Published in 1940, Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again” is widely considered a 20th Century classic. Like the main character of the story discovers, I left home knowing I would likely be a changed person when I returned. I left for many reasons, but primarily the desire to serve. The recent death of my cousin at the time only increased my desire. I didn’t realize how deep the scars would be and how they would persist to this day.
I left western Illinois at seventeen, bound for the United States Army. With the nation embroiled in low-grade wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, there was little doubt that I would likely see combat. In fact, even though I received a perfect score on the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) and could have chosen any job in the army, I decided on combat arms as my specialty. When I told my parents and sister what my path would be in the fall of 2003, they were understandably upset. They, like I, had endured the death of my cousin in March of the same year. I have little doubt they had many thoughts about my cousin’s flag-draped coffin, the haunting tones of Taps from the bugle, and the rifle salute at the funeral.
Having grown up in agriculture, I had grown up around life and death. A new calf or freshly emerged crop always gives way to a mature crop and a harvest. It is a cycle, the oft-described circle of life, but leaving the farm took me halfway around the world for another harvest. A harvest not conducted with combines and grain trucks, but with bullets and bombs. A harvest that didn’t end with revenue and satisfaction, but with empty boots, blood-stained uniforms, and broken families.
The Army and West Point
My early army career went much as my high school career went. I was not naturally athletic but was able to hold my own with good training. My intellectual capacity carried me as it always had. Not long after graduating basic training as an M1 Armor (Tank) Crewman, I reported to Ft. Hood, Texas, and the 1st Battalion of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. My time at 1/22 went quickly. I was quickly recognized as intellectually skilled, hard-working, and competent. Soon after getting to my unit, I was persuaded to apply to the United States Military Academy at West Point. I was accepted into the Class of 2009.
To be truthful, I squandered my opportunity at West Point. Even though I had little time in the “real army,” all of the new cadets coming straight from high school looked up to me, and it made me arrogant. The feeling of being “above this” because I had come from the “real army” coupled with the fact that I was now “average,” or even worse, perhaps a below-average cadet, was a new feeling and one I didn’t particularly like. I was used to being the cream of the crop; at West Point, I was surrounded by the best of the entire nation and struggled. As I struggled, I became sullen, prone to injury, and lost my motivation.
After we were allowed to start calling friends, I placed a call to my XO, the second-in-command of my former unit. He, being a West Pointer but not the rah-rah type, was brutally honest. He encouraged me to stay but was open about the fact that West Point was no place to be if you weren’t “all-in.” “All-in” was not a phrase you would have used to describe New Cadet Swanson. Truth be told, I hated the idea that I was now average. It ate at me every night while I was supposed to be sleeping, and every day I was training. A couple weeks later, the XO mentioned that 1-22’s orders for Iraq had come, and they were leaving in December. My way out had presented itself. I wanted to get out of West Point and into combat.
I informed my Chain-of-Command of my thoughts and was ordered to report to the Commandant’s office. Brigadier(one-star) General Scaparrotti (later a four-star general and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe) was the first general officer I had ever met. As fate would have it, he was the right person at the right time. The General’s office was adorned in awards and unit memorabilia from an adult life that had started at West Point and had been spent in the army ever since. He asked my intentions and what I hoped to accomplish but didn’t try to persuade me one way or another. I can see now that he simply lead me to ask and answer the right questions of myself. When I informed him of how I felt, he immediately disregarded my feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty and concentrated on what I could contribute. In the short time we spent together in his office, Gen. Scaparrotti helped me understand that our darkest personal hours can sometimes lead to our most incredible triumphs, something I would appreciate soon.
At the conclusion of our meeting, and after challenging me to take this experience at West Point and use it as a springboard for my next chapter, he offered to send me anywhere in the army I desired, my pick of any unit or command or duty station in the entire world. I didn’t hesitate; I simply asked him to send me straight back to where I had come from. I needed to reclaim my confidence, and my 18-year-old self decided the best place to do that was in my old unit, and soon by extension, Iraq.
