How Private Ryan saved himself

Thirty minutes on the phone couldn’t possibly encapsulate Ryan Roberts’ four years in Iraq. “We could sit here for 12 hours and I don’t think you’d still understand the full… feeling and emotion behind it,” Roberts says regretfully, he in his hotel room in Boracay; me twisting anxiously on a swivel chair back in Manila, hoping that by way of today’s ease in communication — Skype and a headset, really — the man may be proved wrong.

A couple more times throughout those 30 minutes, he expresses his hesitance in our voice-to-voice contact. But I press him further and he forges on with the lot of “shitty sides” and “good sides” of the time he spent in the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division; with that noble ol’ Fil-Am desire to visit his motherland afterwards and his decision to stay; with his odd glimmer of man meat-parading glory as Mr. Philippines International 2008, and with his current occupation: “model.” It’s taken him from walking for Inno Sotto to getting sweaty for Nestea Fit Camp Hot in Boracay, joining the city’s most “attractive get active” for three days on the island. As the contrast in our careers becomes more vivid, I am convinced that even a day burning up the wires isn’t enough. That the man’s journey maybe warranted my own visit to Boracay, at least to a place where several beers stood between the both of us.

The settings are quite far-off, after all. There’s the sand, for one; alabaster in the summer break capital he’s at, a long ways from the chai-colored masses in Baghdad that make up its sandstorms. And then there’s the sound — the beach beats that’ll spur on his plan to “get drunk” at tonight’s Nestea party, as opposed to the unceasing cacophony that kept him up most nights in Iraq years ago. “I could not sleep unless I had my headphones on with the music turned up full-blast to drown out the gunfire and bombs,” he says of what got him to put on Vietnam-era rock and lots of “really angry music” like System of a Down.

He was a 17-year-old who’d gone ahead and enlisted the day after 9/11, even with his mother’s all-out objection and his father’s passive acceptance. “When I was five years old, that was my plan, to go the army. There was never any doubt in my mind that I was gonna do it. Really, though, it was right around the time the Twin Towers were hit and all the Americans were being really patriotic. I felt it was the right thing to do,” the 25-year-old now says of how his pent-up resolve suddenly became reality. “I was still in high school and had to have my parents’ consent. And then once I graduated, I left for basic training maybe two months later.”

First Blood

It’s taken Ryan a while to settle on an experience that stands out from his tour of duty, but one is distinct, like he’d grazed upon a sharp object in his pitch-black backroom of memories.

“Well, do you want to hear about my first experience of killing somebody?”

It happened one night in Baghdad. After Ryan and his unit had secured a school to sleep in, two Iraqi insurgents had opened fire on a couple of soldiers on guard duty. Amid the frenzy of men awaking to the sound of gunshots, he rushed to the roof with a friend and spotted one of the perpetrators fleeing but then charging into a barbed wire fence.

“Me and my friend start shooting at the guy and pretty much cut him in half at the waist with the M249 automatic machine gun,” Ryan explains. “So then we went down there to drag the body back to our compound — both parts, top and bottom. And I just kind of looked at him and that’s when it hit me. ‘Wow, what the hell am I doing here?’

“I didn’t really see any dead bodies until that moment. The first month or two I was in Kuwait, I was kind of like a robot going through the motions,” he says of the months he’d spent killing time rather than people. “It was a month or two later that I had this eye-opener. I was kind of standing over the body and that’s when it all sunk in. That’s when I really started to understand what we were doing here and how the locals felt about us. That’s when I started thinking for myself.”

Ryan’s progression was less of a boy forced to become a man than a young man discovering his humanity after years of transforming himself into a machine, a weapon. As a kid, he embraced the physical, becoming adept at every sport he got into, whether it was football or martial arts. And while the army called for the dutiful — all balls and brawn — it would, interestingly enough, compel this serviceman to seize his independence.

“I was sitting on my cot one day and my team leader comes in and says, ‘Roberts, it’s time to get your head out of your ass,’” he says. Eight months in, the 19-year-old Private First Class had been asked to lead a unit of 20-somethings who had three to four years under their military belts.

“(My own team leader) was telling me ‘now, it’s time to step up. Stop being a follower and be a leader now. I was shocked.”

To Serve And Get Served

As Ryan recounts what he’s endured in four years of serving with the army, you notice the rasp of weariness in his voice. It was bad enough during those first six months after getting back from Iraq — Ryan shaken, even during trips to the mall. “I was really paranoid, looking at peoples’ hands all the time. I had a friend, actually, who just last week committed suicide. His sister sent me an e-mail saying he couldn’t cope with the people he killed,” he says. “The way I deal with it is I just don’t think about it.”

So Ryan tries not to rummage through thoughts of all those guys who’d stood next to him getting perforated by bullets or having entire limbs obliterated by RPGs. Or that time a rocket airburst tore 20 meters above his head. Not even of the mundane, those nights “just sitting there and staring into nothing” while pulling guard duty.

“But it was also a positive experience. You see so much suffering but at the same time, you see people doing the most honorable things,” says Ryan, recalling the gratitude he received from an Iraqi civilian after he’d given him a Bible. Or his looking fondly upon the soldiers he considers “brothers who’d do anything.”

Occasionally, he’ll chat up an old army buddy on Facebook but he’ll keep it light, maybe sticking to the modeling that’s been keeping him busy or his plans to move away from that and “take charge” in the territory of directing fashion shows. “Do your thing ‘cause we’re all over here doing regular jobs,” his friends would urge, to his surprise.

“Now, it seems like something that never happened. It’s unbelievable. I don’t even know who I was,” he says, looking back at his days as an infantryman, almost five years after making his way to the Philippines and the month he’d allotted to meeting relatives and getting schooled on his roots ended up in permanent residency. After he’d been approached to model barongs in an Arnel Agasang show, the jobs just kept coming. “It was easy, so I stayed. I’ve felt most at home here than since coming home to the States from Iraq. I felt like I was at peace, you know?”

It had to take another country — one that his family had moved from when he was six months old — for Ryan to move forward. Of his momentum since then, he tells me about his wanting to intern with a stylist. He tells me about walking on the beach and staying in last night just watching TMZ. And then tells me about his fiancée and their nine-month-old baby girl.

Just then, I realize, as the sun sets for both of us, that I may not know this man, may not have shaken his hand; but maybe it doesn’t take eight beers or eight hours spent between us to know that after encountering so much death and departure, there is a chance for life again.