Prologue
A parking lot in a semi-rundown housing estate served as my living room, observing life in its mundane and whimsical moments. The NCOs from the nearby base banging on the door of a missing soldier who at that moment was in Texas with his meth-addicted wife robbing a gas station outside Ft. Worth; the hideously ugly transvestite sunning his/her self on the front lawn of his/her apartment wearing a bright red bikini of all things and a chaplain leaving the apartment of his neighbour’s wife, with a smile that spoke un-heavenly volumes.
As for me being in the parking lot, I had become a homeless African-American vet, living in my car parked outside the apartment I had just got evicted from, a few days ago. I would occasionally get the keys from my neighbour, a retired Navy petty officer who worked as a civilian contractor at the base and used her apartment to shower and catch much needed rest before going to work. Going to work meant going to a low paying job as a Correctional Officer where corruption was so rife, it was ops-normal. I am grateful to God that I am working but I needed another job soon and also my car served as a classroom where with my laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter outlet, I pursued my Bachelors of Science in Psychology.
A few months earlier, I had just ended my military career rather ingloriously having been demoted and not be able to retain my rank but I have no one to blame but myself for that debacle. I had forty-two thousand and some change in my account and had planned on one last chance to rescue my marriage by taking my estranged wife and daughter on a bicycling trip through England and north-west Europe. I had done that as a single male in my Coast Guard days and had longed to share that with my wife and daughter and even opened up an account for my estranged wife and placed money in it to help pay her college bills.
Unfortunately, the she-devil had a psychotic episode and thought the summer vacation was a plot to kill her if she didn’t come home and yes we fought but I truly loved her to death and would have given my life for her but her behaviour shot down my plans so I paid off bills, fixed the car; fell behind in more bills and now here I was, sitting in my car studying about the four major theoretical perspectives and longing for something to eat. My neighbour wasn’t home and it had gotten to the point where both she and I were getting urges. Being a male, I answered the call but she fell in love and I was still in love with my wife and knew it was time to find a place of my own soon.
Overhead, two low flying Apache helicopter gunships roared over the housing complex and dropped down behind a tree line as they headed back towards an airfield a few miles away. Watching them brought me back to my first tour in Iraq when Operation Iraqi Freedom was in full bloom and I was no longer sitting in my car but standing….
Ali Al Salem Air base, Kuwait Monday morning 1100 hours
…Laden with gear, my Kevlar helmet, Viet-Nam era flak jacket, gasmask, Alice pack, M16A2 rifle and a survival knife strapped to my right desert boot, I stepped of the Omni airlines 747 wearing my heavily starched Desert Camouflage Uniform also known as DCUs which quickly melted in the fierce Kuwaiti heat. The 300 other soldiers, all members of the MP Battalion, a Reserve unit from out of Long Island, NY all attired similarly and looking equally miserable assembled on the broiling hot tarmac under the protection of heavily armed USAF security police, sitting in Humvees with improvised armoured protection known as “Hillbilly” armour or deployed around the aircraft with M-16A2s at the low ready. We knew the Iraqi Army was disintegrating and being allowed to go home with their weapons so they weren’t an immediate threat unless it was the Kuwaitis who were our “Ally” who really didn’t like us in their country and only tolerated us out of political expediency.
We were eventually herded onto air conditioned buses that you would normally see on some British or European highway. Windows were covered by curtains as if that would prevent the locals from knowing who were riding the buses plus the up-armoured Humvees bristling with belt-fed 240B machine-guns providing the escort were a dead giveaway. With my Alice pack on my lap an M-16A2 between my legs like an extra penis, I, peeked between the partially closed curtains and watched a company of British soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in full kit waiting for transportation to the airport. Nearby were U.S. Army MPs and their British
counterparts from the Royal Military Police Corps wearing scarlet berets contrasting greatly with our Kevlar clad MPs. They were all heavily armed as if expecting the Iraqis to come swarming over a huge sand berm half a mile away.
We eventually arrived at our new home which were a row of large, worn, sand-coloured tents with wooden floors sans cots. It was here, that I got my introduction into how a jacked-up Reserve unit could ruin it for other Army reserve units by its conduct such as lack of discipline, poor leadership on the part of some NCOs and officers and equally frightening, some individuals didn’t even have the basic soldier skills on weapons care, tactics nor they did they fail to realize, that in a few days, we were crossing the border into a war zone but that didn’t wake them up to seriousness of the situation.
The incident, a month earlier in which a certain Maintenance company got ambushed during the Battle of Nasiriyah in which human error was a key factor, didn’t seem to sink in as some individuals in the battalion chose not to take the training very seriously while some of did and then some, even to the point of training with other units on our own.
Being a designated Combat Life Saver, my job was to augment the medics by providing advanced first aid to wounded personnel during combat missions or non-combat incidents. I carried the standard medic bag which to which I added extra IV bags, bandages, etc., scrounged from the Battalion Aid Station (BAS), right down the street from our tent village in Camp Arifjan. I worked there on my days off to hone my skills, and even assisted a doctor and a medic performing minor surgery on an injured soldier. Not being an MP, (I was a generator repair mechanic) I also worked on the twelve 15 kilowatt generators, acquired when we arrived in- country a few days ago. The MPs were also scrounging around the camp, “acquiring” weapons mounts for our Humvees and trucks, extra ammunition and so on. Since I was a SAW gunner for
my squad, I spent many an evening getting very intimate with that weapon and my M16A2 rifle until I became one with both weapons. I was also instructing others how to get familiar with the SAW in case I got killed.
Our supply sergeant, eventually got us new Interceptor body armour known as IBAs to replace our Viet-Nam era flak jackets. The only problem with that was that we didn’t have the ceramic inserts to go with them, which meant that if you hit were with a 7.62 round from an AK
-47 or AK-74 instead of 9-mm round, you were pretty much toast. We didn’t get the plates until after our first casualties a month later during operations in Central Iraq. The IBAs were of the woodland camouflaged variety which glaringly stood out on our desert camouflage uniforms but they were better than nothing.
