E-Mails Reveal a Fallen Soldier's Story
It was weeks later and back in the states that I realized that Griffin was the only soldier I had interviewed at any length with the video camera. Taking the camera along was just an experiment with multimedia reporting, after all. In the end, Griffin was only briefly mentioned in a story about the Stryker unit raids that appeared in the magazine. "Every night is something different," he's quoted as saying, while sitting in the back of his eight-wheel Stryker vehicle. "The uncertainty is one of the hardest things to deal with."
On March 23, I received an E-mail from Capt. Steve Phillips, the commander of Charger Company. Diana Griffin, he wrote, had bought out three stores' worth of magazines when her husband's quote appeared in print. "She called my wife several times to brag about how her husband was in the news," Phillips wrote. "I don't know if you remember him, but he was with [the] platoon the night you chased around for the 5 individuals that were fleeing us. Darrell was shot and killed two days ago when we were returning from our new area of operations within Sadr City."
Snipers are an infantryman's worst nightmare—an unseen enemy who can kill with ease. Even worse, insurgents these days have taken to videotaping kills, videos that are sometimes broadcast on Iraqi satellite television. "We have been the deepest conventional force in Sadr City in the past 2 years I believe," Phillips wrote. "It is tense and it is a tough mission." Griffin was the first soldier from his unit killed during this combat deployment.
There was an E-mail message from Diana Griffin in my in box as well. "I was wondering if you have anything more of his interview [whether] you taped him or wrote it down that I may have, and also any pictures." I sent copies of the interview and the pictures to his family, and agreed to say few words at the funeral.
The bullet that ended his life also deprived him of an open-casket funeral. The ceremony was held at a large church in Porter Ranch, Calif., not far from his final resting place, the National Cemetery in downtown Los Angeles, in front of about 150 mourners. The local television station was there; so were members of the Patriot Guard Riders, a group of former servicemen who voluntarily escort military funerals to protect families from religious zealots who protest such things. Indeed, as the funeral procession made its way along the freeway from the church to the cemetery, a Toyota pickup swerved toward the hearse, beeping its horn with the driver's hand extending his arm with his thumb down.
The often distant branches of Griffin's family came together for the first time in years. His father sat modestly dressed next to Diana, who wore black. There were other family members there, too, some buttoned down, others with tattoos and long hair. And Darrell's sister, who, like her brother, excels in martial arts.
His remains lie under a sliver of white marble in the veterans' cemetery. Despite requests from his family members, the Army erased Griffin's laptop hard drive before returning it to them. It's done for security, officials said, but it also erases pictures and writings. Deletions are done by the military on a case-by-case basis, "but a lot of people buy recovery software and get some of the files back," an Army official offered. The Department of Defense also recently issued new regulations that, in practice, may severely limit soldiers' E-mailing and blogging. "[I] believe that readers should know the situation as it really is over here without any partisan interpretation of the facts," Griffin once blogged to a MySpace group. "Perception must not be reality; reality must stand on its own merits good or bad."
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