KIRKUK, Iraq -- As he
walked through the mud surrounding his temporary barracks, 1st Sgt. Ken
Agueda carried an M-4 assault rifle without its essential lethal
components: bullets. Earlier in the day, Agueda had turned in his
ammunition -- cartridges, assorted grenades -- in preparation for his
journey home after nearly 13 months in Iraq.
"It's like walking around without your pants," said Agueda, a 17-year U.S. Army veteran from Bayamon, Puerto Rico.
With their departure just days away, Agueda and his
unit, the 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment of the 25th Infantry
Division, were euphoric and reflective. In more than a dozen interviews
over three days this past week, soldiers with combat experience in all
corners of Iraq offered up a mixed final assessment of a conflict that
is burned into them forever. Its ultimate outcome, all agreed, remains
highly uncertain and far away.
Soldiers ranging from privates to senior officers
described last Sunday's national elections as vindication for over a
year of hard service. The unexpectedly strong turnout, they said,
altered their perception about the willingness of Iraqis to embrace the
American mission here and helped project a rare positive image of the
U.S. military following such stains as the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse
scandal last year.
"This was the opposite of Abu Ghraib," Agueda said.
"I think it's safe to say that this is the biggest thing that anyone of
us has ever done. I mean, in our humble positions, we helped make
history. We did something that could have a positive effect on the
entire world."
Spec. Andrew Field, 31, of Tallahassee, described the
elections as "the culminating event for our whole deployment. If it
hadn't gone well, it would have been incredibly demoralizing to
everyone. It gave meaning to everything we were doing."
But the soldiers were reluctant to say that the
elections were a turning point in the war. "Leaving with the elections
will definitely be a positive in our minds, but I don't know if I'm
optimistic or pessimistic," said Capt. John Hussey, 26, of Uvalde, Tex.
"I wouldn't be surprised if the entire country descends into chaos. But
I wouldn't be surprised if it flourishes, either."
Asked how long he thought U.S. troops would remain in
Iraq, Hussey said: "Probably 10 or 15 years, if we want to do it right.
I don't think there's going to be 135,000 Americans in Baghdad 10 years
from now, but there are going to be Americans in Iraq for a long, long
time."
The unit, based at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii,
arrived in Iraq more than a year ago. The battalion was deployed from
as far south as Najaf, where it twice battled the militia of Moqtada
Sadr, a rebellious Shiite cleric, to the northern city of Mosul, where
it helped provide security for the elections after it's one-year tour
was extended.
The 700-member battalion handed out at least 550
Combat Infantryman Badges for participation in close combat. The unit
suffered no combat fatalities. It has been nominated for a Presidential
Unit Citation, which honors units that display "extraordinary heroism
in action against an armed enemy."
The battalion experienced everything from snow to
extreme heat; one day last summer, Sgt. 1st Class Greg Baker said his
portable thermometer showed the temperature to be 130 degrees. During a
17-day stretch in Najaf in April, each soldier lived in the open desert
and subsisted on one bottle of water and one MRE (Meal Ready to Eat)
per day. Spec. Kris Johnson, 22, of Chicago, joked that it was so cold
and wet in Mosul in the days before the elections that his fingers
froze around his M-4 and that fellow soldiers had to pull the trigger
for him.
The unit's final mission revealed much about the
rigors of soldiering in Iraq. After the elections, the battalion had to
return from Mosul to Forward Operating Base Warrior in Kirkuk. The
convoy consisted of nearly 100 vehicles, from Humvees to trailers, and
the journey was so complicated that commanders rehearsed it by chalking
out a colored floor map that spanned an entire room. The vehicles left
in stages and traveled with their headlights dark to avoid tipping off
insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades.
A Humvee carrying a reporter drifted off the road
several times Tuesday as the 22-year-old driver, his night-vision
goggles fogging, strained to find it in the rain and darkness. The trip
took six hours and, toward the end, the convoy became lost in downtown
Kirkuk, struggling to find its way back to the base.
"You can never really, totally relax
over here," said Capt. James Everett, 30, of Currituck, N.C., who was
also in the vehicle. "You have your downtime, but you're always on
guard."
The following day, the relief among the soldiers was
palpable. With nothing to do but pack and wait, they watched movies,
read, slept, smoked or wandered aimlessly on the base. The infantrymen
lived on bunk beds in an encampment called Tent City, a cluster of tan,
canvas tents packed with 20 soldiers each. Rain had turned the area
into a swamp. Hot showers were rare. No one seemed to care.
