booklover555's Open Salon Blog

GI Joey was only 21 when he died in Afghanistan

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:07:47 -0400

"I'm fed up with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in" ~ George McGovern

My friend Joey died yesterday in Afghanistan. He was 21 years old. His name hasn't even been released to the press yet; I learned from someone's post on facebook when I logged in this morning.

I stared at that facebook post and I cried. It was a picture of Joey, in civilian clothes, a t-shirt and hoodie and jeans, standing on someone's deck back in Illinois, his home state and mine. I don't know the girl who posted it. She was one of his friends from high school, I gather. His facebook page is now jammed with horrifyingly young people saying goodbye.

I met Joey a couple months ago in Savannah, Georgia. I was at a downtown bar, singing to "Bohemian Rhapsody" with some girl friends, trying to have some fun while my boyfriend was trapped on the base in Iraq, when this young guy came up next to me and started singing along with us.

"Too late, my time has come
Sends shivers down my spine
Body's aching all the time
Goodbye, everybody
I've got to go
Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth
Mama, oooooooh
I don't want to die ..."

Ok, he was cute, but I was all set to send him off with a quick quote from another famous song: "I gotta man."

"Where are you from?" he asked when Freddie Mercury was done.

"Illinois, " I said, raising my eyebrow at his accent.

"Awesome, me too."

"Really." Despite his familiar accent, I didn't buy it; guys always say that they are from the same place as the girl.

"Really." He looked me in the eye. I looked around the bar. If he was looking to pick someone up, there were easier targets--women alone or with just one friend, not a group of hovering busybody chaperones, including one huge male Staff Sergeant, like I had. Furthermore, I look young for my age, but not that young. "So, you like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' too, huh?"

"Yeah, ever since Wayne's World," I said in a challenging voice, as I didn't expect him to know the movie since he was probably a toddler when it came out.

Turns out he loved Wayne's World, which is set in Aurora, Illinois, and, along with John Waters' movies (The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink), is a shibboleth for we northern Illinoisians. We had ten years between us, but we understood the same cultural symbols: we had the same love of bratwurst, cheap beer brewed in Milwaukee, and the Chicago Cubs. If you don't get it, I can't explain it to you; but meeting Joey was like finding an old friend.

So Joey and I became friends, the kind who hang out occasionally but not all the time. I had my friends, fellow teachers and Army wives, and he had his, fellow single soldiers "trolling for trim" as my boyfriend calls it. We hung out a couple times, just the two of us drinking pints in bars, and we had some serious conversations. I had some vague idea that we all would go out drinking when both he and my boyfriend got back home. I thought they would like each other, as they had a similar disregard for the "toe the line," shut up and don't disagree, attitude prevalent in the Army. They both do what they, personally, think is right and best and safest for everyone.

Then I left for Europe to see Odysseus (my boyfriend) on his leave and Joey went back home to Illinois to visit before he got deployed again. He was supposed to be deployed to Afghanistan from about early July to October something (the type of unit he was in only deploys for a short time). After his commitment to the Army was up, which would be soon after his redeployment, he was going to get out of the Army and go to college.

Joey was an Army Ranger, which even in the Army means you are notably tough, a hard-ass, not to be messed with. I could see that he could be like that if necessary, but he was never like that in my presence. He had the hardcovers of the Twilight series; my cats cozied up to him the way they don't normally to men. Despite his job as an ammunitions expert, or maybe because of his job, Joey was one of the most "stop and smell the roses" people I've ever met.

Once we were in his car (some sort of bright yellow sports car with a stick shift), and he was taking Abercorn Extension, Georgia Highway 204, instead of the bypass.

"You could take the bypass," I mentioned casually, not really caring. A girl waiting for her man has lots of freetime. Joey was keeping me from nothing but grading some badly written essays.

"I could, but I like this road. Lots of stops and starts. Sometimes I race people from the light." And that was Joey: take the scenic route and make the best of it. It's more adventurous, after all.

One night Joey and I met up for some beers at his favorite watering hole, a bar with an Irish name in downtown Savannah. There we met up with a friend of his who was a professor at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design). The professor was well into his cups and asked me: "Did Joey tell you how we met?"

