New Introduction: You are not going to like everything I have to say here. Fearing this, I am writing it, anyway. This story is not about garnering ratings or recommendations. This is about something far more interesting and important. This is about recording and reporting the testimony of a soon-to-be former soldier that is only know starting to ask questions about what his life -- and those that he has taken -- mean to him.
This story is about a dead Iraqi child, and the American soldier who lived to tell about him. This is not about war policy, or the morality of war. It's about a hard decision made in a split second by a soldier who has outlived his being a soldier, and now must live with memories that he cannot live down. It's about welcoming a soldier home to life after the only life he's ever known. It's about bringing one boy home.
There was once a conservative Republican, a lifelong grunt named McCoy. This is neither his real name nor are you in grave danger of ever receiving it. His story, however, is irreproachably real. He's still conservative; leastwise, he has no truck with the liberal canon as he understands it. He just doesn't know what he is anymore.
Why? He is on the fast track to being kicked to the curb, a broken axle on a truck that nobody needs anymore. I found him sipping Scotch on the rocks, one after another, in lieu of the profoundly expensive painkillers that he cannot begin to afford, for injuries sustained in the line of duty while driving a truck somewhere in Iraq.
His story circumlocutes that event. His story is that event. I gave him the only expiation I knew how. Some of you will not be kind to my doing so. I cannot begin to care. You were not there, twice. I was not there, once. There is no one in this room who is unhappy not to be in Specialist McCoy's shoes.
McCoy wears a leg brace, three pins, a back brace and uses a cane. He wears a uniform because he cannot fit into his civilian wardrobe with the gear that makes it possible for him to move without screaming in agony. If there is a Hell waiting for whatever he has done, he is there on early admissions policy already. And that's just the physical pain, something that his entire life has prepared him to accept, so that others that he has sworn to protect never will. And this is nothing compared to the burden that belasts him.
It is almost painful to look upon him, this large, strong, broken, proud and humiliated man. His narrative is both humanizing and annoying. He laments war; he excoriates the American media for not celebrating the good things done in Iraq by the young men and women in uniform. He chuckles as he gives account of 'butt rubbing' with the butt of his M-16 against the backside of a journalist who asked him one pointed question too many. He did not care what network or outlet; he did it, was busted and punished for doing so, and maintains it was worth the price. Nor did he specify what point of body contact what made with the butt of his weapon. Presumably the journalist was facing him; you do the geometry.
He's no mere grunt; he knows military history well enough to equate Iraq's place in a wider war with launching the eventual conquest of Japan from Samoa: This is not about Iraq, it's never been about Iraq -- leastwise, not by itself. It's about the eventual subjugation of the entire Islamic world. Iraq was merely the point of least resistance. Iraq was broken. Iraq was morally indefensible. Iraq had no friends.
I piped in that I sure hope Iran wasn't the expected next target. McCoy shrugs. We have no friends in that entire region. They are all enemies of one sort of the other. All of this is preparing for Armageddon, loosely speaking. What's the 'Fall of Bablyon' supposed to mean, if not the fall of Iraq? Regardless, he's quick to discount the notion of a strategic replay of the Book of Revelations. Still, he adds: Don't be surprised if it just happens to turn out that way.
I bring up my own pet theory that the Bushies (I do not use this term in his company) are treating this like a replay of the Indian Wars, and fully intend to place, in some form or another, the entire Islamic world on the reservation. He shrugs and says that would not necessarily bad idea, and that may end up being the outcome.
I remark that's going to take a lot more soldiers -- that, and the Arabs (among the majority of Muslims who aren't) seem to be doing their utmost not to fight us openly. Then again, I add, so did the Indians.
He lets this pass unanswered. The intimation: The Sioux did not seek open war with the white man, either, and got it regardless.
But great sweeping brushstrokes of future history are not the specialist's concern.
His leg is shattered. His lower back is splintered. He is Combat Arms, through and through, and his number is up. He is on medical hold -- on paper. He is dead certain he is counting time until a medical discharge comes his way.
McCoy has a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, a Silver Star. He is not only a veteran but a hero by the traditional criteria of three wars -- Panama, the Gulf, and now Iraq. He is highly unlikely to see a fourth. He is convinced his warring days are over.
Most would see this as a godsend. He sees it as a damnation. "The worst is that I am now no longer fit to serve. I will be discharged in four or five months, and I will be unable to make a living for myself." He orders another Scotch.
Then the real story emerges.
"The worst thing I did in Iraq," he begins. "I was at the head of a convoy, and I drove over a small boy."
The bar's music keeps playing. Patrons keep ordering their drinks. ESPN on the televisions overhead keeps squawking. Regardless, there is nothing but dead air.
"And you did it because...?" I prod.
"He ran out to stop the convoy, so we could be ambushed."
There are many questions out there, I am sure. Most of them involving the question of veracity, whether or not what we are now hearing are self-aggrandizing...accounts. The honor and truth of this account, and the sincerity of his contrition are real enough. Again: We were not there. The importance of this distinction I will explain in full before this story is over.
We sidebar to the topic of ambushes, as we have come to understand the Iraqi variation of them. The insurgents have become deadly accurate with RPGs, to the point that any one of their RPG gunners is the equivalent of a recoilless rifle, and they come backed up with support squads, feeding them round after round.
