The Things They Cannot Say (25 page)
Read The Things They Cannot Say Online
Authors: Kevin Sites
Shortly after Anita and I moved in together I began preparing for a reporting trip to Afghanistan. It would be my fourth time there, and I stepped up my therapy sessions, hoping to find some closure before I went. I found myself telling Dr. Sadoff that one of the ways in which I thought I might be able to be at peace with my actions in Fallujah was if I lost a limb during the upcoming trip, preferably a leg, rather than a hand or arm. The loss of that leg, while not a life, could make me feel that I was even for Nidal; that, along with my years of self-hatred and self-destruction, would ante up for his life.
But while Dr. Sadoff couldn't dissuade me of the notion, my actual behavior during that reporting trip to Afghanistan was the anathema of all that I had been saying. For the summer I was in Afghanistan, I trod perhaps more carefully than I ever had in my life, walking well-worn paths and being careful to stay out of clearings and the line of fire when possible. I had purchased a Kevlar helmet and body armor, which I normally never wore while working in war zones. Inside the helmet, I placed a picture of Anita, and inside the body armor, a photograph of each of the girls, one in front and one in back. Somehow, I understood there was now a value to my life that went beyond myself. If I died or lost a limb, Nidal and I might be even, but I would then be cheating the people who now considered me part of their family, the ones I wore next to my heart and on top of my head. My past actions during war didn't make me a bad person, nor did they invalidate the good things inside me; they simply proved the existence of both. While I obviously had not always seen clearly what was the right thing to do in the past, in this case, I had no doubt. Despite all my shortcomings, all my betrayals, all the pain I caused, all my sins, I wanted to come home aliveâyes, changed by the things war had both given and taken from me, but somehow complete.
Postscript
I secretly married Anita exactly two years to the day I met her at Joshua Tree, three days before leaving for my fourth trip to Afghanistan. I married her again, in front of family and friends, after my return. Inscribed on my wedding band is the Latin phrase “
Ex tenebris lux
”â“Out of darkness, light.”
Ongoing Storytelling Effort
If you have comments about this book and are a service member or veteran (from anywhere in the world) who would like to be part of an ongoing veterans' storytelling effort, please e-mail me at the address below. Your story, photos, or video may be shared in this book's companion website.
The author's mother and father (right) during the Korean War
M
y deepest thanks to all the service personnel, both U.S. and international, who had the courage and generous hearts to share their most intimate stories of war. Your efforts, I strongly believe, will help you on your journeyâand encourage others to find their own way home again. They include those featured in this book: Michael Ayala, Mikeal Auton, Joe Caley, Morris Goins, Zach Iscol, Thomas Saal, Sebastiaan Schoonhoven, Leonard Shelton, James Sperry, Lior Tailer and William Wold.
My thanks also to the many others who helped me to understand the combatant's experience in war, especially past and current service members: Frederick Coe, Wil Cromie, Pat Donahue, Justin Featherstone, Bernard Finestone, Dana Golan, Phillip Herbig, Roxanne Hurley, Gord Jenkins, Jeff Milhorn, Cathy Murphy, Arthur Myers, Zakyia Ibrahim Rahman, Matthew Rodgers, John Schluep, Justin Schmidt, Jonathan Staab, Sean Tuckey, Garret Ware and Joe Young.
I talked with the mothers, wives and girlfriends of some of the combatants profiled hereâand I thank them for their contributionsâbut out of respect for their privacy, I will not name them here.
Several experts in the field of combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder provided invaluable assistance both through their written works and in personal interviews they granted to me, and in some cases, they helped me to make contact with individuals featured in this book. I'm extremely grateful to Dr. Edward Tick, author of
War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation's Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
, and to his assistant Paula Griffin. I'm also indebted to Dr. Jonathan Shay, author of
Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character
and
Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman was very helpful in providing insight into the actual combat experience both in direct interviews with me and in his seminal work
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
and his follow-up work,
On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace
. Particularly helpful in quantifying the impact of combat on our society was the RAND Corporation's study “Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery,” edited by Terri Tanielian and Lisa Jaycox. And all those of us who have become students of war know the debt we owe to J. Glenn Gray and his work
The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle
for taking the subject out of the realm of myth and bringing it back to earth for honest discussion.
