I was planning to come out of my retirement today and share this story with you, but my wife did call me back on an unrelated tactical problem, so this is my second one-off article written just because today is Anzac Day
Well, today is the ANZAC day, by default, the celebration is to head to a RSL club and get pissing drunk, today, unlike many other, flock and flock of ex-servicemen will come fro mall over just to be this gathering and swap war story. When you hear enough, you will know there are all sort of story, some believable, some don’t, some seems too surreal to believe. But regardless, people are obliged to sit there and listen.
So, how
DO YOU tell a war story? In the word of Tim O’Brien, it cannot be done. As real war stories
DOES NOT exist. People hear stuff, people see stuff, it may be real, it may be not real, yet no war story are real, and no war story are not real. Truth may seem too difficult to accept, and war is something sometime very hard to believe. Yet it happens and it’s unbelievable.
To tell a war story, first you need to generalize a war story, that mean you need to generalize both war and stories. But how you generalize war? It can’t be done. War is everything. War can be hell, but war can be fun, war can be chaotic, but soldier marching into battle cannot be anything but organized. War is everything, yet war is nothing, war is anything you want it to be, but at the same time, war is everything you don’t want it to be.
So how do you generalize war? It cannot be done, and if it cannot be done, then a story would just be a story, as any movie, books, diary and any generalize publication. Anything that happened in war can be not true, but at the same time, anything and everything that did not happened in War can be truer than the truth. Say I am telling you a story about a soldier and his lucky charm, if he said his luck charm keep him from any harm, but if he turned out to be dead, then what he said about the lucky charm is not true, and his story would never existed. But did the story ever exist? Or did he ever exist?
A war story cannot be about war, mostly because nobody will believe it, and it mostly because you are telling it to a person who have never saw it, heard it and know about it. To them, things seem too crazy to be truth. Yet if they are indeed true, the story itself is not believable. But it does exist, and at least, it wanted to exist.
So, let me tell you a story. I didn’t see it myself, I was being told this is absolutely true, and I want to believe that it is true, but I did not see it with my own eyes, I cannot vouch for it validity.
One day I was having lunch in the base canteen in Afghanistan, I have a friend who was a part of damage assessment team, one day we are having lunch at the officer canteen, He started tell me about this story. There were a team send to the eastern mountain and set up a OP and LP on a hill, overlooking the insurgent activities. Beyond their post there is this lowland with decline elevation, beyond that is a plateau, they set up the OP there so that when anything coming up on that plateau, we would be the first to know.
So, one night, a moon lit light, no fog, which is abnormal during that time, the team settled in their night, ready to look thru the NVG and listen to the noise coming out of the mountain. It was up there, the sound of step is approaching and there is all kind of noise being reported. The team instantly jumps into highest state of alert and people are readying their weapon, and the RO established connection to the CP.
AS they are ready for whatever coming their way, the sound of the mountain keep coming closer, you can hear and feel each grass move by millimeter but there were no wind that day, no fog too. You can also hear the stone got chip away and fallen on other stone. The crack-crack sound seems like there are people trampling all over. With each crackling sound, you can hear, even range the enemy is getting closer.
On the edge of the elevation, there are stack and stack of logs, sandbag to make a make-shift perimeter. Soldiers are anxiously awaited on top of that mountain, laying and waiting for whatever coming up that mountain.
As the footstep near and the grass move closer and closer, something else was heard; it was singing, unmistakable person voice. People are singing and walking up the mountain. Soldier in the OP are not heighten their sense and turn into an absolute state of mind. As the footstep drew even closer, and closer, more and louder singing can be heard, until a point where they unmistakably just on the other side of the log and sand bag, everything just stop. Silence man, like absolute quiet.
There were no more singing, no more grass moving, no more trampling, no more rock chipping, just a fogless night as if nothing had happened. Somebody cannot beat their curiosity and started to peek over the log and sandbag, “What do you see?” One soldier asked. “Nothing, not a damn thing” That peeper replied.