Now, our supply sergeant, a tall, athletic, Mexican from Queens, New York by way of Laredo, Texas, was a staff sergeant who took his job seriously and in my opinion was more suited to be a grunt in an active duty unit than his current MOS in a badly run reserve unit. He had another supply sergeant that “worked” with him, but she was worthless and always complained about any and everything. So he usually had to do everything on his own, with the help of junior enlisted borrowed from the battalion’s E-4 “mafia.”
The so called E-4 “mafia” which exists in every Army unit are junior enlisted soldiers who are masters in shamming, such as avoiding specific duties, making life miserable for their respective NCOs but can do their duties when needed. Our particular “mafia” didn’t inspire much confidence considering that many of them didn’t want to be in Iraq let be in the Army. The rest of us E4s or Specialists who were “HOOAAH!” and wanted to make sergeant, felt uneasy about going into Iraq with that lot because, one didn’t know how they would behave, if we ran into some insurgents.
I was married but there were a lot of issues that made me wonder how much my wife truly loved me. In the meantime, I flirted with our armorer, a rather beautiful, slim young woman from the West Indies, who recently made sergeant. The flirtation was more on an intellectual level and it passed the time, while we waited to cross the Kuwaiti frontier into Iraq. I also flirted with our senior medic, and that was both intellectual and bit more which included kissing and becoming the subject of unit gossip. It wasn’t as bad as Sergeant So-and-so and a female corporal who were respectively married to their own spouses and conducted a rather open affair which pissed of the company commander, command sergeant-major and the “First shirt” which was what we called the First Sergeant and that behavior would have serious complications later on down the road.
Each day spent at Arifjan told me that we intended to make a permanent presence in the Mid-East. While watching more planes fly in and bring in tons of equipment and troops, we spent time manning check points, searching vehicles and TNCs or third country nationals, mainly from Bangladesh, who cleaned the Porto-Johns, slaved in the laundry mats, chow halls and cleaned the buildings. The Kuwaitis treated them horribly and there reports of Bangladeshi women being raped by the Kuwaitis and some of our guys. The sexual assaults were so bad, that it was considered ops-normal to find yourself being awaken at 0200 and provide and armed escort for one our female soldiers, who wanted to take a piss or shit at that unholy hour.
In the meantime, the MPs and support personnel continued to clash because the latter considered them unmilitary and the former didn’t like the fact that the majority of the MPs were NYPD cops or worked with Corrections. I had to admit, that there was an undercurrent level of racism permeating throughout our unit which was suppressed because, we realized, we had to depend on each other in Iraq. Training continued and we picked up survival tips from our British
counterparts in the Royal Military Police Corps, who showed how to properly set up, improvised checkpoints, use of local interpreters, reaction drills and so-on while MPs from our sister battalion introduced us to the grim realities of dealing with enemy prisoners of war (EPWs) such as keeping the Sunnis separate from the Shi’ites; the extreme Sunnis from the moderate Sunnis because of the latter’s view on Sharia law; riot control and prison rape.
I made friends with a cute English beagle, named Kate. She belonged to some soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. It was trained for bomb-sniffing and was getting ready to head up to Basra (Where the British forces operated in Iraq) with her handler. I would stop by on my way from the gym and play with Kate, and feed her sometimes. It wasn’t long before, my fellow platoon mates were playing with stray cats and dogs that roamed around the camp. During a work detail that saw us packing up supplies for our trip up north, we entertained ourselves by watching two scorpions battle each other. That ended badly, when the handler of one of the scorpions got stung and damned near died en-route to the Battalion aid station, where they kept the anti-venom for such scorpion bites. The war was over for him as he was medevac’d to Landstuhl Medical Facility in Germany and later sent home due to amputation of three of his fingers on his right hand.
To further amuse myself, I got myself assigned to the battalion newspaper as a photograph and wrote stories about my buddies. It got me out of crappy details except when it involved doing maintenance on the 12 generators that I signed for when I arrived in Camp Arifjan, my SAW and the squad’s Humvees and one 5-ton truck. Well, one day, some Major who happened to be with the battalion S2 (Intelligence) shop and the editor of the battalion paper, a slightly chubby red-headed female and another photographer decided to jump in two white, 2002 Toyota Highlanders, with all terrain tires, reinforced roof racks that held Jerri-cans
full of water and fuel plus tools. Since I was the CLS (Combat Life Saver), I brought my medic bag and rode shotgun with the Major, whose call sign was “Clever Patriot”. “Kermit the Frog” was the editor’s.
Our two SUVs, departed Camp Arifjan, taking a service road and then onto King Fahad Bin Abdul Aziz Road, skirting the outskirts of Kuwait City, passing military convoys, a mile long heading north to Iraq, Patriot missile batteries ensconced around oil refineries, Kuwaiti Police ticketing military vehicles for speeding and the ubiquitous Bedouin nomads either encamped or moving along the highway with camels laden down with their gear and way of life. We turned onto Highway 80 and made for the Iraqi border town of Safwan, and that was my first introduction to a war zone. Ragged little Iraqi Children, begging for food at the side of road, burnt out homes, a knocked out Iraqi T-72 tank, in a hull down position at a crossroads. I watched some soldiers from the 1st Cavalry division that were in convoy, pull over and stop to take pictures atop this knocked-out tank. Later on, we would hear that the uranium depleted rounds used to destroy the tank would cause cancer amongst our troops.
We drove around the town, feeling very apprehensive as sounds of smalls arm fire and grenade blasts reverberated throughout the smashed-up houses and nearby streets. A Bradley fighting vehicle, attended by its complement of dismounted American soldiers, guarded what appeared to be an important building or what was left of it as we drove up a rubble-strewn main street. Refugees, clutching their meagre belongings looked at us angrily. Others begged for food and water. We ignored them and drove on. The safety was off my M16 rifle and the barrel poked out an open window. The Major cracked some rather lame jokes, trying to mask his nervousness. Insurgents still roamed the area even though the town was “secure” and God help us if we encountered a bunch of them on some deserted back street.
