Of the estimate 2.2 million troops serving in the Unite States military, approximately one out of every six is a woman. Officially, woman are not allowed to fight in frontline infantry combat units. But, just as in wars past, they are frequently place -- or put themselves -- in harm's way.
At the age of thirty-three, Helen Gerhardt enlisted in the U.S. Army in May 2000. Three years later, having just completed a double undergraduate major in fine arts and English literature, she found herself in the Middle East with the Missouri Army National Guard, 1221st Transportation Company. The job entailed driving 915 A1s (eighteen wheeled tractor-trailers) throughout Iraq to move everything from large cases of food and water to charred Humvees incapacitated by roadside bombs. The work was demanding and often extremely dangerous. (Soon after the invasion commenced, eleven U.S. soldiers with the 507th Maintenance Company were killed when their convoy was hit by rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire.) In the following e-mail to loved ones back in Missouri, Specialist Gerhardt shared her first impressions of the Iraqi people and their country, which seemed to be a curious mix of the ancient and the modern.
Dear friends and family,
A few days ago I sat in the passenger seat of a truck with my M16 pointing out the window as I crossed the border into Iraq for the first time. All of us methodically scanned the landscape for the flesh-and-blood snipers or grenade launchers we had envisioned during training. We constantly glanced in the rear view mirror to make sure the truck behind us was at a safe distance. I felt greedy for every concrete detail to dispel the figments of the Iraq I had constructed in my imagination over the months of waiting.
Our convoy of nine trucks and a humvee felt very small to all of us. Our request for a Military Police escort had been denied without the required 48 hours notice, never mind that we'd been ordered onto the road with only about 36 hours warning. The MPs are stretched very thin, and although officially all convoys are supposed to be escorted, in reality most small groups go without. We'd been advised to make our own firepower very apparent as the next best deterrent to an attack. The convoy commanders traveled in the Humvee with a machine gun mounted on top and the other saw gunners in the 915s were placed at front, middle, and end of the convoy. Combat Lifesaver drivers and their first aid bags were also spaced evenly throughout the line. We'd been instructed to look as wide-awake as we could. I didn't find this difficult.
The border was a real border. In Kuwait, high status sports cars, Islamic skyscrapers, gleaming ranks of enormous oil drums, and slickly designed billboards all shouted the thriving economy of our hosts. Light poles, power lines, and little green trees marched beside the near-flawless highway, unremarkable until they abruptly halted at the DMZ, the demilitarized zone, marked by bulldozed ridges topped with concertina wire. On the other side, the village of Safwan straggled loosely north and south along the road. Carefully stripped rusty car frames littered both shoulders of the road, uncomfortably reminding me of the props at our live-fire training range. Small windowless houses shed grey bricks on patches of thick, fine dust and rocky sand.
As we approached, children ranging from around three to ten years old piled out through the ragged gaps that served as doors to run toward the sound of our engines, heels raising puffs of dust behind them. At the edge of the road they lifted their thumbs-up signs, eager smiles, and open palms like little billboards of friendliness and need. During our briefing at the fuel stop before the border, we'd been strictly warned about throwing food to these kids and threatened with Uniform Code of Military Justice prosecution if we did. Several children had reportedly leapt in front of trucks for the leftover scraps of our MREs; jelly, salt packs, vegetable crackers, and coffee creamer had drawn crowds that completely blocked the road. With some dread, I had imagined hollowed faces, bony ribs, and the faked meekness of desperation.
The first face I saw closely was a girl maybe ten-years-old, thin, but beating time on a half-full water bottle as she danced up and down on the shoulder of the road with confident grace. She looked straight into my eyes with no trace of humility, her brilliant smile seemed to command acknowledgment of a beauty impossible to deny anything to, her cinnamon and curry-colored gown waved like a flag of bold pleasure in her past triumphs. I wished I could throw roses and roast beef, confetti and corndogs, wanted to celebrate her gutsy contrast to my worst fears and to get a good square meal into her belly. Behind her an older woman stood still and straight, wrapped in black, staring through her daughter and me to the desert beyond.
As we passed the last house, beyond the line of other children, two young boys squatted with hands on knees, one in shorts and a Western-style oxford shirt, the other in a white knee-length desert cloak. They ignored our tight-fisted caravan as they examined and seriously discussed some mechanical contraption between them.
