephew are now 17 and 19, but it is hard to look at them in any manner other than as objects to be hurled wide-eyed and giggling into the air or as face-painted children ready for an “Uncle Jay Day”, something I surely looked forward to more than they did.  So as I venture fifty yards or so onto the boulders around Taylor Point, and realize that I cannot see anything but cliffs and more rocks and an incoming tide and that this might cause some problems for my traveling companions, I, as my older sister might say, lose my shit.  I look back at my sister gingerly negotiating the boulders and my niece absorbed in her vain search for tide pool creatures, and say “turn around.” My sister freezes, pauses, looks at me, then asks, “turn around?”

I do not like feeling anything but fully in control, and though I am confident that no wave foreseeable could possibly shake me from my perch, even the potential danger of some harm coming to those I see – even erroneously – as ones in need of protection is uncomfortable.  So when my sister asks, “turn around?”, it triggers in me something instinctual.

“TURN THE FUCK AROUND.”  This is a gross, and, in hindsight, hilarious overreaction, but the self-imposed burdens of leadership are significant and spontaneous, and turnthefuckaround seemed like a pretty good thing to say.  My sister moves, quickly.  My niece is cooly unconcerned, and my nephew chooses this moment to remove his raingear.  But we scramble back across the boulders, our final few steps retracing the original, which were then on dry sand and are now in shin-deep water.  The debrief is fairly quick.  We agree that in return for moving quickly when there is a hint of urgency in my voice, I won’t swear anymore, which is a fairly reasonable concession on their part.  The raingear, however, stays on.

The most dangerous stretches of the Third Beach to Hoh River trail are conspicuously marked by large, black and red circular discs affixed prominently on trees and next to an entry/exit point diverting you away from the beach, and danger, and into the rain forests of the Olympic National Park.  They should not be ignored, at any cost, and heeding their warning, after climbing up or down wooden rung-missing ladders and rope assisted inclines, rewards you with silent marches on trails peppered with Pacific banana slugs, looking unmistakably like giant turds; through permanently damp, waist-high skunk cabbage, deer fern, and pick-your-berry (Salmon? Huckle? Black twin?); under soaring Sitka spruce and Western Hemlock.  There are obstacles to be negotiated at every turn, cooperation required, and like a corporate sponsored team-building event, we are positively lifted by the time we make it to Toleak Point.  Everything seems to converge here.  Sea otters, permanently content on their backs, float with the current; Bald eagles projectile-shit from tree branches like expectorant, a county fair participant readying to launch a watermelon seed in reverse; sea lions cruise the channels between rock outcroppings, hunting fish and barking commands to each other like bloodhounds on a chase.  It is easy to imagine life here hundreds of years ago, single plumes of campfire smoke rising from the tree line, soft-lit Thomas Kinkade landscapes unobstructed by the noise and tools and trappings of electricity and progress.  We find a camping spot, luxuriant, just above the beach and the driftwood piles marking high tide.  We hang rope to dry our gear and quickly make the camp ours, pitching our tents and taking forty-five minutes of collective effort and patience to start a fire.  My niece and nephew are, literally, without complaint, and I am a bit ashamed that I find it moving.  If we can’t start a fire, no biggie, but we did, and that’s pretty cool too.

We’re set up early enough to scour the beach, walking over a thick blanket of dried, shredded paper-like seaweed and finding, among other things, Styrofoam coolers, rope, nets, buoys, bags, and all things plastic.  The ocean is an artist, a driftwood sculptor and a gem polisher, but she occasionally does her best Andres Serrano impression, vomiting on her shores the effluence of man far and near.  My nephew finds a bleached skull, sans the jawbone but a radiator-like screen in the nasal cavity intact, and we spend twenty minutes debating what this belonged to.  Is it a coyote or a wolf? An adolescent saber-toothed cat?  A dog?  Sea Lion seems badass – it’s a lion of the sea, after all – but I realize that Google will settle this debate and then, as quickly as we gained it, the knowledge will be gone.  No need to retain it, the answer is always just a search engine away.  I wonder what Google, for all its power, has done to the imagination of a boy.

Last WalkWe spend the night at Toleak Point and head out early the next morning, traversing beach, then rain forest, then beach again.  We startle a raccoon and trace the solo steps of a deer, joined briefly by a larger, second set, then solo again as one set of tracks disappears in the woods to the left and another in the ocean to the right.  Other than a slight mist the night prior, the weather holds out for three days.  Freshwater creeks are shallow but adequate, and with our water filter we could have safely left all water bottles and Camelbacks at home and survived just fine.  The warnings of mud and a fast river crossing are false, as the drought has reached the coast as well.

At Jackson Beach we climb down the vertical face using fifty feet of rope ladder, eat the remainder of our dehydrated food (Jamaican Jerk Chicken and Pad Thai) and have our second group discussion.  This one concerns whether we stay our last night here, risking setting up camp at what may or may not be the high-water mark, or wait for the tide to go out and skirt the point, crossing what turns out to be the much-anticipated boulder field.  The latter wins, and my sister and I kill time talking about life after the Army.  I watch my niece and nephew walking in the sun and think about how one experiences life and risk and adversity and beauty relevant to our age.  This trip as a twenty-year-old, in possession of a healthy ego and an unearned sense of optimism, would have been a significantly different experience than that of a forty-four-year-old in transition.  Articulating the risk of hypothermia from wearing raingear when it’s not raining, for example, is such a pedantic thing to say, but life is easier when someone is there to protect you, no?

The tide starts to go out, so we pack up and start our trip around the last corner, hesitant, not knowing what is on the other side or how far we have to go.  But it opens up after a few hundred yards, the beach covered in giant driftwood logs like dropped matchsticks and the flats reflecting the setting sun and the most extraordinary view.

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Air America

The Delta Embraer E75 from Reagan National begins its descent, and from my window seat I watch us settle into the thin layer of altostratus clouds covering central Florida like batting, diffracted and billowy, perfect mirror-imaged moguls repeating themselves as far as I can see.  Soft rays from the five p.m. sun contrast the clouds and the blue sky, but we pass through quickly and everything below is muted aquarium blue, and blurry, like looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool.  This is Orlando, the Orlando Airport specifically, and my three nights at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Airport Hotel (prime location within the airport!) are appropriate, given this is the last leg of my two-month trip and here too is where it started.  The Orlando airport is Biosphere east, its giant windows and Macaroni Grill and hotel bar sporting too few barflies and too many Wrangler and polo shirt clad Grainger Industrial Supply salesmen small consolation for the sixty-something hours I spend within it.  A flight should end in an adventure, not a cage, and the delicious snack mix upon which I gorge at the bar does not fulfill my need for adventure, or the potential for danger, not just the threat of broken bones and bruised egos and humiliation but also the kind emotive, that sensorial overload we earn from placing ourselves in positions unfamiliar.  Adventurous my work trips are not.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that the danger of the modern person is his constant effort to escape from the street in which he lives, and that were he to be snowed in, with his neighbors and immediate surroundings his only stimulant, he “should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known.”  G.K. overreaches, and his early 1900’s didn’t have the luxury of today’s air travel, but his sentiments remain true: we delve not into our neighbor’s business, ostensibly out of respect but really because once we learn of that wilder world, we still have to face our neighbors in the morning, and wouldn’t that get awkward.  But when your flights end in taxis, and domed airports, and city sidewalks, you take your adventure as it comes.