I watched some heavily armed, British paratroopers from the Parachute Regiment, wearing their famous maroon berets (My mind immediately went to a scene in the movie, “A Bridge Too Far” where Colonel Frost played by Anthony Hopkins and his battalion are entering the outskirts of Arnhem) instead of their ballistic helmets, moving warily down the street, poking among bomb damaged houses; kicking in doors and rousting military-aged males into the back of a few parked, sand-coloured Snatch-2 Land Rovers, waiting nearby. We eventually made our way to Highway 1and headed southeast towards the direction of the port city of Um Qasr. About a mile north of the port, we turned down a dirt road flanked by coils of concertina wire and sand berms towards Camp Bucca. Formerly called Freddy by the British, it was a holding center for Iraqi prisoners and run by them until they formerly turned it over to our MP Brigade in April, right after our battalion arrived in-country. The camp was named after a NYFD fire marshal and former reservist, killed in the 9/11 attacks. Bored sentries wearing body armour, Kevlar helmets manning the front gate, checked our ID cards and waved us through. The editor and her photographer went off somewhere, and I noticed, I was way over-dressed in military gear, marking me as a “newbie”. I quickly took off my gas mask and assault pack, stuffed it the backseat of our SUV and followed the major into a large olive-drabbed tent where British and American military Intel types in civilian and military uniforms were interviewing military aged Iraqi males. The hard interrogation sessions were done elsewhere on the compound and one of the MPs standing outside the tent, casually mentioned to me, that the “Brits didn’t play around when it came to dealing with the insurgents,” emphasizing that fact by pointing to a tan cone box that was open and explained that the Brits would lock the insurgents in there, if they weren’t cooperative and the 120˚ temperature would do the rest.
After getting chewed out for taking for taking pictures and having the role of film confiscated, I got the opportunity if you can call it that to assist in an interview of a young, Iraqi male who had been picked up with a few others near the city of Diwaniyah and brought back to Camp Bucca. The young man was rather pleasant considering his circumstances. He smelt horribly and knew it offended us. He talked about his family and how he was a carpenter. I looked at his hands while the Major continued to ask the man questions without the aid of an interpreter. His English was very good and he so wanted to please us with his answers…until I asked him some basic carpentry questions. I had taken woodshop when I attended St. James Secondary School in Trinidad, and even though I didn’t like the class, I had retained some of what I had been taught, such as a heart shake (an outgoing crack), dovetail joint, a brace or what a plane is, and our subject didn’t even know that! His hands weren’t even calloused but somewhat smooth. I glanced over at the Major, who pointed to a battered grey bus that had a smiley-face painted on the front. “He’s going to Abu-Gharib.” He said nonchalantly, “They will get him to talk up there.” He added, in a tone of voice that sounded somewhat sinister.
As we headed back to Camp Arifjan, I wondered about the prison up at Abu Gharib and little would I realize that the place would also figure predominantly in this battalion’s tour of duty in Iraq. I briefed my S2 and the MPs and what I saw during my brief trip in Safwan and Camp Bucca. Everyone was excited because the fighting was dying down but we were still losing personnel to ambushes and non-combat related injuries. The so-called icing on that cake was that one morning, sitting in the DFAC (Dining Facility), watching the President of the United States land on the aircraft carrier, USS Lincoln and declare, “Mission Accomplished!” On that day, a soldier from H-Troop, 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, died after his Abrams tank fell into the Euphrates River when the bank collapsed under it and soldiers who were on R&R from Iraq, could be overheard talking about fire fights and rumours of an insurgency that was slowly developing.
Our unit a typical Headquarters unit. We were ‘pogues’ in the eyes of the combat-arms community. We had two or three MPs that had combat experience from the First Gulf War and in Somalia. The rest were NYPD cops whom assumed their experiences on the streets of New York would be sufficient when in fact the insurgents here in Iraq were a cut above the “skels” they dealt with in Bed-Study, Harlem, Lower East Side and the Bronx. The females, save for the ones who MPs, had no business being in a combat zone let alone the Army. They were the captain’s and battalion commander’s pets and thank God we had some NCOs that made sure these pets pulled their share of details instead of sitting in the tent, gossiping and trying to keep their uniforms clean. They were the admin types who looked down on their noses at the engineers and mechanics in the unit as if we were “shit on rice.” Me, I kept to myself, listened to my Nina Simone tapes and cried when one of my buddies, told me that she saw on CNN that Nina Simone had passed away; read the books that accompanied me on such diverse subjects such as the history of Iraq, Arrian’s history on the Campaigns of Alexander, Sun of the Morning Star; a book on Arabic phrases and dialect familiar in Iraq plus some paperbacks grabbed from the MWR (Morale Welfare Recreation) tent down near the DFAC.
I also began to draw closer to God and started making my peace with him. I would steal away in the evenings, usually around 2000 hours and in the back of a parked truck or Humvee, with the aid of a red-lensed flashlight, read my desert-camouflaged bible. I felt better and fortified because, in a few days I found out that I was part of the advance party heading up to our
new home in Diwaniyah, Iraq and from what I read at the intelligence briefings, it was and still a Ba’athist stronghold where infrequent but accurate mortar attacks at night and sniper fire directed against the base up there was the norm.
I called home which was around 2200, New York time and chatted with my wife and daughter for about an hour, discussing school, the bills, the war, our shaky marriage and her comparisons between her ex-husband, who owned a yacht down in Tortola, British Virgin Islands and me. She had enrolled in Bronx Community College, with a major in Nursing and I was happy for her. I had a few college credits from Mercy College campus at Ft. Hamilton Army base in Brooklyn, New York but dropped out when 9/11 occurred, and volunteered for active service. After reading a bedtime story to my daughter (I made it up), I hung up and surfed the Internet till sunrise and went to work on my generators, making sure they were fully fueled for the up-coming mission. The MPs also began prepping the Humvees and 5-ton trucks by placing sandbags on the floors, stocking extra ammunition cans for the SAW and 240B gunners, the medics stockpiled extra supplies in their aid bags and those of the combat life savers, each vehicle had a box of MREs stashed in it, and we all spent two days at the range on Camp Udairi, brushing up on our marksmanship skills. Mornings were spent studying maps of our area of operations, location of friendly and insurgent forces, call-signs and the very important nine-line Medevac report.
