Together Again

By Molly


I am sitting by the window of a hotel room in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. I can see the red-brick roof of a building across the way, the sun slowly sinking in the luminescent gray sky behind. It smells of firewood, and I can hear a police siren sounding softly in the distance. Matt, who is the same but maybe a little bit different, is lying on the bed nearby. I can see his hand twitch as he falls asleep. We're both tired after a day walking among the markets and museums of this colorful city, which is filled with ornate Hapsburg-style buildings and a language both unintelligible and striking.

Matt was waiting for me in the Warsaw airport when I stepped off the plane on an afternoon almost two weeks ago. I dropped my bag and he hugged me. I could smell his shampoo and, almost immediately, it felt as though we had never been apart.

Since then, Matt and I have done a lot. We explored the old town squares of Warsaw and Krakow, L'viv and Cherniv'tsi and Cluj. We've eaten many bowls of borscht and plates of mititei. We've drunk countless mugs of tangy dark beer and glasses of surprisingly smooth vodka. We stood by the train tracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, surrounded by crumbling buildings, imposing fences, and a crushing sense of the past. We took a sleeper train to L'viv, Ukraine, where we encountered a mask-wearing population terrified of swine flu and stayed in a hotel with a grand but decaying marble staircase. We took a rickety bus filled with smugglers over the border to Romania and found a bucolic countryside--its medieval monasteries painted in deep blues and reds, its Jewish cemeteries crumbling and covered in moss. We drove a car down winding roads through Transylvania, passing countless mud-caked dogs and weather-beaten farmers guiding horses decorated with red tassels. Tonight we'll see an opera, and tomorrow we will take the train to Budapest. Early next week Matt and I will fly our separate ways. I'll return to New York and Matt to Afghanistan, each with countless stories of this trip, which has been a constant adventure. We will be writing more, soon.

As I sit here watching the quickly darkening sky, I'm happy not to think of that next step. I'm not sure what I expected of this time here in Eastern Europe. I'm not sure what I expected of Matt's leave. But thus far it has been a bright and exciting couple of weeks, ones that have reminded me what it feels like to be close, to be together, to laugh in tandem and sleep at the same time. I miss him again already.

Small Talk

By Matt



The television set was brand new. I could tell from the half-ripped purchase label on the corner of the screen. A dozen plastic roses in a vase sat on top, making the TV the most decorative -- and expensive -- item in an otherwise bland living room. I wondered if the set was a gift from the Americans. Afghan Colonel Jawid Osmani*, my host and the occupant of the room, is himself fond of giving gifts. But he is fonder of receiving them.

A couple of weeks ago, Osmani, a grinning, white-bearded "religious cultural adviser" for the Afghan National Army had invited me and my colleague, Staff Sergeant Justin Boeck, to his quarters for a farewell dinner. Boeck and I would be leaving the base the next day. We'd been reassigned, along with our unit, to a different mission at another camp close by. For the last four months, we had worked with Osmani on reconstruction efforts and humanitarian assistance projects in Paktya Province of which Gardez is the capital. To our disappointment, we have failed to get much done, partly a result of the unimaginably complex bureaucratic web the coalition has weaved here over the last eight years.

This was not our first dinner with Osmani; he'd invited us before. But I never enjoyed them. Neither I nor Boeck were good at small talk, so we hoped the conversation would be driven by our interpreter, Lafik, and another American trainer, Rick, who had also been invited. Before Rick showed up, Boeck, Lafik and I lounged silently on a long dusty sofa, sucking on sugar-coated almonds and Turkish taffies.

Osmani presided over the gathering from a metal folding chair. The television's volume was turned all the way down, but Osmani watched the program intently as if he were the only one who could hear it. A ticker in the national language Dari scrolled left to right along the bottom of the screen while images flashed by in a continuous five-minute loop: General McChrystal giving a speech, Afghan police standing around on a road, body bags being zipped up, an Afghan policeman having a bullet removed from his lower back, President Karzai giving a speech, Afghan soldiers marching ceremoniously through a square in Kabul, a ribbon-cutting at a non-descript building. This was the nightly news in Afghanistan, courtesy of Voice of America.

Although dressed in his pressed military regalia, Osmani had removed his plastic dress shoes and socks at the door when he arrived minutes earlier. Now he picked at his crusty toes as he narrated each image on the screen to Lafik, who translated. But I wasn't listening. I was fixated on Osmani's feet, gnarled toes at the end of pale, hairless legs.

"My legs hurt," Osmani said dryly, noticing my stare.

Jolted from my trance, I dumbly nodded before turning back to watch the noiseless news. I discreetly glanced at my watch hoping that Rick and his interpreter would get there soon.

***

I don't why I was so uncomfortable with Osmani. In the U.S. Army's campaign to train and fight alongside our Afghan counterparts, American soldiers are encouraged to accept -- indeed, to embrace -- our hosts' particular cultural mores, no matter how bizarre or repulsive we find them. I personally have always prided myself on my ability to slink quietly in and out of environments that are alien to me. Back home in New York, Molly and I share friends from all over the world. I've lived in France, Germany and for a short time in Russia, where I always relished opportunities to experience some new aspect of those cultures whether it be unfamiliar foods, radical topics of conversation or just watching the local news. Even in Iraq, these sorts of experiences somehow made my tours almost worthwhile.

