by Trish Wood
I heard the pounding. They grabbed maybe their helmet or something and they were hitting the side of the door. But I didn’t hear any voices. They were pounding on the side of the tank. You could hear them pounding on the doors. And it was just, like, Fuck, what the fuck can we possibly do for you? We’re trying so hard. Just hold on. Stay alive. My roommate, he was very bothered by it. He dove underwater to one of the turrets and someone was grabbing outside of the turret because they can reach outside of the turret. There was a gap there and they were reaching out. He felt his hand and he was holding on to someone’s hand. He didn’t know what to do. He came back up for air and he went back down and he couldn’t find the hand again because it was so dark and murky. So he came up for air and then dove down and tried again and found the hand just drifting in the water.
And it was so hard to have to watch that. I didn’t know any of those guys because they weren’t in my battalion. They were just with us on the mission. I didn’t know them, but they were American soldiers. I didn’t know them, but to have to watch their best friends in the tank trying to pull them out, and the guys on the ground who knew them well, considered them brothers, just, you know, in tears, slamming their fist into the ground because they’re so distraught and so upset that after four minutes there’s no way. There’s no way those guys are coming out alive. They’re dead. But they were still trying hard to get that door open. And then pulling them out and they were just cold and pale, dead, just lying there. I remember me and my driver thinking, like, What the fuck was this for, you know. Five good American kids just died. What the fuck was this for? I hope Bush is happy.
Drowning is a lot different than getting shot. It’s a lot different than getting blown up. I got moved to my brigade because I had replaced a gunner that got killed by an IED. And I took his place. So that felt kind of weird and eerie. I became really good friends with the friends of the deceased soldier and later on they would tell me stories about how they felt at the moment when he was killed. It went just like that. A roadside bomb took his head off and he just laid on the side of the Humvee bleeding to death. Of course there was no head so he was already dead.
And so these things creep in my mind right away. It’s the cold, blunt truth. There was a little girl that died. How do I know? Maybe she’s not dead. Hopefully she’s not dead. It’s just her foot. But chances are she’s dead. But because of this, because of what I’m doing, because I’m wearing this uniform, that’s what’s happening.
I firmly stand by the belief that soldiers can go to war, see the shit, and then be antiwar. There should be no dividing line between that. It’s like, that’s not a valid excuse. No one can come up to me and say, You have no right to be antiwar because you were there and you did that, or You have no right to be antiwar because you put yourself in that situation. Because look at some of the great authors of our time. Was Hemingway antiwar before he saw the shit he did, and was Kurt Vonnegut? Probably not.
I signed a contract and I know that’s a valid argument that anybody has against me. Well, you put yourself in that situation, you signed that paper. No one put a gun to your head. I heard that argument all throughout the army. When someone told me, you know what, I know you hate the army but we didn’t make you do it. No one put a gun to your head. But that’s such a petty bullshit, fucking excuse. It’s not until you actually see what is so bad about it firsthand that you can reach that conclusion. So I stand firmly by the fact that soldiers can be antiwar in the army after seeing some of the shit that they have to deal with.
“We just killed a bunch of dudes
who were on our side”
GARETT REPPENHAGEN
CAVALRY SCOUT/SNIPER
2-63 ARMORED BATTALION
1ST INFANTRY DIVISION
FEBRUARY 2004-FEBRUARY 2005
BAQUBA
We were working at a police station outside of Hibhib. This is a little town with a big police station, and the roof was just perfect to work from because we could see miles of highway from the rooftop. The police would be up there and they’d talk to us and we’d let them play with our gear and look through the thermals. They were all, like, ecstatic about it.
I befriended an Iraqi police guy named Mustafa and he spoke very good English. He was very religious and it made him a really interesting person to talk to. When I was not actively engaged in scanning or whatever and it was my turn to sleep or get some rest or eat something, a lot of times I would just talk to Mustafa. This is what he told me about sexuality in Iraq. When a boy is getting old enough to marry, he can’t have sex with a woman until he’s married. I mean, it happens, but that’s the technicality. To marry a woman, you need to have money and a job. You need to basically pay the father of the person you want to marry. You can have multiple wives, but a lot of people don’t because they’re not wealthy enough to have multiple wives.
They love their women. They’re just absolute treasures to them. They’re forced to wear the veils a lot of times and be subservient and cook them dinner, but the women enjoy that too because they know how treasured they are. This is what Mustafa’s telling me.
When boys are growing up, there’s no pornography in Iraq. They don’t see it on TV. Sex is behind closed doors and not talked about. The Iraqi person, like Mustafa, when they talk to an American like me, they always want to know how many American women have I slept with. I said, I don’t know, thirteen or fourteen. He’s like, Wow, really? What were they like? What did you do? He wants to know details. It was just so mysterious to him and so entertaining because he’s in a culture that it’s not just everywhere. He was innocent.
