Blood Brothers, Parts 1-4 (Army Times)

[Jim Higgins]

Part 1: To Adhamiya and back
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/11/army_bloodbrothers_071126/

As they started loading into the Bradley fighting vehicle to roll out of
Combat Outpost Apache, the soldiers laughed as if they weren’t afraid.
As if each, at least twice, hadn’t felt the shocking heat and been
deafened by the roar of roadside bombs. As if they hadn’t already lost
eight friends to improvised explosive devices and snipers and grenades.

These soldiers of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry
Regiment, laughed because it gave them courage to step back into the
Bradleys. If they didn’t go, somebody else would have to.

“Somewhere on that street there’s an IED,” Sgt. 1st Class Tim Ybay told
2nd Platoon on June 20, briefing them just before they patrolled the
streets of Adhamiya, Iraq, as they had been doing for 10 months.

“I’ll find it!” shouted Bradley driver Spc. Ernesto Martin.

Not that day. Not that soldier. But others riding on that patrol would
be among five to die the next day, when an IED flipped their 30-ton
Bradley upside-down like a cheap toy and set it ablaze.

The surviving platoon members comforted each other that their friends
died looking out for their brothers. They told each other they would
have done the same. They cried and beat their fists into walls. They
knelt in the sand and bent their heads and tried to convince themselves
Iraq was worth it.

But that was hard because they no longer believed they were fighting for
Iraq. They had, once, a long time ago. Before they had seen the Iraqi
bodies with their heads dipped in acid, before the children tossed
grenades at them. Now the locals refused even to acknowledge dead
neighbors sprawled on their sidewalks.

The soldiers of Charlie Company had given up fighting for the Iraqis.
They fought for each other.

And so that day, they forced aside the last moments of their friends’
lives, moments filled with chaos and agony and pain and blood.

They remembered them laughing.

Over 15 months, the war would kill 14 men from Charlie 1-26, more than
any other Army company sent to Iraq, according to their battalion commander.

The group of 138 would earn at least 95 combat awards. They were part of
Task Force 1-26, some 500 troops, who would find 47 weapons caches,
capture more than 300 insurgents, including high-value targets, and find
hundreds of explosive devices. But 122 men would receive Purple Hearts
and 31 would die, more than in any Army battalion since Vietnam.

One respected sergeant in Alpha Company would kill himself. A Charlie
Company soldier would go home with three Purple Hearts and a lost dream.
A buddy would be nominated for the Medal of Honor after saving four of
his brothers. And there would be one brief mutiny.

Still, numbers don’t tell the story.
‘Just blood everywhere’

In its glory days, the mansions of Saddam Hussein’s favorite minions
rose from the dust of Adhamiya, an ancient neighborhood in northeastern
Baghdad. Army generals and Sunni leaders shared the area near Baghdad’s
most important Sunni mosque, Abu Hanifa.

Adhamiya was the last neighborhood to fall when U.S. forces tore into
Baghdad in 2003, and anti-American slogans still emblazon bullet-pocked
walls.

For the six months prior to 1-26’s arrival, no Americans had patrolled
its winding streets. A mostly Shiite Iraqi army kept watch over the
neighborhood, and Sunni citizens suffered corruption and violent reprisals.

Those conditions left Adhamiya in anarchy, and seared images of hatred
and suffering into the minds of the young men of Charlie Company.

When they arrived in August 2006, soldiers with 1-26 found about 250
dead Iraqi civilians a month. Many of the soldiers, including Staff Sgt.
Ian Newland, 27, had deployed with the unit to Samarra in 2004, but that
hadn’t prepared them for Adhamiya.

They arrived upbeat and confident they could make a difference. Such
expectations eroded every time they went outside the wire.

“This deployment, every patrol you’re finding dead people,” Newland
said. “It’s like one to 12 a patrol. Their eyes are gouged out. Their
arms are broken. We saw a kid who had been shot 10 to 15 times.”

Another man had been shot through both hands and his shoulders.

“They laid him out like Jesus,” Newland said. “Just blood everywhere.
That sticks with you.”

Newland joined the Army in 2002 to escape a life of poverty in Dayton,
Ohio. He had dropped out of high school in 10th grade, and then lived on
welfare with his wife and young daughter while working two jobs.

In the Army, he emerged as one of the brightest, making staff sergeant
in four years. As team leader, he made soldiers who got in trouble write
papers about World War II hero Audie Murphy or the carbine system.

Charlie 1-26 slept 25 to a room in a decrepit and sour-smelling
basement. Tiles hung from the ceiling, leaving dust on their faces when
they woke in the mornings. They patrolled all day in full body armor,
but could shower only once every week or two. they had only port-a-johns
in the 117-degree heat.

“I thought it was a dump,” said Sgt. Shawn Ladue, 27. “Every time it’d
rain, we’d get that stagnant-ass water in the basement.”

Ladue joined the Army in 1997 after dropping out of high school in
Phoenix, got out of the military a couple years later to learn a
civilian trade, bounced around from auto mechanic school to community
college, and signed back up in 2004. His career as an infantryman would
end permanently in Adhamiya.
Not like training

Nothing prepared Charlie Company for Adhamiya. They’d spent a week at
Hohenfels training center in Germany learning to work with interpreters.

During the training, Capt. Mike Baka would talk to “the mayor” of a mock
town, and an IED would go off nearby.

“I thought, ‘No way is it going to be like this,’” Baka said. “I was
exactly wrong.”

Beyond that, the West Point grad said he was never trained in
counterinsurgency methods. None, not even Baka, had read Gen. David
Petraeus’ counterinsurgency manual. But he had taken a year of Arabic in
college, and he understood he had to interact with the locals to make it
work.

At Apache, he’d roll into Adhamiya with one platoon, get back, and
immediately roll out with a different platoon.

“I wanted to show a little bit of love for the platoons, but also to
talk to the people,” he said. He’d play chess with the locals or talk
with them about their families. But if he stayed too long, they would
inevitably catch sniper fire.

“It was a rare day if we didn’t see [Iraqis] get killed or severely
injured,” he said. “It was almost like they were testing us. We’d be two
streets away, and shots would ring out. It was always gunshot wounds to
their heads.”

One day, local Iraqis covered a body on the sidewalk with cardboard.

“But he jerked back up — he was still alive,” Baka said.

Sgt. Kevin Guenther, Baka’s medic, performed a tracheotomy on the man.

“The people all gathered around to watch, but no one tried to do
anything,” Baka said. “I actually got really angry. This man was left
for dead. No one here will even call an ambulance. They were more
concerned about the three or four men we were questioning.”

The man died about half an hour later. He’d been shot in the head.

The soldiers were tasked with joint patrols with the Iraqi army, but the
Iraqi army didn’t go out enough for there to be much “joint” involved.

“They’d set up a mission with us, but then they’d have an excuse: ‘No
gas.’ ‘It’s too dangerous.’ ‘We don’t have enough guys,’” said Spc.
Gerry DeNardi, 20, the company smart aleck with high cheekbones and a
mop of hair bleached by the sun.

“We had to pick up an Iraqi body once at Remy [Street] because they said
they were out of gas, but then they rolled past us as we were coming
back in.”

Most of the soldiers were Shiite.

“To join the army, you had to go to western Baghdad,” Baka explained.
“No Sunnis would go there. But the corruption in the Shia military was
horrendous.”

The Iraqi army would trash Sunni houses, take people into custody who
hadn’t done anything wrong and forcefully demand bribes, Baka said.
‘How does that make you feel?’

Charlie Company patrolled constantly — each guy went out three or four
times a day, with a one-and-a-half-hour break between patrols.

The soldiers teased each other just as constantly, a way to break the
relentless stress and fear.

Pfc. Ross McGinnis, the youngest member of the company at 19, at first
annoyed just about everyone.

“He just wanted to learn so much,” said his team leader, Newland. “He
was always on and intense. But then he was so much fun.”

McGinnis spent weekends with Newland and his family in Schweinfurt,
playing with Newland’s children, Dryden and Haley, and trying to answer
Newland’s plethora of Army trivia questions.

