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– a Soldier’s Story on the Iraq War

In the beginning, I felt like a patriot. It felt like I was doing something that was really needed. The whole story was about Suddam and all his tyranny, how he was treating the people, and what we were going to do. 

Once we got deeper into the months before we started the war, that’s when we really started thinking. I mean, what am I about to do? Is this right, or is this wrong, or is this just because my president wants oil, wants money. There was a lot of confusion going on. 

I was the first person to step out of the vehicle, the first person to cross the border in Iraq, going across; it was actually no town; it was right outside, across the border from Kuwait into Iraq. I remember the mission was an observation post; it was OP#9- that’s just some number they gave. It was a little trailer, a little flag post, and a UN trailer on the other side. At the beginning, we bombed that for like an hour before we even crossed the border and got out. The people had left about three days before because we sat on the border for a day and a half before we actually invaded before we got the word to go. We had about 25 Iraqi soldiers come and surrender to us two days before the war started. On the first day, they came and surrendered, we sent them home, we called up to higher up, and they were like, hey, you can’t take them right now because we’re not going to war, we’re not saying that we’re going to go into battle, right now, we’re just here as a show of force. They can’t surrender to you because we’re not actually at war. When we thought about going home, everybody was like, well, are we going to war? What are we going to do? Are we just here for a show of force? What’s going to happen? Once we finally got the word that we were going to move out of Kuwait or out of our camps into the desert and set up on the border, our company commander told us, “Hey, we’re about to embark on a mission that only a chosen few has gotten the go on, and that’s you guys standing right here and all the rest of you guys, men, and women in uniform –  the only way home is north, being leaving Kuwait and going through Iraq. That’s when it started to really hit home. I was in Kuwait for three months. We got there and left on January 7th – Forte Benning, GA. We arrived in Kuwait on January 8th, and the war started on March 20^th, which was my birthday. So that’s a birthday that I’ll never forget. Turning 27, blowing up some stuff, and shooting and being shot at, you’ll never forget it. That’s why I say that I’m kinda blessed.At first, I didn’t want to shoot at other people until they shot at me. Once I got shot at, then I was like, oh, it’s on. I mean, it’s all about me. Then, as a noncommissioned team leader, I figured I had three guys under me, and I didn’t want to have to write any letters; I didn’t want to tell anybody’s mom, “I’m sorry I failed you. I failed your son. I failed this, I failed that…” A unit is four companies, each with four platoons; platoons have squads, and squads have teams. I was a team leader. It was me and three other guys. There are nine people in a squad, two teams, and a team leader.   Basically, they told us Saddam was a tyrant and that the people of Iraq had to be free from this tyrant. I knew a little about Iraq from Desert Storm (the first time), but it was actually nothing that I actually saw (weapons of mass destruction). Honestly, it sounds like he was a tyrant. Just the stories from the people I  met on the streets, strolling the town, doing security as far as checkpoints and security points on bridges.  When we first got to Baghdad, through all the cities I rode through, they were waving, screaming, yay! Yay! Bush! Boo, Saddam, Thank you, America, people running up and giving us hugs and kisses, at first we were leery because they had all these suicide bombers, soldiers that were not in uniform, so we threw down with a lot of civilians.  We found some bombs. We found certain things, but they were like regular bombs; they weren’t like serious nuclear bombs. All of his nuclear bombs, his nuclear warheads, were moved out of the country, I believe before we even got there. I think he had them, and I think he moved them.  You have areas of interest. North Korea doesn’t have anything geographically or as far as any precious materials; they don’t have anything to offer. But Iraq has oil.  We all knew deep down inside it was about the oil. Bush wanted 1. The oil, 2. He tried to get Saddam back because when we look at how Bush cheated to get reelected a second time, he’s in there to avenge his father, to finish what his father didn’t have the opportunity to finish by any means necessary.  I didn’t like being there, but like I said, it’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but (erupts in cough) it’s an experience I wouldn’t change for the world. I met a lot of really good people.  The 2000^th person to die in Iraq was my best friend. We have been together for about six years. I met him at Fort Stewart, GA, in 1999. We were stationed there together and then went to Fort Benning together. We were in the same unit, the same company,  pretty much the same platoon,  for six years straight, and I got out in August 2004; he stayed in the unit I was in, 3^rd ID everybody knows about, 3^rd infantry division, they are the mains ones that fought this last gulf war, and I was an alpha company, the 1^st  of the 30, 3^rd I-D.  He was in Charlie Co 115; they went back for a year after I got out, and he was over there. He broke his hand while there, and he came home; he was home for about 3 ½-4 months; they gave him an ultimatum after his hand had healed: either you could go back, or you could stay. But knowing the type of guy he was, he really believed in his job; he really was a soldier, and he believed in taking care of his soldiers, and he went back.  