What Was Asked of Us Read online

  We were just waiting for someone to run through that smoke and start shooting at us, and after a second it starts to clear up and I look over and the two cars are no longer there. So me and Sergeant Chad Urquhart, we were thinking the same thing, and we both ran out there as fast as we could, and when I got there Sergeant Urquhart was over Sergeant Williams, holding him by the throat, almost looking like he was choking him, but he was actually administering first aid. I walked up and at that moment time kind of slowed down for me, and I looked at him, and Sergeant Urquhart was like, “OK, go help the other guys.” I kind of stared at him for a second, then I snapped out of it and I was looking for Creighton ’cause he was my best friend. I was like, “Oh my God, he can’t be dead,” and I ran into Rincon—we called him Recon—and he was lying there, his foot and his lower left leg were pretty torn up. It looked really bad, but I thought he was going to make it. He was going to lose his leg, but when I got to him he wasn’t breathing and his eyes were open, and he had, like, feathers on his face. I don’t know where the feathers came from and I don’t remember seeing any chickens or anything, but he had feathers on his face. He had this . . . some type of cut on his face, but he was dead. I checked his pulse and he wasn’t breathing. He was dead and his body was gasping for air, like when a body dies it’s releasing all that air. I was yelling for a medic.

  I went looking for Creighton, and about that time everybody started waking up and going out there to find out what was going on. He was lying on his face, and parts of his uniform were burnt off. He had blood covering his entire head, like someone poured a bucket of red paint on him. I didn’t want to touch him ’cause his eyes were open and I didn’t know how hurt he was. He had a big chunk, probably like a half-dollar coin, missing from the back of his skull, and at that point I started to cry. I checked his pulse and it was really weak and he wasn’t moving. I stood right next to Creighton while this was happening. I didn’t leave Creighton, and the medic finally showed up and the medic kind of looked at me a little dumbfounded. He stood over me, looking at me, and I was sitting there crying, holding Creighton’s hand, saying, “Look, he’s got a weak pulse. He’s not breathing, you know, do something.” He’s like, “There’s nothing I can do.” He knew right away that he was dead. I said, “Well, help me turn him over,” and so we turned him over. I was holding on to him and the medic grabbed me and said, “Look, he’s dead. He’s dead. We gotta go.”

  There was a mob of people in the distance walking toward us because they saw the explosion. They were walking toward us like they were afraid and they wanted us to protect them, but at that point we had just been hit. It was weird because when they started walking toward us, everyone started to get really defensive and like, “Pull security around this area! We need to lock this area down, no one in and no one out, find out how many are dead and find out who’s wounded.” At this point I still hadn’t left Creighton, and I could hear Sergeant Urquhart yelling over Sergeant Williams for a medic. But Sergeant Williams died even though he was the only one that didn’t die instantly.

  I was talking to my friend Creighton. At first I just said, “This isn’t happening, you know, you’re not gonna die, this is not happening.” I was kind of freaking out a little bit, but after I realized he was dead, I said a prayer, like a Hail Mary or something. Our Father, who art in heaven. That’s the first one that came to mind, and I said that as I had my hand on his body, holding him. I said that as fast as I could because I just wanted to make sure that he was gonna go to heaven. I walked over to Recon, I said it over his body, and I walked over to Sergeant Williams, and I said it over his.

  We couldn’t find Corporal Curtin. We used to call him Jersey, ’cause he was from New Jersey—like, “Hey, have you seen Jersey?” At that moment I was like, “Aw, shit, he’s dead too,” and we found his body, or what was left of it. He took a big part of the blast and he was really torn apart. The trunk of the vehicle was filled with dynamite. While Creighton and Recon were looking inside the car, Curtin had the man open the trunk, and he was standing in front of it when the trunk popped open and exploded. He was in bits and pieces. I said that prayer over him. I mean, that was the least I could do.

  Later on that day, they pulled us off that line and sat us down and said, You guys just relax—eat something, drink something, and I could not get that smell out of my hands or out of my nostrils. I could just smell burnt skin and I was tripping out. I was sitting there and they were forcing us to drink water and eat something. We had our helmets off and we were sitting in this hole, a dug-in position, and it was dead silent. I remember going to scratch my ear and I had wax that had dripped down from the blast and it had hardened on my earlobe. I’ve lost 15 percent of my hearing from that one blast, I believe.

