They Sent Me to Distant Lands to Fight Against Muslims ... Then I Became One

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted April 9, 2009.

They were all Army or Marine veterans, and they told stories about exploits, adventures and camaraderie, all punctuated with: "and then we got drunk."  They made it sound better than college. But none of his uncles had ever been to war.

After his first tour, Mike would have said his uncles were right. He was stationed in Korea and Bosnia, visited 27 other countries, went to jump school, and while he learned that he hated parachuting, he got a pretty badge for his uniform. He also got awards and affirmations, he made E-5 in 2 1/2, and he says he enjoyed every minute.   

A month after his contract was up, the Twin Towers went down and he re-enlisted.  

Mike wanted to be a Special Forces medic, but instead they made him a civil affairs specialist, which turned out to be "nothing but glorified social work."

His job was to do needs assessments in local villages, consulting with village elders about where schools, clinics and hospitals needed to be built, and organizing their construction.

"I was the one who would go in, smiling and happy:  ‘Look, we can get you guys schools.' "   

But he was not immune to the irony of living in an old royal palace in Jalalabad, which he says was "very nice before we blew it up," or in Fallujah, before "the Marines came through and blew that up," and then making a show of gifting the locals with replacements for what the Americans had destroyed.   

"They didn't like us as much after we blew things up," he told me with a wry smile. "We had to do a lot more building to make the Army look good."   

Civil affairs, however, was not what Mike had re-upped for. He wanted retribution, and he "wanted to do the fun stuff -- kick in doors and fight war." 

So he doubled as an 18 Bravo weapons specialist, joining a team that was doing the actual fighting. But only at night. If he went out with them in the daylight, where his face and his patches could be recognized, it would be much harder to "come back the next day and try to put a smile on 'em."  

But as it turned out, he couldn't do the fun stuff with impunity. About four months into his first tour, he started having intolerable nightmares.

The unit medic gave him Valium, telling him, "If you're not sleeping, we can't use you." 

He started out taking one a night, but after a month he was taking three or four just to get to sleep.

And drinking heavily as well. They all did, in part for the artificial courage, but also because alcohol was an excuse for these warriors to share their horror.

"We'd do a drug house or something, and whatever happened, when we came back, before we cleaned our weapons or anything, somebody would have a bottle of liquor, and we would talk everything through.

"This is among a bunch of guys that normally, if you're sober, aren't prone to expressing their feelings easily, especially with other men."  

It was when he got to Iraq that he started doing heavy drugs.

"With American money, you can walk into any pharmacy, and they will give you what you want. I had someone write Oxycontin and Valium on a piece of paper in Arabic, but after the first few times, they just knew me."  

Of course, he came home addicted to the drugs and dependent on the alcohol. The Army sent him to its Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Program when he came home.

He sat there for eight weeks in bored, defiant silence, celebrated his graduation with a 12-pack and took his "honorable discharge with a bar to re-enlistment due to medical reasons" pretty much straight to jail.  

With one painful detour: an attempted suicide. He took all the meds the VA had given him and anything else he could get his hands on.
"They didn't kill me," he told me matter-of-factly, "so I just kept on drinking and getting heavier into drugs."

Mike got himself a generous one- to three-year bid in state prison for possession --  generous because even though he was holding a lot of illegal substances when he was arrested, the sentencing judge took his PTSD diagnosis into consideration.   

After he sobered up, he spent his time in prison reading the Quran, and he began attending services. When he got out, he made a beeline for the Kemble Street Mosque and asked for the imam.  

Although the spiritual leader has become his primary mentor and support, Mike also has a counselor at SUNY and another at the VA. When he first got out of the Army, he thought he could handle things on his own.

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Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her Web site is Flashback.

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