Ryan Smithson
Authors: Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI
Tags: #Juvenile Nonfiction, #Iraq War; 2003, #Iraq War; 2003-, #Personal Narratives; American, #Social Issues, #Military & Wars, #United States, #Smithson; Ryan, #Soldiers, #Biography & Autobiography, #Soldiers - United States, #General, #Juvenile Literature, #Biography, #History
The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI
For
SGT James H. Conklin
and
EQ Platoon
Red Phase
White Phase
Blue Phase
This is a work of nonfiction, and although some names and identities have been changed in order to protect the anonymity and privacy of the individuals involved, the events contained herein are all true. They have been faithfully rendered as I have remembered them, to the best of my ability. Though details come from my keen recollection of such, they are not written to represent word-for-word documentation; rather, I’ve retold them in a way that evokes the true feeling and meaning of what happened. All of the following stories are written to reflect the essence of the mood and spirit of my experiences as I lived them and to portray the individual personalities of my fellow soldiers.
RED PHASE
E
ast Greenbush, New York, is a suburb of Albany. Middle-class and about as average as it gets. The work was steady, the incomes were suitable, and the kids at Columbia High School were wannabes. They wanted to be rich. They wanted to be hot. They wanted to be tough. They wanted to be too cool for the kids who wanted to be rich, hot, and tough.
Picture me: the average teenage boy. Blond hair and blue eyes, smaller than average build, and I’ll admit, a little dorky. I sat in third-period lunch with friends wearing my brand-new Aéropostale T-shirt and backward hat, wanting to be self-confident. The smells of greasy school lunches filled the air. We were at one of the identical
fold-out tables. We were talking, but my thoughts were on my girlfriend, Heather. She was a senior this year and would finally be done. I was a junior and had two more years to go. What a drag.
I had turned sixteen less than a month ago, and so far being sixteen was boring as hell. I remembered watching shows like
Saved by the Bell
and
Welcome Freshmen
when I was a kid. How amazingly cool high school had seemed in those shows.
I remembered coming to the high school in fifth grade for a district-wide band concert. I marveled at these independent creatures who had their own cars and girlfriends and after-school jobs and holes in their jeans. They were free in the truest sense of the word.
And then, overnight it seemed, I was sitting in Columbia doing all the “independent” and “wild” things that teenagers did. What a joke. High school was so typical and predictable. Everyone here was so occupied with discovering the definition of cool.
To some, cool was Abercrombie and popped collars. Some thought cool was playing sports. Some thought cool was drinking before the homecoming dance. And others swore that cool was not trying to be cool: nonconformists with black nail polish, leather boots, and oversized safety pins in their ears.
Our free expression was in so many ways just a
restriction of our identities. All of us trying to be something we weren’t. Even the nonconformists were conforming.
High school, I guessed, was just a chapter, something standing in the way of real freedom. High school didn’t even seem real. It seemed so fake.
A friend of mine came into the cafeteria and sat down next to me.
“You hear?” he asked us.
“What?”
“A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.”
“That sucks,” I said.
The conversation picked back up and we talked about sex or drugs or something equally as interesting. It wasn’t that we didn’t care about the Trade Center. We shook it off as an accident. We assumed some drunk or stupid pilot had misjudged, clipped a wing, or something, and we shook it off. Shit happens.
The bell rang and the hallways exploded with raucous, horny teenagers. I visited Heather in the hallway, walked her to her class, and went to fourth period, Trigonometry. My math teacher, being pretty obsessive-compulsive, said that we weren’t going to watch CNN all period. We were going to learn trig. She mentioned something about the crash but quickly moved on to the isosceles triangle. None of us realized the magnitude of it all yet. Otherwise we would have watched CNN all period.
It wasn’t until fifth period, American History, that I understood what happened. During math class, the second plane had crashed, and I walked into History to see a TV showing the now infamous news footage: two enormous twin towers that smoked from their tops, one plume a bit higher than the other.
I walked to my seat and sat down, eyes never leaving the television. I took off my hat, but I didn’t open my notebook. I didn’t take out my pencil or assume the slumped note-taking position. I knew we weren’t going to be taking notes in American History class that day.
