What Was Asked of Us

by Trish Wood

  These guys? These guys had a helmet and body armor and that’s it. They were driving civilian trucks, which a bullet or an IED blast would totally shred. For me one of the critical thoughts that I had was, Why are they here? Why are we having civilians who can’t arm themselves? That was another policy of KBR, that they could not carry their own weapons. And why, why, why would they set this situation up? I’ve been doing a little research and the army has gone toward sort of saying, Well, we’re going to take nonarmy jobs, not linked to combat, and contract them out to civilians. So on the base of Anaconda, the dining facility, the laundry facility, the PX, the KBR supply convoys that would support any one of those operations, all of those were civilian. Believe it or not, I think they thought that civilians could operate in Iraq. They thought that Iraq would be stable enough and we could provide enough security for our own asses so that people would not think about attacking those convoys. They were so wrong about what the climate of Iraq would look like; they disbanded the police and army. And then the world knew and then the insurgents knew, when they saw the looting, that we were not in charge. It seems to me that their calculations that civilian KBR convoys can just roam through Iraq with minimal security didn’t work out. Demonstrably did not work out.

  People don’t realize that KBR also hires what’s called TCNs, third country nationals. They take people from Nepal. They take people from Pakistan. And they bring them in at extremely low wages. The people who ran the fuel points, those were third country nationals. So how many of those are dead? That’s another good question. How much is their life worth? That’s another good question.

  One time we were exiting Anaconda and I was in the lead vehicle, and we were exiting the perimeter of the gate, and just on the other side of the perimeter there was the usual group of children on the side of the road and they love waving. To them it’s just an endless parade of green vehicles with all these funny tires and these big things we’re driving in, and it never seemed to get old with them. Just watching convoy vehicles go in and out every single day. Oftentimes people would throw candy to the kids, and in Iraq that is a sign of jubilation.

  As we were going out, this military convoy was coming in down this narrow road leading into the base. They were throwing candy across the road, which didn’t make sense. I guess they didn’t see us coming, and the kids were running right to the edge of the road. I remember thinking, Watch out for those boys and He just missed hitting a group of boys, and all of a sudden I saw this really tall girl with this straw hair. All the Iraqi kids have this matted and disgusting hair that’s not really kept up. She stands up and she looks in the opposite direction of the vehicles. Never looks our way at all because they don’t have the After School Special of “look both ways” that we sort of try to ingrain in our kids. She got up and just automatically started waltzing out and we ended up hitting her. She sort of clipped the Humvee—the side mirrors stick out pretty far—and then she also thudded up against the side of the vehicle.

  And so the driver and everybody is shouting, “Holy shit, you hit her, oh my gosh. Stop the vehicle.” And I remember Sergeant Koehn was sort of, like, untangling her. She was sort of in this crouched, almost sleeping position. I didn’t know if she was dead or something like that. She had blood coming out of her ears. Something was really looking weird with her shoulder. I remember thinking, This is bad, this is really bad.

  My first thoughts were like, Why did we come to Iraq? What was George Bush thinking in sending us over here? If he never had done this, this never would have happened. We never would have left the wire and this kid would still be running around and none of this would have mattered and this would all be gone. And then it was just kind of like, all right, this is stupid. I started ordering other people around, trying to get better security around the perimeter. If I couldn’t help out with her, then I tried to help out in other ways.

  On the side of the road I remember seeing, like, this bag of lollipops that probably is what all these kids were clawing after and I just, like, gave it this really ineffective kick on the side of the road. I was just really pissed off. And I turned and looked and I think it was her friend standing on the side of the road and she had her arms down straight at her side with, like, her palms out. And she just had this, like, sort of this ghostly look on her face. I was looking at her and her mouth was open and she looked up at me and her hands were down by her side and her palms were turned outward almost as if she were asking a perpetual question: Why did this happen? What just happened? And I remember thinking I should go over there and comfort her, you know. And I know that we didn’t mean to do it. I know she wouldn’t understand me, but just having a hug, just having somebody else to suggest, everything’s going to be OK, we’re going to take care of her. But I didn’t comfort her. I don’t know why . . . maybe I just didn’t have any comfort left to give, maybe I was only thinking of myself.

