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Sorry, My Mistake

Badger Six stayed on.  Capt. Eric Coulson completed his year as company commander of a National Guard combat engineering company in Iraq, clearing IEDs off roads in Anbar, and volunteered for another 10 months, a new assignment with the 82nd Airborne.  

 I hope to use what I learned to help another unit.

He could have left with his soldiers, come honorably home, but as his wife has compelled him to tell us, he didn’t. That officially makes him out of his mind. Admirably, quite deserving of respect, out of his mind.

But he’s smarter than I was.  If I knew they weren’t going to send me back, I wouldn’t have left.

I don’t know what’s going on with Badger Six.  Maybe just a sense of duty.  He lost three men, and maybe he can help others avoid that, now that he’s been around the block a couple of times. But I suspect it’s something more than that.  My buddy Sig, who ended up not much liking this war, couldn’t keep away from it.  His newspaper kept sending him back, because he keep giving them reasons to. I don’t where that figured into his PTSD therapy. Last time I checked, it hadn’t helped. Tony Perry of the LA Times said he had no intention of going anywhere near the combat. That was before he got there. My buddy Carl Prine, an embedded reporter from Pittsburgh, was a former Marine who joined the National Guard after he got back from the invasion. He didn’t have to do that. He was 38. He came back from his 2005 deployment to Anbar pissed off. Watch the vid. Listen when he tells you he’d still go back. Here’s Jack Kelly, another former Marine and invasion embed, sending Prine off and wishing desperately to be sent with him. There are others I could name, of different ages and walks of life, some of them missing parts, inside and out. Reporters and soldiers. One of the ones I loved the most, just for that instant, was Matt Boisvert, a Marine at Walter Reed, when he talking about getting up on his new leg so he could go back because, he said, “I loved it. We enjoyed it.” He wasn’t some kind of sick killer.  He was talking about being with some of the people who meant the most to him, fighting next to them, about the out-of-body experience of combat and the fundamental sense of purpose that supplants the fear and the what-the-am-I-doing-here. Because if combat can be traumatic, and echo in your head for years it is also something we are wired for, as combat animals. Not everything it does to us is bad.

I know a lot of people who have been to war from Vietnam through Iraq, and a lot of them have either been back, or tried to go back, or pretty convincingly expressed that they wish they could be back, no matter the misgivings some of them express about politics or family, no matter what it cost them. I know more people who’ve been to some of the worst places in the world who wish they could be back there than who don’t. So what the fuck’s with that?  There’s a book I have on my shelf, I never got more than a few pages into. Because I didn’t feel like I needed to. It’s called “A Terrible Love of War,” and it’s by a psychologist who says it’s not enough to say war is bad.  You must try to understand why men are drawn to it, and even love it.  Why it haunts them. Teflon Don talked about War Cocaine.  I don’t know I can say exactly that I never felt more alive than when I expected to be dead soon, but life and death at that time were direct and simple things, and nothing could touch me. I was doing something that felt like it mattered, if even if I didn’t think, at some points, I’d get to file.

I can’t say whether any of that has anything to do with Badger Six. I don’t know him except from what he’s written. I think most likely he wants to help, maybe recognizes this is his chance to do something worthwhile in life. But this last bit from Badger Six:

I am in a completely different part of Iraq and and least for the time being my Internet and thus blogging capability is a little more limited.

Additionally I am not sure that I will be outside the wire too often and I think that is where the best stories on Badgers Forward came from.

Yeah, that’s pretty much where you find them.

Topics: Iraq

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:21 pm on Monday, September 17, 2007

5 Responses to “Sorry, My Mistake”

1. saltydog Says:
   September 18th, 2007 at 12:06 am

   Poor sod. Poor sod’s family.

   Bless him.

2. Texas Bob Says:
   September 18th, 2007 at 6:08 am

   I both relate and sympathize with CPT Coulson. Sometimes it is maddening, this constant love-hate thing that goes on in my head. Most of my soldiers feel the same way. We got back from our 2nd deployment (my 3rd) last December, and not a minute goes by without thinking about Iraq. We go minute-by-minute praying to be back there - to praying to never go back. I don’t know what to make of it really. I dream about it every night, sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but it is always there. Going back seems like the answer, but it really only postpones things. I bet a lot of guys feel like most of us do, in that we find many aspects of life simpler there. You can see the difference you are making almost immediately. We’re a bunch of IT nerds, who were building the wide area network infrastructure across the country. And for a tactical IT nerd to go into a barren wasteland and build it from scratch, it’s like a kid in a candy store. Teaching Iraqi officers how to use these systems for battle tracking is another story, but had its rewards as well.
   I dunno. This very minute I’m wishing I was there again. Check back later as this will probably change. ;-)

3. RebeccaH Says:
   September 18th, 2007 at 12:20 pm

   Though my father never spoke to us of his time in the war (WWII), he sometimes let slip a longing reference to his Army days when he was around other vets. My mother called it “adrenaline addiction” and it probably fueled his career choices (perforating engineer in the oilfields, small town cop) and his love of fast cars, fast boats, and motorcycles (which eventually killed him). She said he would tell stories about the war, but only to other men who’d been there, because they were the only ones who understood.

4. RebeccaH Says:
   September 18th, 2007 at 12:22 pm

   In case no one knows what a perforating engineer is, that’s the guy who built bombs on cables to blow holes in bedrock for drilling oil. In the old days (no idea how they do it now), it was an extremely dangerous job.

5. saltydog Says:
   September 18th, 2007 at 4:33 pm

   While I’ve certainly known many vets who feel this way, I never did myself. I guess it is because of the nature of my work; only someone truly vicious would want to relive being a nurse or doctor in a war zone (although we certainly had the camaraderie). I do know some corpsmen and medics who felt differently, but their job was closer to the troops.

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