Yet in Afghanistan, it's different. Maybe it's because I am here on the Army's terms now, and not mine. And maybe it's that eight years after arriving here, the United States has little to show for the loss of so much American blood and treasure. Whatever the reason, I can't help but feel revulsion toward the whole society. I've come to resent the way many Afghan civilians make demands of us Americans with a confident air of entitlement. I feel sorry for the millions of enslaved women here whose status in society is one notch below livestock. (Chickens and goats roam the squalid streets unmolested, a freedom rarely extended to Pashtun women.) I'm uneasy when sex-starved Afghan soldiers make subtle overtures to me through gazing, lustful eyes, an occurrence whose frequency has surprised me.

I recognize that Afghanistan, like most cultures, is not a monolith. I have met many good men here who in a different time and under different circumstances I might be happy to serve alongside. But it's been eight years, almost a decade. At this moment, I simply can't think of another society less worthy of our sacrifices.

***

It was another 15 minutes before Rick and his own interpreter arrived. Together, we sat down at the long particle-board dining table, which I noticed was of the same design that we Americans use for our desks and conference tables at our own base not far away. Another gift, I thought. Osmani has been awarded two U.S. Army Bronze Star Medals, for what actions no one seems to know. He performed the Haj to Mecca last year, paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars. His entire living room was furnished by us. The only thing missing was a porcelain toilet in the lavatory. This colonel, it seemed, like the rest of his countrymen preferred doing business with the old hose and hole.

As usual Osmani was perched at the head of the table, the king on his throne. In the center of the table, Boeck and I emptied our cargo pockets of melting ice cream bars. We'd swiped them earlier from the mess hall on the American side of the base. (Osmani claimed they were his favorite, but I think he just enjoyed watching American officers and NCOs bring him treats.) Then an Afghan soldier brought out three bowls of a mutton stew that contained more gristle and bone than meat. That was followed by a heaping pile of steaming, oily rice. I knew my bowels were going to pay for this later. Happened every time.

As I politely started in on my portion, gristle and all, conversation finally got under way. As usual, it began with Osmani talking about himself. Did we know that he had spent several weeks last year at a training program for foreign military officers in Norfolk, Virginia? We did.

"Isn't dat where tobacco come?" asked Lafik, trying to keep the conversation alive while directing it away from Osmani.

"Yeah, it is," I said. "In fact, for years my family has run its own tobacco farm in North Carolina, just across the border."

"What does dis name mean, Virginia?" Lafik asked me immediately, not even translating what I'd just said to Osmani.

I hesitated, wary of being drawn into a topic I did not want to discuss with Osmani or other devout Muslims present. I shot a glance at Boeck and Rick seeking approval, but neither seemed to think anything of it. I put down my fork and cleared my throat. Osmani continued to shovel mutton and rice into his mouth with his fingers, chasing it all down with a glass of warm, sour milk.

"The state is named after England's Queen Elizabeth the First," I said. "She's known as the 'Virgin Queen', hence Virginia."

Osmani looked up from his plate stunned, having apparently understood what I said. (He spoke better English than he ordinarily let on.) A stern, commanding look came over his face, one I'd never seen before. He looked me direct in the eye as he spoke in Dari.

"In our country, it is customary that boys and girls who marry be virgins," Osmani said. "This is our custom."

I wanted so badly to roll my eyes, but I nodded politely. "Yes, sir," I said.

I was distracted briefly by the television, which I could see playing just beyond Osmani's shoulder. A Hazara soldier was being treated in a Kabul hospital for shrapnel wounds from a Taliban IED. There always seem to be a disproportionate number of Hazaras featured in the news here. As the country's most oppressed ethnic minority, I wondered if there was an effort in the national media to emphasize Hazaras' contribution to the building of a new Afghanistan.

"This is not the way it is in America," Osmani continued, as a voiceless General McChrystal reappeared on the TV screen behind him. "Here our women must be virtuous or they are ruined. In our hospitals, it is even possible for women to have surgery that makes them virgins again."

"Jesus," I thought, almost choking. If the food hadn't ruined my appetite already, then the image of what third-world medical procedure might be necessary to re-flower a woman surely would have. Osmani looked positively smug, pleased at his country's medical ingenuity.

***

At the end of our final dinner together, Osmani presented Boeck and I with two small parting gifts. The first was a pakul, a kind of hat most notably worn by Ahmed Shah Massoud, the hero and revered commander of the Afghan Northern Alliance who was assassinated by Al Qaeda two days before 9/11. The other was a scarf. It was a nice gesture, and I immediately felt bad not having something for him in return. Then again, he had plenty.

Asking me to stand up, Osmani plopped the hat down on my head and draped the folded scarf over my shoulders.

“Mujahedeen,” he said with a smile, despite my discomfort. Everyone laughed.

I turned around with that stupid hat on my head and looked at Osmani. What could I say? I was his guest.

"Mujahedeen," I said.

*Some of the names have been changed out of respect for their privacy

Finish Line

By Molly

On Wednesday afternoon of last week I sat at a corner table in a West Village café, a glass of iced coffee standing full next to my computer. It was one of those working cafés, where you’re allowed to nurse a small mug for hours, reading or writing or even drawing, like that one man who scribbled with charcoal on the other side of the room. I alternately typed and stared out the window. It was a windy day—unusually so—and I could see paper bags dancing on the sidewalk, scarves flung suddenly from shoulder to ground. When I had walked from my apartment to the subway that morning my hair swirled around my face and above my head like a tornado. I listened to an older, grizzled man hit on the exotic beauty sitting to my left: “Are those real tattoos?” he asked her. “Wow!”

