Category Archives: mourning

Have You Ever Been In a Firefight? (part I)

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Some time ago, I thought about writing a post titled “Have You Ever Been In a Firefight?” It is one of the many annoying and sometimes infuriating questions I often receive as a female veteran, but this post isn’t about me.  It is Memorial Day Weekend, and some recent events have made me realize that this title is also quite appropriate in honor of many of the fallen soldiers I deployed with who never got to come home.

I understand that for most civilians and those who have never been to Iraq or Afghanistan, what happens over there is largely a mystery.  There is a general sense that wars are not fought the way they used to be, that there is no front line, that there is no cozy safe spot in the rear, that the military is now one almost fully integrated fighting force of men and women (does anyone remember the WACs?), but the details of the modern day battlefield are largely left out of the public discourse.

As a female veteran, I am often asked questions like, “You were in a safe area though, right?” and “Yeah but you’ve never really been in a firefight or anything, right?”  These questions are infuriating for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons alike.  The first question is mindboggling because the answer is an emphatic “No! I was not in a ‘safe’ area!”  The second question makes me want to spin my head around and spit green pea soup because wile the answer is also “No, I have never been in a firefight,” it is usually followed with the clarifying statement, “and neither have most of the men I served with.” The men, of course, don’t usually get asked, which makes the question all the more infuriating.  But all of these inquiries are understandable and easily forgiven when they come from civilians who have been largely kept in the dark about the alternate universe that is OIF and OEF.  As far as enraging points of view go, these more-or-less well intended, albeit naïve, perspectives of the role of women in the modern-day combat environment pale in comparison to the inexcusable jockeying for street credit that often takes place amongst veterans and service members.   Allow me to elaborate …

There is sometimes a tendency for combat veterans to disparage each other’s service based on MOS (military occupational specialty—basically your job description) or whether or not someone has gone outside the wire (essentially left the comfort of the base).  While it is understandable that a civilian who knows little of the details of the modern battlefield would measure the effects of combat in terms of things like firefights, service members and veterans should know better.

I recently, just this weekend of all weekends, read something written on a military Facebook page I follow that almost sent me through the roof.  It was written by a woman who referred to herself as a “milispouse” who was angry and venting about her daughter’s custody battle with her ex son-in-law who was discharged from the Army for malingering.  According to this woman, the former soldier has violent mood swings that he claims are the result of combat-related PTSD.  While I have no issue with her anger over his misrepresentation of his service (apparently this veteran tells people he’s still in the Army and goes to the recruiting station to talk to potential recruits), what I was aggravated by was her commentary on his deployment.  It went something along the lines of “[He has] no combat time.  None.  Downrange, yes.  Combat, no.”  She went on to say that he spent most of his deployment on guard duty and whining about getting yelled at.

This was a civilian who wrote this mind you.  She herself has never been deployed.  She established her own authority to speak on the subject by stating that her father was a Vietnam Vet and her husband is an infantryman with multiple deployments under his belt.  She has attended many funerals in recent years.  In her words, “So I get to call a douche a douche, fair?”

Again though, her opinion I can blow off.  The string of some 50+ comments that followed, most of them validating her perspective of POGs (people other than grunts—non-infantry) I cannot forgive so easily.  Someone who has never stepped foot in a war zone gets this perspective from somewhere, and that somewhere can only be from other service members.  I initially kept silent on the thread, but all the bashing of FOBBITS (people who never stepped foot off the forward operating base while they were deployed) that ensued following her comment slowly ate at me over the course of the night and right into the next morning.

It didn’t bother me because I was a FOBBIT—I wasn’t.  I may have never been in a firefight, but I lived on the most underserved patrol base in our area of operations, I went out on foot patrol daily, I spoke to more Iraqis than Americans while over there, and I drove up and down one of the deadliest highways in Iraq on a regular basis for months.  Don’t get me wrong—my exposure to “combat” was extremely limited, but that had a lot more to do with luck and timing than it did my proximity to the line.  So the whole thing didn’t bother me because I was a FOBBIT; it made me sick to my stomach because almost every person I knew who died over there was.  After waking up with the dialogue still on my mind, I knew I couldn’t keep quiet.  This is the comment I left on the page (I was pretty upset when I wrote it, so please excuse my flowery language):

“I don’t usually comment on this page, but this has been bothering me since I read it. I’m sure your son in-law is a DB, and I’m not arguing that he wasn’t a shit bag soldier, but Taylor is right. You don’t get to call a douche a douche. I’m not denying you your insights or experiences—your relationships to your husband and your father and the Army in general give you an insiders perspective on the war and the military that most civilians will never understand, I will give you that, but it still doesn’t give you “street credit” (for lack of a better term) to judge whether or not someone’s deployment makes them a combat veteran or not. It’s bad enough when soldiers do it to each other; it’s unacceptable when it comes from people who have never deployed (civilians or soldiers).

