What war is like: one version

By Adam Wojack

G

rowing up, I always wanted to know what it was like to be in a war, as did many of my friends. For starters, we idolized anyone who had served in the military and even more, anyone who had been to war, because this seemed to us the most exclusive club: there seemed so many who were curious but so few who really knew, or who had the credibility to tell.

To satisfy our curiosity, we’d turn to what was available: movies and books. Movies about war were constantly on TV. They were mostly about World War II, because Vietnam had just ended and the long hangover only just begun. On cold mornings before class we’d huddle in the school library and turn the pages of Life Magazine photo books, oohing at the coolest or grittiest images of soldiers at war. For lack of any tactile experience of war – or life – we formed our own opinions based on pictures we saw or stories we heard.

For one, I thought the Army in Europe had it the toughest, because not only did it seem like constant fighting – when do you sleep? – but it seemed like they were always outdoors in the cold. Images of the Battle of the Bulge, with soldiers walking knee-deep through snow made me wonder how anyone could function in such an environment, especially when someone else out there was hunting you.

When I got older, I realized that no matter how many war movies I watched or stories I read or heard, I would never understand war as intimately as the storytelling veterans, nor would I be able to verify what was hooey and what was legitimate and useful. I knew I wanted my own answer, and this youthful curiosity drove me to enlist, as much as anything else.

Of course, I remained a soldier because I found I loved the culture of the military: the lifestyle, travel, adventure and benefits, and because after twenty years, recognized that I had joined the ranks of those veterans I had once looked up to for information about what war is “really like.” One could say that after participating in three separate combat deployments that covered two wars, I have my own answer to this question.

So, I’ll attempt to share that. It’s not easy to approach because all wars are different. Even so, they all share a basic similarity: they consist of men, mostly, aiming to kill other men for god or country while bystanders are hurt and property is destroyed. This much hasn’t changed for a few thousand years, if you start with The Iliad, the Greek classic about the Trojan War.

But that’s too general for most people. What I think people want to know – what I wanted to know – are the details: quirky tales and personal recollections from the men (and women) who stood in storm’s center of battlegrounds and have things to tell us which confirm or deny what we already believe to be true about this strange, exclusive adventure. Because most of us never will, for reasons as varied as inclination or timing, experience it for ourselves.

So, after some thought, here’s what I learned that war is not: it is not a state of existence, like being under the influence of a drug, although in some peculiar and temporary ways it can be. It isn’t a haze, or a dream, or an alternate reality where time-honored rules, laws of physics or ethics no longer apply.

What war is, I learned, was a series of days. Some good, some bad, some tedious. All of them occurring in an area where the potential for each existed, but on a more heightened scale than a typical day in, say, modern Kansas City. All of this due, of course, to the proximity of opposing forces and their willful use of destructive means upon each other.

Local day to day life, however, still goes on. During my first tour in Iraq in 2004-5, I watched Iraqis drive down the same highways and roads as the U.S. Army, in the same categories as you’d find on American highways – commuters, trucks, buses, taxis, families. Their lives were delayed whenever an IED was detonated or discovered on the road they were traveling, or interrupted whenever the Army conducted a clearance operation in their neighborhood, street or home. But they returned to their business immediately afterwards, and went on their way, driving down the road or walking along the city sidewalks, shopping for tomatoes or freshly-slaughtered chicken or lamb meat or tanks of propane for cooking.

After periods of somewhat prolonged quiet, we’d watch children suited up in uniforms that made them look like Catholic school students in America, wearing little book backpacks on their shoulders, and walking down these same occasionally deadly streets every early morning and afternoon. Women continued to get pregnant and have babies, and people still got sick, and they all needed access to the city hospital, which continued to operate.

Good days were when something unexpectedly pleasant happened, usually in conjunction with something that would be considered bad, like the late afternoon I found myself stopped on Route Tampa, the main highway that paralleled the Tigris and connected Iraqi cities from Baghdad to Mosul. I was stopped, as was my entire patrol of six vehicles along with several dozen Iraqi civilian vehicles, by a U.S. Army engineer unit that had discovered an IED a few hundred meters down the road, and who were working to reduce the risk and detonate the device in place.

