Walk in My Combat Boots Read online

  It’s my first time seeing actual destruction—the kind of destruction that fighting causes—and I feel my fear kick in.

  Oh, shit. This is actually real.

  The University of Timor is about ten miles from the airport. We move there and set up our commo shop, build a hooch, and set up defensive positions.

  About a week in, I’m pulling security eight hours a day, working another ten, and then sleeping and working out whenever I can. And then it hits me:

  This is really fun. I’m chilling out in some crazy, beautiful, foreign, tropical country with a loaded weapon. It’s fantastic.

  I’m working out by myself in the crude little gym we’ve set up when the task force commander, Colonel Yarney, enters.

  “Why are you here, Private?” he asks.

  “I’ve got to stay in shape to do good on my PT test, sir.”

  His smile says Good answer. “Are you enjoying your time here?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m having a blast.”

  “Working hard?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We work out for a bit. Then, out of nowhere, he says, “Did you graduate from high school?”

  “Yes, sir. I graduated with a 4.0 from a prep school.”

  “And did you take the SAT?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you do well on it?”

  “Yes, sir. I went to a small Catholic college on a full academic scholarship.” Which is true. I leave out the part about how much I enjoyed beer more than class.

  “Have you ever thought about becoming an officer?” he asks.

  “Well, sir, I like money, so yes, I’ve thought about it.”

  We finish working out. We eat some chow, shower up, put on our uniforms.

  “Come to my office after lunch,” he says. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  When I arrive, Colonel Yarney is there with one of his captains. They tell me they’re both graduates of West Point. The military academy, they say, tries to get two hundred active soldiers a year to matriculate. I can go to West Point, they tell me, but since I haven’t done any academic work for a good amount of time, first I have to go to their military prep school for a year.

  “Think about it,” the colonel says.

  I don’t have to think about it all that long. I like the Army. West Point is a great college, and I won’t have to pay anything, which is cool.

  I head back to the colonel’s office before dinner.

  “Sir, about your offer,” I say. “Where do I sign up?”

  Five months later, when I arrive at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona, Colonel Yarney takes me to the officers’ club for a little celebration. I have lunch with him and five lieutenants who graduated from West Point.

  Then, in 2000, I head to Monmouth County, New Jersey, for prep school. I get right back into the swing of academic life.

  Showing up at West Point in the middle of summer—my first day, like the Grateful Dead say, is a trip, man. I see Gothic buildings that look as though they were plucked out of eighteenth-century Europe and placed down along the Hudson River. I eat lunch served family style with roughly four thousand people.

  Cadets run the training, called beast barracks. It’s my plebe year, but I’m the same age as the juniors and seniors. In my private first-class head, since I’ve actually deployed, I have infinitely more military experience and knowledge than any of them. My beast roommate is a recruited swimmer, the first in his family to go to college, no military experience whatsoever.

  When the cadets in my room scream at me like the drill sergeant did on my first day of basic, it’s hard to take them seriously. But my roommate does. He breaks down in tears.

  “Dude,” I say, shocked. “What are you doing? You can’t cry.”

  “I just…Why were they yelling at me? I just wanted to pick up my bag and they wouldn’t let me pick up my bag.”

  “Calm down. No one’s gonna die today. Nothing’s going to blow up. This isn’t the end of the world. You’re going to be okay.”

  Later, when no one else is around, my beast barracks squad leader approaches me and asks, “What did you do in the Army?”

  “I was a signal guy.”

  “Really? I want to branch signal.”

  “That’s great, Sergeant.”

  “Can you tell me what it’s like?”

  You’re supposed to tell me what the Army is like, I want to say. Not the other way around.

  Then it occurs to me that the guys here have accomplished something I haven’t: making it through freshman year. They’re on track to graduate, and more important, they’re in charge, so I reconnect with the attitude that got me through basic: Let’s get this over with.

  Two weeks into the academic year, 9/11 happens. The country is going to war is all we hear from the active-duty officers who are our teachers.

  West Point has a lunchtime tradition of announcing the names of graduates who have died. Those first few months, during the initial invasion into Afghanistan, are rough. Cadets who know the names of the dead—some of them can’t handle it. Some of them say, “I can’t do this,” and quit.

  The older I get in cadet years, the more people I get to know, and the more names of the dead I start to recognize.

  Alumni who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq return to talk with us about the war. They share combat stories from the battlefield. The way they speak, I can tell they’re trying to mold the students into good leaders.

  Graduating West Point cadets get to pick their first post. Much like the NFL draft, the lineup is by branch, in order of merit. When it’s my turn in 2005, I pick infantry. I want to be on the front lines. I want to go to Afghanistan and have my revenge on what they did to us.

  RON SILVERMAN

  Ronald Silverman grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, a World War II veteran who served in the Army, was a dentist and General Patton’s senior medical officer. Ron went to college at the University of Wisconsin during the height of the Vietnam era, and in 1967, he joined a two-year ROTC program, wanting to be an officer in the Army. The military was more interested in physicians and dentists, and after Ron was commissioned in 1969, he went to Temple University’s school of dentistry, in Philadelphia. As a brigadier general, he was in charge of all medical assets in New England. His final command, as a major general, was commander of the 3rd MEDCOM—the US Army Medical Command—located out of Fort Gillem, in Georgia. From 2004 to 2008, Ron was in command of all medical assets in Iraq. He retired in 2008, after serving forty-one years.

