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Saturday, August 20, 2005
Lock and load your mops at Camp Taji
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There’s something strange oozing from the ground at Camp Taji.
Some mornings, the gravel and dirt paths between the soldiers’ trailers turn to chocolate brown slime.
Bita Honarvar/AJC
A soldier’s boots is caked with the thick mud that periodically oozes up from the ground at Camp Taji.
“I had it all over my flip-flops,� said Staff Sgt. Gilbert Sheppard of Millen, who serves in the 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment. “It took four days for them to dry out.�
At the pods where soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team live, conspiracy theories run rampant.
Some said the muck came from morning dew. But even at 10 a.m. under a searing sun, the ground was wet.
Others said the grounds were purposely wetted down to keep the dust away. That sounded like a plausible theory, except that the mud can be rather greasy. Hmmmmm. Where did the oil come from then?
The massive sand storm that came through the area might be a culprit, surmised another soldier. It brought with it alien particles that settled in the ground.
But this is Taji, after all. Home once to Saddam Hussein’s army. Perhaps the Iraqis were testing chemicals here to build weapons of mass destruction. The stuff coming out of the ground could be anthrax or some other deadly substance that could kill us all.
Yikes.
My vote goes to a sergeant who told me this: Taji is a military base built on swampland surrounding the Tigris River. The ground, he said, can stay naturally wet and hold onto diesel and other fuels leaked onto the dirt.
The official explanation from Camp Taji geologists verified some of that information. Due to the area’s low water table — between two and six feet — the composition of the soil is mostly clay, the geologists said. They assured the soldiers that every last bit of it would wash out of their clothing.
Clay? That should be a familiar sight to Georgians. But, who knows?
One day, someone will get to the bottom of the mystery. Until then, it’s lock and load your mops.
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Watching a friend die cuts deep
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Forward Operating Base Michael, Iraq � Cpl. Jeffrey Vennemann was on a reconnaissance patrol near Yusufiyah this week when he heard the ear-shattering explosion.
As the only soldier with medical skills out that night with Echo Troop, 108th Cavalry, Vennemann hurried to tend to a severely wounded soldier.
He heard someone struggling to call his name: “Jeffrey.”
No one in the Army addressed him by his first name except Spc. Michael Stokely.
In the darkness, Vennemann turned the wounded man over. He looked in horror at the damaged face of his best friend.
“I hadn’t realized it was Stokely,” he said Friday.
Vennemann, an emergency medical technician in the DeKalb County Fire Department, desperately tried to stop the bleeding. He couldn’t. The next step was to put an airway tube into Stokely’s mouth. He couldn’t do that either because of the injuries.
Before the medical team arrived 25 minutes later, Vennemann helplessly watched his best friend take his last breath.
“He was going to be the best man at my wedding. He still is,” Vennemann said, tears welling in his weary eyes.
“I’m going to have a photo of him right there,” Vennemann said of the soldier he befriended over the last few years. “There is no other best man.”
Vennemann plans to marry his girlfriend, Christine Iski, on Aug. 19 next year. He was Stokely’s best man when he got married in May; Stokely was planning to return the favor.
But in the early hours of Tuesday morning, with one blast from an improvised explosive devise hidden in the bushes of a narrow road in central Iraq, all those plans were destroyed.
A kick in the gut
Vennemann knelt over Stokely’s body, unable to contain the pain of losing his sole confidant in the military. Yet the compassion he felt provided a sense of relief that his friend did not suffer long.
Friday afternoon, Vennemann and hundreds of soldiers from the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Team gathered here to honor Stokely, who was promoted to sergeant posthumously, and three members of the 1st Battalion, 108th Armor Regiment, who also died this week.
Sgt. Thomas Strickland, 27, of Douglasville; Spc. Joshua Dingler, 19, of Hiram; and Sgt. Paul Saylor, 21, of Bremen belonged to the regiment’s Headquarters and Headquarters Company, based in Calhoun. They died early Monday morning when their armored Humvee rolled off a road and into a canal.
It was the fifth memorial service the 48th Brigade had held since arriving in Iraq in early June. Sixteen soldiers from the unit have died in bomb attacks and vehicle accidents.
Friday’s ceremony was the first organized at FOB Michael in Mahmudiyah, a small town south of Baghdad.
