An Iraq Veteran’s Experience With Chemical Weapons

By
Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Voices

We found chemical weapons my first week in Iraq.

At Contingency Operating Base Speicher, I was a lieutenant working in the operations department for an explosive ordnance disposal battalion. We were responsible for the entire northern sector of the country, about 50,000 square kilometers (or roughly 19,300 square miles) of ground touching the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian borders.

The information came to me in an otherwise benign email, alongside the dozens of field reports that hit my inbox every hour. After just a couple of days as the new guy on the team, the reports showing the aftermath of vehicles and soldiers torn apart by explosives started feeling routine. I’d been expecting them.

But this one showed something I didn’t see coming: M110 shells, which are American-designed 155-millimeter artillery projectiles. These had tested positive for sulfur mustard, a blister agent.

“Chem rounds.”

I looked away from my screen, and not 10 feet away from me was Chuck, an Army E.O.D. technician who’d already served tours in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He was the kind of noncommissioned officer every lieutenant hopes for: a smart, talented young soldier who trained you up and made you better. I was already relying on Chuck for everything.

Here, I turned to him in disbelief.

I told him that the team had found chem M110’s and that the shells had tested positive for mustard.

He was unimpressed.

I persisted. As far as I knew, we’d just made the first “WMD find” of the war.

But it turned out there was a lot I didn’t know.

He cut right to the chase.

Chuck turned to me and peered over the eyeglasses low on his nose. He looked at me for a while without blinking.

“LT, let me let you in on something,” he said. “We find three or four of those things a week up north here. Everybody knows about them. And nobody cares.”

I was stunned. “You got to be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

As good noncommissioned officers do, Chuck got me up to speed quickly but also didn’t hesitate to give me swift reality checks when needed. This was one of those times.

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Helping Veterans Find Their Place, This Time on Campus

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As bow-tied waiters cleared plates and emptied coffee cups inside a plush meeting room at the Yale Club in Midtown Manhattan earlier this month, about 30 veterans from nearby community colleges listened to representatives from Yale, Dartmouth, Wesleyan and Vassar describe their veterans programs and answer questions about academics, financial aid and housing.

Rob Cuthbert, an enlisted Army veteran and member of the fiduciary board of the Yale Veterans Association who helped to organize the event, said the session was an attempt to address a phenomenon he referred to as an “exigent crisis”: the small numbers of veterans attending elite four-year colleges and universities.

“Numbers from the Department of Labor suggest that there are at least 1.4 million veterans without bachelor’s degrees,” Mr. Cuthbert said in a phone interview. “A bachelor’s degree is a key tool for socioeconomic mobility in today’s economy. Enlisted veterans should not doubt that there are clear pathways to Ivy League and peer schools.”

According to school administrators, there was one undergraduate veteran attending Princeton during the 2013-14 academic year, out of 5,244 undergraduates. Harvard had four among its roughly 6,700 undergraduates. Brown had 11 out of 6,182. Dartmouth, whose former president, James Wright, is an enlisted Marine Corps veteran who encourages veterans to continue their education during his visits to military hospitals, had 18 of 4,276.

Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs also shows that less than one half of one percent of the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill money paid since 2009 has gone to individuals attending Ivy League schools. Of that relatively small amount, an even smaller portion went to enlisted veterans attending undergraduate programs at those colleges. The remainder went to dependents of service members, officers or enlisted veterans attending graduate programs.

In response to those numbers, organizations like the Posse Foundation have turned their attention to bringing more veterans to the nation’s colleges. The foundation was started in 1989 to help underrepresented students to enter top-tier schools. Two years ago, Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar College, began working with the group to apply their model — which focuses on helping exceptional community college students gain admission to elite four-year colleges — to veterans.

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A Sister, and Brother, in Arms

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Voices

Just before Sept. 11, 2001, my teenage brother Mike, fresh from Air Force training, pressed something small into my palm: two pin-backings stubbed on a curled shape in dusky silver. Jump wings.

“If you keep them safe, I’ll always be safe,” he said.

My brothers and I had always tried to protect each other. Chris, the younger, was calm, but Mike was rambunctious. When I was 4 and they were toddlers, I would sneak into their room past midnight to ensure they still occupied their dual cribs. I would poke a finger through the crib slats, slide up their eyelids, and check their breathing as they slept. Safe in their company, I would curl up on the floor for a minute, then pad back to my pink-swathed bed. But by elementary school, our parents had divorced, and anger ran through our thin walls.

