The Things They Cannot Say (19 page)

“Abood was very deferential and kind to the brother, but also continued to empathize with me. ‘It was a tragedy,' he told me, ‘because it couldn't happen any other way. Everyone made the best decisions they could with the information they had.'

“At the time, I kept reinforcing that, but I blame myself now,” says Iscol. “When I look back on it, I reacted as if there were a fifty percent chance the truck coming at us was a suicide bomber. I wish we had taken more risks. But if something happened to my Marines and they became endangered I would have felt completely opposite. Still, I question, did we make ourselves safer for this action or create more insurgents?”

Later, the incident would also challenge him to think about the bigger picture, the strategic one, about the military's emphasis on “force protection,” safeguarding the lives of U.S. troops first, sometimes at the expense of innocent civilian lives, as in this incident.
*
And after years of robustly defending the mission, volunteering to go to Iraq not once but twice, Iscol also began to wonder, after his deployment, whether the American military should've ever gone there in the first place.

But Iscol didn't have a lot of time to contemplate what happened in Iraq while he was in there. As the summer wore on, so did the tensions mounting in Fallujah, and incidents around the camp reinforced his unsettled feelings about his mission so far.

“We had these two puppies, named after our call signs, Beowulf and Cannonball. Beowulf ate fly poison and began convulsing. None of the Marines wanted to put it down,” says Iscol. “A Navy corpsman called me over and I put a sandbag over the puppy's head and killed it with my nine-millimeter. That was the moment when I realized this was going to be a lot different than I thought it would be. Thought I'd be killing insurgents and stopping fanatics—instead I killed a puppy.”

W
hen Iscol first returned home from Iraq, he felt a sense of urgency to confirm that his service in Iraq did indeed have purpose. At various engagements he spoke with a zealous assurance that America had been right to go to war in Iraq. But as the months went by, Iscol began to see through his own bluster and did what he was educated to do: contemplate his experiences more deeply. One seminal operation dominated his thoughts, the Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, when American and Iraqi troops took back the city from insurgents, but at a cost of nearly leveling it.

“We came home from that deployment thinking we had accomplished a lot of things. Insurgent activity, especially in al-Anbar Province, was almost nothing,” says Iscol. “But when I saw things go to shit again I wondered what we really had accomplished. You begin to see with great clarity what happened in Fallujah. We looked at Blackwater [the killing and burning of the bodies of four American security contractors] as the beginning. But for Iraqis it started a year earlier,” says Iscol.

“With the benefit of hindsight, I've become more thoughtful about what we did there. I don't think you can really go to combat and not look back, not reflect. When you go to war and you come back it doesn't leave you. How can you not think about things differently?”

O
ne of the things Iscol knew he could not leave behind in Iraq was his interpreter Abood. Because of his work with American soldiers and Marines, Abood, his wife and his four daughters became the target of constant threats, which eventually forced them to leave Iraq and take refuge in Jordan, along with thousands of others. At the time the U.S. immigration policy for Iraqis, even those who assisted American forces, was to allow only a trickle to enter the U.S., three thousand per year.

For Iscol, this was not nearly good enough, especially since the man who had helped keep him and his Marines alive in Iraq was now the target of death squads. He began writing letters and making calls, using some of his parents' political connections, even walking the halls of Capitol Hill in his Marine dress blue uniform, knocking on office doors of senators he believed could help. His persistence finally paid off when Iscol was allowed to testify on Capitol Hill on behalf of Abood and other Iraqi interpreters. The day he spoke, Abood and his family were granted refugee status. Six months later they were in New York.

“It's great that happened,” Iscol says, “but do we have to hold a hearing every time we try to bring someone here?”

Iscol helped set Abood up in a hotel owned by family friends and then helped him and his daughters get jobs as interpreters. While the impact for Abood was immediate, Iscol's work also helped to pressure the government to increase the number of special immigrant visas for people like Abood, who assist American military or policy efforts abroad and then become targets because of it.

Iscol didn't intend his efforts as a kind of reparation for the shooting of the Iraqi driver by Marines under his command, but it did highlight his determination to prove that an Iraqi life is no less valuable than an American one.

Even so, he wasn't done yet. The young man raised on the exhortations of Exeter Academy's founder John Phillips to combine knowledge with goodness in the service of mankind had more he wanted to give.