He soon emerged as a joker — big brown eyes flashing above a bigger
grin. In Iraq, he recorded a mock interview with a friend who had been
slightly wounded — asking in his best Dan Rather voice, without a trace
of a grin, “How does that make you feel?”

As he became more confident in his job as a .50-cal gunner, he bragged.
Sitting on the edge of his humvee, he held up the round from an M4 —
about two inches long — and then the .50-cal round, twice as long, twice
as thick.

“This is your round,” he chanted, holding up the tiny bullet. “And this
is my round. Your round. My round.”

Another day, Staff Sgt. Ely Chagoya, 31, decided to drill his team on
how quickly they could take apart and reassemble their night-vision
goggles — blindfolded.

As he demonstrated, he could hear giggling, and then a flash went off.
It was a digital camera.

“Man, I knew they were up to something,” Chagoya said, shaking his head.
“They showed me the picture, and I see the ass of McGinnis right next to
my head.”

McGinnis was probably the only private who could tease Chagoya about
being a former Marine. A grenade had gone off underneath Baka’s humvee,
and a dud had landed in the humvee with Newland and McGinnis, so the
platoon spent a week tossing tennis balls at vehicles and trying to
deflect them, or, failing that, diving out of the humvees.

“Marine! You will jump on that grenade!” McGinnis yelled at Chagoya,
impersonating a Marine drill instructor. Then McGinnis laughed and said,
“F--- that! I’d be like, ‘See ya!’”
Gruesome reality

The jokes couldn’t keep reality at bay.

On Oct. 17, about two months into the deployment, Charlie Company lost
its first man when a sniper shot Staff Sgt. Garth Sizemore in the
stomach on the way from Forward Operating Base Loyalty to Apache.

“I started to wise up after that,” Ladue said. “Before, it was just
driving around in a hot-ass truck.”

Some of the guys channeled their emotions into unlikely jobs. For Sgt.
Erik Osterman, that meant cleaning out the humvees and Bradleys that
came back to Apache after Americans had died in them.

Osterman, a former bartender and concealed-carry weapons permit
instructor with an intense gaze, said he made the decision instinctively.

He would do it so his troops would not have to.

Osterman asked the first sergeant to get him every time a truck needed
to be cleaned out, and then he’d send the guys off on errands while he
hosed out the blood. The cook supplied him with scrubbies and bleach.

He would do it in an attempt to erase any reminder of death when his
troops went back outside the wire in the same vehicles.

“They’re not going to roll like that,” Osterman said. “That would be all
they see.”

Charlie Company spent a lot of time trying not to think about what had
happened, but they still had to pump themselves up for the fight.

They watched “300” and “Gladiator” — Sgt. Willsun Mock went so far as to
have “Strength” and “Honor” tattooed from the inside of his elbows to
his wrists.

“Instead of a handshake, he’d grab your wrist like the Romans and say,
‘Strength. Honor,’” Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson said. “And he meant it. He
liked the Roman warriors, and I liked the Spartans. We’d go back and
forth over who was the best.”

Ybay, 38 and the father figure of the company with 14 years in the Army,
called Johnson, Mock and Spc. Daniel Agami the “Three Musketeers,” but
Johnson said they were more like brothers. They spent all their waking
hours together — including several a day lifting weights.

“We were going to gain 15 pounds, cut up and shred down,” said Johnson,
his accent giving away his South Boston roots.

He and Mock were both fiercely Irish, with the Claddagh rings and Irish
knots to prove it.

Chagoya and Mock were also close.

“He loved to dance salsa, merengue,” Chagoya said. “I’d be dancing with
a girl and he’d stop me: ‘Hey Gunny — teach me another step.’ This
little white boy trying to dance salsa at the club. That was Mock.”

On Oct. 22, Mock became the second Charlie soldier killed when an IED
hit his humvee near Loyalty.

For a month, Johnson stopped working out, refusing to move except to go
on patrol or eat.

“I went into complete ‘I don’t care’ mode,” he said. “But then Agami
said, ‘Will’s laughing at us.’”
Hard-earned ticket home

Ladue earned his first Purple Heart in late October, when 1st Platoon
made a traffic stop on a car with three young men in it.

“We caught a lot of bad guys by pulling over vehicles with more than two
young guys in there,” he said. This time, all they found was a big bag
of worthless Iraqi money.

Then Ladue heard a bullet rushing toward him.

“It sounded fast and just whizzing,” he said. “I froze. It hit me. I
just felt a sharp burning pain.”

He didn’t fall after the bullet hit him in the shoulder: He turned
around and started shooting at a building.

“Then the little voice of reason said, ‘Hey dumb-ass. You just got
shot,’” he said.

He spent two days at the military hospital in Baghdad and then was sent
back to Adhamiya. He was there Nov. 5, when an Iraqi court found Saddam
Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death by
hanging. Gen. Petraeus praised the Iraqi people because Baghdad remained
quiet following the announcement.

Except for Adhamiya.

“We started hearing gunfire as soon as the verdict was announced,” Ybay
said. Then insurgents attacked Apache.

“We were hopping to fight,” Chagoya said. “We could tell who the enemy
was. They gave us a little fight — about three hours.”

Charlie troops put down the attack, then mounted up to engage insurgents
outside the wire.

At Abu Hanifa mosque, they ran into small-arms fire, grenades and
rocket-propelled grenade rounds, but 2nd Platoon took out several
insurgents and had no losses.

First Platoon followed and during a night search found a house with 40
men hiding inside. One of them had a shotgun, and as the man kicked the
gate open, Newland shot him in the head with a 25mm high-explosive round
from his Bradley.

“We refer to him as ‘split face,’ because that’s what happened,” Newland
said. “He started puking out of his neck. It was pretty nasty.”

The day ended with 38 dead insurgents and 10 wounded, with no U.S.
casualties. But the danger that U.S. troops faced hardly subsided.

On a night patrol a few days before Thanksgiving, Ladue and his crew
drove past Abu Hanifa and the new graveyard that had been dug in a
children’s soccer field. Near it ran a trench.

“We always talked about how they would put an IED there,” Ladue said.

They did.

As he thought about the probability, the IED went off. “I tasted engine
oil,” Ladue said. “I couldn’t see nothing. My gunner, [Pfc. Eduardo]
Gutierrez, started shooting at the mosque.”

Then he heard the driver, Spc. Matthew Yearwood, screaming, “My legs! My
legs!” The steering column had collapsed on him. “Get us the f--- out of
here,” Ladue yelled over the radio.

The other humvees pushed them back to Apache. Yearwood was not seriously
injured, but Ladue had a massive concussion — and his second Purple Heart.

“Everybody walked away from that,” Ladue said. “It scared us. The next
time we went out, we were terrified.”

That next time was Thanksgiving night. Ladue asked Staff Sgt.
Christopher Cunningham to take the lead truck. “I took [the middle
position] because my driver, especially, and I were pretty spooked.”

During the first three hours of patrol, they drove past the cemetery
where they had been blown up a couple of days before.

“We went right over it,” Ladue said. “I was going out of my mind I was
so scared.”

During break, his buddy Staff Sgt. Juan Campos gave him a hard time, but
Ladue wasn’t in a state to be teased.

“It kind of hurt when he said, ‘Quit being a pussy,’” Ladue said. “Me
and Juan didn’t talk to each other the rest of the break.”

They drove into the market area — usually fairly safe, so Ladue felt
relieved. Then the explosion hit. “Not again! Not again!” Yearwood screamed.

Ladue stuck his M4 out the blown-open door of his humvee. He let off one
round, and then the pain hit.

“Oh, I’m f-----d up! Oh, I’m f-----d up!”

The IED had blown a hole through his foot, leaving it a bloody mass of
smashed bone and pulp.

Campos was the first to reach the Humvee. “I didn’t mean it, man,”
Campos said. “I’m sorry.”

That was the last time Ladue would see his friend.

“I just remember arriving at the Green Zone, under a thin-ass blanket,
freezing,” Ladue said. “After that, things got a little fuzzy.” He would
get his third Purple Heart, and that was his ticket out of the war zone.

