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Wednesday, August 3, 2005
3 more from 48th killed in Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By MONI BASU The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq � Three more soldiers from the 48th Brigade Combat Team were killed and one was seriously wounded in a car bomb attack Wednesday, military officials said.
It was the third time in 10 days that the Georgia Army National Guard outfit has suffered multiple fatalities from Iraqi attacks. The brigade has lost 12 soldiers since arriving in Iraq in early June for a year-long tour.
Details were sketchy early today, but 2nd Lt. Selena Owens, spokeswoman for the 48th, said the attack “was along one of those same routes we’ve been having problems with.”
Identities of the dead soldiers were not released.
Brigade officials locked the Internet cafes here and confiscated cell phones and satellite phones Wednesday night to keep soldiers from calling home and possibly inadvertently alerting the families of the dead troops before they could be notified by Army officials.
The news began circulating among 48th soldiers as many were preparing a memorial service tonight for four of their comrades who died in a massive bomb attack Saturday. On July 24, during a patrol outside Camp Striker, a bomb exploded under an armored Humvee, killing four other soldiers.
The brigade has about 2,500 soldiers from Georgia but is augmented for its tour in Iraq by about 1,900 National Guard troops from Alabama, Illinois, Missouri, Maryland, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico.
Climate of violence puts another new face on Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We had expected the worst after reading previous accounts of harrowing flights into Baghdad � of planes dodging mortar fire and squeamish passengers unable to hold their stomachs through corkscrew landings.
But the Vietnam-era C-130 touched down smoothly. Only one of the 30 Baghdad-bound passengers, most of them contractors, got sick.
The Air Force flight crew told us the C-130 can fly low and make landings in the dirt “in case we need to.”
“I’ve seen pretty much all of Iraq, but from the air,” said 1st Lt. Beau Holcombe, who has been flying planes into Baghdad from Kuwait’s Ali Al-Salem Air Base for the past year.
“I don’t know how those Army guys do it,” he said, looking out the small round window from which he kept watch as the plane descended. “They really give it their all down there,” he said about the insurgency raging below us.
At 11:40 in the morning, we touched Iraqi soil. Safely.
This is my third visit to the Iraqi capital in as many years. Each time, Iraq has been a radically different nation, marred by political tyranny, corruption and bloodshed. So much bloodshed.
In December 2002, I had landed on this same tarmac; then it was Saddam International Airport. The Royal Jordanian flight brought me to a nation shrouded in secrecy.
I was nervous then not because I could get shot dead in the street at any moment, but because of the iron-fisted rule of Saddam Hussein. Every move I made was watched. Every person who spoke to me was at risk of paying a heavy price for uttering the truth.
Most foreign journalists then took residence at the famed al-Rashid Hotel. We were forced to walk over a mosaic image of the first President Bush on the floor of the entryway. Veteran journalists talked about the microphones and video cameras placed not so strategically in some of the rooms. Men who looked as if they belonged in a “Sopranos” episode sat in the vast lobby â€â€? 24 hours a day, it seemed â€â€? watching and whispering.
A government minder followed me wherever I went. I did my best to write about shortages of basic goods and services and the United Nations’ attempts at inspections for weapons of mass destruction.
Despite the gloomy atmosphere, Baghdad in 2002 was a relatively clean city. I imagined life here before the first Persian Gulf War, before the sanctions and Baath Party corruption devastated the economy. At a local coffeehouse, I ate lablaby (chickpeas) with a well-known Baghdad artist who recounted an age when Iraq was culturally vibrant.
“Life was good then,” said Widad al-Orfali. She especially enjoyed seeing Hollywood movies and going to the opera house.
War and changes
Everyone knew then that war was coming. Aid agencies had already begun stockpiling food and medical supplies. Margaret Hassan, Iraq’s director of CARE International, who was kidnapped and presumed slain last November, sipped tea with me and shook her head in despair.
“Iraq is already in crisis,” she said, referring to shortages of food, medicine and basic services. “I don’t know how we will withstand another war.”
