What Was Asked of Us

by Trish Wood

  Sometimes you can smell—you can smell the injury. Venous blood and arterial blood look completely different. One is darker, one is brighter red, rich in oxygen, and they smell different. It has this copper kind of iron smell. Sometimes I can smell it. It’s not even comparable to, like, a woman’s period. It’s different. You can tell if they’ve been bleeding for an hour, a couple of hours; you know by how caked up it is. I’m not just talking about a cut. I’m talking about really big wounds.

  Sometimes the guys will be able to keep their hands, sometimes not. I remember one guy asked me, he said, “Hey, Doc, do you think I’ll be able to keep my hand?” And I said, “Yeah, man, no problem. You know, I’ve seen worse.” I failed to look at the bandage, but, you know, his hand was wrapped up and he was still moving his fingers, so I’m like, yeah, you could keep it. When we unwrapped the bandage, there was only the skin and some tendons but his whole biceps was gone and everything was gone and of course we had to cut his hand off. After that, I didn’t tell anyone that they’re going to keep their legs or hands or that they’re going to make it. I just didn’t want to have that on my conscience. Some of the guys are doped up on morphine and some of them are joking because they don’t feel the pain yet, like, “Hey, I’m missing my hands, Doc.” Or, you know, “Hey, somebody stole my hands. Let me know if you find a leg out there on eBay or something, or a hand.” You kind of smile and in the back of your mind you’re thinking that this guy has great, great character, great sense of humor. Unfortunately, you know his life will never be the same. Neither would mine.

  We have our people that are dying in front of us and all we can do is give them pain medication. We know that they’re dying. We had one guy—I remember he had his eyes open. One of them was pretty messed up, but he was still conscious. He was trying to say something. He was kind of being combative but we couldn’t make out what he was saying. He had part of his brain hanging out from the back and all we could do was give him pain medication. We hoped that’s what he was asking for, just to take away the pain. A lot of times, the injuries were so bad that I’m pretty sure, at the time, a lot of them just wanted to get rid of the pain by whatever means necessary.

  I remember the ones that died but I don’t remember all the ones that I treated. But you know, every so often they’ll spot me out and say, “Hey, Doc, remember me?” You know, and they’re missing a hand or a leg. “I don’t know. From where?” They’re like, “Remember Falluja? Man, thanks, you know.” I think for my own safety, I try to block out a lot of the traumatic things I’ve seen. But you can’t escape it. It’s—it’s pretty messed up.

  I heard from some of the guys about how, around Falluja, after about seven or eight in the evening, you have to shoot dogs. They call it Operation Scooby-Doo. You can shoot some of the dogs because there’s so many dogs out there and they walk around with body parts sometimes in their mouths after the bombings and stuff. So you’re allowed to shoot dogs. But everything changes out there every day. Some days you can shoot Iraqis; some days you can’t. Some days, if they have a gun pointed at you, you can shoot them. Some days only if they shoot you, you can shoot them. It changes every day. You forget what rule is going on that day.

  We treated insurgents also, and frequently they made it. I look at it sometimes that maybe by our saving their lives, they look at us differently. But I don’t know if it really matters. I don’t know if they really care. They’ll just go right back out there and try to bomb us again. They know we’re going to help them. So it’s not a big deal to them to, you know, engage on us with an RPG or explode an IED. They just put their hands up in the air because they know we’re not going to harm them. They know we don’t use any unconventional methods of treating our prisoners. We actually treat our prisoners the best.

  I was married to a Lebanese woman, so I speak Arabic and I understood the Iraqis. I knew what they were saying. They think we’re weak because they know that we’re going to help them.

