I got to see this kind of thing first hand. I remember growing up and watching things like Saving Private Ryan, or Band of Brothers, and thinking about how shit scared I would be in a situation like those guys were. WWII was no joke. I'd look around me and notice that I was pretty sure that nobody else I knew was all that much braver, either, meaning better equipped to handle that special kind of misery that was portrayed in the movies. Part of me was inclined to believe that the movies exaggerated the amount of destruction and the bravery of the men. History, however, taught me that this really wasn't the case. So then the obvious answer was that our generation had softened. That we weren't that hard anymore because we didn't need to be, and we'd never be as tough as the greatest generation (I'm not currently arguing that this isn't the case. Those guys were badasses, all of them).
I thought when I joined the military that things would change. That training and camaraderie would shape us into tougher folk, ready to go off and fight and die for our country. And maybe a little bit. I mean, I worked on base with people who had already been to the war and back, and they didn't seem all that different for it. But for the most part, no matter how much training we received, I still had a considerable amount of fear about the prospect of being deployed.
And then I was. Your first experience in a war zone, your very first one, is that of landing. You're flying in a C-130 strapped to a seat that is basically a tiny canvas folding chair. The pilot is executing a maneuver referred to as a "combat landing," which consists of descending at the steepest angle possible, so as to minimize the amount of time that the aircraft is within reach of any land based enemy fire. It's a faster dive than possibly feels safe, and you're almost certain you're going to crash. Only thing is, everyone else is there, too. And they all have their game face on. So you've got yours on, as well. If we all crash into the ground at 400 mph, then at least we're going to do it stoically.
And then you are on land. And it's hot. And you have to be processed in and then you are taken to meet the people that you are there to replace, and they start telling you stories about their time there. These stories consist mainly of how many times this base that you will be calling home for the next several months or longer has been attacked in the previous several months. They are not reassuring. But you notice something odd. The people telling these stories seem to tell them rather nonchalantly, as if they weren't all that scary. They tell the story about the two guys who were scurving off of work and were asleep in their tent when a rocket landed outside and blew a hole through the tent. Neither was killed; one guy got shrapnel through his shoulder and the other guy was unscathed. As a result, the guy who got shrapnel got a purple heart and a hero's treatment. The guy who wasn't hurt got in a heap of trouble for being asleep in his tent when he was supposed to be on duty somewhere (even though they both were). They tell you this story to illustrate the absurdity of the system. What you take away from it is the fear of being attacked in your sleep, sitting comfortably in your tent when a bomb goes off outside. It's terrifying to think of.
But then a couple of days go by and there are no attacks. You begin to realize that these guys are just embellishing their resumes, preparing to go home and tell these same war stories about what heroes they all are for having survived such a nightmarish place. You'll get to do the same thing eventually, so kudos to them. You develop a sense of security about how scary this really isn't going to be after all.
But then something else happens. You see, you rotated in with a large detachment so that all of these people could rotate out. There's a period in between, where the old are training the new. During this period the base literally has twice as many allied forces on it. The enemy knows this, they aren't dumb. But then all of the old people leave. What's left is you and people like you. Fresh blood. Unprepared blood. Scared blood.
From the first day we arrived there were controlled demolitions on base. There were amnesty boxes around the country where people who didn't want to be thought of as combatants or insurgents who were tired of fighting could turn in their weapons and ammunition. Or else the stuff was confiscated or won off of the dead in battle. It would be taken to a remote area on base, buried in the ground, lined with semtex, and exploded. Before each of these explosions there would be a radio announcement "Controlled Detonation in five minutes," that sort of thing. And then BOOM, giant explosion, always from the same area, usually the southeast corner of the base. It didn't take too long to get used to it.
My office was a tent. Two tents, actually. I ran the supply warehouse for my squadron, and I worked alone. They had meant to fortify my tents with hesco barriers (big bags of ballist, essentially, for absorbing explosive debris) but never got around to it the entire time I was there. I guess they figured they had more important places to put the stuff then around two very large tents that were only ever occupied by one person. Here is a picture of my tents:
I mainly occupied the one on the right, while the one on the left was used solely for storage.
One night, I'm sitting in my tent office, completely alone, and I hear an explosion. I think exactly not at all about it. Then, a few seconds later, there is another explosion. It sounded like it came from a different part of the base, which was weird because they usually didn't do that, and I thought that's weird. And I sat there, totally still for a second, thinking the following: You know, I don't remember anybody announcing a controlled detonation... I wonder if this is an attack... I don't feel like I'm being attacked.. If this were an attack the sirens would be going by now... Literally as I'm thinking that, the sirens started blaring. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh fuckity fuck fuck.
I jumped up, ran over and quickly put on my flak jacket and helmet. There was another explosion. I had a dilemma on my hands. You see, I was alone. In the airplane, my whole team was around, looking stoic and assuring me that the proper thing for me to do was also be stoic, this wasn't shit. But now, there was nobody around for me to pretend to be brave for. I desperately wanted to run out and to the next location with people, which was just on the other side of those giant concrete barriers you see on the left of the photo. But I knew that if I did that I would be in a world of trouble, because you aren't supposed to go running out by yourself across a big open space like that in the middle of an attack. So, mostly out of fear of being in trouble, I chose to stay inside of a cloth tent in the middle of an open field while explosions where happening all around. People do weird things to stay out of trouble.
I had a leather sofa in my little office so I did what any rational person would do. I flipped it over so that it made a little A-frame on the ground and I crawled inside of it. I knew it wouldn't offer much protection, but I figured it was slightly better than nothing. After a while the explosions died down and I started to get bored so I poked my head out. On the shelf above me there was a box game of taboo (which can only be played with multiple players). I reached up and pulled it down into my shelter and opened it up, trying to play an imaginary game all by myself. I realized that this would perhaps be the most ridiculous way to die, ever; buried under a couch alone in a tent, playing taboo with myself. I figured it was, in fact, too ridiculous, and that I had to be safe. I waited for the all clear to sound.
When it finally did I grabbed my flashlight and gear and went outside. I was on the recon team responsible for checking to make sure that there weren't any duds nearby, any unexploded ordinance that might go off later when a bunch of people were around. Other people were doing the same thing and we talked about the attack. They were all sheltered together, it was no big deal. They just waited it out. Their experience was very different than mine.
The next day I heard that they were able to trace the rockets back to their source a few miles away, and when they got there they found two guys who had actually blown themselves up shooting rockets randomly at the base (imagine that, these two guys were prepared to die and must have known that they almost certainly were going to, on the off chance that they maybe got lucky enough to get one of us--they didn't).
That was the only time I was really afraid during a rocket attack. After that, I was always with people, or else they had just become routine. I had been a remote miss often enough that they really didn't seem all that scary anymore. It wasn't that I was actually more brave, it was just that I wasn't afraid of this one thing, because I knew it. I had survived it. I didn't get to tell the scary stories to my replacement when it was time to leave because instead my appendix tried to kill me and I left that way, but that's another story.
I don't have too much of a point in this. Just that Gladwell was right, that there's something to surviving a situation to make one stronger in its face. This is what it must have been like for all of those WWII heroes. Still, I would have pissed my pants the first time.
