A Soldier's Story

A Soldier's Story

I didn't join the Army to kill somebody. I never could romanticize the marines in my mind. War movies never resonated with me. I never glorified war heroes; they were nothing more than just actors on a green screen. I joined because I had to do something, or at least that is what my guidance counselor said.

Sitting there in that sterile, white hospital room I couldn't help but think about the events that led up to this point. Brian had been asleep for hours, but the doctors said he would make a full recovery. They had had to amputate. So I sat there for hours and daydreamed.

"Jared, do you have any plans after you graduate?"

I never had considered it. In my mind, graduation was always a year off, always in the future and so distant-never directly pertinent to me. And that senior year came with incredible force. Everything was supposed to come together by then, all the minute details would've been resolved by then. But nothing came my way. College deadlines came and past and I found no acceptance letters arriving in fat packages in my simple mailbox.

"Um, not exactly. I'm looking for a job this summer," I replied.

The guidance counselor was aggravated that day. It was college selection time and he had to sift through the details of countless over- and under-achievers. I was just the icing on the cake from a day filled with indifferent student after indifferent student.

"You might want to think beyond just this summer," he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

"I figured maybe community college."

"Ok, what are your financial options?"

Again, another loophole in my predestined destination. I never had discussed option with my parents. They'd been through the same situation with three other children and weren't about to be bothered by a fourth. I was given more leeway than all my other siblings, and now I was realizing that maybe that wasn't such a benefit for me. I thought I had turned out to be the most responsible one-the only one of the Juarts' that didn't need constant attention from mommy or daddy. That attention could've come in handy, though.

"I'm not really sure about my financial options."

"Do both your parents work?"

"Yes," I answered.

"And would they help with tuition payments and what not."

"I guess."

I knew my parents had no intention of paying for any secondary education, let alone had they predicted me to even attempt such an endeavor.

"Well, I can give you an application to some of the junior colleges in the area if you'd like."

I took them and threw them in the trash can on the way out of his office. There were better options than commuting to a dingy school building to take remedial classes taught by moronic professors. Something would eventually come up and I'd grab the opportunity with zest. I wasn't about to be cornered into a situation that would have no payoff, that would be an entire waste of my time.

The first time I got the idea of the marines came at lunch on one of the last Wednesdays of my high school career. I had had calls from Army recruiters throughout the year, but the idea of the military being a tangible option before hadn't occurred to me. Then, with such great eloquence, my friend Brian articulated why he was joining the military.

"Dude, I decided to join the army."

I choked on my grilled cheese and tried to open my clogged throat with a gulp from my diluted lemonade.

"What, why?"

He grinned, showing off a piece of lettuce wedged between his front teeth from the BLT sandwich.

"Why not?" he replied. "I get paid to workout basically and become jacked. Its better than college, wasting my own money to hear some goof babble on and on about nothing. I'm done with that."

"You're ok with the possibility of being killed?" I asked.

"Yeah, like we're going to be in a war in the next ten years. I'm not worried about ever seeing combat action. Worst part of the whole thing will be boot camp, and staying at home with my dad there would be ten times worse than that anyways."

So, on June 1, 2001, I enlisted in the military with my friend Brian Warning. We both received our letters to deploy to Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina for our basic training. Summer would end early for us as our training was set to begin in early August. We trained together for the two months leading up to, trying desperately to get rid of the excess fat caused by an inactive senior year. By the time July 31^st came around we were trim, focused and determined to get started on the next step of our lives.

We said our teary goodbyes to family and friends on a soggy, early August day and boarded a plane for a state and way of life that had previously been unknown to the both of us. We arrived in South Carolina greeted by the thickest air we'd ever encountered our entire lives. Brian immediately began sweating bullets, his shirt and tie drenched.