Still, the commander in that OP cannot believe this quiet, so he open up his M4 and start raking up and down, side to side down range, down the mountain. Before long, his platoon follow, opening up with everything they got, M239, 240Bravo, M24SWS, M203 is popping off here and there and with Mk19 grenade launcher raking up and down the mountain.
Then before long, the RO called in Arty form the nearby FOB. MLRS rocket, 155mm round just exploded in front of them, hitting whatever in the path, dirt, rock, tree, sand and dust. It’s like picking up a piece of the earth and set it back down violently. But they haven’t done yet, they called in Air strike, AC-130 start their station and circle around and pinning whatever there is on the ground with the 105mm shell and the 20mm minigun. The way they light up the sky is like 4th of July, only a lot more horrendous from ground prospective.
They finish the strike with 2 2000 pound JDAM from the overhead F-15E Strike Eagle, which would make sure anything or everything that creeping up on them dead like a thousand time.
After it all went off, must have been like a thousand shell and a thousand bullet fired. They went back to their own routine.
So, the next day, my friend from the DAT was called to determine how many enemies were killed on that horrendous fire display. He chopper in with MH-60 and arrive just as peak of dawn set in. He carefully walk thought the ground, avoiding anything he think is UXO, he walked around, talked to the team and trying to get a full picture on what happened last night and that afternoon, he talks to the Command in charge.
“What the hell happened yesterday?” My friend asked.
“We went into contact, hajxx was creeping up on us” The commander said.
“How many you think you have ran into?” My friend then asked.
“”Quite a lot actually, estimated a company to battalion size, quite amazes to see how those hajxx can muster some kind of action out of this” The commander replied.
My friend stopped for a moment and finishing up his tea, and the turn around and tell me, “Do you know what I found?” I said “No, but you are gonna tell you aren’t you”
“Not a damn thing, not even half a donkey dick” He said
“What??” I screamed. “So, all that for nothing?”
Psychologist called it battle fatigue, when you are in one position for an extended period of time, you mind started to wonder. And the next thing you know, you are in that “Half-Asleep” stage and you started to imagining things that your brain is telling you that happened. Not what actually happened.
Some dude may have turn on his Ipod a little too loud and the soldier all hear singing, rock can fell off at that place because quite frankly, that place was a thousand years old. And these seemingly half truth and make those soldier believe that they are under attack, and that was how the whole thing started, your brain is playing tricks on you.
So, for those soldier, they still think they are under attack, so, for their stories, it have to be true, but the fact is pointing in a different places, the truth, as they know it, never happens. But the story itself simply cannot be a bunch of Air/Ground fire smashed into earth because there would be nobody in it. So, for the story to tell right, those soldiers must be under attack, as you will not waste shell, bullet and bombs on open ground without any enemy in it.
War story are almost always inconsistence. As nobody would see what being told from the beginning to the end, we all have a job to do, and it’s nobody job to look at other during the whole war. So gaps are by themselves, are a default.
So, to tell a war story, you cannot just jump the gap like that, you would not say one minute he is fine, and the other minute, he’s dead. What happened in between then?? What exactly happened in between is the juice of the story; this is what hook people up with the story. Not that people are listen to them because the guy is alive, or because he is dead. It’s what happen form him being alive to what happened to his death is the gem.
To tell a war story, you will need to fill the gap between them, but it’s sort of a problem when you did not actually see what have gone down. So, you try to make up stuff on the go and when the story jump to a point beyond believe, you tend to make up normal stuff so to ease people to believe on your story.
9 out of 10 times, what seems normal did not happen, and what seems like crazy is the truth. When a soldier was killed because of an IED blown off the watch of another solder and hit him in the brain, you would not believe this happened. But they do, so when you tell this story, you would say he got hit in the head, by the IED, leave out the watch, leave out the other soldier hand, and leave out other crazy detail so your story is easier to believe. The circumstance is what almost seems as the first victim of war story telling.
