A day before my 21st birthday on March 20, 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom had just kicked off. In less than two weeks I had found myself in a dusty tan tent somewhere in Kuwait several miles off the Iraqi border preparing to do my part to help in the “liberation” effort. 3rd Infantry Division was already in route to Baghdad. I was recently married (about 3 months now), and fear completely dominated my mind. I had never been involved in a war before, and I didn’t want to die. I really didn’t know what to expect at this point. I was newly appointed as a Team Leader in my squad and was trying to figure out how I was suppose to act. All the troops at my camp had not been receiving newspapers or any TV news. The inaccurate word of mouth was how we received all of our current events. As I remember there were two chemical attack scares. Apparently the Iraqi Army had shot a couple of scud missiles into the air, but we were able to shoot them down quickly before any harm could be done. The time to cross the Iraqi border was now approaching ever so quickly.
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| This young fellow seemed pretty excited |
Crossing from the Kuwait border to the Iraq border wasn’t much of a difference initially aside from the pungent smell in the air. I was rolling with my squad in a M113 (Armored Personnel Carrier) and every 10 or 15 minutes I saw Iraqi kids and some adults waving a welcome in enthusiasm. I thought “wow, these people must actually want us here.” The thought was odd but comforting all at the same time. Then after about 20 or 30 miles I noticed blown up Iraqi tanks and abandoned fighting positions. I would see a tank fighting positions and then tracks in the sand backing up a few meters, ultimately a destroyed tank. It was as if the Iraqi army was waiting in their fighting position and saw something that frightened them and decided to reverse and run.. but all in vain. Shortly later came the bodies… the disfigured, lifeless corpses that laid scattered about the road. After a couple of minutes I ducked back into the vehicle as it continued to roll forward towards the city of Baghdad. I didn’t want to witness any more death.. I wanted to erase it from my mind as if it were some fictional action movie…. But I couldn’t seem to fool my mind, this was no movie.
Ten miles from Baghdad our convoy stopped and a radio transmission was heard “ 3rd ID is still trying to take over the city, our convoy was to standby until this happened, then a Soldier quickly ran over to our vehicle and started passing out grenades while stating “there are snipers ahead, I was told to pass these out.” I reluctantly attached two grenades onto my vest. I kept thinking to myself “what in the world are grenades going to do if there are snipers in the area???” Before long the sun disappeared into the horizon and then the convoy once again continued to trudge towards the city. I guess the city was completely taken over because we were moving right through the heart of it and heard not a sound. For the largest city in Iraq with over 5 million people residing there you could have heard a pin drop. Nobody was on the streets or corners and all the power was shut off… pitch black darkness. It looked very sinister to witness the moon shinning down on those large buildings with not a soul in sight. At some point during the journey through Baghdad I must have passed out due to what I considered a lack of sleep.
I awoke the next morning to the thunder of a 25mm cannon exploding onto buildings. I realized that a platoon of Bradley Fighting Vehicles were directly in front of my company and they were engaging in what I figured could only be the “enemy”. Iraqi Soldiers with weapons scattered around in attempts to defend the half destroyed buildings. I felt my blood go cold.. I felt chills of fear flowing through my body. I was trying to decide if I needed to join in the fight with my trusty small M16 or.... and at that exact moment my Squad leader yelled "Get your head down!" as he pulled me back into the vehicle. The conflict ended briefly within a few short minutes. I then found out we were in the city of Taji. I would be staying there for the next couple of weeks. The first day my squad didn’t have guard duty and I found myself a piece of long cardboard on the back of a truck…threw it down on a stone floor in a tiny side room after pushing broken glass out of the way with my boot. As I laid down I pulled my uniform top close up to me as if it was a small blanket and slept all through the night.
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| "Its "P" for Plenty boys" |
My unit’s future missions quickly became clear. You see...There was a ton of ordnance throughout the country of Iraq. By ordnance I mean “artillery shells, mines, C-4, mortars..ect” I was in a combat engineer unit and we had plenty of C-4 at our disposal. Understandably everyone was concerned that almost anyone could just walk right up to an unguarded cache and take all the mines or explosives their hearts desired… hence the numerous IEDs that would later follow. It only made sense for big Army to declare that we were to go around the country and consolidate these ordnance caches to destroy them with our surplus of C-4. I would learn later in engineer NCO academies that there are certain formulas for demolitions. At the time there was no formula used.. just the old common rule “P” = plenty. Which means if in doubt just throw more C-4 on it… and then just get as far away as possible before detonating. It wasn’t the right answer, but it was most certainly effective. I would go through the process of lugging around foreign mine systems I never seen or heard of before, throwing chunks of plastic explosives on mortars and other shells just to blow it all up. After the third week of going through the motions of gathering munitions and destroying them the whole process got pretty mundane. I even stopped taking pictures of the explosion clouds.. it was simply business as usual. Until… our mission had one day suddenly changed.
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| Day after Day.. it was the same routine |
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| Its Me....21 year old Team Leader (June 2003) |
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