When I was 14, our stepfather and Mike, 12, got in a fight over pajamas. Too cowardly to burst in, I stayed in bed and turned up my Walkman. Mike sobbed himself to sleep with a nosebleed that soaked his mattress. He had misbehaved, but my crime felt worse — I had let him thrash alone. As the years passed, conflicts with our stepfather prompted police cruiser lights on our street. When I finished high school, Mike’s card to me read, “…Stay another year? Please?” I should have ensured my brothers grew up strong. Instead I fled.

At 18, I paid for college with a Marine Corps R.O.T.C. scholarship; the military’s rules seemed enlightened next to the ones back home. Mike later barreled into the same Boston unit as an Air Force cadet. He tagged along on field exercises with us upperclassmen, easily completing grueling hikes and rappelling down university buildings. My senior year, the Twin Towers fell, and I knew at some point I would deploy. The following June, Mike and Chris pinned gold lieutenant bars on my shoulders.

Teresa Fazio receiving her Marine Corps commission in 2002, with her two brothers, Chris on the left and Mike on the right.   Courtesy of Teresa Fazio

Two years later, on an Iraqi base, I nervously strapped myself into an androgynous Kevlar jacket. Tromping around our gravel-strewn compound, I doled out candy and phone cards while waiting for mortars to fall. We plodded through our days, trusting in grace that wherever we stepped was safe. Late at night, when the desert heat lifted, I taught my Marines martial arts. As we punched foam mats and dragged each other through the sand, I wondered how my fist would feel against my stepfather’s face, how much pressure my forearm required to choke his carotid artery. But I could not predict the techniques my sparring partners threw; I could only try to counter them. And my rage did not help me lead.

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Writing as a Soldier and a Civilian

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It is 12 a.m. in the land of the midnight sun. Seventy-two hours until deployment. I should be at home with my wife, Jen, and 6-month-old son or unpacking the house we bought recently. Instead, I’m on my bike riding home from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. A rowdy group rides down another trail that merges with mine, cycling in a pack in front of me. They laugh, pull beers from messenger bags, see me and offer me one. The exchange is tour-worthy. An anonymous rider pulls out a cold Olympia and reaches toward me. His eyes remain on the trail ahead, as do mine. I extend a blind left hand, close the gap, find the front of the can. For a moment we are connected by cheap beer. Then he lets go and it is all mine. I toast the rowdies and ride ahead.

Voices

***

On Jan. 13, my wife’s water broke, just as I put the final touches on my application to the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. While I drove, frenzied, across town for a post office, she held out through rising contractions. Finnegan Shichiro Komatsu made his entry that night, and a month later a letter came in the mail. I was in, accepted into the creative nonfiction program.

Matt Komatsu and his son, Finn.  Megan Marlene Photography

The university program is low residency: a correspondence course for all but two weeks every summer. During the residency, students from all over the globe — and from three genres (fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry) — converged on the Anchorage campus. For two weeks, it was 12 hours a day of writing: poetry, fiction, readings, lectures, manuscript workshops. Immersed in an unfamiliar world, windows to new material opened hourly.

Because the program required so little time on campus, I did not have to quit my job to pursue the degree. The course work for my first semester was online. When it was time for the residency, I took leave, shed my uniform, pulled on some civvies and rode my bike to class.

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Death, Recovery and Hope at a Hospital During Drawdown

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Maj. Jason Pasley, left, and Lt. Col. Jason Williams operated on a wounded man’s arm at Craig Joint Theater Hospital. Maj. Brandon Lingle
Voices

These days most NATO forces in Afghanistan rarely, if ever, leave the secured perimeters of their bases. While safer, life on base produces a complicated proximity to the realities of war — we’re both close and far away. At Bagram Airfield north of Kabul, the line between life and death is often clearest in the largest American hospital in the country, Craig Joint Theater Hospital.

The Air Force-led hospital’s primary mission is to treat injured or ill NATO personnel, and despite decreased volume of battle injuries due to the drawdown of troops, the facility remains busy. But now, it’s mostly a steady flow of Afghan trauma and humanitarian patients punctuated by sporadic coalition casualties, such as the wounded from the attack that killed Army Maj. Gen. Harold Greene in August.

