Veterans of older wars often returned to the places they fought. With Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s different.
In 1985, writers and veterans of the Vietnam War gathered for a literary conference hosted by the Asia Society in New York City. It proved a contentious affair, as scribes committed to the hard truths of their combat experiences went after Tim O’Brien and other fiction writers for bending reality into something else. Five years before the publication of The Things They Carried, O’Brien laid out his case for more imagination in war stories.
“I think that 200 years, 700 years, a thousand years from now,” he said at the end of a panel, “when Vietnam is filled with condominiums and we’re all going there to vacation on the beautiful beaches, the experience of Vietnam — all the facts — will be gone. Who knows, a thousand years from now the facts will disappear — bit by bit by bit — and all that we’ll be left with are stories. To me, it doesn’t really matter if they’re true stories.”
Hot damn! That’s both a snappy comeback and an artistic manifesto if I’ve ever seen one. Beyond O’Brien’s prophetic vision, though, I was struck by his description of a future Vietnam he and his cohorts might vacation to. That must’ve seemed a fanciful notion during peak Reagan America. At the same conference two years later, Jim Webb, Secretary of the Navy, gave an impassioned speech bemoaning the dangers of Soviet access to the Pacific’s warm-water ports via Vietnam — a geopolitical prediction that did not age as well as O’Brien’s literary one.
Less than a decade later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Vietnam’s government went through its “Renovation,” trade opened up between Vietnam and Uncle Sam. American tourists followed, including veterans, middle-aged now, some with families in tow, returning to see what had become of the place that took their youth and their friends. The beachfront condominiums O’Brien had dreamed about became reality.
Revisiting one’s old war region is a tradition of sorts, not limited to the Vietnam generation. Vets like Hemingway became expatriates and stayed in Europe after World War I. Returning to France and the former Pacific theater was an international staple for the Greatest Generation.
When I was growing up, my best friend’s father had two framed photographs propped side-by-side on his office desk — one of him as a young soldier, standing against a drab sky somewhere on the Korean peninsula in the fifties, and another showing him walking the DMZ in the early nineties, part of a visiting political delegation.
Some things change, some don’t. And yet, here in 2020, the idea of one day returning to Afghanistan or Iraq for something between pleasure and nostalgia seems as impossible as O’Brien’s vision must’ve sounded in 1985. Open war still rages in the former, while sectarian conflict continues to pop off in the latter. As for American veterans of the more recent Syrian intervention, forget about it — returns require hotels, not rubble. Much of eastern Syria is still years away from even the possibility of economic recovery like that.
“I’d love to go back to the Korengal someday,” my friend Scott Turner told me, referring to the infamous valley in eastern Afghanistan that’s known for heavy conflict nearly every spring, what the locals call “fighting season.” “It’s legit beautiful there. But come on — what would that even look like? We book through Taliban Travel Agency? Stay at five-star Mujahideen Huts?”
Most of my fellow Iraq veterans I’ve spoken with feel similarly about a potential return. With the notable exception of the Kurdistan region in the north, there’s not much affinity for the place we fought for and fought with and fought against. Recently I had beers with my gruff-voiced friend Matthew Mellina, who was stationed to the same part of central-west Iraq I was, two years apart. “Shit, man,” he said. “Part of my mind’s still over there, every night. Why would I need to walk that dirt again, too?”
Some Iraq veterans have found their way back to the country — as journalists. Nate Rawlings returned to Iraq in 2010 for Time. Roy Scranton returned in 2014 for Rolling Stone. Elliot Ackerman did the same for Esquire in 2017. And Phil Klay only recently returned from a devastated Mosul still recovering from the fight against ISIS. The parts of the country vary in these stories, as do the authors’ intents and conclusions. But something they all share is a strange, perplexed relationship between the Iraq of their memories and the Iraq of their return. And to a man they all went back alone, on a job, searching for clarity but finding only more dark uncertainty.
Resolution, let alone peace, seems as distant for Iraq as ever. Bearing witness to that, and chronicling it, is important — even if it reminds its chroniclers how futile it all can be.
When I started drafting this column, I thought I’d end with some hazy optimistic shit suggesting that someday, maybe, I’ll be able to take my wife and son and golden retriever to the corner of Babylon I gave my youth to, and lost friends in.
But as I thought about my friends’ comments, and went back to the articles and essays of return, I realized that I want to do anything but. My own professional life may point me in the direction of Iraq someday, and for that, I’d consider going. But placing my combat memories and experiences in a mental box and leaving them there is exactly what I needed to do to find a life afterward.
Opening up all that for something as cheap and easy as nostalgia just wouldn’t be worth it.
Matt Gallagher is a U.S. Army veteran and the author of three books, including “Empire City,” newly published by Atria/Simon & Schuster.
**Some 20+ years ago (as of this writing), Penthouse took a different angle on the Vietnam War and its veterans. You might that worth a look too.
