by Trish Wood
I don’t think it’s ever for nothing. I think that the loss of life that we’ve had is tragic. The loss of life of the Iraqi people is tragic. But I’m going to look back to the good that we were able to do while we were there, to build medical clinics and schools, to upgrade a road, to refurbish a hospital. We had a program called Operation Adopt an Iraqi Village. We had thousands of boxes of stuff come over from all over the country; it was amazing the stuff that we could do with it. We were able to make some people pretty happy, and some children very happy that they could actually have something on their feet instead of running around in the cold, because it was snowing up there. And so it’s not for naught. It’s a difficult situation and I will always believe that we’ve done some good there. I really believe it. Not that I have to—I don’t have to believe anything. The events of December 21st are tough for me to deal with . . . even trying to forgive them for what they did to us. I do believe that my Heavenly Father is there to protect us, but sometimes the protection we receive from God isn’t what we expect.
“War turns you into what your
mother wishes you would
never be”
TRAVIS WILLIAMS
“THE FIGHTING DEAD”
325 LIMA COMPANY
4TH MARINE DIVISION
MARCH-OCTOBER 2005
HADITHA DAM
In high school I was an outdoorsy kind of introvert; I stayed to myself and I went backpacking every chance I had. I really was a big hippie. I smoked marijuana and I went rock climbing. In my junior year, I got a dog, and my dog and I would go backpacking every weekend that I didn’t have a hockey game. It was a mutt. It looked like a coyote. Her name was Kodiak and she was a good dog. Got her a little backpack and I loaded her down and then we’d go up hiking. It was fun. I’d sometimes skip school just to go hiking. I had my plans to go be a guide up in Nepal. I had big aspirations to go climbing these huge mountains. I liked being on my own; I liked being out in nature more than getting drunk at parties, but I did go to my fair share of high school parties and I was on the football team, I was on the hockey team, so I had tons of friends.
I like the seclusion of fly-fishing and the fact that it’s a skill because it incorporates river entomology and you need to have sense of the river and what its habits are. My dad’s a fly fisher and he passed away when I was eight. I felt the need to teach myself to fly-fish because he didn’t get the chance to. He left behind for me a bunch of books and fly-fishing materials and I would read those books even though I had no idea what half the words meant. I would study the books and sit there and try and tie even though I had no clue what I was doing. Once I was old enough to drive and I could get out there, I already had an understanding of it because of those books: what the river was like, what hatch was what. It’s, it’s totally serene. It’s like therapy, when you’re standing in the river, you know. Anytime I had a bad day I’d grab my rod and go out to the river where there’s no reason to feel bad.
After graduating from high school I was planning on going down to Patagonia and doing some ice climbing. Then one night I was watching a movie, Behind Enemy Lines, and I saw that part where the marines go and fetch their friend and all that, and I was like, wow . . . that’s pretty cool. So I went down to the recruiter’s office the next day to squelch my curiosity and the recruiter kind of pressured me, and when he got done giving me his spiel, he said, “Are you ready to sign up? Are you ready to be a marine?” This was December 21st, 2001, and I told him, you know, I need to go talk to my mom about it first and he said, “Well, you’re a grown-ass man, aren’t you?” And me with challenges do not mix well because I’ll always take them, so I said give me the pen and signed up right away and I didn’t go home that night because I was in the Military Entrance Program.
By the time I went to Iraq it was pretty clear there were no WMD. It was actually kind of funny, and I guess I could sum up our train of thought with this: One guy kicks in a door and we find a barrel of oil and he turns around and lifts it up and he’s like, “Woo hoo! We can go home now. We found it. We found the oil.” We joked around about it, but honestly, when I was over there, that’s all I thought we were there for, was just to protect our oil interests.
It’s frustrating being out there weeks at a time, kicking in doors and trudging through shit piles looking for old Russian weapons, and it gets very monotonous and it gets old, very fast. We were pissed about it, but there was nothing we could do. All the bitching in the world isn’t going to change the fact that you’re stuck in Iraq for the next seven months and so you almost have to turn it into a joke just to live with it.
We were posted to the Haditha dam. It’s huge and it dams up the Euphrates and it’s beautiful there, the best view in Iraq. You look south and there’s the Euphrates Valley with the river running through it. There are four or five cities all clumped into one area, Barwana, Haqlania. When you get to the dam you realize there’s a lot worse places we could have been stationed. We even went swimming in the reservoir behind the dam.
Our battalion’s mission was to disrupt insurgent movement up there—I guess, in essence, to set up roadblocks so that they had to go around; just make it harder for them to transport bombs and whatever. Honestly, I have no idea what we did. I think the only thing we did was create a detour for them to move in some other direction. It was retarded, and they’d have us clear these cities, which did absolutely nothing because you go through a city, you clear it out of all the weapons, you find a few things, they’ll leave behind some stuff, and then they’ll flee out in the desert while you’re clearing their city. They come back right at night because we don’t have enough people to stay there and hold the city. We leave right away and the insurgents flow back in. It’s like they were making up shit for us to do because there was no way that we could just be sitting around doing nothing.