“War demands the best and worst of man,” he said in an interview with
Fast Company
magazine about his new project, a documentary titled
The Western Front
concerning his experiences in Iraq and echoing its namesake, Erich Maria Remarque's novel
All Quiet on the Western Front
, as well as the questions the book raises about the value and purpose of war. “Fallujah was a very tough fight and I saw and participated in some pretty awful stuff.”

Rather than recoiling from his war's memories and his own mistakes, Iscol sought them out aggressively. He wanted to understand his choices and how they might be instructive in the future, both to himself and his country. It was in the pursuit of this documentary that Iscol first came to me. Because of my “notorious” video of the shooting in the mosque, he knew that I had been embedded with another company in his battalion during Operation Phantom Fury. He sent me an e-mail asking to use some of the video I shot in his film. At first I reacted negatively, even harshly, to the request. Early on I had taken a lot of grief from ex-Marines for releasing the mosque video. But then almost invariably, I would get requests from them years later, asking for some of my other battle footage to use in memorial videos or personal highlight reels. I thought Iscol was requesting the same. But he explained his project and then asked to do an interview with me about what I had seen in Fallujah. Although it never made it into the film (it complicated the narrative, which was about Iscol's experiences, not mine), I began to trust that he was really struggling with his choices in war and this was the vehicle in which he could both explore them and perhaps find some closure, by sharing their lessons.

He was attempting to break the destructive grip of some of his wartime experiences by listening to that most important voice. J. Glenn Gray comments on this voice inside of us in
The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle
: “Whatever his response, the person who hears the call of conscience is aware of freedom in the form of a choice. He could have performed differently than he did; an act of his might have been different. The whole realm of the potential in human action is opened to him and with it the fateful recognition that he is in charge of his own course. Conscience is thus the first instance in the form of self- consciousness. It is that form that gives to us an unmistakable sense of free individuality and separates for us the domains of the actual and the ideal. Therewith the life of reflection begins, and the inner history of the individual no longer corresponds to his outer fate.”

The need to help Abood as well as to produce a documentary about his own mistakes and his shifting belief system were part of Iscol's attempts to extricate himself from that “outer fate.”

“I began to wonder if we as a country needed to rethink our reliance on the use of force to keep us safe and why we, as a nation, we had not evolved,” Iscol said in the same
Fast Company
interview. “We are fighting two wars that didn't even register as election year issues. Having our troops engaged in combat over there might make us feel safer back home, but are we as a nation simply repeating the same mistakes we made at
that
checkpoint?”

But Iscol is impatient for answers. In the documentary, he travels back to Iraq, no longer as a Marine carrying a weapon, but as a man carrying his conscience. He is looking for more from his time in war than just stories with unsatisfactory endings. He is seeking, simply, perhaps nobly even, to understand.

Postscript

Iscol has kept up a breakneck pace since his return from Iraq. He's the founder and CEO of a tech startup company called HirePurpose that uses analytical tools to match transitional job seekers, such as military veterans, with employers. He also serves as executive director of the Headstrong Project, a nonprofit focused on developing cost- and stigma-free mental health care for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. His documentary,
The Western Front
, screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and is scheduled for release in 2013.

Part V: Moral Ambiguities

How Do You Know What's Right?

War fills our spiritual void. I do not miss war, but I miss what it brought.

—Chris Hedges, author, ex–war correspondent

From
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
, Chris Hedges (Public Affairs, 2002)

Colonel Morris Goins, U.S. Army

1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry

The War in Iraq (2006–08)

Chapter 9: Morris Versus Mo

There are those that need killing and those that need helping.

M
orris Goins had been home from Iraq for almost nine months. There had been some adjustments, even some counseling sessions, but for the most part he felt like he was doing all right. And then one day he was driving down the road near Fort Hood in Texas and he hit a squirrel with his truck.

“I almost pulled over and called my mother,” he says. “It hurt so much to kill something. Or I'm fishing and I hook a bass in the gut and it's bleeding. I feel the same thing, then tell myself, ‘It's just a fish, bro.' ”

But Goins isn't some hot mess, one roadkill away from a nervous breakdown. He's a highly decorated U.S. Army colonel, ambitious, smart, even managing an enviable balance between work and family, despite long months away on “business.”