  The following day is when I actually had my first kill. By then, a lot of us were ready to go kill some bad guys. We wanted revenge and we were ready, and that is what made us so tough, because after that they weren’t sure what they were going to do with our company. They thought, These are the first casualties they’ve had and it’s bad and we don’t know if this company’s going to make it—we might have to pull them back. But the following day we did our Karbala mission. We used to call it the Karbala Gap because there’s a huge gap and there’s hills on both sides, and that’s the best way to get into Karbala. We hit a lot of contact. Our Bradleys were destroying enemy tanks and our dismounts were engaging in firefights. We were moving and we were not afraid. That day we must have got at least 50 percent of our kills for the war, and at that moment our battalion knew—or our headquarters, they knew—that they could depend on our company, and we were pushed forward. We had no time to sit and grieve about what happened, and our fuel was revenge for our friends and also survival for our families. At that moment it changed everything for us, and we became hard because we were still young and innocent and just new cherries, if you will, and after that had happened we had become different soldiers.

  I never thought of it as a historic event, but this last deployment I was in Tikrit for a year and that’s all we seem to see—car bombs and suicide bombs and roadside bombs. That’s such a cowardly way to fight, but I guess if that’s the only way to do it, that’s what you’re gonna do. It’s a different way of fighting and something that, as an infantryman, I never trained for. I remember in Tikrit, my commander, he had us out there on the highways in the city 24-7. Me and my platoon, we’d be out there six, seven hours at a time. It’s kind of crazy. We were looking for bombs, but at the same time if we’re out there long enough, we don’t give them a chance to put the bombs in place. We did a really good job. The city of Tikrit is now being run by Iraqis, by the Iraqi army and Iraqi government. So there is a way to beat it. We just have to work harder than them and stay out longer if we’re on those highways.

  Now when we have a checkpoint, car bombs are something we worry about. You don’t have enough time to react to a car bomb, so you are on your toes and you have the itchy trigger finger. This car seems like it’s not going to stop. Does he see me? Is this guy a car bomb? You kind of freak out. That’s why we have the rules of engagement. Our ROE were a warning shot, a disable shot to disable the vehicle, then the kill shot, but you can’t do all three of those because there is not time. If it looks like it’s not going to stop, it’s really on that one soldier to make the right decision. A lot of the time the warning shots become disable shots, a lot of disabling shots become kill shots because it’s so hard sometimes. We feel like our hands are tied because we don’t want to kill innocent people, but, man, our enemy—they hide, they hide among the innocent people, and it’s so hard for us to do our job out there.

  I don’t see the suicide bombing as a historic event. It changed my life, and I’m just grateful for still being here and I’ll never forget those guys. Sergeant Williams, he was my team leader. He was the greatest leader that I’ve ever had. He could get along with anyone. He had unbelievable talents, like when it came to being athletic, and he had a voice. He
could sing beautifully. Jersey was a really quiet guy, but once you got to know him, he was hilarious. He was a very smart person. He knew his job well and he was friendly. He never had anything bad to say about anyone. He was a good person. Rincon—Recon—he was young and he didn’t know a lot about parties and about drinking and he was very innocent. He was clueless about some of the things we used to talk about. We took him in like a little brother. He always had a smile on his face. And Creighton, he was a lot like me. He was my best friend, and we had a history before the military. We got into some trouble here and there, and we used to be troublemakers growing up. And somehow we found each other and we had a lot in common, and he always tried to be this tough guy but he was my best friend. I knew him inside out. He was a teddy bear. He just loved to give people the impression he was a hard, mean guy—but he was funny. If you helped Creighton out, he would never forget you. He would be your friend forever, and I loved that guy a lot. I still do. We were young, and he was twenty-five meters away from me when he died.

