Dear John(66)

Despite our troubles, I never doubted that we would make it. I wanted a life with Savannah more than I ever wanted anything. In December, I began calling more regularly and did my best to keep my jealousy in check. I forced myself to be upbeat on the phone, in the hope that she would want to hear from me. I thought things were getting better, and on the surface they were, but four days before Christmas, I reminded her that I’d be home in a little less than a year. Instead of the excited response I expected, she grew quiet. All I could hear was the sound of her breathing.

“Did you hear me?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, her tone soft. “It’s just that I’ve heard that before.”

It was the truth, and we both knew it, but I didn’t sleep well for nearly a week.

The full moon fell on New Year’s Day, and though I went out to stare at it and remembered the week when we fell in love, those images were fuzzy, as if blurred by the overwhelming sadness I felt inside. On the walk back, dozens of men were clustered in circles or leaning against buildings while smoking cigarettes, as though they had no cares at all. I wondered what they thought when they saw me walking by. Did they sense that I was losing all that mattered to me? Or that I wished again that I could change the past?

I don’t know, and they didn’t ask. The world was changing fast. The orders we’d been waiting for were given the following morning, and a few days later, my squad found itself in Turkey as we began preparing to invade Iraq from the north. We sat in meetings where we learned our assignments, studied the topography, and went over battle plans. There was little free time, but when we did venture outside of camp, it was hard to ignore the hostile glares of the populace. We heard rumors that Turkey was planning to deny access to our troops for use in the invasion and that talks were under way to make sure they wouldn’t. We’d long ago learned to listen to rumors with a grain of salt, but this time the rumors were accurate, and my squad and others were sent to Kuwait to start all over.

We landed in midafternoon under a cloudless sky and found ourselves surrounded by sand on every side. Almost immediately we were loaded on a bus, drove for hours, and ended up in what was essentially the largest tent city I’d ever seen. The army did its best to make it comfortable. The food was good and the PX had everything you might need, but it was boring. Mail delivery was poor—I received no letters at all—and the lines for the phone were always a mile long. In between drills, my men and I either sat around trying to guess when the invasion would start or practiced getting into our chemical suits as quickly as we could. The plan was for my squad to augment other units from different divisions on a hard push to Baghdad. By February, after what already felt like a zillion years in the desert, my squad and I were as ready as we’d ever be.

At that point, a lot of soldiers had been in Kuwait since mid-November, and the rumor mill was in full swing. No one knew what was coming. I heard about biological and chemical weapons; I heard that Saddam had learned his lesson in Desert Storm and was retrenching the Republican Guard around Baghdad, in the hope of making a bloody last stand. On March 17, I knew there would be war. On my last night in Kuwait, I wrote letters to those I loved, in case I didn’t make it: one to my father and one to Savannah. That evening, I found myself part of a convoy that stretched a hundred miles into Iraq.

Fighting was sporadic, at least initially. Because our air force dominated the skies, we had little to fear overhead as we rolled up mainly deserted highways. The Iraqi army, for the most part, was nowhere to be seen, which only increased the tension I felt as I tried to anticipate what my squad would face later in the campaign. Here and there, we’d get word of enemy mortar fire, and we’d scramble into our suits, only to learn it was a false alarm. Soldiers were tense. I didn’t sleep for three days.

Deeper in Iraq, skirmishes began to break out, and it was then I learned the first law associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom: Civilians and enemies often looked exactly alike. Shots would ring out, we’d attack, and there were times we weren’t even sure who we were shooting at. As we reached the Sunni Triangle, the war began to intensify. We heard about battles in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Tikrit, all being fought by other units in other divisions. My squad joined the Eighty-second Airborne in an assault on Samawah, and it was there that my squad and I had our first taste of real combat.

The air force had paved the way. Bombs, missiles, and mortars had been exploding since the day before, and as we crossed the bridge into the city, my first thought was amazement at the stillness. My squad was assigned to an outlying neighborhood, where we were to move from house to house to help clear the area of the enemy. As we moved, images came quickly: the charred remains of a truck, the driver’s lifeless body beside it; a partially demolished building; ruins of cars smoking here and there. Sporadic rifle fire kept us on edge. As we patrolled, civilians occasionally rushed out with their arms up, and we tried our best to save the wounded.