We walk over to the workstation to gauge our shooting. Surprisingly, nonviolent, spinach-chomping Nermal was the most effective shooter. She killed three or four bad guys. Meghan was next. I brought up the rear. They ask if we want to go again. No.
“Hell yes!” says Meghan.
We run through the simulation several more times, repeating the desert scene before moving on to jungle terrain. Each time we do it, I feel my emotional reaction lessening. I guess this is what desensitization feels like. Our last exercise is something called Shoot/ Don’t Shoot. This is a scenario in which, unlike the others, we are shown actual video of a potentially hostile situation. We’re in tight quarters, a walled hut. Three angry-seeming actors are yelling at us in a language we don’t speak—in this case, Pashtun. One of the actors waves a pistol in our direction. Do we shoot? I feel myself tense. What are we supposed to do here? What if he turns the gun towards us? We stand there, guns raised, our fingers on our triggers, unsure what to do. Then Meghan creates an international incident. She shoots the guy. Wrong move.
“You weren’t supposed to shoot,” our instructor says. He plays the videotape forward and, within a moment, the guy puts his pistol on a table and raises his arms.
“Shit,” says Meghan.
We run through the same scenario again, but we do not know what the outcome is going to be, and when our instructor whispers in my ear, “Shoot him in the head,” I do not hesitate.
POP!
The guy goes down. Oh wow, I just took that fucker out. To my surprise, I feel pretty good about it. I just killed a guy and it feels awesome. To my further surprise and annoyance, it turns out it was
Meghan who fired the kill shot, not me.
By the end of our half hour in the simulator, I feel almost numb to the experience, which troubles me almost as much as my initial emotional reaction; I mean, I’m legitimately annoyed that I wasn’t the one who shot that guy in the head.
I also gain a profound respect for what these soldiers go through in a combat zone. We were in the most controlled, artificial environment imaginable and yet I still experienced incredible tension. What if I were weighed down with eighty pounds of gear in 120 degree heat? What if I’d been out on patrol for five hours in those conditions? What if I’d had to deal with those conditions every day for a year or more? What if it was my second or third tour of duty? What if I’d had friends who’d been injured or killed doing exactly what I’m doing now?
Fuck me, what if it was real?
Meghan:
When we leave the simulation and head back into the waiting room, we see all the soldiers from inside again. They are all very polite and friendly but I know we are probably not going to get anywhere with them. First of all, seniors are in the room, as is PR for the base. In my experience, the only real way to talk to a soldier is over whiskey—lots of whiskey.
We talk to them about our book and what they are doing there and they are not really responding. I get it: they have better things to do than entertain Michael and me. I try flirting with them a little and it kind of works. Then I switch gears and tell them about our trip to Vegas and how Michael doesn’t like strip clubs. This, they find entertaining.
The ugly truth is we are not going to be able to talk politics with these guys; it’s just not going to happen. This is not the right setting and at the end of the day, soldiers are supposed to be apolitical; they are not really supposed to have an opinion and are only supposed to support our president. At the end of the day, these soldiers are not here to be political, or talk politics, they are here to do their job.
Looking at all these handsome, shiny faces makes me think of my brothers, and what Jimmy must have gone through. Easily the worst day of my life was when he deployed to Iraq in 2007. My brother was so determined to enlist that when he was seventeen my parents finally gave in and signed the underage permission letter. When you go into military service in this fashion, you are nothing more than a grunt, with no officer status. He went to basic training like every other man who joins the Marines and was sent off to war.
In the spring of 2007 when I was a senior at Columbia University, I got up at five o’clock in the morning, drove an hour and a half to Camp Pendleton with my mother, sister, and two brothers, and stood in a parking lot for a few hours waiting to say goodbye to my brother Jimmy for what might have been the last time. My family waited in a giant parking lot with probably a hundred other families, all of us in the same grim boat. We watched everyone give last wishes before leaving. I watched as men and women with baby faces put giant packs on their backs, picked up semi-assault rifles, boarded a Greyhound bus, and left to possibly go die in the Middle East.
