The World is Not Waiting Where You Left It
Our ISU-90 shipping containers are packed full, inspected, tagged, and loaded on a C-130 cargo plane. Turnover to the next unit, completed. Mission accomplished. We had it, you got it. S.E.P. — Someone Elses Problem. All our eight-member team has to do now is make it out the door.
Six months feel like one very long breath (mostly held), and we’re back where this alternate reality called war started for us — the Baghdad Airport. The complex is huge, and to us it feels like there should be a ‘safe space’ sign hanging on the gate. It’s not that there’s no chance of dying on this base — rockets do get lobbed over the fence, someone has gone crazy in the chow hall and killed people (apparently why everyone is required to carry a weapon while they eat). It’s just that, compared to the places we’ve been recently, it feels like cozy slippers.
Scheduled take off is 2200 hours — 10 PM civilian time — and this is one flight that we’ve made sure to get to the airport early for. It seems impossible that this moment is finally here. We’re proud of our work — absolutely saved some lives. Can’t really believe that we all still have our own, let alone all of our pieces and parts. Even though EOD technicians imagine dying instantly in a ‘pink mist’, we all have friends who have given strong, young limbs for America. Explosive Ordnance Disposal is unpredictable on the best days; our informal trade symbol is an eight ball.
An hour before departure, the base starts taking incoming. That is, rockets start exploding out of nowhere. Like I said before, it’s not that unusual. We throw our helmets on and head for a bunker to wait for the all clear. Usually, the rockets come in threes. Tonight, there are three, and then three more, and three more…we’re all pretty quiet at this point. So. Close. To. Going. Home. Everyone’s mind is drifting, trying to quell the ironic thought of something sabotaging our escape at the very last moment.
My mind turns to the tour we’ve just been through. It was my first combat deployment and my team’s mission was to get rid of Improvised Explosive Devices (a.k.a. IEDs, roadside bombs) with the engineers of an Army infantry battalion. At first, we drove the streets of Baghdad at two or three miles per hour, peering at camera screens and through thick greenish-blue armored glass till our eyes failed and our pee bottles filled — trying to divine which pothole, brick, trash pile, or corpse in this godforsaken place had a bomb in it. In 2007, the war is kind of at a standoff. So to tip that tug of war in our direction, “the Surge” is happening. More troops are coming and our unit is sent into parts of the country that our coalition doesn’t control.
We head north to Al Qaeda’s new capital and our job gets an order of magnitude more intense. Our convoys are engaged pretty much every time we go out and the IEDs are plentiful, large, and well-hidden. Seems everything is blowing up, including some of our brave infantry brothers. It seems there is never a moment to switch off. We’re always bracing for impact, even on the little forward bases we now call home. Surprisingly, we adjust to that state of living and it just becomes a new normal. Plan the mission, prep the gear, brief the mission, execute the mission, RTB (Return To Base), re-cock gear for the next mission, eat, sleep a little, repeat. It all turns into a blur.
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In the bunker, time is crawling by, but at 4 AM, we finally get the all clear to take off. The plane ascends without lights in a stomach-churning spiral to minimize time over areas we don’t control. Shortly after takeoff we all jump at the sight of fiery explosions outside. A night of rockets and our short-timers paranoia overcome what our minds know: the bursts are just flares, a countermeasure for heat-seeking missiles. We breathe a collective sigh of relief.
My team are seasoned travelers on C-130s. They’re old propeller planes, naked inside so you can see all of the ribs of the fuselage. They have a pretty short range and are crazy noisy in the cargo bay where we always sit, but they’re a versatile and reliable beast. The jump seats we have to sit in face sideways and are not built for comfort, but the air crews always let us string our hammocks over and around the cargo wherever we can find room to clip some carabiners. The plane finally reaches 10,000 feet. There is no fasten seatbelt sign to turn off, but this is the point where nothing from insurgents on the ground should reach us. We’ve made it out. We cheer loud enough to be heard over the din of four large propellers straining against gravity. Then we all put on double hearing protection, crawl into our hammock cocoons and immediately fall asleep.