Clearing cities entails grabbing all your platoons and loading them up in vehicles. You roll into town; you get out of your vehicles, get into your fire teams or squads, and you start pushing on line through the city. You stay in a straight line with everybody next to you and you just start clearing houses. And you go through every room in the house, scan it, check the rooftop, and once it’s clear, let the family go about their business and you move to the outside. The idea is to corner the insurgents or find a bomb or two, and then you get to the end and you load up your vehicles and you leave. And then you move on to the next house. When we started early, the first houses you do, it would be five in the morning; wake them up and they’d be startled and sometimes the kids would cry. Sometimes they were really friendly. Sometimes they were passive. Sometimes they were mean.
A cordon and search is a whole different mission. It’s to gain quick entry into the house and neutralize everybody inside, get them into one room, and start tearing the place apart looking for anything. A cordon and search is more of a raid-type operation.
At nighttime, we would stop our searches and we would stay on line, set up security on a rooftop, and that’s where we slept that night. We kicked the family out of the house, told them to go next door or go somewhere else. And we’d live out of their house for the evening and then move out in the morning. It sounds weird, but it’s just the norm. We made sure we’d leave money for them and we would not eat their food and we would clean up all the trash and burn it and usually we left it just the way it was when we entered.
There’s no way that you can go in repeatedly into these people’s houses, search through everything they own, put their women and their children in a room, you scare the crap out of them every morning, and honestly believe that you’re making anything better. Sometimes we offered medical aid to people who were sick, or we went in and fixed something, but for the most part I would say that searching these people’s houses constantly over and over, kicking them out of the house and staying in their house overnight and doing stuff like that, that just doesn’t win over the public opinion.
This was in Karabala, up north by the Syr
ian border. It was called Operation Spear, sometime in June of ’05. We were told the rules of engagement were pretty much killing anybody that’s in the city. Anybody that’s there, kill them because they’re bad. That’s just what they told us. That’s what our colonel told us . . . that is basically the ROE. Once you see somebody, take them out. We were clearing a house and myself and Major Toland were in the road, and we started getting shot at and so we ducked into a house. And then the fire was going over our heads and it was peppering the wall behind us. And then 1st squad, which was my squad, moved around one of their teams and they neutralized the enemy. And then we got reports that there was shooting from a mosque, or that they were using the mosque to run back and forth, traversing our lanes of movement.
And so we got cleared to go inside the mosque with the Iraqi Freedom Guard. There were three marines; there was myself, Major Toland, and Sergeant Hicks. And we’re just there, I guess to supervise them clearing the mosque. And we went in there, the mosque was clear, and outside the grounds there were two Iraqis yelling at each other from behind this wall. So I went around to go see what it was and as I went around the corner, about ten feet in front of me, under a tree, there was an insurgent lying there with a rifle. And he cocked his leg and he stood up to engage. And I took him out.
They don’t want us using front doors, and so we’re going through about twenty pounds of C4 a day per squad. C4 is the plastic explosive. We’re blowing holes through walls. We’re not moving down the streets—we’re moving through walls, through houses, because the doors are booby-trapped and this place has been fortified to be a final battle. As we get near the end of the city, we encounter more insurgents and the tanks are now engaging insurgents, so they’re shooting buildings and killing three or four insurgents.
About halfway through the city, we find there are actually families there with little kids. Not very many. I mean, we only ran into, I believe, two families. But they weren’t insurgents. And we didn’t kill them, obviously. Our intel was kind of false. But for the most part, everybody else that was in that city when we found them, after we shot them, they had weapons, they were Syrian. That was the good thing.
This mosque thing was actually a big deal because the guy was a Syrian who had just come over. And our platoon killed, I believe, three or four Syrians that had crossed the border. We found their passports, their train tickets. We found a bag in a house that had RPGs lined up along the walls, it had AKs, detonation cord, and it had this bomb-making material. There was a backpack, kind of like a little assassin’s backpack, with IDs from Sudan, Libya, Syria, Iran. Had all these passports. Had tickets, had everything. So we found all this evidence and that’s what we were going up there to look for, because basically the American public didn’t think that there were foreign fighters coming into Iraq to fight us. They just thought we were making that shit up. But we proved through this mission that there were foreign fighters. We fought with them in the streets and we found proof in paperwork that they were there.
And the thing with the Syrian fighters, you can tell they’re Syrian because they’ll sit there and fight you to the death. They’ll drug up before they go into a fight. They’ll take codeine and Valium and all this stuff. Because we pulled it off their bodies after we killed them. Valium, codeine, they got horse tranquilizers, all sorts of stuff because you’ll shoot, you can shoot a Syrian and you shoot him thirty, forty times before he’ll even drop. He’ll still be firing back at you because he’s on all these drugs and he doesn’t feel the pain.