They can seem like children even all the way up past twenty-one years old. They have no stereotype on which to base their masculine actions. They’re not trying to be masculine. They’re not trying to be feminine. When they become sexually active and sexually interested and they’re not allowed to touch the women, then they form more intimate bonds with their male friends and that eventually leads to probably having sex. That’s what I think it is. Mustafa had had homosexual sex, and he did while I knew him, but he was still completely infatuated with women and only women. We had a very, very masculine soldier and Mustafa constantly fucked with him. He would come up to him and hug him and stroke his hair and pet him and he’d always want to wear his clothes, wear his helmet. He just irritated this guy to no end. This guy just wanted his stuff back and never wanted to be touched. He was very homophobic.
Mustafa didn’t have money, so he wasn’t married yet. He was hoping to eventually earn enough money by being a policeman. That’s why he joined the police, even though he knew he had to fight his own people for fighting the occupation. He was making a sacrifice to eventually earn enough money to have a wife and a family. He was a really great guy. I loved him. Mustafa was awesome.
The more I learned about him and the more he taught me about his culture, the more I understood and the more repulsed I was by things like Abu Ghraib. He had a tight relationship with the Koran. Nothing could come between him and the Koran. When he heard about the U.S. soldiers disrespecting the Koran it was more damaging to him than all the other tortures and sexual embarrassments and everything. He was mad at me at that point. He was like, How could you guys do that?
I’m trying to remember the exact day. I remember the town of Khalis was under attack by insurgents and the report was over a hundred insurgents were attacking the JCC compound in Khalis. The JCC compound is the joint command center. It’s a conglomerate of all the major government offices in an Iraqi town. There was a big panic and we started sending units out there in pieces. I ended up gunning on the Humvee. I got up on the turret and I found out that it was an M60, and we call them pigs, and it’s a very old weapon. It’s probably been around since Vietnam.
So we rolled up and Iraqi army guys were running everywhere and a bunch of them were yelling at the major once he got out of the truck that the deputy governor’s house was under attack. As we approached the deputy governor’s ho
use, parked in the middle of the median was a pickup truck facing away from us. In the back of the pickup truck there must have been about four Iraqis; they all were armed and they’re all in mixed civilian clothes. One of them had an RPG and he was pointing it directly at the deputy governor’s house, which was maybe a hundred and fifty, two hundred meters away across a kind of a marshy field. And we stopped about a football field away from them and we came to a halt with all the Humvees kind of parked behind each other.
Basically our first spray took out a lot of the guys in the back of the pickup truck. I was having a hard time seeing because I was behind the lead truck and I couldn’t fire on them because the lead truck was in the way. The guys in my truck got out so I didn’t have a driver anymore to move my truck to where I could have a firing position.
We were firing at them with small arms and the Iraqis’ truck got shot up. I noticed in the corner of my eye a civilian vehicle, a white kind of like Cadillac-looking vehicle, driving directly into the firefight, and before they must have realized it they were just in the center of the firefight and they thought that the easiest way through it was to just floor it and get by.
The crew behind me freaked out when he saw the vehicle just speeding and it was hauling ass toward us, and one of our guys opened fire and I saw the windshield kind of spider and turn white after it broke. I saw a lot of blood and the vehicle shot off the edge of the road almost immediately, just jerked and went away from us off the side of the road. We found out later there was a man cowering off the side of the road. The road kind of dipped down into a dirty embankment with a lot of brush. And a man that was there when the firefight started must have been hiding down there because he had a bicycle right behind him. He must have been riding his bike and just dropped the bike and dove down into this ditch. The car ended up running him over and killing him, and the car stopped in the dirt. I think the driver died almost immediately, but I think there was another man in the vehicle that fell out the door facing away from us. I started firing my M60 because I saw movement on the ground there and they were yelling that there were shots coming from our left and I couldn’t see anybody else.
For an instant I thought that somebody from the car was firing back at us. I didn’t really think that they were any sort of insurgent or anything. I was thinking that this guy just got shot up, you know, and now he must think that he has to fight to get out of this. My weapon wouldn’t fire a burst and I was basically sitting up here on this truck almost sniping at the movement that I see down near the tires. There’s a lot of smoke and wreckage and it’s hard to see, but the firefight had calmed down to a point where we were just sitting there.
There was a difficult moment where I’d stopped firing and the combat just died down. So the Iraqi army guys finally got a couple trucks together and they came up from behind us, and once they got on the scene and saw what was happening, they started freaking out. We didn’t know why exactly, at first. Then we learned that the guys we shot weren’t insurgents but the deputy governor’s bodyguards. The moment I heard it, I was just like—fuck! I mean I was just—I was just floored—I was just—you know, I couldn’t believe it—I couldn’t believe that. The guys we shot probably thought at first when we got there, Great, the Americans are here, cool. They look back and all of a sudden they’re getting shot to shit. I was like, what the fuck did we just do? You know what I mean—we have three dead Iraqis that were the deputy governor’s bodyguards, two dead civilians, and one injured civilian. I mean, everybody got shot that was there. There wasn’t a single person that didn’t get hit by either shrapnel from a grenade or shot multiple times. I think there were two guys that actually lived that were Iraqi bodyguards, I think—each of them was shot twice and they still lived.