I know infantrymen have a tendency to think they are the only ones who experienced combat, but the dick swinging contests amongst veterans have got to stop. My first month in country, an interrogator (FOBBIT) was blown up by a Katyusha while she was asleep in her can. I ran into our company clerk (FOBBIT)the next day, who happened to be in the vicinity and was one of the soldiers who tried to put out the fire. I never saw anyone more shook up than he was trying to tell me how he couldn’t get the site of the blown up pieces of what was left of her body out of his head. Six months into my tour, I was on a FOB that got hit with 14 Katyushas in one attack. Some poor kid (DB?) on extra duty got blown up doing police call in front of the TOC. My team and I were huddled up next to a T-wall during that attack, and we were pretty sure we were going out with him. Our vehicle got totaled by a Katyusha later that night. It was on one side of the T-wall, we were on the other. One lousy month before we got to go home, an MP I spent my first 3 months in country sharing a tent with stuck her 9 mm in her mouth and blew her brains out. One fucking month left. One of the guys on my team who lived next to her stood guard by her door for what he said felt like an eternity until her body was removed from her can. These soldiers—FOBBITS and DB’S among them—gave their lives in a war zone that less than 1% of Americans have seen. And before I get attacked for my service, I wasn’t a FOBBIT. I lived on a PB and went out on foot patrol every day with an artillery unit tasked out as infantry. I made routine runs up and down Route Tampa, but I would never tell someone who never went outside the wire that they weren’t really a combat vet. My husband was a line medic. He lives every day with not only the effects of watching his brothers die, but being the one who wasn’t able to save them. He would never tell a FOBBIT that their service didn’t count as much as his, and a civilian has no place evaluating what someone did or did not do while they were deployed.

It’s Memorial Day Weekend. Like I said, only 0.5% of Americans have contributed to the wars of this last decade. 99.5% of the population has absolutely no idea what it is like to be over there. We shouldn’t be competing for honors or who has the right to claim PTSD and who doesn’t. I will be spending this Memorial Day Weekend remembering the soldiers I knew and who never got to come home with us, FOBBITS and DB’s alike. D__, I am truly sorry for what you’re going through. I know custody battles are ugly and vicious, and I have no doubt your son-in-law is the dirt bag you describe him to be, but his dishonorable discharge speaks for itself. Any commentary you have to add about his time in Iraq is just going to make you look bad, not him.”

If my descriptions of the fallen come off as overly vivid or blunt, it is not intended to disrespect or disparage the memory of these soldiers in any way.  My vulgarity is intended only to emphasize the point that FOBBITS are sheltered from neither PTSD nor death itself.  Surprisingly, the only response I’ve received so far is from the milispouse.  To her credit, she didn’t reply, but she did “like” my comment, so I guess I managed to get my point across without offending the person I was addressing (this may be a first for me!)

I often think of Vietnam and World War II and I am in total awe of what those men endured.  I simply can’t fathom it.  I don’t understand how anyone, no matter how good a soldier, made it off the battlefield alive.  Just knowing some of the fears and anxieties I experienced during my deployment, which was like a trip to Disneyland compared to the wars of previous generations, I cannot imagine going through that without being utterly gripped with fear.  I am a religious woman, but I still have to wonder, how much of their fate was determined by dumb luck?  If the veterans of my generation are engaged in a pissing contest, I’m pretty sure we all loose.

My grandfather was an E5 (sergeant) who served in Germany during World War II, but he never spoke of the war.  My mother said he was the strangest man she ever met.  Never really connecting the dots to his service, she thought he suffered from depression.  He was very successful in life and his marriage, but he had no hobbies, no interests.  He sat in his chair, and he went for long walks.  He was good with small children and enjoyed his grandkids, right up until we got a little older and started to talk like little people.  Then he kind of lost interest.  I always thought the way my mother described him was strange.  It never even occurred to me that he had PTSD until a few years ago when my brother said he thought grandpa was shell shocked.  Now that I’m a veteran, it doesn’t seem strange at all.  Now I understand.  War takes something from those who survive it, and that hole cannot be filled, but only augmented with the memories of those who did not.

In Memory:

SPC MJJ

SGT CAJ

SGT MLL

SGT TLM

PFC TJS

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My Sister Came Home With a New Face Today

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My sister came home with a new face today. Okay, it was more like three or four months ago, but that’s the sentence that’s been running through my head ever since, so that is where I’ll begin.

English: A purple transgender ♀+♂=⚧ symbol sur...

Image via Wikipedia

For those of you who don’t know or haven’t read earlier posts, my sister used to be my brother. For some, watching a big brother transition into a big sister may not be much more dramatic than learning you have a gay sibling. I would hope that in this day and age, that realization sets in more like an interesting piece of trivia rather than a rock-your-world sort of discovery. But my brother and I always had a unique sort of relationship, so when I learned that he was really a lesbian trapped inside a straight man’s body, it took a few years to process it all.

I want to be really clear here—when I say it took some processing, I don’t mean in any way, shape, or form that I thought her gender identity was wrong or she was bad or there were any kind of moral implications attached to her struggle. I love my sister deeply, no matter what body is the right body for her. It’s just that my big brother was, well, such a guy.

