You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  Finally, late that night, her computer buzzed with an incoming message. “Mom,” George typed from FOB McKenzie.

  “I am very relieved to hear from you,” she replied after running to the keyboard.

  “I am sorry.… Could not write or call until Mr. Lourey and Mr. Scott’s wives and children were notified,” George reported matter-of-factly, his way of telling her they had suffered losses.

  “Oh, my goodness. I felt it was probably your unit,” Ann wrote, letting him know she had heard the news. “It gave me a very rough time today.”

  George’s responses to her questions were clipped, almost without feeling. No banter about home, boating, rug shopping in the local bazaars, or Ann’s new life with Mike, his stepfather. He had been appointed to oversee the disposition of Josh Scott’s remains and to comb through his personal effects to prepare them for delivery to his wife, he told her. Ann tried her best to comfort him, but George deflected her attempts. He was in a different place right now. “You’ve never had anyone killed in the Army,” he wrote. “This is my second time.”

  Matt Lourey’s death hit him hard. The two of them had spent hours together in the cockpit, shoulder to shoulder, talking about home and what they would do when they got back. They had flown together over those very same orange groves just days before, one of nearly two dozen missions they had flown in the past two months.

  Matt, whose wife, Lisa, was an Army captain, had been groomed as the ultimate team player. He grew up one of twelve siblings in East Bethel, Minnesota, where his mother, Becky, was a state senator. She and his father, Gene, had four birth children, including Matt, and had adopted eight others, with each new adoption put to a family vote. But he was an unlikely warrior. Both his parents actively protested the Vietnam War. Matt’s mother, meanwhile, had circulated a petition around the Minnesota statehouse urging President George W. Bush not to invade Iraq in 2003. “The Bush administration’s stated goals of a potential war with Iraq, such as replacement of the Iraqi government, economic redevelopment of Iraq, disarmament of the Iraqi military, are as likely to be achieved without war as with war,” it concluded. She had even gotten Matt’s blessing beforehand. But all Matt Lourey had ever wanted to do was be a military pilot. When he was a boy, he donned a World War II aviator’s vest and white scarf to play the part. Gene tried unsuccessfully to talk his son out of a career in the military. When he volunteered for a second tour in Iraq, Matt said it was because his fellow soldiers needed him.

  Everyone in the squadron had a favorite story about him. George remembered the time that one of the soldiers who wore his Christianity on his sleeve started ranting about how he was going to kill all the Iraqis he could. Matt, his face buried in a manual, remained silent at first. Then, at just the right moment in the tirade, he peered over the top of the manual. “That’s very Christian of you,” he admonished the soldier, putting an abrupt end to the tirade. Now George couldn’t stop thinking of the picture Matt kept showing him of the two-seat convertible Pontiac Solstice that he was going to buy as soon as he got home. So much for that.

  George had other comrades he previously served with who were killed in the war. There were nine, in fact. Men like Captain George Wood of Utica, New York, a quiet guy who played football at Cornell University whom George had met during summer ROTC training. Wood was killed by a roadside bomb, not far from where Matt Lourey died, earlier in the war. There was also the twenty-three-year-old warrant officer Michael Blaise of Macon, Missouri, who served under George in Korea. He was killed when his Kiowa crashed near Mosul just days before the end of his tour, leaving behind his wife and high school sweetheart, an Army captain. But as tough as it was to hear about the losses of those men, whom he had lived and sweated with, George hadn’t been there when they were killed. Their deaths hadn’t touched him like Lourey’s—hadn’t been so close. The only consolation was that Matt probably didn’t suffer much. George learned later that the Kiowa had been flying in a downward direction at a pretty good clip when it was hit. Matt likely died almost instantly when the chopper hit the trees and burst into a fireball.

  As for Matt Lourey’s co-pilot on that fateful night, George had never flown with the twenty-eight-year-old warrant officer and father of three from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. But he had been one of his fiercest Xbox competitors back at the base.

  George was nearly overwhelmed with emotion at their loss, and he wasn’t prepared for the reaction of others in the squadron. The commander of the aviation brigade openly sobbed at a memorial service they all held for their brethren on FOB McKenzie a few days later. It was then that George couldn’t fight back the tears any longer. He had reached a crossroads with the deaths of his fellow pilots and now felt very differently about the war and his role in it. The official line on what they were trying to do here was constantly drummed into him—to bring stability to a war-torn nation and give it a chance to make democracy work—but he just didn’t believe anymore that the U.S. military could really do that. It probably never had a chance.

  “What did Matt Lourey and Josh Scott die for?” he thought as he lay awake in his bunk. What would he tell their families if they ever asked him? He didn’t have a good answer.

  “I am afraid.”

  The simple words, confided in an Internet chat to Ann one Sunday as she was getting dressed for church, summed up the mounting pressures weighing on George in the late summer as his tour entered the home stretch.

