by Trish Wood
I was reading Gates of Fire about the Spartan warriors and the Battle of Thermopylae. There were very few Spartan soldiers and they went to this very small place in the mountains where they fought off the Persians and there were over a million of them. It was just glorious. But in that book it says that God gave mankind this one outlet in which underneath all the vice and depravity of man shines this greatness, where the best of man comes out in war because you don’t think about yourself. All you think of is your friends, the men you are fighting with. And that’s what I thought of war. And that’s what war is. It is self-sacrifice so that the guys around you will have it just a little bit easier, and they’re doing the same to try to make your time a little bit better. That’s how I saw war, as this time where the best of you can shine forth, even though man is just this disgusting creature with all these vices. In war, the best of you shines forth and it’s a great feeling. The downside is having your friends die.
On my first tour our relationship with the Iraqi people was great. We would pull over on the side of the road to sleep or whatever, and we’d pull 50/50 duty, meaning half of the guys would be on security, the other half would be off. They’d be able to take a nap or something. We’d go out there with a boom box with a CD player, and we’d play Eminem and the little Iraqi kids would dance and we’d make fun of Saddam in Arabic languages that I don’t really know, but they’d say something and I’d repeat it and then I’d say something in American and they’d repeat it. At the time it was a real loving relationship. They absolutely loved having us there. And we would just have a great time either playing soccer or trying to teach them football or something. They tried to sell me a mule one night for five dollars. I would say I’ve never felt more welcomed than when I went into Iraq the first time. It made me feel great. And it still does to this day.
My second tour I ended up in Falluja for the second assault. Some guys from the 7th Marines were killed and wounded, so me and some buddies had to replace them. It was very late September when they told me. And we went from Ramadi, which is where my unit was, to Camp Falluja to hook up with that unit. I was real happy about going to Falluja because I remembered it as the place where they burnt the contractors and hung them upon the bridge. They disrespected American bodies and civilized people don’t act that way. The insurgents owned the city of Falluja and we actually didn’t even go into the city. They completely owned it at the time.
Even though I personally was not involved in the first assault, every marine had this edge to take that city back, because when one marine makes a sacrifice it’s as if every marine makes the sacrifice of every generation. So when the marines of the April assault got pulled out of Falluja, it felt as though every marine that was in the Marine Corps at that time or anytime in history, it was as if they were pulled back—and pulled back because of politics. And so every marine wanted to take that city back and it was an honor to be able to be one of the guys to do it.
We didn’t know it had started for sure until the bombs start dropping and there is artillery shooting over our heads. Jets would fly over the city and drop on strategic places. I think the bombs they were dropping were JDAMs, basically five hundred-, one thousand-, or two thousand-pound bombs onto specific sites that were known to be insurgent-held.
I went in a while after the ground forces guys went in. While they were fighting house to house, I was outside the city bringing supplies to the resupply point. And I was just going back and forth every day, and then I came back one day and my master sergeant came to me and said, Pack up all your stuff, you’re going into the city and you’re doing security for mortuary affairs. We’re going to go right behind the ground troops and pick up all the dead insurgent bodies.
The insurgents would booby-trap their own dead people and they would set up either IED or grenades or something underneath the people, and when family members would go for the bodies I guess the bodies would blow up or something. Once you go into the city like that and you do the destruction that we did, you need to build it up afterward, and obviously the very first thing that you have to do is start to clear away the dead bodies and start to build up. And since the Iraqis wouldn’t pick up their own because of the danger, they sent us in to do it.
Where we were in Falluja, every building had at least a bullet hole in it. After a couple of hours, I turned to my buddy and said, “Every single place is shot up.” After that, we would look and try and find if there was a building that didn’t have some sort of bullet damage, and basically everything had been hit at least once.