That is what the cold reality of a deployment looks like: standing around a barren parking lot, waiting with bagpipes playing as you contemplate never seeing the person you love again. I stood there, that day, in that parking lot, hating my brother, hating the military, hating wars, hating that my family and my brother were being called to serve while so many others did not, and worse, did not seem to care or really understand our sacrifices.
I remember standing there with my boyfriend at the time, a good friend of Jimmy’s who is also in the military, and screaming at him that none of this was fair. I couldn’t lean on my mother because she was also a mess, so my boyfriend was the only option. He had to hold on to me because I could not stop myself from crying. He grabbed my hands and made me pray with him. I remember hot tears pouring down my face and feeling like I hated God. I remember feeling like I was watching this happen to someone else, that it was some sad movie about the Iraq War that a girl who looked a lot
like me had a role in. I remember feeling angry at every other person in this country who would never have to go through what I was going through at that very moment.
When it was finally time for my brother to board the Greyhound, we walked across the giant parking lot to say goodbye to him in a sea of other soldiers. I hugged him really tightly. At the time I think I weighed more than him; he still has such a small frame but was waiflike as a teenager. I could barely get out of my mouth that I loved him and to be safe. I stood there and thought I would never see Jimmy again. I was angry at myself for not coming up with something more inspiring to tell him as we said goodbye.
I’m not enough of a poet to eloquently explain what something like this is like. Any of you reading this who has sent a loved one to war, you understand. A piece of you dies. A part of your heart just falls out of you and evaporates and if you had any innocence to begin with it will quickly evaporate as well. It was the worst day of my life. I wish that day and those moments on no one. That is why no one gets to lecture me, or my family, about war unless they’ve experienced it as well. I am a gray person, but on this subject, it’s black and white. You’ve experienced it or you haven’t. And those of you who haven’t, you couldn’t even begin to understand what it feels like, thinking that you are giving your brother’s life for the good of the United States of America. That this country and freedom are important enough to you and your family; that all of you would give so large a sacrifice. Feeling like maybe you would die for it as well. And I do. I believe America and freedom are worth dying and fighting for. As painful as that is, I do.
Michael:
To wind down the visit, we take some pictures with the guys and drive over to the Sabalauski Air Assault School, in which “the course of instruction is focused on Combat Assault Operations involving US Army rotary-wing aircraft.” My understanding is that this means “doing shit with helicopters.”
A pleasant guy with two inconspicuous silver bars on his cap greets us at Air Assault School. He’s probably in his mid-thirties, a
little round-faced but fit. He leads us through the school, taking us into classrooms, telling us a little bit about their mission, then leading us into the stifling heat where rows of soaking wet soldiers in full uniform are learning to fasten and unfasten payload nets.
After a while I ask the guy what his job is at Air Assault School.
“I run it,” he says, and not for the first time today, I feel like an idiot.
On our way over, Meghan asked what percentage of soldiers are female. Nobody in the van knew, which was fine. I don’t think anybody expected them to know things like that off the top of their heads, but I am very surprised when we return from our tour of Air Assault School to see three female soldiers lined up waiting to greet us. Somebody clearly plucked them from their duties to speak with us in response to Meghan’s question. They seem less prepared than the guys we spoke with at the simulator, less gung-ho.
Two of them are sergeants, one an adorable twenty-one-year-old specialist. They are more willing to talk about their time in the service than their male counterparts we’d spoken to earlier. “I didn’t get to do what I wanted,” says one. “I studied forensics in college.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Human resources.”
Another says she is an engineer. She describes her job as “digging holes and blowing stuff up.” She’s been in for nine years, has a kid, and wants to get out. She’s only got four months left. I ask her if she’ll continue what she’s doing when she leaves the service.
“No. I’m going to cosmetology school in Miami.”
Meghan asks if they experience any sexism.
