by Trish Wood
One of the biggest things was when some of our guys were doing an IED sweep along Michigan—that’s one of the main roads there—
and they got ambushed. An RPG went through the passenger-side door of the Humvee—it was just a regular Humvee; it didn’t have any armor or anything. It went through the passenger door, which was open, went past the passenger, right past his face, and struck the driver on his Kevlar helmet, which smashed the Kevlar and smashed his skull. The Humvee went off the road and hit a bus stop and then stopped at a streetlight. The firefight went on for a little bit, and then the shooters bolted. It was just a hit and run.
The next day we went out and did another IED sweep on foot, and I found his . . . his Kevlar. I was coming out and I saw something in the distance, and so I walked over there and I found his Kevlar lying on the ground. It had bits and pieces of his skull and his brain in it and a puddle of blood in it. I picked that up and ran it over to our gunnery sergeant because I didn’t want any of the guys to see it. I gave it to him and then I went and I found a little trash bag and I gave it to him to put it in so none of the guys would see it and none of the Iraqis would see it and start smiling and making jokes and pissing everybody off. As I was carrying it over to him, the Iraqis started smiling, which pissed me off, and I started yelling at a couple of them, and the gunnery sergeant told me to stop, but I started yelling at them and cussing and a whole bunch of foul stuff—“I want to kill you,” and “Keep smiling, motherfuckers,” and “I’ll put my fucking rifle through your skull,” and stuff like that.
We should have had way more armor on the Humvees, and they should have made sure we got that before we went. They were sending us out there in pieces of crap with no armor. We had so many guys get hurt from IEDs going off on Hummers, and that could have been totally stopped. And all the guys that have been wounded or killed from Humvees that didn’t have armor would have been OK if we’d only had the right gear and Hummers that were fully up-armored.
I hated IED sweeps especially, because we did it mostly on foot for, like, the first couple of months, us patrolling, looking for bombs, you know, kicking over rocks and stuff. That was pretty stressful, you know? You never know when the rock you’re going to kick over is going to be, you know, 5-5, you know, 5-5-6 round or something. I have had some . . . a couple blow up really close to me.
There’s different types of IEDs. The ones that we came across most of the time were little cement blocks that they would put a 1-5-5 round in, which is a big huge mortar round. They would connect a little computer box—this is one I found—a little computer box and there was a receiver on it, and all they have to do is stand away and get on a cell phone and call that receiver and it detonates. Or there’s a little battery-operated one where all they got to do is touch two wires to a battery and a daisy chain will go off, which is like three IEDs set to the same detonator.
When they go off it’s a big explosion, and they usually try to hit a vehicle or a patrol, just guys walking. It’s very loud. And there’s a lot of dirt ’cause Iraq’s dirt, so a big dirt cloud goes up and a big explosion. And your ears start ringing. If it’s close enough it cuts you off from the rest of your guys, so you don’t know if they got hit or not because there’s a big dust cloud. It’s pretty crazy. There’s shrapnel, a lot of shrapnel, because they put glass and little pieces of metal inside the casing with the bomb so when the bomb explodes, all that glass and rocks and pieces of metal that they’ve thrown in there, like nails, start flying everywhere.
We showed the IPs—which are Iraqi police—how to search for IEDs along the road. It was a waste of our time because they’re not doing it. Their troops are lazy. All they’re doing it for is to get paid. If they can find an excuse not to go out, then they don’t. They won’t. They used us as an excuse all the time. We’re training them how to do it but they would say, Oh, we don’t have enough guys here, or We’re not ready for it. So they make us go out and do it. Training them is a big waste of time. It is a big waste of time. I know for a fact they aren’t doing what we showed them.
They didn’t want to get it. They didn’t put anything into it. They’d always joke and hold hands and hug each other and play around with each other while we were trying to teach them to sweep for IEDs, being in their little culture and holding hands and kissing and doing all that gay stuff. Not like making-out kissing. They kiss each other all the time. They hold hands. They’ll walk down the street, two guys holding hands. It’s their culture. We will not be successful training Iraqi forces. Nope. Not at all. There might be a couple there who actually want the training, but there’s so many there who just don’t care. It’s a waste of time.
Supporting the war is not hip right now. It’s not the thing to do right now to support the troops. Like after September 11th, it was hip to, you know, sport an American flag on your car or raise a flag in front of your house. It was hip; it was in. Now time’s passed and no one cares anymore. It’s just like, okay, I’m moving on with my life until the next thing comes along. That’s how I see it. I have a temper, so I’m not too good a debater because when I start debating, I get pissed off. I get angry, so it’s not a good thing for me to . . . to debate. There’s other reasons besides WMD why we’re there. We’re still doing good there and we’re still doing what we’re supposed to be doing there. And I think it’s good that we have military there.
I had a couple of nightmares about my buddy, my best friend, whatever, but I don’t—I haven’t struggled to cope with society or anything. I’m drinking. I’m not drinking too much—I’m definitely not an alcoholic or anything. I still jump every now and then if I hear a loud bang or something; I’ll catch myself turning and looking. But I think it’s getting better. I mean, I don’t think it’ll always be on my mind when a bang goes off or something. But that’s definitely getting better.
