Taking My Boots Off: Love & Laughter in War
Tags: War, Veterans, Mental Health, PTSD, Love

Marines horsing around, Ramadi Iraq 2005. Original photo by ryan.

An ongoing story about war, coming home, and healing from combat trauma

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”

— Charles Dickens

Summer, 2005: Alpha 7 sector, Ramadi Iraq

“Load up, were moving out! Happy hunting Devil dogs!” Staff Sgt screamed as we mounted our trucks for a patrol through Alpha 7. A sector with a strong presence of resistance to the occupation. They were highly organized through out the sector. We regularly saw their recruiting fliers and propaganda around the Mosques, in the allies, and throughout the Souq market in the sector. Yet, despite all the ‘intel’ that came from the brass officers, and despite all of the doors we kicked in and homes we raided in 7 months, my platoon never found any substantial weapons cashes.

Just as we made our way out the front gate of Hurricane Point and into the city we broke out in song…

From the Halls of Montezuma

To the shores of Tripoli;

We fight our country’s battles

In the air, on land, and sea;

First to fight for right and freedom

And to keep our honor clean;

We are proud to claim the title

Of United States Marine…

If the Army and the Navy

Ever look on Heaven’s scenes,

They will find the streets are guarded

By United States Marines.

It was a tradition I started out of irony. All that “Oorah” moto stuff was always a joke to me and I thought it hilarious to be obnoxiously over the top with it. The sort of ‘fuck you’ to institution that anyone that has known me, at any point of my life, would expect. ‘Motivation is a crutch’ I used to say — and it was. Finding sarcasm and humor in the horror of war saves a piece of your humanity in a sea of numb and anger. So, while it started out of sarcasm, irony, and facetiousness, as the weeks turned to months and we started to lose comrades, we kept singing our way out the gate and it turned into something else. I guess it turned into something different for all of us, yet, something we shared in those words was the feeling that no matter what happened we had each others six. For me it was a visceral exposure of the duality of war. Among all this horror there was still love. Yet, this was a different love than I had ever experienced before.

As the trucks pulled to a halt in Alpha 7, Jangles screamed from the A Driver seat, “dismount, make entry!” Being the breach team, of the assault squad, my team exited the high-back and made our way to the front of the nearest house. Cpl Spee did a textbook “marine corp flying front kick” opening the front gate, and me and Deenie made our way to the front door. I kicked the front door in and our team flowed like water into the house submerging every inch of space with brute force. The opera of marines shouting “Clear!” and “Last room!” sang behind me as I made my way upstairs to the roof with Deenie on my heels. “With you!” he screamed, and we breached onto the roof. All clear. As the team machine gunner, I took my 249 SAW and posted at the corner with the best birds eye view of the neighborhood. Just as the chaos of making entry and establishing position settled, the pounding of my heart in my eardrums slowly faded, and the local Mosque began to sing.

I can still remember the sounds of her voice. It was one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard. There I was, half way around the world in a country I knew almost nothing about, listening to a language I could not understand, and all of the armor I had strapped to my chest could not protect my heart from her voice penetrating and touching a piece of me, forever. I knew nothing about Islam. I knew nothing of the culture of Iraq. I knew nothing of any of it because I was not sent to fight for the people of Iraq. How can we “win the hearts and minds” of a people we were trained to hate?

If we were there to win the hearts and minds of the People of Iraq, we would have brought food, not bombs. We would have brought doctors, not marines. We would have brought love, not war.

Ramadi Iraq 2005. Original photo by ryan

Yet, sitting there staring down the barrel of my machine gun, I knew we could take many things from the People of Iraq; we could take their homes, we could take their freedom, their resources, but, we could never take their love. That is what she told me singing through those speakers, and I am forever grateful for the gift she gave a young man who was lost trying to find his way back home.

“AMBUSH SOUTH!” screamed P, the radio operator. Jangles shouted for the squad to break down from positions and rally in the backyard of the house to move towards contact. En route to the rally, Jangles shouted, “1st squad we gunna jump the fences moving south to flank em.” Coming out the backdoor we could hear shots to the south, but it was not clear where they were coming from.