It was just another day in New York, another attempt to carve out a spot in the windy tumult of the city to write. I had been back from Woodstock for almost three weeks. The next day, however, I would pack up and return north for three more. Today I sit alone in a studio surrounded by the leaf-strewn fields of Ghent, New York. I’m deep into the process of writing my book. I’m so deep within it that I hardly know what day it is. I hardly know which direction is up. The minutes flow together, marked only by the passage of verbs and nouns, split between chapters and page numbers. Will it ever end? Will I ever finish? I’m really not sure. The unwritten sentences extend into the future in what looks like a long gray sheet. I can’t yet see the finish line.

When I last saw Matt, standing in his uniform at the airport in New Orleans six months ago, I felt the same way. His deployment—the year, more or less, that he would spend in Afghanistan—stretched out before us. Days, hundreds of them, would pass before we saw each other again. And who knew what would happen in the meantime. Who knew what we would be up against. The time, the isolation and the fear seemed endless. I certainly couldn’t see the finish line. I didn’t even know if I would recognize it when I did.

But now his leave is upon us. The same day that I finish this residency I will hop on a plane and fly to Poland. Matt and I will meet in Warsaw on Halloween and spend the following two weeks exploring Eastern Europe for a little R&R, as they say. When he returns to Afghanistan, we will be well beyond the halfway point. I’m excited. Wildly so. I can’t believe it’s been six months since Matt and I were in the same room. The time has gone by both painstakingly slow and lightning fast.

Poland, I know, is an odd choice. Many have told me so. Matt and I did discuss some other, more “normal” destinations like Hawaii or Costa Rica or even New York. But Matt is a veritable borscht fanatic, has spent months traveling around Eastern Europe during his previous Army years, and, simply, loves it there. “I want to go someplace where it will be autumn,” he told me on the phone. “I want to show you someplace I love.”

My own great-grandmother, Bertha, was smuggled out of Poland in a barrel covered in hay during the pogroms of the early 1900s, according to Birnbaum legend. I have roots there. I’ve always wanted to go. I’m happy with our plans.

I will admit that I’m nervous, though. My life here, alone, has become normal. I’m used to sleeping alone, to waking alone. I’m used to setting my own schedule, no longer in possession of anyone else’s needs. I eat like a vegetarian, and occasionally go to sleep before 9 pm. I have fun with my friends, and have grown accustomed to being a third wheel. The loneliness and the fear, the anger and the guilt that come with having a boyfriend in Afghanistan have become normal. They hum in the background of my life like the soundtrack to a movie, defining for those who watch but utterly ignored from within. I don’t know what it will be like to see Matt again—if I will keep those feelings shut off, or if I’ll have to face them anew.

Right now, however, I am concentrating on the now. “Take it one day at a time,” my mother often tells me, and I’ve become quite adept.

I can sit in cafes and tap away at my laptop, thinking of story arc and reportage on the sense of smell. I can concentrate on writing one word at a time, one sentence after another. I can watch one couple after another walk hand in hand outside the window of that coffee shop in the West Village, unaware how lucky I think they are. And I can imagine the finish line. Today it resembles the streets of Warsaw, cobblestoned and gritty. It resembles a guy in a uniform, the sound of laughter, the touch of hand in hand.

Bikes and Boys

By Matt

On Friday afternoon, our convoy encountered a rough, bearded man with a motorcycle standing alone in the middle of the desert. In Afghanistan, this can be cause for consternation. On that day, however, the lone biker spelled fortune for three children in a nearby isolated village in Paktika Province.

I was along for the ride as we escorted Afghan National Army soldiers to a faraway outpost. The plan was simple. We’d provide security to one platoon of Afghan soldiers headed to the base and return with an artillery unit they were meant to relieve. The road – which in Afghanistan means a dirt path – had seen some significant IED activity in recent days. Since the Afghan Army’s flimsy tactical Toyota pickups with a six-seater bench in the bed are no match to that kind of threat, our 11-ton armored behemoths were necessary to take the lead.

Luckily we made it through the mission without being attacked. The only surprise, as it happened, was the appearance of the motorcycle man.

“Stop!” said the convoy commander, Captain James Morrow, a policeman back in Georgia with a clean-shaven head, deep blue eyes and a constant scowl that says I’m gonna kick your ass. “I want to see what this guy wants.”

“Cartwright, get down out of there and pull security,” Morrow told his 22-year old vehicle gunner, who snapped his harness loose and marched down the hood of the vehicle. The team’s interpreter and I also went along.

I was wearing more than 60 pounds of armor and ammunition, cabled radio headphones, and was strapped in by a seatbelt harness designed for a race car. It took me a few moments to disentangle myself and climb out the backside of the vehicle. It’s no wonder so many soldiers burn up in these things, I thought.

By the time I joined the rest of the group, the motorcycle man was jabbering away in Pashto and seemed to be bordering on hysteria. Earlier that day, the man said, five boys in his village had been injured by a bomb about a kilometer away, one of them seriously. The old man was impatient, almost frantic, as we tried to determine the exact circumstances of the explosion.

“Where did the bomb come from?” Morrow asked, since enemy might still have been lurking somewhere beyond a dune. “Was it Taliban? Or was it American?”

