When we returned stateside from one of earlier tours in Iraq, the first thing the command started planning was a large memorial service for the boys we’d lost back in Iraq. That time, we’d lost over thirty, so it was going to be the entire MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit], as well as a lot of the families of the fallen.
I’ve never liked formations, ever. You just stand there while your knees start hurting more, the bugs bite you, and your feet go numb. A few guys always pass out, but I’ve never done it. But this ceremony was a little different. It was going to be big and long, yes, but also appropriate. Every guy there was grieving more than he was thinking about how much he didn’t want to be standing at the position of attention.
About that time we’d started getting newly graduated Marines from SOI [School of Infantry]. Because I guess the platoon commander knew that I wasn’t going to beat them up or haze them (others might), he made me handle all their checking in. Trouble is, it’s like handling a pack of refugees coming off the boat from a foreign country. They may speak the language, but only barely. They’re confused, young, stressed out, and dragging around at least two gigantic sea bags full of crap that the Marines made them buy but they’ll never use.
When we went out to do the memorial service for the guys we’d lost, the new Marines have to come, too. They may not have been there, but they’re still Marines, and they can still honor the guys from their unit that didn’t make it. Because they’re pretty young and stupid, they often get stuck doing dumb things, like setting up displays, arranging chairs, or sometimes as attendants to the bereaved.
Just why somebody would give a bereaved family a Marine escort that had been in the fleet for two weeks is beyond me. Not only do they have no idea where everything is on base, but their “comfort” is virtually useless. They’re just young guys, frequently bezitted teenagers, with no real understanding of the fleet Marine force, combat, or the tragedy of losing a comrade overseas. The reason I can think of that they would give the job to junior Marines is because they’re typically too terrified to screw it up, or use anything other than the best possible manners. Compared to a “senior” Marine, it’s much better. The junior will say yes ma’am and no sir, and the more experienced Marine will just grunt, drink, and probably bitch about something. Our capacity for sympathy is virtually destroyed. For grief, not so. We do grieve, but usually by destroying ourselves – hence the dysfunction of most infantry Marines. But sympathy – take it somewhere else. Maybe that’s why they choose the new Marines.
One of my guys, one of the new Marines, made an absolute fool of himself. During the memorial service, he had been specifically tasked with standing directly behind a bereaved girlfriend and adjusting her chair for her, escorting her to the displays on the field, escorting her back, and offering his assistance as she took a seat back in the chair – which was perched on uneven ground in the grass. Sounds easy enough, and he didn’t have to even speak.
This kid decides to hit on the woman.
But let me elaborate a little further. It’s one thing to be perhaps excessively nice to a girlfriend who’s just lost her boyfriend and supposedly future husband. It’s quite another to hit on her and ask her out when you see her in a bar with her friends. And even worse to do it again when you’re at the memorial ceremony for HER deceased loved one.
Yet there’s more. Though my junior Marine didn’t know it, she, too was a Marine, and unlikely to take any sort of crap from a kid four ranks her junior. And on top of this, the guy that was killed – her boyfriend – was a friend of mine with whom we’d done some special operations training. And there was my guy, by now a battalion-wide embarrassment, hitting on his girlfriend.
She did the right thing. She immediately told the people in charge of the memorial service. What that meant is that the fact my platoon had a retarded junior Marine hitting in the girlfriend of one of our battalion’s war dead went up the food chain a LONG way, and then eventually back over to my battalion command, and then all the way back down to us, and me.
And, of course, the entire battalion knew about it, too. They were going to lynch him, I think, and I really wouldn’t have said much about it. Heck, we’ve already had Marines airlifted from directly in front of our barracks for the beatings they’ve received, so I don’t think anybody would have been particularly surprised. What I did tell the kid, however, was that he should lock himself in his room, and not come out after dark. They’d kill him – especially the boys from the platoon that lost the guy. They already had a reputation for being pretty aggressive anyway.
So the command gets the bright idea that we should get rid of this guy before he causes any more trouble. In addition, he’s totally useless to the battalion now. Nobody would trust him, nobody would be nice to him, and if I had my say in it, I’d have him cleaning trash cans and picking up cigarette butts for his entire 4-year enlistment – as a career private.
They ended up making him pack all his stuff and moving over one regiment to some people that supposedly hadn’t heard of him. But, of course, they had. We made sure of it. That was the sort of thing they needed to know. They weren’t just getting somebody who had a propensity for gross indiscretion; they were getting a true ass of a man that had no place within our ranks. For all our dysfunction, it paled in comparison to this guy’s behavior.
I can’t remember his first name, so I can’t check to see of he’s still in the Corps, but I’m hoping that he’s not. There’s no place for people like him.
When they picked the regiment that they put this guy in, I don’t think they picked very well. The battalion they put him in had only recently returned from Fallujah, and they’d lost a lot of their own guys. In other words, they were pretty bitter about everything, and rightfully so, and then they got a kid that didn’t have any sort of common sense whatsoever. And I could see how deeply rooted it was. I watched him get screamed at up and down the line. And he’d just stand there with a blank look on his face. I don’t even think he understood what he did was wrong. He was just disappointed he didn’t get laid.
Copyright © 2009, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The Flag
Approximately six months ago, congress passed a bill (s. 1877) that probably bore no significance at all to the vast majority of the population, but thrilled a select few. Until July 25th, 2007, veterans of the United States military were encouraged to place their right hands over their chests for the national anthem or a raising of the nation’s flag. But now we are permitted to continue to demonstrate pride in military service and devotion to our country. We can salute, however out of shape, old, or retired we may be. We took an oath that extended well beyond the few short years of our service – an oath that, so long as we draw breath, we salute our flag, honor our country, and, summoning arthritic joints and bent backs into a rigid position of attention, offer continued allegiance to the United States.
____
For some strange reason I don’t quite know
The flag most always makes me cry.
Perhaps it’s men who tossed down arms
To battle-march with old glory high.
Or children perched on parents’ shoulders
Cheer draped fire trucks paraded by.
Or every athlete, every bleacher standing
No one moves or bats an eye.
As the anthem plays and the flag still waves
Against a summer’s twilight sky.
Those stars, those stripes I oft saluted,
As did many millions before I.
On the covered coffins of recent fallen
Carried slow to where they’ll lie.
Or strangers clapping, the welcome home
The tears come quick to my eye.
As I stand straighter and I walk prouder
I suppose I do know why.
Because every time they hoist my flag
And it most always make me cry.
____
In my mind, there is nothing more beautiful than an old man, hunched with age and years of living, standing straight, tall, and proud, tears coursing across his wrinkled cheeks, as he snaps a sharp, perfect salute. He is young again. He is a warrior again. He is a patriot again. And we’re free because of him.
The anthem ends and the salute drops. He picks up his cane and painfully sits back down – suddenly old again. He’s still here, you see, and he remembers his brothers who aren’t.
Copyright © 2009, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
____
For some strange reason I don’t quite know
The flag most always makes me cry.
Perhaps it’s men who tossed down arms
To battle-march with old glory high.
Or children perched on parents’ shoulders
Cheer draped fire trucks paraded by.
Or every athlete, every bleacher standing
No one moves or bats an eye.
As the anthem plays and the flag still waves
Against a summer’s twilight sky.
Those stars, those stripes I oft saluted,
As did many millions before I.
On the covered coffins of recent fallen
Carried slow to where they’ll lie.
Or strangers clapping, the welcome home
The tears come quick to my eye.
As I stand straighter and I walk prouder
I suppose I do know why.
Because every time they hoist my flag
And it most always make me cry.
____
In my mind, there is nothing more beautiful than an old man, hunched with age and years of living, standing straight, tall, and proud, tears coursing across his wrinkled cheeks, as he snaps a sharp, perfect salute. He is young again. He is a warrior again. He is a patriot again. And we’re free because of him.
The anthem ends and the salute drops. He picks up his cane and painfully sits back down – suddenly old again. He’s still here, you see, and he remembers his brothers who aren’t.
Copyright © 2009, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Concerning The Ladies
People have often asked me about the women in Iraq; what they were like, their general demeanor, and their treatment in an extremely lopsided, chauvinistic culture. Truthfully, my dealings with them were extremely limited, though I did hear Iraqi males’ opinions about them on a relatively regular basis.
To most men, they’re objects, either to induce great pity, or great respect at one’s accomplishments. I knew an arrogant little Iraqi NCO that would tell us every day that he had four wives. In part, I think he was bragging, and I think he was also trying to elicit some sympathy that he was burdened with caring for so many women.
But in reality, the women are the backbone of the country. While men do work, they don’t attack it with the same desperate fervor that most women do. Whenever we’d be out on patrols that kept us out until sunrise, the first people we’d routinely see were women. They’d wake at sunrise and begin mixing flour and cooking khubz – Arabic for bread. It was typically a flat bread much like a pita, but thinner, and they cooked it in tanoori ovens. At least that’s what they call them in India.
They’d be out there, kneeling over their small oven, tossing in bits of palm fronts, wood, charcoal, and whatever trash their children scrounged up, and slapping the dough into large, flat pieces. Then they’d toss it against the inside of the oven, cook it until it started to peel back naturally, then pull it out. Perhaps depending on their level of poverty or maybe cereal grain availability, some had better ground wheat flour and some had what tasted like cornmeal. I liked it all, and knew they’d labored hard to make it – well before anybody else had awakened.
