Walk in My Combat Boots Read online

  My CO gets involved. “Doc, let it go. You have no control over this.”

  There’s no way I’m going to let this go. I get into it with him, and he gets into it with me. We go back and forth and somehow, in the midst of all my cussing, I manage to persuade him to do something. He leaves me to speak to the Afghan Army.

  They agree to drive her to Delaram.

  When my deployment ends in August, I return to the US with mixed feelings.

  I feel on top of the world, like a conquering hero returning home. I went to Afghanistan, did my job, survived, and came back. I’m confident in my abilities as a corpsman.

  My experiences with the Afghan Army and the Afghan people, though, have left me feeling jaded. I wasted seven months of my life trying to train those guys in combat medicine. I poured my heart and soul into it, and then I ended up doing their fricking jobs for them. They screwed up at the most basic levels, and they didn’t give a shit. They didn’t give a shit about anything.

  I keep asking myself if there was something I could have done better—should have done better. I keep wondering if I considered every possible option.

  But I enjoy my time with the Marines. I enjoy medicine and I enjoy the Navy.

  I’m never able to find out any information on Anja—how she got that head wound, if the Afghan Army did, in fact, take her to Delaram. When I think about her, as I often do, I wonder if there was something—anything—I could have done differently to help her. If there was something I screwed up.

  Mostly, though, I like to think she got the critical medical care she needed. I like to think she survived.

  ALEX

  Alex’s grandfather served in Korea, and his older brother joined the Marine Corps. Alex followed in their footsteps and entered the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, on June 27, 2013, and began his plebe year. During PROTRAMID, the professional training for midshipmen, he fell in love with aviation.

  The night before first flight, my instructor calls me on the phone and says, “About 60 percent of students get airsick on their first flight, so plan accordingly. Pack Ziploc bags and stuff them in your flight suit. Keep ’em handy if you need to throw up tomorrow.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  I immediately go and grab a pair of Ziploc one-gallon bags and shove them in my flight bag. The next morning, I throw it in the cargo compartment.

  We’re flying in a T-6 Bravo—a single-engine turboprop aircraft with a maximum speed of three hundred knots. It’s a high-performance aircraft but not necessarily on the same scale as a jet fighter. Still, it’s a big step up from the Cessna 172 I flew eighteen months ago.

  I sit in the cockpit behind my instructor, wearing a helmet and oxygen mask with a hot mic that allows us to talk to each other. The mic picks up every breath, any sound I make.

  After we take off, I realize that I left the Ziploc bags in my flight bag, which is about fifteen feet from where I’m sitting and inaccessible during the flight.

  Things go well for the first forty-five minutes. I begin to relax. This is no big deal, I tell myself. Clearly, I’m a natural at this.

  My instructor says we’re going to perform a G awareness maneuver, which is where you roll perpendicular to the horizon at two hundred KIAS, then smoothly pull back on the stick to start a tight 360 while maintaining altitude in order to induce a g-force on the body. I’ve never done the maneuver before, and I’ve never had any g-load on my body.

  My instructor performs the maneuver. My vision shrinks to the size of a quarter. It’s awful. Not only that, but I feel like I’m going to throw up.

  “All right,” he says. “Let’s get some landing practice in.”

  “Roger that, sir.” I don’t tell him I feel sick to my stomach.

  We do touch-and-goes—landing and then immediately throwing max power and taking off before you leave the runway.

  “How you feeling?” he asks.

  “Still haven’t thrown up, sir.” But I’m about to, I add privately. There’s no doubt in my mind.

  “Okay,” he says. “Let’s head home.”

  We’ve got a twenty-minute flight ahead of us, and I’ve got about twenty seconds until I puke. There’s no way I’m going to make it—and there’s no way I’m going to throw up in the plane because if I do, I’ll have to clean it up. Plus, if I throw up now, there’s no place for it to go. I’m wearing an oxygen mask, and I left my Ziploc bags inside my flight bag and I can’t get—

  I throw up.

  Clamp my lips together to prevent it from escaping.

  Swallow it back down.

  It’s awful.

  So, so awful.

  Thankfully, though, my stomach settles.

  I’m good. All I need to do now is make it back home and I can—

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, I vomit inside my oxygen mask.

  And I know my instructor heard it.

  “Hey,” he says. “What the heck was that?”

  “It’s nothing, sir.”

  “It sounded like—”

  “I’m fine, sir. Let’s get home.”

  When we finally land, I want to jump out of the plane and kiss the ground, I’m so happy. And I feel fine. I take off my helmet and then, very, very carefully, I remove my oxygen mask and, holding it like a bowl, place it inside the helmet so I can’t spill it.

  Now I have to unstrap myself from all the stuff inside the airplane. Because I’m strapped inside an ejection seat, I have to elevate my helmet above my head and place it on top of the canopy—the sliding transparent enclosure—in order to get out.

  My helmet tips.

  Falls inside the plane and splatters vomit everywhere.

  My instructor pulls me aside.

  “Don’t feel bad,” he says. “Happens to everybody.”

