No one ever talked about deployment. We signed up because we wanted it, and they knew we wanted it. No one there afraid to take the big bird over the ocean to the other side of the world. Especially now that we knew we weren't going to the desert and all the geopolitical mess of the past fifty years of Occupation. And we were all infantrymen, so it's not like we were squeamish at the thought of what we might get into.
It
started at a point of systematic build-up. First the runs, then the rest of PT,
weights and calisthenics and all, maybe some Greek mind-body emphasis without
any mind stuff. That came later: Hours-long Classroom sessions studying
military history, tactics, case studies of military operations gone wrong, some
gone right. The guerrilla fighting that won the Revolutionary War. Attrition in
the Civil War. The trenches of Great-War Europe and all those nasty chemical
weapons. Modern mechanized warfare in War Two, Bastogne and the Ardennes, the
Bulge, Operation Market Garden, Barbarossa, the hell of the Pacific Theater,
the relentless push of the Soviets on the Eastern Front once they regained
Stalingrad. Dien Bien Phu, Hue, Khe Sanh, Langvei, Saigon, the
shock-and-failure of the Tet Offensive, a wakeup call more than anything else.
Declassified Cold War ops. The massive success of Desert Storm after Shield,
airstrikes crippling the Iraqi Army, Coalitions deaths only about one-fifty,
miracle numbers. The botched War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan,
Syria. The quagmire of Iraq - Fallujah, Mosul, the Sunni Triangle, the
invasion, the surge, the drawdown, the full withdrawal, everything - and how
al-Sadr seized control within the year we left. Yemen and Somalia, whole
campaigns run by UAV airstrikes. The China Problem, the North Korea Problem
(quickly answered), vague details about the backroom China-Pakistan alliance,
knowing that part of our job was to de-vague it.
My
favorite part was Desensitization class because it was all theater. It was
mostly all Classroom, and even the few times they sent us out to the field to
stage some benign mock-casualty response, each of us taking turns as wounded or
corpse or medic and going through triage, first aid, basic med, all that
make-believe. It always came back to that lecture-hall-styled room, tiers of
desks, lights dimmed almost in comic reverence, only thing missing was mood
music. We watched slide after slide of dead bodies. It started with natural
deaths of the Old, then progressed younger, more raw, forty- and
fifty-somethings with weight problems and sudden heart attacks, tongues
wrenched in violent directions. Dead teens, dead kids, dead babies, SIDS and
all. We moved onto unnatural deaths, mostly car accidents, that old trot-out
during school proms for drunk-driving scared-straight PSAs, those grizzly
metal-twisted fuck-ups, like someone tossed a crate of tomatoes on the
concrete, bodies half-charred from gasoline fires, glass shards in a fine
mosaic caked in eye sockets in the close-ups. Murders and war photos. Gunshot
wounds. Stabbings. Roadside bombs. Guys that, if they were miraculously brought
to life, would still be too fucked up to walk, to move, to think a clear thought.
Shotgun blasts to the head, high-caliber sniper rifles scoring a perfect
headshot, maybe a sniper with a sense of humor, a bullet right in the eye, all
puckered up and black, puss-filled, dead and that grey fishbelly color of rot
that your primate brain tells you not to touch. Clips of executions. Bad,
grainy, Arabic-only videos from fifty years back, dubbed a million times, a
long tirade about the West before the money shot, some guy getting his head
chopped off with a dull ceremonial sword. Field execution vids that were all,
for whatever reason, definitely Eastern Bloc. One in particular: A guy on the
ground, the videotaper with a boot on the guy's neck, the guy begging in some
backward Eurasian dialect, then someone comes in and stabs the guy in the windpipe
with a serrated knife and saws through it, the guy convulsing all of a sudden,
like life is an electrical current that, when severed, goes on the fritz. Back
in time: SS videos of concentration camps. Masses buried alive with bulldozers.
Handheld shots of the crematoria towers, spewing human ash into the air, can't
help but imagine the cinematographer had a smile on his or her face. And then
Allied videos, post-snuff films, the same bulldozers plowing emaciated corpses
into communal graves. Then a circuit of Vietnam films, the last war the
government allowed journos full access. Indiscriminate bombing and napalm.
