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BACK TO IRAQ
A Cleveland soldier returns to the Persian Gulf to fight a second Bush war.
By Joshua Greene Wednesday, January 05, 2005


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EVER SEEN A SOLDIER STRUGGLE between commitment to his country and to his heart? Ever seen a war rip two lovers apart? Then open your eyes, 'cause it's happening all around. It's happening here at Edison's in Tremont, just a few stools down.

It's New Year's Eve 2004, and while midnight brings the toasts and roars, for the couple at the end of the bar, the new year just brings apprehension. The ringing-in of the new year is like an alarm signifying that the day of his departure nears and their time left together evaporates. At 9 p.m. on the first Wednesday of 2005, he leaves for Iraq.

It's a cruel fact: for this soldier and his lover, the past month has gone by at heart-wrenching speed.

“What the ****, man? All of a sudden it's like fast forward,” Babe says with ten days left.

Babe's not his real name. We can't use his real name. The Army owns him now, and without their permission, he's not allowed to speak freely. He's pretty sure the Army wouldn't grant him permission to speak his mind. “The First Amendment doesn't exist for us,” he said, 35 days ago.

The month has flown for many reasons. His commitment to the Army is for three years. First he had to sell his Jeep. Then he had to pack up the house, put some stuff in storage and give the rest away. The owner of a $3,000 terrarium, he's had to figure out what to do with his plants. Specifically, who did he know who could take his 127-year-old San Pedro cactus, a species once thought extinct?

And then it was the cat, a playful gray hunter named Professor Dietrich Von Chubsworth, aka Chubs. As D-Day drew near, the cat came down with the same sense of apprehension Babe did. Babe had to drink himself to sleep, but it was Chubs who was puking all over the apartment. Who could blame him? If Babe couldn't find a home for Chubs, he'd have to drop him off at the shelter. After all, a soldier can't take his cat to war. Only eight days to go, and it was Babe's buddy Brian to the rescue: Brian, a fellow pool shark from Edison's, agreed to adopt him.

Yet the reality of quitting jobs, saying farewells, packing up, moving out and keeping track of all the details only partly explains why time launched forward so fast. The rest has to do with chaos and confusion. The reality is, Babe is heading toward a war with an unknown cadence and rhyme.

“I see no political objective that is rational,” he says. To hear him say it, the only reason we're in Iraq is so “some ****ing glory ******” — aka Bush and his keepers — “can save face.”

“There's a good chance I might die,” Babe says with eight days left, sitting by himself in a quiet booth at Edison's. He's composing a farewell letter for friends and family.

MEDICALLY SPEAKING, Babe's already died once for his country.

At 33, he's an old soldier. He's been shot seven times. In the leg, the chest and the head. His leg has been rebuilt. His head has a porcelain plate in it. He still carries a round in his chest. He was shot in what he calls “the Gulf War proper,” meaning the first Iraq war. He was shot in Sarejevo and once in a place the Army says the U.S. never was. Once, he was even pronounced dead. “Clinically speaking,” he clarifies.

“I took two in the chest. The helicopter was hit. I fell out. It was pretty ****ed up. There were eight of us. It was a cargo helicopter. Six died. Both of the pilots died. That was Iraq, 1997. We lost a lot of guys, dude.”

He's justifiably cynical about his fellow citizens' ignorance and apathy.

“Everyone wants to know, did Sharon Stone have boob surgery? Other than your hardcore peace protester, no one cares [about the war],” he says, 21 days and six hours before his departure. “No one knows about Iraq 1997.”


The reality
“There's a good chance I might die,” says Babe, counting down the days.
In 1998, Babe officially got out of the Army. But on May 19, 2004, Babe, like many other former soldiers, received “an illegal threat letter” ordering him to return to uniform.

