by Trish Wood
“The next generation of
insurgents”
JONATHAN POWERS
“THE GUNNERS”
1ST ARMORED DIVISION
MAY 2003-JULY 2004
“GUNNER PALACE,” BAGHDAD
At one point I went from being a platoon leader, and spending every day in the faces of Iraqis doing reconstruction and stuff like that, to my battalion position, where I spent a lot more time dealing with logistical bullshit. Even though we got out every day, I wasn’t doing the day-to-day interaction with Iraqis. I needed something to remind me what I was doing there. So I got really involved with helping out at the orphanages.
We had people at home send us toys and clothing and whatever else, and we’d go out and distribute it to the kids and we played soccer . . . kicked the ball around and put them up on our shoulders and they were singing songs and dancing. We don’t speak their language, they don’t speak ours, but everyone is having fun and I think it gave an amazing image of the Americans to them. Every time we went out there, we fixed their generators, we refueled them, and brought them food and clothing. No one else ever brought them anything.
These were two orphanages, and we’d spend a really quality hour there and it would remind us that something good could come out of all this. The kids loved us. When we got there, the smiles on their faces . . . the kids would just glow. And the guys would too. The soldiers would be really happy to be there and run around with the kids.
I think hanging out at the orphanage was as much for the soldiers as it was for the kids. Christmas is a really good example. That Christmas our unit was on the cover of Time magazine when they designated the “American soldier” as the person of the year and we were pretty upbeat, but then right after the cover came out, two of our guys were killed and it was a complete deflation of morale. Guys were just crushed. Then we wake up on Christmas morning and we get pounded, just pounded with mortars. But we had an orphanage trip planned for that day, so we packed our Christmas trees into our Humvee and we got our Santa hats on, and as soon as we pulled up at the orphanage we were able to forget we were in Iraq for a while. The kids were ecstatic and they were having a wonderful time and we were having a wonderful time and everyone was singing. It was nice . . . back to reality afterward.
It’s funny, two of the kids I really got close to. Tara was a young girl who was what I called an economic orphan, because her mother would come and visit her at the orphanage. Her parents just couldn’t support her financially anymore, so a Baghdad orphanage took her in.
Then there was Moqtad, who would get on your shoulders and he’d grab on your hair and steer you around by pulling your hair left and pulling your hair right . . . candy in his hand and it would get stuck in your hair. That was his way, and he’d pull your ears and he’d make these noises because he had a big cleft palate, and I always gave him my sunglasses to put on when I went over there. I tried to get Operation Smile to come in and take care of his cleft palate, but Iraq was too dangerous. When I went back recently, we found Moqtad and I learned that he is deaf and mute. I didn’t know that the whole time I was there. I saw Moqtad about a dozen times and never once knew that he was deaf and mute. I couldn’t speak his language and I just thought he was speaking Arabic. But he was a deaf and mute child. He’s still alive. He’s struggling but he’s still over there. I think he’s seven now.
The trips out to the orphanages came to an end, though. This one time, we got to one of them, it’s a Catholic orphanage, and the nun comes running outside and she said, Come, but you must leave quickly, you cannot stay and you cannot come back, because if you come back, the bad guys have come and said if they see us working with the Americans, they’ll kill the kids. So that just sort of shook me. It just blew my mind that something that evil could happen. Who could kill kids? These kids have nothing to do with any of this, nothing to do with Saddam, nothing to do with Americans, and for sure nothing to do with the insurgency. How can they dare talk about killing kids? But they did. So we had to find other ways to support the kids. We sent stuff through our interpreters. Sometimes the caretakers came by to get boxes. That was my least favorite thing about Iraq, that we could no longer see the kids.
Extensions were happening. Stop-losses were extended. The fighting intensified. And finding any kind of joy over there was just sort of impossible. There was maybe something worthwhile in the camaraderie of the soldiers or your friends, but there was no more joy outside the gates for us. That was gone.