  There was the fear of death, of course, which had always been there. But now it felt as if insurgents were lurking around every corner, hiding on every rooftop, or preparing to fire at him from the camouflage of each palm grove. About a week after Lourey and Scott were killed, George and his co-pilot were flying over FOB McKenzie to test fire their guns when the “Guard” emergency channel squawked with a report of a downed aircraft in the area. As he flew in the direction of the reported coordinates, George relived in his mind the night his fellow pilots went down. His heart was pounding, every inch of his body seemed to tighten, and his mind raced with fear. What was he flying into?

  He breathed a sigh of relief when the report turned out to be a false alarm, and they returned to McKenzie. Yet he was troubled by how he reacted, how he had to fight off what was almost a mental and physical paralysis in the face of danger. The sense of foreboding also came from something else, he realized. George feared that he had given up his chance to live the life he really wanted—and for what?

  As he later sat at a computer and typed to Ann, his dreams of marriage and children felt further away than ever. First, he had set aside his desire as a young man to chart his own path away from the one that he felt had been chosen for him. Then, when he had committed to military service, he chose it over Viv. He had since set aside his personal goals in striving to achieve status and rank in the Army—goals he now confided that he doubted he would achieve in the end anyway. Now he feared it might be too late to have a more fulfilling life. He was only thirty-two, but he harbored a dark view of his future.

  George felt he was being chased by what he morbidly called the “GSE curse,” the bad genetics that had made victims of more than one George Senseny Eyster before their time—his father at the age of forty-nine and his great-grandfather General Eyster at the age of fifty-three. At his most recent flight physical, George’s cholesterol was over 220, and his blood pressure was also too high.

  “Just goes to show you,” he told his mother, “I better get the old family started soon. Or maybe not at all.”

  He had also put on a few pounds since the ground patrols had ended, and while he was trying to exercise regularly, he told her, there was little time with his frenetic schedule. Even when he could, he was frustrated at how difficult it was to go for routine runs. “This place is horrible … can’t find an even pavement in the whole damn country,” he complained.

  The long hours hunched over in the cockpit didn’t help his outlook on his health, either. Some missions flying up north lasted eight hours from the t
ime he took off and returned to base, and he had re-aggravated his old parachute-jumping injury. His back pain was now worse than ever.

  “Sitting in the same rigid position for five hours or more at a time is not the best for people with broken tails,” he wrote. He was now taking several narcotics prescribed by one of the military docs for the pain.

  “The tide is working against me,” he told his mother. “There are only so many years in a GSE’s life.”

  He had too much going for him to be so down, Ann wrote, trying to lift his spirits. His future was still so bright, and he would meet someone to share his life with.

  But he only grew more morbid. Even if he did meet someone, he responded, how much time would he have to enjoy it?

  “It’d be nice to get it all together … just in time to get dead.”

  Not even in Ranger School had George felt this depleted, both physically and mentally. He had an overpowering feeling of dread and a tightness in his chest, especially when he was about to go on a mission. For the first time he also regretted agreeing to the posting in Hawaii. He should have called it quits after this, like all those other officers who were heading for the exits in droves.

  “I’m not sure that I will not regret going to Hawaii,” he told Ann.

  It was clear to Ann that her boy’s commitment to the Army was at an all-time low and the Iraq experience was changing him.

  “I absolutely agree,” she responded.

  In conversations with his stepbrother, Scott, George was even more direct.

  “Hawaii better let me have a life or I am done.”

  A Gallup poll in the summer of 2005 showed that more than two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the way President Bush was handling the war and a strong majority agreed the country had “made a mistake” by invading Iraq. More than half, meanwhile, also believed the effort was not worth continuing. Even the parents of some dead U.S. soldiers were insisting that “Operation Iraqi Freedom” not be etched on the tombstones of their fallen sons and daughters.

  By late summer, as a bloody civil war raged, members of Bush’s own Republican Party were beginning to openly call for an American withdrawal. “We’re locked into a bogged-down problem, not dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam,” said Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Vietnam vet. “We should start figuring out how we get out of there.… I think by any standard, when you analyze two and a half years in Iraq, where we have put in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost almost 1,900 Americans, over 14,000 wounded, electricity production down, oil production down—any measurement, any standard you apply to this, we’re not winning.”

  Later, the retired Army general William Odom, another Vietnam veteran, who ran the National Security Agency during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, made headlines when he called the Iraq War the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history, far worse than Vietnam.” Also feeding the antiwar movement were reports that tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians had died since the invasion. By the fall, a British medical journal, the Lancet, was estimating that the civilian death toll since the war began was between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand. The headlines, when he paid attention to them, only fueled George’s own doubts about the mission he had volunteered for. “Don’t pay attention much to the news anymore,” he confided to Ann, “can’t get my hands around it mostly.”

  Despite all the good he and his fellow soldiers were trying to do, he could now understand why so many Iraqis viewed the Americans as occupiers whose motives were more sinister than simply removing the hated dictator Saddam Hussein. George, too, began to suspect that the United States was here for less valiant reasons. He couldn’t say with certainty what they were, but he felt it wasn’t simply to fight terrorism and build a more stable and free society.

