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War and Peace

Photo courtesy Seth Foley.
Photo courtesy Seth Foley.

Seth Foley joined the Marine Corps in 2002 following graduation from high school. Photo courtesy Seth Foley.

Cpl. Seth Foley was on his way back to base from a day of operations in Hit, a city in the Al-Anbar province of northwestern Iraq, right along the Euphrates River – the cradle of civilization. He and three other Marines were riding in a security detachment with a convoy around 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 14, 2006, and were about a mile and a half from the base’s gate. The road was flanked by a field on the left and a grove of palm trees on the right. Foley was the only one in the Humvee trained to use an automatic grenade launcher, so he was tasked with keeping watch and manning the tank’s weapon.

As the wheels plodded and crunched over the desert soil, Foley’s helmeted, goggled and olive bandana-covered face poked out of the turret of the tank, followed by his camouflage-draped shoulders and chest, weighed down by his equipment and pack. From chest up he was exposed to the shivery twilight air, his lower body was warm in the vehicle. Just a little bit farther and he and his buddies could crash for the night before getting up before sunrise the next day to do it all again.

Foley and his compatriots had headphones on so they could communicate with each other and with the base, in addition to a main radio supplied for each vehicle. They weren’t supposed to do it, but they often taped an MP3 player to the fourth headset to listen to music and keep themselves alert during long shifts. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was playing during their return journey, and Foley nodded along to the wah-wah guitar and Hendrix’s psychedelic vocals in “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).”

“Well, I stand up next to a mountain And I chop it down with the edge of my hand 

Yeah

Well, I stand up next to a mountain And I chop it down with the edge of my hand Well, I pick up all the pieces and make an island Might even raise a little sand

Yeah”

Photo courtesy Seth Foley.

A new, unfamiliar voice rose in the air around the vehicle – a man’s voice, singing what sounded to Foley like a Muslim prayer. He looked around for the source of the sound, which was creating an eerie mash-up with Hendrix. Then things started happening quickly.

“Oh, shit!” the Humvee’s driver yelled, before jerking it hard to the left.

The pothole he veered around exploded and blew the back of the tank off.

Foley blacked out and came to a few centuries-long seconds later. He was shaking and dizzy from the spinning feeling and the ringing in his ears. The Marines all grabbed their weapons, jumped out of the tank and inspected the area around it in widening circumferences – 50 meters, 100 meters, 250 meters. Suddenly, they heard screaming in Farsi followed by Arabic chanting erupting from the palm grove.

“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,” the voices said – “God is great, God is great, God is great.”

Foley, reeling from the attack and protective of his Marine brothers, emptied every round he had into the palm grove. The voices stopped.

---

Seth Foley was born in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 22, 1983 – “the 20th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination,” he points out.

He was born into a family of history buffs – his father, a professional musician, collects Civil War regalia and has participated in battle reenactments, while his mother, who works in the medical field, is an expert on medieval history. Foley and his older brother Ben, born 18 months before him, were steeped in American history from an early age. He became obsessed with World War I and World War II and can rattle off arcane factoids and dates with computer-like command.

The Foleys encouraged their sons to pursue their passions and to get involved in groups, activities and organizations and to give back to their community.

“Seth joins everything coming and going,” his mother, Deborah Cohen, says in a phone interview from Ohio. “Our family has always been involved in fraternal organizations, so he grew up with that and volunteerism. I had to limit him to five activities at a time, God love him.”

Foley played football and was active in theater, volunteering and Masonic youth organizations like DeMolay. His favorite game to play as a child was “army men,” and he and Ben wore different colors to set them apart during their epic battles.

Both boys were civic-minded at very young ages, and their first physical fight was over the 1988 presidential election, which their school simulated in their first- and second-grade classrooms.

“Seth was a staunch Republican then, and his brother was a Democrat,” Cohen says. “Seth wanted Bush to win because he had ‘bush’ in his name and Ben wanted Dukakis to win because he had a shiny face … When they went to cast their ‘votes,’ Seth was standing in line screaming at Ben, saying, ‘You’re wasting your vote!’”

So when Foley graduated high school in 2002 and decided to join the Marine Corps – “at the time it was that kind of G.I. Joe boyhood fantasy, but I thought, 'This is what’s right to me,'” Foley says – Cohen was not altogether surprised.

“Seth is probably, without question, one of the most impulsive people I’ve ever met in my life,” Cohen says. “He hears it and he acts. He just does it … One day I came home from work and he said, ‘Mom, guess what I did? I joined the Marine Corps.’”

She remembers one night before he left, when he and a bunch of friends who were also joining various branches of the military camped out in his room and bragged about their future glory the way that only impassioned and inexperienced young men can.

Photo courtesy Seth Foley.

“I was in my room and I could hear them talking about how they were going to go over (to the Middle East) and turn everything into a Walmart parking lot and show them (the enemy) the true meaning of democracy and capitalism,” Cohen says. “That’s been the biggest change. As he’s seen more of the world, he doesn’t necessarily see everything so black-and-white anymore. I gotta say – I really like that, even though I am kind of sad to see some of the naiveté gone.”

---

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” – Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler in his famed speech “War is a Racket”

Foley sits at a table eating chips, salsa and queso dip with his best friend and roommate Alyse Cho, 23, at a Mexican restaurant in Tempe. He’s about 5 feet 8 inches tall and slim, almost to the point of being bony. His white baseball tee with navy sleeves and faded jeans are relaxed and comfortable. Sandy waves poke out from the bottom of his brown beanie and a scraggly goatee makes him look older than his clean-shaven, baby-faced military days, back when his hair was disciplined into the Marines’ signature “high and tight” cropped bowl cut. He looks more like a slouchy musician or artist than a former Marine.