While it was frequently children that tended to herds of sheep or goats, it was the girls that attended to the crops. I’d see them out early in the fields, hunched over at the waist, backs bent as they worked primitive hand tools on large plots of earth – and it was arid earth, beneath an oppressive sun. Yet they always wore their black garments from head to toe – with a few rare exceptions. Sometimes, on the hottest of days, they’d roll back their robes to expose extremely colorful layers beneath. Still, they were fully clothed, fully covered, would always cover their faces when they looked up at us.
For the longest time I thought it was fear of us, hatred of us, or maybe just social custom, but the conclusion I’ve recently reached is that, more than anything, it was a fear of what would happen to them if they didn’t cover their faces. Iraqi men are insanely jealous.
Though I don’t recall it happening to me personally, I know a number of women that, after being smiled at or spoken to by a soldier or Marine, would be promptly hit by the male traveling with them. This especially happened to the younger women, particularly when they dared smile back.
But in general, it was the younger women who were most mesmerized by us. Though I don’t claim to know the Islamic or social customs at all, I gather that once a woman married, she must spend the rest of her life covered from head to toe, hiding herself from public view. The only women who wore anything other than outer garments of black were unmarried, and young.
And honestly, they were gorgeous. Light, olive skin, dark eyes, and faces frequently smeared with too much makeup – like foundation and lipstick. I didn’t know they wore makeup at all, but I guess it’s okay when you’re looking for a husband. They’d wear tight skirts that would usually fall to their ankles, brightly-patterned blouses (also form-fitting), and a similarly colorful headscarf – probably more custom than functional. And they were quite pretty, though they did wear too much makeup, and often the patterns of their blouses looked more like drapery material than clothing material. I keep thinking of the VonTrap kids in the movie, “The Sound of Music,” when Julie Andrews sews them all clothes of the garish curtains hanging in the mansion. Awful, but decidedly colorful.
Yet chauvinism is pronounced, and total hypocrisy. For example, it was a well-known fact that brothels existed throughout the country. In fact, one of our fire bases lay directly across from one of them. They would frequently come to that base and attempt to market themselves. One price in the Marines came to their place, and another if the women came onto the base. I don’t know if any took the offers, and if I did I probably wouldn’t say, anyway. It’s not important – at least not for the sake of this particular story.
I got the impression that everybody knew about these brothels, and chose to do nothing about them. Everybody knows everybody else in these small towns, so it’s impossible that they NOT know about it. But every now and then, one would picked out and beaten for her prostitution, or maybe even stoned or killed. Same as in ancient times, the men suffered no punishment. Or if they did, we never found out about it.
A friend of mine was visiting a police station once for some mission or another, and a woman came in to plead for the release of her husband, who was jailed for reasons we never figured out. Well, rather than just send her away, they first threatened to lock her up too because she had a brother that was suspected to be involved in the insurgency. Then they surrounded her, started beating her, and ripping off her clothes. If I had to guess, they were going to rape her. We, by the way, were forbidden to do anything about it – though I think that’s a direct contradiction to the laws of war as laid out in the Geneva Convention. But, the officers were trying to suck up to the Iraqis, not piss them off, so nothing was done. If I was there, I probably would have threatened to shoot somebody – or just gone ahead and shot them.
It was almost a certainty that any girl or young woman that flirted with us would pay dearly for it – either with a beating from her father, her brothers, or any available man. It made no sense. I suppose it could have been because they hated us, but I imagine it’s more likely because they thought their daughters were acting like whores – by smiling at us.
Sometimes they’d get bold, however. We’d be checking cars at vehicle checkpoints and a taxi full of young women on the way to college would drive through, and we’d gawk at them. Usually they’d just smile shyly and look away, but sometimes they would laugh at us. I guess even they knew how pathetic we were.
I never saw a woman driving in Iraq – ever. I’d bet that nobody ever did – at least not anybody that I know.
Women age quickly, in part due to poor diet, childbearing, and the sun on what little of their faces are exposed, but I think it’s because they do most of the work. Men, it seemed, never really worked too hard. The running joke was that the women would do all the work and the men would sit around and dream up new ways to kill us.
Now obviously, a lot of the men worked, too, but never as hard as the women. It was the women doing the hardest manual labor, working the fields, and so on, and the men would be driving somewhere, hanging out, standing there with their hands clasped behind their backs doing nothing, or indeed plotting new ways to blow us up. Women work, men laze around. And the women die young because of it. They go from youthful and attractive to just bent, overweight, and halfway crippled.
The absurdity of it all was that they were treated as possessions, prizes, and slaves, and the men were quite content with it. Some clearly exhibited some care for their wives, but it wasn’t very often.
We had been briefed to never ever show an Iraqi porn, but I was surprised during my third tour, by which time the country was starting to rebuild its infrastructure, that innumerable Iraqi men came up to me and showed me the porn on their cell phones. They were proud of it – and wanted to know if we had any to show them. I did not, but others did.
I knew a couple people that somehow “allowed” porn to get out of their vehicles and get carried off by young kids, who where absolutely mesmerized with what the saw. We’re talking immobilized, rooted to one spot, and silenced. And then an older man would walk up, see what they were doing, and start throwing rocks at them, or beating them. One time I saw an old guy grab the magazine from them, rip it to shreds, and throw it back into the street – yelling at the boys the whole time.
We were doing a mission once where I ended up reinforcing a position on top of a police station, and from up there, I had a clear view into the courtyards of most of the surrounding homes. Out of curiosity, I suppose, a bunch of girls would constantly peek out from behind windows, curtains, trees and doors, and stare at us. If we waved, they’d giggle and run away. Sometimes they’d run in fear, though a few times they didn’t.
There was one girl I’d estimate to be in her early twenties that were absolutely fascinated with us (well, me since I was the only Marine she could see from where she was). She probably felt fairly secure inside her own courtyard looking up at me, and I guessed that her father wasn’t home. She’d come out, I’d wave, and them she’d go running back inside.
But before long, she always came back out. And at one point, she even took off the loose, outer garments she was wearing to reveal a brightly-colored toga-like dress. And she was gorgeous. Though she still wore a head covering, I could tell that her hair was long and wavy, and had the distinct color of burnished copper. It’s a natural hair color over there that I’ve only seen in Iraq and nowhere else. It was probably from hours in the fields with the sun on it – lightening it out. But honestly, since I never saw any women working in the fields with their hair uncovered, maybe it was just that away naturally. I’ve also seen it on a couple of little kids, since they don’t start wearing any sort of head covering until they’re at least eight or so.
Anyway, this girl kept coming out and staring up at me, and actually started to respond to the waves. Then she’d smile, which was pretty neat. I felt sort of predatory, but I wasn’t doing anything wrong. What she did next amazed me. She actually took off her head scarf altogether to reveal long, flowing, copper hair. Nowhere else in the world have I seen a natural color like that. I didn’t tell anybody what I saw, because I didn’t want anybody else to run around talking about it. I knew she’d get in trouble if she was caught. All her younger sisters were inside anyway, occasionally peeking out and then fleeing back inside again.
So I tried something. I took off my helmet, maybe as a gesture of good faith, courtesy, or perhaps to show that I would mimic her trust. I know it was stupid, pulling off my helmet somewhere in the middle of Iraq, but whatever. We’ve all done stupider things. Then I ran my fingers through my hair, mostly to eliminate the “helmet head” that you get from cramming yourself in a hard hat for hours on end. Much to my surprise, she mimicked the gesture – which looked far more alluring on her than it did on me. I really think she was showing off, so I gave her a huge smile and a thumbs up. As far as that culture is concerned, though, what she was doing was borderline pornographic. But, with a single Marine as an audience and the safety of the high walls around her home’s courtyard, I guess she felt secure.
They were curious about us. Maybe because we were the first males to overtly admire their beauty, rather than go find their fathers and offer some goats for their daughters’ hands in marriage. I’m not suggesting we had altogether pure motives, but when we see beauty, we usually acknowledge it – especially Marines – perhaps the boldest (and stupidest) people on the planet.
We kept up this little game for awhile, and she even removed her loose-fitting robe to reveal yet another full layer of clothing – but more form fitting. I simply watched with intent curiosity, interest, and probably ogled. If somebody had attacked right then, I would have missed it.
All of the sudden, a man I presumed to be her dad comes to the courtyard door, fumbles with the latch, and walks in. By the time he had the door open, she was already gone. I never saw her again, save for some furtive peeking from an upstairs window. More than anything else, I’m glad she didn’t get caught. He would have beat her right then and there for exposing herself to an infidel American swine. Maybe dragged her into the street and accused her of shaming her family and her father, and stoned her. In that culture, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
The Iraqi men typically fail to recognize the beauty of the women in their country, and fail to treat them as human beings, souls, and, quite simply, the crown jewels of creation. It’s a pity.
I’ve said before, jokingly, that the best thing we could have done for the country of Iraq is drop them porn leaflets from airplanes, and let nature run its course.
