What Was Asked of Us Read online

  NEELY: It was weird that we didn’t have any engagements at all until we started getting nearer to Samawa, and there’s this little shack or something sitting alongside the road. I remember saying to my sergeant that there were dogs and stuff, and where there are dogs there are people. So as we pull into Samawa, there are people just looking at us, and we’re waving at people and that kind of stuff. Then this guy comes out and starts firing on one of the tanks. The tank shoots its round off, and it completely annihilates about fifteen guys. And then later, Soprano and those guys hit a military compound, and the damned thing started boiling over with Iraqi soldiers and shit. Hundreds of guys were pouring out of this building. So there was a big battle there, and then where I was, we started taking secondary mortar shots, one of which knocked our radio out. We had to fall back in order to fix our communications system. In the meantime, we were getting intermittent rocket fire, mortar rounds, small-arms fire, and that kind of stuff. So you can imagine there’s all this shit going on. One minute we’re waving at the people, and the next minute rockets and shit are coming out of the tree line.

  So all of this is going on, and I still haven’t engaged my weapon system yet. I can’t see anybody, any imminent hostile target. Now Soprano is off to my right flank, and he’s engaged with dismounts and guys in trucks, people with small arms. I’m off to the left, and I’ve got mortar rounds landing around me. They were just like bombs blowing up—

  boom! boom!—on either side of us and all around us, and then rockets coming out of the tree line. I couldn’t really fire back because I couldn’t see them to shoot at. If I had seen a guy run out with an AK-47 in his hand, I would have run him right down, right? But me and my sergeant aren’t the type to just blow everything up, you know, fuck it; you don’t shoot unless you have a target to engage. It freaked me out, and it also frustrated me, because I wanted to get the first one under my belt and then I could move on. Then we pulled back to refuel and rearm.

  SOPRANO: The checkpoint shootings of civilians were pretty common, as bad as that is. During the Najaf sandstorm with the sand and the smoke and the burning cars, I remember this one car . . . I don’t remember what he was doing, but he got shot at. We were using a 7.62mm ambush gun, and the car got shot to hell, and he gets out and he’s really bloody, and in the car he had a wife and young kids.

  We had a couple of kids get . . . I don’t think they were trying to do anything to us, but they were playing too close to us or whatever, and one of our guys fired on them. What happened was, some guys say, “Two kids just ran in this building right there.” And there’s really no reason for them to do that. He fired on them immediately. He fired on the little shed itself with high-explosive rounds, which is just going to tear the metal shed into pieces. I think it was two or three times he shot at the building. We’re waiting, we’re waiting, we’re waiting, and I’m nervous for him, because I’m just hoping, you know, these guys were bad. You know, I’m waiting for somebody to pop out. I’m waiting to shoot up the building myself. And I see these kids crawl out, and one has got something on his face. He had some kind of face injury, I think, with his jaw. And the other one was hopping out of there, and there was a good bit of blood, but they were really lucky. After they came out, we looked inside, and there’s all sorts of weapons, all sorts of communication equipment and things like that, so we’re relieved at that point, because the guy who fired was fine. Then the family comes out, and they’re wailing and everything. They wail really loud over there. The kids were so young they had to have been eleven or twelve. I don’t know. . . . The only thing I can really think of is that they were either just kids running around being stupid like kids do and normally the consequences aren’t that severe. Or somebody was telling them to take these weapons back and forth, because they thought they’d use the kids just like old mules.

  Our medics did what they could, but whatever. Sometimes you can’t make a determination of who’s who until it’s too late. It just happens, as terrible as it is. I knew it was bad, and it was sad, but it was a different mind-set by then. It didn’t really affect me that much.

  NEELY: We went through what they call Ambush Alley. That’s an area just south of Najaf. I don’t know if it is actually part of the town, but we got hit hard there. It’s like, we’re going and going and going, and all through the streets it is constant gun battles and trucks and shooting, and people on rooftops shooting, and all sorts of crazy shit. Going through the town, it was like we were the parade, except the people were shooting at us.