Odysseus took ten years to get home from Troy (granted he was imprisoned by a goddess for a good chunk of that). The first crusaders took around three years to walk from Europe to Jerusalem. Hell, it even took a week or two to cross the Atlantic on a WWII troop transport. We wake up as our C-130 touches down at the NATO base on the island of Crete. It is 8 AM, four hours after we left Baghdad. Given that we slept three and a half of those, the feeling is more teleportation than travel. Maybe future space travelers in cryo sleep will have a similar experience.
By 10 AM we are on a harbor cruise from the beautiful little port of Chania. A college student from Athens finishing his summer gig on the island is pushing beers into our hands. The turquoise waters of the Mediterranean lap against the ship while a perfect sea breeze blows through the boat. Six hours ago we were fearing for our lives in a war zone where for six months we had lived under a persistent cloud of death and chaos, now we are quite literally in a vacation paradise. I don’t think it’s possible for we humans to wrap our heads around that kind of change. We drink those beers and some more. We cannonball off the second deck of the boat like children. When the cruise is over, we head for the nearest pub in port. I smell something as if from a past life — can’t immediately place it, but it’s magical. Perfume. A tour bus of Swedish women crowd festively into the bar. I can’t speak. It feels like a TV show that I can only watch from outside my own body. The day passes in a mind-blown haze of overwhelmed senses.
It is late and we have to get back to base for our flight home to Sicily the next morning. The thirty minute winding cab ride from town feels like an eternity in my drunken state. I need the driver to pull over, but he isn’t heeding our pleas. I throw up in the cab just as we near the base. We pay for the ride and he tries to extort us for a huge cleaning fee. We jump out of the cab, flash IDs at the sentry, and pass laughing back through the gate where the cabbie cannot follow. Not my finest moment. I sleep a couple of hours, wake to my alarm, puke again on my shoes, and board the plane home.
It’s been fourteen years since I made that deployment. To this day, the Iraq to Crete exodus remains the most surreal moment in my life. It was not the triumphant return of a citizen-soldier, but it was my blissful crash landing back into civilization. That day and both of my combat deployments seem like someone else’s life. I just don’t seem to have a good way to connect my world of war and my world of peace. Thoughts of the experience came back to me last spring, as the long pandemic hibernation seemed so close to it’s end. I imagined a surreal vaccine-fueled summer of love that was going to feel like a collective version of Crete, a frenzied release of so much pent up anxiety, stress, and trauma. It didn’t exactly match my imagination, even though it was a little surreal to touch people after abstaining and dip toes back into communal life. Yet, the part of my story that feels more analogous now, as the pandemic carries on and we ride the rollercoaster of anger, blame, and exhaustion, is the part that started after Crete, the hard work of actually being back.
When we landed at our home unit in Sicily, our command greeted us on the tarmac with festivities. My teammates with families ran straight into loving arms — and soon to marital and family strife as all of the accumulated strain on both sides of the relationships exploded. No one was waiting for me and I was okay with that. I just needed time alone. My best friend’s wife passed me a bag full of welcome home goodies after they embraced. I said thanks, gave hugs all around, and slipped out of the celebration to go home and sleep. I lived off the goodie bag, uninterested in leaving my house for several days. It would be a long time before I stopped driving aggressively, suspicious of every overloaded car, pothole, choke point, abandoned bag, and piece of trash. I still think about my good luck and others who weren’t so lucky, and packs of feral dogs chomping on body parts. I can’t forget how it feels to be in a place where civilization has broken down and people do desperate things. I know a little of what has to pass for justice when that happens, and appreciate the order and comforts of civility. Can’t wrap up alI the lessons neatly in a box. I have become a less ideological soul.
I’ve been out of the Navy for almost a decade now and have seen teammates go on to do so much more of the hard work of the nation. I have also watched some of them struggle with re-entry into civilian life, civilized life. My team, like countless others, returned to a world where we had changed and where those in our lives had as well. In a similar way, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say our current-world is in the throes of a similar disorienting discovery on a massive scale. Somehow, after these profound experiences, we expect an easy return to our comfortable old relationship with the world. We can’t. It’s moved on and so have we.
I still report suspicious bags to airport security whenever I see them. Sorry if it’s your bag. Habits.
