A Word on Terrorism

I’m scared. I’m not going to lie. With the recent fatal shootings in Ft. Hood, Texas I start to wonder if I am really that much safer in the US than I was in Iraq. In Iraq we had exploding IEDs, ambushes, incoming mortar and artillery fire. One time someone even lobbed a RPG over our camp, timed perfectly to explode about ten feet above our heads. That, I thought, was impressive. But in Iraq we had immense firepower to retaliate with, sometimes without hesitation, at times with extreme prejudice. But now? With what has happened in Virginia Tech and Ft. Hood I don’t know what to make of my personal safety in America. I like to think that this would never happen to me, that I would never be in a situation where a madman opens fires on a crowd. But I just don’t know anymore. Even when I walk to and from class, keeping in mind all the armed robberies occurring in broad daylight and zero-dark thirty, I just don’t freakin’ know anymore. Am I all that safe in a country fiercely fighting for gun rights, where the most unsuspecting citizen breaks those rights by killing other unsuspecting citizens? I’ve lived through two deployments in a war zone where the US maintained gun control by the numbers. But when you have someone from the military shooting at the military, you’re left stupefied. This happened in Kuwait, 2003. Six years later it’s happening here. What to make of it…

I’ve never really been pro-gun rights. Never thought it was necessary and felt that the Marine Corps and combat had exposed me to enough of that. Personally, I do feel safer outside of war. But over time it all meshes together. In the beginning of the Iraq invasion some of the enemy wore uniforms, then the enemy dressed as civilians, leaving us the only ones wearing uniforms. That’s how I feel now, as I’m sure a lot of recently returned combat veterans might feel: everyone is a possible target, anyone could begin shooting at any moment and not having a sidearm leaves you exposed, leaves you unarmed. The vulnerable feeling doesn’t come from living among civilians, i.e., easy targets. No, it comes from not carrying a sidearm, be it a M16, 203, 9mm, even a SAW, and being afraid of civilians. No sidearm in Iraq increased your chances of death: more weapons equaled higher chance of survival, whereas fewer weapons equaled almost certain death.

I ask myself if the war has hit home yet, especially with the murderer at Ft. Hood who said he would have rather killed Americans than Iraqis, even though his job as a psychiatrist wouldn’t have exposed him to kill Iraqis. I think the war on terror has transmitted strongly from overseas to the US. It seems to have left our TVs and soaked in our soil, reverberating from 9/11 to the Middle East to the South, planting and sprouting into homegrown recipes of terrorism self-consciously constructed in the form of the American born citizen. I don’t know how embedded-terrorism will evolve from the virus-like presence we see now and into something else. But I do know that the imaginary sidearm I self-consciously carry might very well soon take form of the real thing.