Arriving at the Vicenza airport 4 years after my first landing there, I recalled my initial fantasies of what the future would hold and compared them with the reality. The initial fantasies were unmet, but the reality was an unexpected journey that changed my life irrevocably in both good and bad ways. What I thought about when getting off that bus to fly home to Seattle was the friends I’d lost, that feeling of depression when great times come to an end, the nights downtown, the beautiful cities, and that I’d bury my involvement with the military as much as possible, taking it as but one experience and moving on. In watching most of The Sorrow and The Pity, a lot of recollections of my year in Afghanistan surfaced, coupled with other memories, and in thinking of writing these journal entries, I decided to bring up some of those memories for this class reluctantly.

When we landed in Afghanistan, the surrounding mountains and environment gave me what I retroactively can now call the most sublime (Kantian) moment in my life. We were all waiting for these supposed mortar attacks anxiously, for that moment we would no longer be cherries. A few days days later, two of my best friends died, and about 7 people were wounded, some severely. We stayed with the bodies over 12 hours to ensure they got back to the base, being shot at multiple times. When the explosives unit came, they showed us the footprints we’d made, crossing over a dozen bombs. It was like stepping in the one empty box in a  full 10×10 minesweeper game. I think about those footprints of mine often, and Salazar who was lying on one for about half an hour. A couple of people were shot those final moments before we finally managed to clean the place up. In the ride back to base I’d laid on someone’s leg wound on accident, in which he laughed and said “do you mind?” Moments before that my buddy Espinoza and I had machine gun rounds snap inches in-between our heads, scrambling in the dust trying to find cover behind the tires. It was pretty funny and terrifying, because I’d said we were going to get shot sitting like that just moments before. The reason I bring some of these moments up is that the group of 30 we’d come with had dwindled to less than 20 and we’d come closer than ever before since the 2 years we’d been together. The one person in charge of us turned out to be a coward which surprise us all greatly, and reminded me of the French who took the German’s side in France during World War II.

I understand that fear he probably was wrenched with, because he’d been blown up hours before and thrown meters away, and had to endure losing one of his soldier’s days within arriving. We had expected him to be courageous, to be that figure to hold our hands, but he abandoned us in despair, and I can’t possibly be mad. You can never gauge what a person will be like during moments of extreme stress, no matter what pre-established notions you have of them. It’s odd seeing someone so built and buff scramble around so afraid during a firefight.

The one thing I didn’t realize before joining the military, was the love these old veterans had for us young cherries. During those initial months in Afghanistan I realized how much I hated war, and how pointless being there was. I already had a semi-disgust for the military, but this cemented a deeper hate for those higher unknown powers at work in decisions for America. I am anti-war to this day, but in some sick way I’m glad I got to experience war firsthand. The reason I joined really fell on a love that fell apart which lasted a few years and my desire to go out in a bang. Rarely I came across people who actually wanted to be in the military, and if they did, they were almost always really, really patriotic. What also struck me was the intelligence most of these people I lived with had. Most weren’t academically smart, but had a high degree of street smarts. My branch of occupation was typically considered for the dumbest of the military, but a lack of intelligence and common sense would have gotten you moved quickly.

Once you deploy and then come home, you come across the cherries back at home who missed the deployment, and you see that innocence in their eyes and long for it. All you care about in training them is to make sure they’re  going to get the chance to also come home when it’s their turn to deploy. The burden lies heavy when you lose someone in your platoon, and is a constant, daily reminder.

Our leader rarely if ever went out on missions with us, and we never got replacements, having to do the full deployment with triple the amount of normal missions tasked out to each individual. He was one of the strongest (physically) person I’ve ever met. He won multiple wrestling tournaments and was an instructor at a prestigious combat school. We thought he’d be this badass dude that was going to protect us, but he spent most of the deployment in the gym. My squad leader was an Iraq vet, tiny and skinny, and smoked a pack a day. The first firefight I was in, our platoon send the 6 of us out to deal with it, being the golden squad of the platoon. It started with them shooting at us in their dried up river bed systems-wadis. Our platoon set up an L, and we went out the side, and crossed this small empty field. They started laying into us with machine guns, less than 150 meters away. I remember using blades of grass as cover, and firing my machine gun, feeling so proud that I was protecting my 5 squad mates as they had to retreat, running their asses off in the extreme heat. This skinny guy didn’t give a fuck, and had no break in clarity, while I was scrambling and disoriented. It took a few weeks to get the fighting down and not lose vision. Fighting in Afghanistan is hell. Not only do we carry hundreds of pounds of equipment, but we’re facing people wearing rags and familiar with the territory, able to blend in quickly with the locals. I don’t know if I killed anyone, but it gave me a shell shock feeling knowing friends with multiple kill counts. I asked myself why we were there daily, always wondering if I should just put up with the penalty of not fighting anymore. The punishments of abandoning your duty during a deployment is extremely severe. I decided to make it through, if only to do what I could to keep what little people we had left alive.

