Where'd You Go?

(A humble request from the author: please play the accompanying song in the background while you read.)

“Where’d You Go” was released by Fort Minor in 2006, and eventually peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart in 2009. Fort Minor is the side project of Linkin Park rapper/guitarist/songwriter Mike Shinoda. The song was awarded Ringtone of the Year at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards. It is a crappy song, performed by the crappy side project of a crappy MC from a crappy, albeit highly successful, band. It probably changed my life. I’m not sure how to feel about this.

I encountered the song in winter 2007 and was hooked by the pounding beat (Jay-Z was executive producer on the record) and the plaintive hook sung by Skylar Grey. The lyrics are, almost certainly, trite, and the rapping is, perhaps, embarrassing, but I couldn’t get the song out of my head for months.

Where’d you go/I miss you so/Seems like it’s been forever/Since you’ve been gone

In October 2006, I arrived in San Diego to commence my last duty station in the active duty Navy. After four years of sea duty (read: frequently deploying), the Navy rewards its Surface Warfare Officers with two years of shore duty (read: office work).

Moving to San Diego had always been a Navy-related dream of mine, and after six months of coaxing, I convinced my wife we should pack up and move across the country. Fortunately, a billet was available and my detailer was in a good mood the day I called him, so I was rewarded with a job as an instructor on Coronado Island. Tough duty this was not.

Sometime after the invasion of Iraq, the land-based military services realized

a) we were going to be in Iraq AND Afghanistan for some time, and
b) while they didn’t have enough soldiers and Marines for the job and never would, the Navy (and for that matter, the Air Force) had quite a few sailors and airmen sitting around in activities that, while important from a peacetime perspective, didn’t really add a whole lot of value to the current war effort. These bodies could be thrown into unfilled billets and perform jobs for which they were untrained and unprepared in relatively short order. For the Navy, this solution came to be known as “Individual Augmentation,” as in the Navy will augment the people doing the real work on an individual basis.

Individual Augmentations ("IAs," in military speak) could happen to just about anyone not already in-country, at just about any time. It was literally a lottery—the Navy could pull a name and send the “winner” a message saying they were shipping out. Lucky ones got a few months' notice, but the gears of bureaucracy might chew a bit too long on your orders, giving some unfortunates only a few weeks' heads up. My name got pulled a few months after we arrived in San Diego, with orders to head to Afghanistan in four weeks.

I wanted to go. It’s difficult to articulate exactly why, but to be honest, the reasons were more selfish than anything else. I didn’t think that my service could make any appreciable change in the war, or that my performance would be better than someone sent in my place. I didn’t have dreams of saving Afghanistan for the Afghans, or avenging 9/11, or anything noble or idealistic. To put it bluntly, I wanted to see the elephant.

“To See the Elephant” is an expression used by Civil War soldiers meaning to participate in actual battle, to be tested by fire. I deployed a few times and earned the Iraq Campaign Medal by virtue of the time I spent a few miles off the coast of Iraq, circling oil terminals and conducting boardings of the local boat traffic. “Action,” such as it was, involved ensuring sleepy fishermen didn’t cross an imaginary circle around the oil platforms. The most dangerous things we fired were flares. It was a job, and an important one, but no live shots were ever fired in anger in the months I spent endlessly circling the platforms. Back at home, although I wore the same uniform and even carried many of the same decorations, there existed a divide, real or imagined, between “combat” troops and … well, me.

It is a strange war we’re engaged in, where literally months can be spent “in-country” without a whiff of danger. Troops engaged in dangerous patrols and security sweeps speak derisively of “fobbits” who inhabit the Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) without ever leaving, without ever seeing the elephant. An incredibly small percentage of Americans have served on active duty, and an even smaller percentage has served in wartime. Even service overseas, though, does not admit you to that most select of groups, the actual combat vets. I yearned to join their ranks. I didn’t want to be a partial patriot or incomplete veteran. I wanted to deserve the accolades I received at home, and proving courage under fire seemed the only way to do so.

This is not, of course, to impugn the courage of those whose jobs are administrative in nature or, for whatever reason, keep them far from the front lines; supporting a massive force on foreign soil for a decade requires immense amounts of infrastructure. The Navy’s ships at sea have many missions, most of them important. We in the rear serve honorably, leaving our family and friends behind to do jobs requiring endless self-sacrifice.

But when the chance came to go to Afghanistan, I was tempted. It sounds ridiculous (not to mention self-serving) to say I desired to go to a war zone, particularly as I never actually went. But I wanted to go. My command didn’t want me to; my office had recently seen a lot of turnover, and I was one of only two that could perform my job. If I left, the command wouldn’t get a replacement from Big Navy.

It was ultimately only my command’s submission of paperwork saying the mission of the office would cease to be performed that kept me out of Afghanistan. Before that occurred, though, I knew if I stated, in no uncertain terms, that I was deploying, my command wouldn’t stop me. They might try to convince me otherwise, but would ultimately fulfill my wishes. The expectation was simply that no one wanted to get sent on an IA, and the command would fight for its sailors.

So why didn’t I do that? Why did I remain silent as my commanding officer made angry phone calls across the Pacific Fleet, demanding that his sailors stop being stolen? It was that damn song.

When I told my wife there was a good chance I would deploy—in a few weeks—there was no stopping her sobs. My words of comfort sounded hollow even to me. When we left for San Diego, my most recent deployment had ended only a month before, a deployment that began three months after our wedding. I came home and dragged her to a new city across the country, where we knew no one. She hadn’t quite yet found a job or a niche in the new place, something that is always a difficult task for military wives. I had also promised I would never deploy again, that as soon as this shore tour ended, I would separate from the military. I was torn between my self-serving desire to deploy one more time and the marital vows I had made less than a year before.

I don't understand why you have to always be gone/I get along but the trips always feel so long/And I find myself trying to stay by the phone/'Cause your voice always helps me to not feel so alone/But I feel like an idiot, workin' my day around the call/But when I pick up I don't have much to say.

I remember listening to these lyrics, delivered in Mike Shinoda’s mordant flow, and picturing my wife alone. Again. It wasn’t that I was unaware of what would happen if I left, but more that the damn song made me more aware, unable to escape the image of her sitting alone by the phone, day after day, while I pursued my G.I. Joe fantasy. Deployment phone calls are the worst, conversations that slide past each other, barely touching. Silences are heavy and frequent. I couldn’t have another one of those phone calls, but more importantly, I couldn’t impose them on my wife. Again.

I have a Navy friend who was sent on IA to Iraq, serving with the Army. We visited him when he returned home to his wife, and I told him about my feelings of inadequacy and regret for not going when I had the chance. He glared at me. “There is no honor to be had there,” he said. He would have stayed home if he had the chance. He had seen the elephant, and it wasn’t worth the trip.

I don’t know if the whole honor thing is true; most of me would like to believe differences have been and will be made by the blood spilled in Iraq and Afghanistan. This I do know: I kept my promise to my wife. Thank you, Mike Shinoda.

TJ Mayotte served on active duty as a Surface Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy (2002–2008) and deployed on several occasions to the Persian Gulf. He is currently a lieutenant in the Navy Reserves. Check out his weekly column about various aspects of life in Elkridge: "."