Copyright © 2008, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
To most men, they’re objects, either to induce great pity, or great respect at one’s accomplishments. I knew an arrogant little Iraqi NCO that would tell us every day that he had four wives. In part, I think he was bragging, and I think he was also trying to elicit some sympathy that he was burdened with caring for so many women.
But in reality, the women are the backbone of the country. While men do work, they don’t attack it with the same desperate fervor that most women do. Whenever we’d be out on patrols that kept us out until sunrise, the first people we’d routinely see were women. They’d wake at sunrise and begin mixing flour and cooking khubz – Arabic for bread. It was typically a flat bread much like a pita, but thinner, and they cooked it in tanoori ovens. At least that’s what they call them in India.
They’d be out there, kneeling over their small oven, tossing in bits of palm fronts, wood, charcoal, and whatever trash their children scrounged up, and slapping the dough into large, flat pieces. Then they’d toss it against the inside of the oven, cook it until it started to peel back naturally, then pull it out. Perhaps depending on their level of poverty or maybe cereal grain availability, some had better ground wheat flour and some had what tasted like cornmeal. I liked it all, and knew they’d labored hard to make it – well before anybody else had awakened.
While it was frequently children that tended to herds of sheep or goats, it was the girls that attended to the crops. I’d see them out early in the fields, hunched over at the waist, backs bent as they worked primitive hand tools on large plots of earth – and it was arid earth, beneath an oppressive sun. Yet they always wore their black garments from head to toe – with a few rare exceptions. Sometimes, on the hottest of days, they’d roll back their robes to expose extremely colorful layers beneath. Still, they were fully clothed, fully covered, would always cover their faces when they looked up at us.
For the longest time I thought it was fear of us, hatred of us, or maybe just social custom, but the conclusion I’ve recently reached is that, more than anything, it was a fear of what would happen to them if they didn’t cover their faces. Iraqi men are insanely jealous.
Though I don’t recall it happening to me personally, I know a number of women that, after being smiled at or spoken to by a soldier or Marine, would be promptly hit by the male traveling with them. This especially happened to the younger women, particularly when they dared smile back.
But in general, it was the younger women who were most mesmerized by us. Though I don’t claim to know the Islamic or social customs at all, I gather that once a woman married, she must spend the rest of her life covered from head to toe, hiding herself from public view. The only women who wore anything other than outer garments of black were unmarried, and young.
And honestly, they were gorgeous. Light, olive skin, dark eyes, and faces frequently smeared with too much makeup – like foundation and lipstick. I didn’t know they wore makeup at all, but I guess it’s okay when you’re looking for a husband. They’d wear tight skirts that would usually fall to their ankles, brightly-patterned blouses (also form-fitting), and a similarly colorful headscarf – probably more custom than functional. And they were quite pretty, though they did wear too much makeup, and often the patterns of their blouses looked more like drapery material than clothing material. I keep thinking of the VonTrap kids in the movie, “The Sound of Music,” when Julie Andrews sews them all clothes of the garish curtains hanging in the mansion. Awful, but decidedly colorful.
Yet chauvinism is pronounced, and total hypocrisy. For example, it was a well-known fact that brothels existed throughout the country. In fact, one of our fire bases lay directly across from one of them. They would frequently come to that base and attempt to market themselves. One price in the Marines came to their place, and another if the women came onto the base. I don’t know if any took the offers, and if I did I probably wouldn’t say, anyway. It’s not important – at least not for the sake of this particular story.
I got the impression that everybody knew about these brothels, and chose to do nothing about them. Everybody knows everybody else in these small towns, so it’s impossible that they NOT know about it. But every now and then, one would picked out and beaten for her prostitution, or maybe even stoned or killed. Same as in ancient times, the men suffered no punishment. Or if they did, we never found out about it.
A friend of mine was visiting a police station once for some mission or another, and a woman came in to plead for the release of her husband, who was jailed for reasons we never figured out. Well, rather than just send her away, they first threatened to lock her up too because she had a brother that was suspected to be involved in the insurgency. Then they surrounded her, started beating her, and ripping off her clothes. If I had to guess, they were going to rape her. We, by the way, were forbidden to do anything about it – though I think that’s a direct contradiction to the laws of war as laid out in the Geneva Convention. But, the officers were trying to suck up to the Iraqis, not piss them off, so nothing was done. If I was there, I probably would have threatened to shoot somebody – or just gone ahead and shot them.
It was almost a certainty that any girl or young woman that flirted with us would pay dearly for it – either with a beating from her father, her brothers, or any available man. It made no sense. I suppose it could have been because they hated us, but I imagine it’s more likely because they thought their daughters were acting like whores – by smiling at us.
Sometimes they’d get bold, however. We’d be checking cars at vehicle checkpoints and a taxi full of young women on the way to college would drive through, and we’d gawk at them. Usually they’d just smile shyly and look away, but sometimes they would laugh at us. I guess even they knew how pathetic we were.
I never saw a woman driving in Iraq – ever. I’d bet that nobody ever did – at least not anybody that I know.
Women age quickly, in part due to poor diet, childbearing, and the sun on what little of their faces are exposed, but I think it’s because they do most of the work. Men, it seemed, never really worked too hard. The running joke was that the women would do all the work and the men would sit around and dream up new ways to kill us.
Now obviously, a lot of the men worked, too, but never as hard as the women. It was the women doing the hardest manual labor, working the fields, and so on, and the men would be driving somewhere, hanging out, standing there with their hands clasped behind their backs doing nothing, or indeed plotting new ways to blow us up. Women work, men laze around. And the women die young because of it. They go from youthful and attractive to just bent, overweight, and halfway crippled.
The absurdity of it all was that they were treated as possessions, prizes, and slaves, and the men were quite content with it. Some clearly exhibited some care for their wives, but it wasn’t very often.
We had been briefed to never ever show an Iraqi porn, but I was surprised during my third tour, by which time the country was starting to rebuild its infrastructure, that innumerable Iraqi men came up to me and showed me the porn on their cell phones. They were proud of it – and wanted to know if we had any to show them. I did not, but others did.
I knew a couple people that somehow “allowed” porn to get out of their vehicles and get carried off by young kids, who where absolutely mesmerized with what the saw. We’re talking immobilized, rooted to one spot, and silenced. And then an older man would walk up, see what they were doing, and start throwing rocks at them, or beating them. One time I saw an old guy grab the magazine from them, rip it to shreds, and throw it back into the street – yelling at the boys the whole time.
We were doing a mission once where I ended up reinforcing a position on top of a police station, and from up there, I had a clear view into the courtyards of most of the surrounding homes. Out of curiosity, I suppose, a bunch of girls would constantly peek out from behind windows, curtains, trees and doors, and stare at us. If we waved, they’d giggle and run away. Sometimes they’d run in fear, though a few times they didn’t.
There was one girl I’d estimate to be in her early twenties that were absolutely fascinated with us (well, me since I was the only Marine she could see from where she was). She probably felt fairly secure inside her own courtyard looking up at me, and I guessed that her father wasn’t home. She’d come out, I’d wave, and them she’d go running back inside.
But before long, she always came back out. And at one point, she even took off the loose, outer garments she was wearing to reveal a brightly-colored toga-like dress. And she was gorgeous. Though she still wore a head covering, I could tell that her hair was long and wavy, and had the distinct color of burnished copper. It’s a natural hair color over there that I’ve only seen in Iraq and nowhere else. It was probably from hours in the fields with the sun on it – lightening it out. But honestly, since I never saw any women working in the fields with their hair uncovered, maybe it was just that away naturally. I’ve also seen it on a couple of little kids, since they don’t start wearing any sort of head covering until they’re at least eight or so.
Anyway, this girl kept coming out and staring up at me, and actually started to respond to the waves. Then she’d smile, which was pretty neat. I felt sort of predatory, but I wasn’t doing anything wrong. What she did next amazed me. She actually took off her head scarf altogether to reveal long, flowing, copper hair. Nowhere else in the world have I seen a natural color like that. I didn’t tell anybody what I saw, because I didn’t want anybody else to run around talking about it. I knew she’d get in trouble if she was caught. All her younger sisters were inside anyway, occasionally peeking out and then fleeing back inside again.
So I tried something. I took off my helmet, maybe as a gesture of good faith, courtesy, or perhaps to show that I would mimic her trust. I know it was stupid, pulling off my helmet somewhere in the middle of Iraq, but whatever. We’ve all done stupider things. Then I ran my fingers through my hair, mostly to eliminate the “helmet head” that you get from cramming yourself in a hard hat for hours on end. Much to my surprise, she mimicked the gesture – which looked far more alluring on her than it did on me. I really think she was showing off, so I gave her a huge smile and a thumbs up. As far as that culture is concerned, though, what she was doing was borderline pornographic. But, with a single Marine as an audience and the safety of the high walls around her home’s courtyard, I guess she felt secure.
They were curious about us. Maybe because we were the first males to overtly admire their beauty, rather than go find their fathers and offer some goats for their daughters’ hands in marriage. I’m not suggesting we had altogether pure motives, but when we see beauty, we usually acknowledge it – especially Marines – perhaps the boldest (and stupidest) people on the planet.
