Until Tuesday (7 page)

I wasn’t the only one in trouble. When we learned the Third Cavalry was on short rotation stateside and we were going back to Iraq in the spring, soldiers scattered. I mean, they just disappeared. They left the Army, or they transferred to other units, anywhere they could find a place. A few were cowards or shirkers, but most realized they weren’t in any condition to go back. There was no counseling in those days, no attempt to deal with the psychic wounds of war, and my troop was unraveling: fighting, drinking, splitting with wives and girlfriends, arguing about everything and nothing at all. There was a burst of thrill seeking—driving fast, jumping out of airplanes, rampant sex—anything to restart the adrenaline pumping. Pfc. Tyson Carter, one of my workhorses from Al-Waleed, lost a leg in a motorcycle accident. Another soldier was arrested in Colorado Springs; I drove there in the middle of the night to prevent him from being jailed. Being a leader of men in the Army is an honor, but also a responsibility. There’s no nine-to-five, home to the family and forget about the office, like the civilian world. My life was intertwined with my men, and their off time was my responsibility too. We joked about bad dreams, about drinking too much, about how none of us could drive under a highway overpass without switching lanes, even in traffic, because we didn’t want to give the bomber on the bridge an easy target. That’s not normal, to worry about bombers in Colorado Springs. A lot of guys realized that, and they wanted me, as their superior officer, to help them. I never turned them down, no matter how late at night or how much I wanted to drink myself to sleep.

I am an American soldier. I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.

I went to counseling, but I never mentioned the chronic pain, stress, or swirling anxiety that had settled over my life. Instead, I talked about my problems sleeping and my wife. I quit after two sessions, which was all the Army provided without authorization. I wasn’t cured. I hadn’t even figured out I was sick. But authorization for more sessions meant explaining myself to my troop commander, and back then that would have jeopardized my career.

I am an American soldier. I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough.

In late July, my physical problems started to outrun me. First, I pulled an abdominal muscle. A few weeks later, I pulled my hamstring. I had been unconsciously compensating for my cracked vertebrae for six months, and my body hit the wall. I stayed out of PT (physical training) with my platoon, rehabilitating myself in the swimming pool every morning, but my recovery was slow and my mind a jumble of contradictory thoughts. I was proud of my service. I had a bright future. I believed in Operation Iraqi Freedom and, especially, in the Iraqis themselves.

I am an American soldier. I am an expert and I am a professional.

But at the same time, I was coming unmoored, my mind dwelling on the hand-to-hand struggle for my life, the Syrian ambush, the sandstorms, the riots, and Ali, Emad, and Maher, the men left behind.

I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.

The wife of one of my best men from Al-Waleed had become pregnant during his midtour leave. The fetus was fatally deformed, but Tricare, the Army’s health service, doesn’t provide abortions under any circumstances, and she had no choice but to carry the child to term
. I will never accept defeat.
Little Layla was born without a nose and several internal organs. Her parents had no financial resources on a soldier’s pay to provide her comfort. It was heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking, to hold baby Little Layla in my hands.
I will never quit.
Her life was pain, and it tore her parents apart.
I will never quit.
She lived eight weeks, and the difficulty of her life, and the inhumanity of forcing that existence not only on her but her parents too—
I will never leave a fallen comrade
—fueled my downward drive.

I was angry with the Army. Not on the surface, but underneath, in the depth of my mind. Why did Layla and her parents have to endure that pain, especially after everything they had already endured? Why were they forcing our regiment back to Iraq just ten months after our return? Why weren’t they helping us cope with our pain? We were badly banged up. We were undermanned and underequipped. The Army didn’t care. They were churning us through. They cared more about getting us back to Iraq and making the numbers than they did about our health and survival.

It was the summer of 2004. Victory was slipping away. Everyone could see that, but the media kept pounding the message: “The generals say there are enough men. The generals say there is enough equipment. The generals say everything is going well.” It was a lie. The soldiers on the line knew it because we were the ones suffering. We were the ones who endured days of enemy mortar fire when we arrived in Iraq without weapons or ammunition, as my element of eighty troopers had in Balad in 2003; we were the ones going back in 2005 without adequate recovery time or armor for our Humvees. And that is the ultimate betrayal: when the commanding officers care more about the media and the bosses than about their soldiers on the ground.

