The Forgotten War

Whenever this country has been at battle throughout its history, that battle has consumed the nation and riveted its people, sometimes uniting them, other times dividing them. But this time, as Charles P. Pierce realizes after visiting the military town of Ayer, the ongoing battles feel like an afterthought.

Four-year-old Sadie Dorman takes a flag from her father, Sergeant First Class David Dorman, at a military appreciation day at Devens in September. (Globe Staff Photo / Suzanne Kreiter)

The cemetery is at the top of a hill, alongside a winding road and next to a medium-security federal prison hospital. Just on the other side of a low stone wall, convicts in white jumpsuits walk silently at various paces around a cinder track. There is virtually no sound here, the silence only occasionally broken by the breeze through the pines that shade the gravestones, and the grinding of a truck coming up the hill and around a bend in the road. The autumn sun sharpens into shards as morning angles into afternoon.

The military has been here in Ayer, a town tucked into the quilted lumpiness of northern central Massachusetts, long enough for the veterans of five wars to have been brought to rest in this place. Some of the wars were long ago and some of the people buried here were not buried here originally, like the bodies they moved from the forts in Boston Harbor, including a woman hanged in the 19th century for attempting to help her husband escape. The locals say she still walks through the rows of graves here, dressed entirely in black.

Some of them are relatively famous, like Lieutenant Robert Massie, killed in a duel in 1817, the circumstances of which were so mysterious that, upon hearing them, a young cadet at West Point named Edgar Allan Poe was inspired to write "The Cask of Amontillado." Some of them are not. Their tombstones read "Unknown." It is a place thick with the country's haunted counter-narratives.

There are not yet any markers here from the latest of the country's wars -- from Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan or Iraqi Freedom in Iraq. The newest stones belong to the spouses and children of older veterans who have been buried in what amount to family plots here at the top of the hill. The cemetery is full now. The only room left is for urns of cremation ashes. It is a dead-level place in a dead-level time. But, for now, the cemetery is a place purely of history, shaded by pines and hard by a prison. In the middle of it, in the silence and the sunlight, you only notice on the periphery of your vision that the trees on the hills beyond have come ablaze with their autumn colors. Rather than see it straight on, you sense at the edges of your perception that the colors have exploded on the hillsides like fire -- like blood.

This series in this magazine began asan attempt to look at the three grand issues of a transformational election in the small scale, in the towns of Massachusetts and in the people who live there. In the first two installments, which dealt with the economy in Lawrence and healthcare in Hull, the issues were immediate and obvious in people's lives. If anything, over the past two months, the economy, in particular, has grown more immediate, almost by the hour.

The war is different. It is certainly an ignored part of what we loosely call the economy, and veterans with medical and psychological problems vividly illustrate the difficulties inherent in the global notion of what's referred to as healthcare. Between January and August of this year, according to the Army Medical Command, 93 active-duty soldiers killed themselves, many of them because of the immediate pressure of the economy and healthcare in their lives, but magnified by what we generally refer to as the war. But, taken as itself, the war seems to exist in another place. The war is something that happens to someone else.

The country went to a strange place almost from the beginning, when medievalist fanatics launched airplanes into buildings, and the anchorpeople said the country was At War, and the president told us to go to Disney World. Now, seven years later, in the middle of the election season, it almost seems as if the war has slipped the country's mind. Information about the conflict always has been tightly controlled -- no photographs of coffins being unloaded -- and the news divisions have largely moved elsewhere, anyway. Local news covers the tearful side of it -- tearful departures, tearful homecomings, and the occasional tearful funeral. As it happens, 64 people from Massachusetts have died in Iraq, and another 495 have been wounded. On television, right before the weather, we even might have learned some of their names.

The detailed costs of the war, estimated to one day surpass a trillion dollars, are not even included in the federal budget. Small wonder then that in five polls conducted by various organizations in September -- which is to say, polls conducted before the massive economic collapse obliterated the entire news cycle -- the "war in Iraq" could not muster more than 13 percent of the responses when people were asked what issue was most important to them in choosing the next president. Even during Vietnam, the war was vivid. Its impact on the country, and on its politics, was immediate, most notably its impact on the presidential election of 1968. Now, 40 years later, this war -- a war that is more unpopular than Vietnam was during that election 40 years ago -- is very nearly an afterthought. The country has never fought a war like this. The country has never fought a war as subtext. The war is being fought off the screen, off the books, and off the radar.

