No place like home
Charlie Company’s first taste of war hadn’t been that bad, not as wars go, anyway. They’d entered the town of Garmsir on April 28 with heavy air support to relieve the outnumbered British troops, and they’d pretty much kicked the Taliban’s ass. When they were done, it was like a vacation.
They’d been told to pack for seven to 10 days, but the operation ended up stretching for over four months, so nobody had any niceties like cots or iPods, which meant they spent a lot of the time sleeping in the dirt and talking about anything and everything. They bought food at local markets, and swam in the river when it got hot. Nobody died, they did what they came to do, and eight months after leaving home, it was time to go on leave.
At first, being back was all about relaxing and spending time with your family. No bills, no work, nothing to do but eat, hang out, sleep with your girlfriend, and drink beer.
But after a while, Canty started noticing that little things bothered him a lot more than they used to, things like traffic, waiting in line, or the way people were always on their cell phones. He didn’t like being in stores, all the people just milling around aimlessly, unable to make up their minds. He was shopping in WalMart one day, when he began feeling anxious and sweaty, like he couldn’t breathe.
“I have to get the fuck out of here,” he said.
He went out and sat in the car.
“What’s the matter?” his girlfriend said.
“I don’t know. I can’t be in there. All those people, and nobody knows what they want.”
About 15 days into his leave he started getting calls from some of the guys in Charlie Company.
“What’s up,” they’d ask.
“Not much,” he’d say. “You?”
“I’m gettin’ tired of this shit,” they’d say. “I think I’m heading back to base early.”
He drove back to Camp LeJeune, kind of glad to be back, and also kind of not. There was some administrative shit to do, but mostly they sat around barracks drinking and listening to rumors about where they were going next.
Word came that they were heading to a town called Marjah said to be the last Taliban stronghold in Helmand, and Canty knew the fighting would be worse than Garmsir. “Second round knockout,” everyone joked, meaning the second time out, someone’s probably going to die.
Angus was a sergeant and a squad leader, but was new to Charlie Company. Canty hadn’t hung out with him much, but Doss had bonded with him because Angus had family in Schenectady. Smitty, on the other hand, was a 19-year-old kid from New York, who everybody liked, even though he was truly new, what Marines called a “boot,” meaning they were fresh from boot camp, and had never seen any action.
Doss had been in a big firefight the day before, so Angus told him he didn’t have to go on patrol that day with Second Platoon. He was asleep in his tent, when a huge explosion woke him up, and he ran outside and saw everyone standing up on the berm. You could see far off the plume of smoke from two IEDs, and then the air was filled with the familiar whump whump of the med-evac helicopter as the names of the dead were called over the radio and everyone began to cry.
Doss was sent to relieve the guy on post four, which faced out over the open desert. The helicopter landed about 20 meters in front of him, and he watched a line of people move towards it, carrying Smitty and Angus in two black body bags.
“When I saw that, I can’t even describe it,” Doss said. “My fucking heart sank, my stomach sank, I felt like I was on a fucking roller coaster. And that instantly made me recognize my own mortality. I looked up to Angus. He was one of those dudes that you just kinda felt safe around. And he just got smoked like that.”
Auclair, the section leader they’d had for both deployments, was next to Angus, trying to save Smitty, when Angus got hit. Doss came back to the tent later and found Auclair sitting on his cot crying and trying to clean the blood from under his nails with baby wipes. There were pieces of intestine hanging from his helmet. Doss sat down across from him and handed him some wipes. He didn’t know what to say, and after a while he got up and left.
Auclair was never the same. Doss, whose cot was next to Auclair’s, heard him crying in his sleep, but remembers also that he became a better squad leader. He was braver after Smitty and Angus died. Brave verging on reckless.
“All of a sudden, everything changed,” said Canty. “You can’t just leap down and go like, ‘Aw, man, this sucks! I’m not playing anymore!’ This is it, this is, like, war now. That changed everything.”
It was only two months into the deployment, their second day of patrols. Charlie Company lost five guys that day, three wounded, two dead, and they hadn’t even entered Marjah yet.
Five months later they were home. Or, putting it another way, five months later they were scattered all over the U.S. in homes, still trying to understand the connection between Marjah and their jobs as commercial fishermen, delivery guys, cell phone reps.
