Injured Hearts, Injured Minds
http://www.texasobserver.org/dateline/killeen
Forrest Wilder
August 7, 2009
In March, Army Spc. Michael Kern, 22, returned to Fort Hood after a
year and a day in Iraq.
Shaken by his experience and disgusted with the war, Kern, a native
of Riverside, Calif., tried to readjust by getting as hammered as
possible. "Put it this way: For the first month, I was drunk at work,
I was drunk 24/7."
In Iraq the violence had been fast and furious. "We were going
through all sorts of bad shit: mortars, IEDs, indirect fire. Anything
you can think of we experienced the first day."
On his second mission, Kern drew the short straw to drive the lead
vehiclea "mine resistant ambush protected" vehiclein a convoy
looking for a weapons cache near Baghdad. An IED exploded next to his
vehicle, damaging his door. The platoon pulled back to base. The next
day, April 7, on an identical mission, insurgents came after his unit
with AK-47s, machine guns and IEDs. During the nine-hour firefight, a
sniper killed Kern's buddy, Sgt. Richard A. Vaughn. Two others,
including Kern's lieutenant, were seriously injured.
Kern tells me his story over two days in July at Under the Hood Café,
a new GI coffeehouse and soldier-outreach center that opened in
February. Since mid-May, when a drunken Kern first dropped in, Under
the Hood has become his second home. While awaiting a medical
discharge for PTSD and traumatic brain injury, he's here almost every
day, working out what happened to him in Iraq, planning anti-war
events and helping other soldiers come to terms with their combat
experiences. The coffeehouse provides a support network, friends
who've helped him quit drinking, people he can call on day or night,
and provides what Kern appreciated most about the military: a sense
of camaraderie.
"If it wasn't for this place, it's sad to say, I feel like I would be
dead. I feel like I would have killed myself," Kern says.
Under the Hood is a rifle shot from the east gates of Fort Hood in a
grim commercial zone of tattoo parlors, pawnshops, car lots, payday
lenders, bars, strip clubs, and a place advertising "gold grillz" for
teethestablishments eager to drain young soldiers of their earnings.
In this garrison town, the café has become a gathering place for
dissident GIs, peace activists, veterans and active-duty soldiers who
need help.
Inside, the walls are decorated with peace propaganda, including a
map of the world pinpointing U.S. military interventions and a poster
that reads, "You Can't Be All that You Can Be if You're Dead." A
bookcase is stocked with anti-war literature. For entertainment,
there's a dartboard, a foosball table and a big-screen TV with
PlayStation. No alcohol is allowed, but there's no shortage of cigarette smoke.
I came here to suss out efforts to build an anti-war movement within
the Army. Fort Hood, the largest military installation in the
country, has produced a smattering of war resisters in recent years.
I met some of them at the coffeehouse, including Victor Agosto, an
Iraq War veteran who refuses to deploy to Afghanistan, and Casey
Porter, a mechanic who did two tours in Iraq. Porter, preparing to
attend film school in Florida, recorded local life in Iraq, posting
interviews with military personnel, battle footage and unvarnished
street scenes.
Over the past four years, I've come into contact with scores of
military personnel through my involvement with the Austin GI Rights
Hotline, a group of volunteers trained to counsel service members
about their rights.
Once a week, I sit on my couch and talk on the phone to soldiers,
Marines and airmen who call with a dizzying array of issues, from the
mundane to the impossibly complex. Many are stationed at Fort Hood.
We get AWOL cases, people with untreated PTSD, 18-year-old enlistees
who've found out their recruiter lied to them, middle-aged soldiers
who've been stop-lossed, moms and dads calling on behalf of their
kids, gay officers who've been outedyou name it. Some have made poor
decisions; others are victims of a sometimes capricious, even cruel
military system.
I got into it through my girlfriend. Katherine was in the news some
years ago for being the first female conscientious objector to emerge
from the war in Afghanistan. The military refused to recognize her
as a conscientious objector, and after a long and painful process she
was court-martialed and sentenced to 120 days in the brig. She ate
lunch every day with Lynndie England, the young West Virginia woman
best known for holding the leash in the infamous Abu Ghraib photos.
Joeie Michaels, Michael Kern's roommate and an Under the Hood
regular, used to dance at Babes, a Killeen strip club popular with
GIs. Performing there, she made sure the troops left with a flier for
the coffeehouse.
Under the Hood's signal event was a Memorial Day peace march in the
streets of Killeen, the city's first since Vietnam. The Killeen
newspaper reported about 70 participants. Cindy Thomas, the military
spouse who manages the coffeehouse and plays den mother to the young,
often-raucous soldiers, estimates about 10 to 15 were locals,
including veterans and active-duty soldiers.
"It's like a mother with a child," Thomas says. "It's unconditional
love, and we help them any way we can."
The building housing Under the Hood's local antecedent, the Killeen
coffeehouse Oleo Strut, is a few blocks away; it now houses an office
complex. The Oleo Strut had a four-year run from 1968 to 1972,
according to a history on Under the Hood's Web site. Run by civilians
and veterans, the Oleo Strut plugged Fort Hood soldiers into the
Vietnam anti-war movement and spread their ideas in the barracks. An
underground newspaper circulated from the coffeehouse, and the crowd
there organized demonstrations and teach-ins. Musicians passed
through, purportedly including a young Stevie Ray Vaughan.
"The tinder was very dry," says Tom Cleaver, an Oleo Strut alum,
Vietnam veteran and Hollywood screenwriter who helped raise money to
start Under the Hood. "They ended up in '69 and '70 having big
demonstrations there, a thousand guys marching in Killeen against the war."