It’s always a happy moment when a responsible party finds something dangerous before you stumble upon it, but there was more. It had been a long, hot day of running around, finding parts, loading them on vehicles and worrying about this or that. All of a sudden, I forgot about all of this. I watched the Army engineer pulling security on the road, manning a Mark-19 grenade launcher from a makeshift steel box sitting on the bed of a cargo Humvee. His morale seemed high and he was alert and focused on the singular task of keeping us all safe. Clearly, he was proud of the fact that his unit had discovered an IED and that he was protecting the rest of us. But it got better.

The day, like I said, had been hot, but as we waited, it cooled and the sun began to set. Blue sky gave way to pinks and reds and everything grew quiet. I relaxed and wondered if the sunset looked like this every night, and wondered again why I didn’t try to watch it more often. The soldiers in my patrol relaxed and stood around outside their vehicles, sharing smokes and stories.

I walked the line of vehicles to check on them all, and behind us, among the few dozen civilian cars also waiting, was a young Iraqi couple holding a baby. I don’t know if they smiled first, but when I saw their baby, I realized it had been months since I’d seen my kids, and I couldn’t help but quietly rejoice at the sight. With another soldier, I walked up to them, smiled and said hello, and asked them, in English, what their baby’s name was. The man said, “Abbas,” and after some basic chit-chat in English and Arabic, he offered to let me hold little Abbas. I did.

We stood there, admiring the sunset and their baby and agreeing that this war was a huge inconvenience for all of us, until the BOOM several hundred meters down the road indicated that the engineers had completed their task and we were now free to continue. I knew I wouldn’t trade phone numbers or make plans to meet this couple for dinner later, but for a short time, we were able to relax and share things that all people have in common: a love for our children, and for calm and beautiful surroundings.

B

ad days were days when someone was hurt or killed. Nothing could be done to change the circumstances, but sometimes a misunderstanding or the mistrust that resulted from these sorts of days were as harmful as the specific act itself, as if an enemy attack could plant a cancer inside a unit’s confidence and metastasize.

A bad day could result in changes to procedure, relief of leadership, a breakdown in alliances between U.S. forces and the local Iraqi government, or feuding between a unit and its higher headquarters, or between soldiers nearest the event.

These days didn’t happen as often as many believe, but when they did, they lingered, usually until the next bad day forced a change in the unit’s focus. Bad feelings could go away quickly if the incentive was there, such as when the grieving or feuding party realized they still needed the other. This sort of conditional bad feeling was as much a product of human nature as the war itself: people tend to form alliances and draw lines, even on the friendly side of the wire.

But most days were in between. Some bad days were really other people’s bad days, and some good days didn’t feel as good as they should. On one particularly successful day in Samarra, the Iraqi commandos I worked with found a house basement full of mortar and artillery rounds and other weaponry that filled an entire courtyard for an after-action photograph.

It was a huge find, and it surely made a dent in some group’s ability to ambush U.S. and Iraqi forces in and around Samarra. But I knew, and the commandos knew, that we were far from calling this a win, and that tomorrow, the same people we took from were going to try to take from us, by following our movements and waiting for us to drive by a planned ambush. Almost needless to say, enemy attacks did increase in the weeks following.

Some days were just tedious. These might have been bad days because they seemed wasted, but they were good because they were safe. They were days spent doing routine, administrative or logistical tasks on forward operating bases that had to be done but weren’t the kind of things that generate war stories: ordering parts, fixing vehicles, planning operations or coordinating resources for this or that.

Soldiers found ways of coping with the tedium. Regular breaks were one – getting on the internet to email or call home, smoking, snacking or making mealtimes last a bit longer. Hobbies were another, such as working out or playing Halo on Xbox or watching movies or playing cards. But all of these things would remind you of home, and since you had the time to do these things, it made you wonder why you were sitting on a FOB in a combat environment doing the same things you did back at your peacetime duty station.

In many cases, this tedium could lead soldiers to seek excitement, in the form of a combat mission on the road or in a city, if this was not the sort of thing they ordinarily performed. For those who had no choice but to conduct daily combat missions, there was a certain tedium to this as well: not every day on patrol in a dangerous city is a good or bad day, either.