  I’m in Florida, getting ready to retire after thirty years in the reserves, when a two-star general I’ve never heard of calls me at home.

  “Congratulations,” he says. “You’re going to be the commander of the 804th Medical Brigade.”

  This is the furthest thing from my mind.

  After I graduated from dental school, I served as a dentist at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia. After four years, the Vietnam War was winding down very quickly, and the Army was shrinking in size. I chose to leave the active Army and opened up a private practice in dentistry in Alexandria, Virginia. My father, being a reservist, kept saying that I should join the reserves. I did, and then I ended up joining an Individual Mobilization Augmentee unit that was attached to the deputy chief of staff for logistics. I got to see how the Army organizes things on such a large scale. I got promoted to lieutenant colonel. It worked out great. Twelve years later, I got another job doing the exact same thing for the dental corps within the surgeon general’s office.

  In the reserves, to become a general you have to apply for the job. You’re given a list of twenty generalships that are vacant, and another list of ones that aren’t currently vacant in case somebody drops out or retires early.

  There was no dental general job. But there were what they call medical brigade commands, where you command all reserve medical troops in a geographic area. They’ve never had anyone but a physician hold that job, but there was no law that said I couldn’t apply for
it, so I did. I applied for six jobs. I didn’t get selected for any of them, went back to working at the surgeon general’s office, and got my mind set on retiring.

  And now this guy on the other end of the line is telling me I’m going to be a general.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The guy who’s currently in command has to leave the reserves,” he replies. “You were the next person on the list.”

  Next thing I know I’m the commander of the 804th Medical Brigade at Fort Devens, in Massachusetts. It controls all the medical assets in New England. As general, I’ll be on active duty for about six months a year.

  And I’ll be traveling. A lot.

  Besides holding my primary job, I’m put in charge of New Horizons, a humanitarian mission in Central and South America. We send down engineering and medical assets to Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to help rebuild some of the areas destroyed, in 1998, by Hurricane Mitch. I know all the medical parts, not so much about engineering. I need to learn that.

  We always have problems finding translators, so I ask the Peace Corps to help us.

  “No way,” they tell me. “We don’t want to be associated with the military in any way. The locals view the military as the bad guys. And if our people are associated with the military, we would be viewed as not being the peace workers that we should be.”

  When we end up in Paraguay, the Peace Corps changes its mind and gives us translators because the military is well liked by the locals. The locals also like us, so the Peace Corps workers won’t be contaminated or compromised, so to speak.

  We set up these little day clinics in this small town out in the middle of nowhere. The Peace Corps workers—about thirty of them, all Americans—translate while we work on patients. They’re all young and roughly the same age as my men: between eighteen and twenty-five. The Paraguay military puts us up in a school gym and some other places. They want to put the Peace Corps workers in separate buildings.

  “No way,” I tell them.

  Generally speaking, Peace Corps workers are much more liberal, and military guys are much more conservative. But I make them work together and sleep in the same facility every single day.

  “They can’t be separated,” I say. “We all work together. We’re all Americans. They sleep in the same quarters as we do—and they eat with us at every meal. I want every table to have a Peace Corps worker and a military guy.”

  When I leave, I get a letter from one of the Peace Corps workers: I never realized the military could be so human. I never realized that the military could be so caring. Your guys are so enthusiastic about their work and what they do.

  After my four years are up, I apply, in 2003, for a vacant position: commander of the 3rd MEDCOM, the US Army Medical Command, at Fort Gillem, in Georgia. The following year, I’m offered the position. It’s the first time a dental officer is given a two-star command.

  The 3rd MEDCOM is a headquarters of maybe 120 people. I have a war team. I have to go overseas three times to get the lay of the land, see what’s there, what the tempo is like.

  The unit gets mobilized six months prior to our departure date. We spend four months training at Fort McCoy, in Wisconsin, and two months at Fort Hood, in Texas. We go back to Fort McCoy and take a charter plane to Kuwait.

  It’s summer, unbearably hot. I like heat, but I’m also wearing fifty-seven pounds of body armor. I’m not a big guy—about five six and 140-some-odd pounds—and this stuff weighs a ton.

  I’m going to travel with the troops. At least that’s my plan. Headquarters says I’m being flown by helicopter—a Sea Stallion (CH-53), the biggest bird the Navy has—because this is my first time going into combat, and because I’m a general in charge of all medical assets, hospitals, and clinics. I’ll also have a gunship accompanying me because I am, effectively, in charge of the largest trauma facilities in the world. We provide care for everybody—military personnel and civilians.

  The helicopter is noisy, and we fly with the back door dropped down. The loadmaster sees me looking outside, at the terrain, and says, “We’re over Kuwait. You can hang over the side and look down, if you want. Put this harness on. We don’t want to drop you.”

