Either Peace or War

Graydon McWilliams

Description

The battalion commander's entourage patrol their sector southwest of Baghdad, in an area nicknamed "Triangle of Death."

When my friends discuss deployments to Iraq, we break them into three separate and unequal parts. The first deployment is when America started in Kuwait and pushed north to Kuwait. "Our deployment," is when I met the majority of friends that I still talk to today. This book refers to, "THE deployment," because it's the one we discuss the least and remember the most.

This book won Second Place in The Book Fest Fall 2022.

https://www.thebookfest.com/award_entries/either-peace-or-war/

Sujets

• Triangle of Death
• Iraq
• Deployment
• Military
• Baghdad
• Army
• Adventure
• Irak
• Fiction
• Action
• Bagdad

Informations

• Publié par: Archway Publishing
• Date de parution: 05 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665726344
• Langue: English

Extrait

EITHER

PEACE

OR

WAR
 
 
GRAYDON MCWILLIAMS
 
 

 
Copyright © 2022 Graydon McWilliams.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6657-2635-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-2633-7 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-2634-4 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022912290
 
 
 
 
Archway Publishing rev. date: 06/29/2022
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Dedicated to the families of veterans who had questions they were afraid to ask and to the veterans who could never find the answers to unasked questions.
In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a single thing more. Do you understand this? So I am saying to you that after a battle each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and that when a war is ended it is as if there have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers.
—Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacc iato
CHAPTER 1

I MISS WAR. THAT SOUNDS CRAZY, but there is a feeling about war that is irreplaceable. It becomes its own wonder of the world. The roaring power of it leaves you with an overwhelming perplexity of new sensations: the pressure of explosions and the way concussions push through your body and reverberate in your head. During an explosion, air somehow splits and turns to a magnificent bloom of fire while the ground vibrates with ferocity. There are brilliant flashes that hit one of your senses the way that lightning strikes a tree and snaps it like a wishbone. It happens so quickly that time feels like it’s slowing down. It’s hard to find it outside of a war. It’s that sense of death that holds time in place.
How blinding the darkness can be. To most of the guys that I knew, war brought assurance in the same way that an owl feels confident at night. It’s the constant practice of patrolling on foot or while mounted in your vehicle with night vision. I could sprint through the woods in the dark or drive down a road with night vision. Reflecting on it makes me want a cigarette. Lighting up after every patrol, I thought, At least, it can’t get any worse . The next week I’d pull a packet of Camel’s from my shoulder pocket, click my butane lighter, torch a cherry into place, and exhale a, “Fuck me. It’s worse.”
The measurements of better or worse were never a straight line. An algorithm of how long a mission was came in summations; how hot, how dangerous, how boring, or the number of people injured—all had to be plugged into a mental calculation. There was no right or wrong answer. Each of us held our own interpretation of the patrols. Everyone has his or her worst day.
The mental fault line seemed to crumble the longer we were there. One day closer to home may seem better to a family member, but a guy overseas may not see it that way. Anxiety would etch higher. The closer we got to redeploying home, the more our nerves kicked in and worry seeped out.
Think about making it to the eleventh month of a twelve-month deployment, only to have your insides blown outside. Or see a vehicle explode in front of you and know that it could have easily been you. The longer you’re over there, and the more you see, the easier it is to come to terms with how quickly you can die. It left me with a feeling of worthlessness. It seemed pointless to do anything that would impair or repair our states of wellness.
In the States, you show up for roll call and head outside. Then there is an hour of running, push-ups, and sit-ups, for the sake and purpose of preparing for battle and becoming stronger and faster than the enemy is. You rehearse until practice becomes a reflex—quick, quick, quick. In Iraq, there’s little need or purpose to it. You’ve spent all that time stateside, preparing for it. Now, you’re in combat. What’s there to prepare for? You’re there. It’s time to do the damn thing, kick in doors, fire back at the enemy, be a hero, and earn your place in the parades. But then you actually do the things, and it’s not all you thought it was cracked up to be.
Bulldoze through the patrols, drive, walk, and fill sandbags. You tell yourself that you’ll come out of this, fitter, leaner, and healthier, by the time you get back to the States. You read books before you rack out, trying to keep your verbalization honed into a civil tone for when you redeploy home. Focusing on the science of terminology and teetering less on jargon, you tell yourself that when it is done, you’ll be cashing that GI Bill at college.
If you don’t pay attention to how much you swear, every third or fourth word is, “Fuck.” The number of times a soldier swears in a sentence takes on a language of its own. So you read literature or poetry and try on classic works. But Charles Bukowski seems to fit your lifestyle more than William Shakespeare does. Crossword puzzles and chess games are your entertainment. They are small pushes that don’t feel like homework. Then you go to the gym to stay in shape.
The constant worry of war is that you’ll do all these things to better yourself and prepare for life after duty, only to be blown into so many small parts that the little bits go into quart-size bags and the larger parts go into the gallon-size bags. All those plastic bags are consolidated into a solitary black nylon body bag. If you’re the only one that was killed that day, it’s easier for those remains to be correctly identified.
Once you learn that all your preparations for after duty don’t help with the afterlife, books and weight training aren’t as tempting. When you see it firsthand while helping with the recovery of a body—the plastic parcels filled with toes, fingers, and questionable pieces—the naïve person you were before that deployment molts off you like a baby’s skin.
You’ve earned an education in combat, and you see how little you can control the way that you die. You may as well enjoy yourself. Smoke two packs a day, cuss, dip, spit, and skip opportunities to exercise. Then double up on Twinkies and Ding Dongs. There are two in a pack. Let’s get diabetic. Then go masturbate as your blood sugar spikes and get twice the high because the somber reality is that it might be the last day that you get to smoke after hand sex.
One evening at a bar, I told my brother that I was mulling the idea around of writing a book. I missed the feeling of duty, the hope that I was working in a field of the world that cultivated something larger than a job, and the responsibility of not only fighting an enemy but also saving a country.
I always thought that calling the army a job was bullshit. It was a duty. In some right, it was a noble act where my small actions would churn up something greater. I told him that I missed it. He put the whiskey glass down, looked at me, and said, “I understand that. There are few places you get to see an entire building knocked down with rockets and machine-gun fire from an attack helicopter.”
My brother joined the army his last year of college and a year before starting medical school. It was no surprise when he was sworn in. When he joined, it seemed like a fiscally sound chess move. “I was with this group of Rangers,” he started. “Not like you,” he said palming his whiskey. “Real Rangers. Third Battalion needed a medical officer for a mission, and I volunteered to go.”
I started laughing. He knew how annoyed I got when civilians said that I was a Ranger. Going to Ranger school—a leadership school—does not mean you are in Ranger Battalion. I don’t know exactly how to put it in worldly terms. I suppose it’s like saying you graduated from a university, but it was only community college. “I thought you were the battalion’s surgeon,” I said, with a slight questioning tone. “How does it spin around that any combat force, much less a Ranger Battalion, snags you?”
“Well, we all have bosses. The battalion executive officer told me to find a volunteer medic for a mission. He asked if I thought I could find one in time for an operation with