by Trish Wood
It was just shy of about ten at night and it was the start of my shift for the evening. I come in and a scream came across the radio from one of the guard towers. We had little Motorola handhelds at all the guard towers that we used to communicate. We heard two rounds from an AK and then a scream come across the radio. Then we heard an M16 light up, and the reports came in from the rest of the guard posts. Then another call came on the handheld, and they said, “God.” The 1st sergeant got on the radio, just on the Net for all the guard points to hear, and he said, “Could you please bring down two five-gallon jugs of water to wash the blood out of the tower?”
So I hiked ’em on down there, and an ICDC soldier—an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldier—was wrapped . . . his legs were wrapped into the stairwell of the tower, which is not really a stairwell. It’s just more or less metal pickets that have been cut and welded into a stairlike shape. And he’d gotten intertwined in that on his flight down the stairs. He had eleven rounds in his back. The American soldier who was with him in the tower there was just completely shut off from reality. Looking at the ground, weapon on the floor.
When he finally started talking, he said that the Iraqi had asked him for money and then demanded it, which is not uncommon. He gave him the six dollars he had, at which point the Iraqi locked and loaded his AK at him and fired two rounds in the air, at which point the American soldier in the tower rotated his selector switch from “safe” to “semi” and proceeded to pump rounds in the Iraqi’s direction. From the burns on the Iraqi’s hands and the holes in his legs, and through a piecemeal story we got later, we know that the ICDC soldier was holding the barrel of the weapon when the American started firing, which means he had to have dropped his own weapon. The American lost it and opened fire. We bagged the Iraqi up and took him in.
A few days later, after talking with the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, which trained on the same FOB as us and we worked very close with, it came to light that apparently the American soldier and the Iraqi had for months been arranging to work in the same guard tower together in order that the Iraqi could sexually service the American for money. The Iraqi’s death was caused by a misunderstanding about payment. Basically the Iraqi had prostituted himself to the American, and the American killed him over what later turned out to be a four-dollar discrepancy in the payment. The American soldier is now doing twenty-five years in Mannheim. He was a National Guard soldier who had never deployed before. A wife, three-year-old kid, and he’s doing twenty-five to life for the murder of an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldier who was a whore. There’s no moral to this story or anything. There rarely ever is. It’s just a strange and frustrating story.
The Iraqi people are strange, strange people, let me tell you that much right now. They believe wholeheartedly that women are for babies and men are for pleasure. Homosexuality there is just rampant and everywhere. It’s funny; it’s amusing to me as an American to see it. But it’s strange too. They just have no shame. They have no understanding of our ideas. People call it a backward culture, but they’ve just been living in the middle of nowhere forever without any media. They have no understanding of reality. One time all the power went out on our base. We couldn’t figure out why. When the ICDC truck was leaving the post, we found almost two hundred feet of electrical wire in the back. It turns out that one of the Iraqi soldiers had kicked a hole in the wall, pulled out two hundred feet of live wire, and was going to go try to sell it. And that’s the way it is. They just steal, they lie, they cheat. They have no affiliation with the Americans or the insurgency. They go both ways. It doesn’t matter to them who wins. They just want their cut of the money now.
I’d gone up to FOB Speicher for some dental work, and I was standing out in front of the twelve-foot cement wall, kind of pressed up against it on the shady side. It’s about 120 in the shade there most of the time. The way the dentists and the medics are located on that post is that they’re toward the center, next to the airfield, in order to remove them from mortar range. I was leaning on the wall in the shade with all my gear on, sweating and smoking my stale cigarette and watching the helicopters come in, kicking up the sand everywhere. Two choppers came in together because they always fly in pairs for the wingman and whatnot, and out of the first bird came two medics carrying a poor kid on a stretcher. The kid’s bawling and screaming and wailing with absolutely no legs, none to be found on him anywhere, and they rushed him off, and very slowly in an almost solemn manner a poor crewman stepped off of his Black Hawk with his helmet on. He was carrying the kid’s legs by the pants, one in each hand, just slowly kind of following them toward the hospital, carrying the kid’s legs by the pants.
I had a rocket land seven feet from my head while I was asleep. It’s a 107mm rocket, which is about three and a half, four inches across and three . . . about three feet long, and it missed my head by about seven feet while I was asleep and buried itself three feet in the ground next to me and didn’t blow up.
I had another rocket come in. The first one blew up to the side of my Humvee. I was outside the Humvee, talking, getting ready to start a mission. We’re standing around waiting to get our briefing, and the first one blows up, and it’s me and this other kid. Me and this other kid are standing out there and we hear the first round zip in. ZZIIPP! Boom! Right in. It goes off next to us. I hit the ground. This kid pulls out a magazine and goes to load his weapon. He’s looking up at the sky. I’m like, “What the fuck are you going to do, shoot it? Get the fuck down.”
And the second one came in probably about fifteen feet to the front of my Humvee, completely peppered me with fucking gravel. I had some cuts on my face from it, but it didn’t blow up either. It just fucking hit there and stuck. So we had to have EOD come out and blow it up before we could start the mission.