Some say he's at the top of his game, and there's plenty of evidence to support that. When I first meet him he's in the middle of a prestigious National Security Fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School. I wonder if he's running for mayor or already has the job, as I watch him work the tables in the lobby area of the Kennedy School, known as the Forum, a popular spot for high-profile socializing in between classes. He smiles, waves, shakes hands and generally carries himself with the energetic jaunt of a successful entrepreneur or celebrity chef.

Still being able to connect with people, as well as his emotions, I realize, is possibly the key to his postwar readjustment.

After a particularly bloody fifteen-month combat deployment to Iraq, he was actually surprised he could feel anything at all. Shutting down was the default mode for so many in the military, silent stoics bearing their burdens in isolation. This was not how Morris Goins operated.

There are twenty-eight dog tags, Goins tells me, hanging from his fireplace mantel. They belonged to the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry soldiers killed in action in and around Baqubah, Iraq, under his command. Another two hundred were wounded. When they first arrived in 2006, they were driving around in Humvees without much drama, but when they moved their outpost into an Iraqi police station, it was like the switch was turned on.

“The next ten months were like
Saving Private Ryan
at Omaha Beach,” says Goins. Seventeen of his tanks, thirty-four Bradley Fighting Vehicles and thirty-three Humvees were damaged or destroyed during operations.

“I know of only one other battalion that had more KIAs [killed-in-action incidents] than me in the entire campaign,” Goins says. “We were eating twenty-five IEDs a day. I got choked up during that time and my guys knew it bugged me. I remember one of my soldiers saying, ‘Sir, nobody wants to be you, hang in there.' ”

And then there was the mother writing to him before they deployed.

“I need you to bring my son back alive.”

And another writing him during the deployment.

“I need you to bring my son home. His father is sick.”

And during one particularly ugly stretch, the so-called lonely burden of command only got lonelier.

“I lost nine dudes in eleven days,” he says.

He wrote all the families personal letters, because the standard letter is BS. “I tell them this is what your son died for, this is what I remember about him.”

At Harvard, Goins has the time to ponder those fifteen months and to try to understand who he was in war and how it has changed him.

“I think a lot about the loss of life,” he says. Unlike many soldiers both above and below his rank, he knows the value of emotion and not burying it. While still in Iraq, he was starkly candid with Britain's
Guardian
newspaper in 2007, concerning a story about the loss of his men. “Sometimes you can't keep it together,” he said. “I don't have the strength. I am human just like you. But these dudes, they need you to be calm and thinking straight, not getting angry and wanting to kick down some doors. That does not mean I won't come back and lock the door and cry by myself. I have eye drops on my desk to clear my eyes. I have my Bible and I do a lot of praying. Then I can go back out again and do what I need to do.”

He remembers getting the news of two of the first casualties of his battalion. His sergeant major told him that their engineers hit an IED while out on patrol. He opened his hands to reveal a slip of paper. In it were the names of two soldiers with the letters “KIA” next to them. Goins said he sent a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) to retrieve the bodies. When the force returned, Goins said he went to the gate to meet them. He walked alongside the Bradley carrying the bodies and, touching it, began to weep. He helped remove them from the vehicle to take them into the graves registration building, where men and their body parts are reunited before being choppered out.

Goins called the battalion together and told them “not to forget those guys, send letters to their families, talk amongst yourself, get the emotions out.” Goins said he himself was choked up. He asked the chaplain to lead them in prayer, but the chaplain deferred to him, saying, “No, you do it, sir.”

Goins said he began the prayer without bothering to hide his grief, tears running down his face, like an old-time Baptist preacher overcome by the spirit. “Comfort the families, Lord, comfort us. Keep us strong and keep us from doing the things we don't want to do.”

But there was something tactical about what he was doing and saying as well. He was encouraging his men to vent their emotions in sadness now, so they wouldn't do it in anger later.

“I prayed to the Lord to keep us from turning evil,” Goins says, “to keep us from revenge. You can kill people anytime,” he says, “a monkey can do that. We have to do it right.”

Goins thinks he was able to do it right and keep his men focused on the mission rather than revenge, but personally, he says, it meant coming to terms with the two very different dimensions of himself.

He literally calls them Mo and Morris, reflecting the concept of the shadow self or alter ego discussed in earlier chapters, but for Goins they were simply a way to more effectively explain the firewall he maintained between the soldier and the man.

