"Did you kill anybody?" The real story about what Iraq was like

"Did you kill anybody?" The Real Story About What Iraq Was Like

You are a soldier of the United States deployed to Iraq. On another typical day, you are standing beside a wall (not crouching, because everyone knows that speed and reaction times usually matter more than cover). For the moment, silence reigns. The enemy is out there, somewhere, but you aren’t sure exactly where. Suddenly, the telltale “clink – clink” of a grenade resounds into your ear. Heedless of the danger, you boldly locate the explosive and throw it back the way it came. You barely get back into cover in time to shield yourself from the fragments. As if that were the signal, tracer rounds begin flying from all sides. Coldly staring down your sights, you acquire and eliminate target after target. Occasionally, should a terrorist make the mistake of coming too close, you take out your combat knife and mercilessly slay your foe with a single stab (with your left hand, of course) without missing a beat. “Just another typical day at the office”, you think, as the glow of the television screen fades and the scores for the last round list you, yet again, at the top of the standings. Your buddies complain that you cheated, but you know the truth: You just get a lot of practice. Eventually, you go to sleep. Tomorrow you have to strap on your body armor and go to work, doing the actual job of a soldier in a war zone, which will probably consist of hours upon hours of uninterrupted boredom. You know this because you have seen the time between the action scenes in the movies, the time between the load screens of Call of Duty. You have actually been to war.

I had always planned on serving in the military. When I joined the Army National Guard in 2004, though, I intended it to be just a way to pay for college while I got my degree and became an Officer.  I picked the job of a Rifleman because it was the closest unit to where I was living at the time and it sounded cool. Three years later, during another uneventful training exercise during the summer, the unstoppable rumor mill finally spit out a tale of truth: We were going to Iraq.

My first deployment was in 2007-2008, during what is known as the “Surge”. I was a gunner whose convoys ran supplies, everything from bullets to ice cream, from al Taqaddum airbase to all the places you heard about on the news. We ran to Fallujah, Ramadi, Baghdad, and occasionally the Syrian border. The war was in full swing, and the intel briefings I received prior to every mission reflected that. “Since the last time you ran this route three days ago, there were IED’s here, here, and here. That one over there was an EFP, likely from Iran, killing two. The Chechnyan sniper in Fallujah took another shot at a passing convoy. This time it hit the vehicle, but missed the gunner. Oh, and somebody managed to toss a grenade into the hatch of a vehicle waiting on the bridge to Fallujah.” IED’s (Improvised Explosive Devices) come in many shapes, but by far the most dangerous were EFP’s (Explosively Formed Projectiles). At the time they were practically guaranteed to kill someone in the truck if they scored a hit.

As my buddies and I left the briefing, we joked about the basketball future that particular grenade throwing Hajji likely had, immediately began complaining about the lack of stir fry at the chow hall that night, and promptly forgot everything we had just heard. It was just another day in the life. We had been running convoys for months and had never been hit by anything we considered serious. A farmer shooting at an armored vehicle isn’t exactly threatening.  And at the end of the day, if something did happen, we were all far too pretty to die.

Returning home, one of the most awkward situations was when people asked about my war experience. I think they usually meant well, and were genuinely curious, but the things they asked about made no sense.

Them: “Was it hot?”

Me: “It was a desert, so during the day, yes. During the night, it was cold.” (What am I, the weather man?)

Them: “Did you kill anyone?”
            Me: “….” (What do you want to hear? Yeah, I killed people? No, I didn’t?)

Even worse were the few times I decided to be completely honest about the level of violence I had encountered and tried to explain how little action actually happens, even during a war. The reactions I got varied, but by far the worst was disappointed. It seemed that, because I wasn’t constantly raining bullets on my enemies, my deployment didn’t count, or wasn’t up to their standards. How could I explain to them the nuance, of the balance between boredom and terror?