In my truck we had about ten guys from miscellaneous units to come pick up bodies. And in the other truck, that’s where they kept all the bodies. Actually, most of the guys that were sent in to pick up the bodies couldn’t handle it, so my friend Ben Tabor ended up picking up almost every single body. Some of the bodies would be about two weeks old, just lying in the middle of the street, and the weather would really screw with the decomposition. It made them decay a lot quicker than usual. There was one body where one of my friends went to go pick it up and the head completely fell back—the neck opened up and thousands of insects came out and went all over the body. It was the most disgusting body I’ve ever seen in my entire . . . it was worse than things I’ve seen in movies.
There was actually one dog that we almost had to shoot because he was standing next to a body, eating it, and as we went to go pick it up he stood there growling at us and he wouldn’t let us come near it. I think someone threw a rock or something and shooed him away. But then there were other dogs that would run through the city with human feet in their mouths and other things. I was pretty desensitized at the time. It actually didn’t register as it should have. . . . I mean, a dog running through the city with a femur in its mouth. It should have registered as something a lot more than it actually did. It just seemed reasonable at the time that a dog would try to chew on the bodies.
Sometimes we laughed about this stuff. I don’t want it to be traumatic; I want to be able to laugh about it, maybe just out of protection for my conscience. We were kind of laughing like, “Can you believe that this is what we’re doing right now?” Then you know, I might have said something like, “You know, I should be at school right now, drinking and partying—instead I’m picking up this body.” Back in Worcester, back home, they’re out at the bar every night or at the school, trying to have a good time. And I was picking up dead bodies.
Dominick King did an earlier tour of Iraq from March to June 2003.
“Killed in action”
PAUL RODRIGUEZ
NAVY HOSPITAL CORPSMAN
MAY-OCTOBER 2004
FALLUJA, NAJAF
We’re sort of honorary marines. They call us corpsmen, we’re combat corpsmen, combat medics, but we’re known as “docs.” That’s our nickname. I had two brothers who were in the Marine Corps and I’ve had several uncles who were in the marines and the army, some who served in Korea, some who served in Vietnam, and it was sort of a family legacy. I did go to college, but it is sort of a family legacy to join the armed forces and serve your country.
I lost a family friend, like a cousin to me, in the World Trade Center attack. He was a police officer there. He died saving people. He was able to, thank God, save a couple of people before he passed away, and he probably wouldn’t have had it any other way than that. My sister also was working in Tower 1. She made it out. She got trampled over, but she made it out alive, thank God. My brother had an office in Tower 2 and was stuck in a train on his way to a meeting there. I’m from New York City, but I was already in the service. I didn’t join because of that.
I’m a pharmacist technician in the navy. Before that, I had to go to corpsman school and I had to go to FMSS, which is Field Medical Service School, which is sort of like a surgical shock-trauma training program for the docs when we serve with the marines. I was working in the pharmacy at the time when 9/11 happened. I didn’t really foresee actually being in combat, although I did want to go out there
and do my part when 9/11 happened, because naturally it’s pretty frustrating and pretty upsetting to see what happened.
Before I went to Iraq, I was very outgoing, a little bit selfish. I was involved in different sports, from football to swimming, power lifting, boating. I loved deep-sea fishing. I did everything. I enjoyed having a drink on occasion, hitting the normal bars and night scene, and I loved women. I was very confident. I was sure I was ready for Iraq and for war. I grew up in a pretty tough neighborhood in New York City—Spanish Harlem. There was lots of violence and a lot of robberies, a lot of homicides. I said, Man, if I could deal with this in New York, I can deal with this out there.
