by Trish Wood
So it progressed from the first time we went to visit when we had a sentry sort of stand guard watching us eat, to soon after, we were all just playing soccer with our shirts off, eating watermelon, and we couldn’t have been more comfortable. This was in July, and I felt a good relationship with this guy. The first time I talked to my parents from Iraq was on Ahmed’s satellite phone. He insisted I call them, so I said, “Hi, I am all right.” And then I handed him back the phone. I believed that Ahmed appreciated what we were doing for his country, and I sort of enjoyed helping to reconstruct his neighborhood. I really felt like it was a gift for us to be able to bond with the Iraqi people, and I had a very solid relationship with Ahmed at this point.
I was in charge of the Baghdad sector that had Ahmed’s propane shop and also a market and a couple of schools and mosques. Propane is a big deal because Iraqis use it for lots of things, like cooking and heating, and they use the propane canisters that we use on our backyard grills. Every day at Ahmed’s shop, we would get four hundred and thirty-five canisters, and we would get about one to two thousand people wanting them. The four hundred and thirty-five canisters was less than the shop usually got under Saddam. So these people showed up with their rationing cards. “Look, I’m supposed to get my propane today. My rationing card says so.” We don’t have a rationing system. We don’t know what’s supposed to happen. I can’t read freaking Arabic, so now there were riots breaking out over the propane, and I had to make up a propane ration system on the fly.
For two or three weeks, we’re trying to get people in lines. Lines aren’t a big thing over there. They’re not getting-in-line type of people. But as soon as we showed up with M16s they started to get into lines. We forced the guys into one line and the women into another line. That’s what the Iraqis wanted. For every woman you let in, you had to let in three guys. So here are these women in big black gowns just sweating in hundred-and-twenty-degree summer heat, standing in lines, moving their cans of propane. The line of men wraps all the way around this huge dirt parking lot. But then we ran into problems. The first few people would want five, six cans of propane, so it would go really fast. And we had to figure out on the fly how to solve it. I decided that this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to implement a rule that is “one person, one can, one line.” This is one line for each gender, and the shopkeeper painted it in Arabic and he hung it up.
So our rationing system was working pretty well when we found out there’s a black market going on. Kids were going to the shop early in the mornings and sleeping there to be the first in line. So you had the same twenty kids going in the mornings, and they would spend the night there, and they would line up early. And they would sell the propane canisters to somebody else on the outside who would get twice the price for them on the black market.
So this took time to break up. Then we find out some of the women were hiding cans under their dresses. So one day I was just so fed up and angry with this, I took this old lady’s can out from under her dress and just launched it across this dirt parking lot, like a rocket. You look at yourself and you think, What the fuck am I? Who am I right now? You have this rage inside you, and you’d be like, what am I doing? I’m throwing this old lady’s can of propane across a dirt parking lot, and all she’s trying to do is get cooking and heating stuff for her family. So that was tough. I was trying to implement order. It was the only way I could see to make a point, was to make it theatrical. I was really pissed. I was angry with them because here I am in your fucking country, trying to get your propane shops straight, and you’re not working with me. Work with me! I was just picking up people’s cans and throwing them. And here comes this guy smoking a cigarette, and he stomps it out. His mom is in line, and he is yelling at me for taking his mom out of line. I took him by the throat, put him up against the wall, and through the interpreter I said, “What the fuck is your mother doing standing in line in hundred-and-twenty-degree heat while you’re standing over here smoking a cigarette? And you’re going to yell at me when the sign says one person, one can, one line. Get the fuck out of here. Your mom can get a can, and I don’t want to see you around here.”
Then we found another guy who was buying these cans from the kids, and he’s got ten cans in the back of his truck, and he’s doing it right in front of me. I walk up to him and I said, through the interpreter, “What the fuck are you doing? One can, one person, one line!” He said, “Oh no, no, no, sir. These are all my cans.” “Bullshit, I see you paying these kids for them. No, no, no, sir; no, sir.”