The battalion is stationed at Michael and two other nearby FOBs, in Lutafiyah and Yusufiyah.
“This is a gut-wrenching experience for all my guys,” said Lt. Col. John King, Doraville’s police chief and commander of the armor battalion.
“The day after it happened, it was tough. But by the end of that day, I started seeing that look in my soldiers, that determination that we’re not going to quit.”
At Friday’s ceremony, a sea of black felt Stetsons and silver spurs — distinctive traditions of cavalry units — filled the vehicle maintenance bay at Michael. Raw emotions surfaced among the cavalrymen, known for their strong bonds and historical traditions.
The scout platoons of the 108th Armor are naturally closer to one another because of the kind of work they do, said Staff Sgt. Sean Sibert. Typically, Scouts run reconnaissance patrols to secure treacherous roads before military convoys head out.
“We go out in small groups to find the enemy,” said Sibert, a landscaper from Martinez, near Augusta. “That makes us a very tight group.”
Part of their closeness, said Echo Troop soldiers, comes from the harsh conditions under which they operate.
Soldiers of the 108 live in Spartan facilities at the three FOBs they occupy. They are not privy to the distractions and entertainment options available at other, more permanent facilities, such as Striker, Liberty or Taji.
“Being here is like going from Manhattan to the wild, wild West,” said Staff Sgt. Joe Wilson, a full-time Guard soldier from Canton assigned to the 108th Armor’s headquarters company.
The forward operatin bases are in an area of lawlessness and insurgent activity. At Michael, the 118th Field Artillery Regiment’s Alpha Battery, from Springfield, has four Paladin 155 mm howitzers ready to fire in any direction. Capt. Jeff Schneider, the battery commander, said the guns were fired almost every day to counter insurgent fire or thwart potential attacks.
Soldiers at the three bases are required to wear body armor and helmets at all times because of the frequent attacks.
Danger never lets up
King said his soldiers were under constant enemy watch. At other camps, he said, soldiers behave one way when they are “inside the wire,” in the relative safety of the base, and go into war mode when they exit the gates. At his FOBs, however, there is no “on-off switch.”
Communications, too, are sketchy for the 108th soldiers. At Yusufiyah, the Internet connection is far from reliable. Soldiers there live inside an old potato factory, share two wooden shower facilities, and have salvaged a Ping-Pong table for relaxation. They tend to rely more on each other when they cannot talk to loved ones at home.
“It’s a morale kicker,” said Spc. Joshua Oxford, an Echo Troop soldier who works as a code enforcement officer in the Griffin Police Department. “It’s hard being under these conditions. When a soldier dies, it’s not like a friend dying — it’s like losing a family member. All we have here is each other to depend on.”
A few days earlier, Oxford had heard from Spc. Rodney Davidson, a friend who is assigned to Alpha Company of the 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment, which lost eight men from the same platoon within six days in late July. Davidson witnessed both tragedies.
Oxford and Davidson often hunt deer and wild turkey together in Thomaston. Davidson talked about the deaths of his friends. Oxford said they “hit him hard.”
Now it was Oxford’s time to feel that kind of grief.
“Before, you’d think [about the danger] real quick on your way to the vehicle,” Oxford said. “Now you actually stop and take a minute to pray.”
After the deaths this week, Oxford said, Echo Troop soldiers became a little more cautious about what they said or did. They took the time to sit down and talk to one another. They went to eat meals as a group more than before.
“This makes it harder to keep going,” Oxford said. “But we know we still have missions we have to do here.”
After the tears Friday afternoon, Vennemann and Spc. Jason Buice traded stories about Stokely. They were known as a trio. Each had ignored Army regulations about hair, and the three launched a contest to see who could grow his hair the longest.
“There’s no barbershop where we are,” said Buice, who lives in Cumming.
They remembered their fallen friend as “one of a kind,” someone who always spoke his mind. They remembered, too, the prankster in him.
“Stokely put a mousetrap in my bunk once,” Buice said.
He laughed as he described how the trap got him in the behind when he was wearing just his Army-issue black shorts.
The soldiers said the Yusufiyah base is being renamed FOB Stokely to honor the citizen soldier. As disheveled and tired as he was, Vennemann found it in him to make one last joke about the only military man with whom he shared his fears and frustrations.
“Yeah,” said Vennemann, “they’re going to name a crap-hole after a great guy.”
