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What war is like: one version
May 13, 2011
Growing up, I always wanted to know what it was like to be in a war, as did many of my friends. For starters, we idolized anyone who had served in the military and even more, anyone who had been to war, because this seemed to us the most exclusive club: there seemed so many who were curious but so few who really knew, or who had the credibility to tell.
To satisfy our curiosity, we’d turn to what was available: movies and books. Movies about war were constantly on TV. They were mostly about World War II, because Vietnam had just ended and the long hangover only just begun. On cold mornings before class we’d huddle in the school library and turn the pages of Life Magazine photo books, oohing at the coolest or grittiest images of soldiers at war. For lack of any tactile experience of war – or life – we formed our own opinions based on pictures we saw or stories we heard.
For one, I thought the Army in Europe had it the toughest, because not only did it seem like constant fighting – when do you sleep? – but it seemed like they were always outdoors in the cold. Images of the Battle of the Bulge, with soldiers walking knee-deep through snow made me wonder how anyone could function in such an environment, especially when someone else out there was hunting you.
When I got older, I realized that no matter how many war movies I watched or stories I read or heard, I would never understand war as intimately as the storytelling veterans, nor would I be able to verify what was hooey and what was legitimate and useful. I knew I wanted my own answer, and this youthful curiosity drove me to enlist, as much as anything else.
Of course, I remained a soldier because I found I loved the culture of the military: the lifestyle, travel, adventure and benefits, and because after twenty years, recognized that I had joined the ranks of those veterans I had once looked up to for information about what war is “really like.” One could say that after participating in three separate combat deployments that covered two wars, I have my own answer to this question.
So, I’ll attempt to share that. It’s not easy to approach because all wars are different. Even so, they all share a basic similarity: they consist of men, mostly, aiming to kill other men for god or country while bystanders are hurt and property is destroyed. This much hasn’t changed for a few thousand years, if you start with The Iliad, the Greek classic about the Trojan War.
But that’s too general for most people. What I think people want to know – what I wanted to know – are the details: quirky tales and personal recollections from the men (and women) who stood in storm’s center of battlegrounds and have things to tell us which confirm or deny what we already believe to be true about this strange, exclusive adventure. Because most of us never will, for reasons as varied as inclination or timing, experience it for ourselves.
So, after some thought, here’s what I learned that war is not: it is not a state of existence, like being under the influence of a drug, although in some peculiar and temporary ways it can be. It isn’t a haze, or a dream, or an alternate reality where time-honored rules, laws of physics or ethics no longer apply.
What war is, I learned, was a series of days. Some good, some bad, some tedious. All of them occurring in an area where the potential for each existed, but on a more heightened scale than a typical day in, say, modern Kansas City. All of this due, of course, to the proximity of opposing forces and their willful use of destructive means upon each other.
Local day to day life, however, still goes on. During my first tour in Iraq in 2004-5, I watched Iraqis drive down the same highways and roads as the U.S. Army, in the same categories as you’d find on American highways – commuters, trucks, buses, taxis, families. Their lives were delayed whenever an IED was detonated or discovered on the road they were traveling, or interrupted whenever the Army conducted a clearance operation in their neighborhood, street or home. But they returned to their business immediately afterwards, and went on their way, driving down the road or walking along the city sidewalks, shopping for tomatoes or freshly-slaughtered chicken or lamb meat or tanks of propane for cooking.
After periods of somewhat prolonged quiet, we’d watch children suited up in uniforms that made them look like Catholic school students in America, wearing little book backpacks on their shoulders, and walking down these same occasionally deadly streets every early morning and afternoon. Women continued to get pregnant and have babies, and people still got sick, and they all needed access to the city hospital, which continued to operate.
Good days were when something unexpectedly pleasant happened, usually in conjunction with something that would be considered bad, like the late afternoon I found myself stopped on Route Tampa, the main highway that paralleled the Tigris and connected Iraqi cities from Baghdad to Mosul. I was stopped, as was my entire patrol of six vehicles along with several dozen Iraqi civilian vehicles, by a U.S. Army engineer unit that had discovered an IED a few hundred meters down the road, and who were working to reduce the risk and detonate the device in place.
It’s always a happy moment when a responsible party finds something dangerous before you stumble upon it, but there was more. It had been a long, hot day of running around, finding parts, loading them on vehicles and worrying about this or that. All of a sudden, I forgot about all of this. I watched the Army engineer pulling security on the road, manning a Mark-19 grenade launcher from a makeshift steel box sitting on the bed of a cargo Humvee. His morale seemed high and he was alert and focused on the singular task of keeping us all safe. Clearly, he was proud of the fact that his unit had discovered an IED and that he was protecting the rest of us. But it got better.
