What Was Asked of Us

by Trish Wood

  My friend Jeff went to Falluja. How many insurgents were killed in Falluja? I don’t know, but I’m certain that they weren’t all Syrian. They were the population of Falluja, that’s who we’re fighting. The people that we were killing were farmers from the local area. If they had a thousand dollars for a plane ticket to come to America, they wouldn’t come here and terrorize anybody. They’d feed their children. We also saw people from Jordan, from Syria, from Iran, from Saudi Arabia, from Afghanistan, from Pakistan. Hell, there was an American we ended up capturing. Weeks prior to being captured as an insurgent, he was at Arizona State University, and he still had his student ID in his pocket. He was American and he was fighting against us. He was darker skin-toned, but I wasn’t there for the interrogation, so I didn’t get a chance to really find out his family history. He spoke fluent English, like he was born in America, raised in America. He was captured in a raid and he was resisting, and then we found four AK-47s, a bunch of grenades, ammunition bandolier, flags which are commonly used to signal from rooftops. I don’t know what he was doing there, but we brought him in and he was eventually transferred to some other prison somewhere.

  I was a sniper, and I’d roll out with the scouts in April when the shit really broke loose. The insurgency watched all the new guys coming in, and they decided, Let’s hit these guys. April was a peak of combat, and we were dealing with the shit. We must have lost four or five vehicles in that time. Vehicles were getting blown apart. People got hurt, but none of them died during that time.

  One of the worst injuries I remember happened during an ambush. He was in a personal-security detachment for the colonel. They were going out to a spot that was ambushed earlier, and they stopped and he actually got out of the Humvee, dismounted, pulling security while the colonel got out to talk to some people. As soon as he got out of the vehicle, they detonated an IED right in his face. It blew him backward with such a force that his chin hit the Humvee and just shattered his jaw, and his chin and his throat were torn out pretty badly by the blast. It blew his Kevlar off of his head because the shrapnel busted his strap, and it blew his Kevlar completely over the Humvee, and the helmet landed on the other side. He had his jaw all reconstructed. It was wired shut for the longest time. Then he was speaking with a little electronic voice box that you hold up to your neck. He’s one of those people who just can’t accept that the war is wrong. He wanted to come back to the unit. He wanted to fight.

  When we got back from Iraq, he was there, and he spoke to us once. He stood up in front of everybody and told us in his little robot voice how much he wanted to be in Iraq. That was too much to bear because I knew how brainwashed he was and how he’ll never think differently about it. Always support the war and what we did there because it’s hard to admit that you’ve been duped and that you got all fucked up for nothing. You can’t go up to the guy and say, “Hey, man, you’re wrong. You got fucked up for no good reason,” and just pat him on the back. He was pretty young, maybe twenty years old. He’d been in the army for a couple of years but he was extremely young. He must have joined when he was eighteen, straight out of high school. I think he was a cook. I guess that goes to show you how much choosing your job can really help you out in the military.

  We came in after it happened and ended up chasing some vehicle down that we thought had blown up our guy. We stopped them and hauled all these people out of their vehicle. We were all mad at them. We never hit them. We never hit those guys. We did kick dirt in their faces, and one of them we had to pull out of the window of his vehicle and throw him on the ground. Then we zip-stripped him. These were plastic strips we used as handcuffs. They’re really cheap plastic pieces of crap that once you get them on you it’s impossible to get them off by yourself. You can’t do it. We zip-stripped their hands and feet together, and a lot of times we’ll zip-strip their hands to their feet with another zip-strip, depending on how angry we are at them or how much entertainment we want that day or how dangerous we think they are or how much struggle they’re putting up. That’s what we did, but they weren’t the right guys. They had nothing to do with it. The colonel came out and questioned them with a translator, and whatever they said satisfied the colonel. So we let them go.

  It was the first time we were dealing with this kind of situation, and we wanted this one guy to be quiet so the colonel could hear what was being said. All sorts of ideas came through my mind. What am I going to do, knock him out? Drag him away somewhere? What are my options here? Yelling at him wasn’t working. At that point I didn’t want to point my weapon at him because he was already hog-tied. I kind of wanted to make it clear to him that I was serious in some way. It was a dirt road, so I just kicked dirt on his face and yelled at him to shut up and he did.

