Earlier this week I posted excerpts from I journal I kept while serving in Iraq. During this fifth anniversary week of the war, I wanted to give readers a sense of what it was like preparing to deploy. Today I'm posting a few more entries from the journal. They all take place while I was at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, waiting to see if/when we'd get the call to deploy. 

March 23, 2003

A Sunday afternoon on the barracks' catwalk. Day four of the war. Nothing much else to do but bullsh*t and watch TV. There are an estimated 50 Marine casualties at this point. Mom said she watched a firefight on TV this morning. Some U.S. forces are less than 100 miles from Baghdad.  Other than that don't know what else to say...just waiting. A lot of us think that we'll end up going no where, just end up staying stateside. I don't believe that, I just hope we don't go somewhere for some bull*t mission. If we do something good I know I'll feel as though I've accomplished something worthwhile in my 23 years. 

Things just get more surreal by the hour. First, we watched more footage of the front lines where Marines were fighting. These guys are just like us, it's so obvious but I just can't get my head around it. At one point the reporter mentioned he was with the 2nd Battalion 8th Marines--and we're staying in their barracks right now. It's getting more frustrating to see Marines dying and not being able to help them. Sgt. D- speculates that our leave date for Iraq might come sooner. He also says when we get there we'll probably wish for these long nights back in the U.S.  Funny, because he's never talked like that before.


March 24, 2003

Not much to say except that today I realized I could actually die. I mean I see vivid pictures of such things, and I see how easily this can happen in war. It may seem like an obvious statement.  I thought about these kinds of things the moment I enlisted. But never in those early, innocent, "good ol' days" when I rushed through weekend training to get back to school and finish my homework, did I ever think I'd be in a war. Then, once this became apparent, it has taken until now to really understand what war actually means...I mean, really means. It doesn't seem like me, David Botti, could be shot to death on a road in Iraq...but, it can so easily happen. So easy to become a name on the wall, and a cross in Arlington Nation Cemetery where thousands like me may have thought the same things. But I shouldn't think about such morbid things. The war is getting bloodier...especially for the Marines. Today I saw an Army convoy come under attack on TV.


March 25, 2003

Things have changed infinitely in a matter of a few hours. We learned today that we would be leaving for Kuwait by the weekend. Things kicked into high gear. The mood seems somber, uncertain, worried. Things are so real and so clear that it seems everyday the fog lifts revealing how things will really be. I could see it in the major's face as he told us we were going. Here are people's thoughts: H- is having trouble sleeping; B- is worried that he'll kill someone and go to hell; S- wishes he picked up a slutty girl last weekend; A- doesn't feel like talking to his parents (he also thinks he only has a 20 percent chance of coming home not wounded or dead); C- wants to go but is scared at the same time; N- is nervous. All I can really do is concentrate on the future, and put all this into perspective when I come back home.

Along with the Iraq war starting five years ago this week, this period was also the first time I began writing in the journal I kept while deployed.  I'm posting excerpts today and tomorrow, so you can get a sense of what was going through the mind of a lowly lance corporal on his way to Iraq.  The entries are not particularly eloquent, but they're real and I hope they just show what the calm was like before the storm.  I've omitted the names of my fellow Marines for their privacy.

The fifth anniversary of the start of our war in Iraq is a little more than a month away. There will be retrospectives looking back to those early days of shock and awe, in addition to news analysis and the nation's self-reflection. Even a month out from the anniversary, conversations about the upcoming day seem to revolve around the same theme: "can you believe it's already been five years?"  It is a sobering thought.  And even if you believe in the war, or are staunchly at odds with its premise, five years is a unit of time to view not so much in length, but in the various phases that occurred.

The summer of 2003, as I saw it, was a honeymoon period. The optimism for Iraq's future still ran high (at least in some circles), and at the same time I could see questionable expressions on the faces of Iraq's citizens as we patrolled past them. No one knew how it would all play out. Personally the fragile tensions that held together a shaky peace ended on November 12, when a suicide bomber destroyed the building in An Nasiriyah that at one time was my platoon's headquarters.

Homecoming was also different. There were no VA scandals, or talk of PTSD, or advocacy groups comprised of Iraq veterans. We simply came home and quickly immersed ourselves back into civilian life. To watch how that has changed is to examine the evolution of the war in Iraq and on the home front. To ask a veteran about his or her experiences in Iraq yields not an overall glimpse into the war, but an occasion to see just one phase of it. This is what needs to be remembered as the anniversary coverage begins. I remember seeing soldiers entering Iraq July 2003 and feeling bad for them. They'd missed the defining war of our generation. They would spend a few months in post-invasion mopping up, and go home on the tail end of the operation. Of course, the irony in this cannot be overstated.

We have enough perspective over five years to eschew generic "looks back" for a more nuanced analysis of how our country has fared over this time. It must be broken into phases: the invasion, the time surrounding 2004's battle for Fallujah, the grinding years of 2005 and 2006, the Abu Ghraib and Haditha investigations, and the controversial surge plan that's brought us to this point. At home the fascination with the invasion's pyrotechnics has given way to simply reading of the daily casualty figures ticking away over the news wires. There's also the trends in media coverage to consider, the heightened focus of home front veterans issues, and how artistic mediums have sought to portray the war and inform us.

