Osama bin Laden changed my life

Osama bin Laden changed my life.

I look at those words, sitting at the desk from which I manage a magazine for the Defense Department’s combat logistics support agency, and acknowledge their truth. The past 14 hours, since I first heard word of his death, have been a bit of an emotional roller coaster, partially from a lack of sleep and partially because I know how immediately the trajectory of my post-college life turned Sept. 11, 2001.

I banged the idea of joining the Army around a lot in my younger years: a failed attempt to go to West Point, a forsaken ROTC scholarship, at least one half-effort at enlisting; but I had a conversation with my dad Sept. 9 that put me in the mind to go talk to an Army recruiter. I wasn’t convinced after our conversation that Sunday, but I thought I’d give it a shot some time that week, maybe Tuesday. Yeah, that was an okay plan for a recent college graduate who was having trouble finding work as a writer.

I woke up Tuesday at my on-again, off-again girlfriend’s place to her phone ringing. Whoever was trying to call was not giving up, so I asked her to answer and see what they wanted. It was her mother. She wanted us to turn on the television. I turned it on and there it was: smoke was belching from both towers of the World Trade Center. That’s kind of a rude awakening, you know? Even ruder once your brain starts turning and you realize that separate planes flying into each tower couldn’t possibly be accidental.

We watched for a bit as events unfolded, but eventually she had to go to class, so I gathered myself up and got ready to head to my apartment. With tears in her eyes, she asked me if I was still planning to go to the recruiter’s office that day. The only answer I could give was “yes,” and I knew becoming a soldier was what I was going to do with a crystal-clear certainty.

The rest of that day is kind of a blur, as are the two months from then until I reported to Fort Jackson, S.C., for basic combat training. I remember watching a benefit as I bartended one of my last shifts; promising to bring bin Laden’s head back to the bar when it was all over; that girlfriend and I sorting our issues out and getting back on a good path; her calling me at my parents’ house in a panic as the first bombs fell on Afghanistan; every car in Chattanooga stopping for a candlelight vigil for the victims of the attacks in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania; running through a wine festival in an effort to shed weight before I shipped; panicked news reports about white powder; sitting on a hill overlooking the pulverized façade of the Pentagon; getting stoned at a Black Crowes concert in Atlanta; my one and only time actually Seeing Rock City on the last day I lived in Chattanooga; the letter my dad gave me the last time I saw him before I shipped. I remember all of that and so much more, but none of it has anything approaching a narrative quality.

My life was changing fast, and it was because of Osama bin Laden and the horrors he chose to perpetrate that day and on others before and since. Before and since, I have made many choices, but I never made one as decisively as I did when I chose to leave the home I loved and fight for my fellow countrymen. That hateful wretch pushed me in a direction that changed everything.

I’ve spent the ensuing 10 years either in uniform or supporting those who are. Two of those years were passed in a damnable desert near the uncivilized cradle of civilization. I’ve been shot at. I’ve lost friends well before their time. I’ve succumbed to – and subsequently overcome – so many fears and terrors I never thought I’d have to fight. I’ve learned, I know, I’ve experienced so many unforgettable things, and I’ve forgotten so much I wish I’d held onto.

When I left Chattanooga, I thought I’d come back when I left the Army; I didn’t. That girlfriend and I were talking about getting married; we broke up and eventually built an enduring friendship. I was going to do five years and be done with it; I did six and a half and am still in the Reserve. All of this was just my plan for a life going into a dramatic upheaval, and I even tossed that right out the window.

Now, nearly a decade after that awful day, I live and work in the D.C. area, a place where my talents can still go to some ancillary part of the fight. I’m engaged to – and living with – a wonderful woman who I never could have imagined knowing 10 years ago. My life is nothing like I thought it would be when I walked across the stage and accepted my UTC diploma in August 2001. It’s not better or worse necessarily, because we can’t know what lies down roads left untraveled; all I know is it’s massively different, and my life came to this point because of one heinously evil man.

So when I heard that Osama bin Laden is dead, that it’s over, that he took a bullet to the forehead from the muzzle of a Navy SEAL’s rifle, my heart fills with joy, remorse, euphoria, sentimentality and a hundred other emotions I can’t quite get a handle on. I fell in a heap, tears streaming, last night when I got off the phone with the person who told me. I spent time with my soon-to-be wife. I called friends. I screamed to the rooftops that the bastard was dead. In short, I went a little crazy.