Everywhere as we progressed north, the middle ages met the modern; a satellite dish protruded from a mud hut, a donkey hauled a cart with two women sharing a cell phone back and forth, a large black and white cow tried to keep its feet in the bed of a small Toyota pick up truck. Roadside stands sold Snapple and long blocks of ice. Men dressed in shiny green U.S. football jerseys waved to us with one hand as they scooped salt from cracked-ivory flats into glinting white pyramids. Lines of camels were urged onward by little boys with big sticks and bigger walkmans.
Guided by MP shepherds at front and rear, long lines of Haliburton's civilian trucks passed us going south, their slick colors and aerodynamic bulk far more alien in this landscape than our beaten up Army trucks. Faded and dusty, over twenty years old, our unarmored eighteen wheelers almost looked at home among Iraqi cars and trucks predominantly from the seventies and eighties. We saw many breakdowns along the road, owners tinkering with engines, many other cars that had been abandoned and scavenged to the frame. We also saw the remains of Army vehicles stripped to their olive green or sand-colored bones, as we had been warned was the quick fate of any abandoned piece of military equipment.
We stayed overnight in a little dustbowl of a new Army camp, Cedar II, setting up our cots on the empty trailer beds out of reach of scorpions and snakes. The next day we were scheduled to pass through the outskirts of Baghdad, near where the members of another mission had seen the smoking remains of a 915 truck after it had been rocket grenaded. We took a wrong turn off the highway and, unable to read the Arabic street signs, wandered into the slums of Sadr City where children pointed and laughed as our long convoy of illiterates passed back and forth through the narrow streets looking for a way out. The adults barely glanced at us, faces schooled into unreadable stone after years of threats by those who had held the keys to hungry prisons.
We finally found our way back to the highway, but by nightfall had barely made it past Tikrit, birthplace of Saddam Hussein.
The next day all went smoothly and we pulled into our destination camp in Mosul, a former Iraqi Army base. Wandering through the littered compound next to the buildings we had occupied, we found abandoned helmets, spent shells, and Arabic training manuals for gas mask use. In one room I found twisted hooks hanging from the ceiling next to an electronic control board and I shuddered at what my inner Hollywood pieced out of the scene.
But in the regular soldier's barracks I found a detail that irrationally moved me more. A black-bottomed coffee pot sat in the sill of a window, its spout pointing out the heavy bars on the windows toward the foothills in the distance. Here the poorly fed draftees of years past may have shared coffee and cigarettes, read letters from home, told each other the news of the families they had not volunteered to leave. I sat there a long time, the door open behind me, finally moved to take myself back to the Army barracks that I had freely chosen.
Just outside the door I found a boy waiting for me. His light brown eyes looked straight into mine. He gestured a wide circle around us, meaning the camp? the country? "Thank you" he said, and then he smiled with what seemed years-worth of relief. Despite all my reservations about this war, I could not help but wonder if he was thanking me for freeing father, uncle, or brother from some cell like that I'd just walked so easily out of.
Everywhere, from southern Iraq to this Baathist garrison of the far north, we have seen images of Saddam that have been literally de-faced, hacked out or painted over from hairline to chin, leaving black hair, shoulders, and body intact. But with Hussein still missing, the effect is ghoulish. The desecrations constantly remind us that the vengeful man still hides among the powerless that he has fed on for so many years. And we wonder whose faces will now be sketched onto the blank slates of power.
I sit writing here among these ruins, looking out the unbarred window, thinking of you, missing you always.
With all my love,
Helen
Excerpted from Operation Homecoming, by Andrew Carroll, editor. Copyright (c) 2006 by Southern Arts Federation. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.
Specialist Gerhardt made Sergeant before finishing her tour in Iraq and time in the military. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. And she is writing a book about her unit's experiences in Iraq and the larger culture wars which divide us both nationally and internationally.
April, 2004
Dear Family and Friends,
This morning I woke under the black belly of my trailer, its weight my shelter from the light desert dew, to a strong voice in the distance singing the Islamic call to prayer. The notes were melodically unhinged to my Western ear but seemed to express the desert they were born from, as though they quavered along the contours of rocky dunes and wailed the miles of empty expanses stretching to the ocean. I felt very alien with all that sea and sand between me and my home, as small as the cold stars I could see on the horizon. A quiet breeze blew the smell of salt gently over our cots from the direction of the hidden mosque.
