A Sense of Duty

Part 2 - A Time Not to Kill

After 76 days at sea, and for the first time on our deployment, we finally got a day off when we pulled into a Japanese port. Since we had been exposed to so much radiation in the preceding few weeks, this was only going to be a three day stop before we headed back out to sea. Since no good deed goes unpunished, we weren’t even going to get a full three days off. The Secretary of the Navy decided that we were the perfect back drop to give a political speech aboard a ship, and I was the lucky winner of flying his staff back to the airport for departure. I had to be back onboard early in the evening the first day, but I heard that my squadron mates had a real blast that first night in Japan.

The next day, a very hungover crew stood in front of the SECNAV, as he promptly thanked the wrong ship’s crew for their work in Operation Tomodachi. Word to the wise, if you force people to give up their first day off in three months to hear you speak, you should probably make sure you don’t thank the Enterprise crew onboard the Reagan. Maybe I never got to that level of guardian training to realize the 3-D chess involved in such stupidity. Our stop in Japan was the first of three scheduled port visits in four weeks that marked a break in our cruise. Most of us flew our wives and girlfriends out to Thailand for a few days. After we left those ports behind, we started to steam towards the real mission for our deployment.

The spring of 2011 had been one of the busiest for pirates in the Indian Ocean, and we were arriving on scene just about the time that this activity was expected to peak. For the entire transit, we were receiving intel reports about the unusually high level of piracy in the area, and I would describe the mood of most of the squadron as downright giddy as a result. We all knew that we were going to get to do some real fighting on this cruise. For me, it meant I would finally do something worthy of all the training and get those coveted green numbers in my logbook. However, it turns out that all I would actually find is frustration and eventually anger.

Since I was the junior aircraft commander, I wasn’t scheduled to fly the night we took our first trip through the Strait of Hormuz. Strait’s transits are always an interesting experience, as this is the time that the Iranians like to be provocative to US carriers. Although it’s safe to say that driving a flotilla with enough weapons to level a city within about 15 miles of their coast is also quite provocative. As a result of past experiences, we were always armed to the teeth and ready for some stupidity to happen when transiting the strait.

I got a bit lucky, as I was scheduled as the alert aircraft in the morning after we completed the transit and would actually get to avoid an overnight flight. I had gotten up and headed to breakfast, but five minutes later someone called down and told me to get to the ready room immediately. Our last crews had just landed when a group of Iranian gunboats showed up near the carrier. My crew and I got up to the flight deck as fast as possible and headed straight the flightdeck to take off. Within about two minutes, we were face to face with a group of gunboats less than a mile from our ship and I got the pleasure of having a machine gun pointed at me for the first time.

Any interaction with the IRGCN is not really what I would describe as fun. Our ROE at the time was rather restrictive so as not to cause an international incident, so our job was really just to fly between the boats and the carrier and wait to see if they did anything. For the next hour we would chase each other, making sure we always had our guns aimed at one another. By the middle of the flight, I used my infrared camera to look at the face of my opponent, and his smile made me laugh at the stupidity of the situation. We were both just cogs in our respective machines sent out to harass each other as our duty for the day. Over the next few days, I was the lucky winner of several of these interactions, to the point that I think my squadron mates were getting a bit jealous that I was having all of the fun.

We ended up spending about a month in the gulf, making a stop in Bahrain and regular flights into Kuwait, where I was able to complete the last of my training and become fully qualified as a combat aircraft commander. When we finally left the strait, we were scheduled to return in about 30 days for a port visit to Dubai. Instead, we spent the next 80 days at sea and I slowly got angrier at our situation.

I think now is the time to take a step back and talk about what it’s like to be an operator in the military. For all the talk about combat, the number of people who are given a weapon with any expectation of using it is very small, usually about 1 in 10 people in uniform. If you are one of those select few, you are trained from day one to be ready to fight when the day comes. You obsess over it, and everyone wants nothing more than to prove themselves in combat like so many others have. Don’t take this to mean that we are a bunch of sociopaths that want to kill people, but anyone who volunteers for an enemy-facing role wants to fight.

