Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.

I’m occasionally asked what I’ve learned from my experiences in the military.

My responses, particularly before my third tour, have always involved leadership, confidence, knowledge of myself and of people in general. This hasn’t changed. I remain grateful.

Sometimes I feel the pressure of expectation to cast myself as a victim of my experiences, but in truth, I think I’ve benefited from them.

The Army, and especially the infantry, gives its junior leaders tremendous responsibility. The rough world of the 82nd Airborne Division was a steep learning curve for me, a freshly minted lieutenant accustomed to the studious habits of Stanford University, of its School of Engineering, no less. I learned an awful lot and, I think, emerged a better person.

More recently, I’ve realized some of my beliefs have formed so slowly and subtly that their learning has been entirely unappreciated. I’ve learned that no matter what, life goes on — it’ll do so with or without any one of us — and I’ve found a measure of respect for selfishness; for people who look out for themselves and their lives yet to come. This is surely cynical.



If there’s redemption in the selfishness, it has to do with loving life, with respecting yourself enough not to end your days prematurely or in futile pursuits. Yes, I said it. Somewhere between my second and third tours, I came to believe that our foreign, undeclared wars flouted our Constitution and made us less safe — from terrorism, from debt and from tyranny at home. Believing this wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t help it. Without faith in our military endeavors, my long-held notions about duty, heroism and fighting the good fight didn’t survive long.

If there’s redemption in selfishness, it has to do with respecting yourself enough not to end your days prematurely or in futile pursuits.

I think you’re only a hero for as long as your image is useful, as evidenced most dramatically by then-Major George S. Patton’s cavalry charge against World War I veterans protesting for their pay in 1932, and General Douglas MacArthur’s zeal in pursuing them across the Anacostia River even after President Hoover ordered an end to the assault. If you’re not troubled by history, you’re not studying it correctly. Let’s choose our role models carefully.

I recognized my ideas about mortality and the false promise of legacy as something learned when I recently described a ceremony at Bagram Air Force Base (B.A.F. pronounced baff) to a friend.

I had arrived at B.A.F. en route back to the United States for my mid-tour leave. Transient housing consisted of a hangar-sized tent absolutely full of bunk beds. There were clusters of men in Polish uniforms, Egyptian and Jordanian uniforms. The majority were Americans — Army and Navy. (I suspect the Air Force found themselves better billeting somewhere else.)

I found a bunk. One neighbor compulsively called me “sir” and told me he returned to B.A.F. to process his U.S. citizenship. The other never stopped watching movies on his laptop.

In the morning, the P.A. system sounded: “There will be a fallen comrade ceremony at zero eight five zero. All available personnel are requested at Disney Drive. P.T. uniforms and photographs are not authorized.”

Disney Drive is the two-lane strip of road around which much of B.A.F. seems to sprawl. It’s named, like everything else, after a fallen soldier. The notice sounded several times before I fully woke. I dressed, dry-shaved and showed up the standard 10 minutes early. Both sides of Disney Drive were lined by military personnel. The notice sounded every few minutes. After 0850, it changed to “momentarily.” I kept waiting in the line of uniformed strangers. It was already hot.

I remember when my battalion took our first casualty in Iraq in November 2003. At the ceremony, my first sergeant who’d been wounded on the same mission choked back tears and called roll, repeating our fallen comrade’s name three time as if his absence was unexpected. In many ways, it was. The sharp commands “Ready. Aim. Fire.” broke the silence after the third call of his name, followed by the report of seven rifles. Then again, “Ready. Aim. Fire.” Bang! And again. Then the lonely, immortal, brassy melody of taps rolled over us from an unseen bugle. The first sergeant faced about and slowly saluted the empty boots and rifle stuck into the ground by its bayonet.

I felt the enormity of what had happened, and the long shadow of eternity. I felt the grim dignity of the 82nd Airborne Division, and admiration for what I then recognized as the noble tragedy of the situation. That was then.

Standing on the side of Disney Drive I felt only hot and tired, and slightly cranky at having shown up early. What five years earlier had been noble tragedy now appeared to me as wasteful folly. My sympathies were bitterly reserved for people I knew and people I was forced to know.

I felt an imagined jury pawing at my soul and pleaded with them: Ladies and gentlemen of the court, I answered the call to return to uniform. Many did not. I am in Afghanistan (Again for God’s sake!) and trying to do my job well. Isn’t that enough? Aren’t I entitled to my private feelings? Leave my immortal soul out of it!

After a 45-minute wait, a security vehicle drove by, followed by two Humvees, each bearing a flag-draped coffin, followed by a pickup truck with two cameramen standing in the bed filming. Everyone saluted as they passed, then went to breakfast, the gym, the bazaar or wherever else.

I mustered only slightly more sympathy for the fallen strangers in those flag-draped coffins than I did for the wounded enemy combatant whose stretcher I helped carry from the helicopter pad to our detention facility in Asadabad. He wore taped-over goggles (sandbags have fallen out of fashion since the torture scandals appeared on the radar), flex-cuffs on his wrists, and a bandage on his leg which had swollen like a sausage, pulling the skin taught and featureless from thigh to ankle.

I napped after breakfast, lifted weights, ate lunch, took another nap, looked at gem stones in the bazaar, and walked the mile or so to the Internet center, feeling disquiet the whole time.

By chance, an officer from another provincial reconstruction team (P.R.T.) found me online. We were both former infantry officers and good friends. We’d been members of a circle of involuntary recalls called “the captain mafia” during our pre-deployment training at Fort Bragg.

He told me their P.R.T. lost two guys the day before to an I.E.D., and apologized for giving me bad news as I left for vacation. I told him about the ceremony. I had known the casualties only distantly at Bragg. We chatted a bit longer and he excused himself for a meeting.

Had I known the coffins carried remote acquaintances from another P.R.T. I might have seen more of myself in their eternity, but I doubt my reaction would have been much different.

For me, an atheist in church, the ceremony and the sacrifice it represented seemed gratuitous, though from a distance I still recognized it as appropriate; necessary, too, for the military institution.

I was like the old Italian man in “Catch-22,” or Hemingway’s Pablo. Patriotism gone, I focused on doing what I must to get along, and on not dying.

I told myself there had been and continued to be tragedies and injustices greater than the I.E.D. which killed two distant comrades. I told myself that everyone in Afghanistan at that point had chosen to be there, including me — we all rolled the same dice. That wasn’t the case in Iraq in 2003. I told myself we’d had a long look at these wars, or at least the opportunity for one and had decided to be here.

I told myself the two dead officers made the choice and other choices too. I wondered if they made bad ones, which I wouldn’t make, like neglecting to coordinate with a route clearance package or choosing to go someplace that didn’t need going. I was very careful in my planning.

Where my sympathy should have been was anger, and a feeling of absolute, positive, beyond a shadow of a doubt certainty that, God help me, I did not want to end up like them. Legacy be damned.

Roman Skaskiw served as an infantry officer with the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan and Iraq. After three years of civilian life, he was recalled from the inactive reserve and deployed with a Provincial Reconstruction Team to Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. He lives in Iowa City.

To read posts from the entire series, visit the Home Fires main page.

