American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories

HICKS: I remember that moment where I thought I’ve got to get out of this any way I can. Like, I...I will not go back to Iraq.

KLAY: During the early years of the Iraq war, Clifton Hicks was in Germany, after his first combat deployment.

HICKS: I was fortunate that I was still in the headquarters platoon at that point, and they have, you know, you can…you can pull up all the army regulations on that computer, So one night I had a set of keys. I went in there after hours, you know kind of like Watergate, kind of at night, and printed off that whole regulation. It's a thick regulation. It's AR 600-43, and I read it cover to cover, and then I read it again. The Army's definition of a conscientious objector was just that you had to be genuinely opposed to war, and I thought that's me.

KLAY: From Insignia Films, and PRX for GBH, this is American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories. I’m Phil Klay.

KLAY: I’m a veteran myself. I served in the Marines in Iraq, from 2007 to 2008, just a few years after Clinton and about a 45-minute drive away from where he’d been stationed. Now I write books about war, and about coming home. About the disconnect between the servicemembers who fight our wars, and the civilians back home who they’re fighting for. To help bridge that divide, veterans from every generation have spoken up to let Americans know what we have done in their name. These are their stories.

HICKS: Nobody ever pressured me or even encouraged me to go into the military. They all basically just didn't say anything about it, but I was very patriotic, and my idea of patriotism was that that was what I had to do.

KLAY: Like almost all the vets we’ve heard from in this podcast, Clifton Hicks has military in his blood. His dad was in army intelligence. His dad’s dad was a career army officer. And on his mom’s side, his grandparents met at Navy basic training in the ‘40s. 

HICKS: I was in school. I had this buddy of mine. He and I used to play cards in the bathroom. We were skipping whatever period that was in the morning, playing cards, and somebody came into the bathroom and you know mentioned, in passing, while they were taking a leak or something, like “hey, you know, there's somebody flew a plane into the… into some skyscraper in New York City.”

Audio: “...uh...one of the World Trade Center towers…”

HICKS: And we didn't think anything of it. I think we kept playing cards. But then when I actually went to class, the teacher and everybody had the TV on...

Audio: “Hold on just one moment, we got an explosion inside…”

HICKS: And at that point, the second plane had hit, and it…everybody knew that it was some horrible, grisly thing was going on...

Audio: “...hold on just a moment…[muffled] The whole building just exploded some more.”

HICKS: And of course, myself and a couple of the other 16-year-old boys were talking like, oh yeah, we're going to wind up having to, to go to war over this.

Audio: “The first strike against terrorism is a missiled barrage lands on Afghanistan.”

Audio of Bush: “We will not falter, and we will not fail”

HICKS: And so as a young, as a 16-year-old kid, I'm basically watching this Pearl Harbor moment that occurred and then all of the…the culture and media that I was exposed to was encouraging those feelings in me.

Audio of Platoon: (shoot out) “Take the safety off!”

HICKS: I'd seen movies like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now.

Audio of Apocalypse Now: I love the smell of Napalm in the morning.

KLAY: Those are all anti-war movies, in theory. In practice, films like Full Metal Jacket have probably convinced more young men and women to join the military than any recruiting commercial. On camera, there’s something alluring about war, the explosions and the guns and the blood and the drama and the heroism. As the French director Francois Traffaut said, quote “violence is very ambiguous in movies…some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an anti-war film.” He went on, “Every film about war ends up being pro-war."

HICKS: I'd absorbed all the media, consumed it all, and at that age, it just seemed like, yeah, I want, I want to experience that. I thought it was a righteous, honorable thing to do. In fact, if you asked me in those days I probably would've told you that it was the only honorable thing to do would be to enlist and just go where they pointed you.

KLAY: Clifton was not yet 18, so he had to persuade his parents’ to let him enlist. First he got his mom, and then his dad, to sign his recruitment papers.