With 138,000 soldiers already at war, the Pentagon recently announced that they would add 12,000 more soldiers. Faced with the continuous stream of solemn news from the front, with 1,340 and counting already dead and 10,000 injured in a war with no clear objectives, recruitment of volunteers has been failing. Thus, soldiers already in Iraq are having their “voluntary” service commitments extended, and old soldiers like Babe, who have served and resigned, are being sent back.

“There was no option,” he says. “They said ‘re-enlist or we're going to take you and put you back in whatever field we think you should be in.'”

In mid-May, Babe moved to a new address, one he thought no one knew about. Three days later, the Army and their orders to re-enlist were in his mailbox. When Babe inquired about how they found him, they informed him that they had traced his computer.

But there was still hope. The months ahead held the possibility of a change of national leadership. Surely the campaign season would bring into focus the obscurity and absurdity of the war in Iraq. But instead of real debate about real Americans really dying in Iraq right now, the nation was treated to a discussion about Bush and Kerry's service during Vietnam. A month before the election, neither candidate was seriously discussing the war. Then reality set in. Babe was committed for three more years, and it was looking like they were going to be long ones.

“There is no way out,” Babe says, adding, “It's not our duty to win the war — it's our duty to win them over. It's a kind of PR thing that's going to fail.”

THAT'S THE KIND OF REALISM that could be dismissed as fatalism if not for the fact that Babe, a Shaker Heights High School dropout, is a committed student of history. His travels around the world with his family and later with the military awoke within him a thirst for history that runs as wild as his description of the gorgeous headwaters of the mighty Euphrates in Northern Iraq.

As a further impetus, he says, getting a formal education helps a soldier climb in rank. He got an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the Army. His master's in philosophy is from Cleveland State University. He got kicked out during his third year of law school at John Marshall after accusing a professor of a crime during class.

Babe is now dreaming of a Ph.D. in political histography, which he describes as the “evolution and implementation of and the effects of government on the people.”

For money, he bar-backed at Edison's and pulled shifts at the downtown adult bookstore on West 9th Street. Working the **** store was a job he hated, but it was a place a soldier with a heavy conscience could disappear. Besides, it was a good place to read. The books he read behind the counter didn't have pictures.

On the 26th day before his departure, a day when the conversation started with Babe asking, “Did you hear we're running out of bullets?” he's looking up from his 1889 copy of Vondel's Lucifer .

“The premise of it is, I guess, the fall of Lucifer,” he says. “There's a celestial war and, resulting from that, the fall of man. It's about accepting your destiny because God's an ***.”

Babe's serious about his literature. A $950 tattoo rendition of Picasso's Don Quixote dominates his back. And why not? Cervantes' Don Quixote is Babe's favorite work of fiction. But both Don Quixote and Lucifer are light reading compared to the only book Babe will carry onto the battlefield: History of the Peloppenesian War , known in certain circles only as “The History.” Babe says he thinks he's read every translation published since 1920 and considers it his bible.

Written in 420 B.C. by the Athenian general Thucydides, Babe says “The History” is especially relevant today. It's the story of the Athenians' failed attempt to force democracy on the Spartans.

“It speaks to me,” Babe says, adding that Thucydides actually lived through the war but died before he finished the book. “It's about war. It's about politics. It's about being a better human being in the face of a terrible, terrible war.”

Babe says the Spartans “were hell on earth,” and it was because they were willing to take warfare to another level that they overcame the world superpower of the time, Greece.

“Athens was known for its great ****ing navy, but the Spartans outweighed that by the end,” he says. “Of course, war was fought differently back then. They fought in lines. Whoever was the host faced the allies of the enemy. The two warring parties never met each other in battle. The Spartans said, **** that. They started meeting Athens at the line. They're the ones who started the nighttime raids. Literally that — they would send 12 or 13 people with a bunch of knives. They would sneak in, throw poison in the well and slit a bunch of throats. There are a bunch of parallels, we being Athens. It was [the Spartans'] glory, dying in battle. Spartan women said, ‘Either you die on your sword or you don't come back.'”

