by Trish Wood
“I just had a hatred for the Iraqis”
TOBY WINN
“MAGNIFICENT BASTARDS”
ECHO COMPANY 24
2ND BATTALION
4TH MARINE REGIMENT
MARCH-OCTOBER 2004
RAMADI
The Marine Corps was just something me and my brother both wanted to do. Growing up, that’s all I can remember is me wanting to be a marine. I joined right after high school. The marines looked like they were better than all the others, so I picked the marines. They looked like they were always first in if anything happened and they were the ones to do stuff before anybody else.
On September 11th, I was actually at the airport getting ready to go to my school of infantry, where they would train me to do my job. On the way to the airport, I heard on the radio that one of the planes had crashed. I got into the airport and there was pandemonium going on—everybody trying to evacuate people, and I was in my military uniform. They gathered us all around and they took us to a separate room so nobody could see us, I guess because there might have been terrorists around or something and they would target us. I figured then that I would eventually have to go to war.
Without a doubt I knew they were going to find WMDs. I still believe there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11. There’s still bin Laden and that guy that we were looking for, Zarqawi, and they’re still connected with it all.
The first time I knew it was the real deal, I was on guard and my friend’s platoon went out on a patrol, and they were in their vehicles, and when they were going out, they were in a small ambush. Two of our guys got shot, one through the stomach. I was on guard and I actually could see the rounds going up in the air, the illuminated rounds. All I could think of were my friends and if they were all right, if they were all going to come back or not.
When we first went in, I thought we were just going to do patrols and hand out pamphlets about getting the new government up and running but I didn’t think we would get in actual combat situations, but we did, and the insurgents were pretty smart. They knew what they were doing. They would set up ambushes. They would back away from us to get away and then they’d hit us from another angle. They’d set up multiple ambushes to split us up. They were pretty well trained. They were very well coordinated. Nobody died that day, so that was good. After that, every day was crazy. Mortars hit our outpost every day, so it was crazy.
As soon as the first mortar hits, everybody just scatters and finds the first place that they can go and hide until it stops. It’s a loud noise; your ears are ringing every day. They’d set their mortars in the back of a truck and they would run up and then they’d shoot a couple mortars and then they’d take off. By the time the mortars were landing, they were already gone, so we could never find them. Every day we were doing a patrol during the day and then we’d do a patrol during the night. So in between those we could do whatever we wanted, wash our clothes. We even had a TV that got sent out to us which didn’t really work all the time because of the sand, but we had magazines and stuff. We had radios; we’d mess around, joke around, and sing a little bit. I listened to some country over there, some rock, that kind of thing. Anything I felt like listening to.
The food kept me alive; I guess it wasn’t too good. We had a lot of those MREs and I ate those every time I’d go out on patrol. It was prepackaged food. They’re sealed and you can keep them for months. There’s all kinds. I had turkey; they had roast beef and meat loaf, noodles. It wasn’t the best.
We took thirty-five casualties in my company, and that was the most anybody’s taken since Vietnam; the biggest firefight since Vietnam. It was pretty hard. It was pretty rough. It was April 10th and it wasn’t my time to go on a patrol. It was my platoon but a different squad. We have three squads, and each squad goes out, and they were out on a patrol and then we heard these mortars going off, so we knew something was going on.
They called in and said that they were getting ambushed. A kid came up and was talking to them and the kid left and went and told the insurgents, the bad guys, where they were. The bad guys set up an ambush and started moving in on our guys, so they called in and we sent a patrol out there. By that time the first patrol had been ambushed, all of us who were still left in the outpost were gathered together and we took Humvees from anywhere we could get them. We went out there, and on the way out there, we got hit in a different ambush. We were split up, but the first ambush was on a street that turned into a town, and the bad guys had a .50 cal. set up on the roof, and as soon as our guys turned in, the bad guys lit up the Humvee, and the Humvee couldn’t even—they had to get a tow truck to pull it out, it was so riddled with holes. That’s where we lost most of the people, in that ambush.
I was down the road. I was at an ambush down the road. There were some old tanks sitting on the side of the road and they set up the ambush for us there, and as we were crossing, they hit us. They were dropping mortars on us. A lot of people got killed in that spot. There was one guy, he’s called Cherry, that’s his name, Cherry. He was in a rice field or wheat field or something like that and he was going toward the insurgents that were ambushing us. He looked over at his team leader as he was getting shot at and he said he knew where they were getting shot from. As he turned around again, he got shot in the face and he dropped right there. I thought he’d tripped. I didn’t think—it just looked like he tripped, but he wasn’t getting up, so I knew something was wrong. I was on a berm and I couldn’t get to him from where I was at, but his team leader went and got him. He died. He died right there. Another guy got shot through the shoulder and it went straight to his chest, and he was living for a couple of hours and then he died.
You couldn’t really get too shaken up at that point; it’s kind of put on hold until everything is over and then you can reflect on it later. Like you’d be sitting back at your outpost, you know, wanting to look at a magazine, and it would hit you, what just happened, and just . . . it was pretty bad. A lot of people just kind of sat by themselves, just to reflect, you know? Other people would just talk to each other about it. We just want to get back out there and take out all the people that were involved with it.