HICKS: One piece of advice my dad told me, which was something that his dad told him when he joined the army: keep out of the front, keep out of the rear, keep in the middle, and don't volunteer. I tried.

Audio of Bush: “My fellow citizens. At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.”

KLAY: In May of 2003,  Clifton took a bus from Florida to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to start basic training.

HICKS: The invasion had just kicked off, right before I went in. So, the drill sergeant started to hear about people from the previous class who had been killed in the war, and they told us, you know, they were like, you know, some of y'all are going to die, for sure.

HICKS: I was trained as what they call a Nineteen Kilo One Oscar, so my job was on the M1 Abrams tank.

HICKS: You have to be able to drive the tank, load all of the weapons on the tank, load and operate them, clean them, fire them. You have to have a gas mask on in the tank and night vision and drive around at night, so it was very challenging stuff, far more challenging than what I thought it would be.

KLAY: People sometimes forget how difficult this aspect of the military can be. Yes, it requires courage and commitment and honor to be a good soldier, but it’s not just a calling…it’s a job. A hard job that demands a lot of technical knowledge to do well.

KLAY: After training, Clifton was assigned to a unit getting ready to deploy. By October his unit was heading to Germany, then to Kuwait, and finally, to Baghdad, where he saw firsthand the damage caused by the initial invasion.

HICKS: We got off the plane and that warm air hits you, and it just smells like burning. Um, just looking around the base where they were, there was combat damage. There was bullet holes, and stuff was shot up, and walls were blown down. We’d hear shots every day. There was always shooting, but 9 times out of 10, in those early days, the Iraqis were shooting at each other.

KLAY: At this point in the war, the regular Iraqi Army had been defeated. The Insurgency, which would keep the U.S. in Iraq for years, had yet to gather full steam. Clifton and other soldiers on the ground felt like they’d be out of Iraq before long, once the Iraqis could form their own democratically elected government. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had promised it would be a short war, after all: “Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that,” he’d said. Clifton and his unit thought they were there just to keep order… 

HICKS: What strikes you when you first go into Baghdad, it’s just ordinary people going about their daily lives. It's not like there's enemy soldiers running around. You know, I think they told us five million people lived in the city at that time.

KLAY: There’s something so strange about riding through a foreign country in a heavily armed convoy. Clifton’s unit was responsible for security in a land they didn’t know, among people whose culture and customs were foreign to them, and whose language they didn’t speak. Insurgents used this to their advantage. They were indistinguishable from civilians. 

CLIFTON: I think the only time I ever really saw a confirmed enemy, you know, up close, was when I was on gate guard duty, where you have to guard the main gate to the base, and there was a mortar attack while I was on gate guard. And after the mortar attack, this Iraqi guy came walking up to the gate, and he had his hand blown almost completely off, and they--they brought the medics up there, and they quickly determined that he had powder burns all on his hand. He had just been firing the mortars at us. But seeing him, I was like, oh, this is a real insurgent, but he's not a terrorist. He was just a regular guy, and truth be told, he had every right to try to kill me. It's their land, it's their city. You know, if I'd been born in Iraq, I would be him.

KLAY: I’ve certainly had that feeling, driving down a dusty road in a convey that’s armed to the teeth, staring out through bulletproof glass at sheepherders and children and shopkeepers who look at you like you came from Mars. You can’t help but think, how would I feel if I was the one on the street and they were the ones in the armed convoy.

KLAY: In late 2003 there wasn’t as much violence in Iraq as there would be soon, but American troops still occasionally found themselves under fire. 

CLIFTON: It was a moonlit night, the guy was on a roof so every time he fired the rifle he sort of lit himself up. I don’t even think he was 100 yards away. The rounds started striking around the Humvee. And you could hear when one struck in front of you it would ricochet over your head and it would hit and it sounded like a cartoon ricochet. It was unreal. I didn’t think the bullets would actually sound like that. So I dropped down inside the Humvee and got up to my eyeballs. I think one bullet hit the Humvee right at the time I dropped down and so they thought that I had been shot at first. They made sure I was okay and then they saw I hadn’t been shot and then they screamed at me to get back up and to shoot back. So I flipped the safety off the rifle, lined up the last muzzle flash that I saw, it was probably you know the span of eight or nine seconds but it feels like you are in that situation for years. I had this clear mental image, just like a hallucination of the bullet traveling right into my face. I could see it happening. I was terrified right as I squeezed the trigger.

