Outside the Wire: American Soldiers' Voices from Afghanistan

By Christine Dumaine Leche and Brian Turner

A riveting collection of thirty-eight narratives by American soldiers serving in Afghanistan, Outside the Wire offers a powerful evocation of everyday life in a war zone. Christine Dumaine Leche—a writing instructor who left her home and family to teach at Bagram Air Base and a forward operating base near the volatile Afghan-Pakistani border—encouraged these deeply personal reflections, which demonstrate the power of writing to battle the most traumatic of experiences.

The soldiers whose words fill this book often met for class with Leche under extreme circumstances and in challenging conditions, some having just returned from dangerous combat missions, others having spent the day in firefights, endured hours in the bitter cold of an open guard tower, or suffered a difficult phone conversation with a spouse back home. Some choose to record momentous events from childhood or civilian life—events that motivated them to join the military or that haunt them as adults. Others capture the immediacy of the battlefield and the emotional and psychological explosions that followed. These soldiers write through the senses and from the soul, grappling with the impact of moral complexity, fear, homesickness, boredom, and despair.

We each, writes Leche, require witnesses to the narratives of our lives. Outside the Wire creates that opportunity for us as readers to bear witness to the men and women who carry the weight of war for us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813934129

Book preview

SPECIALIST CHANTAL OGALDEZ

SPRING I sit on a stone bench in Bayswater Park, Queens, in the oppressive July heat. The burned-earth odor of weed mixes with the smoke of dripping fat from the burgers on one of the public grills. A vagrant pisses on a tree trunk not twenty feet away. A few small children, seemingly alone, run in and out of the sprinklers, and older kids play homicide on the handball court. The scorching sun sears my face and arms. The recruiter next to me keeps talking, determined to persuade me to join the Army.

Look around you, he says. Is this really how you want to live?

Homeless people wander aimlessly. Fifteen-year-old mothers push babies and toddlers back and forth in rusted grocery carts, back and forth, scanning the scene looking for a sucker to take care of their kids. The atmosphere is indeed glum.

Sergeant Smith, bald with thick eyebrows, maintains a pleasant smile. After a long silence, I turn to look him in the eyes, which hold a mysterious pain of their own. These eyes got my attention the first time we met: brown, lifeless pools that unnerved me yet were as familiar as the view of my neighborhood from my bedroom window. His are the same eyes plastered on the faces of my friends, the people in my community, and, sadly enough, my own in the mirror. I break the spell of his gaze long enough to answer his question.

No, I say with hesitation. I want more for myself. My stomach is a lump of anxiety weighted with guilt. I would be leaving my family in New York. To think of saying good-bye to my mom makes my veins feel frostbitten. I see her sweet face, the patient features that reflect my own. Will she resent me?

Sergeant Smith capitalizes on my hesitation. His voice swells with urgency. The ’hood don't give a damn about you! There's no future for you out here! The Army can open a whole new world to you!

His next words hit me like a bullet: You don't want to end up like your family members, struggling to get by each and every day but not doing anything to change their lives.

Specialist Chantal Ogaldez at work in the Technical Supply Office in an aviation hangar on Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, June 2009. (Courtesy of Specialist Chantal Ogaldez)

This is true, I think. My cousin and her three children sleep on our floor because they have nowhere else to lay their heads. My aunt takes her grandkids to the hospital every few weeks to have the roaches pulled from their ears. My uncle drinks himself out of his mind.

I must make a move. I look at the scene in the park. Hopelessness and despair mixed with rage. In two months I am on my way to Fort Jackson for basic training.

Specialist Chantal Ogaldez, US Army, served in Afghanistan.

MOS: 92A Automated Logistical Specialist

HOMETOWN: Far Rockaway, New York

I have left the military and am now a certified medical assistant. I plan to pursue a career in nursing because I really love helping people.

SERGEANT FIRST CLASS BILLY WALLACE

DEPLOYMENT My duffle bags lay clumped in the bed of my truck, and in the backseat all three of my boys were weeping as quietly as they could manage in order to spare me more of the wretched heartache that comes with leaving them behind for fifteen months. I was to drop off my bags at the two-tone military-tan building with the rusted window ledges where I usually worked. By the traffic jam in the parking lot, it was clear I would not be the only one who would be breaking down into tears. I pulled my bags from the truck bed and began placing them in the neat rows already begun by the several hundred others there, rows called dress right dress. My oldest son, Austin, grabbed my duffle, which was just about as tall as he, and without uttering a word walked right by me and placed my bag in perfect unison with the others.

First Sergeant Alkire conducted roll call, the moment we had all been waiting for. We had already drawn our weapons and night-vision goggles, so we could now look for a place to be alone with our wives and children, parents, girlfriends, boyfriends—alone so we could cry. Lord knows soldiers can't cry in front of each other. I could already hear one of the guys popping off with, "Hey, Bobby, did you see Billy crying like a sissy so much he couldn't even kiss his wife