Other books that provided critical perspectives and thoughtful insights:
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
and
What Every Person Should Know About War
, both by the brilliant Chris Hedges;
War
by the excessively talented Sebastian Junger; Anthony Loyd's dually devastating and inspiring tome
My War Gone By, I Miss It So
; Ryszard Kapuscinski's classic
The Soccer War
;
One Soldier's War
by Arkady Babchenko, which provides a grunt's eye view from a Russian perspective; Brian Turner's
Phantom Noise
, which exemplifies the warrior-poet ideal; and the enduring standards of military strategy and tactics
On War
by Karl von Clausewitz,
The Art of War
by Niccolò Machiavelli and the work of the same name by Sun Tzu;
Breaking the Silence: Soldiers' Testimonies from Hebron and Women's Soldiers' Testimonies
; and finally, perhaps the most important American novel to explore the Vietnam War experience and one whose stories and title helped inspire this book, Tim O'Brien's
The Things They Carried
. And I'd like to offer special thanks to author and Vietnam War veteran Karl Marlantes for his remarkable book
What It Is Like to Go to War
, which is one of the most enlightening works on the subject I've ever read and which was instrumental in helping me to both identify and better endure the burdens of my own wars.
Many thanks to Hannah Catabia for her research work in the U.S., to Stephanie Freid for her research and interview assistance in Israel and to Mohammed Jalizadi for his efforts on my behalf in northern Iraq.
I want to express my gratitude to the Nieman Foundation for the fellowship opportunity that afforded me a paid year to struggle and reflect and eventually complete this difficult, emotional and cathartic project. Specifically I'm grateful to my colleague and friend Audra Ang, who tracked down the therapist who succeeded in derailing my plans for martyrdom on the twin altars of self-absorption and self-indulgence.
I'm extremely fortunate to have a very supportive imprint in Harper Perennial; my friend and editor Amy Baker is as encouraging of my efforts as she is forgiving of my lapsed deadlines. She made this a better book. And also with the Harper Perennial team, much appreciation to editor Michael Signorelli for taking the project handoff seamlessly and getting it across the finish line, and to production editor Mary Beth Constant and copyeditor Aja Pollock, who transformed this sometimes unwieldy manuscript from a jumble of words into a readable format where verb tenses actually exist in their proper time and place.
Finally, my thanks to my wife, Anitaâwhose unqualified support and example of courage and perseverance in the face of adversity inspire me and who is now helping me exercise muscle memory in the habit of trying to do the right thing daily.
I'd like to leave readers with this last passage, which I first read in Chris Hedges's book
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
after coming home from the War in Iraq. It's a simple but important message, one I hope never to forget:
“We are tempted to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. But to live only for meaningâindifferent to all happinessâmakes us fanatic, self-righteous, and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion.”
K
EVIN
S
ITES
has spent the past decade reporting on global war and disaster for ABC, NBC, CNN, and Yahoo! News. In 2005, he became Yahoo!'s first correspondent and covered every major conflict in the world in a single year for his website,
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone.
He is a recipientof the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism and was chosen as a Harvard University Nieman Journalism Fellow in 2010.
www.kevinsitesreports.com
Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
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THE THINGS THEY CANNOT SAY
.
Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Sites. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Epub Edition FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062099228
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*
5.56 x 45 mm NATO is a type of
rifle ammunition developed in the United States originally for the M16 rifle
but that also fits the M4, both issued to American soldiers and Marines
during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By contrast, for insurgents in Iraq
and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan the primary combat rifle is the AK-47
rifle, which utilizes larger 7.62 x 39 mm rounds.