KLAY: One night, Clifton and his unit were driving around Baghdad in their Humvees, and they came upon a brief firefight. Another unit ahead of them had taken fire from a field on one side of the road. And they’d heard gunfire from a building on the other side...

CLIFTON: And it must've been a whole infantry platoon. It looked like about 30 or 40 guys, all packed into Humvees, they all had night vision goggles, and they all had their gun barrels pointed out at the Humvees

KLAY: And this platoon had opened up on both sides of the street--on the house they’d heard gunfire from, and on the field. But, only the field had insurgents in it. The gunfire from the house hadn’t been aimed at the platoon. In Iraq, it was customary to fire guns in the air, in celebration during a wedding. There’d been a wedding party going on. 

CLIFTON: When they searched that house, they kicked in the door and raided through the house, they found that they had killed a child. It was a young girl from what I could see. You know, wearing like a dress with flowers on it. Dead on the floor. There was screaming and stuff going on. People were very upset. We…we left as soon as we could. You know our…our sergeant and stuff got us and was like, “okay, let's get out of here”, and that was one of those events that was never discussed by any of us who were there. We didn't talk about it. You know, looking back, that's…that's one of those things that haunts you.

KLAY: My chaplain in Iraq used to minister to dying children in the surgical facility on our base in 2007. At the time, he wrote an entry in his journal that he showed me later. It read: “Urban warfare means children living in fear, children in tears, children orphaned, children wounded, and—God forgive us all—children killed. I will have to square my presence here in Iraq—my life in the military—with my soul and my God.”

KLAY: Some soldiers learn to live with this. Some soldiers feel strengthened in their sense of mission, and their contempt for the insurgents who hide among the people. But others take a very different lesson.

HICKS: Pretty quickly I learned to hate the place. I did count the days. I did not like what I was doing. It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't masculine. It wasn't honorable. It was just stupid and dangerous. You know, you kick yourself every day for being such a damn fool that you volunteered to come out to do this.

[MIDROLL]

KLAY: One bright spot for Clifton in Iraq was music. He sent away for a banjo from a mail order catalog and, to his surprise, it actually arrived. 

HICKS: People really got to know me at that point because once I started playing and singing, it was a spectacle. There was nothing like it for miles. There was no music. I didn't realize that it was going to be such a draw, almost like it made people homesick for something that they didn't even know about, you know, because it's…it's a very American, working-class folk instrument. So, whether you know it or not, it'll often speak to you. There was one song in particular, it’s an updated version of an older folk song, that I played one night.

HICKS: (sings) Come on, you good people, whomever you may be, I hope you'll pay attention and listen on to me. At the age of 16, I joined the Army grand. We left old Kentucky and we sailed to a foreign land.

HICKS: Now the song mentions that the singer, he leaves old Kentucky and sails to a foreign land. Well, we were an armored cavalry unit. We'd all been trained in Fort Knox, Kentucky, so whether you were from Kentucky or not, you had left old Kentucky and gone to Germany and then to Iraq, so right…right off the bat, people were like is this song about us, you know? It drew them in...

HICKS: (plays banjo, sings) The sun, it was a setting all across that bloody plain. Now, all of us was wounded, our noble captain slain...

HICKS: Our previous captain before I got the banjo, his name was Captain Schlang, and so in the song, the captain in the song, he's slain, you know, the average guy just hearing the song for the first time, he thought I was talking about our captain. So, I think some of these guys thought that I had composed the song for them.

HICKS: (sings) ...sails so far away.

