Shrinky Dinks

Anyone remember Shrinky Dinks? Those little plastic, probably horrible-caustic, deals that you would put in the oven and shrink… anyway, that is how my  stomach is… boooyah!!   After 8 days on a nice tight ketogenic diet, I can already see the results I am looking for. After a hard Sunday kettlebell workout, I feel great and continue all efforts to sleep well.

I called the local tanning place today, and felt like a douchebag while doing so, in order to prepare my oh-so-fair skin for the sun of California.  I do not want to be a crispy critter after my first game of Frisbee, but that might happen; If I wear a green hat they’d call me Sriracha…. Yeah, let’s not…

You can’t tell by this page and my 6 readers don’t care, but I was touching up on my HTML and CSS skills today and it is all coming back. Hey, perhaps eventually I’ll get off my ass and fix myself a dope-ass website for my business.

Also, tomorrow is like Christmas!! It’s the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war!!    That was fun times for all involved. Lots of surfing, some high fiving and ultimately a positive effect on our world.

Peace.   

To the Iraqi People..

Many things have come to light for me in the last several years that were not so apparent as a young man. I love my country and what it is supposed to stand for. I, and many others like me, was lied to, trained and used as a tool to oppress others. Many of these things were not my fault, but I was there to witness. So, like the man I want to be:

To the people of Iraq,

     I’m sorry for helping do to you, what I would never let happen to me or my loved ones. I am sorry for having hate in my heart; bringing my horrible skills to bear upon your brave men is a saddening thing for me in retrospect. I feel guilt for terrifying the people who I was supposedly protecting. I’m sorry for having had the drive to be better at tracking people in my scope, when I should have been opposing the occupation. I’m sorry that I was skilled and able to deal death at extreme ranges; what was once impressive is now repulsive.

     Although I will never deserve or receive your forgiveness, know that I am sorry for helping give my people a bad name. We often helped, but more often hurt people. I have joked about the death of others, but cried over those we suffered; no humans should have lost lives on either side. I am sorry for allowing spite, revenge or rage to fill me up and flow over. I’m sorry for being another invader into your sovereign land and removing your civil liberties at gunpoint. I’m sorry for using superior technology and deception to take away your family members. I’m sorry that we removed innocent men from their homes, without cause, in the name of security.

     I’m sorry I took away your guns. I’m sorry that your land has been ravaged by war and that men like me and my brothers were your enemy. If we had been born on the same block, we would probably been friends. I’m sorry that my friends glorified me for my successes in battle and boasted about their own. I’m sorry also that the common condition in wartime troops is to dehumanize their opponents to make them easier to mistreat; I am just as guilty of this. I’m sorry for being a part of something our Forefathers fought against.

     I’m sorry that I, at one time, thought that the ability to take a life was power. I’m sorry that my country is plagued by young men and women who suffer with guilt over things they did. I’m sorry that we had to kill to ensure the safety of others. I’m sorry that war is ironic at times. I’m sorry that the man in Tal Afar who guarded the bank, who treated us with such kindness, is not able to live in peace. I’m sorry that the Christian family in Mosul, who showed us love, has to live in hiding from sectarian violence.

     To the children, I am sorry that you had to witness young American men as monsters. I’m sorry that your childhood was filled with explosions, gunfire and large, armored men kicking in doors. I’m sorry that your soccer fields became a danger zone. I’m sorry that your kindness and wonder was not able to be spent in peace time. There was an old man and a young boy in the car that was hijacked by another man and all three had their hands up. I shot the hijacker when he pulled out a pistol; I am sorry that boy and old man had to fear for their lives.

     I’m sorry that it took nearly a decade to leave your land. I am sorry that thousands of peaceful people per year were killed by ordinance, stray bullets or carelessness. We accidentally killed a woman and went to pay reparations to her family; I’m sorry to that husband and those children that his wife and their mother died. I’m sorry that there were so many dinner tables with families waiting for their loved ones to come home, who never did.

     I’m sorry that it was “us versus them” and that you paid that price by proximity. I can say that I never targeted an unarmed person with lethal force, but some of my peers may have. I’m sorry that communications get confused, descriptions are vague, maps are not marked clearly and that our judgment is not always sound. I’m sorry that I thought my squad leader was a coward for leading us away from the fighting when he could.

       All these things and more are ones I and tens of thousands of military vets get to live with. We all have the chance to make good lives and we have an obligation to work hard accordingly. I saw the error of my ways and now try to teach my friends that respecting others is the only way we will ever evolve as a species. My son asked me “what’s a war?” and it broke my heart. I am glad though, that he has no clue about the horror so many children experience daily.

Bloodlust

This post is one I have put off for years, but decided that people need to know about. I can happily say that in all my years on this planet, I have only run into a few people who were like the one in the story to follow. It is a very small percentage… very, very small.

