We Don't Deserve Them
"Give me, oh God, what no one else asks for;
I ask not for wealth, or for success or health;
People ask you so often for all that,
That you cannot have any left.
Give me what people refuse to accept from you.
"I want insecurity and disquietude,
I want turmoil and the brawl.
If you should give them to me,
Let me be sure to have them always,
For I will not always have the courage to ask for them.
"May God be with you, my fine young Marines,
As you head out once again
Into the heat of the Iraqi sun,
Into the still of the dark night,
To close with the enemy.
"Beside you, I'd do it all again. Semper Fidelis."
I ask not for wealth, or for success or health;
People ask you so often for all that,
That you cannot have any left.
Give me what people refuse to accept from you.
"I want insecurity and disquietude,
I want turmoil and the brawl.
If you should give them to me,
Let me be sure to have them always,
For I will not always have the courage to ask for them.
"May God be with you, my fine young Marines,
As you head out once again
Into the heat of the Iraqi sun,
Into the still of the dark night,
To close with the enemy.
"Beside you, I'd do it all again. Semper Fidelis."
--Lt. Andre Zirnheld, USMC
This past weekend, I finished reading NO TRUE GLORY, a Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, by Bing West. It details, from the highest corridors of Washington, D.C. to the raw-sewage soaked dusty streets and bloody back alleys of Fallujah, from ranking generals and presidents to lowly corporals and privates--the fiasco that was Fallujah--from the time four American contractors (three of whom were military veterans) were mutilated, burned, and hanged from a bridge in April of '04, to the aborted battle to take the city, to the months after the fiercely brave Marines were prematurely pulled out and where Abu Mussab al Zarkawi turned the city into a nest of jihadists, insurgents, bombers, kidnappers, torturers, terrorists, and killers, to November of 04, when Marines and soldiers of uncommon valor cleaned up the snake's nest and secured the city for Iraq's first democratic vote in January of '05.
My son was among the number.
The author, a former Marine and Vietnam combat veteran, made six trips to Fallujah and interviewed dozens of Marines, where he sat down with generals and humped it with corporals and privates. He laid out the final, historical battle sector by sector and described the bone-jarring deafening cacophonous roar of combat and the screaming silence of bloody death. So good are his descriptions, in fact, that the rights to the story have already sold to Universal Pictures.
This war is different than any other before it. Thanks to digital technology, the field of battle is no longer the private purgatory that burns with the fires of hell in a man's--in fact, these days, woman's too--tortured thoughts. Embedded journalists no longer have to send film by helicopter and plane to their home papers or networks, where they can be carefully censored before airing or publication several days or weeks later. Nor do they have to do as they did during the Gulf War, which is place themselves near a satellite dish for their broadcasts, which, needless to say, are not always handy to the battlefield.
Nowadays, they take digital photographs, then sit down at the first opportunity with their laptop computers and e-mail the photographs or video straight to their Internet websites.
Through a fluke, really, I managed to learn the names of several embedded journalists with my son's unit during the weeks of November of '04. Two or three times a day, I would go to gettyimages.com, call up my son's unit and company, and look at hundreds of color photographs taken, sometimes, only an hour or two before. (We thought we saw our son many times but it was everybody's sons.) My husband and I were seeing much the same things our son was, minus the stench and thunder and danger and much of the horror, because even embedded journalists hesitate to show the worst.
But it was enough.
And even if we hadn't seen that website, we'd have seen the pictures, because our son fell into the habit of dropping a cheap disposable camera in his pocket when he went out on patrol. Any stray moments not taken up with actual fighting, he would slip the camera out of his pocket and snap a photo. Weeks later, he would wrap up the camera in what looked like an old paper grocery sack taped up into a makeshift envelope, address it, and mail it home. I would develop the pictures, have duplicates made, and send him his photographs. Many of them were almost identical to what the embedded journalists were selling for thousands to magazines like Time and Newsweek.
When he came home, I presented him with a beautiful leather album, the photos he'd taken arranged in chronological order. On the front was a brass plate with his unit, company, and platoon numbers and the dates of his deployment.
I noticed, he didn't show everyone the album. Only those rare few whom he trusted. This cousin but not that one. This friend but not these others. It was an intensely private thing but something of which he was deeply proud. He did not want to waste it on somebody who would not appreciate it.