Once I got back to the States, I knew I was either going to start teaching school or I’m going to try to find a way to work with kids in Iraq. A foundation in Washington asked me for a plan, which they accepted, so I moved to Washington to get this project off the ground. I went back to Iraq as a civilian, which was a really strange experience in itself, but it opened my eyes to what I should be doing.
We developed War Kids Relief and it includes orphans and street kids in Iraq, but it’s spread to youth in conflict situations in general now. Down the road I want to get to child soldiers, but obviously my passion is in Iraq right now. I’m working on a youth center project for Baghdad that was developed by me and a senior guy at our embassy there. Of the nineteen billion dollars we spend on the Iraqi government, we spend zero on youth development. So there are no programs over there to engage kids.
Are these kids we’ve been ignoring the next generation of insurgents? There’s 3.5 million kids out of school right now in Iraq and there’s nothing to engage them.
“Nor dread the plagues
of darkness
FATHER DAVID SIVRET
CHAPLAIN
MAINE ARMY NATIONAL GUARD
133RD ENGINEER COMBAT BATTALION (HEAVY)
FEBRUARY 2004-FEBRUARY 2005
MOSUL (FOB MAREZ)
There have always been chaplains with soldiers since the beginning of time. Even in the Old Testament, it talks about chaplains there to minister to the soldiers, to help lift them up in times of distress and pain and suffering and hurt. I tend to focus more on the spiritual needs and nurture the soldiers than I do on the war itself. It was a strengthening thing to know that I was in the area where Jonah and Naaman preached. So it was inspiring, knowing that I was in that place.
It kind of shocked me at first, because there were a fair number of soldiers in the battalion who attended churches back home, but the ones who showed up in church over there quite often were ones that had no connection with church at all. They came just for the comfort of knowing that God was present in their lives. They needed something to reach out to. War has a way of bringing people back to their faith. We had Protestant and Catholic services and we’d do whatever we could just to keep the soldiers’ minds off what was going on. Sometimes it was difficult when you had a mortar coming in, because we were in a plywood building that didn’t offer much protection, but we tried to be around to be a visible witness to the soldiers. We call it a ministry of presence . . . being in the midst of the soldiers and very visible.
Of course, the favorite one for a lot of the soldiers is Psalm 91, which talks about protection: “Now you don’t need to be afraid of the dark any more, nor fear the dangers of the day; nor dread the plagues of darkness, nor disasters in the morning.” We have soldiers from my area here in Maine and when we have a going-away for them, I’ll give them a bandanna with the 91st Psalm on it and they can just carry it in their pocket.
In all the sermons, I tried to focus on God’s saving acts, and how He is compassionate in love, there for us at all times, no matter where we find ourselves. I talked about God’s love and compassion for all humanity and the need for us to continually reach out for His forgiveness for what we do. That was a continual message that I had to preach just about every Sunday, and trying to find new ways to do that, it got challenging sometimes. Sometimes there may be comments like “What do we see around us that is good? Here we are, we’re in a war zone, we get mortared, we get rocketed.” But I just looked around and pointed out
many times the different blessings that we had—you know, simple blessings, from food on the table to seeing the green around us. You could just look around the area and you could see the death in the region, where everything just dries up and it’s all dust and sand. And then all of a sudden, there’s a new birth, and you can see God’s hand at work all around us.
I would, of course, pray with them, and sometimes I’d go down when they were going out on patrol and pray with them, but other times I’d pray in the chapel for them as they went out, and there were a few times when they were hit by IEDs. Our first casualty was Specialist Christopher Gelineau. He was riding shotgun in the backseat of a Humvee and that Humvee was hit by an IED and destroyed. A piece of shrapnel came in through the window and pretty much killed him. I got the message at the aid station and my assistant and I ran back to the chapel and got my Humvee and went over and met them at the combat support hospital. I walked Chris out to the helicopters as they took him out. Chris couldn’t be saved and I could see that he had a very serious head wound. He wasn’t conscious, but I talk to everybody and I talk like they can hear me. That’s something I’ve always done because you really don’t know who can hear you.