I was so angry. When we got back, some of the guys were laughing about it. Some of the guys, it was their first time in combat and they were excited about it because they felt like they went through some rite of passage. I’m just thinking, You guys are fucking idiots. You know what I mean? We just killed a bunch of fucking dudes who were on our side! I asked one of them, “Would you be so happy if they were Americans?” And he just looked at me like, Why the fuck are you shitting on my parade?
I saw one of the guys a few months later, one of the guys that we’d shot. A guy came up to us and he had a buddy and he was limping and he showed us a huge scar. His buddy who spoke better English said he was telling us, You did this, you guys did this. He was kind of proud of the scar—very bizarre people. I think they were just going up to the Americans and saying, like, You’re the Americans; you did this to my friend.
“And then I hear the explosion”
ADRIAN JONES
2ND MARINE DIVISION
SEPTEMBER 2005 (WOUNDED IN ACTION)
RAMADI
One of the main reasons why I wanted to be a marine is because I had a whole bunch of servicemen in my family. My stepfather, he was a good influence on me. He was a marine, so I kind of wanted to go in that direction of becoming a marine. When I got wounded, I was on my second tour of Iraq. I was hit by an IED and ended up losing both my legs.
We had different toys that were sent to us from back home, bags of candy and stuffed animals, and we were taking them to the children at the local school. We had the toys in the rear vehicle, the fourth Humvee in our convoy. We got to the school and we started giving out the toys, the candy and everything, with the little kids surrounding us. This is the sort of stuff that really brightened my day.
Once we were done, we got in our vehicles and headed away from the school, and we were probably about a quarter mile away on this main road. I’m not quite sure what happened, but I think the first vehicle in our convoy bypassed the IED but actually triggered it. Once my vehicle was actually on top of the IED, it went off. One minute we’re just driving down the road and then I hear the explosion, and the only thing that I saw was a bright light, and then I heard ringing in my ears. Then I saw a cloud of dust and I noticed the front of my vehicle was actually on fire. I had my seatbelt on and once the IED went off my whole body just clenched up and I gritted my teeth. I actually felt my Humvee go up in the air and come back down, and it landed in the crater created by the IED.
I felt a pain in my right foot, but nobody noticed I was still in the vehicle because they had gone out looking for the triggerman and they were setting up a perimeter. The actual explosion threw my door into the bushes about fifty feet away and it set the bushes on fire. I could feel my left leg was pinned. I checked my right foot and I had a little bit of pain in the ankle area, in my heel, and I thought it was just a sprained ankle or whatever.
Then I kind of turned myself sideways so I can wiggle my left leg loose. Once I pulled my left leg up I actually saw that my left foot had actually turned completely all the way around. It was facing the other direction. When I saw it I knew that I had already lost that foot. It was still attached but hanging. The only reason it was still there was because my boots were laced pretty tight. I started really thinking about getting out of the vehicle. I was bleeding pretty bad and I could see the blood actually soaking through the boot and everything. When I saw that, I called out for somebody to come and help. I know I called out for help. They got me out of the vehicle and the corpsman was on my right-hand side and my best friend, Sergeant Henderson, was on my left-hand side and he was trying to keep me calm. He was telling me everything’s going to be all right because they were going to take care of me. Me and Sergeant Henderson, we was real close friends. We was kind of like brothers, really.
The only thing that I was thinking about at that time was the guy that was in the turret, because when the IED went off, I saw in my peripheral vision him getting thrown out of the vehicle. I was worried about what was happening to him. The corpsman told me he got thrown about seventy-five feet and hit a tree. He broke two ribs and bruised his kidney and when they found him he was coughing up blood and everything.
My body temperature started rising and I kept on a
sking for water, you know, because I was sweating, I was sweating a whole lot. They took my flak jacket off and everything, and my helmet. While they was putting the tourniquet on, one of the guys noticed the fire in the vehicle. Also the weapon that was in the turret had fallen into the vehicle and was cooking off rounds. A round actually hit me in my thigh and then came out again. When they cut off my cammies they saw that I had a baseball-sized hole in my thigh. I had a chunk of meat missing from my leg. It was a 240 machine gun that hit me. The corpsman started freaking out when he saw that wound and he put pressure on it until the medics got there.
Our CO came out with the ambulance to check on us, so when they put us on the litters he was right there. He was talking to me and telling me that everything was going to be OK.
The first surgery that they did, it was actually at Baghdad. I didn’t actually realize the extent of my injuries, that my right leg was gone and that I might lose the other, until I got back to the States. They tried to fix my other foot, but it was completely shattered. They put the pins in and then put the cast on it. But at one point they said I should think about having that leg off too. It was a pretty hard decision to make, and my mom was there, my dad and my fiancée and my sister, and I talked to them about the situation. I thought about it for a couple of days, and then I decided to go ahead and get it amputated.
The only thing I think about right now is the well-being of the other guys that are still over there.
Adrian served an earlier tour of Iraq from September 2004 to March 2005.