I met then-Specialist Chris Cates at the Bayji Joint Security Station in July 2007. He was a 23-year-old forward observer with Charlie Company, from Winnemucca, Nevada, and had been in the Army for two years.
In the early days at the JSS, before most of the soldiers had warmed up to me, he was friendlier than most, happy to talk to somebody new. He was never on the ground that much, often driving a Humvee instead; what that meant was I never had a chance for good pictures of him, and without pictures the Winnemucca newspaper wouldn't have much interest in a story.
But we still chatted here and there, about nothing interesting or special. He shows up in my notes the first time sort of randomly, and I know I'd already talked to him by the time I wrote his name down.
The notes I took don't mean much, four years later. Now they're jumbled together, and I don't have the memory to say it was him or not, who said the things I wrote down. I think he did - it says he was a "13-F," which was the MOS of a forward observer, so I think it was the notes I took while we talked.
I must have asked him something like, "so what do you do?" or something similar; that was the usual first question I asked, to see if it where it might go.
"I'll end up driving," he said - I think, which makes sense, because he was always driving when I went out with him. "Pull security,make sure nobody's coming up on us; peek around corners, avoid sniper fire; other than that, not much you can do.
"If we're in steady contact, I'll call it in," so return fire could be directed at the enemy, he said - the job of a forward observer.
"You got to get used to it, first time I was in Bayji...." but I don't know what he said after that. "First time," what? I don't know.
"My father, my grandfather," I wrote, were in the Army - I think he meant. Joining the Army, "was just one those things. A different route."
There are other short phrases, but they're incomprehensible now. I didn't expect to write a story about him, so I never went back over the notes to decipher the handwriting, and four years later, I can't figure out what I was writing.
"Only time I was ever hit, it banged my mirror." Is that right? Did his Humvee's mirror get shot? Is that what my notes said? I don't think so. It might be. Does it matter?
Other people talked about him. We were sitting in a Humvee, waiting for an explosive ordnance team to come defuse a discovered IED, when Tony Atkinson and Greg Ramirez showed me a video of Cates dancing in the middle of Bayji city's primary East-West Road. Cates' dance was pretty funny, there in the middle of the street; a way to kill some time during a similar mission, sitting and waiting five hours for another EOD team to show up, for another IED.
"He makes up all kinds of funny songs on his guitar," Ramirez said. "One time, he just had a breakdown because he couldn't get Crispy M+Ms."
"Yeah," Atkinson agreed. "He heard some voices in his head."
But it was said with affection, the kind of good-natured backstabbing that everybody had to put up with. If you weren't in the room, then you were probably the subject of the conversation.
"Cates used to work in a gold mine or something," I think Atkinson said, "drove a big dump truck filled with ore. He's a funny storyteller. Refers to himself in the third person a lot. That's kind of funny."
I never heard Cates do that, but he'd go on a few political rants now and then. In 2009, we were sitting in the dining hall at Combat Outpost Carver - he and Paul Beliel were headed home on leave; I was headed home for good. Sgt. Hyrum Durfee, a soldier I had met in 2007 but didn't remember, was there too, listening to Cates talk about how Ron Paul was the only one who could save the country.
"Keep it going, Cates," Durfee said, when he got up to leave, slapping Cates on the shoulder.
2009 was a lot different than 2007. Before he left, Durfee had laughed - "Back in 2007, I was like, 'today, I just want to live.' Now, it's all about what I can bench press."
In 2007, I rode in a Humvee as Cates drove and Aaron Donatto sat up in the turrett. The early morning mission was to the small farming village of Bujwari. We left at 3 a.m., and without night vision, I didn't want to try walking around until the sun rose a few hours later.
The Humvee - a piece of shit that had been handed off from unit to unit over several deployments - kept stalling as Cates tried to meander through the village, keeping slow pace with the soldiers on the ground. Donatto, in the turret, tried to guide the vehicle. But it was a comedy of errors.
"I know what's wrong!" Cates yelled up, when the truck stalled again.
"Well, fix it!" Donatto yelled back, barely audible above the engine.
"I can't fix it; I'm not a fucking mechanic," but that was said more to me, with his voice too low for Donatto to hear.
"Cates!"
"Yeah?"
"What's the deal, dude? What are you doing?"
"Driving, dude. I'm in four low."