*
Glenn Gray wrote in
The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle
, “The
basic aim of a nation at war in establishing an image of the enemy is to
distinguish as sharply as possible the act of killing from murder by making
the former into one deserving of all honor and praise.” Gray enlisted in the
U.S. Army as a private in 1941, the same day he received a doctorate in
philosophy from Columbia University.
*
During my research, I discovered that on at least two other occasions Iraqi prisoners were executed during Operation Phantom Fury.
*
I later independently released the entire raw video of the mosque shooting on NPR's website.
*
“Phantom Noise” from
Phantom Noise
. Copyright © by Brian Turner. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org.
*
Operation Vigilant Resolve, or the First Battle of Fallujah, began in early April 2004 in retaliation after four Blackwater American security contractors were killed and their bodies burned on a bridge in Fallujah that March. It ended less than a month later with a cease-fire that handed over security responsibilities in Fallujah to a force of Iraqi Sunnis known as the Fallujah Brigade. The brigade was supposedly allied with the American military and the Iraqi government but soon switched sides, joining the insurgents, turning over weapons to them or both. Operation Phantom Fury, or the Second Battle of Fallujah, was about correcting that mistake. With more than thirteen thousand American, British and Iraqi government troops, Fallujah was brought under military control in forty-five days. It was the bloodiest battle of the War in Iraq, with as many as fifteen hundred insurgents killed and more than a hundred coalition troops. Eight hundred civilians were also estimated to have died.
*
His name, I discovered from Naval Criminal Investigation Service reports, was Farhan Abd Mekelf, and according to the identification found on his body, he was an Iraqi policeman. He was the insurgent executed at point-blank range by a Marine lance corporal in front of my video camera the day
after
Wold's fireteam first entered the mosque and confronted the room full of armed insurgents. I was asked a few days later after his shooting by an NCIS investigator to identify him inside his body bag at a storage building at a U.S. military base. I could tell it was him, even though his face was crumpled and collapsed into itself, reminding me of a rubber Halloween mask with a tuft of black hair on top.
*
Wold's mother had to give her permission to allow him to join while he was still in high school. He was selected out of boot camp for a special Marine presidential protection unit. He guarded President George W. Bush during his retreats to Camp David.
*
The police report says it may have been an accident. Wold's father, Thomas Nelson, was found on an icy road with a broken neck when William was only eleven. Wold's family says he was unsettled by the death and believed it had been a homicide.
*
The Mayo Clinic says traumatic brain injury “usually results from a violent blow or jolt to the head that causes the brain to collide with the inside of the skull. An object penetrating the skull, such as a bullet or shattered piece of skull, also can cause traumatic brain injury. Mild traumatic brain injury may cause temporary dysfunction of brain cells. More serious traumatic brain injury can result in bruising, torn tissues, bleeding and other physical damage to the brain that can result in long-term complications or death.” According to the 2008 RAND Corporation study “Invisible Wounds: Mental Health and Cognitive Care Needs of America's Returning Veterans,” as many as 320,000 of the 1.64 million U.S. troops who have served in Iraq may have suffered some form of traumatic brain injury.
*
All e-mails and Internet postings displayed as written.
*
“Outside the wire” is an American military term used to denote the defensive perimeter surrounding any type of forward operating base. Inside the wire is considered a protected space, outside the wire unprotected.
*
T-rats, or T-rations, are precooked military meals that come in rectangular tray-packs rather than individual serving sizes like MREs, or meals ready to eat. They don't need refrigeration and can feed troops in a forward operating base or combat outpost with no preparation.
*
The CH-47 Chinook is an American heavy-lift, double-rotor transport helicopter. It has been in continual use by the U.S. military since the Vietnam War.
*
Balad, seventy miles north of Baghdad, was a hub site of air operations both under former dictator Saddam Hussein and for coalition forces following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Under the U.S. military occupation it became known as Joint Base Balad.
