Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families
416
Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families
416eBook
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Overview
–Richard Bausch, author of Wives & Lovers
The first book of its kind, Operation Homecoming is the result of a major initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases and inspire U.S. Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen and their families to record their wartime experiences. Encouraged by such authors as Tom Clancy, Mark Bowden, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Jeff Shaara, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front. Taken together, these almost one hundred never-before-published eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, letters, and other personal writings become a dramatic narrative that shows the human side of warfare.
• the fear and exhilaration of heading into battle;
• the interactions between U.S. forces and Afghans and Iraqis, both as enemies and friends;
• the boredom, gripes, and humorous incidents of day-to-day life on the front lines;
• the anxiety and heartache of worried spouses, parents, and other loved ones on the home front;
• the sheer brutality of warfare and the physical and emotional toll it takes on those who fight;
• the tearful homecomings for those who returned to the States alive– and the somber ceremonies for those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation.
From riveting combat accounts to profound reflections on warfare and the pride these troops feel for one another, Operation Homecoming offers an unflinching and intensely revealing look into the lives of extraordinary men and women. What they have written is without question some of the greatest wartime literature ever published.
“Andrew Carroll has given America a priceless treasure.”
–Tom Brokaw, on War Letters
Proceeds from this book will be used to provide arts and cultural programming to U.S. military communities. For more information, please go to www.OperationHomecoming.gov.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781588365712 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/12/2006 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
To schedule a speaking engagement, please contact American Program Bureau at www.apbspeakers.com
Read an Excerpt
Operation Homecoming
Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families
Random House
Copyright © 2006
Andrew Carroll
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-6562-3
Chapter One
And Now It Begins
heading into combat
I remember the golden globe in the vast courtyard between the two buildings and
a spattering fountain next to cold stone benches. Inside, I would look up in awe
at the cathedral-like glass, the suspended walkways, and the grand, vaulted
ceilings rising ten stories, crowned with a diadem of crystal chandeliers. I
remember the large fabric hanging artwork. I can still smell the concourse
level's red carpets when they were new. I was eleven. I remember sitting on
those red carpets, reading my schoolbooks, imagining I was in the city's most
elegant reading room.
Now, up there on floors so high no hook and ladder could ever reach, a man in a
tattered and burned white business shirt stands in a broken window with flames
licking at him and smoke billowing around him. I see someone let go, briefly
flying. I read later hundreds did the same. Hundreds.
I remember spending many summer afternoons and twilights as a teenager sitting
on top of the South Tower, sometimes reading poetry or a book, the raucous sound
of the city muted and far below. I was listening only to the air passing by me,
my mind wandering.
A second plane slams into the South Tower. The explosion sounds like thunder.
I rememberclosing my eyes outside in the open air up there and feeling the
sun's warmth on my face. No matter how hot it was on those city streets below,
there were always cool breezes at more than a thousand feet up. The Tower would
gently sway from the wind. It was unnerving at first, but after a while, I
remember feeling comforted like a child being rocked back and forth. I wasn't
worried she'd tip over. Ever.
The president addresses the nation and the world. He says to us, the Armed
Forces, "Be ready."
I am.
- Forty-four-year-old Petty Officer First Class Gregory S. Cleghorne, born and
raised in Brooklyn, New York.
Antoinette
Personal Narrative
Captain William J. Toti
Just before 9:00 a.m., as word spread rapidly throughout the Pentagon, military
and civilian personnel alike began huddling around television sets to watch
breaking news about a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center towers
in New York City. "I am sitting at my desk when I hear someone yell, 'Oh my
God!'" forty-four-year- old Captain William J. Toti wrote in a detailed,
present-tense account of what he was doing on September 11, 2001. Toti had
enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age seventeen, while he was still in high school,
and eventually became a career submariner. In 1997, he was given command of the
nuclear fast-attack submarine USS Indianapolis, based in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii,
and named after the legendary World War II cruiser. On the morning of September
11, Toti was in the Pentagon, serving as the special assistant to the vice chief
of naval operations. "I glance up at the television to see the World Trade
Center on fire," he continued in his narrative.