Free-fire zones in hootches that damn sure didn't look like Charlie was using
for cover. Dumbfuck grunts unloading whole mags, draftees in birth-control
glasses constantly looking for an officer to tell them what to do. And you know
that famous photo of the street execution of some guy? Well, that guy was
convicted 'Cong, so even though he's all boo-hoo weepy he did enough shit to
deserve one in the dome. That photo is actually a still printed from
documentary footage. You see death a million times in movies and games in vivid
tru-def, death so amplified that when it happens In The Real World, it seems so
anticlimactic. So the ARVN guy with the gun goes up to the VC, barely hesitates
to raise his revolver, shoots the guy in the grape, a pencil-width geyser
spurts out, and the guy crumples to the ground to bleed out. Looks weak, but
hey, it's effective, it killed the dude, and at the end of the day it's really
just a scorecard, right?
All
this was fairly pedestrian. I think we were all collectively waiting for
someone to rush off to vomit and the rest of us would feel the proximity
embarrassment. That never happened.
Most
other Classroom time was entirely different. It was more history than anything
and a half-baked attempt to keep us guessing where we'd get deployed. Our
Instructor sat in the front corner of the room while the specialist, some
Doctor, went through the class with a quiet, bedside-manner voice, and the
Instructor kept shifting in his seat every other minute, knowing most of the
lesson was bullshit. Over the year we were Stateside, we were inundated with
anywhere between four and ten hours of that every day, running through enough history
of Pakistan, Russia, China, and all their proxy states. Enough for us 716ers to
receive honorary BAs in History. Then came Languages, which, even when
balancing Dari, Pashto, Persian, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, and a
few common dialects of each, didn't come too hard for us types. Again, we
weren't bottom-of-the-food-chain last-resorters. If it wasn't the Forces, we
could've started our own companies or taught at universities or cured the
common cold or some other shit if it weren't for certain elements of certain
Conditions and--
And
besides, it's not like we had to be fluent. Just the usual "Put down your
weapon and you will not be hurt" and "Move!" and "Where is
the enemy?" and "Sorry to intrude upon your residence, but we are
looking for information" and the at-the-time strange but in-the-field
sensible "I cannot tell you my nationality, but our mission here is
important for the global community." Six-Four, second to Caf as the
talkingest motherfucker among us, really took to it, and not long into our time
at the Base he was speaking more gibberish than English.
But
they had already tipped their hand. Granted, China has itself quite a storied
history, but we took our sweet time going through all the dynasties and
emperors, and we practiced Mandarin and Cantonese far more than the other
languages. Wasn't hard to figure where we’d ship. But there was always
something strange about it. Like we were supposed to chat up the natives about
the Ming dynasty? Would traditional Chinese horse-and-sword-and-spear battle
tactics have any play in Modern Mechanized Warfare? At least they didn't make
us read Sun-Tzu.
And
The Base With No Name was its own vacuum. None of us had cars. They never
issued weekend passes to go out to town. We didn't even know if there was a
town past those gates. We didn't even see the gates. We didn't know if
"weekend passes" actually existed in the mil world. All I remembered
from the blurry dawn drive was that the middle-of-nowhere turned into a
fenced-in middle-of-nowhere. There were no newspapers, no television news, no
idle talk among the higher-ups since, well, the only non-Unit men we
encountered were our Instructor, the illusory Doctor, a few teachers, the low-E
groundskeepers who seemed to be serving the terms of small-scale punishment,
and the shadow of Mr. Hawk (real name, not our invention) in his tower on the
Firing Range. None of us had any idea why we'd edge up to war with China. They
weren't part of any Terror War mandate; they spent every other year on or off
the five-seat UN Very Special Council, often hand-slapped for some human rights
warble; they still made the bulk of our manufactured goods; and they owned most
of our debt. Maybe politicians were tired of turning a blind eye toward their history-erasing,
1984-copped bullshit. Maybe The Powers
That Be finally decided to stick it to them, disregarding - minor detail - that
their standing army was twice the size of ours; and that in the past fifty
years they had been buying up aircraft carriers and the usual Soviet bulk with
no end in sight, not in any act of qualifiable aggression but more a
thumbed-nose tell-off of See? You're Not The Only Ones With A Big Stick.
So
once we were ready, the Stateside whirlwind picked us up and threw us across
the Pacific. And just like that, twelve fifteen-year-olds went off to war.
(Chapter 26 coming Friday, January 13, 2012.)
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