Funny & Interesting People Part 1: Wesley Morgan on spending the summer in Iraq and what war sounds like.

I have asked Wesley Morgan, sophomore at Princeton, to write us a guest blog entry. Below is a brief interview with him, and then his essay. Why Wesley? Well, he is a generally fascinating kid who spent part of the summer in Iraq with the US military’s top dog General Patraeus.

Cameron: You had a pretty amazing summer. Tell me what you did.
Wesley: After my freshman year at Princeton ended in June I went to Iraq for the summer as a reporter.
C: That’s very brave of you, or crazy. What inspired you to go?
W: I’ve been interested in counterinsurgency for most of my life.
C: Not many people can say that, especially not many twenty year olds.
W: I’m one of the lucky few then. Anyhow, about a year ago, I interviewed Gen. David Petraeus for my school newspaper, the Daily Princetonian. [Petraeus is an alum.] He liked my questions. And when he found out that I’m also an Army ROTC cadet, he stayed in touch.
C: Are we talking about General Petraeus, the guy that the New York Times is always talking about? The guy in charge in Iraq?
W: Yeah, that’s the one. Last winter, after he took command of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus suggested that I come to Iraq for the summer, and I of course jumped at the chance. My search for funding for the trip led me to Bill Roggio, a conservative blogger and embed who generously backed my project and helped me get credentialed as an embedded journalist. So, after working at a DC think tank for the first half of the summer, I flew into Kuwait in late July for what ended up being a pretty phenomenal trip.
C: And you wrote all about your experience, right?
W: I’ve written a lot about the military details and lessons learned from the trip at my own blog.
C: Tell me a little about what you learned and the piece you wrote for me.
W: Well Iraq is a fascinating place, so completely different from the States or any other country I’ve ever visited that I hardly know where to start – going chronologically or even just describing incidents that happened seems like it wouldn’t convey what the country and the soldiers are like. Since the last few days on my trip I’ve been thinking about how to write about Iraq through a different lens, one that would seem kind of out of place on my own blog maybe, but that would convey a sense of the place. Since you’re so artsy and original I think this blog is the place for it.
C: I’m flattered! Thanks for talking to me.
W: No problem. Thank you.

Here is the essay Wesley wrote for Funny and Interesting:

How I will remember Iraq

Before I left for Iraq, a soldier I know told me to choose carefully what book I brought along, because I’d always remember that as what I was reading when I first saw a war zone. I reread bits and pieces of Gen. Petraeus’s and Gen. Mattis’s counterinsurgency field manual while I was over there, and I did finish Harry Potter, but there really wasn’t a lot of time for reading (except the endless hours of waiting for flights, which I think are better spent talking to soldiers). There are movies and TV shows playing in every waiting area or lounge and on every forward operating base, but more often than not those just seem jarring and weird – watching episodes of Alias while waiting in a cavernous hanger, for instance, or a pirated copy of Transformers in the basement of a combat outpost between patrols, seemed strange and out of place, and not something that will stick with me as symbolic of the experience. What I will remember is the music I listened to here, and probably always associate a few songs with the experience.

A few months back, Tom Ricks wrote about soldiers’ music in a short piece in the Washington Post, and one the songs he mentioned I actually did hear a bunch of times. You know that song “America, Fuck Yeah!” from Team America: World Police, I’m not sure exactly how many times, but I heard soldiers playing that before or after patrols, either on speakers or once when a soldier gave me one of his iPod’s earbuds. Also, I probably played the “Army Strong” music from Army recruiting ads (yes, I do have it) a hundred times because I listen to it when I need to stay awake and write, which was all the time in Iraq, and it was also the background music to a slideshow that an infantry unit called the Black Lions was working on while I was with them. Those are both very hooah, Army songs, even though the Team America one is obviously tongue-in-cheek, and I heard them a lot, but even they don’t really seem like Iraq to me. They seem superficial somehow, and when I think back over the sounds I associate with the trip, they’re really not the first things that come up. Instead, two other, much more random songs do.

The first is a song called “Older” by Colbie Caillat, some new singer I know nothing about, which I got from the iTunes “new music” thing right before I left and which somehow copied itself into my computer three times, meaning that it is constantly coming up on shuffle. That song is completely un-Iraq-like – as one soldier told me with a combination of disgust and confusion when he saw it playing, “I can’t believe you’re listening to that queer-ass shit again,” which is a fair description, at least in Army vocabulary. But I heard it so many times while writing or updating maps and data that it was stuck in my head for a good week in Baghdad, and sort of still is. That might make for weird memories – associating a sappy, incomprehensible pop song with the sights and smells of Baghdad – but it’s true. I wonder whether that association will stick.

Most of all, though, the music that says “Iraq 2007” to me is “Mad World” by Gary Jules (I had to look up the name). It starts, “All around me are familiar faces, worn out places,” and you might know it from the movie “Donnie Darko.” When I first heard it in Baghdad, it took me a good hour to realize that that’s where I recognized it from. Anyway, sometime in my second week in Iraq, a Spanish journalist named David Beriain showed me a phenomenally powerful slideshow of his time with the 1-4 Cav in Dora, with that song in the background, and it has stuck like epoxy.

I’ve been back for two weeks now, and I still play that song whenever I’m writing about Iraq, because it brings back a vividness to the experiences and recollections like nothing else. I’d probably only heard it once or twice before I got here, but now it won’t go away. In Iraq, it was my brain’s default background noise whenever I spaced out from tiredness or was just trying to piece together everything I’d seen, heard, and smelled on a given day. When my mind went blank staring out the window of a Black Hawk, or sitting in the sweaty hold of a Stryker, I heard that song. When I sat down to write on military computers and didn’t have my own music, I heard it the whole time. It was running through my blank mind the first time my vehicle was ever shot at, and again the last time.

Two weeks ago, on the flight out of Kuwait, as I drifted in and out of consciousness while trying to run through the five weeks in Iraq in my mind, that song was just there, in the background, playing over a fuzzy mental montage of carbine-toting, grey-clad soldiers, crowds of hostile Shia pilgrims, an Iraqi cop with shattered and bloody legs, alert officers at intelligence briefings, frightened prisoners, and colorful reporters. The hundreds of new military and civilian faces I saw in Iraq, the least familiar environment I’ve ever been in, were anything but familiar, but when my mind was drifting sleepily back over all those faces on the plane ride – and now when I try to write about it – that was what I heard.

There’s something about that song. Maybe that’s why David chose it for his tribute to the cav soldiers he knew in Dora. Capt. Grim and the snipers on Haifa Street, the hateful glares of the Sadrist marchers, Gen. Petraeus with his intense energy and endless questions, the eccentric interpreters, the brilliant Lt. Col. Peterson, the journalists I met, the black-robed expressionless women, the quietly weeping sergeants at the Stryker memorial service, Lt. Col. Frank and his infantrymen, the soldiers from Southie in that Manchu infantry platoon, the blindfolded Mahdi Army detainees at a south Baghdad outpost, the eerie green drone feed of insurgents being reduced to chunks of meat by an Apache, the Sadrist intelligence source coldly giving us targeting intel on dozens of his comrades for a stack of cash, the Iraqi policeman washing the blood from his hands at Kalsu, the pride in the eyes of the Black Lions. All of those are, in a way, even if I saw them only once, familiar faces, faces I doubt I’ll completely forget, ever.

The Mad World Video--


Some of Wesley's Photos--



To read more about Wesley’s experiences go to his blog.