Long Distance Sit-Down #2: The Longest Month

Based on Instant Messenger Conversations

Inertia holds enormous sway over my brother’s personality. He’s not one who takes to stasis with much enthusiasm. If he had his druthers, he would be constantly moving, constantly active, constantly reminded of his vitality. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always afford us perpetual motion, and my brother seems to take that personally.

After graduation, Andrew took a number of assignments before heading to his permanent residence in Fort Collins. He spent several months at Fort Monmouth, the West Point prep school, teaching Calculus and assisting the girl’s basketball team. From what I gather he really enjoyed his time there. Despite his social limitations, he was always involved in something, always busy. After a semester at the prep school he transferred to Fort Benning for his Bradley Tank training and Army Ranger School. Unfortunately, as a result of Andrew’s tenacious work habits, he finished up nearly every class in the Benning catalogue in a matter of months before facing a wait of several more months before the next session of Ranger training began. I don’t know how long he actually waited, not long I’m sure, before deciding to move on.

Now in Iraq, it seems Andrew’s has found a new front for his battle with his own internal kinetics. It goes without saying that he’s at his best when he’s on the move.

“I went 70 hours without sleep and 48 without anything but Gatorade,” speaking of the days immediately following the destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. But despite health care that would make my Aunt Becky (a nurse practitioner) pass out, Andrew tells me: “It’s fun.”

Andrew’s unwillingness to sit on his ass even comes into play in the field. He often takes the reigns on jobs he should delegate, like the day his men stumbled across the weapon’s cache.

“It was like 89 degrees. Privates should be digging, but we didn’t have any with us. And we’re not patient enough to wait.”

Unfortunately, as we enter the seventeenth week of his deployment, it appears that the days of run-and-gun fun are going to be fewer and fewer:

“I found out today that we’re handing everything over to the Iraqi Army in April,” he tells me.

It’s a good news/bad news situation.

The Good News: Andrew will be safer.

The Bad News: “Time will go slower, and I’ll be bored,” Andrew says.

Andrew’s trying to find ways to occupy his time, but with the strain of ADD that seems to run through our blood (blame that for our infrequent e-mails and posts) nothing holds our attention for very long.

“I’ve read 5 books in the past five days,” he tells me. “I started studying Arabic for an hour, working out, then reading till I fall asleep. And most times I don’t fall asleep until 4 or 5. I was up till 4:30 last night for no particular reason. I’m bored out of my skull.”

At the risk of alienating my audience, that boredom has infiltrated my interactions with Andrew as well. He and I have talked more in the last two months than we did when he was stateside. And once we get through the political bluster that prologues every one of our conversations, our responses are usually one or two sentences followed by ten minutes of nothing. Then we’ll ask what the other is doing. Then ten more minutes of nothing.

“Why don’t you go to sleep?” I ask him. We usually talk between ten and midnight Iraqi time, and he always seems to be sleep-deprived.

“Not tired. Besides, I’m writing a response to someone that posted a blog entitled “Fuck the Soldiers” on MySpace. I privately messaged the 16 year old kid that started the site. I wanted to call him a pussy, but I figured a nice well thought-out argument would be more appropriate.”

“Yea, but somebody like that doesn’t deserve your time,” I tell him. “Of course, if you’re just killing time that’s something else.””That’s precisely what I’m doing.”

Of course, Andrew and I are optimistic that we’ll soon have a wealth of conversation in April when baseball season finally begins. Not only did our cousin Brian set us up with a friendly (as of now) fantasy league, but Andrew fully expects the Cubs to win the World Series the one year he can’t witness it.

“Cubs are going to the playoffs this year – wild card. Cardinals will win the division by 3 games, but we’ll go to the Series. D. Lee and Ram Ram are going to combine for 280 RBIs and Prior is going to win the Cy Young. Of course, my Cubs predictions are always flawed, because I cannot give an unbiased prediction. I have the Cubs schedule in magic marker on my wall.”

For somebody whose only concern for Andrew is his morale, I couldn’t be happier to see baseball season approaching. Andrew is obsessive compulsive about baseball, and he can easily kill two or three hours studying not just the Cubs, but all of baseball. I recently ventured into hostile territory – the mall – to purchase three Cubs hats that are on their way to Gabe as we speak – two in desert camo, the other the faded, worn blue that is Andrew’s “style.”

For now we’re distracting ourselves with the WBC and Spring Training, but that’s not really the same thing.

“Holy shit. The Netherlands pitcher threw a no-no yesterday. What is the world coming to?” I tell him.