"No, he didn't," I said, rather impressed that Joey was such good friends with this forty-something SCAD professor. Here is the professor's story:

The professor was sitting at the bar at Joey's favorite Savannah watering hole, minding his own business. Now this professor is a fairly flamboyant gay guy. I guess some bully at the bar took issue with this, and approached the professor:

"Hey, faggot," said the bully, and started pushing the professor."What you gonna do, faggot?"

Joey and one of the other Rangers got between the professor and the bully.

"You got a problem with my friend, man?" Joey said to the bully. "You got a problem with my friend, you're gonna have a problem with me."

Now, Joey insisted it didn't quite happen like that, but he became friends with the professor. The thing that struck me most about Joey was that he was barely old enough to fight these silly wars but that he seemed to gravitate toward people who were much older and world-weary. Sure, he had his Ranger friends who were mostly his age, and if you look at his facebook page, it's clear that he had left a lot of friends back home who remember him from childhood. At the end, he's also gotten a girlfriend, which makes me both happier and sadder than I can articulate.

Then he was also friends with this middle-aged art professor and this thirty-something teacher who'd traveled so much, and I'm sure others. His war experience (he had been deployed a couple of other times) had made him older in some way, to me, some regrettable way.

He should have just been some stupid, ignorant 21-year-old kid in a suburban bar in Illinois. He should have been in college.

He should not have been on a mountain in a horrible land, taking apart a bomb.

When I found out that Joey had been killed, I send Odysseus a message, and then talked to him on skype. Despite the fact that I've lived near military installations since 2007, Joey is, thankfully, is my first friend who's been killed.

Odysseus summed it up better than I can right now: "So you are sad for three reasons: you think what we are doing is hopeless, you are worried about me, and you are sad about your friend."

Yes, all of that. I wish I had some good answers for why Joey died. I wish I could say he died for a good reason, for a good cause.

Tomorrow I will go back to do some summer school work at my school, and I will notice the roads falling apart and the school that could use some more funding and the students whose parents are unemployed, and I will know, know, know, that Joey died, but I sincerely in my heart don't know if it mattered one fucking bit. Did it make anything better?

My friend Joey, I can't lie to you: I don't know that your death changed anything. I wish I could tell you that it did.

I know what it means to miss New Orleans

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 15:02:27 -0500

I have fallen in love at first sight only one time in my thirty-one years. I was eighteen, and I was traveling with my mom during the spring break of my senior year of high school. Back in my Illinois hometown, the tulips were just sprouting but the grass was still dead and the snow newly melted. Mom and I flew down to New Orleans because I was seriously considering going to college at Tulane University. The school had offered me a merit scholarship that made it nearly as affordable as in-state tuition at the University of Illinois, so my parents had acquiesced that, yes, Tulane was a possibility. I had already poured over pictures of New Orleans and of the campus, and I was sure that I would love it.

The city was more beautiful than any of the pictures. You cannot capture the spirit and beauty of New Orleans in any picture, or with any words, although we can try. You have to be there to feel the living pulse of this city. The first day, Mom and I took the streetcar from our downtown hotel uptown to Tulane's campus. Flowers bloomed riotously, and huge live oaks hugged the streetcar as we clanged by. It was April, and already the city seemed alive, thriving. After I had spent a full calendar year there, I knew: the city never died like the cities of my childhood had every winter.

And the architecture! Perhaps there is some other city in the world with a more myriad collection of architecture than New Orleans, but I've yet to find it. As a kid I had poured over home plan books and architecture books; New Orleans was all that come to life and more. Along St. Charles Avenue I spied dozens of Victorian mansions, a collection of Georgian-style abodes, a few Art Deco buildings, and the famous Wedding Cake house. (Later, I would spend afternoons walking and driving New Orleans many neighborhoods, soaking in all the fabulous residential architecture.)

We got off the streetcar in front of Gibson Hall at Tulane University. Since we were coming from downtown, we'd first been astounded by Loyola's beautiful Gothic-style campus, and then right next to it, the imposing and intricate gray Richardson Romanesque facades of Tulane's front buildings. Across St. Charles Avenue was Audubon Park, beds of flowers shaded with more live oak trees.

