For one York student and former U.S. military officer, the scenes of conflict on our TV screens were once a reality. He talks to Joanna Shelley about his experiences

In York, Marco* keeps the story of his life a closed book. While other gap year graduates enthuse about the experiences that have taken them out of their hometown and into the ‘real world’, very few people are privileged with information from his travel journal - one that records the events of not one but three years in which he went from Harvard academia to wartime Iraq. These basic plot details are, you sense, where he’d like the story to end and ironically, with the click of the Dictaphone, even they take an effort to confirm. His eyes narrow and I notice that his arms have folded across his chest. He’s cut across me before I can get my first question out. Quick, but curt: “There are some things that I won’t talk about with anyone.”

Officially, Marco only closed this last chapter of his life by agreeing that some of the particulars would be ‘forgotten’ on paper. Before beginning his studies at York he was a naval officer in the U.S. Armed Forces, a career that, at 18, he had been keen to sign up for but one that, after it had taken him onto the battlefield, he was desperate to escape from. In managing to get himself released early from duty, he - like all retiring officers - had to sign a contract of non-disclosure, consenting to protect details about his experience that are, for now at least, considered ‘classified’. He says it’s a small price to pay for the distance that’s now between him and the conflict still occupying our TV screens. “As soon as I got out there I was like, ‘I need to get out of here, right now.’ And when I got out, I was like, ‘I am never going back.’”

‘Boot camp is just about brain-washing. They make you all into a group of fanatics, and then they give you a bunch of weapons and tell you to do, go, accomplish.’

Perhaps Marco’s desire to leave Iraq, and his reluctance to revisit the country now, in conversation, both have something to do with his denial that he is a “real veteran” of the conflict. For him, having been in the war zone and worn the uniform of the invading force isn’t enough to elevate his experience to that of the men and women he served with. “They have a real sense of duty, which I never really had,” he admits. “It takes courage and faith too, and I guess I didn’t have that either.”

In retrospect, Marco admits that it was arrogance that made him decide to drop out of one of America’s top Ivy League universities in order to enlist in the Navy. “Harvard was very challenging academically, but that wasn’t the way I wanted to be challenged,” he explains. Instead, he had set his mind on joining the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, a faction of the Forces responsible for disposing bombs in war-torn areas. “That just seemed like the ultimate challenge, a way I could prove myself. In the EOD. you’ve got to be able to think quickly, solve problems, be creative, make decisions… I thought it would be an altruistic thing to do, too. It seemed more realistic to me than academia did, more practical rather than theoretical.”

Marco’s preparation to enter the EOD began at boot camp, where training all officers started their training, whether headed for the special or conventional forces. The two months were more of a mental test than he had anticipated. “From day one in the military, they start brainwashing you,” he says. “They take away any sense of individuality that you have. All of a sudden, you follow any order, no matter how stupid. It’s mind games basically - you have to just shut up and obey. Any sort of curiosity about what you’re doing is frowned upon. I had to really push myself through it.”

On 20th March 2003, however, the day when the United States declared war on Iraq, the coming months suddenly seemed a lot tougher. “We were in our bunk beds when they told us. A lot of people were excited, but a lot of people were kind of scared.” Marco, however, believed he had a way out. “I couldn’t sleep that night, I was anxious. But I had a lot of training ahead of me at the time, and I thought that hopefully, when I’d finished it, the war would be over. I knew there was the possibility I’d go to Iraq but I thought that, if it happened, I was going to be so well trained with EOD that I would survive - I’d have been in danger, but I’d just be so well trained that the odds would be in my favour.”

Marco continued onto ‘A’ School to begin training as a parachute rigger, which was to be his field of speciality until he reached the EOD. It was another two months of preparation, but this time in an environment “where they beat you all physically to try and weed people out.”

He talks enthusiastically of the four a.m. wake-up calls, the mornings when they’d be ordered to put on swimming gear, wade out into the freezing sea water and lock arms and stay afloat on their backs until given the instruction to come back. “The cold really gets to you; you always felt it was too long. But to a certain extent you do enjoy it - not because you like the pain, but because it’s about pride and confidence. I’m still proud right now that I went through as much as I did and I didn’t quit. It was tempting at times to say ‘this is enough.’”

