Words: Robin Brown 2017-10-31 17:11:56
I took another step and looked behind us. I could no longer see our base camp, from which we’d skinned in the dark hours of the morning. I could see the end of our skin track some 500 feet below, where we’d put skis on our packs. It was steeper than I’d imagined, and I decided it was better to look up than down. I leaned my weight into the mountain and took another step. We still had another 500 feet to go.
This wasn’t the first time any of us had been to the country—all three of us are U.S. Army veterans who fought in the Iraq War. And while all three of us were crazy enough to return of our own volition this past April, I blamed Stacy for my current icy perch along the Iranian border. He had called me less than a month previous, inviting me to return as part of his project, Adventure Not War. The organization takes soldiers back to countries in which they fought to undertake humanitarian work and adventure travel.
While Stacy was in the military, he traveled to numerous war-torn countries. After his time serving, he became determined to have a different kind of experience in those places that had held so much darkness—a kind of a rewriting of the script. His first trip was in 2016, rock climbing in the African country of Angola with legendary alpinist Alex Honnold. One year and many expeditions later, he wanted to make a first ski descent from the summit of Halgurd. Along with our three-veteran team was filmmaker Max Lowe and cinematographer Mack Fisher.
Having carried the weight of the Iraq War on my shoulders for more than a decade, I wanted to meet the people for whom so many of my friends had died. I wanted to see what had become of the country I never thought I’d set foot in again. To me, nothing good had come from the Iraq War. I often wondered if we should have ever been there, or if our efforts had been in vain.
This could be my chance to find out. I just never imagined the answer would involve a pair of skis, crampons and a frighteningly steep slope deep in Iraq’s biggest mountains.
I served two tours in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, as a helicopter pilot, and on December 9, 2003, I was shot down by an SA-16 shoulder-fired, heatseeking missile in Fallujah. My copilot, Jeff Sumner, and I survived the crash, evaded the enemy and were rescued. Three days later, we were back in the rotation flying missions and fighting the insurgency in Iraq as if nothing had happened.
Every day we took off from our airfield outside of Fallujah to fight the insurgency, looking for IEDs that had been buried in the roads and providing security for our ground forces. Our battalion conducted operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There were no days off, no time to think about anything but the next mission. We lost four aircraft to enemy fire in three months, and the fighting only intensified as the insurgency became more sophisticated.
Too many soldiers died. Too many friends died. Most of us stuffed the guilt of surviving out of our minds, and just kept fighting. It’s hard to put into words, beyond that it was a terrible time and a terrible place. It was the Iraq War.
As a pilot, I spent the majority of my time at an elevation of about 100 feet. When I picture Iraq, I picture rooftops. My interactions with Iraqi citizens were limited to a few interpreters. When I was on the ground, the women wouldn’t look at me and the men wouldn’t speak to me. At the time, I didn’t really understand the Shiite were different than the Sunni. I didn’t understand the Kurdish people were a different ethnic group entirely, one that didn’t identify as Iraqi, and they were carving out a separate nation-state in the northern part of the country.
The call to prayer that rang out over the cities and towns five times throughout the day scared me because I didn’t understand it. I told myself that most Iraqis were probably good people, but because there was no telling the good from the bad, I assumed they all wanted to kill me. I came to the conclusion they were incredibly different from us Americans. We had nothing in common.
Thirteen years later, I landed in Erbil, a city of some 1.5 million people in a northern part of Iraq known as Kurdistan. It was the middle of the night, I was exhausted from the 36-hour trip, and as I fell asleep in the hotel room, I was still questioning whether I should have come at all. The next morning, I awoke to a sight I knew too well: Concrete rooftops, exactly the same as I’d seen more than a decade ago.
Those first few days were terrifying. I worried about the fight in Mosul only 40 miles away. I worried every time we entered a restaurant and I was the only woman. I worried every time we went through a military checkpoint and had to show our passports.
