War stories: Huskies tell of their time serving in Iraq

Ted Lester, ’02

Corporal, 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, Marines; Time of service: August 2004-April 2005; Stationed: all over; Currently: Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif. (Pictured at top.)

It was seven months of combat. Because we had armored vehicles, we had the ability to move across entire regions, or the whole country. With a few hours notice, we could get anywhere within about a day or so. And that’s pretty much how our time was spent-just jumping from hot spot to hot spot.

We just got hit all the time. We’d go to a house, and we’d check the house, and there’d be nothing we could find-the property would be clean, no weapons. There’d be no apparent involvement with any Mujahideen or anything like that. Then we’d leave, let them go, apologize, give them a case of water, give them a case of food. And then the next day we’d get ambushed from that area. It was hard, because . there are people who truly want the help. But they’re few and far between. And the majority of people-they just don’t want any involvement. They seem to be so scared of the insurgency. They want to stay at home and not get involved. They don’t want to be on their side; they don’t want to be on our side.

… We were constantly laughing. That’s one thing I do kind of miss. We’d laugh every day, so hard. I’ve never laughed so hard before in my life. And you have to. Anything from making stupid nicknames for each other, that were totally offensive and so inappropriate and would never fly in the outside world-I’m talking, like, racial jokes . I’m a white guy, and we had a couple of black guys on the platoon, and there was stuff that I could say to them that I would never be able to get away with [back here]. And in return they could do the same to me, and no one cared. Everything from that to making jokes about the dead bodies we’d come across-some guy could be totally obliterated, burned to a crisp, and someone would look down and say, ‘At least he’s got nice socks.’ It got pretty bad sometimes. You’ve got to clown around with everyone, and no one’s immune.

Fallujah was the toughest by far. You couldn’t trust anyone. You constantly had to watch your back. You’d think that if a woman and child were coming up to your checkpoint, it would be no problem. They’re not as suspicious as a military-age male. But there are female suicide bombers, kids carrying grenades. Nobody could be trusted. And you really felt . a great sense of frustration. You really felt alone, even though you’re with all these other guys. You’re disconnected from the outside world, so you’re wondering, ‘Is this even worth it? Are we even making any progress?’ It felt awesome, once it was over with. But at the same time, within 48 hours of returning to our base for the first time in a month, we were told, ‘Now you’re going to Ramadi. You’re going to try to take down Ramadi too.’ So there we were, back to how we felt at the beginning of Fallujah. ‘Aw man, are we gonna make it through this one?’

One of the stories that comes to my mind was a time where one of our platoons was down on the river, on the Euphrates, and at this point [Fallujah] was within days of falling. They started having insurgents swim across the river. And we were told at first that we were going to fire warning shots at them, to get them back into the city. But if they do happen to make it across the river, if they’re wounded, our priority is to collect and care for the wounded. So this one day we got a report of some people that had dropped weapons and were swimming across the river. And we went down to check it out, and there were a couple of guys . that were starting to low-crawl out of the water, through the mud, and up to the bank. They kept screaming and yelling, ‘Mister, mister, help me, we’re hurt, we’re hurt, we need help.’ And we went down there to help them out. And I mean obviously our weapons were still drawn on them, because we weren’t sure what to expect. And as we went up to go help them, one of the guys just leapt out of the mud and threw a grenade at us. And so he got killed, needless to say. And none of our guys got hurt. But it turns out that they were part of a 12-man squad that was sent across the river with grenades to try to ambush us.

For a month or two or three at a time, your house is in a pile of mud. And it’s 20 degrees at night, 90 degrees during the day, there’s body parts of a suicide bomber lying all around you, it smells like crap, you’re not getting anything good to eat, you’re getting, like, two hours of sleep. It’s really hard to relate to people who haven’t done it, because they just can’t imagine it. You come back to your friends and family, and life is normal for them. It’s as it was before you left. But for you, it’s just, like, every little thing . As of right now I don’t like being around large crowds of people. And there are certain smells that will trigger memories. And obviously, like a car backfiring or a door shutting in the distance-that echo just sounds like a mortar round impacting. It’s not drastic-it’s not like I’m going to pull out a gun and start shooting back or anything. It’s just enough to make you freeze for a second, and think, ‘Am I really home? Am I really out of this?’