Much of this difficulty stems from the weariness of civilians when it comes to the war they didn’t have to fight. This sense of pointlessness can be felt in Mehdi Hasan. Writing for the New Statesman, he says that the war in Afghanistan is lost. Drawing parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam, Mehdi says that our “ill-preparation” and lack of focus has doomed the war to failure. Written from a British perspective, Mehdi holds the body counts of this war as compared to others, such as the Falklands, and then asks the question “Why did they die?”

Another reason for the difficulty in communication comes from the soldiers themselves. A massive change in context, both socially and in terms of relationships, has been endured by soldiers both when they leave their home and when they return to it. Soldiers have trouble relating to friends and family because they feel their family has no perspective on what they’ve experienced (Wands, 2013). Internally, soldiers struggle with having to turn off the learned aggressive behavior that has helped them survive. They struggle with the sense of pride and self-reliance that sees getting help as a weakness. They also can be embittered, believing that those they fought for do not value their sacrifices (Wands, 2013).

Contrary to popular belief, not every soldier is riddled with PTSD upon returning home. Soldiers have been receiving more treatment than ever before, during, and after the deployment for combat related stress (Mulligan, 2010). Only 3.4% of those studied during the deployment showed signs of probable PTSD, which was similar to those who had not been deployed. Soldiers on deployment had better overall physical and mental health than police officers and doctors in emergency treatment areas (Mulligan, 2010).

Yet another misconception is that the stress that a soldier experiences arises solely from actively engaging in combat. A study was conducted that attempted to measure the activity in the amygdala, which plays a large part in fear responses in the body, and find out if combat stress caused the amygdala to be overactive even post-deployment. It was determined that actual exposure to “combat” was not a good indicator for PTSD. The constant perception of danger, however, was a good indicator. It was also important to note that this was true whether or not this fear was ever realized (Wingen, 2011).

The vast majority of experience in a combat zone is that of the mundane. You wake up, you eat breakfast. You go to work and do whatever job it is you are assigned. You wait. You wait for orders. You wait in line for chow. You wait for Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) to blow up an IED. You roll down the highway for miles and miles and miles in the dead of night, with nothing more interesting to look at than the featureless desert stretching as far as the eye can see.

Yet, during all of it, you are waiting for something else. You wait for that fateful bullet. You wait for the IED you didn’t see, the one man in a crowd of civilians who has a grenade in his pocket. You wait for the ambulance you are allowing to pass to suddenly turn into your truck and detonate, killing everyone within 100 meters. You wait and wait and wait for these things. Sometimes they never happen. Sometimes they do. Either way, you wait.

This is the fundamental misunderstanding between those who have been there, who have seen and tasted and smelled warfare. The uneducated believe that all of war is one scene of carnage after the next, always dodging bullets and performing thrilling heroics. They think that it is the constant din of explosions which make every returning soldier a bundle of unstable nerves, just waiting for the right moment to explode into violence. Yet, if this is not true, what is it about the experience of war that affects soldiers so strongly?

The common thread that one should find through the various researched papers is that it is not only the actuality of danger, but the threat of danger or the possibility of killing that affects the psyche of a soldier (Wingen, 2011). Sometimes, what changes you is the constant knowing that the next day, the next hour, the next minute could be your last. Sometimes it is the reality that around the next bend there could be a target that you will have to be ready to destroy, utterly and completely. These possibilities may never realize, but whether or not they do, their reality is not lessened at all.

If we as a nation take all of this knowledge to heart, we can change how we approach our veterans. They are not any more dangerous or unstable, on the whole, than any other group of public servants (Mulligan, 2010). The war they fought was not one from the movies, and we should not expect each one who returns to regale us with tales of thrilling heroics. Even so, the experience of being torn from everything they know and tossed into a situation where death is very real and apparent can affect them deeply. If we take this lesson to heart, we can finally understand and truly believe that these facts should not be a source of shame, that they are perfectly normal, and that they are likely not broken beyond repair.

Only when we really and truly believe these things that can we start treating our veterans the way they deserve to be treated: Not as mythical heroes disconnected from reality or as fragile dolls who will break at the slightest provocation, but as normal people who have seen and done extraordinary things.

