"Thank You For Your Service"

Francis P. Sempa

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Any true postmortems on the 21st-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should factor in the domestic human costs of those conflicts. Not just the casualty lists--the dead, wounded, and missing that litter every war--but also the effect of the wars on those who survived. Two new books written by veterans of combat--one a memoir by a Marine combat cameraman who served in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, the other a novel about the postwar life of a survivor by a Marine combat veteran of both wars--shed light on the hidden costs of endless wars and should be read by U.S. policymakers before they send more young Americans into harm’s way.

Miles Lagoze’s Whistles from the Graveyard: My Time Behind the Camera on War, Rage, and Restless Youth in Afghanistan is a raw, introspective look at the harsh realities of war, a vivid snapshot of some of the soldiers who were sent to fight the “Global War on Terror,” and a story of the human “costs” of endless wars at the micro level. Lagoze was not a “gung-ho” Marine when he joined up, and his service there--what he saw and experienced--soured him even more on the Marine Corps and the “military-industrial complex” that sent young Americans to wage a “forever war” that seemed to have no real purpose. Officially, successive U.S. administrations said we were fighting in Afghanistan and later in Iraq to avenge the attacks of 9/11, to find and kill the terror masters who planned the attacks, to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction, to prevent another 9/11 from occurring, to form stable democratic governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, to defeat insurgencies that arose in both countries after we “won” the wars. Some neoconservative writers and policymakers said we were fighting a “world war” against Islamic fascism. The goalposts kept moving. Soldiers, who endured multiple combat deployments, kept dying and suffering terrible wounds. Like in Vietnam, we were repeatedly told that there was light at the end of the tunnel, but we never seemed to reach the end of the tunnel.

To Lagoze and many of his fellow Marines on the ground in Afghanistan none of this made sense. They saw first-hand that Afghanistan wasn’t really a “country.” Apparently our policymakers forgot or never learned that Afghanistan was “the graveyard of empires.” Lagoze’s job was to film America’s victory in battles at the front--but in this war there wasn’t any “front” and there were no real victories. But among the troops he was supposed to film there was, according to Lagoze, a lot of drug and alcohol use, some suicides, some misogyny, some cruelty to animals--the endless war and multiple deployments had taken their toll. We had courageous heroes in Afghanistan, too, but they don’t make it into Lagoze’s memoir. The endless war took its toll on him, too. He was wounded during combat and received a Purple Heart, but the psychological wounds were more lasting. Especially when he filmed what he believed was an unnecessary killing by some of his fellow Marines of a wounded Afghan in Helmand Province. But that was something he was not supposed to film. He describes his job as a “propagandist” whose job was to build support at home for America’s war abroad. If Americans saw what war was really like, support would dry up--the politicians and the Pentagon and the arms producers (the “military industrial complex”) wouldn’t like that. I believe it was George Will who once wrote that if there had been film crews showing the fighting at Gettysburg or Antietam, America would be two nations today.

Some veterans, Lagoze writes, come to realize that they are “more comfortable at war than in the real active chaos of home.” That realization is at the heart of John Waters’ crisply-written, engaging and marvelously descriptive tale of post-Afghan War life, River City One: A Novel. Waters is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who did combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. His novel is a fictional account told by his protagonist “John Walker,” a combat soldier in America’s endless wars turned lawyer in civilian life. Walker lives and works in River City. “River City One,” Waters writes, “was the code they used aboard ship whenever the internet and phone line went dead, whenever the ship shut off communications with the outside, leaving everyone onboard in quarantine from the world beyond.” For John Walker, “River City One” came home with him.

Waters begins the story with Walker, who was a sniper in Afghanistan, at a shooting range talking to an old military buddy about vets whose lives fell apart after they returned from the country’s endless wars--divorces, domestic abuse, broken families. Walker then recalls how he met his wife Grace at college before he left for basic training, then shifts to describing Tailor & Tines, the law firm he worked for after his tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. On his office wall instead of his law degree, Walker placed a framed print of a soldier on duty at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Some at the firm asked him about his war experiences. Waters has a friend of Walker remark: “They can’t help themselves. They want that secondhand glory. ‘Tell me you’re a hero.’ ‘I’d be really freaked out if you killed somebody, but please, please tell me that you killed somebody.’”

Walker as a new young lawyer does the grunt work for the firm--reading and highlighting transcripts and other documents--and he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t much care for the business lunches he has to attend, either. Or the “war stories” told by the firm’s trial lawyers. In fact, very little about civilian life back home interests Walker. At one point, when asked whether he had shown an interest in an older lawyer, Walker reflects: “There was no interest to show. I had no respect for older men, older lawyers who hadn’t done anything noteworthy to earn respect.” What Walker respected was “action and purpose” --what he and his fellow soldiers did in Afghanistan.

A visit to a prison to review evidence with a client charged with drug trafficking--a client sporting “club” tattoos--reminded Walker of soldiers who took their deployment pay to cover themselves in tattoos with images of “names of friends written on tombstones and dog tags.” War, he recalled, produced “expectation and excitement,” but also images of death. Walker had become “a captive to memory, measuring today against what no longer existed.” In civilian life, he felt alone.

That feeling stayed with him even when he attended an event celebrating opera at a judge’s residence in an exclusive part of the city. There, he was reminded of what his old war buddy said about the wealthy in America: “[T]he only thing rich people loved more than other rich people was a war hero.” An opera singer--Ruth Ryan, the star of the evening--chatted with him after the event, asking him, “What did you do in the army?” His first thought was: “There were years spent hunched under an eighty-pound pack, dirty, shitting in plastic bags on training assignments, when carrying around a pile of your own shit could not be justified by explanations of war? Where to begin?,” but instead he said, “I was in the infantry.” They are both married but are obviously attracted to each other.

Like Lagoze’s memory of the killing of a wounded Afghan, Waters’ character John Walker is mentally scarred by the death in Afghanistan of a fellow sniper, Sgt. West. It is a memory he reveals in detail to Ruth Ryan, with whom he has a brief fling. Walker’s wife suspects that he strayed from her with Ruth, but while he acknowledges a flirtation he continues to lie to her. They stay together. “Grace and Charlie [their son] have their life,” Walker thinks, “and I have whatever is left of mine.” Walker and his wife stay together and he continued to profess his love for her, but he still emotionally clings to Ruth: “Every day had been stale and unimaginative,” he reflects, “until Ruth appeared.”

In the end, neither John Walker of Waters’ novel nor Miles Lagoze can leave their pasts behind them and just get on with their lives. The endless wars waged by successive U.S. presidents have had consequences that followed their participants home. “Soldiers,” Lagoze writes, “are instruments of the state.” Perhaps Carl Cannon summed it up best in his foreword to River City One: “[T]hose of us who . . . stand and cheer for veterans and their families at the ballpark, or who tell men and women in uniform, ‘Thank you for your service,’ can do more. For starters, we can read their memoirs and their novels. And after doing so, we can look with deep skepticism on elected officials who are too eager to send young Americans off to war.”