One of the ways the guerrillas in the Ramadi resistance formulated ambushes was through small teams dispersed through out the neighborhood (satellite teams). Once the ambush commenced, various teams around the city would make ‘pop shots’ for no reason other than to make it nearly impossible to identify where the shots were coming from. In an urban landscape, everything reverberates and echos, and that makes tracking their location nearly impossible. The resistance could lure us into the battle grounds of their choosing. Consequently, They could direct us into spaces that limited our capabilities, and those not engaged in direct contact could merely drop their weapons and disappear like ghosts into the civilian population. It was a brilliant and highly effective tactical strategy that maximized their very limited resources one the one hand, while minimizing their risk of mass causalities on the other.

They ran us all over Alpha 7 for over an hour in the blistering heat. 1st squad moved from yard to yard climbing over every wall that separated every yard. Just as my boots landed from one climb, “CRACK! CRACK!” It was close. Being in the back yard is completely exposed. We were kettled in a walled yard as rounds surrounded us cracking and snapping. “MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!” Jangles screamed and we ran for the next wall. I was holding the rear with the machine gun so I was last to reach the wall as the “SNAP!” told me I was now running for my life. Using my left foot to get a boost up the wall I grabbed the top and pulled myself up, throwing my right leg around the top. In that moment, my machine gun got lodged between my legs and the wall. Thankfully, I had enough momentum going that I cleared the wall, however, I did not have the time to prepare myself for the fact the landing on the other side was about 5 feet lower than the previous yard.

Down I went strapped with over 100 lbs of war gear pulling me like an anchor, face first, into a giant trash pile below.

As hilarious as it sounds (and must have looked), being buried vertically, head down, wearing over 100 lbs of war gear in a giant pile of trash is actually not an easy thing to get out of. In fact, I almost suffocated to death. All of the weight of my gear was pushing me the wrong way. All of the straps and clips were caught on everything making it impossible to turn around. The limited air I could breathe was…well…I’ll leave that to your imagination to spare you from re-tasting whatever you have in your stomach. Just as I felt I was not going to be able to struggle my way out any longer, Deenie saved my life and yanked my legs so hard he flew down the mountain of trash and I rose enough to the surface that I could get out and roll my way down the pile.

All the while the SNAPS and CRACKS hailed around us in harmony with the singing machine guns and the marines shouting back and forth.

Bong and Kreegs were hilariously going back and forth between laughter and dry heaving from the smell. “Fucking trash” I said laughing. “God dam machine gun fire, RPGs, IEDs, and I almost get taken out by fucking garbage” I manage say. As I am gasping and trying to catch my breath the squad is roaring with laughter. And it was hysterical. One of the funniest moments of my life. We laughed and shot, and ran and shot, and laughed our way back to the truck. I am not even sure at what point the battle ended. Time itself had dissolved from the experience, and it was an existential moment of play in war.

Looking back now still makes me laugh. I can still smell it. I can hear the sounds of Kreegs dry heaving. That, I believe, is the power of laughter, love, and the bonds of war. They span across time and space. They are a bond that echos for the rest of your life into the stories we leave behind and they live forever through the laughs of the next generation. Love lives in war. It is just a different love.

The trucks were in a back alley that had been flooded by some sort of sewer or septic main. We made our way through about a foot of whatever soupy cocktail had poured from the break and jumped into the truck. Being the last in the truck I turned and went to lock the back doors of the high-back Humvee. At that very moment I hear Kreegs hit the roof signaling the driver, and Jangles scream “MOVING OUT!” Which was a very unfortunate timing for me, being I had not yet locked the rear doors or braced myself for the sudden movement. The inertia of the truck taking off took the floor from underneath my feet throwing me face first out the back doors.

Down I went, face first, with over 100 lbs of war gear into the pool of filthy water. It was not one of my most graceful moments.

