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Saturday, February 11, 2006
Mission rolls on for those who lost 8 comrades
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tallil Air Base, Iraq — The soldiers of Alpha Company were going out in armored Humvees this day. Like they did back then.
They poured bottled water over the ballistic glass windows to rinse off the dust. One installed a new bracket on his machine gun.
There was a last-minute run back to the living trailers to stock up on Red Bull. As they waited, some compared the knives strapped on their belts. The gunners, who stand in turrets exposed to the elements, and more, put on camouflaged cold- weather gear.
Some soldiers in Iraq kiss talismans around their necks before leaving base; others pray collectively with a chaplain.
But such rituals are not part of the pre-mission routine for Alpha Company’s 2nd Platoon.
Not after last July.
On this January day, they settled instead on a brief discussion of the mission at hand: escorting a shipment of 160,000 gallons of jet fuel from southern Iraq to Camp Anaconda, just north of Baghdad.
Sgt. 1st Class Don Whitmire, 48, the patrol leader, read from the latest intelligence report on what to expect on the treacherous road.
Speed limit is 55. Wear your seat belts. In the event of a rollover, grab the gunner from the turret. Gentlemen, you all know what IED holes look like.
Then came the reminder.
“Come by and pick up your bracelets,” Whitmire said.
The bracelets — elegant stainless steel bands bearing a U.S. flag and the lightning bolt insignia of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team. Each etched with four names of the fallen. Whitmire recently ordered a set for each of his soldiers.
The bracelets are his way of honoring the loss his company suffered last summer. In two incidents separated by six painfully short July days, eight soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment’s Alpha Company, died when their Humvees rolled over massive bombs hidden in the roads of rural southwest Baghdad.
Eight men gone from one platoon, their lives ended with brutal swiftness.
The shock, followed by intense grief and anger, reverberated through the tents that the Valdosta-based infantrymen occupied last summer at Camp Striker, adjacent to the Baghdad airport.
The Alpha Company soldiers were the first in the 48th Brigade to die in blasts generated by improvised explosive devices, bombs planted beneath or beside roads. They are the weapon of choice of insurgents in Iraq.
Alpha Company soldiers coped the best way they knew how; undeterred in their resolve to soldier on, traversing the same roads and hunting an elusive enemy.
“You can’t bottom out when you have 10 months to go,” said Sgt. William Rousseau, 24, a Richmond County sheriff’s deputy who survived both the ill-fated patrols in July. “We moved on.
“Do I think about it? Every day. Every time we go down the road I think about it.”
Whitmire, a real estate developer from Bainbridge, couldn’t bear to hear the names called out at a Veterans Day event he attended while home on leave in November.
“Hearing all the names — my eight guys — was really hard,” he said.
Whitmire had made up the roster for the patrols. He lives with his decision every day.
“It could have been anybody in the platoon,” he said. “I’m the one who said who was going on those trucks. They’re all my sons.”
Whenever a 2nd Platoon vehicle was attacked, on subsequent patrols, Whitmire positioned his own Humvee in the slot of the one that got hit.
“If the No. 2 truck got hit, I moved my truck to No. 2,” he said. “I could see the looks in the guys’ eyes. Nobody wanted to be in that spot.”
It was difficult, too, to ask his men to keep going back out there.
“Not that we had anyone who didn’t want to do it,” Whitmire said. “But there was that sense of hesitation. I still feel my platoon was targeted because of the good things we were doing.”
During training at Fort Stewart last spring, Whitmire talked to his soldiers about what they were about to face in Iraq.
“It’s a cliché — some of us may not be coming back,” Whitmire said. “Then when it happens in the fashion that it did happen … “
Whitmire paused, unsure how to finish.
“It will be extremely hard,” he said, “to get on a plane and leave this country without them.”
Trust in locals shattered
The names are painted on concrete barriers at Camp Striker, occupied now by the 101st Airborne Division. They are scratched on the trunk of a tree near a safe house that Alpha Company soldiers used last summer. They appear under their photos at brigade headquarters at Tallil.