Babe says it's the whole concept of suicide bombers, people who blow themselves up for a military objective, that is redefining today's war in Iraq.

“It's a psychological war we are not going to win,” he says. “We're not willing to do what they're willing to do. We're not willing to strap a C-4 to ourselves. What was it Patton said? ‘You don't become a hero for dying for your country. You become a hero by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his.' The majority of our military is not willing to die like that. Mainly they're in there for the college tuition.”

He says suicide bombers “are going to **** with the nerve of every soldier over there.”

The larger parallel Babe points out is the overarching theme of forcing democracy on an unwilling nation.



MUNDANE PREPARATIONS FOR WAR
Have included finding a home for an aging cat and divesting of possessions.
“The Athenians were trying to enforce democracy in the surrounding city states. The Spartans noticed what was going on and challenged the Athenians. The Spartans? They whooped ***. The Spartan confederacy won the war. They adapted so fast into a better way of warfare then the Athenians. [The United States] thought they were going to blast into Iraq and teach these people democracy,” Babe said 30 days before departure. “You can't teach a blind man to see. Now they don't want to admit they're wrong, and they're willing to lose as many men as they need to prove it. They're a bunch of glory-hound *******s willing to kill me and my brothers so they can go into the history books.”

On this day, Babe's reading “ The History”'s funeral speech by the Athenian Pericles. Babe says the speech is “supposed to honor the dead, sort of like Veterans Day when it meant something. But he turns it into a political speech. It's the same sort of bull**** the Republicans do. It's a bunch of crap.”

DAY 26, BABE IS ANGRY about the controversy surrounding Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's answer to the question of why soldiers in Iraq had to rummage through the dumps to find “compromised ballistic glass” to armor their vehicles.

Babe explains that compromised ballistic glass is actually broken bulletproof glass. Somehow the major news story has changed from the fact that U.S. soldiers are unprotected to the less important story about how a reporter scripted the question for the soldier to ask Rumsfeld. All of this angers Babe, but it's Rumfeld's response that boils him over.

“Sure, you go to war with the Army you have, but you should be ready before you go to war,” Babe says.

By day 20, Babe has given up on politics.

“Did you see that Pentagon report that said every single Humvee will be armored by June? By June? What the ****?” Babe says. “I definitely have my opinions about it, but politics are not going to save my life. Politics start to give way to survival. My opinions are not changing, but I find myself not caring.”

Babe says it took him a few years after he left the Army, a few years of not being shot at and a few years of not seeing dead people, before he stopped being over-the-edge paranoid. Even so, he continued to be overly cautious. Yet as soon as he began returning to the soldier's mindset of war, he found that old friend, paranoia, returning too.

He found himself second-guessing people's motives and predicting their motions. He noticed himself noticing “a box in the middle of an empty parking lot.” He began scanning rooms for LED lights, putting imaginary crosshairs on strangers and estimating the best location to call in an artillery round on a group of people if he needed to take out any one of them.

That's what Babe does for a living now. He's half-Greek and half-Persian, speaks Arabic and several tribal languages, and has no problem disappearing in a crowd. He rides in a helicopter or hides out in the mountains or in the marketplace and calls in artillery rounds. He brings death.

He says his regiment's specialization in the Army is traditionally known as the Red Legs, because they are the ones who march through the recently lit-up targets. They are in front of the scouts and given their name because of the blood they march through.

“Artillery is such an efficient killer in the battlefield,” he says. “One artillery round would eliminate this whole bar. It neutralizes or destroys the enemy. We simply neutralize them and walk forward. Yeah, it does **** you up to see it. Lots of people have seen a couple bullets here and there, but when you see something freshly lit up with artillery and organs are still moving…the smell has to be the most godawful thing I ever smelled. But just keep marching forward.”

