The Silence of War Read online

  I considered staying in the Marine Corps and making it my career. I had been promoted to first lieutenant and life wasn’t too bad. But I was nearing thirty years old and I already had a lot invested in law enforcement, so I decided to get out. My last active duty date was January 15, 1979. I was twenty-nine years old.

  I had left police work to join the Marines. Fortunately, my boss had been a Marine during World War II. He welcomed me back. I had been granted military leave, which meant that my job was waiting for me when I returned. Marines tend to take care of each other like that. But something was different. Not the job, me.

  I didn’t realize how much I had changed until I got back home. I found that I had difficulty talking to civilians, even old friends, but no problem talking to anyone who had ever been in uniform—any uniform; they didn’t have to have been Marines. I’ve often reflected on this phenomenon. Transitioning from peacetime to civilian life was problematic for me, and took about a year.

  It’s no wonder so many of today’s servicepeople are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as they return to civilian life from a war environment. It’s not just the war. It’s an adjustment from a military to a civilian way of life. It was difficult for me to adjust to being what I was very happy being prior to joining the Marines: an ordinary patrolman. After six months, I left the job to attend graduate school.

  A part of me also missed the Corps, so I joined the Reserves. I became the executive officer and acting commanding officer of a rifle company in the 1st Battalion, 25th Marines, 4th Marine Division. We were Alpha Company and we were headquartered at Albany, N.Y. There I was promoted to captain on the first of November 1980.

  The way the 4th Marine Division was run when I joined, and the way it is run today, are radically different. Today’s Reserve component gets called up for extended periods of active duty in a war zone. Today’s 4th Marine Division by necessity needs to be war-ready. I did not perceive the same sense of urgency in the division when I was in it. It should be noted that the division was spread across the entire country. I never saw anything of it outside my own battalion.

  The Reserve component of my day was meant for World War III. Our purpose was to enable the Corps to expand rapidly in the event of a major war with the Soviet Union. If war broke out, we believed that the “deck would have been shuffled.” Active duty Marines from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Marine Divisions would have been transferred into the 4th Marine Division, while Marines from the 4th Marine Division would have been transferred as replacements to those divisions. It’s how the Corps expanded during World War II, and it’s a sound way to ensure an even spread of trained and experienced Marines throughout the divisions.

  Since we only met one weekend a month and two weeks in summer, training for war was a formidable undertaking. To make up for the lack of training time, we went to the field as often as we possibly could, using public land in upstate New York. The intense cold of winter did not deter us. We slept around fires at night to keep from freezing to death.

  But I confess that I never considered the company to be war-ready. After two years in the Reserves, I was hired by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a special agent, and I resigned my commission. Law enforcement resumed as my primary mission in life.

  Nine years later, however, in August 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I rejoined the Marine Reserves. An old high school pal, Jack McMahon, had done his active duty time and remained in the Reserves, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. I joined his unit at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

  Naturally, I was hoping I’d be deployed. I felt like a football player who had practiced constantly but never got to play in a single game. I also felt anxious because the Reserve unit from Albany, redesignated Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines, was called up. Even though after nine years there was no one left that I had served with, I was worried about them.

  Worrying about young Marines came all too easily for me. I cared about them—deeply. I still do. Known as the First Gulf War, the conflict was over quickly. To my dismay, the United States won without my help. I never left the States. I stayed active in the Reserves for two more years, keeping high-ranking officers well supplied with coffee. As a mere Marine captain I was one of the lowest-ranking individuals around the War College.

  However, minor irritations were more than compensated for whenever I checked into the visiting officers’ quarters in civilian clothes. The sailor who checked me in only asked for my rank, not branch of service. When I said—truthfully—“captain,” he assumed I was a Navy captain, the equivalent in rank of a Marine full colonel. I got great quarters overlooking the bay at Newport. After two years, my time in the Marine Corps ended. That was in August 1992. The Corps didn’t get around to actually discharging me until February 1, 1997.