These were his memories of his war, and he did not want to waste them on the blind.
With us, he went over every picture, named every name, identified every place, every experience. But he did it in that way peculiar to combat veterans, choosing to relate the experiences as funny stories, when he could. If he couldn't, he chose not to talk at all, other than to speak in glowing terms about his staff sergeant, who got the whole platoon home in one piece, and the company commander, who did everything in his power to protect his men as much as possible with artillery, tanks, and air support, and who got all but one of his men home alive.
His staff sergeant, Dustin said, was the quintessential movie-Marine, square-jawed and hard-charging, and he took care of his men. He went home two weeks ahead of them, and when they got off the plane, young "boots" just out of boot camp, scurried around gathering up the weary men's sea-bags and carrying them back to the barracks, where the men later found their things, in their rooms, unpacked and neatly put away.
In the book by Bing West, there was chapter after chapter, story after story, detailing courage unimaginable to the rest of us…men who braved a fuselage of bullets in a house loaded with insurgents, just so they could recover the body of a buddy…men who refused to leave the battle after suffering wounds that would render the rest of us into screaming mounds of jello…men throwing their bodies over their wounded buddies even as they barely clung to consciousness from their own losses of blood…men who put themselves right smack in the line of fire because they handled bigger, more deadly weapons that could stop the bullets for everybody else if they survived long enough to take aim…men who, as my son put it, became seemingly deaf to "the whiz and whir of bullets flying past your ear."
I could only read small portions at a time, but as I neared the end of the book, I burst into tears and traipsed into my husband's home office, where he was working at the computer. He glanced up and paused, astonished at my tears, and said, "What's wrong?"
I waved the book, and said, "He doesn't deserve them."
"Who doesn't deserve them?"
"This president," I wept. "He doesn't deserve the men and women he flung into war. He doesn't deserve them."
My Republican husband, a combat veteran himself, did not angrily defend Bush or yell at me for my foolishness. He smiled at me in a very sad way and said, "None of them deserve them. No politician-president has ever really deserved the troops he has sent into battle. It has been so in every war."
I was sobbing now. "They are the brightest and best this country has to offer," I cried. "Their courage should shame us all."
He nodded. "It has been so in every war. They have always been so very brave."
He got up and came over and hugged me, saying, "The vast majority of people in this country not only do not fully UNDERSTAND the sacrifice these men and women are making every day, but they don't APPRECIATE it--and that goes for the president and that goes for all the rest of us who have not made that same sacrifice."
I thought of something my son wrote once, commenting not just on the bitterness of battle but the unflinching, horrific poverty of the people: "It is here in Iraq, I see the blessed life I have been given…My family, friends, girlfriend, opportunities; all were and are far richer than anything these people in Iraq have experienced in terms of a whole connected Mandala of living…"
He described coming upon an insurgent in one house they searched, how the man was, "scared and shaking uncontrollably. He was a terrorist, and he had the look of shock…I stared him directly in the eye for about five seconds. Face to face with my enemy, his image burns in my thoughts. His eyes were wide with fear; seemingly asking only the single question: WHY? Indeed, perhaps in my aggressiveness, I too had that question stenciled in my stare…"
He talked about how his heart aches for the families and friends of the men who did not make it home. "People, CIVILIANS, all back home, will never, ever truly realize just how good they have things. In a way," he said, "the blood of our country's Marines, soldiers, and sailors are all on their soiled, well-fed hands."
This war is not a video game, although I know a lot of young people think of it that way because they buy and play video games based on it. They get to skulk around corners of crowded urban-desert buildings and blow away the enemy without ever having to leave the comfort of their bedrooms.
This war is not a three-minute network news story, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because that's the only time they ever think of it at all.
This war is not a movie, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because they enjoy a two-hour popcorn adventure where they can live vicariously through the rugged hero's dance with death and triumph over tragedy.
This war is not a television show, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because they see it featured on so many fictional TV shows where the celebrity-soldiers get to fly off to the desert for various glamorous "special ops" missions to dusty glory and soaring soundtracks.