  And when I turned and looked back she was walking away toward her house and her hands were still turned outward . . . still in that stuck position. Her body was very rigid and she was making these little steps. She walked away totally alone.

  It’s selfish to talk about my own inadequacies that I was feeling. But that’s what I was experiencing. I couldn’t change anything. I couldn’t change what happened. President Bush couldn’t have changed it from happening. It just happened, you know, and it sucks, and it sucks to go through it. For a couple of days, I just really kind of wrestled with the sound of somebody hitting a vehicle . . . it’s like this, it’s this loud thud and seeing her in that sort of, like, sleeping but bloodied state that I first saw her in.

  You know those sort of images replayed themselves in my mind a lot more frequently than I wanted them to. They were unpleasant, you know, but that’s just the point. It was the unpleasant thoughts that I think subconsciously or whatever, your mind is trying to work into, it’s trying to put in the right hole. And later we found out that all she had was a broken collarbone, amazingly.

  Right now there’s this cold and calculated side of war that just accepts tragedy for what it is, and doesn’t dwell on its sorrowful nature. It just says: This is what happens when people speak to each other with rifles. For me, the flashes keep coming back: Oh, do you remember this, do you remember this? You hit the girl, there was that sound. She had blood coming out of her ears. Do you remember that?

  It really pisses me off when people don’t have an understanding of who’s Jalal Talabani. Who’s the prime minister of Iraq? Who’s the president of Iraq? When did we assault Falluja? A lot of people died during those times.

  “It’s the cold, blunt truth.

  There was a little girl that died.”

  JEFF ENGLEHART

  3RD BRIGADE

  1ST INFANTRY DIVISION

  FEBRUARY 2004-FEBRUARY 2005

  DIYALA PROVINCE

  I joined the army before 9/11. I was drifting. That was definitely the factor because I was in what I consider to be a dead-end job and I was just so desperate to get out of the United States and travel. Boredom and complacency were definitely two factors that I kind of ran with when I decided to join the army. I was naive, I won’t deny that. But I kind of wanted just to start a new life again. I was trying to get my life in order. I didn’t think I needed the discipline—I didn’t join to be a man. I never bought into that. I just wanted to get out of the dead-end town I was in . . . Grand Junction, Colorado.

  On 9/11, I was walking back home in the early morning. My roommate who was on the porch smoking a cigarette just went crazy when he saw me. He was telling me that the World Trade Center got bombed, or someone—some crazy Islamic fundamentalist flew planes into the World Trade Center. I kinda figured the World Trade Center would get bombed—I realized that since I was twelve years old, that it would be a target because of what it was. I watched the second plane crash into the tower and that was—that was definitely eerie to watch that happen live. And then the whole day was personal chaos for me. I went to work and t
hat was definitely playing in my mind, having to go to war. I just joined the army, so I figured this would be a war situation. And plus the whole thing was just so catastrophic and really sad. I talked to my dad over the phone about it and he said, Oh, you know, SF—Special Forces—will just go in Afghanistan and wipe out the al Qaeda and it would be over probably before you even get out of basic training. Nothing will happen.

  I served in the Balkans before I deployed to Iraq and I honestly feel that we were doing good things there. If we weren’t there acting as a police force I absolutely feel they would have just killed each other. So without us being there, it would have been really bad for a long time. I honestly feel our mission there was humanitarian, and it was gratifying going on sector and being welcomed by everybody and looked up to, and to talk to kids and put your arm around a kid and kick around a soccer ball. It was totally opposite in Iraq. But in Kosovo I think we did a good thing there and I don’t regret that.