Mom and I were both impressed by how friendly and real our Tulane hosts seemed. At this point, I'd been on a number of campus tours, but I felt more welcomed and comfortable at Tulane than any of the other places. Other students were constantly coming up to our tour guide to say hello, and a few struck up conversations with me, too. Tulane has a greater percentage of students from more than 500 miles away than any other university in the US; there is a mindset of openness and friendliness. People can't stay sequestered in their high school cliques like they can at a state university, because those high school cliques aren't here. We were on the Newcomb College (at that time, Tulane's coordinate college for women) campus, chatting with a student who was also from Illinois, when I spied the palm trees.

Palm trees. That winter of '96-97, my midwestern hometown went something like 35 days with no sunshine. Here in New Orleans were a line of green palm trees. I was sold.

My college years in New Orleans are a blur of textbooks, 15-page papers, dark bars, and Mardi Gras parades. For three years, I was a member of a Mardi Gras krewe, which meant I was invited to a number of parties throughout the years and two formal balls each year. Of course, I rode on a float during the krewe's parade. Every year I scrimped and saved to buy Mardi Gras throws (beads, doubloons, etc) for the parade. This is the spirit of New Orleans: most people don't have much, but they will happily use what they do have to bring joy to others.

Like most Tulane students, who work hard and party hard, I did graduate in four years (with several majors, but to list them would make my identity easy to figure out), but I couldn't leave the city yet. There was nowhere else I'd rather be. New Orleans has heart and soul, and if you live there, it gets into your soul. I liked the area where I grew up, but New Orleans inspired a passion in me that nowhere else ever has. The history, the architecture, the food, the people—it's a cliché, but it's also true: New Orleans is the most unique of American cities. It's also the most welcoming. If you love New Orleans, the people will love you back. New Orleanians love life, and they love their city in a way that few other city's residents can understand.

New Orleans is haunted. It has a lifeblood and a pulse of its own. I have lived in cities that have soul (Savannah, Chicago, Bangkok) and cities that do not. New Orleans is haunted because it has so much history, because it's meant something to so many people, because so many people love it with a visceral and instinctive love. Places that are haunted are haunted because they mean something to many people. That collective feeling hangs around the city like a fog, a ghost.

-------

In 2003, I had a job offer in Asia, so I took it, leaving New Orleans. I had always wanted to live abroad, and this opportunity was too good to turn down. I loved the Asian city and lived there for several years. I didn't realize how much I talked about NOLA until I was out with some coworkers one night, welcoming a new coworker to town.

The new coworker asked about New Orleans so I started describing it. When I took a breath, I noticed the new coworker staring at me.

“She's really in love with New Orleans,” another coworker offered. At that point, we'd worked together abroad for a couple of years and were like family. “I don't know how else to describe it. But she really loves New Orleans.”

A few months later, Katrina happened. At first, it seemed that New Orleans had been spared, and I celebrated in a Bangkok bar with friends. Then the levees broke. I had insomnia for days, and watched CNN-International and BBC International when I wasn't at work. It's corny, but my heart was breaking. I was filled with an impotent anger. The Superdome where I'd once cheered for the Green Wave was seemingly destroyed. I remembered meeting the kindly architect of the Dome, Arthur Q. Davis, when he came to talk to one of my architecture classes; I remembered his pride in his design. My coterie of international friends watched the news reports with horror.

“Five days, why does it take so long for your government to get help to those people?” One of my Thai friends asked.

“How can this happen in America?” asked my best friend, who was French and felt a kinship with me because of my love of New Orleans, where I had learned to speak some French with a reasonably good accent.

I had no answers, just a deep shame and sadness. I thought I had lost my love.

-----

At the end of 2005, I moved back to my hometown because I had fallen in love with someone I'd known since we were children. In retrospect, I can see I was looking for some stability after watching what I thought was the death of my adopted city. The romance did not last long, and 2006 was the worst year of my life, just as it was the worst year for many people who lived on the Gulf Coast. I had pretty much every sort of problem one can have: medical, financial/career, romantic, familial. For the first time in my life, I had some gigantic problems over which I had little or no control; I had worked hard and tried to do the right things and had failed. I felt like some unknown Katrina-like force had somehow devastated my life as well.

