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Friendly Fire: The
War on Terror
By: Susan
Stinson |
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Prior to my twenty-eighth birthday, nothing about
my life indicated I would join the National Guard. I worked at a reputable publishing house in
I toyed with the idea of becoming a New York City
cop—even signed up to take the test and bought the study guide. I interviewed a few Brooklyn detectives and
a lawyer—who was once himself a cop, once himself a detective, now charged
with the intense responsibly of defending other police officers, those who
had gotten jammed up in the system due to complaints made internally or by
civilians. That interview was the most
important reason I decided not to go into civilian law enforcement. There were times, my friend explained, that
you got a bad partner—one who would put you in need of the services he, as a
lawyer, now provided—and the results could be minor—bad public opinion
citations—or severe—not getting a response from other cops for backup. This insider information tainted my ideas of
police work and my desire to become an officer started to fizzle. A few weeks later, on a clear September morning in
2001, I was in midtown Manhattan sitting in a business meeting that was
scheduled to last all day, and it would have had two planes not purposefully
been flown into the World Trade Center’s twin towers. As I watched the towers collapse on the
television in a I decided that day to join the National
Guard. A few weeks later, I scheduled
an appointment with a recruiter in I provided a singular rational for this decision
to others (and myself): in joining the National Guard, I could keep my job in
As it turned out, however, four months later, I
found out firsthand all of the truths about the military that my recruiter
had neglected to mention. I realized,
too late, that what I couldn’t handle was the absolute blind obedience I
discovered was needed for one to be considered a good soldier. Even now, though, I understand the
necessity for obedience: if an individual soldier is ordered into combat and
is simply afraid to move forward, the resulting hesitation could be deadly
for the entire group. Blind obedience
to command, however, can also result in great evils. Take, for example, the Abu Ghraib tortures.
Even after my very short stint in the military, I can almost guarantee
those young soldiers who took pictures of and participated in the torturing
of the prisoners were either poorly equipped in their training or, worse,
encouraged by their superiors to take the illegal and unethical actions. I say this with almost complete certainty
because it takes a complete devotion to one’s superiors in order to make it
in the ranks as a soldier. The slogan
“An Army of One” is taken quite seriously: one equals the many. All actions in the military require
teamwork. All actions are based on the
buddy system. Even normal, daily
soldiering is often done in pairs. One
simply does not go it alone in the military and attention to detail and
allegiance to command are the primary tools of survival within this
system. It wasn’t until I’d settled into boot camp,
however, that I realized I had been so idealistic when signing up. Prior to my enlistment, my weekdays and
many weekends were consumed by work.
While repetitive in many aspects, the job I’d settled into only a year
before did have a steep learning curve, and I struggled to stay ahead of the
game. It was a job that entailed a
great amount of responsibility, and I felt honored to have it. So I worked hard to make it appear to my
coworkers that the work came naturally to me.
On an occasional weekend I did go out to clubs to dance or museums to
take in an exhibition. The woman I was
dating at the time lived on the west coast, in Los Angeles, so more often than
not, I used weekend days and nights to make up for the sleep I lost during
the workweek. So there were one or two
things I had neglected to fully consider before joining—namely the fact that
I am a lesbian. I did wonder, briefly,
how I would negotiate the rule Don’t ask, don’t tell—the United States
Military’s stance on the enlistment of homosexuals; however, I wasn’t overly
concerned with the issue. Instead, I
was preoccupied with thoughts of quashing Al Quida
terror cells. Simply put, I signed on to
serve my country as a patriot—not as a lesbian. If one were to inquire as to why the policy
excluding homosexuals from military enlistment exists, the individual would
be told that homosexuality is considered incompatible with military
enlistment. That’s it. Incompatible. The word itself implies two groups engaged
in a hopeless Promethean struggle to become a singular unit—an army of
one. The homosexual who enlists in the
service with the notion of serving his or her country is not only subject to a
divided sense of conditional acceptance but also a burden of worry as to what
will happen when someone does ask or when someone else tells. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when, in
May of 2002, I watched three women get discharged from active service at Around zero-three-hundred-hours, my buddy and I
discovered two women sitting in bed together, talking, as far as I could
tell. My buddy and I had our
flashlights on, red lenses bobbing from bunk to bunk to do a head count. I noticed the women but thought nothing of their
sitting on the same bed. My buddy,
however, noted something was amiss. “Did you see them?” she asked when we left the bay
to compare our totals. “See what?” I replied, our numbers not matching
up. “They were kissing; that’s so gross” she
said. I looked up at her slowly. “We have to recount,” I said. “Our numbers are
off.” “Take a look when you go back in. You’ll see,” she said. And I did.
The soft red rays of the flashlights we carried did not reach the women
entwined on the bed before we did, and we caught the two kissing. We said nothing, just stood hovering,
watching by the bunk. When the women noticed our presence, we moved out into
the hallway, completing the additional count.
“Did you see?” my buddy asked. “Yep,” I said, tallying. Our numbers still didn’t match up, and
there was no way for me to convince her to change her tally, since the
missing soldier—the one marked AWOL on her pad of paper—was actually present,
a discrepancy resulting from two women in one bed. “We should tell someone,” she said. “Why? It’s
no big deal. Those guys are kids,” I said, looking back at my notes to keep
the alarm on my face from her. I hoped
that by pretending nothing was wrong, I might negate her interpretation of
the event. The tactic didn’t work and there was no way for me
to convince her to change her tally. I
remained mute, pinned in the hallway by her silence. Finally giving into the unspoken command to
conform, go along, join the army of one, I changed my numbers to match hers,
and we headed back to our post. I said
nothing further of what we’d witnessed.
Working in the quiet, my mind focused on the inconsistencies
presenting themselves. I realized that
my assigned buddy wasn’t my buddy after all.
This was not someone who, were she ever to find out that I was gay,
would support me. This was someone to
whom I would become an object of ridicule and gossip. Worse, I realized that in my silent
complicity of changing my numbers to reflect hers, I had participated in the
temporary erasure of an individual from active duty status. When we were relieved from post, we returned to
the bay to ready for morning muster. I
said nothing about the incident to anyone.
My buddy, on the other hand, told everyone who would listen. The reactions of the female troops varied.
The majority of folks didn’t care who had kissed whom. It was exciting for others that “at least
somebody was getting some.” There was
a group of women in the bay, though, to whom this kissing incident mattered
greatly. For these individuals, about
ten in total, the act must have had the equivalent impact of watching snuff
porn and having live ammunition fired in their direction: it scared them
shitless. So they did what they had
been instructed to do in sensitivity training: they told the Drill
Sergeants. Ten women, including my buddy from the night
before, piled into the Drill Sergeants’ office and rehashed for our superiors
what they’d heard and what they’d speculated all along. It was, to use a military cliché, a cluster-fuck
of new proportions. I sat outside the
office with another buddy on a different pretext. I wanted to hear what was being said and by
whom, to know who was in that office and what disciplinary actions were being
planned. Thirty minutes later, the
women piled out. I looked at each one,
independently. These were the women I
had begun to befriend—people who would be responsible for watching my six in
combat. These recruits had absolutely
no idea that I was a lesbian, and now knowing how they would respond if they
found out, I was alarmed. Six women were targeted through rumor and
innuendo. I acted immediately in the
way I thought best: grabbed my latest buddy, found each of the women under
suspicion, and gave them a heads-up about the load of crap that was coming
down the pipeline. They steadied
themselves and waited for the impact.
It came swiftly. The Drill
Sergeants told other Drill Sergeants the news, and the word in the ranks
spread faster than a command. Drill
Sergeants began nipping at the girls, calling them dykes, saying they just
couldn’t believe it—they’d seemed so normal.
Everyone was scrutinized, including me. One of the Drill Sergeants called me into his
office because my name had come up, behind closed doors, as one of the women who
had witnessed the homosexual act. I figured the gig was up, that I would be
implicated by my silence on the matter, and if I was about to be outed, I intended to come out gloriously. A buddy and I went into the office, and the
Drill Sergeant asked me to close the door.
I was primed and ready to tell the Drill Sergeant exactly where he
could put his merry band of men and women, but I didn’t get the chance. His questioning disarmed me. I quickly realized he didn’t know I was a
lesbian. No one knew. I hadn’t looked the part, and I had
remained a silent witness. “Soldier, why is it that you didn’t tell me about
this incident,” he said. “Drill Sergeant,” we had to preface everything we
said with those two words, a Drill Sergeant sandwich they called it, “I don’t
think it matters, Drill Sergeant.” “But it does, and you know better—you saw it and
you should have come forward with the others.” “Drill Sergeant, ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell, Drill
Sergeant.’” “I am surprised at you,” he snapped. “Next time,
you’ll know better.” I thought next time? Hell, next time the person outed might be me.