Killed July 24, 2005:
Sgt. John Thomas
Spc. Jacques Brunson
Staff Sgt. Carl Fuller
Sgt. James Kinlow
Killed July 30, 2005:
Spc. Jonathon Haggin
Staff Sgt. David Jones
Sgt. 1st Class Victor Anderson
Sgt. Ronnie Shelley
A truck driver, a warehouse supervisor, a meat cutter, a construction worker, a bakery supervisor, a sheriff’s deputy, a jailer and a security guard. Sons, husbands and fathers.
After the remains of the eight were flown home last summer, several Alpha Company soldiers moved up their two-week leaves. They feared the worst — that next time out, it might be them. They didn’t want to miss seeing their families one last time.
Spc. Jeffrey Anderson, 36, a construction worker from Gainesville, went home using the time that had been allotted to one of the fallen, Ronnie Shelley. Shelley had been Anderson’s battle buddy, the gunner on his Humvee.
Anderson took his wife and two daughters to see his friend’s widow, Heidi.
“I haven’t figured it all out yet,” he said afterward. “Somehow you dig deep down inside and keep going.”
Staff Sgt. Gerald Coleman, 43, a night manager at a hotel in Columbus, also visited Shelley’s family.
“The worst part is that people back home don’t know everything. They ask questions you can’t answer,” he said. “The pain is still there.”
The three men who witnessed both days of carnage — Rousseau, Spc. Vito Pellitteri and Spc. Rodney Davidson — were inconsolable last summer.
After the first memorial service at Camp Striker, Rousseau and Pellitteri sat on the steps of the stage with Victor Anderson to remember their brothers.
Days later, on patrol with Anderson, Rousseau and Pellitteri again heard a thundering explosion and looked back in horror: the third vehicle on the patrol was no longer in sight. Anderson and three others were gone.
Rousseau and Pellitteri went home on leave in September. Along with Sgt. Scott Davis, they attended a tree dedication at Fort Stewart for the fallen. The eight Alpha Company names were added to Warrior’s Walk, a memorial to those killed in action.
Rousseau worried for Pellitteri, a student at Valdosta State and only 19. So young to have experienced such losses.
Rousseau worried, too, that the deaths hardened the hearts of Alpha Company soldiers and changed the way they would interact with Iraqis.
“I lost a lot of the wanting to be able to trust,” Rousseau said. “The outreach stuff ended. It was all business for us. We didn’t want to take that extra step anymore.”
But they gathered their strength and continued patrolling towns and villages in southwest Baghdad, handing out toys and candy to the children and speaking with the adults to find information on suspected insurgents. They would look into Iraqi eyes and wonder — did they know the person who was responsible?
The mission rolls along
Time. Alpha Company soldiers wanted time to march on, knowing that every new day would help soothe their loss.
Place. Alpha Company knew its patrols in “that area” would end in the fall. The 48th Brigade was scheduled to move to southern Iraq for a new mission. They longed for the day they would no longer have to drive on Route Aeros and Route Red Sox and catch glimpses of Kevlar, a Gerber multipurpose tool or pieces of a Humvee seat still strewn in the dust.
After the deaths, the 2nd Battalion was transformed into an “air mobile unit.” Some missions were conducted using helicopters that dropped off and picked up soldiers so they wouldn’t have to drive the deadly roads.
“I personally like this because I can’t remember the last time a helicopter ran over an IED,” Spc. Jason Smith, an Alpha Company medic, wrote to friends in an e-mail. “I know that’s a little bit of an obscure way of looking at it, but I’m more worried about IEDs than I am being shot out of the sky.”
In late October, those missions ended when the battalion moved to Tallil Air Base, near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq. A month later, Alpha soldiers started new jobs as escorts for trucks that carry supplies from Kuwait to U.S. military bases in central and northern Iraq.
It wasn’t what the soldiers had envisioned.
“Now, we are covering three or four times the ground in Humvees through some of the worst areas of Iraq,” Whitmire said.
Before they pick up the fuel trucks, Alpha Company soldiers drive out of Tallil just as they did at Striker: Humvees in single file on a dirt road that leads out to the highway.
The imagery is chilling. Too much like those two days — Pellitteri in the driver’s seat with Rousseau by his side.
But after eight months in Iraq, Rousseau said he “feels more at ease.”
“I can’t do anything about what’s buried in the road,” he said.
The convoys are long, tiring and often risky. The soldiers of 2nd platoon have been driving to Camp Liberty, Camp Anaconda and forward operating bases at Taqaddum with 20 giant trucks carrying thousands of gallons of jet fuel. One spark, one blast, could mean a fiery end.