“No more than in the civilian world,” one says. The specialist, twenty-one, the lowest-ranking soldier there, doesn’t meet our eyes and doesn’t offer any information about anything. I get it: there’s no upside in talking to us, and a lot of potential downside. One military expression that has found its way into the popular lexicon is CYA: cover your ass.
After a few more minutes, our minder announces it’s picture time again. I guess this is their standard “move it along” call. We take
some more pictures and head out, this time to a change of command ceremony. One colonel is leaving, another one is replacing him.
We drive over to some hot parade grounds and sit in half-filled bleachers to watch the procession. Out on the grounds are three formations of solders lined up at attention in perfect rows. Beyond them is a tree line. Occasionally I notice people running from the tree line towards the groups, and then, a few minutes later, walking back out. I can’t figure out why they are doing that.
We sit through a lengthy ceremony. A welcome, followed by an invocation, followed by several speeches and a presentation. Even under shade, it’s uncomfortably hot, and out of the corner of my eye I notice somebody in formation toppling over. One of the soldiers just collapses onto the field. Another soldier dashes from the tree line to help him up, and walks him off the field as yet another soldier runs in to take his place. So that’s why they’re running back and forth: people are passing out!
The whole thing seems crazy to me, that these officers are standing up there speechifying while their troops are forced to stand stock still at attention for an hour in full uniform in 100 degree heat. Meghan and Stephie both look as shocked as I feel, but nobody else in the bleachers even seems to notice the bodies collapsing one after the other.
In civilian life, if I even see
one
person faint, that’s a pretty big deal. During the ceremony, I must see about fifteen of them go down.
After the ceremony, Meghan brings up the fact that people were fainting all over the place, but our minder doesn’t seem to have a lot of sympathy for them. He tells us they’re trained to not lock their knees while standing at attention. Locking the knees restricts blood flow. That’s why they passed out. In other words, it’s their own damned fault.
It’s getting late and I can tell that everybody’s kind of itching to wrap up our tour. They bring us to the PX, where I pick up some army T-shirts for my wife and kids. Then we go back to the parking lot, where Cousin John is waiting.
They’ve got one more surprise for us. Our choice of MREs: meals ready to eat. They come in big cardboard boxes. We choose spaghetti and meatballs, pot roast, and chicken with noodles. Then we shake hands all around and thank them profusely for the tour.
I leave Fort Campbell blown away by the professionalism we experienced, the dedication, the discipline. There’s a real sense of purpose here, which is something I think a lot of people (myself included, at times) lack in the civilian world. Here, people are training for specific missions. They understand exactly what is expected of them and are given the tools and resources to succeed. The trade-off is the loss of freedom that accompanies mission-specific assignments. Here you are told where to go, when to be there, how to dress. So many decisions are taken out of the individual’s hands. That’s great for a military organization, I suppose, but I don’t know how well that translates to the larger experience of what it means to be an American.
“Freedom doesn’t come free,” is Meghan’s catchphrase, the one she kept yelling at me at that bar in Prescott. I still don’t know what that means exactly, but I feel like today gave me a sense of the cost.
When we get into the RV, Meghan instructs us not to eat the MREs. She’s had them before. “They’re disgusting and they give you constipation,” she says. “Throw them away.”
We do.
Meghan:
As I watch the changeover ceremony, I feel an odd mixture of pride, honor, and reflection, which gets me to thinking about Michael’s point at the beginning of Tennessee: how there’s a black and a white city. There is no doubt that our military is comprised in part of lower-income personnel, particularly in the junior ranks. I’d like to think that this is a result of my generation not seeing color lines, but I’m not naive. We see them; we just don’t make a big deal about it.
I do believe that in a lot of ways race really isn’t an issue for my generation—at least not the way it was for our parents, or the generation in between. It doesn’t feel as intense to me as it does for
Michael. I do not feel entirely comfortable speaking on the issue of segregation and racism in the same way that I do not feel comfortable having a man lecture me about sexism and being a woman in a man’s world. Men cannot ever really understand what it’s like to be a woman in America, and I have no idea what it is like to be a racial minority in America.