That’s the difference between these guys—they’ll stand toe to toe in the middle of the street and no shit, just stand there and start shooting at you. And they won’t be afraid of getting shot. And you go down south, back into middle Iraq, and they’re cowards. They’ll shoot from behind windows or behind walls, and they’ll hide and they won’t show their faces, or they’ll just use IEDs because that’s easier. So going up north was actually kind of a treat for us because we actually got to fight our enemy face to face. That mission, it was a fun—it was fun, I guess. Just because we finally, we got cleared, you know, we got told that everybody in the city, whoever is left in the city is a bad guy. . . . They’d been bombing this city for the past three days. If anybody is left, they’re bad, take them out.
That’s what war does. War turns you into what your mother wishes you would never be.
A month prior to August 3rd, we were in the city of Hit. Our mission there was to clear the city and we were going to set up two firm bases inside the city for India Company from Al Asad to take over and hold. This was mainly because Hit had been a known grouping station for insurgents. They operated out of there regularly. And we wanted to clear them out and keep them out, so in order to do that we had to keep a constant presence inside the city. We got done clearing. It only took us about four days, but we stayed there for a month running squad-sized patrols three times a day and holding a position down by the bridge for a week at a time. Sometimes we’d have to fill sandbags all day. If you didn’t lose fifteen pounds there was something wrong with you. We came back looking like ghosts. We were eating next to nothing. It’s just that it was so hot you weren’t hungry. I basically lived off of Copenhagen and water the whole time. I lost a lot of weight. It was actually kind of nice because I thought I looked good. Six-pack.
We stayed out there, did patrols, and about four or five days before we left, one patrol—not from my platoon but weapons platoon—
went out and got hit with an IED and one of our corpsmen, Travis Youngblood, was killed. And then we headed back to the dam and our CO said that basically he was offered a choice to go back to Hit for our remaining two months of the deployment and operate around there, or go up north again for one more big battle up near the Syrian border. We all wanted to go up north. One last shot. Some people were adamant about it. Some people were gung ho about it. Just because we lost so many people up there that we wanted revenge. We wanted to get back at those guys up there. And so we were tasked in the meantime of waiting for this mission near the Syrian border at Al Qaim to just run security patrols around the Haditha dam.
We were running these POO patrols—point of origin patrols—because we were getting mortared a lot and we were continuously taking about five mortar attacks a week. They started getting better. There were points when they were walking mortars right outside our doors, right up the river.
On this one day they sent out a sniper team to a position further out from the dam to look for insurgent mortar teams, and basically what happened was the snipers were compromised, their position was given away. Our six snipers were inserted to their position by vehicle. And they hiked up on the backside of this hill and took a position up on top and they were overlooking the valley. There’s one thing about Iraq, once somebody sees you, everybody knows you’re there. Once you’re spotted in Iraq, once one of the villagers or the townspeople sees one of you, everybody knows you’re there. Once you start clearing houses, telephones start ringing. So I bet that it took maybe an hour for these insurgents to organize themselves into a little group and go attack the snipers.
We were out in the South Dam village, which is across the river from Barwana, where the snipers were. We were hearing gunshots from across the river. Now everybody is crowded around my radio listening to what’s going on. There was another team south of them, who was inserted the same way, and they were in a house. They were called by the first team for backup and they walked up on the carnage. We’re hearing them report that the first sniper team is dead. One’s missing. We don’t know where Boskovitch is at. And we’re listening to this because we’re on the same frequency of the battalion net. So right now, we’re thinking that Boskovitch is still alive and he’s a prisoner of war. There’s drag marks leading from the hill down through the sand to the road where the car took off.
So now they tell us to stay out there and the whole night we’re sitting out there and finally at around eleven o’clock they tell us to come back to the d
am. At that point Boskovitch had been missing for about five hours. There was a possibility that he had escaped. They thought maybe Boskovitch got away and that he was hiding somewhere waiting for someone to pick him up, waiting for nightfall to turn on an IR strobe and then get picked up. So we get called in and they tell us they’re going to send out small craft to pick us up on the river. As we are going down to the river, everybody puts on their NVGs and scans the banks of the river in case Boskovitch is still alive and he’s got a strobe going. We never found him, and later that night it comes across the radio that they found his body. They found his blouse but it was covered in blood and it was shot up. So he was most likely dead when they drug him off, but he had been killed further away from the rest of them, so he could have been making an attempt to get away. They drug him to a vehicle and drove him. I guess maybe they paraded his body around town and then dropped him off.
The next morning at seven o’clock we get woken up and they tell us to load up, because we are heading out to a staging area because we had to wait for all these people to come in before we could do this assault, which was called Operation Quick Strike . . . going into Barwana. We know that the insurgents have a lot of weapons that have good sights and that they have night vision because they took it from our sniper team that they killed. We just sat there and waited in this staging area and I think everybody’s mentality is that we are going into an ambush. We’re walking right into a big trap. Everybody is somber because we all knew those guys, those snipers. Everybody had worked with those guys.