What did it matter where the bomb came from, the motorcycle man’s eyes seemed to say. Children had been hurt. They were in desperate need of a doctor. And now his village was counting on him to seek help. Approaching a heavily armed column of American armor had been risky enough for a guy with a beard on a bike. “Just help us!” he said.

Morrow radioed his platoon sergeant in the rear of the convoy. “We’re gonna head over to the village to see what happened to these kids,” Morrow said, “see if we can help.” Roger, came the muffled reply.

The village was a small cluster of qalats couched behind a row of shady trees at the end of a dirt path. No sooner had our vehicles shuddered to a halt than a flood of men and filthy children poured out of a break in the tree line. Two men who seemed to be the village elders calmly scolded Morrow while younger, more virile, men held back the angriest in the crowd.

Moments later, grown men with boys riding piggy-back shuffled out of the village toward us. The victims, four boys – the fifth and most badly wounded had already been taken to the hospital in the village’s communal car – were between the ages of eight and 10. Their arms, legs and faces had been punctured, presumably from shrapnel.

The worst off of the four appeared to be in shock. As noise and commotion from the incensed crowd raged all around him, the boy stood there wide-eyed and speechless. He held his dusty, blood-caked little hand out like a zombie, and dark blood ran down his skinny legs.

“Tell Nef to get over here,” Morrow barked at someone, requesting his medic, 28-year-old Senior Airman Andrey Nefsky, who showed up minutes later primed for action.

Nef – as his American comrades call him – dropped his medic’s bag in the dirt and drew out a pair of light blue latex gloves, slapping them on in an exaggerated manner that left no doubt among the Americans and Afghans about who was now in charge. Immediately, he went to work on the boy in shock.

A tall, no-nonsense Russian from Novorossiysk, a Black Sea town founded by Peter the Great near the resort city of Sochi, Nefsky came to the United States in high school as part of an exchange program through Columbia University, before moving to Florida and joining the U.S. Air Force. His muscle-bound frame, strong Russian accent and hardened Slavic demeanor belie the gentleness with which his fellow soldiers and airmen credit him.

To witness the skill with which Nef worked was like watching an expertly choreographed ballet. In a performance marked by precision and speed, his interaction with the wounded boy was firm yet delicate. As the boy quietly looked on, Nef scrubbed away clumps of dried blood and dirt from his wrist with a sterile saline solution. At one point, dark streams of blood shot five feet out of the boy’s wrist in spurts, causing the crowd to jump back in surprise. But Nef kept it cool and continued to work.

Despite the macabre setting, I couldn’t help but smile at the irony: Among Afghans, Russians are almost universally hated, blamed for plunging their country into a brutal war, the lingering violence from which has crushed the will of the people these 30 years. Although it was impossible for the Afghan villagers to make the distinction, I wondered what they might do if they found out Nef was from Russia. I doubt he saw it this way, but I like to think Nef’s actions were a small, if inconsequential, attempt at reconciliation.

Calmly sealing the severed artery with pressure and gauze, Nef went to work on the boy’s legs, where shrapnel had pierced his inner thighs. Then he patched up the other victims with the same skillfulness and care. While Nef worked, Morrow made plans for an Afghan doctor to make follow-up visits.

Hours later, as the sun set below the horizon, it was the first time that day I’d had time to process all that happened. We waited in our vehicles for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team to come and blow up what was left of the artillery rounds the children had found – and tampered with. According to one of the boys with a deep, gash over his right eye, the friends had found the bombs that morning. He reluctantly admitted to us and the elders present that the boys had decided to make the bombs targets in a rock-throwing competition.

I wondered where the munitions had come from. Could they have been duds fired from the nearby U.S. Airbase? There were no impact holes; they lay on flat ground. Maybe they’d been discarded or “lost” by the Taliban who had stolen them from the Americans. Judging by their conspicuously missing fuses, that seemed plausible. The Taliban would have used the explosive material inside to make an IED.

I thought about the boys. It appeared all of them were going to survive their injuries. I was grateful for that. Yet something didn’t sit right. My mind returned to the chaotic events of that afternoon – the yelling, the anger, the tension and fear. Something just seemed off.

Then it hit me. The children, I thought. The boys were what was wrong. As I replayed the events in my head, I realized that not a single one of them had cried. Their bloody little bodies were riddled with shrapnel, yet not one had shed a tear. They simply stood there in line, obediently waiting for Nef to patch them up, like an American grade-schooler waiting for the lunch lady to serve him his beans.

It was a display of courage and toughness I have rarely witnessed. It helped me to understand a little better our adversaries. What does it take to produce such a people? No wonder these guys are so hard to beat, I thought.

The names of the soldiers in this post have been changed out of respect for their privacy.

Into the Woods

By Molly

The Woodstock Festival took place over 40 years ago on a farm in Bethel, New York.  Longhaired, flower-wielding youths came from all over the country to camp and dance and listen to music on a wide expanse of farmland in the Catskills. They brought guitars and acid and free love.  They twirled, they smoked, and they arrived by the hundreds of thousands for three days of promised “peace, love and music.”  When I think of that time, images come to mind that are hazy and light, earth-toned and effervescent like a slew of Polaroid photographs baking in the sun.