A good number of our thirty-five casualties could have been avoided if we’d had proper armor. Many of them were killed by vehicle-borne IEDs. The bad guys put them in vehicles or just plant them on the side of the road, and as we’re going by, they press the button and it explodes. The Humvees just got riddled; every time they got hit, they would fall to pieces. Shrapnel would go through everything and there was nothing to stop the shrapnel from hitting the passengers.
One of our officers actually made protective gear for the gunners who had to stand up in the Humvees. He actually made pants out of flak-jacket arm pads and strapped them together so they could wear them and have a little bit more protection. We’d get scrap metal and then weld it on or they’d get these plates and we’d tie those on the side; they kind of look like Frankenstein. We attached stuff with string and it would start falling off and we’d have to hold it on ourselves. You’re holding your weapon in one hand and you’re holding the armor up by another hand.
I was on a patrol. We were on the main supply route we called Michigan, and that’s the road we had to use to get out of our outpost every day. We hadn’t gotten half a mile out when we got hit by an IED. We had an engineer, and he’s the guy who knows about explosives, so we put him up front, and then the rest of our team; we had an RO—
which is the radio operator—and our team leader and the squad leader, who was in charge of everybody who was out there. And there was me right behind him.
All I remember seeing is this big cloud of smoke; it happened that fast. I noticed that the engineer was gone and our RO was gone. So I got up and I was looking for the RO because he was closest to me. And I got to him and he was lying on the ground, not moving. He had blood all over his face.
I looked over to the left and I saw the engineer, so I ran over there and he was blown completely
in half. There was no way he was going to live, so we ran back over to the RO, and he’s starting to move around now. He’s starting to moan. We got our doc over there.
I noticed we didn’t have radio communications, and we had to report in what happened. So we had a seven-ton there and the windshield was blown out and it was, like, barely making it, but I took one of our machine gunners and jumped in that, and we went all the way back to the outpost.
I reported what happened and we hauled ass back out there. By that time, an army unit that was doing a patrol in Humvees came by and they were there by the time I got back. They were doing a medical evac to the RO, who lived. He’s blind now and he’s got a metal plate in his head. They just took the guy that was blown in half away. They sent him home in a casket. I think about him all the time.
We had these informants in town that would tell us things. Each prisoner we’d get we’d interrogate, and they’d give us information, and we would set up a raid on a house for that night. We’d set up a perimeter around the house so nobody could go in or out, and then another team would actually make entry into the house and take everybody down and look for the guy that was supposed to be there. If he was, then we’d take him back as a prisoner. There were a lot of failures where the person wasn’t actually there, but we did find a lot of people we were looking for. We checked a lot off our list. I don’t think any of them are really failures. I think it’s kind of a, If you mess with us, we’ll come in your house and do something. I think it was kind of like a deterrent.
I just had a hatred for the Iraqis, I guess you could say. Even . . . even the good ones that would actually offer us food, water, I still just had this distrust, like I couldn’t turn my back on them. As soon as I turned my back, they’d become a bad guy. They were hajjis or camel jockeys. We didn’t have anything nice to say about them at all.
I thought that eventually they’d have a government of their own and we could actually pull out and we wouldn’t even have to worry about them. Kind of get rid of them, I guess. I think it’s about time we pull out now; we set their government up and they need to see how they can work on it on their own now. I think that they’re going to have a civil war no matter how long we stay there. I think that they need to have a civil war. We had our civil war and it made us better, and I think that they need to have their civil war.
I don’t like talking about the war. Me and my friends will talk about the friends we had—not during the war but when we went to a bar and had a good time before we went to Iraq. Friends dying. Losing my friends. The war is just something I don’t want to recall. Bad thoughts.
“They were sending us out there
in pieces of crap with no armor”
MATTHEW WINN
“MAGNIFICENT BASTARDS”
FOX COMPANY
2ND BATTALION
4TH MARINE REGIMENT
MARCH-OCTOBER 2004
RAMADI
I guess I would say I had a pretty good childhood. I had a single mother who raised three boys. I got most of the things I wanted. I’m not spoiled, but my mom would do her best to get whatever we wanted and make sure we grew up the best that she could do.
Being in the marines is something I’ve always wanted to do. I wanted to be active and get out and do something. I can’t sit down and be inside for too long. I wanted to go see the recruiter in elementary school. I got into the delayed infantry program, and I was in that for about a year while I was in my senior year. I think I got in when I was seventeen, so I had my mom sign the papers. A week later, my twin brother and I had our birthday, and then he came in. My mother was hoping we’d pick something else. But she was behind us 100 percent.