That was also Yearwood’s last patrol. His brother had been killed by an
IED in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom II, and the company moved him
to headquarters platoon.
‘The grenade is in the truck!’

On Dec. 4, 1st Platoon rolled out of Apache looking for a place to put a
generator to provide electricity for 100 homes. As the six-truck convoy
rode through the narrow alleyways of Adhamiyah, McGinnis, in the turret
of the last Humvee, manned his .50-cal as usual.

Sgt. 1st Class Cedric Thomas served as truck commander, Sgt. Lyle
Buehler drove, and Newland and medic Pfc. Sean Lawson rode in the back.

“Grenade!” McGinnis yelled after someone dropped one from a rooftop.
“The grenade is in the truck!”

McGinnis could have leapt from his turret. Instead, he tried to catch
the grenade, just as he had done with Chagoya and others when the
platoon practiced with tennis balls. As it ricocheted around the turret,
he fumbled and the grenade dropped into the Humvee.

“When he yelled ‘grenade,’ I wasn’t even alarmed because we’d seen so
many,” Newland said. “Then I saw it. It was next to me.”

McGinnis quickly dropped into the humvee and smothered the grenade with
his body. “I heard him say, ‘It’s right here,’” Newland said.

McGinnis absorbed the brunt of the explosion.

Through the smoke and confusion, Newland didn’t yet understand what had
happened.

Buehler saw a man on the roof of a building and started shooting as
Newland reached for McGinnis. “I remember seeing his eyes moving
around,” Newland said. “I grabbed his hand and started praying.”

Then he realized he also was injured. Newland looked down through the
cloud of black smoke.

“It was like a horror movie watching blood come out of my side,” he said.

His jaw hurt — a 4-inch piece of shrapnel had cracked it and he couldn’t
think of anything but the pain. Then the pain flowed everywhere.

“When I took my glove off, I thought my hand was coming with it,” he
said. Shrapnel had dug into the nerves of his forearm, causing him to
lose the use of three fingers.

Then he saw his leg was bleeding. He tried to hold a pressure bandage on
the inside of his thigh, but blood gushed out between his fingers.

“It was squirting me in the face,” he said. “I realized I needed a
tourniquet. I got about three turns in, but it was just so painful.”

The blast had blown open all four combat-locked doors, and Thomas and
Buehler had shrapnel wounds.

“I heard voices outside the humvee and thought, ‘I’m going to get
grabbed out of here and get my head cut off on the Internet,’” Newland
said. “There was dark, dark blood coming out of my thigh. I told
[Thomas], ‘I’m going to die right now if we don’t get back to the aid
station.’”

He felt dizzy and knew he was dying.

“I bled out,” he said. When he woke up, he was on a table in the aide
station back at Apache.

“Don’t mess with me,” he said to the medics. “Did it hit the artery?”

Baka pushed him back down on the table as a medic injected him with
morphine. Then Newland saw McGinnis on a table nearby. The grenade had
exploded at his lower back and sent shrapnel up into his sides.

“What’s up with Ross?” Newland said. “Why isn’t anybody working on him?”

Baka answered.

“He’s gone.”

=======================================================================

Part 2
‘I’ve seen enough. I’ve done enough.’
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/12/bloodbrothers2/

Every time they learned to evade the insurgents’ methods of attack, the
insurgents changed their methods. For the first five months, the Iraqis
hit Charlie Company with snipers and firefights.

“I can’t even tell you how many bullet rounds I heard popping off my
gunner’s turret,” Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson said. But after the unit lost
Staff Sgt. Garth Sizemore to a sniper’s bullet Oct. 17, 2006, as he
patrolled on foot, the soldiers learned to stand behind vehicles, not to
stand in hallways or doorways, to watch the rooftops.

For several months after they arrived in Baghdad in August 2006, Charlie
Company stayed at Combat Outpost Apache in the insurgent stronghold of
Adhamiya only while they conducted day patrols. When they rotated to the
night shift, they stayed at Forward Operating Base Loyalty and drove the
45 minutes into Adhamiya. At Loyalty, they could go to the gym, the
store and the air-conditioned dining facility with its five flavors of
Baskin Robbins ice cream and all-you-can-eat buffets. Apache, with only
one building for the American soldiers, offered little but the safety of
a shorter drive.

But when Sgt. Willsun Mock died five days later after his Humvee
triggered a roadside bomb during the trip to Adhamiya, the company
commander moved his men to COP Apache permanently.

Then the insurgents started with grenades. Spc. Ross McGinnis was killed
Dec. 4 when a grenade was tossed into the turret of his vehicle; he
threw himself on it to save four friends.

“So we covered the turrets,” Johnson said. They put up guards that
deflected the grenades but still allowed the gunner to operate.

Then the insurgents began planting bigger improvised explosive devices —
and more of them. One platoon ran over four IEDs within 24 hours. On
Jan. 22, Pfc. Ryan Hill died when an IED exploded near his humvee.

So the soldiers began relying more on their heavily armored Bradley
Fighting Vehicles.

“That was our fortress,” said Johnson, an even-keeled noncommissioned
officer the younger soldiers trusted for advice. “We were fearless in
that Bradley.”

If the guys were in a Bradley when an IED erupted, they walked away. So
rather than patrol only in humvees, they went outside the wire with
Bradleys at the front and tail, humvees in the middle.
Death and corruption

Now it was January, and as the chill wind of Adhamiya’s desert nights
slipped through the unheated building where they slept, the soldiers of
Charlie Company knew they still faced at least six more months in Iraq.
Over that span they would watch two commanders leave, see nine more
soldiers die, give up faith in their best defenses against the
insurgents, refuse a combat mission and have three more misery-filled
months slapped onto their deployment.

When the soldiers of 1-26 finally got to go home in October, the war had
hit them harder than any other battalion since Vietnam.

In January, though, they knew only that they had to summon the courage
to go out again. And again. The deaths, as well as broken bones, burned
bodies and smashed limbs, scared them, and the young soldiers found that
while the number of attacks against civilian Iraqis declined, the number
of attacks against them increased.

The soldiers of Charlie 1-26 were convinced the Iraqi Army troops they
worked with, Shiite forces already despised by the majority of Sunni
residents of the area, were untrustworthy and knew more about the
attacks than they let on.

“The corruption in the Shiite military was horrendous,” said Capt. Mike
Baka, commander of Charlie Company.

But within Charlie 1-26, the men learned to count on each other like
family and to grieve for each other like brothers.
‘Adhamiya Blues’

Of the 140 men, 95 hadn’t yet achieved the rank of sergeant, and most
were younger than 25. Even after 14 hours of patrolling, laughter rang
through their crude quarters at the Apache building — especially in the
dining room.

First Sgt. Kenneth Hendrix made sure Girl Scout cookies graced every
table, and spent his own paycheck on video games and movies for the
troops, with the teasing reminder that first sergeants make much more
than privates.

Chaplain (Capt.) Ed Choi organized tournaments — spades and dominoes —
and conducted religious services there every Tuesday. Sgt. William
Redding, the cook, made Black Forest cakes to remind them of their home
post in Schweinfurt, Germany, where they were part of the 1st Infantry
Division — the Big Red One. Without contractors to serve up lobster and
steaks as they did in the dining facilities at FOB Loyalty, Redding
offered a continuous supply of Pop-Tarts and peanut-butter-and-jelly
sandwiches to the guys going out on patrol three and four times a day.
Another soldier clipped hair once a week in the hallway, creating a
community barber-shop atmosphere.

Spc. Gerry DeNardi, 20, served as the company cruise director. Artistic
and moody, he worried before his deployment that he might be the guy
whose courage left him in the midst of battle. Because of his own fears,
he wanted to make everyone else forget Adhamiya, too. So every evening,
he’d break out his guitar and sing the silly songs he made up about his
teammates. At 2 a.m., in the dusty dank basement where the soldiers
slept at Apache, DeNardi led them in karaoke.

“There’s nothing better than listening to a bunch of soldiers singing
Britney Spears at the top of their girly lungs,” he said. Really, it was
more of a warble, but it carried through the building.