The class was abnormally silent. It was high school, and things were usually done in a loud, disrespectful manner. Our teacher, Mr. Barret, motioned to the television and said something I’ll never forget.
“You guys are living history.”
I never thought of myself as living history before 9/11. History was something that had already happened, something I studied in school. It came out of a textbook. It was hearsay, not real enough to count.
My mind tried to tell me I was watching a movie. It was on TV, after all, and everyone knows you can’t believe everything you see on TV. We watched in horror as the first tower collapsed into itself like it was being demolished. This was real, terrifyingly real. The sort of real that makes you lose hope. The atypical, unpredictable kind of real that you never see coming.
That night I called Heather and we talked for a long time about how shocking the attacks were.
“This is probably how people felt after Pearl Harbor,” said Heather.
“Probably,” I said. “Makes you realize some things.”
“Like how crazy the world can be,” she said. “It’s scary. This is going to cause a war.”
“I know.”
The next day at school Heather told me she’d had a dream we were attacked. Right in Albany, she said. You could see the city exploding from Denny’s, where we worked. Since then, once in a while, she had these dreams. They were always different scenarios related to terrorism, but we were always together.
“They feel like the world is ending,” she said about the dreams.
But, contrary to her dreams, life went on. Wrestling season started and was filled with all the hard work, sweat, and pain of my first two seasons.
On nights and weekends I continued working at Denny’s as a dishwasher. And Heather worked as a server.
Heather and I broke up, dated other people, and got back together. Then we broke up again, dated more people, and took a final vow to give it one more shot.
As the fall approached, I dreaded going back to school. Not only did I have to finish a whole other year of high
school, but senior year inevitably meant making all the decisions about the future.
For me, the future was a complete paradox. On one hand colleges were virtually throwing themselves at me through my mailbox and teachers were pushing that “know what you want to do for the rest of your life” attitude. Yet, on the other hand I wanted to stay a kid. Parents and teachers were so intimidating when they talked about the “real world” and taxes and mortgages and bills and insurance. With freedom comes responsibility and I wasn’t sure if I was ready for all that.
Teens want to know what they should do for the rest of their lives. But how can people with no life experience outside of their crappy after-school jobs and awkward, hormone-induced dating life know what they’re supposed to do in adulthood?
I didn’t have any kind of plan. I longed for a purpose.
The more I agonized, the more I realized that what I’d watched in History class a year before was my purpose.
I’d thought about joining the military the moment I saw the towers fall, but I was too young. The military wouldn’t take you unless you were seventeen. So after waiting a year, thinking it over, and feeling the increasing pressure of finding a purpose in life, I started talking to recruiters.
My family and friends were apprehensive when I told them I planned on enlisting in the service. My mother
especially. She wanted me to go to college. She wanted me to pursue writing.
“I have to do this,” I told her.
I’d heard all about September 11th. I’d watched it happen on television. I’d heard the theories and discussions about foreign policy that were way over my head. I’d bowed my head during tributes and moments of silence. I knew all about 9/11, but I felt like it was my generation’s responsibility to do something about it.
One night I invited an army recruiter to the house before dinner. I told him my situation, the reasons I wanted to join. My mom and dad stood off to the side as the recruiter recommended the reserves.
“It’s one weekend a month and two weeks a year,” he said. “You can still go to college. You can still have a job outside the military. And they’ll only deploy you if they need you.”
Keep in mind that this was only the fall of 2002. The war hadn’t started yet.
I discussed everything with my parents.
“If you’re really going to do this, I think you should join the reserves,” my mother said immediately.
“I figured,” I said.
“Do whatever you think is right, Ryan,” my father said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“The reserves probably is the best option,” he added. “You
still get to go to college. Plus, what if you end up hating the military? If you go full-time, there’ll be no escape.”
“That’s true,” I said.
There was a pause.
My dad repeated, “Do whatever you think is right.”
Wrestling season started in November, and it was going to be my best year. I could feel it. I had been going to the wrestling club almost every chance I got. My balance had improved, my takedowns were flawless, and my mat sense was so confident that I could practically wrestle with my eyes closed. Everything changed during our first match.
While I took a shot on my opponent, my left kneecap decided it wanted to relocate to the outside of my leg. The ensuing injury kept me out for a third of the season.
