Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.
This is the fifth part of a 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.
Another Game
By Josiah White
March 20th, 2003: Every winter the drama department puts on a musical, but I don't sing. Every spring is the play, alternating between drama and comedy. This year it's "The Crucible." I tried out and got the part of Reverend Parris, who has more lines than my last role in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again." I've been watching the movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis. In two months I'll be graduating, and with any luck making my way to join my friend in Burbank where we'll begin our film careers.
Another war started today, not far from the last one. I don't care much for it. Like many Americans, I posted patriotic rants on Internet message boards after 9/11, but my interest in the "War on Terror" has waned and my only knowledge about them comes from "Saturday Night Live." My brother wants to join the Marines, but dyslexia keeps him out. Only jocks join the military anyway, not sensitive artistic types like me.
December 15th, 2011: Our Secret Santa's gift came at the perfect time, I need to cool down from a tough quarter at school and our botched winter trip to New Zealand, undone by a visa problem. A big box containing a big board game. My wife and I have already played it five times today. Board games seem anachronistic in this age: these entertainment devices requires no power, nor come in clamshell packaging. "Carcassonne" transports us to a medieval French city, where we construct the countryside tile by tile. I huddle over the game and concentrate deeply.
No blinding blue light, no distracting Internet, no infuriating news. Most importantly: no war. "All troops successfully withdrawn from Iraq," they say.
When I had signed up I thought the war would be over before I'd deploy, but my training was swift and within the year I found myself in Iraq. A suicide bomber assured I would only go once. The war went on for another five years. Today my war is declared over. But Afghanistan—the first, the longest, the seemingly endless one—will keep taking my Marines, my friends, my brothers-in-arms who have already given so much.
I shouldn't be bothered. War should not be my life. I've been out for three years, earning a degree in astrophysics. My life is rich in love, knowledge, and experience. But the calming elegance of little cardboard squares cannot erase the scar of violence etched in my being. Nothing in six years has taken me back to the blissful apathy of youth. Maybe one more game.
JOSIAH WHITE served in Iraq in 2006 as a rifleman with the First Battalion, Seventh Marine Corps Regiment. After being wounded by a suicide bomber, he medically retired in August, 2008 and earned a degree in astrophysics from the University of California, San Diego. He lives in San Diego with his wife Yohanna.
Given Circumstances
By Maurice Decaul
With every breath, the fire in my lungs intensified. I looked up and noticed the Marines ahead get smaller until they disappeared. A stitch developed on my right side. I tried breathing in on the left stride to clear the stitch to no avail.
Complete breathlessness. Shin splints and an ankle sprain.
Drill instructors impress upon recruits that pain is weakness leaving the body. Another adage goes: when you feel like you've given 100 percent you haven't; there is still another 40 percent to mine if you dig deep enough.
It was March 2003. I had left the Marine Corps eight months earlier and gotten fat. I had gained 20 pounds and had a B.M.I. of 20 percent. I had joined the Marine Reserves to prove to myself that I was still a warrior. I joined because being a Marine was all I knew.
Now I was failing, falling out of the company run on the first day of the war. Thoughts of Rangers in Mogadishu running for miles in full combat load to get back to base kept me moving. Knowing I would be leading Marines over in Iraq kept me moving.
Each Carolina sunrise brought another formation run, and after a few days and a few formation runs I had relearned to catch my second wind and I am grateful I did.
None of us knew we would be in Nasiriyah two weeks after the war began.
I served in Iraq in the first five chaotic months of the war. Obviously I was lucky. I survived. But what if I hadn't?
In our family's ancestral village, Biabou, St.Vincent and the Grenadines, custom holds that a father has the right to avenge his child's death. Though we'd moved from there to Brooklyn when I was a small child, these customs, our tribe's ways of achieving justice, stayed with us. If I'd died in Iraq my father would have been denied this right. Until he told this to me, the night the war ended, I had no idea the pressure he must have been under while I was overseas.
The summer afternoon in 2003 when I walked back into our home , lean, muscled and temperamental, he hadn't yet found reason to mention village justice.
And I would not have understood anyway. I would have been dismissive. I might have said: "The deployment felt like training on steroids. Marines are the best shock troops. You don't need to worry about me."
Something arrogant. Something dumb. Something rebellious. Something unexceptionally juvenile.
The night the news reported the war's end, I sat with my father in the front room of our home listening to the Flatbush traffic. We had never done this. Sat quietly like this. My little girl, sleepy, began fidgeting to be put down.
And my father chuckled, started telling me about himself when I was her age.
MAURICE DECAUL served in Iraq in 2003. He is a poet, librettist and essayist, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Sierra Magazine, Leatherneck and elsewhere. He recently appeared as a performer in the theatrical show "Holding it Down: The Veterans Dreams Project," in New York and Washington.
Read the previous published articles in this series.
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