Scott F. Baker, ’87

Chaplain, Captain, Air Force; Time of service: June-September 2004; Stationed: Camp Victory, Baghdad; Currently: Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho

We showed up [at a lower-security unit of Abu Ghraib prison] and there were probably 200 men. Some of them were taking showers over on the side. Others were just lying low and trying to stay cool. And the guards were taking initiative with some of the younger Iraqi men [. . .] learning the language and trying to figure out ways to communicate. And as I stood there talking and watching, one of the guards broke out a Frisbee and had eye-contact with one of the young men across the barbed-wire fence. And he threw it over to him. And it went back and forth a few times. And pretty soon there was a crowd of men. And then another guard introduced a Nerf football. And pretty soon there was this game that just kind of transcended language. There was a sense that enough trust had been built up, and that this was a welcome diversion from, just, the hot, and the clear and kind of awkward situation in which one side has all the power. …

I served for 16 years in the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. During that time, I got my seminary degree, and as those things both came to a close, September 11 happened, and my wife and I looked at each other and said, ‘Maybe it’s time to make a change, and move from campus ministry-which we always felt was front-line ministry-to a different kind of front-line ministry. And I’d only been in [the Air Force] for about 15 months when I had the opportunity to volunteer to deploy. Occasionally-it doesn’t happen very often-but occasionally you’re in the right place at the right time, talking to the right people. And it was just one of those things where, I think, somebody they had tapped to go couldn’t go for some reason, and I was having a conversation with the decision-maker, saying ‘Boy, you know, I’d love to get out there and do something.’ And one week later I got orders, and three weeks after that I was on the plane.

When I came into the military at age 38, I knew I was signing up for that, and I embraced that, wholeheartedly-I want to be where the action is. I want to be where people have needs. My day-to-day life here, on the base, is just practice, as far as I’m concerned. . I don’t profess to know all of the politics of what’s going on. And I didn’t feel like I needed to be absolutely convinced that everything we expected to find there, we were going to find. It was easy for me: that’s where our young men and women are, and they’re going to be asking ultimate questions in that environment, and that’s where I want to be: where people are asking ultimate questions.

During my visit to the hospital with one of our Muslim chaplains, we stopped by the ER on the way out, and a young man, a Marine, named Steve, had just been brought in-I don’t mean to be graphic here, but his right foot had just about been blown off. It was still attached. And he was in a great deal of physical pain. And the Muslim chaplain and I went up toward his head, on each side of his bed. And I was definitely the apprentice, and my comrade, who did that day in and day out, kind of took the lead and introduced us and asked him if he would want me to pray for him. And he said yes, and he reached out this 20-year-old, strong as an ox, bloodied arm, and kind of pulled me in close. And I reassured him -the doctor actually said that he thought he’d be able to keep the foot. And it was just one of those moments where I thought, you know, this guy needs a word, and I’m here to give him a word.

Stan Seo, ’93

Captain, 281st Military Intelligence Company, 81st Brigade Combat Team, Washington Army National Guard; Time of service: March 2004-March 2005; Stationed: Camp Anaconda, near Balad; Currently: Mill Creek

I was manning the entry control point at the airbase over there in Anaconda. At my entry control point, we got everything. We got indirect fire, mortars and rockets. We had small-arms fire on a regular basis – people shooting at us or near us. And then we also had what are called VBIEDs, Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices, and IEDs dropped along our route, right in front of us, about 500 meters out, on a regular basis. What else did we have? We had what are called VCIEDs, Vehicle-Carried IEDs. They attached those to unsuspecting Iraqis that were inbound into our base. Essentially, all the civilian vehicles came through our entry control point, so we had to screen all those people. So invariably they would stick bombs on these people’s cars and trucks and whatnot. A lot of times the drivers would get out and find them. Sometimes we would find them on the cars or the trucks that were coming into the base. And then we’d have to get the bomb personnel- EOD, explosive ordnance demolition-out there to disarm the bomb or blow the vehicle in place if they couldn’t disarm it. …

The friendships were what enabled us to kind of work through it. We had a group, we called it the Captain’s Cove. We built a little deck by our hooches, and every so often when we all had a chance, or when it cooled off to, like, 90, we’d be out on the deck. Just a quick sanity check. Shoot the breeze. Drink our near-beer. We had our spades games, our poker games. And we were able to commiserate about all the issues we had. For me, personally, that’s what kept me sane. That and being able once in a while to get ahold of my wife on the phone.