Watching my teammates from the bench, I thought of 9/11. It had changed my entire worldview. I thought parents and teachers were intimidating when they talked about the “real world.” But I was in the real world. In New York City, three hours away, people crashed planes to kill other people. And my knee had ruined what felt like my last chance for accomplishment.
Life was not typical or predictable. And I learned even life in high school was no different. I couldn’t change my knee injury, but I still had lots of control over my future.
My country had been attacked. My people had been
attacked. Enlisting, volunteering, giving oneself for the greater good: that’s what you’re supposed to do in this situation. So I did it.
In December I went to the MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) in Albany. I took the eye test, the hearing test, and all the other physical tests. My knee hurt only when the doctor made me do the duck walk, a squatted walking exercise. But I toughed through it and was fine. After the physical I took the army multiple-choice test, called the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery), and chose the job I wanted, my MOS (Military Occupation Specialty). I decided to become a Heavy Construction Equipment Operator, or a 21E (Twenty-one Echo). As a 21E I would learn how to operate bulldozers, scoop loaders, dump trucks, road graders, and scrapers so the army could use me for whatever the army needed to do with bulldozers, scoop loaders, dump trucks, road graders, and scrapers. Assuming I made it through nine weeks of BCT (Basic Combat Training), I would learn my MOS at an additional nine weeks of AIT (Advanced Individual Training). I’d conduct both trainings at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
It’s funny how the army talks, this whole other language of acronyms and jargon. It may seem impossible to someone who isn’t familiar with it, but recruits just pick it up along the way. Think of it as on-the-job training. On only
my first day I was barely allowed to call myself a recruit, yet I already knew what MEPS, ASVAB, MOS, BCT, and AIT meant. Plus, I knew that E was for Echo.
In the military every letter corresponds to a word. All the cool conversations you hear in movies about Alpha team and Delta this and Foxtrot that, it’s all real terminology based on the phonetic alphabet. Over a radio an “E” could sound like a “D,” or an “O” could sound like a “no,” and in military operations where precision is everything one misheard digit could mean people’s lives.
Now, there are two ways to sign up for the military: as an officer or as an enlisted soldier. To be commissioned as an officer a recruit has to have at least a bachelor’s degree, so I couldn’t go that route even if I wanted to. Not that I wanted to. Officers are the soldiers who have to plan and run everything. When you hear of lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels, and generals, you’re hearing about officers. But when you hear of privates, specialists, and sergeants, you’re hearing about the enlisted.
Further, there are four branches of the military: army, air force, navy, and marines. And each branch has three components: active duty, reserves, and national guard. Each of these components serves a different purpose for the Department of Defense (DoD), the department of the federal government that oversees the military. The Iraq war has changed everything we know about how
these three components work.
Active duty: the everyday soldier. The men and women who live on military posts. The military is their career. These are the first soldiers deployed to a combat zone when there is one.
Reserves: the weekend warrior. For one weekend per month, reserve soldiers meet at a reserve station and “drill.” At drill reservists do what active duty soldiers do every day, which means they train. Also, there is a two-week, mandatory AT (Annual Training), usually in the summer. During AT most units travel. Sometimes they go overseas to places like Central America or Japan and sometimes they stay in the U.S.
When active duty soldiers are deployed to a combat zone, they leave vacant spots back at their home stations or the military posts at which they’ve been stationed in the U.S. Just because a war is going on doesn’t mean that military operations stop back in the States. So the reserve soldiers take the active soldiers’ spots until they come home.
National guard: the other weekend warrior. Their commitment is basically the same as the reserves. The major difference is that they’re funded by state taxes, while the reserves are funded by federal taxes—so a national guard is activated by its state for natural or man-made disasters. All the men and women in army fatigues cleaning up after a
hurricane or an ice storm or 9/11: they’re the national guard.
At the MEPS station I enlisted in the army reserves.
On the phone Heather asked me, “You think you’ll be sent over?”
“It’s too early to tell,” I said. “If an actual war comes out of this, they’ll send the active duty guys first. I might have to go take their spot for a while in the U.S., but that should be it. And even if I do get sent to Iraq, I’ll be doing construction. I won’t be fighting.”