Spc. Sean Martin, dressed in full “battle rattle,” sat quietly in the driver’s seat with a pocket-size New Testament in his right hand. It was a moment of introspection.
“If it’s my time to go, I want to be in a position to go to heaven.” Martin said holding up the Bible. “It’s kind of like soul food. This gives me encouragement.”
Memories in the dark
In the Baghdad area, the roads are far from quiet. Often, soldiers spend long hours waiting for a freshly discovered bomb to be removed. Or they wait because a highway was shut down after an attack on U.S. soldiers.
They count the overpasses on the main north-south highway.
“Ten more to go and we’re home,” Whitmire said on a recent run to Anaconda.
He ordered his gunners to shoot bags left on the roadsides. Or fire flares at suspicious vehicles.
“This is our old home,” Whitmire said as the convoy approached southwest Baghdad.
Moving out of that area gave some of the guys a “fresh start,” Rousseau said. It lifted their spirits.
“To me it didn’t matter where we stayed,” he said.
But some 2nd Platoon soldiers wish they were still there.
“Maybe it’s the guys we left behind,” Coleman said.
Or maybe, he said, it’s because the soldiers felt they were winning their war — there were tangible signs of progress in the villages around Striker. In turn, that would lead to fewer casualties.
Davidson said he wanted to stay behind. It wasn’t vengeance that ate at his soul — it was a matter of justice for his eight fallen friends.
“I lost my whole squad there. The people responsible for killing them are in that area,” said Davidson, 39, an employee at Yamaha in Thomaston.
Scattered among the big trucks, the 48th Brigade soldiers drive mostly at night, when the air is cold and the roads sometimes pitch black.
That’s when reality sets in.
“I don’t want to forget but I want to pull up the memories when I want to,” Davidson said.
After so many months, he has found peace in the ability to do just that. To think about the eight out of choice — not because the nightmares are never-ending.
‘I love you, man’
Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” blasted out of Spc. Jason Smith’s iPod mini. The paramedic from Philadelphia is a big fan of music from the 1980s. Smith, 28, occupied a rear passenger seat in the Humvee and strained to read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” with the help of a small flashlight. On this night, the wait at the gates of Anaconda was long and uncomfortable.
A helicopter had gone down the day before and there were reports of an IED on the main highway ahead. No convoys could exit the base until the area had been cleared.
“Resilience is a good word to describe the company,” Smith said, reflecting on a deployment approaching an end this spring.
Smith often thinks about the words tattooed on his left leg: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.”
Last summer, he could not live up to that promise.
“There was absolutely nothing I could have done had I been there,” Smith wrote home to friends in an e-mail. “I can tell you that I had mentally prepared myself for the absolute worst, but even the worst didn’t compare to what I had to face.”
In October, he wrote to friends about his numbness or why he wouldn’t share any of his soldierly life in letters or phone calls anymore. Not after what happened.
“My feelings of this place and its people had changed and I had pretty much forgotten all about one of the very reasons that I had chose to deploy in the first place, which was to make a better life for these people,” Smith said. “Well today I caught sight of that vision once again and it came in the form of a little girl.”
Everyone has a story of healing.
A child with ribbons around her pigtails held Smith’s hand and softened the anger within.
“Later in the day I begin to reflect on the events of earlier and I feel positive about this place … something I haven’t felt in a long time,” Smith wrote.
Of the eight who perished, Smith knew Haggin the best. They slept next to each other on cots in a tent covered by a dusty blue tarp.
“He and I were neighbors and shared many things,” Smith said in one of his e-mails. “He kept quiet about his family and his past, but I knew that he had … a 3-year-old little girl whom he loved more than life itself.”
Haggin had spent three weeks in Germany recuperating after three ribs were broken in an IED attack earlier in the summer. He could have stayed on medical disability longer, but he was eager to rejoin his platoon.
July 30 was his first mission after he returned.
Smith walked up to his friend. “I love you, man,” he told Haggin.
Hours later, Haggin was dead.
When Smith recalls that blistering July day, he thinks about a lot of things. About how the eight laughed and made others laugh. Their love for their families. The bond they felt so far from home.
He also wonders why he chose that particular moment to utter three little words he doesn’t often use.