  JEFF MILLER

  Jeff Miller grew up in Madison Heights, a suburb north of Detroit, Michigan. His father was a Marine, and his uncles served in the Navy, Army, and Air Force. Jeff joined the Air Force in April of 1994 and served as a master sergeant. He retired from the service, at forty-four, after twenty-four years of service.

  An Army recruiter shows up at the house out of nowhere. I invite him inside and he shows me his portfolio of all the amazing and great things he did in Honduras and South America. He can tell I’m excited.

  “So,” he says. “What do you think?”

  I think I need to get my life straight. I’m eighteen, and the subcontracting job I had with General Motors, sewing leather products for their cars, went south of the border because of NAFTA. My friends are going down the wrong path, and I don’t want to go with them. I think if I stay here in Detroit, my life is going to turn to shit. I think I need to get as far away from Michigan as possible.

  “The Army looks great,” I tell him.

  When my father comes home from work, I tell him I’m going to join the Army.

  “No, son. No Army.”

  “What about the Marines?”

  The color drains from his face and he swallows several times—the same look he gets when fireworks go off during the Fourth of July.

  My father was a Marine, served in Vietnam. Not that he—or my mother, for that matter—ever talked about it. The only reason I know is because I found an old photo album of his. He served four years, all of it pretty much on an aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise.

  My father takes a deep breath. He’s a hard man. Growing up, me, my brother, and my sister—we couldn’t do anything right in his eyes. I figured if I joined the military, he’d show me some respect, maybe even say, Hey, I love you, son. I’m proud of you.

  “No,” he says. “Absolutely not. No Marine Corps.”

  “I’m nineteen. I can do it.”

  “You’re not going to join the Army, Navy, or the Marine Corps. If you’re going to do it, you’re going to do the Air Force.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been to almost all the Army and Navy bases. The Air Force bases—the quality of life there i
s so much better. And you’ll learn a trade, one you can take with you after the service. Besides, your mother made you soft, so the Air Force is perfect for you.”

  I think he’s joking about me being soft. I hope he is.

  Air Force basic training is the easiest thing in the universe. Once you get over the initial shock of someone yelling at you, it’s like being back in parks and recs. Let’s go on the monkey bars and climb across. Let’s walk over this rope across a pool. You won’t fall. No one is going to swing a rope at you.

  My second week in, a career counselor asks me what I want to do. I tell him what I told my recruiter: I want to be a loadmaster. Fly with the aircraft, load ’em up.

  The counselor consults his clipboard. “Closest thing I’ve got is air transportation. You’ll like that. Says here you worked at a warehouse for a lot of your high school years. You’ll load aircraft. It’s pretty much the same thing as being a loadmaster.”

  It’s not even close.

  I don’t fly with the aircraft or do any weights and balances. They have me load everything from explosives and tanks to refueling vehicles, helicopters, humanitarian supplies—just about everything.

  Two months later, they send me to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. They put me on the graveyard shift. I don’t see the sun for six months. Then the seasons change, and the daily allotment of five hours of dusk, no sunlight, becomes the northern lights. I discover that Alaska is beautiful—and covered in greenery.

  The base is an aerial port, the focal point to get anything out of Anchorage by air. I love my job, which is primarily unloading trucks and shipping everything on special air pallets called metal skids. The six of us stationed here become a close circle, do everything together—hunting and fishing, barhopping at night.

  I have ambitions to be a hotshot entrepreneur and own a bar. The Montgomery G.I. Bill will pay for school, so I can go learn how to do it right. Four years later, though, when they ask me if I want to reenlist, I tell them yes. I like my job, my life. I like it very much.

  On September 11, 2001, I’m married and working at the BWI Airport in Baltimore, Maryland. Air Mobility Command has a terminal there, and instead of moving cargo I’m moving passengers. Military personnel traveling to Europe or some other forward operating base, or FOB, fly out of BWI.

  Before coming here, I worked in California, at the Travis Air Force Base, where I deployed to places like Saudi Arabia and helped open new Air Force bases and airfields. Sometimes we’d get fired at or shelled, but it was always far away, way outside the base. It was like going on a Boy Scout camping trip that might turn deadly. I never was in direct combat.

  On 9/11, they shut down the airport. It’s the first time that I actually feel, Holy crap, I’m in the military. I actually may get the opportunity to defend the nation.

  This is going to be wonderful.

  Then I remember I have a wife and three kids and I’m not so sure.

  For the next six years, they send me all over the world. Then, in 2007, I’m deployed to Afghanistan. The Air Force puts me in charge of scheduling airlifts and putting soldiers on planes. No other country comes close to moving stuff like the US. We move foreign troops and equipment for Germany, France, even England.

  I’m stationed on a German-led FOB with a team of eleven people. We’re at the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. A lot of American Special Forces are on base, as well as Air Force commercial and military cargo craft.