Sometimes the contrast between hope and despair, between smooth recoveries and catastrophic battle injuries, comes into focus within minutes.

July 22 was supposed to be the last day in Afghanistan for Air Force Lt. Col. Jason Williams, and he wanted an easy morning to pack, tell friends goodbye and perform a final check-up on a special patient. But a suicide bomber in Kabul changed those plans. Instead, the 38-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon was in an operating room scrambling to save six gravely injured Nepalese security contractors.

More than a dozen doctors, nurses and technicians attended to one man who spent five hours in surgery. Maj. Jon Forbes, a neurosurgeon, worked on a severe brain injury while Colonel Williams and a trauma surgeon, Maj. Jason Pasley, tried to save the man’s arm.

“We’re on our last unit of B. I’m going to activate the walking blood bank,” the anesthesiologist, Maj. Scott Jensen, said as he set a cooler with the last of the hospital’s B-positive next to a pile of empty blood bags.

“Jon, do you think this guy’s survivable?” asked Major Pasley while suturing a hole in the man’s radial artery.

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Williams Opposed War, but Supported the Troops

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Robin Williams greeted troops at a December 2004 U.S.O. stop in Baghdad. Sgt. Dan Purcell/U.S. Army, via Associated Press

Robin Williams opposed the war in Iraq. His many comedic riffs that punctured the rationale for the 2003 invasion, and the president who ordered it, are evidence enough.

Yet his affection for the warriors sent to carry out the nation’s grim and bloody business in Southwest Asia was on display each time he left home and family at Christmas to go overseas and join the U.S.O. holiday tours for the troops.

His successes on TV and on stage, in film and in stand-up clubs, have been amply noted following his death on Monday. But his audiences, especially among the troops, never knew how hard, really hard, Mr. Williams worked at his craft.

I observed his comedic diligence, genius and humanity up close during two of his intense, raucous U.S.O. tours of Iraq and Afghanistan; in 2004 and again in 2010. (In all, he made four holiday barnstorming visits to the wars.)
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From Hero to Hateful: Recalling an Afghan Soldier’s Descent

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Voices

The recent green on blue attack that claimed the life of Gen. Harold J. Greene, the deputy commander for the Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan, has, for good reason, caused a fury of questions in the media about these attacks and what they meant. Who are the Afghans that carry them out? Why do they seem to suddenly turn on the Americans that have been fighting with them for years and years, struggling to help Afghanistan build something from the ruins of three decades of war. The answers, it seems, are complex, but also nuanced. And the questions reminded me of the worst case of post-traumatic stress syndrome that I’ve ever seen.

He called himself Castro. He was a slight Afghan man with fine features, wide eyes half-hidden behind a chronic furrow, and black hair always swept back for how often he would sit with his head in his hands.

One of his first firefights, in 2003, was an ambush that cost two American lives. It happened in a distant valley in eastern Afghanistan, a chance encounter at dark in a place without the slightest significance to American interests before, and now significant only for the families of men killed there. All of it is a metaphor for how CIA officers often die.

The sole remaining American – we’ll call him John – charged up the mountain, trying to break the ambush at the flank. The Afghans with him tried to keep pace, but much popular mythology to the contrary, not all Afghans have evolved with genes uniquely selected for fighting and climbing steep hills. Between the valley floor and the ridge, they all dropped, from exhaustion or fire. All but one: Castro. He and John reached the top, taking fire from both sides. Shooting at the row of Taliban militants to his front, John could not turn to return fire coming at his back. Castro, close behind, saved his life.

Years later, John did not remember the story quite the same way. But distinguishing the details of one firefight out of one thousand can be hard. What was interesting was that this was the story Castro chose to tell over and over: that he was there when two Americans died, he was there when the third charged up the mountain.

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A Letter to the President, and a Well-Timed Response

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In June, a Marine Corps veteran named David Nelson wrote a letter to President Obama expressing concern that the rapid advances of Islamist militants in northern Iraq might prompt the United States to send troops back to bolster the shaky government in Baghdad. In his letter, Mr. Nelson, who was a judge advocate during the Vietnam War, wondered whether the Obama administration might use the successes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, much the way President Lyndon B. Johnson used confrontations between North Vietnamese torpedo boats and an American destroyer in August 1964 to justify expanded military action in Vietnam.