My big brother was 9 years older than me. I am the baby in a family of five. The big “whoops” if you will. My parents essentially thought they were done having kids and were settling into the idea of relaxing a bit when “whoops,” I came along. I never as a child had any sense that I, personally, was, well, unintended. It was, however, pretty clear early on that my father had a different sort of lifestyle in mind by that point in his life.

My parents are a sort of rags-to-riches story. When my oldest brother (and now my only brother) was born, they lived in one of the motel rooms in my grandparents’ little motor inn. My grandmother was the 24-hour desk clerk, the housekeeper, the bookkeeper, and my grandfather was maintenance, security, and pretty much anything else that needed to be done. My mom was basically on call between diaper changes and my dad, fresh out of the Army, was busy trying to make a life for them with a real estate license. Their big step up after getting out of my grandparents’ place was a cute little “building” that was originally a chicken coup and had been renovated into apartments. They weren’t poverty stricken (although my mother was most of her childhood), but the early years of their marriage were mostly about working hard for a better future. I came along right around the same time as that “better future” did.

My father was always a bit of a workaholic. He typically put in about 80 hours a week. (My mother says this is one of the reasons why they got along so great in those early years). That didn’t really change when he finally achieved the success he worked so hard for. The only difference is when the weekend rolled around, or whenever he did have a free minute outside of work, he wanted to enjoy it doing things adults with babies don’t really do, like socialize. I think I was the only kid in school who got excited when her parents decided to “get separated,” which was about every six months or so, because I saw more of him during weekend visitation than I did when he lived at home. (Am I dating myself here? I think people nowadays skip over that whole separation nonsense and cut to the chase with a plain old divorce).

So what does all this have to do with my sister’s new face? Please bare with me. I’m getting there. My big brother had an unusually maternal instinct (should have been our first clue). In the midst of my parents’ tumultuous marriage, and my father’s general absence, my big brother being 9 years my senior stepped in when he could. In retrospect, he was a terrible role model, but in many ways, he was the only male role model I had. My other brother was even older than him and out of the house by the time I was in elementary school. Tony with a “Y,” by contrast, was very much my guardian and protector.

In order to understand why his transformation into Toni with an “i” was so shocking for everyone, you have to understand what kind of guy Tony with a “Y” was. Yes, maternal in some ways, like when mom brought me home from the hospital and he decided to take me out of my bassinet, hold me wiggling over the second story railing, and announce “Mom! I think she needs a diaper change!” (That was just the first of many occasions where my big brother almost got me killed). But on the surface, Tony was the roughest, toughest, most machismo guy anyone had ever met (again, another clue, but who really sees these things?)

When I told my childhood best friend, a dear friend who I spent every weekend with from age four to middle school and who grew up with my family, that my brother was a transsexual, she had the most interesting response:

“If someone were to ask me what I think of when I think of the archetypical male and everything that embodies masculinity, I would ask them, ‘Have you ever met Tony Vale?’”

That pretty much sums it up. Tony was the most popular guy in school. In spite of his relentless acne, he was stunningly handsome. All the girls wanted to date him, every guy wanted to be friends with him, and nobody messed with him because if they did, he’d kick their ass. He was muscular, but not in a meat-head, “I use steroids” sort of way. He was charming and kind, but a bit of a jock on the track or the soccer field. He was into martial arts and drag racing and out-running the cops with his friends (that’s the not-so-great role model part I was talking about). Think Patrick Swaze in Roadhouse. I could go on and on, but you get the point. Everything about Tony screamed GUY. So when he came out to the world as Bad Ass Chick, everyone was stunned, including my utterly heartbroken gay college roommate.

When Tony first came out, and I was still grappling with the whole concept, I asked him about the machismo front he put on. What about the fighting and the drag racing and all the guy stuff?

His response was, “Did you ever hear the phrase, ‘Be all you can be?’” He went on to tell me that it was all a lie. That his entire life was a horribly painful exercise in hiding the truth, that everything from working on muscle cars to the movies he liked—or pretended to like—was just a huge front. Everything but the girls that is. He genuinely liked the girls. Like I said, he was a lesbian trapped inside a straight man’s body.

Now, most people would look at that conversation and say that’s all just superficial stuff anyway, and to them I would say, bullshit. I mean, yeah, whether or not you really like to chew food with your mouth open to prove you’re a man’s man isn’t really important, I’ll give you that. The important things about your identity are things like how you treat people, how honest you are, being true to yourself …. hmm. When you become so comfortable with lying about something as huge as who you are, you can lie—and often do lie—about anything. I love my sister dearly, but one of the painful realizations that came to me later in life is that you never know when she’s telling the truth or not. In most people, this is a character flaw I can’t tolerate, but in her case, I attribute it to habit and tend to blow it off.

When I was a kid, my brother woke up one morning and couldn’t get out of bed. My mom rushed him to the hospital. He had injured his back so severely that he had crushed two disks and a vertebrae. He told everyone he hurt himself in gymnastics training, and the doctor said he probably made the injury worse in his sleep. The truth is he jumped off a four-story building at a nearby construction site in the middle of the night. By all accounts, he should have died. That was the plan anyway. He laid there for what he said felt like hours, writhing in pain, immensely pissed off that he was still alive. Finally, he was able to pick himself up, limp home, and flop into bed. When he woke in the morning, he couldn’t move. All because he was so afraid of what the world would do to him if they knew the truth.