On September 11th, I was actually at the airport, going to infantry training. Driving to the airport, we heard about the first plane hitting and then thought it was just an accident. We got there and heard about the second one and then watched it on a TV in the airport bar. We had to leave because I was in my uniform and I was getting too much attention. Everybody wanted to talk to me and was asking me questions when I had no idea what was going on. We went to where we were supposed to get on the plane and met up with about seven other guys that were going. They shut down the airport, so we couldn’t get on the plane. They made us get out of our uniforms so we wouldn’t draw attention. My mom was wearing a marines shirt, so they made her turn it inside out. They put us in a basement and waited, and after about three hours they said we were not going to get a plane.
About a week later we flew out and we started our infantry training. Basically all that is, is just to get you used to, you know, the uniform and the rifle and all that. It doesn’t really train you in anything to do with war. It is basically to teach you the different weapons and stuff like that.
They flew us to Kuwait. Then we just spent about a week to acclimatize. Then we got in a convoy through the border to Iraq and to our post. You know they want to kill you, so no one really sat down and no one was relaxed. The convoy was pretty stressful. You’re told how to act around the people, but you know it’s always different when you’re face-to-face with them.
You know the basics of why you’re there and you’re just doing the missions that they give you from there. The mission was to, um, look for terrorism and try to help the people out and make their lives better and keep them from basically being slaves and told what to do and how to live their lives.
I don’t really give a damn about Iraqis and their culture. I really don’t. The Americans are what drive me and my family and everybody here and at home. I really don’t care about the Iraqi culture at all.
I was at a base called Snake Pit in Ramadi. It’s the smallest base. I was a squad leader for half the time, and then when we got about halfway through, we got a platoon commander and everybody bumped down a space, so I bumped down to team leader after that.
My brother was about two or three miles away. We went for a memorial for some guys and they got me on a convoy to go out there to see him, so I actually got to see him once. And they wanted me to go out there again, but I didn’t want him to risk it, not a convoy just to come see me and me get on a convoy just to go see him.
I worried about him all the time. I knew he had enough training, but I did worry about him. We went in through the buddy program for boot camp. I guess it’s not a usual thing for twins to go in as a buddy program, so they deemed that worthy enough to play little games with us and have a good time. The drill instructors who wanted to entertain themselves, they would call me and him up in the middle of the squad bay and make us stand in front of each other like a mirror. They would make us talk to each other and have to do motions exactly the same, and I’d say, “I’m not ugly. You’re ugly,” and we’d have to act exactly the same and do the same stuff, like it’s a mirror. And if he’d get in trouble and have to go up to the deck and do push-ups and get hazed a little bit, then I would too because they didn’t know the first names. They just said, “Winn,” and we’d both run up there. And they would say, Since you’re both here, you might as well both stay here. So if he got in trouble, I got in trouble. If I got in trouble, he got in trouble. It made me stronger.
On my second patrol when I was a squad leader, out of nowhere we were just hit. There were pot shots taken at us. You start thinking about it and it’s just, like, I got to start paying attention and this isn’t a joke: people are trying to kill me.
I’m glad that I joined and got to see some combat. I don’t think I was ever scared. I know it sounds like a typical guy, but I don’t think I was ever scared. Combat was just something I always wanted to do, and I enjoyed doing that. I had adrenaline—I guess I’m an adrenaline junkie, but it was fun.
The worst event was when my best friend died from drowning. They were going to do a mission. There was a little island in the river and we suspected that they had a weapons cache there, AKs and RPGs and a whole bunch of stuff buried. We had a post on top of the hospital that kept seeing boats go to the island, spend some time on the is
land, and then turn around and take off, and so our company decided to do a little raid on the island to see if we could find anything.
That night came about and it was the 1st platoon, which are scout swimmers. They got in the water and the underpull was too strong, I guess, and the current was too strong and it sucked two of my friends under. It grabbed one and it pulled him down in the water and they threw a rope and finally got him out. They couldn’t find the two guys that it pulled under. So they spent the whole night going along the entire bank, trying to find them.
The next day, we switched with the 1st platoon that had spent all night out there trying to find them, and they sent the 2nd platoon, which is my platoon, out there, and we got little Zodiacs—it’s a rubber craft. We got the Zodiacs out there and just started going back and forth along the banks, trying to find them. Then we got some contract scuba divers out there to try to find the bodies.
We were holding security, with the Zodiacs going up and down the beaches and over the bank while they were underwater trying to find the bodies. I think the third day they found the first one, and later that day they found the other one. His name was Green. He was twenty or twenty-one. I called his mom when I got back. I didn’t talk to her for very long. I just called her and told her that he was a great guy and it was a great opportunity knowing him and I told her some good stories about him. I couldn’t think too much on it because I didn’t want it to cloud my head, you know? Got to keep going on with the mission and do my job. But I did think about it.
I’ve got some pictures of dead bodies and Hummers blown up by IEDs, and I’ve got a picture of almost right after a firefight and everybody’s exhausted but still, you know, holding security, and pictures of a couple of wounds that people got from getting hit by IEDs and stuff. They’re for memories. I mean, some people might say, Why would you want memories like that? But it’s what we did for eight months and it was a big thing, and dead bodies are normal. It’s like, you know, a doctor’s in working on a body, making a cut, you know? With war and combat, it’s just normal.