The 50th anniversary of the 1964 episode, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, came and went. Then, on Thursday, Mr. Nelson, now a lawyer in Houston, received an email from the president. In it, Mr. Obama said, “I want to be clear: American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq.” But he added that the United States was “gathering more information about potential targets associated with ISIS, and, in consultation with Congress and leaders in Iraq and the region, we will be prepared to take targeted and precise military action if the situation requires it.”

The White House declined to comment on the exchange but did not dispute the authenticity of the president’s email.

Hours after Mr. Nelson received that message, Mr. Obama announced that he had authorized limited airstrikes against Islamist militants in Iraq. Several hours after that, Navy F-18 fighters dropped bombs on an ISIS target near Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region.

Below are Mr. Nelson’s letter to the president and the president’s response.

Mr. President,

The old saying is that “history repeats itself.” But in the current Iraq situation I implore you NOT to let the history of our nation 50 years ago repeat itself.

In early August, 1964, an incident occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin that led to Congress passing the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Within a few months thousands of U.S. troops were sent into Vietnam even though President Johnson, Senator Richard Russell, and others never did see light at the end of the tunnel.

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Dean Baquet, Times Executive Editor, on the Word ‘Torture’

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Over the past few months, reporters and editors of The Times have debated a subject that has come up regularly ever since the world learned of the C.I.A.’s brutal questioning of terrorism suspects: whether to call the practices torture.

When the first revelations emerged a decade ago, the situation was murky. The details about what the Central Intelligence Agency did in its interrogation rooms were vague. The word “torture” had a specialized legal meaning as well as a plain-English one. While the methods set off a national debate, the Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of “torture.” The Times described what we knew of the program but avoided a label that was still in dispute, instead using terms like harsh or brutal interrogation methods. Read more…

The ‘Battle Rhythm’ of Helping to Build a Democracy

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KABUL, Afghanistan – Here come the helicopters again. Blackhawks, flying out of the Kabul night, the gunner hanging out the side, scanning the city from behind the sights of an M-240B automatic rifle. The blades thunder their rhythm throughout the compound, too loud to talk over. They land quickly, spill out their passengers and a few bags, and leave. This isn’t the place to linger.

The last Blackhawk landed so close it blew open the windows and scattered papers across our office floor. I’m on the ground, at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a relatively safe NATO compound in central Kabul, along with more than 2,000 people from 48 coalition countries.

Tonight, the Macedonians are playing a serious game of soccer at a small court surrounded by a chain-link fence. On my walk around the small compound, I see Afghans, Britons, Dutch, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Swedes, Poles, Romanians, Turks, and a few whose country I can’t recognize; troops from the United States Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force; and civilians. Almost all are armed. My friend said that this place was like the Epcot Center, with guns.

I pass a white-haired lady wearing a conservative blue dress who could be described only as grandmotherly, if it weren’t for the 9-millimeter Beretta strapped to her hip. Every Sunday, I sing and play acoustic guitar at the base chapel. I’m learning from my musical betters. My tendency is to rush a song. If I don’t position the strap just right, my 9-millimeter handgun bangs against my guitar as I play. The rest of the congregation, except for the chaplain and a few civilians, is also armed.

Lt. Col. James Bishop in Kabul. TSgt. David Zheng.

Our “Battle Rhythm,” meaning the meeting schedule and work shift, is long. We work seven days a week, and 12 hours a day, or more, with two glorious exceptions: On Friday and Saturday mornings, we get to come in at noon. I average about 84 hours a week; others average more. Days blur, so it hardly matters whether today is Tuesday or Saturday. People said you would get used to working seven days a week. I haven’t. The pace does violence to the ancient rhythm of work and rest: Six days shalt thou labor, the Lord told Moses.

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In Ukraine, Spent Cartridges Offer Clues to Violence Fueled by Soviet Surplus

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An expended rifle cartridge removed from bloody puddle, before, left, and after cleaning, which showed that it had been manufactured in Ulyanovsk, the city of Lenin’s birth, in 1982. C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

With its independence in 1991, Ukraine inherited a huge and unneeded stockpile of arms and ordnance from its former Soviet masters. In the years since, the country’s businessmen, security services and cargo carriers, operating in an environment plagued by corruption, have repeatedly been accused of trafficking the surplus in black-market arms deals to Africa and the Middle East. So it was little surprise that this year, after fighting broke out, that Ukraine felt the sting of what had been its own shadowy trade. Exactly the sort of weapons it has long exported found bloody use on Ukrainian soil.

