On The 13th Anniversary Of The Afghan War-Immediate
Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops!-A Cautionary Tale- Private First Class Jack Dawson’s War
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
John Dawson who had been in my class in North Adamsville
High School when we graduated back in 1964 is the source for this sketch. John,
a Vietnam veteran who saw military service early in that war around the
hellhole of Da Nang when the blossom was still on the American adventure there
and was proud of his service and also knew that I had done my military service
during a little later period of that war grudgingly and had been involved after
that service with the Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and later worked
with a group called Veterans for Peace (VFP). So we, when we met around town on
occasion or at a reunion, would argue about those times and about then current
American military policy. When 9/11 in 2001 happened and the subsequent
occupation of Afghanistan and then later the second Iraq war, the ‘shock and
awe’ war, both of which I opposed with had plenty of disagreements.
But John also knew that I had done a lot of work with
returning veterans, had written several series under the title Brothers Under The Bridge publicizing
the plight of those from the Vietnam War who could not adjust to the “real
world” and had formed an alternative “community” in the style of the old hobo
jungles out in the arroyos, river banks and bridges of Southern California.
Knew that whatever opposition I had to American governmental war policy that my
brother-soldiers were not the target of that ire. He had urged his son, called
Jack from childhood, to join up after 9/11 when Jack was gung-ho to go get the
bastards who did that criminal deed in New York and elsewhere. After Jack
finished up his tours of duty in early 2005
and returned state-side for discharge something snapped in him and his world
turned upside down. Jack fell through
the cracks and after John had not heard from his son for a couple of years he
contacted me to see if I could through my contacts find out where he was,
whether he was alright, and whether he wanted to come home. I found out what
happened to Jack and the end of this sketch details what I found out. As with
my old series about the Vietnam veterans from my time where I liked to put a
piece under a particular sign I will put this one under- Private Jack Dawson’s Private War:
Jack Dawson was angry, angry as hell if he was asked and
he was on more than one occasion that those dirty Arabs, those cutthroat
barbarians, those damn sand n----rs, those slimy rug merchants and anything
that he could think to call them (strangely until the news media started
touting the names Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and mujahedeen around he did not think to
call them those names although all three were by then reasonably well-known
names for those extremist Islamists who were going to make life tough for the
new American century). Hell, they had blown up the World Trade Center buildings
without blinking an eyelash, were ready to do the same to the White House and
probably thinking that the Pentagon would be a sweet ass legitimate target of
war and the nerve center for the American war machine had hit that building
across the Potomac as well.
Not only was one Jack Dawson (everybody called him Jack to
distinguish between him and his father John) angry but he was made of the stuff
that required him to personally do something about this latest menace to the
peace of the world (like his father who had been an early soldier in Vietnam,
not quite at the advisor stage but well before the huge troop build-ups in the
mid to late 1960s, who had enlisted when Lyndon Baines Johnson called for
troops in order hold back the “red menace,” our generation’s bugaboo). So in
the fall of 2001 Jack Dawson dropped out of Northeastern University in Boston
where he had been a Co-op student (this was a five year work-study program very
popular in my day with those working-class kids from places like North
Adamsville who could not have swung the tuition without some work to make ends
meet. Jack was a prime example of that for this generation) and enlisted in the
United States Army. Before that decisive event he had tried to rally his
friends and relatives, the young ones anyway, to follow his lead and join up as
well as millions had done when those “Nips” (his term) blew away Pearl Harbor back in 1941 like his
grandfather had told him about when he was just a kid.
Strangely although he harangued the hell out of them, made
a nuisance at the Quad just off Huntington Avenue where he would use his
bullhorn purchased for the occasion to gather in the fellow recruits to the
great mission of saving Western Civilization from the heathens, again he was
almost totally unsuccessful in his ambitions. ( The Quad a place where students
went to eat or chill out and at this campus unlike say Boston University in the
old days not a place to be harassed by political salesmen of any kind or a
place where anti-war activity fared any better especially in the heated
atmosphere after 9/11.) He did find a
guy, a young guy from Wakefield who was thinking of dropping out of the Co-op
program, out of school anyway to join up with the Massachusetts National Guard
where he served out his time guarding the Armory in Wakefield every weekend and
did monthly duties monitoring traffic patterns in Boston in case emergency
evacuation were necessary.