  It was my third honorable discharge.

  Once I finished twenty years in the law enforcement world, I retired and went to law school. I was fifty years old—what they called a “nontraditional student.” It was a nice way to say “old guy.” It was while I was in law school that the World Trade Center was attacked and I tried unsuccessfully to get back into the Reserves.

  I went to see one of my law professors who had been a Marine sometime during the 1950s. Since he was internationally known in legal circles, I told him of my plight and asked if he had any “connections.” Apparently not, as he (surely in his seventies) had already tried to get back in. He was so serious when he told me about it that I had to smile. He just couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t take him back.

  2

  Iraq

  I finished law school, but watching “kids” I knew grow up and get shipped off to Iraq started to get to me—especially when they didn’t come back. Despite what it said on my birth certificate, I felt I was still young and fit for duty. Deep in my heart, I was still a Marine. I searched for a way to get into the global war on terror. I began to take “high-speed, intense” civilian training courses. After blowing the dust off my brain, the tactics and rifle skills I had learned in the Marine Corps came right back to me.

  The days of “cowboy contractors” were over, and getting into the war turned out to be easier said than done. However, around the summer of 2006, a friend gave my résumé to a retired Marine officer who handled Defense Department work in Iraq. That led to my becoming part of a team that included two retired British army colonels. Until this time, I regarded working with the U.S. Army as exotic; being employed with high-ranking British officers was positively daunting.

  I apprenticed under “Colonel Thompson” (his nom de guerre)—a gentleman who, from his extensive knowledge of alluring places, enthralled me with tales worthy of Rudyard Kipling. He had immense experience in the Middle East, the Near East, the Balkans, and Northern Ireland. On one occasion he had been shot in the lung by a sniper in Bosnia. He would have drowned in his own blood had his medic not been able to think—and act—quickly. The man slid a knife between the colonel’s ribs and drained the fluid out.

  It slowly dawned on me just how small my world had been. I could go literally anywhere in the United States and fit in, but my world was limited to our fifty states. Working with the colonel was like brainstorming with my own personal university professor—a private tutor who made it his business to try to teach me about the rest of the planet. I began to feel that although I was safe in the womb of America, the time had come for me to be birthed into the cold, glaring light of “the world,” where a sharp slap of bitter reality was waiting.

  I began to get nervous about what the future held for me. I didn’t have the confidence that I could handle any exigency I might have to face. During my twenty-year law enforcement career, as time went on I became more and more expert in the vagaries of the profession. As a result, my self-confidence grew. By retirement, I felt I could handle anything.

  —

  But now I heard myself saying, more th
an once, “Baghdad ain’t Brooklyn.” Nervousness morphed into fear. I felt it in the pit of my stomach. I had trouble sleeping. It was fear of the unknown. Fear of the war on terror that loomed just over the horizon. It didn’t help that I had practically begged to be a part of it. There was no turning back. Whatever lay ahead, I had to face it squarely.

  In the spring of 2007, endless hours spent at planning meetings at various locations in the United States were abruptly terminated. I was ordered to meet with Colonel Thompson in London. It was time.

  I flew to the United Kingdom and met with the colonel at the airport that evening. We flew together into Kuwait via British Airways. There we checked into the most luxurious hotel I had ever seen. It even had shining brass fixtures in the marble-and-glass bathroom. The room was opulent. TV wasn’t very interesting, since I didn’t speak more than a few words of Arabic, but I was getting my first taste of the world outside of America.

  The world of war included.

  My room overlooked a cemetery left over from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. It was the most unkempt, mournful cemetery I have ever seen. There was no semblance of order, no neat rows, no grass, flowers, nothing but sand and helter-skelter headstones of some type or other. Most graves had no markers of any kind. Many were sunken in. The heavily tinted windows added a sense of gloom that was palpable. I gazed upon it from a room that was luxurious. The view from the window was ghoulish. It was also incongruent—sandwiched as it was between the hotel and—off in the distance—a modern, gleaming, flourishing city.