One result so far has been violence in eastern Ukraine that has claimed hundreds of lives and destroyed homes and infrastructure in areas that had not seen combat since World War II. The prevalence of Soviet-era military equipment used in the rebellion and crackdown was obvious from the semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles seen at rebel checkpoints to the glimpses of shoulder-fired, heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, or Manpads, that were occasionally carried by rebels and apparently used to down several Ukrainian military aircraft, including one strike that killed more Ukrainian soldiers than any other incident in the war. A legacy of weapons from the Soviet period, the SA-11, or Buk surface-to-air missile, was also suspected in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, though the precise origins of that particular missile and the launch vehicle used in that attack are as yet unclear.

Today, At War will look at an element of the conflict that standard images or field reporting does not readily capture, because the details are too small to be seen at a glance, or cannot be viewed at all without magnification: the origins of small-arms ammunition.

Understanding the origins of small-arms ammunition, which usually attracts less attention than big-ticket or high-tech weapons, is important, because in most conflicts it is a primary fuel for organized violence, and accounts for a large share of the casualties and the disruption caused by armed parties. This was certainly the case in eastern Ukraine, where the war began as rebels seized territory with common and relatively simple rifles and other light weapons. This war, like many, gained velocity with small arms, and as the violence from small arms escalated, it grew into a conflict that claimed a civilian passenger jet and the lives of 298 people passing through overhead.

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Returning to Service, and Iraq, With Blackwater

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Matt Pelak in Iraq in 2008. Jon Willoughby

“Selfless service.” Words that I’ve lived by for most of my life. Words that my brother and sister military veterans know all too well and continue to live by whether in or out of uniform.

In the two years that I worked at Blackwater, I followed this same guiding principle, along with the other contractors I knew, regardless of the mission. Though the daily activities of a State Department contractor are rarely glamorous and are as uneventful as most days on a military deployment, we accomplished our work with much the same commitment that was instilled in us while in the military. Often, those missions involved countless hours in convoys to or from meetings, securing venues while American officials conducted high-level meetings with local authorities, or providing medical evacuations in our helicopters.

Before joining Blackwater, I had found myself back home after a deployment to Iraq and, like many veterans, feeling lost and working a job with friends and co-workers who no longer understood me. After a few months of partying and attempting to readjust to civilian life, my mind wandered and yearned for the same sense of mission I had while on deployment. The desire to serve alongside my brothers in arms again, as well as to have the security of a rifle within arm’s reach, was strong. I wanted to be back in Iraq with soldiers.

I tried to get on another deployment with the Army but nothing was available at the time, so when an opportunity with Blackwater presented itself, I accepted the job, completed mountains of paperwork and waited for a date to attend the qualification course at the company’s training compound in Moyock, N.C.

Dozens of questions flooded my mind: Who would I be working with? How hard would the instructors be? What should I wear? The list goes on. Only the right amount of tactical-casual clothing would make the cut with the cool kids at Blackwater, and no one wants to make a bad impression on the first day of school. One thing was for certain, my NPR T-shirt would not be very popular there.

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‘The Enemy,’ Through the Eyes of a Child

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It was dark. Iraq. The middle of the night. The height of the insurgency. The explosion shook our insides. I ran up to my friend and looked at what was left of his body. His limbs were blown off. His eyes were still open but he stared off into nothingness. He gasped and choked as his body was still trying to breathe. I did everything I could to save him, but he still died in my arms.

This is what I brought home from the war with me, and it almost killed me. Or, I should say: This, and many similar incidents like this from my deployment, is why I almost killed myself when I returned home.

I was just a boy when I joined my country’s military. Eighteen years old. I was untested and unproven and I thought that joining a Special Operations unit and fighting in a war was the only way to prove my love of country, and my self-worth. But I learned an extremely hard and valuable lesson: War is not glorious. There are no monologues. There are no curtain calls where everyone joins hands on stage and bows to the audience at the end.

It is messy. It is violent. It makes you hate your enemy, even long after the war is over. It brings out the worst in people.

It brings out the worst in you.