The Nine-line Medevac report is a laminated card that has specific procedures to follow when calling for a medevac such as location, call sign, number of casualties, special equipment, number of patients by type, wartime security and so-on. Every chance we had during down time, we spent a few minutes practicing our Nine-line medevac calls with the 498th Medical Company (Air Ambulance), which was doing sterling service with the Marines still on combat operations
in Iraq and each other. I carried my laminated Nine-line medevac card folded and tucked in the helmet band of my Kevlar helmet for quick access and a spare one in my medic bag.
One night, one of the engineers attached to our unit, a loud-mouthed Puerto Rican from Long Island, picked a fight with this Haitian kid in my platoon and got his ass whipped in front of his girlfriend, a rather delicious looking Latina who was one of our mechanics. The animosity between those two idiots went back to our initial training back at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where we trained for desert warfare in the middle of a February snowstorm instead of the National Training Centre at Ft. Irwin, California which borders the Mojave Desert. The Haitian kid was a recent émigré and quiet. He was an okay soldier but took lousy care of his weapon and his poor grasp of English was the butt of Puerto-Rican engineer’s aggressively racist jokes. Well, on that particular night, his jokes finally drove the Haitian kid to the breaking point. He lunged at his antagonist, and began pummeling the guy’s face with his face until it was a bloody pulp. One of our operations NCOs, a strapping female staff sergeant, who happened to be a cop in 75th Precinct in Brooklyn, wadded into the fight and handled both combatants like they were ‘perps’ on some street corner. Our medics took care of the battered engineer and the Haitian kid was sent out to cool off, manning a check-point by the front gate. No Article -15s, just some ass chewing and the incident was wept under the rug.
My company commander, a 6 ft. tall, mustachioed, African-American, who had a reputation as a womanizer, walked upon me, sitting beside my favourite senior medic, rubbing her tummy and getting ready to steal a kiss from her. He ordered her to stand duty in the aid station and sent me to my bunk and go to sleep. Later that morning, in private, he commented that “what happens in the desert stays in the desert and I should be more discreet.”
Our battalion commander, wasn’t well liked by all save a few in the battalion. I wondered how he made it that far in the Army because, he wasn’t that smart and his junior officers and the Command Sergeant Major ran rings around him. The BC as we called him, was a fat, balding Italian who yearned for some glory at our expense. He hardly knew the names of the people in his command and was quite ignorant in basic tactics which was evident during MOUT training back stateside at Dix. Thank God, we had some NCOs that knew their craft quite well when it came to urban combat.
As for the Command Sergeant Major, he was full-time Reservist and a stickler for discipline. He didn’t care much for the support personnel and garnished his attention on the MPs. His wife ran the Family Readiness Group back home and she was very racist and that was brought to my attention by my wife who never bothered to attend another FRG meeting after experiencing said racism when the lady asked her if she was Arab. My wife told her she was South Asian and schooled her on the difference between East Indians and people from the Middle East. The CSM’s wife didn’t appreciate that and asked her to leave but before my wife called her out on her ignorance in front of the other wives and family members present. That was my wife and she brooked no asinine behaviour from anyone including a very snooty teacher at my daughter’s school who lied on my daughter during a PTA meeting I attended right before I deployed. My wife told me to stand down and went full bore at the teacher and swore to ruin her career which got her escorted out by school security. We had to pull our daughter out of that school and sent her to Charter school, where she did much better academically.
Anyway, we, that is the advance party, got a warning order to move out, on a cool Friday evening. We staged our vehicles in front of the huge warehouse that was our home, having moved from the tent city, a few days ago and started packing our kit. We scrounged around for
more ammo and extra supplies and that meant lots of midnight requisitions from nearby units. On Saturday, one of the NCOs and myself paid a visit to an RAF Puma HC1 helicopter parked on a heli-port near our conex storage area. We test drove their Land Rovers and they test drove our Humvee and I actually liked driving the Land Rover while the pilot, a Flying-Officer with a somewhat unmilitary haircut, and a worn flight suit had a blast four-wheeling around in the Humvee. He and his crew had just come back from Basra, where they had to rescue a local national from being hung by a lynch mob near a village, by landing the helicopter on the road and having the door-gunner cover the man while he sprinted to the safety of the waiting Puma, which deposited him at Basra airport where the main British base was located.
We returned to our quarters, ate chow and went to bed early. At 0300 hours, I was awakened, and took a quick shower. The drivers were doing vehicle checks and the rest of us were conducting pre-combat checks (PCCs) and Pre-combat inspections on each other and ourselves. The commander, with assistance from the CSM did the PCCs while the platoon leaders, NCOs and squad leaders performed the PCIs. Deficiencies were corrected, one or two people replaced and the chaplain blessed our vehicles, said the 91st Psalm which was the soldiers’ prayer and after saying our goodbyes, we mounted our vehicles. I was the gunner for our Humvee, which was the command vehicle. The driver was an MP, the company commander was the convoy commander and the supply sergeant was my A-gunner. We didn’t have a mount for my SAW, saw I had sling over my shoulder and sit on the gunner’s seat with that 200 round plastic box digging into my knee. My other weapon was an M16A2 rifle which was locked in place behind the driver’s seat. The SAW or M249 light machine-gun was basically an M16 on steroids since it fired the same 5.56 ammunition and in case of emergency, I could use a standard
M16 magazine in case I ran out of linked rounds but the downside was that, using said magazine caused malfunctions and that was not good in a gun fight.
We had other MPSs from the 3--th MP Battalion from, Pennsylvania and the 30-th MP, which was from our reserve centre back in Long Island, NY. Our escorts were the 3--nd MP Company from Maryland and their main job was patrolling the main supply routes (MSRs) leading from Kuwait into Iraq. Some members of that unit would later on, gain a dark reputation at a place called Abu Gharib. It was a cool Sunday morning as we headed north on Highway 80 bypassing well-lit Kuwaiti houses in Jahra which is suburb of Kuwait City. Eventually, we continued onto the Iraqi border, rolling past the main checkpoint near Safwan, waving at Kuwaiti border police and British military police. The sun was coming up, and we turned onto ASR- Jackson or Highway 8, where we many of my fellow soldiers saw their first signs of war…burned out hulks of vehicles, mainly US and that T-72 tank at the crossroads, which I saw on my unofficial foray across the border. I took the safety off my SAW and readied myself for “Come what may.” We were now on operations in Iraq.