  Those men—they died . . . they gave the ultimate sacrifice and they died beautifully because they died fighting for our country. They died fighting for us. Isn’t that better than dying in a car accident or falling in a plane crash or getting hit by a drunk driver? I like to think of it as if, if I’m going to die, let me do it serving my country or let me do it doing something heroic, something where they can say, He died doing something for someone else, not something selfish or not in some freak accident.

  Adrian Cavazos served a second tour of Iraq from January to December 2005.

  “Three Kings”

  MARIO “MICK”

  MIHAUCICH

  TANK GUNNER

  “CRAZY HORSE” TROOP

  3RD SQUADRON

  7TH CAVALRY REGIMENT

  MARCH-AUGUST 2003

  INVASION FORCE

  MICHAEL

  SOPRANO

  BRADLEY GUNNER

  “CRAZY HORSE” TROOP

  3RD SQUADRON

  7TH CAVALRY REGIMENT

  MARCH-AUGUST 2003

  INVASION FORCE

  BRONZE STAR (FOR VALOR)

  JASON NEELY

  BRADLEY GUNNER

  “CRAZY HORSE” TROOP

  3RD SQUADRON

  7TH CAVALRY REGIMENT

  MARCH-AUGUST 2003

  INVASION FORCE

  MARIO “MICK” MIHAUCICH: Before we even crossed the border, when we were still in Kuwait, we had an Iraqi guy come and talk to us about the culture and customs. He was sort of a defector from the first Gulf War, and now he is going to be an interpreter for us, and he kind of explained certain things. . . . You don’t do this; you don’t do that. Don’t shake with your left hand, because you know they wipe their ass with that one. You know, the basics of Arabic culture, and what it was like where we were going. I remember the most significant thing that he ever told us was Arabs lie. “That’s what we do . . . Straight up to your face.” He says, “They’ll come and shake your hand during the day, and shoot at you at night. Arabs lie. When they tell you they don’t know what happened, they do. They make it their business to lie.” He says, “Sometimes they lie just to lie, even when it serves no purpose to do it.” I remember him telling us that specifically. And I was amazed that an Arab is telling us this. He says, “I’m ashamed of my people.” This is before the war started.

  MICHAEL SOPRANO: I was with 3rd ID, and we were considered the tip of the spear going into Iraq. We were in Kuwait months before the actual invasion. We did some training, but we also spent our time catching lizards. There were these really cool lizards, and if it was late night or early morning, when it was cool, you could just pick them up. They have really spiky tails, and they ranged in size from really small, small enough to fit in your hand, to probably three feet long. Someone said their saliva is so full of bacteria that you could really be in trouble if they bit you, and I believe it because they were hissing and stuff, the big ones. Everybody caught them all the time. Someone told us they were called viper-headed sand lizards, but I don’t know if that’s true or not.

  The other thing just about everybody did was chewing or smoking tobacco. It’s weird, because you’ll find that soldiers from New York to Florida, and everywhere in between, chew tobacco. You get a pinch of one of those little circular cans, and you put it somewhere under your lip, and it’s great stuff, because when you first start doing it you get a nice buzz, but it’s a tobacco buzz, so it’s kind of queasy, but it’s still good. Eventually you get nothing from it, though.

  While we were waiting to go into Iraq, there were varying degrees of enthusiasm. Some of our older guys were veterans of Somalia, and we had a guy so old he was in Vietnam. That’s how old this guy was. The younger guys, the single guys, absolutely wanted to go into Iraq. . . . Sure, some of them are just being macho, but I wanted to go to Iraq. Going to war is something I’ve always wanted to do my entire life. I would have felt some big void if I hadn’t done it. You heard a lot of guys say, I’m tired of sitting on our asses. . . . We need to go—to do it or go home. And of course 9/11 was also in our minds. . . . At least in mine it was. Since they established that Saddam didn’t do whatever . . . He’s still a terrible guy. I don’t think that even if we knew then that there were no WMD that it would have changed a lot of guys’ minds about wanting to go in. We were soldiers, and we want to go fight. There were people who were not that enthusiastic about going, and we worried about them. Many of them had a wife and kid, and it was mostly guys we didn’t like anyway. I just didn’t have any sympathy for the guys who didn’t want to go.

