Longing for the Test of War as a Young Man The war began for me while I was sitting on a couch in a living room. Like many people, I watched it all commence on television. At a friend's house on campus, I sat with a few college friends and drank Bud Ice from bottles. We weren't drinking beer because of the war; we were drinking simply because, being in college, it was something we often did. White smoke from an explosion would burst up from the cityscape of Baghdad as the sound echoed through the dark. Yellow tracers from antiaircraft fire sprayed randomly into the sky. The ticker on the bottom of the screen euphemistically summarized what was happening (while adding some alliteration and a subtle rhyme): "Large explosion rocks Iraq's capital." By March 2003, I had been enlisted in the Army National Guard for nearly two years. I'd signed on in June 2001 for the standard six-year commitment - roughly three months before the attacks of Sept. During the invasion of Iraq, I was still certain I wouldn't deploy anywhere (I am sure the Pentagon and our president at the time might have agreed with this certainty). Mostly I imagined, as many of my military friends imagined, that we'd be taking care of Army bases while active-duty forces deployed. No one needs to be told now that these were poor assumptions. In that living room, being the only person in the military, my friends treated me as some kind of expert regarding the war, the invasion, everything we were watching on television. Truly, I was the military-affairs expert and spokesman in that living room. At 19 years old, I was glad to show off some of the new knowledge I'd gained in basic training (completed in October 2002) about weapons, vehicles and basic soldiering skills. As we watched what was probably B-roll of Marines and their vehicles, I would say, "That's an M2 Bradley, shoots 25 millimeter rounds." That's an M1A1, I drove those in Basic. I would explain the specifications of the tank, the massive size of it, the mind-numbing sound of its main gun firing a round. Before completing Basic Training, I had had my share of failures: kicked out of a private high school for poor grades my sophomore year, cut from the basketball team at the other high school my senior year, rejected by multiple universities and colleges due to my not-so-stellar grade point average of 2.7. So at the time, sitting in front of that television and being able to understand, at least on the surface level, what these machines were and who these men were felt good, even meaningful. In my reserve unit I felt a sense of community, of purpose, and although I didn't know these soldiers on the screen and I wouldn't be driving into Iraq with them, I still felt a deep bond, a connection that binds all who are in the same military. I didn't intend or want to go to war, but I still felt a draw to it, a strange attraction. Christopher Isherwood writes of growing up in the 1920s in England after World War I: "I was obsessed by a complex of terrors and longings connected with the idea "war." "War," in this purely neurotic sense, meant "the test." The test of your courage, your maturity. ..."Are you really a man?" Unconsciously I believe, I longed to be subjected to this test, but I also dreaded failure. This idea of "the test" summed up much of what I felt while watching the war unfold. Part of me wanted to take part in "the test," to be there on the ground with others I had trained with at Fort Knox. In some ways, I felt regret for not being there, for sitting on the "wrong" side of the screen. But at the same time the possibility of failing, which could mean anything from cowardly hiding during a fight to just getting killed, made me less eager. I hadn't joined active duty; I had joined as a reservist. Meanwhile, explosions were happening all over a country I knew very little about. Politically, at the time, I felt supportive of what was going on: Saddam Hussein might give illicit weapons to those who might use them against us; his government has connections with Al Qaeda; most of all, we must kill Mr. Hussein (we had chanted many times in Basic Training, "Gotta train, gotta train, gotta train to kill Hussein"). You might think you're informed, but in the end, you're just a 19-year-old boy from northeast Ohio drinking Bud Ice on a couch. In that room, we were aware that "war" was beginning and that, although we couldn't understand it or fully comprehend why, something significant was happening. In Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of Courage," before going into battle, Henry Fleming felt that "he was about to mingle in one of those great affairs of the earth." I felt a similar sense, although in my case, I was about to watch, and was already watching, this "great affair" unfold. Clearly, the "great" used by Crane is not meant in any way to be celebratory or positive. His "great" is more associated with the largeness, the monumentality, the extreme effects upon the land and the people, before, during and after those first bombs fell, or in Henry's case, when the Union clashed with the Confederates. In that living room I understood this importance, though I couldn't articulate it at the time and I couldn't imagine how much that place being bombed would affect me in roughly one year. All of us sat on couches and watched the war begin through the same medium we'd watched a basketball game, a reality-show, a film on DVD. If I had any trouble comprehending the reality of that country, its people, the explosions that had already happened and the explosions yet to come, in less than a year I would cross Iraq's border with Kuwait in my own up-armored Humvee. Until then, I'd continue to watch through a television. Hugh Martin served from June 2001 to June 2007 in the Ohio Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker and deployed to Iraq in 2004. His chapbook of poetry, "So, How Was the War?" (Kent State University Press, 2010) was published by the Wick Poetry Center, and his first book, "The Stick Soldiers," won the 2012 Poulin Prize from BOA Editions and will be released in April 2013. He is now a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, Calif. More Reflections on the Iraq War A Diarist at War