Camp Edson Diwaniyah, Iraq
It had been a month since we crossed the Kuwaiti frontier into Iraq and since that Sunday, we had lost two vehicles on that trip to mechanical issues and destroyed them with thermite grenades to prevent the insurgents from looting them. Near the town of Samawah, the convoy came under small arms fire from five or six, black clad insurgents, with AK-47s, hiding
behind garden walls. While our escorts from the 372nd and our guys returned the favour, the rest of us, up forward kept watch as Marines dismounted from LAV-25 armoured vehicles and began clearing the houses at the side of the road, three hundred yards away. Overhead, a Marine Cobra helicopter gunship circled low overhead while a second Cobra stood over watch. We had a Physician’s Assistant, (PA), a rather elderly gentleman who was recalled to active duty, leave his Humvee and began treating two wounded Marines at the side of the road. I could one our guys on the SINGARS radio in my Humvee, calling in a nine-line medevac request.
Things were escalating very rapidly. The convoy moved on leaving behind our P.A. who volunteered to stay with the wounded Marines until they got medevac’d. We were all on edge when we finally rolled into Camp Edson, a sprawling compound that was actually Diwaniyah University and home to Marines of the 1st Marine Division, mainly the 3rd Light Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion, an aviation asset and support elements, the 977 Military Police Company and our unit.
Sniper fire at night from an abandoned building on the southbound side of the highway kept us on our toes, as we settled in our new home. The rest of the battalion was still in Kuwait and the Marines were showing us the ropes since we were attached to them. My squad which was the maintenance section, consisted of two staff sergeants, and four specialists which included me. One of them was a female, and she knew her job but was usually found flirting with the Marine sentries that provided security for our area of the compound which happened to be an auditorium and a small clinic. I, being the main scrounger, decided that asking politely for supplies instead of midnight requisitions would be preferable and my first contact, was a very attractive female Marine (That was a rarity) who worked in the nearby supply shed. Since I wore a PT uniform and no rank, I politely asked for a camo-netting, poles, MREs and other goodies to
help make our stay more bearable. I smiled and she promised to deliver. A few hours later, my captain and female, ops NCO walked up to me, grinning suspiciously. “There’s a female Marine looking for you.” said the captain, “You move fast.” he added, “rather quietly.
I ignored the comment and walked to the female Marine who gestured to another Marine in a cargo Humvee to bring the vehicle over to where we stood. Within minutes, our guys off loaded everything and gave the female Marine, two cases of soda and a pack of Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies, that made her day. That was how I did business when scrounging, in Iraq. Pretty soon, we were quite at home in our section of Camp Edson, a bullet-scarred auditorium with a vandalized painting of Saddam, staring down on the row of cots below the stage where we stored our supplies and ammo.
I worked on the generators and stood watch in a wooden guard tower that was mounted on the roof of our aid station. From there I had a view of Highway 8 for a half mile, the outskirts of Diwaniyah to my left, an abandoned factory to the front, and a farm 400 metres to my right by the main the main entrance to the camp. That farm and the Iraqi family that resided there would figure predominantly later on. Behind the camp, was more farm land and a rail line that ran to Baghdad and the Euphrates River. The insurgents, mainly former soldiers from the Republican Guard or the Fedayeen Saddam, Iraqi paramilitaries who were hard-core and still loyal to Saddam Hussein, every now would use the cover of the nearby farms, to lob mortar rounds, trade gunfire with the Marines and the MPs who occupied the far side of Camp Edson.
There was one night, which was rather pleasant. The day had been very hot, I think it had been 110˚ and miserable. A very, serene and comforting breeze blew across the compound making it desirable to sleep on the roof. Since the floors were marble, it retained the day’s heat and that made sleeping in the auditorium at night, horrid. But it was a cut above the infantry unit
that was harboured up for the night outside the wall, sleeping in ditches and atop their Humvees and Bradleys, while stray dogs helped themselves to leftover MRE scraps cast aside by the soldiers. Our attached engineers had built showers (about six) the previous week and their Marine counterparts had dropped off a huge water bladder two days ago which was a Godsend and better than the four large bottles of Evian, issued to us for shower use every three days.
Anyway, I was taking my first hot shower in a month and with my rifle hanging from its sling on a large nail thought about my wife. Was she getting ready for school or staying home. It was about 2:00 p.m. back home and if my wife had no classes, she would be watching the soaps or some idiotic talk show. Shots began hitting the outside of the auditorium, ricocheting off the wall and either hitting parked vehicles nearby. I heard two of my friends, Murphy, a former Active duty soldier and another MP shouting at me to run for the door while they laid down covering fire. As I ran towards the door, with soap still in my hair, naked and my rifle slung over my back, I sprinted towards the door, hoping to God that I wouldn’t die like that…nude, with soap suds all over me…not good.
I dried myself off after pouring bottles of water over me to get rid of the soap, and put on my uniform. Grabbing my ballistic vest and Kevlar, I took my position on the roof alongside my squad while the Marines in the guard tower fired a burst from the 240B across the highway into the abandoned warehouse. Flares lit the night sky, people shouted, scurried about dropping off ammo cans; cursed each other or like our loud-mouthed Puerto-Rican engineer, hid in the bathroom. I saw my CLS bag land beside my feet as a lieutenant dropped down beside me, clad in PT gear, flak jacket and helmet, firing a short burst from his M4 rifle. “The TOC is monitoring radio chitchat between the Marines and their air support. “He said matter-of-factly, “They are taking rocket and mortar fire near the hospital in the back.”
I now began to hear mortar rounds exploding near the perimeter on the other side of the camp and an RPG round hit one of the classrooms which served as a barracks. More flares illuminated the night sky and two LAV-25s burst out of the front gate, taking up positions in front our wall. They opened up with their respective 25-mm chain guns and co-axial machine- guns, hitting the warehouse with a nasty volley. Minutes later, the person or persons, sniping at us ceased and probably disappeared into the field nearby. Sporadic gunfire and a mortar round or two kept the Marines up most of the night. I slept on the on the roof, using the CLS bag as a pillow.