At the beginning of 2007, I moved back down south, and a while after that, I moved to Savannah, partly because it reminded me so much of a smaller, calmer New Orleans. Since I was back in the south, I met up with some fellow Tulane alums and we reminisced about our times in the Big Easy. I heard from several who had been back to New Orleans that it wasn't time to visit yet; the city was still a mess, a nightmare, and seeing it would break my heart. Anyway, I didn't have anyone to go with, and despite having gone to places like Cambodia on my own, I knew the trip back to New Orleans was not a trip I could make by myself.

New Orleans stayed in my mind. I dropped my car insurer (as did my sister) after finding out about how the company had fudged paperwork in order to avoid paying out Katrina victims the money that they were owed. I was dating a lawyer in Savannah, and we got into a discussion about Katrina. He had some choice words for the people who had been trapped in the Superdome: “Why didn't they just walk somewhere else?”

Of course, the lawyer had never been to New Orleans. I explained the social conditions to him: many people in New Orleans (or at least a higher percentage than in most American cities) didn't own cars and knew few people who did. Some of them were poor by choice (artists, etc), some were the indigent poor with whom I'd volunteered as a college student. New Orleans is not unique in its endemic urban poverty, but Katrina had shined a light on the disturbing situation.

I explained the geography to him: New Orleans is essentially an island; the only way to reach the city is from miles-long bridges. August and September in New Orleans are still months of sweltering tropical sunshine and humidity, interspersed with terrific storms. One would need a good number of supplies as well as considerable physical endurance to walk to safety—if one could even make it because of the floods of polluted waters. Despite all this, the lawyer was determined to blame the victims. To me, this was as ridiculous as blaming the victims of tornadoes and river flooding that I'd known as a child; there are few places you can live where you are totally immune from some sort of natural disaster.

There but for the grace of God go any of us. Ironically, the lawyer's spacious house is situated on a coastal marsh outside Savannah. Should a hurricane hit here, he would lose everything. I stopped seeing him; some part of his heart was missing. (And perhaps a part of his brain, as well.)

-----

In May 2009, I met my boyfriend, who I call Odysseus on this blog. Odysseus was an Army brat, but he'd graduated from Auburn University and his parents now live in Gulf Shores, Alabama, although they'd lost a house in Hurricane Ivan. Odysseus' entire family had lived with him in his cramped apartment at Auburn for a week right after Ivan.

Before I met him, Odysseus had been to New Orleans at least a dozen times as a college student. We had even been to several of the same Mardi Gras, wandering through the same French Quarter crowds. Odysseus had last been to New Orleans in 2008, when he was on leave from his first deployment in Iraq. We both had funny New Orleans stories; he had sympathy for the residents because he understood the situation, and had heard stories from Army friends who'd been there right after the hurricane.

We decided to take our first “big” vacation together to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I had only known him for about two months, but I could already tell that he was someone I could share my city with, because he understood what it means to miss New Orleans. We spent his 26^th birthday at Galatoire's in the French Quarter, where old men in seersucker suits and old ladies in loudly colored dresses sang him “Happy Birthday!” Now, I was just another tourist in the Quarter. But my heart was back home.

The next day, we had brunch at Commander's Palace and, fortified by good food and a little liquor, I took my first drive around the city since I'd left in 2003, my first drive around since Katrina. Magazine Street was spiffier than I remembered it, peeling buildings painted and broken shutters fixed. Audubon looked healed; Tulane's campus was better than before. (We came back the next day, a Monday, and I was astounded by the wonderful new student center, among other new buildings.) All of the houses I'd lived in were still standing. The one on Calhoun Street was a brighter shade of yellow, another on Nashville Avenue had a huge Saints flag hanging in the picture window.

All of the places that meant the most to me were still there. All of my fears of losing my city were assuaged. NOLA had survived an apocalyptic disaster. In fact, it even seemed better than I remembered it.

I am lucky in that; we also drove around Mid City, Lakeview and Gentilly and I could see the horrible scars in what had been charming neighborhoods. I feel for those residents, many who are from families that have lived in New Orleans for generations. I thought about the way that New Orleans had gotten into my soul—and that of my family, who all visited New Orleans numerous time and love it—in less than 15 years. That love, that spirit, multiplied through the generations—that's why people came back to rebuilt New Orleans.