We kept up this little game for awhile, and she even removed her loose-fitting robe to reveal yet another full layer of clothing – but more form fitting. I simply watched with intent curiosity, interest, and probably ogled. If somebody had attacked right then, I would have missed it.
All of the sudden, a man I presumed to be her dad comes to the courtyard door, fumbles with the latch, and walks in. By the time he had the door open, she was already gone. I never saw her again, save for some furtive peeking from an upstairs window. More than anything else, I’m glad she didn’t get caught. He would have beat her right then and there for exposing herself to an infidel American swine. Maybe dragged her into the street and accused her of shaming her family and her father, and stoned her. In that culture, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
The Iraqi men typically fail to recognize the beauty of the women in their country, and fail to treat them as human beings, souls, and, quite simply, the crown jewels of creation. It’s a pity.
I’ve said before, jokingly, that the best thing we could have done for the country of Iraq is drop them porn leaflets from airplanes, and let nature run its course.
Copyright © 2008, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
Monday, January 19, 2009
From Bended Knee We Cheer
When Martin Luther King had a dream in his 1963 speech, it was more a vision of racial equality than anything else – a nation where his children would, “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by their character.” And for his era, it was an immensely lofty dream.
Nearly 46 years later, most blacks stated in a recent poll that they felt Dr. King would be pleased with the current situation in this country – namely the election of a black man as President of the United States – arguably the most powerful position in the world. Yet this is not just a victory for blacks. It is a triumph for us as a nation.
In order for racism to properly die, color-based bias must necessarily be omitted from a child’s rearing. Indeed, it clearly has been. Visit nearly any playground in America for an illustration. Children are not innately racist; they are taught it.
Just as much as this is a victory for blacks struggling for racial equality, it is a victorious testament to the improved character of those who have set aside their prejudicial inclinations. It is a victory for whites because they have shunned once-common social norms and racial segregation. Collectively, they have proven for all the world to see that they are more concerned with the leadership and direction of their nation than with the ethnicity, name, or skin color of the man they freely elected to lead it. I, too, think Dr. King would be pleased.
In large part due to his efforts and with the assistance many others, an era of unfair treatment is dying a natural – though belated, death. Tragically short though his life may have been, his words have left an indelible and hard-earned mark in the history of this country. I am personally pleased to witness, years later, the triumphant culmination of his efforts.
Yet there are still innumerable victories unrealized within our borders, and some are perhaps worse than they were in Dr. King’s days.
Free speech is still very much in jeopardy, as one group or another, clamoring to prevent the offense to others, will muffle the speaker. Yet it is our right to offend others, and our right to be offended. As Americans, we take pride in our resolution of differences not through violence, but through compromise, collaboration, due process, the free election of our political representatives, and a healthy dose of thick skin.
Freedom of religion is also threatened in this country, as followers of various faiths are labeled zealots, terrorists, inherently violent, or perhaps simply ignorant. And, having been unfairly demonized, they struggle for justifiable advocacy. In many ways, a new kind of racism has risen from this discrimination. In short, the first amendment to the Constitution has yet to be fully applied.
Additionally, the second amendment is a source of continued, rabid debate, leaving the vast majority of citizens wishing the founding fathers had been more clear with the articulation of their intent, and members of both camps perpetually at each others’ throats.
Undue increases to the power of the executive branch of the federal government have resulted in the legalization of law enforcement agencies acting without warrants, and threatening the right to privacy and due process that every U.S citizen was intended to enjoy. Furthermore, continued, ambiguous interpretations of the eighth article of the Bill of Rights has permitted the construction of foreign prisons that practice questionable interrogation and confinement guidelines.
Similar directives have signaled the death of the Posse Comitatus Act, permitting various political leaders to deploy United States troops domestically without popular, judicial, or congressional consensus – another threat to the belief that the government is intended to advocate the People, not quell them.
Misinterpretations of eminent domain rights in the fifth amendment have paved the way for some localities to evict land owners in pursuit of tenants that provide greater tax revenue – shaking the very foundations of the universal right of land ownership.
Unclear writ in the eleventh and twelfth amendments has caused state governments to carelessly cede some sovereignty to the federal government, and the federal government to voluntarily erode the nation’s collective sovereignty to international organizations, giving rise to the concern that the country cows to pressure rather than stand firm in her convictions.
Lastly, the nation is still at war against various state and non-state aggressors who harbor unfounded hatred towards innocents worldwide. It is questionable if these matters will ever be resolved, yet ignoring them is all the more disastrous. Regardless, in consequence to these conflicts, the nation has lost many of her sons and daughters for the preservation of our safety, and struggled to accept more than one million surviving veterans with varying degrees of disability and discontent, burdening an already-overworked veterans administration. There are many battles still waging, and many more yet to be fought.
Tomorrow, this nation will bid farewell to one president and swear in another, ushering in a new administration, a new ideology, and a new era for this country. Yet even as the cheers for the death of racism still echo, we should fall to our knees and pray this:
That as our recognition of color fades further, our vision sharpens to what history has already revealed and what the future will undoubtedly soon present us. That we will have the wisdom and foresight to carry our country in whatever direction we uniformly deem appropriate, and that we will continually reference the Constitution as the profound and inarguable document it once was and still remains today. And that above all else, we act righteously, as citizens and patriots, and demonstrate love for our fellow man as we carry our nation forward.
God bless the efforts of Dr. King, the leadership of President-Elect Barack Obama, and may God bless this country, which, regardless of the direction it is taken, stands poised to write a critical chapter in global history.
Copyright © 2008, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
Nearly 46 years later, most blacks stated in a recent poll that they felt Dr. King would be pleased with the current situation in this country – namely the election of a black man as President of the United States – arguably the most powerful position in the world. Yet this is not just a victory for blacks. It is a triumph for us as a nation.
In order for racism to properly die, color-based bias must necessarily be omitted from a child’s rearing. Indeed, it clearly has been. Visit nearly any playground in America for an illustration. Children are not innately racist; they are taught it.
Just as much as this is a victory for blacks struggling for racial equality, it is a victorious testament to the improved character of those who have set aside their prejudicial inclinations. It is a victory for whites because they have shunned once-common social norms and racial segregation. Collectively, they have proven for all the world to see that they are more concerned with the leadership and direction of their nation than with the ethnicity, name, or skin color of the man they freely elected to lead it. I, too, think Dr. King would be pleased.
In large part due to his efforts and with the assistance many others, an era of unfair treatment is dying a natural – though belated, death. Tragically short though his life may have been, his words have left an indelible and hard-earned mark in the history of this country. I am personally pleased to witness, years later, the triumphant culmination of his efforts.
Yet there are still innumerable victories unrealized within our borders, and some are perhaps worse than they were in Dr. King’s days.
Free speech is still very much in jeopardy, as one group or another, clamoring to prevent the offense to others, will muffle the speaker. Yet it is our right to offend others, and our right to be offended. As Americans, we take pride in our resolution of differences not through violence, but through compromise, collaboration, due process, the free election of our political representatives, and a healthy dose of thick skin.
Freedom of religion is also threatened in this country, as followers of various faiths are labeled zealots, terrorists, inherently violent, or perhaps simply ignorant. And, having been unfairly demonized, they struggle for justifiable advocacy. In many ways, a new kind of racism has risen from this discrimination. In short, the first amendment to the Constitution has yet to be fully applied.
Additionally, the second amendment is a source of continued, rabid debate, leaving the vast majority of citizens wishing the founding fathers had been more clear with the articulation of their intent, and members of both camps perpetually at each others’ throats.
Undue increases to the power of the executive branch of the federal government have resulted in the legalization of law enforcement agencies acting without warrants, and threatening the right to privacy and due process that every U.S citizen was intended to enjoy. Furthermore, continued, ambiguous interpretations of the eighth article of the Bill of Rights has permitted the construction of foreign prisons that practice questionable interrogation and confinement guidelines.
Similar directives have signaled the death of the Posse Comitatus Act, permitting various political leaders to deploy United States troops domestically without popular, judicial, or congressional consensus – another threat to the belief that the government is intended to advocate the People, not quell them.
Misinterpretations of eminent domain rights in the fifth amendment have paved the way for some localities to evict land owners in pursuit of tenants that provide greater tax revenue – shaking the very foundations of the universal right of land ownership.
Unclear writ in the eleventh and twelfth amendments has caused state governments to carelessly cede some sovereignty to the federal government, and the federal government to voluntarily erode the nation’s collective sovereignty to international organizations, giving rise to the concern that the country cows to pressure rather than stand firm in her convictions.
Lastly, the nation is still at war against various state and non-state aggressors who harbor unfounded hatred towards innocents worldwide. It is questionable if these matters will ever be resolved, yet ignoring them is all the more disastrous. Regardless, in consequence to these conflicts, the nation has lost many of her sons and daughters for the preservation of our safety, and struggled to accept more than one million surviving veterans with varying degrees of disability and discontent, burdening an already-overworked veterans administration. There are many battles still waging, and many more yet to be fought.
