What Was Asked of Us

by Trish Wood

  Our Humvee was about eleven or twelve feet away from our truck with the prisoners in it, and I had just said “Amen” after my prayers when everything went black. The explosion was so loud that I’ve got about a 30 percent hearing loss, and the smell, it was like TNT; it just burned into my lungs. All I could think of was my gunner: God, no, not Smitty! So I reach up, and I yank as hard as I can on him, and he pulls back against me, letting me know that he’s alive. Then he’s firing in case this is an ambush. I remembered my training just to keep going, and just as I’m driving through the black smoke, I see the Deuce careen off to my left. It was coming to a stop, so I slam on my brakes, and I angle off so I could offer them some cover, and I see a rifle coming out of the Deuce. It was Sergeant Cook, carrying an M16/203. He was shell-shocked and had blood coming out of his ears. Then the driver stumbled out too.

  As I’m looking in the back, I see blood, and I remember before the explosion seeing everybody, all the prisoners sitting, and then there was the explosion, and I saw things go flying, and now there was no one sitting on the benches. So I jumped out of the vehicle and start yelling, “Call it in, call it in, call it in,” and Dean’s screaming into the radio, but I can barely hear him because my ears were ringing. They had changed the frequency on the radios, because we constantly had to change the frequency so the insurgency couldn’t hear us. We constantly had to reprogram our radios, and our box wasn’t reprogramming it right.

  I remember as we are pulling the wounded off the truck that they were still handcuffed from behind, so they couldn’t defend or help themselves. It was the biggest letdown of my heart, because I remember thinking that these guys trusted me to help them. They trusted me to get them where they were going safely. I just kept thinking that my prayers in the Humvee just before it happened had been for the soldiers: “God, help me get my soldiers back home.” I didn’t pray for the Iraqis. . . . It wasn’t to get the Iraqis back home safely, and I felt guilty.

  All at one time, it starts flooding in as we’re getting the wounded off. There’s one laying on the floor, not moving, and there’s a guy who’s got his hands handcuffed behind him, and he looks at me, and he says, “Help my friend.” Actually his friend was already dead. I remember just feeling like, what use am I? You know, where’s my place here? Where, where do I fit anymore, because I can’t even help those that are helpless? I can’t even protect those that need my protection. Later, I asked, “Where did you put the dead one?” And they said, “Over there in the tent,” and they didn’t put him in a body bag, they just draped him, and I walked in and I said, “Guys, leave me alone for a second.” I walk over to him, and I pull the drape back, and all I can do is tell him I’m sorry. And I hope he didn’t have family that needed him.

  So I come out of the tent, and everything had been taken care of, and I’d made sure my troops were OK, and I said, “I want to be alone, guys. I’ll be right back.” And I remember putting on my Oakleys, my sunglasses, and I started bawling. I just started crying, and I said, “God, you picked the wrong guy for this job. You picked the wrong guy to be in this country, because if I’ve got to deal with this, I can’t take it. There’s no way that I can take this. I can’t take losing like this.”

  Then I remember seeing a shadow behind me, and he walked up and put his hand on my shoulder. The person turned out to be Sergeant Pearson, who shared my room at Abu Ghraib, who was always picking on me about talking to God. He wasn’t supposed to be there because his guys had been running a different mission, but they heard about it on the Net and then risked their lives getting to where we were.

  Pearson says to me, “All the times you talk to God, and it paid dividends today, because all of your soldiers are alive. And that speaks to me.” As I walked away, I looked back at my soldiers, and they were happy that all the soldiers were alive. What they didn’t see was that I was dying in my head because not everyone was alive. I was mission leader and that was my job, to keep everyone alive. Then the chaplain rolls up, and he comes up to me, and he says, “Hey, all your guys are OK. They’re talking. They seem all right. You, you OK?” I said, “No, sir. I’m not OK.” He goes, “I know. War’s hell, isn’t it?” I said, “This isn’t a war anymore, remember? The president said ‘Mission accomplished.’ I don’t know what I’m doing here anymore, sir.” And he says, “Well, you need time to heal. You need time to deal with this because of what you’re saying now.” I said, “Whatever.” And I walked away.

  There were six wounded Iraqis medevaced out to CASH 28, and I remember the seven other detainees sitting on the sidewalk, and they said, “Sergeant Davis, we don’t want to go to court today. Take us back home.” I know they were affected because they called Abu Ghraib home. They just wanted to go back to where they were at least halfway safe. And then one of them said, “These people who do this are mad. They’re insane.”

  So we loaded them back up, and we washed the blood out of the Deuce, changed the tire, and as I got in the vehicle, I remember turning on the air conditioner, and it blowing the smell of the IED back into the truck, and how it burned my lungs and nose, and how it brought it all back. On the way, there was a bunch of Iraqis in the middle of the street where we got hit, dancing in the street, celebrating. I wanted to stop my vehicle in the middle of the street and yell at them and say, What are y’all thinking? You didn’t kill me. You didn’t kill my soldiers. You killed your own.