It’s interesting when you work with the Iraqi army because they’re sworn to defend Iraqis. They refuse to shoot at Iraqis or they’ve been seen shooting at Americans before. I don’t feel comfortable around Iraqi soldiers. The inability to communicate makes me uncomfortable. We had a questionable incident involving some Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers that were blown up by an AC-130 gunship. It’s a plane with a 30mm chain gun built into it called a Vulcan. We had a raid go wrong and cars everywhere, drive-bys, just a complete fuckfest. The gunship came in and lit up one of these cars. We pulled all the bodies out of the cars, and they were all fucking cops. We know for a fact they were shooting at us. So, you know—civilian or not—whatever. I don’t trust the translators for shit. There’s no way of knowing if he’s telling something even remotely close to the truth or what he’s telling them. It’s impossible to regulate the translator. He’s the only person there who knows what’s going on, so he runs the show. We’ve got some bitter, hateful translators out there who will just beat the shit out of fucking POWs because they can. He’s a fucking translator. He’s a civilian contractor who gets paid $200,000 a year to come out, and he fucking attaches himself to some officer’s hip. I don’t trust the translators. I trust the translators the least out of anyone.
Those burn shitters that we used to have—it looks like a little wooden outhouse with three seats. You take a fifty-five-gallon drum and you saw it off about a quarter of the way up. You fill it with diesel fuel and you shit in it, and once a day some poor low-ranking sap like me has to go out with a big metal stick, torch it up, and stir it. I was going out to the burn shitter and I heard sobbing, just bawling, crying, sobbing.
I go over and I kind of peek in the window, because they’ve got a little window cut in the top because sometimes, when it’s hot out, people strain too hard and pass out. So you’ve got to be able to look in and see if they’re all right. So anyway I kind of peek in the window and this guy is bawling his eyes out and just masturbating as furiously as I’d ever seen, just flogging it and bawling his eyes out, which is really funny to me and was really funny at the time. And it’s still funny now because he’s an Insane Clown Posse fan and I hate them. It’s a terrible, terr
ible, terrible band, and all their fans—when I take over California, when it just . . . and we annex Baja and all that happens, I’m going to have my own tiny genocide. I’m going to kill all the Insane Clown Posse fans. It turns out his wife had called to tell him he was going to get divorced.
We’re in a country for the oil. There are no weapons of mass destruction. There’s no connection to 9/11. There’s no reason for us to be there. We’re walking down the street telling people we’re there to help them, and all night long we just kill each other. If I was a citizen there and someone came in and tried to take over my country, take over my city, force me to live the way they said, if I was held oppressed by the white infidel invader, I would be out on the street with every single one of them. It’s hard to understand killing people who think the way you do. But, ah—that’s something for my counselor later. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know, ah, where to continue that idea at all.
I understand everything they’re doing. I understand every action they’re making. I understand the want for us to leave. I understand the hatred for a group of people who, ignorant and blind, charges into a country for its one export. Not to say everyone in the army is ignorant, because we have officers too. But it’s just so many Midwestern, Jesus-loving, well-adjusted, high school football players who went out and did the right thing. Joining the army before 9/11 really cut off those who joined the military after. Myself or my friends Garett and Jeff, we’re the last of the breed. No one joins the military nowadays on the line. We were on the line.
I have so many problems with this war and this military, this government. It’s hard for me to talk about it because I don’t know where to direct my frustration. I have so many . . . so many ideas in my head of what to say and so many different angles I could play it from and so many factoids that have been handed to me. And in the end it all breaks down to the simple fact that after all this emotional frustration and fatal peril that I avoided, it’s still going on. There are still people that are dying for no reason on both sides. They both have Gods, the same God, mind you, on their side, so neither one of them will relinquish anything. We’ll go there for a year at a time and fight and leave and then go back later. Meanwhile the people who live there have no choice. We shouldn’t stay to prevent them from killing each other. Who cares? Let ’em. Fuck ’em. Sunnis want the power; Shiites want the power. Fucking everyone up in the Kurdistan area would go insane. And they’d all kill themselves. And that’s absolutely fine. We just need to stop driving so many fucking SUVs. You know, Americans’ dependency on fossil fuels is an embarrassment. I’m not even safe fucking skateboarding on the streets most times, so—I don’t know . . . nothing. It’s all worthless. We just need to get out of there now. Any war is hell, but, I mean, a meaningless one is worse.
Now I work at the 7-Eleven. When I was lying there in my cot, I tried to think to myself what was the most worthless shit job I ever had with absolutely no responsibility, and that was 7-Eleven. So I came back and got my shit job back, and they pay me ten bucks an hour to restock the cooler. Until I can get a real job, I’m just kind of in that holding pattern.
I need to re-create the intensity in my life here and there. Skateboarding helps, and living the life I lead helps. But I need to get in the political arena. I really think that it’s my calling and it’s what I should do. I think that it would be a waste for me to stay outside of the political arena, because once I am allotted, you know, an education, once I can kick my GI Bill in and once I can go to school, once I can get a political science degree, once I can start doing what I need to do in order to change the world, you know, my life’s going to perk up a little bit. But for now, you know, the little bit of money I saved is gone and I’ve got to make ends meet. There are no other options. I don’t miss Iraq. No. No. For a split second, though, I thought I understood it.