“Definitely not California”
JASON SMITHERS
USMC/INFANTRY
2004
SUNNI TRIANGLE
I joined the marines to better myself and prove to everybody that I wouldn’t be in trouble like the rest of my family, like going to jail, things like that. Growing up, I was three years old, and my brother was four, and my sister was two, and my dad went to jail, so my mom abandoned us in the house, and my grandma found us, like, a week later and took us in. From there I went from foster home to foster home and got locked up a couple of times and went to my group home, and that’s when I got my life on track.
We flew out to Kuwait and we were there for a week and we were doing a lot of real hard-core training. When we were in Kuwait, a lot of people were wanting to quit and, you know, just say, Forget this. If there’s a way I can get out, get me out. One dude killed himself. He went to the chaplain and shot himself in the head, right inside a tent; he shot himself in the head and it went all over the roof, and we found him over there because he stole a razor and got yelled at for it and he felt bad. It was pretty stressful over there. It wasn’t no joke.
A lot of people didn’t like him for it, didn’t like the guy who killed himself. A lot of people called him a coward for taking the easy way out before we got to combat and figured that’s why he did it. I knew the dude. It’s just . . . everything built up. It wasn’t that he was a coward, not like that. He was actually a pretty tough dude, and enough was enough for him. A lot of people have a different mental stability about what they can handle and what they can’t.
From Kuwait, we convoyed over to Junction City. It’s a really big army base near Ramadi. As soon as we stepped off the bus, instantly the humidity . . . you’re fucking sticky and sweaty, the smell of shit all around you, trash everywhere. You just smell the air around you. You see all the trash on the ground. They’ve got shit creeks running right down the side of the road. We saw kids playing in it. It’s just nasty shit. It’s all their rotten garbage. They throw it in this little creek. Some of them, they shit in cans and dump it in the creek. They’re dirty people and that’s what it is, it’s shit,
smells like shit, looks like it, and it is. They were just dirty, dirty fucking people, mugging you, giving you dirty looks when you’re over there to help them. Immediately I didn’t like the place at all. Definitely not California.
I just played it cool, you know, hearts and minds, that’s why we went over there in the beginning, and we were just waving, smiling. The very first convoy we went on, I didn’t like them immediately because of the way they treated us when we were trying to help them. They didn’t give us a chance. Their way to flip people off is showing you the bottom of their shoe, and a lot of these little kids were doing it, like, little twelve-, thirteen-year-olds were doing it to us, throwing rocks at us, flipping us off in their Iraqi-culture way. They didn’t like us at all. I never thought highly of them. I couldn’t have thought less of them.
Where we were, they weren’t used to Americans. They had some Special Forces guys there and some army people, but they never really patrolled the city that much—they barely went out—and then we got there and every single day we’re on patrol. They see all these marines patrolling around, riding in their convoys, and they aren’t used to us. I wouldn’t like it either if somebody came to my hometown and started telling me I had to do things different. We were there to help them out and they just didn’t know that. They couldn’t see it.
You couldn’t trust the kids. One example in not trusting kids is the ambush, the really bad one in April. That’s when we lost a lot of our guys out of our platoon. We lost almost the whole squad that day. I knew one of the Iraqis that was killed there. The day before, I had been patrolling down that road, and I gave his kid candy and the dad took it and threw it on the ground. I saw him do it but he didn’t think that I saw him. The kid ran up and I gave him another piece of candy, and the father shook my hand. I didn’t trust him, and then, sure enough, that same dude, the father, is lying dead on the ground with an AK-47 next to him the very next day.
We lost like almost the whole squad—from our squad alone, it was six. Some of them were nineteen. I think the oldest one was, like, twenty-four. That Iraqi was right next to the Hummer, with all our dead marines, and he was lying on the ground with an AK. He was involved in the ambush.
Going down Gypsum and Nova, it’s an intersection and it makes a T. Gypsum has shops along the side of it the whole way, so you have no way to get out once you’re on that road. The bad guys had roofs lined with people and they had a .50 cal. antiaircraft machine gun pointing down the road, and they shot at our guys’ vehicle. It was just a single Hummer in the middle of nowhere. It had no armor on it whatsoever. Nothing. Everybody says, Oh, we fucking tied shit to it, but we didn’t have a fucking thing on it. We called it Skeletor. It was a Hummer with nothing, no back on it—no, not shit, just the fucking bed like a truck on the back of a Hummer, and our guys were sitting in it.
There were six guys in it. They were shot up. After they shot them up for a while, they shot them with an RPG, and somebody said they think the bad guys threw a grenade into the Hummer. It looked that way from the damage that was on the lower bodies of everybody, like some of their legs were just destroyed, and one of them had his leg missing. Their whole top halves were there, so we figured somebody threw a grenade inside the bed of the Hummer. Two of them made it out of the vehicle and they got shot. We were right down the road. They were all the guys that we trained with and we lived with, and the guys that died lived in the same room as us, everything, and then, you know, they died.
They didn’t expect it, so it’s weird. There were so many killed that day. Everybody pretty much died. We thought about how much we hated being there and how much we hated the people that were over there because we were trying to help them and they were treating us this way—killing our friends. They don’t follow laws of war or anything, so we just hated them, pretty much. It’s all everybody talked about all night.