It’s not that these things we associate with gender are important. Of course they’re not important. It’s that once you realize the closest person to you in your life has been playing a role the entire time and you never even had a hint of it—you had absolutely no idea—the incredible realization that you never really know anybody comes crashing down on you. We only know what people let us see, and sometimes people let us see things inadvertently, but anyone could be hiding the most unbelievable secret from you and you’d never know it. Slowly over the years I went from believing in first impressions and fancying myself a good judge of character to developing a more humble and skeptical approach to my own instincts. Now in the back of my mind, there is always the realization that you never really know anyone as well as you think you do. I often find myself surrounded by people who cling so dearly to their perceptions of others—good and bad—without ever considering they may be wrong, but I have no problem admitting you just never know about people because ultimately, we tend to see what we want to see.

When you realize that one of the dearest people to you has been pretending to be someone they’re not for your entire lives, you start the process of getting to know them all over again. You start the process of trying to dissect which traits we associate with gender and which aspects of a person are truly defining. And it’s not as easy as just write off or forget about all the “guy” stuff either. Like Toni with an “i” might not care so much about muscle cars, but she really does enjoy drag racing. You have to go through an entire list of things and find out which ones are real and which ones were bullshit.

It gets even crazier when the hormones kick in. When someone who is a relatively calm and detached individual is reduced to a blithering basket of tears over absolutely nothing, or at least something she would have thought nothing of in her past life, you have to ask yourself, how many of our own character traits are in fact defined by our biology? But that one’s too obvious. I’ll give you another example that is downright bizarre. Toni with an “i” had the same taste in furniture and general décor-type stuff as Tony with a “Y.” As far as she knew, she liked her couch and her bedframe and the pictures on her walls just fine. After all, her taste is her taste and she likes what she likes, right? Her gender apparently doesn’t have anything to do with her sexual preference, so why should it have anything to do with her window shades or her comforter? It didn’t. Until, that is, the hormones kicked in. Then everything started to look kind of dark and masculine and she decided some remodeling was in order.

Tony’s transition has been a long, painful process that has taken more than a decade and is still ongoing. It would have probably been much faster and far less painful for her if she hadn’t sadly (ironically?) gotten her girlfriend pregnant when she was only 21 years old. Since then, she’s had two marriages, two divorces, and a total of two children to match her double life. It seems that her unwanted appendage sure did bring about its share of trouble before she finally got rid of it. But all kidding aside, the fear of loosing or harming her children has made her transformation agonizing.

She went through all the pain of telling the world her secret, loosing most of her life-long guy friends (although some have pleasantly surprised us all), and facing my father (who still refers to her as him but loves her as much as he ever did), only to jump back into the closet when she watched her wife and son pack up and drive away. She managed to convince the ex that she “cured” herself and went back to being a guy for a couple years. This was absolutely heartbreaking for the rest of us to watch, and the extra oomph she put into her macho-guy persona sometimes made it downright annoying. Anyone who didn’t hate the ex prior to this “relapse” into masculinity definitely hated her after because it was hard to imagine letting someone you were supposed to love torture themselves trying to be the person you wished they could be. This charade went on for a couple more years until she finally came back out of the closet, this time to the sweet sound everyone’s sighs of relief rather than their shock and dismay.

When I was a little girl, I used to have a reoccurring dream that my brother had disappeared or died. Sometimes it was so vivid, I would wake up sweating and crying. As I grew up, the dream continued, although usually it was less dramatic as I got older. Sometimes I would wake with the vague sense that I was wandering around, looking for my brother in the woods or on some long journey to find him. While now the dream makes perfect sense, at the time it did not. I had absolutely no idea, at least not on any conscious level, that my brother was harboring this secret. My older sister knew, but for me, the shock and disbelief that accompanied my finding out that my big brother was a transsexual was equal to someone trying to convince me that the world was flat. Once the reality set in, there was an incredible sense of loss. Her lengthy transition, however, has given us all plenty of time to go through the five stages of grief. As much as I embrace the rebirth of Toni with an “i,” it would be disingenuous to pretend I didn’t mourn the death of Tony with a “Y,” no matter how tempting it may be to pretend that I’m that good of a person.

The five stages looked a little something like this for me:

1. Denial: Are you sure it’s not just a cross-dressing thing? I mean, you like women, right? So maybe you’re not really a transsexual.

2. Anger: You have children who are going to be devastated by this! I need my big brother!

3. Bargaining: Aren’t you at least going to try to go to a psychiatrist and see if that helps? I mean if it doesn’t, fine, but aren’t you going to exhaust all options before you do this?