Even talking about the war is not entirely accurate. People talk about "The War," as though the conflict in Iraq is the only one currently raging. The war in Afghanistan, the war that was launched most clearly in retaliation for the attacks of September 11, grinds on, more obscure even than the one in Iraq. It becomes a subtext to the subtext, popping up only when the Democratic candidate for president, taking what is widely considered to be the sensible and moderate approach, argues that soldiers fighting in Iraq should be moved to Afghanistan and dropped into a conflict in a country whose people have been fighting someone, more or less continuously, since Alexander the Great came over the mountains.

The peril inherent in this position, backed up by the news from a National Intelligence Estimate that the entire Afghan enterprise might be coming apart, didn't even move a needle on the Gallup Poll. After all, the housing market was cratering, the stock market was immolating itself, and people were staring at their 401(k) statements the way people look at wrecks along the highway. The story from Afghanistan dropped down a well. It was obscured even by the news from Iraq, which was not exactly a drumbeat.

Ayer is not that odd a place to be at a time when war seems to have become an afterthought. Because now the military itself has become an afterthought here. For nearly 80 years, through five wars, the town moved to the powerful internal dynamics of the US Army. In 1917, Ayer and several surrounding towns each gave up some land in order that the military might establish what it called Camp Devens, later Fort Devens. Ayer became a military town, albeit an unusual one. It remained a bucolic place, unlike the rowdy base towns of the South and the Midwest. "We never had what you see in some military towns," says Ed Kelley. "You know, you might see pawnshops or shops that sold military stuff." Kelley ran a Hallmark card shop on Main Street for three decades before selling the place last fall. "You never had any of that here," he says. "We might have had a few more nightclubs than we have currently."

Instead, Ayer stayed the kind of a small town where, immediately upon finalizing the sale, a new owner of the Park Street Diner threw his keys to the place into a pond, promising never to close his doors. It was a small town with a big fort that was part of its identity without completely subsuming it. It moved to the rhythms of military life without being capsized by them. Ed Kelley used to work in an appliance store, and he would always know when one unit moved into Fort Devens and one moved out.

"They'd go through washers and dryers like you wouldn't believe," he recalls. "Every time some poor service guy got shipped out, the biggest thing for him was the weight he was allowed to take with him. They'd leave the washer and dryer behind."

The last great mobilization at Fort Devens was during the first Gulf War, in 1991. Ed Kelley remembers a run at his Hallmark store on sweetheart cards. However, despite the efforts of Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, and of then governor William Weld, the Department of Defense closed Fort Devens as part of an ongoing effort to streamline the number of domestic military bases. Military operations there were phased out gradually from 1991 to 1996, and the decision blew a big hole in the local economy. The area lost an estimated 7,000 jobs. Unemployment went as high as 9.4 percent, and it never went lower than 6.1 percent. Property values crashed.

However, Ayer reinvented itself as an outer bedroom community for Boston and as a center for small manufacturing. By June 2005, the median sales price of single-family homes and condos in Ayer had risen from $82,950 to $292,275 in the years since the base had officially closed. In addition, most of what used to be Fort Devens is now part of a MassDevelopment project called, simply, Devens, what MassDevelopment describes as a "4,400-acre planned community with a business-friendly attitude." It is held up as a national model for the reuse of old military bases. There are 2,100 acres of open space and recreational land, including an 18-hole golf course. It set up its own public school system in 2001, although Devens still contracts with Shirley and Harvard to use their public school facilities. The project has rehabilitated 102 former military residences. Fort Devens always was a town within a town. Now the property is largely civilian, and that relationship is becoming formalized.

"We've always been a railroad town at heart," explains Shaun Suhoski, the town administrator. "That's part of the reason they put the fort here. What we have become is the center of commerce for the area around here. We have the Nashoba Valley Medical Center, with about 500 employees. We've had a long relationship with the Army, and that continues, albeit on a lesser level than it was. The town has diversified its tax base."

