Hate, Logic, and Deployments

“How hard or easy was it for you to cultivate the hate needed to fight the enemy during war?”

For me, “cultivating hate” was never an issue on my deployments.

I hated the heat. One fine Iraqi summer day back in 2010, I took a digital thermometer on top of one of the helicopters during pre-flight and was astonished to see it top at 136̊ F. During our initial hand-off in August 2006, the number of missions a crewchief and medic performed could be directly measured by the salt stains on their flight suits. As a measure of comfort, we would freeze those nasty bottles of chlorine-flavored water and grab them on our way out after the “medevacmedevacmedevac!” call; they would be completely thawed and somewhat cool by the end of most missions.

I hated some of my co-workers. I started smoking before we even left Kuwait with the explanation that I needed to do something with my hands other than strangle one or two problem children. I continued smoking as a means to maintain whatever calm I could (2006-07 was a sporting time to be flying in Iraq, with around 22 U.S. helicopters crashing for various reasons); at times, it seemed as if one guy was determined to either kill me through sheer irritation or utter incompetence.

I hated being gone. I married my first wife shortly before my 2004-05 deployment to Afghanistan. While that one was the (relatively) easiest of the three, the following deployments and the extensive training that took up much of the time in between proved to be much harder and strained our marriage past its breaking point. I missed my son’s first words, first steps… I wasn’t available to help manage the emergencies which only seem to occur during deployments… and, during leave on my last deployment, I was beginning to become resentful that I kept going away, but others – both civilian and military – stayed home. While it was my choice to serve, I became embittered that there were so many folks willingly detached from anything beyond their immediate surroundings.

However…

My feelings towards the people who saw fit to fight us?

I never really hated them… in fact, I never really gave people and their ideology much serious thought while I flew in both countries.

One of the things I miss is the binary thinking that goes on during missions: “threat” or “no threat.” The scenery goes by pretty quickly, and one of our jobs was to provide “airspace surveillance” – looking for dangers to our aircraft or the others in our formation. Life becomes simplified in those times; I would venture to say that that… rush… or context of immediacy and experience is what many other vets who ventured past the boundaries of the bases truly understand and can never fully recapture in later years. In those times, there isn’t a “cultivation of hate” as much as a focus on the here, now, next checkpoint, and actions on the objective/landing zone/CSH (combat support hospital) helipad.

For those events where a UH-60 was lost due to ground fire? Again, for me it wasn’t a hatred towards people. Maybe a group, if they were positively identified (they usually weren’t), but my own reaction to those incidents were just a sadness for the losses of the crews, the friends gone, and a resolve for that situation to not be replicated. There was no desire for revenge, just a processing of information and whatever modifications in my own actions were necessary. Logic is often a wonderful component of self-preservation.

To this day, I hate the idea of ideology which compels man to be inhuman to “others” and this is a big part of my issue with the original question. Warfare has naturally evolved, and the tactics and technology often don’t find us fighting a person in a direct manner where hate can be applied to a person or formation on a battlefield. So, it’s hard to hate an enemy as an individual; rather, it is more of an emotion to the motivations and machinations which brought both sides together to one moment in time.

It was never a matter of cultivating any emotion; it was just assuming a mindset necessary to complete the mission safely… so we could go back to sweating, griping about “that guy” in the unit, and missing home.