Tomorrow, this nation will bid farewell to one president and swear in another, ushering in a new administration, a new ideology, and a new era for this country. Yet even as the cheers for the death of racism still echo, we should fall to our knees and pray this:
That as our recognition of color fades further, our vision sharpens to what history has already revealed and what the future will undoubtedly soon present us. That we will have the wisdom and foresight to carry our country in whatever direction we uniformly deem appropriate, and that we will continually reference the Constitution as the profound and inarguable document it once was and still remains today. And that above all else, we act righteously, as citizens and patriots, and demonstrate love for our fellow man as we carry our nation forward.
God bless the efforts of Dr. King, the leadership of President-Elect Barack Obama, and may God bless this country, which, regardless of the direction it is taken, stands poised to write a critical chapter in global history.
Copyright © 2008, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Andy Gets Exposed
I knew some guys once that were occupying a small fire base at an intersection in the town north of us. They didn’t get attacked very often, but they did get IED’d all the time whenever they went out, so they were on edge.
In the middle of one night, some dumbass fires like two rounds at the base. They didn’t hit anything, but pissed everybody of so badly that they all just started firing back – and anything and nothing. Just unloading every rifle and machine gun they had – into the dark. They even started firing mortars. They had 60s [60mm mortars] on the base, so one guy gets on the gun and just starts throwing rounds down the tube. He’d drop one, it’d fire, he’d make a small adjustment to the sights, then fire another. He went through a LOT of rounds like this, just lobbing them into town, I guess. I know he wasn’t aiming.
His platoon sergeant comes out and scream, “What are you doing?!” at him, and he screams back, “I don’t know!” and keeps dropping rounds down the tube. “Stop doing that!” the platoon sergeant yells at him.
“Okay,” he says, and drops ONE more round, which blasts off to who knows where, and then he walks away. All that for two potshots…
He was good guy, though, and ended up getting hit badly later on in the tour. He was taking a nap in the tent on base, and a mortar round came through and blew up inside the tent. It killed the guy next to him, and peppered his legs and torso with shrapnel. Another guy got burned badly. The one that died was a friend of mine. Actually, all three of those guys were.
Being shot at makes you forget stuff, though. Basic stuff. I remember the first time I was in a firefight, I couldn’t see anybody shooting at me, so I just provided suppressive fire where I THOUGHT they might be. And I forgot to take cover. I just stood there in the open firings. I know we were taking hits, since a lot of the vehicles had ricochets on the turrets, but I never actually SAW any of the shooters.
And then we had to put a casualty in my truck, so I had clear off a seat in the back for him. But it was loaded with gear, food, water, and a HUGE stack of mail. I’d just collected a whole pile from the platoon and I was going to stop by the post office and mail it for them. So when I went to rip everything off the seat and throw it into the road, I ended up heaving mail all over the ground – like dozens of letters.
So there I was, in a firefight, walking around in the middle of the road, and picking up all the mail I’d just thrown onto the ground – like an idiot. Amazingly, I didn’t get shot. In fact, nobody did. They all missed. The only casualty we took was a guy hit by shrapnel from the IED that started off the ambush. He was hit pretty bad, too. Almost lost his arm. As is, he still can’t bend it. The fused it together where his elbow used to be. I think he spent more than two years in Walter Reed trying to get it healed up and rehabilitated enough that he could to home. I never saw him again, but I’ve run into a few guys that says he’s okay, got married and rides a snowmobile a lot. He actually told the doctors to fuse his arm in a position so he could still drive one of those things. He’s a raging alcoholic still, though. But that isn’t new. He was when I first met him. I don’t think I saw him completely sober for months. Maybe almost a year.
Another time, we had just finished interviewing the lady that lived in a house southwest of Ramadi. It was a really quiet community. We’d never actually been to it until that day. They said nothing ever happened down there. No attacks, nothing. “Nobody as ever shot at Americans here,” she said. Well, that’s nice.
So we get outside and start to drive away, and we get shot at, from right behind her house. The heavy guns open up, and I jump out and start maneuvering towards the source of the fire. Eventually we get over there and start pushing through the area on foot and with the trucks. We never found out who it was that shot at us, but we ended up spending the next several hours hunting for a shooter.
We’d drive down some back roads until the disappeared into the trees, then usually get stuck trying to turn around. My driver wasn’t driving too well, at least in my opinion, so I was yelling at him and he was yelling back, and we were always backing up and trying to find a way around to where we were trying to go.
We ended up going down this really narrow alley, which wasn’t too bad, until we got to a rock pile that somebody had dumped into the road. It was too narrow to drive around it, so we sort of just crawled through the rocks on one side, and scraped a long rock wall on the other. The wall hit my door so hard that I had to beat on it just to get it open. But, we got down there, and so did a couple other trucks. A couple miles later, I decide I’m lost, so we do a foot patrol, find nothing at all, and turn around to go back – there was no other way, since we weren’t even on a road that the map showed. My navigation skills completely failed that day.
So we get back to the rock pile, and we have to do the same thing again. My side of the truck is already scraped up from rubbing the wall, and this time, the other side gets scraped, too. Actually, it rips off the exhaust pipe. When we got back through, I had to zip-tie it back together just so it wouldn’t fall off. I think we broke a mirror, too. Strangely, all the other vehicles got through okay, too. Actually, my door was so bad, that I later I had to jack it up with the truck jack and beat on it with a sledge hammer. The Iraqis that watched us probably thought we were nuts. They were probably right.
Anyway, later that day, I started noticing that my driver, a good friend, wasn’t even talking to me. He was ignoring me like he was super pissed. I mean, we always yelled at each other, so I wasn’t sure what set him off. So I asked.
“Well,” he told me, “when you get out of the truck to fire back earlier today, you left the door wide open. If anybody had fired on the truck, it would have gone right inside and hit me. And then the door behind me got left open wide, so I couldn’t even get out if I’d wanted to. I was freakin’ stuck in the truck and you didn’t even bother to close the door behind you. THAT’s why I’m pissed.”
I felt really badly about it for a long time, and always made certain that I shut the door each time I got out. I didn’t want him to get hit an it be completely my fault. That wasn’t something I could live with.
Yeah, people forget their brains when they get shot at. But they give them back when you get out of the Marines.
Copyright © 2008, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
In the middle of one night, some dumbass fires like two rounds at the base. They didn’t hit anything, but pissed everybody of so badly that they all just started firing back – and anything and nothing. Just unloading every rifle and machine gun they had – into the dark. They even started firing mortars. They had 60s [60mm mortars] on the base, so one guy gets on the gun and just starts throwing rounds down the tube. He’d drop one, it’d fire, he’d make a small adjustment to the sights, then fire another. He went through a LOT of rounds like this, just lobbing them into town, I guess. I know he wasn’t aiming.
His platoon sergeant comes out and scream, “What are you doing?!” at him, and he screams back, “I don’t know!” and keeps dropping rounds down the tube. “Stop doing that!” the platoon sergeant yells at him.
“Okay,” he says, and drops ONE more round, which blasts off to who knows where, and then he walks away. All that for two potshots…
He was good guy, though, and ended up getting hit badly later on in the tour. He was taking a nap in the tent on base, and a mortar round came through and blew up inside the tent. It killed the guy next to him, and peppered his legs and torso with shrapnel. Another guy got burned badly. The one that died was a friend of mine. Actually, all three of those guys were.
Being shot at makes you forget stuff, though. Basic stuff. I remember the first time I was in a firefight, I couldn’t see anybody shooting at me, so I just provided suppressive fire where I THOUGHT they might be. And I forgot to take cover. I just stood there in the open firings. I know we were taking hits, since a lot of the vehicles had ricochets on the turrets, but I never actually SAW any of the shooters.
And then we had to put a casualty in my truck, so I had clear off a seat in the back for him. But it was loaded with gear, food, water, and a HUGE stack of mail. I’d just collected a whole pile from the platoon and I was going to stop by the post office and mail it for them. So when I went to rip everything off the seat and throw it into the road, I ended up heaving mail all over the ground – like dozens of letters.
So there I was, in a firefight, walking around in the middle of the road, and picking up all the mail I’d just thrown onto the ground – like an idiot. Amazingly, I didn’t get shot. In fact, nobody did. They all missed. The only casualty we took was a guy hit by shrapnel from the IED that started off the ambush. He was hit pretty bad, too. Almost lost his arm. As is, he still can’t bend it. The fused it together where his elbow used to be. I think he spent more than two years in Walter Reed trying to get it healed up and rehabilitated enough that he could to home. I never saw him again, but I’ve run into a few guys that says he’s okay, got married and rides a snowmobile a lot. He actually told the doctors to fuse his arm in a position so he could still drive one of those things. He’s a raging alcoholic still, though. But that isn’t new. He was when I first met him. I don’t think I saw him completely sober for months. Maybe almost a year.
Another time, we had just finished interviewing the lady that lived in a house southwest of Ramadi. It was a really quiet community. We’d never actually been to it until that day. They said nothing ever happened down there. No attacks, nothing. “Nobody as ever shot at Americans here,” she said. Well, that’s nice.
So we get outside and start to drive away, and we get shot at, from right behind her house. The heavy guns open up, and I jump out and start maneuvering towards the source of the fire. Eventually we get over there and start pushing through the area on foot and with the trucks. We never found out who it was that shot at us, but we ended up spending the next several hours hunting for a shooter.