“It is gruesome to just beyond
the realm of a horror film”
DANIEL B. COTNOIR
MORTUARY AFFAIRS
1ST MARINE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
FEBRUARY-SEPTEMBER 2004
SUNNI TRIANGLE
MARINE CORPS TIMES “MARINE OF THE YEAR”
Later they started with the IEDs. They started stacking land mines, and every time you figured out what they were doing, they did something different. When a guy comes in with a bullet wound, the marines can associate with that and know that they had buddies who were shot and survived. So you know it’s shit luck whether they shoot you and kill you or not, but then all of a sudden you get these massive explosions. When guys are shooting at you, it’s like gang warfare. It’s one gang of marines against a gang of insurgents, and we just happened to be better armed, but with things like the IEDs, the devastation is just so much I think the marines just can’t wrap their heads around it. It was like there was no winning.
I give the insurgents credit. I mean, they’re smart. They’re wiring cell phones to blow up bombs, doorbells, remote controls for cars . . . you’ve got to give them credit because their guerrilla-warfare tactics are very good and they’re obviously doing very well with them against us.
We had a lot of pretty bad IEDs, but for me the one that really marked it was an army unit that got hit by an IED in a drainage culvert. It was right on the outside of Habbaniya. They had filled a drainage culvert with explosives and blew up an armored personnel carrier. We knew we were in the shit at that point because when we dove up to the scene, the hole in the road was so big that an Abrams tank on the scene couldn’t drive over the hole; it had to go around it. We pulled up and I was on the machine gun on the commanding officer’s vehicle, and as soon as we stepped off the truck, we took fire. We were like, you’ve got to be shitting me. The firefight ends and then we look down the road and there’s just a motor and tranny on the street, one hundred yards from where the blast hole is. We were just like, oh shit, and we’re talking big diesel engines. We were there ten hours or more, picking up more than three thousand parts. We had that realization that the only thing that we could identify from the vehicle they were driving in was the motor and tranny, the back door, and one set of road wheels. One set. That was all we could identify. While you’re out there doing it, you become a machine. You just . . . pick it up, put it in a bag, make a note. It crosses that line. . . . There’s a soldier or a marine or someone that’s dead and it is gruesome to just beyond the realm of a horror film, and I don’t think you can even put your head around it. You just do it. Some of them you couldn’t tell what it was, as much as you just knew it was a body part.
There were the remains of four or five guys spread out over six hundred square yards. We had to walk a grid. It was just like a police scene. We had different-color flags that marked personal belongings, whether it was a wallet or a picture or anything like that. We had to take photos of the scene so that if it ever had to be reconstructed, they could reconstruct it. It was so huge that when I stood up on the Humvee with the camera to take a picture, there are thousands of these flags in the field, and it’s just surreal knowing that all those flags represent something.
We had done some recoveries, and this was our biggest one the whole time we were there. It became the landmark event for us. Everything got treated as reverently as if it were a whole body. Even if it was just a leg or an arm or, God forbid, a hand or, you know, a torso . . . everything got treated the same. If you put four marines to work on a body, then you had four marines doing the paperwork on a leg, and it got its own body bag and its own tag, and it got carried onto the plane on its own stretcher just as a full body would be. So if you got . . . you know, nine arms and ten legs and parts of another one, those would all go in separate bags home. We’d get them all in the same plane so that they all would get home together at the same time, but every part got its own bag. The chaplain said prayers over the body parts. I don’t think he saw the shit in Vietnam that he got to see in our unit, but he was an awesome old man. He came over no matter what time it was.
If it wasn’t
ashes blowing in the wind, we grabbed it. I mean, we recovered bodies out of a burnt helicopter that literally were just cremated. I mean, they were vertebrae and ribs, and the only reason we knew we had two was because we counted the vertebrae and there were too many vertebrae to be one. Our chaplain prayed over that. The sad part is it’s someone’s son and that’s all you’ve got left.
You want closure, and it’s not really for the dead marines; it’s really for everybody else. It’s for the marines that were with him when he died. It’s for the officer who was in charge of him. It’s for his family back home. Because as the war got on and the devastation of the IEDs and the antitank mines got worse, that type of gruesomeness multiplied, and we got bodies and we knew the families were never going to get to see—we’re going to get them home, but they’re not going to get that closure of seeing their husband or their wife or their son in the casket. So we looked at it, as it was our job that the family knows that the marines went out and got them. They don’t have to worry about turning on the TV that night and having some Iraqi running around with their kid’s Kevlar helmet or their kid’s dog tags or their kid’s boot. There’s no pictures of their son being beaten by some little Iraqi kid with a stick. They know that we got him. So that became our big mission. That is why we risked our lives walking through a farm field outside of Habbaniya, making sure that there was nothing on the ground, not a helmet, not a finger, not a toe, not a boot, not nothing. It looked like the sanitation department rolled into town. Everything was picked up. We didn’t want anything left behind.