DeNardi joined the Army for the same reason so many other young men
enlist. “My plans consisted of lying in a hammock,” he said. “I needed
time to figure out what I wanted. And I don’t think you can say you’re
an American or you’re a patriot without serving.”

But the bodies and violence shook him. He and Sgt. Ryan Wood talked
about the politics behind this war — and complained that Americans knew
more about Britney Spears than Iraq. Wood, wiry in a way more Billy Idol
than Rambo, had already decided he wanted out of the Army.

“I’ve seen enough. I’ve done enough,” he said.

During a 2004 deployment with Charlie Company in Samarra, Wood watched
as his platoon sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Jorge Diaz, shot and killed a
zip-tied Iraqi civilian. Wood turned Diaz in; the platoon sergeant was
sentenced to eight years in jail and a dishonorable discharge, ending
his 17-year Army career.

DeNardi and Wood both complained that the surge — five additional combat
brigades sent into Baghdad — hadn’t reached Adhamiya, where Charlie 1-26
patrolled one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. And they
didn’t understand why they couldn’t attack the Abu Hanifa Mosque, even
when they could see insurgents shooting at them from the holy site.
Politics, they said, held them back. Politics meant they had to ask
permission from the Iraqi government. Politics dictated that they
provide comfort to known insurgents.

“They won’t let us do our jobs,” DeNardi said. “You have to finish the
war part before you can start the peace part.”

Together, DeNardi and Wood wrote “Adhamiya Blues,” and they had to sing
it together because DeNardi knew the music and Wood knew the lyrics:

Adhamiya Blues

War, it degrades the heart and poisons the mind

And we’re tossed aside by governments’ lies.

But we continue to grieve.

Politics would soon become an issue within Charlie Company, too.
Unwelcome change of command

Baka knew since before he left Germany that he would give up command of
Charlie Company while in Iraq. Army leadership wanted to give as many
commanders as possible experience leading in combat by rotating them
through companies, and after 24 months as company commander, Baka’s time
was up.

Yanking respected commanders out midtour can set back a combat unit, and
so it was with Charlie 1-26.

“When you leave and they trust you, they feel slighted,” Baka said of
his men. “If you have a company like mine, you don’t take out the team
captain and expect the rest of the team to operate.”

Baka spent the majority of his time out on patrol with his guys, often
participating in firefights. Most days, he didn’t take a break — just
hopped in a vehicle with the next group going out.

But when Capt. Cecil Strickland arrived to replace him seven months into
the deployment, the mission changed. So did the leadership style. Baka
had treated his men like friends, but Strickland, a former enlisted
soldier who had always dreamed of commanding a rifle company, kept a
certain distance between his officers and soldiers.

The men missed their old commander.

“We didn’t want him to leave,” Johnson said. “[Strickland’s] a totally
different leader. He leads through planning. Baka leads through execution.”

“Mike’s very charismatic,” Strickland said. “There’s always going to be
that bond with Charlie Company. I’m a fool if I think I’m going to walk
in and say, ‘Cut ties. You’re mine now.’”

But as the surge took hold last spring, Strickland said he was required
to plan more night raids in search of high-value targets and coordinate
joint raids with special operations units. That meant he spent most of
his time in the operations room, planning missions. He went out on four
or five patrols a week, compared to Baka’s daily patrols.

Strickland had tried to get to know the guys before he arrived, but it
was hard because he had spent little time in Adhamiya, having served
with the battalion at another FOB. It became even harder to bond when,
four days after the March 9 change-of-command ceremony, he lost his
first soldier.
‘Something was going to happen’

On March 13, Sgt. Ely Chagoya went out on patrol with Pfc. Alberto
Garcia Jr. Garcia was the good soldier, always carrying a Bible and
always the one to get a job done without being asked, said his boss,
Sgt. Jake Richardson. But he had a playful side, too. A week after
Garcia touched a guitar for the first time, Richardson heard somebody
playing Johnny Cash. Garcia had already bought himself a guitar and
learned to play it.

But March 13, some of the Charlie 1-26 soldiers had a bad feeling.
Including Chagoya.

“We would get hunches: ‘I don’t feel like going on this street,’”
Chagoya said. “‘I know this mission I’m not going to come back.’ When
it’s more than one of the guys saying it, we knew something was going to
happen.”

And it did. The explosion killed Garcia, 23, and left Richardson and
Chagoya heartbroken.

Like Garcia, Chagoya played guitar, but soon stopped. “I quit playing
over there because I feel when I play,” he said. “I decided to block
everything and not feel so much. But when you stop yourself from
feeling, it goes all the way around: You don’t feel good. You don’t feel
bad.”

Chagoya said he tried to combat his angst by getting to know his friends
better. “When you go outside the wire, you don’t know if you’ll see them
again.”

The IEDs only grew more frequent — and bigger. At first, they’d just
blow out the tire of a humvee. Now the guys waited for the big one — the
one that would count as a catastrophic loss. A catastrophic loss is the
military term for a vehicle destroyed with loss of its crew. On May 14,
they moved closer to that gruesome mark when yet another Humvee hit an IED.

The IED hit the fuel tank, causing it to erupt in flames. Staff Sgt.
Juan Campos and his men leaped from the vehicle, but they were ablaze.
Other soldiers dodged small-arms fire to try to put the flames out as
the men screamed. Pfc. Nicholas Hartge died that day. Campos died two
weeks later at the burn center at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas.
Three other soldiers suffered burns over 70 percent of their bodies.

After that, Charlie Company patrolled in Bradleys. But now, anger
motivated them as much as the mission. Anger made them fearless — and
sometimes reckless. It made them not themselves.

Three weeks after the humvee explosion, 2nd Platoon went looking for a
high-value target: the triggerman who set off the IED that killed Hartge
and Campos.

DeNardi and Staff Sgt. Vincent Clinard saw the guy outside a building.
DeNardi grabbed an Iraqi Army 9mm Glock, and he and Clinard raced after
Hartge’s accused killer. “We jumped a fence, but Clinard got caught up
on a wall,” DeNardi said. “I ran inside and ran right into the guy
coming down the stairs. I forced my gun into his eye socket, and that
was when he started crying.

“I wanted to kill him so bad,” DeNardi said. “Instead, I pretty much
crushed his eye socket. I got promoted to specialist like five minutes
later.”

Charlie Company kept going out — three and four patrols per soldier per
day. The feel of each patrol could be entirely different: searching for
IEDs and blasting them with the bomb squad in the morning, then checking
in with the neighbors in the afternoon to see if they had everything
they needed, or if, by chance, they knew anything about the IED that had
been found down the street. Charlie Company handed out chem lights and
soccer balls, and they secured areas so schools could be built.

But they couldn’t get past the feeling that something worse loomed.
‘Nobody was coming back’

On the morning of June 21, Chagoya’s Bradley came in the gate at Apache
as Spc. Daniel Agami’s went out. The two gunners grinned at each other
and lifted their chins in greeting.

“We passed them and said, ‘What’s up?’” Chagoya said. “That’s the last
time we said, ‘What’s up.’”

Within an hour, everyone heard the deep thud of an explosion. Faces
immediately went grim, and then the call came in. Wood’s Bradley had hit
an IED. It had flipped over. It was on fire. Six men were trapped inside.

DeNardi had the day off, but this was 2nd Platoon — his platoon. He
raced to the gate, screaming at the guards to let him out.

“Open the door!” he yelled. “I can run it!” When the guards refused to
let him out, he fired off a couple of rounds toward the Abu Hanifa
Mosque. That’s where the explosion had come from. Then he ran back to
the main building. He saw a guy sitting outside, not geared up, and
said, “Where the f---k’s the [quick reaction force]?’”

The soldier answered, “I don’t know. Go find it.”

DeNardi said he clocked him in the head with his Kevlar helmet and then
ran to find Johnson, who immediately loaded up four humvees with Charlie
Company’s scout platoon and pulled out of the compound.

Spc. Tyler Holladay and the other medics prepared the aide station,
while everyone left at Apache set up stretchers and tried to create
enough shade for a large number of casualties. Apache baked in
111-degree heat that day, and medics distributed water as everyone waited.

