Losing My Religion
By Elizabeth Jefimova, 2021
Kris Goldsmith is a veteran on the Iraq war. During the course of our three meetings, Kris talked about his time in Iraq and the trauma that his service left him with. In our first interview together, I had asked Kris to introduce himself in any way he wanted. What follows is a short excerpt from his introduction.
TRANSCRIPT:
I grew up in Long Island. I was a kid of the 90’s. I was in high school when September 11 happened and like a lot of little kids, I grew up like idolizing uniform. When I was a Boy Scout, Cub Scout, I wanted nothing more than to be in the military my entire life and then once 9/11 happened, it kind of put a different flavor on things, and made my dream of joining the military feel much more urgent.
So I graduated high school in 2003, and signed up in 2004, for the army as a forward observer. What a forward observer does is basically they’re the eyes of the artillery. They’re responsible for calling in airstrikes, mortar attacks, that type of thing. If you watch something like Forrest Gump, and you see all of the guys, you know, the infantry guys walking out into the field or the forest, and all of a sudden they start taking fire, they all hit the ground and then there’s some nerdy guy, usually with glasses, in these movies with a radio shouting into it. I was the nerdy guy with the glasses.
I ended up in the Third Infantry Division, which was stationed out of Fort Stewart, Georgia, which was a little bit of a culture shock going into what I would consider the the deep south after growing up in New York suburbia. It’s a very different world.
So a year after I signed up and went to basic training, I was in Iraq. I spent most of my time in Sadr City, Baghdad, which is kind of a neglected slum that was in really, really bad shape for decades before the invasion in 2003. Now, I had, like I think a lot of Americans had, a very different perception of what it looked like on the ground in Iraq compared to reality. The guys that I deployed with, were the people who, you know, they’re famous videos and photographs of tearing down the Saddam statue. They came to an Iraq that was very different from the Iraq that I came to two years later with them. You know, in those videos and in those pictures, you see people waving American flags, you see them hugging and kissing American soldiers. My greeting in Iraq was being hit with or having bricks and trash thrown at us.
That was a bit of a [pause] a moment where it started to feel like I was losing my religion. I had, you know, wanted nothing more than to serve in the military and when I finally get to go overseas and participate in, you know, what I think is an honorable mission to help the people of Iraq, they certainly don’t feel like we’re helping them at the time.