  It was early November, and we had just come off of missions and were back at Abu Ghraib; we’re in our Humvees and a call comes across the FM radio that there was a riot and they needed all the MPs to respond, so we stayed in our gear and we responded. Our windows were down, and as we were heading in, we heard the sounds of shotguns going off, and we understood that the shotguns had nonlethal rounds, which were rubber rounds. Then a call comes across the radio to Shadow Main—Shadow Main was a command center—saying, “We’re out of nonlethal rounds. What do you advise?”

  We weren’t really authorized to use live rounds unless prisoners were breaking the wire, escaping or whatever, but Shadow Main comes back, “Well, since you’re out of nonlethal rounds, we’re in a combat zone, you must go to lethal rounds,” and . . . we copy, “Go to lethal rounds.”

  We pulled up right after that, and it sounded like all hell was breaking loose. No one was escaping. They were throwing rocks and chanting and, and getting loud and, and, and . . . they were mad about food. They were mad about the living conditions. The food was nasty. There was glass in it. It was not fully cooked. Rice and broth and the like. They were throwing stuff at the guards. They were just doing all sorts of aggressive things in that regard. And they had threatened to take a guard hostage and kill him if they didn’t get their way, but they hadn’t.

  I jump up on a pallet full of MREs, and I had my weapon ready to shoot if anybody’s coming through the wire. I’m looking, and no one’s coming through the concertina wire. By then, they had actually shot a few people inside of a tent containment area. Then I saw this dead guy. They had shot him with a SAW, which was the automatic weapon in the tower, and they pulled him out, and they dropped him at my feet, at the bottom of the box I was standing on, and he was still twitching. I looked at the chaplain’s aide, who had responded with me, and I said, “What are we doing? What am I doing here? You know, this isn’t what I came here for.” The dead guy was not a threat where he was. He was in the inner perimeter of the concertina wire. I guess some people just get antsy on the trigger because they want payback. They want to take out their frustrations because mortars are coming in over the wall, and they can’t fight back because they’re prison guards.

  I think that three to six people died that day and a lot more were wounded. Pretty much all we heard was that an investigation had been done; it was all justified as a prison riot.

  What makes us always right? That’s what I always ask myself: America, what makes us always right? In the Christian tradition, it is very clear that if you’ve sinned, acknowledge your sin. And even if that�
��s not enough, you go to your brothers and your sisters, and they help lift you up. But if you will not admit your sin, God will shine his light on it and show you. Someone’s got to stand up and take the blame for this war and say . . . we’re sorry.

  I don’t believe it was just a few bad apples. I’m not that gullible. I am not going to be lied to by a government that I would have given my life for in Iraq.

  “Indirect fire is really good at finding me”

  JOSEPH HATCHER

  1ST SQUADRON

  4TH CAVALRY REGIMENT

  1ST INFANTRY DIVISION

  FEBRUARY 2004-MARCH 2005

  FOB WILSON, TIKRIT

  First you hear it coming. Indirect fire, mortar rounds, rocket rounds, indiscriminate high explosives thundering out of the sky have got to be the single most traumatic thing ever. Firefights are fine. I like those. Indirect fire is just so inhumane. Not that a .50 cal. is humane or anything, but at least there’s some skill involved. You have to consciously execute someone. Lobbing eighty-five-pound chunks of high-explosive metal at someone is kind of chickenshit. It’s a great guerrilla technique because they can just drop a 107mm rocket on a berm, pull a twenty-minute timer fuse, and walk away. The next thing you know, your fucking hallway blows up, you’ve got three guys with holes in them, and the guy who did it just walks away. It’s a great guerrilla technique. I really admire it, but I hate fucking indirect fire more than anything ever, period.

  You hear it either whistle or whiz, depending on how close it is, if it’s going to land on you. If you’re really good, you hear the rockets whistle. Mortar rounds just kind of make a real small thud in the distance, and you know it’s coming, and the second it blows up, you don’t hear anything. But rockets, rockets give you a good zip or a whiz depending on how close they are. You just slam to the ground about the same time as it fucking blows up, unless it just blows up, and then you fucking hit the ground. Then you’ve got to scatter for your gear and get all your shit on. We didn’t have any bunkers, but if you’re at a site that has bunkers you go to the bunker. We just kept doing whatever we were doing. We just put our gear on and continued playing video games. People buy TVs and Xboxes out there and shit. You’ll be sitting there playing video games, and fucking rounds will come in, and fucking half the people flip out and half the people won’t. And eventually everybody just puts their gear on and sits back down and keeps playing video games. Indirect fire is really good at finding me. Maybe that’s why I hate it as much as I do.

  “There’s going to be an

  uprising here soon”

  JONATHAN POWERS

  “THE GUNNERS”

  1ST ARMORED DIVISION

  MAY 2003-JULY 2004

  “GUNNER PALACE,” BAGHDAD

  It’s not Iraq necessarily that drives the younger officers like me out. It’s the way this war has been handled within the Pentagon. There are stop-losses, and there’s extended tours, and there are guys in Washington telling you what to do who have never been to war and have no idea what’s going on out there. There was a big issue initially that they weren’t listening to us on the ground—the lieutenants, the captains, the sergeants, the guys doing the patrolling, the guys seeing the Iraqis, the guys knowing way more about what’s going on than these guys at the Pentagon. We knew there was going to be a civil war in November ’03. We said, “It’s coming. There’s going to be an uprising here soon.” And you could feel it in the streets. Moqtada al Sadr’s militia started these protests . . . These guys were wearing masks all the time.