Just yesterday, a chilly Sunday morning, I was curled up in a studio in the actual town of Woodstock, a small but charming bohemian village.  It was my last day of a month-long artists’ residency, which was housed in a rickety old villa up in the hills.  I spent my days writing.  I spent my nights reading and cooking and eating with nine other artists who were there to write, paint and compose.  It was quiet and calm, filled with the sounds of crickets and owls.  The landscape was clear and cool, drenched in the burnished greens and reds of a coming autumn.

The distance between Woodstock and Bethel is relatively small.  Only 70 miles or so.  And though the iconic festival didn’t actually take place in Woodstock, the town bears a legacy that represents a culture that defined the time. Its residue can be seen everywhere.  On my late afternoon walks, which I took to clear my mind of excess words and occasionally talk to Matt on the phone, I saw middle-aged men with gray hair cascading down their backs and roadside booths selling more tie-dyed t-shirts than I knew existed.  The main street was exploding with yoga studios and Tibetan souvenir shops.  Bob Dylan once lived up the dirt road that runs in front of the studio where I worked.  

One Friday a few weeks ago I saw a movie with a handful of the others in the residency.  We saw “Taking Woodstock,” an Ang Lee film about a family who ran a motel close to the concert and their son, who played a role in bringing it to Bethel.  It was fun and happy, but filled with stereotyped characters that grated on me by the end. I can’t say I recommend it highly.  It did make me think, though.

In the movie, a young scraggly-haired man named Billy functioned as the token veteran.  He wore his olive drab uniform blouse unbuttoned over blue jeans, and constantly sipped a beer.  His eyes were glazed and vacant. He thought of going back for another tour of duty, because at least he wasn’t “weird” in Vietnam.  In one scene, Billy has a flashback of a battle and wanders through the forest, crouching and looking for enemies.

It made me think about a different kind of distance.  One far larger than 70 miles.  I know it's not a surprise, but I’ve been thinking about war. 

The Woodstock festival took place at the height of the Vietnam War.  Young men died every day. Veterans returned with minds and bodies bearing the scars of battle.  And in the 60s, men didn’t have a choice.  The war touched all Americans because each man’s number might be the next.  Anyone could be wrenched from his life, like Matt was from his, and sent to fight an “enemy” who was not clearly defined or understood.

Then, the youth culture came together in protest.  The Hippie movement wasn’t born of solely of the war in Vietnam, of course.  It was an outlet for many things.  But it rose alongside the Viet Cong and the Tet Offensive and resulted in a wild energy, intense togetherness and desire for peace. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about that energy—one that perhaps died with my parents’ generation.  Now, as our country fights two wars that have dragged on for almost as long as Vietnam, there is a familiar underlying hopelessness.  But there’s also an apathy.  One that I’ve seen in myself, and one that I couldn’t help thinking about as I walked among the retail shops there in Woodstock selling coffee mugs painted with peace signs.

I protested the Iraq war in 2003.  It was a huge demonstration, coordinated in cities around the world.  I was a college sophomore and hitched a ride to New York City from Providence with a friend.  We marched down First Avenue in a biting winter wind.  There were speeches near the UN, which we listened to while eating bagels and sipping cups of coffee. I felt part of something large in that moment.  I was proud of myself for making the trip.  But then I went back to school and turned my attention to other things.  I read the paper; occasionally I attended events like peace vigils on the campus’ main green.  When I moved to New York in 2006 the protests were nothing more than a memory.  The immediacy of the conflicts abroad had faded bit by bit, for me and my family, for many of my friends.

I know that I was out of touch.  There have been many protests. Dissent—and also support—has been voiced and covered widely by the press. I’ve read the books and the editorials.  I’ve seen the movies.  I’ve seen cars with “Support our Troops” bumper stickers on the highways around Boston.  But the wars didn’t touch my life, really, until I met Matt.

Matt volunteered for the Army when he was 18.  He chose to go to West Point.  He began as a cadet before the Towers fell, yes, and the invasion of Iraq came as a surprise to him, too.  But by putting on that uniform and earning his degree he promised to see it through to the end.  When Matt invaded Iraq in 2003, right around the time I was eating bagels outside the UN, he and everyone else in the military was there of their own volition.  The men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan today made the choice on their own.  

The all-volunteer force today means that large swaths of our country have no connection to the wars.  It means that it is entirely possible to sit at home in suburban Boston, in Northern California, in Manhattan and to view the conflicts we’ve been fighting for the last eight years as merely peripheral to daily life.  For many, war takes place on television and in the newspapers, somewhere incomprehensible and very far away.  Before I met Matt, war didn’t cross the boundary of my daily life.  The subject hardly ever came up at the dinner table.  I could ignore it, and I did.

I spoke to my mother on the phone as I walked into town to get some coffee a few Saturdays ago around 10 a.m.  I could see my breath in the air and a group of deer paused to stare at me from the forest nearby.  The sun sliced through the trees in sheets, hitting the pavement like painted lines. I told my mom about “Taking Woodstock,” which I’d seen the night before, and what it made me think. 

We talked about the striking similarities between Vietnam and Afghanistan.  About the length of the war and the endemic hopelessness.  My mother remembered the draft.

The climate in our country would be so different if our brothers and husbands and sons had no choice but to go to war, I told her.

Everything would be different, she agreed.