This war is not a chess piece on a political power-board, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because they hotly debate it on radio talk-shows and Internet blogs and in the op-ed pages of the newspapers and in political campaign ads and in State of the Union addresses, where the president can parade the latest crippled hero or read aloud a letter he received from bereaved parents to the American populace to demonstrate his resolve and patriotism.
This war is corporals and sergeants and privates and platoon leaders dodging bullets and bombs and rockets and grenades in the grit and the sweat and the stink and the blood and the boredom and the hunger and the heat and the cold and the wet and the dirt and the sweet letters from home and the snapshots tucked in their helmet-bands and the heartache for home and the fierce fight just to get, as my son put it, "the man to the right of me and the man to the left of me and the man in front of me and the man behind me…home in one piece."
That is the glory and that is the misery and that is the sacrifice and that is the power of war and NONE of us, NOT A DAMN ONE OF US WHO HASN'T BEEN THERE DESERVES THEM.
Not one.
This past weekend, I finished reading NO TRUE GLORY, a Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, by Bing West. It details, from the highest corridors of Washington, D.C. to the raw-sewage soaked dusty streets and bloody back alleys of Fallujah, from ranking generals and presidents to lowly corporals and privates--the fiasco that was Fallujah--from the time four American contractors (three of whom were military veterans) were mutilated, burned, and hanged from a bridge in April of '04, to the aborted battle to take the city, to the months after the fiercely brave Marines were prematurely pulled out and where Abu Mussab al Zarkawi turned the city into a nest of jihadists, insurgents, bombers, kidnappers, torturers, terrorists, and killers, to November of 04, when Marines and soldiers of uncommon valor cleaned up the snake's nest and secured the city for Iraq's first democratic vote in January of '05.
My son was among the number.
The author, a former Marine and Vietnam combat veteran, made six trips to Fallujah and interviewed dozens of Marines, where he sat down with generals and humped it with corporals and privates. He laid out the final, historical battle sector by sector and described the bone-jarring deafening cacophonous roar of combat and the screaming silence of bloody death. So good are his descriptions, in fact, that the rights to the story have already sold to Universal Pictures.
This war is different than any other before it. Thanks to digital technology, the field of battle is no longer the private purgatory that burns with the fires of hell in a man's--in fact, these days, woman's too--tortured thoughts. Embedded journalists no longer have to send film by helicopter and plane to their home papers or networks, where they can be carefully censored before airing or publication several days or weeks later. Nor do they have to do as they did during the Gulf War, which is place themselves near a satellite dish for their broadcasts, which, needless to say, are not always handy to the battlefield.
Nowadays, they take digital photographs, then sit down at the first opportunity with their laptop computers and e-mail the photographs or video straight to their Internet websites.
Through a fluke, really, I managed to learn the names of several embedded journalists with my son's unit during the weeks of November of '04. Two or three times a day, I would go to gettyimages.com, call up my son's unit and company, and look at hundreds of color photographs taken, sometimes, only an hour or two before. (We thought we saw our son many times but it was everybody's sons.) My husband and I were seeing much the same things our son was, minus the stench and thunder and danger and much of the horror, because even embedded journalists hesitate to show the worst.
But it was enough.
And even if we hadn't seen that website, we'd have seen the pictures, because our son fell into the habit of dropping a cheap disposable camera in his pocket when he went out on patrol. Any stray moments not taken up with actual fighting, he would slip the camera out of his pocket and snap a photo. Weeks later, he would wrap up the camera in what looked like an old paper grocery sack taped up into a makeshift envelope, address it, and mail it home. I would develop the pictures, have duplicates made, and send him his photographs. Many of them were almost identical to what the embedded journalists were selling for thousands to magazines like Time and Newsweek.
When he came home, I presented him with a beautiful leather album, the photos he'd taken arranged in chronological order. On the front was a brass plate with his unit, company, and platoon numbers and the dates of his deployment.
I noticed, he didn't show everyone the album. Only those rare few whom he trusted. This cousin but not that one. This friend but not these others. It was an intensely private thing but something of which he was deeply proud. He did not want to waste it on somebody who would not appreciate it.
These were his memories of his war, and he did not want to waste them on the blind.