Fort Hood at that time was a holding station for soldiers returning
from Vietnam with less than six months left on their enlistments.
Before being discharged, many were deployed to suppress domestic
riots and protests, including those at the 1968 Democratic National
Convention in Chicago.
"Here they come back to America, and what does the Army want them to
do?" Cleaver asks. "Fight a war in America. That radicalized a lot of
guys. They came back with bad feelings about the war, and now they
were supposed to go defend the war."
There's no draft now, nor is there a broader social counterculture,
to tap into. Given that, Thomas says, one of Under the Hood's primary
functions is giving soldiers a place to speak openly.
"The military, they don't want you to think for yourself," Thomas
says. "They don't want you to be informed; they don't want you to
know that you have support because they function by fear and
intimidation over these soldiers. So when you have a space where you
can talk freely and find out what your rights are, you have that
support, you have that kindness. It is a threat to them."
One coffeehouse regular, Spc. Ben Fugate, told me that after his
commander spotted his name in a Killeen Daily Herald article about
the Memorial Day peace march, his unit was lectured for two hours on
the dangers of protesting.
Fugate, who describes himself as "very conservative," had been quoted
in the paper saying, "I lost three buddies in my platoon in Iraq, and
for what? Why lose more when we don't have to?"
Kern, seated on a couch in a cozy back room at Under the Hood,
explains how he became a coffeehouse fixture. It's a Thursday in
July, and he's wearing a T-shirt that asks, "Got Rights?" He's pale
and swallowing tranquilizers to suppress panic attacks.
"I'm fucked up," he says. "I know it." Later, he says, "You know how
they say a teenage boy thinks about sex every eight seconds. Every
eight seconds I think about Iraq."
Kern, a tanker, says his unit averaged about two and a half missions per day.
At first, Kern says, he was gung ho: "I was an excellent soldier. I
took joy out of killing people in Iraq. It was such an adrenaline
rush. I craved it."
Over time, bravado faded into depression, guilt and a strong feeling
that the war was wrong. When Kern deployed to Iraq he took a small
handheld digital video camera and a laptop with editing software. He
fixed the camera to his vehicle's turret and captured hours of patrol footage.
Some of that raw video has been distilled to a 10-minute film called
Fire Mission that's available online.
In the film's last minutes, Spc. Steven Pesicka, a soldier in Kern's
unit, narrates what he calls a "mortar mission for shock and awe"
near an Iraqi village. The first mortar lands near a house, and the
forward observer calls for the next one to be targeted 200 meters
farther from the village. The mortar team thought that was too far
away, Pesicka says. The film shows the second mortar hitting the
town. "Oh fuck," the forward observer is heard to say. "They did not
drop 200 [meters], over. They hit the town."
Minutes after the explosion, the soldier describes dead bodies being
loaded into the back of trucks.
Such experiences led Kern to a radical form of empathy.
"If you just take a step back and you think, I mean, I'd be doing the
same thing if Iraqis were in the United States," Kern, dressed in
battle fatigues, says in Fire Mission. "I'd be the dude trying to
plant a bomb under the road. I'd be trying to kill them. Oh, hell
yeah, get the fuck out of my country."
Beginning in May or June, Kern started having nightmares, sometimes
while he was awake. On several occasions he hallucinated an Iraqi
child with half his skull missing, as real to him as the desert heat.
His psychiatrist says the child might represent guilt, but all Kern
knows is that it scared the shit out of him. In January, on his
birthday, while his unit was on patrol, he told a commanderin
confidencethat he was going to see a mental health specialist. The
doctor prescribed Zoloft and sent him on his way. Back with his
platoon, Kern discovered that the commander had ratted him out to his
platoon sergeant.
"I was called out in front of the entire platoon, was made an example
of, saying why are you going to mental health. This isn't a war. This
isn't bad." The next day, on a mission, Kern talked openly of
suicide. "Still to this day, my buddy doesn't know he talked me down,
but I really wanted to kill myself on that mission. I had three
loaded weapons sitting right next to me. I could have done it real easy."
Back home, Kern avoided his demons, drowning them in drink. Thomas
and Michaels encouraged Kern to open up.
"They'd be like, 'How was Iraq?' I'd say 'Oh, it was just Iraq.' I
kept brushing it aside and stuff. They kept telling me, 'You're gonna
break, you're gonna break. You need to get help.' " Kern relented.
Michaels found a psychiatrist in Austin whom Kern has been seeing
twice a week for free. In May he visited Fort Hood's mental health
services office, but was told he'd have to wait six weeks to see a doctor.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi child had followed Kern back to Texas. On the
first of June, Kern was in the bathroom at Under the Hood when the
child made an appearance. Afterward, Thomas and Michaels found Kern
sitting outside under a tree. "The look on his face was just empty.
His eyes were hollow," Thomas says. Kern entered the 12-bed
psychiatric ward at Fort Hood's military hospital. He spent the next
week there, emerging with a diagnosis of PTSD and traumatic brain
injury. Doctors put him on five medications, including tranquilizers,
antidepressants and antipsychotics, which he carries in a small
orange pillbox.
A week after being released, Kern started a blog, "Expendable
Soldier." In his first post he wrote, "I still hate myself and
everything I do. No matter what I am doing any day of the week I some
how am still reminded of the things I did while I was in Iraq, and
sometimes it gets so bad that I believe I am still in Iraq. ...
Sometimes I wish I never came back."
Still, Kern reports for duty at the coffeehouse every day. He's
working on restarting an Iraq Veterans Against the War chapter in
Killeen and talking to other soldiers about the coffeehouse. Does he
feel like he's become part of an anti-war movement? "I am part of an
anti-war movement," he says. "There's no 'feeling' about it."
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