What Was Asked of Us

by Trish Wood

  We sat around all day listening to music in this house at the staging area. It was our whole company. We talked about how close we were to getting home and we knew that the next morning we had to get up and start this assault. I don’t think very many people got that much sleep, just knowing what we were walking into. The following morning we woke up at four. We loaded up on the tracks and we were just sitting there waiting for about an hour before everybody was ready to go. And we got all the vehicles lined up and the order of march and everything ready to do this assault.

  And about five minutes before we took off, myself and Major Toland get pulled out of that vehicle that we were in with 1st squad, and this is the first time in the whole deployment that I haven’t ridden with 1st squad. And we get told we’re riding with the Iraqis in the lead vehicle because the section leader changed. And so we get pulled out of the track and we start moving.

  We’re staying off the roads because everybody knows that those roads are lined with IEDs. But the Iraqis that are with us, their vehicles aren’t as good as ours, so they’re getting stuck in the sand and it’s taking way too long. So our CO says, Go on the road, the tanks cleared it yesterday. So the tanks called back to us and told us that the roads were clear because they had been driving on them all day yesterday.

  Right as we make the turn to go into Barwana, I’m sitting in the back of the vehicle and I hear a huge explosion, and I think our track is the one that’s hit because we were right in front of them. I look up at the Iraqi in the track with us and I can see in his glasses, the big ball of flames, the reflection off his glasses. Our track pulls over and I’m thinking, Goddamn, I’m lucky. That IED just hit us and we’re still alive.

  I get out of our vehicle and I’m on the radio and everybody is trying to talk to me like, what’s going on, what’s going on. I look back and there’s a track flipped upside down, ripped open. There’s bodies lying all over and it’s burning and it just looked like a pile of garbage burning. There’s rounds that were inside because these tracks are filled with .50 caliber rounds, they’re filled with a box—we called it the boom box—that we carried all our extra grenades and flares and everything in. All this stuff is cooking off inside what’s left of this carcass of the track. And we don’t know which squad got hit. It’s still up in the air. And I’m just staring at it and thinking a lot of people just died. It turned out it was fourteen.

  I see 3rd squad sitting there and now I know it’s either 1st or 2nd squad that got hit. I see 2nd squad roll in and some of the 3rd squad guys are sitting there crying. Sergeant Osborne, he’s squad leader for 2nd squad, comes up and he’s crying and he’s talking to Major Toland. Saying, There’s nothing I could do. I tried. That’s when I knew that it was my squad and my heart just hit the floor. Then they came across the radio and they’re asking for the names of everybody who was killed. So I start reading them off on the radio and I can’t even finish. I can’t . . . I can’t finish.

  And Major Toland takes the radio from me and he starts finishing off the names. And then we heard kind of a faint screaming. We can hear somebody yelling, so somebody’s still alive back at the crash site because it’s about fifty yards away. I get on the radio and I call over to the light armored reconnaissance unit that’s sitting up on the hill waiting for us to assault. I call them because they’re the closest ones to them and tell them, Hey, get down there and get that guy. It was the driver, Christopher Borne, and he was badly burned. He was crawling and screaming and we were sitting up there and then the rounds were still cooking off, so nobody wanted to get near the vehicle, but I called my guys and they came down and grabbed him and threw him in the back of the vehicle and started giving him aid.

  He was medevaced out. Everybody else is KIA. Everybody else is dead. I could see from where I was that there were torsos, SAPI plates, the armor plates were all over. There were body parts everywhere. Second squad walks out there. They put blankets over the dead bodies so the dogs wouldn’t eat them. I just sat by myself for a little bit and just kind of, just cried, just broke down.

  I felt kind of alone in the world. In one fell swoop everything had been taken from me, and now the survivor’s guilt is kicking in and this overwhelming feeling of, Jesus Christ, you were in that fucking vehicle not five minutes before it blew up. All I know is that it was a bomb. It was an IED. Somebody either placed it there or set it off when they drove over it. And that’s all that matters to me.

  A lot of the parents were asking me all these details about it. Was it trigger detonated or was it pressure detonated? And to me it was trigger detonated, because the tanks had been driving over it the whole day the day before. This was a huge bomb. They had a fucking plate underneath that was dug in with propane tanks and African rockets. It was just an enormous bomb.

  I was angry at the higher-ups for not thinking out the mission. I was angry at our CO for putting us back on the road when the Iraqi vehicles got stuck because, you know, as shitty as this sounds, hey, if they can’t make it in the sand, then put them on the fucking roads, because our vehicles can travel in the sand, so why the fuck do we all have to go on the goddamn road because one vehicle’s getting stuck? Put that motherfucker on the road and if he blows up, hey, they’re Iraqis, they’re not me and they’re not my friends. That’s the reality of how I was thinking. I was pissed off and I was angry and I was confused and I was lonely. I missed Reed, who was my best friend in the unit. Every time we go firm in a place, I was waiting for Reed to come over so we could share a dip and bullshit, you know, and, and it’s just that those times aren’t ever going to happen again. I loved him like a brother and we had all these plans for when we got home and just realizing that I wasn’t going to have that again, to see his goofy smile. He was next to me in the vehicle when I left so I’m guessing that he would be on the, like, on the radio side, right by the radio. I don’t know where everybody moved to, once I moved.