As the physical endurance of the recruits improved, however, their increasing confidence was having an effect on the collective’s attitudes and outlook. The Marco slouched in his chair now seems somehow different from the 18-year-old who, he recalls, was prepared to square up to a group of men on a night out after training, knowing that his new “buddies” of just two weeks were standing, ready to back him up, behind him. “I was a different person,” he admits. “I was kind of stupid and narrow-minded. They made us into this group of really arrogant and overconfident, but really motivated people. In retrospect, they really do make you fanatics, and then they give you a bunch of… well, we called them toys, but weapons basically, and tell you do, go, accomplish.”

Marco, however, didn’t finish his training. His first physical screening at boot camp had revealed stress fractures in his bones and while he was allowed to continue with his training - “I told them I felt good, even though I didn’t” - they got worse. By the time he was in dive school, EOD was definitely off, and the route that he had seen himself taking in the Forces became “completely different”. While on medical hold in Virginia Beach, he was deployed on a naval ship. It was headed for the Persian Gulf.

“I didn’t want to do this anymore. I was like, ‘what is going on?’ I had to call my family and tell them I was leaving really soon – in just a few days we were shipping out.” Military training had been marked out clearly for Marco. Recounting his first assignment aboard a naval ship, however, he begins to struggle to put a time scheme on things. He was to be deployed for seven months, using his skills as a parachute rigger to do maintenance on the troops’ essential survival gear. “We were out there maybe a month or two. The days really start to blur into each another because you’re working shifts and there’s no weekends, no Friday, no Monday, every day’s exactly the same. Seven days a week, at least 12 hours each day.”

Life on the ship he describes as “very cramped and surreal. You lose all sense of things, especially when you’re on night watch. You’re always in fluorescent light, you don’t see the sun, it’s always dark; you’d go to sleep before the sun came out and you’d wake up after the sun was gone. They said the freaks came out at night, because we’d be all pale. We hadn’t seen the sun for a long while.”

‘You’re trying to stay as calm as you can. You’re not thinking about politics, or trying to get home - you’re just trying to do your job as fast as you can and hopefully you’ll survive.’

It’s during his time here, on this narrow stretch of inland sea, that the specifics anchoring Marco’s narrative become obscured. For an unknown reason, he was pulled from the ship and sent to work on land with the marines in Iraq. It was a harsh daylight to wake up to. Despite all his training, he had not been prepared for the situation out on the ground. He was occasionally required to stand watch at the American checkpoints. “I had thought that I would be okay. I hadn’t thought that I’d just be standing on the street like that, just waiting to get shot.

“I can’t tell you enough how vulnerable you feel when you’re standing watch. It doesn’t sound scary: you have to go up to each driver, ask for ID and then wave them through. But he could have a shotgun across his lap, he could be a suicide bomber. It’d be really easy to take you out.”

Luckily, because Marco wasn’t a marine, his main job was, as he puts it, to be “the bitch”. “I was like an extra hand out there. When we were on base, I was in charge of the people cleaning toilets and I would do a lot of maintenance on the gear.” In terms of combat, most of the time Marco was there, he only faced what he calls “skirmishes and ambushes.” Looking back, he paints himself as the timid naval officer caught in amongst “the brave guys” of the marine convoy. “They just shoot at convoys as you’re driving by, down the main highway. I was the one who was always trying to get them to drive through it, because I knew that even if there was one guy it was too dangerous for me.”

He wasn’t part of the major assaults that we associate with the war effort but on the ground, he says, there were still incidents that raised his awareness of the possibility of the danger. “One time we were in a hummer and we started getting shot at. We didn’t know where it was coming from, so the guys sprung into action and I just basically covered my section. It was kind of scary, not knowing where the shots were coming from, just knowing that you could be in the crossfire right at that moment. You know you have to stay still and you’re trying to calm yourself down, but you really want to just get in the hummer and run. It got kind of crazy there for a second, but…” He breaks off mid-sentence and shakes his head, giving an attempt at an apologetic smile. “I don’t really want to talk about it any more, actually.”

