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Veterans'
Stories
Troops On-the-Ground The Human Cost of War The War in Iraq
Sr.
Airman Pedro Espaillat
KIA: Iraq 5/004 20 Years old Over
100,000 people visited the Eyes
Wide Open Exhibit when it was set up in Union Square in New York City
during
the Republican National Convention in September, 2004. An accidental
visitor to
the exhibit turned out to be the mother of one of the dead soldiers.
Airman
Pedro Espaillat was killed in May and since that time his mother, a
Dominican
national, had seldom left her NY apartment. On September 5 she went out
for a
walk in the direction of Union Square and happened upon "Eyes Wide
Open". A volunteer took her to her son’s place in the exhibit.
Grief-stricken, she was escorted home by another volunteer, but
returned the
next day with Pedro’s photograph, a Dominican flag, an American flag
and a red
rose, all of which she placed with the boots.  LCpl.
Jeff Lucey, USMC
Veteran: Invasion of Iraq Suicide: 6/22/04 (after being discharged) 23 years old
Jeff Lucey was called to
active duty with the 6th Marine
Motor Transport Battalion in early 2003. By February he was in Kuwait
and in
March he was part of the invasion of Iraq. On
Spc. Thomas J.
Sweet, Jr. On Thanksgiving Day, 2003 the Army informed the Sweet family that
their son, TJ, had died in a barracks
shooting earlier that
same day. Within days, the Army contacted the family to inform them
that the
initial information had been incorrect and that TJ had died by
accidentally
discharging his own weapon. Two months later, following a CID
investigation,
TJ’s death was judged to be a suicide. On Memorial Day, 2005,
representing Gold
Star Mothers in a formal ceremony, Liz Sweet placed a wreath at the
Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.
“The
feeling that we were doing our patriotic duty,
protecting America, faded over time. It eventually boiled down to being
able to
find your comfort zone, because you just didn’t trust ‘em on when you
were going
home… you were gonna be there for a while. So you stopped thinkin’
about going
home and concentrated on staying alive. “I hear people now say things
(jokingly) like ‘I’m gonna cut
your head off’, … stuff like that
infuriates me because they have no idea what they’re talking about.
Yeah, it’s
playful and maybe I’ll find that sense of humor again… I hope so… but I
don’t
believe in tough guys anymore. You can be a hardass all you want, but
the cost
of that… you lose yourself.” Was a Navy Corpsman
attached to a tank unit in the First
Marine Division during the invasion. Arrived in Kuwait with his unit on
”We didn’t care about the
politics so much (before deployment) because we were
trained to do a job and we were focused on that. We were thinking more
about
what we would have to do and a lot of people were asking themselves ‘am
I as
good as I think I am?’  Cpl. Ryan Groves,
USMC Was wounded
in October 2004 by a rocket propelled grenade
that exploded about 10 feet away from him, blew off his left leg and
severely
injured his other leg. He was interviewed by the “Aftershock” crew at
Arlington
National Cemetery on Memorial Day,
2005. His father had pushed his
wheelchair the mile up the hill from the main gate to the amphitheater
at the
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to hear the President deliver his annual
Memorial
Day speech. When they arrived, the amphitheater had already been closed
off for
security reasons and Ryan and his father had to wait outside until the
President left the area. Question: Do you think
your sacrifice was worth it? “I do… yeah, I do. It’s a rough
question though. I
definitely want to ask myself that every day.”
“I served
with the 1st Battalion 41st Infantry Regiment, Alpha Company. I
was in
the 3RD Brigade 1st Armored Division. My Battalion was part of
the
invasion. We were attached to the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne
until the
rest of the Division (1AD) showed up a couple months later. I
stayed with
my Company in Iraq for a year after the invasion. We were
stationed in
West Baghdad in the Abu Ghraib Area. We were involved in almost
constant
combat operations.
Andrew: My ship was part of the first battle group that went into the Gulf. We knew approximately 5 weeks beforehand the day we were gonna launch Tomahawks (missles; on Iraq). So knowing that information and then listening to CNN say ‘we’re negotiating now, and we’re tryin’ to avert war’… Like I can’t believe what I was hearing. I was disgusted. We were already told we were going to be shooting on this exact day…." Question: And did you
shoot on that
day?
Lt.
Seth Dvorin enlisted in the Army in July of 2002.
In January of 2003 he went to OCS for training in air defense
artillery. In
September of 2003, three weeks after his wedding and one day after
arriving at
his first duty station at Fort Drum, NY, he received orders to go to
Iraq. In
October 2003 his platoon was given the assignment of looking for
I.E.D.s along
roadsides in the Sunni Triangle around Baghdad. He was killed instantly
by an
I.E.D. in early February, 2004. His mother, Sue Niederer of Pennington,
NJ
calls his assignment a “death sentence”.