  Even the Iraqis that are our friends, everybody and their mother has a cousin who’s an insurgent. In Iraq, everybody knows someone who knows someone who’s an insurgent, and naturally they’re going to protect their own. Regardless, it doesn’t matter, they’re all Iraqis. I mean, of course you don’t want to cause any harm to the ones who allegedly are not there to hurt you. But a lot of times, there’s just very little differentiation. Whether they’re helping them out by giving coordinates or counting steps, counting paces, or telling when the next convoy’s going to leave, you don’t know who’s who. You don’t know who your friends are out there. You just kind of lose it after a while. You just kind of say, Screw these damn Iraqis, you know, forget about them. Sometimes the guys you’re fighting are from Syria or from Jordan, or from different provinces, or maybe a different party, the Baath Party, you know, Iraqi nationalists.

  I was at an Iraqi Internet café and the guys were surprised that I was speaking Arabic, and I’m hanging out with the guys, talking to them, and I was still pretty fresh to the war. I’m talking to them and they’re giving me sodas and they make this pita bread in these stone ovens—

  it’s pretty good. I’m there eating the bread and I’m talking to the guys and drinking soda. This guy was talking about how the computers are real slow and they needed to get computer parts. The guy asked me, Where can I get them? I said, I know this place on the Internet, and I showed him the Web site and I said, But you need credit cards. They said they can’t order anything to Iraq because, since the war, the post office doesn’t deliver to Iraq. The Iraqis have to order things to Syria or to Jordan and they have to pick it up there. So the guy asked me, Hey, can you order stuff to be sent? And I said, I don’t think I can do that. I think that’d be a conflict of interest, even though these guys weren’t insurgents or anything like that.

  The owner comes in and they’re talking to the owner about it. I said, Well, I couldn’t do anything anyway—I didn’t bring my credit card with me. And the guy says in Arabic to the other guy, We have plenty of credit cards from all the stupid GIs that order things on the Internet here. But they said this in Arabic. Now the owner didn’t know that I spoke Arabic. He was telling this to his employees. They told him I speak Arabic, and he says, Oh, we’re just kidding, but that was the last time I went to that Internet café.

  That was really upsetting and pretty surprising to me, and I think from that day on I changed my view. I thought really differently of the Iraqis. Coincidentally, those guys were killed about three weeks later because they were providing services for Americans by having an Internet café for the GIs.

  I don’t really care for Iraqis. I’ve never been one to really hate anybody, but when I was out there, I did say that I hated them. I don’t trust them. I avoid them as much as I can. I know that that’s bad because I know not all of them are like that, especially the ones here, you know? But unfortunately it’s what I’ve experienced. I mean, can you blame me?

  There was a time that I had a shower, and this guy walks in and says, Three-minute showers. I kind of look at him, peep through the curtain, and I pay him no mind. I just keep on bathing because I have blood crusted in my nails and skin, my hair. I mean, you kind of learn to eat food like that. It’s OK as long as the blood is dried. I keep on showering, and the guy comes back about five minutes later and he sticks his hand in and he says, Three-minute showers.

  I grabbed his hand through the curtain, ripped the curtain, put him in a reverse lock on his arm and put him up against the shower, and I told him, “You see my fingers? See the stuff on the floor? That’s blood.” And he said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” Everybody was looking at me and saying, Leave him alone. The guy looked at me with fear in his eyes like he wasn’t sure what I was gonna do. I don’t think I knew what I was gonna do. You have so much rage inside and so much—so much anxiety that you don’t know how to release it. You try to release it in spurts so you don’t blow up. But even those little spurts just kind of get you. I finished showering. I’m pretty sure th
at was the last time that he went ahead and tried to enforce that.

  The family members of the individuals, all they know is that their son was killed in action, but unfortunately I know how their son was killed. I know how their son looked. I know the last words their son said. And I have to live with that. I know if he was missing an eyeball. I know if his guts were hanging out. I know if he tried to make it. I know if he was fighting for his life or not. And maybe for the better those things should be classified, because I don’t know if that’s something that maybe the parents or family members would want to know. Maybe it’s just better left said as “Killed in action.”

  Sometimes smells remind me of the war. Sometimes I go shopping and I’m in the meat section and I look at meat and it reminds me of the flesh torn off of bodies. Sometimes I’m eating a chicken leg, and if it’s cooked or charbroiled, it brings back memories of burnt skin, burnt flesh, burnt muscle from Iraq, just how when you throw meat on the grill, that’s the way bodies look when they’re burnt up from bombs and from explosions or helicopter crashes. A lot of things remind me of it, like loud noises.