For an hour.

Then 30 more minutes.

“You pretty much knew nobody was coming back,” Holladay said. “But we
thought they were still trapped, still fighting.”

Several soldiers, including DeNardi, sat with the guards at the gate
listening to the radio.

“This is taking way too long,” a soldier in the aide station said. “They
should have been here by now.”

They busied themselves with a wounded Iraqi girl. The blast had killed
three children and an Iraqi woman in homes nearby.

“I don’t even care,” Spc. Armando Cardenas said. “I know that’s wrong,
but they knew it was there. There’s no way they didn’t know it was there.”

The bomb was within 300 yards of an Iraqi Army checkpoint, and it was
big enough to flip a 30-ton Bradley upside-down and leave a hole the
size of a humvee. Somebody had spent some time digging, and somebody had
seen it.

Outside the gate, small-arms fire sounded continuously as U.S.
helicopters flew overhead waiting to evacuate the wounded. They shot off
flares as the insurgents tried to shoot them down.

Then, another explosion.

Choi’s truck had been hit by yet another IED. The blast broke both of
his truck commander’s legs. Choi had been responding to Charlie’s call
for help with the 554th Military Police Company, 95th Military Police
Battalion.

More gunfire. Still no word on Wood’s men. Charlie Company lined up
against the wall with arms around each other, smoking cigarettes, trying
to believe. But DeNardi had been listening to the radio. He stalked past
and hurled a magazine into a wall. “They’re all gone,” he said, and kept
walking.

Another explosion.

An RPG hit the driver’s side of one of the MP vehicles, decapitating
Spc. Karen Clifton, a 22-year-old soldier from Fort Myers, Fla., who had
hoped someday to be a state trooper. Four more MPs came into Apache to
be treated for smoke inhalation.

As wave after wave of despair hit Apache, Baka got the news back at the
S-3 shop at nearby Camp Taji.

“I looked at my NCO,” he said. “I knew it was Charlie.”

When he heard Wood’s name, he whipped his soft cap against the wall. The
ballistic eye protection inside shattered. “I was able to get some
soldiers out of this fight because of [Expiration Time of Service]
dates,” he said. “Wood was one I couldn’t.” Wood had been stop-lossed,
ordered to serve beyond the date he otherwise was supposed to be
discharged from the Army.

As he waited for more news, Baka learned a dear friend, Maj. Sid
Brookshire, had been killed the day before by an IED in Baghdad.

“It was the worst day in our history,” Baka said.

Johnson and his QRF arrived at Wood’s Bradley in time to see medic Pfc.
Timothy Ray trying to get past flames and gunfire to get to the vehicle.
But the flames were too hot and too high. Johnson’s best friend, Agami,
struggled to get out from underneath the 30-ton Bradley, which was
resting on his legs.

“The turret came off the Bradley,” Johnson said. “[The guys] had to
watch Agami try to get out of that hatch for 10 minutes. I’m never going
to forget seeing him like that.”

The 25-year-old soldier from Coconut Creek, Fla., burned alive as he
tried to escape.

At Apache, Strickland ordered all of Charlie Company to go inside the
main building. Sgt. Erik Osterman remained outside to clean the blood
out of the vehicles. The medics handed out body bags.

“We have to identify the bodies,” Holladay said grimly as he prepared
the paperwork for the task. Then later, “I will never forget the smell
of burnt flesh, their facial expressions. These are my friends.”

In the aide station, the medics worked on Choi, who let out anguished
howls. “Jeez, Chaps,” a medic said. “Your worst injury is the IV.”

But the attempt at humor couldn’t soften the real pain. Choi had a deep
contusion to one leg from the IED, but, worse, he faced the task of
explaining to Charlie Company why his God had let five of their friends
die. Choi didn’t understand himself.
Far from done in Iraq

Choi gathered Charlie Company in the dining hall, crying and hugging
each one of them. The soldiers entered the room flinging down body armor
with their jaws set in anger and grief.

“Nobody wanted to hear what he had to say,” Johnson said. “Something
like this happens, the last thing you want to do is talk about God. You
want to hurt. You want to feel that pain. God? I hated him right then.”

But then they remembered each other. In their misery, they reached out.
They streamed out of the dining room to huddle in tight groups.

“I love you, man.”

“We’re going to be OK.”

“They’re watching out for us now.”

That day, 2nd Platoon lost Agami, Wood, Pfc. Anthony Hebert, Spc. Thomas
Leemhuis and Sgt. Alphonso Montenegro, as well as an Iraqi interpreter
who can’t be named because the families of Iraqis who work with
Americans are often killed.

As the guys mourned, Choi and Lt. Col. Eric Schacht, 1-26’s battalion
commander, loaded a helicopter to head back to Taji. as the helicopter
lifted off, more bad news waited for Schacht. Back home in Schweinfurt,
on the same day he lost five Charlie 1-26 soldiers, his 15-year-old son
Justin had arrived home from a youth group trip to Italy. The mop-haired
rosy-faced kid grabbed a quick snack — then choked to death. Choi
accompanied Schacht back to Alexandria, Va., to perform memorial services.

With the battalion commander gone, Charlie’s status was in limbo, but
the patrols continued. Second Platoon took a couple of days off at Camp
Taji. Standing in the music section of the PX, DeNardi bounced in a
tense display of anger when he spoke, fists tight.

“Why can’t we just flatten them?” he said. “Why won’t they let us do our
job? We need to do like Samarra and tell everyone they have 24 hours to
leave, and then kill everything that moves after that.”

Soon, the 1-26 commanders realized they had to get Charlie out of
Adhamiya — to a less volatile area of Iraq — to keep them from getting
in trouble and from hurting anyone in anger.

At Taji, the guys went to mental health and tried to regroup. But no one
could sleep. When they did, the nightmares seemed as bad as June 21 itself.

========================================================================

Part 3

Blood Brothers, Part 3 of 4
‘Not us. We’re not going.’
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/12/bloodbrothers3/

Spc. Gerry DeNardi stood at the on-base Burger King, just a few miles
from downtown Baghdad, hoping for a quick taste of home.

Camp Taji encompasses miles of scrapped Iraqi tanks, a busy U.S.
airstrip and thousands of soldiers living in row upon row of identical
trailers. Several fast-food stands, a PX and a dining facility the size
of a football field compose Taji’s social hub. The base had been struck
by an occasional mortar round, and a rocket had hit the airfield two
weeks before and killed an American helicopter pilot. But the quiet base
brought on a sense of being far from roadside bombs, far from
rocket-propelled grenades and far from the daily gunfire that rained
down on the soldiers of Charlie 1-26 as they patrolled Adhamiya, a
violent Sunni neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad.

Just two weeks earlier, the 20-year-old DeNardi had lost five good
friends, killed together as they rode in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that
rolled over a powerful roadside bomb.

As DeNardi walked up the three wood steps to the outdoor stand to pick
up his burger, the siren wailed.

Wah! Wah! Wah! “Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!”

The alarms went off all the time — often after the mortar round or
rocket had struck nothing but sand, miles from anything important. Many
soldiers and others at Taji had taken to ignoring the warnings. DeNardi
glanced around at the picnic tables to make sure everyone was still
eating. They were. The foreign nationals who worked the fast-food stands
hadn’t left; so he went back to get the burger he had paid for.

The mortar round hit before he could pick up his order.

“I turned around and all of Burger King and me went flying,” DeNardi said.

He’d lived through daily explosions in 11 months with Charlie Company,
1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, at nearby Combat Outpost Apache,
a no-frills fortress smack in the middle of Adhamiya’s hostile streets.
He had rushed through flames to try to save friends and carried others
to the aide station only to watch them die.

“I’m not getting killed at Burger King,” he thought, and he dived for a
concrete bunker. People were screaming. DeNardi saw a worker from
Cinnabon hobbling around, so he climbed out of the bunker, pulled
shrapnel out of the man’s leg and bandaged him. The Pizza Hut manager
was crying and said two more foreign workers were injured behind her
stand — near the Burger King.