They were not always this way, but somewhere since 2003 they got all the practice that was required to figured out (a) how to tell good RPGers from bad ones and (b) how to maximize that skill and (c) how to train it to most damaging effect.
Current rules of engagement are this: An RPG gunner firing from a crowd gets a pass. A gunner firing from the wide open dies. I do not know if reprisals occur (or 'searches for weapons') in neighborhoods or villages near instances where the ROE do not allow immediately and deadly response. Still, a lot of searches the evenings after an attack on Coalition forces do seem to occur. This was not covered in conversation.
Back to the kid. McCoy says the boy ran out in front of his 'gun truck' to stop the convoy. I asked if RPGers had been spotted already. He said yes. A snap decision was made; keep driving, or stop. Take out a child for sure, or spare him, and assume what experience informed was a real risk of losing every man and woman in the convoy.
Specialist McCoy hit the gas. He said the effect was the same as striking a deer with a Freightliner at high speed: Splash.
Oh: Doubt there was an ambush? Well, that's just it:
The ambush happened, anyway.
RPG's went off in a salvo. McCoy's truck was knocked to shreds. Of four men on the vehicle, two were killed instantly. Two survived, badly wounded. One of them is McCoy. I never heard one way or the other about the other vehicles, or the other injured.
His friends and comrades are dead, anyway. His career is over. He is wounded, he fears beyond repair sufficient to take up a civilian career indicating that 'my civilian career requires legs'. He feels financially and physically ruined. Worst of all, he feels morally wounded. The splashed boy in the road haunts him nonstop. I suspect he drinks more from the moral than from the physical pain.
He looks around, the hint (but not the actuality) of a tear in his voice sounding as he checks out the other patrons: "And none of this young kids will care. It will be like every other time; they will forget."
I counter: "No one I know, or care to know, forgets, or will allow the country to forget. There are too many ways to remember now." I am thinking of the many people here online, who follow the war, who know the sacrifices made by soldiers required to fight in wars, have come to know the private pain of justifying the harsh moral choices forced upon them, by people incapable or unwilling to make moral choices -- or capable of forcing painful decision on others.
People like Specialist McCoy.
I consider for a moment something said to me a while ago, in response to my own lamentation: Many here will be shocked and amazed that I don't have much appreciation for abortion. Perhaps if they knew why, they would not be so.
Once upon a time, a friend of mine called. It appears his girlfriend was pregnant. He had no idea what they should do. Neither did she. The overt issue was she was the sole known kidney donor match for a brother who was about to need one. The covert issue: They wanted someone else to make the call.
After ninety minutes of evasion, I decided I was going to have to give some straight advice. I did: I said lose the child. Oh, it was more diplomatic than that. But I went years knowing in my heart that there was a dead baby out there because of me. Then I had my first child of my own, and about the second thought I had was that if I had not lost my best friend before, I most certainly had now, for I had given myself what I had taken from him.
Later, I was told (online of all places, funny how the blogosphere works) that I should if anything stop being so hard on myself: I had been placed in an impossible situation, forced to make a hard moral choice in the absence of the directly responsible parties doing so, and I had done so. I responded that it wasn't my child. The riposte: Doesn't matter. After an hour and a half of insistence that you make the call in their stead, the decision was no longer theirs, but it was always going to be the erstwhile parents' responsibility.
In time, literally in the last conversation I had with the man who had insisted on my giving advice, I told him how I had felt. We were in the midst of a friendship-killing argument; he had no reason to pull punches. He said that he had never considered it my fault that the abortion had taken place. I said thank you for that much, and then good-bye, then silence for...heck, it's been quite a few years now.
And as I recalled that tale from my own past, I knew right away what to tell Specialist McCo. As macabre as it was going to sound to my own ears, I knew what needed to be said.
I took a breath. I was committing myself in so many ways: "You will probably never hear this again, from anyone. It is probably a good idea that you never do. But about that boy: Thank you."
McCoy did a double-take. "What?"
I did a double-take myself. Yep, that's what I had said. "I said, thank you. You were placed in an impossible situation, and asked to decide in a split second who lived and who died. Not me, not your pals, not your C.O, but you -- you made a tough call when you were on point, and went through with it. I'm sure there's a family out there in Iraq wondering what their little boy was thinking, and I feel bad for them, as I'm sure you do. But how many lives did you save by hitting the gas?"
McCoy just shakes his head. "Two, as far as I know. One of them mine."
Then, only in the least little bit, do I understand how deep his despair runs. He really feels all he's traded was some kid's life for his own now-broken one.
"No. That's not it. You were on point. You did your job. You made the choice you trained your whole life to make. And, no, it wasn't to decide whether to run down some kid in the street. It was the choice to save the lives of your fellow soldiers and countrymen. It was your turn."
"Thank you," he said as he shook my hand, hard. "I can't tell you how much I appreciate that."
"Now think how tough it is for an officer who knows whose lives he's trading to save people he doesn't even know."
"Our LT was a good one," McCoy pipes in.
"Yeah," I wrap up. "The good soldiers always seem to get 'em."