"Can you like stay steady on the gas at all? It's fucking squealing!"
"What's squealing?"
"The fucking engine. Can't you hear it? You're driving like a kid, you're 24 years old!"
"Grrr..." And that's what Cates said - he literally growled.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"What the fuck? Turn the wheel to the right...go straight..."
"What?"
"Turn to the right!"
"To the right?"
"Cates!"
"Right!"
"Right! Keep right!"
"Right?"
"Cates, please!"
"Please what? Pull up there?"
"No! Right! Turn Right!"
"It's stalled, hang on."
"Cates!"
"Hang on! It's stalled!"
"Turn right!"
"Hang on!"
"CATES!"
"Hey, fuck you! Stop yelling at me, you son of a bitch!"
Maybe it's not very funny. Maybe you had to be there.
I asked him about it later - he was a truck driver after all. Humvees are fidgety, but the good news is they can be started out of gear.
"It was aggravatting, stalling out," he said. "Normally it's not like that. Usually, I'd blame it on the fuel injector; put it in neutral, start it, shift it into drive so it won't stall."
I think that's what he said, but I don't know. That's what it looks like in my notes, but the words are unconfirmable.
Earlier, we had stood under the entryway to the JSS, keeping out of the afternoon sun. Then a mortar hit not too far away, and we both looked at each other; a second one hit and exploded much closer, and now we both smirked and moved quickly under the concrete entrance.
Nothing special about it; the mortars hit all the time. It was only special because Cates happened to be the one standing next to me at the time.
In 2009, I left Combat Outpost Cahill on my return to the US, and Cates and another soldier went with me.
We went to the chow hall, where we met Durfee; hung out and chatted in the transiest tent where soldiers arriving or departing had a cot to sleep on, before heading out to parts unknown. I had a private room, a reporter's perk apparently.
Cates and the other soldiers traded stories and joked around. I made a few comments, laughed at the jokes, but I wasn't really part of the conversation.
In my book, in the epilogue, is a passage Cates said, sitting there. I wrote it down, but it was only later when it meant anything to me. When I put it in the book, I left his name out. It was a private conversation, not really an interview. And it was a personal comment that I don't think was meant for everyone else.
He was talking, now in the quiet, fairly peaceful days of 2009, about the bad old days of Bayji. Only two years before, but they seemed a lot more distant.
"When we got to FOB Speicher," Cates said, "after leaving Bayji for the last time, I got to the chow hall and some girl was there, she wasn’t a soldier, was some Red Cross girl, volunteering or something. I don’t even know.
"I started to talk to her; I was so happy to see a girl.
"All of a sudden, it just came out of nowhere. I started laughing; couldn’t stop. And it got worse. Then tears started pouring down my face. I was still laughing, but now I was crying; got so bad I couldn’t even talk.
"She finally just got up and walked away."
He’d been there 15 months, from 2006 to 2007, and would be there twelve more, from 2008 to 2009.
Twenty-seven months is a long time to give the country of Iraq, even if one is supposedly there on behalf of the United States. Twenty-seven months of overseas time, and about five years in the Army. From 21 to 26 years old, that's the better part of a man's youth, spent in Iraq's dust and heat, or the dingy bars, and vast training areas of Fayetteville and Fort Bragg.
So it's only fair that when you give all that - five years - you get to grow old and tell your war stories to somebody down the line, about how it all went down, all those years ago. You can exaggerate it, if you want; or downplay it, and act like the war was no big deal; or shrug your shoulders and say nothing at all.
But after five years, you ought to get that choice.
Christopher Cates, a sergeant by the time he got out, didn't get the luxury of time. He died on Oct. 23, 2011, not in Iraq from a sniper or mortar or IED, or truck accident, or negligent discharge, or helicopter crash or plane crash, or car bomb or truck bomb or moped bomb or suicide bomb; not in a training exercise from a parachute that didn't deploy or deployed too late, or deployed too early, or got swept into the propellor, or cigarette-rolled the whole way down, or got dragged by the wind across the drop zone. He died in a house fire at home in Winnemucca, though that's all I know. Not alone, but with his cousin and two small boys.
It would make me angry if there was anyone to be angry at.
Here was a man, now a few digital recordings of his voice and photos taking up some memory, a few lines in my notes, a few hours of my time.
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