FSB Author Article
Why They
Talked, and What They Want
By Bill
Murphy Jr.,
Author of In A Time of War
A great gulf
exists between American military and civilian societies. But
paradoxically, it's can be hard to tell young veterans of our wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan from their peers who haven't served. As I wrote
a book about West Point recently, I would visit with vets who had
left the Army and were attending some of America's most prestigious
universities. I was struck that the veterans were often the ones
walking around campus with the longest hair, and the most stylish
clothes. Spot a guy with a high-and-tight haircut and a wardrobe
looking straight out of the AAFES at Fort Bragg -- odds are he's a
wannabe who reads too many Tom Clancy novels and never served a day
in the military.
But soldiers and veterans want to be noticed.
That's not to say they want to be singled out, but I found over and
over as I wrote my book that they want civilians to pay attention to
their collective service. Soldiers talked with me for thousands of
hours, and even gave me access to their diaries, their letters, the
"sent mail" folders of their yahoo and gmail accounts. They
know their stories are worth telling. And what's more, they recognize
that the rest of us need to know. We need to understand.
I did
more than six hundred interviews for In a Time of War. I recorded
most of them, and paid people to write transcripts. Here's a sample
of what I heard:
Joe DaSilva was assigned to lead a
platoon of soldiers in Kuwait just days before the March 2003
invasion of Iraq.
"I pulled everyone in that night, and I
told them, look . . . I'm not going to lie. I don't know what awaits
us on the other side of that berm. I have no idea but I'll tell you
this . . . [I]f I have to give my life for any of you I would do that
in a heartbeat . . .
"And I had soldiers after that come
up to me and telling me that they don't know why but just hearing
that from their lieutenant made them feel better. I knew they weren't
B.S.-ing me because months down the road we would talk about how they
felt when I took over . . . They were brutal. They were talking
about tying [me] up in the back of a humvee. . .
Some of the other platoons were joking with them, saying, You guys
are going to die! You guys are going to die!"
Drew
Sloan was nearly killed when his humvee was hit with a
rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan. He turned down a medical
discharge, endured a year of surgeries, and recovered to go to Iraq.
When an IED went off right in front of his humvee, he was surprised
by his own reaction. He smiled broadly and reached out to bump fists
with a sergeant in the front seat.
"Having a bomb go off
close by to you can't help but remind you about your own mortality,"
he explained later. "And being reminded of that makes you feel
really alive."
Eric Huss served an intense Iraq tour,
taking over for a lieutenant who had been killed in action. I
interviewed Eric and his wife, Julie, in a brew pub in Denver, just
after he got off active duty.
"I didn't let him drive for
a while when I was in the car," Julie explained. "And his
short term memory was non-existent."
"I talked to a
lot of different guys," Eric said. "It's about a year
before your short term memory comes back."
"I
haven't heard that," I replied.
"I've been trying
to, like, psychoanalyze it, and here's what some friends and I have
come up with. You're doing a job. It's kind of a crappy job.
You go through a lot of stress on many different levels.
Regardless of the stress you face you still have to get up the next
day and do the same missions over and over again, whether it be a
different patrol, a different IED, a different guard shift --
whatever the case may be. Regardless of who shot at you the day
before, whether you got mortared the day before, you know, etc., etc.
And as a defense mechanism in order to help you cope, we figure that
over time you start to basically, automatically, kind of forget a lot
of what just recently happened to you, so you can kind of cope and
live in the present. . . [W]hatever happened to
you that day or the day before, you still have to continue on that
mission regardless. As a result, you act, react, and then dismiss it
and try not to dwell on it. Because otherwise it'd be so hard to get
out of bed the next day and do the same damn thing."
War
is a horrible thing, and not all of the real-life characters in my
book survived Iraq. I interviewed Jen Bryant, the widow of Lieutenant
Todd Bryant, about the day she learned his fate.
"I was
in my classroom waiting for all my students to come back up from
lunch, and the assistant principal came in and said to me there's
somebody in the office. We need you in the office. My whole chest
caught. . . And so I walk in the office and for
a split second I was relieved because I didn't see any officers. And
I thought it's okay. And I just looked around for someone to tell me
what was going on. And one of my students was in there, and she's
like, 'Oh, they're in there,' pointing to the principal's office in
back. . . I saw my principal standing there, and
I just looked to my right, and there's four or five officers
standing, wearing their class As. And one of them was one of the
generals at Fort Riley.
"I just hit my knees and I
started saying, No, no, no. Don't tell me. Don't tell me. And I
remember General Kearney, like, kneeling down beside me. And he took
my hand. He just kept holding my hand. And I screamed. I kept saying,
No! No! No!"
About one and a half million
Americans have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. They want us to
notice them. It's disturbing, to say the least, to come home from a
war only to find that nobody notices anymore. The opposite of love
isn't hate; it's apathy.
We owe these veterans quite a bit.
But before all else, we owe them the duty to pay attention. And to
listen.
©2008 Bill Murphy
Jr.
Author Bio
Bill
Murphy Jr. is the author of In
a Time of War: The Proud & Perilous Journey of West Point's Class
of 2002. He worked as Bob Woodward's
research assistant on the bestselling State of
Denial. A lawyer and former Army Reserve
officer, he lives in Washington, DC. Please check out his
website at www.inatimeofwar.com
and http://billmurphyjr.wordpress.com/.