With us, he went over every picture, named every name, identified every place, every experience. But he did it in that way peculiar to combat veterans, choosing to relate the experiences as funny stories, when he could. If he couldn't, he chose not to talk at all, other than to speak in glowing terms about his staff sergeant, who got the whole platoon home in one piece, and the company commander, who did everything in his power to protect his men as much as possible with artillery, tanks, and air support, and who got all but one of his men home alive.
His staff sergeant, Dustin said, was the quintessential movie-Marine, square-jawed and hard-charging, and he took care of his men. He went home two weeks ahead of them, and when they got off the plane, young "boots" just out of boot camp, scurried around gathering up the weary men's sea-bags and carrying them back to the barracks, where the men later found their things, in their rooms, unpacked and neatly put away.
In the book by Bing West, there was chapter after chapter, story after story, detailing courage unimaginable to the rest of us…men who braved a fuselage of bullets in a house loaded with insurgents, just so they could recover the body of a buddy…men who refused to leave the battle after suffering wounds that would render the rest of us into screaming mounds of jello…men throwing their bodies over their wounded buddies even as they barely clung to consciousness from their own losses of blood…men who put themselves right smack in the line of fire because they handled bigger, more deadly weapons that could stop the bullets for everybody else if they survived long enough to take aim…men who, as my son put it, became seemingly deaf to "the whiz and whir of bullets flying past your ear."
I could only read small portions at a time, but as I neared the end of the book, I burst into tears and traipsed into my husband's home office, where he was working at the computer. He glanced up and paused, astonished at my tears, and said, "What's wrong?"
I waved the book, and said, "He doesn't deserve them."
"Who doesn't deserve them?"
"This president," I wept. "He doesn't deserve the men and women he flung into war. He doesn't deserve them."
My Republican husband, a combat veteran himself, did not angrily defend Bush or yell at me for my foolishness. He smiled at me in a very sad way and said, "None of them deserve them. No politician-president has ever really deserved the troops he has sent into battle. It has been so in every war."
I was sobbing now. "They are the brightest and best this country has to offer," I cried. "Their courage should shame us all."
He nodded. "It has been so in every war. They have always been so very brave."
He got up and came over and hugged me, saying, "The vast majority of people in this country not only do not fully UNDERSTAND the sacrifice these men and women are making every day, but they don't APPRECIATE it--and that goes for the president and that goes for all the rest of us who have not made that same sacrifice."
I thought of something my son wrote once, commenting not just on the bitterness of battle but the unflinching, horrific poverty of the people: "It is here in Iraq, I see the blessed life I have been given…My family, friends, girlfriend, opportunities; all were and are far richer than anything these people in Iraq have experienced in terms of a whole connected Mandala of living…"
He described coming upon an insurgent in one house they searched, how the man was, "scared and shaking uncontrollably. He was a terrorist, and he had the look of shock…I stared him directly in the eye for about five seconds. Face to face with my enemy, his image burns in my thoughts. His eyes were wide with fear; seemingly asking only the single question: WHY? Indeed, perhaps in my aggressiveness, I too had that question stenciled in my stare…"
He talked about how his heart aches for the families and friends of the men who did not make it home. "People, CIVILIANS, all back home, will never, ever truly realize just how good they have things. In a way," he said, "the blood of our country's Marines, soldiers, and sailors are all on their soiled, well-fed hands."
This war is not a video game, although I know a lot of young people think of it that way because they buy and play video games based on it. They get to skulk around corners of crowded urban-desert buildings and blow away the enemy without ever having to leave the comfort of their bedrooms.
This war is not a three-minute network news story, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because that's the only time they ever think of it at all.
This war is not a movie, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because they enjoy a two-hour popcorn adventure where they can live vicariously through the rugged hero's dance with death and triumph over tragedy.
This war is not a television show, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because they see it featured on so many fictional TV shows where the celebrity-soldiers get to fly off to the desert for various glamorous "special ops" missions to dusty glory and soaring soundtracks.
This war is not a chess piece on a political power-board, although I know a lot of people think of it that way because they hotly debate it on radio talk-shows and Internet blogs and in the op-ed pages of the newspapers and in political campaign ads and in State of the Union addresses, where the president can parade the latest crippled hero or read aloud a letter he received from bereaved parents to the American populace to demonstrate his resolve and patriotism.
