Veterans Writing Project. - Seriously not all right: five wars in ten years: a memoir

Copyright 2014 by Ronald N. Capps

Published in the United States

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reprinted without the written permission of the publisher.

Parts of this book have been previously published in the following: Prologue and Uncle Wiggly in Darfur appeared in Back From the Brink: War, Suicide, and PTSD in Health Affairs, July 2010, Volume 29, Number 7; Yellow in the journal JMWW in a special non-fiction issue, Fall 2011; The French Lieutenants iPod in the Press 53 Open Awards 2011; The Whole Mehgilla, originally titled Writing My Way Home in The Delmarva Review, Volume 6; Writing My Way Home appeared on TIME Magazines Battleland Blog, 2011; and in Healing War Trauma: A Handbook of Creative Approaches (Routledge, 2009), edited by Ray Scurfield and Kathy Platoni.

For other permissions and copyright information, see Publishers Note at back of the book.

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Permissions Dept., Schaffner Press, Inc.

POB 41567, Tucson, AZ 85717

First Hardcover Edition: May, 2014

ISBN: 978-1936182-58-9 (hardcover ed); 978-1936182-59-6 (adobe); 978-1936182-60-2 (epub); 978-1936182-61-9 (kindle)

For Cataloging-in-Publication Information, see back of the book

For B.C.

The opinions and characterizations in this book are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the United States Government.

W HEN THE PHONE RANG I jumpedstartledand nearly shot myself. This would have been somewhat ironic, because I was sitting in a truck, about to kill myself and was already holding the pistol in my hand. But I would have pulled the trigger while the pistol was pointed at my foot rather than my head. After all the crying and shaking, the moralizing and justifying, the calming of hands and nerves, the intense focusing on the immediate act of charging the weapon to put a bullet into the firing chamber, and then taking off the safety and preparing to put the barrel in my mouth, the sudden ringing broke the spell, and pulled me back from the brink.

I looked down at the phone lying on the seat of the pickup. It was my wife, Maureen, calling from Washington, D.C. I then looked up just as a boy with a camel in tow walked past my truck. The boys face was dirtyhed probably been walking in the desert all dayand he was wearing a stained, full-length thawb (the classic garment worn by many Arab men) and dusty sandals. He looked at me, our eyes locked for a second. Then he turned away and pulled the camels rope bridle a little harder. I picked up the phone.

Hello?

The static on the phone cleared up.

Hey, Maureen said. Whats up?

I paused. I certainly couldnt answer with the truth.

Not much, I said. Whats up with you?

I swallowed hard to clear my throat and fought to get control of my breathing. The pistol felt good in my hand. I felt surprisingly deft with it. The selector switch had two painted dots, one red and one white. White is safe; red is not. With my thumb, I put the pistol back on safe and laid it on the seat. While I talked to my wife for a few minutes, I stared out through the windshield and watched the sun setting over the rocky brown desert of Darfur.

Ill be careful, dont worry. Ill be home in a few weeks.

I started the trucks engine and drove back to the United Nations guesthouse where I was staying. On the way, I returned the pistol to the peacekeeper sergeant Id borrowed it from. We had served together for five months. He had loaned me the pistol, no questions asked, because he knew me and because I was a senior officer with more than twenty years of field experience whom he believed to be competent and trustworthy. Id given him no reason to think otherwise.

This book tells the story of how I got to that point in my life when I was sitting alone in a pickup truck in the middle of the African continent ready to end it all, and how I came back from there. It is the story of five wars in ten years.

But, it is only in the vaguest sense a war story, in that it takes place in the midst of wars. During the story people will die and people will be horribly wounded, lives will be destroyed along with villages and towns. During part of the story I am a soldier in a war, but I dont kill anyone. There is no moment where I level a weapon towards an enemy and recognize in that brief instant before I kill him that we are both human beings sent by our masters to kill and die for vague concepts like honor and patriotism.

There are no massed movements of forces on an epic scale, nor small unit combat pitting handfuls of warriors against each other. There are no moments of stark courage in the face of sustained enemy rifle and machine gun fire, nor the ungodly fear of an artillery bombardment. No, its not that kind of war story.

This is instead the story of one person going in and out of wars, sometimes as a soldier, sometimes as a Foreign Service political officer for the State Departmenta bystander for the most part to hideous violence, an observer among hundreds of thousands of dead on three continents.

I joined the Army in 1983. I had been in and out of different colleges for seven years, first studying music and then working off and on towards an English degree. I wasnt making much progress at school until I decided I wanted to join the military. I guess I didnt have a real reason to want to graduate, so it wasnt a priority. But I realized that playing my guitar and singing in bars around Virginia Beach and the Outer Banks of North Carolina wasnt going to hold my interest for too much longer, so I decided I would try to get in to flight school. I was too old for an ROTC scholarship, so when I enrolled in ROTC I simultaneously enlisted in the National Guard to make a little extra money. When I graduated from school a couple of years later, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in armor branchnot aviation, so no flight schooland went on active duty in the regular Army.

After training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, I was assigned to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment on the East-West German border. The Cold War was in its death throes and the Army had just passed the height of the build-up begun under President Reagan. Everything we did in my unit had to be bigger and shinier and faster than any other unit in the Army. For three years I cruised around Germany on M1 Tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, patrolled the East German border, and shot up boatloads of ammunition on the ranges at Grafenwoer.

At the end of that tour, I was transferred to Military Intelligence branch and assigned to Korea for a year. My first assignment was in Seoul as a liaison officer to the Korean Defense Intelligence Agency. I wore a suit and shiny shoes to work. I was told to get a membershipusing government fundsat the local golf course and to plan to play a lot of golf with senior Korean officers. The joke was that this was the only job in the Army where your golf handicap was a part of your evaluation. It wasnt far off, and it wasnt what I had in mind when I joined the intelligence corps; I thought I would be the staff intel officer in a combat arms unit rather than doing strategic collection among allies. I volunteered to move north to the De-Militarized Zone and spent the second half of my year in Korea in the Second Infantry Division.

At the same time, the U.S. was preparing to go to war with Iraq in Operation Desert Shield. Because of the war, the regular assignment process was disrupted and officers who had been assigned to schools were deployed, leaving seats to highly competitive schools open. So while I was in the 2nd Infantry Division, two guys walked into my office to ask if I would be interested in attending some specialized training as a case officer. The training would take me out of the big Armythe regular Armyand into the small world of clandestine intelligence operations. I said yes.