  I remember being in the MWR center in Kosovo, where they have the pool tables and the computers and it’s a recreation center. I remember everyone gathering around the televisions and they were watching the news, watching Bush give the ultimate, final ultimatum to the Hussein family to leave. It was bullshit, you know. Saddam was never going to leave and we’re going in. I just knew that shit was going to go bad.

  After we got out of Kosovo we had six months before we were slotted to go to Iraq. And we did a lot of training. So it was a big rush of getting equipment ready and getting personnel in order and getting them trained up and getting them ready to deploy to Kuwait and then Iraq. So there was a lot of chaos during that time. We were very concerned. We read a lot of magazines, read a lot of Newsweeks, read a lot of newspapers, read a lot of Internet postings about what’s going on in Iraq, and just—it looked bloody from the very start. Then soldiers started dying because they didn’t have the right equipment. And it was like, Good God, the guys that are out there getting killed are in the same trucks that we have now.

  I definitely believed at one time Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but I was investigating on my own on the Internet when I could. I didn’t think he had them when we went in. Man—I remember when I was a kid watching Baghdad get bombed and just feeling eerie about that. And here I am twenty-two years old and thinking, you know, How am I going to be involved in this if it goes down? Definitely there was a fear of dying for a cause you didn’t believe in and that was something that was kind of depressing. And we had talked about going AWOL because we didn’t believe in the war. We talked about filing for being a conscientious objector. But then the paperwork wouldn’t go in time and it would just be a big mess. Then you just—you open a door to just, you know, being chastised or getting harassment from chain of command, filing for CO.

  While I was there my unit didn’t really do any humanitarian missions. Every mission was geared around protecting ourselves, doing raids to weed out the insurgency. I was a gunner on a Humvee the whole entire time. I started out on an MK-19 automatic grenade launcher, which is a devastating weapon in an urban environment, because if you miss you can easily blow up a household. I was on one of these grenade launchers at first and got into some engagements and saw the power that it really does have. And then depending on what truck I was supposed to be on, if maybe my truck broke down and we had to use another truck that had a .50 cal., I went from a 240 machine gun to a .50 cal. once in a while. But predominantly throughout the whole deployment I was on an M-240B machine gun.

  Some of those circumstances were fucked up, like knowing that there’s going to be an ambush around the corner and going into it anyways and getting fired at with rocket-propelled grenades and smaller arms fire. Then just lighting up anything that you see. I did my best to not kill civilians.

  One of the guys I killed was holding an RPG, running across an alley, and that to me is a target. There’s no reason why a civilian should have a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. So I took it as a direct threat because he could turn around and just shoot that at me and just kill me on the first shot. I shot in a lot of urban areas, so—and the houses that they have in Iraq and especially around Baquba are pretty much built from scratch, built from clay mud, that kind of stuff. The bricks they use, kind of cinder blocks, are not necessarily strong. And you know, a .50 cal. round can go through—I think I heard once that it could go through like three houses before it finally stops. And the 240 that I was on could definitely go through walls. And when you’re laying down lead and you don’t really know where the guy is coming from . . .

  There was one time we were being shot at by a sniper on Election Day and we couldn’t find him. So we just lit up a house and I took part in that because my truck was getting shot at. I could hear the bullets going by me and the bullets were hitting the top of my truck. And I just returned fire at the house. We all just shot at this house. I have no idea if the guy was there. But God knows how many me and my friends or anyone else in the army has had to kill unintentionally, you know. It’s just—it’s the ugly part of war, especially a war like this.

