My stepson -- my ex-wife's boy -- just left our house for his week away at work. My wife and I live halfway between his home in Philly and his summer job in Baltimore, so he starts out the week with a night here.
I never get tired of having him around. After his service in Iraq, where he drove an Abrams tank on the long, frantic charge to Baghdad, every time I see him provides a bit of a rush:
He's alive.
Well,
mostly alive. His body is largely intact, but his soul is old and tired. He's 26, going on 60.
The Third Squadron of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment crossed the Iraqi border in March 2003 on what amounted to a suicide mission. They raced out ahead of the main body of the Third Infantry Division, scouting for resistance and crossing the Euphrates River repeatedly to draw out and expose the enemy. They were entirely self-contained, fighting the long battle from Kuwait to the pause outside Baghdad with only the supplies and ammo they could carry in their vehicles.
My boy drove a tank with Apache Troop of 3/7 Cav. His unit was the first to encounter human shields, killed 500 Iraqi soldiers in a single battle with no casualties, and wiped out the elite Hammaurabi division of the Republican Guard in the only tank-on-tank battles of the war. Their accomplishments, the longest, fastest armored advance in the history of warfare, shortened the ground war, thus saving lives on both sides.
Somewhere, along the blood-soaked road to Baghdad, he left behind his youth and most of his happiness.
We're not sure
where he left his youth. Maybe it was the night he discovered that the insurgent he "rinsed off" while on guard duty -- a ghostly night-vision figure, crawling across the perimiter with a machine gun -- was an eight-year-old boy. Perhaps it was after the fighting had died down, guarding the intersection where they had wiped out the Hammaurabi Division, as he woke each day
for a month to the stench of the unclaimed Iraqis he and his buddies had killed. There's a good chance that he left it on guard duty one night, when a car crashed through the wire and he reflexively shot the occupants who ran screaming from the wreck... a woman and her three children.
There are other places his youth might be, places he has never told anyone about. Places he revisits in his sleep, sometimes making so much noise that our cats are afraid to pass his room on the way to the litterbox. This morning, I cleaned up yet another pile of nervous cat shit. I'm kind of used to it by now.
I'm not used to the fact that my boy is a haunted, cynical old man now, who sleeps only through a combination of Xanax and exhaustion. I'm disgusted that Bush & Rumsfeld managed to lose this war after 3/7 Cav gave them such a great head start.
I
am resigned to the fact that part of my boy's PTSD is my fault: I raised him to understand that it was wrong to impose our will upon other nations by force, and that the soldiers he would later kill in such great numbers -- with his pistol, with machine guns, with the treads of his tank -- were patriots defending their homeland against a foreign invader. I taught him all that, and then I encouraged him to join the Army to help pay for college.
So I guess I do know what happened to his youth:
I lost it for him.