“Lightning doesn’t strike twice,” DeNardi said, “so I went back. But
there were body parts everywhere.” The first man’s leg had been blown
off, his other leg was barely attached and he had a chest wound. “He was
going to die,” DeNardi said.

The other wounded man had shrapnel to his neck. DeNardi peeled off his
own shirt and fashioned a bandage out of it as other soldiers started
streaming in to help.

Then, “all clear” sounded over the loudspeakers as medics arrived and
took over.

“I’m covered in blood, but I still have my hamburger receipt,” DeNardi
said. “I went back to Burger King the next day, but they wouldn’t give
me my burger.”

For all his dark humor, the “Hero of Burger King,” as fellow soldiers
teasingly called him, was deeply rattled by the carnage of the explosion
at the fast-food court. At Apache, he expected trouble. But not at
Burger King.

“That affected me,” he said. For the next few days, he said, he slept in
the open-ended concrete bunkers positioned between the housing units.

It was just another bad day to add to many — and DeNardi’s platoon had
already faced misery that seemed unbearable. When five soldiers with 2nd
Platoon were trapped June 21 after a deep-buried roadside bomb flipped
their Bradley upside-down, several men rushed to save the gunner, Spc.
Daniel Agami, pinned beneath the 30-ton vehicle. But they could only
watch — and listen to him scream — as he burned alive. The Bradley was
far too heavy to lift, and the flames were too high to even get close.
The four others died inside the vehicle. Second Platoon already had lost
four of its 45 men since deploying to Adhamiya 11 months before. June 21
shattered them.

Though their commanders moved them from the combat outpost to safer
quarters, members of 2nd Platoon would stage a revolt they viewed as a
life-or-death act of defiance. With all they had done and all they had
seen, they now were consumed with an anger that ate at the memory of the
good men they were when they arrived in Iraq.
Primed for revenge

After June 21, most of Charlie Company moved out of COP Apache, their
makeshift home on the grounds of one of Saddam Hussein’s son’s palaces.
At Taji, the company would try to recover for a new mission.

Sgt. 1st Class Tim Ybay, 38, served as 2nd Platoon’s platoon sergeant,
but also its father figure. The former drill sergeant teased constantly
and tried to treat his men like family. At memorial services for lost
soldiers, he cried the loudest. He’d been on patrol June 21 when the
five 2nd Platoon soldiers died in the Bradley. When he came back, his
grieving platoon circled him as the weight of the loss forced him to his
knees in the sand. He’d promised to bring all his boys home.

Now he would concentrate on the ones that remained.

“I knew after losing those five guys, my platoon had to get out of
there,” he said. “These were the guys they slept with, joked with,
worked out with. I don’t think they’d be able to accomplish the mission.”

the tears came again as he spoke, and he looked away.

“And I was having a hard time losing my guys.”

At Taji, the company had a week off. DeNardi looked more surfer than
soldier after a couple of days at the pool. Ybay and his sergeants sat
at the picnic tables drinking frozen coffee concoctions. The guys bought
Persian carpets and brass lamps to send home as souvenirs — as if Taji
were a vacation spot. But the anger over Adhamiya emerged even poolside,
and erupted at the mental health clinic, which they visited in groups.

“You never really get over the anger,” said Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson, a
member of Charlie’s scout platoon who had been especially close to
Agami. “It just kind of becomes everything you are. You become pissed
off at everything. We wanted to destroy everything in our paths, but
they wanted us to keep building sewer systems and handing out teddy bears.”

Some of the younger members of the platoon were particularly disillusioned.

Spc. Armando Cardenas, 21, had taken honors classes in high school but
feared college would bore him. He wanted something challenging and found
it in the Army, in Iraq. As a soldier, he was the guy who leaped out of
a truck to chase an insurgent, or instantly returned fire with an
uncanny ability to tell where the rounds came from. When a friend, Pfc.
Ryan Hill, was killed in battle, Cardenas helped carry him back.

But Cardenas’ anger was just as quick as his heroics.

He said the platoon had been waiting for June 21 — that they had known
they would eventually hit a big IED and have a catastrophic loss.

Cardenas wanted revenge. “But they don’t let us take care of the people
responsible,” he said. “It was a slap in the face.”

Adhamiya remained under the control of 1-26, but the brass moved Charlie
1-26 to another combat outpost, Old Mod — so called because it used to
house Iraq’s Ministry of Defense — in a calmer area on the outskirts of
Adhamiya. From there, they patrolled Kadhamiya.

“If my guys had stayed at Adhamiya, they would have taken the gloves
off,” said Capt. Cecil Strickland, Charlie’s company commander. “We were
afraid somebody was going to get in trouble.”

There had been close calls before. DeNardi had to fight back a strong
desire to kill an Iraqi — accused of triggering an IED that killed two
Charlie Company soldiers — as he held a 9mm Glock handgun to the man’s
eye socket.

And Cardenas and Staff Sgt. John Gregory had been ordered to the Green
Zone to talk to an investigator after they roughed up two insurgents. A
week after Pfc. Ross McGinnis fatally threw himself on a grenade to save
four friends, Cardenas and Gregory had chased a couple of guys on a
scooter and managed to stop them. Cardenas kicked over a wooden box the
two Iraqis stood next to.

“There was a grenade full of nails,” Cardenas said. “We had to go see a
major about detainee abuse. We told him [the Iraqis] didn’t want to get
in the Bradley.”

Nothing came of the investigation.

Such incidents belied the squared-away record Charlie 1-26 posted during
its deployment to Iraq. In 15 months, they had one incident when two
soldiers were caught with alcohol, Strickland said, but that was all.

“I think the performance comes from the level of discipline,” Strickland
said. “And the discipline comes from the hardship. They’re a little bit
more mature than a lot of other units.”

In Shiite Kadhamiya, Charlie Company found paved, clean streets. In
Sunni Adhamiya, so many garbage collectors had been killed that the
Shiite government workers refused to go there. “It was one road and one
river away from Adhamiya,” DeNardi said. “But there was civilization on
one side and chaos on the other.”
Suicide and a twist of fate

Lt. Col. John Reynolds replaced Lt. Col. Eric Schacht as battalion
commander July 8. Schacht left after his son died of a heart condition
in Germany, the same day Charlie Company lost five men in the Bradley.
Even with the high operations tempo and the loss of so many men,
Reynolds called the changeover “easy.”

“It was the best transition you could get,” he said.

But within days, he would lose five men, including a respected senior
non-commissioned officer. Master Sgt. Jeffrey McKinney, Alpha Company’s
first sergeant, was known as a family man and as a good leader because
he was intelligent and could explain things well. But Staff Sgt. Jeremy
Rausch of Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, a good friend of McKinney’s,
said McKinney told him he felt he was letting his men down in Adhamiya.

“First Sergeant McKinney was kind of a perfectionist and this was
bothering him very much,” Rausch said. On July 11, McKinney was ordered
to lead his men on a foot patrol to clear the roads of IEDs. Everyone at
Apache heard the call come in from Adhamiya, where Alpha Company had
picked up the same streets Charlie had left. Charlie’s 1st Platoon had
also remained behind, and Rausch said he would never forget the fear he
heard in McKinney’s driver’s voice:

“This is Apache seven delta,” McKinney’s driver said in a panicked voice
over the radio. “Apache seven just shot himself. He just shot himself.
Apache seven shot himself.”

Rausch said there was no misunderstanding what had happened.

According to Charlie Company soldiers, McKinney said, “I can’t take it
anymore,” and fired a round. Then he pointed his M4 under his chin and
killed himself in front of three of his men.

At Old Mod, Charlie Company was called back in for weapons training,
DeNardi said. They were told it was an accident. Then they were told it
was under investigation. And then they were told it was a suicide.
Reynolds confirmed that McKinney took his own life.

A week later, without their beloved first sergeant, Alpha Company would
experience its first catastrophic loss on a mission that, but for a
change in weather, was supposed to go to Charlie Company.