"Sir, how the hell are you?" a soldier yelled,
smiling and waving to Capt. Chris Loftis, of Honolulu, who speaks
fluent Arabic and served as the battalion's liaison to the Iraqi
security forces.
"I'm great, sergeant," Loftis shouted back.
"I love you," yelled the soldier before disappearing into one of the camp's reeking portable bathrooms.
At the evening meeting for senior officers, the
unit's commander, Lt. Col. Dave Miller, asked the battalion medic, Maj.
Joel Meyer, for an update on his activities.
That afternoon, Meyer, who is normally a family
practitioner at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, had removed two
locks from a black box that he had carried for the past year. He
methodically took out the contents -- vials of morphine, dozens of
bottles of pharmaceutical-grade Demerol, a painkiller, and Ativan, an
anxiety-reducing medication -- and spent the next two hours destroying
them. Meyer dumped the pills into a toilet, where they dissolved. He
injected the morphine into the mud.
"Well, I disposed of tens of thousands of dollars
worth of controlled substances," Meyer reported. "I had three square
meals. I'm planning on turning in early."
All of the soldiers were taking reintegration
training to help cope with what senior officers predicted would be a
difficult transition, especially for those with families. "A year
deployment is not healthy for nobody," Agueda said. "Every single man
in this company has been through a crisis, I guarantee that. Right now,
it's going to take some time to repair, and that includes myself."
"We've all aged tremendously," Hussey said.
Each soldier seemed to carry a memory of his own
brush with mortality. Passing a filtered-tipped cigar among friends
outside his tent, Johnson, the specialist from Chicago, said his came
last October during a U.S. offensive 65 miles north of Baghdad. He was
outside an Iraqi police station occupied by U.S. forces in Samarra when
a rocket-propelled grenade came hurtling toward him.
"It was just a white streak, and it was screaming
your name -- Johnson! Johnson! Johnson! -- all the way down the
street," he said as his friends dissolved in laughter. The grenade hit
a tank about 15 yards away and pitched him to the ground, he said,
shaken but unharmed.
Baker said his defining memory came during the same
operation. "There was this family walking down the street, and, you
know, it's a war," he said, staring into space. "There's bodies tore in
half and stuff all over the place and this barefoot kid comes walking
up to me. He's holding his father's hand. I was just thinking, 'How
will this kid possibly get over this?' He had brains and pieces of guts
between his toes. I took out a piece of candy and I gave it to him, and
he started smiling like absolutely nothing was wrong."
Baker paused.
"I just want to get home and see my girls," he said.
Capt. Chris Duncan, 28, a Johns Hopkins University
graduate from Kingsland, Ark., said he staunchly supported the war. But
when he heard a soldier had been killed, or saw one of his friends
wounded, he occasionally found himself asking, "What was it for?"
On election day, Duncan said, he stood near a
precinct and watched Iraqis stream to the polls. "First you had one,
then two, then 50," he said. "Then the line was around the polling
site. And this was in a neighborhood where people really had a reason
to dislike us -- former Baath Party members, former military regime
guys."
Duncan, who has spent 20 months in Iraq over the past three years, said the image solidified his resolve.
"Now I know what it was for," he said.
Now, the battlefield calculus is enabling sustainable security. We are doing this through two means - Securing the population where they sleep and developing Iraqi Security Forces (both Army and Police). We are fighting, too. When the International Zone (IZ) was pounded by dozens of rockets from Sadr City, thus killing and injuring both Iraqi and Coalition civilians, we were called upon to fight the Jaysh al Mahdi uprising in Sadr City and Bravo Company (Bushmasters) fought magnificently. In four hours, Bushmaster assembled from the most distant location in our battle space, rearmed and deployed to Sadr City. Many of you have seen their exploits on CNN, CBS and in the NY Times…these boys are the real deal. What you need to know is their success kept the Government of Iraq (GoI) intact. Sadr wanted to displace the GoI from the IZ, thus delegitimizing it. I well up with emotion when I talk about them. 
great Americans with true character that empathize with our sacrifice. They send me packages and mail that I deliver to our Dragons out on Patrol Bases. It impacts soldiers. I’ve seen them stop what they are doing, sit on their cots and start reading their cards from a complete stranger that simply says – “Thank You” in their own words. It’s because of you and the people of Soldiers’ Angels that we endure the unendurable. I will close with a note from a Soldiers’ Angels Card – “May No Soldier Go Unloved.”
Recent Comments