HICKS: The imagery in the song about riding down the streets of hell, that was something that everybody could relate to. We all did that.

HICKS: (sings) I've been in the midst of battle. I know its harshness well. I've been across that great ocean, and I've rolled down the streets of hell. 

HICKS: It really just captured, you know, all the guys, and before I knew it, I had to play it every night.

HICKS: I've lived a life of misery, and I've been where death, he roams. I'll tell you from experience, boys, you had better stay at home.

KLAY: Late in the spring of 2004, Clifton and his unit finished their tour of duty…

HICKS: And then there comes that happy day when you actually hand it all off to the new guys, and it's their problem now. You know you just pack up all your stuff. We spent days and days just burning all…all of our trash and stuff we weren't going to take back, and so there was huge burn pits, and we weren't going on missions anymore. We weren't doing guard duty anymore because it all had been handed off, so it was kind of like bonfire parties, you know, some drugs came into the unit around that time, and people started getting ahold of alcohol. People sort of cut loose.

HICKS: Finally the day comes, you know, you're leaving Baghdad, going toward Kuwait. You get out in the country, away from the city. Everything opens up. I actually saw what looked like rice fields and water buffalo and stuff, which I had no idea they had those things there. You get to Kuwait, and then all the hard work starts. We spent days and days just cleaning weapons, cleaning rifles and machine guns, and all that stuff gets meticulously cleaned and then covered in, in grease, and we wrapped it all up in plastic and tape and packed it all away in these shipment containers and stuff, and everything…we thought everything was over at that point.

Audio: “Mr. President, April is turning into the deadliest month in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad…”

HICKS: So, we started to hear through word of mouth that things were going really bad in Iraq.

Audio: “Four Marines injured this morning in a firefight…”

HICKS: You know, parts of Baghdad had been overrun, that our old base where we were had been overrun, that all of Fallujah had been taken by insurgents and that a lot of Americans were getting killed.

Audio: “It’s being called the single most deadly attack on Americans in Iraq…”

HICKS: But we still had that feeling like, man, we got out of there just in time. It never occurred to anybody around me that the Army would…would send us back.

KLAY: But that’s exactly what happened. 

Audio: “18,000 soldiers on the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division will begin deploying for a second combat tour in Iraq…”

KLAY: After only 3 days in Kuwait, Clifton’s unit was ordered to return to Iraq...

HICKS: Some of us got together and discussed taking some kind of action, like what we could do, would we just refuse to go back?

KLAY: Of course, that’s not how the military works. Orders aren’t optional. 

HICKS: So, that, that last night in Kuwait was a sad scene, all those ugly, black, cold machine guns all getting pulled out of the shipping containers, and we take our pocket knives out and cut open the plastic and clean all the grease off of them and mount them back on and they loaded us all up on the tanks, and we bolted all the machine guns back on and had everything ready, and you start driving back toward Baghdad. It was a…a very somber moment.

HICKS: Things were very different when we got back. All of the overpasses over the highway had been blown up. And the closer we got to Baghdad, the more just destruction you started to see on the side of the roads. You started to see, you know, tons of shot-up, burnt like trucks and cars on the side of the road. You would see the occasional dead person on the side of the road.

KLAY: After one night back in Iraq, Clifton was relocated to the town of Abu Ghraib. The town was infamous for its prison. Saddam had tortured Iraqis there during his reign, and, once the Americans took over, they’d tortured Iraqis there as well. 60 Minutes had just revealed photographs of the abuse. But Clifton wasn’t at the prison—his unit was there to bring stability and security to the town.

HICKS: That town, it stunk, like rotten meat and burning and gasoline and just like gunpowder. It was disgusting, and that really started to take a toll on…on a lot of us and on me.

KLAY: Clifton didn’t end up seeing a lot of combat in Iraq, but it was all getting to be too much. 