August 2005, Mosul, Iraq: The gravel of the company housing area crunched loudly with each step. I walked down the aisles of small buildings towards the sheet metal “hootch” I was staying in. My 3 roommates were getting weapons torn down and cleaned after the day’s mission and were getting ready to go eat. I had been trying to find my platoon sergeant to get some information about my scope that had been in the shop for many weeks; there was no conceivable reason it should take so long to get it.

I was the designated marksman (SDM) in my squad and was the only one in the company without a scope. I had a bone-stock M4 carbine, where the rest of the SDMs had free-floated barrels, match-grade triggers and specialty gear costing thousands of taxpayer dollars; mine was $383 dollars according to the accountability form. At this time in my life, I was unafraid to tell others what I felt about my abilities and that sometimes landed me in hot water; having a big mouth and the ability to back it up only pisses people off. I was a master at pissing people off.

Well, now that the situation is set, here is the actual part that’s interesting: While taking a lap one row down from my usual digs, I passed the room of a former squad-mate. As I passed, he yelled loudly for me. “Jack, come here man!”. Whirled around at the familiar voice of the Staff Sergeant and ran back to his room. I snapped to parade rest and sounded off with “Yes, Sergeant?” looking straight forward to the rear wall of the small hut. He waved his hand at me saying “Relax brother, come in and shut the door”. I relaxed and did as directed.

I walked into the dim room, lit by only the light let in from the slightly-ajar blinds. The strong man who called me was like a brother to me at many times, but we had been apart for several months since he moved to another platoon. He had taught me so many things about saving lives over the years. He was the only Infantryman who knew more about emergency medical procedures than our medics; we all trusted him implicitly. This conversation took a dark turn immediately, though as the look in his eyes were unfamiliar to me.

“It’s me and you, brother. We have the most confirmed kills in the battalion. It’s a contest now.” he started, gesturing to a pair of bloodied gloves and a large Stryder knife hanging on a wall. He had, only days earlier, been involved in an ambush where he stabbed an enemy with that knife. The gruesome trophy on the wall hung there as a reminder of his devotion to his job. We had been fighting the forces of (insert your preferred term for other humans who resist invaders here) in Mosul for months and he and I were the most prolific of the soldiers making a dent in enemy forces.

I raised my hands up in a manner to show I was not enthusiastic about it and told him “I’m not here for blood, man”. I really only wanted to go home, but that was not on the list of options. He pressed me for my compliance and insisted that we have to compete for the most kills. I was actually fearful at that moment. I was in a room with a man who was a hunter like me, but his resolve was overriding his morality. I am not without sin in that respect, but I was certainly not looking for a contest counted in human lives.

The horror was that his eyes told me there was no exaggeration in his statements and that there was a genuine bloodlust. Only the previous week, he and I were on separate ends of the same ambush where two of the original four enemy were killed in the initial contact and the other two were dispatched by myself and the Staff Sergeant at opposite ends of the city after a chase. The man in front of me was killed where he stood out of necessity to protect my life and those of my peers. The man he gunned down had his body violated as an entire magazine was fired into the corpse as to make the point stronger or to make him even more dead (?). It begs the question: Is it more wrong to kill someone and then continue to shoot the body out of anger or rage than it is to kill them and do nothing?

This whole mess of words I managed to throw together only illustrates that there are a select few people who really want to take humans’ lives and that is sad. We need more people who resist war or learn to resist it so that we as a nation can thrive.

Nearing the End

So over the past two years, my buddy Ken and I have had some fun times riding motorcycles, shooting or just sitting around and BSing over coffee. The stories he has about being in the Special Forces in Vietnam are incredible; incredible and sad... just to be clear. Some of the stories he tells me, I can plainly tell that he wishes he couldn't remember those painful images.
He told me about a time where he had to sneak into a village and dispatch the sentry, a teenage boy, with his knife. He talked about holding the boy as he bled to death over about a minute. His detail was amazing, heart-wrenching and sickening in a way. I understand why he had to do that; the boy with the AK-47 was ready to kill the Americans who were in his country and they simply couldn't allow that. Not to get into politics with this is hard, but I will just say it is a sad series of events.
While I try to keep him off the subject of warfare, it is actually hard being that it is one of the things he and I have most in common with. I can see it in his face and eyes when he talks about certain parts of his experience where he goes somewhere else. His eyes glaze over a bit and sometimes get to the brink of tears, but they don't flow out. It is hard to describe, but he goes to another place in time and his actions get more animated while he speaks. This is a man with passion, training and a lot of horror that never left him.
So, a while ago we were supposed to go on a motorcycle ride and he told me that he was having a tough time with the clutch lever so he wanted to move it back. His hands were beginning to curl in like a fist almost; it is the way a soldier will hold his hands at the Position of Attention. He went to the VA to see what was going on; the results came back with sad news.
The doctors at the VA told him he has ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease) and that is what had been causing many of the issues he had been having. For me, it made sense why he would systematically jump from subject to subject and routinely repeat himself several times in one sitting.
Due to the illness, that is progressively getting worse, he had to sell his motorcycle, he sold his guns and can not even open a door knob. Yesterday I went over and installed some new handles on the garage for him so he can at least get into his beloved shop for tools. I am more than happy to help him in these ways; I can only hope my sons or perhaps grand kids, would be there to help me when I am old and dying. Ken's son has not spoken to him in years, so for whatever reason that is it means that the help is not coming from him.
Anyway, I was happy to pick up Ken's Glock 22 (yes, another one) and am trying to sell the old 30-30 Winchester for him. He's a good guy who is a real pain in the ass to deal with at times; being stubborn is a trait not well-suited to one who is incapable.