I don’t know how to feel. I am jubilant. Knowing one of the most evil men I’ve heard of is dust will do that. I’m sad, because I know how much sacrifice, and how many wrong turns, led us to here. I feel closure, and I lack it. I feel happiness that moves me to tears and it’s been so long – let’s go with a decade – since that’s happened that they feel alien. He’s gone. It’s not over. In fact, it may be nowhere near over, but I can let what started this long beginning go now. I can steel myself for what might lie ahead and let go of this ball of anger I let sit in my gut all these years.

Somewhere, I hope there’s some kind of alternate universe where those attacks never happened; where that Jake Boyer never had to learn the things I did. I don’t know where his life would be now. Plans fall apart no matter what happens in your life. I just know he’d retain some of the dumb innocence I possessed in 2001. He’s probably still bartending. Who knows?

All I know is Osama bin Laden did change my life. I love what it is and what it’s become, but the actions he initiated somehow led here. I’m glad that evil bastard’s dead. I know it’s not “right” to think like that, but I don’t care. He gave up any claim on a long and happy life when he plotted the deaths of all those people. It didn’t start or end on Sept. 11. It’s not over now, but there is a catharsis in his death.

Osama bin Laden changed my life. I hope he burns in hell.

I write this in memory of James Adamouski, Matthew Boule, Erik Halvorsen, Scott Jamar, Mike Pederson, Eric Smith, Chris Frost, James Hunter and the 5,970 other servicemembers who’ve fallen in the wars set off by bin Laden. He’s dead, ladies and gentlemen. Our fight is not over, but he’s gone.

Best of the Old Blog: Wait. . .This is Still a Shooting War?

This blog was posted on MySpace on 21 Jan 08, just a random day in Baghdad:

What with how quiet it is around here at Lovely Camp Victory, it sometimes can be easy to think we’re not in a war zone and are actually on a very long working vacation; ridiculously long. But no really, this deployment has generally been the least exciting war zone trip in modern recorded history. Days are long. I never leave the FOB except to ride the Rhino over to the IZ.

Occasionally, the monotony is broken by a random explosive coming over the wall and randomly blowing up in a totally random place. Every now and then you hear (and sometimes see the light from) some insane firefight just beyond the fortress walls. Some times those shootouts end up with a few stray rounds coming over the wall and over our way. But in general, this is more like being stuck at a sober Club Med that forces you to sit at your desk whether there is work to get done or not.

But every now and then the tranquility of these beautiful lakeside palaces is broken up by something a little more immediate to the individual. Back in the Spring, a trailer two doors down took a mortar round. Fortunately no one was in it, but my roommate, who’d been playing Playstation at the time, spent the next few days a little shook up. Heck, it freaked me a little when I walked home and saw all the firetrucks around the general area of my domicile.

The view from outside my trailer at Camp Victory on an average day in January 2008.

In addition to that, there was the rocket attack right around PT time a few months back. We heard the boom and felt the shake, but had no idea where the rockets hit; nowhere near us at least. So we went about our business. When I got to work later that day, there was a small hole ripped in the wall near my desk and another, even smaller, hole punched through the metal cover of our junction box – shrapnel from a round that landed a hundred yards away or so. One piece. Weird.

But last night was definitely more immediate. Occasionally, when the aforementioned firefights go down, you hear a story about someone who had a random 7.62mm round – the kind fired from the insurgents’ ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle (I said that like Ice Cube in the “The Predator,” for the record) punch through his trailer or bounce off one of the omnipresent T walls in her vicinity. But it’s never really happened anywhere in the vicinity of Your Intrepid Reporter.

So that changed last night. I was sitting in my room, enjoying all the cool lightsaber battles in “Revenge of the Sith” and submitting resumes online, when all of a sudden I heard something akin to a loud snap, then a metallic bounce of some sort. It was on the other side of the room, my roommate’s side, which is obscured from my line of sight because we erected a wall of wall lockers in the middle of the room so I don’t have to watch the sex he and his girl have. I only get to hear it unless I have the forethought to throw on my headphones, but I digress.

So the noise – which was anything but the sound of ecstasy – was on the other side of the room, which was unoccupied to my knowledge. Jumpin’ Jehosephat*, I thought to myself, That sounded like – no way. I decided to investigate.

Cue twinkling piano sneaky music^. I poked my head around the corner. There was way too much drywall and insulation-looking material strewn about – on my roommate’s bed, on the floor. I looked up and saw it – the telltale hole in the ceiling, complete with dangling shreds of drywall, evoking the similar hole I found in the office wall a few months ago. I investigated a bit and found it: a single 7.62mm round which had rolled over behind the trash can.

