How Am I Supposed To Tell People What It Was Like?

[M2BFV]

The car bomb would have killed me if it wasn't for a broken hydraulic pump for the ramp on my Bradley. I was sent back the night before with our logistics convoy. The next morning the half of our platoon that came back with me was woken up early and told about the attack. Iraqi police had escorted a car bomb through their own lines and the Iraqi National Guard post- right into our outpost- where I would have been sleeping had I been there. It was July 8th, 2004, in Samarra. The bomb killed five of our men and wounded about 20 more- I don't know how many Iraqis were killed, but it was at least 30. The Iraqis routed and left all their shit behind. As our platoon leader was telling us this, helicopters were landing nearby with our wounded men in them. An hour later we were driving the other half of my platoon's tracks to the site of the attack, what became known as FOB Razor, on the Tigris. On the way over the spill-way I looked out of my track's periscopes. In defense, what was left of the outpost had fired at anything and anyone in every direction after the attack. We passed a dead Iraqi policeman, I saw his brains next to him in the front seat of his truck. The building that comprised the outpost had collapsed. Over the next three days we endured several heavy mortar attacks, an attempted assault across the bridge, and several bouts of machine gun fire- all while digging corpses out of rubble. Our dead we taken away immediately. But the Iraqi dead had nobody to come for them for a few days. It was over 120 degrees.. We finally had some of our guys bulldoze a trench with an M88 and we buried them, we couldn't handle the smell, or the flies anymore- the bodybags didn't seem to help. This wasn't even one of the worst days for me. It sticks out in my mind because I was sent home on leave only 20 days later- just in time for my 21st birthday.

I don't know why I thought of that instant first, out of the long list of shit that bugs me everyday.

There's another memory that'll haunt me forever. There's a kid named Ross Mcginnis, you can look him up. He earned himself the Medal of Honor when he smothered an RGD-5 hand grenade with his body, saving the other four men in his gun-truck by trading his life for theirs. I washed pieces of his him out of that truck with a bottle of water and paper-towels. What they don't say in the citation or in the book about our unit, "They Fought for Each Other," is the details. Ross was the youngest kid in our regiment. His birthday was June 18th, the same as the US Army's... Before we deployed we had a big battalion formation on June 18th 2006 for the Army's anniversary. He, being the youngest in the battalion, and another soldier, the oldest, cut the cake. Ross hit our battalion commander in the face with a piece of cake- got a huge laugh from all 800 of us. In December that same year, he was dead. The guy that threw the grenade was named Roba. He was 16 years old. Our boys captured him just like he had been more than once before... But there wasn't enough evidence for the Iraqi detainee section to hold him for more than 24 hours, as the terrible rules of conflict dictated at the time. He had been released after attacks in the past and we knew he would be released again. We didn't take him to the detainee section. We took him downtown to the worst place in the Adhamiyah District of Baghdad, the most horrific and dangerous place we could go- the Abu Hanifa Mosque. We pushed him out onto the street as close as we could get to a group of unfriendly looking men- the type that usually shot at us. We shook Roba's hand and loudly, in Arabic, proclaimed him a great help to us. We then gave him $50 and left. I'll never forget the look on his face as we drove away. We never saw him again. I visited Ross's grave at Arlington two Thanksgivings ago. He was 19 when he was killed in action by a 16 year old who threw a grenade. It still boggles my mind.

I can't help but jump around in time. Some of these events are linked, but I can only tell the stories the way my mind lets me and as they come. Even typing some of these stories is more difficult than I thought, I haven't told anyone after all.

The first big fight I was ever in was Easter Sunday, 2004, in Samarra. A section of Charlie Co, 108th Infantry was ambushed as they came into the city after a week-long truce. Nathan P Brown was hit squarely in the chest by an RPG, killing him instantly and severely wounding several other men in their truck. The ensuing fight lasted for the next two days, drawing in our entire battalion. During that time my Bradley was hit by no less than 5 RPG's, one of them almost piercing the floor-plates near the troop-ramp- it would have detonated an ammunition ready box filled to the brim with high explosive incendiary 25mm cannon shells. I was lucky. Two other tracks in my platoon were damaged too, but nobody was hurt.

I have so many stories. I don't want to tell some of them. I'm actually afraid to. I'm shaking while even thinking about some of this.

I miss my friends. Garth Sizemore bled to death, and I still have nightmares about Juba. You can even google it and it comes up as a term on wikipedia- Juba, the f*cking snipers. They killed my friends. There's even video footage of it online.

