While I was on a beach in the Outer Banks on my mid-tour leave from Iraq, I first read this from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried: “They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.” I had been home for about a week and was going to be returning to Iraq in another week to finish the remaining five months of my tour. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explores his experience as a 19-year-old American infantryman fighting in Vietnam. While reading it, I remember being struck by how similar our experiences were. Like him, I was a 19-year-old infantryman serving in a conflict with ambiguously defined parameters in a far away country. The surroundings were different. His war took place in a dense tropical jungle while mine took place in the mazes of ancient Arabian streets and alleyways, but this difference was an inconsequential detail. Both environments are appropriate metaphors for the wars that took place within them. The environments embody the same conflict.

It is a story that has been driven to the point of cliché: a middle-class American boy gets sent off to fight in a nightmarishly confusing conflict in a foreign country, where the term ‘fog of war’ is driven to its absurd extreme. Now another cliché: ‘history repeats itself.’ But I digress.

Sometimes it felt more like chasing will-o-wisps than fighting a proper war. The enemy existed as muzzle flashes and tracers, shadowy figures darting in and out of alleyways, like incoming rockets. The enemy was an elusive undercurrent beneath a membrane of seeming normalcy.   The village that greeted us with smiles and platitudes would be the same village whose young men would fire rockets into our base at night.

That was six years ago. The memories are no longer fresh and have had time to ferment. They are no longer merely raw sensory data, but rather meaningful and symbolic representations of my little slice of that war.

I remember once finding a nine or ten-year-old boy asleep on a rooftop clutching an AK47. I remember taking the rifle out of his hands and waking him up. I remember how he looked at me, with a mixture of disbelief and defeat. I remember how, even though I was his enemy, when I held my hand out to him, he took it and walked with me to the stairs.   I remember holding his hand in one hand and his assault rifle in the other. I remember lying to my squad leader saying that I found the rifle somewhere else on the roof.   I remember how, when it came down to it, he was only a child.

Then there is the endless procession of skinny, hooded prisoners that has been marched through the Vietnam War up into this war and into my memory. Yusef Komunyakaa writes in Prisoners, part of his collection of poems about his experience in Vietnam entitled “Dien Cai Dau,” “usually at the helipad/ I see them stumble-dance/ across the hot asphalt/ with crockersacks over their heads/ moving toward interrogation huts.” In that poem, Komunyakaa is pointing out how tragically dehumanizing it is both to be a prisoner and to take a prisoner. He goes on to ironically ask, “how can anyone anywhere love/ these half-broken figures/ bent under the sky’s brightness?” In the poem, the speaker is so dehumanized that he scorns these helpless, bound men. I remember this feeling. I also remember feeling horror when I realized how monstrously cold I could sometimes be.

War is one of the only experiences shared by every generation of mankind. There is little that can be said about it that hasn’t already been said, so I will leave you with another quote by Tim O’Brien: “Even now I haven’t finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don’t.”