by Trish Wood
At the point I got to basic, that was September 10th. I woke up on the plane dropping into Louisville, Kentucky. Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” was playing on the headphones—which broke my heart. From there we moved to the buildings we were in, got issued everything, and then September 11th happened. We were told that you’re going to war, you’re going to war. Everyone had told me previously, When you get to basic, they’re going to tell you something’s happened and you’re going to war. There it was, day one, and they told us, OK, they blew up New York and you’re going to war. We were cut off from TV, print, and every other media, so I’m like, OK, whatever. I blew it off. I told everybody else to blow it off. It was a week and a half before all the mail got there with all the news clippings. Nobody believed them. It was that simple. Nobody did. I just don’t understand how my timing was so impeccable, really.
When I read about the attack, I didn’t freak. It’s just an attack. People die. People die every day. They’re Americans. You know, I appreciate that fact. I appreciate it was an attack against this nation and against the capitalist regime. I understand that people who were innocent were killed. But on both sides of the line, everybody made their point. America found its martyr and they got their kill. I mean, it’s a common consensus that every few years we just pick a country and kick the shit out of it to prove our point that there’s no reason to bother with the U.S., and here these guys come out of nowhere.
Once we beat up Afghanistan, there was nothing left to do there. We showed up. We let bin Laden get away. We left. We just pushed our way into Iraq. The only connection to 9/11 is their choice of religion. Everything else was created and forced upon the public by the United States government in order to find a way into that country.
It took well into the time that I was in the military before they actually drew any connections to Iraq. Once I got to Germany and we had access to media, it was obvious that it came down from the top. At that point there’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to follow orders. The connections that were made politically between Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and 9/11 are completely separate from what we were told as soldiers, because even people who possess all the rank in the military are still people themselves, and they have their own understandings of what’s going on, and they aren’t all goose-stepping to what the president says. But when it comes down that we’re going to go to Iraq, it doesn’t matter why we’re going to Iraq. We’re going there. Just get ready. That’s how it came down. It doesn’t matter if there’s a reason to go or not. It has to be done.
Of course there is skepticism even among the officers, but I believe it’s Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that prevents any officer from speaking against and/or contradicting anything that comes down from higher, be it the president or a major to a captain.
There was no mention of a noble cause. At no point through any one of my chain of command was there a noble cause placed on the table. We were given a job, and our job was to go to Iraq for a year and to provide safety and security operations for our area of control. Other than that, there was no hype, there was no nonsense, there was no propaganda, there was no political jargon forced upon us. We were given a mission, and we accomplished it. We came home alive. That’s the only thing that mattered to me.
The first thing for me in Iraq was paranoia. It doesn’t matter who it is, they’re probably trying to kill you, and that’s just the understanding you have to come to. You can’t trust anyone, ever, for anything. If you see someone on the street, they’re a threat, and you have to understand that and learn that and just live in total fear and paranoia 24-7 for a year. There are 155mm rounds blowing up on the side of the road, mortar rounds landing on you, rockets landing on you, kids shooting at you. It’s just nonstop almost the whole time.
I was located at FOB Wilson, between Tikrit and Samarra, probably about a third of the way north between the two, directly on the Tigris River. The insurgency situation in the area around Samarra was a hotbed, and no one was willing to touch that city. It was completely insurgent—held and controlled for most of the deployment. We did “retake the city” about ten months in, but Samarra was—God, it was hell. Mujama, the city south of us, was also an insurgent stronghold, but we had no way to prove it.
Retaking Samarra was one of the most interesting missions that was ever accomplished. It was called Operation Baton Rouge. We had to advance on the city. We used Bradleys with the 25mm chain gun to advance on the perimeter of the city in order to attack, identify, and eliminate any enemy presence on the fringe of the city. At that point, once we’d taken the perimeter, it was the job of the infantry and the Iraqi army to move into the city and secure it. That was one of the single most complicated and interesting missions I’ve ever seen executed.
The scale of it: four thousand soldiers moving on a city of twenty thousand people, and we had to evacuate all the women and children. They were the only people allowed to leave, and everyone else was just kind of—I don’t know—held in the city, unless you had no reason to be there, like a woman, child, elderly male . . . which is how several people slipped by: you get the elderly male who’s an actual somebody in the insurgency and they just walk through.
I don’t know, the whole thing was executed in a matter of seventy-two hours. We rolled up on the perimeter of the city, which we’d been securing since we got there. From there we slowly attempted to move in. We were attacked. We returned fire. We eliminated as many threats as possible, and once we reached our objective, the infantry and the Iraqi army came in to do the rest. I believe the total number of insurgents that we had on paper as eliminated was 108. The casualty count was close to 300—just an amazing mess—but 108 were actually written down as insurgents. There was no way of knowing who the other dead people were. When you fire a 25mm armor-piercing round into a mud hut and it passes through an entire city because there’s nothing to stop it, the odds of an accidental casualty are phenomenal.
The way they identified the insurgents was: if he’s firing a weapon at you and you eliminate him, that is an insurgent. That’s pretty much how it breaks down. If you found a weapon next to the body, it was an insurgent. The other people were either people that failed to evacuate, were not allowed to evacuate, or were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe they were connected. But I’m not sure how the numbers break down. I’m not sure how they do that.