We’d drive down some back roads until the disappeared into the trees, then usually get stuck trying to turn around. My driver wasn’t driving too well, at least in my opinion, so I was yelling at him and he was yelling back, and we were always backing up and trying to find a way around to where we were trying to go.
We ended up going down this really narrow alley, which wasn’t too bad, until we got to a rock pile that somebody had dumped into the road. It was too narrow to drive around it, so we sort of just crawled through the rocks on one side, and scraped a long rock wall on the other. The wall hit my door so hard that I had to beat on it just to get it open. But, we got down there, and so did a couple other trucks. A couple miles later, I decide I’m lost, so we do a foot patrol, find nothing at all, and turn around to go back – there was no other way, since we weren’t even on a road that the map showed. My navigation skills completely failed that day.
So we get back to the rock pile, and we have to do the same thing again. My side of the truck is already scraped up from rubbing the wall, and this time, the other side gets scraped, too. Actually, it rips off the exhaust pipe. When we got back through, I had to zip-tie it back together just so it wouldn’t fall off. I think we broke a mirror, too. Strangely, all the other vehicles got through okay, too. Actually, my door was so bad, that I later I had to jack it up with the truck jack and beat on it with a sledge hammer. The Iraqis that watched us probably thought we were nuts. They were probably right.
Anyway, later that day, I started noticing that my driver, a good friend, wasn’t even talking to me. He was ignoring me like he was super pissed. I mean, we always yelled at each other, so I wasn’t sure what set him off. So I asked.
“Well,” he told me, “when you get out of the truck to fire back earlier today, you left the door wide open. If anybody had fired on the truck, it would have gone right inside and hit me. And then the door behind me got left open wide, so I couldn’t even get out if I’d wanted to. I was freakin’ stuck in the truck and you didn’t even bother to close the door behind you. THAT’s why I’m pissed.”
I felt really badly about it for a long time, and always made certain that I shut the door each time I got out. I didn’t want him to get hit an it be completely my fault. That wasn’t something I could live with.
Yeah, people forget their brains when they get shot at. But they give them back when you get out of the Marines.
Copyright © 2008, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Laid To Rest
From January, 2008:
I sat down last night to write out a few of the details of how a certain Marine was killed on my base in Al Iskhandariyah (first tour). He was killed as a consequence of what I considered to be gross negligence on the part of one person.
He wasn’t even stationed on our base, but a visitor. And, because somebody failed to give him some basic information, because somebody didn’t do a simple job, this boy died. And I do even not remember his name anymore, which bothers me.
I have long placed the full blame for this on the shoulders of a particular man (a Marine officer – Captain) who was tasked with base maintenance. He had been given a simple task, but failed at it abysmally. Specifically, there were rickety, plywood shower stalls scattered across the base, and they were our sole option for getting showered up. It was summer, miserably hot, and our flesh was sloughing off quickly, so we sought amenities wherever we could find them.
And usually these showers worked. But after at while, like all things wired by either Marines or local electricians, problems developed. In this case, the entire metal plumbing, including the fixtures themselves, became electrified, presumably due to a short in a pump somewhere. There were a few close calls, and I knew of at least one incident when a Marine had to use his towel to snag a friend that was caught, electrified, on the shower faucet. He made it, but it was an alarmingly close call.
I also know that a number of people put in repair requests with the captain in charge of base maintenance – the Camp Commandant. Nothing happened. The requests came from lower guys, Staff Non-Commissioned Officers, and at least one came from a Lieutenant. But not a thing was done.
We had a unit come in late one day. This wasn’t uncommon. They were the operators and crew of a bunch of AAV7-LVTP7s, the big amtracs: amphibious or land vehicles with treads instead of wheels.
They were given some space to park and unwind, and naturally a few wandered off for showers. One was electrocuted that night. Found, stiff with rigor mortis, the next morning.
NOW they rope off the showers. NOW they shut down the area.
After something has happened. They closed down all the outdoor showers on our base, indefinitely. Too late.
This happened in 2004. I have spent the past three and a half years blaming that one captain for his negligence. He was undeniably incompetent. I have been told that he had been relieved of two other commands before being given this third to ruin. And his irresponsibility finally got a man killed.
But last night, while writing all this out, two things happened. First, I cannot even remember this captain’s name. And while I had no intention of writing it down here, I did want to have it in mind, to restore the unbridled anger I directed towards him. I sat up until 4AM trying to remember it.
Second, as I wrote out the whole incident, how people had known about this whole thing and still used the showers, how nobody took any initiative to close things down themselves, it became more and more obvious that I could not blame just this one captain. And that frustrated me, too.
Textbooks say that when dealing with grief, the first stage is denial. Well, I’m far past that. But I have been stuck in the second stage: anger. I’ve always been there. And I blamed one man. It was easy; he was incompetent; and nobody liked him anyway.
But now, more than three years later, I cannot remember his name. I cannot concentrate my anger against him because, as useless as he might have been in his billet (and he was), there are a number of intellectual leaps I have to make to get from fact to farce and blame him entirely for the death of the Marine on our base.
I do know he was a horrible human being, which made blaming him easier, but it isn’t realistic. His negligence may have increased the likelihood of the incident, but he did not cause it.
But what did they tell the Marine’s family? He want away to fight in a war and died instead in a shower stall. Did they give them any details? Would those details have helped anybody anyway? Just make them more angry and slow down the progression of their grief? Is knowledge of the details what prevented me from getting on with things?
He is not the only man I know who was unjustly robbed of life. There are many others. And I am still blaming other people.
I have forgiven this captain of something he didn’t do, but I for which I held him personally responsible for almost four years. In my heart, that Marine, the boy visiting our base, cut down young, has been laid to rest. Directing anger at another will not help his recovery or return him to his family. That time has passed. And in reality, the captain’s name is unimportant. What is important, however, is that there are many more men awaiting burial.
Copyright © 2008, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
I sat down last night to write out a few of the details of how a certain Marine was killed on my base in Al Iskhandariyah (first tour). He was killed as a consequence of what I considered to be gross negligence on the part of one person.
He wasn’t even stationed on our base, but a visitor. And, because somebody failed to give him some basic information, because somebody didn’t do a simple job, this boy died. And I do even not remember his name anymore, which bothers me.
I have long placed the full blame for this on the shoulders of a particular man (a Marine officer – Captain) who was tasked with base maintenance. He had been given a simple task, but failed at it abysmally. Specifically, there were rickety, plywood shower stalls scattered across the base, and they were our sole option for getting showered up. It was summer, miserably hot, and our flesh was sloughing off quickly, so we sought amenities wherever we could find them.
And usually these showers worked. But after at while, like all things wired by either Marines or local electricians, problems developed. In this case, the entire metal plumbing, including the fixtures themselves, became electrified, presumably due to a short in a pump somewhere. There were a few close calls, and I knew of at least one incident when a Marine had to use his towel to snag a friend that was caught, electrified, on the shower faucet. He made it, but it was an alarmingly close call.
I also know that a number of people put in repair requests with the captain in charge of base maintenance – the Camp Commandant. Nothing happened. The requests came from lower guys, Staff Non-Commissioned Officers, and at least one came from a Lieutenant. But not a thing was done.
We had a unit come in late one day. This wasn’t uncommon. They were the operators and crew of a bunch of AAV7-LVTP7s, the big amtracs: amphibious or land vehicles with treads instead of wheels.
They were given some space to park and unwind, and naturally a few wandered off for showers. One was electrocuted that night. Found, stiff with rigor mortis, the next morning.
NOW they rope off the showers. NOW they shut down the area.
After something has happened. They closed down all the outdoor showers on our base, indefinitely. Too late.
This happened in 2004. I have spent the past three and a half years blaming that one captain for his negligence. He was undeniably incompetent. I have been told that he had been relieved of two other commands before being given this third to ruin. And his irresponsibility finally got a man killed.
But last night, while writing all this out, two things happened. First, I cannot even remember this captain’s name. And while I had no intention of writing it down here, I did want to have it in mind, to restore the unbridled anger I directed towards him. I sat up until 4AM trying to remember it.
Second, as I wrote out the whole incident, how people had known about this whole thing and still used the showers, how nobody took any initiative to close things down themselves, it became more and more obvious that I could not blame just this one captain. And that frustrated me, too.
Textbooks say that when dealing with grief, the first stage is denial. Well, I’m far past that. But I have been stuck in the second stage: anger. I’ve always been there. And I blamed one man. It was easy; he was incompetent; and nobody liked him anyway.
But now, more than three years later, I cannot remember his name. I cannot concentrate my anger against him because, as useless as he might have been in his billet (and he was), there are a number of intellectual leaps I have to make to get from fact to farce and blame him entirely for the death of the Marine on our base.
I do know he was a horrible human being, which made blaming him easier, but it isn’t realistic. His negligence may have increased the likelihood of the incident, but he did not cause it.
But what did they tell the Marine’s family? He want away to fight in a war and died instead in a shower stall. Did they give them any details? Would those details have helped anybody anyway? Just make them more angry and slow down the progression of their grief? Is knowledge of the details what prevented me from getting on with things?