Nashville at night, to paraphrase Shawn Mullins, is far more Los Angeles than Grand Ole Opry, despite it being the home of modern country music, the proof in the glut of decorative, Crayola-box spectrum piebald cowboy boots and bought, not won, belt-buckles; embroidered, rhinestoned cowboy shirts more Affliction and Ed Hardy than Pendleton and Sheplers.  And boobs. Boobs everywhere, huge, fake ones, spilling from spaghetti strap shirts and protruding out the front side of back-less dresses, on all ages, 16 to 60, inappropriately large when they should be average, or smooth and taut where they should be leathery, Tennessee such an unhealthy (third in obesity!)[1], unathletic state to have so many giant breasts on Time for Timer[2] bodies.  Nashville also has, I suspect, more people per capita who talk to themselves.  Loudly.  No timid under the breath commentary here, and your presence is more likely nuisance than potential audience, particularly for those crazies lingering west of the railroad tracks running under Broadway; a stark juxtaposition to the itinerants on the east side, some brilliantly playing guitars and fiddles, or white five-gallon plastic buckets and accordions, mandolins and melodicas for whatever money you’re willing to throw down, metal or paper non-discriminatory.

Across the street from the Sheraton I pause to hear a young man give his testimony to a mix of itinerants and groupies, black and white, backpack-laden and homeless, some crammed at his feet like a mosh pit and an equal amount strewn across the plaza like morning-after red Solo party cups.  A city bus roars by, denying me the opportunity to hear the preacher give his take on the role of wife, but at the same time a disheveled, scholarly looking man approaches me from the sidewalk, cigarettes and keys in one hand, newspaper in the other.  We listen to the preacher for a few minutes, then talk ourselves, about Jesus, and wives, and bluegrass music, loudly enough that we get shushed by a half-asleep vagrant, until the man tells me he’s locked his keys in his car, and could he just borrow a few dollars for the bus and I realize it’s all a ruse and as epical a beggar’s pitch I have ever heard.

In Reagan National I pass Laura Bush and one of her twin daughters, the two of them focused, a string of dark suited men both in front and in back, a silent, woolen pinstriped elephant walk; on a flight to Phoenix I witness two robust twenty-something black women, obviously on their first flight, vociferously and adamantly refusing to part with their bags which the flight attendants want to check; as clear, I think, a manifestation of black mistrust of any sort of government bureaucracy as one could ask for.  The black women’s resolve outlasts the flight attendants devotion, and they keep their luggage.

On a flight to Kansas a couple behind me talk to their young child, non-stop, explaining every detail, the finer points of acceleration and lift, depriving him of any element of surprise, or the exhilaration of flight, likely creating apprehension where there may have been only joy.  Explaining how 80,000 pounds of alloyed aluminum defies gravity sounds sketchy to even my ears, and it must be gobbledygook if you’re two, so why not just let the kid enjoy the ride?  I find hope for them when they discuss, at length and after smacking their son’s hand for smacking his own mother’s hand, their suspicion that “perhaps we’re sending the wrong message.”  Realization late is better than realization never.

Leaving Detroit a middle-Eastern man – Yemeni, in fact, which turns out to not be a state-sponsor of terrorism – moves up several rows in order to sit across from me, in a row of empty seats, him wearing a thick winter jacket despite the stiflingly hot preflight airplane air; he looks from front to back multiple times, nervously, apprehensively, each one of his looks making me, in turn, more nervous and apprehensive.  He spends too much time in the bathroom, and upon return begins to pray, semi-prostrate on the seat-back tray in front of him.  This causes me such consternation that I lift the arm rest, unbuckle my seat belt and turn slightly towards him; I will not let him leave his row if it appears he’s making a break for the cockpit.  And though I like the idea of hero, I’m more lover than fighter, so I instead engage him in conversation.  He is neither bomber nor one-way pilot, but rather a Detroit gas station attendant on his way to Yemen to visit his three children, last seen more than two years ago, and he produces pictures of his two daughters and son.  The eldest daughter, surprisingly, is the object of his most affection, and he pauses at her photo the longest, a Disneylandish five by seven picture of the girl standing, arms crossed, with her own airbrushed headshot in the upper right corner. Shame, I think, on me, and I wonder if any of the 9/11 terrorists had saccharine pictures of lovely daughters in their wallets.

From Orlando to Philly a precocious girl next to me asks me to smell the feet of her stuffed Minnie Mouse (I do), then peppers me and everyone else around us, for the rest of the flight, with all forms of the word “irritate.” She uses it correctly, if not gratuitously.  She’s irritated, her father is irritating her, she doesn’t mean to irritate me, the air is irritatingly cold.

From Hawaii to DC I sit next to another daughter, this one a laconic college senior returning from a trip with her inversely verbose mother, them discussing the daughter’s future but the latter dominating the conversation.  She solicits my opinion routinely; she wants her daughter to be in “policy,” but the daughter, wearing too-tight jeans, a long sleeve mock turtle with a peach colored button up sweater and a strand of pearls, just wants to write.  She is uninspiring, and I wonder at what age the prematurely mature turn from precocious to simply boring.

In a Philadelphia airport hotel bar I witness a female bartender taking absolutely no shit from the Korean couple who own the bar, first exasperating the husband, then pleasantly taking my order for a beer (“another Sierra Nevada honey?”), then exasperating his wife.  It becomes apparent the bartender has only worked here a few weeks, and I do not know how it can last too many more.

From Denver to San Francisco I read that the world still thinks America is the coolest country on the planet; boarding a plane in Seattle I overhear an older woman, fumbling with her dated cell phone over the tops of her glasses, ask her traveling companion “how do I put this thing on vibrator;” on the way to Kansas City a meticulously manicured male flight attendant hits on me, casually dropping my name during his rounds: “can I get you something to drink Joe?”  Beat. “That is your name. Isn’t it?”

My cab driver from Incheon International Airport to my Seoul hotel is an American citizen; Mr. Kim – all Kims and Lees in Korea, no Hatfields versus McCoys here lest the country eat itself in genocide or mutually assured destruction – is 41, but has spent the last twenty years of his life on America’s west coast after spending the first twenty here.  He left his fifteen year old daughter with friends so he and his wife could come home to take care of his ailing father, and he tells me, salaciously, that though his wife was born in America, her “body is all Korean.”

The flight to Korea chases the sun for the duration, mirroring the revolution and defying darkness; the return flight counters it, defying time (I leave Seoul at six pm on Friday, and arrive in Seattle at 1230 the same day).

Gone: the resetting of watches upon touchdown. Cell phones are tethered to satellites, and watches will be gone from the civilized world soon enough, at least for practical purposes, serving instead as they do in the Third World, nothing more than a bauble, a Swatch Watch for the 21st Century.

In Seattle, a friend’s beautiful downtown wedding is juxtaposed with listening to a convicted triple-murderer, being prepped to testify for the government in a trial against a co-conspirator, complain about his haircut.  I crack a joke about the difference between a bad haircut and a good one (two days), and am later horrified at my detachment in the presence of bona fide evil.

I find that flying more often makes it harder, not easier, a subconscious recognition, perhaps, that my odds are decreasing; particularly on takeoff, where I start to imagine the plane nose-diving into a field, or houses, or a river, and I wonder if I will close my eyes during the fall or keep them open.

While waiting for my ride in the Incheon International Airport, I meet 32 year-old Keshab Raj Sapkota, an American Soldier as of one year ago and a Nepalese citizen the 31 years prior.  He taught social studies in his hometown of Butwal until he won a proverbial Golden Ticket, a free path to American citizenship, just one of about fifty thousand annually out of nearly fifteen million applicants in the Diversity Program.  Keshab had a point-six percent chance to win this Green Card Lottery, and after spending about six months at Ft. Benning, Georgia, here he is on his way to the 2nd Infantry Division at Camp Casey, Republic of Korea, to be an air conditioner repairman in order to provide for a better life for his wife and daughter.  Such are the things that make us American, and I think, perhaps, America is the coolest country on the planet, in spite of it all.