  Nobody had a chance. Nobody, that’s the thing I find comforting. They were probably asleep except for the two people up on watch, and it was such a big explosion that nobody felt a lick of pain. They probably didn’t even know what hit them.

  I used to make fun of some of the guys that were more religious, asking, Why aren’t you going to take responsibility for yourself? After my squad was blown up I thought maybe there is a God and this is his fucked-up way of punishing me for all the blasphemy and all the times I put my self-righteous ass above him. All my friends, all my family, is gone. He did all this and he left me here to fight. He left me here to talk to the parents, to pick up all the pieces, to be the last one here, when out of everybody I should have been the first one to get blown the fuck up. Maybe my survival is a punishment.

  I never once asked God to help me out in this situation; I never once looked to him, because Eric Bernholtz did, he was like our preacher of the squad, you know. The kid would never hurt a fly and he read his Bible constantly, and one time he shot up a car because it was coming up on our position and he ended up shooting and wounding a couple girls and he felt so horrible about it. And if that’s what God is going to do to people who respect and follow, then that just pisses me off.

  I think my life would be a lot easier if I had died with my squad, if you know what I mean. It’s a shitty algorithm of life that I got left in the mix. I can drink myself into the ground and turn into fucking nothing or I can take this experience and build off of it and tell the story. I can honor their memory through living my life better because of that, instead of going the route of “somebody owes me something.” I was at that point when I got home. I thought people should fucking feel sorry for me and if I want to drink, then that’s what I’m going to do, but I realize that nobody owes me anything and it was my choice to go to Iraq and what happened, happened. Sitting around in a bar killing myself is not going to bring those guys back and it’s not going make their parents any more happy.

  I have volunteered to go back to Iraq. Over there you have a constant flow of adrenaline becau
se every time you leave the wire there’s always a thought that you could get hit with a mortar round. Here, you’re in a safety net and it’s just boring going through everyday life, and it doesn’t excite me and it doesn’t make me feel alive. I feel like I’m dead back here. I don’t agree with the war, but I guess I like it. I like the feeling of being there and I like the feeling of danger.

  I don’t know. I’m not going to go there and try and get myself killed, but I don’t think I would have any doubts about running headfirst into a room with guns blazing at you. I feel that after my whole squad was blown up, every day that I’ve had since is more or less bonus points. People ask, “Aren’t you afraid of dying?” or “Aren’t you pushing your luck going back there again?” I am pushing my luck, but I’m not afraid of dying and I wouldn’t have any remorse if I did. I hope that someday I will get rid of this feeling. I don’t want to make a career out of being in a war zone, you know.

  “I didn’t get my happy ass

  blown up . . . That is what

  winning is now”

  DANIEL B. COTNOIR

  MORTUARY AFFAIRS

  1ST MARINE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

  FEBRUARY-SEPTEMBER 2004

  SUNNI TRIANGLE

  MARINE CORPS TIMES “MARINE OF THE YEAR”

  No one wants to lose their innocence, but I wouldn’t take mine back. Once you’re into the marines you always want to be at war. It’s part of the brainwashing. Me and my buddies always talked about how there’s nothing wrong with the guys who were lucky enough to serve during peacetime. There’s guys that did four years, eight years, ten years and never saw a war in their time, and good on them. But when you’re in, you get to the point where you either go to war and use the training you spent years getting, and you win the medals and all that happy shit, or you are a retired marine who never went to war. I never wanted to be one of the guys who never went to war, so I guess I got what I wanted in Iraq. I’m not sorry I went over.

  I do wish that it was more of a Desert Storm scenario, though. I do wish it was more of a fast-paced, less losses on our side, just go in and kick ass and take over a country. There is no endgame in this war. There’s no “When we reach this place, we win,” or, like in World War II, When we take Berlin, or when we take Tokyo, we win. There’s no endgame to it.

  It’s like, we win—win what? Win if they have elections? Well, they did it. Do we win when they get their own military back? Do you want them to have their own military back? At what point do I get to say I fought in a war and we won? The way people look at it now is that they win if they survive their tours. I went to Iraq, my job was to pick up the bodies, and we picked up 182, and no one was left behind, and that means I won. None of my marines got killed. My commanding officer made it through. We made it through. We got very well decorated for our tour of duty compared to most. So we won. We won the war. At least we won our part of it.

  I can remember when we were over there, there was the handover of sovereignty or something, and I can remember we had it marked on our calendar in the unit because we thought that would be a fucked-up dangerous day and that everything’s going to get blown up. They didn’t tell anybody and they bumped it up three days or so and so it went off without a hitch and we thought, Well, that’s not so bad, but we are also thinking, The country’s back in Iraqi hands, so now what are we doing?

  And then the next tour of duty comes and it’s the same thing. As long as we get back, we win. But, you know, we’ve got guys on their third fricking tour of duty. How many times do you want to push your fucking luck that you can go, “Hey, as long as we get there and get back”? It’s gone from liberating a country to guys saying after their second or third tour, “My whole unit got home and I didn’t get my happy ass blown up, so we’re doing good.” That is what winning is now.