"Daddy, What's that Red Badge for?"

Today, my son reminded me of a brief conversation he and I had a little over a week ago around his bed time. When I was tucking him in with the usual good night hug and kiss, he asked me what I was looking at, through my scope, in a picture on our wall. At the time, I told him I would talk to him about it later; well, later was today for him.

My wife hung up a picture of me that was taken in early 2005 in Tal Afar, Iraq in which I was looking through my rifle scope at suspected enemy positions as the rest of the squad moved through the area. We were not actively engaged with hostile forces at the time, so the picture is just neat and happened to have been taken at the right time by someone. The picture has a simple wooden frame with my bronze star pinned to it and then my broken KIA bracelet on top of it.

My son asked me to lift him up so he could see what I was doing in the picture. When I lifted him up, he saw the Bronze Star with its “V” device pinned to it and asked me “Daddy, what’s that red badge for?” I was shocked that he knew what a badge was, let alone semi-proper use of the word and then I was astonished that he knew that there was some significant reason that I had it.

I just told him that I got it for doing a good job, which was true, because there is no way I am going to get into the nitty gritty of what actually transpired that warm April day.  I realize that there will come a day that he will want to know more, but not today. It is a tough thing to describe to a five year old, let alone anyone. The stone-cold facts may not be the best way of telling him either.

In the end, he knows where I was on the globe (Thanks to the Leap Frog Explorer globe) and that I was there for a year and it was before he was born. This should be interesting one day.

Whitewashing Over Mental Illness

When I came back from Iraq in September 2005, we were sent through a series of redeployment screenings. The most horrific of all things I witnessed of the red tape while in the Army was the way they herded us through and passively suggested we lie about our conditions. They rewarded those who lied and "checked the block" let them go home earlier than those who told the truth.
The test was one that asked a series of questions that relate to what we had experienced the previous year. We were infantryman and they were treating us like Girl Scouts; if we did what they said, we got a reward. I was among the few who got no reward due to my truthful nature.
I had, and still am without, no shame about telling a stranger about what I did. I committed murder in the name of freedom. I pulled innocent people from their homes because we were terrified that they may be bad. I helped make enemies out of people who just wanted to go about their lives. Men whose heads had been cut off had been blown up, from IEDs under them, when family went to retrieve the body; these horrors are commonplace in war in my experience.
When we rounded up the men, we treated them like cattle; ultimate hypocrisy on my part in that I would never let people do to me what I've done to others. We did it to protect ourselves, and sometimes we may have been right, but more often than not we were recreating the horrible events that the nazis did in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s. The pleas of the old men are haunting, just as the screams of the children as we took away their fathers and brothers.
Back to the screenings: those of us who answered truthfully about what we did, saw, felt and experienced while we sleep were kept there for several hours more. We had to speak to a series of counselors, social workers and a chaplain. we were the bastards who told what we saw.
The next part is how they asked us to explain away our nightmares, flashbacks, violent tendencies, suicidal thoughts and murderous dreams. I answered "yes" to the question, "in the past two weeks, have you thought about hurting yourself or someone else?" The person whom I spoke with later was happy to remove the red flag once I told them my logic; I may imagine it, but it doesn't mean I'm really going to do it. She was happy to do this with every red flag on my sheet.
Over the course of the time, they managed to get me to explain all my symptoms away and suddenly, according to my medical records, i was 100% fine and dandy. Of the men who were made to take this same course, three are dead today. One sought out death by repeated deployments and two others took their own lives with firearms. The point is that they should have been more prudent with the data given on testing.
The modern stigma that exists about soldiers seeking help is one of the worst ones that can exist. The men and women who are experiencing bloodshed and who are taken from their loved ones deserve to be looked after. Instead, we get wrung out like a sponge and promptly discarded.
I found out about the extent of the cover-up when I went to the VA (department of veterans affairs) after getting out of the service. They told me that I had no evidence of having nightmares, flashbacks or of being hyper-vigilant. This shocked me and was only taken seriously once they interviewed my wife. She told them how I am, which may not be so bad most of the time, and how I manage to wake up screaming or gasping from time to time.
While few people will read this and do anything with it, those who have loved ones coming back from war or who have problems now, will know how serious it is. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is as deadly as a round from an AK-47 or an IED. If you know someone who suffers from this disease, be there to listen to them. Also, don't be scared to act.
In August of 2010 a man, who used to be a soldier of mine, killed himself after he was refused psychiatric help. He wanted to see his daughter after a year-long deployment and his ex-wife insisted upon getting counseling. He tried....