Well it's funny to me

During the last year and a half I have observed a common characteristic among combat soldiers. Nearly all of us display a certain grim, sardonic wit. An outsider would probably describe it simply as a morbid sense of humor. Often, as we prepare for a mission, one of our friends (who have the day off and are staying behind) will call after us, “Dudes, if you get blown up out there then I get your laptops.” We all chuckle, sock him in the shoulder and continue on our way. Other times we’ll engage in such seemingly tasteless debates as over which body part we could most afford to lose in a blast (I’m a left leg below the knee kind of guy myself). So much of our humor tends to make fun of our mortality and the uncertainty of our future. We have even written elaborate songs about being killed (my favorite being “Death Month,” which we sang last October as Ramadan, elections, and Saddam’s trial loomed over head). There seems to be no end to the number of dark and foreboding one-liners that stream out of our mouths.

It isn’t that we truly think death and crippling injury are particularly funny. Many of us have known other soldiers who have lost limbs or have been killed here. Believe me when I say that few people understand more than we do how serious the job of a combat soldier really is. Few (aside from the families) feel the loss of a fellow soldier more personally than those of us here.

To understand how we can laugh and joke as we do about such terrible things you have to understand how we have lived for the last year and a half. During our training back in the States we were repeatedly told of the dangers we would face when we arrived in Iraq. Military experts went into great detail to describe to us the myriad techniques and tactics that insurgents would employ to kill us. We’ve listened to casualty statistics and examined pie-charts, each slice representing a different cause of death. It often seemed that any effort to survive would be futile. For every roadside bomb that we could see and identify there would be twenty more that would go unnoticed until it was too late.

After only having lived in Iraq for a short time several additional difficulties became obvious to us all. For example, there is no way to differentiate a friendly Iraqi man from one who wished to harm you. There is no way to know whether you are traveling toward harm or away from it. No matter how many times you have driven down a road you can’t know from day to day whether it is safe or whether, on this occasion, there is something deadly waiting for you.

It is living with constant uncertainty that wears a person down. You no longer feel as if you’re in control of your life and your destiny. Everything is a matter of luck. If today is the day then there is nothing you can do about it so you might as well stop worrying. I think that’s why we joke about our own deaths so often. It’s a sort of relief from the tension of our work and the reality that most situations are beyond our control. Since I can’t do much to affect the situation, I might as well make light of it. It doesn’t seem real when you joke about it. After all, jokes are only jokes. To laugh about death and disfigurement just makes it seem that much less likely that it will happen to you. We strip death of its ability to scare us by wrapping it in humor.

Through the occasional slip in judgment I have found that most people back home do not appreciate our morbid jokes. (Mental Note: never sing the chorus of “Death Month” to your ex-girlfriend no matter how funny you think the song is; it will make her cry.) For those who are offended by our dark humor and cavalier attitude I apologize, but that’s how we’ve chosen to cope with life in a combat zone. Believe me, there are worse ways.