On July 17, Charlie’s 2nd Platoon was refitting at Taji when they got a
call to go back to Adhamiya. They were to patrol Route Southern Comfort,
which had been black — off-limits — for months. Charlie Company knew a
500-pound bomb lay on that route, and they’d been ordered not to travel
it. “Will there be route clearance?” 2nd Platoon asked. “Yes,” they were
told. “Then we’ll go.”

But the mission was canceled. The medevac crews couldn’t fly because of
a dust storm, and the Iraqi Army wasn’t ready for the mission. Second
Platoon went to bed.

They woke to the news that Alpha Company had gone on the mission instead
and one of their Bradleys rolled over the 500-pound IED. The Bradley
flipped. The explosion and flames killed everybody inside. Alpha Company
lost four soldiers: Spc. Zachary Clouser, Spc. Richard Gilmore, Spc.
Daniel Gomez and Sgt. 1st Class Luis Gutierrez-Rosales.

“There was no chance,” said Johnson, whose scouts remained at Apache and
served as the quick-reaction force that day. “It was eerily the same as
June 21. You roll up on that, and it looked the same.”

The guys from Charlie Company couldn’t help but think about the
similarities — and that it could have been them.

“Just the fact that there was another Bradley incident mentally screwed
up 2nd Platoon,” Strickland said. “It was almost like it had happened to
them.”

The battalion gave 2nd Platoon the day to recover. then they were
scheduled to go back out on patrol in Adhamiya on July 18.

But when Strickland returned from a mission, he learned 2nd Platoon had
failed to roll.

“A scheduled patrol is a direct order from me,” Strickland said.

“‘They’re not coming,’” Strickland said he was told. “So I called the
platoon sergeant and talked to him. ‘Remind your guys: These are some of
the things that could happen if they refuse to go out.’ I was irritated
they were thumbing their noses. I was determined to get them down there.”

But, he said, he didn’t know the whole platoon, except for Ybay, had
taken sleeping medications prescribed by mental health that day,
according to Ybay.

Strickland didn’t know mental health leaders had talked to 2nd Platoon
about “doing the right thing.”

He didn’t know 2nd Platoon had gathered for a meeting and determined
they could no longer function professionally in Adhamiya — that several
platoon members were afraid their anger could set loose a massacre.

“We said, ‘No.’ If you make us go there, we’re going to light up
everything,” DeNardi said. “There’s a thousand platoons. Not us. We’re
not going.”

They decided as a platoon that they were done, DeNardi and Cardenas
said, as did several other members of 2nd Platoon. At mental health,
guys had told the therapist, “I’m going to murder someone.” And the
therapist said, “There comes a time when you have to stand up,” 2nd
Platoon members remembered. For the sake of not going to jail, the
platoon decided they had to be “unplugged.”

Ybay had gone to battalion to speak up for his guys and ask for more
time. But when he came back, it was with orders to report to Old Mod.

Ybay said he tried to persuade his men to go out, but he could see they
were not ready.

“It was like a scab that wouldn’t heal up,” Ybay said. “I couldn’t force
them to go out. Listening to them in the mental health session, I could
hear they’re not ready.”

At 2 a.m, Ybay said, he’d found his men sitting outside smoking
cigarettes. They could not sleep. Some of them were taking as many as 10
sleeping pills and still could not rest. The images of their dead
friends haunted them. The need for revenge ravaged them.

But Ybay was still disappointed in his men. “I had a mission,” he said.
“The company had a mission. We still had to execute. But I understood
their side, too.”

Somehow, the full course of events didn’t make it to Strickland. All he
knew, the commander said, was his men had refused an order, and he was
determined to get them to Apache.

“When you’re given an order, you’ve got to execute,” Strickland said.
“Being told, ‘They’re not coming,’ versus, ‘They’re taking meds and went
to mental health,’ are different things. It was just this weird
situation where almost nothing connected.”
A revolt in the ranks

“They called it an act of mutiny,” Cardenas said, still enraged that the
men he considered heroes were, in his mind, slandered. “The sergeant
major and the battalion commander said we were unprofessional. They said
they were disappointed in us and would never forget our actions for the
rest of their lives.”

But no judicial action ever came of it.

“Captain Strickland read us our rights,” DeNardi said. “We had 15
yes-or-no questions, and no matter how you answered them, it looked like
you disobeyed an order. No one asked what happened. And there’s no
record — no article 15. Nothing to show it happened.”

After the members of 2nd Platoon had spent a year fighting for each
other and watching their buddies die, battalion leaders began breaking
up the platoon. Seven noncommissioned officers were told they were being
relieved for cause and moved out of the unit. Three noncommissioned
officers stayed at Old Mod. Two, including Sgt. Derrick Jorcke, would
remain in Iraq for one month after 2nd Platoon went home in October
because they had been moved to different battalions in different areas
of Iraq.

“In a way, they were put someplace where they wouldn’t have to go out
again,” Johnson said. “But as an NCO, they took these guys’ leaders away
and put them with people they didn’t know and trust. You knew 2nd
Platoon would die for you without a second’s hesitation. That’s what
made them so great. These guys need each other.”

Then, they were all flagged: No promotions. No awards. No favorable actions.

“We had PFCs miss [promotion to] specialist for two months,” DeNardi
said. “Bronze Stars and [Army Commendation Medals] were put on hold.
You’re talking about heroes like Cardenas. These are guys who save lives
and they can’t get awards.”

“I didn’t want to punish them,” Strickland said. “I understood what was
going on. But they had to understand you couldn’t do something like that
and have nothing happen.”

And things could not continue as they had. Strickland could not operate
for three more months with a platoon that refused to go out.

“Within the company, we made some adjustments,” Strickland said. “They
needed a fresh start. After looking into it, I didn’t feel the need to
punish anybody.” However, he left the flags in place.

“If anything was going to be punishment, that was it,” he said. For at
least one soldier, that meant going through a promotion board again.
Jorcke lost his promotion table status, but Strickland signed a memo
re-establishing it. “I’ve tried to fix those issues. Almost everybody
else has been promoted except one guy.” Jorcke made his E-6 on Nov. 1.

Even after the “mutiny,” Strickland said, he had a great deal of
admiration for his soldiers.

“I understood why they did what they did,” he said. “Some of the NCOs, I
was disappointed in them because they failed to lead their soldiers
through difficult times. They let their soldiers influence their
decisions. But on a personal level, I applauded their decision because
they stood behind their soldiers. I was disappointed, but I thought they
had great courage. It was truly a Jekyll/Hyde moment for me.”

And though they were horrified at being torn away from each other, the
soldiers themselves were conflicted about the outcome.

“For us being disbanded, now we definitely had unfinished business,”
Jorcke said. “If we’d cleared Adhamiya, we could have said, ‘I left Iraq
and my buddies didn’t die in vain.

“But in a way, the disbanding was good,” he said. “We — what was left of
the platoon — got to come back home alive.”

Their tour had been extended from 12 months to 15 months. They had been
scheduled to go home June 20.

They still had four months to go.

========================================================================

Part 4

Blood Brothers, Part 4 of 4 "Picking Up the Pieces"
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/12/bloodbrothers4/

For 12 months, Spc. Tyler Holladay, 22, patrolled the violent streets of
Adhamiya, Iraq. He raced to strap tourniquets on wounded buddies to save
their arms and legs. He picked out pieces of shrapnel and performed
battlefield tracheotomies to open airways.

As a medic, he’d seen more than enough to know he wanted to avoid
bullets, grenades and roadside bombs — especially roadside bombs. Back
in March, when a military police company had hit a daisy-chain of
roadside bombs, Holladay helped fill body bags with the liquefied
remains of fellow soldiers.

“That was the day I thought, ‘You’re not only going to die here, you’re
going to be disfigured,’” he said. “‘It’s going to hurt. It’s going to
be quick. And it’s going to be messy.’”

Now it was the last day of July 2007, almost exactly a year since he
took up residence at Combat Outpost Apache in Adhamiya, one of Baghdad’s
worst neighborhoods, and Holladay was out on patrol with Alpha Company.
The platoon was searching an abandoned car. Normally, they would have
first surrounded it with Bradleys to keep themselves safe from snipers,
but not this time. They were in a hurry and had only one Bradley on the
patrol.