  It was still very ambiguous to me what I was able to do to an enemy prisoner of war. Honestly, we didn’t get a whole lot of training on what we’re supposed to do at that point. I mean, for all I know I could have kicked the shit out of him. If I did, I probably would have gotten away with it. If I hit him with the butt of my weapon on the back of the head and knocked him clean out, I’m sure not a single person would have said a thing. There were people that punched him and knocked him out and it was a big joke afterward. I was disgusted by it but I didn’t do anything about it. It’s just sick. I didn’t really think that writing a report about it or writing it up would have done me or anybody really any good, other than polarizing the camp and causing a rift between the soldiers. It wasn’t so severe that I saw it as major abuse. It was before Abu Ghraib happened. I wasn’t really friends with the person who did it. Me and the guys kind of sat down and we talked about what happened. Everybody pretty much just agreed in my close circle of friends there that it was wrong to do it. But nothing happened.

  I mean, we were getting shot up and blown up, and I’ve asked soldiers why they thought we were at war. I’ve literally talked to a hundred soldiers straight down the line—I’ll get a hundred different answers. Like, Well, I think we’re at war because of oil, we want the oil. I heard because they’re Muslim and I’m a Christian, that’s why we’re here. I heard because of terrorists, because of 9/11. I heard because of Jerusalem and Palestine. I heard it’s because of the abuse of the Kurdish people by Saddam Hussein. I heard to keep the peace between the Sunni and Shia, bringing them democracy, bringing them capitalism. I heard because we were in bed with Saudi Arabia. Even the people that supported the war, all of them had a different reason for being there. So you’re coming up with this ambiguous reason for war, and then a lot of it seems to be about helping the Iraqis, but we’re getting shot at and blown up and the Iraqi people are lying to us.

  Once we got shot at by an RPG from a town that’s right next to our base, right into our camp, and it hit our command center. We asked the locals where this RPG came from. Everybody says they don’t know. What RPG? What are you talking about? Somebody knows something but nobody will help us. It’s obvious that a lot of Iraqi people support the insurgency or it wouldn’t be able to operate. You can’t have a guerrilla war without the support of the population because the guerrillas will starve and die and be run out of town. They’ll be ratted out. It was obvious to the American soldier that it wasn’t a problem with a select few individuals who were pissed-off insurgents. It was a problem that the whole nation agreed upon. We were all sure when they showed up for call to prayer at the mosques that they were all in agreement and shaking hands, like, Yeah, go, insurgents! Kick those fucking American asses! So there are pissed-off soldiers and a lot of abuse. It was frustrating to just exist in that environment. A rational person would have been upset at the people that sent you there, which was their own government and their own leadership and corporate America and etc., etc. But that was too hard to accept and too complicated for most of the soldiers, so they blamed the Iraqi people. I didn’t want an Iraqi up in my shit messing with my gear and grabbing at stuff, saying, “Mister, mister, can I have this? Mister, mister, can I have this?” You just get sick
of it—all day long, people grabbing at you and touching you and wanting stuff. You end up pushing them away. You push them, shove them, and yell at them.

  Shit rolls downhill in the army enviroment. You’ve got orders that get passed down and passed down and passed down and eventually if you’re on the lowest end of the totem pole, you’re taking shit for it. Look at the Abu Ghraib thing. To say that a few people at Abu Ghraib got away with this thing without anybody else knowing is a bunch of shit because tons of people knew what was going on. I can’t go to the bathroom without an NCO sniffing up my ass asking me what the hell I’m doing and why I’m out of uniform. You know what I mean? “Is that the army regulation for sideburns? I don’t think so, soldier. Go get a haircut.” If they’re so worried about little shit like that, they’re going to notice if an Iraqi is getting shit smeared on him or electrocuted or walked down the hall with a leash around his neck. It’s going to be common knowledge.

