Sitting in a coffee shop on campus with a few minutes to kill before class. Standing up to refill my cup, I see something . . . absolutely ridiculous. I don't know if you have heard of G4 TV but it's some cable channel focused on young adults. They are showing some game shop-type series with two chicks dressed up to look like a New Yorker's caricature of a trashy teenage girl: daisy dukes, midriff t-shirts, and pigtails.
This is America now. It's 11:45 on a Monday, I'm at one of our so-called "elite" institutions and the flat-screen on the wall is showing two anoxeric whores playing Marble in the Oatmeal, where they mock fight each other in a kiddy pool of porridge.
Originally I wanted this blog to be a way for me to remember and make sense of my deployment to Afghanistan. I've been afraid to write in it for the last five months and I don't know why. Maybe it has something to do with the steaming, messy pile of shit that is American culture. How can you justify what our eighteen and nineteen year-olds are going through when this is what we do with the opportunities?
There is nothing of value is what we create under the logic of profit maximization. I may want to watch some girls flailing around in oatmeal (actually, I really don't but when I was sixteen I might have) but does that justify a channel dedicated to hedonism? Is it right just because they can make a few bucks on advertising?
We are lost.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
It never leaves you
Occasionally you are reminded how different you are from other students at school. Most of the time you can pretend you're not but then the most random little event will trigger something inside of you. And that can scare you.
I was walking with a friend toward the Stanford Quad last week along Serra Street. It was a beautiful day, clouds playing across a blue sky while a brisk wind kept it just on the chilly side. The two of us had spent a carefree afternoon walking around the new Graduate School of Business complex looking at some of the new sculptures, discussing them (she's a writer for an art magazine), and generally catching up since we hadn't seen each other since I'd returned.
Two people crashed into each other on their bicycles about one hundred and fifty meters ahead of us while we passed the fountain in front of Memorial Auditorium. I could hear a few people yelling and sprinted over to see if everyone was okay. One of the girls was standing up and seemed to be okay while the other was lying on the pavement on her side, screaming.
The first thing that flashed in my head was how only one woman was even attempting to help. Everyone else was just standing around. I let a wave of anger pass over me and then focused on the girl. She was on her right side, grimacing and incoherent. After making sure someone called 911, I looked her over. She was unable to move her left shoulder but claimed to be otherwise hurt, which a quick scan confirmed.
Her name was Hillary. I rolled up my sweatshirt and put it under Hillary's head while we talked for the next seven or eight minutes. First the police (a wonderful deputy name Harris Kuhn who is a good friend of the Stanford veterans) and then the fire department showed up and took over, much to my relief. This should have been a pretty unremarkable event - Hillary gets hurt, gets help, end of story - but it wasn't. Not to me.
Kneeling over her, telling her she was going to be okay, telling her help was on the way - all of the sudden I was back in Sangin during a clearing op with L/3/7, watching an Afghan soldier with no legs slowly bleed out muttering "Allah, Allah" over and over again. All I could do was shout at him in English to stop moving because we were about to drop a GBU on a compound only sixty meters away. He ended up dying on the MEDEVAC bird. Did I check his tourniquets and do a blood sweep every time we moved him? I think so.
I think so. But I'm not sure. It never leaves you.
I was walking with a friend toward the Stanford Quad last week along Serra Street. It was a beautiful day, clouds playing across a blue sky while a brisk wind kept it just on the chilly side. The two of us had spent a carefree afternoon walking around the new Graduate School of Business complex looking at some of the new sculptures, discussing them (she's a writer for an art magazine), and generally catching up since we hadn't seen each other since I'd returned.
Two people crashed into each other on their bicycles about one hundred and fifty meters ahead of us while we passed the fountain in front of Memorial Auditorium. I could hear a few people yelling and sprinted over to see if everyone was okay. One of the girls was standing up and seemed to be okay while the other was lying on the pavement on her side, screaming.
The first thing that flashed in my head was how only one woman was even attempting to help. Everyone else was just standing around. I let a wave of anger pass over me and then focused on the girl. She was on her right side, grimacing and incoherent. After making sure someone called 911, I looked her over. She was unable to move her left shoulder but claimed to be otherwise hurt, which a quick scan confirmed.
Her name was Hillary. I rolled up my sweatshirt and put it under Hillary's head while we talked for the next seven or eight minutes. First the police (a wonderful deputy name Harris Kuhn who is a good friend of the Stanford veterans) and then the fire department showed up and took over, much to my relief. This should have been a pretty unremarkable event - Hillary gets hurt, gets help, end of story - but it wasn't. Not to me.