But war came the following March. And after Saddam’s statue was toppled in Firdos Square, I went back a second time to see for myself what good might come out of the rubble that was Baghdad.
The Baghdad I had seen only months earlier was now dotted with bombed buildings, looted offices, homes and stores and garbage everywhere. Electricity and clean drinking water had become scarce. Hospitals filled up quickly with the injured and sick.
Still, there was hope in the once-mute voices of Iraq. My minder, a Kurdish man who spoke so carefully about “the situation” before, gushed about Iraq’s new freedom. Saddam was gone and people were ready to start their lives anew.
Newspapers sprang up. Satellite dishes became the hottest commodity in Baghdad’s markets. Then came the Internet and cellphones and a whole new window to the world of which Iraqis had been deprived for so long.
I returned home optimistic that perhaps the war had been worth it.
Perhaps people I knew in Iraq, like my friend Hala, could now look forward to a better quality of life. I saw in her smile a future for her children; that they would be able to have a life free of repression that their mother had not known in her homeland.
Another different Iraq
More than two years later, I have journeyed back to this ancient land. It was once again an unfamiliar place, one in which people � both Iraqis and Americans � are dying randomly every day.
This is a nation where the steady drone of Black Hawk helicopters overhead and the rattle of machine gun fire have become as normal as the music that blared from the new DVD shops that opened in 2003.
The translator who worked with me and photographer Bita Honarvar in 2003 said he had to do something to give his children a better life. He moved his family to Kuwait several months ago.
As the C-130 made its descent to the airport, I thought of Hala. What must she think now of her beloved Baghdad, awash in blood from the daily bombings that snuff out innocent lives in the blink of an eye?
This time I am here to write about Georgia soldiers, whose mission is to make Iraq a better place.
I arrived at Camp Striker, where a majority of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team is located, on a heart-wrenching day. Four infantry soldiers lost their lives July 24 when their Humvee was destroyed by a roadside bomb during a routine patrol a few miles from Camp Striker.
It was a jarring re-entry into Iraq and confirmed what I had feared: that through the soldiers’ eyes, I am destined to see, yet again, an entirely different Iraq.
David Randall Jones: A handshake, and always a joke
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sgt. David Randall Jones greeted people with a booming voice and camaraderie that came straight at you.
David Randall Jones“When you saw him coming down the hall, you knew you had a handshake coming â€â€? there was no way around it,” said Capt. William Johnson, assistant jailer at the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department, where Jones worked as a jailer for eight years before his Georgia Army National Guard unit was activated in January.
Jones, 45, who died Saturday in Iraq in a bomb with three other members of the 48th Brigade Combat Team, was a student of history and planned to return to college, earn a master’s degree, and one day become a college history professor, said Sgt. Brent Walker, who worked the B Shift â€â€? 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. â€â€? with Jones at the Richmond County Jail. “He kept up with history and all current events. If something happened and you didn’t know about it, all you had to do was ask him.”
Lt. Sheila Burkes last talked to Jones on July 16 when he called the jail and asked for a care package. “What he really wanted was Crystal Light to flavor the water with,” she said. “And snacks. We were getting together a big package, taking up a collection, but we hadn’t sent it yet.”
What the B shift remembers most about Jones, said Burkes, is that he ended every morning roll call at the jail with the joke of the day. Nobody can remember any of the jokes, just that he told them, and, if nobody else laughed, it didn’t matter, Burkes said. “He did.”
Text of e-mail from Victor Anderson
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
‘YES THEY WERE MY GUYS’
Sgt. 1st Class Victor Anderson sent this e-mail (reprinted here unedited) to family and friends in Georgia a few days after four of his fellow soldiers were killed July 24 by a bomb. Anderson died six days later in a similar incident.