I walk into my outer office, turn up the volume, and hear the anchor theorize
that the cause of impact is some sort of technological malfunction. We know
immediately that there is no way navigational failure could cause an airliner to
fly accidentally into a building on a bright clear day. By the time the second
plane hits the Trade Center's South Tower, we all realize this is a major
terrorist attack.
What Toti and his colleagues did not know was that a third plane, American
Airlines flight 77, was heading straight for them.
I quickly go back to my desk to call my wife, but nobody is there. I leave a
voice message, telling her to take the kids out of school, stay home, and keep
the telephone lines open.
As I hang up the phone and walk back to the outer office, I hear the sound of an
approaching airplane, the whine of the engines growing louder and louder. And
then impact-a massive earthquake-like jolt. There is screaming everywhere, and
the halls immediately fill with dust and smoke. There is no time to think. I
sprint down the hall behind two other Navy officers toward the point of impact.
My office is on the fourth floor of the E-ring, which is between the fifth and
sixth corridors of the Pentagon. The plane has hit between the third and fourth
corridors. We run through a brown haze that I learn weeks later was a
combination of vaporized aviation fuel and particle asbestos that had been
shaken loose from the ceiling. We pass through an area that recently had been
abandoned for renovation and into a newly renovated, fully occupied area
containing our operations center.
I finally reach the fissure-a gaping hole of sunlight where there should be
building. The floor simply has dropped out, and parts of the airplane are
visible, burning not fifty feet below us. It does not take us long to figure out
that everybody on our floor who is still alive has evacuated, and that there is
nothing we can do for anybody in the pit.
I run outside to the point of impact, and I encounter total devastation.
Aircraft parts, most no larger than a sheet of paper, litter the field. I can
make out, on one of the larger pieces of aluminum, a red A from american
airlines. A column of black smoke rises into the air, bending toward the Potomac
over the top of the building.
I start to wonder, Where is everybody? Thousands of people work in that
building, there should be hundreds streaming out of the emergency exits right
now. But at first I see no evacuees. Then as I round the corner of the heliport
utility building, I notice a very small number of walking wounded, and then, on
the ground before me, one gravely injured man. He is a Pentagon maintenance
worker who is burned so badly that I can't tell whether he is white or black.
Amazingly, he is still conscious. An Army officer is kneeling beside him, and
since we are just a few feet from the still-burning building, the soldier says,
"Let's get him out of here." A few more military men gather, and we carry him
away from the building to the edge of Route 27, where the first ambulance has
just pulled up.
As the EMTs tend to him, 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 say, "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,
so I lean over the lady and ask, "What's your name?"
"Antoinette," she says.
"No, Antoinette, you're not going to die. We have a helicopter coming for you.
I'm going to stay with you until you're on it."
She nods, and I feel relieved for having said this.
The medevac helicopter arrives a few minutes later. Since the Pentagon's
heliport is in the middle of the attack area, the helo has to land up the hill
toward the Navy Annex, on the other side of Route 27. The trek up the hill is
surprisingly long and difficult. When we finally get her to the helicopter I
yell out over the noise, "I'll visit you in the hospital!" Then I turn and run
down the hill without looking back.
When I arrive, the "Pentagon Physician" (who, it turns out, is actually a
dentist) asks me to take charge of establishing a station to receive the
"expectants," which means I am in charge of caring for those who are not
expected to live. Just then one of the Defense Protective Service police shouts,
"Clear the area! Another plane is coming in!" So we cram the rest of the wounded
into the few ambulances present and they drive away. We move farther from the
building to wait for a second attack, which never happens. This is the first of
many false alarms that day.
I try several times during the morning to call my wife, but the cell phone
circuits are jammed, and eventually I kill my battery trying to get through.