[1] Gold to Mississippi, Silver to Louisiana

[2] When I’m slow on the draw, and I need something to chaw, I hanker for a hunka cheese.  When my ten gallon hats-a-feeling five gallons flat, I got something planned, which is little cheese sandwiches.  When my get up and go has got up and went, I hanker for a hunka cheese.  When I’m dancin’ a hoe down, and my boots kinda slow down, or any time I’m weak in the knees, I hanker for a hunka, a slabber slice a chunk of, a snack a day’s a winner, and it won’t spoil my dinner, I hanker for a hunka cheese.

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Waking the Grand Wizard

Part 1

Around a hundred and ninety years ago, in a central Tennessee basin teeming with dogwood, red oak, and poplar-treed expanses splotched by canebrake and Bluestemmed barrens, the blacksmith William Forrest and his young wife Marian gave birth to Nathan Bedford Forrest, their second child. Ten more followed, as well as a move to Mississippi, where 13-year old Nathan soon found himself paterfamilias, his father dead and this being Mississippi in 1837 where, I like to think, they commonly used words like paterfamilias. Nathan, possessing only a rudimentary education as it were, quit school and went to work to support his family, though the primitive conditions of 1840-ish Mississippi alleviated him of many mouths to feed, five of his eleven siblings (including Fanny, his twin) killed off by yellow fever.

Nathan was an aggressive, resourceful kid, and legend has it that at twenty years of age, he shot and killed two men and, using throwing knives, injured two others, all brothers Matlock, avenging the murder of his uncle and employer, Jonathan. Apocryphal or not, Nathan was clearly a man of action: he took over his uncle’s livery and livestock business, married, moved to Memphis, and built an empire through his dealings in cotton plantations, livestock, real estate, and slaves. By 1859, Nathan was retired and had in his possession well over one million dollars. That’s twenty-seven million dollars in 2010 money, if we use the Consumer Price Index, but if we go with the more bourgeois Relative Share of Gross Domestic Product, Mr. Forrest was worth a little over three billion dollars, putting him just south of Misters Gates and Buffett on the Forbes list of the world’s richest men.

In November of 1860, America elected Abraham Lincoln president, and barely a month and a half later South Carolina – fearing the abolition of slavery – seceded from the Union. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas quickly followed, and by April 12th, 1861, relations between the Union and the seven Confederate states had degenerated to an armed stand-off at Charleston, South Carolina, resolved (sort of) only when Edmund Ruffin, a scholarly 67 year-old farmer from Virginia, pulled a lanyard that lit a fuse and lobbed a mortar round from Fort Johnson, over Charleston Harbor and into the Union-occupied Fort Sumter, starting the Civil War.

Between April 17th and May 20th, Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina seceded, and on June 8, 1861, Tennesseans voted 2-to-1 to join suit. By mid-July billionaire Nathan Forrest enlisted, as a private, in the Tennessee Mounted Rifles. Four years later he was a three-star General, had been directly engaged with and fired upon by enemy forces almost one hundred and eighty times, taken over 31,000 prisoners, cemented his status as World’s Greatest Cavalryman, allegedly ordered or condoned the wholesale slaughter of surrendering (and defenseless) black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, and uttered the timeless adage “war means killing, and the way to kill is to get there first with the most men.” Lesser known, but of great importance to this story, are his post-Civil War activities: Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

And here is where I begin each morning: I leave my house in Tennessee at about 5:30 am, getting on the interstate at Exit 1, ensuring I stay left to avoid the tractor-trailers parked in the narrow shoulder overnight; head west on I-24 to exit 86, now in Kentucky; then drive south on Highway 41A amidst the closest thing we have to rush hour traffic. Across the street from Jenna’s Toy Box, recently put off-limits by the Commanding General not for their extensive porn-and-bong collection but for their equally extensive synthetic marijuana offerings, I make a right through Gate 5 and onto Fort Campbell, but only after showing my identification card to, more often than not, the contracted security guard and advice-dispensing Mr. Williams (“stay dry now!,” or “keep smilin’, you almost made it to Friday!”). From beginning to end, the road at Gate 5 – Forrest Road – is just nine-tenths of a mile.

But it’s not the length, I’m told, but rather what one does with it. And what Fort Campbell has done with it is put the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate – my office, the place where I spend about 60 hours a week doing my best to lead, guide, and mentor fairness, integrity, and, hopefully, justice – right at about the half-way point of Forrest Road, named after a man who, if we look through the Yankeeist of eyes, achieved vast wealth on the unwilling backs of black men, dedicated four years of his life fighting against America, then headed up a new organization that has spent the last century and a half inciting violence against just about anyone who wasn’t white and Christian.

Aside from a short, nondescript road at Ft. Campbell, Nathan Bedford Forrest is memorialized by, at a minimum, a town in Arkansas, a county in Mississippi, high schools in Tennessee and Florida, a park, a university building, monuments in Nashville; Selma, Alabama; and Rome, Georgia; over thirty historical markers throughout the state of Tennessee and at least one figure in pop culture (run, Forrest). He is a favored Son of Tennessee and of the South, and is remembered accordingly. But he has nothing to do with Fort Campbell, no connection to any unit ever garrisoned here. The Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne owe their lineage to, of all things, a Union unit from Wisconsin. The entirety of Forrest Road sits, in fact, in Kentucky, not in Tennessee.

Mumbai was once Bombay; Volgograd Stalingrad; and Istanbul Constantinople. Russell Jones (RIP) was known as Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, Joe Bananas, and, fleetingly, the Old Dirty Chinese Restaurant. It should be a minor inconvenience to rename a mile long stretch of asphalt on an Army base. But this is the South.

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Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger

Fourteen years ago this summer I suffered through the most miserable two and a half months of my life – 17 days each in the soupy July air of Fort Benning, Georgia; the frying pan-hot Chihuahuan Desert of eastern New Mexico; the demoralizingly steep ascents of the Appalachians; and the dysenteric swamps of the Florida panhandle; all largely on a meal a day and little to no sleep.  The reward was a Ranger tab, yet conventional Army wisdom still derisively labels me a “leg” – a non-Airborne qualified soldier.  But now here I am back at Ft. Benning hoping to remedy my deficiencies, this time at the U.S. Army Airborne School.  I am the senior officer in my class, and one of just two Majors out of over five hundred students.  The vast majority of my classmates are younger than my youngest sister; many, I find, were born the year I graduated from high school.  The training is geared specifically towards these Privates who are, regrettably, prone to not be where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there, and not wearing the uniform they are supposed to be in.  For their trespasses I am yelled at (always respectfully, never directly), forced to do push-ups, flutter-kicks, ski-jumpers, and the grossly underestimated “overhead clap.”[1]

I am, as some have reminded me, no longer twenty-four.  I know this.  I am thirty-seven.  But no one here knows this, so on the outside I am a rock.  I always do my “optional” ten pull-ups and twenty push-ups each time we are released for the day.  I sound off vigorously with an “Airborne!” each time I hit the ground.  I never complain, I never doze off in class, I do everything Sergeant Airborne tells me to do, enthusiastically and without delay.  But inside I am dying.  The bottoms of my feet hurt.  The side of my neck is friction-burned from the straps of the mock-parachutes.  I have fire ant bites on my legs and hands.  I cannot feel, inexplicably, the this little piggy had none toe on my right foot.  I quietly await what, by all indications, seems to be the early stages of a hernia, and I think I pulled a muscle in my triceps opening my hotel room door.  But still I am here, and after two weeks of training and five jumps from a C-130 Hercules airplane, I will no longer be a dirty, nasty, non-Airborne qualified leg Ranger.

Zero Day and Ground Week

Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger, where have you been?

Around the world and back again.