Subject: I AM OK
HELLO EVERYBODY
WELL I GUESS EVERYONE HAS HEARD THE NEWS YES THEY WERE MY GUYS. THEY FELT NO PAIN I WAS IN THE HUMVEE ABOUT 30 FEET IN FRONT OF THEM ALL GREAT GUYS. I DO NOT LIKE MOST OF THESE IRAQIS THEY ARE ALL LIARS. MAYBE SADAMM HAD THE RIGHT IDEA ON HOW TO CONTROL THEM. THERE NOT ALL BAD OUR INTERPITERS ARE GOOD GUYS. I DO NOT SERVE TO HELP OTHERS I SERVE BECAUSE OF THOSE GUYS TO MY LEFT AND RIGHT THEY ARE MEN OF THERE WORDS, THEY TOOK AN OATH TO DEFEND OUR COUNTRY THEY ARE WHY I CAME HERE NOT SOME IDEOLOGY. THEY STEPD UP AND DID NOT RUN AND HIDE WHEN OUR COUNTRY CALLED. WHETHER YOU BELIEVE IN THIS WAR OR NOT BELIEVE IN THEM BLESS YOU ALL. DONT MEAN TO BRING ANY ONE OF YOU DOWN JUST SAYING WHATS ON MY MIND BE GOOD
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Victor Anderson: Saw buddies die, then bomb ended his life
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Americus — Victor Anderson had a very close call 10 days ago.
Victor AndersonRead text of Sgt. Anderson’s e-mail
The 39-year-old platoon sergeant was riding in a patrol convoy July 24 when a bomb planted in the road destroyed the Humvee just behind his, killing four National Guardsmen from Georgia.
“Well I guess everyone has heard the news,” he e-mailed family and friends here last week. “They were my guys. They felt no pain.”
Anderson helped prepare the bodies for shipment home, he told his younger brother later in a phone conversation.
“He volunteered to help because he didn’t want his men to have to see what he saw,” said Joseph Poole. “He said it was just awful.”
On Tuesday, Poole stood outside his mother’s home with a somber host of relatives. Like other families across Georgia, they were waiting for a body: his brother’s. Sgt. Victor Anderson died Saturday in a second attack on a convoy outside Baghdad, only six days after his narrow escape.
The July 24 bombing produced the first combat fatalities since the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team was deployed to Iraq in May. The second, almost identical attack Saturday killed another four soldiers from the same platoon. At least two of them, including Anderson, were in the first patrol and had witnessed that terrible scene.
Barely two months into the brigade’s yearlong mission, Georgia towns are coping with multiple casualties among their recently civilian soldiers. Two of the eight guardsmen killed in the bombings were from Valdosta. Two others worked in Americus and lived near this southwest Georgia town.
Anderson was a deputy in the Sumter County Sheriff’s Department. Spc. Jacques “Gus” Brunson, who died in the first attack, had worked next door at the Sumter County Correctional Institute.
“It’s hard to live this way, knowing that someone can knock on your door at any time with this kind of news,” said Elisia Ingle of Americus, who received a visit from an Army casualty notification team last week. She is Brunson’s ex-wife and mother of his two children. Her husband, Ronald, is also serving with the 48th Brigade in Iraq, and she works with Ellen Anderson, Victor Anderson’s widow, at Sumter Regional Hospital.
Operating room nurses had chosen Anderson in their adopt-a-soldier program, showering him with letters, goodies and comforts from home. He sent them thank-you cards addressed “To the OR Girls.” Now the department bulletin board has a picture of him in his dress uniform posted next to a fresh black ribbon.
Hospital employees who know the couple well remembered Anderson on Tuesday as a playful man who liked to horse around with his children, 9-year-old Tyler and 14-year-old Jessica.
“Victor was the class clown, always silly,” said Lisa English, a financial counselor at the hospital. She was in Anderson’s 1983 graduating class at Tri-Counties High School up the road in Buena Vista. Her eyes welled up as she spoke of her friend, who had recently asked her to send him some “cool music.”
Her colleague Sundie Avery recalled that Anderson helped underwrite a recreation league baseball team and usually showed up for games wearing his Guard fatigues. He was so proud of his military service that he often sported his desert camouflage around town.
