War stories
Six evenings ago, as I sat on a third-story porch with the ocean surf providing background music, I listened to my son as he told the gathered family about his time in Iraq as a Marine combat rifleman.
I am profoundly grateful that I didn’t know then — which is to say, during the time he was deployed — what I know now. Ignorance is truly sometimes a gift.
The onset of reality actually had arrived earlier in the day, immediately after my son’s unit, Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines based in Camp Lejeune, had turned in its weapons at the armory and marched into the parade yard near the barracks, where families and friends awaited. The ensuing moments were a combination of greeting and farewell: The Marines were all obviously happy to be home (with at least one of them seeing his child for the first time), but all of them also were preparing to scatter for a few weeks of post-deployment leave. At one point, my son hugged a comrade whose face bore several large, vivid scars. A few minutes later, my son explained: Just three days after the company’s arrival in its area of operation in Iraq’s Anbar province, a suicide truck bomber had driven into the unit’s compound and exploded his charge. My son’s young friend had taken a face-full of shrapnel as a result. He was lucky to even be alive.
As my son told this, I suddenly realized that I had talked with him by phone at about that time, and remembered how alarmed I’d been by the conversation. I hadn’t even recognized his voice that day. He’d sounded hoarse, tired and stressed, and I fretted about it until the next time we talked, when he seemed more like himself. Eventually, thanks in part to news reports on the decline of insurgent activity in Anbar, I was able to make myself believe that things were relatively calm in my son’s little patch of Mesopotamia. It was, as I later learned on the oceanview porch, a foolish and naive belief, born of the mind’s ability to shield itself from even the hint of potential horror. Of course he’d been in grave danger. He was in a war zone.
Later in the day of his arrival back home, when we’d relocated to the beach cottage I’d rented for the week, my son added details of his time in Iraq. He told of the small-arms fire that hit his guard post one night. He told of the roadside bomb that failed to fully detonate as his vehicle passed, instead creating only a flash and some noise. He told of being so hot and thirsty that hell would have been an improvement. He told of the ubiquitous presence of insurgents, who’d been driven out of Iraq’s major cities by the surge and into the villages where the companies of the 1/2 were stationed. He told these things matter-of-factly, with the obvious satisfaction that comes from taking on a tough, dangerous job and doing it well. He’d not been traumatized by the events of his service, nor made afraid or uncertain by them. Those reactions were left to me. I claimed them for myself.
As if to underscore the danger my son had faced in Iraq, I discovered that the battalion that replaced his in Anbar endured four casualties in a single day shortly after taking over operations. And as if to underscore the worry that awaits me, I learned — on the same day my son arrived home — that he’s likely to deploy again in the spring.
I have until then to reacquire that blissful sense of ignorance and naivete.