In August, I informed my unit I was leaving the Third Armored Cav. I was an American soldier, a guardian of freedom, an expert, a professional, but I was physically and mentally worn out. I was pursued by pulled muscles and black thoughts, and I knew I could never get the treatment I needed in the Army. Not if I wanted to rise above my current rank, anyway. I wanted to be that junior officer with unlimited potential, I wanted to be that warrior who had barked the Soldier’s Creed only two months before, but I couldn’t run. I could barely stand the headaches. And I was drinking, in private and alone, almost every day. In short, I could no longer exceed the standard, something I had always pushed myself to do, so it was time for me to go.

One month later, in September 2004, I signed on for a second tour.
I am
, after all,
an American soldier
.

CHAPTER 6

ANYTHING
BUT STABLE

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have
a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful,
or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother.
Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

—E
RNEST
H
EMINGWAY
,
T
HE
O
LD
M
AN AND THE
S
EA
*

It’s times like this that I thank God for Tuesday. The
last two chapters take me back to difficult times, to memories so strong they blot out my present life. Instead of reading or writing in the middle of my bed, for the last half hour I have been at Al-Waleed with the knife at my neck, or on a helicopter waking up to the sight of flight medics in night-vision goggles. I have felt the tension of sitting on my bed near Fort Carson in the summer of 2004 and acknowledging for the first time that something was seriously wrong, and I’ve been holding my breath against the long fall of the next three years.

And then . . . Tuesday sticks his chin over the edge of the bed. He has come to me from across the room, where he likes to lounge on the cool bathroom tiles. He has plopped his head beside me and stared at me so intently and lovingly that, even in my agitated state, I can’t help but notice him. He was monitoring my breathing, scrutinizing my body language. He knew I was anxious, and he came to pull me back to the present.

When I see that look—or even better, when he climbs all the way up on the bed and puts his chin across my keyboard—I know it’s Tuesday time. I never argue. Tuesday knows what I need more than I do, and besides, I love playing with him. When he interrupts my work, I know it’s not because he’s bored or lonely, but because I need him. So I’ll slip on his vest, the one that announces he is a working dog, and go out with him for a walk. Other times, I’ll toss the tennis ball. My Manhattan apartment is a tiny room, too small for an eighty-pound dog to chase anything, so we usually go into the narrow hallway and bounce balls off the wall.

Right now, though, it’s the middle of the night and neither option is available. So I close down the document and give Tuesday what he really loves: YouTube. He loves dog videos: dogs popping balloons, dogs riding skateboards, and best of all dogs running around with each other having a good time. He follows the action with his head, twitching in crazy patterns and letting out a soft bark for the good stuff. He’s not as crazy about cats or hamsters, but frenetic squirrels make him lurch to attention and horses put him in an excited mood. He likes to put his head down, a boozy smile on his face, and watch them run.

Tonight, I click a bookmarked favorite, then say, “Jump on, Tuesday,” to tell him to climb on the bed and watch. He’s big enough to lie side by side, or I can prop myself on his belly and drift off, using his body as a pillow. This time, I sit and watch him stare at the screen, aware that I might write this moment into the book because it’s so perfectly emblematic of what Tuesday does for me. As if reading my thoughts, Tuesday turns to look at me, a twinkle of love and thanks in his eyes, then turns back to the screen.

“No . . . thank
you
,” I say, giving him a rough shake. “Thank you, Tuesday, for being my boy.” He rolls over slightly, allowing me to pet his belly, but he doesn’t take his eyes from the two dogs who are jumping back and forth over each other in front of a glass sliding door. I laugh, give him another shake, then walk over to refill his water and grab a glass for myself. In the cabinet is my knife. I carried a bigger one in Iraq, never putting it down after the assault at Al-Waleed. I carried this one, with a blade one millimeter shorter than three inches, the average legal limit, for three years after returning from my second tour. I put it down for the first time a few months after adopting Tuesday. It reminds me how much difference he’s made in my life.