  So we sat there, and we fought for, like, three days on this bridge just south of Najaf. The first night, they had guys driving in at us and ramming our vehicles. So we started shooting up everything, pretty much. We had civilians on the battlefield at that time, so, you know, there were civilians who got killed. There was a sandstorm, and there are a lot of people trying to get home out of this sandstorm, right? It was so weird, because right as we were getting ready to cross over at this bridge that was one of the crucial crossing points of the Euphrates, the sandstorm kicks up, and visibility goes to nothing in seconds. Then as we are just starting to cross over this bridge, boom! We get hit with RPGs. That’s when the civilians drove into the sector where combat was occurring and got killed. “Engage a target” is how you—how you speak or refer to it in a military situation. I think we talk this way about it because it keeps us safe, having that sterile terminology for it. Those are the ones I shot.

  There was one night on the bridge when I thought I was imminently going to die. We had just crossed the bridge and we had fought, fought, fought, fought, fought, fought. We went through Ambush Alley, where we were attacked from both sides for probably about seven miles, and it was just un-fucking-believable, horrific. We’ve got all this shit coming into us, and we’ve got a sandstorm, so we’ve got no support from the air force. No overhead cover. I swear to God, I thought I was going to die. I pulled out a picture of my son, you know, out of my wallet. I prayed, you know, Please . . . and pretty much I resigned myself to dying and was cool with it. And then out of nowhere, the damned sandstorm cleared, and we started calling in the air force for air strikes, and they were dropping these JDAMs, which are like three-thousand-pound bombs, just blowing stuff up—you know, blowing big holes in the road to keep people from being able to travel the roads to get to us basically, as well as blowing up their columns and stuff that were coming in on us. I remember how close it was, because I could feel the ground shaking from the air force dropping these huge fucking bombs. And just like in the movies, when they fly over they tip their wings at you. They did that to us, and that was kind of cool.

  Afterwards, I jumped off the track for like the second time since I was in Iraq, and I went and I laid down in this grassy field, and there were fucking buttercups all around me, and I could smell buttercups. And I was like, Jesus, this is just so weird. I remember writing to my mom about it, ’cause I always took an opportunity to experience the situation and reflect upon humanity and that stuff while I was over there, because we were doing pretty inhuman things, you know, and so it was interesting for me to sit there and think, God, buttercups. And then fucking load a bunch of ammo and start lighting shit up.

  SOPRANO: I remember talking to my friend Neely and saying, “You know I just know that I’m going to die. I just know it.” We’d been through a week of close calls, and you figure your luck is going to end at some point. I remember thinking about it, and I remember my stomach flipping over for about five minutes. It kind of made me sick to my stomach . . . until I had accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to make it out of there. I just knew I wasn’t. It would sound great if I said, Well, fuck it, but I didn’t. I just remembered that feeling lifting and that I was back to normal.

  MIHAUCICH: I remember popping my head out of the tank, and it was just morning, and then I stood up on top of the tank and looked down one side of the street and then looked down the other, and there was nothing but army vehicles. Bradleys and tanks and tru
cks and nobody died. No. We didn’t lose anybody. We were trying to think. How did we not lose anybody with all of that small-arms fire and our light-skinned vehicles? But not one person took an injury. And I remember my commander going, “This is as good as it’s ever going to get for us, I think.”

  We knew our shit. I mean everybody knew his or her jobs. Everybody was very alert to everything going on around them, very suspicious. No one took it as a joke. Everybody respected that we were in a war. We were petrified, not cocky, and we just respected the fact that this is where we are. We are in a country where people can kill us, and we took it seriously.