  November ’03 was about the six-month period for us, and we hadn’t yet provided adequate water, sewage, and electricity to the Iraqis. So all of a sudden, we were no longer “America the liberator.” Now, we’re the invaders who can’t supply what we’re supposed to be giving them. Their attitudes toward us changed. It’s hard to explain. It was more of a feeling. Examples: On a patrol in June of ’03 we drive on the streets, and you’d get around to neighborhoods where people would be out there clapping and cheering and giving you thumbs-up and saying, “Go, Bush,” and thanking you for what you’re doing. You could stop by, you could walk into a tea shop, and people would be more interested in what can you provide us than hating you.

  By that November, we wouldn’t go into a tea shop without a force because we didn’t know what to expect. That first summer, I would walk around the schools, myself and my sergeant, while my guys were outside, having no fear at all and no worry that we were putting the kids at the school in danger just by being there. That changed. Once the Iraqis realized that we weren’t providing what we were supposed to be providing, and we started to be seen as the enemy, then going to the schools would put the children in danger.

  It was weird because the Iraqis weren’t hostile toward us one-on-one. They never did that. Sometimes there was anger, but we were the guys with the guns. They weren’t the guys with guns, at least when we had them one-on-one.

  As a unit, we were very good at surgical strikes, so if we were going to get a target in that area, we’d go in there with six Humvees, get them, and leave. The unit next to us would go in there with a tank, two platoons, throw all the women out on the streets, tie them up, sandbag everybody, beat a few people around. It was a show of force, and it caused a lot of hostility that way. We didn’t do that. We were very quick, thanks to two people: our colonel, who was just good at it; the other great leader was my buddy Ben Colgan. Previously he had been a sergeant first class, Special Forces with Delta Force. Ben was just a really gung ho guy and had gone to OCS to become an officer because he got married and had kids and wanted a safer line of work. Ben showed us how to do these surgical strikes without pissing everybody off. So when we went in there, we went there with a handful of guys, we got in there, we got our guys, and left.

  Ben was our first casualty. He was killed by an IED.

  “Someone’s going to fucking pay”

  BRADY VAN ENGELEN

  “THE GUNNERS”

  1ST ARMORED DIVISION

  MAY 2003-JULY 2004

  “GUNNER PALACE,” BAGHDAD

  BRONZE STAR (FOR VALOR)

  Ben Colgan was the chemical officer for the battalion, and when he got there, there really wasn’t much for him to do. Obviously there were no WMDs for him to contend with. He was the go-getter and the motivator, he really motivated individuals—I honestly think that he really did want to do some positive, constructive things in Iraq. He wanted to get out there and interact with the Iraqi people.

  By the time Ben was killed, we wouldn’t even have thought of hanging out with Iraqis anymore. We would still buy batteries from the locals, and coffee, but we’d just stop at a store and run in and buy it real quick and then run out and keep moving. But I wasn’t afraid of them. The summer was not too bad. People still had the side doors off their vehicles just because it was cooler. They wanted to get a little breeze blowing through there. It’s hotter than hell in those Humvees to begin with, and taking the doors off helps quite a bit. But they couldn’t even think about that come September and October. The pace started picking up with the IEDs, little by little, and it was just an incident here and there. And then eventually it just came at us. Ben got hit and it just kind of punched us right in the face, you know what I mean?

  Ben was on a quick-reaction-force mission. They were responding to an explosion, I believe, and it was November 1st. There’s a mosque on the Tigris right next to a bridge, and they were chasing someone heading across the bridge. I think it was a setup and they were tricked into running over an IED, but it didn’t kill him initially. He made it to the hospital.

  When I saw him after the incident, he had a little blanket on and was pulling it up a little bit to get more comfortable. He was conscious, but I don’t know if he was really responding to anything or anyone. And his eye was pretty messed up at that point. That’s the last time I saw him.

  He was on the FOB and they were getting ready to take him out to the hospital. I kind of thought he’d b
e OK: He’s probably going to be blind, but he’ll be OK. And then I went to bed that night, I didn’t really sleep but I lay there for a while that night thinking that he’s going to be OK. I was just hoping that if I didn’t hear anything, it’d be OK in the morning, you know? And then another friend came in and cleared the room out and started packing his stuff up. I thought, What’s going on? And then I just kind of sat there for a minute, taking it in, that he’d passed away. I just wanted to be left alone a little bit.

  It had a huge impact on the unit. He was a pretty big player in the neighborhood, not only intelligence gathering but also the rapport between soldiers and Iraqis. He’d spent a lot of time and a lot of effort trying to build a positive relationship, and the unit took spite upon all Iraqis at that point in time. It hit home. It was like, someone’s going to fucking pay. I could tell for a few days that the guys in the unit were really on edge, just waiting for someone basically to step on their toes or do something to push them over the line. I thank my lucky stars that none of the guys retaliated.