  There’s a huge prejudice, and I understand where it was coming from. I didn’t agree with it. I tried not to take part as much as possible, but it existed. I lost my patience and yelled at Iraqis. I pointed my weapon at some of them, trying to push them away. I’ve hit them with my weapon to push them back, trying to keep my distance from them, but there was nothing that I really feel was terrible. I know it wasn’t helping. It wasn’t building a love relationship with the Iraqi people. I wasn’t winning friends and influencing people. The environment I was in basically called for it.

  I was an American soldier. A lot of my friends can’t really picture that I was a soldier. Most of the time, I was a pretty calm, reserved sniper guy, hiding in the weeds, patiently waiting, staring at the dirty world through thermographic vision. At other times I had to be in the middle of a bunch of Iraqis that weren’t doing what you wanted them to do. I don’t know what else you got to do in those situations. You can’t quit. You can’t say, “I can’t deal with this. I’m going back to base and going to bed.” It’s a frustrating situation to have to act outside of your nature. The reasons why soldiers do half the shit they do is mostly out of fear of punishment. I think most soldiers go out on missions day after day because the alternative is the fact that they’re going to be punished by their superiors if they don’t go out on a mission. I mean, every soldier would rather just stay in his hooch and watch a movie or play Sega or PlayStation, listen to music or read a book, go to sleep, go to chow, rather than go out on some combat patrol and get blown up and shot at.

  So what motivates these kids is fear of being punished. It forces you to act outside of your nature and your comfort zone because you’re just stuck in a shitty situation where you do the job or you face serious consequences. You might get shot at that day but probably not. Ninety percent of being in Iraq in war is boring. It’s another day riding around in sector where nothing happens.

  Our main job as snipers was to counter IEDs. We would sit on some highway in Iraq all night, hoping that a truck would pull up, somebody would get out, plant an IED on the side of the road, and then we would nail him. We’d be in the right spot at the right time to catch one of these guys doing it. That was our primary mission.

  For the sniper the primary mission is to kill an enemy from a long distance. His secondary job is intelligence gathering and reconnaissance. We’re trained to kill people over a thousand meters away. That’s ten football fields. With the proper equipment and a good sniper rifle, I can choose which eye I want to shoot from three football fields away. In sniper school all you do is shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, all day long until your shoulder is so sore from firing a rifle that it’s ridiculous.

  We learned how to do math formulas from wind, height trajectory, humidity, elevation, and direction of the sun. Many things go into a mathematical formula that we use to set our dope, which is a scope. If we lay our crosshairs on somebody’s face and pull the trigger, that bullet is going to hit exactly where we’re aiming. Normally we aim for an area called the triangle of death. It’s an area around the mouth region in the chin where a shot is designed to separate your spine from your head, rendering the person completely paralyzed.

  All the shots that were taken were taken by my NCO. If I was in a position to take a shot, usually we switched so he was the person that was responsible. He felt that it was his duty to be the one that was going to take this shot. Mostly he was a glory hound and he wanted to be the hero, right? So, props to him.

  There’s such an anxiety looking through thermographic vision because most of our shit was done at night and it’s very hard to tell what somebody is doing. It’s not crystal-clear Hollywood night vision. You can’t quite tell what someone is holding. There’s a lot of argument between snipers while they’re watching. There are three guys. One has a regular-vision telescope. The other person has thermographic vision. The other person is looking through a magnifying scope in the rifle. Everybody is arguing. What has he got? Is it a gun? Is it a gun? No, I don’t think it’s a gun. Is it a bomb? It’s a bomb. No, it’s an IED. No, it’s a toolbox. It’s a toolbox, yeah, it’s a toolbox. So, he doesn’t die. Sometimes, Yeah, he’s got a shovel. He’s digging. He’s digging on the side of the road. He’s going back to the truck. He’s got something in his hand. He’s going to bury it. Take him out. Bang.

  Most of our stuff, we operated in that highway stretch going from Khalis and Baquba. It’s a place where a lot of the IEDs were set, and we called it IED Alley. Hearing the stories from other vets now, I think everybody has an IED Alley and an RPG Alley. They would attempt to plant IEDs on this road and set up ambushes fairly often.

