Nothing Left to Write Home About

Twenty years ago, I enlisted in the North Carolina Army National Guard as a 13M Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) crew member.  I signed up on the assumption that I would blow stuff up one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer and get easy college money like the recruiter promised.  I enlisted the week before 9/11 and shipped to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for basic training November 14, 2001.  Between raising my right hand and flying to Oklahoma the world changed forever.  Not long after graduating basic training and advanced individual training (AIT) we launched into a war that lasted nearly twenty years.  

Two long decades of war was all any of us knew.  It was like an errant jazz tune that wouldn’t resolve.  My entire generation went from weekend warriors to full time combatants in a war we figured would end before we’d get to partake.  On the latter, we were wrong.  We just learned “on the job” and adapted to the complexities of urban warfare as the years waged on.  Many of my peers went on to deploy multiple times in various combat zones.  I have a lot of guilt for getting out after my first and only deployment to Iraq.  I regret not going to Afghanistan like so many of my friends.  I also am often ashamed of the job that I had while deployed.  It wasn’t sexy or worthy of Hollywood acclaim, yet it was necessary.  

I wasn’t a door kicker doing kinetic operations.  I was doing long haul convoys.  Admittedly, I did have a “cool” job as a machine gunner on a gun truck for a third of that deployment, but I never engaged the “enemy.”  I just shot MK19 grenades into the desert at vehicles already decommissioned by generations of previous wars.  I went an entire mission with my .50 cal machine gun inoperable because I couldn’t remember how to set the head space and timing.  I guess only having a literal crash course in crew-served weapons could be to blame.  The rest of my deployment I just cradled a M249 machine gun in the cramped passenger seat of a “bob tail” tractor trailer as we drove across Iraq wondering what the hell we were even doing there.

The global war on terror, GWOT if you’re nasty, officially ended with the abysmal failure of a withdraw in August of this year.  To many Americans, it meant nothing because in so many ways they forgot we were still “over there.”  The war really hadn’t touched them in a tangible way.  So, it became out of sight out of mind.  As GWOT came to a close, I had the same feeling at its end that I had when I crossed the border of Iraq back into Kuwait on my last mission.  I felt a conflicting sadness.  I was obviously happy with the conclusion of war but conflicted by the dissonance it all creates in my mind.  In the case of my last mission in Iraq, I was sad because in war the only things you worry about is living to the next day.  Life is simple, it’s black and white, you do your job and you either live or die.  Nothing else.  Going home meant I would have more variables to contend with.  More choices.  By the end of my deployment, I knew how to be a solider but I still had yet to realize how to be a man.  

“Two long decades of war was all any of us knew.  It was like an errant jazz tune that wouldn’t resolve.”

With the conclusion of GWOT, a long season is over.  A chapter has closed.  The sun has set on both that war and my youth. I find myself still wrestling with the same questions I had so many years ago.  So now what do we do?  Many veterans, myself included, have identified ourselves by continued service in the Global War on Terror in one way or another but now that it’s over, who are we?  Who am I? 

Several years ago, as I watched news footage of ISIS taking over places in Iraq that I had been a decade earlier, I felt an overwhelming sense of futility.  The same emotions took hold as I watched the Taliban take over Afghanistan while we tucked tail and retreated.  I felt a sense of loss in the same way I suspect the veterans of Vietnam must have felt after the fall of Saigon.  What was it all for?  Was any of it worth it?  Twenty years and all we knew was this war.  Now it’s over.  So, what do we collectively do now?  I have no answers.  I’m tired of telling this story but it’s a story we all need to be telling.  Our voices need to be heard so we can keep good on that promise we made to “Never Forget” so many Septembers ago.  Let that be your new mission.  Let us GWOT veterans step up and become the next greatest generation.  We owe it to ourselves.  Happy Veterans Day.