The day, like I said, had been hot, but as we waited, it cooled and the sun began to set. Blue sky gave way to pinks and reds and everything grew quiet. I relaxed and wondered if the sunset looked like this every night, and wondered again why I didn’t try to watch it more often. The soldiers in my patrol relaxed and stood around outside their vehicles, sharing smokes and stories.
I walked the line of vehicles to check on them all, and behind us, among the few dozen civilian cars also waiting, was a young Iraqi couple holding a baby. I don’t know if they smiled first, but when I saw their baby, I realized it had been months since I’d seen my kids, and I couldn’t help but quietly rejoice at the sight. With another soldier, I walked up to them, smiled and said hello, and asked them, in English, what their baby’s name was. The man said, “Abbas,” and after some basic chit-chat in English and Arabic, he offered to let me hold little Abbas. I did.
We stood there, admiring the sunset and their baby and agreeing that this war was a huge inconvenience for all of us, until the BOOM several hundred meters down the road indicated that the engineers had completed their task and we were now free to continue. I knew I wouldn’t trade phone numbers or make plans to meet this couple for dinner later, but for a short time, we were able to relax and share things that all people have in common: a love for our children, and for calm and beautiful surroundings.
Bad days were days when someone was hurt or killed. Nothing could be done to change the circumstances, but sometimes a misunderstanding or the mistrust that resulted from these sorts of days were as harmful as the specific act itself, as if an enemy attack could plant a cancer inside a unit’s confidence and metastasize.
A bad day could result in changes to procedure, relief of leadership, a breakdown in alliances between U.S. forces and the local Iraqi government, or feuding between a unit and its higher headquarters, or between soldiers nearest the event.
These days didn’t happen as often as many believe, but when they did, they lingered, usually until the next bad day forced a change in the unit’s focus. Bad feelings could go away quickly if the incentive was there, such as when the grieving or feuding party realized they still needed the other. This sort of conditional bad feeling was as much a product of human nature as the war itself: people tend to form alliances and draw lines, even on the friendly side of the wire.
But most days were in between. Some bad days were really other people’s bad days, and some good days didn’t feel as good as they should. On one particularly successful day in Samarra, the Iraqi commandos I worked with found a house basement full of mortar and artillery rounds and other weaponry that filled an entire courtyard for an after-action photograph.
It was a huge find, and it surely made a dent in some group’s ability to ambush U.S. and Iraqi forces in and around Samarra. But I knew, and the commandos knew, that we were far from calling this a win, and that tomorrow, the same people we took from were going to try to take from us, by following our movements and waiting for us to drive by a planned ambush. Almost needless to say, enemy attacks did increase in the weeks following.
Some days were just tedious. These might have been bad days because they seemed wasted, but they were good because they were safe. They were days spent doing routine, administrative or logistical tasks on forward operating bases that had to be done but weren’t the kind of things that generate war stories: ordering parts, fixing vehicles, planning operations or coordinating resources for this or that.
Soldiers found ways of coping with the tedium. Regular breaks were one – getting on the internet to email or call home, smoking, snacking or making mealtimes last a bit longer. Hobbies were another, such as working out or playing Halo on Xbox or watching movies or playing cards. But all of these things would remind you of home, and since you had the time to do these things, it made you wonder why you were sitting on a FOB in a combat environment doing the same things you did back at your peacetime duty station.
In many cases, this tedium could lead soldiers to seek excitement, in the form of a combat mission on the road or in a city, if this was not the sort of thing they ordinarily performed. For those who had no choice but to conduct daily combat missions, there was a certain tedium to this as well: not every day on patrol in a dangerous city is a good or bad day, either.
Tedium led me to volunteer the Iraqi commandos and my three-vehicle, ten-man element to conduct security patrols around the city whenever a shortage of human intelligence meant no targeted raids on a given day. This wasn’t required, but it could be useful and it felt more proactive than sitting around behind a barrier while other folks took care of daily security tasks.
Most everyone had mixed feelings about this activity, since it involved leaving an area we controlled and driving around quite visibly in an area we did not. But we were all soldiers, and this is why we had signed up: action. Leaving the safe area for the dangerous area was where things got interesting, and everyone maintained a certain optimism or hope for either finding something or drawing fire so it could be returned with greater force and emphasis.
In many ways, this was gambling, and the longer we did it, the better we got. Our odds were clearly better than average, since having a good day or a tedious day were both wins. Only a bad day was a loss, and we learned how to hedge our bets through observation and historical analysis, or just by remembering where the worst places were and avoiding them at vulnerable times, such as hours of darkness or when the streets were free of civilians.
