Five years ago today, the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" invaded Iraq. Some $600 billion later, with over 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers, more than 6,000 U.S. casualties, and some some 82,000 dead Iraqi civilians, the U.S. continues to occupy the country. A Nobel prize-winning economist has calculated that the war will ultimately cost the U.S. more than $3 trillion. On Monday, during Dick Cheney's visit to Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed 43 people in Karbala.
Jason Christopher Hartley, a National Guard soldier who was living in New York City on 9/11 and subsequently served at Ground Zero, maintained a blog during his 2004 tour of duty in Iraq. Though he was ultimately ordered to shut down the blog and demoted, his story has been published in a book, Just Another Soldier
, a humorous and unflinchingly honest view of Iraq from the perspective of one highly perceptive infantryman. We spoke with Hartley about his service in Iraq; the first part of our conversation was published yesterday.
From your perspective as a soldier on the ground, why do you think Iraq is still mired in violence after 5 years? People like to fight. It's fun, it brings the illusion of meaning to your life, and you get to reproduce your perceived collective history of resistance against [insert any oppressive regime name here]. There aren't a lot of jobs in Iraq and there are a lot of young men growing up who are bored, disaffected, and sometimes extremely angry. If I was an Iraqi I'd be an an insurgent. It would be a lot more fun to be part of the Rebel Alliance rather than part of the Empire. We used to joke about how cool it would have been to play the Imperial March theme music over the loudspeakers every time we rolled into the town of Dujail where we worked – something indicative (even if only subconsciously) of our awareness of our being more like Storm Troopers than, say, Luke or Han.
My point is that I don't trust, nor do I believe, there is any sort of policy-oriented answer to that question. It's mired in violence because there's nothing more fulfilling to do. If there were better things for Iraqis to do to – i.e. go to decent jobs, go to decent schools, consume electricity that's available 24-hours a day – then there might be more incentive to not spend your free time thinking up new and inventive ways to employ IEDs against fresh faced American Gen-Yers.
What are the biggest complaints you would hear from Iraqis? This is unanswerable, mostly because I had very little meaningful interaction with Iraqis. That's ostensibly the job performed by Civil Affairs units, not infantrymen. If Iraqis complained to us, it was usually because they wanted reimbursement for property we damaged during operations. We interacted mostly with Iraqi kids, who didn't complain about anything; they just wanted to play with us and hit us up for free stuff. You can't have a real conversation with someone when you have a gun and they don't.
What are the biggest complaints you would hear from soldiers in Iraq? Soldiers have PhDs in complaining. I wouldn't even know where to begin. But nothing we complained about would be terribly interesting or surprising. This chow sucks. This mission sucks. Our battalion commander sucks. Fort Drum in January sucks. Iraq sucks. Our internet connection sucks. Wearing all this heavy shit sucks.
Do you have any regrets about your tour in Iraq? The only regret I have really is that I wish I would have kicked the asses of some of the guys I was in charge of a little bit more. That’s about it. I don’t have any big regret-type stuff, like I shouldn’t have killed the dog or wasted loads of people; there’s none of that. There are things I think about that occupy my mind and it is pretty fucked up the way war affects indigenous people. That bothers me. But I behaved in a way that I can definitely live with myself.
So you’re not waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares about the dog? [During an ambush, Hartley killed a barking dog who was exposing his position, an incident vividly described in Just Another Soldier.] Not in the classic Vietnam vet movie sort of way. It’s definitely there though; the first year is strange after you come back. You’re kind of in a euphoric state for the first few months; you want to talk and share your experiences. For me it was about the six month mark where it starts to sink in how alien and absurd everything is that we worry about in civilized America, and our lifestyle seems so lame and completely unnecessary. And it comes out a lot when you drink. But there are guys I know who’ve had some pretty intense experiences when it comes to the death of their buddies and they have intense PTSD when they come back and look at a water bottle and it reminds them of the time they drank water after performing CPR on their buddy. I don’t have that, thank God. I do have a lot of anxiety since I came back, but not like other guys who have debilitating fixations.
What do you think triggers the anxiety? I don’t know, I’m not one to self-diagnose. But I think the worst thing for me, psychologically, happened after my blog was discovered and I was put on house arrest for my last month in Iraq. And that fucked me up because I’m just sitting around wondering when the other shoe’s going to drop, what kind of trouble I’m going to get in; it was possible I would be detained in Iraq while I went through the whole court martial Article 15 process. I had no idea what my fate would be and I developed an ulcer and acquired this weird tic where I felt as though I had to gag all the time and cough. So I was doing this gag/cough thing all the time when I would get nervous. And the anxiety I have now I think is more tied into that than seeing dead people or anything.
