Frontlines
is a collection of real life essays from Wayland Baptist University students, devoted to military life and service. Some
have seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some support
those missions. Some are Army, some are Air Force, and
some are National Guard. Others serve the Navy, Marines
and Coast Guard. Some are career soldiers. Some are not.
All serve the citizens of the United States of America, and
these essays are a historical marker and testimony to that
fact. Frontlines and Wayland honors the sacrifice and service of these men and women.
“The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the
soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and
scars of war.”
~ Douglas MacArthur
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T
he cadence of commands, the mind numbing
physical exertions and rigorous training were
developed over decades to desensitize a person
to violence and wean them from Starbucks and steak dinners, all the while molding them into a man or woman capable of understanding war. “What makes the green grass
grow?” shouted Drill Sergeant Thompson to the formation
of recruits. “Blood, blood, bright red blood,” was our answer. This casual process of teaching and understanding
violence only prepped us for the next stage, and when I
graduated, I realized that I still had no idea what I was
training for nor what it would feel like to be a soldier.
During Basic Training the United States was already at
war, and I knew that I was getting into something beyond
my imagination. There were dreams of heroism and glory,
defined by movies and video games, and I thought that
when I graduated I would “be a soldier” and know what
going into a war zone entailed. That thought process
couldn’t be further from the truth. Basic training was an indoctrination period where a Drill Sergeant’s job was to cultivate your mind from being a civilian and break you down
into the psyche of a basic recruit. This was a person who
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understood what it took to teach you that your comfortable
world was gone and how to think of war in another than abstract or pixilated way.
Next on the path of progression was Advanced Individual Training. This was a schooling process where you
learned your technical trade. At this point it seemed that
after learning your job skill and being a “fully trained” recruit, you should finally know what it meant to be or at
least feel like a soldier. Again, I was wrong. Learning high
tech skills, such as flying drones, was something in no way
close to understanding what it meant to be a member of a
fighting force. It was like growing up and attending a
Catholic high school, overly strict, pressed uniforms, nuns
(drill sergeants), rigid protocols and structured learning. It
was nothing but a process to mold you into a rough formed
template of a person capable of becoming an adult. By the
time I could fly I still had no idea what I was looking for,
and I didn’t know if I would ever know what it meant to be
a soldier and if I would ever understand what to expect in
war.
My next stop in the process was changing stations. I
was stationed at Ft. Campbell in Kentucky, the home of the
101st Airborne Division “Screaming Eagles.” Surely that
meant I was finally a real soldier. No, I only found out that
I was still green, still half trained and had absolutely no
idea about anything and was even further from understanding what it meant.
All said, by the time I landed in Kuwait and my unit
completed our final preparation for deployment into Iraq I
realized that I had gone through over two years of training
and was still groping for that understanding. The only
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thing close to the feeling would be approximating it to
when a person “grows up” and has to admit he or she is finally an adult but is still unsure of what the words imply.
And, then it started. “Platoon! Attention! Fall in!” shouted
my First Sergeant. A steady cadence of names was called
until they came to me. “Mandala, here are your 210 rounds
of ammunition, 3 atropine injectors, and Cipro. Take a
seat, and count them. We go into country tonight.” Holding the atropine injectors and Cipro in one hand, both treatments against exposure to nerve and biological agents, I sat
down and started to count my rounds with the other. I still
didn’t feel as if I knew what it meant to be a soldier. Yet, I
held in one hand my life in three injectors and a bottle of
pills, while in the other hand I held 210 rounds of death in
stripper clips. I was apprehensive and nervous, but I had
trained for this hadn’t I?
That night, loaded with 100 pounds of ammo, gear, and
weapons I loaded a C-130 bound for the far northeast corner of Iraq. I was exhausted, scared, confused, and everyone around me seemed the same. You could see the look
on their faces. What did I get myself into? We tried to sit
down on our web seats, a mesh of straps that were more for
holding cargo down instead of soldiers up, and I was
promptly tangled with soldier with whom I was interlocking knees across from me. We departed with only the
words, “Puke in your helmet and piss in your pants, but
don’t get up.” Four hours later the C-130 lurched over 45
to 60 degrees and dropped like a stone. The red lights inside the cargo bay turned on, and you could see the sweaty
faces of scared people looking across at you trying to appear unconcerned. And we dropped some more.
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The strain from holding yourself up in place was
cramping my back, as murmuring could be heard around
us. We didn’t know what was going on. We abruptly leveled out and a couple seconds later smacked onto the
ground with a back breaking jolt. We taxied at what
seemed like take off speed for a full minute when the plane
abruptly spun around and the back cargo door opened up.
My Command Sergeant Major was already outside, obviously expecting us, yelling at us to move. Over the drone
of the engines we could hear a siren blaring and rockets or
mortars blowing up outside. We all unlocked our knees,
picked up our gear and shuffled off the plane in disbelief
and apprehension. We then followed the first person at a
fast jog towards a dilapidated Iraqi hangar and prayed that a
mortar wouldn’t land on us on the way to safety.
Once inside our Sergeant Major looked at us and said,
“Welcome to Paradise. Welcome to Iraq, soldiers.” That
was the moment when I knew the answer to my question. I
knew what it felt like to be a soldier. A soldier was a state
of mind, not a person or a job, defined by a culmination of
training and experience. It was handling fear, reacting to
dynamic and scary situations, and being able to smile at the
cruel irony in a Command Sergeant Major’s choice of
words. War was nothing but the territory that tempered a
warrior, a place when and where a boy became a man and a
civilian became a soldier.
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Brad Mandala grew up in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California. He was in college during and right after 9/11
and wanted to make a difference so enlisted in the U.S.
Army in 2003. Brad was stationed at Ft. Campbell in Kentucky, “Air Assault!” he served for 27 months in Iraq and
PCS’d honorably after a 14-month “bonus round” that was
added at the convenience of the Army to his four year initial enlistment. Brad now works as a contractor and trains
both domestic and foreign militaries. He is a father of two,
a 2-year-old son and a 5-week-old daughter, who mean
everything in the world to him. He is married to the “first
woman of my life, and happily at that.” If all goes well, he
should be graduating from Wayland in December 2012.
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