E-Mails Reveal a Fallen Soldier's Story
Later in the day, the Iraqi police, who were family members of the destroyed body, began to drink heavily and one of them (Ali) started shooting randomly into the crowded traffic circle below the castle. We watched as he killed a 17 yr. old girl, a 7 yr. old girl and a 28 yr. old male. We could not intervene as this was happening for very complex reasons. This has been one of the most horrific days of my entire 34 yrs. of living on this earth ... I am stupefied and stand in tragic awe in the face of this carnage, what could I possibly say? Where was God today?
He often wrote about God in his E-mails home. He'd been a part-time pastor at a California Baptist church once, giving sermons on Wednesday nights. He'd knocked on the door of a church shortly after he met his wife in 1992. "I'd like to be saved," he'd said. In January, he asked his wife to send him a copy of the Koran, because he wanted to read about the Muslim faith. But in early March of this year, he told me that he'd stopped attending church. "I started studying philosophy and became an atheist," he said. "I'm still trying to contemplate God, but it is kind of hard here." Ten days later, on his birthday, he called home. "He was remarkably calm," recalled his father. "The things he has seen in war and the fact that he read so deeply in philosophical and theological issues led him to be often conflicted internally about God. He said that he reconciled his conflicts and that he was ready anytime God called him. Not the statement of an atheist."
Whatever his personal convictions, the memories of Najaf and other missions in early March were becoming a heavy piece of dangle. While embedded on March 5, I followed Charger Company on another raid that Griffin recounted in his journal. The platoon entered the home of a family whose only crime was having names similar to those of wanted insurgents.
I noticed the mother attempting to breast feed her little baby and yet the baby continued to cry. [The interpreter] who is a certified and well educated doctor of internal medicine educated in Iraq, told me that the mother, because she was very frightened by our presence, was not able to breast feed her baby because the glands in the breast close up due to sympathetic responses to fear and stressful situations. I then tried to reassure the mother by allowing her to leave the room and attain some privacy so that she could relax and feed her child. I felt something that had been brooding under the attained callousness of my heart for some time.
My heart finally broke for the Iraqi people. I wanted to just sit down and cry while saying I'm so, so sorry for what we had done. I had the acute sense that we had failed these people. It was at this time, and after an entire year of being deployed and well into the next deployment that I realized something. We burst into homes, frighten the hell out of families, and destroy their homes looking for an elusive enemy. We do this out of fear of the unseen and attempt to compensate for our inability to capture insurgents by swatting mosquitoes with a sledge-hammer in glass houses.
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