"AND NOW IT BEGINS: Heading Into Combat"

Chapter commentary: One of our biggest challenges in editing “Operation Homecoming” was figuring out how to structure a book relating to two on-going wars. Should it be arranged chronologically, by genre (i.e., by grouping all the poems in one chapter, short stories in another, journals in yet another, and so on), or by military service? Ultimately, we decided to organize the book thematically and emphasize the human experience -- as opposed to the history -- of these conflicts, with the initial chapter focusing on the 9/11 attacks and firsthand accounts of heading into Afghanistan and Iraq. The material we found was not only extremely well written, but captured the drama and intensity of the early days, weeks, and months of the War on Terror and told stories that have not yet been heard or recorded.

ANTOINETTE
(Personal Narrative)
Captain William J. Toti

Commentary: Forty-four-year-old U.S. Navy Captain William J. Toti wrote a riveting, present-tense account of being in the Pentagon when American Airlines flight 77 slammed into the building at more than 500 miles an hour. After rushing outside to safety, Toti ended up going back into the Pentagon to help the wounded and the dying. The following excerpt is from the larger story Toti write, which is featured in its entirety in “Operation Homecoming.”
 
…I look back down toward the building and see an open emergency exit, thick black smoke billowing out. There’s some sort of movement inside the doorway, and it appears as if someone has fallen, so I run back down the hill and into the building.

Just a few feet inside I almost stumble over a lady crawling toward the door. She can’t stand up, and I try to lift her, but I’m having trouble because sheets of her skin are coming off in my hands. I call for help, and two Army officers respond immediately. Then, as we hear -- and feel -- a series of sec­ondary explosions just a few yards away, the three of us half-carry, half-drag the woman to the top of the hill, where we place her by the maintenance worker as a second ambulance arrives.

Third-degree burns cover her. But she is conscious and lucid, and a man with a blue traffic vest proclaiming PENTAGON PHYSICIAN stops to examine her. So I leave, confident that she is in good hands, and run back down the hill to help evacuate another of the wounded.

When we attempt to lift a badly burned man, he screams out, “Let go! Don’t touch me!” Just then we hear more explosions coming from the fis­sure which we fear are bombs (but later learn are the airliner’s oxygen tanks cooking off ), so we carry this man out of there with him screaming the whole way.

When we arrive at the top of the hill with the second man, I notice that the woman we had just carried up the hill is becoming agitated, saying, “I can’t breathe.” I call over to an EMT, “Do you have any oxygen?” He runs to the back of his rig, pulls out a bottle, and puts it on her. As the flow begins and she starts to calm down, she looks at me like she wants to say something. I kneel down beside her and ask, “Is that better, are you all right?”

And then comes the moment I’ll never forget. She blinks and asks, “Doc­tor, am I going to die?” Wham. Just like that. That is a question that I never imagined myself having to answer. I look around our little triage area on the side of the road --

The first injured man I had come across is no longer conscious and is doing poorly.

Another young lady is standing nearby with severely burned hands, screaming hysterically.

A soldier is trying to chase down a fire truck that has become lost in the maze of roads surrounding the Pentagon.

Other officers are attending to the walking wounded, and someone is pouring water from a five-gallon cooler bottle onto people as they exit the building to extinguish the small fires on their clothing.

-- And here lies this woman, with no one to attend to her but me. What should I say? Should I tell her I am not a doctor? But there are no answers to be found…

© “OPERATION HOMECOMING: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families” (Random House, 2006), edited by Andrew Carroll. Reprinted by permission.

~

A QUICK LOOK AT WHO IS FIGHTING THIS WAR
(Letter)
Captain Ryan Kelly

Commentary: Thirty-five-year-old U.S. Army Captain Ryan Kelly wrote a letter from Camp Buehring in Udairi, Kuwait to his mother back in the States just before he and his company went into Iraq. After remarking how excruciating the wait to charge into battle was, Kelly began describing the individual members of his company. The following is an excerpt from this letter, which, in my opinion, is one of the most important pieces in the book because it shows the diversity of the troops who serve in the U.S. military and the unique story each one of these men and women has to tell.

A quick look around my tent will show you who is fighting this war. There’s Ed, a 58-year-old grandfather from Delaware. He never com­plains about his age, but his body does, in aches and creaks and in the slow­ness of his movements on late nights and cold mornings....

There’s Lindon, a 31-year-old ex-Navy man from Trinidad who speaks every word with a smile. His grandfather owned an animal farm and lived next to his grandmother, who owned an adjacent cocoa field. They met as children.

There’s SGT Lilian, a single mother who left her five-year-old daughter at home with a frail and aging mother because nobody else was there to help. There’s Melissa and Mike, two sergeants who got married inside the Ft. Dix chapel a month before we deployed -- so in love, yet forbidden, because of fraternization policies, even to hold hands in front of other soldiers. But if you watch them closely, you can catch them stealing secret glances at each other. Sometimes I’ll see them sitting together on a box of bottled water ten­derly sharing a lunch. They are so focused on each other, that the world seems to dissolve around them. If they were on a picnic in Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park, instead of here, surrounded by sand and war machines, it would be the same. War’s a hell of a way to spend your honeymoon….

There’s Noah, a 23-year-old motor cross stuntman, who wears his hair on the ragged edge of army regulations. He’s been asking me for months to let him ship his motorcycle to the desert. I keep telling him no….

And on, and on and on....

I hope you are doing well, mom. I’m doing my best. For them. For me. For you. I hope it’s good enough.

Tell everyone I said hello and that I love and miss them. Talk to you soon.

Love,
Ryan

© “OPERATION HOMECOMING: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families” (Random House, 2006), edited by Andrew Carroll. Reprinted by permission.
~

NEXT WEEK: Excerpts from Chapter Two of OPERATION HOMECOMING -- “Hearts and Minds: Interactions with Afghans and Iraqis”

Listen to the Military.com interview with Andy Carroll