Looking back on the fifth anniversary means not so much seeing what happened, but understanding how we got to where we are today, and how driven we are to look at Iraq not simply as a war, but as a series of distinct eras.

It's been widely reported recently that movies dealing with veterans and the Iraq war are mostly  flopping at the box office. Peoples' opinions on the cause of this are varied, but a common line of thinking is that it's just too soon. Recently, however, I came across a movie from 1946 which astounded me in the accuracy and relevance of the veterans issues addressed.  The movie is called "The Best Years of Our Lives," and while it won the 1947 Oscar for best picture I'd never heard about it until my father mentioned the film at the Christmas dinner table.

If conventional wisdom within my own generation believes that many mainstream movies from that time period are sanitized and fail to address complex issues, "The Best Years of Our Lives" is an exception. The film traces the lives of three WWII veterans and their return to a small town and their families. One of the actors, Harold Russell, was a veteran himself and lost both hands while serving in the U.S. Army. 

While watching the movie I was struck how veterans of Iraq could easily replace these WWII-era characters. We see their apprehension as one-by-one a taxi drops the men off at their respective homes. None of the vets want to get out of the car, and face their families for the first time. The ensuing story line involves alcoholism, depression, joblessness, financial troubles, broken relationships, and opposition to the war. Even among their families and old friends the vets feel out of place, with images of their wartime experience always present. The plot is subtle and methodical. In portraying the assimilation of these vets back into civilian society, we see how they initially depend on each other, and how they eventually come to depend on their families as well.

From Newsweek's Dec. 31, 2007-Jan. 7, 2008 issue:

I grew up in an era when war veterans were the aging men at Memorial Day parades wearing triangular hats. It never crossed my mind that a vet might someday be a kid like me. If it had never crossed yours, either, this year probably changed all that. At my graduate school in New York, I can count at least five classmates who know an Iraq War veteran firsthand—and that's just one class, in one school. More than 1 million veterans have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, lifting our collective profile by the sheer weight of our numbers.

During the past year, veterans' issues were all over the media—and often the news was grim. In February the Walter Reed hospital scandal broke, with revelations about decrepit housing and substandard care. Next came a series of reports on Iraq War data: we learned that the Army suicide rate had reached a 26-year high in 2006; that there'd been 4,698 desertions during the 2007 fiscal year, an 80 percent increase since 2003; that the number of Iraq vets diagnosed with mental-health issues triples during their first six months at home. I followed these stories with a strange sense of relief. For too long, people seemed to think veterans came home and simply melted back into society. Now vet issues were finally getting attention—even if it took bad news to make it happen.

When I started my blog this year, I wondered if there would be enough news about veterans to get me through one day. I couldn't have been more wrong. There we were in the rhetoric of politicians, in countless newspaper features, even on reality TV. For the blog, I've made an effort to examine not only the challenges that my fellow veterans face but also their accomplishments. As one Wall Street Journal columnist wrote, "The media struggles in good faith to respect our troops, but too often it merely pities them."

Stories like the Walter Reed scandal can invite this kind of pity and overshadow the fact that most of us are immensely proud of our service. A single tour in Iraq or Afghanistan can define a person's entire life; collectively, our experiences will echo for decades. If 2007 was the year when veterans' issues entered the public's consciousness, we need to make sure they don't go away in 2008.

Photo: Seth Wenig/AP

He was killed on Aug. 16, 2006-shot by a sniper near Fallujah as he went to rescue a wounded Marine, Lance Corporal Glover, who also died that day. Their funerals both took place in New York City within the same week.

I often wish that every American could attend at least one funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. They are one of only a few occasions when military and civilian rituals can come together as one. They are the proud and largely unknown moments of American history. Since 9/11, they’ve taken place more than 4,000 times.

I wait for emails from my former Iraqi translator to appear in my Inbox—too long a wait, and I assume he’s dead. I fear mentioning any part of his name that might identify him to the wrong people.

Sitting on the steps of my platoon’s HQ in southern Iraq some time in 2003, I asked our translator what he had done while his city was being bombed by Americans during the invasion. 

He started into an impassioned 5-minute monologue. A 20-year-old student, he told of how Saddam’s Fedayeen guerrillas tried to recruit his university’s English class to defend the city as Marines closed in. He described days of remaining in his home as the fighting began, the fervent praying in a cramped room with his sister’s annoying children.

In subsequent conversations he would speak of life under Saddam’s regime, the murder of his anti-government uncle and the torture of a friend whose fingernails had been ripped out after emailing the United States.  

He still tells stories.

In November 2003 he wrote to my unit (then recently returned from Iraq) about the bombing of our former HQ, where he was working Italian soldiers.

"im okky my friend god help me from this explosion i was in petrol with my friend italian it was every thing horrible thanks for god because he saved me"

He wrote that he feared being killed and how he hated Iraq and wanted to leave it.

"just tell me what ican do if when i walk in the street one day terrerist man will kill me in front of all people in the markit or in any where."

Another email, sent on April 10, 2004:

Earlier in the week I interviewed Erica, the wife of Jim, a fellow Marine from my old unit. I asked about her experiences being in a relationship with Jim while he was deployed to Iraq in 2003. Today we have my interview with Jim. Among the things he talks about is leaving her a knife to keep at home, family drama, and a surge of anger while eating at a diner.