  NEELY: Baghdad is where me, Mick, and Soprano really gelled as a group. We were in the Green Zone and stayed in Baghdad for a couple of months just running patrols and running security at the big palace and embassy and everything, where all the fucking bigwigs are now. We were the first ones there. Iraqis were looting the place and that kind of stuff, so we kicked everybody out, and now you have to be a fucking VIP to get in. We used to swim in the pools, and paddle boats around in the lake there. I always took time out to spread goodwill. Did they tell you about how we formulated a soccer team that played against the Iraqis in the soccer amphitheater? They outfitted us in Olympic Iraqi uniforms and all sorts of shit, and the Iraqis let us win. These guys were so goddamn good at soccer. They wanted to play us in soccer, and so they went up like six-nothing right off the get-go, just to let us know we’re just a bunch of army fucking jokers, right? But then they just let us win, you know, seven-six. It was—it was a total show of respect, you know.

  That part was all right, but you don’t send a fucking outfit that is supposed to dehumanize others and turn them into targets and kill them, and then fucking ask them to shake hands and stuff with the people they’ve been killing. There’s two different types of operations. There’s combat operations, and there’s peacetime stabilization operations. And as soon as we got done doing what we needed to do, our asses should have been packed up and headed home, and give us a fucking parade and that kind of thing. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that 3rd ID is being criticized for some of the behaviors of a few, you know. Because, let me tell you, the human being can stoop to some pretty low depths, as I’ve seen.

  When we went to Balad, there were still problems. We went there to support operations Sidewinder and Peninsula Strike. The Iraqis came out and attacked us and all this shit, and we just kicked the shit out of everybody. We didn’t have any problems after that. The elders came out and said, “Hey look,” you know, “we’re sorry. There are some bad seeds out there. We’ll take care of them. Don’t worry about it.” All right, cool. And after that, we didn’t have a problem.

  The Iraqi does appreciate—and I’m talking very loosely here—

  the Iraqi does appreciate a heavy hand. But the Iraqi people are also very generous and very warm. I enjoy the Iraqi people. But, you know, if you throw a rock at us while we’re driving by, we’ll go ahead and stop the entire fucking convoy to kick your ass. And that’s kind of how it was. Now is that wrong? Absolutely. . . . It’s fucking wrong and sick and fucking bullshit.

  If you think about it, an Iraqi kid has a right to be pissed off at you, if you look at the big picture. And we’d sit around talking about fucking shit up, and we’d be thinking to ourselves, You know we’re pretty fucked up. We think we’re normal, but we’re fucked up. Know what I’m saying? Feeling bad is different than feeling guilty, if you know what I mean. Do you know what I’m saying? It was regretful and unfortunate and all that other stuff. But it’s important not to put a value or judgment on anything that occurs in a setting such as that. There’s such a unique set of variables that you can’t control, and therefore you shouldn’t place a judgment. So if a guy shits his pants in combat, you don’t judge him for it. You know, you don’t judge, Oh, were you chickenshit or whatnot? No, the guy didn’t take a battle crap before he went out on patrol and shit happened. You know what I’m saying?

  We bought some Cubans from hajji and smoked them up. I went out to the mall and bought them. Hajji fucking set up a mall outside our gate. Basically you walked up to a fence, and there’s Iraqis lined up. They’ve got booths set up all outside the gate of our compound. And they would have anything you wanted, and if they didn’t have it, they would have it for you by five tomorrow.

  And I wanted Cuban cigars for Mick’s daughter being born, so I bought Cuban cigars. They’re probably not—they say Cuban, and they look Cuban, so they’re Cuban. You could get crazy shit in Iraq—

  whiskey, beer, whatever, it didn’t matter. Guys were getting pot, whatever. Anything—switchblades, compasses. They sold lighters that had these airplanes going into two buildings, so we fucked some people up over that one.