In November, 2003 Army Pfc. Jason
Gunn was driving an unarmored troop carrier across a bridge when an
I.E.D.
exploded next to the vehicle. The soldier next to him was killed by the
blast
and the left side of Gunn's body was shredded by shrapnel. He was
evacuated to
Germany and later to the US. Three and a half months later, partially
healed and still weak from the experience, he was sent back to his unit
in
Iraq. “When I left country (Iraq) the
first time I thought, ‘that’s it, I’m never comin’ back here’. After I
got hit
I thought I was in the clear, but they sent me back anyway.”
Combat
Veterans
“The
term ‘surgical strike’ is meaningless.
It’s a term civilians and dramatic movie producers come up with. The
weapons
aren’t always accurate, there’s always other people around and the
intelligence that generated the target information is frequently wrong.
And it
doesn’t necessarily accomplish the mission anyway. Surgical strikes
wouldn’t do
us much good in Iraq because what we’re dealing with isn’t a couple of
leaders
that are fighting us… what we’re dealing with are movements.”
“Veterans, having had the taste and felt the sting of war, know what it costs. The idea of the ‘citizen soldier’ is that the soldier comes back to the citizenry and reports what he’s done, reports this other part of the world that others haven’t seen, this other part of life, this other method of death… We need to bring that back.”  Wayne Smith
Tim O’Brien was drafted in the
summer of 1969 and assigned to Alpha Company, 5th Btn, 46th
Infantry of the Americal Division, operating in Vietnam’s Central
Highlands. A year earlier, another
company from the same Division was involved in the infamous My Lai
massacre. He
has written several award-winning novels about his experiences
including: The
Things They Carried, Going After Cacciato, and If I Die In A
Combat Zone. “Veterans
who’ve served in combat… not typing, or driving a truck… who’ve really
served
in combat, don’t feel a nostalgia for war. Nostalgia means ‘a longing
to return
home’; I don’t long to return to a foxhole and a wasted village, and
looking at
corpses and getting wounded… I don’t want any of that back in my life.
Too
often I watch the Fox Channel or CNN and I see these guys in their bow
ties and
their great haircuts supporting the war and I’m wondering ‘you’re old
enough,…
why the hell aren’t you there if you think this is such a great thing.
Why are
you sitting in that nice safe TV studio. Get your ass over there… It
seems to
me hypocritical to say ‘you other people go out and do my fighting and
my
killing and my dying for me and I’ll just stay in this nice safe office
in the
Pentagon or in a TV studio.’ “Cameras
can’t go inside the minds of human beings,
you don’t get into the tear ducts. You can’t put a camera in there, or
into the heart or into the stomach… all the places that hurt… cameras
don’t go
to those places. So you don’t really get a full picture of the real
suffering
of war.”
Robert Jay
Lifton
Robert Jay Lifton has spent his
life studying and writing about people in extreme situations. He has
written
extensively about survivors of Hiroshima, Vietnam veterans and members
of
terrorist cults. His book “Home from the War”, based on extensive
research into
the struggles of returning Vietnam combat veterans, reflects many of
the same
issues being experienced by veterans returning from the war in Iraq. I
think that we’re
producing a generation not only of alienated vets but of an alienated
general
public… I think the public struggles between two different images (of
the war):
one is not wanting the dead to have died in vain; the more traditional
meaning
that you give to a war so that you therefore prosecute the war ever
more
vigorously. And, on the other hand, you have the opposite kind of
survivor: one that questions the justification for the war and claims
that the dead
will have not died in vain only if we learn about the
absurdity and the
grotesqueness of the war from their sacrifice."
Chris Hedges
was a war
correspondent for the New York Times for 15 years, covering conflicts
in
Central America, the Balkans and the Middle East, including the first
Gulf War
when he was captured by the Iraqis. He was a member of a team of
reporters that
won the Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times coverage for global
terrorism.
His two recent books, “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning”
and “War:
Realities and Myths” are meditations on his experiences. On the war
in Iraq he says, "Once
you unleash the "dogs of war", and I know this from every war I've
ever covered, war has a force of its own. It's not surgical. We talk
about
taking out Saddam Hussein. Once you use the blunt instrument of war, it
has all
sorts of consequences when you use violence on that scale that you
can't
anticipate. I'm not opposed to the use of force. But force always has
to be a
last resort because those who wield force become tainted or
contaminated by it.
And one of the things that most frightens me about the moment our
nation is in
now, is that we've lost touch with the notion of what war is… War is
death. War
is the enterprise of death." What we saw during the buildup to
the war and during the war itself was an exaltation of our military
prowess and
our weapons systems. So we had retired generals and colonels going on
the air
talking about how far cruise missiles could go and what their explosive
capacity was… We never saw what those missiles did at the receiving
end; we
never saw the pools of blood and the agony of the dying and the mothers
who had
lost their children… we never saw any of that.” |