Anderson looked like a soldier with his shaved head, ramrod posture and short, stocky build. He grew up in Ellaville, a small town north of Americus, and enlisted in the Army after high school. He left active service and joined the Guard, taking a job as a police officer in Ellaville.
He re-enlisted in the Army after the Gulf War, meeting his wife of 11 years when he was posted in Germany. He left the Army again, rejoined the Guard and settled into a life of family and police work.
Anderson had been overseas with the Guard, as a peacekeeper in Bosnia, and he badly wanted to go to Iraq. But it almost didn’t happen.
In January, when the brigade was mobilized, he was told that he couldn’t join the other soldiers because of his diabetes. When hundreds of people turned out to see the unit off in a motorcade through the middle of Americus, Anderson had to settle for leading the way in a police cruiser.
“He had tears streaming down his face,” said Maj. Jimmy Jordan of the Sheriff’s Department, a retired guardsman who befriended Anderson. “It really hurt him not to be with his men.”
Anderson exercised, dieted, lost weight. Not long before the brigade deployed in May, he was cleared to go.
“He was as happy as a boy on Christmas morning,” said Jordan, who recalled his last encounter with Anderson. They hugged in the halls of the Sheriff’s Department, and he told the younger man to be careful.
On Tuesday, family and friends gathered at the home of Anderson’s mother and stepfather at the end of a long dirt road in the countryside north of Ellaville. Anderson lived next door with his wife and children in a rustic house with gray wooden timbers. In the yard sat a silver Chrysler Sebring with a yellow magnetic ribbon on the bumper that said, “Pray for SSG Anderson.”
“I talked to him just Friday morning,” said his mother, Belinda Poole, as she straightened the photos on a tabletop shrine in her living room. “He called and said they were getting ready to go out on some more missions. He was calm. If that bombing upset him, he didn’t show it.”
Outside, in the afternoon swelter, her husband and several other kinfolk were digging a hole in the front yard. They were erecting a flagpole, like so many Marines hoisting the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. They wanted to raise a flag so they could lower it to half-staff.
Jonathon Haggin: Death won’t end love story
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Kingsland � The pains started Saturday morning. Anna Haggin said they felt like contractions. Her stomach tightened. She began to bleed. She worried she was losing her baby.
Jonathon HagginAnna rushed to the hospital. She kept telling her mom, “Nothing can happen to this baby.”
Things were just starting to get better. She had been reconciling with her ex-husband, Spc. Jonathon Haggin, and she had become pregnant. The Georgia National Guard soldier was now thousands of miles away in Iraq, but they were already talking about getting back together and becoming a family again.
The emergency room doctors tested Anna’s blood and listened to the baby’s heartbeat. Everything was OK. They had no explanation for her pains.
The next morning, however, a pair of U.S. Army officers in dress uniform showed up at her apartment. They told her the baby’s father had been killed by a massive bomb in southwest Baghdad the night before.
Anna believes the pains were no coincidence.
She won’t learn the sex of the baby until later this month, but she already has a feeling it’s a boy.
“I’m praying to God it’s a boy. If it’s a girl, she will have to be named Jonathon,” Anna, 21, said Tuesday as she sat in the comfort of her mother’s home, where she has been grieving for the past few days.
Jonathon learned Anna was pregnant with their second child while he was recovering in a hospital in Germany this summer. He had been wounded by an insurgent’s bomb in Iraq. It broke three of his ribs.
The former Marine got bored resting in the hospital. He wanted to get back to his unit with the 48th Brigade Combat Team.
“He begged and pleaded to be sent back to Iraq with his squad,” Anna said.
Somehow, Jonathon persuaded the doctors to send him back before he was fully healed. But his buddies kept hiding his gear to keep him from going out on patrol. On July 24, while Jonathon was still recovering, four soldiers from his unit were killed in a bomb attack. He was angry that he wasn’t there. He wanted to find the people who killed his friends.