Iraq
My Iraq experience in 2006 was not unlike that of many young men and women my age. Iraq was heating up, and we were up. 1/22 Infantry played a role in capturing Saddam during the last deployment. It would get a choice assignment in 2006 as well. We were assigned to an Area of Operations (AO) south of Baghdad controlled by the famous 101st Airborne Division. This AO was rural, farm country, dominated by open fields, much like my own home. The 101st had traded one of their light infantry battalions for my unit, 1/22 Infantry. We were a new style unit, branded as infantry; our battalion actually consisted of heavy armor. My company, Delta, were tankers, not infantrymen. We trained to ride into battle on 70 tons of jet-powered behemoth, armed to the teeth with three machine guns and a 120mm cannon that fired a shell with the diameter of a coffee can downrange at nearly a mile a second. We could hit almost anything we could see, night or day, bad weather or clear, up to three miles out. Unfortunately for us, the fight we primarily trained for wasn’t the fight we were getting into.
I spent Christmas 2005 in a pouring rainstorm in tents in Kuwait. Soon after arriving in our area of operations in January of 2006, we received word that we would have to leave our tanks on the firebase. Command wanted us up close and personal with the local populace, something we couldn’t do protected by armor that was feet thick in places. Instead, we were issued Humvees, basic up-armored trucks. It was no tank, but it would get us from place to place while staying closer to the populace, all while burning a lot less fuel than the Abrams. The one thing it didn’t offer however, was the invincibility we felt in the tanks. The trucks, even with extra armor added on, were not IED proof. They also did not offer much protection from snipers, something I would become intimately familiar with later.
My first combat came quickly. No more than a few days into patrolling, we struck an IED(improvised explosive device). The bomb went off just after we passed and did little but superficial shrapnel damage to the truck. What that explosion awakened in me, I will never forget. As my platoon dismounted in the dark to search and prosecute the area, we found ourselves in a one-sided firefight. The machine gunners opened up. The relatively slow thud of the heavy .50 cal machine gun was the bass line. It pounded out a rhythm that will be forever etched in my memory. The medium 7.62mm machine guns came next, tearing through the dark with muzzle flash and tracer fire at a higher rate and pitch. Finally, above the din came the light M249 machine gun and M4 rifles, chasing every shadow the soldier behind it might have seen with tracer fire. Coupled with commands being shouted and over the occasional thump of a thrown grenade, I heard the symphony of combat. It was there, 6000 miles from home, standing beside the truck in the dark and on the radio giving status reports to the XO in the command post, that I found myself truly happy for the first time in months.
Later, back on the outpost, the XO took me aside. He told me, “Swany, you were in the zone last night. Over the radio, I could hear all the chaos in the background, and you were so calm, your voice never changed or quickened. It was like we were back at home talking about football or the next stupid tasking we had gotten. Impressive dude.” I didn’t dare tell anyone, but I had loved it. The flood of adrenaline didn’t make me frantic or speed up time. Instead, time slowed to a crawl. My senses were on high alert and feeding my brain information in a way that I had never experienced. Combat was a drug, and I was hooked from the first taste.
The next few months consisted of patrol after patrol. At first, it was 12 hours on duty, then as the fighting became more intense, it was 18 hours in the sector. At the peak, we patrolled for 24 hours at a time with 12 hours off. We ran on chow, caffeine, and for those who smoked, tax-free cigarettes; Cigarettes not measured in packs per day, but cartons. We slept on the ground in sector, dug at potential IEDS with metal detectors, fighting knives and shovels, and slowly hardened. Long hours of boredom were broken with IED strikes, buildings raided, and tense checkpoints. Men in the battalion were injured or killed with semi-regularity, but we kept at it. In one particular incident, I found myself standing directly over a live IED consisting of several 155mm artillery rounds. It was terrifying and exhilarating all at once.
