October 29, 2004
Akintade had been dead for only a few hours, but I had to put it out of my mind. It was my first time leading a raid and I was nervous as hell. I wasn’t the actual leader of the raid—I wasn’t in command—but since I had done the recon for the mission, I was in the lead Humvee of the convoy, directing the vehicles into town on the route I had chosen during the planning of the mission.
The intelligence we had was very explicit. We had the name and a photograph of the man we were looking for, and an informant had confirmed from a photograph the exact gate of the target house. It was in the center of town, a typical urban environment, dense with buildings. I knew the streets fairly well where the target house was, but I wasn’t completely familiar with the road we would be taking to get there from the main street of the town. During my recon I had noticed a large tree at the corner of the street where we needed to turn, and I knew its exact GPS grid location, but despite all this data I was still worried I’d miss the turn.
It was early in the morning and still dark, and from my seat in the Humvee, my view of the landmark tree on the other side of the street would be obscured. I was obsessively watching the grid numbers on the GPS, and judging from them I knew we were getting close to our turn. The intersections were pretty close together, and the numbers on the GPS were changing rapidly. I knew it would be easy to make a mistake if I went solely off those numbers. At the next street I asked the gunner in the turret, “Is there a tree to your left—a really big tree?” The tree I was looking for was tall but it was behind some buildings. The gunner said, “Tree? What? Uh, yeah, there’s a tree.” He had no idea what I was talking about, and I couldn’t see anything. Fuck. I told the driver to take the turn and then I realized it was the wrong one. Fuck, fuck fuck. The whole convoy was snaking behind us. I started to panic. I had no idea where we were. “Fuck! This is the wrong turn. Um, keep going,” I told the driver. At the end of the road there was a T-intersection with a building that had a long horizontal fluorescent light on it. Wait, this looked familiar. I recognized the light from the photographs. The house we were looking for was on the same street as this building. I was relieved. But this meant we’d be approaching the house from the opposite direction from the one I had planned. The sergeant who would be leading the teams in was in my Humvee. I told him the mistake I had made and that we’d be hitting the house from the opposite direction. He told me, “Don’t worry about it, it’s fine. We can adjust.” His simple reassurance helped me get my mind back on track.
This was the first mission Willy and I had ever been on together. He and Kirk were the breach team and would be breaking down the door to the house. Without any more wrong turns, we arrived at the target location. A hook and chain was attached to the top of the gate, and the gate was pulled open by a Humvee. Once the double doors of the gate had burst apart, the teams quickly filed into the courtyard. The entrance to the house was a heavily reinforced metal door that Willy and Kirk immediately started pounding away at with the breach tools while the teams lined up alongside it and waited anxiously.
On a perfect raid, the front door is breached in only a few seconds. This particular door was stronger than any I had seen, and it looked like Willy and Kirk had a ways to go. Then the family who lived there started to come out a side door we hadn’t even noticed, probably to see what the hell was going on. This kind of tunnel vision is a common mistake made during missions, where you get so fixated on one thing—in this case, breaching the front door—and you fail to see alternatives.
The family was corralled into the courtyard and the house was searched. This was one of the nicest houses we had been in. We found no weapons other than one AK-47, clean, well oiled, and legal for them to have. The man of the house was a doctor and certainly not the man we were looking for. Hitting the wrong house is, unfortunately, a common mistake made on raids, so I double checked everything. I went out to the street and looked at the front gate as well as the address on the wall. I went to the nearest Humvee and checked the grid location on the GPS. This absolutely was the house we were supposed to hit. Mike was in charge of this raid, and once he realized this was not the man we wanted, he asked me tensely, “Are you sure this is the right house?” I looked him in the face and said, “I’m positive.”
My only guess is that someone purposely gave us bad information, perhaps envious of a family who had money, knowing we would break into this man’s home and detain him until we got things sorted out. This was not a happy time for us, and getting negative results on an otherwise well-planned raid was totally frustrating. It had been less than twenty-four hours since Akintade had been killed; he was our company’s first casualty. It was still not real to me, someone I’d known for years suddenly just…gone. I wanted a moment of reprieve to think about it, and to grieve, I suppose, but we had been working nonstop since it happened.
October 31, 2004
REMEMBERING AKINTADE
The memorial service held at our base for Akintade was really good. A company formation was held outside our tactical operations center in front of a small platform with a display of boots, a rifle, and a helmet to symbolize a fallen soldier. Ceremonies held in a combat zone are usually an undisciplined mess, but this one, for the most part, was a rare and touching exception.
Shortly before the ceremony began, two helicopters landed with the brigade commander, the brigade sergeant major, and their entourage. The moment the helicopters landed, several soldiers rushed out from them and formed a perimeter around the helicopters, all down on one knee with their weapons at the ready. (This security detail never ceases to amuse me. The helicopters with the brigade leadership land on a U.S. military base, but they still deploy their own security team.) After the imperial guards were in place, the leaders majestically stepped off the birds and were followed by a motley band of mismatched soldiers—some short, some fat, some female—all carrying strangely shaped black cases of different sizes.
