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by Jason Green
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On my first night in Iraq, June 2008, I felt real fear for the first time in my life. Fourteen years later, when nightmares break through the drugs I take to prevent them, that same fear returns, as if I’m right back on that runway in Baghdad where the most terrifying incident of my life occurred.
As an adult fan of horror movies and someone who grew up as an absolute weenie and mama’s boy, I was pretty sure I was an expert at being scared before I deployed to Iraq. But I was wrong, and it would take me less than a full hour on the ground in Iraq to realize just how wrong I was. The fear struck as my fellow soldiers and I were walking toward Chinook helicopters on the runway at Baghdad International Airport which were supposed to carry us north to Camp Taji where we would reside for the next twelve months. Instead, the Chinooks suddenly took off without us, blasting us with a heat that felt like it could melt the flesh from your bones. The rotorwash lifted me and my fifty pounds of gear off the ground and coated my sweaty body in fine sand. Panic set in; soldiers scattered everywhere, dropping their gear on the runway as they fled. That’s when I felt what real fear was for the first time.
Two years earlier, in 2006, I had been living in a 600-square-foot apartment in the worst part of Lawton, Oklahoma, going to college on the GI Bill. I was feeling pretty low, like my life was not working out the way I thought it should. The smell of stale carpet, the weed smoke drifting in from the neighbors, the stray dogs roaming the complex, it all just got to be too much. I was sick of ramen and roaches. I needed money. I had been out of the Army for two years at that point, having already completed a four-year enlistment as an intelligence analyst, which is an amazing job for an eighteen-year-old kid. Working on top secret briefings, meeting with spies working overseas; it really doesn’t get much better. I got to spend part of my enlistment living in England, working on a former British nuclear missile base. But now things were less exciting. In Lawton, post-Army, I was trying to go to college, support a child, have a dating life and do ROTC. Nothing seemed to be working out right for me as a civilian.
In ROTC, I wore the same uniforms I had worn on active duty, but now there was a kid with pimples yelling at me and telling me that my push-ups weren’t right. I was also an Army reservist with a job as a chaplain’s assistant and the rank of corporal, a junior non-commissioned officer. The ROTC kids meant nothing to me. The school meant nothing. My four years in the Army had convinced me of two things: I was better than other people my age or younger than me because I had been in the military, and I only knew how to do Army shit and to try to do anything else was really a waste of my time. Both things were drilled into me at age seventeen when I first joined. I began to skip school regularly to work in the local Army recruiting office with the recruiter who had signed me up for the reserves. It paid about $100 a week. Enough to keep me stocked up on ramen and bomb the apartment occasionally to get rid of the roaches and the neighbors’ fleas.
It wasn’t too long before I decided that the only way to really make money and stop having to listen to children tell me what to do was to rejoin the Army. The recruiters and I talked a lot about the job I used to have and how cool it was. They all agreed that I must have had really good test scores because they had never seen anyone get that job out of high school. Well, I hadn’t gotten any stupider, so I just needed to go get my old job back. Simple enough. No more ramen for this guy.
“Yeah, we don’t need those anymore. Plus, the Army isn’t paying to send you back to school for a year to teach you shit they already taught you,” said Sergeant First Class Marc Pruner. His matter-of-fact tone matched his 1950s buzz cut and the hint of Old Spice aftershave that trailed him everywhere he went. I had started dating a girl named Sofia that I was pretty sure was gonna be my wife—though she didn’t know it yet—and I was definitely gonna need a lot more money, quickly. At that point, I was willing to take any job except bullet sponge. At least I could count on Pruner to be straight with me. What I hadn’t counted on was not being able to work in military intelligence again. It seemed like common sense. Once you had previously had a top secret security clearance, they’d probably want to let you keep using it, right? Especially after September 11.
“Nope. When this shit kicked off, they hired a bunch of secret squirrel fuckers and now they don’t need any more intelligence specialists, especially not ones they’d have to send back to school because they’ve been a civilian too long,” said Pruner, opening up his laptop to see what other jobs were out there. I’d seen him do this hundreds of times in the last month for farm kids trying to escape North Texas or South Oklahoma. Those kids always seemed to end up choosing infantry or some other combat job that would only make their lives shittier. But hey, at least they’d get paid and they could finally get their teeth fixed.
“Just find me something that has a bonus,” I told Pruner.
“Supply.”
“Supply? Really?”
“Yeah, man. That’s where the money’s at. Get your bonus. Avoid getting shot at. It’s a win-win, man,” Pruner said. “You want to get married, right? Sofia’s gonna want her husband to stay alive.” Pruner grinned, smacking a neon-blue wad of gum.
By this point it had been almost exactly three years since President Bush declared victory in Iraq and a few years since Pruner had come home to the safety of recruiting duty.
“Weren’t you a supply guy when you were over there?” I asked.
“Fuck no. I was an MP. I actually did shit,” Pruner said.