Amid the usual tears that generations of American families
have gotten used to when the war drums start beating Jack Dawson left for basic
training down at Fort Dix in New Jersey (the same post that his father trained
at in the Vietnam times and I did as well) expecting to put fire into whatever
recruits he found there to go destroy those who would destroy the innocent of
his country, and just the plain innocent at the World Trade buildings. When the
now freshly shave-headed Private Jack Dawson wrote his first letter home he
made his father laugh a knowing laugh. The guys in his unit were mainly from
the ghettos and barrios (he noted in his letter that he would have to avoid the
word “n----r” and “spic” that he liberally used at home (learned from father
John), the white hillbilly boys from the hills of Kentucky and farm boys from
Ohio. The knowing laugh from father John was that those were the same comrades
who populated his unit back in the day. What John knew from somewhat bitter
experience in Vietnam with many of those same comrades when the hard fighting
began was that the guys who wrote and talked about beating the war drums were
not the guys who did the fighting. Private Jack was learning that lesson early
on as John pointed in a return letter. Still father John was proud that Jack
would be the fourth generation of Dawsons who served their country when called
to arms.
Private Jack went through basic like every other gung-ho
physically fit recruit (he of wiry frame, six two, and one hundred and seventy
five pounds, and good looking- that last a comment by his father). He learned
to fire weapons, take drill, and walk nice long twenty mile walks. But here is
where Jack learned the hard realities of war policy when the drums are beating and
men are desperately needed to fill the units. Private Jack had missed the
initial fighting in Afghanistan since the thing had been a “walkover” against
the Taliban who evaporated under the hail of American aerial bombings and
firepower on the ground. But the first units were scheduled to rotate out after
a year once the occupation forces began the task of training the Afghans to
fight for themselves. Jack had signed up with the expectation that he would go
to computer school after basic.
Naturally once you decide to sign on the dotted line with
“Uncle” you absolutely need to read the fine print since everything (backed up
by plenty of court decisions supporting the government when cases have been
brought on breach of contract grounds) is conditional. Conditional on the needs
of the Army at any given moment. And at that moment the “grunt-hungry” army was
in need of boots on the ground and so Private Jack was assigned to Fort Bragg
for Advanced Infantry Training (AIT), the “paradise” of grunt-dom. Unhappy with
this result since he expected to learn enough computer skills to get a good job
after the service instead of wasting a few more years in a Co-op program to do
the same thing and have overhanging debt for a long time Jack nevertheless dug
in and became one of the best soldiers in his unit.
Of course in the world of the “new world order” in the
fall of the year 2002 the only place where a grunt’s skills were needed by the
American military was humping through the killing fields (some say the poppy
killing fields) of a place like Helmut province in Afghanistan and thus was Jack so ordered. Although he had
some trepidations about going into a combat zone half way across the world with
guys he trusted but hardly knew he only
needed to look at a photograph of the smoking ashes at Ground Zero to get his
blood rising. And so in that fall of 2002 he left America (for the first time
although the family had taken short trips to Canada) on the troop transports
that was bringing his unit and his brigade to Kabul and then Helmut province.
Jack left the States with his belief in his mission, in his country’s mission
to stamp out the virus of Islamic craziness (his term), in the virtues that had
been produced in country and by his family intact.