I knew what people told me and what I saw on television, but it’s a whole other story when it’s really happening to you. It’s not like that suspense when you’re in line to get on a roller coaster like at Six Flags and you finally get on it and there’s no turning back now, because even then you could still get off, you could still tell the operator, “Hey, I don’t want to ride this roller coaster. I want to get off.” You still have a chance to get off. On our first approach, although we were getting shot at coming in, the plane was getting shot at by rocket-propelled grenades, it still kind of felt like fun. You still felt like, it’s sunny over here, it’s a different place, and it’s Mesopotamia, the beginning of life, sort of exciting, you know? But it all changes once you see your first bloodshed, your first dead body. He was probably in his late thirties. He was a staff sergeant. He left some kids behind and his head was blown off. There was a truck filled with explosives. It was a fruit truck full of explosives and it . . . it blew up two convoys, a marine convoy and an army convoy. I ran up to the helicopter. The call came on the radio: “Fire striker, we have multiple casualties inbound.” I think there were, like, four urgent surgicals—three urgents and a couple walking wounded—and they were all going in different places. We weren’t sure which was going to come to us. We got somewhere around five or six of them. You kind of lose focus on who else is coming and you just kind of keep focus on your casualty, on who you’re going to be in charge of. I remember running into the helicopter and one guy came out. He was a Halliburton employee, Dick Cheney’s company, and he was a truck driver. He was walking out; he had blood on his face. He was an old man, kind of scruffy, with about a ten o’clock shadow on his face. The guy was probably about forty-five to fifty years old but he looked like he was about seventy-five at that moment, and he walked out and I went to grab his hand because he was limping. And he said, “No, I’m OK.”
The pilot and the crew members of the helicopter run out and they tell me there are more people inside. I run in and the helicopter is shaking, shaking and moving stuff and rattling. There was a body on the right and a body on the left. They both had IV bags on their stomachs, on top of the poncho liner. It’s like a camouflage kind of blanket that everybody gets when you go to war. The guy I went to on the left side, as I was running to him, his hand kind of fell to the ground and I thought that he was alive. I ran to him and I pulled off the sheet that was slightly covering him on one side where—I could see the hair. I’m like, oh, OK, this guy needs help right away. I pulled the poncho liner off him, and his head was missing. He just had half—he just had a quarter of it where the hair was and that’s what was showing. I thought there was someone there and I’ll never forget that guy because he had the same wedding band like I had, and I remember seeing his watch, and his fingers were blown up and, you know, just—I’d never seen anyone without their head. There were exposed bones from some of the teeth and stuff. I looked at him and I looked back at the old man who was walking out, and he looked back at me and he just nodded his head and he kept on walking. I look at the crew member inside the helo and he puts his head down, and my other comrade runs in to help me and he looks at it and he puts his head down also. I grabbed the stretcher on one side and we unhooked it from the helicopter and we pulled him out and we were running because you have to do this real quick because the helicopters have to keep on going and go back and get more people.
We’re running now and bringing him to put in the back of the Hummer. I’m just thinking, like, Wow, this is actually a dead body I’m running with. This guy’s actually dead here, and his parents, his wife, his kids, are home. They don’t even know he’s dead. It was pretty overwhelming. I remember later on that day speaking to the old truck driver, and he says, “Man, this is the last time. . . . I’m done, I’m going home.” That was the fourth time his convoy had been hit. After that, I never forgot anybody’s name that died. I’ll never forget.
We were flying over Anbar Province, which people in America know as Falluja. It consists of Falluja, Ramadi, Habbaniya. Inside those places are all these different camps, like Camp Manhattan, Camp Blue Diamond, Camp Falluja, Korean Village. It would be like how Brooklyn and Queens are together, all the five boroughs, but in closer proximity. I was either over Habbaniya or Ramadi on a helicopter’s first mission of the day, and they were testing the .50 caliber weapons.
This is actually my first mission. I’m on the bird and you know you’re in constant communication with the air boss as far as the ETA of the bird and what’s the LZ, if it’s a hot LZ. You’re usually getting shot at on the way down and shot at on the way up. I’m on the bird and it is kind of unstable. They kind of go up and down a lot. And as old as they are—they’re from Vietnam—I feel very comfortable in those because they move pretty quick, not forward but side to side.
We’re doing turns, and the marine next to me says, “Doc, hold on. I think we’re catching fire.” And I say, “Huh?” He says, “Doc, hold on, I think we’re catching fire.” Right there the bird did a roll and I’m sitting on the starboard side of it, which is I’m on the right side of the bird, and so now I’m looking down, I’m looking down, and a .50 caliber is shooting. I’m just thinking that he’s just testing the weapons. I had my Kevlar on, so I couldn’t hear what was going on. They’re shooting and I’m like, wow, all right.