That's why New Orleanians love the Saints. The Saints are not an easy team to love. In fact, I was never much of a Saints fan until after Katrina, when I began to understand that they were a symbol of New Orleans. I have a life-long inherited love of the Chicago Bears, so my loyalty is split; but I'd like to think I can root for both teams. Other than 2007, they've rarely both had winning seasons in the same year, anyway.

Unlike da Bearsss, the Saints are not a vaunted NFL team with a long-storied history or lots of Super Bowl wins. It's not really cool to love the Saints, or it wasn't until this year. They don't make it easy, and neither does New Orleans, despite its nickname. The endemic poverty and racism of the city shocked me when I first moved there. People in New Orleans move slow as molasses, the tropical summer showers can drown you every day. New Orleans will never be the most productive or organized place in America, and the Saints will never be the Patriots. If you want order and predictability, there are a hundred cities and several football teams in America which can give that to you. But if you want heart and soul and, yes, a unique jazziness, well, New Orleans is your city and the Saints are your team.

It's been less than five years since we thought New Orleans was lost. Some predicted its demise; some seemed determined to kill it with neglect. New Orleans never will be the same, but in many ways, it's better than it was before the storm. Even if the Saints don't win today, just getting to the big game is symbolic of New Orleans' ability to rally as a community, fight back and triumph. Some football games are just sporting events, but this one is symbolic of something bigger, because the Saints organization and the people of New Orleans have made it that way.

Like the rehabilitation of New Orleans, my own life has been looking up since that disastrous hurricane. I finished my master's degree and I have a job that I love, and I live in a city that I love for the same reasons that I love New Orleans. Most importantly of all, I love someone who knows what it means to love New Orleans. If you don't know why that's so important, it's okay. You just don't know what it means to miss New Orleans.

---

Odysseus is pondering getting out of the Army when his time is up. Last week on one of our Skype dates (he's currently deployed in Iraq), he read off a list of possible post-Army careers for us to discuss. Second only to “be a drummer in a band” was “be a cop in New Orleans or Miami or some other big city.” Odysseus knows I don't like most cops but have nothing but the utmost respect for the New Orleans Police Department. In the six years I lived there, all of my run-ins with the NOPD were pleasant, and unlike many other police forces, they are actually out fighting crime and helping people, as opposed to harassing individuals and writing dubious tickets. Some journalists portrayed the NOPD in a negative light after Katrina, and I've no doubt that some situations were handled poorly. Considering the epic damage, and the fact that they were not supported by other law enforcement as they should have been, I view the NOPD as heroes. I half-jokingly told Odysseus he was only allowed to be a cop if we moved to New Orleans.

I do not know if we will end up making New Orleans our home, but I would not be surprised. We have both traveled widely, and we know there's nowhere else like NOLA.

It will be a Happy Veterans' Day when my veteran comes home

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:11:06 -0500

As the remains of Hurricane Ida swirled around my rented townhouse, I lay in my double bed, alone except for two purring housecats. It's 9 a.m. on Veterans' Day, 2009, and I've slept in because that's how I'm celebrating. I start reading the copy of Slaughterhouse-Five that I checked out from my school's library.

(In a fit of self-improvement, I've decided that, as an English teacher, I need to read every book on the school reading list that I have not yet read. There are some, not many, and Slaughterhouse-Five was at the top of my list. I figured the book had to be thought-provoking if it incurred the wrath of the close-minded townspeople in Footloose, the campy 80s movie in which Kevin Bacon brings dancing back to east Texas.)

While reading page one, I realized the irony of reading such a book--a patently anti-war book--on this holiday. Here I had the day off from my job as a public school teacher, a job in which I teach American Literature and read such foundations of our nation as the "Declaration of Independence." I'm alone and listless on this random Wednesday off because my boyfriend Odysseus, an officer in the Army, deployed to Iraq a few weeks ago. He has been gone long enough for me to miss him and cry at odd moments (but only in my car, when particularly meaningful songs --like Elton John's "I guess that's why they call it the blues"-- come on the radio), but he has not been gone long enough for me to formulate a free-time routine that does not include him. There is a big empty space in my life, and I do not yet know how to fill it. Filling the space left by my boyfriend's deployment means I have accepted the unavoidable truth of his year-long absence. And then part of me fears: what if I fill it with something that becomes too familiar, too wonderful, and then when Odysseus returns, there is no room left for him?