There is no need to go into all the gory details of war,
of the ways of the Afghan war, of the kicking all of the doors in of some
isolated village looking for terrorists who allegedly supported the Taliban on
the information of paid informants (who half the time were paying off old time
personal grudges on some poor guy whose only crime was not to smart enough to
get to the American paymasters first), of the calling in of American airpower
to incinerate some off-hand village where a sniper’s fire might be pinning a
platoon down (and on more than one occasion bringing the fire on themselves
when some GI misread the coordinates or those friendly Afghan trainees
panicked), of blowing of the head of some kid who had at the wrong moment
popped his head up from the rocks (later when the field was cleared and the
gruesome body discovered that child of about ten was listed as a “terrorist”
KIA, in shades of Vietnam time). Nor of the fire fights in the night with real
Taliban forces who killed the guy next to you, wounded the guy of the other
side, maybe nicked you up too (Private Jack would receive two Purple Hearts
from Afghan duty), of coming under attack by raw Afghan recruits who panicked
when an ambush went awry, and of actually taking out a few bad guys (who in at
least one case were working both sides, the Taliban who protected their poppy
fields in exchange for tribute and the Americans for arms). Yeah all the
confusions of war, all the modern confusions of wars with unsure aims and
unlikely allies. Yeah, too the little acts of kindness when the unit brought in
much needed water or other desperately needed materials and in return teaching
American GIs how to ride a donkey, and how to celebrate various unknown
holidays with feasting and dancing.
Yes, Private First Class Jack saw all that, saw the myriad
faces of war in that tour of duty, in that year of living dangerously. Jack
came back to the States with his belief in his mission, in his country’s
mission to stamp out the virus of Islamic craziness (his term), in the civic
virtues that had been produced in this country and by his family intact. Came
back for some rest and recreation in the bosom of his family proud to have
served and proud that his town recognized his efforts with “Welcome Home, Jack”
signs all over the place. Then the other shoe of world politics, of
international war strategy moved Afghanistan to the back-burner, made the place
an afterthought, moved men and materials out for the new danger, and placed
hard-boiled Iraq on the front-burner. And in the year 2004 if you were a grunt
in the American Army then if you were not gainfully employed in those Afghan
poppy field then your “young ass” was stepping off the tarmac in the outskirts
of Baghdad, I-raq. And so once again
Jack left the States with his belief in his mission, in his country’s mission
to stamp out the virus of Islamic craziness (his term), in the civil virtues
that had been produced in by country and by his family intact.
And yet again there is no to go into all the gory details
of war, of the Iraq. Of playing some James Jones from Here To Eternity World War
II civic pride and good old boys story. The wars come and go but the motifs
stay. Once again Sergeant Jack had his fill of kicking all of the doors in of
some isolated village looking for terrorists who allegedly supported the insurgents
on the information of paid informants (they really should form and
international union to peddle their wares to the gullible American paymasters
who took too much stuff on good faith going back to Vietnam days as well), of yet
again calling in American airpower to incinerate some off-hand village where a
sniper’s fire might be pinning a platoon down, of yet again blowing some kid’s
head off who had at the wrong moment popped his head up from the rocks (and
don’t forget the yet again after the field was cleared and the gruesome body was
discovered that child of about ten was listed as an “insurgent” KIA, in yet
again shades of Vietnam time). Nor of the fire fights in the night with real insurgent
forces who killed the guy next to you, wounded the guy of the other side, maybe
nicked you up too (Sergeant Jack would receive a Bronze Star in Iraq), of
coming under attack by raw Iraq recruits who panicked when an ambush went awry,
and of actually taking out a few bad guys, guys who were selling arms to the
insurgents provided by the American arms caches ripe for the taking guarded by
raw Iraqi recruits. Yeah all the confusions of war, all the modern confusions
of wars with unsure aims and unlikely allies. Yeah, too the little acts of
kindness when the unit brought in much needed water or other desperately needed
materials and in return teaching American GIs how to ride a camel, and how to
celebrate various unknown holidays with feasting and dancing. And at the end of
his tour Sergeant Jack yet again came
back to the States with his belief in his mission, in his country’s mission to
stamp out the virus of Islamic craziness (his term), in the virtues that had
been produced in by country and by his family intact. Came back with his
mission accomplished and his sense of duty filled and so left the Army when his
time was up despite many entreaties for him to stay in.