It’s also a reminder of why I went back to Iraq for a second tour. Even now, I don’t question that decision. I had to do it. Al-Anbar Province was in revolt. Abu Ghraib had hit the national news. Iraq was disintegrating and my friends, both American and Iraqi, were in danger. We had shaken hands with the Iraqis, eaten with them, fought and died with them. I couldn’t have lived with walking away at that point; I would have felt empty and disloyal for the rest of my life.

I wouldn’t have gone back, though, if I hadn’t believed in success—not that it was inevitable, or even probable, but that it was possible. One man made me believe: Col. H. R. McMaster, the new regimental commander of the Third Armored Cavalry. He didn’t try to convince me to stay; instead, he sat down with me and showed me what I could accomplish. Col. McMaster rarely gave orders, I soon found out; instead, he inspired you to lead. He made me believe I could make a difference. In short, he restored my faith. Then he offered me a position on his regimental staff as Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) liaison officer. How could I refuse?

We deployed in March 2005 to south Baghdad, part of the so-called Triangle of Death, and it was everything you’d expect from a war zone: broken and abandoned buildings, shattered glass, charred rubble swept into piles; snipers, bombers, militiamen, spies, and men I had no idea whether to shoot, arrest, or congratulate for their fortitude. We drove through the street, scanning the buildings, and it was like Mogadishu or Saigon or Berlin or any of the other fractured places Americans had held in their grasp over the last sixty years.

As the liaison officer, my responsibility was to embed with and advise Iraqi units in the area. Even in those surroundings, I was astounded by the Iraqi Army’s disarray. There were hundreds of men on the roster, and therefore the American payroll, who never showed up and might never have existed. Most of the troops had insufficient weaponry, and those with decent weapons often lacked ammunition, even though the level of violence was extraordinarily high. A day never passed without an attack, and often it was three or four incidents per patrol. Car bombs. IEDs. Snipers and armed gangs. Suicide attacks on living quarters, traffic checkpoints, and payroll lines, threats against wives and children, firefights in crowded streets. The Iraqi Fourth Brigade had been losing men for more than a year, and if they ever had any discipline, it had long since broken down. Men were deserting en masse. Others had the thousand-yard stare of the shell-shocked; still others looked like they wanted to hunt down every suspected “insurgent”—in this case, Sunnis—and beat them to death with their bare hands.

It was an impossible situation, especially for a group of poorly trained men fighting not for their screwed-up government but mainly for pay. South Baghdad was a major ethnic and sectarian fault line, with a population split almost evenly between Sunni and Shia, but the local Iraqi Army was almost entirely Shia and it was impossible, after a while, to determine who was in the right. One day, there was a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque, complete with mothers screaming, bloody children, and innocent vendors dead in the street. Two days later, we raided a different Shiite mosque and found a cache of weapons large enough to arm a battalion. In a back room, we found photographs of Sunni men being tortured, beheaded, and bound in chairs with their eyes burned out.

I was leading a patrol in downtown Mahmudiyah, accompanied by
New York Times
reporter Sabrina Tavernise, when I received word over the radio that a major clearing operation by the Iraqi Army was degenerating into sectarian aggression, with soldiers grabbing Sunni men out of buildings and beating them in the streets. I managed to keep those facts from the reporter, telling her instead when she asked: “These Iraqi troops aren’t ready for combat operations—they shouldn’t even be out here.”

When that quote made the front pages of the
New York Times
, the commander of the 2-70th Armor Battalion demanded to speak with me. “We don’t need that kind of publicity,” he told me. “Keep it positive from now on.” I wasn’t sure what to think. I had asked Colonel McMaster for two extra months in south Baghdad to create a basic level of organization for the Iraqi soldiers and the next American advisers. I had believed in the American mission, even after discovering the depths of the problems in our “allied” Iraqi Army. But by the day of the street beatings, it was clear that there was civil war in south Baghdad. The Iraqi government, through the Iraqi Army, was engaged in a campaign of tribal and sectarian cleansing against the Sunnis, and the U.S. Army was aiding and abetting that effort. Didn’t the commanders know that? Or did they simply not care about combat readiness and morality among the Iraqis as long as the promised trained troop numbers were met? What, pray tell, did they want me to say?

