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,
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. 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 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, 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” 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. 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 Carlsbad, California (place
I knew there were 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 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.