Not too long after he went back, they found an unidentified landmine on the side of the road; some of the soldiers went to go check it out, and he told them to back up, and he got them away from it, and he went to go check it out, and it blew, and it killed him and injured two of his soldiers. He pulled two of his soldiers to safety before he collapsed. He lived for about a week, but he went to surgery, he had like a third or fourth-degree burns, he was going to be nothing more than a vegetable. So his family made a decision to take him off life support because he had told his girlfriend and his family that before he went back, if something happens to me and I’m on the breathing machine, let me go. I don’t want to live like this. That’s when I really started to detest the war, now. When I was there, I did what I had to do. It was a job. Like I said, I just wanted to bring home my soldiers and make sure that everybody came home, but when I got home, it was the things that I had to live with the guilt. Sometimes I have dreams and nightmares about some of the things that we did, some of the stuff  I saw, and it was just a bunch of lies like there is this – the best way I can describe this whole situation is just watching the movie the matrix because that is what the entire world is like. The government is a lie. Everything we live and see today is not really what it seems to be, and I learned that from being over there. From having somebody tell me we’re going to go home in two weeks, every four days, and that went on for two months. He told us we’re going home in two weeks; in 96 hours, we’ll be heading back to go home…do all this stuff, but… Regarding the weapons of mass destruction, we found a few things, nothing major, nothing considering weapons of mass destruction. What I did see were American weapons, brand new stockpiles of weapons that shouldn’t have been in Iraq. We found millions and millions of American dollars on TV, but what they didn’t have on there were (redacted), which were something new to us, these missiles. We had just got them six months before we got to Iraq, but we found a warehouse full of them in Iraq.  The French didn’t want to have any part in it, and at the last minute, they decided to send people cause when we got to Baghdad, we found a warehouse full of surface-to-air missiles from the French dated June 2002, so they had been selling Suddam arms. And we found this, and it got back to the public; before they put it on TV, the French got a hold of the information and decided to kick in. This whole situation was greed, money, payback,  and world domination. I mean, people told us over there that Saddam was ruthless. He had people personally executed; he wouldn’t stay in his palaces. He made ten-15 billion-dollar palaces; I’ve been in three of them. And he wouldn’t stay there because he didn’t feel safe. He would go from house to house, from city to city, and throw people out of their homes and say, ‘I’m going to sleep here tonight,’ and if you didn’t leave your house, then his troops, his security guards,  would kill the whole family on site.  When it came down to raw leadership and being a soldier, those types of people stood firm. All the white boys who were, you know, Yale material, Harvard material, ‘I’m going to be a ranger and CIA when I get out, they were the ones – I had one little dude, he’s from Upstate New York, he was just so hard, “My grandfather was in world war 2, my dad was in Vietnam, and now I’m in Iraq, and I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that but – it was the regular guys who were the real fighters. We were the first ones across the border. I got out of the vehicle. First,  I was scared to death when I got out and looked; at night, all I could see were these vehicles, and I didn’t see a single person on the ground, and that’s when I realized I was the only one out here so I dropped to my knees and one of my gunners, he came behind me. Then, as I looked, I started to see people flow for like two seconds on the ground, and then all of a sudden, they started shooting at us; we shot at them, got them, got over there, they had bombed the place, the border where we had crossed, bombed the mess out of it, so by the time we got there, those two people were half alive. They were out. We’re there, the OP. They have just shot off the last rounds, and you know they had the nerve to give us plastic gloves and body bags; what you mess up, you clean up. Everything we killed, we had to pick up. I was like, I’m not picking up nothing. So what they did was they had a detail follow behind us. Whatever we blew up.  We got to the point where we just started treating those people with less respect than how we would treat people here. We began robbing people. Me and my soldiers beat up people, taking their money, buying food, and getting drunk. Anything we could do to take our mind off of being there, and the one thing that tripped me out was a friend who took me to this one house in this village. We walked in; I first saw a classic Capri sitting on blocks covered up in mint condition. We were in the house; they had drugs all in the house. They had hash, heroin, guns, the whole nine; that thing was a trap house.  I was like, even in Iraq?  My boy was like, ‘There’s hoods everywhere!” They were in a battle with a rival gang in that village over guns and drugs, and we were in the middle of it. So it was like, alright, if we give you protection, what will you give us? So they would provide us with money, they would go buy us beer, and we would go get drunk every night. I remember one night, my whole squad, my vehicle that I rode on, my entire crew, we got real drunk one night and passed out. We woke up the next day, the next morning. We were supposed to pull security on this bridge,  but nobody was up. All these Iraqi people were standing around us, just looking at us; we were passed out. We woke up, and it was bright; we usually get up at 4.30 every morning; everybody grabbed their weapons, trying to get dressed, “Back up!” The thing they don’t put on TV is that kind of stuff happens, then you have these officers, people that you look up to,  with sex scandals over there.  We had a female captain who was selling herself; some people were doing it the First War and doing it this war.  I have a friend right now who, one of his soldiers, his driver for his vehicle, has a baby that is 2.5 now, and that baby was conceived in Iraq in the back of a car. The mother was in the military, his father was in the military, they were messing around, and she got pregnant. All that stuff goes on over there; that’s the stuff that doesn’t make the news. Before we came home, they doctored everything. They tell us you can talk about certain situations and missions, but some things you can’t talk about, and most of the time, they do something to people. Like the medicine that they wanted us to take, one of the guys from special forces came back with two cases of special forces guys who killed their wives. They linked their temporary insanity back to that medication, which I still have in my bag at home. They tried to get us to take the medicine, I was like, no. Like when I got out of being exposed to that radiation, it was in my medical files, and I claimed disability for my knees, my back, post-traumatic stress, and a couple of other things. I was going to argue, you know, that I was exposed to this radiation, so if I come down with cancer sometime in the future or if I get sick, I will have it on file. They took all that out from every last person in my company file; nobody has it in their medical records, they can’t find the paperwork, they can’t find anything. And right now, they deny that we were even in that area.  “You weren’t in that area. It wasn’t that bad. You were somewhere else.”“You can’t tell me where I was. I’m not stupid. I know where I was at.”  

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