  “Hopefully I provided

  some relief”

  MARIA KIMBLE

  COMBAT AND OPERATIONAL STRESS CONTROL OFFICER IN CHARGE

  APRIL 2005-APRIL 2006

  TALL AFAR

  I knew from my experience in the army before I became a psych specialist in the National Guard that a lot of young people who come into the military have issues. Being in that environment, and not having any real friends when they come in and no family close by, they just get into a lot of trouble. I had lived in the barracks because I was single, and I noticed there was a lot of drinking, a lot of people just sleeping around, and at that young age it seemed that they were looking for comfort and connection. When you go into the army you are taken away from all your support. I knew I wanted to help these people.

  Looking at myself, I came from a small town and a divorced family. My father was an alcoholic, and I think other people like me joined the military to escape and start a new life. However, when you get in, so many people are like that that you can connect with the wrong group instead of taking advantage of what the military has to offer. They can easily be sucked into the alcoholism and the solitude of the military.

  I think my father’s alcoholism helped me. I took a lot of the negatives from my home environment, and instead of being sucked into and living my life like that, I went the opposite way; that’s not the way I want to be and I wanted to help other people to not be that way. It helps that I can share my own background when I talk to someone who grew up in an alcoholic household. I can say, “You know, I’m not all that, but I grew up that way too and I did OK.”

  The way I ended up in Iraq was that I had just come back on active duty after working at the Central Texas VA and facilitating a PTSD group. I was hearing stories from Vietnam veterans and other veterans and seeing how their experiences were still affecting them twenty, thirty, forty years later, to the point that when they were telling me stories they were breaking down in tears. That was the first time I’d ever been with a group that had been actually diagnosed with PTSD, they truly had it, and it just made it real to me. Some of them had turned to drugs and alcohol. Some had been financially ruined and lost their families. It made me hope that I would be deployed as a social worker on a combat stress control team in Iraq and then be able to go as far forward as possible. I thought if I could just be there when trauma happens and help people talk about it and bypass all that hurt, that would be better.

  At the time I was sent to Tall Afar, it was extremely hot because it was close to the Syrian border and insurgents were coming over the border and taking over the town, almost like Falluja. The Department of Defense decided it needed to get a whole regiment up there and take care of the city, clean it out, because voting was about to take place because it was December of ’05. There was only a squadron—which is about eight hundred people—but about a week after I got there we learned that 3rd ACR is all moving up, which is about five thousand soldiers. My unit was like, “Well, you’re it, so take care of them.” They came in and it was overwhelming to me. Luckily, because I had been in the army before, I was comfortable approaching commanders and asking for help in setting up shop.

  Soldiers were going outside the wire every day and I was probably there two weeks when I experienced my first day. It was late in the evening, about nine or ten o’clock, and I remember I was in the dining facility eating dinner, and one of the medics came and said, “We need your assistance at the TMC, a soldier has been shot.” They brought him in on a tank and carried him into the troop medical clinic. He was shot by a sniper in Tall Afar. At that time it hit me that this is real, it’s real. In that situation you just make yourself available in case the soldiers want to talk. The soldiers who carried the soldier into the camp were all distraught, very emotional. They were crying, bawling, wailing, and asking things like, “Why, why him?” Immediately I just felt helpless, seeing all these male soldiers just breaking down. I was just wondering, What do I do? Even the chaplain was wondering what to do. It was a platoon and they were using each other for support. The next day I introduced myself to the command and we arranged a critical-event debriefing. That was my first one.
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  Their feelings were a mix of sadness and grief and anger. They just experienced an insurgent killing not only their coworker but friend, so they were very angry. Why him? He was one of the better guys. He’d do anything for you. They would get into not only what happened at the incident and how they were feeling, but they would reflect on the soldier. It was just very emotional and touching for me. I feel very fortunate about what I experienced.

  This was a bad event in the sense that the majority of the soldiers in his platoon witnessed it. It happened in a building that they were using for rest and recovery while they were in the city patrolling. They would go to this building and either take a nap or play cards. They had guards around the building, but the soldier was walking through the hallway to go down the steps, and through the window a sniper shot him and it hit him in his head. Soldiers witnessed this and they said it played as in slow motion. He fell to the ground and basically his head exploded, and they explained that the brains were all over the floor and there was gray matter and how it was so surreal, and then they went into further details and each one of them almost replayed it the same way and then shared how it affected them. I was amazed because I didn’t think they would talk.

  I did see him on the stretcher for a brief moment and then he was pronounced dead. That night when I went to sleep and a few nights after that I would shut my eyes and I would get a visual of what they explained. I would get all teary-eyed and ask myself, “Why are we here? Why do soldiers have to die like this? What’s the purpose?” I just started questioning myself. It affected me pretty hard.

  The chaplain and I used to talk to each other. When you do a critical-event debriefing the rule is to always have two people there; so he felt comfortable with conducting critical-event debriefings, so we would do them together, and after each critical-event debriefing we would debrief ourselves.