So I sit and read a lot because that's what I've always done with my free time, even when Odysseus and I had free time together. Both oldest children who had to learn how to quietly amuse ourselves, we both have similar childhood stories of reading voraciously, of solicitous parents taking books away from us at 5 a.m. after we'd been up all night reading. I like that Odysseus is able--nay, was more than willing--to sometimes sit quietly and read, without demanding my attention constantly. For me, a man's ability to sit quietly and read with me, while not being the sole focus of my attention, has been a dividing line between serious boyfriends and guys I just date.

I was roused from my reading holiday by an unusual number of phone calls--parents, brother and sister all called me from various midwestern locations to see how I was doing on this day. Several friends called or texted. I'm fine, I'm not doing much today, just taking it easy. Getting some laundry done, grading some essays... By evening I had the speech down pat.

There was a Veterans' Day parade in Savannah, where I live, and another in the town where I teach. My students had admonished me to come to one or both parades, as many of them would be marching in their ROTC uniforms. I had already decided I would not go to either parade. I did not think I could deal, yet, with seeing a bunch of Army guys in their ACUs (Army Combat Uniforms, the current desert camo), unless one of them would be Odysseus, and it would not, and that would make me even sadder. Some Army wives and girlfriends ignore the news because it makes them anxious; I follow the news, but this I knew I could not handle.

And part of me would be jealous, or mad--those soldiers were here with their lucky significant others. I wanted mine!

Some people cannot make the distinction between supporting the troops and supporting the war. But these tend to be people on whom important distinctions are lost, or ignored, or denied. My belief is that engaging in war is one of the unfortunate things about being a democracy and protecting freedom. Sometimes war is necessary. Sometimes.

However, this does not mean that we have to blindly support every conflict that our government enters into. I think it is plainly irresponsible to begin a war on bad intelligence, with little international support, and without an exit strategy. Those planning our wars, the politicians and generals, owe it to the citizens and the soldiers to plan our wars well, and to ensure that our wars are fought for noble causes--for example, democracy and human rights. Wars fought out of pride or greed--these wars disrespect our soldiers, they disrespect taxpayers, and most of all, they disrespect the ideals of democracy and freedom.

Sometimes supporting the troops means being anti-war. I don't want to see Odysseus spend another year of his life in a foreign country to fight an unjust war (he was already deployed to Iraq once before). Odysseus doesn't disagree with all of the reasons for the war, but he does take exception with the way it's being fought--mostly with the waste he sees from the private contractors, and that the people who vote us into war so rarely are damaged by it themselves.

This is what bothers me the most: that the real burdens of war are carried by those who are least likely to benefit from the spoils of this war. I am not talking about my boyfriend and I here; Odysseus is an officer and although he was in combat the first time, now he has a relatively safe desk job. I do not really have to worry that he won't make it home (of course, there is always that possibility.) No, I am talking about the kids (yes, they are still kids, 18, 19, 20 years old) that were my students a few years ago and are now the enlisted soldiers who are on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are individuals whom our society sees as so immature, so needing of protection, that we won't let them belly up to the bar for a cold beer. But we will ship them halfway around the world, put guns in their hands and tell them to fight. (My students point this contradiction out at least once a week.)

But, you say, those kids fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan had a choice to sign up. I used to say this myself, until I saw the stark reality of these kids' lives. These are kids who grew up poor, with uneducated parents, or maybe a grandma or aunt or cousin raising them. Sometimes their only meals are breakfast and lunch at school. Nothing short of an all-expenses paid scholarship would allow them to afford college (and who gets that, except for very exceptional athletes?), if they can even surmount all the logistical hurdles--transportation, housing, the costs of moving to the college town, etc. These lower-income kids have a choice between a crappy dead-end job (if they can even find that in this job market) and the military, who will spring for training and college after they've put their time in. Our shitty economy and scant social programs ensure that we have plenty of cannon fodder.

No, I didn't really enjoy my Veterans' Day. Veterans deserve more than a holiday; they deserve politicians and generals that will only put them in harm's way for just and meaningful causes, and after every other alternative and diplomatic trick has failed.

I'll enjoy Veterans' Day again when my boyfriend is home. I'll enjoy it again when my students are no longer cannon fodder for the greed and selfishness of more privileged men.

