Non-combat vets’ experience shaped by popular war culture

Dacia Sachtjen’s grandparents want her to learn karate. They want her to be able to kill a man with her bare hands all by herself. 

Six months from now, Sachtjen, a junior and sergeant in the Army National Guard, will be deployed somewhere in Iraq.

She doesn’t know where yet or for how long she’ll be there. She’s been told to act as if she’s not leaving, but it’s hard to pretend nothing is happening when you’re on your way to a war zone.

Sachtjen’s grandparents are worried about her, but it’s not the insurgents they’re concerned about — it’s all of the male soldiers she’ll be surrounded by on base.

When Sachtjen arrives in Iraq, she’ll follow in the footsteps of a new breed of veteran: the fobbit. Fobbits are soldiers who never leave their forward operating base; they’re the postal clerks and paralegals of the War on Terror.

Hollywood doesn’t make movies about fobbits.

Despite the popular depiction of modern warfare in video games and films, in reality the military is a big, slow-moving bureaucracy staffed by thousands of people whose jobs keep them on base to keep the American war machine moving. 

For a society with an increasingly inconsumable amount of media, there is a substantial lack of the fobbit in our popular perception of the Iraq War.

“Honestly,” said SPEA graduate student and former Marine Corps Sergeant Jeremy Degler, “I feel that a squad of Marines going house to house, watching over a neighborhood, isn’t going to sell as much as far as a news story goes in terms of 20 people dying in a car bombing.”

Soldiers do not roam outside the wire on their own similar to Matt Damon in “Green Zone” or Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker.” They don’t make their own choices about how they spend their day, and unlike the video game series “Call of Duty,” most soldiers don’t spend their days moving from firefight to firefight.

Although they might never see combat, the fobbits endure the same stress and pressures as their combat-seasoned peers, but there is never that cathartic moment of victory in battle. 

Degler said he has a lot of hostility toward the media for focusing on the horrors of war and not the day-to-day life of a soldier. In the seven years since the U.S. invaded Iraq, only 4,427 U.S. military personnel have been killed.

Compared to the more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam and the 418,500 who died in World War II, the U.S. has had very few casualties for a war that has gone on for almost a decade.

Even when combined with the death toll from U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the total number of U.S. casualties in the combined War on Terror is less than 10,000.

Eric East was in Australia when 9/11 happened. He was among the first soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan, and now, years later, he said he thinks both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unjustified. “I spent seven years just researching the facts,” East said. “I’ve come to the conclusion that these wars are holy crusades.”

East said reading information on the Internet influenced his thinking more than the time he spent in Afghanistan.

Unlike their silver screen heroes, they were tasked with standing in guard towers and getting shot at. If they did leave the wire, they built schools or passed out teddy bears.

Those who left the wire to fight, to go door to door looking for insurgents, found a war they couldn’t rectify with what Hollywood had sold them. There were no great battles, no beaches to storm. 

For some, it’s as if nothing changed about their lives except that at any minute that life could be ended by a stray bullet or mortar round.

“We were fobbits,” former Air Force Sergeant Mike Mojonnier said. “Just the stress from that, having multiple mortar and rocket attacks a day, knowing that the mission you’re doing is dangerous, knowing that being over there is dangerous, and then on top of it, you have almost no way to relieve that stress. Guys would just bottle it up and take it out on whoever, whatever was next to them.”

Mojonnier worked in what’s called “blue on blue” — he policed the soldiers on the base. When he got off work, he went home and played “Halo.”

Despite the presence of Xboxes and gyms, life on a Forward Operating Base (FOB) is not life in the United States. Nobody notices this more than the women who serve overseas.

“People figure hey, you’re deployed. It’s like Vegas,” sophomore Sergeant Stephanie Tremblay said. “What happens here stays here. So you never know what’s going to be lurking around that dark corner.”

Along with the threat of sexual assault, soldiers deal with constant petty crimes such as theft and driving under the influence. Sometimes the pressure of living on the FOB is so great that soldiers turn to suicide.

“You get a letter from home saying your wife is divorcing you,” National Guard member and senior Kayla Neir said. “And sometimes soldiers take their service rifle into the port-a-john and kill themselves.”

Among all of the firefights, the mortar rounds, the sexual assaults and the suicides, there are video games and war movies. And in contrast to the fobbits, there are the grunts.

“We didn’t play Xbox or anything because we lived in a big warehouse with just rows of bunk beds,” said sophomore Tim Whitson, who was deployed to Iraq with the 82nd Airborne. “But we would go there, and someone who does live on the FOB would yell at you for putting your hands in your pockets or wearing something you’re not supposed to wear. That kind of raises the amount of spite that you have towards them.”

Whitson spent most of his tour walking around Baghdad with night vision goggles and bolt cutters, raiding the houses of suspected insurgents. He slept on concrete floors with no electricity. They had to burn their bodily waste because they had no running water. When he came back to the FOB, it was like a completely different planet. Despite having to survive in much rougher conditions than his fobbit counter parts, Whitson said he misses doing what most people only see in the movies.

“When you’re running through Baghdad with night vision goggles hunting insurgents, there’s a cool factor to that,” Whitson said. “I miss that sometimes.” Whitson was hit by a mortar round during his tour of duty. He was on patrol, and he saw the first mortar round near his position. 

“It blew my ear drums,” Whitson said. “Just like in the video games, when everything gets muffled and sounds far away. That’s exactly what it sounded like.”

Soldiers called up from the reserves and the National Guard entered the War on Terror with only hours of film and video game experiences to tell them what modern war was.
The generation that enlisted after 9/11 grew up with “Saving Private Ryan,” “Band of Brothers,” “Halo” and “GoldenEye.”

When they arrived overseas, many of those who served complained of boredom and restlessness. The struggles they do face, the constant stress and unrelenting boredom, lack the romance of the war stories from their grandfathers’ generation.

“I was watching ‘Saving Private Ryan,’” Mojonnier said. “And my buddy just looks at me and says, ‘That’s the war I want to fight.’”