As I finished this essay I realized that it included many sources from well respected, peer reviewed journals on psychology, but through all this research there was one thing that was lacking: Anecdotal evidence collected by an untrained Engineering student in an informal setting. I vowed that his oversight could not be allowed to continue and therefore conducted research of my own to confirm others’ findings. I tracked down a former Specialist in the US Army, whose name I have redacted but whom I shall refer to as “Sexy Beast”, who was a two deployment veteran of Iraq.

During the interview, I primarily focused on his first deployment to Iraq in 2007, because he stated that deployment was more dangerous in his estimation and affected him more deeply. I began by asking him what the most common questions were upon his return, and which ones he found the most annoying or offensive. “For both the most common and the most annoying,” Sexy Beast said, “it would be a tie between ‘Was it hot?’ and “Did you kill anybody?’” (Sexy Beast, 2013)

This was in line with my own experiences, as well as that of most other veterans I had talked to previously. I was curious, though, in how he responded to the question about killing. Most movies would have us believe the brooding veteran would regale the civilian with a dark tale, but the answer was far less dramatic: Make it a joke (Sexy Beast, 2013). When asked how civilians responded to that answer, he said it varied. “It varied from laughing with me, to simply not understanding. The worst reaction was being disgusted that I could joke about something like that.” Just as expected, it seemed that civilians had a very difficult time relating to those who had been to war. What was it about the experience that made the veteran so different?

“Having to be constantly on guard, always on alert…It made me angry, it made me bitter. I felt like I could never let my guard down, even when I came home.” The environment, the reality of danger that was always just a bit of bad luck away, stayed with him. Despite this, he said the moment that stood out the most was the time he sandbagged a Sergeant Major (blocking his door with a barricade of sandbags so it cannot be opened from the inside) while the SGM was inside, asleep.

I never get tired of sharing this picture.

In my own research of this topic I found confirmation of my own experiences and responses by those who had experienced similar things. Sexy Beast, as well as many others I have talked to, had been affected by their tours but none of them were particularly unstable or dangerous. They were simply different. 

Annotated Webliography: The real story of the war in Iraq.

After both of my tours in Iraq I was struck by just how little the average citizen understood about the conflict there. Despite being at war for over ten years, there appears to be next to no true understanding beyond what is seen on the television screen. My goal in writing this paper is to provide some insight on how deployments actually work and how they actually affect soldiers, in contrast to what the reader may have seen on the 6 o’clock news.

Hasan, M. (2011, July 4). If I die in a combat zone: the war in Afghanistan was lost long ago, says Mehdi Hasan, but we carry on fighting. New Statesman. Page 28. Retrieved September 10, 2013 from the JSRCC Library database.

This article provides a critical commentary of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from a British point of view. The author ties in casualty counts and a lack of objectives as reasons why the war is lost.

Sexy Beast, B. (2013, October 3). Interview about experiences during and after Iraq deployments. Conducted via Skype on October 3, 2013.

Mulligan, K, et. al. (2010, July 22). Mental health of UK military personnel while on deployment in Iraq. British Journal of Psychiatry. Volume 197, pages 405-410. Retrieved September 11, 2013 from the JSRCC Library database.

This article takes data gathered from self-reported questionnaires of deployed and non-deployed soldiers to find patterns of mental health issues. It also identifies conditions that tend to cause greater instances of PTSD.

Wands, L. (2013, July). “No one gets through it OK”: The health challenge of coming home from war. Advances in Nursing Science. Volume 36, pages 186-199. Retrieved September 10, 2013 from the JSRCC Library database.

This article explores the difficulty veterans have in reintegrating with civilian society. It discusses common issues that have been raised by combat veterans and how their experience on deployment affects them after they return home.

Wingen, GA, et. al. (2011, January). Perceived threat predicts the neural sequelae of combat stress. Molecular Psychiatry. Volume 16, pages 664-671. Retrieved September 10, 2013 from the JSRCC Library database.

This article identifies the perception of threat as a major cause of combat stress. It determines the distinction between the perception of threats and the actuality of threats as it relates to PTSD.