“Doesn’t the ball rotate differently where he comes from? Gravitational pull is different I’m betting.”

Yea. The WBC is definitely not the same thing.

* * *

The past four weeks have seen a monumental shift in the state of Iraq. I’ve also seen a less seismic shift in my brother’s attitude.

“We’re not trying to win this damn thing. We’re trying not to lose public opinion. That much is clear.”

I ask him about this week’s big news item, Operation Swarmer: “You guys going Apocalypse Now over there or what?”

“Shit no. That whole mission is a PR stunt. They won’t get anything out of it.”

Much of what I’m reading on the news sites seems to confirm this assessment.

I ask him about Najaf. Newsweek recently ran an article claiming it is completely under Iraqi Army protection, and it’s one of the few places that is under control.

“First, yes we handed Najaf off to the IA,” he says. “Second, it’s not under control at all. It’s just as bad as [everywhere else]. But we have to report that it’s safe in order to look good politically.”

From what I gather from my brother and my inner circle of news sources, the final phase of the Shock and Awe Shit War will be a public relations campaign. Things will not be better when we start to withdraw troops; the administration will only make it appear that way. And since so much of the American public supports withdrawal, most of us will chug that Kool-Aid by the bucket load.

And Andrew’s not happy about that: “We came here, and now we’re going to leave without finishing the job.”

The most striking change in my brother’s rhetoric since landing in Iraq is he wants to get the job done. He doesn’t like the idea of pulling out, having already seen a preview of what will happen if the US decides to leave; in a word, genocide.

“We found those 47 bodies,” he tells me. A busload of civilians had been executed the day after the Golden Mosque attack, and Andrew’s team made the discovery. “And it’s destined to get worse. 47 slaughtered civilians, Phil. On their way to work. I’m not sure what the civilian casualty numbers are right now, but whatever CNN’s reporting, add 20%. The AP is reporting that we’ve only found 53 bodies in my AO, and that reports that more people have been killed are false – which is a lie. The number they are getting are from the mortuaries. 90% of the people that die over here are buried on the spot by their families. I’ve seen 100 bodies since the mosque got hit. [They can’t keep track of bodies buried in somebody’s backyard] or people that we kill. They bury them and claim we didn’t kill them.

“I found a town that was destroyed – genocide. No men or women or children in it. Just one boy that had been gunned down from behind. All the homes burned. All the livestock slaughtered. They are trying to say it wasn’t a religious thing, but the Shia villagers homes were untouched. What’s worse. It was the Police and the Ministry of Interior that did it. There are 27 missing people, all women and children, gone. No bodies.

“My question of the week is “What role do we play in an Iraqi Civil War?” Right now we’re basically sitting back and waiting for something to happen. I have no idea what’s going on or what’s going to happen, but everyone I talked to said that if we left the Sunnis would die.”

Then Andrew makes this unhappy assessment:

“Unfortunately, they need a Civil War.”

This admission shows what an impossible position we’ve put our military in. They can do their job to the best of their ability, but in the end they know the Iraqis are just going to have to fight it out amongst themselves. But Andrew, despite being American, already feels a part of their conflict. On Andrew’s nastiest night in Iraq, a matter of days after the Golden Mosque attack, they raided a suspected enemy stronghold. Five US soldiers and five Iraqi soldiers in the dark of night.

“They are now my brothers,” he says simply.

But the most touching and heartbreaking reality of Andrew’s growing attachment to the Iraqi people is, not surprisingly, the kids. Andrew is always looking for pens to hand out on his visits, and he recently requested a hundred one-dollar bills from home to give to his kids.

“I harass the kids. Bad guy [in Arabic] is ali baba. So, I call them all ali babas and throw them in the truck.”

And I’m sure they love every minute of it. The image of Andrew walking down the Iraqi streets followed by mobs of children, Lt. Pied Piper, doesn’t strain the imagination.

Although the tragedy of this image is that these children will likely never know a life without peril or war. An Iraqi Civil War is not only likely (if it isn’t here already), but likely to spread, like a cancer, to its neighbors. In fact, it seems some of those neighbors are already getting involved.

“We surrounded a Shia town to keep the factions apart,” Andrew says. “But there’s a faction in the Shia area called the Mehdi Army. They take their orders in the form of Fatwas from Iran’s Shia religious leaders. I asked some questions and found out that al Sadr, Iraq’s Shia leader, also issued a fatwa to kill Sunnis.”

“So the stuff the administration is saying about Iran pissing in your pool is true?”

“Iran is definitely a target. We have more justification for going into Iran than we ever did going into Iraq.”

