Abstract: At times I feel a surge of painful remorse about my contribution to the Iraqi war even though I was “just” a 92Y meaning Unit Supply Specialist. To translate this portion of my service into civilian terms you could say that my role was that of an Office Clerk and relatively nothing more; I saw no physical combat whatsoever in those four months.Yet, my guilt for just being there, “downrange” was, is an incredible weight of which I cannot express aloud.
© Margalit Berriet
A Land Without Heroes
“Occupation.”
The word had hit me like a migraine—the pain suspended against my eyeballs, stabbing me in the pupils with hot splinters, making my body shutter wildly with fear and hate. All this under the guise of my silence and the continuous projection of sound that ricocheted from interviewer’s voice and into my naïve eardrums. This moment was one of the few times that I had truly hated the fact that I had chosen to speak to the American media about the Iraqi War, myself as a black female veteran and or course the desperate aid that recent homecoming Veteran’s and their families are not receiving rapidly enough-if at all, for their service. The press in my eyes stick to the facts, which sometimes if not most times as of late tend to remove the heart of one’s story, which makes the truth a black & white tale that is less than fiction.
Her insults of the current Bush regime and the policies of the military enacted during the Iraq & Afghanistan wars had become a sonorous Gatling gun desecrating my illusions about “The Coalition’s” presence that is there still. But that is not what had unsettled my soul at that moment; no, it was the very impact that what I had chosen to do in order to provide for my daughter, serve my country, comply with my comrades and continue my mission had become ranked in history, amongst the copious atrocities that affronted human rights. The year that this event took place in my life was in 2005.
At times I feel a surge of painful remorse about my contribution to the Iraqi war even though I was “just” a 92Y meaning Unit Supply Specialist. To translate this portion
of my service into civilian terms you could say that my role was that of an Office Clerk and relatively nothing more; I saw no physical combat whatsoever in those four months.
Yet, my guilt for just being there, “downrange” was, is an incredible weight of which I cannot express aloud. When I did those press entanglements, I did my best to conduct the rest of the interviews trying to make my fellow vets proud of me. But underneath I couldn’t erase the truth of what I knew. She and the many others like her were right, and no amount of irrelevant comfort could erode what I had allowed myself to become apart of a conforming pack of wild avarice animals believing that our sense of “justice” was righteous and in that it must be the way for all to follow or else.
My path had never seemed so obstructed and blurred to me as it did at that second.
The vile word—occupation, was like a shark circling somewhere inside my body, transforming the calmed waters into something that dreadfully wanted to roar and rage; but I did not know who the enemy, the exact enemy was. No, I did know I just didn’t want to admit it to anyone. The “enemy” was the interviewer’s voice that echoed into my headphones, it was all the vets who had survived and all the soldiers who didn’t; it was everyone who called me a patriot along with all those who labeled me a traitor. It was the boyfriend who could never understand, and the friends to whom I could never explain. It was the very breath of the revolution itself, and every politician who wanted this war and all those who claimed they didn’t.
It was every flag waver and every flag burner, every kid who would cling to the romantic tall tales of war, along with all those who would someday willingly forget. It was the guilty, the innocent and those reserved to indecision. It was war and it was peace, it was humanity, God, the universe, myself. My enemy had my same face, wore my clothes, bled my blood, and breathed my air. My enemy was the occupation and the need for an occupation. It molded itself underneath my fingernails and crept into what was my earth. It had meshed and melded with my thoughts, taking over everything, eclipsing even my reason at times.
The enemy was everyone, and in everything that was human on all fronts. Iraqi, Afghani, American, British, name them. Eventually, all our hands, and our children’s hands and their children’s will be baptized in blood sooner or later for some cause that is above our limited understanding. Greed. And yet having seen its face in all of us I find myself more displaced than ever. I fear that even these words I write shall be taken for jokes rather than something relevant.
Yet I till this day do not know its name, it is a figure in the dark, seen only slightly in the right light and in glimpses on my peripheral vision. But maybe I cradled it long before the war had ever begun for me, or should I just say my enlistment. For as long as I remember I was groomed to be a “revolutionary” or, as my best friend still believes me to be an “anarchist.”
One of my fondest memories—if not the fondest of them all was when I was in the third grade and my class along with other students and teachers from different schools, that ranged in various grades and ages joined together with several hundred protesters against apartheid in South Africa. It was the first time in my life that I had felt like my voice was heard and I was iterating something worth hearing. I was surrounded by like minded people who wanted to change the world for the better. It was when I believed in the idea of possibilities despite the disappointments of the Regan years, which included a burnt-out city full of lost souls who wondered “Where did the 1970’s go with all the good times?”