BABE'S PART OF THE ARMY'S 101st Airborne Division. He's jumped out of a plane 4,426 times. The last time was in the North Atlantic Ocean, known as the coldest, stormiest and saltiest body of water on the planet. His parachute got tangled, and he began falling out of control. He tried to cut himself free but cut himself instead. When he looked up he got blood in his eyes. He tried to remember the mantra “don't panic,” but it was getting harder by the second. When he finally pulled his reserve chute, it too got tangled, and that's all he remembers. When the Coast Guard fished him out, he was way under. He broke both legs.

Moreover, Babe's been court-martialed several times. Once was for stealing, or rather, “tactically acquiring” a Humvee to get a fellow soldier to a hospital where his wife was having emergency complications during childbirth. The commanding officer had forbidden the soldier leave during a training exercise. Babe was brought up on charges. The charges were dropped, but Babe was given 45 days of restriction to barracks and 45 days' extra service.

But it was the first time Babe was court-martialed, after the first Gulf War, that has given Babe room for thought. He was charged with murder, and the situation was very similar to the recent highly publicized case in which a marine was captured on video shooting an unarmed “enemy.” Babe's situation involved an injured Republican Guard soldier. Babe was supposed to help the man get medical attention. Instead, he shot him.

“The flight commander was like, ‘What the **** did you just do?'” Babe recalls. He told the commander that it was utilitarian. He told his military lawyer to argue that the Geneva Conventions didn't apply because Congress had not declared war. He was found not guilty.

“I have since changed my opinion about what I did. I was 18,” he says. “It seems like the gung-ho military thing to do, but it's not the human thing to do. It's about being human first. It's this balance thing.”


A few days left
The soldier says, “I want to go over there to keep those boys alive.”
Babe pulls out a handwritten passage from his wallet. It's a quote from an editorial about the similar incident involving the marine in Fallujah. It reads, “The highest and most difficult challenge is to behave well in the face of everything that drives us towards revenge, retaliation, towards the worst in ourselves…To maintain one's moral balance in the desperation and chaos of war is the highest measure of military discipline, of humanity, of maturity.”

It's somewhere in this balance between being human and being part of something whose “main business is exporting violence” that Babe finds his primary call to duty: helping the young men we've sent to war.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, he says, “Despite what you hear, suicide is alive and well amongst American troops right now.” He says the holidays are the hardest.

And over a month of conversations, he frequently brings up what he sees as the Army's greatest shortfall: that there is no support structure for the troops. He says it is especially hard on the younger soldiers, and that the Army is all about personal training but offers nothing for personal growth.

Babe says when he makes it home alive, he can step toward his dream of becoming a history professor. But for the time being, he has a more important aim.

“I think I'm here for a reason,” he says. “I think I'm a damn good teacher. I plan to teach my soldiers just, basically, how to keep their asses alive. I want to go over there to keep those boys alive.”

Sent to do our dirty work, Babe carries a constant reminder to keep a humble state of mind.

Along with the dog tags around his neck is a 2,500-year-old carbon-dated Roman Legionnaire's ring. He says he found it while digging trenches in Germany. The Romans would bury their prized possessions before heading into battle. If they lived, they would return and exhume their things.

“I found some dude's soul,” he says and smiles a sad smile.

THE LAST WEEK before Babe left went even faster than the rest.

With only eight days to go, he was informed that his departure date had been bumped up. And so the eighth day became the seventh. The seventh night he lay awake in bed until the sun rose, unable even to drink himself to sleep.

“I'm starting to get scared,” he said.

On the sixth night he drank too much, blacked out and ended up locked out of his empty house. So he slept in the garage.

He agreed that it was probably just the uncertainty of not knowing where he's going and the million details that are out of his control that were driving him crazy.

But then, too, he's in love.

“I finally found someone, finally really hitting it off with someone,” he confided at the beginning of this story. “Isn't that how it always happens?”

When asked what he's going to miss while he's gone, only her name kisses his lips.

He planned to spend the last night in her arms.

“That's the last safe night I'm gonna have in a long time,” he says. “They're downplaying the fact that a whole lot of mother****ers are dying right now.”