Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(58)
But I had yet to make a full commitment.
Over the next few years, the hunt for bin Laden continued. (His eventual killing on May 2, 2011, in Pakistan by SEAL Team Six and other participating units prompted Al Qaeda to vow vengeance). But in 2003, focus was shifting toward Saddam Hussein in Iraq. US intelligence believed Saddam had significant chemical and biological weapons, perhaps even nukes, that he planned to use against us. I felt deeply conflicted about this. It looked now like a second war would be started, and I hated the idea of more war. Yet I held a deep concern for the future of America. What would my own children experience in this new post–9/11 world?
Slowly, America adjusted to the new normal. We took off our belts and shoes in the airport. We consented to random pat-downs. We couldn’t go all the way to the arrivals gate anymore. We saw young people enlist and head off to war. We began to understand we were fighting a new kind of war against a cowardly enemy who blended in with the population, an enemy who often used children and civilians as shields, an army of suicide bombers, a war that wouldn’t be over anytime soon.
Yet life continued for America, and work continued for me. In February 2003, I shot the movie The Human Stain, starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, and Ed Harris and directed by Robert Benton. I played Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who develops a theory about how the characters played by Anthony and Nicole are killed. In one scene, I go out to the middle of the lake to confront Ed Harris, the bad guy, who is ice fishing. We needed a frozen lake, but shooting wasn’t set to begin until mid-March. So Ed and I were asked to shoot the scene in February on a frozen lake just outside of Montreal. It was freezing cold. Ed’s character wore plenty of clothes, but my character had only a thin overcoat. My teeth chattered as the camera rolled. And in that period I often felt myself shaking for other reasons, ones that had nothing to do with the weather.
In early March 2003, the shoot finished, and I came home. My brother-in-law Jack Treese and I got to talking—debating, really. He was a hawk about our country and was convinced we needed to go into Iraq. Because he’d been a combat medic in Vietnam, I took his views seriously. Unmistakably, Saddam was an evil killer. His sons were evil killers. Saddam tortured and killed many, including his own countrymen, in unimaginable ways: by tearing people apart, feeding them to wild animals, lowering them into vats of acid, burning off their limbs, and raping women in front of their families. He squandered millions of dollars given to him by the United Nations’ humanitarian oil-for-food program and used it instead to pay the families of Palestinian suicide bombers $15,000 to $25,000 every time they blew up Jews in Israel. Some 117 of these bombings were carried out.
On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell made a convincing presentation to the United Nations that Saddam continued to build weapons of mass destruction in spite of UN Resolution 1441 demanding that Iraq comply with its disarmament obligations set forth in previous UN resolutions. Saddam had killed some 5,000 women and children by having Iraqi jets drop poison gas on them. All told, he killed as many as 250,000 Iraqis, 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds, and many other men, women, and children. This post-9/11 world was a frightening place, and Saddam Hussein was an evil, evil man—no question about it.
Yet I was not completely on board with sending our troops into a new war zone in Iraq. “I just don’t want to see any more of our men and women get killed,” I said to Jack, my adrenaline rising.
We debated each other hotly for some time, and eventually I blew up and walked out of the house. For an hour I circled the block, thinking, cooling off. All kinds of political problems were bound up with the plan to go to war with Iraq. To name just one, a few years earlier we’d actually supported Iraq when they were at war with Iran. As I walked, the hawk and dove parts of me tore at each other. I wanted evil to be confronted, but I didn’t want anybody to have to actually do it. We’d invaded Afghanistan nearly a year and a half before. Our men and women were getting killed and wounded, and we still hadn’t found bin Laden. Yes, we had removed the Taliban, and Al Qaeda was on the run, and I was glad about that, but I was reluctant to open up another battlefront and go into Iraq because more Americans were going to get hurt and die.
I debated and debated myself, circling the block. Finally, a switch flipped. I decided the necessity of the cause outweighed the problems associated with the invasion. Evil needed to be confronted, and Saddam was evil. Period. He needed to be stopped.
A few weeks later, on March 20, 2003, our troops began the invasion of Iraq in a mission titled “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” A month after the war began, I watched on TV with the rest of the world as our troops and the Iraqis wrapped one end of a chain around a tank and the other around the statue of Saddam Hussein in the town square in Baghdad—and yanked that bastard down. The local Iraqis, filled with rage, surrounded the statue and beat Saddam’s image with their shoes, a sign of great contempt and disrespect in that culture. The evil dictator finally had been toppled—figuratively and literally—and he was now on the run. (Eventually he was caught hiding in a hole in the ground near Tikrit. Saddam was tried by the Iraqi judicial system and executed on December 30, 2006.)
Shortly after the liberation of Iraq began, something big began to stir inside me. My thinking turned a corner, and I made a decision to go all in, making my commitment to support our troops stronger, more permanent. And as there was clearly a divide brewing in our country over whether we should or should not be fighting a war in Iraq, I had a fear that our troops, like those who fought in Vietnam, would be caught in the middle, not feeling supported and appreciated for their service. A fuller mission began to galvanize in my mind, heart, and soul. I began to feel a new and compelling calling to serve directly. I didn’t want to serve only a little bit, then go back to my golf game. I wanted to do something lasting.