There is a famous cartoon in the World War II memoir Up Front by Bill Mauldin, the editorial cartoonist for Stars and Stripes. Mauldin’s main characters, GIs Willie and Joe, slump against a wall, exhausted and unshaven, as a spit-shined soldier struts aggressively past them.
“That can’t be no combat man,” Willie says to Joe. “He’s lookin’ fer a fight.”
I once mentioned this cartoon to someone who was a combat soldier, with a Purple Heart and Silver Star from Korea to prove it. He laughed when I asked him if he thought George W. Bush had ever seen it, or if he thought the president would understand why it was funny. “All I can say,” he told me, “is that we never said ‘bring it on’ when those Chinese were shooting at us. We wanted them to bring it somewhere else.”
A great deal has been written about how Bush has left his war up to soldiers like Mauldin and my friend—soldiers who had a war brought to them while the rest of us were urged to keep shopping to keep the terrorists at bay. (If the recent performance of the stock market is any indication, we certainly have been doing our part.) I tore myself away from the mall one day last week to attend a party in honor of one of the soldiers who is just back from fifteen months as a convoy escort on a road even more dangerous than 35W at rush hour.
I’ve known him since long before he left home as a nineteen-year-old recruit. He passed both his twentieth and twenty-first birthdays in Iraq, but while his friends and relatives were enjoying a celebratory party keg of Michelob, he sipped root beer. He wearily but smilingly endured dozens of relieved hugs. He answered all our silly questions while not going into much detail about what he’d seen or done. He laughed as he told the story of smuggling an unauthorized incendiary grenade aboard his vehicle and using it to burn down a field of elephant grass; the enemy had been using it as cover to attack his convoy. About the regular fire fights, though, he said only that he’d fired his weapon almost every day—except for the days his unit was told to conserve ammo because of supply problems. “We were almost out of food at our base, too,” he said. “I was afraid we were going to have to resort to eating MREs. Those things taste terrible and they stop you up for days.”
His mother had compiled a scrapbook of his Army career to date. On the first page was the smiling recruitment photo. On subsequent pages were photos he’d emailed to his mother of him sitting atop a wrecked Humvee or pointing to bullet pocks in the gun turret he manned. He had no idea he was terrifying his mother by sending her such images. That was just his life, and those photos were the equivalent of his cartoons.
He didn’t talk about the commendation he’d got for one incident when he’d provided the suppressing machine gun fire that had driven off an attack on his unit. He wasn’t even aware that his mother had pasted that document into the book as well. When I asked him about it, he claimed he didn’t remember that day.
He also didn’t mention that six men from his unit had been “lost.” His father, who had also been a soldier, had to fill in that part.
His preferred topic of conversation was the shiny new motorcycle, which he’d ordered when he was home on leave at Christmas and had just picked up that morning. I asked if that’s what he had spent his enlistment bonus on. “No. I joined before they started paying the bonuses. The only thing I’m getting is the education benefits.”
“I’ve never driven a motorcycle before,” he admitted. “But I’m going to learn. The one thing I learned in the Army is that, if I can do this, I can do anything I want to do.”
Of course, he’s learned more than that. He’s acquired the reticence of a real combat man.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply