ianstone
09-04-2010, 05:19 PM
War and the City: March Song
By ROY SCRANTON (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/roy-scranton/)
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/homefires/design/homefires.45.jpgHome Fires (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/home-fires/) features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.
Tags:
Iraq war (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/iraq-war/), New York City (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/new-york-city/), u.s. military (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/us-military/), Veterans (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/veterans/), War and the City (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/war-and-the-city/), war protests (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/war-protests/)
This is the first part of a five-part series, “War and the City,” by the Iraq war veteran, Roy Scranton, chronicling his path from unemployed youth to soldier to civilian writer in New York City.
In March 2007, on the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I put on my desert camo top and took the train in to Bryant Park in Manhattan. I was painfully self-conscious: everyone was staring at me, I knew it, at my combat patch, my black t-shirt reading Iraq Veterans Against the War.
I came up out of the subway station almost shaking from nerves. It was a beautiful, cold New York spring morning — the sky was blue, the light on the skyscrapers full and golden. I had come to walk with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War, the IVAW, at the head of a protest march; I planned to put my four years on the line as a testimony for peace.
New York addled me: I struggled against the streets’ sensory assault. I seethed with scorn at the hedonistic excesses around me.
I’d gotten out of the Army almost a year before. I was finishing my B.A. at the New School in New York, taking the L train in every day from Brooklyn for classes in experimental fiction and continental philosophy, and working as a dog runner on the Upper West Side. Life was good, I was doing just what I wanted, but something was wrong. Every morning I’d go into the city, anxiety prickling my neck, feeling helpless, edgy, and weird. I’d come home and drink, restlessly sleep, then get up and do it again.
New York addled me: I struggled against the streets’ sensory assault, the adrenaline surge so close to what it felt like driving through Baghdad. I got into arguments with strangers, walked into traffic, muttered obscenities through clenched teeth. I wanted to punch people who stopped on the stairs in the subway. I missed my rifle.
I seethed with scorn at the hedonistic excesses around me. Walking home through Williamsburg in Brooklyn offered such an astounding parade of self-absorbed, prolonged adolescence and fatuous faddishness, I found myself driven insensible with contempt. One night a gaggle of hipsters playing kickball in McCarren Park provoked me to a burst of vitriol on how kickball was a grade-school kids’ game, how hipster culture fetishized immaturity, and how their vapid, petty lives were being dissipated in bankrupt idiocy — from wearing mantyhose and Members Only jackets to spending their lame, wastrel days planning nothing more serious than pretentious and quirkily-themed dinner parties.
“Chill out, they’re just having fun,” my girlfriend said, and she was right. But I had a point, too. These weren’t kids — they were adults, citizens, in their 20s and 30s. They were older than the men I’d ridden with on patrol in al-Dora.
Fiala, for example, a ruddy-cheeked 19, one of our S.A.W. gunners. He was a goofy, chubby Minnesotan, who before joining the Army had never left his hometown. He liked “The Simpsons” and “Friends,” and it was his job to ride in the roof of the Humvee with a machine gun and provide cover fire, especially watching for snipers, I.E.D.’s, and those guys who liked to drop grenades on us from overpasses. He was just a kid and he risked his life for what? Kickball?
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/08/20/opinion/homefires_c1a/homefires_c1a-custom1.jpgRoy Scranton The destroyed United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, 2003.
The shift from war to peace, which was supposed to have been so difficult, had been easy compared to the shift from military to civilian. When I’d come back from Iraq, I was still a soldier. The combat patch I wore marked me as tested, experienced, someone who’d been there. When I was transferred to Fort Sill, Okla., for the last 18 months of my service, I took what I’d learned in Iraq and put it to work training young soldiers how to run traffic control points, search prisoners and clear rooms.
Now I read Spinoza and Lautréamont. Now I flew into rages for no reason. My combat patch didn’t mark me because I didn’t wear it, and if I did, no one knew what it meant. Every day was like a dream where you show up to school and don’t know anybody, don’t know the teacher, don’t even know your own friends.
And I couldn’t get past it because the Army still clung to me, ingrained in the way I held my hands and how I walked, in my very words, in the story of how I got here. At every party, every dinner, every new room demanding introductions, I’d inevitably have to explain how I’d moved to New York after getting out of the Army, I’d been in Iraq, and yeah, it was pretty intense. Then I’d watch them shift their eyes, as if searching for something appropriately respectful to say, and I’d hate them for it. I’d have to hear how they couldn’t imagine, or they wanted to thank me, or they wanted to know why I joined. Every time it came up, I had to relive the whole question of why we were in Iraq and what it all meant.
The prior four years of my life hung over my days like the eerie and unshakable tingle of a half-remembered dream — “my time in the Army” — and the sense of chronic disconnection was getting to me. I walked between two worlds: the New York around me and the Army in my head.
So I called up the IVAW. I was against the war, sure: who wasn’t by this point? Iraq was a mess and everyone knew it. But I wasn’t looking just to speak out, to testify and proclaim — I was looking for other vets, some kind of relation, some way to fit the Army back into my life.
As I walked past the cameras and Vietnam-era peace activists that spring morning in 2007, I saw a tall man with a shaved head and a black goatee, wearing an IVAW sweatshirt. This was José, head of IVAW’s New York chapter. We’d spoken on the phone and still I didn’t know what to think of him: a self-described “war-resister,” he’d never actually been to Iraq or Afghanistan. When his time had come, after several years in the National Guard, he’d applied for conscientious objector status and refused to deploy.
We shook hands and he thanked me for coming. He introduced me to his second-in-command, a girl named Jen in a green camo B.D.U. top. She too was a “war-resister.” She too had never been to the desert. Zero for two now. I was beginning to worry, but José said he expected more vets soon. He told me how excited he was about all the press and how Tim Robbins was going to speak with us.
The news crews set up their cameras and more people showed up to march. Not one of them was an Iraq war vet; none had come for the IVAW. I kept looking for a flash of desert camo, a combat patch, something familiar, someone I could look in the eye and ask where they’d been and share a moment with, remembering.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/08/20/opinion/homefires_c6a/homefires_c6a-custom1.jpgRoy Scranton Iraqi boy north of Baghdad, 2003.
Tim Robbins arrived and the circus began. I was still the only Iraq war vet there. When it was the IVAW’s turn at the podium, José spoke, then Tim Robbins, and finally Jen got up and launched into a rambling jeremiad on the evils of patriarchy, our collective guilt for Native American genocide, the inhumanity of eating meat, the need to ban nuclear weapons, the dangers posed by global warming, Bush’s Supreme Court-led coup, and our need to pay reparations for our crimes against humanity. As Jen wound down with a quotation from the cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, José asked me if I had anything to say. I shook my head. Not with these people. Not behind this sign.
Still, I marched with them. We walked up Park Avenue and down Lexington to the United Nations, where people had set up tables at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. It was a nice walk on a beautiful day, and by the time we got to the end I was sick of it, sick of the sanctimonious do-gooders cheering on the sidelines and their empty slogans, sick of how many different issues were piggy-backing on my war, from legalizing marijuana to freeing Tibet, and sick of talking to Jen and José, who had no right to call themselves “Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans.” A German reporter stuck a camera in my face and asked me how I felt about the war — I shouted back that it was a disaster, nobody knew what they were talking about and nobody cared.
I took the subway home from the march and threw my IVAW shirt in a drawer with my desert camo, disappointed and disgusted. Since then, the impulse to protest has passed. My confused rage has hushed to a quiet disaffection and my bitterness mellowed and cooled.
Next: Part 2, “The Gyre”
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/09/02/opinion/scranton75/scranton75-thumbStandard.jpg
Roy Scranton served in the U.S. Army from 2002 to 2006, and deployed to Iraq with the First Armored Division from 2003 to 2004. He recently finished an M.A. in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research and is beginning doctoral study in English at Princeton University. His work has been published in New Letters, Theory & Event, LIT, and elsewhere.
By ROY SCRANTON (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/roy-scranton/)
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/homefires/design/homefires.45.jpgHome Fires (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/home-fires/) features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.
Tags:
Iraq war (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/iraq-war/), New York City (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/new-york-city/), u.s. military (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/us-military/), Veterans (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/veterans/), War and the City (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/war-and-the-city/), war protests (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/war-protests/)
This is the first part of a five-part series, “War and the City,” by the Iraq war veteran, Roy Scranton, chronicling his path from unemployed youth to soldier to civilian writer in New York City.
In March 2007, on the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I put on my desert camo top and took the train in to Bryant Park in Manhattan. I was painfully self-conscious: everyone was staring at me, I knew it, at my combat patch, my black t-shirt reading Iraq Veterans Against the War.
I came up out of the subway station almost shaking from nerves. It was a beautiful, cold New York spring morning — the sky was blue, the light on the skyscrapers full and golden. I had come to walk with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War, the IVAW, at the head of a protest march; I planned to put my four years on the line as a testimony for peace.
New York addled me: I struggled against the streets’ sensory assault. I seethed with scorn at the hedonistic excesses around me.
I’d gotten out of the Army almost a year before. I was finishing my B.A. at the New School in New York, taking the L train in every day from Brooklyn for classes in experimental fiction and continental philosophy, and working as a dog runner on the Upper West Side. Life was good, I was doing just what I wanted, but something was wrong. Every morning I’d go into the city, anxiety prickling my neck, feeling helpless, edgy, and weird. I’d come home and drink, restlessly sleep, then get up and do it again.
New York addled me: I struggled against the streets’ sensory assault, the adrenaline surge so close to what it felt like driving through Baghdad. I got into arguments with strangers, walked into traffic, muttered obscenities through clenched teeth. I wanted to punch people who stopped on the stairs in the subway. I missed my rifle.
I seethed with scorn at the hedonistic excesses around me. Walking home through Williamsburg in Brooklyn offered such an astounding parade of self-absorbed, prolonged adolescence and fatuous faddishness, I found myself driven insensible with contempt. One night a gaggle of hipsters playing kickball in McCarren Park provoked me to a burst of vitriol on how kickball was a grade-school kids’ game, how hipster culture fetishized immaturity, and how their vapid, petty lives were being dissipated in bankrupt idiocy — from wearing mantyhose and Members Only jackets to spending their lame, wastrel days planning nothing more serious than pretentious and quirkily-themed dinner parties.
“Chill out, they’re just having fun,” my girlfriend said, and she was right. But I had a point, too. These weren’t kids — they were adults, citizens, in their 20s and 30s. They were older than the men I’d ridden with on patrol in al-Dora.
Fiala, for example, a ruddy-cheeked 19, one of our S.A.W. gunners. He was a goofy, chubby Minnesotan, who before joining the Army had never left his hometown. He liked “The Simpsons” and “Friends,” and it was his job to ride in the roof of the Humvee with a machine gun and provide cover fire, especially watching for snipers, I.E.D.’s, and those guys who liked to drop grenades on us from overpasses. He was just a kid and he risked his life for what? Kickball?
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/08/20/opinion/homefires_c1a/homefires_c1a-custom1.jpgRoy Scranton The destroyed United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, 2003.
The shift from war to peace, which was supposed to have been so difficult, had been easy compared to the shift from military to civilian. When I’d come back from Iraq, I was still a soldier. The combat patch I wore marked me as tested, experienced, someone who’d been there. When I was transferred to Fort Sill, Okla., for the last 18 months of my service, I took what I’d learned in Iraq and put it to work training young soldiers how to run traffic control points, search prisoners and clear rooms.
Now I read Spinoza and Lautréamont. Now I flew into rages for no reason. My combat patch didn’t mark me because I didn’t wear it, and if I did, no one knew what it meant. Every day was like a dream where you show up to school and don’t know anybody, don’t know the teacher, don’t even know your own friends.
And I couldn’t get past it because the Army still clung to me, ingrained in the way I held my hands and how I walked, in my very words, in the story of how I got here. At every party, every dinner, every new room demanding introductions, I’d inevitably have to explain how I’d moved to New York after getting out of the Army, I’d been in Iraq, and yeah, it was pretty intense. Then I’d watch them shift their eyes, as if searching for something appropriately respectful to say, and I’d hate them for it. I’d have to hear how they couldn’t imagine, or they wanted to thank me, or they wanted to know why I joined. Every time it came up, I had to relive the whole question of why we were in Iraq and what it all meant.
The prior four years of my life hung over my days like the eerie and unshakable tingle of a half-remembered dream — “my time in the Army” — and the sense of chronic disconnection was getting to me. I walked between two worlds: the New York around me and the Army in my head.
So I called up the IVAW. I was against the war, sure: who wasn’t by this point? Iraq was a mess and everyone knew it. But I wasn’t looking just to speak out, to testify and proclaim — I was looking for other vets, some kind of relation, some way to fit the Army back into my life.
As I walked past the cameras and Vietnam-era peace activists that spring morning in 2007, I saw a tall man with a shaved head and a black goatee, wearing an IVAW sweatshirt. This was José, head of IVAW’s New York chapter. We’d spoken on the phone and still I didn’t know what to think of him: a self-described “war-resister,” he’d never actually been to Iraq or Afghanistan. When his time had come, after several years in the National Guard, he’d applied for conscientious objector status and refused to deploy.
We shook hands and he thanked me for coming. He introduced me to his second-in-command, a girl named Jen in a green camo B.D.U. top. She too was a “war-resister.” She too had never been to the desert. Zero for two now. I was beginning to worry, but José said he expected more vets soon. He told me how excited he was about all the press and how Tim Robbins was going to speak with us.
The news crews set up their cameras and more people showed up to march. Not one of them was an Iraq war vet; none had come for the IVAW. I kept looking for a flash of desert camo, a combat patch, something familiar, someone I could look in the eye and ask where they’d been and share a moment with, remembering.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/08/20/opinion/homefires_c6a/homefires_c6a-custom1.jpgRoy Scranton Iraqi boy north of Baghdad, 2003.
Tim Robbins arrived and the circus began. I was still the only Iraq war vet there. When it was the IVAW’s turn at the podium, José spoke, then Tim Robbins, and finally Jen got up and launched into a rambling jeremiad on the evils of patriarchy, our collective guilt for Native American genocide, the inhumanity of eating meat, the need to ban nuclear weapons, the dangers posed by global warming, Bush’s Supreme Court-led coup, and our need to pay reparations for our crimes against humanity. As Jen wound down with a quotation from the cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, José asked me if I had anything to say. I shook my head. Not with these people. Not behind this sign.
Still, I marched with them. We walked up Park Avenue and down Lexington to the United Nations, where people had set up tables at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. It was a nice walk on a beautiful day, and by the time we got to the end I was sick of it, sick of the sanctimonious do-gooders cheering on the sidelines and their empty slogans, sick of how many different issues were piggy-backing on my war, from legalizing marijuana to freeing Tibet, and sick of talking to Jen and José, who had no right to call themselves “Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans.” A German reporter stuck a camera in my face and asked me how I felt about the war — I shouted back that it was a disaster, nobody knew what they were talking about and nobody cared.
I took the subway home from the march and threw my IVAW shirt in a drawer with my desert camo, disappointed and disgusted. Since then, the impulse to protest has passed. My confused rage has hushed to a quiet disaffection and my bitterness mellowed and cooled.
Next: Part 2, “The Gyre”
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/09/02/opinion/scranton75/scranton75-thumbStandard.jpg
Roy Scranton served in the U.S. Army from 2002 to 2006, and deployed to Iraq with the First Armored Division from 2003 to 2004. He recently finished an M.A. in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research and is beginning doctoral study in English at Princeton University. His work has been published in New Letters, Theory & Event, LIT, and elsewhere.