Then all hell broke loose. Some of details were sketchy as
John Dawson related the details to me since he had not been in touch with his
son for a couple of years at that point. The long and short of matter was that
Jack Dawson suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS) from his
experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. Part of the problem had to do with the two
close deployments which when Jack told the in-take worker at the Veterans
Administration Hospital in Bedford he dismissed out of hand. Told Jack that
many guys had done multiple tours, no sweat, so suck it up and get back into
the real world. Those comments had Jack flying out the door never to return.
Of course like a lot of military- related issues that I
have seen over years (including my own war horrors drowned in cocaine and
whatever else I could get my hands on at one point) the first signs of problems
came when Jack started to drink heavily, drank heavily into dawn, drank during
the day causing him to lose a job or two when his absenteeism became a problem
for his team manager at the computer firm that had taken him on as a veteran as
a favor to his father. Then came the drugs, at first a little marijuana to calm
the nerves, then some cocaine and then the “graduate program” once heroin
became the flavor of the month drug of choice and relatively inexpensive (strangely
although Jack had like lots of working-class kids, and not just them,
experimented with liquor in high school he had not smoked dope, even a puff,
until after the Army although in any given barrack or tent you could find about
twelve varieties for your smoking pleasure).
Then came the loss of menial jobs, the breaking up with his fiancé, Tracey,
a young woman whom he had met at Northeastern and who had waited for him
despite several other tempting offers while he was overseas-no Dear John
letters from her, who could not endure the slide downhill, bailed out, and
subsequently married one of those tempting offers, and the first flirting with drug
dealing to pay for the habit and keep body and soul together. That is when John
Dawson started to lose contact with Jack as he travelled around the country,
did “mule” work to feed his habit.
Then something happened, I was not able to get all the
details when I checked with my sources but some drug deal went south and Jack
disappeared from view. Apparently Jack and another guy he met in Los Angeles, a
guy named Markin, on his way downward had the bright idea that they would go
out on their own, would stop “muling” and become entrepreneurs on their own.
Probably be-bop drug-crazed (I knew that part too well) they decided to start
business with a shipment that were muling down in Sonora. Nobody told them that
that was not a wise move and Markin who actually had the stuff in a suitcase
was found in a dusty back street face down with two slugs in his heart. Jack,
as far as anybody knew though, got away with his life. That is the point that John
lost all contact with Jack.
As I pointed out earlier I had contacts with various
veterans organizations (not the VFW or American Legion stuff but veterans
self-help or political groups) and so John asked me to find Jack if I could.
Well eventually I did in an arroyo encampment down in Los
Angeles which was essentially like the old hobo jungles that I frequented back
in the 1970s when guys who couldn’t adjust after Vietnam set up an alternative
life under the bridges, “brothers under the bridges” to steal a title from one
of Bruce Springsteen’s songs (and which I used for several series I did on the
“lost” brothers). He was in pretty tough circumstances and refused my help,
said his help was a needle and a spoon and to be around guys who had been
there, seen what he had seen. I could not tell John Dawson that about his son
and so for a long time I did not tell him about his son’s fate out west. Said I
was still looking and hoping (which in a funny way I was but I knew from my
1970s experiences that the odds were not with me.)
Although I was in contact with John periodically there was
nothing further to report. Then back in 2011 when I was up in Maine for some
conference I got a call from John on my cellphone. They had found Jack Dawson’s
bruised and battered body along the railroad tracks near Westminster,
California. Cause of death a heart attack or an overdose, take your pick. I
told John it was probably a heart attack without the rider of the overdose. So
yes while we are today commemorating the 13th long bloody year of the failed
American expedition in Afghanistan (and apparently getting restarted in Iraq at
some level if not yet “boots on the ground”) let’s remember Private Jack
Dawson’s private war.
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