Despite some anxiety – this will be the first time I’ve been around Joe[2] on a regular basis in over three years – I show up as close as possible to the Zero Day “no later than” report time of 1200 hours.  I am a cagey veteran, a veritable old-timer given the apparent average age of my classmates, and my Army experience has taught me that reporting any earlier than absolutely necessary only means you’ll either get tasked to go do something or just end up waiting that much longer.  I file into a classroom with about 200 other soldiers, holding in my hand my orders directing me to Ft. Benning; an Airborne physical stating I tested negative for HIV, have no blood in my stool, and am generally an able-bodied male; and an age waiver signed by my boss stating that despite the age limit of thirty-six, I should be allowed to attend Airborne training.  The soldiers around me are clearly brand-new to the Army – many having just arrived from Sand Hill, the basic training area for infantrymen – and do not need an age waiver.  The soldier sitting to my right appears to have a zit for each of my years.  I hear an audible gasp from the group as I stand after the administrative sergeant calls out “any majors here today?”  The NCO, a red-headed Sergeant First Class whom I immediately dislike, calls out for the other officer ranks, then directs us all in the completion of four forms he had previously passed out.

 

“Airborne, take everything off your desk and put it under your seat.  Everything Airborne!  Get everything off your desk or else you jackasses will fuck everything up, and I don’t have the time to be fucking with you.  Now, reach in that folder and take out THE TOP SHEET AND THE TOP SHEET ONLY.  On that first sheet, fill out block one where it says ‘last name.’  In this block you should put your last name and your last name only.  Airborne!  Did I tell you to fill out block two?  Don’t get ahead of me airborne, because you’ll just fuck everything up.  You don’t do shit until I tell you to!  Now, in BLOCK TWO” – he sends a condescending look in the direction of the overly ambitious jackass – “put down your first name and your first name only.  Fill it out in standard Army black letters and in ENGLISH ONLY.  I don’t want to see no Japanese hieroglyphics.”

It takes us over an hour to do what should have taken ten minutes, a trend that continues for the remainder of my time here.  I have to show, for the six hours of Zero Day I have spent at Airborne School, a helmet, a moldy canteen, a sunburn and an order to show up early Monday morning.  It’s going to be a long three weeks.

The Army frequently uses the “crawl, walk, run” method of instruction, which essentially means we train to the lowest common denominator, and so we spend most days crawling like a figurative nine-month old.  Though I am staying in Officer’s Quarters away from the Bravo Company area, where the soldiers sleep, I have to report each morning at 0450 hours for “forced hydration.”  This is where we stand around the second floor of the barracks (we’re in second platoon – note the symmetry) holding a full canteen of water until Sergeant Airborne shows up, reels off a few disparaging remarks, and then tells us to “DRINK UP AIRBORNE.”  We then guzzle the entire canteen.  After a few minutes, we solemnly move downstairs and outside to wait in formation with the rest of the company.  The cadre waits inside until the last possible minute (I went into their office one morning and found them sleeping, sprawled out like a bunch of cats), yelling through an open window if they need to talk to any particular soldier.

Sergeant Airborne yelling out the window for a specific student is one of my favorite parts of Airborne School.  It is five am, five hundred students have just guzzled a canteen full of water, and we all know we will stand around for approximately thirty minutes waiting for the cadre to come outside and run us to the training area.  This routine accommodates that basic human need for interaction, even at five am, and the company area quickly comes alive with human chatter, sounding like cicadas emerging from their seventeen year sleep.  Conversation is stopped only (but always) whenever we hear one of the windows slide open, Sergeant Airborne’s head emerging to yell out a roster number: “Charlie Three One Seven!”  Immediately five hundred voices respond.  “CHARLIE THREE ONE SEVEN!”  The cicada love song then resumes, and I giggle internally.

The main purpose of Ground Week seems to be to teach us how to fall down correctly, employing the “PLF” – the parachute landing fall.  In short, this consists of landing with your feet and knees tightly together, and hitting, preferably consecutively, your five “points of contact”: the balls of your feet, the outside of your calf, your thigh, your butt, and then your pull-up muscle, hopefully exposed by you keeping your elbows together in front of you and high up above your face.  This sequence of events, developed in the 1940’s, is the basis for the Army-specific directive, to “get your head out of your fourth point of contact.”  Feel free to adopt it into your own library of colloquialisms.  Ideally, the PLF will save you from serious injury, because the T-10 Delta parachute – a version of which has also been around since the 1940’s – is designed to get you to the ground safely, but more importantly, as quickly as possible.

This is not the landing you’ve seen on television, where a rainbow-clad skydiver pulls on toggles just before impact, hitting the ground running, yet softly, like a Pelican landing on terra firma.  This parachute was designed with the soldier in mind, specifically the enemy soldier, who is probably shooting at you as you fall from the sky, so getting down quickly is of utmost importance.  The trade-off is that you hit the ground harder than you’d like to, and to be able to properly minimize the impact is a good skill.  So we practice falling down.  Again.  And again, and again.  We practice falling down from our standing position.  We practice falling down from a 2’ wall.  We practice falling down while sliding on a cable.  We practice falling down facing forwards, facing sideways, facing backwards.  We practice falling down moving in all directions while sliding on the cable.  To emphasize the importance of keeping feet and knees together, we bunny-hop around the practice pit with our legs welded together, like we’re training for a gunny sack race but can’t find a gunny sack.  Not wearing underwear was a decision considerably lacking in foresight, as the sweat building up in my man-regions has nowhere to go.

We spend the last day of Ground Week jumping out of the 34’ Tower, the first occasion where I feel like I’m doing something kind of cool.  We do it both “Hollywood” – wearing only the parachute harness and a reserve parachute strapped in front of you – and “combat load,” which includes all of the above plus a thirty-five pound rucksack hanging from your waist.  Once we’re geared up, we walk up five flights of stairs, where a Sergeant Airborne hooks our harnesses to a pulley resting on a cable suspended 34’ off the ground.  Once hooked up, Sergeant Airborne gives a smack on the ass, indicating it is now time for you to jump out the door.  I give a vigorous kick and throw myself into a tight body position – chin tucked into chest, elbows in tight, feet and knees together.  I fall for just a fraction of a second until the harness catches, and then slide down the cable to other students waiting to unhook me.  With the exception of jumping off a tower, this is not a pleasurable experience.

If you’d like to get a taste of this, here’s a suitable recreation:  Take two seat belts, run them between your legs and then over your shoulder.  Fasten both, ensuring a buckle is digging into each clavicle.  Now squat down, and have your buddy cinch the belts up real tight.  Now stand up.  If you are unable to stand completely upright, then you’ve done it correctly (if, however, you feel your scrotum being pinched in between a belt and your thigh, you probably have some adjusting to do).  Now go get a computer monitor – not a flat screen, but one of the old school big ones.  Fill it with sand, and hang it from your waist.  Take two more seat belts, and run them through the two existing belts, right about at the front of your shoulders.  Make sure that when these belts extend straight up, your head doesn’t fit easily between them.  You want to reproduce the feeling of having your neck filleted as the straps rapidly shift from front to rear.  Now go walk up five flights of stairs.  Tie your two shoulder belts to the railing.  Jump off.  Repeat ad nauseum.

Tower Week

Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger, how did you go?

In a C-130, flying low.

 

The highlight of Tower Week is supposed to be the 250’ tower, where some students are slowly reeled up by a cable hooked to a parachute, and then dropped.  Think the Free Fall ride at Six Flags, and you’ll have the visual.  But we’re on a shortened training schedule, both because of a post-wide “Safety Day” and because of the four-day Memorial Day weekend, so the Tower is scrapped.

Instead we do a lot more hanging around, sitting in the bleachers and bullshitting in between either Sergeant Airborne or some uptight student yelling at us to “shut the fuck up.”  And for the majority of our down time, I’m pretty happy, because being around Joe again is invigorating.  Though my description at the end of this essay might leave you somewhat hesitant about the kismet awaiting Joe, have no doubt – he’s someone you want on your team.  And Joe is funny.  There are two female ROTC cadets in our platoon, both under 21 and attractive.  They are the object of much affection, and watching and listening to the mating call of Joe is hilarity of the highest order.  One afternoon I overhear two Marines one-upping each other in their efforts to impress Female Cadet, the winner clearly the Marine who proudly states he once teabagged[3] an anthill for $100.