Ft Hood shooting: I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 19:11:34 -0500

I can only imagine the stress of being a mental health professional in the Army, as Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan, the purported Ft. Hood shooter, was. We want to pretend that these wars we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are easier somehow, simply by virtue of being more technologically advanced and fought solely by a volunteer force.

But in many ways, these wars are harder than any of the past wars in which Americans have fought. Some of the soldiers in Odysseus's (my boyfriend) unit have been deployed to Iraq four times now. FOUR. This is Odysseus's second time, and he's 26 and he's been an Army officer for barely three years. More and more of our soldiers are parents; some are Guard or Reserve. The length of time we keep our soldiers away, and the demands we make on them and their families, have consequences that are permanent and not easily healed.

I have students whose childhood timelines (every student of mine gives an autobiographical presentation the first week of class) are divided by parental deployments. A few kids at the school where I teach have had both parents deployed at the same time, or dad and brother deployed at the same time. Even if they ended tomorrow, these wars are going to affect us for the next two generations.

An Army shrink has to deal with war fallout every day. Every day, the shrink hears about the violence in Iraq (things get swept under the rug, trust me.) Every day, he listens to soldiers whose lives are in disarray, some with angry or sad spouses and acting-out kids. Some soldiers themselves are what my students call "a hot mess." Every weekend, a handful of soldiers (or more) get DUIs in Savannah. When I lived in Augusta, angry packs of enlisted guys from Ft Gordon would roam the main drag, Broad Street, like rabid dogs but worse, picking fights with locals and yelling vulgarities at women.

The dark humor part of my brain revels in the irony that at least one shooter was an Army psychologist (or psychiatrist, the news reports aren't clear on which.)

How bad are things that the Army support system itself is imploding? Will the Army finally admit that they are not adequately addressing the effects of PTSD? Can we finally admit that 12, 14, 15 month deployments cost more in the long term than they save? Can we finally admit that multiple redeployments in a short span of time are not a great idea, especially if you are pretending to care about "family values"? Most of all, can we admit that fighting endless wars (for which we have no exit strategy) is asinine, irresponsible, and dangerous?

Because of Maj. Hasan's name, I am sure wacky conspiracy theorists will continue to insist that the Ft Hood shooting was some kind of terrorist attack. Maybe it will prove to be so, but I doubt it. (For one thing, to make major, a person goes through a very, very thorough background check; if this dude sneaked through, we've got big problems.)

I think the poor man was just seriously stressed out. I'm simply surprised this doesn't happen more often than it does.

My boyfriend, a liberal in the US Army

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:10:45 -0400

I'll freely admit that, before I moved to Georgia and lived around a bunch of military folk, I had some mostly-negative stereotypes in my head. I believed that military guys were mostly anal, rabidly-conservative bullies who carried a gun because they couldn't get any other job, or they were bloodthirsty, controlling warmongers. Sure, my favorite uncle served in the National Guard, and he wasn't bloodthirsty, anal or a bully in any way...but he couldn't find any other job at the time.

I've lived in two different cities in Georgia, both near large military installations. In the first city, I dated two different enlisted Army guys (in addition to others; I'm not a uniform-chaser or "gate-girl," a woman who hangs out by the post gates waiting for a man with a steady paycheck.) and both were rather mental: one neglected to tell me, during any of our numerous dates, that he was getting deployed. He just showed up one day with a teddy bear dressed in Army fatigues and explained that he was leaving the next day...for Iraq. The next Army guy left for Ft Benning (still in Georgia, not even a long-distance phone call!) for six weeks and didn't contact me the entire time, but called the day he got back in town and wanted to see me "right away." Riiiight.

To say I was jaded about Army boys is putting it lightly. Then I moved to Savannah and, geez, there were even more of them here! My boyfriend Odysseus (not his real name, obviously) and I met the way everyone meets now: on match.com. He found my profile when he searched for women who had indicated their political preference as "liberal." Turns out he had his own negative dating experiences, mostly with the types of girls in Georgia who freely identify as "conservative." (I hate to stereotype, but they are a special breed, and that word does NOT mean what it means up north or out west. More on that some other time.)