I walked downtown, and bought an iced coffee at a bakery.  I wondered what would happen if the young man behind the counter had to go to war.  I walked towards the library, and wondered what it would be like if the teenage boys riding skateboards on the other side of the road had an older brother or two fighting abroad.  I walked back towards home and I wondered what it would be like if I had to go to war, if all the writers and artists at this residency had to go to war.  What if my brother, Ben, was drafted?  Or the sons and daughters of our leaders in Congress and the Senate? What if those young men and women were torn from their lives, like Matt was from his, and had no choice but to fly to Kabul and then take a convoy to Gardez.  I often wonder what it would be like if this was America’s war.  

Fallen

By Matt



By the time I reached my room in Eisenhower Barracks, the sweat-soaked cotton t-shirt beneath my uniform clung to my back. I had just run from one class in the bowels of Mahan Hall, a long granite structure along West Point’s southeast rim that houses the Department of Civil Engineering. I was late for my next class, which was held at the farthest possible point away on the campus. I only had a few seconds to dump the Structural Steel Design books on my bed and gather up those for Surveying before dashing out again.

In my fourth and final year as a cadet, this was my Tuesday morning routine.

But on that particular Tuesday, when I burst through the door of my room, I was surprised to see Scott Smiley, my friend and neighbor in the barracks, hushed and leaning over my desk. The room was dim in the soft morning light. Scott’s face was inches from the glowing computer screen. He was watching the news – and he didn’t look up.

“Shh,” Scott said, before I even uttered a sound. “My TV card died so I came over here. A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”

“What? What kind of plane?” I said, as I threw down Steel and tipped Surveying from the shelf above Scott’s head, not even giving myself time to glance at the screen.

“I don’t know. They didn’t say,” Scott said, as if in a trance. “A plane. There’s a fire.”

“Damn,” I said, imagining a small collision by a wooden-winged prop plane, the kind King Kong swatted away like mosquitoes. Then I looked at my watch. “Shit!”

Panting and sweating, I barely made it to the classroom in time. It didn’t matter, though. Class had been canceled, something that at West Point just wasn’t done. That’s when I knew it was serious.

On hearing the first reports of an attack in New York, my Surveying professor, an Army major and a New Yorker, had flipped on the classroom projector and turned to CNN. Although my classmates and I were free to go, no one budged. In the three minutes since I’d seen Scott, another plane had hit the second tower. The major leaned forward on a drafting table facing the screen, his arms supported by white-knuckled fists. A few minutes later, we all watched stunned as the towers crumbled onto lower Manhattan.

“They got the fucking towers!” the major shrieked in his characteristic Brooklyn accent. He seemed angry or scared or both. His loss of composure scared me, too.

For the first time since I’d begun at West Point in 1998, the academy went into lock-down. No one was allowed in or out. As the most important military base in the vicinity of New York – only 50 miles down the Hudson River – it seemed reasonable to academy brass that the 4,400 Army officers-in-training might have made an appealing target to would be attackers. The rest of the day was filled with anxiety over what might come next.

“This is gonna be our Pearl Harbor,” was a typical remark heard on campus that day. Other cadets noted it might turn out to be the greatest loss of American life since Antietam. And whether it was said or not, all of us were thinking the same thing: “This is going to mean war.” In our first three years at school, that was a thought none of us had had to seriously confront. Now it was a certainty.

A couple of days later, academy officials held a Taps Vigil for the still-unknown number of victims in New York. Until September 11, these somber ceremonies were reserved exclusively for members of the Corps of Cadets who died while enrolled. It was the highest honor a cadet could receive.

At 11:30 on Thursday night, thousands of us cadets quietly filed onto the pitch-black apron facing Constitution Island across the broad Hudson River. We stood at attention in our Dress Gray uniforms and stared out into the blackness as the ghostly sound of Taps echoed across the plain. Then a lone set of bagpipes played the longing notes of Amazing Grace before we joined together to sing the West Point alma mater.

…And when our work is done,
Our course on earth is run,
May it be said, “Well done,
Be thou at peace”…

Every year, on the anniversary of 9/11, I reflect on that episode in my life. It was a period when the naïve prism through which I viewed the world and my future was shattered all at once by an act of barbarism I still cannot grasp.

This year, observing the eighth anniversary of the attacks from Afghanistan – within kilometers of where Bin Laden and Al Qaeda hatched their evil plan – my memories of that day and my subsequent experiences are particularly lucid. For the rest of my time at West Point, I had lamented that my classmates and I would miss our chance at war. I thought that the vengeance exacted by the U.S. Army on Al Qaeda would be over long before we graduated the next June.

I was wrong.

Over the next decade, my life would be inexorably connected to the events of that day. I have spent most of my twenties either at war or preparing for it. Eighteen months after graduation, I invaded Iraq at the “tip of the spear” with the 3rd Infantry Division. For the next year I would take part in “support and stability operations” there. Later in 2005 I deployed for another year to Ar Ramadi, which by the summer of 2006 had become a cauldron of violence so deadly it was considered the most dangerous place on earth. I was only 21 years old on 9/11, and I’ll turn 30 here in Afghanistan. It’s difficult for me to fathom that this cursed war will ever end.

But my travails are nothing compared to the sacrifices of many of my West Point classmates and comrades. To date, my class has lost nine officers fighting in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The most recent notification came to me just a week after I was recalled to duty. In February, Brian “Bubba” Bunting, a fellow civil engineer who was in my Steel Design class on the morning of Sept. 11, was killed by a roadside bomb in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Like me, Bubba had been recalled from the Individual Ready Reserve to serve another tour of duty. Buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Bubba left behind a wife and infant son.

