Things From War That Stick With You, Part 1

Being at the spearhead of the invasion of Iraq carried an odd feeling. Rather, a mixture of them. Excitement and confusion being primary. Forget about trying to look backward and determine how exactly you end up in a certain place in time; there’s no way to pick out the details out of the whirlwind of events surrounding something like that.

For fourteen days, I rode in the belly of a tank, behind the fire control system for a 120 millimeter cannon and a 7.62 millimeter machine gun. I saw the country only through a small viewer that I could switch from daytime to thermal using a little lever that opened one shutter and closed another. When we would stop for fuel, I would climb out to get rid of waste, stretch my legs, fill up my canteen, grab an MRE, and snap a picture or two with my Kodak disposables. I would always marvel at how beautiful southern Iraq is, at least along the river. Lots of trees. It was cloudy and it rained a little. Breezy and cool, much like right before a Florida afternoon thunderstorm.

The first couple of days were just moving really quickly. Shock and awe, is how it was being peddled to the plebeians enjoying the war live on television back home. Funny, that. Americans sitting at home, eating a bountiful meal, watching the war from every conceivable angle and with total news coverage. Meanwhile, in the country being invaded, the same type of family units, huddled around an oil lantern in a shelter somewhere, with no electricity, no DirecTV, eating canned goods and drinking bottled water, while praying a missile doesn’t hit their neighborhood. Americans witnessing some such ministry being destroyed by cluster bombs, and an Iraqi man employed as a low-level political functionary who won’t be going to work in the morning anymore.

Digressing, we moved quickly, sticking to the west of the Euphrates. Trees, grass, agriculture to our right, open desert to our left. The divide between the two is not gradual. Without much in the way of prelude, we started in on our first real combat action. We climbed a big hill; an escarpment, they called it (the first time I had ever heard the term; now I use it often in my job as a terrain analyst). It was at the top of it, that I took a human life for the first time.