I am not sure how long it took them to realize I was not on the truck, but the the convoy took off without me. Only team leads and above had radios so I was left alone with no com (communication). I knew where I was, but the gov center was a good two or three miles away. So I knew to stay put. I made entry into a yard and waited.

Once I was recovered and loaded, securely, onto the high-back, Kreegs and Bong were anxiously awaiting their comedy hour full of jokes and dry heaving as the sewage dripped from my helmet. It was in that moment, when my adrenaline had calmed enough for me to feel my body again, that I realized what I was feeling was the maggots crawling underneath my gear inside my shirt. When the initial roar of laughter subsided, Deenie shouted “kick it Endo,” and I started our ‘coming home’ song by Sublime…

life is too short, so love the one you got

’Cause you might get run over or you might get shot

Never start no static I just get it off my chest

[Everyday I] battle with my bulletproof vest

Take a small example, take a tip from me

Take all of your money, give it all to charity…

Lovin’, is what I got, I said remember that

Lovin’, is what I got, I said remember that

Lovin’, is what I got, I said remember that

Lovin’, is what I got…

September 2019: Stateside

Something I am realizing now as I look back into one of the most chaotic and traumatic periods of my life, is that all war is a process of politicizing the human experience. Whether justly in revolutionary struggles for liberation, or whether unjustly in wars of occupation, colonialism, imperialism, war is the material manifestation of politicizing human beings. However, the average solider fights to the death for something deeper than political agendas. Warriors through out history have sacrificed futures, dreams, time, and our very lives for love. The politicians appropriate our sacrifices and call it ‘the love of country,’ or ‘the love of freedom,’ but, these are merely abstractions that have very little place on the battle ground. It is the love of our family, friends, and communities that brings us to the battle field, and it is the love of our comrades that drives us to fight, kill, and sacrifice ourselves on the field of battle.

The deeper existential ideals of freedom are rooted in that love. We fight, kill, and die because we want freedom for the ones we love. It is this love and offering of sacrifice that warriors give that the politicians exploit. Further every warrior sacrifices a piece of what makes us human in a process of de-humanizing those in the other trenches. That piece dies in the war and it dies for love.

However, It is a different type of love. A love born out of context. The moment in a warriors life when we go to war and lose ourselves in the boundary dissolving experience of combat on the one hand, while losing ourselves in the love of our comrades on the other. This part of you, the space when a warrior dissolves into their element, has no place back home and so that part of you stays there — forever. This is what veterans are talking about when we say we miss the community.

Because the war makes sense. Back home makes none.

Feeling, expressing, and most importantly accepting love can be very difficult for a returning combat veteran to navigate. Feeling anything means we feel everything, and we are still working through how to feel. Compartmentalizing and numbing out is one of the most important tools a combat warrior has. We tend to express our love through actions of militant loyalty, displays of protection, or actions that are not socially connected to actions of love back home. Many times, the ‘angry vet’ stereotype is merely a misrepresentation of Veterans showing our love in the only way we know how.

Accepting love is extremely difficult when you come home from war. I spent so many years refusing to even think about it. Blaming myself for taking part in such a horrible crime. I could not even look in the mirror for years, and it is still hard to sometimes. How could I begin to accept the love of others when I did not love myself? Accepting love is so contrary to everything that kept me alive in the war that I did not even know where to start.

Today, 14 years later, I am trying to work on moving away from looking back at the war as an “either/or” and instead acknowledging the “both/and.” This is the duality of war. It truly was some of the best of times and the worst of times. The deepest love I have ever experienced and the most terrible things I have ever witnessed and taken part in. It is this dualism that defines war. Which is exactly why I went…

Maybe this is just the long way for a marine grunt to say I love you. They didn’t exactly teach us this emotional intelligence hippie shit in boot camp.

There is no room for home in the war…and there is no room for the war back home. This is an ongoing series where I am exploring what it is like to open my heart through radical vulnerability. I would love for you to walk with me in this journey.

I am taking my boots off.