  JASON NEELY: Our unit is called “Crazy Horse” because it is the military phonetic alphabet. Charley Troop is what it is actually, but because it starts with a C you adopt some other name. Crazy Horse is adopted because of Chief Crazy Horse’s attack on the 7th Cavalry at the battle of Little Big Horn, where he killed General Custer. Custer wasn’t really that good of a general. In fact, he got his ass kicked at Little Big Horn. Everybody died except his horse. Pretty much the whole 7th Cavalry was annihilated there. Historically, a cavalry soldier is a soldier who is on horseback. And the 7th Cavalry was developed as Americans were moving west to protect them from Indian raids and stuff. After the Civil War, it was made up of the ruffians of the army.

  In Kuwait, the tents could burn down really quickly, and I think one may have burned down because someone was smoking in it, and that kind of leads to how Soprano, Mick, and me got hooked up. When we had guard duty, we had to go a certain distance from the tents to smoke, and me and Soprano used to go off together to have a smoke. Sometimes we would head to the chow hall for coffee, and Mick caught on to that, so during our downtimes the three of us hung out together.

  SOPRANO: We crossed into Iraq sometime around midnight on March 20th, and the first people we saw were Bedouins or whatever, people with little herds of sheep, but I don’t think we even saw them for a couple of days. I don’t think we saw any enemies for a couple of days either. There was a lot of ground to cover, and you have to stop all the time so the tanks can fuel up, and that takes a long time. With the first civilians we saw, they didn’t look fearful or surprised, and we waved at pretty much everybody as we’d go by.

  I just remember being awake for days, and it wasn’t even hard. I don’t even remember getting tired, because of the stress and not wanting to die and everything. We’d just sit there in the Bradley looking through our little weapons sight, and the days just seemed to blend together, and it went by really, really fast. The next thing I knew, it was day six, and I wanted to get some sleep. So I laid down that afternoon, for I think about an hour or so, because the bugs were fucking with me. They seemed to always go right in your ear or your nose. They would zzzt zzzt zzzt right in your ear. It’s like they knew when you were going to sleep because that’s the only time they messed with me. The bugs and the heat were driving me nuts. It would either be a fly zipping around your ear and nose or a droplet of sweat forming on your head
and then rolling down, and that’s irritating too. I’d always wake up in a terrible mood, because you only sleep for a few minutes at a time, and you’re just pissed when you get up.

  Our first engagement was in Samawa, and I remember going in there, and it was really weird because there was a lot of movement going on and lots of civilians, and everything seemed alive. We had been told before we got there that this town and its people were on board with us, with the Americans, and that they would probably greet us with some kind of parade or something like that. But they didn’t. We got there and people were waving white flags, and then we were actually taking fire from the people that were waving the white flags. It was really weird. I remember that one of the tanks fired the first shot, and I thought, I better stand up and take a look so I can see the first shot of the war.

  MIHAUCICH: I remember hearing about the first suicide bombings against American soldiers of the war. I can’t remember the exact date, but I remember all of the talk about taxicabs at checkpoints.

  Everything over there is fucking taxicabs. Very rarely did you see a regular car go by. I mean, you’d see a pickup truck, but there were all these freaking white-and-orange taxicabs. It’s one of those things that stays with you all the time, you know, that color of orange and white, and they were just so odd, and I remember our very first battle at Samawa. . . . This is where we made our first shots fired, and we didn’t know what to do, because we expected to see guys in uniform in military vehicles. But that’s not what happened. I wasn’t there because my tank had broken down, but we were listening to it on the radio. All we kept hearing was that we don’t know what to shoot at. There were buses pulling up, with soldiers in uniform getting out and firing on us. So certainly the actual bus driver is not in the war. He probably just showed up for work that day, driving a bus, and the guys that get on the bus just happened to be soldiers going to work. Think about the cabdriver. . . . He just showed up for work. Someone said, Hey, I need a cab; I’ve got to go to work. The guy takes a cab over to the Baath Party headquarters in Samawa, the soldier gets out and gets shot at, and the cabdriver gets shot at too.