  Being painfully aware that I was leaving my safety zone behind me, I went for walks alone in Kuwait City. Out past the security guards and car bomb barriers I went. As I left the hotel, I would say salaam (literally “peace” in Arabic) to the impeccably dressed and perfectly mannered doorman who stood beside the metal detector at the hotel’s entranceway. I ventured into a city where the Arab world met the Western world, but on its own terms. Everywhere were men in traditional Arab clothing—flowing, gleaming white robes—reminiscent of the movie Lawrence of Arabia. They walked past Western business establishments such as Pizza Hut, which beckoned the hungry with both English and Arabic writing.

  As part of my preparations for the global war on terror, I had begun to study Arabic. I made a little progress, and I practiced with the people I met in shops or at the hotel. Their demeanor expressed either approval or slight annoyance with my fumbling attempts to communicate, but everyone responded—correcting my Arabic as necessary. I persisted. A little later, in Iraq, this fledgling knowledge would come in handy.

  It was there, in Kuwait City, that I experienced my first sand cloud. It wasn’t a sandstorm, as there was no wind to speak of. The sand just sort of enveloped the city like a fog. Even the light-sensitive streetlights came on. It grew dark in midday. The airborne sand was very fine, very gritty and very eerie. It hurt my eyes and I tried in vain to squint it away.

  I became ever more aware that I was alone in a foreign country, where even the weather was alien to me. I was on my way to Iraq, and I grew concerned that there might be people around me who could tell I was an American and where I was bound. I grew concerned that they might have liked to have captured me. Being alone was disconcerting, but most importantly, in my eyes, I was unarmed.

  This wasn’t Kansas, Toto.

  Being off the tourist track, I would take notice of anyone and everyone around me, watching for signs that I was being followed. Since I had done surveillance work during my law enforcement days, I had an idea what to look for.

  I won’t lie—I was more than a little nervous—most likely for nothing; I don’t think I was being followed. All the same, I changed direction, doubled back, and crossed streets repeatedly. I went away from, then toward, my destination numerous times, ever watchful in all directions, until I got back to the safety of the hotel.

  Kuwait City was a curious mixture of extraordinary wealth and abject poverty, which could be taken in with virtually the same glance. There seemed to be no middle class, just fabulously wealthy and dirt-poor. The dirt-poor, I would later discover, were the laborers who were brought into the country to do all the work. The native-born Kuwaitis were so oil-rich they didn’t have to lift a finger, and they didn’t. Kuwait is a sheikdom. The government is feudal. The royal sheik and his family run the country. They have an advisory national assembly, but it’s just for show. To keep their people happy, they spread the oil wealth around. They didn’t share any of that wealth with their laborers; that was obvious from the slum-like conditions I observed.

  After a couple of days, Colonel Thompson and I linked up with the other retired British army colonel, previously alluded to, and an American Marine major—an intelligence officer. Our activities in Iraq were to be conducted in Al Anbar Province, in the western part of the country, which was the area of operations for the Marine Corps. I bid farewell to the luxurious hotel, and we entered a holding area known as Ali al Salem.

  Ali al Salem was a military base run by the U.S. Army that ferried civilians and military personnel to and from Iraq. There we drew gear, body armor, helmets, and so on from the Army—I took more than a little kidding from Marine buddies who saw pictures of me wearing Army equipment—and we were assigned tents while we waited for transportation to Iraq.

  Although a far cry from the hotel I had just left, Ali al Salem wasn’t an unpleasant place. We had a decent chow hall, showers, and a free Laundromat. There were fast-food restaurants, a small post exchange (store), gourmet coffee, and Internet—all of which seemed highly out of place. We were surrounded by tall concrete walls crowned with razor wire and protected by guard towers at regular intervals. It was life inside a protected fishbowl.

