Why I Went to Iraq

By Elliot Ackerman

Thursday, March 16, 2023

 

When the war in Iraq began, we were in crisis. We were young Marine second lieutenants training in Quantico, Va. Most of us had never seen combat. We were convinced that we would miss our generation’s war. I secretly hoped that progress in Iraq would prove slower than expected, that there would be a little bit of the war left for me to fight in when I arrived at my infantry battalion the following year. When Baghdad fell on April 9, I felt hopeless. When President Bush delivered his “mission accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, I despaired and stopped watching the news. Among the second-lieutenant trainees and captain instructors, the attitude turned from despair to resignation. The captains were frank with us: You missed the war. We missed it, too. Now let’s get down to the business of soldiering.

 

In the summer of 2003, new instructors began to check in to Quantico. These were senior first lieutenants who would soon be promoted to captains. A couple of them had participated in what would eventually be called “the invasion” but what we then called, simply, “the war.” They had stories — real war stories. I remembered how captains and majors who’d taught at Quantico for years deferred to the experience of these new instructors, many of whom still wore their desert-combat boots in the Virginia woods. In August, on the front page of the Marine Corps Times, the headline read: “Marines Back to Iraq.” The story quickly made the rounds through the barracks, and many were left wondering what we’d even be doing there. Marines are shock troops. The war was over, and we don’t do occupation duty — that’s the Army’s job. As if to emphasize further that the war was over, the Army dragged Saddam Hussein out of a hole near Tikrit two weeks before Christmas.

 

Everyone wanted one of two things: orders to Iraq or orders to Camp Pendleton, in Southern California. In January, I received orders to the Camp Pendleton–based First Battalion of the First Marine Regiment, or “one-one” in Marine-speak. That battalion wasn’t going to Iraq; it was deploying with the Navy to the western Pacific as part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU. Our instructors told us that for the next 24 hours we could exchange assignments if we wanted. Another lieutenant in my battalion, who desperately wanted to be stationed in Camp Pendleton, had orders to First Battalion, Eighth Marines (the less illustrious “one-eight”) stationed in the North Carolina swamps of Camp Lejeune. I knew that battalion would be leaving for Iraq immediately.

 

I called two mentors. The first, an instructor at Quantico, said, “What do you want to go to Iraq for? All you’ll do there is occupation duty. Deploy with the MEU.” The second, then–Marine captain Doug Zembiec, who would later come to be known as the “Lion of Fallujah” for his heroics in that battle and would also, three years after the night of our call, be killed while leading a group of CIA-sponsored Iraqi commandos in Baghdad, responded more contemplatively: “If you go on the MEU, will you be carrying live rounds every day?” I responded that I would not. “If you go to Iraq,” he asked, “will you be carrying live rounds every day?” I said I would. He then asked, “So, Marine, what do you think you should do?” I switched my orders.

 

None of us imagined that the war in Iraq would last the better part of a decade. We also didn’t understand how, for many of us, it would become forever commingled with the war in Afghanistan, which would stretch into a second decade.

 

I left for Iraq in June 2004. At the time, I still believed I’d missed my war. That November, my battalion fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah. I remember sitting, in a dilapidated house between firefights, with a sergeant in our battalion who’d served in the invasion. He was making some point about the fighting then versus the fighting now. He began by saying, “Back in the war . . .” and I had to ask him: “If that was the war, then what the hell is this?”

 

I’ve observed from my conversations with other veterans that saying I served in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 is like saying I was in Vietnam in 1965, at the very beginning. I’ve fought in two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and covered two others as a journalist, in Syria and Ukraine. In every instance, I’ve felt that I had arrived late to the conflict — whether by weeks, months, or years — only to realize later that I got there early on. As we mark the 20th anniversary of the “beginning” of the Iraq War, it’s important to recognize that we’re also marking the approach of the moment when we realized that our conception of the war was outmoded — not only as to the discovery of weapons of mass destruction, or the perils of regime change, but also as to length of time. We had no idea how to limit American involvement in the war in Iraq and achieve our objectives on a timeline the American public could accept.

 

I’d argue that we still don’t.

 

Is the war in Iraq over? Some might say it ended on December 14, 2011, when the last coalition forces withdrew into Kuwait. But it’s tough to make that assertion given that the same coalition forces returned to Iraq two years later to combat the Islamic State. And, unlike the servicemen and -women we withdrew from Afghanistan — in an ignominious “ending” — the ones in Iraq remain.

 

It’s neither simple nor sufficient to mark anniversaries. We also need to understand what the beginning, middle, and end of a war mean — so that we may better understand where we find ourselves on the timeline of any future war. When I remember the beginning of the Iraq War, I remember that naïve lieutenant who fretted about “missing his war,” the one who hadn’t yet learned that all too often in war there’s more fighting than anyone could ever imagine.