  “They don’t think we are here solely to liberate Iraq and keep the world safe,” he told Ann. “I don’t either. It’s just part of it.”

  In July he got word he would be moving again, this time up north, where the war had spread from the Sunni Triangle. From what he was hearing, the Kiowa pilots flying up there were taking a beating.

  “Mosul is the next Fallujah,” he told Ann.

  “Stay away from Mosul, then,” his mother advised.

  “I’ll be going to Mosul next month.”

  The most prominent landmark that George could see circling over Mosul was the ruins of the ancient walled city of Nineveh, on the eastern bank of the Tigris River. The massive stone and mud brick gates of the Assyrian capital stood as a constant reminder that the animosities playing out below were as ancient as man itself. A review of his Bible reinforced George’s belief that this place was cursed. Nineveh had been the wonder of the ancient world and its fall the theme of the prophets. It was here that Jonah prophesied in the Hebrew Bible against the city’s inhabitants “for their great wickedness.” Now, twenty-five hundred years later, the words of another Old Testament prophet Zephaniah still seemed to apply to the violent crush of humanity George could see below him: “He will stretch out his hand against the north and destroy Assyria, and will make Nineveh a desolation and dry waste like a wilderness.”

  There had once been hope for Mosul. In the months after the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s third-largest city had been a bastion of relative stability and a point of pride for American generals when Baghdad and other cities were being looted and the insurgency was gaining strength in the Sunni Triangle. Now, more than two years later, Mosul’s fault lines were fully exposed. It was considered Iraq’s deadliest city, where a lethal mix of Iraqi insurgents and Islamic terrorists was waging war on the U.S.-led coalition and, increasingly, the Iraqi people.

  American reinforcements were locked in a desperate struggle against at least three different groups mounting suicide attacks, planting roadside bombs, and ambushing U.S. troops from their hideouts in Mosul’s labyrinth of concrete apartment blocks, mosques, and garbage-strewn streets. First, there were the holdouts from the toppled regime. More than a third of Saddam Hussein’s officers were Sunnis from Mosul, and considerable Army infrastructure was left to draw upon, including weapons stockpiles. Mosul was also now the headquarters of the outlawed Baath Party that had run Iraq under Saddam and still clung to the hope of restoring the party to power through a guerrilla war. It was in Mosul where Saddam’s two sons had been tracked down and killed by U.S. troops. The Sunni population, living mostly in the western part of the city, had largely been implanted there by Saddam Hussein and was helping to stir the cauldron.

  At the same time, the city had become a base of operations for terrorists inspired by al-Qaeda who had fled the Sunni Triangle or slipped in from neighboring Syria to recruit from a population suffering from unemployment as high as 75 percent. Yet still another well-armed foe was the Shia Muslim militias that intelligence reports suggested were financed and armed by neighboring Iran.

  In this environment, Kiowas were particularly vulnerable. The previous September a Kiowa had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile, several more had been hit by RPGs, and a number of pilots were wounded or killed when they struck electrical wires. There had also been a host of crashes due to mechanical problems.

  George, darting in and out of Mosul’s neighborhoods to come to the aid of ground troops, was regularly shot at as he watched the flashes of IEDs exploding in the streets below.

  On a sweltering morning in early August, George and his co-pilot, Joey Moorhouse, were sitting side by side in the cramped cockpit of their Kiowa flying low over the Tigris River through Mosul. Their mission for the next few hours was to be on standby to provide air cover for ground units conducting operations in the sprawling population center. Strapped to the right leg of George’s flight suit was a “knee board”—a tri-fold with a small notebook for making quick flight calculations and jotting down notes. Tucked inside was his good luck charm: a snapshot of him and his mom taken a few years earlier during a birthday dinner at Bud and Alley’s, a seaside restaurant in the Florida Panhandle tha
t was one of their favorites.

  The pilots were winding their way north, following the greenish-blue waters of the Tigris, when an urgent message came over the radio. An American patrol in the al-Yarmouk neighborhood in the western part of the city had been fired on near the main traffic circle, and at least one soldier had been shot. Two men fled the scene in a black Opel sedan and were being chased through the cluttered streets by heavily armored 4×4 troop carriers from the First Battalion of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division. George quickly punched in their reported position and headed for the scene.

  Within a few minutes, visible through the cockpit glass up ahead were the clouds of dust being kicked up by the Americans’ eight-wheeled Strykers. George spoke into the headset to Lieutenant Colonel Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the senior officer on the scene, who was riding in one of the armored vehicles. George reported that he had the sedan in sight, and Kurilla ordered him to stick with it.

  The Kiowa was flying at top speed, but the sedan was outrunning George and his co-pilot on the straightaways. They were able to catch up only when the car slowed down to turn onto another street or into an alley.

  “It’s going about 105 miles per hour,” George estimated.

  Kurilla radioed back with orders to use force to stop it.