As crazy as this might sound, sometimes when it had been quiet for days, we would go to the worst area we knew and just park in the open, trusting that our eyes, our armor and the poor aim of our enemy would neutralize their advantage of surprise if gunshots or rocket propelled grenades were fired our way. This also, we hoped, would send a message to both the bad guys lurking in the area and the non-combatants caught between us that we were still here, and we were not afraid.
The best day? I still remember the day we were finally relieved by our follow-on unit – an armor battalion from Fort Stewart, Georgia – of the responsibility for control of Samarra. It was February 10, 2005. It felt like the last day of a very long freshman year. Summer – and home – was just around the corner. And I think everyone can understand thatsubmitted by Major Adam Wojack on May 13 2011
Comments
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Adam Wojack
May 16, 2011 9:32 AMThanks for the positive feedback. Glad you enjoyed my story. More to come, or at Notes From a Duffel Bag on facebook. Thanks for reading.
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Drew
May 18, 2011 8:23 PMI really was intreged by this post this made me a little more positive on the ARMY. It was well told it was a good thing to hear from a person that has experinced battles and hardtimes in Iraq. Again Very Great post!!
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Adam Wojack
May 21, 2011 3:06 PMDrew, thanks for your comments. It's always nice to hear when someone gets something positive out of my posts, and I think it shrinks the "storytelling gap" between those in the military and those who are observing us from a different point of view. Thanks again for the feedback.
Adam Wojack
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Tyler Munch
May 22, 2011 12:25 AMThank you for this. It really opens my mind on the army. I'm a freshman and I'm signing up for infantry when I'm 18 and I can't wait. I've heard stories but this is by far the best one. I still can't imagine what it is like to see war but this gives me a good idea. Once again thank you for this and for serving our country. Tyler Munch.
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Adam Wojack
May 22, 2011 6:51 AMTyler, I'm happy this story spoke to you, and feel proud that it increases your motivation to serve in my profession! Best of luck to you in the future. You can read more on my blog--Notes From a Duffel Bag. Take care.
Adam Wojack
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Patty Piña
Jun 20, 2011 10:17 PMDear Mr. Wojack, Thank you so much for this great article. When it comes to writing about war etc...it's better to have first hand accounts. I've read articles about war and sometimes it's not too clear. I've come to realize that our service members often suffer the most. If it weren't for them standing up to defend us then we'd be defenseless. So thank you to all the men and woman who serve our country.
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Adam Wojack
Jun 21, 2011 8:52 AMPatty, thanks for your very nice comments and for taking the time not only to read, but to understand. I think I speak for all service members when I say that the very best feedback we get is appreciation from citizens like yourself. Take care.
Adam Wojack
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Pierre Poteau
Jun 28, 2011 12:39 PMMAJ Wojack, I was so glad to read your article, especially when you mentioned the little baby "ABBAS" you held. I remember those days and I was there with you holding the baby as well. Those are really great souvenir. I am not sure if you are still in the Military, but I went from Enlisted to Officer right after we redeployed to Germany in 2005. That was a great article, God bless you and keep up the great work. Thanks!
CPT Poteau
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Adam Wojack
Jun 28, 2011 1:38 PMCPT Poteau, we meet again! Great to hear from another old Falcon soldier after all these years. Congratulations on going the O-route and making it to captain. I'm sure you're enjoying the new challenge. I'm still on active duty, and in Heidelberg, Germany. I switched over to Public Affairs last year after CGSC, and I'm enjoying the change. I continue to write, and of course, my favorite material still is that year we spent in Samarra. Find me on facebook. Talk to you later.
MAJ Adam Wojack
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Michael Strain
Jul 6, 2011 1:48 PMMAJ Wojack, I really appreciate the article. It gives great insight on both the good and the bad. I'm very grateful that you shared your memories, and tried to help us civilians understand what war is really like. I'm extremely interested in the army, and plan to enlist very soon. Thank you very much for your service. Hooah!
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Adam Wojack
Jul 8, 2011 5:03 AMMichael, I'm glad you enjoyed the article and that is was useful to you. The Army is definitely a calling, as old a profession as any there is, and I'm always proud to hear when young people enlist for this reason - it's like the torch is being passed from old-timers like me to the next generation. I hope you find your service as rewarding and inspiring as I have found mine. Best of luck!
MAJ Adam Wojack
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Phillip
Oct 19, 2011 10:46 PMAdam,
You are the worst officer I ever had to serve under. How does it feel to be a chairborne ranger that no one in the infantry wants? Also your story is complete crap!
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Adam Wojack
Oct 20, 2011 12:22 AMPhillip, thanks for reading my story and taking the time to reply. Unfortunately, vague personal attacks are not very useful. If you have a grievance you'd like to address with me, feel free to contact me at adam.wojack@us.army.mil. Have a nice day.
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adam
May 14, 2011 6:13 PM