There were books to read too. Lots of books. “Boxes of books,” says Cho. “Trash novels. Cheesy romance novels. I kept a list of books I read. A lot of Grisham. TheRainmaker. The Summons. Robin Cook. Stephen King. When you’re out there, you want to read something completely unrelated to war: books about what it’s like to be a public defender, what it’s like to smell a girl’s hair, all that stuff.”
But it wasn’t all mindless escapism. “I read All Quiet on the Western Front twice,” says Cho. And the questions asked by the narrator, Paul Bäumer, got him thinking. “How do you win a war? Do you just kill everybody? Do you just take one city? How do you decide?” Soon Cho found himself agreeing with Bäumer’s epiphany. “I wish the two leaders of the two nations involved would just go at it themselves in a dogfight rather than ruining millions of other lives.”
Cho got out of active duty in 2004, returned stateside, and started applying to schools. “I like the different pace. Laid back. I like the idea that you’re in this intellectual bubble.” He’s graduated from Boston College and will be starting at BC Law this fall. But along the way, something unexpected happened.
“When you’re out, you kind of yearn to go back in,” he says. “You reminisce. I started looking at what books were being written about Iraq, trying to make sense of my own experience through different literature. Sometimes it’s hard to fully appreciate your own experiences from the inside out. Sometimes you have to look at it through a reporter looking at you.”
And so Cho often finds himself at Barnes & Noble, haunting the current-affairs and military-history aisles, thumbing through such books as Baghdad Express and Terror in the Name of God. At BC, he ended up with a minor concentration in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.
“I’m trying to understand my own experiences,” says Cho. “At BC, almost all my free time was spent helping veterans groups. I did my dissertation on homeless veterans. I’m more into Iraq [now] than I ever was when I was there.”
Sgt. Rock’s radio-free Europe
Before his deployment, Army Staff Sergeant Nicholas Rock, 27, never thought his tour of duty would give him occasion to learn the Spanish slang for semen. Of course, he had yet to hear the Catalonian rock band Jarabe de Palo. (The name of which, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, has that connotation in Latin America, though in Spain refers to smacking kids with sticks.)
Starved for entertainment, the Warwick, Rhode Island, native found himself hooked on European satellite radio, particularly stations in Italy, where the acclaimed Barcelona rockers have a following. And upon his return to the States, Rock found himself listening to more and more Spanish music. It reminded him of Kurdistan.
That’s right: unlike Cornejo, who still listens to wordless techno to clear his head of nightmarish war-time memories, this sergeant finds himself listening to music to remember his time in Iraq.
While hardly a Caribbean beach vacation, Rock recalls that Kurdistan was a good deal less violent than other regions of Iraq. “In general, it was safe in comparison to the rest of the country,” he says. “You still had to wake up every day and tell yourself, ‘Someone wants to kill you.’ But I always tell people, ‘If you had to be there, that was the place to be.’ No question. The Kurdish people wanted us there, and they cared about our well-being.”
