Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.
This is the final installment of the six-part series.
Ten years ago this week, on March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.
The war officially ended on Dec. 15, 2011 — eight years, eight months, three weeks and four days later — when the last American forces withdrew. In the days between, hundreds of thousands of lives were altered irrevocably. Home Fires asked 16 veterans who served in Iraq to reflect on how their lives changed on the two dates bracketing the war. Their accounts will be published in Home Fires on consecutive days this week.
Listen
By Jake Siegel
I was in college, Army R.O.T.C., when the war in Iraq began. I watched the invasion on TV in my friend Michael's apartment. After the bombing started, the arguments against the war that we'd been sounding out for months seemed beside the point. If I wasn't entirely convinced by the administration's claims, I no longer had to be.
The war was writing itself, and the terms had changed from "for / against" to "how" and "for what" and "at what cost." I believed that freedom was a universal right and that sometimes it had to be won by force, but the war didn't seem to need those ideas. It needed men, like me.
I could talk calmly to Michael about Iraq, Islamism, and imperial power, all the things that sent me into a frenzy when other people brought them up. Michael had grown up in Tennessee, the son of ministers in The Church of Christ. He went to college to study literature but switched to physics in his first month — his religious belief was already gone by then.
I came from argumentative Brooklyn Jews. My old friends couldn't understand how a guy like me, who listened to The Ramones and read Artaud, could get suckered in by the the war machine. But Michael and I understood each other. We shared the agnostic's need for moral purpose and an ordering vision of justice. We disagreed about Iraq, but took each other in good faith.
The war in Iraq had just officially ended when I saw Michael for the first time since college. He'd joined the Peace Corps after graduating and spent a year in South Africa. He was one of the few non-veteran friends that I talked to about my time in Iraq.
I told him about what I'd seen and how little it fit the available political frameworks. The ideas I'd taken overseas had been naïve, aloof from the messy business of the world. Michael had been chastened by his experience, too, his beliefs challenged by his time in the Peace Corps.
The responsibility I had felt when the war began, to claim an active part in the exercise of American power, was the same for Michael. His principles led him to different ends but he too had followed them out onto the line on the far side of empire.
When he talked I listened.
JAKE SIEGEL serves in the New York Army National Guard. He was deployed to Iraq in 2006-7 and to Afghanistan in 2011-12. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Daily Beast, New York Press, and elsewhere. He is a contributor to "Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War."
'War Is Over'
By Perry O'Brien
It's the eve of the invasion of Iraq and I'm working the night shift at a clinic in Kandahar. One of our lieutenants is sitting on a desk with his acoustic guitar, quietly plucking the chords of a Ben Harper song. Over his head there's a rash of bullet holes; chalky craters in the turquoise-painted wall. The clinic is quiet except for the guitar and the Afghan policeman with an amputated foot, who wakes up every few minutes and croons "Allaaah." We joke that maybe he's trying to sing along, but of course he's only crying out in pain.
Every few hours I go outside to smoke. Inside we have bright electric lights, but outside is an absolute darkness of mountains and desert. I've only been in-country for three months, but already it feels like there's no more war for us to win. Or maybe we're losing to ourselves.
At the clinic we've treated more self-inflicted gunshot wounds than combat injuries. Some are accidents. Now it seems like Iraq is going to be a real war. The Armed Forces Network keeps running the same footage: tanks forming up in Kuwait, green flashes of night-vision bombings, the shot of Saddam on a balcony, firing a rifle with one hand. Guys in my unit are lobbying to transfer from Afghanistan so they can join the invasion.
I go the other way. In 2004, a year after coming home from Afghanistan, I submit my paperwork to become a conscientious objector. Then two years later, honorably discharged and going to college, I return from a protest installation — a field of empty boots, an overflowing pile of children's slippers — and get the voice mail telling me that a sergeant from my unit has been killed by an I.E.D. in Iraq. At the funeral, I'm reunited with my old fellow medics. Half of them are out like me, uneasy in their civilian clothes. The rest are still in uniform, soon to be deployed for their second, third, fourth tours of combat.
Then, in December 2011, the war ends.
It ends in magazine stands, in bodegas. It ends discarded in puddles of mud and melted snow on the rattling floor of the subway. The war is over, says the news, but there is no mention of Kandahar or the soldiers who are still shooting themselves. The war is over, even this week, as I write, and car bombs tear through Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad. The war is over.
Who can disagree?
PERRY O'BRIEN served in Afghanistan in 2003 as a medic with the 82nd Airborne Division. He was discharged as a conscientious objector. He is an M.F.A. candidate in fiction at New York University, a co-author of "After Gandhi: One Hundred Years of Nonviolent Resistance" and a contributor to "Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War."
Read the entire series.
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