  There was a car bomb that—what happened was, there’s an Iraqi police station and right next to it was, like, a coffee shop, and a lot of the police officers would go there to get coffee in the mornings. There were a lot of civilians in that area. And a car bomb just drove up and just indiscriminately killed everybody there—cops and civilians. And these explosions that happen are just so enormous that body parts can fly up to a hundred meters away. And so we got to the scene, we checked it out; we were trying to secure it. There was a lot of chaos, a lot of shit going on at the time. And I was in my truck scanning from my machine gun and I’m scanning for anything that could happen because that’s part of the job, just sitting there scanning. And then looking over and on the side of the street there was—there was a little girl’s foot. Well, I think it was a girl because it looked like a little pink sandal, but there was a foot still in it. A little pink sandal with a little flower or something on it. The shoe was so small I’m imagining the girl was no older than six, and just the foot was still in it, smoldered, you know, burned and smoldered and just sitting there on the side of the road. The body parts. . . . I don’t know. It’s not a video game. It’s very real. But you think about—this was a little girl. She was obviously innocent. No way you could accuse a child that young of being guilty. And her life was snuffed out in a second just from being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  There’s no way to get emotional about it. Like I said, you’re just numb to it, you know, and just, like, there’s no crying about it. A lot of soldiers joke about it. Look at that little foot and the bastard child that got blown up, but I guarantee that soldier thinks about it a little bit more deeper than that. I don’t really know how to explain it any other way. It’s just a great numbness that creeps over everybody. But you know, it did cross my mind later, like, Well, that’s pretty disgusting, I should have been more grossed out. I hope I’m not fucked up in the head. I mean, it’s just dealing with death every day.

  One thing that really affected some of my nightmares and some of my flashbacks was . . . oh, it was bad. . . . We’re in a column going down this road, and it’s just one of the things that pisses me off so bad about the army is that they knew it was a dangerous route because they had already reconned it before. We probably had four or five Bradley tanks and probably fifteen or twenty Humvees. Our objective was to go raid a roadside bomb factory, an IED factory. And we chose the back roads so we could sneak into their little village. The very last tank in the column was pulling rear security. So nobody was behind them.

  We got to the—we call it an alpha-alpha—like a little assembly area where we stage a mission, and we all got there and someone came across a radio saying that one of the Bradleys wasn’t there. We’re missing a Bradley. We’re missing whatever his code name was. Everyone was like, “What the fuck do you mean you’re missing a Bradley? What happened to him?” “Well, I don’t know, he’s not here.” �
��Well, what the fuck, what happened?” “We don’t know.” This is going on over the radio.

  A couple of trucks went back to look for them and then over the radio we just heard screaming and crying. It had rolled over in the ditch! He rolled over in the ditch! Oh my God, they’re drowning to death. They’re drowning to death. And it just—everyone was just like, Oh my God, what the fuck?

  So at that point the mission was canceled and we all went back to that scene, and my truck and another truck in my platoon were some of the first there, and we all just jumped out of the trucks and we got in the water trying to figure out if we could get them out. What happened was they were going across this piece of dirt road and the road crumbled and it wasn’t even their fault. The road just crumbled. It caved in. Just imagine a tank that rolled upside down in the water. Flipped upside down in the water and it is submerged, tracks up.

  At that point there was nothing we could do because of the water pressure and those doors are so heavy. They always kind of consider the Bradley a death trap anyways because in situations like this there’s only one real escape and that’s the back hatch. There’s a crew compartment and then there’s the driver’s hole and then there’s the turret. And the driver’s hole and the turret were stuck in the mud upside down. So there’s only one way out and the guy, the guys in the turret, they’re infantry, they’re soldiers, foot soldiers, and it’s a crew carrier and their only means of escape would have been that back door.

  And everybody was trying so hard to get that back hatch door opened. But the tank was completely upside down in the water, in the canal, and it was just submerged in mud and water and we couldn’t get the door open. They had another Bradley come up and try to tug the door off. And we just kept on breaking the chains and the straps and it took us, like, I think almost an hour and forty-five minutes to just open the door. By that time, you know—everyone—everyone in the crew except for two died, drowned. There was just no way of saving them. The only two that survived, they survived because they were lucky enough there was an air pocket in there that was maybe two or three feet of air. And they managed to survive because they had enough air.