Okay, obviously I do not agree at all with the insurgents’ side of the argument, but I get most of what they do. Lobbing explosive projectiles over the wall hoping to his something? It kinda makes sense – they have a blast radius and you might get something. But walking over to the wall and spraying and praying single rounds in the vain hope that one might find its target? That seems like a very uneconomical way to fight a war. I think they’ve gotten like one person on this entire FOB with this method. Don’t get me wrong; one is too many. But you have to be pretty desperate AND stupid to give this a try.

So it turns out they’re even dumber than I thought. That, and they’re assholes. I swear, if this was the Mahdi Army’s opening salvo in a new offensive, I am going to kick Moqtada’s ass when I see him. As much as I now have to laugh at the futility of it, I am getting way too short for this kind of garbage.

Oh well, at least I have something resembling a war story from this trip now. Also, I’ll have a pretty cool necklace when I get back.

So you may ask if I slept okay. You may also ask if I felt the need to wear my vest and helmet last night. The answers are yes and no. I just think this place reared its stupid head again.

* With aplogies to Duck, Daffy.

^Okay, I’ll cadge to reliving my childhood with WAY too many old-school Looney Toons shorts lately. You can get them cheap on iTunes and I’m bored people! Don’t judge me.

Best of the Old Blog: Anatomy of a Rocket Attack

ANNOUNCEMENT! In an effort to leave MySpace completely behind forever, I’m manually migrating the good blogs out of there and over here so I have them somewhere. So I figure once a day I’ll paste up an old one. Kinda fun for me, but I don’t know how great it is for you!

This blog was posted on MySpace on 9 Mar 08, the day I landed in Kuwait after 15 months in Baghdad:

We had a bit of a crazy day a few weeks ago. I wanted to write about it at the time but torn between my semijournalistic tendencies and a desire to not get everyone overly worried during the last few weeks of my deployment. So now here goes.

Anyone who’s been to Iraq or watched any news about it knows the FOBs are subject to occasional rocket and mortar attacks. We had a mostly quiet year punctuated by occasional terror. For a few months, said occasional terror became a regular occurrence. Almost weekly, the booms would start and we’d kind of cower in fear as the indirect fire fell haphazardly across Camp Victory. From roughly September to November, it became a decent-sized part of the game. Then it went away. Quiet. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. None.

So the last few months were, to be honest, really quiet and almost peaceful, at least in my little slice of Iraq. That all ended for about a half hour a few weeks back.

 I was sitting in front of my office computer with a really annoying Air Force major (LONG story) trying to explain to him how to fix something on a page he was designing. Suddenly the alarm went off. Usually, it’s a little unreliable, so we ignored it. Of course, that meant it was quickly punctuated by the sound of the world falling over right outside the door. It was an actual attack. Instinct kicked in and I hit the floor. Jackass Air Force major just sat at the computer working away. I laid there waiting for either the “All Clear” or another boom. The Boyer luck being what it is, I got the latter.

As soon as the second one hit, I grabbed my weapon and ran for the door, on my way to the bunker. Dingus sat there at the computer.

“Sir, let’s get some f$%^ing cover!” I hollered.

“Where do we go?” he decided to take the time to ask. Seriously, he wasted my time during a rocket attack to ask me this. I should point out that at this point I could actually hear them whistling overhead and falling – very nearby.

“Follow me.”

There is nothing worse than dumbass officers in situations like this. I look back to make sure he’s able to tear himself away from my workstation and scramble for the bunker. There’s a bunch of us crunched in there – soldiers, civilians, etc. It’s a little cramped. I’m crouched. It gets quiet. The explosions start again. The alarm periodically reminds us that yes indeed, we are in the middle of a rocket attack. I’m still crouched like a catcher.

Adrenaline is surging a bit as rockets continue to impact somewhere near. My leg starts kicking a bit. The jackass next to me tells me to calm down. I’m calm as hell, but my stupid leg is kicking like my old dog’s did when you’d scratch his belly.

Finally, we hear the all clear. The civilian, who’s obviously a veteran of many a conflict over the meat bar at Ryan’s, looks at me and asks if I’m new here, thinking that would explain my panic. Yeah, panic is what it was, jerkoff. Because, you know, I’ve only been here for 14 months now!

Later reports showed that more than 10 very large rockets decided to join us that afternoon.

Indirect fire attacks are really the worst kind. There’s nothing to be done when they happen save hunkering down and hoping it doesn’t fall on your head. You can’t go after the guy shooting at you. You can’t shoot back. You can’t choose that ONE safe location, because the attacks we get aren’t exactly well coordinated. It’s more “spray ‘n’ pray” – they line up a bunch of rails or tubes, point them in the general direction of a FOB, and loose the flying hounds.

