Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq

340 Pages·2005·1.62 MB·English

by  Jason Christopher Hartley

Just
Another
Soldier
A Year on the Ground in Iraq
Jason Christopher Hartley
For Keith Wood
Contents
Endpapers
Fort Drum 9
Fort Polk 49
Camp Udairi, Kuwait 63
Iraq 71
Home 307
Glossary 321
Acknowledgments 327
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher

April 30, 2005
TRUE AMERICAN HERO
Getting dressed in my desert camouflage uniform is something I’ve
done hundreds of times, but it felt weird to be putting it on again for
the first time in four months. Since returning from Iraq, my National
Guard unit hadn’t had any drills yet. Typically a drill weekend for us
consists of some sort of infantry training, but this one, taking place
at Camp Smith, about an hour away from my apartment, was noth-
ing more than taking care of some paperwork and attending an
awards ceremony and a dinner. I was wearing one of the uniforms
I’d worn in Iraq. It was well worn and comfortable; my boots fit my
feet perfectly—they were the only pair I’d worn for the last year. My
roommate Matt, one of my platoon mates, was in uniform too now,
something I used to see daily in Iraq. But being dressed in my uni-
form in our apartment in New Paltz, New York, made me feel fake,
like I should be going to a Halloween party.
I’m very proud of the fourteen years I’ve served in the Army Na-
tional Guard, but since we’d returned, I hadn’t felt very gung-ho about
being a soldier. In fact, I’d done everything I could to be as unmilitary
as possible. I hadn’t cut my hair for the entire four months we’d been
back until a few days ago. I looked ridiculous with my mop of hair,
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like I should have been driving a Camaro and listening to an eight-
track. My hair hadn’t been that long in years; I just wanted to grow it
as long as I could out of spite. I had also grown a goatee and a mus-
tache that made me look more like a child molester than a hipster, two
other things that had to be shorn before getting back into soldier
mode.
Before I deployed to Iraq, I was part of an infantry company based
out of Manhattan. There are a lot of infantry companies in the New
York National Guard, but only a few are based out of New York City.
Companies from the city are dramatically different in personality
(and ethnicity) than companies based out of other parts of the state,
creating rivalries based more on resentment than on competitiveness.
I was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah—yes, I was once
Mormon—and spent nine years in the National Guard there, where 99
percent of soldiers were white suburbanites. When I moved to New
York City in 2000, it took some adjustment to learn how to better in-
teract with the personalities of soldiers who had grown up on the
streets. I was one of only two white soldiers in my Manhattan unit, a
company that was almost entirely Hispanic, with a handful of other
minorities. The other white guy was this jovial, barrel-chested Irish
cop from the Bronx named Willy, who quickly became one of the best
friends I’ve ever had. After a few months in my new unit, I realized I
preferred soldiers who grew up in the city to soldiers who grew up in
the suburbs.
When my battalion was deployed to Iraq, different companies
were combined in order to get us to full strength. My city company
was merged with soldiers from other parts of the state, and the dis-
parity was the source of a lot of friction that never got resolved, even
after eleven months in combat together. Now I was on my way to
drill, where I would see all these guys for the first time in months.
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I had pulled my uniform out of the duffel bag where it had been
stuffed since I’d gotten back from combat and put it on without iron-
ing it. I’d cut my hair, but it was barely within military standards and
nowhere near as short as infantrymen usually keep theirs. It was still
long enough that my hat didn’t fit because of it. My uniform carried
no rank. For the past several years, I’d been a sergeant, but on the
second-to-last day of our deployment I was demoted. On the last day
of my tour of duty, while at Fort Drum, New York, before being re-
leased back into the wild as a civilian, I wore the rank of specialist. As
I drove away from Fort Drum that day, I threw my pin-on rank out
the window. I never bothered getting another set of pin-on rank or
having them sewn on. The stories in this book, and their presence on
the internet, were the reason I was demoted.
Matt and I weren’t in any mood to take this upcoming drill seriously.
Before getting on the highway we picked up a case of beer at a gas
station and put the cans in a garbage bag full of ice in his backseat.
We drank all the way to Camp Smith.
All the stories I’ve ever heard from vets about returning from
combat are stuff like “You fight for the guy next to you” or “The
friends you make in combat will be the best you ever make.” What-
ever. For the most part, I enjoyed my time in combat. I love being in
the infantry. I served with a lot of good soldiers in Iraq, in a platoon
with solid leaders. Fighting there was an incredible experience for me,
the culmination of almost everything I’ve wanted to do as an infantry-
man, but the worst part was being surrounded by so many assholes.
When we got to Camp Smith, it was good to see all the guys again,
most of whom I cared for a great deal, but it also reminded me of how
much I couldn’t stand them as a group.
Since the company I was originally a part of in Manhattan had
been disbanded while we were in Iraq, now, like it or not, I was per-
Just Another Soldier 3
manently a part of this new company. I wanted to show my face, hug
everyone, then ask to be transferred to another city-based unit again.
We spent only two hours at Camp Smith before being released for
the night. All we did during those two hours was fill out a few forms
with our addresses and signatures. It’s amazing how many times I’ve
written my address on something for the Army. I know my company
knows my address. They send me crap in the mail all the time. All
these forms are printed out with a word processor, and the National
Guard could save millions of dollars each year in man-hours if they
would just let my sixteen-year-old sister teach the administrative guys
how to use the Mail Merge function in Microsoft Word. I didn’t mind
it so much this time though, because we had plenty of beer.
Once we were released for the evening, about a dozen guys came
back up to New Paltz for a night of further drinking. These were guys
who never normally hung out together, but drinking is a much more
unifying experience than modern combat. The rest of us had changed
back into civilian clothes, but Willy was still in uniform, which drew
a lot of attention in the liberal town of New Paltz. The sun had al-
ready set on the New Paltz skyline, the most visible feature of which
is a watchtower on a cliff, the same one Bob Dylan wrote about in “All
Along the Watchtower.” Woodstock is a stone’s throw away.
Ray, one of our company’s snipers, was there as well. I love Ray. If
there is a list somewhere of ten traits, any seven of which you’d need
to become a psycho killer, Ray has six of them. Were it not for an
innate kind of commonsense Zen spirituality he quietly nurtures, he
would be a true-life Travis Bickle. His comic timing and deadpan de-
livery of one-liners, along with his legendary marksmanship skills,
made him a rock star in our company in Iraq.
Willy is also impossible not to love. He’s loud, loving, and totally
uncensored. I once made the mistake of telling my mother that as long
as I was near him, I felt safe. Now sometimes I wonder if she loves him
4 Jason Christopher Hartley