Drew Jensen was paralyzed from the neck down when in May 2007 a sniper shot him in the neck in Baqubah, Iraq. He had been trying to save one of his soldiers who was pinned behind a Humvee after a bomb exploded. From his hospital bed in Fort Lewis, Washington, Drew donated $10,000 to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to establish a fund to help families cover expenses while visiting their wounded loved ones. Then on Sept. 7, 2007, honoring his final request, Drew’s wife and mother took him off life support. He was 27.

On March 10, 2008, just before I finished up graduate school, Torre Mallard was killed when a roadside bomb struck his vehicle outside Balad, Iraq. I didn’t know Torre personally, but his is the only funeral of a service member I have attended. It was something I had to do. I suppose it was my way of paying respects to all the veterans who in this war have made the ultimate sacrifice.

On that cold, windy day at the end of winter, Molly and I made the hour-long drive to West Point from Manhattan. The simple service was held in the Old Cadet Chapel. A larger one with Torre’s family had been held back in Alabama days before. This was just one final farewell before Torre was buried among other members of the Long Gray Line.

The cemetery at West Point is an open air museum featuring some of America’s great historical characters. Indian fighters, Civil War generals, architects and astronauts make up some of the 7,000 graduates interred on the sleepy promontory overlooking the Hudson. George Custer, Winfield Scott and Ed White all occupy plots, which have been carefully groomed for decades. But the majority of those buried there are not giants of American lore.

In the northeast section of the cemetery, discolored patches of grass stretch from gravestones of every style, from soft white marble to mirrored granite. Freshly laid wreaths, bright American flags and potted flowers give the impression that those buried in this section arrived recently and all at once. Here lay the members of modern West Point classes killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. This exposed fringe of the cemetery overlooks a parking lot, a gas station and a small strip mall with a Subway and a coffee shop. It’s as if West Point expanded the burial ground in haste, unprepared for the sudden return of its sons and daughters in flag-draped coffins.

Just before Torre was laid to rest, I held Molly’s hand tightly as seven rifles barked three times in unison. Then the familiar sound of Taps filled the air. Standing there, I thought about the terrible price America has paid in avenging the deaths of the 3,000 lost in the towers. Today, the wars’ toll is more than 5,000 dead and counting. Tens of thousands more have been wounded – my friend, Scott Smiley, among them.

The last time I saw Scott was graduation day in 2002. A member of the class of 2003, Scott had one more year to go, so I shook his hand and wished him well. I lost touch with Scott after that and heard nothing more about him until one day in 2007 when I came across his name in the news. He’d been named “Soldier of the Year” by the Army Times.

In April 2005, while leading his platoon on a patrol in Mosul, Iraq, a suspicious truck approached Scott’s vehicle. The truck got to within 30 yards of the formation, and Scott fired two warning shots to ward the driver off. But it was too late. A suicide bomber was the last thing Scott ever saw. Shrapnel from the blast sliced through his eyes, blinding him for life.

Scott was one of the finer men I had met in my years in the service. He was the kind of officer destined for greatness, cut from the very fabric of which generals are made. Focused and driven, he would spend hours in the gym at West Point, fine-tuning his intimidating frame. Devoutly Christian, Scott derived his self-discipline from God, he said. He was kind and thoughtful, even to plebes. And I imagine he was the same way with his men. Even before he graduated, Scott was eager to join the infantry. His ultimate goal was to eventually become a Green Beret like his older brother before him.

That would, of course, never happen. Yet despite his wounds, Scott surprised even those who knew him best. He petitioned the Army to let him stay in uniform, and with the help of a general, Scott’s unlikely wish was granted. Since then, he’s toured the Army giving motivational speeches about leadership, faith and perseverance in the face of tremendous adversity. He continues to run, surf and ski. In 2006, he even climbed Mount Rainier. Scott eventually went on to earn an MBA from Duke University and is now teaching a course on leadership at West Point.

“I started to understand that there is something greater than me and there is something better than me,” Scott told a reporter in 2007. “A lot of times, when someone goes through trials and adversities and still manages to have a positive outlook on life and still worships God like I did before, it motivates people.”

That was the Scott I knew. At a time in America when there are few heroes – indeed, few good leaders – people like Scott and Bubba and Drew and Torre remind me that although it was devastating, all was not lost when the towers came down on 9/11. No matter what your stance on the war may be, the fact is that almost a decade since that horrifying day, American men and women continue to fight and sometimes die for ideals greater than themselves.

I am humbled to serve among them.



To the fallen members of the West Point Class of 2002: "Well done. Be thou at peace."

Little Luxuries

By Matt



It was late in Germany, about 2a.m., when the last of our buses rocked up the curb into a dimly lit parking lot on post. Were it not for the glistening beads of water on their brass instruments I might not have noticed the six-soldier military band shivering in the light winter rain. The band had been ordered to greet our returning battalion with a short military tune, which they sloppily belted out before hopping in their cars and driving away.

It was all the Army could muster that night, and it would be our only welcome home. The date was Dec. 10, 2003. I’d just spent the previous year as a platoon leader in Iraq.

As our bus rumbled away, I shook hands with fellow officers and NCOs whom I’d gotten to know on the deployment. Many of them had become my close friends. As they all went home to wives and children or just cozy flats in the town’s medieval center, I hauled my ruck sack and duffle bag about 200 meters from the parking lot to my assigned room.