No more of that mess. I still have friends dealing with it, though – plenty of them. Knowing what it’s like can make the worry a little worse, especially when it’s fresh in your mind.

George Bush’s Dumbass Head on a String

I grew up a very political person. When I was in college, it all kind of culminated my fifth (senior) year, when I wrote a weekly column for the Echo, my school’s newspaper. That was the year in which this country either elected George W. Bush or the Republicans stole the election from Al Gore, depending on who you ask. I tend to stick to the former, in case you ask me. Anyway, I had quite the soapbox from which to espouse my view that Gore was the best choice in those days, and I used it. In fact, politics probably took up about half my writing back then.

Then I joined the Army, and I gave up a lot of those things. In giving myself to the service of my country, I begrudgingly gave up my public political voice, at least as long as said voice cold be connected to my service in uniform. Rather than split hairs and try to get stuff out there clandestinely, I just kept my mouth shut for a lot of years. I didn’t put so much as a bumper sticker on my car as the world seemed to go to hell over the course of eight years. My one concession? Shortly after Bush was reelected in 2004, my mom stuffed my Christmas stocking with a “George Bush’s Dumbass Head on a String” car air freshener. It was one of those cardboard cutout things that you hang from your rearview mirror:

George Bush's Dumbass Head on a String

I figured it was small, all-but-invisible, and had zero to no chance of being noticed by a senior NCO or somehow influencing one of my soldiers one way or another. It was proper in my mind and, as far as I know, in regulation. I was admittedly a bit exasperated with our country at the moment after spending an entire summer writing a series of nonpolitical get-out-the-vote stories at the behest of the commanding general for the post newspaper I was running at the time. I knew there were regulations limiting me and I appreciated their importance and purpose, but keeping my public mouth shut while the public made the lesser of two very bad choices was driving me nuts.

Anyway, that election was over by this time, and he was my commander-in-chief, but nevertheless I hung George Bush’s Dumbass Head on a String proudly from the rearview mirror of my red Dodge Neon. What can I say? I was a young sergeant testing my boundaries.

That was a mistake. From the second this small, barely noticeable air freshener went up, I heard all about it from any NCO or officer senior to me:

“You really shouldn’t have something like that shouting out of your car. It’s disrespectful to the commander in chief.”

“That’s unAmerican.”

“I’m going to look into UCMJ options. I don’t think you’re allowed to have /display that.”

So I figured maybe it was a bit – okay, a lot – disrespectful, but it was in my car. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t exactly public speech, which is basically what you’re prohibited from doing while you wear the uniform. I mean, you really had to go out of your way to even get close enough to read the thing as it was no bigger than any tree-shaped air freshener you’ve ever seen. Despite all that, though, it became too big a pain in the butt to keep George Bush’s Dumbass Head on a String up. I got really tired of having to defend myself to anyone who disagreed with me and thought I was in blatant violation of military regulations.

Fast forward four years. Now I’m out of the Army, but I work as a civilian on an Army post. As I drive around each day, I see any number of bumper stickers dealing in political advocacy. They’re of all stripes, actually, but most are relatively simple and inoffensive to anyone.

Then there are the others. Since Barack Obama became president, it seems like every conservative with a grudge wants to make it known just how disappointed he is by way of vinyl sticker affixed to car body. Many are beyond borderline disrespectful, just as my teeny tiny air freshener was, but instead of disappearing, they’re multiplying! Even here, on post where uniformed members are supposed to wear their political leanings under their ACUs, bumper stickers and huge vinyl decals scream out from the back end of vehicles belonging to first sergeants, captains, privates, and colonels.

“Barack Hussein Obama: The Man Who’s Ruining America” read one gem I caught on the back of a female captain’s car the other day.

“I’ll take God and guns, you can keep Obama” read another I saw yesterday on the back of a truck carrying a colonel’s bird next to the DoD decal on the front windshield. Never mind the fact that Obama’s a professed Christian and that one made about half-sense, what about the fact that it’s once again an example of speaking against the commander in chief?

First, I have no personal problem with it. I think everyone should be able to express themselves in any way they want on the back of their vehicles, be it with a Darwin fish or a gaudy “In Memory Of. . .” decal (is your S10 really the way you want to memorialize your love one?). I was a bit put off by it when people were giving me grief about George Bush’s Dumbass Head on a String. But it seems to me there’s an unspoken, unwritten double standard going down along obvious stereotypical political lines. Because you know, everybody in the military is a Republican.