4. Depression: My big brother is gone.

5. Acceptance: What brother? I’d like you to meet my sister.

Before you judge me, I am fully aware of how selfish most of these emotions are, but I’d rather be honest than pretend I’m above being selfish. Emotions aren’t rational, and we generally don’t choose the way we feel. All we can do is choose how we react to them and express them, and in spite of all the selfish emotions I’ve experienced watching my brother slowly disappear, I have always loved and encouraged my sister. Ultimately, I began to forget about my brother all together. For all the pain I felt over the loss of him, it’s kind of funny. I don’t miss him at all anymore. I mean I really don’t. Not even a little bit. But that may be because when you idolize someone, you don’t really see them for who they are in the first place. You put them up on this pedestal with expectations no one can live up to. When you become disillusioned, you set them and yourself free. The only thing that’s difficult now is watching my sister endure the cruelty of an unaccepting world. (That and feeling like I’m the big sister most of the time).

Toni was so physically masculine, she had a hard time passing after her surgery. She had the most unusual combination of male and female facial features. On the one hand, the shape of her face, her high cheekbones, and beautiful eyes were very feminine. On the other hand, she had a pretty thick eyebrow ridge, a strong jaw, and definitely a guy’s nose and chin. She hasn’t been able to get a job to save her life. It’s hard to tell with my sister, who has always been a bit of a grifter, if the no job thing was truly the result of bigotry and prejudice, or if it was her way of getting my mom to shell out for the final touch of her transformation, but in the end, mom decided it didn’t really matter. The bottom line was her daughter was frequently stared at and laughed at, mocked and ridiculed, and the thought of that killed her. So she found a plastic surgeon that specializes in feminizing surgery, and she made an appointment.

Here’s the thing about my sister’s face. There were a lot of people putting their two cents in before my mom decided to get Toni her plastic surgery. There were a lot of people who insisted she looked great and she didn’t need to have anything done, and their incessant need to reaffirm their own tolerance by completely denying the fact that she didn’t pass became almost infuriating. Yes, she did look great. She is a beautiful person with a kind heart and a glowing personality, and kind people who knew her looked at her and thought, “She looks great.” But that’s not the point. People who didn’t know her looked at her and snickered behind her back because whether or not she looked great, certain features gave her away. For me, and I think everyone else in the family who knew her before she became Toni with an “i,” when I looked at Toni’s face, all I could see was my brother, so I had no idea what other people really saw when they met Toni.

When Toni came home with her new face, it looked awful. It was so hard to picture what she would look like after all the swelling went down and the bruising went away. Mom and Toni were anxiously waiting for her new face to emerge from the swollen wreck that it was, all the while both fearful they may have made a big mistake. I really had trouble imaging the gentle face of a woman was going to appear, but all we could do was wait. Slowly, but surely, my sister’s new face came to the surface. There was nothing dramatic about the transformation—there wasn’t supposed to be. She still looked like the same person, and I think that’s why my husband and maybe my mom and even Toni herself couldn’t see the difference. But for me, the changes were plain as day. It wasn’t like the difference between pre-Sonny and post-Sonny Cher, and it certainly wasn’t Jackson 5 Michael versus Immortal Michael. Everything was just … softer. Her nose was the same nose, just smaller. Her hairline was brought forward and her eyebrow ridge was gone. Her strong jaw was a little more delicate, and her chin didn’t protrude quite so much.

I got mad at my husband when he said he couldn’t see the difference because for me, it was so obvious. I knew she looked different because even though in some respects she looked exactly the same, it was the first time since she embarked on this path that I didn’t looked at her face and see the sad reminder of my brother. For the first time since Toni became my sister, all I could really see was my sister. After my husband went out of town and came home again, all of a sudden he could see it too. And while that’s all well and good for me and him and everyone else, the sad part is, I don’t think Toni sees it, and what she sees is all that really matters. If she can’t look in the mirror and see a woman, then she can’t believe anyone else who looks at her can see a woman. So after all this, she still thinks the world is laughing at her.

In the meantime, we are all still living together trying to pull each other up out of the void. It is at times a contentious situation and other times a warm one, as living with family often is, but I only wish my sister could see what I now know. My sister came home with a new face today, and it is the same old face she has always had. The only difference is now I can see what was always there.

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In Memory of SGT Mason Lee Lewis

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SGT Mason L. Lewis

26 February 1981 – 16 November 2007

Mason's place seating at our wedding reception

When I lived in NYC, I was always aggravated by the subway ads, not only because I was very cognizant of myself as a captive audience, unable to look away, but because my mild OCD made it impossible for me to not read every banner sign as I rocked along the dark corridor doing the daily grind.  Instead of people watching, like most normal New Yorkers do to pass the time on the train, I tormented myself trying to figure out if I picked up any Spanish from years of reading bilingual poster ads.

Conspicuously absent on any given base in Iraq are advertisements.  Sure, there are a few, but overall it’s nothing compared with what we are bombarded with here at home on a daily basis without even realizing it.  On a FOB (forward operating base), there are no billboards, marquees, bus decals or those terribly annoying banner ads lining the ceiling of the subway.  There really aren’t too many stores or restaurants with big flashy signs out front announcing their own presence.  The only T.V. soldiers ever really get a chance to glimpse at is usually in the DFAC (dining facility), and soldiers are rarely there long enough to pay much attention to it.  An American operating base in Iraq is remarkably free of corporate advertising.