There is still a military presence at what used to be Fort Devens. Down at the southwest corner of the property, away from the hustle of the new development, the fences get a little higher and the wire in the fences gets to looking a little more serious. It is now called the US Army Garrison at Fort Devens. And since the current wars started, people in the town have felt an old familiar rhythm in the place again.

"I do see a lot more military, but it's still nothing like it used to be," says Ed Kelley. "I remember just the other day, I saw two gentlemen walking in first-class Marine uniforms. I was shocked. Before, you never paid any attention here to a guy walking in fatigues. It was just as normal as looking at your brother and sister."

The Harry Malony USARC Center -- AN army travels on its acronyms -- is a quiet place on this morning. There is no receptionist on duty at the front desk. Walk through the security doors and down the halls, and you see rows and rows of cubicles, some obviously occupied and some just as obviously not. There's the clickity-click of computer keyboards and the low hum of other office machinery. There are whispers from around the corners and sudden, light laughter. If everybody in the room weren't wearing fatigues, you might think you'd wandered into a reasonably successful insurance company or a regional office of the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Two soldiers are sitting around a table, talking. Both of them are sergeants. One is a middle-aged man. The other is a young woman. The man already has been deployed overseas during the current conflicts. The woman is still waiting for the call that sooner or later must come.

Crystie Somero and Patrick Malley are both members of the active-duty Army Reserve. They are assigned to the 99th Regional Support Command East, which was formerly the 94th RSC, a unit responsible for all the logistical support for the Army and Army Reserve units deployed elsewhere, most especially those units deployed overseas. This includes everything from supply to human resources work. (Yes, the Army has an HR department, just like your company does. The stakes are just a tad higher here.) The quiet of the office is a small part of the quiet that suffuses the entire Devens area, a function of wars that seem to be happening on the periphery of the public's consciousness. "I see some things that are good," Malley says. "There's much more outpouring of support for the individual soldiers than there was after Vietnam.

"But the country was not mobilized to a war footing, like when you think of World War II and the bond drives and all kinds of things. We didn't do that. If you didn't see uniforms in airports, you wouldn't know anything was going on."

Malley is 57, and he's been in the Army since 1996, but that's not his whole story. On his fatigues, incongruously, he wears the dolphins of a Navy submariner and a submariner's war patrol pin. In 1969, Malley was a student at St. Francis College in Loreto, Pennsylvania. He was active in protests against the Vietnam War, but his conscience bothered him. He couldn't justify protesting something he didn't think he understood. So he joined the Navy, and he wound up on the patrol boats that plied the rivers in Vietnam, seeking to interdict Viet Cong supply lines. (These were boats that went through waterways too small to accommodate the larger Swift boats like the ones on which Senator John Kerry served.) Afterward, Malley served on a destroyer escort, and then, after a term at submarine school, he went out on the fast attack subs. "Big and black and you never come back," he jokes. "You're always deployed."

He was in the Navy for 14 years, leaving only in 1982 because his wife balked at having Malley go back out on another five-year cruise. "After four years," he says, "she told me to find something to do on weekends, so I joined the Army."

Malley signed up for the reserves, which, at the time, meant a couple of weekends a month and two weeks a year duty. All of that has changed over the past seven years. "It's a lot better on the reserve side of the house than it was back [during the Vietnam War]," he says. "My older brother was in the reserves back then, and at that time they really didn't prepare the reservists and [National] Guardsmen for what our job is. Nobody thought we'd ever go anyplace. Now we're 52 percent of the military. The training is more realistic, more focused. The troops know now that it's not a question of if you go. You're going to go somewhere, sometime, so you better be ready."