Our brigade was mobilized to go to Iraq in November of ‘03, but we’d been initially alerted for the invasion back in March . and my wife and I had found out, right about that time, that we were pregnant: ‘I’m going to be a father, holy cow, and I’m going to be deployed to Iraq.’ And of course, everything going through my wife’s head-’Hold on a second here. I have to be a single mom for the first year of our son’s life.’ He was 15 months when I came back. I can’t imagine how people back in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, how they could do without e-mail. E-mail was the best – a huge morale booster for all personnel. Including myself, obviously, because I could keep up every day, or every couple of days, when I got a chance to get online and check email and see pictures. I’d get kind of a daily update from my wife: this is what he did today.

David Dickinson, ’90

Major, 65th Airlift Squadron, Air Force; Time of service: July 2004-October 2004; Stationed: Green Zone, Baghdad; Currently: Hickam Air Force Base, Honolulu

I started out as the approval authority for humanitarian airlift into Iraq. I worked in conjunction with the Regional Airlift Movement Control Center. And they basically control all commercial and military movements in and out of country. I was like the point of contact inside of Iraq any time commercial humanitarian movements came in the theater. They sent me information regarding the incoming flights, and I coordinated with the carriers, with Baghdad International Airport, stuff like that, to ensure de-confliction, that the runways were good, anything that dealt with civil-aviation type stuff.

I worked with some Iraqis. To me, it was really, really incredible that Iraqis on a daily basis were risking their lives coming into the Green Zone to help us help them. I talked to one of the guys who worked in my office. He had been a computer graphic artist. His two brothers had been killed by Saddam Hussein back in the early ‘80s. . When you actually meet these people, it’s a whole different kind of deal.

On the 14th of July, the first car bomb went off. It had to be within about 500 meters of where I was. I’d been in the Green Zone for two days and nothing had happened. I was walking outside, and the explosion went off-when they go off, it’s nothing like you see in the movies. Nothing prepares you for it. You can actually feel the air kind of vibrate. The ground shakes. And it’s a heavy feeling. And that heavy sound-it was like that with the mortars and the rockets, just that heaviness to the sound and the air.

My first time being in an actual, if you will, combat zone, was on the 12th of September. I had just gotten up to start shaving, and my roommate had just gone down to do a little workout in the gym that we had right there in the compound. And you could hear it just go ssssshhhhvvvv. You heard that swoosh sound, and boom, I mean the whole house … it just shook the shit out of the house. I actually had to duck because I thought the window was going to blow out. … A 122-millimeter rocket had hit the house that I used to live in. I had just moved out about three weeks before, and I was literally just two houses down.

Rich Eyrish, ’00

Captain, Army, NATO Allied Joint Force Command; Time of service: August-October 2004; Stationed: Green Zone, Baghdad; Currently: Fort Gordon, Augusta, Ga.

I was part of a NATO training mission in Iraq. The Iraqi government asked NATO to go down there and provide some training support for the military, in addition to what the coalition was already doing. My business in all of this is communications. I do computer networks.

It’s an odd thing, because it’s a circumstance you don’t see anywhere else. Everyone’s got their own secret network. The U.S. has its own secret network. NATO has its own secret network. And an entirely separate secret network was built just for Iraq. And trying to set up communication between all these guys can be quite difficult sometimes. NATO, as an entity, doesn’t really have the experience or the equipment to go down and do what we did. So we were constantly making stuff up-trying to figure out how we could hash stuff together to get anything working. So that was plenty to work on in between stuff blowing up.

In Baghdad, it’s just a weird situation, because no one is shooting directly at you. The only thing coming in is whatever gets lobbed in there. And after a while you just get kind of numb to it. You just get used to what’s out there around you, and try to remember, when you’re doing stuff, not to leave yourself in exposed areas. But most computer work is all inside buildings, inside hardened facilities. There’s lots of guys between me and them.

The Western sense of Arab folks-at least the one I’ve read about-doesn’t quite hold true in Iraq. They’re a lot more secular than people think. They really do admire some of the Western models . education, and even our military. But a guy was telling me he was talking to the Minister of Defense, who was saying, ‘You know, we’ve had 25 years,’-or however many it was-’under Saddam, and now we’ve got to unlearn everything and start over from scratch, to build a military back up that has a real structure to it.’ They’re certainly willing, but it’s hard. There’s no ability to mentor within their own. We have to get to the point where they teach themselves.