“It got worse when I got back from Marjah. It got a lot worse,” Canty told me. “Cause people had died, and then you look around and you say,‘My friend died for this shit? For what?’ And nobody gives a fuck here, and nobody cares. … It’s like an anger or frustration, where it’s just like, dude, there’s a war going on and nobody seems to know, and it’s like such a big deal, like the war is such a big deal if you’ve experienced it. It’s just like, dude, people die in that shit, kids, fathers, brothers, sons, they’re all dying, and like, you’re watching Transformers 3.”
“At first I had this feeling,” Doss said. “I was like, ‘I’m done with this.’ I was so happy to be done, and alive, and out of the Marines.”
His first day back Doss bought a keg and had a party. “Yo, motherfuckers,” he said. “I’m home.”
But the motherfuckers barely noticed as they sat against the wall nodding off, heads lolling, pinned eyes rolled back. While he was gone the scene had changed, everyone was into heroin now, and it wasn’t long before he joined them.
In Afghanistan, Doss said, his mind was always filled with the law of averages: “You have to go on foot patrols every day, and you get in a firefight almost every day, and it’s just like, ‘I can’t do this every day and not get hit, I’m gonna get hit.’ And that just wears on you. It just wears on you. Booby traps everywhere. Everything is boobytrapped, so you never know where to step, and that wears on you. There’s so much stress, and you’re just so, like adrenaline fueled, and so on the edge of death, and you just don’t care, you’re just like, ‘Fuck it.’ And then you come home and you just have to, like, stop.”
He couldn’t stop thinking about Smitty and Angus, and all the other guys who died in Marjah. And Marines kept dying. Tooker in a motorcycle crash, and Schiano when he wrecked his car going well over 100 mph. Ryan and Grosso both killed themselves. Several of Doss’ friends from home died as well, some in random accidents, some from overdoses.
He tried going to community college, but dropped out after five months. He was uncomfortable around all those people, everybody asking him stupid questions, like “How loudly did they yell at you in boot camp?” But when he tried to talk about anything that actually mattered, like Smitty and Angus, the conversation quickly got awkward. But he thought about that stuff all the time, and not being able to talk about it sucked. Thank God for heroin.
“The first time I ever did it I was stressed out,” Doss said. “I had been thinking about Smitty a lot, and I was at my boy’s house, he’s in prison now actually, and he was doing it, and I sniffed some of it, and I just went into a peaceful fucking bliss. All my problems were fucking solved, and I just felt amazing.”
Heroin distanced him from people as much or more than his war experience did. After getting out, Canty kept calling him up to talk about this crazy idea he had to make a documentary, but after a while, Doss stopped calling him back. When they’d talk, guys from Charlie Company would ask each other, “You heard from Doss?” The answer was always no.
Watch a segment from Once a Marine in which Doss describes his experience at community college:
Doss called Canty from rehab in the late summer of 2011. By then, Canty had been steadily buying camera equipment and learning how to make movies, and the documentary didn’t seem so crazy anymore. Canty urged him to come down and help. Doss was really excited, but when he got out, he went silent again, and Canty knew he was back on dope.
Canty continually returns to the idea that the movie can save Doss. He talks about him almost as much as he does about himself, and although it may not be what a Marine, or a 24-year-old, wants to hear, the way he speaks about his friend is beautiful and touching.
Doss is clean now, and committed to working on the movie. The idea makes him laugh. “He says my official title is producer, but I don’t know the first thing about that. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.”
He knows Canty thinks of the movie as a way to save him.
“It means a lot to me. I fuckin’ really appreciate it.” He laughs. “That’s my boy!”
When he thinks about war, getting shot at, and shooting at people, Canty doesn’t think he was ever afraid. Maybe, he thinks, that’s what’s wrong with me, that I’m not afraid of the things I’m supposed to be afraid of.
“Once you overcome your fear of death,” Canty said. “What kind of person are you? Are you that numb to living and dying? And then it’s like, how am I expected to come back and have a normal life and feel, like, love, and feel, like, a lot of these emotions that I’ve kind of shoved in as a survival mechanism to kind of hide all of that or just not feel it, just numb yourself to everything, numb yourself to losing a friend, numb yourself to losing friends after you get out, not talk about it, avoid it, smoke weed when you start feeling anything, just kind of be numb. But once you’re numb for a certain period of time it’s kind of like, if you let your arm stay asleep, eventually it will hurt.”
So he’s waking up, to make a movie about coming home from war, and he wants us to wake up too.
To donate to Stephen Canty’s Kickstarter campaign and help him make his documentary click here.
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