  We had this location that we would go to that was the perfect little spot for the military intelligence because you could see the highway and you could see the field behind it where they launch mortars from every once in a while. We operated in this area so much that it was very, very nerve-racking going out there because it would be obvious that once soldiers start working in that area, the insurgency is going to be scared away. Then they slowly start coming back once they realize that we’re developing a pattern. That’s the scariest thing. When you develop a pattern, you become predictable, and then you become an easy target.

  We were dropped off by four Humvees at about eleven o’clock at night. We all dismounted. The snipers dismount and scurry off into the brush or the ditch. That’s the most frightening part about the mission: getting to our hiding spot. Our assholes are puckered. We get into this giant field. We slowly make our way across the field and finally we get to our canal. Normally it would be a really good place to hide, except we hide in this spot all the freaking time. We go down in it extremely slow, looking for wires and booby traps. It’s always been a nightmare of mine that we get to our location, set up, and then the IED goes off right under us rather than on the road because they figured out where we’ve been hiding. When we leave these places, I make sure that nobody left anything. There’s no trash, there’s nothing, no sign that we were there, because I’m so afraid.

  We’re working in a five-man team at this point and we bring out a radio and we prop it up with an antenna and we stick it kind of near a tree. One guy is always on that radio, listening. Convoys would pass by or Apaches would fly over and see heat signatures and we can’t hide our heat signatures. There’s no way to mask ourselves from thermal vision.

  If somebody’s riding by and they see a bunch of guys in the woods, looking like they’re pointing weapons at the road, they’re going to start shooting at us and we’ve got to be quick on the horn. We’re hiding in this ditch. Can you please tell them to stop firing at us?

  Soon a car comes driving up, a two-door vehicle, and he parks near a bridge that crosses a major canal. It’s not uncommon for an Iraqi vehicle just to run out of gas; they have a huge fuel problem. People try to push the fuel as long as they can and they mix it with God knows what else to try to keep their vehicles running. The door opens up and a guy gets out and he walks around the vehicle to the other side. I’m thinking his gas tank is on the ot
her side, but I don’t know what’s going on.

  He opens up his trunk and he’s digging around. I’m just watching him, and he pulls out something long and I know from my thermographic vision that it’s warm. He’s behind the car now and he’s fooling around with something, and at this point a military patrol is coming down the road. He sees it and he completely gets in a panic and he jumps in his car and he starts driving really slow. The patrol passes him and we’re calling up on the radio. The patrol passes by and this guy makes a U-turn. He comes back to the spot, parks on the other side of the road, gets out, walks back over, and starts messing with something.

  This time I’m sure it’s an IED. We’re calling up the patrol and we’re asking the patrol to come back around and to watch out because we think there’s an IED. The guy gets back in his car and he starts driving. He sees the patrol coming and he slows down and he pulls over to the side of the road a little ways in front of the patrol.

  The patrol is coming and the patrol is asking us through the command center where is the IED but they don’t understand what we’re trying to tell them. We give them the grid and the area and they’re basically rolling right up on it. We realize that they’re going to get to the IED and the guy in the car is going to detonate it and if we don’t act immediately people are going to get hurt.

  So the shooter is uncomfortable with just shooting this guy and he is asking me, “Should I shoot him, should I shoot him, should I shoot him?” It was a very tense moment, and we agreed, so he pulled the trigger. The guy was sitting in his car on the side of the road, looking back, we shot him through the car window, and he just kind of jerked real quick and lay down. The convoy basically passed the IED and found the car and parked around the car, and they found the guy in the vehicle dead. It was a big deal. They found the IED, and the ordnance team came and detonated it. We’re just sitting in the trench, filled with adrenaline. It wasn’t a combat scenario but it’s just so nerve-racking to have to make a decision to kill somebody when you’re not in jeopardy. I mean, you have to make a rational decision to execute a man because he’s going to kill someone else. I think killing is never easy, but it’s easier if you see your enemy and he’s attacking you. I almost wish that that guy was shooting at me. It would have been easier. It’s just a difficult situation. The entire war is a pretty difficult situation. It feels very predatory.