That day said something to me; even though I was a misfit at school, felt alienated at home and wanted desperately to belong anywhere else then where I was, I still had the power to make something more than what statistically said awaited me. It was that taste of uprising, and empowerment that had done strange things to my blood. It begat a fire that never really died, but as I got older, I learned that it also fueled my zealotry and blinded me to the idea of a truth that everyone must someday face in adulthood. It came in the guise of a simple question, “What if we are ALL wrong?”
My endeavor to survive and eventually quit the military life had undergone a strange metamorphosis after two events: the first being 9/11 and the second being the conception of my daughter. Now most might ask how in the hell do these two events connect. Well in terms of my intrinsic island they are forever moored together in my mind, intertwined like an ocean. Ironically, that ocean would be made of sand.
The connection itself is life; the calm and the rage within it, the violent peace that sweeps across it day in, day out. Her life was mine within her small hands, while in the world we live-a world new to her and many others, was, is and always will be preparing to end it. The only separation is the idea of time, how it sits in the middle, like land does consistently embedded in the base of the world segmenting the earth into almost indistinguishable pieces.
On the surface everything is separated by boundaries too thick and long to crossover to the other side and witness that there is only infinity waiting. But for some time now I have longed to look deeper, diving into the unknown and when I come up for
air, I see the same world with new eyes, evidentially discovering that humans, as severed a race as we, are we are all fused into the same consciousness.
When I had first arrived in Germany, my head swelled with a myriad of emotions which included fear, exuberating, loneliness, and curiosity. My eyes were probably so brightened then by the abstract alliteration of the Army’s credo commonly known as the “Army Core Values” which was drilled into my head everyday for about two months. It was the acronym “L-D-R-S-H-I-P” (pronounced leadership) that I could have probably recited them in my sleep; or maybe, secretly I harbored the need for it to be real. The need to have faith in the ideas of Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage was a genuine as the desire for them to exist within me at some point although my pride probably wouldn’t have let me stake any claim to that in public.
Still, I wanted to assert this motto with every molecule that held my body together no matter what it took. Because believing in things other than myself gives me hope, and hope gives me strength. In a peculiar way, these ideals are the best of humanity-not in terms of war but in glimmers of hope to do what we are here to do and better our environment.
For several years, the idea of the military had been something that would raise the taste of bile from my throat leaving a foul tinge behind, but something in it also fascinated me as I was also an astute scholar of history. I had listened attentively over the years when all of teachers, professors, and superiors would render my mind with their rhetoric about what war, and warriors had done throughout time.
Yet, it wasn’t until I enlisted that I actually peered into the arrangement that was the strange dance between greatness and grief, achievement and annihilation. To be broken down and “rebuilt” in the Army’s image was my Drill Sergeant’s “duty,” and yet I look back at those moments seeing that was something God had chosen to do to me, for all of us, long before I even knew of his existence.
It was through these historically observational lessons that my journey into understanding what creates these hindrances began. On the one hand, I had uncovered invaluable lessons that abated all ideologies, classes, and societies as a system which is altogether similar—if not the same in more ways than they seemed to differ. Contritely, I stumbled upon humanities incestuous need to dominate, separate, and classify in order to survive and moreover prosper.
In the end, the search for the “one great” or “absolute” taxonomy is what both divides and unites us. This is the bond and the boundary that condemns humanity forcing us into believing in the illusion of solitary existence. Yet, these ideas were cast aside for many years of wandering through my adolescent years. They laid at the bottom of the sea of my mind for many years—that was until I was deployed to Iraq.
It was under the silence of the night sky in that desert that I had rediscovered the truth; even though it may seem as if we are separate and finite beings, our subsistence is apart of a great circle. Our lives are links in a chain to everything and everyone around us-our earth, our children, our pasts, and futures are interwoven by the good within our choices or the lack thereof. A million wars and peace treaties are created and broken under the same sun, whether it is with our neighbors-be they plant, animal or human or our very own fragile souls. Sooner or later amends are demanded in order for there to be another dawn.
I have gained one thing if anything throughout these long, short years of my minute life. We create our prisons as for the prisons that hold others, everyone in their own way, whether they are outright or just righteous contributes to the walls of encompassing stone. But freedom isn’t just a word or a thought. It is more than that—and no one war or warrior can ensure it permanently or remove it entirely. Our society and its way of thinking has to change. What frightens me the most is that the very words I write, the very things I say mean nothing in the end. To slap the word occupation to both of the “wars” is an innate need to bind the deeds done by others, to others, for others.