It was 5am, much later than my bladder usually got me out of my sleeping bag. Near to popping with all the water I'd drunk yesterday, I had to quickly beat out my boots to dislodge any slumbering scorpions and hurry to a decent distance from the trucks, barely managed to put a low swell between me and other wakeful eyes. It's been warming up here in Kuwait and I worried about nuerotoxic vipers as I squatted, but the camp Port-A-Janes are just too far away from where we park.
Field modesty is very circumstantial – men and women do their best to spare each other's eyes but there are no highway rest stops or gas stations and we don't sweat it if it's impractical or unsafe to do anything but pee in public, with courtesy then extended by potential viewers as they turn their backs. On the road we usually squeeze into the niche between truck and trailer wherever we pull over to change tires or wait for a roadside bomb to be defused.
That space is really no cover at all if your audience isn't willing to withdraw their eyes. Several times we've had to pull over next to long convoys of foreign national drivers, Pakistanis, Indians, Egyptians, and other members of far and near eastern countries. All four of my cheeks have burned with mighty blushes as some have frankly stared and laughed at my embarrassment. I have seen many of these men praying on little carpets by the side of the road and their brash enjoyment of my predicament probably stems from Islamic judgments of a woman more ready to bare her bottom than pee her pants. I must certainly be breaking the most basic of taboos here by putting myself in a position where I must make such a choice.
I believe all of us who inhabit or travel through Iraq are feeling the gulf of culture more strongly as time wears on. The mutual curiosity, enthusiasm, and well-wishing of the first months has eroded on both sides as bungled American plans, persistent Baathist violence, and civil chaos have threatened the hard work of mutual cooperation.
The young beggars near the Kuwaiti border often seem blasé now, as though they raised smiles and thumbs-up signs as part of a twelve-hour work shift. Women wrapped in black, so proudly reserved at first, smile stiffly and wave as they shove forward children to dance for our bread. Boys sometimes steal from the smaller kids, especially from girls. Teen boys and young men grin until we draw level with them, then make obscene gestures, especially at us women.
Many Iraqis are becoming more aggressively impatient as gas, electricity, clean water, and food remain beyond their reach all these months after occupation. Families stand in mile-long lines holding bottles, jars, and cans for every drop of fuel they can carry. Water-borne diseases are rocketing through families more slowly, more painfully than the quick death of an American missile. Haliburton company's KBR supply trucks gleam through their ragged cities, where I have seen black-cloaked women grazing next to cows and goats through mounting piles of trash. The civilian drivers are not armed and their loads are temptation enough for local Robin Hoods to brave the laughably inadequate MP escorts at the front and rear of these long convoys.
Not too long ago one of our convoys passed by a KBR civilian eighteen wheeler being looted in the city of Diwaniyah, near our first Iraqi camp a couple of hours south of Baghdad.
Here, in the first few hopeful months of our deployment, we had bought fresh veggies and just-slaughtered chickens from the Iraqis, as free range as an American dollar can buy, as well as cooking equipment to stir fry meals that were often inspired by the locals' home cooking. Several members of our unit had eaten as guests of families here, honoring the customs of hospitality by bringing bottles of shampoo rather than of wine.
But it had been many months since we talked face-to-face with a civilian. We are increasingly isolated in our far more comfortable new base camp further south. As we slowly nosed through the traffic jam around the looting, the Iraqis hauled bags of rice out of the back of the truck, and those who did not ignore us looked straight into our faces with a wide range of expressions, from a sort of neutral curiosity as to what we would do, to a joyful complicity, as though surely we would be happy that they would eat well that night. The KBR driver was halfheartedly trying to stop them and was being gently jostled back by men who did not look at all angry, indeed they looked patient… even soothing. "There, there" the faces seemed to say, "It's not your food… don't worry, be happy." We drove on past. Intervention was for the MPs, stretched thin to breaking as they were. Our job was to guard our own loads.
In the north things are deteriorating more rapidly. Up there we never relax, watch crowds carefully for AK47s, scan roadsides for disturbed earth thrown over roadside mortars, swerve around the smallest of road kill that might contain an Improvised Explosive Device in the emptied gut. Most children no longer run to meet our trucks and in Baghdad groups of kids sometimes take off their shoes and wave them at us as a sign of disrespect. Children freely express the attitudes their elders often keep hidden, and so we watch them carefully as barometers of potentially dangerous human weather.