So I start taking the cans out of the back of his truck. He’s getting all fed up with me, and he’s yelling and stuff. These are not my proudest moments in Iraq, because this is when I felt like I was being the evil asshole. And I’m giving him his cash back. I’m like, here’s your money; but you’re going to get one can. But he’s still getting livid with me.
I’m going to make this guy an example so that no one else does this. So I arrest him and put the sandbag over his head. That just freaked him out because a sandbag back in the day meant Saddam was going to shoot you in the back of the head. We only learned this later.
So I got this guy in a sandbag. He wouldn’t shut up. I threw him in the back of the Humvee, and we leave him there with one of my soldiers guarding him. This guy is crashing around and screaming, and we take him and we drive him in circles around the neighborhoods for a while. I just get to a field, and I take him out of the truck, and I think he thinks I’m going to kill him now, and I get him out in the middle of the field, and I take this sandbag off, and through the interpreter I said, “Do you understand that you were doing wrong?” He’s like, yes, sir, I won’t come back; one person, one can, one line. I get one can of propane for my family. Obviously somewhat bullshitting me but . . .
So we ended up cutting his hands free, and this guy was so relieved he started kissing me, he started kissing the interpreter. And then we just left him there. And we were only four or five blocks away from where we first left.
Burning trash. Burning garbage. That was the constant smell of Baghdad. Oh my God, it always smelled like something was burning . . . that fucking city. Oh, the place just sucked.
There had been no sewage pickup, no garbage pickup for about six months, since before the war even. There had been little or no government functioning, and so the sewage and the garbage was piling up in the street. We were driving through pools of sewage in neighborhoods, and there was this green-black ooze that sort of covered the streets. It would come halfway or three-quarters of the way up the tires of our Humvees, and we had to pull our feet up so we weren’t dragging them through all this sewage. The Iraqi kids would be out walking through all this shit. It was important that we get something up and functioning for them.
Our idea was to use the neighborhood people to come out and clean the garbage up, and we’ll get this going here. We went to the local director general of sewage and waste, who just happened to be in our sector, and said, “What would we need to get this up and going?” He said, “Forty dollars a week.” It would have cost us just forty dollars a week to pay for trucks, garbage bags. That’s how cheap stuff was. We had tried to work with these different sheikhs and tribal leaders, and one of them was an imam, and we tried to orchestrate this garbage plan with them. So we talk to them about it, and one week later they come back for the next meeting. And we don’t have the money yet. It turns out the CPA wouldn’t give us the forty dollars a week. The CPA kept saying, “We have our own plan coming. It’s coming.” It never came.
The tribal leaders and sheikhs kept coming back, and we’d have to say, “So sorry, they haven’t given us the money yet.” They would ask, “What’s going on? Where is the money?” This is all through interpreters, obviously. It was very tough to talk through interpreters too. And by week three, week four, they were saying, “Thanks for nothing. You guys cannot provide shit for us. You’re giving us security, and that’s about the extent of it.” We were not giving them any
services that they needed.
Some of us were going to get our money and pay these trucks to start up. But there was no place for us to get our own cash. There’s no ATM working. We knew something bad was going to happen if we didn’t get this up and running. In a way it became self-preservation. Here we are totally bullshitting these people, making false promises, and it was our asses on the line.
It is summer and a hundred and twenty degrees with cooking sewage sitting in people’s neighborhoods, and what have the Americans given them at this point? Nothing. They’ve gotten rid of Saddam, but they’ve provided no functioning government. Those people are sitting in their own sewage and waste for months. I can’t stress enough that it just became obvious there was no plan. We kept looking at each other like, what the fuck are we doing? They needed a sewage solution. Forty bucks a week for a fifty-thousand-person sector, and we couldn’t get it done.
Also by the fall, I couldn’t go over to Ahmed’s house anymore. When I went the first times, we would leave the two guards outside while we were inside eating. But by that fall, I wouldn’t have trusted leaving two guys out in the streets for their sake. I would have to take a whole patrol, and then all of a sudden we would have been way too big a target for too long to sit at someone’s house and eat. So we just didn’t do it anymore.