Though he realizes the uselessness of dwelling in the past, Andrew can’t help but become frustrated by the obscene prologue to this war.

“Let me tell you about our [Rules of Engagement] so you can write about it. In order to shoot a suspected enemy, they have to have means and intent. Means – the ability to harm us. Intent – some sort of show of force. Both things have to be present in order to fight. Now, isn’t that ironic? Iraq had neither the means nor intent to attack the United States. Yet the soldiers are limited by an ROE that our federal government did not even follow. Food for thought.”

Last week, Bill Maher, on his HBO show Real Time, featured John Burns, the New York Times’ Baghdad bureau chief on the war in Iraq who voiced this assessment on the war: “There were many mistakes made but my feeling is that if this fails, as I have to say on the balance of the odds, it seems now likely to do, it's probably not going to be because of American mistakes but because the mission was impossible in the first place.”

For my brother’s sake, I didn’t want to believe this statement, though my gut has told me it’s true since this whole circus started. So, I asked my brother: “Do you think you eventually could get the job done?”

“Twenty to thirty years of committed force and the willingness to go to war with Iran… and Syria … and anyone else that’s truly harboring terrorists.”

“So basically the majority of the Arab world?”

“Basically.”

I honestly can’t say if that means Andrew would agree with Burns or not.

* * *

With the prospects for success in Iraq dwindling and Andrew’s responsibilities and operations reduced, it has left my brother with a lot of free time. And in the quiet, as Andrew said, “homesickness hits like a hammer.”

The frequency of Andrew’s e-mails has tailed off in the past month, but mostly because Andrew is mindful of his readership.

“I think if all I had to say was that I’m homesick and bored, it wouldn’t be a very good time for me. Or a good read for our loyal audience.”

Though Andrew might not appreciate this section of this article, I can’t help but voice my own displeasure with the disconnect between the soldiers and their country. At best, it’s depressing. At worst, it’s infuriating.

“The whole package process is nice,” he says. “Most of the guys here are definitely jealous. Some have only gotten one or two boxes the whole time. Some none. And you gotta keep in mind that for some people this is their third trip.”

“That’s amazing. Who are these guys?”

“My NCO for sure.”

“Career Army guy?”

“Something like that. His kid has heart problems and the Army pays for them. So, he can’t get out and be uninsured. And that’s not all the uncommon.”

If that doesn’t make your yellow ribbon bumper sticker look extraordinarily inadequate, I don’t know what will.

Andrew has a way of allowing things to roll of his back that I don’t really understand. He’s earned the right to dispense a few F.U.s. But he doesn’t. Amazingly, he doesn’t.

“Is it wrong that I’m kind of pissed that more people aren’t keeping in touch with you?” I ask him.

“Don’t lecture anyone,” he tells me. “I don’t really care. Just a lil bit. It doesn’t really matter to me. As long as I come home, I don’t give a fuck who supports me while I’m here. I knew it was going to happen. Only four or five people send me messages now, and it’s only [March]. I got about 9 e-mails today (the day after an IED destroyed his hummer), which was nice, but I just wish I didn’t have to almost die to get them.”

“Well, you know where the real love is at,” I assure him.

“Yea. I always knew.”

Though Andrew plays off the relative lack of correspondence from home, going so far as to sew a “give-a-shit meter” onto his uniform, the great disparity between his considerations of his friends and his friends’ considerations of him differ in both frequency and intensity. In his downtime, all he thinks about is home. And despite what he says, I know it matters to him who keeps in touch and who does not. I know he cares because of the great lengths he went to reconcile with a girl who he left on frosty terms.

“I want to talk to her,” he says. “I’m over it.”

“I’d imagine most personal grievances seem kind of retarded in your circumstances.”

“Yea. Pretty fucking stupid.”

“I think an awful lot,” Andrew continues. “Not about Iraq. About getting a fresh start. About me and my life. It’s crazy man. I wanna get married, have kids, and grow up. I probably should find a girlfriend, but I’ve thrown away good girls by being in the Army and moving all the time.

“Reality is I’ll be 25 when I get back.”

“Fuck you. I’m 26,” I interject.

“I need to start towards what I want. I want to own a bar and a skydiving company. I want Andy [Reiff] to manage the bar. I’m going to get out and get a government job. I think I’m going to take Mark’s job. 2010 – Rockwell, Mayor of Rock Island.”

“I’d jump on that bandwagon,” I assure him. “Is there any information you want me to pass along to mom and dad?”

“Not really,” he says. “I think it’s time for me to settle down and start popping out grandkids. That’s about it.”