By the time that I first saw the business end of that boat’s machine gun, I had been in uniform for a month shy of nine years. In Annapolis, I sat through four years of training to become an officer and listening to the stories of guys I knew fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I spent two years in flight school, with hundreds of hours in planes, sims, and classrooms learning to be a helicopter pilot. By that day, I had spent 10 of the last 18 months on an aircraft carrier waiting to get the chance to prove myself in combat. I wasn’t going to get to do it that day either. I was clearly ordered to not start any fights, just go out there, make a scene and hope that they would leave us alone.

Over the next couple of months, the stress of our deployment really started getting to our entire squadron. The reason we were patrolling in the area was so that our airwing could support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We had flown up to the border with Iraq earlier in the month several times, but that war had long since died down and our mission was mostly civilian support. Afghanistan, on the other hand, was raging in the summer fighting season. However, it’s also several hundred miles from the sea and therefore out of helicopter range.  Most of our days were just spent flying in circles and waiting for a boat to come nearby to investigate.

 The promise of repelling pirates also never came – the only time we found them, the airwing decided to send a jet instead. But finally, after several weeks at sea, I thought I was going to get a chance to do something real. We had brought a SOF team onboard and were planning to conduct a takedown of a hostile vessel. I was a part of the initial training crew, and we had set up everything to conduct our mission two days later. The day before, our crew was pulled off the mission and the next afternoon, the whole show was called off. By this point, I was starting to realize that all that training might be for naught and was starting to get angry as a result. All those years of sweat and tears, only to be a glorified mailman, moving ass and trash around the strike group. This wasn’t what I signed up to do, and I couldn’t understand why our superiors wouldn’t find some place to use my talents. We just had to sit and defend against an attack we knew was never going to come.

On a typical deployment, we would get a break about every six weeks to visit a port and take some much-needed rest. On this cruise, that type of respite never came. We found out our port visit to Dubai was cancelled and we would be at sea indefinitely after about 40 days at sea. We weren’t going to visit Dubai because we had a real mission and I was going to be a part of it. What happened then, though, is a story for part three.

It has taken me several years after leaving the navy to try to make sense of the anger that came to me in that time. Back then, I was very disappointed that I spent so much time creating a great potential within myself that was never released on an opponent. When faced with this continual disappointment, the feelings built into anger, which the monotony and stress of daily life compounded. My feelings today have changed greatly with a decade of hindsight. Looking back today, the part that I find most difficult to understand about my younger self is the anger that came from not being able to kill another person. I certainly don’t hate myself for those feelings, as I understand that this mindset is the only one that would allow me to act in combat. The difficult part is realizing what a monster I am capable of being. With the benefit of hindsight, I feel much relieved that I never did get to find out what that monster is capable of doing. However, back then I never once considered how I would have processed killing another person, I just wanted to prove that I could do my job.

A major theme of the movie Jarhead is the agony of never getting to engage in combat. This can be seen especially well in the scene where two scout snipers who haven’t fired a shot yet in the war are finally targeting an enemy and waiting to fire. Just before being given clearance, an officer storms in and calls off the shot and uses an airstrike to kill the enemy instead. At this point, an angry and exasperated marine sniper begs and eventually berates the officer for stealing his chance to make a kill. The sniper was robbed much like I was of the chance to finally complete his own journey from potential into actual fighter. The movie originally came out when I was in college, and I didn’t really like it the first time. When I saw this scene again about a year ago, I literally had tears in my eyes. Nothing in a film has ever felt more real to me than that moment.

I have such a sense of relief in the fact that I never had to kill anyone. To me, one of the major issues that faces any combat vet, especially those suffering from PTSD, is the ability make sense of killing. I understand in hindsight what I may have been capable of doing, but I am blessed with the ignorance of never truly having to find out the extent to which I could use it. For those that are survivors of combat, they do not possess the blissful ignorance that I do. Instead, they each have a much more difficult task of making sense of the things that the monsters inside of them did, even if it was completely justified. I guess my biggest takeaway is that I had no idea in my youth of the gravity of killing, but today am thankful that I can live the rest of my life at peace for having avoided it.

That just about does it for part two of this story. Part three will explore the last bit of our deployment, which would cause me a great deal of disillusionment in the years to follow. For although I never pulled the trigger on another person, I did directly participate in the killing of others. In this case, it involved targeting American citizens and my own struggle with understanding my duty as an officer and my willingness to participate in evil. I hope you join me again next time

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