We got sent out on a quick-reaction-force because we were taking mortar fire and no one knew where it was coming from. We took a wrong turn going down a dirt road and we got ambushed from about ten feet away. Everybody jumped out. One person got hit in the stomach and he was on my fire team. Then another one got hit in the elbow and the bullet traveled down his forearm and he lost three of his fingers. We killed four of them and captured two.
You just look at them after they try and kill you and maybe it kind of turned me racist in a way. I just don’t like any of them and don’t trust any of them. They’re shooting at you, and it’s a lot harder if a whole race of a certain kind of people are always trying to kill you. You can’t tell them apart or nothing, so it’ll make some people racist. It’ll make some people never want to trust them, and some people will try and fight it and try and trust them. We called them hajjis and sand-fucking niggers and anything mean we could think of. We called them Ali Baba to the little kids when we were looking for them. Have you seen Ali Baba? Of course they lie and say no. Whatever we could think of that sounded mean, we’d call them that.
My buddy, he died because of them. He went to the snipers when I went to Special Forces, and he died over there, and me and him used to drink, like, every day before we went to Iraq. We used to party all the time. He was a sniper on a roof with four other guys, and they started to trust the Iraqis like everybody wants us to. Everybody that sits back here in the States says, Oh, you know, the Iraqis are good people. My friend believed that and started trusting them. These Iraqis would bring them ice when they were on the roof to cool down their water and things like that. The next thing you know we find all four of them up there, dead. One had his throat cut. All of them had bullet holes in their heads. One of them had four bullet holes in his stomach and chest.
Sometimes if we captured one of them that had been shooting at us, if we caught him with an AK and he surrendered, we’d bring him back to the combat outpost. Sometimes they didn’t make it that far, you know? People just took turns punching and kicking, letting out anger because their buddies were dead and they’re taking it out on these guys. One time I got a pretty good picture of it. My buddy who is dead now lost many of his friends during the big ambush, and after that he started kicking everybody. We had a guy all FlexiCuffed, lying down, and my friend was kicking him and I don’t blame him. He had a lot of aggression he wanted to take out, and these people were sitting there laughing at us, so he kicked him in the face a few times to make him stop laughing.
Everything built up. One way to explain it is that some people have really bad tempers and it’s really hot and you start getting really pissed and you’ll snap on anybody for anything. When you’re over there and you’re in a firefight, you’re all hot. We got all that gear on us. It stinks. We’re sweaty. We’re sticky. We’re running out of water and we’re getting shot at. It just builds up a lot of tension, and then, when you’re done and these people are sitting there laughing at you and you just want to go back to the outpost and take a rest . . . take a break, these people are laughing. It’ll make anybody snap. I thought it was pretty funny. I wish I would have got it on videotape.
I’ve got various set-up pictures. Some of them I got are posing by the bodies, you know, like where you lift their head up by their hair and stand up with your weapon. I got a few of those. I got a bunch of them where the bodies are just lying there, mangled, blown in half, people shot, people that were shot from far away so that it’ll look cool, you know? I’ve got pictures of blown-up vehicles from IEDs. I’ve got pictures of wounded Iraqis, pictures of Iraqis that we beat up, and pictures of me and my buddies, a lot of them that died, having fun. We tried to have as much fun as we could making a good video over there, but it never turned out. We were trying to make a Marines Gone Wild in Kuwait and Iraq, just like how people film videos of dirt-bike stunts or something. We’d be out there filming firefights, just the way people act crazy on their dirt bikes. We’d be just as crazy but we’re running around getting shot at and shooting people, laughing and cursing, you know? It would have been pretty cool.
I guess maybe it wou
ld be weird to somebody who doesn’t see it all the time, but to us this was normal. It was something to laugh about. This dude looks cooler dead than that dude—he’s bloodier, he’s got a bigger hole. That’s the kind of stuff we looked at.
It’s just like pictures of flowers. Some people think it’s queer, but if you’re around death all the time, you’re going to like the picture of it. I don’t think I lost anything. I think I gained something. I’m pretty sure civilians look into the eyes of a dead person and see the human being that’s dead. We didn’t do that.
“In war, the best of you shines”
DOMINICK KING
7TH MARINE REGIMENT
1ST MARINE DIVISION
AUGUST 2004-MARCH 2005
FALLUJA
I joined the marines because I have a lot of uncles who fought in Vietnam, and ever since I was a little kid I’ve always been brought up that every able-bodied American male should do what he can for his country.
I signed on four days before September 11th. Four days. But it wouldn’t have changed my decision. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I thought maybe Afghanistan, but I didn’t see the need to call up all the reservists and have this big massive force in Afghanistan. I thought that there was the very good possibility of further military action along the road wherever it might be.
I was actually excited. At the time I romanticized war. I looked at my uncles who served in Vietnam as heroes and I was thinking, I’ll go to war, I’ll come back as a hero, I’ll have all these great stories, and it’d be this great thing. And it turned out somewhat the way I thought but not exactly. I realized the hard part of war.