Later on, around two or three in the morning, when the shooting died down, two Army “Dust-offs” swooped down on the heliport in the back and medevac’d a couple seriously wounded Marines back to Kuwait. That woke me up and that was an excuse to go downstairs, take a piss; grab some bottles of cold water, we kept in a fridge outside the aid station and return to my post on the roof. Our captain was in the TOC, pretending to be in charge while the First sergeant actually ran the show. The BC eventually, got a hold of a satellite phone and chatted with his wife, while everybody else, either slept or stood –to at their fighting positions.
Two weeks after that episode, the rest of the battalion arrived around midnight aboard Marine Chinooks and almost, immediately, some of the females began griping about the conditions which drew dirty looks from the two female Marines that were manning the Guard tower. Even some of our guys were crying and it those of us who had been here at Diwaniyah from the beginning quite angry. They didn’t even have the common sense to realize that this was
not Arifjan, Kuwait but a fucking active combat zone, with Jihadis prowling around outside the wire waiting for a chance to kill us. That morning, being the duty generator mechanic, I accompanied a platoon of MPs and two generators into downtown Diwaniyah and over to the prison which was then being run by the Marines. The Iraqi police were also present and our lieutenant spoke with his Iraqi counterpart prior to assuming g responsibility of the compound. It was a mud-coloured brick affair with an outer and inner courtyard. The Humvees and the 5-ton truck were parked in the outer courtyard, while myself and two other MPs unlimbered the generators and went about making them operational. After that, I instructed both MPS how to refuel them after 8 hours and do basic PMCS on them. Anything worse, required me with an armed escort to come and service them.
I caught a glimpse of some of the inmates, many of whom were basic criminals while the others were bona-fide insurgents from the local Ba’ath loyalist groups operating in the area, awaiting transportation to either Bucca or Abu-Gharib. After finishing my job, Edwards, the other generator mechanic and myself, jumped into our Humvee, with me serving as gunner and drove back to Camp Edson, followed by another Humvee, loaded with three MPs. We stopped at a local bakery, where I took pictures, bought some Laffa, which is a type of Naan bread that was baked in a stone oven and enjoyed some homemade local ice cream. Since we had a box of goodies, my wife had sent me, I decided to share it with the neighbourhood kids but first, I sought permission from a couple of mothers that were accompanying the kids. I was a bit angry at one older boy, who snatched a box of ginger snap cookies that I had given to a little girl, and laughed as he shared it with his friends. The little girl had on a white dress, stockings and slightly dusty black shoes and a very unhappy look on her face. Her curly and the glasses she wore, reminded me of my daughter and this made me discreetly aim my rifle at the kid and gesture to
him in a threatening manner to return the box of cookies to the little girl. He mouthed off an obscenity and handed the cookies back to the little before storming off back to his house across the street. “He will probably ambush us, later on,” remarked Edward, who still had his weapon trained on the boy. I wondered to God, if my actions had created another recruit for the nascent insurgency developing across Iraq.
Across the street, I saw something that made me realize how resilient the Iraqi people were and it gave me hope. It was a very lovely looking bride, wearing an extremely beautiful white wedding dress, in a lace design, holding a bouquet of flowers, navigating her way across a rubble strewn street, followed by her mother, clad in the traditional black robe called an abaaya, which she wore over light blue dress. I had my camera with me and regretted not taking a picture, but felt it would violate that moment. We made it back to camp without incident, save for going tense at the sound of distant small arms fire, coming from the other side of town and spent the rest of the day, trying to stay cool. When you have to pour a bucket of water on your cot, so as to catch an afternoon nap that should be a clue as to how hot it was that afternoon.
Highway 8(ASR Jackson) 11 miles north of Diwaniyah
When I was younger, I enjoyed watching a BBC television comedy series that came on PBS called Ripping Yarns. It was produced by two members of the original Monty Python crew and it poked fun at British culture and literature prior to World War Two. There was one line though, from an episode in that series, that stuck with me because it pretty much explained the epiphany I experienced concerning the attitude of the local population in my unit’s area of operations. The line went like this, “…a brooding resentment festering into a holocaust of violence.”
That very resentment manifested itself in the silent scowls of the locals as we drove through villages and towns, offering those MREs or Care packages sent to us from the home front. The general mind set up at HQ in Baghdad’s Green Zone and Washington, DC, entertained this scenario, that Iraq was like occupied France at the time of the Normandy Invasion, and the locals were the grateful French people, gleefully welcoming us, and from that point reality began to part from fantasy. Many of the locals were glad Saddam was gone and welcomed us while a great many others were not. Unfortunately, both parties saw us as an occupation army and this was where the Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary Ba’athist group and elements of Al Qaeda, began to make inroads by stepping up recruiting drives in the towns, cities and villages and executing hit-and-run tactics against us.
The resentment at this stage was simmering and on this particularly warm, Wednesday morning, as our convoy of six Humvees and one 5-ton truck still painted in woodland camouflage instead of desert tan with a 15Kw trailer in tow, headed north on Highway 8
towards Al Saniya, a small town, 11 miles north of Camp Edson. On the outskirts of the town, was a police station where MPs from one our Guard companies, were stationed alongside their counterparts in the Iraqi Police, training them and keeping the peace there. The town, bore some scars from the previous fighting two months earlier, such as the obligatory bombed out houses, burned out vehicles and the trash that littered the sides of the road. A tell-tale sign that the Americans were here.
As we turned right off Highway 8 and approached Al Saniya, the lead Humvee which mounted a “Ma deuce” which was the nickname for the .50 calibre machine-gun, slowed down as a child shepherd drove a large flock of goats across the road to a nearby farm field. I was sitting in the third Humvee, with my SAW, facing the 3 o’clock position, watching some students doing their studies under a tree near a mosque. In the distance, I could see the Euphrates River and thought about how it figured predominantly in the Bible. A shot rang out from the direction of the traffic circle, three hundred feet ahead of us. I glanced sideways and saw the gunner in the lead Humvee, slump over in the turret with a gaping bullet hole in his face. No open casket for him, unless, the morticians at Dover could do a good reconstruction job.