 

[M2BFV]

Once we had a journalist with us on a patrol. Our task for that day was humanitarian... We were given a truckload of school supplies for children. We took them all to a Kurdish neighborhood in Samarra. I remember thinking how much it would suck to have to go to a specific school just because of my ethnicity- like these poor kids in Iraq, segregated from other kids. We put down our razor-wire to keep cars a safe distance from our tracks, lest they be car bombs. I unbuttoned my pants to take a leak on the wall. We relaxed for a moment as some our guys and the reporter went into the school, not expecting anyone to shoot at us while there were a few hundred children around. We were wrong. An RPG landed amidst myself and my two fireteam mates just as I was redoing my buttons. I was stunned for a moment- a fragment ricocheted off of my helmet, as I found out later. But my friends were hit. Downing was on his back, screaming, his M240 machine gun in the dirt nearby. My sergeant, Aponte, was leaning on the wall with his fingers in his ears. I ran to Downing, the most visibly injured. His kneecap had been shredded by the RPG. I called for our medic who came sprinting. I called him again, screaming in his face, actually, until he said "I'm right here, man. We're good!" The wall began to fragment and turn to dust in little pockets and I heard loud pops as I noticed the dust get kicked up around us. They had begun firing a machine gun at us now. It only lasted for a second before I saw some of the rest of our platoon bounding past us, Huff fired no less than three 40mm grenades in only a few steps. I looked up from Downing to see Aponte realize that he had a hole in his abdomen. He was okay and he wasn't bleeding badly, but enough to notice now. I saw the journalist already in the back of a truck, writing notes. I made eye-contact with him and he averted his gaze immediately- I remember it. In just a moment we had everyone back in our Bradleys and we were on our way away from there. In the back of the Bradley I noticed Crawford, another teammate who'd been just around the corner when the rocket impacted, he wasn't spared either- He had his hands cupped over his face while he leaned forward. A fragment had gone through one cheek and out the other, taking a couple teeth with it.

I remember being so angry. Not just because they hurt us, but because they shot at us while there were children around. Those f*cking animals. Later they murdered one of the teachers at that school because she drove a car.

The very next day was another patrol. I was given Downing's machine gun, which I wasn't qualified on. I was one of the only dismounted infantrymen left at this point though, with so many wounded. We could field barely half of ourselves. A couple Bradleys and six or seven dismounts- a real skeleton crew. The same men attacked us this day too. They aimed for me. Our company commander noticed me on the wall with the M240, and he knew I wasn't qualified on it. He called me to come over to him. Just after I got up and began walking, an RPG slammed into the corner where I had been kneeling. It missed me by mere seconds. I was a nervous wreck for the next few days. We figured that they had gotten wise and began aiming for the guy with the most firepower- a squad's machine gunner. They'd fire a shot with a rocket propelled grenade launcher, a few with some automatic rifles or machine guns, and then they'd take off in a car they'd stashed nearby.

 

[M2BFV]

We raided the house of a known-terrorist one night. One of our guys drove a Bradley Fighting Vehicle- 33 tons- straight through the front of the house. We all ran inside expecting to find the enemy taken completely by surprise. Instead, we found a care-taker, an elderly couple, and their two middle-aged mentally retarded sons completely taken by surprise. We had just destroyed their house. It was the wrong f*cking house. The WRONG f*ckING HOUSE.

I wonder if those people can sleep at night. I hope they sleep better than I do.

Apart from the loss of my friends, it's the mistakes we made and the people we hurt that get to me the most. I've destroyed so much that I sometimes I wonder if I wasn't destroyed in the process. I've wrecked innocent people's livelihoods, families, homes, and lives by mistake. And I've done more than the same to the enemy too. I'm not sure if I can forgive myself for the harm I caused other people. I've crushed cars, and smashed down walls and houses. I've helped dig-up graves and wreck offices. I've broken into people's homes and invaded their privacy and lives. I've destroyed personal things and have literally dragged people out of their homes in the dark of night, kicking and screaming. We were the scariest, most deadly things in the world where I was- It was wonderful at the time, even with the dispersed moments of utter horror, dread, and fear. Now though, I just feel bad about it all.

I don't regret killing the enemy. I do regret hurting everyone else. There is no other feeling of shame that I have ever felt in all my life that can compare to what I experienced when my teammates and I smashed through a door, expecting to find the enemy, but instead finding a helpless and harmless family huddled in fear- fear of us. They had nothing to do with the war- until we brought it to them.

 

[M2BFV]

I was the gunner on a truck for a few months. It was near the end of my last deployment and I was nervous about making it home alive, after so many of our boys were killed. I was angry at the world and at anyone who got in our way. As the lead truck's gunner It was my job to make sure nobody got in our way or stopped our convoy for any reason. We were on our way back to our FOB after a shift at the Adhamiyah Joint Security Site. Typically, Iraqi Police or Army troops would see our convoy coming and would stop traffic, because we stopped for nothing. I was to shoot warning shots and then kill anything that tried to block us. This day the Iraqi guards weren't paying attention and didn't stop traffic for our section. A white sedan appeared from our front left and wasn't stopping. Instinctively I fired a warning shot at the car itself, as there was nowhere else to fire. I hit the back passenger-side window, shattering it. The car immediately screeched to a halt. Only a second later we were passing them. I looked into the car as Iraqi guards were just then jumping to their senses. I saw the driver turned around and reaching over the seat towards someone in the back of the car. Instantly I was terrified that I hit them. It was a girl in a black hijab. Her hands were over her face as we drove by. I lost sight of her after that.

I can still see it all, like it happened just five minutes ago. I sincerely hope that I didn't hurt her. I should have aimed for the engine-block of the car. I'm so sorry.