As we stood in formation waiting for the ceremony to begin, the brigade sergeant major took a moment to check us out. Sergeants major are usually the torch bearers for standards, and they take uniformity very seriously. This one was no exception. Every time he visited us he wore knee pads, elbow pads, and yellow-tinted ballistic glasses. We were required to wear knee pads and ballistic eyewear for every mission—something that was a never-ending source of complaints from soldiers who wanted to configure their gear at their own discretion—but elbow pads were optional, and no one ever wore them. But this sergeant major was a stickler for maximal protective gear. For any other formation we would have been wearing our typical combat gear, where each soldier might look a little different—some with goggles on their helmets, different styles of modular pockets to hold ammunition on their vests, various types of slings on their weapons, and so forth. But for this formation we made sure each soldier looked as uniform as possible. One of the things we had done was to remove everything from our helmets except for the black plate on the front where night-vision goggles are mounted. After the sergeant major informally looked us over, he stood in front of the display on the platform. He then pulled our first sergeant aside and told him that we were not uniform. Everyone in formation had the black plate for their night-vision goggles on their helmets, but the helmet on the display to represent Akintade didn’t. The sergeant major insisted that either everyone in the formation unscrew and remove the plates from all their helmets (not a simple task considering the number of screwdrivers we’d need) or we affix one to Akintade’s. I couldn’t believe that he was serious. I wanted to murder him on the spot. To play this game any other time was one thing, but to do it at our friend’s memorial service was tactless and tasteless. I was furious. I knew these clowns were going to ruin this. The memorial was in honor of Akintade, but it wasn’t really for his sake, it was for us, the soldiers—something you do to get a sense of closure and to begin the process of accepting the loss. Psychologically I needed this ceremony. The loss of Akintade was so abstra
ct to me, and something about a memorial made me feel better—that his death was now something official and concrete. It felt good to have a chance to formally show my respect for him, and in a sense to say goodbye, and now this guy was fucking with it. Before I had a chance to murder the sergeant major, someone found a spare night-vision plate and it was hastily glued onto the display helmet.
A pair of speakers had been set up along with a microphone and a lectern for those who would be speaking. I was pretty sure we didn’t have a bugler in the battalion, and I felt it unfortunate that taps would probably be played over the speakers from a CD. Ray told me a story once about when he was on a funeral detail. At the end of the ceremony, when it came time to play taps, the CD was queued to the wrong song and reveille was accidentally played instead. I hoped this wouldn’t happen.
When the ceremony began, the chaplain gave a prayer and read a few words, as did a few of our leaders. Two soldiers from our platoon read eulogies for Akintade, one of which I was proud to have helped write. There was also a well-executed twenty-one-gun salute led by Chris. The soldiers who were part of the salute had practiced the procedure for hours the day before, despite the fact that when it was performed at the ceremony they were behind barriers and completely out of sight from everyone in the formation. I found this gesture to be particularly thoughtful. To insist on doing something well even though no one is watching is the definition of integrity, and appropriate to symbolize the life of Akintade.
During the moment of silence, I couldn’t stop thinking about how of all the soldiers to be killed, it was sadly ironic for it to have been Akintade, because he was more empathetic toward the Iraqis than any other soldier in our platoon. There have been times when I’ve witnessed locals treated without as much respect as they deserved, and I am a little embarrassed to say that I never spoke up. It’s not easy to tell another soldier, “Hey, go easy on that guy,” for fear that your sympathy will be seen as weakness. But Akintade was unafraid to insist that everyone be treated with dignity.
Taps began to play, and it was beautiful. I was standing at attention with my eyes fixed on the horizon, and I thought, Wow, those must be some incredible speakers because if I didn’t know better I’d say it was being played live. I glanced toward the sound of the music and was shocked when I saw a complete five-piece brass section, including a tuba! (The imperial guards had now formed their defensive perimeter around the musicians.) It was such a bizarre sight, but what made it especially surprising was that the musicians were phenomenal. After taps, they played “Amazing Grace.” The performance was sublime. There was a slight breeze that carried the music, and I didn’t want it to end.
