From the Field

Answering the Call of Duty

December 1st, 2009

I’ve been In The Shit™ these past two weeks. I’ve crossed continents to kill legions of enemy troops, gather intelligence, plant explosives, and snuff the life from men with my bare hands—silently—in the middle of a blizzard. I’ve been struck by countless bullets, fragged by all variant of grenade, and battled back from certain death to pull a knife from my own chest cavity and continue the fight. I have been a goddamned hero and I did it all from the comfort of my couch, in my well-heated apartment, safe from the realities of war. The recent release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 marked the most successful entertainment launch of all time, beating out all other previous revenue bests in books, box office, and music, and simultaneously turned me and nearly five million gamers into glory-bound soldiers armed with the latest advancements in tactical murder.

Murder! My god, the blood I’ve spilled: so many virtual Russians, an airport of innocents, a handful of my own support team—it’s just so hard to tell who’s who at times out there in the midst of battle—and all of their deaths portrayed with gritty, pixelated realism. In this game, I kill in the name of my character, my virtual buddies dying face-down in the mud as the constant chatter of gun fire coming from my television speakers barely rattles my steely nerves. I am the protagonist in a visceral narrative of orchestrated chaos. I make all the right moves, trigger all the right events in just the nick of time; even death, for me, is temporary—a moment’s pause for contemplation as the level resets and I begin again, in the place I was just two clicks prior, ready to decimate the enemy that I now know waits for me around the corner in the corridor to my right.

Yet for all of the teachable deaths I’ve endured as I play out the narrative and progress toward the end of the game, for all of my awards and achievements attained on the battlefield, and for all of the tangos taken down and victories earned, I am humbled and reminded that this is likely the closest I’ll personally come to modern warfare. And we are, in fact, at war. The entire country is, and there are currently men and women serving in my stead somewhere in some dug out dirt hole, wishing they could be where I am, sitting on a couch in a well-heated apartment, safe from the realities of war.

Tonight, our President will tell a gathering of West Point graduates what they can expect in the coming months. He will likely tell them that he is sending them in his stead, in our stead, to fight harder and longer against a resilient enemy. And he will hopefully provide them with a timeline and a game plan and a reason to kill, and they will say their goodbyes, get up from their couches, and walk into a world that looks remarkably like the one on my television screen. But in this war, the one we’re fighting out there in Afghanistan, there are no teachable deaths. There is no level reset, no reconfiguring of character placement to account for the sniper you weren’t expecting, and no compelling narrative to guide you. War—real war—is hell, and I can only hope that each and every one of our countrymen makes it home safely, and soon.

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