  Finally, after numerous delays, we were flown out of Kuwait aboard a C-130. A C-130 is a four-engine propeller-driven aircraft that can carry cargo or troops. In our case it carried both. When used as a troop carrier, there is literally not enough room in one seat for one person when wearing protective gear. We were all more or less layered over one another. Once strapped in—securely—I felt lucky to be able to wiggle my toes. It was not for the claustrophobic and it was not British Airways.

  But for me, the worst part about flying on a C-130 is no lavatory. I learned to hate C-130s. If you had to go, you just sat there and tried to take your mind off things. Long flights on a helicopter weren’t any easier. I hadn’t yet learned to deliberately dehydrate myself before flying—that knowledge would come later. There were interminable flights wherein I literally prayed for a refueling stop! Since aviation fuel can be a serious fire hazard, everybody had to get off the aircraft and move a safe distance away when refueling. As the aircraft filled its tank, I emptied mine. One of the simple pleasures of life; the absence of discomfort is comfort.

  All flights into and out of Iraq took place at night. The enemy occasionally shot down aircraft, and darkness made it more difficult for them. Also, since heat-seeking handheld surface-to-air (SAM) missiles were used, pilots would perform all kinds of aerial gymnastics at takeoff and just prior to landing. I swear there were times I thought we were flying upside down. I discovered that the pilots wanted to disperse the heat from the engines in hopes of confusing a heat-seeking SAM. I was glad I wasn’t prone to airsickness.

  When the time came to leave the C-130, at an airfield in “God knows where, it’s pitch-dark” Iraq, we were ushered to a plywood shack by military personnel. The barren interior of the structure was ablaze in fluorescent light. We, and others, just sat and waited. “Hurry up and wait” is more than a cute saying in the movies. It’s the reality of life with the military. Being tired, I tried to pass the time by sleeping, but I was too excited and nervous.

  I was finally in Iraq. It was April 2007. I was fifty-seven years old.

  The next leg of the trip was in a large helicopter. Everyone, bound for various places, had their final destination written on their hands in Magic Marker. That way nobody a
ccidentally boarded the wrong helicopter in the inky blackness. Military personnel checked each hand just prior to boarding the copter. Once again the takeoff and landing would have put a barnstorming crop dusting pilot to shame.

  I relearned what I had learned many years before on active duty—if there was one thing you could count on, it was getting dripped on by hydraulic fluid when being transported by helicopter. In fact, it’s been said that if you’re not getting dripped on, that’s a bad sign; it means the chopper is out of fluid.

  We arrived at our first destination—the Marine base at Camp Fallujah—sometime in the middle of the night. The chopper flew off and there we sat on our gear, completely alone, in pitch dark, miles from anywhere—in Iraq. I silently prayed the others in my group knew what was going on and where we were because I was definitely as lost as a little country boy in the big city.

  The major was furious. The flush on his face was obvious even in the dark. Evidently he had made all the right prior arrangements and we were supposed to be met by ground transport. I got the impression he was professionally embarrassed, since the British colonels were with us.

  Finally ground transport arrived and we were driven to a large tent surrounded by thick six-foot-high concrete barriers. This served as protection from the mortars or rockets that the insurgents fired into the base randomly—and regularly. The tent was—rather ostentatiously, I thought—known as the “transient quarters.” A big tent didn’t seem much like “quarters” to me, but there were bunk beds and most of them even had real mattresses on them. I found one and crashed. I had been trying to seem nonchalant in front of the others, but I was physically and emotionally wrung out. It was my first night in Iraq.

  After a few hours of sleep I awoke to the cheerful sound of Colonel Thompson’s voice. He said, “Good morning, Terry. How does it feel to have slept through your first incoming rocket attack?” He continued—sounding downright chipper, I thought—“Even more impressive, you slept through the outgoing counterbattery fire.” He was referring to the 155mm howitzers—think big boom—the Marines had used to return fire. I really had been exhausted. I do believe the good colonel knew only too well how far in over my head I was and he delighted in watching me take my first faltering steps after being “reborn.” I still thank God for the colonel’s thoughtful, caring tutelage. It was invaluable.