In May, cracks showed. Some men had developed deep animosity towards one another and had stopped speaking. Chain-smoking Marlboros had become a past time, and the XO and 1SG were clearly struggling. 1SG had arrived in Iraq a gray-haired man. By May, his hair seemed nearly white. The XO, a man I had seen lighten a room with a well-timed joke too many times to count, had stopped laughing or smiling.
In January, we had taken incoming mortar fire on our outpost. After taking some shrapnel from a mortar round, I had been stitched up, put up for my first Purple Heart, and put back on duty. The second time was different. It was late May, somewhere up the chain of command, it had been decided it was time for fresh troops in our area. We were tired and apparently it had started to show. It is likely that we were being replaced simply because it was time for a realignment. Either way, it did not matter, we were ready to leave Falcon. The hardest part about combat operations in Iraq wasn’t the combat itself. It was the Rules of Engagement, and the simple fact that often our objectives (covering up anti-coalition graffiti, presence patrols etc) put us on constant defense. We often had to be attacked before we could go on offense and it took a mental toll.
It was a night patrol, one of many, but we were to begin introducing our replacements to the area on this particular mission. Along for the ride on this night were a new Lieutenant and squad leader from the unit coming to relieve us and a brand new interpreter.
IED Magnets and the Sideline
Earlier in the day, I had picked it up a brand-new, experimental up-armored truck from the motor pool. Similar to our old ones but much improved. It had factory-installed(not retrofit) armor, door handles that actually opened the door every time, functional air-conditioning, and 61 miles on the odometer. When I had gotten back to the command post with it, 1SG had been outside smoking. He walked around it with me, smoking and admiring my brand-new ride. We chatted like we always did. As we parted, he said, “Enjoy that new truck.” I said, “Top, you and I both know this thing is going to be an IED magnet. I’m going to get blown the F*ck up!” He shook his head and walked back inside.
I was right.
I was looking over the right side of the truck. We flew down a canal road and headed back to take our new charges back to base after a few hours in the sector. After we dropped them off, we would turn around and come back out to finish our patrol. We never made it. I remember looking over a field into a palm tree grove with my head well above the armor when my world exploded. The IED detonated just in front of the truck on the passenger side. I was knocked down inside, badly dazed, with the sweet taste of cerebrospinal fluid in my mouth. I remember the radios’ green glow, unintelligible shouting over the radio speakers, the interpreter praying, and the driver screaming at me, asking if I was ok. I never did find the words to reply, I was told. I just laid in the back, my ears leaking fluid, dazed, with some interpreter I had only just met and barely spoken to praying with his hand on my face.
We were towed back to the outpost. The truck rolled on its own wheels, but barely. Our crew wasn’t in fighting shape, and the platoon leader decided we were close enough to just drive back. Once back on the base, we went to the aid station. I was brought inside, evaluated, and promptly evacuated via helicopter to the 10th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad proper. On the way to be loaded onto the helicopter, the medics dropped my stretcher with me on it. Even after months of extended operations and dozens of pounds of weight lost, I was too heavy.
The next morning in Illinois, my parents got a second early morning phone call informing them I had been injured but was alive and mostly ok. Ruptured eardrums but luckily no skull fracture, it was not enough to be sent home. I was cleared to leave the hospital and go back to the unit. It was fine with me. I wanted more. Perhaps more than anything else, I just needed to finish this tour. However, I spent months on the sidelines, too damaged to patrol, not damaged enough to get sent home. I languished. I was irritable and unpleasant to be around. I wanted back out on patrol, but my superiors saw something they didn’t like, and I wasn’t medically cleared anyway. My friends kept going outside the wire and left me behind. It was horrible. Eventually, Delta company got a new tasking and needed to be at full strength. I was a medical liability, taking up space that the company required to be filled by someone useful.
