Through Veterans' Eyes

by Larry Minear

  The Pentagon took several initiatives to orient soldiers more fully to the circumstances they would face. A spouse described the work of her husband, Sgt. Charles M. King, beginning in January 2002, at the Marines’ National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. “The military had built a billion-dollar simulated Iraq deep in the Mojave Desert, complete with mock operating bases and Iraqi villages, in which Iraq’s exiles acted as civilians and insurgents. Charles’ job was to observe recruits as they conducted simulated assaults and gauge their proficiency with weapons and familiarity with combat rules of engagement. The training,” she concluded, “might one day save the life of a young man or woman who less than a year earlier had been taking their sweetheart to the prom, or that of a career soldier close to retirement.”28 Army Sgt. Gregory Mayfield confirmed that the United States had “built up little miniature Fallujahs and staffed them with Arabic-speaking people.” Despite the value of such training, Mayfield noted, “deep down in the back of your mind, you know it’s still training, even as real as it gets.”29

  In September 2007 the Pentagon launched a program to “assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the twenty-six American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan.”30 Some of the early results of these “human terrain teams” were positive. The 82nd Airborne reported a 60 percent reduction in injuries in combat operations and a more steady focus on “improving security, health care and education for the population.”31

  DOD’s human terrain team initiative however, proved highly controversial. At the 2007 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, supporters and opponents faced off. Some urged a boycott, arguing that embedding anthropologists in the ranks of the military violated the core principles that “anthropological research should never be used to inflict harm, must always have the consent of the population being studied, and must not be conducted in secret.”32 Others touted the benefits to local populations from more knowledgeable occupation forces. “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology,” responded Montgomery McFate, one of the authors of the new army counterinsurgency manual that encourages putting social science insights at the disposal of military operations. “But we’re really anthropologizing the military.”33

  In early 2009, the Pentagon announced an initiative to allow immigrants with temporary visas to serve in the U.S. military, broadening the current applicant pool beyond those with green cards who were already eligible to serve. “The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical,” said a senior Pentagon official.34 Priority will be given to those with critical language skills and with specified professional backgrounds. Two weeks after the initial announcement, one report noted, “The enormous response so far highlights an untapped resource that could be critical to filling severe shortages in the military of doctors and nurses and people who speak languages such as Arabic, Hindu, or Pashtun that could prove crucial to operating in foreign countries.”35 However, for a combination of bureaucratic and political reasons, the program did not meet its objectives.36

  VIOLENCE

  The fears harbored by outsiders as they negotiated unfamiliar and dangerous terrain were well founded. One study of troops who had experienced combat found that 58 percent of Army personnel sampled in Afghanistan and 89 percent in Iraq reported being attacked or ambushed; 84 percent and 86 percent, respectively, had experienced incoming artillery, rocket, or mortar fire; 39 percent and 95 percent had seen dead bodies or human remains; 43 percent and 86 percent knew someone who had been seriously injured or killed; and 30 percent and 65 percent had seen dead or seriously injured Americans. In addition, 46 percent and 69 percent, respectively, had seen injured women or children whom they were unable to help, and 12 percent and 48 percent reported having been responsible for the death of an enemy combatant. One percent of the sample in Afghanistan and 14 percent in Iraq acknowledged responsibility for the death of a non-combatant. The study found higher rates of major depression, generalized anxiety, and PTSD among U.S. troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan.37

  The progression from a sense of impending uncertainty and danger to actual violence was often sudden and traumatic. For a young soldier from Madison, Wisconsin, Spec. Abbie Pickett of the Wisconsin National Guard, it happened when an incoming missile struck a fellow soldier on her base. “All of a sudden I could see that he had been hit in an artery in his arm and there was blood coming out all over, and we didn’t have anything to put on this guy’s arm. We finally were able to scrounge up a medic bag. I applied a bandage to his wound and we set off for the hospital. When we got to the hospital, I’m covered in this guy’s blood, pretty much from head to toe. Everything was chaotic. The hospital didn’t have blood there for transfusions. They were turning their sleeping cots into gurneys.”