I’d gotten to the point where I wasn’t interested in “doing shit.” If I’d been a hard-charger, I wouldn’t have taken the job as a chaplain’s assistant in the reserves. (Another gig I took because of a signing bonus.) Signing bonuses are tied to the jobs that the Army needs most at any given time, and if you’ve never been in the Army, you might be surprised by the number of soldiers who are only doing their particular job because of the money they were offered when they enlisted. I’m sure plenty of people sign up for dangerous jobs in order to fulfill some romantic idea of heroism, or because they think they’re going to have a starring role in a real-life action movie. But I’d bet most recruits happily take whatever job they’re qualified for that has the highest signing bonus. That was certainly the case on the day of my third enlistment. To Pruner’s delight, I took the supply job.
After supply training I got sent to a combat aviation brigade which was already training for deployment to Iraq. It was about twenty-four months from the time that I first thought about needing money to get married to the day I departed for Baghdad. On the flight over to Kuwait, where we had a brief layover, I thought about my new wife and my two children, who were three and four years-old, but I spent most of the time worrying about whether we had trained enough. I was an NCO, part of my unit’s junior leadership, and I felt a sense of responsibility for the younger soldiers. I kept looking around at the faces of everyone in my squad and wondering if they were as anxious as I was. Did they feel prepared to take a life or to see their own friends get killed or wounded?
We were an aviation unit, the ones who had the helicopters and were responsible for flying everyone all over Iraq. We had spent months training for the deployment in the deserts around El Paso. Loading and unloading the giant double-bladed CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopters was second nature to us by that point. Now we were on an airstrip in Baghdad, loaded down with gear and tired from our long overseas flight, waiting to load a Chinook that would take us to our final destination, Camp Taji. The only thing on my mind was getting on board so I could finally sit down. That’s when a strange thing happened: the Chinooks that had come to pick us up took off without us. We were only a few yards away when they blasted us in rotor wash and disappeared into the pitch-black desert sky.
My mind raced: Why are they leaving us? Why is First Sergeant running, he’s the baddest dude I know? What the fuck is happening?
Then I heard it. The C-RAM lighting up the night sky, searching for the rockets that were raining down on us from the darkness. BWAAAAAMMMMPPP! The rockets seemed to have no problem finding their way through the maelstrom of flak. Explosions lit up the runway like daylight. In the glow, I suddenly saw things I did not know were there—palm trees, the airport’s control tower, jet liners parked on the runway.
Why would there be commercial airplanes parked here in the middle of a war, I wondered? Were people still taking vacations? I couldn’t make sense of it.
We had been on the ground in Iraq for all of thirty minutes. We had just combat-landed in the C-130 with half of us puking into our helmets as the plane descended in zig-zags and circles directly over Baghdad to avoid being shot down on its descent into the war zone and we were already getting rocketed. Wasn’t it just three days ago that I had been holding Sofia and telling her not to cry? I mean, I was just a “supply guy” after all. When I told her that everything was going to be fine, I thought I was telling the truth. Now I was afraid I was going to die.
For months, I’d been hearing about how certain factions of Iraqi militants wanted me dead, along with every other American soldier. Now I knew that they were real, and yes, they did indeed want me dead. I felt a surge of anger. How could they just shoot rockets at us like that? They don’t even know us? They just want anyone over here dead? That doesn’t make any sense. Despite a year of training, my brain was not prepared to absorb the terrifying reality of it. Perhaps that’s why I still wake up drenched in sweat a few times each month after screaming myself awake. It’s been fouteen years, but those rockets sound just as real now as they did that night landing on the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport (BIAP).
I heard a loudspeaker blaring INCOMING INCOMING INCOMING. I scrambled into a concrete bunker where I saw the First Sergeant. “Why did the Chinooks leave without us?” I yelled over the noise of the loudspeaker.
“Because, dumbass, they need to keep the helicopters safe,” First Sergeant Jackson said, shaking his head. “Those things are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They don’t want them getting hit by rockets.”
“And what about us?” I asked.
“You ain’t worth a fucking hundred million dollars, Corporal Green.”
This wouldn’t be the last time during my year in Iraq that I realized my worth to the U.S. Army, and it wouldn’t be the last time I feared for my life.
Eventually the Chinooks came back to get us and we made it to Camp Taji, where we would reside for the next year. I would soon learn that rockets were not limited to BIAP. Anytime a dust storm kicked up and the helicopter noise from the flight line died down, you could count on the sound of rockets whooshing in. It was guaranteed. Rockets exploded within fifty yards of me several times during that year. That was something I never shared with Sofia during the precious thirty-minute conversations we were able to have on the phone three times a week, though I’m sure I complained to her about the indiscriminate nature of the rocket attacks. I kept thinking: if they just got to know me, they probably wouldn’t want to rocket me at all, right? At one point, a dud rocket landed right outside of one of our tents and sat there for several days until the explosive ordnance disposal team could get to it. They were busy, of course. There were a lot of rockets landing on Camp Taji. We never lost a helicopter to the rocket attacks in Iraq, but we did suffer much worse losses: we lost soldiers.