Ultimately, on both fronts, by both sides the multitude of “US” and the “THEMs” that are coming cannot and should not be confined by such a word. It is not a blanket large enough to explicate what is necessary to say yet which there are no words. When humanity sees itself within its own brethren’s eyes there will be no need to explain the unexplainable. This I believe is because we will be delivered from the lies that language can create or destroy. The truth is neither blind, nor deaf, nor mute. The deeds as well as the “why’s” behind them are viewed as a sum of the parts, and the parts of the sum. That my friends, is above our understanding. That is why it is called justice.
In my youth I used to wish for greatness—to be recognized as a heroine of some sort and be loved for it. Now, that dream is dead. In my mind’s eye there are no heroes, or heroines worth appraising. I shed no tears for the death of this dream; I place my faith in the Universe, in my daughter, in my loved ones, in myself. I realize that we write of great people to diminish the responsibilities of us all in our actions. Everyday I walk this
earth as myself, I wish to be judged as myself for all my benevolence and malice thereof. I am what is said of me, I am what I say I am. I am what I have put into this world, what it has given me willingly, what I have criminally demanded of it and taken. I am no guiltier of the occupation as anyone, and yet I am for I did not do anything to stand in the way of it. My hope is that with my obsessive “skill” writing words that I will portray the war in all the colors of truth that I can.
And now the year is 2021 and it looks like another war, a new war is on the horizon. Or is it better to be honest and exclaim that this war is both old and new simultaneously. As the media covers the first—and notably not the last of the attacks on Capitol Hill, that started on January 6th, I declared my shame in being a veteran on Facebook that very same day. I was kindly retorted with well-wishes and hopeful sentiments. “You’re one of the good ones.” All I could think was “am I” with a sarcastic snort.
I dare ask a question I have yet to hear America ask, how many other members of the unruly cabal were veterans? How many of those cops who let in the angry mob were not just White Supremacists at heart, but also just as disgruntled, and unhinged as Airforce veteran Ashli Babbitt was in her final days? The creation of this country is pathed with blood and so will it be its destruction. And with this enlightenment I carry, I also carry shame. Shame that I too served this country and its Anti-Black, racist agenda.
That is a shame I can never escape, for the knowledge of it, the awareness I now gain and share every chance I get is rooted in my experiences with seeing the occupation and demolition of Iraq firsthand. For American ignorance has kept these events
historically segregated; but we can no longer turn a blind eye, nor claim a blind spot in all this reckoning. As Malcolm X once said, “America’s chickens have come home to roost.”
But what he didn’t explain was that there were Trump-serving culprits that look just like him and I, waving their “Blue Lives Matter” flags, wearing MAGA brick-red caps, while their Black and Brown brothers and sisters are serving life terms in privatized prisons and immigration/concentration camps that wealthy villains such as Trump make tremendous currency off of. Is this suffering a well-deserved game in their eyes? Is this how we still constitute freedom, by way of the suffering of Black and Brown people in America and taking whatever dignity there is for from those abroad?
I admit to myself and to many that know me that I am indeed a war criminal.
There is no escaping it and January 6, 2021 the war I escaped from finally reached me yet again. For the war with Iraq and Afghanistan is just a symptom of the escalated disease of Anti-Black favoritism that led to Trump’s reprehensible win in 2016. It can be said that with Kamala Harris, that the majority of White folk are trying to remedy that “mistake.” But facts remain facts. 74 million citizens voted for Trump to be in office. But in all reality, he is merely one tumor in the body. The cancer of race hatred has infected this country since its dawning. Trump—and Covid-19 in some ways only revealed how ugly minds are in the “Republic” we all share.
I carry my shame like a badge of honor. It reminds me that I am still human. That I still have a heart; a conscious, and that I can still feel for my fellow man. Is this goodness? I like to think it is. But I will not lie; I am no pacifist. I live in fear of the White Supremacist terrorists and how far are they willing to take revenge for their wounds that came with defeat. It has become harder to distinguish who is an ally or who
is a foe, simply because I don’t read minds. And like in Iraq how I discovered that the enemy looked like me, the White Supremacist terrorists, look akin to the majority of our leaders in this wayward country.
And with that realization, that truth staring me in the face I am humbled by the illuminated revelation that all of my heroes are dead and suffering; they in one way or another have left this land to the savages and us to the wolves. We must defend what is righteous ourselves and fend for ourselves through love; for love is the only thing left to hinge our hopes upon. It is what they would have wanted from me, those who died and the remnants of those the “survived” the occupation compel me to do from their PTSD ridden eyes.
I am no hero, but I will stand for true freedom. I will stand for it as long as there is breath in this broken body; I will stand and rebuild as my ancestors did, for the future without occupations or colonizers, brick by weighted brick.
Contribution received in the frame of HAS #03 Truth and Belief - January 2021
GOODW.Y.N.
A Land Without Heroes
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