There was a bus waiting for us at the airport to take us directly to the camp. We arrived at Fort Jackson at approximately at 0800 hours greeted by a throng of similar new recruits. It was a contingent surprisingly diverse in gender, race, geography, religion and I assumed sexual orientation. However, one thing that seemed common among all of us was that we had no other options.

This wasn't an elite group by any means. I had gone to a high school with overachievers, those incessant kiss-asses whose entire life revolved around doing better than their peers. This was the group of underachievers I'd been looking for.

No high school dropouts, junkies, kids with rap sheets-just a large mass of those who didn't care about their GPA more than anything else in life. As for the boot camp I didn't have any problems with it. Being called a "moron" and "pussy" never riled me up. I learned that everything in boot camp was about the psychological effect. Eventually you'd learn your limits physically and could train yourself to be ready for all the challenges you faced.

Brian, on the other hand, didn't excel at his training. He was the constant butt of jokes from our Commanding Officer-his weight constantly ballooning even under the intense pressure of boot camp and record high summer temperatures. But he was resilient-more resilient than he'd ever been in his entire life. I'd never seen Brian determined to do anything, but he was constantly changing everyday.

He fed off of the degradation that is boot camp. When our drill sergeant berated him, it only emboldened him to be a better soldier. There seemed to him a purpose in being there.

I never felt a purpose, though. The entire idea of being paid to do this was a joke to me.

"You need to take it more seriously," Brian would urge, trying to quell the streams of sweat running down his forehead.

"Why?"

"Think about your future, dude."

Future, I didn't plan on being here any longer than a brief stint. This was vacation to me. I didn't mind the physical labor, it was a way for me to get a tan and build a beach body. There was plenty of relaxation between the drills. Everyone else saw this as hell; I saw it as an opportunity to be paid for having to listen to more mindless banter from ignoramuses. At least now I was making a living while being propagandized to on a regular basis.

Brian saw this even before that fateful day as something worthy of him-for the first time he felt the urgency to be an American and defend the ideals of the country. I didn't understand him; he had changed so rapidly for seemingly no reason. No one could say or do anything to have me completely alter my perception of how things worked or why they worked.

"My future isn't in the army, man. Last time I checked you weren't looking for career opportunities, too."

"You don't understand," Brian said. "This is a chance for us to finally fucking do something. Look at you; you've never cared about anything your entire life. Now you can, finally there is something worthy of you."

I clenched my fist and took a deep breath. He had completely absorbed all the bullshit they'd been telling him. I'd never seen Brian take to authority so quickly. He absolved himself of all the preconceived notions that had been ingrained and let this lifestyle become a part of him. I admired that he found something to cling onto, but I wasn't about to be swayed by some nationalistic empathy.

"This isn't worthy of me."

"Fighting for your country isn't worthy of you!" he said, as sweat masked his face in the drenching heat. His camouflage had lines of perspiration running from the neck all the way down his back. Brian's face had turned a bright red, the vein in his forehead pulsated.

"We're not fighting anyone, Brian," I was adamant with my words. "You act like there is this constant enemy out there. There is no one!"

"You really think that. You really think that we are wholly at peace with the rest of the world? You think that someone out there, somewhere doesn't want to see us annihilated."

"Dude, what are you talking about?" he had stood up and was pacing now. "You're paranoid, like you're always looking over your shoulder for someone watching you. Why, what makes you think that we are constantly under threat of attack?"

Brian turned his head towards me and for a brief second I saw the carefree side of him, like this was all one big joke he was clinging on to. The punch line never came.

"Maybe you shouldn't be defending this country."

"Yeah, ok. And I want the terminator here to be protecting me."

The next week Brian was deployed to a based in Kentucky for his advanced individual training. The week after that was September 11. I never talked to Brian about that day, but I could just imagine the look he had on his face. This was justification for all the talk that he had so vehemently espoused before. Here was the enemy, hitting us with a blunt blow on our chin.

The attacks never really hit me. I watched them on a United States military base with a couple thousand teary eyed, maddened soldiers who wanted nothing more than to feast on the blood of the people who had victimized us. But to me it never occurred as an attack.

