By Aaron Webb
(See more of
Aaron's photos from Iraq)
When you think of a grand adventure, what visions come to mind? Do you see slot canyons, underwater caves, and alpine slopes? What about the gear? Do you plan on stuffing your backpack with a two-man tent, climbing shoes, and insect repellant?
Or are you the person who has dreamed up images of wide, palm-crowded rivers in the deserts of a foreign country, where you patrol the wadis with rocket launchers and assault rifles, wearing armored vests and utilizing the most rugged night vision and communication equipment available?
Let me tell you about my latest journey to the ends of the earth.
I don’t even know where to start. I’m home from Iraq. It has been a few weeks now. Two and a half or so. In some ways it feels like I am slipping right back into normal life, like I have been gone to work over a long weekend or something. I don’t think I ever lost some of my rhythms upon leaving the states in the first place. Does that mean that I failed to engage the combat mindset? I am not sure.
Things are looking good. My faithful wife loves me. My nine month old daughter – she was two months old when I left for Iraq – didn’t seem to necessarily remember me, but she sure warmed back up to me remarkably fast. I have been offered a tantalizing job, writing for, and designing graphics for, redrockadventure.com, an opportunity that I am taking up with pleasure. It is a family-run business. One more way to remain close to those who I most care about. I am active in my church, and people seem not to have forgotten who I am. I am going back to school; I wonder if I will be the only twenty-seven year old freshman in the graphic arts program.
Other things are harder to gauge. I am adjusting well, but there are still hitches. I am ridiculously wary of the potholes on the roads as I drive. I hear machinegun fire on the Marine Corps ranges here at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and my ears perk up and I automatically start trying to determine distance, direction, and possible caliber of the weapons.
I anger a lot quicker than I used to. I am not nearly as patient and easy-going as a few years ago. Maybe that would have come anyway with growing up and taking on the responsibilities of an adult. I used to fancy myself Peter Pan, the boy who would never grow up. Flying would have been cool too. I have always been a free spirit of sorts, a happy, carefree guy who was always playing games, reading books, exploring Anasazi ruins, or catching snakes.
In fact, life has always been just one large adventure to me, a quest for something larger than myself. During tough times, I have even disciplined myself to think of it as a game, a challenge. That is one of the reasons I like that Italian film from the late nineties, Life is Beautiful. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
The desire for exploration, for adventure, for a noble quest, has always been a driving factor in who I am. It is one of the reasons I love trekking through Grand Gulch with a backpack and a camera, or rafting down the Colorado, or climbing the spires of Zion National Park. It is one of the reasons that I went to South America to preach to the people for two years, learning a foreign language and foreign customs. It is also one of the reasons I enlisted into the United States Marine Corps infantry.
Iraq was certainly adventurous, and at times, a pure adrenaline rush. Just off of the plane in Kuwait, we were gearing up and loading ammunition into magazines, checking gear, and preparing to touch down in an unstable country with a fledgling government. A familiar military proverb – hurry up and wait – describes quite accurately how you slide into a seven month trip to this place of violence. We hit the ground running, alert, pumped up, ready for the worst that they could throw at us.
And we waited.
Three weeks passed. Finally we got a mission. And from that point on, until near the last two months of our deployment, we just kept getting missions, one after another. We ran clearing ops in three of the most volatile cities of the Al Anbar province, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Habbaniyah.
We ran some pretty spine-tingling operations, a few of which made the nightly news. We were working in an area where other, more stationary units were taking dozens of KIA during their deployments. We had our fair share of casualties, some of them very serious. I myself was the casualty of a roadside IED back in March. It was not too serious, but certainly startling. There were three other Marines with me at the time, and all four of us came closer than we would have desired to the flying slag and shrapnel of shredded vehicle armor and equipment. But we suffered only six fallen brothers in our battalion. All of them were courageously committed men who had earned the respect and admiration of the Marines they worked and fought with.
I suppose that there is still a layer of reality amid all of the games and challenges of turning life into an adventure. There is still responsibility. There is still emotion, both joyous and tragic. There is consequence. There is living with the choices you have made.
When I think of memorable experiences now, I will include other things to the standard list of bouldering, scorpion-catching, and stargazing. The rate at which my heart thundered in my ears as I kicked in doors and cleared rooms immediately after being hit by an IED on the roads outside of Habbaniyah definitely rivaled any high I have ever felt while preparing to leap into the dark waters of Lake Powell from a protruding sandstone rock face.
It was a unique thrill to poke around in the bushes at the edge of the Euphrates River, looking for camel spiders, cobras and saw-scaled vipers instead of bull snakes and diamondback rattlers.
The age and history of ancient Mesopotamia were tangible enough to be felt in my bones, and thick enough to be breathed in and tasted as I looked over the vast, desolate stretches of dust and sand outside of the frantic noise of the cities. It was not unlike the heavy sense of reverence that I feel upon sitting quietly and gazing upon the abandoned cliff-dwellings of the original Southwest inhabitants.
Racing up walls, roofs, riverbanks, and hills in over eighty pounds of armor, comm. gear, weaponry, and water, while not my favorite pastime, was still a personal challenge of endurance and reckless daring. Worthy of any of my twenty-mile day hikes back home.
I was reminded of my missionary days in Argentina as I went through the neighborhoods of Ramadi, Fallujah, and Habbaniyah, meeting the people, playing with the kids, trying to learn their language and customs. It was easy to see some good coming of an otherwise violently unpleasant situation, as Marines handed out school and medical supplies to eager children, as families finally dared to emerge from their homes because we had set up secure areas where they knew that insurgent activity would be sorely impeded, where they could live, and work, and play in peace. People would beg us not to go once we were done with an op.
I think that I will learn from and grow from the undesirable memories and lessons that I have from Iraq too. The tedious hours doing busy work while the rest of my squad is out on a recon patrol. The grudging patience with, and painful obedience to incomprehensible, and sometimes inane commands.
The horrible feeling of helplessness as I watch a combat surgeon operate on a man whose lungs are gunshot and rapidly filling with blood.
And I don’t think that I am ever going to forget the stench of charred human flesh. I am not going to get over the hollow in my soul that was there as I cleaned up the armor and weaponry that a fellow Marine had been using when he was killed.
There was still more to drag me down to stark reality once I came home as well. The weight in the pit of my stomach as I attended the memorial service of one of the guys that I was just joking around with in Fallujah. The convulsing sobs of another’s wife and children as the Chaplain talks of heroic deeds and noble sacrifice.
So, looking into my own soul, I begin to preach. Peter Pan, life is a challenge. A game. You know what you have to do. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t panic when you can’t control the world around you. Don’t lose sight of the joy and the wisdom that later come from living a good life, even if existence is sometimes harsh.
So with all of those sins of commission lurking out there, what kinds of things should a person do? Go on a quest. Go climb a mountain. Kayak down a stretch of whitewater. Earn a degree. Teach kids in Peru how to speak English. Tackle one of your fears or weaknesses. Turn it into a strength.
Whatever it is, go courageously, and commit yourself to a cause, an exploration. And enjoy life.
I think that there is some solace to be had in the idea, to me anyway, that my fallen brothers didn’t go sitting down, doing nothing. They were actively engaged in helping their brothers in arms win the fight. Maybe all of them were on their own quests for adventure, for meaningful, life-inspiring experiences. There are some of us who knew them who have set aside a place in our hearts for honor, for mourning, for memories. I would hope that their sacrifices would have positive, life-inspiring effects on those who will still remember them even after the war in Iraq is over with and set aside for whatever takes its place.