What you do have, however, are equally annoying, good-old-fashioned, cork bulletin boards.  You’re usually smacked in the face with one while standing outside the company office waiting to talk to 1st sergeant, or while hanging around some designated smoking area where someone took the time to build a really nice wooden gazebo next to one of those really aggravating boards.  I say they’re aggravating because of that previously referenced OCD–the one that doesn’t let me walk past a sign without reading it–but also because there was almost never anything actually useful to the reader pinned to the board.  It almost always served the needs of the individual who wrote the flier.

More specifically, the boards were generally used for warnings and to admonish disobedient soldiers who could not follow simple instructions.  They almost looked like press releases complete with graphic and quite often disgusting photos that demonstrated the consequences of “doing your own thing” as it’s called in the Army.  Sometimes I hoped that someone other than myself was reading certain signs, like the one that informed those in leadership positions that smoking soldiers (civilian translation: smoking is a form of physical punishment that usually involves some combination of push ups and sprinting like a jack rabbit) in full battle rattle (civ. trans: ceramic plated body armor vest weighing 20-50lbs depending on whether or not ammunition and other equipment was attached to it) in the middle of the desert on a 120 degree day was a BAD IDEA that could possibly lead to serious injury or death.   I generally hoped someone other than myself read those announcements.

I did not care, however, to see the photo of the melted hand that some poor soldier ended up with after a firefight or some other kind of attack because he decided he wasn’t going to add gloves to the list of clothing items that made 120 degrees feel like 200 degrees in the middle of Hell on Earth.  It generally irked me that someone felt this was an opportunity to warn soldiers that they should wear their standard issue gear while on mission, as if these kinds of grotesque wounds were simply the unfortunate result of a failure to follow instructions and weren’t somehow an expected consequence of war.  I often suspected that the person who wrote the flier had himself (or herself) never actually been out on mission–or at least never stepped out of the vehicle–and would probably drop dead of shock if he had and learned that it wasn’t uncommon for soldiers to not only remove their gloves on hot days, but also their Kevlar helmets and sometimes even–gasp–their bullet proof vests!

The soldier’s body armor embodies the trade offs of modern civilization that remind us for all our advancements in technology keeping us safer, healthier, and protected from the cruelties of nature, there is a price.  At the time I was in the Army, it seemed like they came out with a new version of the vest every year.  They were constantly striving to make it more protective while at the same time it needed to be lighter, more flexible, and less cumbersome.  When I deployed, the latest modification was the under-arm plate added to protect the area of the body that had become the kill shot for snipers.  It was the most vulnerable spot in the vest.  When a soldier lifted his or her arms in any direction, a huge area of the body became exposed, opening up the heart and lungs to penetration.  The plates that were inserted into the vest closed some of this gap, but they also added a few pounds to the weight.  More importantly, they seriously inhibited movement.  We looked like an Army of Pillsbury Dough Boys running around with our arms pushed out.  The vest saved lives, no doubt.  But it also hampered the soldier’s mobility, which was a danger in itself.

While removing the vest wasn’t necessarily unheard of, most soldiers wore their vests most of the time while out on mission.  Like I said, there’s no question the vest saved lives, and as a result, it got worn.  Getting used to the body armor can be one of the most difficult adjustments for a new soldier to make in preparation for deployment.  Most soldiers go through basic and advanced training wearing a much lighter version of the ballistic vest.  It’s generally not until you get to your unit do you start going to the firing range and doing field training exercises wearing full battle rattle in an effort to get used to its weight and awkwardness.  I remember I used to feel like a modern day knight walking around in it because it seemed almost as ridiculous as a full suit of medieval armor.  (For a female soldier, having to squat to pee in the thing when you’re nowhere near a porta-potty is a nightmare).  The vest incredibly hampers the mobility of the soldier, at least until he or she gets used to moving in it.

It was about halfway through my deployment, before I met my husband, when one day I was standing outside the company, waiting to talk to 1st sergeant, that I read a flier I will never forget.  The message was to be careful while wearing your vest.  It warned soldiers that simple tasks like turning around can require a great deal of care and balance when wearing body armor.  There was a picture of some kind of lift parked next to a building.  The flier went on to explain that an American soldier who was on a mission to help train Iraqi soldiers fell off the lift and died.  He was only two stories up, but he was crushed by the weight of his vest when he fell and later died from the internal bleeding it caused.

I didn’t know the soldier, but I can’t even explain the feeling that came over me when I read his story.  I will never forget what I thought: to come all this way over here, for your family to be back home worrying every day that you’re going to get shot or blown up, and to die in an accident–to be killed by the very thing that is supposed to save your life–I couldn’t make sense of it.  It just didn’t seem fair.  It didn’t seem right.  I know war generally isn’t fair or even right, but this just smacked of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.  ”Died in a non-combat related training accident.”  That’s how it’s listed in Honor the Fallen, the Military Times online database (http://militarytimes.com/valor/army-sgt-mason-l-lewis/3194071).  It wasn’t just non-combat related–he was on a mission to help the Iraqis learn how to protect themselves so that we could go home and get out of their country.