I wondered what would happen to me, physically, if anyone did find
out. We were, after all, in the
military. We did, after all, deal with
live munitions all the time—M16s, grenades, and teargas. What if? was the
question on my mind. What if an
unfortunate accident happened during training? I shook, silently considering the actuality
of friendly fire. I internalized the tongue-lashing, was excused
from the office, and sought to go about another day’s business of soldiering.
Three of the recruits outed in the incident
confessed to actively engaging in homosexual acts and were slated for
immediate discharge—but Uncle Sam’s Big Green Machine has its own concept of
immediate, usually taking about one or two weeks. I empathized with the women as they
waited. Empathized, but it would have
been foolhardy on my part to stand up and proclaim, “I, too, am a lesbian!”
My treatment would have been the same.
I was incompatible with the U.S. Military for
reasons technically different from my sexual orientation, but my sexuality
was at the core of the matter. While I
didn’t mind being shot and killed trying to defend the now believe that
it was more likely that I would be killed if I stayed in the service. I realized that, for all intents and
purposes, I was the enemy—outside the army of one. No particular person, mind you, but
sometime, somewhere, something, or someone would do the job—blind obedience
to command would see to that if word got out. In military training, when one person commits an
act that goes against the rules, then everyone is effected
by that person’s actions. I recall one
incident in basic when a soldier purchased a sport drink, a Power Aid,
without the Drill Sergeant’s permission.
The Drill Sergeant heard the sports drink as it came through the
system and out of the mouth of the machine (we were in a bay area that echoed
sound). By the time he made it to the door to check on the bay, the soldier
and the drink were gone. So the Drill
Sergeant ordered everyone in Alpha Company downstairs and outside into the
open bay. When we were all assembled,
we were disciplined through strength training: in other words, we did
pushups. Everyone did pushups and no
one was allowed to leave the area until the soldier who committed the crime
came forward and confessed. It took
over an hour for the guilty kid to muster up the courage to accept
responsibility. The incident is funny to me. It was funny then and it tickles me still
because it was such a trivial matter: a juice drink. But in the military, this incident is
symptomatic of a larger problem: the military’s insistence on blind obedience
to authority. Abu Ghraib
was not funny, and I have little doubt that the crimes there weren’t
orchestrated by people much higher up than Spec. Sabrina Harman. My rank in Basic was that of a Specialist,
and had I, fifteen weeks later, been sent to prisoners whom my
superiors told me were terrorists then, to say the least, I would have been
edgy. Had my superiors then told me to
pile up the terrorists, naked, and take pictures of them to break their
spirits, use as propaganda, and get them to confess, well, I may have done
that too.
They are, after all, terrorists, right? And had my superiors then ordered me to put
a bag over the head of one of the prisoners and make another prisoner perform
sexual acts on him, I would have disobeyed the command, right? That is what I tell myself, but in a land where
friends are here today and shot beside you tomorrow, how should a person
act? In this war zone where soldiers
are constantly under fire, threatened by car bombs, watching men and women
they love as family—sometimes even as lovers (sometimes, regardless of
sexuality, in secret)—come back to encampments day after day in pieces to be
zipped into body bags and flown home, how can people claim to know how they
would react? In this land where bodies
lie in the street in situ while civilians stand by causally smoking and life
goes on at the corner grocery, how can anyone be sure? Especially when my job is on the line, my
reputation as a soldier, and the fact that my hesitation may cause the deaths
of so many. I am certain only of one thing: I would have been killed had I stayed in
the service. Perhaps through the
incompetence that causes friendly fire, maybe by a hate crime like the one
that killed Allen Schindler in 1993, maybe by my own hand if I had been
ordered to participate in anything remotely similar to the events at Abu Ghraib, but I was lucky.