There’s no hint of militaristic seriousness or bravado in his demeanor, either – his voice is gentle and friendly, and he nods and smiles as he listens to people speak, beaming encouragement and affirmation. His blue eyes are like sparkly aquamarines embedded into his pale face and framed by little crinkles of laugh lines between his cheeks and brow bones.

He opens doors, pulls out chairs, offers to buy drinks and carries around a pack of American Spirits and a lighter to offer to friends, though he doesn’t smoke. He’s just that kind, that polite and that eager to help out and be of service.

He’s the kind of nice that makes people suspicious.

“When I first met Seth I was like, ‘How could anybody be this nice?’” Cho says. “I thought he was a cyborg.”

Foley lives in Tempe with Cho and a menagerie of cats (with colorful names that pay homage to pop culture, like Beatrix Kiddo and Pink Floyd Sound) and ferrets. Friends pass through town and crash for a few days or a few months, rent-free – Foley pays rent for the gypsy house with the disability money he receives from his war injuries (shrapnel in his legs and thumb, a fractured and hyper-extended right ankle, tinnitus and post-traumatic stress disorder, which contributed to his being awarded a Purple Heart upon his return to the U.S.). He refuses to accept money for “something I didn’t have to pay for anyway.”

He took a semester off from studying political science at Arizona State University but plans to return in the fall to graduate in December 2012. For the past few years he’s worked as a manager at the Hippie Gypsy, a Mill Avenue institution and haven for neo-hippies and herbal enthusiasts – not exactly the place you’d expect to find a Marine.

“A lot of folks come into the Hippie Gypsy and assume, since we’re behind the counter, that we’re all hippies,” Foley says.

He loves it when conservative, straight-laced types, especially current or former military, come in and he gets to bust their preconceived notions by telling them about his former life. Foley himself walks an interesting line between hippy-dippy “anything goes” freedom and the regimented, badass aggression of Marine Corps life.

“I would love to call myself a hippie because in my heart what it means to be a hippie, I agree with,” he says. “But I’m not, because I’m a productive member of society. As a student of history, I think that movement was totally destroyed and made less potent because of all the drugs and non-productivity.”

This is not to say he’s anti-drugs – it’s more like he’s anti-laziness.

“Do all your drugs and have fun, but be a productive member of society,” Foley says. “Then your opinion and argument actually means something.”

Foley says he got caught up in the post-9/11 patriotic propaganda machine and feels like he was “duped” by the United Stated government, which he says preys on the passionate and nationalist impulses of young men and women to serve its political agenda.

“I hate it because I disagree with the country’s motivations for why I was doing what I was doing,” Foley says. “If I’d been born in Syria with my mentality, I’d be wearing a face wrap and shooting at the guys in uniform. I’d be just as impassioned and just as against the occupation we (the U.S.) were perpetuating.”

His patriotism is ardent and unwavering but no longer ignorant, he says.

“It’s OK not to be that Toby Keith and flag-waving kind of patriot,” Foley says. “I’m still a patriot. I still love this place and everything it’s given me, but I’m no longer jaded.”

Foley says he came to identify more and more with his enemies as the war progressed.

“If you are human, you have more in common with me than every other living thing on the planet, regardless of what language you speak,” he says. “We’re all fellow people.”

He wrestles constantly with guilt – at surviving a war that many of his comrades did not survive, and for his part in the death of those on the other side of the conflict, especially those in the palm grove.

Foley looks back on that evening in Iraq and his eyes widen yet become more dull and glassy, as if he’s trying to take it all in and look at everything that happened but not let it swallow him back in. A slight haze is necessary to stay present in this life, to keep him from being stuck in that one.

“I killed him,” Foley says. “That’s final, it’s over, he’s not coming back.”

He lifts his shoulders up in a pose that could be defensive or self-comforting, like a protective recoil or an inward hug – or perhaps it’s both. Foley rubs his heart with big, firm circles of pressure from his fist and forearm and squirms in his seat.

“I have a lot of guilt, but I don’t,” he says. “I have a lot of guilt, but I don’t.”

“Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remodeled; they were made over; they were made to ‘about face’; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing of killing or being killed.” – from “War is a Racket”

“I don’t know anyone who could go through the meat machine of the military and come out a real person,” Cho says. “Seth is an old soul, a learning soul, always truly growing and learning. He lives an intentionally purposeful life…(but) there’s also a sense of being an addict, to go back and save the people who were like you once.”

After he graduates, Foley wants to reenlist in the Marine Corps if they’ll take him. He has unfinished business – not in a revenge fantasy way, but because he feels compelled to be there for his brothers and to keep defending his country, something that was interrupted when his Humvee was hit by that roadside bomb.

“He’s really, really into the fraternity aspect of the military,” Cohen says. “He likes having his band of brothers, his groups – fighting for what’s right.”

Foley doesn’t like war, he wishes it didn’t exist, but if there has to be one, he says he’d rather be there – sort of a “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself” situation.

“I love history,” Foley says. “In the history of people this is the best kind of lifestyle that anyone’s had, ever. I feel proud of having done my part to protect that … If more people had been aware of what was really going on I feel like it would have been different. There’s always going to be a war to fight.”

 

Reach the reporter at llemoine@asu.edu


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