The Faces of War

Without understanding it, I was once an unquestioning devotee of war.

It started during a Congressional internship in 2008, when I took a manic deep-dive into the minutest developments in the Global War on Terror. In my night classes, obsession grew as my classmates and I probed the nation building efforts meant to convert the fragile state of Afghanistan into something resembling a successful democracy.

Before long, I had been hollowed out by my contempt for the policymakers and elected leaders whose errors were holding us back from success. The emptiness was filled with a growing awe of the warriors we trained for violence, and called to act as armed statesmen in far-flung, culturally-divergent battlespaces where lines were never neatly drawn.

The following semester should have knocked back my burgeoning affections. I spent many months parsing through the detailed records of a former Nazi desk jockey and occasional genocide accomplice while I searched captured German documents and horrific photographs for proof of the war crimes the longtime US citizen denied participating in. (A year or so later, he would confess in full just before dying.) In my evening classes, I dissected the anti-war literature of Vonnegut, Heller, Owen, and Ledig while my wiry hippie professor took great enjoyment in lambasting the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombings of Japanese cities, and solemnly attempted to unmask the “greatest generation” as a group of violent, alcoholic cowards.

I leaned away from my professor’s cynicism, desperate to protect the honor of my veteran family members. To prove the nobility of the practice of war, I perused the works of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and devoured manuals on counterinsurgency and irregular warfare. During spare moments, I filled my researcher shelf at the Library of Congress with more warfighting literature than I could ever hope to read.

To combat vivid Holocaust nightmares, I took to watching war porn into the wee hours. My pulse raced as aviators dropped 500-pound bombs on terrorist strongholds and performed breathtaking aerial maneuvers. I loved watching warfighters at work, slogging through the shit to bring down terrorists in mountains, deserts, cities, and fields of luxuriant greenery. I was hooked on what I perceived as glory, happy to watch the spilling of guts, and blind to the depth of experience beneath those grainy captures.

In the fall of 2010, my total devotion to war was finally tested when I unexpectedly fell in love with a Marine who was going through the infantry officer course in Quantico.

I had just begun my career as an Army civilian intelligence analyst, focusing on Afghanistan. One day, a young captain stopped by my grey government cubicle. She stood glaring at my boyfriend’s name tape affixed to the wall.

“Lieutenants have the life span of a fly over there,” she said, laughing with incongruous gaiety.

Her words nearly brought me to tears.

The surge in Afghanistan was underway, a Band-Aid solution to expediently change our occupation’s course. Horrible news came home daily to the families of Marines serving in places like Marjah and Sangin.

My boyfriend was nearing the battlefield, where he would become a pawn for men and women looking for a quick fix, who cared nothing about the depth of his eyes, or how very many humans needed him not to die. The truth was also beginning to creep over me that I had become part of the apparatus failing our warfighters, and that they — and the humans who loved them — would pay for our shortcomings with their lives.

All at once, the idea of war was not thrilling. I began to fear the thing the Marine I loved was inexorably racing towards. He got orders to Camp Pendleton, and our strained relationship would not survive straddling the coasts.

We still kept in touch. Around a year later, he deployed to Helmand province to help train the Afghan National Security Forces. At the time, members of the ANSF had begun turning their weapons on their American trainers, sometimes due to enmity, and other times because of foreign or Taliban influence. I maintained no faith that our leadership would keep him alive, so throughout that deployment, I sent the Marine I still cared for every piece of information I found on these green-on-blue attacks and other security threats.

He did survive, but it had nothing to do with my bundles of reporting.

Years later, when I interviewed him at a diner in the middle of nowhere, I learned that his Helmand deployment had not, in fact, left him unscathed. It was physically painful to hear one of the most confident men I know tell me of the anxiety of his deployment, and of the emptiness that overtook him while decompressing from that warzone.

I recognized the twisting of my organs and the quaking of my sure footing. It was the same feeling that overtook me when I first recognized that he was not immune to death. It is the sensation that echoes inside me to this day any time I hear a veteran tell me a difficult story of service, or of the wounds they live with as a result of their selflessness.

The memories of my earliest deep conversations with veterans are incredibly visceral. Like Billy Pilgrim, I sometimes slip out of the present and back into those recollections.

While running around after my children, I might be sitting in a glimmering ballroom as a colleague tells me of the fallen friend and soldiers inked permanently into his arms. While folding laundry, I can be watching a nameless gentleman in a coffee shop dissolve into tears about his struggles with God and his regrets about killing the enemy in the Battle of Panama. As I type this piece, I am listening to my mother-in-law’s dearly departed friend confess that he sought mental help after he slammed a man who degraded his military service into an airport bathroom wall on returning from the Vietnam War. Whenever I listen to my daughter’s much-requested “Walking on the Moon,” I return to the night when my father told me about the man whose death in the F-14 almost certainly saved my father’s life.

Too often, I find myself at the kitchen table in a family friend’s home where his young neighbor told me truths he withheld even from his wife. He explained how he held his twin brother’s hand when rockets flew towards their Afghan base. He told me how disgusted he felt loading jingle trucks for drivers who kept young boys in their cabs to use for sex, swapping their young passengers from time to time. When he returned home, he told me about the various times the VA had failed to help him battle back his demons. I remember willing myself to believe what he said about his struggles being in the past.

And I remember exactly where I sat eighteen months later, when I heard that the young man had committed suicide. I can still feel the place where something inside me that had long been stretching finally snapped.

I often recall a moment months later when I stood at my kitchen island as my infant daughter slept. I was watching a virtual VA presentation about how friends and families can support their veteran loved ones. The chat was open for questions, so in the window, I explained that a veteran I knew had killed himself after struggling to get help from the VA. I asked what could have been done to help him sooner.

“Tell your friend to come to one of our group therapy sessions,” a VA employee responded.

“I can’t, he’s dead!” I screamed at the screen.

Often, veterans and service members tell me of their triumphs, Always, they describe the deep love they bear for those they served beside. They also tell me of their challenges: of explosive amputations; of deep disappointments with military bureaucracy; of painful transitions into civilian life; of coming to terms with their participation in a lost-cause-conflict; of being a warrior who never “saw the elephant,” and of fighting against time, deadly enemies, and their own countrymen to deliver on promises made to the foreign allies who risked their lives for our warfighters in battle.

Their stories have killed my belief in war. At least at the strategic level, I have seen no proof that our leaders can conduct it well. Somewhere in the planning, they lose sight of the people, and of the purpose. The effects are devastating.

What I fervently believe in is the fortitude, bravery, camaraderie and selflessness of our warfighters. Courageous men and women helm our country, ready to act with ferocity and abandon to protect people who have forgotten them. Our leaders will deny them battlefield advantages and tie them down with rules of engagement. The institutions they fight for will fail to care for them in mind and body during their service, and will keep failing them in unconscionable ways when they return from battle and assimilate back into society. Though they are the most capable fighting force in the world, our service members and veterans rarely receive the support and admiration they have earned.

Listening to the intimate observations of those who trained for it and were its practitioners has been the education of a lifetime in conflict. I know now that one cannot understand conflict from studying warfighting manuals, watching grainy war porn, or reading comprehensive battlefield histories.

War is not a faceless monolith. It has as many faces as those who have experienced it. The only way to truly comprehend it is to start listening and opening our hearts to the warfighters we sent to do our fighting.