He is not the only man I know who was unjustly robbed of life. There are many others. And I am still blaming other people.
I have forgiven this captain of something he didn’t do, but I for which I held him personally responsible for almost four years. In my heart, that Marine, the boy visiting our base, cut down young, has been laid to rest. Directing anger at another will not help his recovery or return him to his family. That time has passed. And in reality, the captain’s name is unimportant. What is important, however, is that there are many more men awaiting burial.
Copyright © 2008, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
Friday, January 16, 2009
Things We Saw, But Nobody Will Ever Believe
These are accounts from several people:
We were doing a VCP [vehicle checkpoint, where all vehicles are searched and allowed to pass] in Mahmudiyah in the middle of the night, and we get a call over the net that there’s a black BMW that’s loaded with dudes, and they’re going to ambush us. They had just turned around and run from another checkpoint somewhere in the city.
So we start looking out for a car like that and before long, we see one coming towards our checkpoint. We run up to it, rifles up, and scream at them to stop and get out. They do, and we search the whole car – nothing at all. Not a thing. And they had the tape deck going. It was the Gun ‘n Roses album “Appetite for Destruction.” We weren’t sure if they were hostile or not, but if they were, it’d be really weird for them to come try to kill Americans listening to our own music. We sent them in for questioning, anyway, because their stories didn’t match up at all. Each one of them said they were going to a different place.
___
We were manning VCPs over Tampa [largest highway in Iraq, running from Kuwait too Baghdad], and we kept getting cars come up to us with strange stickers on their back windows. Like for local politicians somewhere in Missouri, or even Marine Corps stickers. I have no idea where they got them, but they were really proud of them. They’d pose with us for pictures with their thumbs up, grinning happily.
I knew a guy that had a small truck run on his position, and after the guy ignored their orders to stop, they ended up shooting him and stopping his approach. Well, when they searched the truck, they didn’t find anything. But for some reason, he had a Marine Corps sticker on his back window. Sometimes I wonder if they thought we’d let them through if they had USMC stickers on their cars. We didn’t, though. And we never figured it out.
___
When we were patrolling west of Ramadi, we’d frequently drive into this small town near our base in the early morning when everything was still blanketed in a layer of mist. We’d see a white donkey on the roadside all the time. I think he’d escaped and nobody bothered to catch him again. But we’d see him almost every day, just trudging along the side of the road and looking miserable – like donkeys always do, I guess.
Anyway, we started calling him the spirit donkey, because every time we’d drive through in the morning, we’d see him along the side of the road – or IN the road – and he’d always have a little bit of rope dangling from his halter. Wandering around like he was lost. One day we saw him as we rode through, but across one entire side of his body he had “USA” painted in huge, blue letters. I have no idea who did it, but I almost asked the platoon commander to stop so I could take a picture. I still regret not asking him. That would be my favorite shot from Iraq.
___
When I was training Iraqi soldiers, they always spoke fondly of America, mostly California and New York. They’d always ask me where I was from, and since none of them had ever heard of Virginia, I’d draw a map of the country in the dirt, point out California, New York, Florida, and then show them were Virginia was. And they were always disappointed. Then they’d ask me if I liked Michael Jackson. After I got over being incredulous that they DID like him, I would imitate some of Jackson’s early dances and they’d cheer me on. They loved that guy – and his one glove. We searched a lot of cars that had Michael Jackson tapes in the glove compartments. These guys have awful taste in music.
___
I was in a convoy one time and we were riding through a bad neighborhood where we got hit with IEDs all the time. Well, as we were driving, I see about three young men standing on the side of road just watching us like hawks. As we pass, one of them raises his hand in the air with something and shakes it as us.
“Stop the friggin’ convoy,” I screamed into the radio, so we all screech to a halt and a bunch of us go running back down the convoy to those guys and scream at them to get on the ground.
I spoke a fair bit of Arabic at the time, so I started yelling at them. “Show me the cell phone. Where is it?” We assumed they were going to detonate an IED with it.
They all looked me and said they had no phone. Right. We searched them, and they had nothing. And we even checked their car – no phone.
“Where’d you hide it? Where’s the phone?” I imitated the gesture that I saw the guy do. Maybe they’d figure out what I meant if they weren’t understanding the Arabic.
The little kid with them pipes up. “This?” He imitated the hand waving in the air.
“Yes. So where’s the phone, huh?”
This friggin’ kid runs to the car, digs in the glove compartment, and comes running back. He waves his hand in the air – with a Michael Jackson tape in his hand. THRILLER. That was the cell phone. We were about to truss them up and arrest them. Oops.
___
I was on a big mission one time, a cordon and knock [completely surround an area and search every structure within it], and we were reinforcing an ING post [Iraqi National Guard – predecessor to the Iraqi Army]. It was still dark when we got there, and as the sun came up, more ING guys came out of their bunker, relieved the guys on post, and started talking with us.
This huge guy comes out. He looked like a wrestler. Just big and stocky. He soaks his hair with a water bottle, slicks it back, and looks up yelling. “Me crazy!” he tells us. Yeah, that’s for sure.
But then he says, “America good.” Yes it is.
“America good. Michael Jackson bad. He viki-viki little boys.” Viki-viki isn’t something I need to define. You can figure it out. I guess at least one guy in Iraq doesn’t like Michael Jackson.
___
Whenever we found weapons caches buried in people’s yards, or search bodies of insurgents, we frequently found LBVs [load bearing vests – with magazine pouches for ammo]. While some of them were old Iraqi army shit or even Russian stuff, a LOT of them were Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger. I know they weren’t actually made by those companies, but who the hell decided to put that logo on it? And, where were they made? We never figured it out.
___
For whatever reason, literally half the cars in Iraq are white Opals, and nearly all of the other half are small, blue “Bongo” trucks – with rear tires smaller than the front. They were all pieces of crap, but I don’t know where they were made. Some of our guys thought they were great trucks.
Almost every day, we’d be out on a mission and they’d call over the net that we should be on the lookout for a white opal or a blue bongo truck loaded with insurgents and guns. What are we supposed to do? Stop and search everything? We didn’t have the time. After awhile, we just started ignoring the alert. If they shot at us, we’d shoot back. Simple. But when they blew up, it was a different story. Only a few did, though. White Opals every time. Well, one guy I know got hit by an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme – one of like the four in Iraq.
___
During the initial invasion, the Iraqis were all terrified of Marines. They knew that the heavy gun teams had trucks loaded with huge machine guns and missiles. They called us “little trucks with the big guns.” Or, because we always roll up our sleeves and you can see the much lighter interior fabric, they’d call us “men with the white sleeves.”
But they also thought we were nuts. Some of them were so convinced we were lunatics, that they started telling the other Iraqis that in order to be Marines, we had to eat our parents, or babies, or kill off entire your family – depends on who you ask. No shit. They actually told people this. We found this out when they started doing the interrogations.
___
Another rumor that went around about Marines in the first year of the war was that our sunglasses were magic. If we wore them, we had x-ray vision. We would see through their wives’ clothing. Seriously. When we found out, we started taking off our sunglasses whenever we talked to them so they’d calm down a little bit. They were firmly convinced we were staring at their wives.
___
We patrolled one town all the time where there was a retarded boy that would stand on the shoulder and wave to us every time he saw us. He’d stomp his feet and clap his hands and cheer. We felt sorry for him, so we always greeted him right back, which was pretty neat.
But then, we’d drive across town, and he’d be there again somehow. Miles away, within minutes. We knew he didn’t drive, so we had no idea how he did it. We started calling him the Amazing Teleporting Retard. It sounds insulting, but we were pretty impressed with his special skills, no pun intended. The town we were in had NO insurgent activity at all. So we started thinking it was the Teleporting Retard that kept them away. Whatever.
___
We were doing LPOPs one night [listening post/observation post] and what we’d typically do is patrol for awhile, then knock on some random peoples’ door and tell them we were going to sleep on their roof and watch observe the area when the sun got up – and hopefully nobody would know we where there. We did this all the time, and we were always really nice to the people, so it usually went okay.
Well, one time, we knocked on a door and some guy answers. He has a HUGE head like a basketball – it was freaky. And behind him, he had a bunch of kids with pinheads. And they no power in there so we just saw it with flashlights, which made it even more disturbing. We’re talking like horror movie stuff – the movie “Freaks.” It looked like a circus. My buddy turns to me. “Man, we can’t stay here. These people are scary.” We all stumbled out of there and never, ever searched it again, even though it was in an area that was known to be full of insurgents. It was one of the most horrifying things I saw.
Actually, not exactly. There was one time we were patrolling and suddenly I see a man GALLOPING at us like a dog – he had stumps for legs and arms. I was like, “Holy shit; it’s Wolf Man!” I started to raise my gun. Then he just gallops up to me on his stumps, sits back, and says, “hello mista.’” It freaked me out.
When we were leaving out of Iraq on my first tour, we had to drive in a huge convoy from the center of Iraq all the way south into Kuwait. It was usually a two or three day drive. We were almost into Kuwait, and we pulled off the highway onto an overpass to head to a base, and I looked back onto the highway below us. There, with each letter larger than a car, I saw the following message:
“America, Fuck Yeah.”