When we had the ceremony for the two that died, days into our deployment, while saluting the portraits of the fallen, a staff sergeant from another platoon yelled “Wombats” at the top of his voice (Wombats being our platoon name). I normally cringe at anything military related-wearing dog tags, salutes, marching, cadences etc.-but this yell was the most beautiful, tragic, and heart wrenching sound I’d ever heard in my life. Being a Wombat was something that had deep roots in our brigade, memories you hear while being smoked for hours down “the hallway”. If there’s any one strong moment in which post memory resonates for me, it’s the feeling of walking down those barracks hallways, recollecting the memories handed down to me-“this person died, this person went to Legion Co., that used to be my old room.” We had a creed that went, “pork chop pork chop, greasy greasy, beat that team, fucking easy easy, Gooooooo Wombats.” It’s from 3000 Miles To Graceland, and it was the weirdest shit ever. Whenever someone died on the base in Afghanistan, you would hear Taps being played, and salute the helicopter flying away with the body. I remember someone died a day before he was to fly home. The day our 2 friends died, we heard Taps over and over and over. During the summer, that song feels like it is endlessly playing. I remember thinking there was no point in believing I was going to come home, and the fear of death actually left me until I came home from Afghanistan. I remember rolling that phrase, “the fear” and “I lost the fear,” off my tongue all during the deployment. Once you lose the fear, you become comfortable there in its simplicity and seeing dead bodies doesn’t strike you as hard. The routine is just like any other place, except you don’t worry about bills, rent and debts.

A few days after the Wombats yell, I’d survived a near atomic explosion. They said it was the biggest vehicle suicide in the history of the war. It turns out that the semi carrying these explosives was turned around at my checkpoint, and decided to go around the wall and blow up at the side. I remember looking at the vehicle x-ray machine and then suddenly being hit by a massive shockwave. Everything went black and I reached my hand up to make sure my buddy Espinoza’s top half was still there. He crawled down the hatch and we asked each other if we were okay. We got on top of the vehicle and looked at the mushroom cloud next to us, amazed. There were tents everywhere, and I mean everywhere. The debris was as far as the eye can see. It killed a ton of people, but I never saw them, and we left that base a few days later to go to another base. Flying away I was struck with a hopeless, entrenching feeling of despair that we’d lost two amazing people for absolutely nothing, and I started to question that day if I was even alive. The rest of the deployment was a miserable grind, always waiting for an explosion which would take your legs off, or having to gauze a carotid gunshot wound.

Salazar’s mother flew to Italy for a lost soldier’s family get-together. The company gathered money for their flight to Italy, and then showed them around the city for a week. Horsley’s family didn’t come and wished to never speak to us. I talk to his brother every now and then, but other than that, I respect their wish entirely. Salazar’s mother is a wonderful woman. They have a daughter with cystic fibrosis, and I remember Salazar sending all his money to help with her surgeries. We had a toast to his mother, and my squad leader gave a heart-wrenching speech. He broke down in tears during it, saying he was sorry he couldn’t bring her little boy home. That is a guilt I can honestly say is with me every second of my life. I’m not sure how easy that is to get across, but the few of us Wombats left from the deployment all share that burden. When at “our” bar in downtown Vicenza, where the bartenders each had drinks named after us, I had a moment with a buddy where we looked at each other, nodded, and he said “me too.” We both were thinking of him, and it was comforting knowing my pain was shared. There’s something about losing someone in war that wrenches your soul harder than any other death I’ve ever witnessed. I think about the World Wars often and the immeasurable amount of pain the world took on from those years. My usual silence about my involvement with the war makes me relate easily to those old war veterens-it’s hard to speak of war to those who haven’t experience it. And most of all, it’s hard to speak of it when you are shamed of being a part of it, while being proud of those brave enough to have endured it with you.

The days of coming back to Italy, drunk and ecstatic, walking around the parks and taking the bus downtown, were blissfully peaceful. As time goes, it’s easier to feign normalcy, but the wounds of seeing such monstrosities stays in my memory, and reminds me of what mankind is capable of, and the importance in doing whatever it takes to strive for peace, no matter how ignorant and childish a wish of such is. As for my memories, I doubt I’ll ever talk about them as brief as this again, and when I die, I know they will no longer exist unless I’ve shared them.