They replaced me with someone from Battalion Headquarters. He got my place on the line, and I became a personal security detachment member, a glorified body-guard. Assigned to an officer on the staff, I spent the next several months driving him out to meet with Iraqi officials so he could plan joint missions and watching his back while he did it. We went outside the wire, but it wasn’t the same, no doors to kick in or weapons to find, just hands to shake and standing around waiting for something to happen. I listened to several missions via the radio while watching progress via a map in relative safety. It was gut-wrenching.
It was at this time I met Creed and Aguirre. They were also on the PSD team, Aguirre, our medic, and Creed the gunner on one of the other staff trucks. We didn’t get along that well. They came from the infantry, I from tanks. We lived in different worlds, and our personalities clashed regularly. It was one of these clashes that led to where I am today.
22 Oct 2006
The day started like any other. We met for our morning briefing, huddled around the trucks in the morning sun. My vehicle wouldn’t be going out that day. My boss had work to do at the command post and would be the senior officer in the command post to handle the inevitable problems. That day the mission was to head to a local market to show our presence and meet with the locals. The night before, Creed and I had gotten into it. It was nothing abnormal, just the result of a little too much ego on both our parts. Nevertheless, we stared at each other across the huddle behind our mirrored sunglasses, both more worried about our latest beef than the content of the briefing. Soon the briefing was over, and I left to go about my day while they geared up and left.
Something was wrong. I heard the radio go off from down the hall as I walked back into the command post after lunch. While I couldn’t hear the words, the voice’s tone on the other side of the radio was unmistakable.
While they were stopped in the market there had been contact. Creed had been shot out of his turret by a sniper. No one had seen the sniper when Aguirre went to render aid. He was also down. From a typical day to a nightmare in seconds, and all we could do was listen across the airwaves. The TOC was muted, the radio operators took the casualty reports and battle roster numbers identifying them. No call for an evacuation helicopter, just a somber report of status. They were dead.
Creed had been shot in one of the few exposed places he had while sitting in the turret, right. He was likely dead within seconds of being struck. Matthew Creed was 23 and married to his wife, Ashley. Roughly a month before his 22nd birthday on this day, Nathaniel Aguirre did what combat medics do, he went to render aid. He was shot by the same sniper and died soon after.
The convoy rolled back in, having already dropped the bodies off with the mortuary teams; Creed and Aguirre were just gone. I stood outside the TOC with some of the others with my mirrored Oakleys covering my own thousand-yard stare. The men who had been on patrol slowly slipped out of their gear. They looked a little lost. We milled around the trucks for a while. Slowly, they disappeared back to their hooches, each to deal with the day in their own way.
I told the Sergeant in charge of the TOC that I would handle cleaning the truck. He looked at me, nodded, and walked back into the building. I slipped into the drivers’ seat and drove It to the motor pool. Once there, I opened the passenger side door to find the floor inside the truck and turret covered in congealing blood and bits of tissue, the formerly olive drab seats with large dark red stains.
It took the better part of two hours to clean. There was bucket after bucket of clean water and rags to wipe down every surface and find every speck of gore. I was quiet, on autopilot, really. I viewed it as the next mission, to try and do some small thing to help those who had ridden in the truck that day. Inch by inch, I combed over that truck, trying to erase every reminder. I just removed the seats, gave them to one of the sergeants in the motor pool, and asked for replacements. Before too long, he returned with two more green seats, and it was done. Around dusk, I drove the truck back to the line and parked it in its usual location. The next day, with different crew members, it rolled out again. The mission went on.
About 6 weeks later, we flew home. Two years after that, I was medically retired from the army. Between coming home from Iraq and being retired, I performed funeral details and trained and equipped new soldiers to go to Iraq. One of those new soldiers, along with my former company commander, was also killed on the next tour. I had the honor of escorting Tucker’s remains back home to his family for burial and then made a second trip to his family when new remains were found later in the year.
