{"id":16119,"date":"2016-06-10T12:07:28","date_gmt":"2016-06-10T17:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=16119"},"modified":"2016-06-10T12:07:28","modified_gmt":"2016-06-10T17:07:28","slug":"what-a-veteran-taught-me-about-facing-my-own-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/06\/10\/what-a-veteran-taught-me-about-facing-my-own-war\/","title":{"rendered":"What A Veteran Taught Me About Facing My Own War"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Chopper\"<\/h3>\n

Bringing Iraq\u200a\u2014\u200aand my experience in Somalia\u200a\u2014\u200ato the homeland<\/h4>\n

by MARK WILKERSON<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\n

Memorial Day is over. You had your barbecue. Now, you can stop thinking about America\u2019s wars and the casualties from them for another year. As for me, I only wish it were so.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been Memorial Day for me ever since I first met Tomas Young. And in truth, it should have felt that way from the moment I hunkered down in Somalia in 1993 and the firing began.<\/p>\n

After all, we\u2019ve been at war across the Greater Middle East ever since. But somehow it was Tomas who, in 2013, first brought my own experience in the U.S. military home to me in ways I hadn\u2019t been able to do on my own.<\/p>\n

That gravely wounded, living, breathing casualty of our second war in Iraq who wouldn\u2019t let go of life or stop thinking and critiquing America\u2019s never-ending warscape brought me so much closer to myself, so bear with me for a moment while I return to Mogadishu, the Somalian capital, and bring you\u200a\u2014\u200aand me\u200a\u2014\u200acloser to him.<\/p>\n

Boom!<\/strong><\/h4>\n

In that spring of 1993, I was a 22-year-old Army sergeant, newly married, and had just been dropped into a famine-ridden, war-torn Third World country on the other side of the planet, a place I hadn\u2019t previously given a thought.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know what hit me. I couldn\u2019t begin to take it in. That first day I remember sitting on my cot with a wet t-shirt draped over my head, chugging a bottle of water to counter the oppressive heat.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d trained for this\u200a\u2014\u200aa real mission\u200a\u2014\u200afor more than five years. I was a Black Hawk helicopter crew chief. Still, I had no idea what I was in for.<\/p>\n

So much happened in Somalia in that \u201cBlack Hawk Down<\/a>\u201d year that foreshadowed America\u2019s fruitless wars of the 21st century across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, but you wouldn\u2019t have known it by me. That first day, sitting in a tent on the old Somali Air Force base in Baledogle, a couple of hours inland from the capital city of Mogadishu, I had a face-to-face encounter with a poisonous black mamba snake.<\/p>\n

Somehow it didn\u2019t register. Not really.<\/p>\n

This is real, I kept telling myself in the six months I spent there, but in a way it wasn\u2019t or didn\u2019t seem to be.<\/p>\n

After about a month, my unit moved to the airport in Mogadishu\u200a\u2014\u200aaway from the snakes, scorpions and bugs that infested Baledogle, but closer to dangers of a more human sort. Within a few weeks, I became used to the nightly rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire coming at us from the city. I watched the tracers streak by as we crouched behind our sandbagged fighting positions.<\/p>\n

We would return from missions to find bullet holes in the skin or rotor blades of our Black Hawk helicopters, or in one case a beer-can-sized hole that a rocket-propelled grenade round punched cleanly through the rear stabilizer without\u200a\u2014\u200amercifully\u200a\u2014\u200adetonating.<\/p>\n

And yet none of it felt like it was quite happening to me.<\/p>\n

I remember lying on my cot late at night, not far from the flight line full of Black Hawks and Cobras, hearing the drone of low-flying American AC-130 gunships firing overhead for hours on end. The first boom would come from the seaward side of the field as the gunship fired its M-102 howitzer.<\/p>\n

A few seconds later, another boom would mark the round\u2019s arrival at its target across town, sometimes with secondary explosions as ammunition stores went up.<\/p>\n

Read the Remainder at War is Boring<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bringing Iraq\u200a\u2014\u200aand my experience in Somalia\u200a\u2014\u200ato the homeland by MARK WILKERSON Memorial Day is over. You had your barbecue. Now, you can stop thinking about America\u2019s wars and the casualties from them for another year. As for me, I only wish it were so. It\u2019s been Memorial Day for me ever since I first met…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1286,1911,6160,1898],"tags":[4027,12157,12158,11784,12159,3913],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}