  Convoy Moving Through Najaf

  Luis D. Almaguer (AFC2001/001/34147), Photographs (PH08), VHP, AFC, LOC

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  Marine Corps Sgt. Luis D. Almaguer, deployed in Iraq between June 2004 and February 2005, took this photograph from the passenger side of an armored Humvee, part of a six-vehicle convoy providing security for a U.S. colonel on a visit to the city of Najaf.

  “Most of the ambushes we got were on small streets like this,” he explains. “There are many hidden dangers in areas like this one. For example, insurgents use potholes … to hide IEDs. They also hide weapons under [their clothing] and would use them against us when we pass through. The street is a little congested with the daily traffic of people. We had experiences in which a group of insurgents would crowd the middle of the street and slow [down] or even stop our convoys. At that point we came into contact with live firing from the top of the buildings and windows. One moment they’re waving at you, the next moment they’re shooting at you.”

  Almaguer dropped out of high school to earn money, but then returned to get his diploma. He enlisted in the Marines in 1997, and as part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit at Camp Pendleton, California, he has been deployed to East Timor, Jordan, Australia, Thailand, the Seychelles, Africa, and Kuwait. He was returning to the west coast when the September 11 attacks occurred. When he left Iraq for the U.S. in 2005, he was significantly disabled from combat-related injuries. To be closer to a veterans’ health care facility, he moved from Del Rio, Texas, to San Antonio. In 2009, he spent several months at the VA hospital in San Diego receiving treatment for traumatic brain injury (TBI). Now retired from the military, Almaguer provides for his family through social security and veterans benefits. Despite his full disability status, he maintains a remarkably positive attitude. Looking back on his time in Iraq, he comments, “It has been a rough experience. War is surreal, a strong reality that I deal with every day of my life. The VA has been a great help to me and my family in moving forward.”

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  “Bam! Another one hits,” she continued. “‘Cover your patient! Cover your patient!’ We didn’t have anything. We didn’t have flak jackets, for goodness sake. The only thing we could cover our patients with were our own bodies, because we weren’t hurt at this time—at least not as bad as they were. I remember how angry I was after the attack. I was out there feeding these people during the day, I said to myself, and now they’re attacking us at night. I was really pissed off and just wanted to go out and find the people that had hurt that guy and hurt them as bad as they had hurt him.”38

  Army Spec. E-4 Teresa Little, who deployed to Iraq on the first day of the U.S. invasion, recalls having stopped by the side of the road next to a burned vehicle containing two charred bodies. “You can always see that car with a burned body hanging out of it,” she said. “Someone in my unit actually took a picture of it,” but “we trashed it afterwards because it was so horrific.” Asked by her interviewer how she dealt with the emotional impact of such events, Little replied, “I just held everything inside. If I didn’t, I’d be one of the crazy people. To this day, I’m terrified.”39

  On their first day in I
raq in January 2004, Marine Cpl. John C. Little and Cpl. Lucas Bollinger were providing security for an unusually large convoy of troops from the 82nd Airborne who were being rotated into Iraq. Trained for warfare in which two armies would face off against each other, the danger they confronted in Iraq instead came from small arms. The IED explosion that targeted their convoy served as “a big wake-up,” they explained. Surveying the damage and anxious to counterattack, they realized, “there’s no one to take it out on.” They found they needed to be continually on guard. Neither the Iraqi civilian defense forces nor the Iraqi police, they felt, were trustworthy. In fact, their commanding general had gotten into hot water with his superiors for instructing his troops: “Expect every Iraqi to kill you but don’t treat them that way.”40

  In both the Afghanistan and Iraq theaters, the smell and feel of death were palpable. “Today was the first day I shook a man’s hand that wasn’t attached to his arm,” recalls Sgt. Steve Pink of an incident involving a civilian driver in Iraq for whom he provided first aid. “I looked down and he had his hand dangling from the exposed bone that used to be his elbow like a child’s safety-clipped mitten dangling from their winter coat.”41 Maryland Guardsman Sgt. Matthew Miller, a paramedic back home in Maryland and a medic in Iraq using helicopters to rescue the injured, finds the contrast between venues striking. “At home it’s car crashes, but their body parts are still on them,” he explains. “Here there is so much blood and pieces of bone missing. We have sprayed our aircraft and have found pieces of bone.”42