*
According to U.S. Marine Corps documents, 3/1 Marines had the highest casualty rate of any unit during Operation Phantom Fury, with 22 killed and 206 wounded in action.
*
The A-10 Thunderbolt is an American military jet developed in the 1970s to provide close air support to ground combat troops. Because it was neither sleek looking nor fast it was nicknamed the Warthog, but armed with a 30 mm cannon and air-to-ground missiles, it was particularly deadly during the Gulf War, reportedly destroying nearly one thousand Iraqi tanks and thousands of other military vehicles and artillery pieces.
*
Because the eleven American deaths came so early in the Gulf War's ground combat operations and were considered “friendly fire,” Jenkins's photo was featured on the February 18, 1991, cover of
Time
with the title “The War Comes Home.”
*
The term “Greatest Generation” was coined by NBC News anchorman and journalist Tom Brokaw in the title of his book
The Greatest Generation
, about the generation that built modern America following the trials of growing up during the Great Depression and World War II.
*
“Tunnel rat” was the nickname for American, Australian and New Zealand troops whose job it was to find and destroy the tunnel systems of Vietcong guerrillas in Vietnam. Once found, they would also have to penetrate them armed with nothing more than a flashlight in one hand and a .45 caliber pistol the other. They were often shorter men so that they could squeeze into the tunnels.
*
American troops' nickname for Vietnamese National Liberation Front guerrillas, or Vietcong (VC). In the NATO Phonetic Alphabet (used by the American military for radio communications), the word “Victor” is used for “V” and the word “Charlie” is used for “C,” so the “VC” for “Vietcong” became “Victor Charlie,” often shortened to just “Charlie.”
*
The use of the derogatory term “gook” dates back to U.S. Marines fighting in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902. It was widely used by American service members during the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
*
In Iraq and other wartime operations the U.S. military typically renames major roadways in terms more recognizable to their troops than the names used locally. MSR Michigan, for Main Supply Route Michigan, and MSR Tampa are examples of roadways renamed during the war in Iraq. They are used consistently across all American military maps and GPS systems so that forces will see and use the same terms of identification during missions.
*
“Bat” is military shorthand for “biometric automated tool,” an eye scan the American military uses to check individuals against a database of known insurgents and terrorists.
*
Judge Advocate General (JAG) officers advise their specific commands concerning a broad range of legal issues, but most specifically concerning application of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), which is the primary legal code for internal American military matters.
*
“Force protection” refers to the measures a military unit takes to ensure the safety of its own troops. When force protection is a military priority, tolerance for risk is usually low. For example, if a vehicle is speeding toward a checkpoint and can't be properly identified, force protection protocol may allow troops to shoot to kill the occupants before positively identifying them as hostile. In this instance, Iscol wonders if less force protection and a willingness to take more risks might've helped identify the driver as a civilian and prevent his death.
*
In the U.S. military an army battalion is usually five hundred to six hundred soldiers divided among three to five companies. A brigade is typically made up of three thousand to five thousand soldiers divided among three or more battalions.
*
In Israel, Order 8 is issued to call up or activate military reserve units during times of large-scale military action or imminent threats to the nation.
*
“TOW” is an acronym for the American-made tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided missile.
*
Also known as the 1st Brigade, the Golani Brigade is one of the most highly decorated in the IDF and is often one of the first units to be sent into military action. However, the unit has been cited for disciplinary problems, including revolts against officers and intimidation and abuse of Palestinians.
*
The South Lebanon Army (SLA) was a mostly Christian Lebanese militia allied with Israel during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The SLA collapsed after Israel's 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Many SLA members fled to Israel; others were captured and tried for treason by the Lebanese government.
*
Pashto and Dari are the two official languages of Afghanistan, with Pashto being used primarily by the Pashtun people prevalent in southern Afghanistan and Dari widely spoken in the northern, western and central regions of the country.