I walked into the lounge room that morning and thought they were watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

"Hey, I've never seen this Arnold movie before. What is this?" I asked a private sitting on a chair in the corner. He was so completely fixated on the screen that I had to ask him again.

"It's the news," he replied.

"Is this New York?"

"Yeah," he tried to hush me.

I watched over and over as the towers collapsed, as the military headquarters turned into a fire pit and saw the colossal debris in the fields of Pennsylvania. It never even fazed me that this was an attack on our country, our values. How was this attack any different from the Unabomber or Timothy McVeigh? It was the act of mad men trying to terrorize us, but this wasn't an attack. This wasn't Pearl Harbor. No one at the camp saw it that way.

Up until the decision to head to Afghanistan the camp looked like a morgue. The training began to take an even greater urgency. We had always been preparing for war, but now it seemed the battle was actually eminent. It was known that we would be deployed soon, somewhere. People wouldn't stand for us to wait idly by and not attack. I felt like the entire country was thirsty for blood and I was at the epicenter of it all.

*****

Before I knew it the humid air of South Carolina was replaced by the dry heat of the desert. I had planned on applying for discharge but now found myself here. This isn't what I had expected. I was the lone voice of dissent and had no forum on which to speak. So I stayed quiet, became a recluse in a non-existent war.

We never really found the war, either. I saw the news show clips again and again of nighttime combat that I never was a part of. I wondered where this action was all going on. I only saw miles and miles of desolate land with no one in sight. Combat didn't come till one fateful night high in the mountains.

It was brutally cold in the desert that night. The wind swept through my uniform and hit me with a bitter chill. I was part of a small battalion that night that had been sent to smoke out a supposed camp that had been spotted on the northern ridge of the nearest mountains. I guess our officers wanted us to capture them and take them as prisoners of war, because this was certainly a mission for stealth bombers. But, alas, we ventured into the dark abyss along a rough terrain.

We were there for a day and a half until we caught sight of our target. It was a small strand of smoke trailing into a blinding darkness that was spotted by the night watchman. I was awaked to sounds of bullets being exchanged across an echoing wasteland. I quickly picked up my rifle and fired as many shots as I could muster into a cloud of smoke.

This was the news clips I saw in the lounge rooms. These were those so-called Taliban guerrilla fighters who were adept at fighting this kind of war. I finally saw it, the enemy was there-they were tangible. I could feel Brian's words over me; they proved to be so true. These people were out for my blood, for my freedom.

I fired ruthlessly at nothing. We all did. No one remembered their training, it was all instinctive. In that moment we were fighting for all those innocent people. My gun was aimed at this tyranny, my bullets cascading downwards into the abyss of hell. Finally, I saw it all so clearly. I was to vindicate all those that had suffered needlessly.

Our firepower was too much for the lowly fighters. We battled seemingly endlessly through the night till they relented. We pursued with great vigor, trampling through unknown terrain towards our enemy. Finally, after a series of mortar fires, we trampled upon our small enemy.

From a near distance they looked just like us. Adorned in camouflage and appearing also equipped with our same weapons. We crept closer and closer and felt our mistake in the pit of our stomachs. None of us spoke, hoping and pleading to God that this wasn't the case. But we saw it; we saw the bodies of our own brethren strewn about a dusty plateau.

An American flag was draped over one soldier lying akin to a boulder. I slowly uncovered the body, carefully removing the flag. Behind that great emblem I was greeted by a ghost, a pale and so familiar ghost. Looking back at me was Brian Warning. His right leg was mangled and his shirt was seeped in red.

I looked at him for as long as I could stand, it seemed like an eternity. And for a moment it didn't seem real, like it was just another injury from our high school days. He was going to get up and bounce back anytime soon-he didn't. Instead, he writhed in pain until the helicopter arrived.