I immediately trained my SAW on the door and windows of the mosque and saw a pudgy, middle-aged male train an AK-47 on me. My training kicked in very swiftly and I gunned down my assailant with a short burst to the torso. An RPG exploded against a wall nearby and it was on! A full blown fire-fight. Other MPs jumped out of the Humvees and started engaging the shooters, who were trading shots with us from across a traffic circle. My A-gunner who was also the vehicle’s RTO, began calling in for 9-line medevac as I watched my driver, slump over the steering wheel, clutching his bloody face. Rounds began peppering the thin armour plating on rear left side of the vehicle and that made me very nervous.
The MPs in the police station and their Iraqi counterparts began laying down suppressing fire from behind a wall in front of the station house, allowing us to drag in our wounded and dead. Our 5-ton was on fire and both the driver and his assistant had already bailed seconds before an RPG demolished the driver’s cab. My driver, though badly wounded, managed to drive our Humvee close to the gate leading to the police station, allowing one of our medic, to drag him out of his seat and into the safety of the police station.
Two Marine Cobra helicopter gunships, operating out of Camp Edson, swept in low from the east and began engaging a group of Jihadists that were executing a contested withdrawal towards the river bank and the cover of some date palms. One of the Cobra gunships received serious small arms fire in a vital area, causing it to trail, oily black smoke forcing it to head back home. The other gunship continued strafing the river bank, and suppressed the ground fire being hurled at us, allowing two of our Humvees to get in closer and finish off that lot with, gratuitous bursts of machine-gun fire. Some Polish troops, riding in Humvees and their BRDM-2 armoured scout cars, showed up and took up defensive positions, while we gathered our dead and wounded at hastily made collection-point outside the now bullet ridden police station.
The convoy commander, a thin, sun-burned Master Sergeant, who last service in the First Gulf War and Bosnia, popped smoke on the grounds of the mosque and waved in the ’dust-off” helicopter, from the 498th which had been circling over the highway under the watchful eye of an Army Apache helicopter gun ship. Once it landed, the wounded, totaling six of our guys, were placed on board and whisked away to the Combat Support Hospital, located at Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone. A second “dust-off” landed and our two KIA, with escort headed towards Kuwait and the mortuary affairs unit waiting to receive them.
We exchanged MREs with the Poles, who were heading back to Um Qasr. Their English was very good and they oozed a professionalism that some of our guys in the battalion could never match. They had heard the gunfire and knew that there was police station with American troops in the town, so they came to investigate and drove right into a fire-fight. We recovered an assortment of AK47s, and a DShK heavy machine-gun and about nine dead insurgents. The others simply melted away in the local population and were looking at us with the rest of the crowd that had gathered to watch the aftermath, taking notes and bidding their time.
In the small PT field, behind the auditorium, we held our memorial service the next morning for our two fallen brothers. One was from Jersey City and a father of two, and the other who was the gunner in the lead vehicle was from Hempstead, Long Island. Some of the Marines also attended. The rest of the day was spent, doing basic maintenance on our vehicles, cleaning weapons and getting a convoy ready to head over to Hillah and work with the MPs maintaining a jail at the main police station there.
I finally got a few letters from home, mainly from my daughter and a care package. My wife didn’t like to write, so I t was mostly phone calls, if we were lucky and the Internet which barely worked. The Marines had a phone service located in one of the classrooms, so we usually waited till around late in the evening or early morning to call home and endure the long wait to use the phone. I was so happy to chat with my daughter, hear about her adventures in school, and how much we missed each other. My wife was starting classes at Bronx Community college, to get a nursing degree and our conversation, focused on bills and new furniture for the apartment and sex.
On the way back to my quarters, I could hear small arms fire erupting somewhere in the other part of Diwaniyah and the unmistakable sound of mortar fire. “Fucking natives are restless.” remarked an MP from another unit as she made her way towards the 977th ’s motor pool. From the looks of it, I could tell they were sending out a patrol to prowl around the town with the Iraqi Police or IPs as we called them. With them, the IPs, we didn’t know whether to trust them or not, nor anyone in that town for that matter.
One of the female engineers attached to our unit got caught sleeping with an Iraqi interpreter. She is a staff sergeant and her soldiers don’t think highly of her. She knows her job, but as an NCO, she pretty much sucked when it came to military bearing looking out for her squad. That part was emphasized a few days later, when she took her squad out on a mission at the police station, where they installed wiring and electrical outlets, replacing very old ones that were a danger to anyone who used them. On the way, back, she didn’t bother to do a head count and left behind one of her soldiers in town and that caused a big stink, when the missing soldier, turned up at a Marine traffic control point (TCP) in an Iraqi taxi cab. It was only by the Grace of God, that this Spec.4 wasn’t abducted by insurgents and murdered. The base commander, a very, hard-charging Marine and a better commander than our battalion commander, got wind of that incident and let our BC know how he felt about that episode. Instead of a field grade Article 15 and a demotion, our staff sergeant got a slap on the wrist from the BC and I will leave at that.
It was another typical, and uncomfortably hot afternoon as I repaired to my cot. The fans were not much use, since they blew in hot air and the floors being marble retained heat, so even at night, you were still miserable. Many of us took to sleeping outside if you didn’t mind stray dogs licking your face. You poured water on your cot and sleep in it or moved to the roof which was cooler as long as no errant mortar round landed on the roof and killed you. Anyway, as I lay
in my water-soaked cot, swatting away flies and hating life, I noticed a petite, brunette in a wrinkled DCU (Desert Camouflage uniform) carrying a clipboard in one hand and an M16A2 rifle in the other, walk through our quarters and make her way to the supply and armory located behind the auditorium.
“She’s attached to our S1 (Administration).” One of my friends, who happened to be an Admin “puke” pointed out. “She’s pretty cool.” he added with a wink.
I acknowledged him and went back to killing flies, when she appeared again and said “hello”. I noticed her name tag said ‘Ryan’ and smiled rather weakly at her. “Have a nice day,” she said quietly before disappearing outside the door.