It was a great thing to see as we put Iraq behind us. I flew over it at least four more times, but I never saw it again. I’ll bet somebody made people go out there with cleaners and brushes and scrub it off. And probably not the guys who did it. I wish it was still there.
Copyright © 2009, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
We were doing a VCP [vehicle checkpoint, where all vehicles are searched and allowed to pass] in Mahmudiyah in the middle of the night, and we get a call over the net that there’s a black BMW that’s loaded with dudes, and they’re going to ambush us. They had just turned around and run from another checkpoint somewhere in the city.
So we start looking out for a car like that and before long, we see one coming towards our checkpoint. We run up to it, rifles up, and scream at them to stop and get out. They do, and we search the whole car – nothing at all. Not a thing. And they had the tape deck going. It was the Gun ‘n Roses album “Appetite for Destruction.” We weren’t sure if they were hostile or not, but if they were, it’d be really weird for them to come try to kill Americans listening to our own music. We sent them in for questioning, anyway, because their stories didn’t match up at all. Each one of them said they were going to a different place.
___
We were manning VCPs over Tampa [largest highway in Iraq, running from Kuwait too Baghdad], and we kept getting cars come up to us with strange stickers on their back windows. Like for local politicians somewhere in Missouri, or even Marine Corps stickers. I have no idea where they got them, but they were really proud of them. They’d pose with us for pictures with their thumbs up, grinning happily.
I knew a guy that had a small truck run on his position, and after the guy ignored their orders to stop, they ended up shooting him and stopping his approach. Well, when they searched the truck, they didn’t find anything. But for some reason, he had a Marine Corps sticker on his back window. Sometimes I wonder if they thought we’d let them through if they had USMC stickers on their cars. We didn’t, though. And we never figured it out.
___
When we were patrolling west of Ramadi, we’d frequently drive into this small town near our base in the early morning when everything was still blanketed in a layer of mist. We’d see a white donkey on the roadside all the time. I think he’d escaped and nobody bothered to catch him again. But we’d see him almost every day, just trudging along the side of the road and looking miserable – like donkeys always do, I guess.
Anyway, we started calling him the spirit donkey, because every time we’d drive through in the morning, we’d see him along the side of the road – or IN the road – and he’d always have a little bit of rope dangling from his halter. Wandering around like he was lost. One day we saw him as we rode through, but across one entire side of his body he had “USA” painted in huge, blue letters. I have no idea who did it, but I almost asked the platoon commander to stop so I could take a picture. I still regret not asking him. That would be my favorite shot from Iraq.
___
When I was training Iraqi soldiers, they always spoke fondly of America, mostly California and New York. They’d always ask me where I was from, and since none of them had ever heard of Virginia, I’d draw a map of the country in the dirt, point out California, New York, Florida, and then show them were Virginia was. And they were always disappointed. Then they’d ask me if I liked Michael Jackson. After I got over being incredulous that they DID like him, I would imitate some of Jackson’s early dances and they’d cheer me on. They loved that guy – and his one glove. We searched a lot of cars that had Michael Jackson tapes in the glove compartments. These guys have awful taste in music.
___
I was in a convoy one time and we were riding through a bad neighborhood where we got hit with IEDs all the time. Well, as we were driving, I see about three young men standing on the side of road just watching us like hawks. As we pass, one of them raises his hand in the air with something and shakes it as us.
“Stop the friggin’ convoy,” I screamed into the radio, so we all screech to a halt and a bunch of us go running back down the convoy to those guys and scream at them to get on the ground.
I spoke a fair bit of Arabic at the time, so I started yelling at them. “Show me the cell phone. Where is it?” We assumed they were going to detonate an IED with it.
They all looked me and said they had no phone. Right. We searched them, and they had nothing. And we even checked their car – no phone.
“Where’d you hide it? Where’s the phone?” I imitated the gesture that I saw the guy do. Maybe they’d figure out what I meant if they weren’t understanding the Arabic.
The little kid with them pipes up. “This?” He imitated the hand waving in the air.
“Yes. So where’s the phone, huh?”
This friggin’ kid runs to the car, digs in the glove compartment, and comes running back. He waves his hand in the air – with a Michael Jackson tape in his hand. THRILLER. That was the cell phone. We were about to truss them up and arrest them. Oops.
___
I was on a big mission one time, a cordon and knock [completely surround an area and search every structure within it], and we were reinforcing an ING post [Iraqi National Guard – predecessor to the Iraqi Army]. It was still dark when we got there, and as the sun came up, more ING guys came out of their bunker, relieved the guys on post, and started talking with us.
This huge guy comes out. He looked like a wrestler. Just big and stocky. He soaks his hair with a water bottle, slicks it back, and looks up yelling. “Me crazy!” he tells us. Yeah, that’s for sure.
But then he says, “America good.” Yes it is.
“America good. Michael Jackson bad. He viki-viki little boys.” Viki-viki isn’t something I need to define. You can figure it out. I guess at least one guy in Iraq doesn’t like Michael Jackson.
___
Whenever we found weapons caches buried in people’s yards, or search bodies of insurgents, we frequently found LBVs [load bearing vests – with magazine pouches for ammo]. While some of them were old Iraqi army shit or even Russian stuff, a LOT of them were Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger. I know they weren’t actually made by those companies, but who the hell decided to put that logo on it? And, where were they made? We never figured it out.
___
For whatever reason, literally half the cars in Iraq are white Opals, and nearly all of the other half are small, blue “Bongo” trucks – with rear tires smaller than the front. They were all pieces of crap, but I don’t know where they were made. Some of our guys thought they were great trucks.
Almost every day, we’d be out on a mission and they’d call over the net that we should be on the lookout for a white opal or a blue bongo truck loaded with insurgents and guns. What are we supposed to do? Stop and search everything? We didn’t have the time. After awhile, we just started ignoring the alert. If they shot at us, we’d shoot back. Simple. But when they blew up, it was a different story. Only a few did, though. White Opals every time. Well, one guy I know got hit by an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme – one of like the four in Iraq.
___
During the initial invasion, the Iraqis were all terrified of Marines. They knew that the heavy gun teams had trucks loaded with huge machine guns and missiles. They called us “little trucks with the big guns.” Or, because we always roll up our sleeves and you can see the much lighter interior fabric, they’d call us “men with the white sleeves.”
But they also thought we were nuts. Some of them were so convinced we were lunatics, that they started telling the other Iraqis that in order to be Marines, we had to eat our parents, or babies, or kill off entire your family – depends on who you ask. No shit. They actually told people this. We found this out when they started doing the interrogations.
___
Another rumor that went around about Marines in the first year of the war was that our sunglasses were magic. If we wore them, we had x-ray vision. We would see through their wives’ clothing. Seriously. When we found out, we started taking off our sunglasses whenever we talked to them so they’d calm down a little bit. They were firmly convinced we were staring at their wives.
___
We patrolled one town all the time where there was a retarded boy that would stand on the shoulder and wave to us every time he saw us. He’d stomp his feet and clap his hands and cheer. We felt sorry for him, so we always greeted him right back, which was pretty neat.
But then, we’d drive across town, and he’d be there again somehow. Miles away, within minutes. We knew he didn’t drive, so we had no idea how he did it. We started calling him the Amazing Teleporting Retard. It sounds insulting, but we were pretty impressed with his special skills, no pun intended. The town we were in had NO insurgent activity at all. So we started thinking it was the Teleporting Retard that kept them away. Whatever.
___
We were doing LPOPs one night [listening post/observation post] and what we’d typically do is patrol for awhile, then knock on some random peoples’ door and tell them we were going to sleep on their roof and watch observe the area when the sun got up – and hopefully nobody would know we where there. We did this all the time, and we were always really nice to the people, so it usually went okay.
Well, one time, we knocked on a door and some guy answers. He has a HUGE head like a basketball – it was freaky. And behind him, he had a bunch of kids with pinheads. And they no power in there so we just saw it with flashlights, which made it even more disturbing. We’re talking like horror movie stuff – the movie “Freaks.” It looked like a circus. My buddy turns to me. “Man, we can’t stay here. These people are scary.” We all stumbled out of there and never, ever searched it again, even though it was in an area that was known to be full of insurgents. It was one of the most horrifying things I saw.
Actually, not exactly. There was one time we were patrolling and suddenly I see a man GALLOPING at us like a dog – he had stumps for legs and arms. I was like, “Holy shit; it’s Wolf Man!” I started to raise my gun. Then he just gallops up to me on his stumps, sits back, and says, “hello mista.’” It freaked me out.
When we were leaving out of Iraq on my first tour, we had to drive in a huge convoy from the center of Iraq all the way south into Kuwait. It was usually a two or three day drive. We were almost into Kuwait, and we pulled off the highway onto an overpass to head to a base, and I looked back onto the highway below us. There, with each letter larger than a car, I saw the following message:
“America, Fuck Yeah.”
It was a great thing to see as we put Iraq behind us. I flew over it at least four more times, but I never saw it again. I’ll bet somebody made people go out there with cleaners and brushes and scrub it off. And probably not the guys who did it. I wish it was still there.
Copyright © 2009, Ben Shaw
All Rights Reserved
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