“It was just eating him alive,” Sgt. David Grimes, a fellow Georgia National Guard soldier and longtime friend, said in a telephone interview from Camp Striker, Iraq. “It bothered him badly.”
Finally, on Saturday, less than two weeks after returning to the field, Jonathon went outside the wire again. Grimes remembers their last conversation.
“I told him, ‘Jonathon, if you see the shot, take it.’ He said, ‘You know it.’ “
Jonathon was 26 when he died.
Grimes’ wife, Michelle, hung by Anna’s side Tuesday. They joined Anna’s mother, Edna Martinez, and a friend at a cozy Italian restaurant in St. Marys on the southeast Georgia coast.
The four laughed as they reminisced about Anna’s and Jonathan’s early dates. At first, the two disliked each other. But his cynical sense of humor attracted her.
On their first date, she placed her hand on top of his as they rode in his “busted” 1997 Ford Probe, which was three shades of blue. He jerked his hand away and told her to stop. After a few more tries, he wrapped his thumb around the back of her hand. “He likes me,” she thought.
On another early date, his car broke down on I-95 and they had to push it off the road. “The engine blew up,” Anna said. “We were sweating and I was mad.” Later in their relationship, she totaled the 1990 Thunderbird Super Coupe she had persuaded him to buy.
“We never doubted our love,” she said. “We had a lot of tests and a lot of trials through our dating.”
The couple married young. She was 17. He was 22. They divorced in December and were living apart when he left for Iraq.
When she started to dwell on Jonathon on Tuesday, Anna nervously rubbed her hand up and down a red plastic cup of ice water glazed with condensation.
She wonders how she will tell their 2-year-old daughter, Leaundra, what happened. Leaundra was Jonathon’s world, she said. A trained sniper who avoided emotions, Jonathon frequently bought his daughter white seashell necklaces and lovingly called her “Angelbutt.” She has his brown eyes. She started saying “daddy” before “mommy.”
Tuesday afternoon, little Leaundra danced on the dark- blue-carpeted floor of her grandmother’s living room and played with a small hamster figurine dressed in a Marine uniform. She wore one of her father’s seashell necklaces and sported a red U.S. Marine Corps baseball cap. Turning to a visitor, she proudly declared, “My daddy is in Iraq.”
Ronnie ‘Rod’ Shelley: ‘Needed to do his part’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sgt. Ronnie “Rod” Shelley wanted to escort the body of his best friend back to their hometown of Valdosta.
Ronnie “Rod” ShelleyShelley was riding in a three-vehicle convoy in Iraq on July 24 when a bomb in the road tore apart the Humvee carrying his buddy, Sgt. John Frank Thomas, killing him and three others from his platoon.
Shelley was devastated, but determined to keep doing his job in Iraq, and to serve as a pallbearer at his friend’s funeral.
But Saturday night, Shelley and three other Georgia Army National Guard soldiers met the same fate, killed by another large bomb detonated by insurgents on a road outside Baghdad. Tuesday, as the Thomas family continued to wait for John’s body to return for burial, Shelley’s wife, Heidi, began her wait, too.
Her husband could have gotten a medical exemption from serving in Iraq because he had severe problems with his teeth, she said. A doctor offered to sign a letter that would let him stay home.
“Rod said ‘No. Pull them all so I can go,’ ” Heidi Shelley said. “He needed to go. He needed to do his part.”
Shelley, 34, served in the Marines for eight years and saw combat in the first Gulf War, his wife said. He signed up for the Guard about three years ago, mostly for the retirement pay. He and his wife dreamed of someday selling their house, buying a motor home and sending postcards from the road to their three children, who are now 4, 8 and 13 years old.
Shelley was a graduate of Lowndes County High School. In civilian life, he was the overnight maintenance supervisor at a bakery. He enjoyed bass fishing, camping, four-wheeling, and spending time with his family.
“He thought we were supposed to have a barbecue every Sunday,” said Heidi Shelley, 25. “He was the grill master.”
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