Mike Scotti - A Sort of Homecoming

 

So, I can still remember the sound of the front door slamming behind me in my old apartment. It's a small studio in New York City. I remember I had just gotten home from a run, and I threw my keys up onto the counter, and they slid across, and they ran into my BlackBerry, which just happened to be ringing at that moment. 

 

At this point in my life, I'd been home from the war in Iraq for about a year and a half. Things were starting to feel a little bit more normal. I was in grad school. I felt good that day because of the run. But when I saw the name on the ID on the BlackBerry, my heart dropped because it was my old commanding officer from the Marine Corps. And in the year and a half that I'd been home, I learned that when somebody from the Marines calls you during the week, especially while it's still light out, it means that somebody that I knew was dead. So, a few seconds later, my fears were confirmed and the tears were falling and that was the reality. I'd lost another brother, and it wouldn't be the last. 

 

Now, I joined the Marine Corps because I wanted to defend my country. I wanted to earn the title of United States Marine. I wanted to see if I had what it took. After September 11th, obviously, everything changed. I'd been in for a few years at that point. I was a first lieutenant. I lost two friends in the World Trade Center, Beth Quigley and Peter Apollo. I would think about how they died. They died violently on some random day at work while they were trying to earn a living. And so, I knew that I would do whatever it took to help find those weapons of mass destruction. I would do whatever it took to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again on US soil. That was something I was willing to fight for and I was certainly willing to die for. 

 

Now, my job in the Marine Corps specifically was that of artillery, forward observer. I would call in over the radio the enemy's position, I'd be up front with the infantry, and I'd call in those enemy positions to the artillery units who were parked behind us. They would shoot these large barrages of these shells on the enemy. And if they missed, I would make a correction over the radio. 

 

Now, these shells are big, they're heavy. They weigh over 100 pounds each. They're made of high explosive and steel and iron, and they're designed to burst into large pieces of shrapnel. Each piece can be up to the size of a man's arm, and each piece is very dense and heavy, like a crowbar, but jagged. And these things, when they blow up, the shrapnel covers an area the size of a football field. And that's for one round. We'd shoot 50 or 100 of these things in the same area to just obliterate everything. So, that was my job. I would call in the shrapnel onto people. 

 

I can remember very quickly understanding what that meant in Iraq from seeing all of the dead bodies on the sides of the roads as we drove along. We'd hit an area and then drive through it. I can remember the bodies would be in these very unnatural positions. Their eyes would have many times turned this very deep black, and their mouths would be open. I thought I could see the looks of pain on many of their faces. And unfortunately, sometimes they were the faces of children who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And those faces, they stay with me. 

 

So, I realized quickly that once all the politics have been stripped away, for those who are fighting it and those who are caught in the middle of it, war is nothing more than a slaughter. It is filled with things like chaos, and hesitation, and uncertainty, and fear. There's fear that you are going to make a mistake and get your friends killed, there's fear that there are other human beings out there who are trying to kill you, there's fear that you could be maimed or wounded or burned. And there are things like chaos, the chaos like the day that we finally made it to Baghdad. We transitioned from fighting in the countryside where if you could see it, you could kill it, to fighting in a city where you couldn't see more than across the street or maybe half a block.

 

It was chaos. Your radios wouldn't work so well, because the buildings block the signal. You had 1,500 Marines assigned to 80 square blocks. You're all trying not to shoot each other, because the enemy is in between you and you've got another 1,500 Marines on your left and on your right, and the bullets would snap through the air, and you wouldn't know where they'd be coming from. I remember that every time a Marine would get killed, none of us would look each other in the eye for a little while, the guys in my vehicle, because it was all just becoming a little bit too much. 

 

We hadn't slept in two or three days and nights. I remember I looked to the west, just happened to be looking to the west one instant, and I saw a very large artillery barrage land on the edge of our battalion's position. I knew by the way that it landed that it was US artillery, and I knew what was happening at that instant. We had just hit our brothers with our own fire. So, I picked up the radio and I screamed, “Check firing. Check firing.” I shutdown all of the artillery in Iraq that the Marines were shooting for a few minutes, because I had no time to figure out what was happening. I knew the next barrage was going to land directly on us, and it would. 