Back home, before the deployment, I would sometimes have to inventory a soldier’s room because they went home on leave and never came back. I didn’t mind the job that much. You get your paperwork, you write everything down, you box it all up and ship it home. No big deal. I never considered that I might one day have to inventory the belongings of a soldier who got killed at war. When a soldier dies in Iraq, the supply sergeant—which was my job, even though I was a corporal—is the one responsible for making sure that the deceased’s personal items are returned to the family. It was a somber task. Inventorying the belongings of suicides was even worse. The time that job fell to me, I remember staring at the bullet hole that was still in the ceiling of the shipping container where the soldier lived, known by the acronym CHU, or containerized housing unit. Sometimes when I lie awake in bed at night unable to sleep, the shadows on my ceiling look a lot like the spray of blood and brain that were on the ceiling of the CHU.
Soldiers do weird things to cope with the constant specter of death looming over them. In my case, I made a lot of inappropriate jokes and cussed a lot, and so did most of my friends. Somehow, it helped. I knew a few soldiers who found religion, and I knew others who grew more irritable, or more introspective. Energy drinks became a stand-in for alcohol. Some guys worked out like madmen to beat back the anxiety. I saw soldiers distract themselves lots of different ways, but I don’t remember anyone addressing the tension and fear head-on. I don’t remember ever talking to anyone about how close we had come to dying. I never told anyone the most clear and terrifying thing that was always on my mind: I did not want to die. Not even once. We just didn’t talk about it, as if mentioning our fear might magically summon the final, fatal rocket.
One of my therapists told me that the guys who went to World War II had it so much better than us when they came home. It sounds crazy to hear it like that, but I don’t know? Those guys came home on ships, often a month or more out at sea with the men that they had just spent a year or so with at war. They told stories and talked about things that had happened. Whether they meant to or not, they were decompressing. They were each others’ therapists. Of course, there were probably still plenty of dirty jokes and a ton of cussing, but at least they talked. That’s what the therapist said anyway. I don’t know if it’s true, but it sounds better than leaving a war zone and trying to eat with your family at Denny’s three days later.
When our year in Iraq was up in June of 2009, we flew from Taji to BIAP and then to Kuwait. Thankfully, we made the whole journey without any rocket attacks. We spent a few days in Kuwait, where we were able to call home, eat KFC and McDonald’s, watch movies and TV, and sleep. Of course, sleeping wasn’t easy for all of us, even in a place where we were safe. From Kuwait, we flew to Germany, and then back to Texas. We went from war to our family rooms in a matter of a few days. Soldier to dad and husband in seventy-two hours. Same uniform. Same boots. In fact, I still had blood on my boots from a Medevac helicopter I had been in only a few days before, on my last flight back from BIAP. A soldier died on that flight while I looked on, and the memory was as fresh as the blood. I had no time to process any of it. No buffer. It was impossible to turn off the heightened sense of alertness from people trying to murder me for a year. Even while being surrounded by everyone I love. It was all too much. Still is.
The nightmares didn’t start immediately after I got home. I had a lot of really good nights with my family. Then one night I was back on the runway at BIAP and the rockets were coming down. The Chinooks lurched up into the sky, leaving us all over again. I turned to tell Morris and my other soldiers to run for the bunkers, but they weren’t there. Instead, Sofia and my kids were there. I could see the rockets getting closer and closer to my family who were in the war zone with me. I started to scream. I woke to Sofia shaking me, still screaming softly through my closed mouth. It must have been the sound that woke her up. It was two years later when I finally saw a therapist. I had just gotten home from my second deployment, to Afghanistan. The therapist diagnosed me with PTSD and recommended that I be medically retired from the Army. I had served fourteen years in uniform and survived numerous near-death moments. But in the end, it was that first attack on the runway at BIAP that got me.
About five years after I retired from the Army, I ran into Pruner, the recruiter who got me my supply job when I was looking for money to get married. I told him I was retired at thirty-six years old. He was happy for me, almost as if he played a part in it, which, in a way, he did. Then I told him why I was able to retire. He didn’t really claim any responsibility for that. I don’t blame him. I asked for it. I was tired of ramen. There are no roaches in my house now. The only weed smoke I smell these days comes from me. It’s medical—I have a prescription for my PTSD. It helps keep the nightmares away most of the time. I still eat ramen sometimes just for the hell of it.
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Jason Green is a retired U.S. Army veteran with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia Journalism from the University of Texas at El Paso and is currently finishing his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Denver. Jason is the father of two boys, Tristan and Gavin, the greatest dog in the world, Nellie, and has been married to his one true love for fifteen years, Sofia. He has been published in Potato Soup Journal and has work forthcoming in Proud to Be: Writing By American Warriors, Vol. 11.
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