This war is corporals and sergeants and privates and platoon leaders dodging bullets and bombs and rockets and grenades in the grit and the sweat and the stink and the blood and the boredom and the hunger and the heat and the cold and the wet and the dirt and the sweet letters from home and the snapshots tucked in their helmet-bands and the heartache for home and the fierce fight just to get, as my son put it, "the man to the right of me and the man to the left of me and the man in front of me and the man behind me…home in one piece."
That is the glory and that is the misery and that is the sacrifice and that is the power of war and NONE of us, NOT A DAMN ONE OF US WHO HASN'T BEEN THERE DESERVES THEM.
Not one.
posted by Deanie Mills at 11:15 PM
4 Comments:
HI
Again- I have read through teary eyes. Ben only shared his pictures with a few, and he also made the stories funny. Recently he joked about one of the Marines getting two purple hearts in two days, and even though it wasnt funny how he earned them, they were able to joke about.
My son has awed me over the years, the time he was voted class president, the time he scratched his name in my car with a rock, he was only 4. The day he graduated, we were not sure he would. Just the simple things most moms are so proud of their kids for.
But now when I am around him, I feel so insignificant. He thinks he has done nothing but his job, I think he is a hero, and a part of history. I am in AWE of the all.
You are terrific Deanie and I so enjoyed our conversation .
I enjoyed our conversation too, Jamie. If I didn't have other Marine moms to hold my hand through these deployments I really would be crazy. (My family thinks I already am.)
My son doesn't like to be thought of as a hero, either. Marines have a different attitude toward those kinds of things. For one thing, they don't wear patches and insignias on their uniforms the way, say, the Army does. And their requirements for getting a Combat Action Ribbon are much more strict than the Army's Combat Infantry Badge. Dustin knows a guy who was shot in the head while in Iraq, but did not get a CAR because he was not in combat at the time.
Their purple hearts, everything, are on much stricter criteria (another reason not to mess with John Murtha). And Dustin is by nature modest anyway. He knows Marines who really ARE heroes, who risked their lives to save others, and does not consider himself one just for doing his job.
He hates to tell people he is in the military--strangers, I mean, like on a plane--because when they gush about "We support our troops!" it just makes him feel uncomfortable. Though he's deeply proud to wear the uniform of the United States Marine Corps, he thinks of it as his job.
But still, I'm like you. Sometimes I marvel at what my sweet little boy grew up to be.
Deanie
There are many who may not understand the price of war, but I do understand. I am very proud of Dustin and Mike and all of the others in harm's way but as I read this post I was even more proud of Kent. Not that I haven't always had hero worship for my big brothers who are all heroes in my eyes and have always been, but for the humility and compassion he has always displayed. He is correct, no one deserves the bravery, loyalty, and sacrifices of the brave souls who have choosen to serve America. But I do understand and will always be grateful not only to this generation but to those who got us here as well. I can't remeber the exact language of the toast from the last Marine Corps Birthday but it went something like, "Here's to the ones beside us, here's to the ones who came before, and here's to the ones who will never be with us again. Semper Fidelis" It has much more meaning to me now then before. Not only do I think of the brothers in arms of my son, but also of my brothers and my father. And I think of their mothers and I cry alittle more.
Thank you, my sweet sister-in-law, for a beautiful post. You are, of course, absolutely right.
And you know, as we've talked about before, that I think of your mom every day. I think about how she seemed so brave and funny, as always, when both of her sons were deployed to war--only later did I learn that she would wake up screaming in the night, jump out of bed, and run into the wall. Dad would have to pick her up and help her back to bed.
I don't know if you remember this or not, and I doubt Richard even knows--but when he was getting ready to graduate college ROTC and go into the Army, and the Vietnam war had yet to completely wind down, she wrote a letter to her congressman, and begged him to see to it that Richard not be sent off to war, because she felt like the Mills family had sacrificed enough.
Truthfully, I think the war ended before he had a chance to go anyway, but I'll always wonder what became of her letter.
I feel closer to her these days than ever before and man oh man do I still miss her, every day.
By the way, I printed up your post and will give it to Kent to read. I know it will mean a lot to him.
Love,
Deanie
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