There is another story, this time I was in it, I can attested to it existence. We were driving on the infamous “Baghdad Highway” the famous ambush alley in Iraq. I and the driver of my HMMWV were sitting in the front and we are just chatting. While Mike is looking at the road, because he have to, he is the driver, I was glancing outside on my right to the field of view and scanning my sector.
We were talking about everything, baseball, women, basketball, Iraq, deployment, cars and something I don’t really remember. But at the exact moment we crossed an intersection, we ran into an ambush. I can still see the reflection of the scope of a RPG-7 peeping out of the sand dune, I can still see the guys face when he fire the rocket. I can still remember the smell of the gunpowder, blood, sweat and Mark face afterward.
What exactly happened was, the RPG was fired on the right side, ahead of the HMMWV, The rocket exploded just in front of the fender, but the concussion is violent enough to smash the Plexiglas into million pieces. Funny thing about Plexiglas is they will not cut into pieces when break, they will just chip away, that’s how they fell apart individually and minimized the damage. However, what it does not count on is the propulsion forces from a RPG-7 Rocket. Which literally shoot that tiny piece of chipped Plexiglas inside the HMMWV.
While I was look away to my right the whole time, my left year and left face took most of the damage. Mostly just skin deep implant of the fragment, but Mike was looking straight ahead of the road, he face caught most of the glass, what those tiny piece do is to embedded into your eyes, and cut the optic nerve, and then you become blinded.
I feel like I was being slap with a diamond ring on the left side of my face, I look back and Mike is holding on with his face with both hand, nobody is driving the damn truck. I use one hand to steady the wheel and the other hand trying to feel if Mike caught anything beside the blast from the glass. I keep telling him “On the pedal, On the pedal” Meaning don’t stop, as I can still see, and that is the only way to get out of that ambush alive, if we have stopped, then the Iraqi will bring in small arms fire and envelope us all around, it would be a hard fight, and survival is not guaranteed.
So we drove on about a mile and a half away, making sure were over the kill zone, then we stop and call on the horn. There, when we stopped, I start to wipe the blood off mike’s face and see the extensive of the damage. Not good, I can see he is bleeding form inside the eyes. And the face is like you just push it against an open flame. The doc come by and bandage that face as much as he could and he apply a pressure dressing to my exposed left side (I was wearing my K Pot with ICom receiver then) which is mostly cheek. And off we wait for Heli extraction.
A few years later, when I was visiting Mike in his home, now totally blinded in both eyes, we have dinner together, and his nephew, barely 5 years old, ask her uncle what had happened to him. And Mike said “The angel in white light took my eyes away” No Iraqi, no war, no HMMWV, no Plexiglas, no insurgent, no pain, no scare, no firefight and no ambush. I understand why he said that though, why subject a 5 years old child to those kind of war story??
But it rocks later that night, when he told me, he actually believe that story, it’s not just a kid story, even he is in the mist of all that himself. I said to him, “You are joking, right?”
What it was is, he did not see the round coming, the beam of the windscreen blocked his view on the person who fired the RPG, in short, he never even saw that guy firing. He himself only knows when he gone all suddenly blinded and all the noise and realize what happened.
The keywords, however, was realized. He didn’t see it, the last moment he actually did saw is when the RPG exploded and the white and red glow that follow. Then in a millisecond, a thousand of Plexiglas chip hit his face, he saw nothing since then.
To him, the white glow is the last thing he saw before he went blind, so if he have to believe what he saw, then he have to believe that it was the white light that take away his sight. Not the RPG round, nor the Windscreen. To him, the ambush never happened, as he never saw it, it’s all just second hand information, as he heard that from us, who get out of that ambush unscathed. But he saw none of that, for him, the ambush is an hearsay.
So to believe what exactly happened but you did not see, or to believe what you see but not what exactly happened. Either of which can be said as truth and either of which can be said as lies. As both have element that did not happened, and both have element that did not existed. So, how do you tell a war story if you cannot see what happened? That would make what seems to happen does not happen, and what seems not happen do. In the end, would you believe the real story, which Truck, Plexiglas, insurgent, RPG, ambush do exist? Or would you believe what you see?
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