We rolled the other way. Now the other .50 caliber is shooting and I’m like, I’m like, “Hey, what did you say?” He said, “We’re getting shot at.” I’m like, “No way.” And we roll again and I see the tracers coming up and our tracers going down. I see more tracers coming up and I hear them hitting the rotors, and God, it looked like it was the Fourth of July out there.
I looked behind—46s have the back open at all times. It’s about 125 degrees, and inside the bird you want to add about another 30, 40 degrees to that. So it’s really hot and sticky. It’s so hot, it’s almost nauseating. You’re just constantly drinking water with your CamelBak. You’re sitting on fricking blood and shit.
I’m like, oh fuck, if we land I’m just gonna keep one bullet for me. This is right around the time that the guy Nick Berg got his head cut off, and there’s no way I’m gonna have my head cut off. I’ll take everyone out and then I’ll just keep a bullet for me. I’m not going to have these guys humiliate me on television. So I’m like, fuck, man, and I started praying.
So I’m looking back and our Cobras are just shooting out the hellfire and I’m like, oh fuck. Then we turn again and I see the Iraqis. They usually roll these little pickup trucks, these hajji pickup trucks, and they’re shooting up at us. They’re really shooting up at us—RPGs and, you know, AKs. They spray and pray. They don’t really aim. They just let clips off and just rounds and rounds and it’s just nonstop.
I could hear the bullets hitting the rotors and I’m like, fuck, we’re gonna fall, we’re gonna crash. And I’m praying, oh God, please, please. And it just seems like forever. It’s like slow motion and we’re just turning and we’re getting shot at and the Cobras are shooting and the Iraqis are trying to drive and run. This was my first time and I just want to scream and tell them, Why don’t we just get the fuck out of here? Actually I did say it, because the guy next to me said, “No, we’ve gotta neutralize the threat because they could shoot us as we’re leaving.” So I’m like, fuck, man. I just want it to fi
nish. I just want it to be over. I really just want it to be over. It lasts only about five, ten minutes, but it seems like an eternity. But then we blew up the trucks. They were obviously neutralized.
From that point on you’re always on your toes, you’re always on the edge. You’re living your life out there with your heart just pumping at high revolutions. It’s like driving a car at eight thousand rpm for seven months. Your heart is always palpitating. I think I slept only about maybe thirty to forty minutes a day, if that, because the worst thing is to wake up to a bomb attack, a mortar attack, or a rocket attack, or, you know, bullets or RPGs. You don’t want to wake up to that. It’s your worst nightmare.
So you’re always on point, you’re always on the edge. You’re always very edgy and snappy but you learn to live like that. It becomes normal. It’s kind of like that even when you’re going through a neighborhood on patrol and you’re like, you know, should I shoot him, should I not? Is he going to shoot me? Is he? Should I shoot him? Fuck it, I’m going to shoot him. Are they gonna shoot me?
You have to be like that because that’s the only way to survive. The guy that goes to war confident is the guy that comes back in a body bag, but the guy that goes to war scared comes back alive, because fear keeps you alive. This war just sucks, man.
Got them bullets coming at you, there’s bombs coming in, everybody gets quiet. Everybody gets real quiet. You sometimes don’t even make eye contact with each other because you don’t want the other guy to see the fear in your eyes, and by the same token he doesn’t want to see the fear in your eyes anyway because he knows. You can’t deny it. Nobody can deny that they aren’t scared. Nobody. Sometimes you want to say, “Hey, time-out. Stop bombing us, stop shooting us.” You want to say, “Stop, cut,” you know? But you can’t do that. You can rewind a movie but you can’t stop war. You can’t stop the feelings. You can’t tell the insurgent, “OK, time-out. Just take a break. Don’t shoot me right now. Stop the movie, stop recording.”