I had known Akintade for years, but I didn’t know him very well. He was a very private person and kept much of his personal life to himself. Very few people (including me) knew he had a fiancée. He was an immigrant from Nigeria and had the last name Okiwobe (oh-kih-WHOA-bee) when I first met him. It was a difficult name to remember, so most the guys called him “Obi Wan.” When he changed it to Akintade (ah-kin-TAH-dee), his mother’s equally difficult maiden name, I thought it was pretty funny. So I made up a short song for him that I loved to sing when he was around, even though he hated it:
Akintade (Sung to the tune of “Istanbul [Not Constantinople],” by They Might Be Giants)
Akintade was once called Okiwobe
Why he changed it I can’t say
Maybe he liked it better that way
Something that always bothered me a little is that Akintade thought I didn’t like him. During the first few months of our deployment, while we were still at Fort Drum, I was having a hard time getting the respect I needed from some of the soldiers in my squad and platoon, and it was making my life very difficult. One morning, after I had just woken up, I was standing in the hallway outside my barracks room door in a particularly bad mood, contemplating how I was only two months into what would be an incredibly long deployment with a platoon full of know-it-all assholes, when Akintade walked by, slapped me hard on my ass, and said in his jolly, booming voice, “Good morning, Sergeant!” He had a habit of sometimes doing this when he walked by me. He would usually do it pretty hard, which made for a nice loud SLAP! and it would always scare the bejesus out of me. Since I had just gotten out of bed, the only thing protecting my ass was a thin pair of Kermit the Frog pajama pants. Normally this wouldn’t have bothered me—I’ve always found ass-slapping to be hilarious, something I like to do a bit of myself—but on this occasion his timing was really bad. The slap was loud as hell, I might as well have been bare-assed, and there were a lot of sniggering witnesses. For the past week I had been trying to wean him from slapping my ass so much, but this time my patience was depleted. I shouted down the hall at him to drop and give me twenty I’ll-stop-slapping-your-ass-sergeant push-ups. I was pissed, and it was apparent to him. I usually avoid publicly punishing soldiers, but since the ass-slapping incident was public, I made the punishment public. I felt horrible doing it, but I thought it important to curtail the notion that I was someone whose ass could be slapped. Later in the day, a few guys from his squad told me he thought I hated him. This just made me feel worse. I wanted to apologize to him, but I couldn’t. To apologize to a soldier for disciplining him is patronizing and wishy-washy. I had to stick to my guns. The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t believe I was spending so much time thinking about something I should never have given a second thought. He never slapped me on the ass again. He also hardly ever spoke to me again.
Something I learned from Akintade is that when you get frostnip on your toes, it’s best to warm them on the stomach of someone who is a little flabby. Our company was at a weapons range late one freezing night at Fort Drum, and a lot of guys were starting to get cold-weather injuries. My feet were colder than they had ever been before, and I couldn’t feel my toes. A lot of guys were in the same boat I was, so Joel, our medic, made us go into a small heated room, take off our boots and socks, and place our feet on another guy’s bare belly for twenty to thirty minutes. I wasn’t very excited about putting my feet on some dude’s stomach, but I got over it instantly once I realized how well it worked. Joel knew he wasn’t going to get many volunteers for belly duty, so he would go outside and grab the nearest innocent bystander and command him to surrender his belly. I was given one guy for a little while, but when Joel checked my feet he said they were not warm enough yet. Rather than use the poor guy who had already endured twenty minutes of my stinking frozen feet, he grabbed Akintade to pull the second tour of duty. Akintade had an incredible physique, and I always swore that if I had a body like his I’d be a merciless womanizer. The first guy had been a little on the soft side, and my feet had sunk nicely into his pillowy gut. But Akintade’s abs were lean and flat, which made for less surface area for my feet. He wasn’t very comfortable with this duty and kept laughing nervously. But every time he’d laugh, his stomach would take on the shape of a cobblestone road, making it even less effective for feet warming. I told him to stop laughing and to relax his stomach because his stupid chiseled abs weren’t warming my feet very well. This just made him laugh more. I eventually gave up, relieved him of his duty, and put my boots back on.
I didn’t see Akintade the morning he died, so I had to think for a while before I remembered when I had last talked to him. The night before he was killed, I was at my bunk sitting in front of my laptop when Santo, one of our platoon’s machine gunners, came over to ask me a question. While we were talking, Akintade also came over to ask Santo something. Santo and Akintade were the two primary machine gunners for our platoon, and I had always found it very humorous that they also both possessed, by far, the largest penises in the platoon—something that was a common topic for jokes among the guys. Even though Akintade slept on a bunk less than twenty feet across the room from me, this was the first time he had ever been at mine. It was also unusual for Santo to come over to my personal area, so I held my arms out and announced, “To what do I owe this pleasure
of having the two biggest cocks in the platoon at my bunk?” Akintade laughed his loud, distinctive laugh, and Santo put his arm around me, saying in his nearly unintelligible Dominican accent, “Aaaaaww, you know we luh you, Sar’n Hartley.” This was the last time I saw Akintade.
November 21, 2004
WORRY WEEK
At the beginning of our tour it was a brigade policy that approximately 60 to 80 percent of soldiers from each company be allowed a two-week period of leave. Our company gave the first available dates to soldiers who had special situations, such as newborn children or sick family members. For the rest of the available dates there was a lottery for the order in which soldiers would be chosen to go on leave. My name came up as one of the first allowed to go, but I traded my slot with another soldier who had one of the last numbers.
It felt good to sacrifice my chance to go on leave so a younger soldier would be able to, but in all honesty I did it because I didn’t want to leave Iraq. One of the ways to cope with being in combat is to go crazy just a tiny bit and learn to enjoy the work. I was cognizant of the fact that the comfort I felt in being in Iraq was somewhat illusory, and something I probably couldn’t maintain indefinitely, and I was afraid that if I left, it would be difficult to get back into the “combat is fun” way of thinking when I returned.
About midway through our tour, the leave policy was changed to 100 percent of soldiers being allowed to go. I asked if it was possible to decline going on leave, but was told it was an order and not an option. Since my name was now near the bottom of the list, I would go during our second-to-last month in Iraq.
Just Another Soldier Page 27