Tedium led me to volunteer the Iraqi commandos and my three-vehicle, ten-man element to conduct security patrols around the city whenever a shortage of human intelligence meant no targeted raids on a given day. This wasn’t required, but it could be useful and it felt more proactive than sitting around behind a barrier while other folks took care of daily security tasks.

Most everyone had mixed feelings about this activity, since it involved leaving an area we controlled and driving around quite visibly in an area we did not. But we were all soldiers, and this is why we had signed up: action. Leaving the safe area for the dangerous area was where things got interesting, and everyone maintained a certain optimism or hope for either finding something or drawing fire so it could be returned with greater force and emphasis.

In many ways, this was gambling, and the longer we did it, the better we got. Our odds were clearly better than average, since having a good day or a tedious day were both wins. Only a bad day was a loss, and we learned how to hedge our bets through observation and historical analysis, or just by remembering where the worst places were and avoiding them at vulnerable times, such as hours of darkness or when the streets were free of civilians.

As crazy as this might sound, sometimes when it had been quiet for days, we would go to the worst area we knew and just park in the open, trusting that our eyes, our armor and the poor aim of our enemy would neutralize their advantage of surprise if gunshots or rocket propelled grenades were fired our way. This also, we hoped, would send a message to both the bad guys lurking in the area and the non-combatants caught between us that we were still here, and we were not afraid.

The best day? I still remember the day we were finally relieved by our follow-on unit – an armor battalion from Fort Stewart, Georgia – of the responsibility for control of Samarra. It was February 10, 2005. It felt like the last day of a very long freshman year. Summer – and home – was just around the corner. And I think everyone can understand that.

The statements made in this article are the express opinions of the author, and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States Army.

The unavoidable rookie mistake

By Adam Wojack

The “cherry” story is prized in military folklore because we like to believe that no matter how awkward a “first time” mishap, the person’s reaction tells us what we need to know about their character and potential usefulness to a group. Do you have a story you’d like to share?

H ere’s my “cherry” story. I’m the cherry, or rookie, and the mistakes in this recollection are mine, but as you’ll see, I get a little help. I’m the motor officer for my battalion at Forward Operating Base, or FOB, Brassfield-Mora near Samarra, Iraq in March, 2004. It’s my first combat patrol as a leader.

I’m an infantryman, but I’ve been asked to think like a maintainer and get our battalion’s fleet of wheeled and tracked vehicles fixed and to keep them running. This requires a large section of working Army mechanics – which we have – and a continuous supply of replacement parts for the vehicles: tires, tracks, engines, transmissions, fuel pumps, igniters, generators, window glass, and anything else you can name – which we don’t. This is simply the nature of the maintenance business: Replacement parts flow into theater to a central location, and it’s your job to drive to that place two or three times a week to pick up the parts you’ve ordered.

I have been in this job for a month, and already I am frustrated. I have elected to lead a separate patrol to our parts warehouse, located at FOB Speicher, which is 45 minutes to our north and passes through some areas notorious for IED ambush. Ordinarily, I send our parts team – which is two soldiers and a 10-ton truck – with the battalion’s twice-weekly food, fuel and ammunition convoy to get our needed parts. But for whatever reason, my team hasn’t been bringing the right parts back, if many at all, and my battalion commander, who has no patience for unserviceable vehicles when parts are available, has hinted publicly that I need to be more aggressive in getting our “down” vehicles back “up.”

As a root cause, I suspect that my main parts guy, a young sergeant not known for assertiveness, is not asking the right people at Speicher for parts, or maybe not even asking at all. Thinking that “leadership by example” might cure what ails, I organize a patrol around the parts team and their big, 10-ton cargo truck, adding three armored Humvees crewed by mechanics and an assorted group of soldiers from other sections in the battalion headquarters, all of whom have business on Speicher that day. My mission: get the critical parts I need and “show” my parts guy how this business – at which I am also very new – is done.

The patrol starts on time, which is promising, and as we roll down the main north-south highway in Iraq, the one we call Route Tampa, I’m thinking this is simpler than we make it seem. We’ve planned, rehearsed and inspected, but all we’re doing is driving down the road to another secured FOB to load parts into the back of a truck. How complex is that?