It’s ironic that you go served Iraq yet the thing that brought on the most anxiety had to do with something within the military. Yeah, I can say without a doubt that the stuff that happened internally within the unit – other guys I had to work with and the leadership – that was far and above the worst stuff. The combat stuff was fine. I honestly believe that human beings are made such that it’s pretty easy to flip into combat mode, it’s basic survival. Flipping out of it is hard, but switching it on is not. And I don’t hate the Army, I don’t want to fight the Army and so when the Army is fighting me it’s confusing because I don’t want to fight back. I want to preserve myself in some sense but I don’t want to make an enemy of my own organization.
Are you still in the National Guard? Yep. I’ve been in it for like 16 years. I want to retire. I re-enlisted for another six years a year ago.
Is there a chance you could go back to Iraq? Oh hell, yeah. If McCain gets elected, I’m definitely going back. Most of my unit is in Afghanistan right now. They were able to fill the ranks of that mission with volunteers and dudes who hadn’t been deployed yet. And now they’re talking about calling us up for Iraq in 2009.
Would you keep the blog active again? You know, probably not. The whole thing overall was such a fucking nightmare that I don’t want to have to do that ever again. Your command has a lot of power, and if they suspect that I’m going to be a thorn in their side, it’s a simple solution: make this guy in charge of a laundry detail for a year. And that would destroy me. If I wasn’t allowed to be a part of everything, I would eat a bullet. It would be devastating, psychologically, if they said to an infantryman, go guard this pile of rocks for a year because we don’t know what you’re going to write about on your fucking blog.
I can imagine. Just from reading the book it sounds like you love the whole experience of being a soldier. Yeah, and it was good too because we started to get really good at our job, especially toward the end of the deployment. We started doing all these ambush missions led by my buddy Jeff, and he had a core team of guys, I was one of these four dudes he took out on all these missions. And so I got to be part of the inner circle of the most productive things we could be doing, and that was very satisfying. That’s what I want to do. I don’t want to be put on KP for a year. I would write but I wouldn’t be putting it online.
You participated in a theater piece in Manhattan called SURRENDER. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What we did a few months ago was a workshop for a show that’s going to be put on this summer. It’s a three-act experience where, during the first act, attendees get boots, uniform and rifle and I train them on the super-basics of close-quarters battles; room clearing stuff. During the second act, they break up into teams and go through the typical drills we do during a weekend at the National Guard. They run missions through these rooms. Then the third act is as if they’re home from Iraq and they’re dealing with the aftermath, which could be any number of things; you could be dead, wounded, healthy, working at Wal Mart, being asked stupid fucking questions during dinner like ‘Did you kill anybody?’
Are you supporting any of the presidential candidates? I could live with any three of the candidates, which is something I never thought I'd be able to say about a presidential race. I like McCain because I trust that he'll do the right thing like abolish torture and close Gitmo because he knows on a personal level why they are reprehensible. But I know that if he gets elected I'll be spending more time overseas, something I'm more than happy to do, but I'd feel a little better about it if I felt like we were doing something good and not just making enemies faster than we can kill them.
I like Hillary because she included in the information on her website what her plans are for the space program. I think NASA is super important because it gives us an impetus to think creatively about problem solving. NASA is constantly developing new technologies and the exploration of space is something that inspires people like me and it gives our national identity something truly extraordinary to be proud of. I have no idea what those plans are, maybe they totally suck, I'm just impressed that she would bother to include this info, something Obama and McCain didn't do. I think she has a disdain for the military though, and this concerns me.
I like Obama because he's too inexperienced to have already sold all of his soul to the devil, and he's a great speaker and right now I'd be happy with a president who doesn't speak entirely in malapropisms. The fact that he didn't put his hand over his heart for the national anthem that one time concerns me though. I think a perfectly evolved and enlightened human would eventually transcend nationalism and patriotism, but if there's one person who needs to be fiercely patriotic, it's my president. If I had to choose one today, I'd choose Obama because I think his inexperience is his greatest strength.
Only 3 beers per soldier per night while on leave? That's rough. Was there any way around that? Yeah, when on pass in Qatar, they didn't let anyone get hammered. They scanned your ID to keep track of how many you bought. They even had the two bars' computers networked, so you couldn't have three at one, then three at the other. The only way around this was to find a non-drinker and make him buy beer that you could surreptitiously drink.