Now, the pertinent facts: According to DoD Directive 1344.10, dated Feb. 19, 2008, a servicemember may not “display a large political sign, banner, or poster (as distinguished from a bumper sticker) on a private vehicle” (subpara. 4.1.2.11). So by that judgment, my George Bush’s Dumbass Head on a String was okay, as it was far smaller than any bumper sticker. My question, though, is do these stupid decals, some of which are large enough to stretch across the rear windshield of a Lincoln Navigator, still count as bumper stickers? There’s not a lot of clarity there.

Beyond all that, it’s not as if I was the only soldier, sailor, airman or Marine who had to deal with overzealous NCOs and officers applying a nonexistent regulation to my personal life and expressions during the Bush years. While he was in office, you would rarely if ever find even so much as an anti-Bush bumper sticker amongst those in uniform. Now that it’s Obama, you see it everywhere and stretching far beyond bumper stickers, and instead of those NCOs and officers requesting it be taken down, it seems they’re doing nothing.

I Woke Up and My Forehead Said “QWERTY” Backwards

Everybody complains about Mondays. Look at Facebook around noon on Monday and you realize that – while we’ve all long considered it universal – people really hate Monday. Everybody I know who spends significant time online and has a Facebook page feels the need to express their displeasure at another weekend’s passing and a new work week’s start.

I’m generally not that worried about Mondays. I tend to hate the weekend being over, but when I’m busy at work, it’s not so bad. Today is a big exception to that rule, because it’s that one Monday out of the month during which I’m returning from one of my Army Reserve battle assemblies. For those not in the know, that’s what we in the Reserve call “drill” nowadays; makes it sound a lot more Warrior-ific or something.

Anyway, that stuff kicks my butt hard when the inevitable weekend rolls around. I’m fortunate enough that I work at a place with flexible scheduling, so I am usually able to take the Friday before off. That’s massively necessary if you’re a single guy working full-time and dealing with the traffic in this area, as if I didn’t get that day off, I’d be wearing last week’s boxer shorts inside-out this week.

So I get Friday off, but the battle assembly weekend still looms. I live about half an hour south of DC and go to assemblies about half an hour north of DC, so it’s a drive. Plus, I go out of my way (often stupidly) to squeeze in some fun on these weekends. Here’s how it worked this weekend just passed:

Friday night: Go out with some friends to celebrate someone’s birthday. Drink a couple beers. In bed by midnight.

Saturday: Wake up at 5. Drive an hour or so to Fort Meade, Md. Drill (sit in an office and work on a newsletter and complain about the stupidity of the Army Reserve) until 5. Meet girlfriend and best friend and eat dinner and see a movie and go to best friend’s house and drink beers and talk about Iraq. In bed by 1.

Sunday: Wake up at 6. Go do that drill thing all day again. Start to drive home, then find out it’s cousin’s birthday and there’s a dinner about 45 minutes away from home that should be attended. Go to dinner. Go home. In bed by 10:30.

Monday: Wake up at 5!!!

Now typically, it’s not a killer, as I don’t do much Sunday night. Of course, I had the surprise birthday dinner invitation as I walked out of the Reserve Center yesterday and it would have been kind of cruddy of me to not go sans excuse. So I brought this all on myself by going.

So I come to work this morning and get to editing photos, simultaneously opening the usual Web pages I leave up all day so I can check in during a brain break: Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Millarworld, this one here, etc. And I start seeing the weekly “weekend’s over/I hate Mondays” status parade. I usually laugh at those people, thinking “Oh, the online group loneliness of being the person who has to come up with an original way to hate on Monday, the most reviled day in the Western World outside of Earth day.” Then I realize that at some point between waking up and leaving the house, I’d joined the cacophony. BLAST!

I was all supercharged for the day, I thought. I hate this Monday with a passion every month, and this one is worse. I’m the guy who never even fell asleep in philosophy class in college, yet a member of our cleaning crew discovered me at an undisclosed point in the afternoon leaned all the way back in my chair, dead to the world. SNORING!

I hate Mondays.

At least this one.

Almost as bad as Earth Day.

He’s Ba-aaaack!

Okay, nothing too deep here. I’m trying to get a new blog going. This will get better and expand as the weeks go by, as I intend to get moving with my writing again. Some of you may be coming from my MySpace blog. You will notice I’ve provided a handy feed to the right if you’d like to link to and/or read the old stuff. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any serious writing, so bear wth me as my voice comes back and I figure out where it is and wher I am in this life.