I almost didn't respond to Odysseus's email because he was a year under my self-imposed age limit (we are almost 5 years apart, although I can be glaringly immature--either because or the reason why I work with high schoolers--so we work out well), but then his profile belied an eloquence and facility with language that I had rarely seen since moving down south. (You know, his subjects matched his verbs, and he used capitalization correctly.) And he actually listed something under "Recently read"!! And he self-identified as "liberal." Then again he was in the Army...ugh... but he had a college degree, and in poli sci ... and at least two of his pictures were so goofy that there was no way he was an uptight, anal prick who thought he was better than everyone else.

So we met, and we learned that we had a lot in common. He isn't uptight--rather, we have the same sarcastic, smart-ass sense of humor. He surely isn't ridiculously anal--amazingly, away from work, he's even messier than I am, and less punctual.

Moveover, I agree with Odysseus's political stances: he likes Obama, thinks most conservatives are out-of-touch, spoiled ignoramuses. He's pro-choice because that's not his body. He thinks the greatest scourge on society is deadbeat dads. He loves New Orleans (where I lived for 6 years) and we both bought "Defend New Orleans" t-shirts last time we visited. He sees the need for social welfare programs, and he realizes that as a member of the military, he is a recipient of the biggest social welfare program of the US government. His favorite quote is "Every politician who votes to go to war should have to send at least one child off to the front lines to fight that war."

Sure, we disagree about certain things: I push harder for gay rights, though he does think they should have equal rights, but he's very obscure about "Don't ask, don't tell." And, although he has some good reasons why women should not be allowed in combat, I feel that if they are physically able, why not? We need all the good soldiers we can get.

I liked his reasons for joining the Army: he took advantage of the ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) program to go to college for free, but also he wanted adventure. He wanted to travel. Oh, and he wanted to "do crazy stuff and blow up shit," and if someone was going to pay him for it, cool. I liked that he had found a way to take his more destructive urges and do something useful with them. (We all have destructive urges; how many of us use them in a positive way?) Plus, he didn't pick infantry or anything violent as his branch of service: he's a logistics officer. His weapons are mostly two phones and a keyboard, and he's talking and typing, "getting stuff to people and people to their stuff" as he puts it.

Occasionally he will bring up the fact that he is "serving his country," but only in this very oblique way. He does not like to take credit for what he is doing, but he will talk about how he thinks he should run for office because "Not very many liberals in politics have combat experience and because of that, I think I could easily beat the average Republican."

Another time we were talking about his choosing to join up, and he said "It's the most masculine thing a guy can do, you know? Go off and fight a war. There aren't very many really tough, masculine things left."

That resonated with me, because I thought about my dating experiences since returning to the US after living abroad for a few years. I had lived in a second-world nation in southeast Asia, and after hearing of my exploits traveling around Asia, most guys stateside expressed admiration (and they kept asking for more info), but their eyes generally said something else. What do you say to a girl who's shot off an AK-47 at a rebel compound in Cambodia? Suddenly she becomes less like girlfriend material and more like... a drinking buddy. The unpredictable, wild drinking buddy. On the other hand, the redeployed soldiers I'd met (I'd made friends with a few in Savannah even before meeting Odysseus) matched and trumped my silly stories, and I'll admit, I admired them more for it.

I am a feminist, so maybe that's why I feel this way: I'm not really sure what to do with a man who doesn't have some talent, some skill that I don't have. I guess it's the fish and bicycle thing? Or does wanting a "real man" make me old-fashioned? But really, I've met too many men down south who compensated for their lack of expertise with anything meaningful by tarting up their pick-up truck and shooting animals on the weekends. That's not a real man, dude. A real man takes accountability. A real man fixes shit that I don't know how to fix. A real man protects me. A real man says, hey, we disagree on this, but that's okay. A real man brings things to the table that I don't already have but that I need. Because I have lived mostly sans Y-chromosome in the house for 12 years... and mostly, it gets easier to be alone and harder to find anyone who can bring something new to the table.

Obviously, though, Odysseus can bring something to the table that I haven't already figured out. There has been one time --one time-- that he didn't know something that I also didn't know (I can't even recall now what it was, exactly). He looked at me and said, "If I don't know it, you're supposed to know it. That's a partnership."

I smiled, "You're right, it is."