Dispatches from Iraq

Let me start off with another Matt story. Last summer, after Matt found out he was being deployed to Iraq, he came out to visit me in Boston for a few days. We went to New York, Matt's first visit to the big city. We walked around Manhattan, did all the touristy things, and visited the World Trade Center site.

We capped off our trip with a visit to Yankee Stadium, and ended up seeing the classic 13-inning Red Sox-Yankees game, the one where Derek Jeter made that memorable head-first catch into the stands.

We sat in the upper deck. When the Yanks rallied in the bottom of the 13th, I told Matt to get ready to bail the second the game ended if New York won.

The Yanks won. I bolted out of the stands, went down the runway, and reached the ramp. Eventually I realized I had lost Matt. So I waited for awhile by the ramp. I was wearing a Red Sox hat, and got taunted by Yankees fans. No Matt.

I waited until the place pretty much emptied. Checked back in the upper deck. Still no Matt. As I said, Matt was a first-time NYC visitor. He didn't bring his cell phone to the game. I was the one holding the NYC map.

I waited by the subway entrance another hour, right until they announced they were closing the station. By this point, all 55,000 fans at Yankee Stadium had their individual chance to taunt me. It mostly went in one ear and out the other, because I was freaking out -- I had just lost my buddy who had never been to New York, in the Bronx, in the middle of the night.

So I got on the train, took it back to 28th street station, and walked to my friend's place we were staying on W. 28th. I planned on finding Matt's cell phone, calling his girlfriend, seeing if he checked in with her, and taking it from there.

I get to my friend's place, and there's Matt at the front door, waiting for me. He remembered my friend lived on W 28th, deduced the city worked on a grid street system, and found his way back from there.

It was at that point, if I had any doubts to begin with, that I knew Matt was going to be able to handle himself in the desert.

The following is part one of a two-part post, a journal entry from over the winter. We'll have the second installment in two weeks …

I was having a bad day. We had been up all night moving into our new quarters on Forward Operating Base (FOB) Freedom. We have moved in to a four-story former hotel with marble floors and walls. It sounds plush, but in reality, the top two stories are floorless shells due to repeated mortar attacks. The 250 square-foot, 7-man room I sleep in would be considered substandard living arrangements if I were a felon in a prison, and the building has so many beams being supported mechanically, it’d be condemned in America.

I now call it home. There is an aspect to being in the military, especially while deployed, that the media never covers: the anger and disgust that can percolate under duress. The movies portray the relationships of soldiers in combat as one of brotherhood. But no matter how much you might like the people you work with, if you spend eighty-plus hours a week under stressful conditions without the benefits of home, and share an overcrowded room with some the people you work with, those "brothers" can get on your last damn nerve.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, we were about to drive out to eastern Mosul and pull 48 hours of rooftop guard with some Kurdish soldiers in the winter cold. Did I mention I was having a bad day?

Just as we were about to depart for the Kurdish outpost, we received a quick recon mission that we needed to complete prior to assuming guard duties. The "ears in the sky" had overheard a band of terrorists plotting around the eastern highway through Mosul. We loaded up in to our Strykers in the late afternoon and headed out.

There I was, standing up in the air guard hatch, winter wind in my face, scanning for bad guys. A few miles in to our drive, one of our vehicles skirted too close to a light pole when driving over the median and lost some ladders that were attached to their slant armor.

We stopped, took a deep breath, gathered our sanity, and strapped the ladders to the roof of our Stryker, and continued on to our objective. We arrived at the sector and found nothing out of the ordinary. We called this absence of significance in on the radio and were directed to drive on to our guard position.

That’s when it happened.

We turned right on our route and within a block, BOOM! A loud explosion from behind rocked us. I felt the concussion of the blast blow over me like a wave. I turned my head back and looked at the large pillar of black smoke rising, and watched the Stryker slide sideways out of the smoke.

(To be continued)

Dispatches from Iraq 6/26

For more on the Stryker Brigade, check out Stryker News.

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