I soon get my answer. We aren’t ten minutes down the road when I’m contacted on the FM radio by my trail vehicle – mechanics – who say they’re having a problem with their Humvee and want to stop and check it out.

I have no choice but to stop, so we roll to a halt on the northbound shoulder of the four-lane highway. I depart my vehicle with weapon at the ready and walk back to the trail Humvee, which already has its engine hood raised and two mechanics in full gear peering into its dark jumble of metal, belts and hoses. Before they tell me what the problem is, they say the vehicle is down and that we can’t drive it any further.

The senior mechanic, Sergeant Chase I’ll call him, tells me this vehicle needs a new throttle position sensor, and that it can’t be driven any further unless we want to damage the engine. These words stick in my ears because a TPS is one of the critical parts on my list and it’s one that my parts team has failed to pick up for the past week. I start giving an earful of frustration to Sergeant Chase – maybe because he’s the bearer of bad news – until he informs me that we can stand here in the open and bitch about it or we can hook up this Humvee to the 10-ton truck and tow it to FOB Remagen, which is on our way and closer to us than Speicher, and then try to fix it there.

This, of course, makes good sense, so Chase and his guys hook up the Humvee to the 10-ton. In minutes, the Humvee is attached to the rear of the big cargo truck, but the crew is still sitting inside the small vehicle. We have exactly two empty seats in the other three vehicles in the patrol to seat these four soldiers. Chase and I and the crew stand there for a few minutes, trying to figure out how to get everyone seated. We debate having them ride in the 10-ton’s cargo bed (bad idea), double them up in the other Humvees (not enough room) or leave them where they are. Since this Humvee is attached by a V-shaped steel tow-bar to the 10-ton – which stabilizes the towing situation more than would, say, a chain – and because we aren’t going that far, I make the final decision to move two and have the other two stay put. Everyone takes their place, and off we go, Humvee in the lead, Humvee in trail, and truck-Humvee combo in the middle.

The drive toward Remagen is short and routine, and things are looking up. I’m sitting in the passenger seat marking our progress on a paper map by counting terrain features and overpasses, and I ask my driver, a big, easygoing kid I’ll call Williams, who ordinarily drives for the company first sergeant, if we are near the entrance. Williams has been to Remagen before and tells me he knows where to turn. But maybe his mind is wandering, because only a few seconds after he responds with, “No worries, sir, we’re good,” he turns his head and gives me the You May Never Trust Me Again look and says, “I think we just passed it.”

Okay, I tell him, let’s turn around. I pick up the FM radio handset and transmit this news to the rest of the patrol. Williams starts braking in preparation for our u-turn across the highway.

And this is where things get memorable. Out of habit, I look into my side-view mirror to check on the position of my trailing vehicles, but instead of seeing anything owned by the U.S. Army behind me on the road, I see something bright and small and silent – a civilian automobile – sliding forward quickly and upside down, its tires and dark underbelly oriented upward. This inspires one of those feelings of disbelief into my mind, like, I didn’t really see what I thought I did, did I? And I tell Williams to stop.

I step out of our stopped Humvee and all traffic behind me has also stopped. Behind us in the next lane, a small white car is resting on its roof – bent, twisted and leaking fluids onto the road. Our 10-ton truck is on the shoulder a short distance behind us as well, but it’s facing the opposite direction. A long semi-circular skid mark on the road ends where the 10-ton sits. And the Humvee it has been towing is still attached to its rear, but is now resting on its side, with its bottom facing us.

I’m still looking around, trying to figure out how things suddenly came to look this way when people start emerging from their vehicles. The turret gunner from the capsized Humvee helps himself out of the top – now side – of his vehicle, spilling MREs and water bottles onto the road shoulder, which merge with the automotive fluids that are also draining from this vehicle.

My parts guy, the driver of the 10-ton truck, has dismounted and walks over to me with a half-smile on his face that might be embarrassment but doesn’t seem to convey to me that he understands the gravity of this situation. Maybe I misread his expression, but I’m already so frustrated with him that I walk the other way. From the smashed civilian car, two Iraqi men are pulling themselves out from inside the upside-down hull. A mere minute earlier, they’d been thoughtlessly driving along the highway in their little white Opel. They are wearing white dishdashas, and these long shirt-dresses are spotted with their own blood.