Our sector was 100 miles north to south along the Tigris River, 120 miles along the Jabal Hamrin Ridge, the eastern front, and we had about an 80-mile front on the south. It’s about the size of Delaware, and we had 120 dudes to police it. During this mission we had 90 dudes in the south, working Samarra. So we had about 30 dudes to actually go out and patrol this AO, this area of operations. I was in charge of maintaining that.
On the northern edge of Samarra, it’s probably about a 2K front, and we had probably four or five different positions set up. Two were taking mortar rounds constantly. We had one sniper position that was just in business all day. Just to see the scale of it and hear the noise and the explosions. It’s hard to put into words. The thing about going there and doing it and coming back is that there’s no way to put into words what actually happened. That’s why war stories are stories, because there’s no way for them to be true. But of course it was.
It smelled like sand. It was tan everywhere. There’s the explosions, the noise, the gunfire, the mortar rounds coming around. There’s no way to paint a verbal picture of what was going on because the whole landscape is bland, the whole society there is fairly bland. When you live in mortal fear for three or four days at a time, it’s hell.
The entire time we were there, we lost only two people. One was a first-class sergeant named Marvin Lee Miller. He was killed in a drive-by at a vehicle checkpoint. We’d pulled over a vehicle, and the entire undercarriage of the car was packed with the Russian equivalent of C4. The guy claimed he kept it there because he used it when he went fishing. From ther
e we started taking mortar rounds on the position, and we scrambled to the vehicles. As this was happening, a blue Opal hatchback drove by and lit Miller up point-blank with an AK-47. The bullet pierced his body armor just through the right shoulder, and another round went through the base of the neck on the right side. He bled to death on the chopper flight.
The other one of our casualties didn’t die. He lost his arm, eye, testicle, and a good chunk of the meat out of his left leg. They were patrolling for improvised explosive devices. One went off, and so they stopped in order to see if they could find the guy who detonated it, to see if anyone would take off running. A secondary device exploded. Sergeant Robert Laurent found the detonation device and picked it up. It was equipped with C4 and a mercury antihandling device, and it exploded in his hand. Other than those two, we had three or four guys take a little bit of shrapnel here and there, but nobody that had to go home, other than those two. We were really, really lucky in our unit.
I was on the other end of the radio when Miller got hit. I took the whole message sent up from 91 medevac and had him shipped. Four kids, six months out from retirement. They stop-lossed him. He was the person who had the most to lose, and that’s what bothers me about it. He had the most to lose. I’m angry about it now, but I can’t change it. So I’m not going to waste my energy frustrating myself. There’s no reason to chase your tail. I could run myself ragged over nothing all day because someone that I appreciated lost their life in a meaningless conflict. Or I can accept it and use it as a reason to fight. So you choose your battles.
I was a gunner for my XO. I was also his driver. My XO was a brilliant man. I’m glad I worked for him. I also gunned for my 1st sergeant. That was the perilous—that was one of the two perilous Humvees, that one and the XO’s Humvee. I also gunned for a major. That was not so bad because that was an actual up-armored Humvee for the major.
The Humvee I had, the XO’s Humvee, was interesting because it was also a soft Humvee that we just put the up-armored doors on. We literally mounted a seat off the back tailgate so you could sit down in the back, and we put on some metal plates on each side in the back and filled those with sandbags. So you kind of sat between those with the .50 cal. in front of you. That one wasn’t too bad.
But we had a soft Humvee with no top. We had up-armored doors on the sides and a pedestal mount in the back that was centered in the back of the Humvee, and when you put a .50 cal. on that, the tail end of the .50 cal. is even with the tailgate on the back. You hold the butt plate of the .50 cal. under your chest, which, mind you, tends to fall off here and there, because it’s just a little clip on the bottom. So if you jostle it too much, it just comes off. While you’re holding this to your chest, you have to put your feet inside the back. I’m standing there—with a .50 cal. under my chest—shaped like the letter S to fit my legs through the back into the Humvee, and we just hang off the back. Then we’d drive the sixty miles up to Tikrit to pick up MREs and water and whatever else for the missions. We’re the lead vehicle on that. We’re out front, so we’re the IED risk. That was fun, perilous, interesting. I’d rather take the risk myself. I loved the guys—well, most of the guys—I served with. They’re good friends and we spent a lot of time together. I was glad it was me on the back instead of them. It was the worst Humvee we had and, to my knowledge, probably one of the worst Humvees there, but I’m glad it was me and not them.