  Army Spec. Nicole Ferretti expressed relief that she was not among those in her unit in Iraq asked to take dead bodies out of vehicles. “A couple of guys talked about that but they didn’t seem too damaged” by the experience. “I don’t know how they could do that.”43 Josh Barber, a combat soldier in Iraq, told his wife that he would never be free of “the smell of death” from an incident he witnessed in December 2004, in which a suicide bomber killed twenty-two people. Barker took his own life in August 2008.44

  Army Sgt. Gregory Mayfield, whose first exposure to combat came in an ambush of his truck convoy in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, described the sequence of emotions he experienced. Initially, he said, “you don’t think, you just act. There wasn’t a lot of time to be scared. Afterwards when you have time to think about it—that is when your hands start shaking and you feel like you’re going to crap yourself and you get scared and think, ‘Man, how did we get through that?’” At the same time, however, “there was also a feeling of, ‘Man, that was cool!’ There was exuberance and a massive adrenaline rush unlike anything I ever experienced before.”45 Adrenaline rushes are featured in the Armed Forces’ recruitment literature.

  A large proportion of the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were guaranteed direct exposure to violence because of the dynamics of military operations there. “The big change” in these conflicts, explained an officer in the New Hampshire National Guard transport unit, “is the front-line concept. A lot of what we do is still based on the whole World War II concept that there is a frontline and then there is a rear echelon farther back and that it’s safer. That’s not the case right now. We have forward operating bases in the middle of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan and it’s a 360-degree front all around these bases or areas that we’re operating in. You can be a logistician that typically would be one hundred miles away from the front and you could be smack dab in the middle of Baghdad. It’s a totally different concept. There is no more rear echelon. Everyone’s there in the middle of it and that’s the current operating environment.”46

  Nowadays, confirmed Army Col. Mark Warnecke, traditional distinctions between combat troops on the frontlines (normally, active-duty forces) and support and supply troops in the rear (normally, National Guard units) no longer prevail. Most bases are subjected to incoming fire; convoys supplying them and patrols operating outside the wire encounter IEDs, suicide bombings, and small arms fire. Guard troops and other support units are exposed to a much greater incidence of military action than in previous wars.47 This change in the choreography of warfare increases troop vulnerability and enhances psychological stress. As a result, while the study mentioned earlier sampled the exposure to violence of soldiers with combat duty, the lay of the land in Afghanistan and Iraq ensures that many non-combat troops are exposed to significant violence as well.

  The risk of daily exposure to violence took its toll not only among boots on the ground, but also on loved ones back home. “My wife tried not to think about the danger,” New Hampshire Guardsman Sgt. Ben Flanders recalled. “She was just missing me. I remember having a conversation with her, and she is crying, ‘I miss you, I miss you.’ I celebrated our first-year wedding anniversary in Iraq. We never talked about the danger I was in.”48 Some contingents wished for more action and felt guilty that they were less exposed than their colleagues. However, families were quite happy when their loved ones were not exposed. “Thank God they were bored!” exclaimed one spouse in a focus group of her peers.49

  INDIVIDUAL EFFORTS TO REACH OUT

  Faced with unfamiliar and dangerous surroundings, some soldiers sought to reach out to people near their encampments and reduce the element of peril. “I shall never forget the ten minutes I spent with this family,” recalled Cpl. Michael Bautista, a cavalry scout in the Idaho National Guard who accepted an invitation to stop at a home near his base for a cup of tea. “No conversations of substance transpired, no earth-shattering foreign policy formed. Simply hospitality and gratitude; just smiles, body language, and handshakes. For a while, there was no fighting, no explosions, no terrorist possibility lurking around the corner. Even though I was in full combat gear, sharp steel sheathed, ammunition and explosives strapped to my chest, rifle slung at my front, for a moment, I was just a guy enjoying a hot beverage and some candy with the neighbors.”50