Kneeling over her, telling her she was going to be okay, telling her help was on the way - all of the sudden I was back in Sangin during a clearing op with L/3/7, watching an Afghan soldier with no legs slowly bleed out muttering "Allah, Allah" over and over again. All I could do was shout at him in English to stop moving because we were about to drop a GBU on a compound only sixty meters away. He ended up dying on the MEDEVAC bird. Did I check his tourniquets and do a blood sweep every time we moved him? I think so.
I think so. But I'm not sure. It never leaves you.
Friday, March 25, 2011
War as an Attachment
Life as an attachment sucks, especially in war. We breath the same air, eat the same food, walk the same route, and can die just like everyone else yet we are never a part of the core group of guys, the grunts who do all the sweating and bleeding. Try as we might, attachments hover slightly off the "tip of the spear" earning a dubious gratitude from their infantry counterparts.
The basic Marine warfighting unit is the infantry platoon, which varies in size but usually contains about thirty-five people. These guys must be augmented to provide a full spectrum of offensive capabilities: machine gunners, snipers, assaultmen (think rockets), and others as dictated by the mission.
In Afghanistan the (ideal) standard loadout also includes engineers to sweep for IEDs, a dog and dog handler for explosive detection, an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team to dispose of any IEDs, an interpreter for the patrol leader to talk to locals, a Human Exploitation Team (HET) guy to question any shady characters, and poor ol' Civil Affairs bringing up the rear to gather information on VIPs, identify projects to help out locals, and pay claims for damages or deaths.
This never happens. In fact, I have never seen an infantry patrol with all elements together ever - even in training. Two reasons for this: one, there aren't enough personnel to cover down on every platoon; and two, attachments can be viewed (rightly, sometimes) as another mouth to feed. So instead we end up moving around a larger area, attaching and detaching as instructed.
For Civil Affairs the default infantry attitude is skepticism if not downright hostility. Most of our work is seen as a joke - the whole hearts and minds crap that no one sees as useful in a place as violent as Sangin. When you first start out with a new platoon you have no friends and cry yourself to sleep every night. Or maybe that last part is just me.
Anyway, there's nothing to do but plug away day after day - patrol, debrief, stand post, fill sandbags - until the guys start to open up to you. Eventually you get know the names of the squad leaders, then the fire team leaders, then the individual Marines. You learn the "in" jokes, get made fun of, wrestle or box someone and win/lose (usually lose), and work your way in. Depending on the platoon this process could take two days, a week, or even a month.
And then you leave. The relationships you built are gone. The guys you've learned to work with, respect, and trust are gone. You're gone, headed off to a new group where you will face a sea of uncertain, even unwelcome faces again.
Lather, rinse, repeat. War as an attachment.
The basic Marine warfighting unit is the infantry platoon, which varies in size but usually contains about thirty-five people. These guys must be augmented to provide a full spectrum of offensive capabilities: machine gunners, snipers, assaultmen (think rockets), and others as dictated by the mission.
In Afghanistan the (ideal) standard loadout also includes engineers to sweep for IEDs, a dog and dog handler for explosive detection, an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team to dispose of any IEDs, an interpreter for the patrol leader to talk to locals, a Human Exploitation Team (HET) guy to question any shady characters, and poor ol' Civil Affairs bringing up the rear to gather information on VIPs, identify projects to help out locals, and pay claims for damages or deaths.
This never happens. In fact, I have never seen an infantry patrol with all elements together ever - even in training. Two reasons for this: one, there aren't enough personnel to cover down on every platoon; and two, attachments can be viewed (rightly, sometimes) as another mouth to feed. So instead we end up moving around a larger area, attaching and detaching as instructed.
For Civil Affairs the default infantry attitude is skepticism if not downright hostility. Most of our work is seen as a joke - the whole hearts and minds crap that no one sees as useful in a place as violent as Sangin. When you first start out with a new platoon you have no friends and cry yourself to sleep every night. Or maybe that last part is just me.
Anyway, there's nothing to do but plug away day after day - patrol, debrief, stand post, fill sandbags - until the guys start to open up to you. Eventually you get know the names of the squad leaders, then the fire team leaders, then the individual Marines. You learn the "in" jokes, get made fun of, wrestle or box someone and win/lose (usually lose), and work your way in. Depending on the platoon this process could take two days, a week, or even a month.
And then you leave. The relationships you built are gone. The guys you've learned to work with, respect, and trust are gone. You're gone, headed off to a new group where you will face a sea of uncertain, even unwelcome faces again.
Lather, rinse, repeat. War as an attachment.
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