The blank is there now, however, wanting to be filling in. How did he deal with these kinds of situations? “The way I explain it to my younger brother, back home, when he asks is that combat, for me, was almost like playing American football. I hate to make the comparison, because here, if you miss your tackle, so to speak - well, you get shot. But it’s the same in that it is all really fast and kind of violent, but you are just completely focused on your job. You’re trying to stay as calm as you can so that you can see where the fire’s coming from and where the cover is. You’re not thinking about politics, or trying to get home, you’re just trying to do your job as fast as you can and hopefully you’ll survive.

His frustration at the situation is palpable. “There were just so many people dying, and once you’re on the ground, I don’t see how you’re going to avoid some of the situations.” You don’t think as much when you’re actually scared of dying. You don’t even know who’s firing at you a lot of times. You just see figures, the missile flash in the night, or the dust moving in the day. They’re not people when you’re shooting at them like that, unless it’s hand-to-hand, and that rarely happens. So you just shoot the…” He breaks off. “You shoot the enemy.

“So that, that, that,” he stresses, “really does get to you.” He struggles to explain the effect it had on him. “I was kind of cynical before that, but I think something died in me when I went out there, when death was thrust in front of me like that.” His words sound bitter. His eyes flinch toward the Dictaphone. “Can you turn that thing off for a second?”

After four weeks in Iraq with the marines, Marco was welcomed back into the baking heat of the Gulf. For another three months, he was back on the shift system, either on watch at night or working the oxygen shop and fixing equipment in the day. His real release, however, was a trip to Italy with two other servicemen when he was on leave. “It was like going back to the world. Just the juxtaposition! God it was weird. We rode a bus down from Naples, down the Amalfi coast, and it was just the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. There were a few times I got pissed off because I was getting lured back into my previous life - it was almost like Iraq never happened. I tried talking to the guys I was with about it, but I guess they just didn’t want to think about it. They wanted to pretend it never happened. I did too, I guess - it was like, ‘I like this better! I don’t want to do that again!’ I remember just feeling so happy, those three days, just because of the distance. I was really sure I wanted to continue with that, and not go back.”

His deployment ended when his naval ship docked in Norfolk, a major naval base in the state of Virginia. He stayed there for around six months, but by that time he was determined to get out. “Back in the US, I started making good impressions on people, gaining their trust and their loyalty. I eventually found a friend in the legal department who took me through all the regulations and helped me put in a special request for discharge. It was based on them sending me from medical hold into the conventional forces, when I had a special forces contract.

Of course, in the end they’re pretty much allowed to do whatever they want with you once you go into boot camp. But I did get some sympathy, because they usually don’t do that.” With a year and two months left on his contract, he was let out on an early discharge for education.
A few months later he arrived in York. “I wanted to get out of the US, because I wasn’t feeling like an American, I guess. I felt kind of ashamed of being an American. That’s kind of simplistic, because not all Americans agree with the war. But I wanted to be more international.”

Marco has listened to the media analysis of the failures in intelligence gathering that led up to the declaration of war and, having spent the last of his teenage years witnessing the human cost of the coalition governments’ mistakes, expresses his anger with the politicians he sees “sitting in their offices, dealing death, basically. “I don’t know why they went to war. I really hope they thought there were weapons over there and they were just too stupid to confirm its.If not, then they’re guilty of something far worse than stupidity.”

Of President Bush, however, he says: “It’s hard to label him stupid at the same time, because he seems to manipulate the American people well enough. He did win two elections. He seems indoctrinated, I think that’s the problem, in this culture, this ex-military culture, that’s so proud to be an American that they’re willing to isolate themselves from the rest of the world.”
Despite his disillusionment with the conflict, however, Marco has respect for the servicemen that he fought with and that remain in Iraq. “I have respect for them because they have something I don’t, I guess. I admire that they can still believe, that they’re still optimistic. In the end, to be there, to risk your life like that, they all have to have faith, on some level, that it’s worth it.”

* Name has been changed

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