When I first got back to Illinois, I didn’t think about it too much. I had a new son, a new marriage, and tried to adjust to life back on the farm. Soon though, I began to confront the demons I brought home. My new wife soon became my ex-wife, and my young son was reliant on his father to provide as a single parent. Luckily for him and me both, my parents were near. They filled the role that I could not. I got remarried to a patient, wonderful woman, who may not understand, but at least knows how to handle my struggles. We currently have 3 boys together.
“Earn This…..”
My battalion lost 26 soldiers during our 2006 tour in Iraq. When combined with the other losses of soldiers, sailors, airman and Marines I knew, along with the subsequent losses to depression and suicide post-deployment, I find myself often wondering if I’m good enough. If the life I have lead to this point, and will hopefully lead in the future, is worthy of the sacrifice my cousin Evan, Creed, Aguirre, Tucker, and thousands of others made. Did I really deserve life more than they did? They all certainly had full lives in front of them. Would the world have been a better place if it were they who survived and I who died on foreign soil? It’s an unanswerable question, and yet I find myself struggling with it regularly. I often think of the line Tom Hanks’ utters to Matt Damon at the end of Saving Private Ryan. Captain Miller says, “Earn this…“. I can relate to Ryan and his pain later in life. Their faces haunt my quiet moments, asking if I have truly earned the life I have been given.
Hards Days and Healing
Until recently, I hadn’t thought much about Survivor’s Guilt, but guilty is how I feel. I feel guilty that I have survived by some stroke of cosmic luck, and they did not. Even though I know that it is an impossible standard, I still find myself lacking compared to the life they would have lived, at least the one that I conjure up for them in my head. I find myself wanting to be the best and achieve the most, and I am always thoroughly disappointed when I actually do succeed and feel no better. At times I have considered suicide as a relief. I certainly wouldn’t be the only one to have considered it, and there are more than a few men like me, including several I served with who have later chosen to end their lives. There is no shame in surviving, but it is undoubtedly a life sentence for me and others like me.
There is a song by country artist Brantley Gilbert called “Hard Days”. In it, Gilbert and the songwriters talk about how our worst experiences make our best days sweeter. I know there are days I feel that extra grace. There are also days that the hardest days of my life dull the shine of today. Those experiences can suck the joy out of the everyday. I encourage the reader (veteran or not) to be conscious of this. Do your best to live in the present and not let the worst days of your life color your perception of tomorrow.
Make no mistake, while there are few openly talking about it, I am not alone. Suvivor’s guilt is incredibly common among combat veterans. The remarkable thing about it is that there are thousands of veterans just like me. Most choose not to talk about it for various reasons. They may feel the public does not or will not understand, that their fellow veterans will look down on them, or they may simply not know how to process it. While my experience may be shocking for some, it is far from unusual.
Agriculture has always been a healing lifestyle for me. Seeing crops sprout, grow and flourish by your own hand and then take them to a bountiful harvest reminds us that life never stops. It always renews in the spring. I’ve had the opportunity to not only grow national-contest winning corn at home in Illinois, but also observe record-breaking soybeans in Arkansas and orange groves in Brazil. Delta agriculture has become a passion for me. Seeing rows upon rows of cotton, corn, peanuts and soybeans in the South has become one of my favorite places in the world and a welcome escape from my own mind. Agriculture feeds, clothes, and medicates the world. I see it as a way to bring some light into a world plagued by darkness.
Agriculture reminds us that when the season is right, new life will always appear. For me, spring brings hope, another chance to try and live in a way that would make those men proud. Every year I struggle through fall and winter and just try to make it to spring. Those new rows of crops, fresh green in what had been a gray world, are a lifeline from the universe. A lifeline that I can grow with my own hands and one that I hope tilts the scorecard a little in my favor. My old profession was taking life, my new one creating it. In some small way, I hope that I can “Earn This” and honor those men and women who didn’t have the chance to grow old as I did.
Matt Swanson is a father, high-yield farmer, budding land investor, space enthusiast and public speaker. Unabashedly honest, you can find him frequently getting himself into trouble on Twitter @MaxROIFarmer.
Western Illinois University School of Agriculture 