During my ninth of eleven weeks of BCT, I developed fractures in my
left leg. Fractures of this sort occur
when the body’s muscle mass cannot support the weight that it carries (in the
form of ruck sacks and other equipment). Instead of building additional muscle, the
body responds by cuing the bones to try and compensate for the lack. Unable to do so, the bone starts to break
on the cellular level. Unlike a
standard break, which runs on a left to right axis across the bone, the
fracture begins to split the bone lengthwise on an up and down axis. As the result of too much weight bearing
pressure, week after week, for nine weeks, I fractured my leg in several
places and suffered from depression, diagnosed as PTSD upon leaving the
service, and was discharged under a Section Two—Uncharacterized. All told, I had been in the service just
under six months—five and a half years less than I anticipated—so Honorable
and Dishonorable weren’t even terms that applied. Uncharacterized was how I felt about my entire
military experience. I showed no
character in failing to defend the women who were discharged for being
homosexuals. I could show no allegiance
to the soldiers in my platoon once I witnessed the hand these homosexuals
were dealt. I wasn’t the type of
patriot the armed services wanted. I
couldn’t go to war with this group. I
also couldn’t go into a war that I didn’t agree with—at the time I broke my
leg, American troops were just entering My mind, in fact, had been breaking down for a
long while. At times before joining
the service, my thoughts edged me forward into conflict, into fantasies of
making the enemy pay for its crimes.
At other times my thoughts reeled back to my Pakistani neighbors next
door who had been shy about leaving their apartment before the terrorist
attacks and who now, even as I knocked on the door to check on them, seemed
never to emerge from their confinement.
As I prepared to enter the service, I ran every morning to get in
shape, reading the newspapers, watching the television to find out what the
enemy was up to, and working as a volunteer for the Red Cross at Ground Zero
when I could. Anger and fear, sorrow
and compassion were enjambed within one another,
indistinguishable from one moment to the next. Of the incidents recounted here, several happened
in the recovery unit soldiers are sent to when they are injured in Basic
Training (not in regular BCT). The
recovery unit is called PTRP: Physical Therapy Reconditioning Program. Soldiers who are built cheap, as the Drill
Sergeants say—those who break bones, tear rotator cuffs, sprain limbs, tear
hamstrings, and rip ligaments—are sent to this unit to recover over a
specified unit of time or be discharged.
I watched for weeks and months as soldiers came through the doors
injured then recovered and went back into BCT only to suffer re-injury and
land right back in the recovery unit.
I learned the stories of two women who were permanently partially
disabled and who spent over one year in the PTRP unit waiting for their
paperwork and medical claims to be attended to in Even stateside, the world I found myself in was
fractious and torn, and I was being consumed from the inside out. Body broken, identity questioned,
self-erased inside an institution that dealt only with units—squad, platoon,
company, battalion—not individuals—there was no bravery and no cowardice that
I could claim. The damage done to
government property—my leg full of fractures and my mind that, without rest,
was dividing—halving, quartering, splitting into one-eighths, one-sixteenths
one-thirty-seconds—was all I had. I realize now that I truly was incompatible with
the U.S. Military. My sexuality wasn’t
the trigger, but my ability to regain rational thought and objectively
consider my sexuality inside the system was.
My thought process—the same one that lead me shortly after the
terrorist attacks on September 11 to the recruiting office of the National
Guard— finally registered
the sacrifice of self that was necessary to engage in battle as part of the
army of one. It was complete. It was worse than the death of the body. It was the sacrifice of my own mind and
values in favor of another’s, and it was one I wasn’t willing to make. As a
lesbian, I would never be considered a patriot—an odd notion when one takes
into account the When people talk about the military and service to
one’s country, I hesitate now before speaking. I hesitate because I have the luxury to do
so, and were I still in the service, I would not have such leisure time. What started outside of me in a quickening
that took over three thousand individual lives, worked its way through my
system like the shrapnel of a claymore mine—friendly fire. Intolerant extremists, not entire religious
sects or populaces, carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center, but it
wasn’t until after I had served in and been discharged from the U.S. military
that I realized my hatred for the enemy had been born out of my own ignorance
and fear of the unknown—a terror as irrational as the military’s fear of
homosexuals. In the quiet of the nights in the service, on
those nights I did sleep, I dreamed only of killing. I saw myself entangled fights against
shadowy figures. I saw soldiers in
fatigues, women and men, in my platoon shot and killed before my eyes. In these dreams screamed as I killed
other people and then as one of them killed me. The people in my dreams, those being
killed and those doing the killings, were all Americans. Now, several years out of the service, I
understand that as people of a global community we can only hope to survive
the external war on terror by first subsuming the terror of otherness we hold
within—the fear of one another is the biggest threat we have to face on
American soil. |
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