I had no idea at the time I learned of SGT Mason L. Lewis’s death that I would someday have a son who’s middle name would be chosen after him.  I had no idea because I had not yet met my husband, and all of my husband’s friends, to know that the death of Mason Lewis left a hole in all of them.  On this last Wednesday, like every November 16th since I’ve met my husband, a series of phone calls and texts rang in a circle across the country, between a small group of young men, just to say we remember the day, we remember Mason, are you okay?  Some of them wear tattoos that say “Strength and Honor” in memory of him.  All of them need that phone call on that day.

When I was pregnant with my son and reading through baby books looking for names, I asked my husband if he liked the name Mason.  That’s when I learned that the soldier whose death had touched me in such a distant way was much closer to my life than I realized.  I never had the honor of meeting Mason, but when my husband told me how he died, I knew exactly who he was.  I never forgot him because I was so shaken by the way he died, and while my heart went out to my husband for the loss of his friend, it brought me some kind of selfish comfort to know that my husband knew the soldier on the bulletin board.  He wasn’t just the poor soldier who died so unfairly anymore.  He was missed and remembered, and I had the honor of witnessing how his life continued to be celebrated by his friends who loved him.

Mason’s death is a story of tragic ironies, and I suppose it’s fitting that the week before the anniversary of his death, the news was abuzz with a certain constitutional law professor at Suffolk University in Massachusetts named Michael Avery.  Professor Avery responded to his institution’s request for support in sending care packages to troops that it is “shameful” to support men and women “who have gone overseas to kill other human beings” (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2808535/posts).  The most accurate response I have to that statement is this: Professor Avery is an idiot.  That may sound like an understatement, and it may not be very eloquent, but it is profoundly accurate.  Professor Avery is an idiot because he has absolutely no idea what deployed soldiers actually do.  That part’s not his fault.  Most civilians don’t know what a soldier’s mission is.  But unlike most civilians, he thinks he does.

The reality is that the actual conventional war part of the Iraq war was over in less than 60 days.  We declared war on a nation and its leader.  We invaded said nation.  We captured said leader.  Every second we stayed beyond that point was in an effort to rebuild the country and not leave it in a shambles when we left.  Every firefight and bomb dropped since then has been in support of that mission.  Even if you’re an ill-informed conspiracy theorist who thinks our ulterior motive is oil, that doesn’t change the above listed facts.  I don’t want to detract from Mason Lewis by making this entry political.  The point I’m getting to is poignantly relative to his sacrifice.  No matter how anyone feels about the reasons we went or why we’re there or how long we stayed, what everyone needs to understand before forming any strong opinions about the war or the soldiers fighting in Iraq is that our armed forces devote more troop strength, time, energy, and I suspect money to building schools, roads, hospitals, bridges, clean water supplies, and training the Iraqis to take care of themselves than we do killing “other human beings.”

But that’s not what made me want to throw up when I heard the news of Professor Avery.  What made me want to vomit was that not only do our soldiers sacrifice precious time with their families and years of their lives to go overseas and try to train Iraqi soldiers what should be obvious things, like you can’t slaughter a village just because they aren’t the same sect of Islam as you, or even something as simple as how to detain someone without beating them senseless, but many of our soldiers give their lives in the service of that mission.

When I heard Professor Avery’s comment, I immediately thought of SGT Mason Lewis.  There is a Facebook page called R.I.P. Mason Lee Lewis (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6476283260&v=info).  There is only one thing on it really.  It’s a newspaper article about how some of his friends organized Operation Mason in honor of his memory after he died.  The article explains how Mason frequently asked his mother to send him toys for the kids in Iraq.  He was deeply troubled by how kids in Iraq often played with dangerous things like sharp metal cans.  Operation Mason was organized in his honor to request toy donations for Iraqi children.

Mason Lee Lewis didn’t go overseas “to kill other human beings.”  He didn’t go down in a blaze of glory or earn a posthumous medal for being brave in a firefight or even roll over an IED  in his vehicle or loose his life in a rocket attack.  He lost his life doing something infinitely more heroic.  His family can truly, quite literally say that Mason Lee Lewis sacrificed his life trying to bring peace and freedom to a war torn country.  Mason Lewis lost his life trying to teach Iraqis how to protect and take care of themselves, and that self-sufficiency is the most fundamental cornerstone–the very essence–of freedom.  I don’t know how to do justice to or properly honor someone I never met, except to say that his life and his death have profound meaning for me without ever even having met him.  I hope his message speaks to everyone who reads this.  I know it speaks far louder than a piece of paper on a bulletin board ever could.

Remembrance

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Friday was an emotional day, much of it spent memorializing those who have passed on.  The day began with the awful news that my sister-in-law made another failed suicide attempt the night before. Then while the rest of the house readied themselves for one memorial, I got myself and baby ready to attend a separate one.  The first event was an annual golf benefit for cancer held in memory of my brother-in-law who succumbed to lung cancer while I was in Iraq.  I don’t really golf, so I went on behalf of the family to pay respects at the funeral mass for my elderly neighbor who passed of natural causes earlier this week.

