September 2009Going to WarBy David MatsudaI didn’t take leave during my first deployment to Iraq, in 2007 and 2008. Fourteen days – known as “a two week good-bye” – is too short a time. The sleep debt incurred by passing through multiple time zones would, I reasoned, cloud my senses and hinder my ability to meaningfully reconnect with my anxious family, who’d suffer from no such REM deprivation. And as a contractor my employment terms contained a clause that made it all too easy for me not to return. This logic, be it rational or stubbornness twisted by the fog of war, saw me through more than a year of training and deployment without a visit home. Prior to my 2009 tour of duty with United States Army I Corps, my former Human Terrain Team chief surprised me by sponsoring my participation in a seminar at the U.S. Army War College. The seminar dates fell at the end of four months – a third of the way through my tour – and coincided with my wife Kristi’s 50th birthday. I eagerly planned to blend business with pleasure at Carlisle Barracks, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania with my family. A month of baboob (silt storms) miraculously cleared before my flight from Baghdad to Kuwait. I caught up with an officer who’d left Baghdad the day before me. As we admired a landscape sun-bleached by 120 degree temperatures we were joined periodically by old friends heading to and from Iraq. Soon enough we parted company, the officer on a military flight to officially demobilize, and me on a 15-hour flight to Carlisle Barracks. Stiff and sleepy after a day of transoceanic passage and delayed domestic flights, I rented a car and drove to Carlisle Township, where I checked into both hotel and seminar, took a shower and drove back to the airport to meet my family. We saw each other from a distance, and after a mad dash it was hugs and slobbery kisses all around. As we reveled in each other I simultaneously became vulnerable to my family’s love, and to my enemies hatred and mission to take my life and deny our future. Fearlessness in the face of death would have to be a reacquired trait. War College students receive a Masters of Military Science. My role was to show them the value of culture, understanding and protecting the civilian population, and to demonstrate how non-lethal operations are changing the nature of warfare. In seminar after seminar I talked about how on countless occasions an understanding of culture enabled me to diffuse what might have been a faux paux or a fight. When not in class my family and I toured colonial Pennsylvania townships, and the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg. When school was out for the summer we visited friends in Connecticut. All too soon it was time to take leave of my family again. Going to war is easy with months to transition mentally and to prepare the heart emotionally. But to replicate this age old separation ritual in two weeks is impossible. |
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