Hence, it is several hours before she knows I am still alive.
The day is full of vivid images. At one point, a group of firefighters is inside
the building, knocking out windows to vent the heat, when they come across a
Marine Corps flag. They extend the bright red flag out the window to a wave of
cheers.
Another time, I am going to the fissure to help an FBI agent plan his evidence
walk-down. As I approach the burning core, I see a single yellow flower in a
clay pot, miraculously sitting untouched amid smoldering embers and soot.
I also watch as a Catholic priest, who I later find out had walked three miles
to the Pentagon from his parish in Arlington, stands over a dying man to give
him his last rites. The priest then moves to another man, who is severely burned
but still lucid enough to be screaming, and he repeats the sacrament.
Overwhelmed by the enormity of the event, the priest walks up to the gaping hole
in the building and gives absolution to all of the dead at once.
One of the great ironies of the day is that earlier, when we were saturated by
wounded, there was almost no medical help available. Then later, when we had
hundreds of doctors, nurses, and paramedics on the scene, we had a profound
shortage of injuries that needed treatment. Those who were rescued were saved
not by trained first responders, but by people who were on the scene at the
moment of impact.
At about 2100, almost eleven hours after the Pentagon attack, a wave of
exhaustion hits me, and I decide there is nothing more I can do. I need my wife
to come for me, but I realize she will be unable to get anywhere near us. So I
borrow a cell phone and tell her to start driving north on Interstate 395. I
start walking south, and after about fifteen minutes a state trooper pulls over
beside me and asks me if I want a ride. I tell him that if I get into his car I
am afraid that my wife will never find me, so I continue walking for almost a
mile, with him creeping along behind me in his patrol car, both of us traveling
south in the northbound lane, until I arrive at the barricade and see my wife.
Not surprisingly, I have trouble sleeping that night. I receive calls from some
friends who, during World War II, survived the sinking of the cruiser USS
Indianapolis. One says, "You got hit by a kamikaze just like us." Another
remarks, "You got too close to us, now you have to share our fate." And through
it all, I keep thinking about things we might have done better, the possibility
that we might have been able to save more people. I am comforted, however, by
the thought that at least we saved one individual: Antoinette.
The days immediately after the attack are a continuous stream of fifteen-hour
workdays. I never find the time to make good on my promise to visit Antoinette.
I know that she is in the Washington Hospital Center, and I call to check up on
her, but then move on to what seem like more pressing matters. The urgent
eclipses the important.
On September 19, I open The Washington Post and find a story about Antoinette.
Thirty-five years old, budget analyst, raising a teenage foster child by
herself. Two dogs, Oreo and Rex. Had been on the phone with a friend before the
plane hit the Pentagon, planning a cruise together, just a month later. She was
wheeled into the emergency room fully conscious. But despite hours of surgery,
she never opened her eyes again. She had been burned over 70 percent of her
body. She died on September 18.
I had only known Antoinette for a few moments, but I am shocked by the news and
feel as if I have lost someone very close to me. I will never forget her.
During a memorial service near Ground Zero in New York, Rabbi Marc Gellman said
that it is improper to think that on September 11 approximately three thousand
people died. To understand the enormity of the loss, we have to recognize that
what really happened was that a single individual died three thousand
times.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Operation Homecoming
Copyright © 2006 by Andrew Carroll.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface Dana Gioia xi
Introduction Andrew Carroll xix
And Now It Begins: Heading into Combat 2
Hearts and Minds: Interactions with Afghans and Iraqis 66
Stuck in This Sandbox: Gripes, Humor, Boredom, and the Daily Grind 132
Worlds Apart: Life on the Home Front 190
This Is Not a Game: The Physical and Emotional Toll of War 250
Home: Returning to the United States 322
Acknowledgments 397
Glossary 401
Credits and Permissions 403
Index of Contributors 405
Index of Titles 407