HICKS: You know, I kind of clammed up at that point. I stopped talking for a long period of time, because basically as an 18-year-old kid, at that point, it was more than I could process. I could not make sense of the things that I was seeing. So my response was just to shut down and just pull into myself.

HICKS: The gunner on my tank kind of took me aside and was like, you know, what's going on with you, like, are you okay? And I was like no, I'm, I'm not good, like, this is bullshit, I don't want to do this anymore.

HICKS: Everything quickly, you know, fell apart for me at that point, because then that's when I started really running my mouth against the war. When I did start speaking again, I was very vocal about how wrong the war was and how we shouldn't be there and how we were all getting used. And it didn't take long before I figured out that that was illegal. (laughs)

KLAY: It’s not actually illegal to speak out against the war. You don’t lose your free speech rights when you join the military, and plenty of troops have criticized military policy while serving. But it doesn’t make you popular, and if your leadership feels you’re detrimental to the morale of your unit, they’ll find a way to deal with you. 

HICKS: I woke up one morning with a boot to me. My sergeants and my platoon leader were sort of standing in a semicircle around my cot that morning. You know, things were bad between us, so I was afraid that they were maybe going to kill me or beat me up or something. So, the first thing I did was I reached for my weapons, and I saw that they had…they had stolen those from me before I woke up. They slapped me real hard with a Field Grade Article 15. That's the…the highest punishment you can get in the Army without actually going to jail.

KLAY: Clifton was charged with ‘operations security violations and disrespecting official and superior commissioned officers.’ They busted him down in rank to private, put him on half-pay, put him on extra duty, put him on confinement, and took his weapons away…

HICKS: Which was actually kind of cool. I didn't think they'd ever do that.

KLAY: In the state he was in, the way he was feeling, he was perfectly happy to be disarmed.

HICKS: So I traded in my rifle for a broom, basically, and I…they had me just sweep, help with delivering like ice and food. If I had spare time, as I often did, I'd go get the banjo and I would play.

HICKS: By the final days, you know, I'd kind of made peace with everybody. I had learned to keep my mouth shut, and I was just trying to get through now. We burned a lot of stuff again, cleaned a lot of stuff, and just I…I think I was kind of numb by…by the time we had actually left for good. I don't remember feeling much.

HICKS: When I got back to Germany, you know, they gave us 10 days to kind of reorient, but for those whole 10 days, it was just a drug and alcohol binge on the barracks. Everybody just went crazy. But after those 10 days, day one of our first day back on the job in Germany, they had us in the basement, lined up outside the arms room, and we all drew our rifles again, right back into training. Like, that's how the Army operates. So, I knew, I was like, oh, they're going to send me right back, as soon as they can.

HICKS: I remember that moment where I thought I've got to get out of this any way I can. Like, I…I will not go back to Iraq.

KLAY: Clifton had signed a contract and sworn an oath when he enlisted. If the Army ordered him back to Iraq, he had to go. Unless...

HICKS: I did not know anything about being a conscientious objector. I…I had heard of that, and I thought those people were all, like, Amish people, like I thought that to be a conscientious objector, you had to be a pacifist, right, and I was not really a pacifist, and everybody knew it. So I didn't think much about it. I just figured I was stuck, but I had access to a computer in the orderly…what we call the orderly room, where all the troop logistics and paperwork are done. You can pull up all the army regulations on that computer, and so I found out that they have to have a regulation that covers the conscientious objector application process. And I thought, let me, let me print this out. And so once I did my research, I found The Army's definition of a conscientious objector was just that you had to be genuinely opposed to war.

KLAY: Clifton didn’t think it would work, but he applied for CO status anyway. The Army conducted an investigation. They questioned Clifton, they questioned the people he’d served with in Iraq. 

HICKS: There was tons of paperwork, but after eight months, somebody came and said, hey, you're needed up at the first sergeant's office, and I was like oh great, you know, I'm in trouble again, because I’d been in a lot of trouble. And so I went back up to the first sergeant's office, and…and he said, oh, your paperwork came through, you've been honorably discharged. That was probably the happiest day of my life.