We’ve now spent almost eight days together, for extended hours, and the student appointed as my squad leader annoys me.  He’s a 39 year old National Guard E7 from Oklahoma, and though his hayseed routine was initially endearing, it’s quickly become tiring.  He is a brownnoser, a Spotlight Ranger, a suckass, a sycophant, and has chosen Airborne School as his forum to display his leadership skills.  He also lacks what we call “situational awareness.”  One morning, after several rear PLFs, a Sergeant Airborne asked us if we wanted to do more.  My E7 responded affirmatively, the only one of 500 students.  Not like in “hooah Sergeant Airborne, you can’t smoke me!” but like in “shucks Sergeant Airborne, I sure would like to practice one more time.”  Later in the day, while assisting soldiers, he began calling off everyone’s number before they slid down the apparatus, as if the Sergeant Airborne was illiterate (our roster numbers are painted in big black letters on both the front and back of our helmet) and the student was mute.  Here’s our conversation, verbatim:

“Sergeant, if you feel the need to call out each person’s roster number, then just have them do it.”

“Oh no sir, I’m good, it’s not bothering me.”

“But it’s bothering me.”

On the last training day before Jump Week, I lock my keys in my truck at approximately 0440 am.  We spend all morning in our Physical Training uniforms, first conducting a company run and then, for no apparent reason, walking through an outdoor shower.  This is fine for all the Army soldiers, not so fine for the Marines.  The Army PT uniform consists of a thick gray t-shirt and black water repellant shorts.  The Marine Corps PT uniform, on the other hand, is a thread-bare thin olive drab t-shirt and a pair of short silkies,[4] and the cold water additive has rendered the rest of us observers at an impromptu spring-breakish scene.  My Marine Corps platoon sergeant looks like he’s been shrink-wrapped.  I can tell his religion.  After about 20 minutes, he tells the formation that some people are a little uncomfortable around the wet Marines (I have to admit, it’s difficult not to stare), and tells all his mates to use their canteens to discretely cover themselves.  So now I have about 10 strapping Marines (they’re all Force Recon guys) walking around holding their canteens below their waist like fig leaves.  They look ridiculous.

We end the morning (and the day) with a platoon photograph.  We arrange ourselves from tallest to shortest.  I put myself in front of three or four guys who I’m fairly certain are taller than I.  My weekend safety brief to all the soldiers consists of “don’t be a jackass.”  I hope I can follow my own advice.

At 8:30 pm, about two hours after calling “Pop-a-Lock,” I am visited by a tricked-out Jeep Wrangler with no visible company logo.  Out steps a 350 pound kid in jeans and a sleeveless tee (not the homemade type, but purchased, indicated by the hemmed arm-holes), white deodorant residue both hanging from the hairs protruding from his armpits and spread liberally across the sides of his shirt, markings of the hard day’s work put in by his mammoth and pendulous arms.  He sticks an air bag into the door jamb of my truck, inflates it enough so he can reach a beefed-up clothes hangar through the crack, and then unlocks my door.  Sixty-five dollars for about thirty seconds of work – I hope jump week goes a little better.

Jump Week

Airborne Ranger, Airborne Ranger, how’d you get down?

In a T-10 Charlie, big and round.

I am not afraid.  Though I’m uncomfortable in the harness, I am not sweating.  My heart rate is normal.  I am essentially indifferent as the loudspeaker calls out “CHALK FIVE, STAND UP AND FACE THE AIRFIELD.  KEEP YOUR FEET AND KNEES TOGETHER AIRBORNE.  IT’S GO TIME.”

It’s about noon inside the chute warehouse, and an overhead door slides up, revealing a C-130 Hercules rolling up the tarmac towards us, her four turboprop engines whining noisily.  She turns the corner, the lowering tailgate visible through the combined heat waves from the ground and the aircraft itself.  We shuffle towards the back of the plane, entering in reverse order and passing two or three of our instructors, who will act as Jump Masters on our flight.

As soon as we are seated, the plane begins to roll, and Jump Master beings his routine.

“TEN MINUTES!”

Sixty of us call back, “TEN MINUTES TEN MINUTES TEN MINUTES!”

Jump Master shouts, “GET READY!”

It has not been ten minutes; closer to thirty seconds.  As he shouts his second command, the jump door of the aircraft rolls up, revealing the passing tree line below us, and the tenor inside the belly of the airplane changes significantly.  A soldier sitting across from me turns his head from the open door to me, his mouth and eyes wide open.  I give him the “OK” sign, and we sixty call back “GET READY!”  I smile at the soldier.  This will be a breeze, a walk in the park.  We are trained, we are ready, equipment always works, and we have a reserve anyway.

Jump Master calls back to us, “INBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP!”  We repeat it back to him, and the first five jumpers in the two inner rows of cargo net seats struggle to their feet.

“OUTBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP!”  I repeat his command as I stand myself.

“HOOK UP!”  Jump Master simultaneously makes a sign-language “X” with both of his hands, and we twenty standing jumpers move to unhook our static lines from our reserves,[5] placing them on the cable running over our heads.

“CHECK STATIC LINES!”  It is imperative that your static line go from the cable overhead, through your hand, and over your shoulder to the parachute on your back.  Underneath your shoulder is bad juju, so you first check your own static line and then the line of the jumper in front of you.  If all appears to be well, you tap the helmet of the jumper in front of you and tell him “safe.”  This is passed forward until it gets to the Jump Master, who then shouts –

“CHECK EQUIPMENT!”  We repeat the command while running our hands along the brim of our helmet, our chinstrap, the buckle on our chest and then on each leg.  The last man in line, after checking his equipment, slaps the backside of the man in front of him and yells in his ear “OK!”  The command is passed forward until it reaches the last man, who confidently thrusts his open hand into the face of the Jump Master and yells “ALL OK JUMP MASTER!”

The Jump Master slaps the jumper’s hand, then turns to the door.  He stomps down one foot, checking the stability of the ramp, then methodically but deliberately checks the door jambs for any protrusions or sharp edges – it’s a truly dramatic scene.  He then looks at the first jumper, affirmatively shoving his finger-extended hand in his face, and shouts “STAND IN THE DOOR!”  The first jumper then hands the Safety (a non-jumper there to ensure a smooth exit from the aircraft) his static line, puts a hand on each side of the reserve at his waist, and then turns so he is facing out the door.

I cannot see him (I am the eighth of ten jumpers on my side of the airplane), but I have no doubt his eyes are as big as Oreos, his pulse racing, breathing heavy, his brow littered with sweat.  But not me.  I am solid, coolly indifferent to jumping out the door.  The light at the front of the aircraft turns from red to green, the Jump Master shouts “GO!,” and we are moving.  I shuffle forward, hand the Safety my static line, and turn towards the door.

When one jumps out of an airplane moving at 130 knots 1200’ above the ground, one is supposed to exit the door by jumping up six inches and out thirty-six.  One is supposed to tuck one’s chin into one’s chest, keeping elbows in tight to the ribs and hands firmly gripping the sides of the reserve parachute hanging at one’s belly.  The jumper is then supposed to count to four – one thousand two thousand three thousand four thousand – then move hands from the reserve parachute to the risers of the opening parachute above his head.  Once the jumper confirms he has an open and untwisted parachute, he then looks for other jumpers, ensuring not only he is keeping a safe distance from the other jumpers, but also that he is falling at a rate of descent consistent with the other jumpers.  At approximately 100’, the jumper is supposed to reach up and pull down on the two risers in the direction opposite of any drift, keeping eyes squarely on the horizon.  One does not look down once below 100’, as he is supposed to “feel” the ground with the balls of his feet.  Once the jumper feels contact, he should execute his perfected PLF, landing expertly.