 

[keifer]

I don't know if you can tell people what it was like or not. You can try, but for those who haven't been there, I just get blank stares.

Your friends and family can support you, but sometimes you just really need to talk to someone who understands. You'll find people here who may not have walked in your shoes but sure know what the pain is like afterward.

I hope that made sense.

 

[M2BFV]

It was sometime in November, in Samarra, 2004. It had rained a bit. The Iraqi police had checkpoints around the city, four of them. Due to the construction of their concrete outposts, we called them all "cop-in-a-boxes." They were supposed to stop traffic and look for weapons and bad guys, essentially. They were also notoriously unreliable as the Iraqi police at the time were very corrupt. One day though, they all disappeared. The enemy launched a well-coordinated attack on them all simultaneously. All the police either ran away, switched sides, or were executed.

I was on the roof of our FOB, Uvanni, right in the middle of the city, when the fighting started. A couple platoons went out to find out what had happened to the police and meet the guys responsible. As we listened to the ensuing firefight and our 25mm cannons rhythmically thumping away we noticed a man several hundred meters away, digging a hole near the side of the road. This was during a fight and it had just began raining again- to us he appeared to be up to no good. He had a bag next to him, what we took for an IED that he was attempting to place- in plain view of the entire rooftop of the forward operating base of an entire American Infantry battalion.

He was an easy target. A sniper fired a warning shot, which he seemingly ignored. I was told to kill him after that. He was at over 500 meters- a pretty long distance for an iron-sighted M16A4 in the rain, but for some reason our section of the roof was told to open fire first- even after the sniper had fired. The first shot I fired was a tracer and I watched it arc, hit him in the chest, and skip off the road behind him. He sat down where he was, cross-legged, it looked like. After that, everyone else began shooting. The whole area around him was whipped into a frenzy of muddy geysers and little bits of dirt and rocks flung into the air as perhaps a hundred or more rounds smacked into it and him. It was over in a split second. But then it wasn't... An hour later two more men arrived in a car in nearby. We watched them get out and approach the body, which we would have let them take away- but they tried to get the bag. They were killed too.

That night we went out on patrol and I was the driver of a Bradley. Long after curfew we nearly killed a man that we found on the street, somewhere you didn't wanna be after dark. He approached us and began pointing at houses on his street and others and telling us all about the people in them, specifically those who had been involved earlier in the day. We began raiding houses on this man's word, which turned out to be good.

We found car parts that had belonged to Iraqi police cars in one house. The guy's sons and his friends had stripped the police cars for parts after he murdered all the men at one checkpoint. The kids were no more than 12 or 13. We also found one of the guys that had helped coordinate the attacks- we took his motorcycle and I pivot steered on it with my Bradley, turning into scrap metal. No regrets about that.

I still never found out if the man I shot and the other two men who were killed were actually enemy or not. It bothers me and I think it will forever.

 

[M2BFV]

I just found the combat PTSD forum in the networks section, perhaps they can help too.

Last night was hard. After typing some stories, I thought about many more. Even the Ambien didn't really help me get to sleep. This morning, all I could think was "I wonder how many people were killed in Iraq today." My war never ended. We left, but it's still going on.

 

[AS1975]

One thing I notice is that I can actually understand the reactions, I'm more cut up about the things I couldn't have changed forcefully or otherwise without considerably more support than I actually had and the consequent effects upon the innocent in the middle - the "what if's" and "could haves" are incessant, as is the playback. I have seen things on remote communities that should never have happened, that are still happening, and are ignored by the majority of people, there is guilt there too, I haven't stopped it, changed it or made it well enough known - how my brain suggests I may have done so is beyond my grasp.

I have hurt innocent people due to reactions and automatic violence honed by years of exposure to violence, the old "strike first, or be first struck" approach. There is nothing I can do to help those people, or assuage my guilt for my actions, except ensure that I get myself to a place where I can understand what happened and why, to ensure I can understand myself and not put myself voluntarily in certain situations (it's why I choose to fight fire - I feel no guilt whatsoever for any damage I can do fire accidentally).

But most importantly, you are human, you aren't perfect. It seems like you kind of expect that you should be (or should have been). You'll be surprised what other people understand, albeit a slightly skewed version of what you understand from the same incidents. That isn't the point, just about everyone on this site will understand your position now and what you are going through, the same way I understand how unpleasant this shit is to actually think of and write about, I was physically shaking when I did it. All I want to do is support you to get to where I am now, which is a long, long way from perfect, but a hell of a journey from where I was a year ago.

AS

 

[keifer]

I don't know how much you don't sleep. It gets better but I went two months or so with little to no sleep. If I get five hours or more a night, I'm happy. Last night, 3. I'd say it's getting old but I'm past that point where that is. Sleep aids and I don't mix. Doc said sleep walking with those are not a good, least I didn't do an thing crazy.

 

[RussH]

Do what you are doing now, write the stories in this diary. You might also consider writing them on paper, and submitting them for publishing some day.

 

[keifer]

My Google drive is stuffed with journal entries and notes.

 

[HOPEFULHEART82]

Keep talking. Don't worry about any rules except for grammar, and keep talking. Im not there yet, I can't speak, but I can listen.