My brother-in-law married my sister when I was just a child.  They had been married more than 20 years and had four healthy boys together.  My father always said my brother-in-law worked like a dog to support his family.  He was a mason, but he was not rough around the edges at all.  He was mild mannered and easy going and always a kind face at family functions.  This means a lot in a giant family where the feelings between people can sometimes be contentious.

His fight against cancer began before I left for Iraq, and I prayed for him every night.  When his lung cancer appeared to be gone, I thought God really did answer prayers.  But then they discovered that it had spread to his brain.  When he died, no one told me.  They didn’t want to upset me.  It was only a week or so before my tour ended, and we were scheduled to come home.  I learned he had passed from my nephew’s Myspace status.  It read: “Loosing your dad really sucks.”

I hated not being there for my sister and my family while they were grieving, but the worst part was I never got to say goodbye.  I only saw my brother-in-law once since he was diagnosed, and he was reeling from chemo and radiation therapy.  I never got a chance to talk to him during his remission.  I never got to talk to him at all really after he got sick.  His last Christmas happened to be the first Christmas in 10 years that all of my brothers and sisters were together, celebrating with my parents on Christmas Eve, but I was in Iraq.  It’s nobody’s fault.  That’s just the way it happened.  If I had just had the opportunity to spend that last Christmas, or a family function, or some other holiday with him, I think I’d be more at peace with being in Iraq when he died.  It was a somber note to come home on.

I never really got a chance to say goodbye to my neighbor either.  He was an elderly man and also a veteran. I didn’t have too many conversations with him, but my husband, who was very fond of him, had many. When we first moved here, my neighbor was lively and energetic.  On warm days he was always outside tending to his flowers and his landscaping.  He was a pretty spunky old guy who sort of grouched out everything he said in a way that made you laugh.  But after his heart attack, everything changed for him.  He made a strong recovery at first, but then he had a back operation that left him permanently paralyzed in one leg.

A man like him was never meant to be wheelchair bound.  EMS made frequent visits because he often  fell down trying to do things without help.  My husband finally told his wife to call us before calling the ambulance, and he generally ran next door about once a week to help pick poor Charlie up off the floor.  Once, when my husband was at work, I went in his place.  Charlie’s wife was doubtful little old me had the strength to pick him up off the floor, but I assured her my combat load was much heavier than little ole’ Charlie.

We knew the end was near when hospice started making house calls and their out-of-town children came up to visit.  It was one of those awkward situations where I wanted to stop by but I didn’t want to intrude.  One morning, shortly after his children left, I woke up and saw out my window a dark station wagon backed up to their garage.  I knew then  he had passed.

The funeral service was held at the church by a priest whose services are always eloquent and inspiring.  Refreshingly, he talked a lot about how at the official level, the church doesn’t pretend to know what happens to us after we die.  He said a few kind words about Charlie, but I had a hard time focusing on why I was there.  In basic training, even the atheists found a Sunday service to attend.  It was the only hour or so out of the entire week you could escape the drill sergeants and think about something other than training.  For some reason, these services were very emotional for me, and it was the same whenever I attended a service in Iraq.  Ever since, for reasons I can’t entirely explain or put into words, church services feel almost overwhelming to me.  All I could keep thinking at the funeral service was that there had to be something after this, because if there’s not, what’s the point?

My father believes when you die, you shut off like a light switch.  Everything goes dark and that’s it.  You just cease to exist.  I can’t fathom that.  Maybe it’s just the limits of my rational mind, like my inability to conceive of infinity even though I know, by logical necessity, either the universe itself or the original cause must be infinite, but I simply cannot imagine it anymore than I can imagine the end of my own existence.  If there’s nothing after this life, why bother doing anything but trying to feel good while you’re here?  If in the end, I will simply cease to exist, what difference does it make if it happens today or 50 years from now?  What difference does it make what kind of legacy I leave behind me if we are all just some random cosmic accident that will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs?  Anyway, this is where my thoughts kept drifting to while trying to honor my neighbor’s memory.

In between the funeral and the benefit dinner I attended after the golf tournament, I made a stop home to put the baby down for his nap.  There were only two stories bouncing back and forth on the news: Mayor Bloomberg called for the first mandatory evacuation of flood zones for the first time in the history of NYC, and Former President George W. Bush gives an exclusive interview with the National Geographic Channel discussing his thoughts for the upcoming 10th anniversary of September 11th.  In a clip, Bush described how walking onto Ground Zero was like walking into hell.  In one big rush, I remembered how in the days following 9-11, walking through the city, how seeing my fellow New Yorkers and the looks on their faces was like bearing witness to each individual’s own personal hell, and  I choked back tears.  I don’t know why everything seemed to intersect on one random Friday last week, but it made for a very heavy day, leaving me with the thought that there has to be more than this, that this life must be part of some bigger plan we just aren’t privy to, because if it’s not, what the hell is the point?