This is not how it works for me.  It turns out that I am totally and unequivocally mentally unprepared for the violence about to befall me.  As I move to exit the door, I am sucked out before I can get my first “thousand” out of my mouth.  My chin is in my chest, but only because the risers being yanked out of my pack have slammed my head forward, knocking my helmet down over my eyes in the process.  I have a tight body position – elbows in, feet and knees together – but only because I am scared shitless.  I can see a sliver of scenery from the underside of my helmet, and I watch it turn from tree to ground to tree to sky and back again.  I feel like a cigarette being flicked from a fast moving car.

I do not count to four thousand, mostly because my jaw is clenched shut but also because I am chanting, in my head, to the God of Agnostics: chute open chute open chute open chute open.  I stop tumbling, fix my helmet, and then look up to see my risers twisted.  As I was instructed, I quickly grab a riser in each hand, pulling apart as hard as my panic-induced arms will allow, and bicycle my legs like I stole something and my Schwinn is the getaway car.  I untwist, the risers parting to reveal a gloriously open, unobstructed, fully inflated chute.

She is beautiful.  I want to name her.  I think I want to name my children after her.  I sheepishly look around and collect myself, feeling like I just took a spill on my skateboard at a quiet intersection – did anyone see that? – and settle in to enjoy the ride.  I then notice that I am falling faster than everyone else in front of me.  This is not, I think, supposed to happen like this.  Shouldn’t the first one out the door also be the first one to the ground?  I crane my neck to see the jumpers behind me, but nothing – I am falling faster than them as well.  I look for the smoke pot on the ground, lit to help us see which way the wind is blowing so we can execute the appropriate PLF.  The smoke seems to be moving only upwards, directly at me, and I am falling only down, directly at it.  They did not teach me how I was supposed to land if I was falling straight down.

I hear a voice.  “AIRBORNE STOP LOOKING AT THE GROUND.”  I have no idea where the voice is coming from, and cannot see its source, but it reminds me to keep my eyes on the horizon.  I need to feel the ground as I land, first touching with the balls of my feet, then calves, then thigh, then butt, then pull-up muscle.  This PLF, I think, needs to be a good one, because I am falling really, really fast.

I do, in fact, feel the ground with the balls of my feet.  A microsecond later I feel the ground with my ass, and then, like it’s the tail end of a childhood game of “crack the whip,” I feel the ground with the back of my head.  I have skipped my second, third, and fifth points of contact but added a sixth.  I lay there for a few seconds, spread eagle, partially disoriented but mostly grateful to be on the ground and alive.  When I sit up, I see a Sergeant Airborne (the source of the voice I heard) sitting on a cooler, only about fifteen feet from me.  His right hand, holding the bull horn, is draped lazily over his right knee.  His head is hanging down, and I can tell he is laughing.  I give him a “what the f**k” look, and he swings the bullhorn up to his lips.

“ARE YOU OK AIRBORNE?”

“FUCK NO I’M NOT OK!  That hurt.”  He laughs.  He goes back to the bullhorn.  “YOU HAVE TO TWIST YOUR BODY AIRBORNE.”

“When?,” I ask.  Because there is absolutely no time between my feet and ass and head hitting the ground.  But there are already more jumpers floating down, so I gather up my equipment and start running across the drop zone to the staging area.  I am the first one back, by a good five minutes.

Jumps two, three, and four go much the same, though on my second jump I land on a packed road rather than the tilled ground, seeing stars after my head hits; on my fourth jump I am dragged across the drop zone for ten feet or so before I can unhook the chute.  I have no idea why I fall faster than everyone else – I’m really not that much bigger – but for all subsequent jumps I make sure I am the last one out the door so that I will not interfere with anyone else as I come down.  I still make it back to the staging area first. For each jump I am progressively more nervous, but loathe them all equally.  We jump twice on the first day and twice on the second day, needing only one jump on day three to get our fifth, and Airborne-qualifying, jump.

The last day comes early.  We have to be at formation by 3:30 am, and we silently run the mile to the airfield.  Once we get there we practice exiting from both doors of the mock aircraft and go through our practice PLFs for Sergeant Airborne – I am, admittedly, phoning it in at this point, as I have yet to have a PLF work for me.  We eat a cold MRE for breakfast.  We are in the harness – combat load for jump five – by 6:15 am.  This morning my squad will be on the second aircraft, and I am very much looking forward to being on the ground and out of this torture device of a parachute harness as soon as possible.  There are a limited number of Jump Masters, and they do double-duty both for the Jump Master Personnel Inspection in the harness shed and as the Jump Masters on the aircraft, so once we’re inspected, we can’t get back out of the harness.  I don’t drink water so I won’t have to pee, and pass time trying new ways to sit on the wooden benches to alleviate some of the pain.

The first jumpers are scheduled to get on the plane at 1000 hours, but the hour comes and goes.  Then eleven.  Today is overcast, and we need the clouds to be no lower than 1700’ – 1200’ is jump altitude, but we’re required to have 500’ of clearance.  I ask a passing Air Force pilot about the ceiling: Only 700’.  The clock reads noon.  The sergeant in charge (NCOIC) gets a waiver from the commander so we can jump at 1000’ instead of 1200’.  But the clouds are still only at 900’.  I volunteer to jump from 900’.  I volunteer to jump from 700’, 500’, whatever it takes to get out of this harness.  It’s now one o’clock.  A soldier two down from me passes out from dehydration.  We yell for Sergeant Airborne, two of us clumsily unhooking the passed out soldier from his gear.  The NCOIC unsuccessfully tries to get the commander to allow us to drop combat gear.  Another soldier wets his pants, the rest of us informed by the NCOIC conducting his end of the conversation with another Sergeant Airborne over the loudspeaker (“WHY IS ONE NINE EIGHT GETTING OUT OF HIS GEAR?”  Seconds pass. “DID HE GET THE PARACHUTE WET?”  More seconds.  “DID HE TELL ANYONE HE HAD TO GO?”).

At 1345 hours – one forty-five pm, and seven and one half hours after getting into the harness – Sergeant Airborne comes over the loudspeaker.  “CHALKS FIVE AND SIX, STAND UP AND FACE THE AIRFIELD.”  At this point, there is neither elation nor relief.  I want to get out of the harness but am, to be honest, fairly apprehensive about this last jump.  I will exit the door, no doubt, but I am not particularly looking forward to it.  We trudge out the door, wait for the aircraft, walk up the back of the ramp, and sit.

And then?  And then.  And then.  And then, over the airplane radio, music.  No, not music, but an anthem.  The anthem of my senior year of college, Everlast’s opus, that homage to kicking ass, self-aggrandizement, and yes, jumping around.  And why not?  Why not jump around?  I’m about to exit an airplane with fifty pounds of crap slung off my body like an overloaded bandito, and I deserve to serve your ass like I’m John McEnroe.  I deserve a little jumping around.  A smile replaces my grimace as I drift back to 1993, sitting on our dryer in the filthy basement of the Green House, my friends around me smoking a joint as we stare together at the wood floor above us, pulsating with the synched bacchanalian jumps of a hundred of our closest friends living the dream.  Over the plane radio it begins, pack it up, pack it in, let me begin, I came to win, and the Jump Master is literally packing us in.  He seats one of us, then makes us lift our rucksacks up as high as possible as he squeezes someone else into the seat directly across.  There is barely room for one person with a ruck, but he needs to squeeze thirty per side.  He makes everyone raise their hands in the air (get up, stand up, come on throw your hands up) as he shoves us to the back of the plane.  But I do not care.  I am 37 and have been sitting on a wood bench for almost eight hours and I have to pee and there’s a metal bar grinding into my shin and I don’t care, because across from me I see an ROTC cadet, a young kid looking all of his twenty years, mouthing – yelling – the words to Jump Around and I cannot help but be overcome because this is one of those days, one of those moments that doesn’t come around all that often but when it does, it reminds me that I really, really like what I do.

