The last word: No longer a soldier

I'm home from Iraq in one piece, writes Matt Gallagher, but I'll never be the same

I’M ONE OF the lucky ones. War destroys without regard to what’s fair or just. This isn’t a new or terribly profound revelation, but witnessing it, and sometimes participating in it, makes it seem like both. In a professional military, the entire point of training is to minimize the nature of chance in combat. But all the training in the world will never eliminate happenstance in war, or even render it negligible.

I returned from Iraq with all of my limbs, most of my mental faculties, and a book deal. I wake up every morning in an apartment in New York City. I’m working toward a graduate degree. I have a beautiful fiancée who reminds me to slow down when I’m drinking. And every day I feel more and more detached and removed from the Iraqi dust lands I promised myself I’d shed like snakeskin if I ever got back home.

Like I said, one of the lucky ones.

MEANWHILE, THE BLACK bracelet on my wrist carries the names of four individuals who weren’t so lucky. One got shot through the armpit with a ricocheting bullet and bled out on an outpost roof. Two drove over the wrong piece of street at the wrong time and likely didn’t even know it was a roadside bomb that ended it all. The last one made it through 15 months of war only to get drunk one night back in the States and shoot himself in the face during an emotional breakdown.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, becomes “unstuck in time.” Much of the novel focuses on Pilgrim’s experience of the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II, something Vonnegut himself survived as an American prisoner of war. Like many American-literature students, I was required to read Slaughterhouse-Five in high school, and if memory serves, I even enjoyed that assignment at 16. But I didn’t really appreciate the concept of becoming unstuck in time until I returned from war. Just like anyone who poured blood, sweat, and tears into missions in faraway foreign lands, I left part of myself over there, and it remains there, while the rest of me goes about my business 6,000 miles away—a paradox of time and space Vonnegut captured all too brilliantly.

I’ve walked by manholes in New York City streets and smelled the sludge river I walked along in north Baghdad in 2008. I’ve stopped dead in my tracks to watch a street hawker in Midtown, a large black man with a rolling laugh and a British accent, who looked just like my old scout platoon’s interpreter. And I’ve had every single slamming dumpster lid—every single damn one—rip off my fatalistic cloak and reveal me to be, still, a panicked young man desperate not to die because of an unseen IED.

Despite these metaphysical dalliances with time travel, the names on my black bracelet are, in fact, stuck in time. Or, more accurately, stuck in memory, where they’ll fade out and disappear like distant stars before becoming shadows of the men we served with and knew.