We had a few events here and there where the trigger was pulled. When you point a gun at someone and pull the trigger, things happen. So it’s nothing unexpected, but it’s nothing I want to talk about immediately. A .50 cal. is a very messy way to kill a person, very messy, but there’s no other choice. There are no morals involved. There’s no anything involved. When someone’s shooting at you, you shoot at them. For a few brief seconds, it’s just—am I allowed to like it? Am I allowed to enjoy that endorphin rush? You know, I can’t say I disliked firefights. I can’t say that. Most people say, Oh, God, it was terrible, this and that. God, I loved it. I loved every firefight I was in, because for those few brief seconds nothing else matters. It all comes down to the fact that you’re going to die if you don’t kill this guy and that’s it. You’re out there at two in the morning, screaming down a road. You’ve got sparks tearing off the asphalt in front of you where bullets are ricocheting. You’ve got people screaming. You’ve got people trying to flank; you’ve got Bradleys moving into position, trying to dump rounds on ’em. You’ve got people running through the streets. You don’t know what houses have people in them. And all you have to do is stop thinking entirely and just fight. I never minded that at all.
I love it. I love the fight. It’s just I don’t think we should be fighting in that country. I don’t think we should be fighting a war there for any reason whatsoever. But when it actually happens, for those few brief seconds, it’s—it’s honest, it’s clean. There’s no politics involved when it actually happens, when it comes down to you having to exchange rounds with someone. They don’t care because once they’ve pulled that trigger, they’ve stepped up. They’ve engaged in something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything except removing the infidel. And all I have to do is live. There’s no lies there, there’s no pro-paganda, there’s no nonsense. It’s just the endorphins and the adrenaline and the knowledge that everything can change real quick if you don’t act immediately.
I don’t know how to phrase these ideas. We have one guy who is an E6 and he’s a staff sergeant and he’s out there. He’s a metalhead from Texas. He used to play with Pantera, just violent, out there, ex-meth addict, freaky dude. And the other one was this really young kid. I think he’s from Texas too. He took frag to the arm from a grenade attack, and the first thing he said was, “Fuck this!” He just bought a new uniform and he was more worried about the cuts in the uniform than the holes in his arm. He really enjoyed it. He liked fighting. Neither one of them is a stable person I can possibly compare myself to. Like I said, I haven’t really confronted any of these issues yet.
If anyone had told me I would like firefights, I would have said they were a fucking crazy person, a crazy, crazy person. It’s just raw primal instincts and just your reaction and your training and your ability to remove yourself or the threat from that situation as quickly as possible. The only point of being in a firefight is to end it, and I like that kind of honesty about it, but there’s no honesty in the war.
They removed me from the line. Yes, I was in Iraq for thirteen months, I was out there every day, but I feel that I could have done more. I don’t know how to explain it. I feel bad that I didn’t do more. I don’t feel any remorse for what I had to do. I don’t know if I’m mentally prepared to talk about this. I don’t know what to say. The people I shot at knew the risks they were taking. I haven’t really processed it. I’m sure I will feel remorse. I might even feel bad, but I don’t feel guilt, I don’t feel remorse. I’m completely emotionless about the whole thing. I didn’t want to kill them. If they’d just run away, that would have been fine with me. But they provoked it. I never . . . I never started a firefight.
I am a left-wing nut. I don’t think the left wing is left wing enough, actually. But the Jesus-loving Republican Midwestern kids in the army were good friends of mine. We went through a lot together before we deployed as a unit. During the train-up for all this, you get to know people really well, and in spite of my political views and my differences with those who served around me, we found a consensus with each other on what we believed and how we thought. We came to the agreement that in spite of the fact they don’t hold my political, religious, or ethical viewpoints, we came to the agreement that in the end we all want what’s best for everyone. If they take their route and I take mine, maybe we can just meet up in the middle one day. What other options are there? If mankind can’t learn to exist with itself, there’s nothing but chaos.
I just tend to be a dissident about religion and politics. When you’re going to deploy with a bunch of soldiers who tend to be e
asily molded mentally, they couldn’t have someone like me causing that many problems in a place where you need to have complete control. Ideas are dangerous, you know. They removed me from my line unit in order to keep my views and influence away from the soldiers on the ground. So they put me in tactical operations command with all the officers. You know, they kept me secluded away and they kept me off the line. I was never in as much danger as the others in my unit. I was out there every day, but it was logistical patrols. It was convoys; it was escort missions.
I never did a dismounted patrol through Adwar, which is where they found Saddam. I never kicked in doors. I’ve been decorated sixteen times. I mean, on paper I’m a brilliant soldier. I’m great at my job. I love my job. It was a good job. I just hated the employer.
Email was weird. I don’t know if I was the only one who felt the burden of having to communicate on a daily basis when the same terrible shit was just going to be going on again, and, you know, interesting stories just mean closer calls. It’s hard to maintain the exterior of being calm and collected while the entire time you’re just being torn apart. It’s got to be worse for people with families or children. The inability to distance yourself from the ones you love because you’re capable of communicating with them like that adds a large amount of emotional strain to the soldier’s daily life. It’s perilous because you know every time you call or communicate, the people at home know you’re going insane, and they can’t lie to themselves about that. You’re trying to maintain your own psyche for the purpose of letting your mom or your friends think you’re all right. And it hurts to fucking not be able to communicate with them what you’re actually going through. You have to maintain that facade. You have to maintain the impression that everything’s flippin’ copacetic. I didn’t like the immediacy of communicating like that. I see it as burning everyone. I thought the Internet would cause a decentralization of power that would influence a new world. But instead it’s just become a haven for time wasters.