“Morris is the guy that is out bass fishing and gut-hooks a fish or hits a squirrel and feels bad. Morris is the guy who's really sensitive. But when I'm operational I'm Mo. Mo makes decisions based on fact.”

Goins provides me with a simple yet striking example from Iraq of the differences between his alter egos.

“We're on a mission and we're taking fire from a house. Through our scopes we can see the shooter goes back inside. We can also see two little kids inside the house as well. We've got birds [choppers] flying overhead and I give them the order to take it down.
But there are kids in the house!
I thought about those kids for about two seconds. Take it down. Boom! That's not my problem.”

Goins is married, even has a son of his own, C.J. He can understand this may sound callous, but Mo's thinking is clear, logical and without emotion. He believes—no, he knows—that he's saving his men's lives.

“I'm responsible for the lives of my guys. I'm not responsible for those kids. Whoever started shooting at us was. Now, I don't have problems living with both [Mo and Morris], but other people do. There are those that need killing and those that need helping,” he says, as if stating an obvious fact.

Former Army Ranger Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman would likely agree with Goins's rationale. In his book
On Killing
, Grossman observed that properly trained soldiers can become like reflexive weapons, able to kill quite efficiently, after they've predetermined the parameters for doing so. He wrote, “Usually killing in combat is completed in the heat of the moment, and for the modern properly conditioned soldier, killing in such a circumstance is most often completed reflexively, without conscious thought. It is as though a human being is a weapon. Cocking and taking the safety catch off of this weapon is a complex process, but once it is off the actual pulling of the trigger is fast and simple.”

In this context, Goins obviously knows his parameters, understanding even before he's in a fight that his responsibility to the safety of his men and his own moral code will dictate when he will keep his safety on and when he will pull the trigger, whether Morris or Mo will be in charge. While those choices can be clear on the battlefield, Goins admits that it's sometimes difficult to keep the man separated from the soldier in the aftermath.

Goins recalls being out in the field during a firefight when two young Iraqi girls were wounded in the crossfire. During the incident Goins pulled up to a residential area where his medic was working on one of the girls.

“But she's so jacked up she doesn't look like she's going to survive,” says Goins. Then he heard over the radio that there was another wounded girl a little farther up. He told the medic they needed to leave the first girl behind and see what they could do for the second. When they reached the second girl, they discovered she was badly hurt as well but might survive with advanced medical treatment back at their base. When the medic picked up the girl up to put her in the Humvee, she began to cry and her parents, standing in the doorway of their house, told them not to take her away. The medic ignored them, still holding the girl, until Goins said, “Sit her down—and let's go.”

“The parents didn't want her going with us,” he says, “so I tell him we can't take her, that's kidnapping. Put her down, we gotta roll.” Reluctantly the medic put her down in disbelief. They got back in their Humvee and drove silently back to their base. Once there Goins said he was overcome by the gravity of the decision he made to leave both girls to die. He says that when he saw his brigade commander he couldn't contain his tears.

“I just left two little girls behind,” he explained. For the next two hours, Goins said, the brigade commander, Colonel David Sutherland, drove him around in a Humvee, inside the base perimeter, talking him through it.

It was an incident in which “Mo,” the trained soldier, had to make the decision, but “Morris,” the empathetic man, had to suffer its consequences. Goins knows that while imperfect, this psychological firewall has allowed him to be at peace with himself, both morally and professionally.

Most important, though, he believes it lets him be the officer that his men can respect but also the human being to whom they can relate.

Goins knows that when his year at Harvard is done, he will likely be sent to war again, but this time he will command an entire combat brigade rather than just a battalion.
*
With each promotion the responsibilities multiply, more lives are at stake and the balance between soldier and man becomes harder to maintain.

“Emotionally I'm ready to deploy, but do I have enough in my well to survive? My body armor is in my garage, it's ready to go,” he says. “But your well is not just yours as a commander. Everyone is dipping in it and everyone's runs dry at some point.”

But if his well does run dry, he can take comfort in the fact that there will be another Goins to take his place. His son, C.J., is currently a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Postscript

After completing his National Security Fellowship at Harvard, Colonel Morris Goins was made commander of the 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division (Alaska). The brigade deployed to Afghanistan in January 2012 and is operating as Task Force Spartan in a highly dangerous region near the eastern city of Khost and the border with Pakistan.