I was talking with him, praying with him, and I had my hand on his arm as we rolled him out to the helicopter, and I said a silent prayer for him as he went off in the helicopter. I knew Christopher pretty well because he drilled with me in Gardiner, Maine. . . . That’s the headquarters for 133rd. He was fairly newly married and it was difficult, but he came from a good Christian family. It was a ministry of presence . . . just being there with my hand on his arm and walking him out to the chopper. I knew that I was not going to say that you’re going to be OK, because just from the look of him, there was no way he was going to be OK. Whether he lived or not, he was not going to be the same. I just told him to hold on. Later we heard that he died.
Doc Major Nelson came in and we were talking in the chapel. I hadn’t planned on going up to the mess tent to eat, but Doc said, “Let’s go get a chili dog.” I don’t particularly care for chili dogs, but he does, so we went to the mess tent and got in the chow line. They had some wonderful-looking roast beef that day, so I had a nice little plate of a couple of pieces of roast beef. I got something to drink and we sat down where we normally did, at the far end of the table.
I said grace. I looked up, and all I remember at that point is a bright flash. I don’t know how much time passed, but I woke up lying on my side and I couldn’t hear anything and I thought, Oh my God, it was a mortar attack.
I woke up next to a soldier from the light engineer unit and his face was half blown off. I recognized the badge from a sister battalion, and it was awful because the body was still twitching and it was—well, it was awful. He was dead, but his muscles were twitching. So he was gone. His soul was gone. It still freaks me out. It still does. It’s one of those things that stay with me. It is dehumanizing, but as a clergyperson—that’s one of the reasons I went into the ministry, to be there for people. And if I can be there at the time of their death, and even just say a brief prayer over them, it’s worth it to me to have had the ministry. I stayed there for a minute with this dying soldier and said a silent prayer. It is “He departed this world, O Christian soul, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” People came to where we were and took him out.
They were taking tables for litters because there weren’t enough stretchers and the main concern was to get people out of there. I got through my anger as best I could. I know there were a few words that came out of my mouth that shouldn’t have, but they did. I’m not going to repeat them because it’s not becoming of a chaplain or a clergyperson. I was just angry that somebody would do something like this.
As I was moving around I realized this was not a mortar attack. Of course, later on in the day, we found out it was a suicide bomber. I went around in shock trying to comfort soldiers that were wounded. I saw a lot of my soldiers and a lot of soldiers from the 204th Engineers, who were attached to us. As I got up, it was chaos, tables all over the place, chairs just thrown around, and smoky bright light coming from where the tent had blown out. The floor was slippery. There was some blood, but I was talking with Doc later, and he told me that the slipperiness was a residue from C4, which makes things slippery. I saw another PA working on a soldier to my left, medics just reaching out and helping whomever they could, combat lifesavers putting in IVs.
After that, I just kept walking, and eventually found Doc and some of the medics in the kitchen taking care of soldiers and civilians alike. Doc wrapped one person in a roll of cellophane to save his life, because they couldn’t stop the bleeding. He was bleeding all over. They had wrapping stations out in the hall, with big rolls of Glad Wrap with the heating pad to seal them.
I looked down at Doc and I said, “Doc, you’re wounded.” And he said, “No, no, no, nothing’s wrong with me.” He had been sitting across from me at the table, and there was a thirty- to thirty-five-foot distance between the back of the suicide bomber and him. He took shrapnel and little pieces of what looked like ball bearings—some in his shoulder, and one in his neck. If he wouldn’t have been there and I had been sitting on the other side of the table, it would have killed me. If it had gone out a little bit farther into his neck, it would have killed him.
Eventually we got to the point where everybody was moved out and Doc was starting to feel a little . . . the adrenaline was wearing off, let’s put it that way. And we got a stretcher and we put him on a stretcher. The command sergeant majors pretty much told him to get on it.
