At the Naval Academy in the 1990s, my classmates and I were immersed in the greater canon of war.
As midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy in the late 1990s, my classmates and I were immersed in the greater canon of war. We read the books, watched the movies and many of us hoped for a chance to see combat before our time in uniform was over. That opportunity came unexpectedly one day when many of us were just finishing up our first operational tours in the fleet. |
I started that day like normal: driving to 32nd Street in San Diego in shorts and flip-flops, and listening to N.P.R. I saw the planes hit the World Trade Center on television right after I walked aboard my ship. And before lunch I was planning to shoot down a civilian airliner that intelligence reports said might be inbound from LAX to kamikaze the aircraft carrier across the bay. When I would normally be going to sleep, I was trading off watches on the bridge, talking to my sailors standing within arms-length of loaded .50-caliber machine guns and trying to figure out if there were any small boats we needed to shoot. |
Some classmates in the SEAL teams deployed "to the show" in Afghanistan soon thereafter. The rest of us wondered if anyone else would get to go before the whole thing was over. The first Navy "individual augmentees" sent to Afghanistan were folks from my era, officers and enlisted sailors plucked from their first shore tours, put through a brief training course on an Army base and then attached to a unit on the ground in combat. Shore tours were normally supposed to be a time when we would get a break from deploying. But for those selected, these solo deployments were the result of a decision to add sailors to the war effort by themselves, instead of simply deploying additional Army companies and battalions. As a young conflict, the newly christened "War on Terror" had yet to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up, and Uncle Sam hadn't yet figured out how he wanted to feed it. There was really no safe downtime, no way to plan for a break between deployments. We were all on the merry-go-round, racking up more time away at war. |
My classmates and I waited to be selected as department heads as we tried to figure out if the war was going to be going on much longer. But by 2003, we had a new war to fight in Iraq. |
My generation got married, had kids, bought houses and went to grad school with the wars as a constant companion — often interrupting each of those phases of life. These conflicts became a family member many of us had to plan for. By the late 2000s, we were juggling at least two wars at any given time, including the less-public ones in Yemen, in the tribal areas of Pakistan and in various African countries — but we had to be in a windowless vault to talk about those other ones. By then we had the necessary "top secret / sensitive compartmentalized information" clearances to do so. |
Over the years, forward operating bases we served on opened and closed. Territory was won and lost. Even some of the submariners ended up carrying M4 carbines. Friends were killed. Djibouti got huge. My peers got to see the trucks we drove in Iraq repainted with black flags and under the new management of the Islamic State, while other classmates took those same trucks out from the sky one by one with 500-pound bombs. |
Today, with our 20-year reunion in Annapolis about a month away, most of us are in one of three camps: those who split a long time ago; those just finishing their command tours and are selecting for captain or colonel; and those who have decided to cash in their chips and are now planning retirement ceremonies. The class of '99 has watched 18 years of war pass by, and I'm not sure what any of us has to show for it. |
John Ismay is a staff writer who covers armed conflict for The New York Times Magazine. He can be reached at @john.ismay@nytimes.com. |
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