  Army Sgt. Christopher Walotka recounts a highlight of his tour in Afghanistan: slipping away from his base at night to chat with local tribal elders at a nearby roadhouse. The conversations confirmed for him the purpose and value of being there: to help “keep people like that safe and free.”51 Pursuing such contacts, however, rendered him absent without leave (AWOL). Special Forces units were sometimes less isolated from local people than were combat and support troops, renting “safe houses” in Iraqi villages and hiring Iraqi cooks and housekeepers. Nevertheless, as Sgt. Trevor Bradna, a Special Forces finance officer, pointed out, the bombing of one of those houses in Erbil proved it anything but safe.52

  Some veterans identified similarities between their new surroundings and their home settings. Army 1st Sgt. August C. Hohl Jr., who supplied Afghan schools with pencils and paper provided by people from his native Wisconsin, wrote that “coming here has shown me that while we might all live differently due to environmental, geographical, and educational conditions, people are basically the same inside. Learning some of the history, social habits, and religion of this country has left me with a profound sense of hope that we can assist the people here. But we’re not so smart that we can’t learn from them, too.”53

  One innovative connection to the local scene was devised by Sgt. 1st Class Jonathan Trouern-Trend, a Connecticut National Guardsman who, beginning in February 2004, served for a year in Iraq with the 118th Area Support Medical Battalion, stationed at Camp Anaconda. “Its fifteen square miles held not only a large portion of the American military arsenal in Iraq,” he wrote, “but also many birds and other creatures that shared the base with us.” An avid birder, he reported the results of his walks on the base and his travels around Iraq to family, friends, and other bird enthusiasts through blog posts. “The birds gave me both the excitement of the new and exotic and the anchor of the familiar. I hope to return to Iraq one day,” he wrote in the introduction to Birding Babylon, “armed only with binoculars and a camera.”54

  One New Hampshire Guardsman, who had received what he considered inadequate advance training at Fort Carson in Colorado regarding cultural di
fferences, was struck by the fact that things considered odd in Afghan society were commonplace for Americans, and vice versa. Among these he mentioned praying five times a day, even in the midst of combat. “But in the end,” he concluded, “aside from not speaking the same language, we were the same people.”55 Other soldiers remained more negative in their views. One Marine lance corporal deployed to Iraq was outspoken in his views. “I’m just not a big fan of their culture,” he said. “They’re just a nasty, unclean people.”

  Capt. James Sosnicky, who saw Michael Moore’s trenchant antiwar film Fahrenheit 9/11 in a theater with an Arab audience in Amman, Jordan, noted that during the scene in which an American mother weeps for her dead son at the White House, “every headscarf-wearing Muslim Arab woman around me was sobbing. The pain of a mother grieving for her dead son cut through national and religious boundaries and touched on an emotion common to us all. That compassion, the compassion of the average Muslim Arab, is hardly ever put on display.”56 Other veterans, too, discovered and articulated a sense of shared humanity.

  A number of soldiers commented in interviews and dispatches home on the rich religious history of Iraq. Some took advantage of tours arranged by U.S. military officials of the Mesopotamian city of Ur, home of the prophet Abraham.57 One soldier commented on the eye-opening experience of discovering centuries-old cuneiform tablets on a visit to Babylon. Nineveh, a city mentioned in the Old and New Testaments and an archeological treasure trove, was also a favorite destination.

  Some veterans sought to interpret the history and culture to families and friends back home. In a “Letter from Afghanistan” that appeared in the Caledonian Record, Vermont National Guardsman Jeffrey Bitcon, sheriff of Vermont’s Caledonia County and a police trainer in the Afghan Ministry of Interior, provided a detailed description of Ramadan, a holiday celebrated by “more than a billion Muslims worldwide—including some eight million in North America.” After explaining to his readers in rural northern New England the elements of prayer, fasting, and charity, he remarked that the holiday “sounds a little bit like Christmas to me.” His conclusion: “Our Holy celebrations are not all that different than other cultures or theirs different from ours.”58