KLAY: Given how first sergeant’s tend to feel about war objectors, it was probably one of the happiest days of his life, too. On Clifton’s last night in Germany, he and his unit threw a party.

HICKS: I believe we drank Johnnie Walker Blue Label out of blue Dixie Cups with Dr. Pepper.

KLAY: Eventually, Clifton flew home to Florida, where a different set of problems awaited him...

HICKS: I did not sleep when I got home, and that hadn't been a problem in Germany, but I didn't realize, because, you know, I was using drugs and alcohol in Germany to sleep. You have a real hard time just, you know, driving in traffic because I learned to drive in Baghdad, Iraq, basically. When I came home, I was 20, so I was not even old enough to like, you know, say, get a drink in a bar. You know I remember I tried to rent an apartment in Gainesville, and they would not approve my lease application because you had to be at least 21.

KLAY: Clifton was barely an adult, and yet he was already a disillusioned war veteran. And like many veterans before him, he was uncomfortable with the reactions of the people back home. 

HICKS: You can't help but notice that nobody cares about anything you've been through, and even the people who do say thank you for your service, they don't mean it. It strikes us as…as kind of hollow. I wasn't serving anybody. All I did was find myself in a…in a bad situation, and I survived it. The only thing I'm proud of is that I spoke out against the war.

KLAY: Clifton continued speaking out. He joined Iraq Veterans Against the War. Went to protests.

HICKS: I was so naïve that I actually thought like we could end, you know, these wars if enough of us who had been there, how could you argue with what we were saying? I was dumb enough and naïve enough to think that our politicians and leaders would actually listen to that and that they would have to stop the war once they realized it was wrong.

KLAY: That’s obviously not what happened. Even though one of Barack Obama’s campaign promises from 2008 was to end the war in Iraq, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on…

CLIFTON: So, once he was in office, a lot of the momentum fell out of the bottom of…of the antiwar movement, and once I saw that…that Obama was not going to end the wars and no meaningful change was coming, that's when I…I kind of just packed it in and quit and decided I needed to, you know, start focusing on myself because I had not really focused on myself through those years.

KLAY: Clifton is now a full-time musician: teaching banjo, selling banjos, and playing...

CLIFTON: I was a banjo picker and a…a songster before I joined the Army, during, and after. That's one of the few things about me that didn't change, that I didn't lose, maybe that's the only thing I didn't lose.

HICKS: (sings) I took morphine last Saturday night. Lord, I took it in a hell of a way. If the doctor hadn't come just as he did, Lord, I'd been in my grave today.

KLAY: War changed Clifton profoundly, from an enthusiastic volunteer to an anti-war protester. First he lost faith in the war he’d been sent to fight and then he lost faith in the fight against the war itself, waged in protests and in the halls of Congress. But Clifton has kept his faith in his music, and music can deliver truths about war and peace and the struggle to live a decent life. 

[CREDITS]

KLAY: American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories is a production of Insignia Films and PRX for GBH. This episode was produced by Julia Press. The lead podcast producer is Curtis Fox, the composer and sound designer is Ian Coss, and the executive producers for Insignia Films are Amanda Pollak and Leah Williams. Kathleen Horan did the interview with Clifton Hicks. Thanks to Matt Gottesfeld for his research. For GBH, Devin Maverick Robins is managing producer, and Judith Vecchione and Elizabeth Deane are executive producers. 

KLAY: Funding for American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories was provided by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding was provided by The Wexner Family Charitable Fund, Battelle Memorial Institute, JPMorgan Chase, and Analog Devices.

KLAY: For more powerful memories from veterans, visit PBS.org/American Veteran, where you can also watch the American Veteran television series and digital short films.  You can also learn more by using #AmericanVeteranPBS. 

I’m Phil Klay. Thanks for listening.

[GBH sting]

Note: Red text denotes Archival Transcription.