  I’m hanging out there on the back, having a great time. When we cross over into Iraq, the loadmaster says, “You’ve got to come back in a little bit. We’ve got to make sure we’re safe—”

  The helicopter’s hydraulics system breaks and sprays fire-hot fluid into the cargo area and the next thing I know the helicopter’s going down fast—and the pilot is losing control.

  He executes a hard landing in the sand near Camp Bucca. Nobody gets hurt, but the guys in the back are covered in hydraulic fluid. The gunship circles, waiting for the Black Hawk to come and pick us up and take us to Bucca, where we’ll get another flight to Camp Victory, the headquarters of the US military in Iraq.

  This is all so new to me.

  I soon learn that I’ve been targeted for assassination.

  The attack happens when I travel to a place called Korean Village in Anbar Province, where the North Koreans built roads for Saddam. I am inspecting a little clinic there. As I’m walking away from the helicopter, it gets hit by an incoming rocket.

  Although I get blown down, I’m not injured.

  We remove the pilot from the wreckage to treat his injuries. He’s a kid, not much older than my son Matthew, who is also serving in Iraq right now. My heart sinks when I see that the pilot is eviscerated, his femoral artery cut. There’s nothing I can do to save him.

  The gunner has a bad leg wound. I save him, and we get him a medevac out.

  When I’m in Baghdad, if the military hospital downtown is very busy, I help out with triage whenever I can. I do a lot of interviews. The first question I’m always asked is, “You’re a dentist. What are you doing here?”

  First of all, most of my work is administrative. Second, the CEO of Ford isn’t necessarily an engineer. The CEO of American Airlines isn’t a pilot. I look at dentistry as a subspecialty of medicine. I deal with the head and neck. No different than if I was a dermatologist, I’d deal with just skin. Or if I was an ophthalmologist, I would deal with eyes. I think I have enough medical background to make the necessary decisions.

  Being a general, I soon realize, allows me to make command decisions that save lives.

  My senior medical staff officer comes to me and says, “There’s a kid who got badly burned in an explosion. We’ve got to get him to San Antonio in a hurry.”

  San Antonio, Texas, is the world center for burns. Cost isn’t an issue. Moneywise, I can have anything I want. When I have staff meetings with General Petraeus and tell him what I need, his answer is always the same: “Okay, you got it.”

  “Do it,” I tell my medical staff officer.

  “No, you’ve got to do it, because if we do it through proper channels, it will take six, seven hours to get a plane here.”

  I call up an Air Force guy, a one-star general. “Where’s your closest C-17?”

  “I actually have one flying right over your head.”

  “Tell him to land,” I say, and then explain what’s happening.

  “No problem.”

  When the C-17 lands, it takes less than twenty minutes to convert into a cargo plane—a hospital plane, with all the necessary medical equipment. We get the kid to Texas.

  He lives.

  Other days, I’m not so lucky.

  My son Matthew is a signal officer with the 82nd Airborne. He lives in Sadr City, in a combat outpost—a disgusting old police station. When I visit him, I have to come in by helicopter.

  One day Brian, an orthopedic surgeon, calls me and says, “Do you want to go visit your son?”

  “Sure. Why do you want to go?”

  “Well, I need a helicopter ride. If I go with you, I get a helicopter right away.”

  “Okay.”

  When I hang up, my aide says, “For God’s sake, leave that kid alone. You just saw him last week.�
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  My aide has a point. When I go to visit someone—anyone—it’s a big deal. Matthew doesn’t like people to know that his father is a two-star general. He doesn’t like the fuss that comes when I visit him. I pick up the phone and call Brian back.

  “Listen, Brian, I can’t go. But I’ll get you the helicopter.”

  Brian takes the helicopter. It gets shot down, and Brian is killed.

  After the invasion of Iraq, the US military took over Saddam Hussein’s sprawling complex of ostentatious palaces and artificial lakes and gave it the name Camp Victory. The main palace is now our military headquarters. When Saddam is captured, he’s brought to one of his son’s houses out in the middle of a lake. I have corpsmen stationed there around the clock.

  Saddam has significant medical issues: heart disease and lung problems from smoking Cuban cigars. “Your job,” General Petraeus tells me, “is to make sure he stays alive.”

  Every morning, one of my physicians checks him over. I also send a psychiatrist. Saddam, he tells me, believes he’s going to be released and take over the country, go back to being who he was.

  “I think he’s a little depressed,” the psychiatrist says.

  “What do you mean you ‘think’? I’d be depressed, too.”

  The head of the prisons calls me and says, “Saddam broke a tooth. Can you send over one of your dentists?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  He laughs. “Can you send someone over?”

  “I just told you, I’ll do it. I’m a dentist.”

  “Stop kidding around. I really need a—”

  “Do you want me to send you a photocopy of my license?”

  “Just bring your equipment out,” he finally says.

  “I’m not bringing my equipment out there. We’ve got clinics all over Victory. There’s a small one-man clinic—bring him to that one. At night. You can have all the security you want, as many guards as you want, but within that room, it’s only me and him, and maybe a translator and an assistant, if I want one.”

  “Okay.”