“Not bad,” I commented. She wore glasses, but that didn’t mask her cute features and the uniform actually did justice to her well sculptured butt and firm, pert breasts, which was a rarity at times. I took a mental note of that and found myself, heading towards the aid station to say “hi” to my favourite medic, who happened to be in a bad mood. My cue to retreat and catch some sleep before heading out that night, to check on the generators over at the prison.
Diwaniyah Prison,
Al-Furat District, Diwaniyah 2314 hours, Saturday
I took my place in the back of the cargo Humvee, my M16 at the ready and noted that some of the officers in this battalion had an awful habit of undermining the authority of the NCOs when it came to handing out assignments or having the junior enlisted perform a task. As we prepared to head out to Diwaniyah prison, the S3 (Operations) officer, who was a captain, wanted everyone to take extra ammo and water, having heard from his counter-part in the S2 (Intelligence) shop that, there may be trouble with insurgents. Instead of talking to Sergeant First Class Richards, who was NCOIC of the mission and having him pass down the information to the junior NCOs and soldiers, the Ops officer bypassed him and ordered the soldiers to draw the extra ammunition and water canisters from the supply/armoury shed.
When SFC Richards voiced his displeasure, the Ops officer proceeded to pull rank which drew the ire of Master Sergeant Logan. The end result, was an ugly shouting match that was not only embarrassing but it showed us junior enlisted, how little respect some of the officers had for the senior NCOs and the lack of authority, our battalion commander had, when it came to controlling us. As previously mentioned, we are a battalion headquarters with attached MP companies. Our company is not a combat support unit but a designated I/R
. Internment/Resettlement) unit. That meant we handled enemy prisoners of war and refugees, but as things were turning out, we were not properly trained for this mission.
We rolled out of the front gate, past bored but alert, Marine sentries in a convoy of three Humvees, sporting “Hill-Billy” armour and improvised hard mounts. The night was muggy and
somewhere in Diwaniyah, we could hear gunfire as Shi’a militants slugged out against their Sunni counterparts for control of some strategic neighbourhood. The streets were deserted, save for U.S. Marines conducting combat patrols with the Iraqi Police, some of whom, weren’t so eager on being out there.
The prison is located in the Al-Furat district, in the north-eastern part of Diwaniyah and the house around there still bore scars of the heavy fighting back in April. Trash and the detritus of war still littered the streets, such as burnt out vehicles, dead animals and an occasional unburied body. The Marine sentries at the checkpoint, were expecting us and waved us through. Once inside the compound, I was greeted by the site of personnel burning shit, inmates, mainly, grimy looking Iraqi males who were involved in acts of insurgency against Coalition and U.S. forces, criminal activities or being in the wrong place at the wrong time during a sweep by the Marines, who peered out of cell windows at us or were being searched by Iraqi prison guards for contraband.
Specialist Morgenstern, our MI guy from the S2 shop stepped out of a sandbagged, mud coloured building to greet us. He began briefing the MPs while myself and SSgt. Martinez, our supply sergeant, who was my A-gunner on the trip up here from Kuwait, went over to the three 15 kilowatt generators and serviced them. Outside, the prison wall, that famous distinct sound of an AK-47 could be heard at the far end of a side street followed by a grenade blast and more AK- 47-gun fire…then silence. A Marine, watching us work on the generators, remarked, that they were Ba’athist diehards having it out with Shi’a gunmen who had infiltrated into the city and added nonchalantly. “If it isn’t them then it is us.”
I needed to take a piss, so I headed towards sandbagged building, which had a bathroom of sorts, which is a hole in the ground, Iraqi style. Sergeant Richards was smoking a cigarette by
the front door, still ruminating over his pissing contest with the Ops officer, one of the MPs sat on a crudely made bench, cleaning his weapon, chatting with a Marine about Houston Astros pitcher Oswalt’s no-hitter against the Yankees, four weeks ago and Spec.4 Morgenstern was antagonizing a handcuffed Iraqi prisoner, sitting in front of his desk by waving a Star of David pendant in front of the man’s face. It wasn’t cool because, we were supposed to be above that type of behaviour, but here was this idiot, baiting a shackled prisoner, by flaunting a symbol not well received in many Middle Eastern countries and mouthing off some serious racial epithets. I forgot that I had to piss and walked back outside. “Sergeant, “I said quietly, “Go talk to Morgenstern.”
Sergeant Richards noted the urgency in my tone of voice, tossed aside his cigarette butt and hurriedly walked into the building. I could hear someone else, yelling at Morgenstern and it wasn’t Richards but another NCO who quickly placed Morgenstern on report. That type of behaviour turned people who already didn’t like us into potential insurgents. Richards stormed out of the station house and brusquely ordered everyone to mount up. My job on the generators were done and I lugged my tool box into the back of the cargo Humvee, before climbing into the back. As we rolled out of the main gate, a single burst from an AK-47 reverberated down the street, hitting the two Marines at the checkpoint. Being CLS qualified, I snatched up my medic bag and made my way to the two downed Marines, while being covered by a SAW gunner in a nearby guard tower. A Navy medic joined me and he pronounced one of the two wounded Marines dead, so we worked on the other one, providing an IV, rescue breathing and bandaging him. Someone fired an illumination round over the entire street which just provoked my gunplay from our assailants. Within minutes, a Marine Chinook from nearby camp Edson landed in a vacant lot and departed with both Marines, while the door-gunner laid down suppressing fire at
gun flashes coming from an alleyway. A Cobra gunship circled low, dropping flares while three LAV-25s rolled up, vomiting out its respective cargo of four heavily armed marines, who cautiously made their way down the alleyway, while one of the LAV-25’s swept the path ahead with 25-mm chain gun and co-axial MG fire.
Richards decided to spend the night at the prison and radioed our TOC of the situation.
What surprised us but shouldn’t have was the Ops officer telling us to get back here ASAP! Richards lost it and told him off before telling our RTO (Radio telephone operator) to ignore the Ops officer. “I am not endangering my soldiers just to please his jackass!” exploded Richards, He ordered the vehicles to be harboured up for the rest of the night by the front gate, and we had a choice of sleeping in the vehicles or in the empty room next to the clinic. I chose to sleep in the back of my Humvee rather than deal with the scent of unwashed inmates, while outside the gate, Marines mopped up, kicked ass and took a lot of name.