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent launching of the war in Afghanistan, Malley found himself shipped off to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and he worked on what were called "Raven flights," an adaptation of an existing armed-transport program that was being used to ferry detainees from the battlefields in Afghanistan to the prison at Guantanamo and back again. These were 17-hour flights each way, and the planes were refueled three times in the air. Very soon, he'll be leaving the Devens facility and going to Kentucky. He will no longer be working with Crystie Somero, who also will be leaving to join her husband, a veteran of both wars with Iraq, at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

"I can say that I'll be going with some certainty," she says. "I'm one of the few people here who haven't deployed. It's only a matter of time before I'm deployed. If the trade-off is that I get my education paid off and when I get out of the military I'm debt-free, if I have to go and spend a year or two in Iraq, that's something I'm willing to do."

She joined for the benefits, just like all those commercials back in the 1990s said she should. One of eight children in a family from a small New Hampshire town, she joined because the Army said it would pay for her college. Somero enlisted in 1995, and she went through basic training a year later. Somero opted to join the active-duty reserves, which made the Army her full-time job. Like Malley, she felt the ground shift under her after the 9/11 attacks. She was assigned to work on what was called the SRP -- the Soldiers Readiness Project. The program suddenly took on a fierce kind of urgency.

"After 9/11," she recalls, "we started SRP-ing our soldiers, making sure that their medical, dental, and personnel records were up to speed and ready to go. Once we started sending soldiers through that project, that was when there was a realization for the soldiers that times had changed. It was no longer one weekend a month or two weeks a year. Now it was one weekend a month, minimum, and a minimum of two weeks a year, and the reason we are doing this is because we're going somewhere. Not if, but when, and not 'How long will I be gone?' but 'Will I go again?' "

The mother of a young daughter, Madisson, from an earlier relationship, Somero married Sergeant Sean Bowers after she'd already been in the Army for a decade. She stayed behind as Bowers went off to Iraq with his transportation company. This put her in the position of being not only a soldier, but a soldier's wife, with one foot almost in the civilian world. "I got to experience what a lot of military wives go through," she says. "I saw both sides, and I could relate to them. But because I'm a soldier, it was a little bit easier for me, and I could explain to them that I understood why my husband couldn't call me every single day, and that he's not able to send an e-mail every day, and to realize that what you see on the news isn't necessarily going on where my husband was in Iraq."

In October, Crystie Somero picked up Madisson on the last day her daughter would spend in her grammar school. The boxes had been packed and shipped south. Her husband already was at Fort Bragg, finding them a house. "I know I'll be over there, and I'm OK with that," she says. "If you're not a little bit frightened, you ought to worry about that. You've got to think about how you can make a difference, because you have troops to take care of. You've got to be ready to be a leader, and I'm ready to do that." Patrick Malley nods as she says this.

The following Saturday, Somero and her daughter drive to North Carolina. She is sure this will not be her last stop. The war is still somewhere on the periphery, but it's a damn sight closer to her than an afterthought.

Soldiers march on the old drill field again. Old howitzers are scattered around the green lawns, and children play on and around them. Ayer and Devens are one again on this bright fall day. The town has declared this to be Community Covenant Day, in which Ayer will formally sign a document attesting to its commitment to support those soldiers who still train here. "It's to reestablish our connecting with the military," explains town administrator Suhoski. "It's not necessarily about the war." But it is, because at some level, it has to be. From far down the road, you can hear the distant rattle of the drums and some marching-band music.

Tents are set up in thin lines around another part of the field, many of them advertising social services for returning veterans. One of them advertises the service of assistance dogs trained to help with the needs of amputee veterans and those veterans with traumatic head wounds. Another one offers construction work for veterans who return with post-traumatic stress disorder, as a transitional vehicle into civilian life. "When I came back," says Bennie Cournoyer, a Navy veteran of Vietnam, "there was nobody there to help me find a job. The VA kept sending me to places for janitorial services and things like that. What we see now, primarily, are veterans with PTSD, and our principle here is that our veterans will keep each other in check. When they finish a job, they can see what they've achieved." The overflow parking for the event is in a squarish lot surrounded on all four sides by empty barracks, their windows filled with plywood. They look like old mills in Lawrence, the places from which all the jobs first went south, and then overseas, the way Crystie Somero likely will one day. Off to another place. Off to somewhere else.

Charles P. Pierce is a Globe Magazine staff writer. E-mail him at cpierce@globe.co

.