  My job is forwarding Air Force property to the correct FOB while also coordinating troops for redeployment or sending them back home. I’m responsible for getting equipment, air certification letters, and people cleared through customs and for calculating the correct load plans for each aircraft to utilize space, which is critical. To fly a large military transport aircraft like a C-5 Galaxy to Afghanistan from the East Coast of the US is a little over a million dollars in fuel and flight costs. The work is mind-numbingly painful but also challenging and important.

  Soldiers are getting killed and wounded in record numbers. My transportation group is placed in charge of finding aircraft for our fallen warriors and heroes and delivering them to the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. I have seventy-two hours to get them home—and all the military aircraft are assigned to high-priority missions, Special Forces, and medevacs. Trying to reroute one of our aircraft to pick up the remains is a nearly impossible task, but fortunately I have a little bit more play with the civilian carriers, which normally start their mission in Dover. I enter the necessary information into our system, make sure that the funeral director who will collect the remains knows the state and condition of the body, which means I need to read the death certificates.

  They’re very difficult to look at.

  And the deaths don’t stop. I’m moving eighteen, twenty-two bodies at a time.

  Then our timeline is cut from seventy-two hours to forty-eight. I can’t get any additional equipment or manpower. My people and I have to figure out a way to do it on our own.

  We work eighteen, twenty-two hours a day, and we sleep in our tents on the airfield. It’s insanely hot and humid, flash flooding all the time, our computer systems crapping out, and we hunker down and make it happen because we’re dealing with the human remains of warriors, and we’ve got to get them home.

  I don’t have, to my knowledge, PTSD or anything like that. When I deployed, I always found great people who made my time memorable even when we were living in a tent in the middle of winter and didn’t have a working heater. But I won’t lie to you: when I got back home, I wanted to go back overseas. I’m retired now, but if they asked me to put on the uniform and go back over there to support the mission, I would do it in a heartbeat.

  JIM TAFT

  Jim Taft grew up just outside Newport, Rhode Island. He joined the Army, then attended West Point and graduated in 2005. He served as a psyop officer before leaving the service.

  One morning, in the summer of 1998, I wake up with an epiphany.

  I get into my car, drive to Providence, Rhode Island, walk into an Army recruiter’s office, and say, “Sign me up.”

  I never had any intention of joining the military until today.

  I went to a Catholic all-male prep school in Newport, Rhode Island; played sports; did what my mom and dad told me. Then I went to a Catholic college in New York and figured out that I really, really liked beer and I really, really didn’t like class. I left after one semester, came home, and went to a junior college. It felt like high school all over again, and I quit. My first bout of adulthood, and I failed miserably.

  I’m eighteen years old and need to do something different with my life. Clearly, I don’t know how to be responsible. My thinking is maybe the military can teach me.

  Two days later, I fly to Fort Benning, on the Alabama-Georgia border, for basic training.

  It’s a shock to the system.

  I’m short, about five five, and the drill sergeant seems eight feet tall. He has his shirtsleeves rolled up, and I can see every single sinewy muscle and vein in his arms. He’s got the perfect high and tight haircut and the perfect square jaw, and I’m pretty sure he has about half a can of Copenhagen packed in his cheek.

  I have never been yelled at in my entire life. On top of that, the drill sergeant and all these other guys are using words and combinations of adjectives and adverbs and cusswords and made-up words that I didn’t know could be put together. I hear the word fuck used as a comma.

  I didn’t know you could use fuck as a comma.

  What the hell am I doing here? What is this?

  I decide to give it some time. Slowly, my attitude changes from I don’t want to be here to Let’s get this over with.

  I grew up in an extremely Irish Catholic family, in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. Here, I’m seeing all the colors in the crayon box. I’m being forced to interact with people from all different walks of life. And as hokey as it sounds, none of it matters because we’re all
here together to accomplish a mission. This doesn’t happen in the real world. Even at my age, I know that in the real world you can’t throw together a group of people who have no reason to be together and expect them to do anything successful.

  After basic, I head to Fort Gordon and get advanced individual training in communications. It’s nearing the end of 1999, and I get word that I’m going to be joining a humanitarian mission called Operation Stabilize, in East Timor. We get issued timber boots, uniforms, and these cool boonie hats. I’m assuming we’re leaving Georgia for someplace tropical. I’ve never heard of East Timor, but I’m assuming it’s in Indonesia since that’s our destination.

  That’s all we’re told. That and we’ll be providing UN standard communications so everyone can talk to each other.

  I’m the youngest person on the deployment. I quickly find out that I’m surrounded by specialists and higher-up guys who have a proven track record of being great at what they do. I also find out that my team leader fought for me to deploy. He told the command that I’m a capable and good soldier. He thought this would be a great experience for me.

  I’ve been the good private. Got the shiny boots, the tight haircut, and I do well at PT. I never cause any trouble. I wake up, go run a couple of miles, do some push-ups, go to work, go back to the barracks, and shine my boots. Up until this point, the Army has been easy for me.

  Now I’m going to be put to the test, to prove my worth on an actual real-world mission.

  The airport in Dili has been completely sacked by civil unrest. It’s riddled with bullet holes and pockmarks left from an attack by some crude mortar systems. Some of the buildings have been mortared, maybe even bombed.