I exit the aircraft fifteenth of fifteen and am flung from the door like litter.  My chute opens – no twists – and I watch as I pass fourteen other parachutists on my way down.  I pull the release lever for my rucksack at about 200’, and it dangles on its cord thirty feet below me.  I find the smoke pot to gauge the wind; it’s pushing me to my left.  At 100’ I reach up and grab the two right risers and pull down as hard as I can, my eyes on the horizon.  I feel the ground with the balls of my feet, then my left calf, then my left thigh, my left butt cheek, and finally my left pull-up muscle.  I keep my elbows in front of my face, my momentum swinging my feet and knees – held firmly together – up and over.  I unhook the parachute and start to get out of my equipment, and hear a Sergeant Airborne through his bullhorn: “NICE LANDING SIR.”

I want to hug somebody.  Instead, as I reel in my parachute, I utter, under my breath, that one word I have heard over and over so many times the last three weeks, to the point I never want to hear it again:

Airborne.

[1] For this exercise, stand with your feet shoulder width apart, arms extended out and parallel to the ground.  Keeping your arms straight, move your hands upward until they touch, then return them to shoulder level.  This is a four count exercise – one, two, three (one!), one, two three (two!).  Do 200 of these.  Seriously.  Now do push-ups.  Now do more overhead claps.

[2] “Joe” is a slangy name given to soldiers of any rank below that of sergeant, and it should convey to you a vivid image of his idiosyncrasies.  Joe owns both an XBox and a PlayStation.  Joe took his enlistment bonus and bought an ’08 Ford Mustang GT, financing the balance with a double-digit APR.  Joe smokes – he’s likely to chew as well – and has a tribal tattoo on his arm and shoulder.  He owns denim shorts, and frequently sports them with a “Linkin’ Park” concert t-shirt and a DC skateboards hat.  Sometimes you have to remind Joe that he needs to wash between his toes.  Though he likes girls, Joe’s not real sure how to relate to them, and so is prone to do things like flicking or punching them in the arm, much like a fourth-grader lustily reacting to the early pangs of puberty.  Joe has a big heart, with which he isn’t entirely sure how to deal.  Joe works hard, and most importantly, Joe will do anything for his fellow soldiers (and by proxy, you), including but not limited to: lie, display common sense-defying acts of loyalty, steal, provide back-up in a fist fight, assist in the cross-border transportation of marijuana, and dive on a grenade.

 

[3] Recounting here the definition of “teabagging” is simply too much for me, so I’ll instead refer you to http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=teabagging.  Reader beware.

[4] Army Rangers and Special Forces wear shorts consisting of essentially the same material, sometimes referred to as “Ranger Panties.”  The shorts are typical of what you’d see on any world-class marathon runner, expect Marines and Rangers aren’t usually built like world-class marathon runners.  They’re built like, well, Marines and Rangers, and so the shorts are really, really short and really, really thin.

[5] The system works like this: inside the aircraft and a little over 6’ from the floor are two cables running the length of the airplane.  On each soldier’s back is a parachute, with a nylon “static line” starting at the bag holding the parachute intact, protruding out of the pack and then over your shoulder.  At the end of the static line is a metal hook.  This metal hook goes onto the static line, and when you jump out of the aircraft, the hooked line pulls the bag and parachute out of your pack.  You are hooked to your hopefully opening parachute by four “risers,” pieces of think nylon webbing that run from the chute to your harness.

 

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Letter from Baghdad

Baghdad, Iraq/ February 24, 2005

I’m on my first convoy today, where riding shotgun once again means exactly that. I wear a ballistic helmet, ballistic eye-protection, fire-proof gloves, and a flak vest designed to defeat the exact size round the enemy fires. The vest comes with a snap on groin-protector, but I’ve already decided I’m going to sit on that thing; it seems to me that I should be more concerned about a blast coming from the bottom than one from the top. I carry a Baretta 9mm pistol, with one magazine in the well and two hooked to my vest. I also carry an M16 rifle, with one magazine in the well, but with six extra magazines. In total, I have 255 rounds of ammunition. I feel equally empowered and apprehensive at the prospect of possessing so much ability to destroy. I have a client at an outlying Forward Operating Base, or FOB, and I’ve asked the unit to come pick me up at my base, about a 40-minute round trip in light traffic. It will take them three vehicles, and they’ll have to be on the road four times, but I need to see where my guy lives, and what he does, and where his misconduct supposedly took place. Each of the three vehicles coming to get me has a three-man crew: A driver, a vehicle commander, and a gunner. I don’t like them having to take extra risks just for one man, but the alternative is to bring all the witnesses to me, which would turn it into about 10-vehicle convoy. I meet the First Sergeant and his men outside my building. I’ve been in Iraq for about a week, and all my equipment is new and clean, my glasses unscratched, my weapons unfired, all in stark contrast to the men I now look upon. To most, I suspect, they would look dirty and used. To me they do look worn, but also intense, experienced, professional. They look like guys I’d want strapped to roof-top guns when I take my first ride into a hostile city. Another obvious difference between them and me is our age. Aside from the First Sergeant, a career soldier, they all appear to be in their early twenties or late teens. The young man sticking out of the turret of my ride and manning the .50 cal machine gun – as intimidating a weapon as any in our inventory – is surely outweighed by the gun he operates. I decide he must rarely need to shave. The First Sergeant salutes me, hands me another magazine of 5.56 mm, and asks if I’m ready to go. I say I am, get into the vehicle, and we’re on our way. Using his radio, he calls his home base to let them know we’re leaving through Emerald Gate, and then says to me, over his shoulder, “sir, go red.” I lock and load around into the chambers of both my rifle and my pistol, and we’re onto the streets of Baghdad.I’m on the road today because I need to interview my client and several witnesses, all of whom are located at an outlying FOB, named Camp Headhunter, or Camp Independence, or Al Istiqlal, depending on how politically correct we’re being, or whom you’re talking to.Independence (I’m going with the most optimistic) is near the volatile Al Khark district, home of Saddam’s youth and a significant number of incredibly poor Sunni Muslims, who comprise the brunt of the Insurgency. It’s also home to Haifa Street, the most dangerous road in Baghdad, and one of the most dangerous places in all of Iraq (I find out later the soldiers have taken to calling it Grenade Alley).

 

Camp Independence is home to two companies of 1-9 Cavalry, a mechanized infantry unit from Ft. Hood, Texas. Their greater mission is to attain stability in the area by defeating the Insurgency. They act on intelligence from sympathetic locals, intelligence gathered on previous missions or from higher headquarters, or intelligence given to them from other units. Once they get information, which usually identifies locations of a weapons stash or a particular person the unit might be looking for – also called a High Value Target, or “HVT” – the unit commander gives an operations order to one of his subordinate units to go out and conduct a patrol of the area. It could be a show of force, a recon, a raid, or a movement to contact. In its execution, it involves anywhere from 10 – 200 men loaded for bear, getting into up-armored HMMWVs and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, driving to a pre-designated area, getting out of their vehicles, and conducting their mission on foot. In a nutshell, these men walk down the streets of a dangerous and densely populated neighborhood and try to get people to shoot at them.

I’m visiting Charlie Company, or “Crazywolf,” and they’ve had a particularly rough go of the Haifa Street area. Of the 130 men in the company, more than 80 have received Purple Hearts. All but 16 returned to duty after receiving their injuries. Of those, 13 had injuries too serious to stay in country, and 3 were killed in action. My client saw one of the thirteen lose his legs when an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) went off next to him; he saw one of the 3, a soldier who was also his roommate, take a Rocket Propelled Grenade first through the front windshield of his HMMWV, then through his head. He tells me that in the past year he’s been shot at, has had grenades thrown at him, has gone door-to-door, at night, in a huge city apartment building in search of armed men meaning to hurt him, has been near IEDs and car bombs as they exploded, and felt the collapse of air around his head that follows an RPG as it flies by. He talks the language of a soldier, acronyms in abundance – RPG, IED, VBED, CO, PL, ATL, ING, FISTER – the form so familiar and easy to me, even if some of the words are new. It’s also peppered with so many variances of “fuck” that I can’t help but smile.