I really didn’t think much of anything, except doing my ministry to the soldiers. Later on, of course, I found out that I had more damage than I thought—broken ribs, and my knee was destroyed. But we just did what we had to do that day. I was the only chaplain there at the time and the doc was one of two PAs that was there.
There were twenty-five killed in total, I think, but when I went to the area where some of the dead soldiers were, there were eleven black zipper bags. I unzipped the bags and looked at the ID dog tags to see if they were Christian, Jewish, or what. If they were Christian, I’d give them last rites according to my tradition. . . . “He departed this world, oh Christian soul, in the name of the Father who created you, in the name of the Son who redeemed you, in the name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you. May your rest be this day in the paradise of the saints and light.” I would just open the bag up enough, and make a sign of the cross on the forehead.
After we got done there, a couple of soldiers walked me down to the battalion aid station and I got cleaned up finally. I had one ruptured eardrum and a piece of shrapnel in my leg. I didn’t know about the broken ribs until later. In the meantime, the Iraqis fired rockets at the hospital. Time kind of stood still. I couldn’t stay outside anymore.
At the end of the day, we had a time to get together, a little time to reflect. Then we had a few days of memorial services for the civilians and soldiers that were killed. And then we’re going into Christmas Eve . . . and it was one of those times where we thought, “Well, now, what do we do?” So we had a candlelight service at seven p.m., and shortly thereafter, we decided we need to do something else. So we started going around caroling, and we started out with a few people from the seven o’clock service and we ended up with thirty or forty people, going around singing all the traditional Christmas carols. . . . “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” even “Jingle Bells” and stuff like that. We photocopied the words and we handed them out. It helped. People would come out of their rooms when we were singing and join us. They needed something. That night, a lot of the officers took over watchtowers so the enlisted soldiers could have the time off. And we got on the radio and we sang songs so that they could hear them at the towers.
I’m not sure who the suicide bomber was. I know that he was an insurgent Arab, but I don’t know if he was Iraqi or Saudi Arabian or Syrian or what. They found pieces of him
because he was all over the place. In fact, actually, the forensics put it together that he was sitting down in the chair back to back to Doc. So he was a distance between them, but his back was to Doc’s back. And the way he blew himself up, it looked like he was praying. I’ve heard that he might have been a Saudi Arabian medical student and that he may have been brought on base by a female interpreter—these are all speculations. I don’t know the truth. I don’t know how he got there. All I can tell you is he was in what we call a chocolate chip uniform. If you are familiar with the desert uniforms that the U.S. soldiers wore during Desert Storm, with the little chocolate chip-type pieces of brown in the uniform—that’s what he was wearing. Those uniforms are a dime a dozen on the market there.
The suicide bomber could have been a fanatic. He could have been on drugs, who knows what the story is? My feeling is that he’ll answer before God. When they get promised these seventy virgins, I kind of wonder about that one.
At one point I was irrationally mad at Arabs. I thought, How can anybody do this? I don’t care what tradition or faith group you are, if you believe that life is sacred, how can you commit something like that, to take the lives of so many people? But I don’t know, I just figure that, again, it’s in God’s hands and we all answer at some point.
I still hold a little animosity . . . a little anger toward Arabs. I probably was able to put peace to that when I was in the emergency room here, when the doctor came, and I found out he was Saudi Arabian. I didn’t know how I was going to deal with it. I didn’t say anything to him. I just looked at him and then I thought to myself, They’re not all alike. I see Dr. Ali quite often, and I don’t hold any animosity to him. Dr. Ali was probably one of the biggest things that snapped me out of it.
One of the other things that actually helped me through the whole time was, we were able to release one company at a time to go up into the Kurdish area and refurbish a hospital, build some medical clinics, and build some schools. The Kurdish people were wonderful up there. If we had somebody that was sick, they’d take them into their homes and take care of them and feed them. They’d invite us into their homes for a meal, they were just really good folks. If I was to make a general statement that all Iraqis are bad, that would be an injustice and a wrong comment to make, because there are some real good folks there.