All of us except drivers and turret gunners have dismounted by now, and several soldiers in my patrol rush over to the wrecked Opel and assist the injured Iraqi men. Our signal officer, a young captain named Jaison, plops down in the middle of the road with the more wounded of the two Iraqi men and applies a pressure dressing to a cut on the man’s head. I radio the situation to my battalion and ask for whatever help or advice they can provide. I’m clueless. I have a 12,000 pound Humvee that is off its wheels and leaking fluids but is still attached by tow-bar to a 10-ton truck. Plus, we have a destroyed civilian car and two injured local men.

On the radio, I’m told that it’ll take 45 minutes for someone from Remagen – a FOB we can see from the highway – to respond to us.

While we wait, I gather leaders from my patrol to re-create the accident. I reach this tentative finding: my 10-ton truck driver, towing a 12,000 pound Humvee, was not able to slow his vehicle in time to make our unplanned u-turn, maybe because he was following us too closely or going too fast. To avoid rear-ending us, he slammed his brakes hard enough to put his truck into a 180-degree spin with a 12,000-pound “tail” which swung around behind the truck with such force to schwack the little Opel that was attempting to pass. The 10-ton truck/Humvee combo batted the Opel forward with such force during that it flipped the little car onto its roof and caused it to continue its slide in the direction of travel. Finally, as the 10-ton truck came to a rest from its 180-degree tailspin, the Humvee’s lateral inertia caused it to tip over just as the big truck reached a stop.

Eventually, a wrecker from FOB Remagen arrives to pull the Humvee back onto its four wheels. We watch as the same wrecker easily moves the Opel off the road, and we watch as an Iraqi ambulance picks up the two injured Iraqi men and takes them away. Jaison, the signal officer, has been applying the field dressing to the injured man’s head the entire time. I also watch a U.S. Army field ambulance take away two of my mechanics – the crew of the capsized Humvee. They hadn’t appeared injured, but since they had been in a vehicle rollover, the medics insisted they be x-rayed.

We spend hours at Remagen, waiting and wondering when we’ll see these two again (they are now at FOB Speicher, fifteen minutes up the road) and discussing backup plans to return to our FOB, such as splitting up the group or staying overnight at Remagen. We discuss how unlucky those Iraqi men were, but agree that they shouldn’t have gotten so close or attempted to pass when they did. We know that the Army has a procedure for property damage or injury claims made by local nationals, and we know that these men, if they file, will probably get a few thousand bucks for their trouble.

We have too much time on our hands and while we wait, cannot imagine our situation easily correcting itself. Plus, we will obtain no needed parts here at Remagen. We are, for precious hours that day, a unit with broken vehicles, missing soldiers and an unfulfilled mission, stranded on an unfamiliar FOB. We are military homeless, and this sucks.

By sunset, a minor miracle happens: another patrol from our battalion shows up at Remagen on its way back from Speicher with the two soldiers who had been taken there for x-rays. We are able to assemble our original patrol and attach it to this other element – which is part of the miracle because they have the extra seats we need so nobody has to ride in the towed Humvee – and the big bunch of us drive back to FOB Brassfield-Mora by sundown.

Back at our FOB, I head to our tactical operations center to report completion of my patrol. My battalion commander has already heard all about my day, and searches me out to get my side of the story. I can see in his eyes that he is angry: for the accident, the vehicle damage, the injured soldiers, and the embarrassment this will surely cause him in the eyes of his boss, our brigade commander. He angrily asks me which soldiers and vehicles I have left at other FOBs, but changes his tone when I tell him that everything we’d brought with us – soldiers, vehicles and equipment – have all returned with us to base.

“Good job,” he says, and walks away.

I learn that even though we have acquired no repair parts, bringing everyone and everything home by dinner is something that a commander – like any parent – can appreciate.

I stand there and hope that every patrol will not be like this first one. Our next one is not: two days later we try this again, but this time we make it to Speicher, pick up the critical parts we need (including a TPS), miss no turns, injure no people and damage no property. When I tell my battalion commander that several vehicles are now mission-capable or will be shortly, all is forgotten.

The statements made in this article are the express opinions of the author, and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States Army.