  I watched the History Channel and the Discovery Channel about the World War II veterans and the Vietnam veterans, and when I was growing up, you’d always see Vietnam veterans on the train, with signs up saying, I’m a vet, help me out. But I had no idea what it meant to actually have been to war. It stiffens you, it hardens you. It almost feels like it’s not happening. Everybody’s thinking they just want to get home as soon as possible.

  I’m not going to say I lost my compassion. But . . . I’ve lost my . . . you know, Adam and Eve lost their innocence when they ate the apple; there was no turning back. So, like them, I think I lost my innocence after being in war.

  “I was an American soldier”

  GARETT REPPENHAGEN

  CAVALRY SCOUT/SNIPER

  2-63 ARMOR BATTALION

  1ST INFANTRY DIVISION

  FEBRUARY 2004-FEBRUARY 2005

  BAQUBA

  My father was in the military, so my entire life I pretty much was convincing myself that I was never going to go down that road because my father was a prime example of who I didn’t want to be. I told myself I was never going to join the army, ever, ever, ever. I was involved in the counterculture of the punk-rock scene, and pretty much the average consensus in that scene is that authority sucks, the military’s shit, the government blows, and the last thing I was ever going to do was join the military.

  My father joined the military when he was eighteen after graduating from high school. His friend had just been drafted and the friend went into the engineers, so my dad joined the engineers. It was during the Vietnam War, and he served in Vietnam, and after that he just stayed in.

  My father died when I was thirteen, and I thought he’d had a huge amount of oppression and authority over me. When I was growing up, my bedroom, which I shared with my brother, was like a military-barracks room. We had bunk beds. My brother had the top bunk because he was older, and we had hospital corner-made beds. When we woke up, we had to make our beds. We couldn’t have posters on the wall. We weren’t allowed toys. The only things in our room were clothes and sports equipment and our schoolbooks. I think it definitely had to do with the army and the Vietnam War. He needed to control the environment around him. My dad was completely paranoid of what other people thought about him and his family. He was constantly worried about it. And that’s why he was so critical when he thought we were embarrassing him.

  I was allowed only three types of toys: blocks, Matchbox cars, and plastic army men. They were kept in a black military footlocker in our basement, and it was locked. When I wanted to play with these toys, I would have to ask my father for the key. I was allowed to go downstairs and play with the toys on an oval orange carpet, and the toys weren’t allowed to leave that carpet. That was the designated area I was allowed to play in. When I was through, I’d have to pack up the toys in the footlocker, lock the chest, and bring the key to my father.

  When I was punished for any minor offense as a child—from spilling milk to coming in late—there were a lot of different degrees of punishment. Physical abuse was part of it. Getting beat on or hit was always part of it. On top of that, if I was grounded, it also included me doing physical training with my father in the morning. He was an NCO at the time, an E8, which is fairly high ranking, so he commanded a good number of soldiers. I was forced to do push-ups and sit-ups and run with my father’s platoon in the morning.

  I got inducted into this physical-training program pretty early in life, and I remember the other soldiers’ hatred, looking at me, just hating me because my father would use me to goad them. Look at my eight-year-old son—he can do a hundred push-ups and you can do only thirty. What the hell’s wrong with you?

  Me and my older brother were my dad’s little soldiers. We were the perfect little soldiers, and anything that we did that was fun or interesting looked to him like an embarrassment. It wasn’t proper soldier conduct. Now that I’ve served in Iraq and Kosovo, I can connect his weird behavior to his Vietnam service. I’ve only now started forgiving him for who he was. I still don’t agree with him, but I don’t completely blame him for why he was the way he was and why he treated us the way he did.

  By the time we got older and into high school, I was listening to punk music that I got from friends. I kept the music tapes in a shoe box hidden under my bed, these cassettes of punk tapes. And I didn’t really understand why I liked the music so much. I knew it was mean and pissed off.