By the time I joined the rest of Colonel McMaster’s regimental staff in Nineveh Province, northwest of Baghdad, I was drained, mentally and physically. The regiment was taking significant casualties, and I could no longer understand what those men were fighting and dying for. Were we helping the Iraqis? Were we making the world more secure? Were we saving lives over the long term—the ultimate job of an army, not the killing soft-hearted liberals suppose? Violence was surging. American troops had never been held in lower esteem by the local population. The ultimate goals of the war had never been less clear. And yet the message from the top was the same: We have the right strategy. We have enough men. We’re winning this war.

As the Third Armored Cavalry’s lead operations officer for our border region, I was high enough up, despite my relatively low rank, to travel to the Red Zone (the Iraqi government area next to the Green Zone) to participate in high-level meetings with General Petraeus’s key staff, as well as briefings with General Abizaid in Mosul and General Casey in Tal Afar. After returning home, in April 2006, I accompanied Colonel McMaster to the Pentagon for meetings with General Odierno and Secretary Rumsfeld, among others. By then, it had long been clear that the top officers in Baghdad, CENTCOM, and Washington weren’t asking combat officers what they needed; they were telling us what they wanted. And they wanted successes to back up their claims. Not real success on the ground—the brass had long since lost contact with the actual soldiers fighting the war. They were fixated on metrics, like the number of detainees captured and “enemy” KIAs, even if that meant taking time away from more important work or angering the local population. They wanted me to report a certain number of Iraqi security forces trained, even if I knew half those soldiers were “ghosts” who either never existed or never showed up—but still got checks from the American taxpayer. And, especially, they wanted us to say we had enough soldiers. Several times, I heard Colonel McMaster tell superior officers he didn’t have the manpower necessary for the mission. The next week, I’d hear those same generals telling the media, “The commanders have assured me we have enough soldiers for the operation.”

When you’re a leader on the line (in a combat position), your responsibility is to the men and women beneath and beside you. You do everything you can for those troops, because they are your brothers and sisters and if you let them down, some of them might die.

For the senior officers in Iraq, at least in 2005–2006, the responsibility was to the men at the top, the media, the message, the public back home—anything and everything, it seemed, but the soldiers under their command. And that’s the ultimate betrayal of Iraq, the one that disillusioned me in Baghdad and Nineveh and keeps me outraged today.

I can’t vouch for the other regimental staff officers in the Third Armored Cav, but by the second half of my second tour I didn’t feel like I was working for the U.S. Army or implementing a higher plan. I was working for the men below me, both Iraqi and American, to keep them alive. I was a military attaché, spending most of my time at forward operating bases, but I had served recently as a combat leader and advisor, and I was close to the troops. I knew Pfc. Joseph Knott, who was killed by a roadside bomb. Our Regimental Command, Sgt. Maj. John Caldwell, whose skull was shattered by an IED, was a friend and the first person to shake my hand when I arrived in-country in 2003. The soldier I bailed out in Colorado Springs the previous summer suffered a devastating combat injury. We lost three officers in a Blackhawk helicopter crash, and I knew them all. Death wasn’t a number; it was something that crept up in quiet moments and stabbed at my neck, then reared back to strike again. It had a face, and a hot salty breath. I felt a tremendous responsibility to the troops of the Third Armored Calvary. Tremendous. I felt my work might save their lives, and I felt guilty whenever I took an hour off. So I didn’t drink. I didn’t socialize. I didn’t watch television or play video games. I don’t believe in being too tired to feel pain, but I believe in being hurt to the point that giving in to the pain, even for a day, will drag you down for good. So for six months I dragged my cracked back and throbbing head through twenty-hour days with the help of nothing more than a fistful of Motrin, then collapsed every night into a dreamless sleep.

Eventually, I was promoted to Colonel McMaster’s adjutant, a unique position for a junior officer. The colonel worked from 7:00 a.m. until 1:00 a.m., seven days a week, and I was always with him. When he went to bed, I worked an additional four hours making sure the regimental headquarters was organized and efficient, and that every operational component that Colonel McMaster needed for the next day was ready. I was relentlessly driven, sleeping less than two hours a night, and I wasn’t surprised when the official assessment of my PTSD, compiled by a doctor I worked and roomed with in Nineveh, stated that I had “unrealistic expectations of others.” Nobody could work that hard for an extended period of time. Nobody could meet my high expectations. Including me.