The daily work of war can play tricks on the brain
Stories and art help us make sense of the world.
Our minds catch on the patterns and echoes. They connect and grow in our imaginations. Sometimes we find flashes of understanding, but more often we’re left only with more questions or a sense of awe.
In a 700-word column, there’s little room to get into the connections and scraps of conversation that linger in a writer’s brain after the story appears. Such is the case with my recent column about Judge Erica Dominguez and Bexar County’s misdemeanor Veterans Treatment Court.
The story was about the new judge and her veteran-focused specialty court, but something she said, which didn’t fit into that column, remains lodged in my mind.
In a courthouse office, she sat at her desk beneath a framed photo from her time as an Air Force staff sergeant and spoke of her service.
In 2004, while on her second deployment to Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, she spent her 12-hour shifts loading bombs onto aircraft headed to the Middle East. Each bomber left loaded and returned empty — except for the bomb’s pins hanging as reminders.
“We’d write on the bombs, so it’d be like ‘To Saddam from the 28th Bomb Wing or 57th AMXS or whatever,’ ” she said. “And they’d come back with just a bunch of pins of all the bombs that dropped.”
At the time, the messages felt like a joke, but “then you didn’t realize it’s actually killing people.”
And no matter your place, being part of a system meant to kill and destroy can play tricks on the brain.
“I would have dreams of the bombs dropping and then not coming back, or like one bomb
came back, and it would have a smiley face,” she said. “It was weird.”
Each B-1 bomber she loaded could carry up to 84 bombs weighing 500 pounds or 24 bombs weighing 2,000 pounds.
The judge’s story reminded me of helping build 500-pound bombs once at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. In the moment, I did not care about the carnage they could create.
Within days, F-16 or A-10 fighter aircraft would drop those bombs on close air support missions.
The coalition dominated the skies over Afghanistan, and generals touted “airpower on demand” — the idea that aircraft could respond anywhere in the country within minutes.
One morning, an A-10 buddy was flying back to base when he received orders to bomb a
man identified as a “high-value target.” The intelligence people don’t use a target’s real name; rather they bestow nicknames to help ease communication and avoid confusion.
They’d named this individual for a ’90s rapper. As the story goes, the person was eating his lunch under a fruit tree when his world went black.
The oddity of using a popculture moniker humanized and dehumanized this individual, who may have helped kill Americans.
The label also created a distance that limited full understanding of the human cost. Did a bomb I helped build kill this man? Even if not, I was still part of the larger system. The mind grapples with where culpability starts and stops.
Two weeks before meeting with Dominguez and visting
Bexar’s Veterans Treatment Court, I wrote a column about the Air Force’s unveiling of the B-21 Raider, the nation’s newest strategic bomber.
The column compared the unveiling of the B-2 bomber years earlier, and my mind went to my colleague Jason Armagost’s essay, “Things to Pack When You’re Bound for Baghdad,” which appeared in an anthology called “When War Becomes Personal.”
Harper’s Magazine also republished the work that chronicles a B-2 pilot’s journey on the initial bombing of Baghdad in March 2003. On the 20,000mile journey from Missouri to Baghdad and back, Armagost found peace in the books he carried with him
“I know I left more than thirty-six tons of high-explosive and weapons-grade steel in
Iraq: buildings destroyed, bunkers mangled beyond recognition, airfields once bombed to submission, and now in use by our own forces,” he wrote. “It is conceivable that I killed no one. It is, however, very unlikely.”
With references that span from the ancient Greeks to the writer Cormac Mccarthy, Armagost cites much wisdom on war and killing.
He quoted Ernest Hemingway’s words that “there are worse things than war and all of them come with defeat,” and added, “I believe that. But just because one thing is worse than another, it doesn’t make the lesser good — just less bad.”
That is one certainty that will always hold true.