  I got to the situation where I was twenty years old, I had three jobs, I was a high school dropout, I had a child from a girlfriend that I wasn’t married to and I was paying child support, I owned a house and a car but I had to file for bankruptcy, and I was in a dead-end town and a dead-end situation. I was starting to come to grips with the fact that standing around in bars talking shit about the government wasn’t getting me anywhere. I think the birth of my baby girl prompted me to realize I needed to change something.

  I don’t think I ever understood my father very well, and I said to myself that if he survived the army, so can I. It was before September 11th and I decided that I would join. I would get college money and I’d get to travel to Europe. I’d go overseas to serve. George Bush was president but it was still kind of Clinton’s army, and I figured that, hey, it’ll be fun. I’ll run around and play soldier in the woods, like every eight-year-old boy’s dream. I’ll be like GI Joe but I’ll never really go to war because we just didn’t do that anymore, I thought.

  We were stationed in Vilseck, Germany. From there we went to Kosovo, and the war started while we were in Kosovo. I came back to Germany for six weeks, got the opportunity to become a sniper, and we were off to Iraq by January 2004. We flew to Camp Wolverine in Kuwait, which is an air force base. Then we got bused in to a place called Camp New York, which was like a temporary encampment that rises and falls whenever units are deploying in and out. It’s basically tent cities in the middle of the barren desert, and they built up kind of like a chow hall and restrooms and tents in different areas called pods. We lived there for about a month, and we trained—trained a lot—during that time, and eventually we staged our trucks and got ready to move up north into Iraq, and the day came that we were in the front of the line and our convoy left. While we were training, we were training like we were in the original push to Baghdad, as if we were going to encounter some sort of armored-personnel carrier full of Iraqi soldiers or something. But all that was done. It was an insurgency now.

  There’s just nothing but desert up until the Iraq border, and on the other side of the Iraq border, there’s an Iraqi town built up. It is just trash. You go from bedouin camel jockeys in the desert to ghetto that’s in absolute poverty with begging children. There is razor wire that’s dividing Kuwait and Iraq, and it is littered with garbage and hanging and ripped-apart clothes on the wires, and I thought, Well, I’m in Iraq now. This is Iraq. It reminded me a lot of the poverty in
Kosovo, but it was worse.

  We crossed the line into Iraq, and it took us three days to drive not extremely far from the border of Kuwait to Baquba. We had to take really unusual paths because the insurgency was getting started. We had marines trying to clear different areas so we could pass through it safely, and we were in soft-skin Humvees with plastic doors. Some of them didn’t even have plastic doors; they were just, like, canvas. We really didn’t know what we were going into. None of the training that we had at that point really effectively prepared us for what we were going to encounter, especially by the time April hit. It was an ass-puckering drive with no sleep, and I was constantly on the gun, ready. I was on the .50 caliber machine gun, and in the other hand I held my M4 carbine. I was deathly afraid that some Iraqi insurgent would drive right up next to the car and shoot our driver.

  We encountered problems just getting to Baquba. The highways in Iraq were made by Germans, so they look a lot like the autobahn, very efficient, very clean. There are tons of overpasses and cloverleafs, and the Iraqis would throw grenades and stuff down on passing vehicles. You had to learn how to swerve in and out. We were hit by a couple IEDs on the way. Some people fell asleep at the wheel and crashed the vehicles. We had to stop so many times to help people that by the time we got to Baquba, we were the very last truck to enter. We were basically escorting destroyed vehicles being towed. There weren’t any fatalities, but in the convoy ahead of us there was a female soldier that was killed by an IED.

  I was still thinking selfishly at that point, and I was worried about myself. I thought, These people are extremely desperate and begging. I thought of a Rage Against the Machine lyric which says, “Hungry people don’t stay hungry for long.” I was thinking, If this is the desperate situation, it’s not going to be long before this is just a complete shit storm. Sure enough, that’s what happened.