From The New Brothers Under The Bridge Series-The Iraq And Afghan War Brothers- Private Jack Dawson’s Private War

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman:

A while back, maybe a couple of years ago now, I did a retrospective series of sketches about guys, about war veterans, Vietnam War veterans that I had started in the late 1970s and did not get a chance to complete since the publication that I was writing them for out in California, the East Bay Eye, like a lot of alternative media operations folded up as the 1960s went into a deep ebb tide and the audience went back to the professions, academia, and bourgeois politics. Those sketches centered on some groups of returning veterans who could not cope with the “real” world after Vietnam and build themselves an alternate “community” mostly down in Southern California and who by life’s circumstances got called the “brothers under the bridge.” Let me reproduce my motivation in part for that series because now for different reasons I am finding out stories about guys from the recent Iraq and Afghan occupations that also can’t cope with the “real” world and are forming, well, I don’t know exactly what they are forming but I damn well know it feels a lot like “brothers under the bridges.”:

“In the first installment of this series of sketches [Brothers Under The Bridge] space provided courtesy of my old 1960s yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy for fellow veterans since I had been in the military, grudgingly, during the Vietnam War period although not in combat were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and another down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who I had worked with after my own military service was over knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.

Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or got caught up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his whole blessed life pointed the other way…”

Now, after having recently as a favor to an old high school classmate tried to find his son, Jack, who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and upon discharge got caught up in some stuff he could not handle, another generation of soldiers needs to be heard, need their stories told. In the old series I noted that I liked to finish up these introductions by placing the sketches under a particular sign; no question Jack Dawson’s sign is Private Jack Dawson’s Private War:

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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, was proud of his service and also knew that I had done my military service grudgingly a little later period of that war 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 the few occasions I passed through the old hometown or at a reunion, would argue about those Vietnam times and about then current American military policy. When 9/11 in 2001 happened and the subsequent occupation of Afghanistan and then later with the second Iraq war, the “shock and awe” war, both of which I opposed we 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 also 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 through a mutual friend that I was still in contact with to see if I could through my extensive veterans’ 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 will detail 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 asked 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 deserved to be taught a lesson, an American lesson(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 angry (everybody called him Jack to distinguish between him and his father John) 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 had that stuff and 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 and enlisted in the United States Army.  (That Co-op is 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 real work to make ends meet. Jack was a prime example of that for this generation.) 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 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 evacuations 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 kinds of 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 out 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 were 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 be 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 was working both sides, the Taliban who protected his poppy fields in exchange for tribute and the Americans for arms to protect his fields that he then sold to whoever had the money). 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 fields 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 an 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 the details were sketchy as John Dawson related the story 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 the 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. Jack with not an inch of anti-war sentiment in him had seen things, had done some things in both occupations (my word not his, his was “engagement” like some prissy white-laced pure bride rather than cutthroat bastards the American government was lavishing with endless money and materials) that made him also instinctively hate the very word war whatever his politics. Those comments by that jackass in-take worker had Jack flying out the door never to return.

 

Of course like a lot of military- related issues, guys who were/are gung-ho, guys who have seen things and done things that would haunt them later when they got back to the “real world,” that I have seen over years (including my own 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 at some lonely closing up barroom, 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 firms 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 Stateside or in Iraq or Afghanistan you could find about twelve varieties for your smoking pleasure).  Then came the loss of menial jobs (day labor, pearl-diver, stuff like that), 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, that kind of girl- who could not endure the slide downhill, bailed out, also that kind of girl,  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 aimlessly around the country, did “mule” work to feed his habit.

 

Then something happened, happened out on the West Coast or finished up there, I was not able to get all the details when I checked with my sources (very reliable on the drug scene) but some drug deal went south and Jack disappeared from view. Apparently Jack and another guy he met in Los Angeles, a guy, an Iraq veteran named Markham, also on his own downward slide had the bright idea that they would go out on their own, would stop “muling” for some rich boy dealer up in Frisco that had been working for in the Mexican triangle 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 Markham who actually had the stuff in a suitcase was found in a dusty back street face down with two slugs in his heart. The Mexican police never went further than that in their investigation, wrote the thing off as a busted drug deal and forgot about it when nobody came to claim Markham’s body. 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 who were willing to go down and dirty with the brothers) and so John asked me to find Jack if I could. Well eventually I did find him 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. Refused too the offer of money to get back home that his father had sent me in case I found Jack.  I could not tell John Dawson that about his son, the son he was so proud of who went off to war and who had lost his moorings, 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 to find him (which in a funny way I was but I knew from my 1970s experiences that the odds were not with me.) I did eventually tell Joh I had made contact but that Jack had told me that he would be in touch when he had worked things out in his head.

 

Although I was in contact with John periodically after that last discussion 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 Carlsbad, California (a place I knew had plenty of “brothers under the bridge” after finishing up their Marine Corps duties at Camp Pendleton up the road in Oceanside). Cause of death a heart attack or an overdose, take your pick. I told John it was probably a heart attack, probably from the tough life he was living, without the rider of the overdose. (How do you tell a father his son was a stone-cold junkie.)  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.