  SOPRANO: It was kind of like there was no definite end for us, because even when it was supposedly ended, it was kind of a short-lived celebration, because we were getting shot at after that, and it was pretty much more of the same. Me and Jason and Mick even had cigars and stuff like that ready for the war-end day to smoke, because we were wanting a Desert Storm-type of ending, something like that. We didn’t get that because there was always a lot of stuff going on. There just wasn’t ever a high-five ending that we saw. There was just no elation like in the beginning of that movie Three Kings. Have you seen that movie? They were celebrating the end of Desert Storm, and that is what I was looking for. I want to dance and smoke that cigar for the end of the war, but that didn’t happen.

  MIHAUCICH: I don’t really have any bad thoughts about my war experience, and I thought for a long time there was something wrong with me. Maybe I really was a cold, heartless son of a bitch or something. I don’t have nightmares. I have memories, but I can talk about them. This is something Soprano and I talk about a lot, figuring out that there is something wrong with us because we actually had a good time over there.

  I would have to rate my war experience as ten. I thought it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, and I think about all the people that live day to day and never do anything significant. I did something significant, and I feel good about that. Despite the politics of what this war may end up being ten years down the road, I loved it. I had a good time. I met great people, and I had a lot of fun. Despite all the horrors and everything else. What war isn’t psychologically taxing? Me and Soprano might just be the 1 percent that look at war in a different way than some people who say, “Woe is me.” I think some people just don’t know how to process it.

  It’s different for the guys today, because they can’t do what we did. If a guy shoots at you from a building, the guys today can’t walk in that building and slap the shit out of everybody in there, like we did before. When you know damned well that somebody in that house shot at you, you’re going to go in there and slap him around. And then you’re going to take him in and let the authorities do something. You can get a little bit of—I don’t want to say aggression out, because it’s human nature to be pissed off when somebody shoots at you, but you kind of have a release. I think that’s one of the reasons they got us out of there as quickly as they did, because they realized that for us, one minute these people were the enemy, and now it’s coddle and woo them. Two minutes ago, I was killing them. So now how do you flip that switch automatically? You really can’t. It’s hard. It was very hard for us to go from the trigger pullers to basic peacekeeping.

  I think that’s the difference between us and the guys there now. If they lose six guys, they can’t do nothing about it. If we were to have lost six guys because someone fired at them from a house, the house would have been leveled, and no one would have said a goddamn thing about it.

  “The Word of the Day”

  DANIEL B. COTNOIR

  MORTUARY AFFAIRS

  1ST MARINE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

  FEBRUARY-SEPTEMBER 2004

  SUNNI TRIANGLE

  MARINE CORPS TIMES “MARINE OF THE YEAR”

  When we got packages from home, it was just great. We actu
ally stopped what we were doing when we got those packages with all the pictures and stuff drawn by the kids. My mother-in-law is a grammar school teacher, and her classroom did a bunch of stuff and mailed it to us to hang up at the mortuary affairs tent. My kids were also drawing pictures and then mailing them. To the marines I was with, this was great, and we all took turns reading their stuff and passing it around. They were cute, because you know they were drawn by five-year-olds, so the guy’s holding a gun bigger than him, and they were trying to squeeze helicopters into the pictures and stuff, so it was really morale boosting to the marines. It was really great. They loved it. Every time we got a package that had a bunch of those kids’ drawings in them, we would go through them and find the ones we thought were the best or the funniest, and we’d hang them up on the wall.

  And of course we had our big white dry-erase board in the meeting room, and we had a Word of the Day. My wife sent me out one of those Webster’s build-your-vocabulary dictionaries with the big huge eight-syllable words, and every day we’d open up the book and decide what is the Word of the Day, and we’d write it on the board with the meaning, and then get marines to use them in a sentence during the day. We would also try to see which marine could use the Word of the Day in a sentence to the highest-ranking officer he could get to. Some of the words of the day were like nubile, and then it got funny, because who’s got enough guts to say it to the general? It was pretty funny, because it got to the point where marines would come in in the morning, and they would go to see what the Word of the Day was. I don’t remember all of them, but we have a marine who is on embassy duty now in Mozambique, and he kept the logbook of all the words of the day.