Jeff Newell, ’90

Captain, 1st Battalion, 303rd Armored Regiment; Army National Guard; Time of service: March 2004-March 2005; Stationed: Camp Victory, Baghdad; Currently: Seattle

The 303rd Armor is based out of Kent. We’re a tank battalion. But we had our tanks taken away and were retrained as infantry. And then we were responsible to protect Victory Base.

There were two villages immediately outside [Camp Victory] that we were responsible for patrolling. And it became clear that it was in our best interest to be very heavily involved with both of those villages, because once we started working with them and did an incredible amount of projects with them, the violence from those areas toward the base went to zero. … We wanted to have a much more active role than just sitting in a static defense position. There was a large village just to the east . a village where Saddam put tons of widows and orphans of either his policies or wars. It pretty much emptied out right after his government toppled, and you had 10,000 squatters move in with really no form of government, really a microcosm of the whole country, with lots of diverse interests. And we went out there pretty quickly and used a lot of our citizen-soldier skills, our professional skills, to start projects and help them establish their first-ever city council. We would hire them to clean out the area and rebuild their electrical grid and fix their sewage lines and get their school running and their medical facility running. That really helped us, I think-it gave us a mission we really could sink our teeth into, and we could see not just the happy kids and the happy citizens but also the diminishing number of attacks from that area to zero, to where they would call us for help.

I’m what they call the S-1, the battalion personnel officer. The way I explain that to friends is, in essence, I was the human resources director for the whole battalion, meaning pay, promotions, benefits, awards, demotions-all those types of things that you and I would go to an HR director for. That’s kind of what the S-1 does for the battalion. Which was weird for me because I joined the Army National Guard and got commissioned a tank and armor officer to get away from my sales desk job, and I found myself during the deployment sitting a desk most of the time, using the Internet and e-mail and office automation.

[My daughter Grace] was 13 months old when I left, and when I got back she was 27 months. So I’d missed half of her life. The pendulum has now swung back to where I’ve been with her more than I’ve been away from her. But for a while there I’d been away longer than I’d been with her, which was a hard reality to deal with. It was tough missing all the firsts. That was the toughest part. I mean I love my wife and I missed her tremendously, but not seeing a lot of firsts-that’s something, unfortunately, I’ll never get back.

I told everybody I’d do it, and when I got back, two weeks ago, I held a two-and-a-half birthday party for Grace, because I missed her two. I decided that every two-year-old should have at least two birthdays a year.

Grace did know me when I got back. Between technology and my wife, every day, mentioning me, talking about things I liked . there was not the ‘Who is that?’ reaction. And that happens to a lot of soldiers and it’s perfectly natural. I was very fortunate that she knew who I was and ran up right away and now, I’m sure, doesn’t even know that I was gone for that amount of time. Which is the great thing about the resiliency of kids. But my wife and technology did a great job. Between video and me talking to her on the phone, or singing songs on cassette tapes … all those types of things really helped.

I saw more Husky hats and Husky shirts over there than I expected-not just alumni in the military, but contractors or what have you. You’d meet them in the strangest places. Especially when [Congressman] Adam Smith came. We went up to the big chow hall, and there was a Husky helmet on the table. And I’m like, ‘Boy. First Cav is either incredibly great with their PR for every congressman who comes through or there’s something more to this. How could there be a Husky helmet there?’ And sure enough, I asked one of the aides, ‘Whose helmet?’ ‘Oh, General Chiarelli. He’s a huge Husky fan.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding me!’ We hadn’t met him yet, even though we were attached to him. It’s 60 battalions-that’s the biggest division in the history of the U.S. Army. When he left Baghdad, they had 35,000 troops in one division, which is unheard of. That’s the size of most corps. So I went up to the general and said, ‘Hey, sir. I’m sorry, but you’re not the biggest Husky fan. I am.’ And we started talking and laughing. And then we would periodically correspond, just regarding Husky stuff. Which was nice-not just to have a two-star calling me to talk Husky football, but it was a great diversion, just to talk about Husky Stadium and growing up there and those things.