We made our way north, stopping at a refugee camp to work with a nonprofit organization called The Haven Center. There were thousands of people in the camp, most of whom had fled Mosul when ISIS took over the city four years earlier, and the Haven Center provided schooling for the children there. Lacking an actual building, the Center’s classes took place outside, and we helped build a shelter to cover them on stormy days. The kids were delightful and beautiful and enjoyed practicing their English, while the mothers peeked out from their tents. There were few men in camp; most had been killed in the invasion of Mosul. The families all hoped to return home one day, but it was hard to imagine what these kids’ futures would look like.
The mountains came into view shortly after we left, and grew taller with every mile. I was surprised by their beauty and size—hulking pyramids covered in rocky, alpine meadows, their grassy flanks streaked with snow. The foothills and deep canyons reminded me of Colorado.
At the time, Stacy, Griff, Max, Mack and I were just getting to know each other. Our Kurdish driver didn’t speak English, and our Kurdish translator, Harley, was a self-identified communist who said Karl Marx was misunderstood. He was also a poet whose dream was to translate communist poetry into his native language.
At the beginning, we bridged the gap with politeness, but soon Stacy poked fun at Griff, then Griff poked fun at me, and then we all made fun of Max. Eventually even our driver and Harley were throwing zingers and laughing at our antics. We ate meals together and talked about our families and our pastimes. But most of all, we laughed.
I swung my ice axe again, planted my pole, and pushed myself another step closer to the summit. Temperatures were quickly rising, and we rushed upward in T-shirts under the spiking avalanche danger. I thought about the war and all the trauma that had come with my service to our country. I thought about those that had lost their lives to that service. With each step, I laid down my anger and my guilt and I focused on the beauty around me. I thought about the families we had met, all hoping for a better future for their children. I thought about the meals we had shared in their homes.
Down below, I could see our mountain guide, Reband Chomani, taking pictures. Despite being in the Halgurd Sakran National Park, landmines were everywhere, planted by Saddam Hussein decades ago to keep the Iranians from invading, and Reband had guided us through that deadly gauntlet. I thought about his hope to travel the world and be a mountain guide. With each step up, I replaced my darkness with the dreams of our Iraqi friends. Lost in thought, I suddenly realized I was only a few steps from the summit. I was overwhelmed and began to cry, because I think that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’ve just conquered the second-highest mountain in a country where you experienced your lowest lows. I hugged Stacy and Griff and I looked over the Sakran Range, its jagged peaks seeming to go on forever.
The skiing down was terrible, a steep, icy couloir between islands of rock. But it didn’t matter. As I dropped off the summit, I left all the bad stuff behind, the guilt I’d carried and misconceptions about everything and everyone I thought exemplified Iraq. I arrived at the bottom with new hope for this place, which I realized I had only now discovered.
A few nights later, we sat with our Kurdish friends in a concrete hut near Halgurd. We had spent the day looking for spring powder, but what we had hoped would be snow turned to rain. The night outside was cold, but between our blankets and a dinner of roasted chicken and vegetables, we were cozy. The air was thick with fruit tobacco from the hookah being passed around, and our Kurdish friends showed off by blowing smoke rings.
We sang Kurdish songs and attempted to follow the complicated footwork of Kurdish dances, laughing as our hosts played the fiddle and strummed some kind of Iraqi stringed instrument. When we couldn’t keep up, we collapsed in a heap, feeling hazy and happy and a million miles away from the rest of the world.
Soon Max picked up the fiddle, plucking an American song I had never heard. It was “Furr” by the band Blitzen Trapper, and was about a man who had spent his youth as a wolf, running wild and alone and directed only by instinct. Later, he turns back into a man and is forced to navigate a world he no longer understands. It sounded so different from the Kurdish music we’d heard on this trip, but we all knew it was about us.
Then we could sing no more. We crawled into our sleeping bags, all nine of us crammed into this little room, a pile of Americans, Kurds and Iraqis. Outside a wolf howled, and sleep found me.
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