 

It hit one Marine, and it took out a few of his organs and entered him through the abdomen. The next one would have been a lot worse. I remember slamming the radio handset down and being angry, shaking my head, because somebody had shot into our zone without permission. I realized that in a war, the difference between life and death can be a few millimeters here or there, a few seconds, or the fact that one tired Marine happened to be looking in the right direction at the right moment. I thought to myself, I shook my head, I said, “This all better be worth it, because we've been fighting for months and we haven't found any weapons of mass destruction.” 

 

So, when I came home, there was a day that sticks in my mind. It was November. I'd been home for about a year. I was driving from Manhattan out to Long Island. I had a fresh haircut. My dress, blue uniform was very neatly pressed. I was on my way to be the pallbearer in yet another Marine's funeral. This Marine's name was Lieutenant Matt Lynch. His older brother Tim had called me and asked me to carry his little brother's coffin. Tim and I had served in Afghanistan together. 

 

I can remember carrying Matt's coffin with my white gloved hand. And gripping the rails very tightly, the rail that runs along the edge of the coffin, because I didn't want to drop it. I remember a few minutes later, trying not to wince as the rifles went off, as I gave Matt his final salute in front of his loved ones, because it was the first time that I had heard gunfire since the war. And later that evening, I sat at the bar in the Maine Maid Inn in Long Island, and I just drank and drank beer after beer. And the tears came, and I didn't care who saw them. I was still wearing my dress blues. Because at that point, I had just given up of ever finding any hope of finding weapons of mass destruction. 

 

I was searching for meaning in the deaths of men like Lieutenant Matt Lynch and others that I'd lost, and I couldn't find any. As a warrior, my belief system began to unravel. And that took me to a very, very dark place. It took me to the edge of the abyss. I stood there looking in, and I remember wondering whether or not I was going to just jump off, wondering whether or not suicide for me was going to be the way to go. I have these conversations with myself, like whether I should make it look like an accident and go for a run in New York City one day, right into the path of a bus, or should I make a spectacle of the whole thing and take a flight to San Francisco, do a swan dive or something off of the Golden Gate Bridge, Just like the first person to ever kill themselves there, that was a veteran from World War I. 

 

And then, I thought about my mom and dad and what it would do to them if I went through with it. I knew that I just couldn't do it. I knew that I had to survive for them. So, I started talking, I started listening, started reading, and opening up a little bit, getting out there. The first thing that I realized, was that there were a lot of other veterans my age who felt the same way. And then, I realized that even the Marine Corps knew that it had a problem on its hands, and they needed to help do something to stop the few and the proud trained killers from killing ourselves, because we were doing it in record numbers. 

 

And the Marine Corps put out this video that was on their website and had a bunch of colonels and generals on there and high-ranking sergeants talking about how they struggled about the war, after the war. About halfway through the video, this woman comes on-- She's a Navy psychiatrist, and she had served in Fallujah on the front lines with the Marines, helping talk to them as they came off the line. She had struggled and she talked about her struggle. 

 

She looked into the camera and she said, “It's okay to be angry. It's okay, Marine, to be sad. It's okay if you're not okay.” I remember those words. They hit me like a train, because I'd never heard words like that before. It never occurred to me. They were exactly the words that I needed to hear at that moment, because the Marine Corps teaches you that vulnerability is weakness. Because in war, vulnerability is weakness, because the enemy will exploit that vulnerability, and kill you and all of your men. But when you come home, vulnerability is the one thing that will allow you to survive. It will allow you to take those demons that are inside of you, and drag them from the darkness out into the light. They cannot survive there. They cannot hurt you there. 

 

So, now, I no longer search for meaning in the war or in the deaths of these beautiful human beings, these Marines and soldiers. I find meaning in helping fellow veterans and allowing other veterans to help me, because that's what we do. We take care of each other, just like we did in the war. So, now, when the phone rings, it's not 03:00 PM on a Tuesday, with the news that someone's been killed. It's 03:00 AM on a Sunday morning, and a buddy is calling because he's upset. 

 

Maybe he's had a little bit too much to drink, and he's angry or he's sad, or both. Because his demons are eating him alive. And I say to him, “I love you, brother. Lay it on me,” and then we talk. And then, we talk some more, and I listen. Before we say goodbye, I always say, “No matter what happened over there, or no matter what's happening to you right now, or no matter what will happen later on down the line, one thing is for certain and that's ‘It's okay that you're not okay.’” Thank you.