Almost a year earlier, in January of the same year, I’d arrived there in the Bavarian town of Bamberg, home station for the 54th Engineer Battalion. I hadn’t had time to find an apartment before the unit was shipped off to the Middle East, so I’d been ordered to drop my bags in a dingy suite of the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters on post.

It took several tries before I found the right key. Then with a click and a kick, the door swung wide. I fumbled in the dark for the light switch. Once I found it, the room flickered for a moment, and a low electric hum joined a fluorescent glow.

The stillness was frightening. The bed’s ruffled sheets indicated the haste with which I had vacated the room on my way to war. Scattered from wall to wall were empty cardboard boxes and other military gear. The tilted refrigerator held a solitary can of Mountain Dew. Everything was exactly as I’d left it, as if I had never even been gone.

I was mesmerized by the silence. It reminded me of how lonely I had felt on arriving in Germany that bitter cold January. During my ensuing year of combat, I would go on to make the best friends of my life. But standing here again in the doorway of this transient room, I was overwhelmed by a crushing sense of isolation.

I didn’t sleep that first night. Indeed, to be back in Europe – in civilization – the idea of combat seemed unreal: the sandstorms and explosions, the stench of rotting flesh and human waste, sleepless nights in the backs of Humvees along the mosquito-plagued Euphrates. Had all of it really happened?

Several weeks passed before I became reaccustomed to the details of “normal life.” Words can’t describe the disorientation felt after a year at war. It’s impossible to explain how every little luxury is amplified a thousand times: the taste of a cold dark beer, the sight of a beautiful woman or the light crunch of virgin snow beneath one’s boot. After Iraq, every one of these otherwise mundane experiences made my heart glow. I felt born again, and my appreciation for tiny wonders never wore off. On some level, I don’t think it ever will.

Returning to Iraq for my second tour in late 2005, I again encountered this bizarre detachment from my life, this time in reverse. There was still the familiar revulsion to the sights and smells of Iraq, which bridged the two-year interim I’d spent living and traveling in Europe. As my tour in Ramadi marched into the summer of 2006, the authenticity of the world outside began to feel distorted, illusory. With rockets and bombings and ghastly violence a fact of life for my unit, my time in Germany seemed nothing more than an oasis of privilege in life’s cruel expanse.

Looking back now, it felt as if I were two separate men living two separate lives. These men shared a common past but lost touch at age 23, when one went off to war, and the other preferred not to think about it. Over the years these men would briefly cross paths. But they began to recognize each other less and less. Before long, as far as they both were concerned, the other’s life was mere fantasy.



***


I have now been in Afghanistan for the better part of three months. By the time I get home next spring, I will have spent three years – 10 percent of my life – at war. When I was recalled to the Army in February, I made a promise to myself that this time, no matter what, I would not allow my new life – my work as a journalist in New York, the freedom I’d come to enjoy as a civilian, my growing love for Molly – to slip away. And it hasn’t – in part because of Molly, who has kept me anchored to a life I long to continue.

During quiet hours at night here in Afghanistan I often sit outside, alone under the stars. The Milky Way, which streaks across a broad swath of the sky here, is visible even on nights when the moon is bright. And each evening, without fail, a shooting star arcs silently through the blackness, flung as if from another world. It reminds me that there is a life waiting for me outside this place.

I sit there, and I remember the chilly day that Molly and I spent riding our bikes through the ritzy neighborhoods of the Hamptons, imagining what it would be like if we were filthy rich. I remember the weekend before I deployed when she and I defiled the Cajun two-step on a dance floor in Acadiana. My favorite memory, though, is when I brought Molly to Bamberg last summer, when she came to visit as I was working as an intern reporter at BusinessWeek’s Paris bureau.

For months, I’d wanted to show Molly the place I had called home for almost five years. I knew it wasn’t her notion of fun, but this trip was for me. I’d been out of the Army just over a year, and the ties to my old life were still strong. I was confused about who I was becoming, where life was taking me. I needed Molly to see for herself the backdrop against which I underwent the most intense changes in my psychological development. I thought if she could see where I’d come from, she might understand better who I really was.

Molly went begrudgingly, preferring the idea of late dinners in Montmartres to beer and bratwurst at rowdy German breweries. I think she also was nervous about how her perception of me might change when she was finally confronted with my military past. But after a week of morning runs near millennium-old castles and window shopping along the cobblestone alleys of one of Bavaria’s quaintest cities, she was happy. I was, too. I’d taken a risk in bringing her there, since our relationship was still fragile and my volatile years in this city still evoked unpredictable emotions.

But with that visit I introduced one profound period of my life to another. It was difficult, but helped me to realize that living is not simply a collection of disparate events. None of them can be canceled out when memories are unpleasant, especially not my years of war. Rather, it is in the juxtaposition of the good with the bad that I am able to find greater meaning in it all.

On our final night in Bamberg, as the sun’s last rays blinked out beyond the city’s main cathedral, Molly and I drank kellerbier outside at a hilltop brewery overlooking the town. I considered the scene: good cold German beer, a beautiful woman. Only the snow was missing.


I told Molly that I could live in a place like this with her for the rest of my life. I knew that my sentiments were intensified by lingering memories of war's deprivations. Yet in that instant, I thought about how lucky I was that I would never have to go back.