Columbia’s Warrior
CC 'O6 Goes to Iraq
As the sun sets over Manhattan, it rises over Iraq and the head of one of Columbia’s own: First Lieutenant Josh Arthur, CC ‘04. He is an infantry officer. And he is in Iraq.
Most days are routine, really—another patrol around western Baghdad, maybe some paperwork for the higher ups, and of course, seeing to the needs of his men. Yes, they are his men. He leads a platoon of a few dozen soldiers—grunts, really—and he is responsible for their lives. He has to make sure that they don’t die, that they kill when they have to, but not when they don’t—if they fly off the handle and start massacring people, that’s his ass. He must care for them like children yet be ready to send them off to their death—into the dark house, into the fire fight, into danger. And when they die, he must soldier on. No stopping to cry or to reflect, no feeling sorry for himself. And no giving in to the yearning revenge, for blood, for misdirected hate.
He walks a fine line.
No more jogs around Central Park, no more calisthenics at Lincoln Center. No more training sessions and lectures. No more CC. No more rhapsodizing on the meaning of life and death from a dorm room. No, this is it. ROTC is over and done with. This is war—and he’s in it.
Over the next several months, Columbia College alumnus Josh Arthur, now of the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, will be filing reports for The Eye from Forward Operating Base Liberty, a fortified encampment near the Baghdad Airport. His work will be edited for space, but we will pull no punches. He is a soldier writing about war. His images and his thoughts will be here on these pages for you to see. Period.
How did you get this crazy idea in your head to join the Army?
In the fall of my sophomore year, I started to really think about what I wanted to do after college. Until then, I’d sort of been leaning toward hoping to get into constitutional law, believe it or not. I still find it interesting, although I’m horribly undereducated on the subject—President Bollinger’s First Amendment class notwithstanding, of course. But then some interesting things happened. I realized, for one, that I wanted to study international relations, and I realized I wanted to do something pertaining to the field. I watched the movie Spy Game and thought, “Hey, you know, that CIA—that wouldn’t be a bad route.” As I thought more about it, the notion came to me that maybe I could get into military intelligence somehow and perhaps use that as a stepping stone to get into the CIA after a few years in the Army. But then I looked at things a little more honestly, and I realized as I started to think about joining the military that what I really wanted to do—no matter what occupation I held—was do something that would make me proud. And it dawned on me that, in fact, being an Army officer itself was the one thing I could think of that would make me more proud than anything else I could do. I wrote a ROTC recruiter with a very curious mind, and the more I was exposed to the program (at St. John’s University) the more I came to understand that this was really what I wanted to do. And then the more I thought about actually being an Army officer, the more I came to accept that I didn’t really want to be in military intelligence. The “purpose” of an Army officer, insofar as I could ascribe one to the whole profession, was to lead soldiers in combat. I knew that if I were going to join the Army, it would have to be in that role. It just seemed foreign to me to be “in the Army” and not be part of the warfighting group. So to hell with military intelligence, I thought; for me it had to be Infantry or Armor.
Do you feel yourself changing—mentally, emotionally, physically—since graduating from Columbia?
Columbia was an unusual place for me. You read testimony, here and there, about how Columbia has helped students discover themselves, etc. Columbia didn’t do that to me, exactly, although perhaps in a way it did by exposing me to so many different people from so many different backgrounds, Columbia, perhaps ironically, convinced me that I was proud of who I was already, that I was glad I had the values I did, the upbringing I did, the world view that I did. I’m still thankful to have met so many very interesting people there, understand?
But I arrived, and it seemed to me that I saw so many people to whom this part of their life was somehow expected, like it was part of a somewhat charted course to wherever. So many people seemed simply to expect that they would go to Columbia, just as afterward they expected to get their MBA or M.D. or Ph.D. or whatever it was they wanted to do. I’m not saying everyone did—I have friends that did those very things, although I don’t think what I’m saying applies to them. But I looked around, I saw all of these people, and so many of them, it seemed to me, were simply ungrateful for what they had. I found it supremely ironic that I, son of an upper-middle-class WASP family whose parents had worked hard to be able to send me to a place like Columbia, was the one who looked back and was thankful for all I’d had growing up!
I was probably surrounded by plenty of classmates with chalets here and there, exotic cars, life experiences I couldn’t imagine—and I was somehow glad that I didn’t have that. I was proud to say my father had served in the Army, had served in Vietnam. I was awfully grateful to have succeeded and to have somehow found a way into a school—a place—like Columbia. And I thought it strange that I—when surrounded by so many people who probably had much more to be grateful for than I did—should feel compelled to give back somehow, to serve. But I did.