Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.
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, including the three presented here, will be published in Home Fires over the next five days.
"A War, Before and After," was initiated and led by Roy Scranton — an Iraq veteran, writer and co-editor of "Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War," an anthology of fiction by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans — who contacted and organized the contributors to this series.
What Did You Do?
By Eric Fair
"Imagine what you'd be doing right now if you were still in the Army." This is what a fellow police officer says to me in Bethlehem, Pa., as we watch the start of the Iraq war on CNN. I'm in the records room, scanning decades of old police reports onto a computer. The scanner clicks and whines as a beam of light passes over each page. A heart murmur has ended my career on the streets. I can no longer be a police officer. I can no longer return to the Army. I sit in the records room and wonder what I'd be doing in Iraq if things had been different.
A few weeks later a detective enters the records room and says, "I'm looking for the former Army linguist who speaks Arabic." He takes me to a Syrian restaurant in Allentown. The owner's eldest son skipped bail on assault charges. The owner's daughter serves us tea. Her English is poor. I interview her in Arabic. The detective says: "You're good at this. You should be doing this in Iraq."
About a year later, I am.
In Iraq I conduct interviews in Arabic. The Army calls them interrogations. I work as a contractor. The company didn't require a medical examination. They never spoke to my supervisors at the police department. They know nothing about my heart murmur. I conduct these interrogations in a place unfamiliar to most Americans. That will change. Soon everyone will know about what we are doing at Abu Ghraib.
The war in Iraq ends. I watch the last vehicles cross the Kuwaiti border from a hospital bed in Philadelphia. The heart murmur has worsened. The cardiologist calls it advanced heart failure. A social worker talks to me about the emotional strain of pursuing a heart transplant. A nutritionist talks about a low-salt diet and the dangers of alcohol. A nurse asks about Iraq. She says: "I heard you were over there. What did you do?"
ERIC FAIR served in the United States Army from 1995 to 2000, and was a private contractor in Iraq in 2004-5.
Let It Start
By Kayla Williams
Three honks from a Humvee in the distance. "Gas, gas, gas!" A soldier, wearing a mask, arms extended straight out from his sides, bending them at his elbows in to his head three times.
I feel an immediate stomach-tightening nervousness, stop breathing, rip my mask out of the carrier strapped to my hip, slap it to my face, pull the straps tight and check the seal before inhaling again. Is it chemical weapons? Is it for real? Soon after, the all-clear is given. After the fourth time, I don't bother taking off my mask before lying down on a cot by our team's Humvee, hoping to get a little sleep.
We don't know when our part of the war will kick off. It is March 20, 2003, "shock and awe" has begun, and our trip over the berm separating Kuwait from Iraq could start any time. My team is in the second vehicle of the Fourth Ground Assault Convoy of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault).
Just let it start, I think. Please let it start.
We've been waiting in the desert in Kuwait for weeks, mind-numbingly bored, uncomfortable and anxious. Better to invade Iraq than sit here. Better to just get it over with than to keep wondering if I'm going to get killed.
Dec. 15, 2011. The news is full of the official end, triggering powerful memories of my time in Iraq. As my two-year-old son bends down to kiss his giggling infant sister, a thought intrudes: "If I die, I'll never see them again." I clutch my children to me as if I can preserve this moment forever.
During the war, we made macabre jokes about death, forcing the fear down under a veneer of toughness. As a woman, I felt extra pressure to prove I was as strong as the guys; admitting weakness was unthinkable.
Those habits stuck — and sustained me in the following years as my husband, who suffered a penetrating traumatic brain injury in the war and developed severe post-traumatic stress disorder, gradually recovered. It took all my will to keep us going; my love for him was weighted by responsibility and shaded by worry that we would never be healthy enough to start a family. I couldn't even allow myself the luxury of fearing death.
Almost a decade later, I'm finally strong enough to feel afraid again — and hopeful enough to forge ahead anyway.
KAYLA WILLIAMS was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and 2004 as a sergeant and Arabic linguist in a military intelligence company of the 101st Airborne Division. She is the author of "Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army."
Pledge
By Ted Janis
As the first kinetic strikes were being delivered in Baghdad on Wednesday, March 19, 9:30 p.m. E.S.T., I was mortified. I was experiencing a new level of stress, and quickly discovering the world was not as rosy as my suburban upbringing had led me to believe. Blindfolded in a dank, smoky room, I was being interrogated on my actions, and my failures, of the previous week.
Our pledge marshals were very disappointed. My pledge class had yet again failed to memorize the creed of our esteemed fraternity. It was unacceptable, we were told. Generations before us had learned this simple lesson, why couldn't we? The 13 of us returned to our respective dorms across the country club of a campus that is Wake Forest University, humbled and dispirited. Ignoring our academic studies, including my homework for Army ROTC, and the nightly news, with its breaking story from half a world away, we re-dedicated ourselves to memorizing the three-paragraph passage, the knowledge of which would dictate how much longer we had to suffer the indignities and terror of pledging a Southern fraternity. The end was in sight, but the final task seemed impossible.
In December of 2011, I found myself back in school. I was at Columbia University, with New York City as my campus. I was navigating the swirling eddies of ideas and people that teemed at the roots of this concrete forest, my mind racing from the never-ending deluge of headlines and information, trying to decipher the future of the world.
That last month of the war, for a course entitled "Peace Operations in Fragile States," I handed in a 20-page paper on my experience as an infantry lieutenant conducting counter-insurgency in Iraq. I had spent the semester rehashing old events, thumbing through sweat-stained notebooks, deciphering inkblots bleached by the desert sun. I tried to make sense of the unintended consequences of everyday decisions, and replayed the smallest details again and again. The warm orange soda during daylong sheikh meetings. The telltale smoke rising from a nearby home that meant Mohammad was now the "late Colonel Mohammed, may he Rest in Peace." The collection of cement blocks and plastic pipes by the Euphrates that was the never-completed water filtration project. The pages teemed with lessons learned the hard way. I was humbled and dispirited. My pledge marshals would have approved.
TED JANIS was an infantry officer in the United States Army from 2006 to 2011, and was deployed twice to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan. He is a student at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and is a contributor to "Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War."
NEXT: "A War, Before and After, Part 2."
A version of this article appeared in print on 03/17/2013, on page SR5 of the National edition with the headline: A War, Before and After.
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