USA. Fort Jackson, South Carolina. 2011. Army recruits on their first day of basic training. My escort around the base was a soldier with a
Combat Infantryman Badge on his uniform. I told him he was lucky to have gotten a quiet job
working at the Public Affairs Office and he was silent for a while. He told me he was medically
transferred out of the infantry after he’d received a traumatic brain injury from a roadside bomb
in Iraq. He had trouble concentrating and lost his equilibrium when he walked. Over time, he
said the injury would prove fatal as his brain tissue continued to deteriorate. The rest of the
day he talked about his wife and children and about how much he missed being at war. Later
we watched recruits walking through a course designed to teach them to recognize IEDs, the
number one killer of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. In every instance, they missed the warning
signs: an invisible tripwire, a pressure plate. A jumpy young soldier, short, thin and shrill,
explained in detail the consequences of such failures in the field. He told stories from Iraq of
fellow soldiers and friends being eviscerated, others decapitated. The recruits listened, their
eyes wide, but they still didn’t find a single device. One drill sergeant whispered to me that no
matter how well the recruits are trained, they’ll miss most of the hidden bombs. When I was
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first warning of an IED was usually the explosion. One time it was
hidden in a dead animal carcass, another time in a pile of garbage. Yet another was buried in a
curve along a dirt road.