We didn’t bring a lot to the table for them initially. But also at some point, they had some pretty outrageous thoughts, you know. One guy sat up in a meeting and said, “When are we going to have air-conditioning in our school?” My commander said, “Did you have air conditioners before in the schools?” And the guy who stood up says, “No, but you have air conditioners in America in your schools.” And just, wow, “Wait a minute here. You know we didn’t come here to give you America . . . that’s not what we did, you know. We came here to get rid of Saddam and find weapons of mass destruction.” It was shocking to hear that. They thought we were bringing them America. They also think that when Americans come, they bring American culture, which is hated, but you’ll see pictures of a guy burning an American flag, and he’s wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey while he’s doing it. You know you can’t have it both ways, buddy.
“Just get me out”
GREGORY LUTKUS
CONNECTICUT ARMY NATIONAL GUARD
248TH ENGINEERING COMPANY
JULY 2003-JUNE 2004
AL ASAD AIR BASE
I was part of a convoy with supplies and riding in a Hemmet wrecker truck. I was in the turret manning an M60 machine gun that fires 7.62 ammunition. We had really pushed that first day. It was supposed to be a three-day convoy, but we were trying to cut it down to two so we could get supplies to our people and keep things going.
Trevor Stone was driving, and we were on our way from Kuwait going northwest, and there is a dreaded part of the route we called “the washboard.” The washboard is roughly eighty miles of the most bone-jarring, teeth-gritting little bumps that in a military vehicle transfers huge shock. It will make you piss blood it was so nasty. That day, like nearly all the days over there, was sweltering, stifling—the only way I can describe the heat is, go into a sauna, put it on its highest setting, and feel the heat go into your mouth, and feel it sear your trachea and your lungs. And that’s what you breathe, and you beg for the night to come to let some of the oppressive heat go.
We’re not supposed to convoy at night, but this time we had no choice. We had two highly abnormal mechanical problems, including having a wheel sheared off, and they delayed us into darkness. By the time we got to the convoy-supply center, where we could stop for a while, I was so exhausted that even though there were bugs crawling all over me, I just collapsed. Didn’t care about the bugs. I had this one can of chunky beef stew that I put on the engine, and it heated up somewhat, and I wolfed that down. Before I know it, my buddy Trevor’s waking me up. He’s like, hey, man, we got to run; we got to go. We got to get back to Al Asad.
We’re pretty tired, we’re haggard, and we’re just getting started on the day. So Trevor hops in the driver’s seat, I hop into the turret. I always liked riding in the turret just because I thought it was the wildest thing to be in this country that most people have never seen before, and you’ve got the blast of this sweltering heat in your face. You’re smelling the smells of the place, which can be so wretched in some ways, burning shit or the general smell of Iraq and the Third World, sickening sweet diesel smells that just waft into your nose. I just thought it was so cool that we were getting to be here. But this is in the beginning, and everything was so new and wild that my motivation level was through the roof. This was in July, so the insurgency hadn’t really got going. I mean, we were still driving past Iraqi tanks that were blown up, because they hadn’t even cleaned that up yet.
I came down out of the turret to get a drink of water, and I just sat down for a moment. I remember Trevor saying, “Wow, looks like there’s an accident up there.” And then he said, “Holy shit; it’s us.”
I remember him popping the brake on the Hemmet, and I jumped out, and I was running forward. I didn’t even know where we were, what was going on. I remember seeing the Hemmet truck in front of me, and I yelled out, “Is anybody hurt?” And somebody screamed out, “Yeah!” Back in the civilian world, I had gone through EMT training because I’m into rock climbing and things like that and I wanted to get the training in case somebody got hurt. And I had training from the army, as a combat lifesaver. But it’s another thing to have to test these skills in real time when there’s diesel fuel all over the place and somebody’s in agonizing pain. I was scared shitless.