Or at least, so I once believed. For the last six years, I felt an honor and pride in the hardships I had faced. But I also felt a hate and mistrust for the Iraqi people I had fought, and tried to protect. And I still harbored those feelings right up until one recent morning. Right up until brunch time, when my son’s kindergarten class decided to have a “Teddy Bear Picnic.” An event that would teach me a sobering and humbling life lesson.

Gerardo Mena and his son. Courtesy of Gerardo Mena

I was busy unrolling and perfectly placing my son’s Spider-Man blanket that we made from a No-Sew kit last year, when I saw them preparing their own blanket a few feet from us. Arabs. I could feel my stomach muscles clench as that initial wave of hate began crashing itself against my insides. That uncontrollable spider sense that lingered from the war. The one I couldn’t seem to turn off. The one that kept me safe, vigilant and hateful.

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Signs of an Afghan Crisis, There on Election Day in June

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KABUL, Afghanistan — With the Afghan election commission releasing preliminary results that seemed too inflated to be trusted, the stage is set for even more conflict over the political process here.

But the signs of trouble could be seen even on the day of the presidential runoff vote, on June 14. Almost immediately, accusations of fraud, intimidation and even violence started pouring in like the rain that fell on the initial April 5 election.

The teams of Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister who led the first round with 45 percent of the vote, and Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister who trailed with 31.6 percent of the ballots, have both been accused of the kinds of fraud many Afghans said would dissuade them from future voting.

One scene from Lycée Zarghuna, the Kabul high school where l voted in both rounds, remains perhaps the most telling about shifting perceptions in the second round.

In the final minutes of the 2014 election cycle, a handful of bored female election workers raised points that both echoed the sentiment of a seemingly fatigued electorate and foreshadowed the actions of the leading candidates in the days to come.

I walked into the empty room just minutes before polls were set to close at 4 p.m. Before I could ask how many people had voted that day, the young girl who registered incoming voters said: “68.”

Instinctively I wrote it in my green notebook, but just as I was about to turn around to go to the next room, I stopped and said: “Only 60-something since 7 a.m.?”

“Yes, what’s wrong with that? We are happy that 68 people invested in their nation’s future despite this morning’s attacks,” an older woman in a brown chador said, referring to the 50 civilians who had been killed throughout the country that day.

“Still, only 68 in nine hours. How many voted last time?” I asked.

“Last time we couldn’t catch our breath, it was that busy. Every time we turned our heads there was another line waiting,” the young girl said as she fidgeted with her pen the way you do when bored in class.

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Officer ‘Separations’ Break More Than Years of Service

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How does it feel when the country for which you’ve lost youth, relationships and health wants to get rid of you? It feels like betrayal. If the Army is our family, then this is divorce.

The week of June 22 was a hard one for Army captains. After announcing in early December that about 20 percent of captains commissioned in 2006, 2007 and 2008 would receive pink slips this spring, the cuts were finally handed down starting June 23. Those who were chosen for the ax (or, as Army officials more tactfully call it, separation) were given the bad news in a meeting with a senior officer. Everyone else waited nervously to see whether they would be next.

The Army isn’t the only service enduring reductions. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have announced “force shaping,” too. While officers face separation boards or are denied promotions — and, therefore, required to exit — even more enlisted service members are being downsized. Instead of being asked to leave after being reviewed, however, they are simply not permitted to re-enlist, an action that had been all but guaranteed when the wars were raging. While the Army stands at about 520,000 soldiers today, the Pentagon’s 2015 budget proposal calls for it to shrink by almost 60,000 by 2017.

About 1,100 Army captains in June heard “Thank you for your service. You have until April 1 to exit the Army.” About 500 Army majors were to get the same news this week. My husband escaped the reduction — this time. Many of my friends’ husbands and, by extension, my friends themselves, were not so lucky. After giving between seven and as many as 17 years of service, these officers and their families are being ordered to leave. Many of them don’t have a backup career plan. When they joined the Army they, like my husband and me, planned to stay 20 years or more.

They have watched buddies die, missed anniversaries, first steps and birthdays. And now, just like that, it is all over.

For the entirety of our Army service the enemy has been “over there,” far away in Afghanistan or Iraq. We grew comfortable with the danger of deployments, reassuring ourselves that in a down economy where factory-working or cubicle-dwelling civilian friends faced layoffs, we had job security. With a steady paycheck on the 1st and 15th of the month, military service felt safe compared to the nightmare of unemployment. But it doesn’t anymore.

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