Women glance sidewise at us with what used to seem like dignified curiosity, but now more often seems to be veiled resentment. I and many of the soldiers I serve with have hoped that our efforts would bring greater freedom for Iraqi women. I would like to think of them as sisters under the veil. But lately I have been remembering my grandmother telling me that women should always submit to their husbands. I don't agree with her but I deeply respect her integrity and her steadfast commitments to what she believed to be right. By forcibly changing the culture of Iraq are we freeing women like my grandmother from male tyranny or are we undermining the pillars that give meaning and pride to their lives? Or both? I can no longer ask any Iraqi what freedom means to them.
We have barely an inkling of the internal clashes within this pasted-together nation and how they might affect us, no context or uniforms to help distinguish potential friend from foe. As roadside bombs have become more frequent, our own anger has grown and our sympathy for the poverty we pass does not always hold up under the daily threat to our skins. Long gone are the swarms of friendly Shiite peddlers, from ages seven to seventy-seven, who used to run toward our trucks whenever we stopped by the side of the road. They always came bearing supplies that met our demands: cigarettes, fake Rolex watches, souvenir Iraqi money and flags for our families, pornographic photographs, and lifesaving ice. As the insurgency has grown, the peddlers have finally been run off by the MPs for security reasons. Coils of razor wire keep them at a distance. But the separation was also partly for their own protection. I'd heard members of my own unit boast of thefts, claiming that they'd just relieved another Hadji of overpriced black market goods, conveniently omitting the detail that it was usually the youngest children that they had robbed. They also seemed to forget that those children had fathers and older brothers that might bottle their resentment into another roadside bomb. Now, with what seems to be a widespread breakdown of discipline in our chain of command, even many of the Iraqis who have risked their lives as "collaborators" to help us are withdrawing their faith in our good intentions.
Each delivery south to friendly Kuwait has been a welcome break from the tension. This morning as we leave port, tall torches of oil refineries in the distance burn pillars of smoke that we must follow north to the barbed-wire border. We trail long lines of tankers slowly retracing their rubber-blacked road to fuel an Iraq which cannot even harvest the vast wealth under its own sands. I remember my first border crossing late last summer. I no longer have the projections of inexperienced imagination to contend with; I face concrete memories as possible futures.
My co-driver hits the play button of our little boom box jouncing on bungee cords from the ceiling and that good old rock and roll fills the cab with its homey beat. When we cross the line into dangerous territory we will shut off the music so that we can better focus on the stretches of desert littered by potential cover for snipers. After many months of waiting we are finally armored with the forest-camouflaged ceramic shell vests that will stop at least one bullet before cracking into uselessness, but a new bounty of $6000 has been promised by insurgents to hungry Iraqis for bagging our greenbacks. I know many of the landmarks we will pass by heart; the scavenged Hett trailer lying in its own rust, like a centipede exoskeleton with its many wheels to the sky, the adobe and straw huts, and finally the long berm of bulldozed earth that protects our home base.
Things are heating up again. The dust devils once more whirl their way through our camp. We will spend a day on truck maintenance, clean our weapons, review combat lifesaver skills, and a few of us will go to the camp target range to re-test our marksmanship on our M16 rifles. I am scheduled to visit the city of Ur and look forward to hearing Abraham's story, a cornerstone of what mutual history we share with those who sing from their mosques.
I hope and fear the future histories that we are all constructing together, Iraqis and Americans, commanders and followers. Our own leaders are trying to build new foundations of Western-style democracy with bricks hauled from the rubble of ancient stair-step ziggurats, palace mazes, and imperial tombs.
As for me, I think a pair of ruby slippers would look mighty fine with my old Missouri muddy green BDUs. If you happen to see a pair, please send them right over by cyclone, would you? I long for no place but home.
Your soldier
© Helen Gerhardt
"Here Among These Ruins"- 3:46 MP3 Perspective on her emailed-essay published in Operation Homecoming. (Music by Jess Atkins.)
The American People- 0:49 MP3 Hopes that the American electorate's decisions are wise as to how to use force, her force.
Peloponnesian War- 1:32 MP3 In Iraq, thinking of Thucydides, the ancient Athenian general & historian.
(This page is from the Hearing Voices
webwork for Operation Homecoming.)