I could see that there are black skid marks on the road, there’s dust settling and carnage, and pieces of metal everywhere. The truck, a Hemmet, had hit the back end of a Hemmet fuel truck filled with fifteen hundred gallons of aviation fuel.
I remember running toward the accident, and still there was nobody else there. I was the first one, and I remember seeing, like, a flood of diesel fuel spilling out. And I knew it was fuel, and I knew it was flammable, and I stopped for a moment and knew—I knew what was going on and what could happen and was scared shitless. And pretty much I just said, “Fuck it,” and “I got to do it. I got to find out if there’s somebody there who’s hurt, because I’ve got this stuff in these medic bags and I can help him.”
But there was another problem on top of the diesel fuel I was now sloshing through. Brad, the trapped soldier’s, SAW was pointed straight down toward the diesel fuel, and there was a real danger a round could ignite the fuel into an explosion and fire. I really didn’t have time to go screwing around trying to clear it, so I took my foot back as hard as I could and I kicked the butt stock, and I broke the weapon in two. And I grabbed the ammo that was dangling in the diesel fuel and I took that and the butt stock, and I threw it as far as I could toward dry pavement.
Finally I just . . . I took a deep breath, and I crawled up into the cab, and that’s when I saw him. He wasn’t talking. He was leaning forward and his face was just shredded. But I still hadn’t seen how bad it was—
I’m looking at him from the side. He’s looking forward, and I’m kind of just coming into the cab. So I’m crawling through the wreckage, and I remember putting my hand down. When I got almost to him and I picked my hand up, there were pieces of glass and human teeth in my hand, and maybe I should have saved the teeth, I don’t know. I just kind of shook my hand off.
And I finally got to him, and now I got diesel fuel on me, and he’s bleeding all over the place. The medic from Brad’s unit was there now too. Working from outside the cab, he managed to get an IV started on his right side. About this time, there’s more and more people forming a perimeter. Help has been called out to BIAP. I’m trying to get as much information, but he can’t speak too coherently because he’s got stuff in his mouth. The first thing you need to do for a patient is to make sure they have an open airway. I’m just kind of opening his mouth as gingerly as I could but still clearing out the tissue and the teeth and stuff
out of his mouth so he can at least breathe. I can remember it looked like his lower mandible was split in several places. I couldn’t see the lip. It looked like when his face came forward . . . There’s a steel grab bar when you get in a Hemmet that, when you’re climbing in the cab, you grab onto. You grab onto the doorjamb and this grab bar, and then you hoist yourself up and swing your butt in. There was nothing between his face and the grab bar when the crash happened. The engine’s behind you, so you have all the momentum of all sixty-three-thousand-plus pounds of this truck coming forward on his jaw.
He was conscious, he was trying to say, “Help me. Get me out of here. Get me out.” He just wanted out. I just started talking to him and telling him what was going on, what we were doing. He knew he was hurt bad. So I was telling him, I said, “I’m here, I’m not going to leave your side. I am not going to leave you.” I’m telling him that other people are coming: “We’re going to get you out of here. You just got to hang on.” I knew his arms were broken, and I couldn’t see his legs. His legs were pinned, and it would be hours before I would see his legs, hours or minutes, I don’t know. I still swear we weren’t there more than ten minutes. I guess we were there hours.
Meanwhile, we had a marine patrol pull up, and they were just on a routine patrol. They added to the perimeter that is now forming around us. On the other side of the highway, you’ve got houses, and there’s a bridge right in front of us, which would have made me a perfect target. I remember waiting to feel a bullet hit me and thinking, Just get it over with. But the marines and the army and I guess a QRF from BIAP had arrived, and they had stopped traffic on both sides, and they had everybody pushed way back. I remember looking up and seeing all these people were here to help this one soldier. And they didn’t know the soldier; they didn’t know anything about him. But they were all here to help us. It kind of got me a little choked up because they’re putting their lives on the line now.