We sit outside, about 150 yards from the front gate, the Bad Guys purportedly just on the other side of the wall. As I ask questions, and he answers, I hear the familiar “pop pop” of rifles, though with a rhythm and cadence I’m not used to.

“So it was about midnight when this happened?,” I ask.

“I think so,” he answers. Pop, pa-pop, I hear. The sounds are close.

“Uh hum. And you were supposed to be on guard duty?” “Roger,” he says, “me and Smith were up in the nest, when we heard the argument.” Pop pop pop pop pop.

I say, as coolly as I can muster, “Is that a gunfight?” “Roger, sir,” he says. Brrp. Pa-pop pop. Yelling. “Um hum.” I continue.

“So what did you and Smith do after you heard the arguing?” Pop pop. Brrrrrpp. Lots of yelling.

“I sent Smith down the stairs to the SOG, to see if he could find out what the fuck was going on.” Pop pa-pop. Pop pop pop. I too would like to find out what the fuck is going on. “Is that right outside the front gate?” I ask.

“Roger sir,” he says. Another soldier walks by, my client knows him, and he calls out to him. “Hey Gonzalez, you slut!” Gonzalez smiles, they exchange a touch of their closed fists, and Gonzalez continues on his way. Neither Gonzalez nor my client seem particularly concerned by the potentiality of men dying yards from where we sit, and I learn that this is, in fact, perfectly normal for the men of 1-9 Cav. Also normal are stray rounds (the camp doc was hit in the calf by a stray AK 47 round), mortars, and rockets. Less common is the occasional gate crasher-cum-suicide bomber in the form of a “VBIED”, or “Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device.” This, I realize, is a way of life for these men, and has been for the past year. They deal with it individually, but clearly share something through the commonality of their constant danger.

I spend the day conducting interviews, visiting the scene, learning what life is like for my client and his fellow soldiers. I eat in his dining facility, where lunch is a self-serve buffet of white bread, mayonnaise and mustard packets, roast beef or turkey, cheese, fruit, and bags of potato chips. I ask a soldier sitting next to me if this is what he eats everyday. “No sir,” he answers, “we get hamburgers on Tuesday and Thursday.” Shortly after lunch I’m told that a platoon of soldiers, acting on a tip that an insurgent has moved into a neighborhood friendly to American soldiers, will conduct a recon to check the veracity of the information. I want to see them when they come back, so I wait outside their living quarters. Around 1500 they return, dismounting from their vehicles once they enter the gate. I meet the NCO in charge of the patrol – the same one who told me they were going out on the mission – and I ask him about the tip.

“Roger,” he says, “the guy wasn’t there, but we talked to some neighbors. They said that there was a terrorist living there, that he wasn’t home right now, but that they were going to kill him when he got back.”

As I talk to the NCO, I watch the other soldiers as they file by. They all wear protective helmets and vests adorned with ammo pouches, flash lights, snap-links, first-aid packs – collectively known as “full battle rattle” – and dark sunglasses. Despite the relatively cool day, I can see most are sweaty as they walk by me, on their way to unwind however it is they unwind when they come back from a combat mission. Almost all are quiet, some patting my client on the shoulder as they walk by, some softly saying his name, some touching knuckles with him. Many have told me that my client, in some way or another, has saved their lives in the past year.

Time slips by quickly, and dusk is on the way. The unit is supposed to drive me back home, but they still have to turn around and come back to their own base. I remember being briefed that the roads are most dangerous early in the morning and late in the day, when insurgents have had the opportunity to emplace IEDs. I tell the First Sergeant that I’m ready to head back; he quickly and concisely gives orders to get the convoy ready. I get back into my gear and climb in the back seat of the HMMWV, but we’re momentarily held up while the First Sergeant and Platoon Leader check for a new route – two suicide bombers, both within the past 2 hours, have temporarily closed our primary and alternate routes back to my base. I get out, take off my helmet, and lean against the front hood of my HMMWV, listening to the remaining four soldiers talk as we all wait for the route check. All four of them have been here 11 months, three are from Texas, and three have had their twenty-frist birthday since they’ve been here in Iraq. The fourth is nineteen.

“Dude, I’m lead vehicle on the way back!” the rear gunner calls out to the front. “Fine,” says the front gunner, “but I get your Play Station if you die on the way home.” They all laugh. The front gunner asks me if BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) is “that way;” I say no and point the correct direction. The rear gunner, now out of his turret and sitting cross-legged on the hood of the HMMWV, asks me if I have a Leatherman. I do, and pull the utility tool from my belt and hand it to him. He proceeds to dig a piece of shrapnel out of the grill. The front gunner watches, still asking about BIAP. I live at a base near there, with a Burger King and a pizza shop, a big Post Exchange, and many other amenities in relative comfort and safety in comparison to these kids’ surroundings.

As the sun falls behind a grove of date palms, the First Sergeant returns from the Operations Center with a third route planned. He seems to be a bit more nervous than when he went in the building. I want to offer to stay the night, so they can bring me back in the morning, but the soldiers seem excited to go to the Burger King, and I don’t want to seem like I’m questioning the First Sergeant’s judgment. I remain silent and tentative.

We leave the base, going through the same ritual of “going red,” the soldiers now wearing clear-lens ballistic eyeglasses. All cars make an extra effort to give us the right of way. I ask the First Sergeant about this, and he says most of the people are used to us being here, and have learned to always give us the right of way. I suspect it’s also partly due to the placard attached to the back of the rear vehicle, proclaiming, in Iraqi-Arabic, “STAY BACK. I HAVE AUTHORITY TO KILL YOU.” From the backseat, I strain my eyes around each corner, down each alley, on each overpass, and into every vehicle we pass, looking for anything suspicious, whatever that may be.

We make it to my base without incident, though the rear gunner tells me that someone took a pot-shot at him about ten minutes after we left his FOB. For my part, I am internally frantic the entire ride home, and remain so after the convoy drops me off at my own operations center. I scramble to find them phone numbers to check the original routes, a better map, water – anything to somehow make up for getting them home so late. Despite my twelve years in the Army, I’ve made a rookie move, and I feel sick for doing so. These young men have put their lives in danger – twice – simply to get me from one base to another. I have contributed nothing except to place them at greater risk. I resolve to never do so again, and when I get back to my office I practically yell at my own attorneys to ensure they never make the same mistake.

The next morning I will email the First Sergeant and Platoon Leader my sincerest apologies, and ensure them that though it is unlikely they will need to drive me again, I will never make the same mistake with other units. I get an immediate response from both. They tell me not to worry about it, that they made it home safely, and that they are happy to do anything they can to make it easier for me to do my job, to help one of their soldiers, one of their men, one of their brothers. Despite their circumstances – away from their family and loved ones, austere living conditions, Spartan lunches, and the constant possibility of killing or being killed – despite this, it boils down to this one thing for these men: I will do my job.

For many of them, especially the young soldiers far closer to my little sister’s age than mine – kids, really – they know no politics, or global strategy, or hyper-power, or at least pretend they don’t know and don’t care. Inconsequential is the difference between Sunni and Shiite, Allawi and al Sistani, contemporary Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld circa-1983. All they know is I will do my job, and then I will go home back to Texas and so will my buddy on the .50 cal on the rear vehicle and then he can keep his own Play Station. They will do their job, and so, I promise myself, I will do mine.