“I’m on one knee between the car and a wall,” Holladay said. “I take two
steps back, and I’m joking about a girl, and all of a sudden, I heard a
loud bang. I looked down and realized I’d been shot.”

The bullet entered through his back and exited through his stomach. He
understood instantly that he had a stomach wound — on a soldier’s
most-feared list, it stands just behind a sucking chest wound. He also
knew he would have to treat it himself.

“My gunner was looking at me with a dry Curlex bandage,” Holladay said.
“I needed a wet dressing. I had him treat my back while I concentrated
on the front.”

He could tell his large and small intestines had been hit.

“I realized my stomach was filling up, so I had some internal bleeding,”
he said. “I knew what the chances for survival were. I was really scared.”

As he started to fade out, he asked his gunner to relay a message to the
other medics: “I love them and I’ll miss them.”

“Probably the greatest feeling in my life was to wake up,” Holladay
said. Doctors at a military hospital in Baghdad had stitched his
intestines back together. He couldn’t eat for several days, but would
require no further surgery.

Holladay was the last member of 1-26 wounded in Adhamiya. In 15 months,
31 men from 1-26 were killed and 122 wounded, making it the hardest-hit
battalion since the Vietnam War. Charlie Company suffered the most, with
14 men killed — most of them in Adhamiya, one attached to another
company. Holladay had served as one of Charlie’s medics, but he remained
at Apache when the company moved to the base established at the old
Ministry of Defense.

“I could never get away from Sector 19,” he said, referring to
Adhamiya’s roughest area. “And sure as hell, I got shot in Sector 19.”
Hard memories, bad dreams

None of the men of Charlie 1-26 will ever get away from Adhamiya
completely. The memories of what they saw, did and endured will stay
with them forever, as with any combat veteran. Memories of the deaths of
their friends, as well as of the insurgents they had to kill, are
engraved in their psyches, waiting to be triggered by a car horn in a
traffic jam, a popping balloon, a familiar face in an old photograph or
dreams that can’t be shaken.

Some will try to forget with drugs or alcohol. Some will let anger or
guilt infect relationships with their spouses and families. Some will
battle depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Many will
experience short-term memory loss or uncontrollable emotions, possibly
as a result of undiagnosed traumatic brain injuries.

A few may take their own lives. In 2006, suicide rates for soldiers
leapt to a 26-year high with 99 deaths, one-fourth of them by troops
diagnosed with PTSD, according to the Defense Department. Statistically,
male veterans commit suicide at twice the rate of their nonveteran peers.

Defense Department research shows one-third of Iraq war veterans have
sought help for mental health issues, and officials estimate 150,000
troops have suffered concussions — mild traumatic brain injuries — since
the war in Iraq began.
‘We did make a difference’

As Holladay recuperated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in
Washington, D.C., he worried about getting released in time to see his
friends return to Schweinfurt, Germany, 1-26’s home as part of the 1st
Infantry Division.

With his medical training, he understood what could lie ahead for his
friends. In Iraq, he’d seen loud guys suddenly become quiet as they
tried to deal with the stress. He knew his friends had memorized the
series of questions and answers medics ask to check for TBI. He worried
they would come home and drink too much and drive too fast. He worried
that, away from the constant close contact they’d had with other
soldiers at Apache, his friends would fall apart.

“I needed to see everybody’s face and see that they were really OK,” he
said. “They’ll cope with it for the rest of their lives.”

Each Charlie Company soldier who patrolled the streets of Adhamiya
experienced the blast of a roadside bomb at least twice — some as many
as a dozen times, according to the soldiers. The blasts left them
bleeding from the ears, suffering violent headaches or unable to
concentrate. Each had experienced the death of a friend. And most had
returned fire on the enemy. As they redeployed, they would go through
several briefings: a screening for traumatic brain injury. A
questionnaire for post-traumatic stress disorder. A session with a
mental health therapist about warning signs. They would rush through,
wanting only more time with their families or more time with their
friends in the barracks. At least two would be diagnosed with TBI.

At the battalion level, officers called the unit’s presence in Adhamiya
a success story, and cited the 27 high-value targets they caught, the 47
weapons caches they found, the 850 or so combat awards they earned and
the hundreds of tips they received from Iraqis — though the tips often
came after the fact.

“[The soldiers] may not see it, but I think if you do look at the big
picture, they’ll see we did make a difference,” said Capt. Cecil
Strickland, Charlie Company commander.

Adhamiya did not change drastically until after Charlie lost five men to
an improvised explosive device on June 21, and someone higher up the
chain sent a 1,000-man battalion to cover an area Charlie Company had
been patrolling with 110.

“Everybody started paying attention: ‘Oh my God. There’s only three
platoons in Adhamiya,’” Strickland said.

But he’s proud of those three platoons.

“We were catching bad guys left and right — almost nightly,” he said.
“Each of my platoons had a different personality. If I wanted to find
somebody, it was 3rd Platoon. If I wanted to find something, it was 2nd
Platoon. If I wanted to lay the smack down, it was 1st Platoon.”
Getting it out of their systems

They came home to Germany from Iraq in October, each flight delivering
another wave of soldiers to the gymnasium at Conn Barracks, where a
smoke machine and screams from friends and family filled the air around
them. Then, and only then, came the freedom to go where they wanted for
the first time in 15 months. No body armor, no bombs, no port-a-johns.

No one knew quite what awaited him, but each scattered to find out.

Within 24 hours, several soldiers lined up at the military police
station in Schweinfurt. Some scouts had gotten into a fistfight with a
civilian who questioned their role in Iraq. Within days, other soldiers
refused to show up at formation — mostly because they were hung over.
Strickland smiled a little at his men’s sudden change from trusted
battle-proven veterans to 20-year-old troublemakers.

“Personally, I think there should be a cooling-off area,” he said.
“Isolate them in a controlled environment: ‘Here’s your beer. Try to get
it out of your systems.’”

But sitting in his new office — he took over as Charlie’s commander
midtour — Strickland worked to get the experience out of his system,
too. “When I do think about it, I mentally go off somewhere,” he said.
“You’re trying to give a general overview of what happened, but it’s a
microscopic detail running through your mind.”

And there’s always something to remind him. “Two nights ago, I got a
call asking for [Spc. Gabriel] Garcia to escort [Sgt. Alphonso]
Montenegro’s remains,” he said. “They finally put the pieces together.”
Montenegro was among the five killed by the IED on June 21.

Just before Halloween, Capt. Mike Baka’s daughter tore off the last link
of a paper chain that had helped her count the days until her daddy came
home. Elizabeth, 3, had wanted to know if he’d come home faster if she
yanked apart all the links. She had slept on the floor of her mother’s
bedroom since he left 15 months before, and she’d prayed every night for
the 14 men who had died in his company.

“What happened to some of daddy’s friends while they were gone?” asked
Cathy Baka.

“They were killed,” Elizabeth answered. But then Cathy Baka shook her
head in sudden awe of the life ahead for her family.

“How do you explain death to a 3-year-old?” she said.

The Bakas met when both were cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point. Cathy Baka later resigned her commission to raise a family. In
eight years of marriage, the couple has spent just four together.

“It’s hard,” she said. “Feeling alone. Nighttime. Being an ocean away.”
From across that ocean, she watched for signs of problems. “I always
ask him point-blank,” she said. “I know he’s suffered from PTSD.”

Baka served as company commander for the first nine months of Charlie’s
deployment before moving to the battalion S-1 shop. When he came home,
Cathy and Elizabeth, with 10-month-old Hannah, met him at the gym, all
grins and tears.

When it got hard in Iraq — when he’d lost a soldier — he would call his
wife.

“She’s the one person I could talk with or cry with on the phone, other
than the moms,” he said. “It wasn’t until after I talked with the family
that I had the emotional release. I’d ask them what they know. A lot of
times, it’s nothing. It’s bare bones. I’d say, ‘Do you want to know
more?’ I haven’t talked to a family yet that didn’t want to know.”

He plans to honor, in his own way, the soldiers of the company he
commanded who gave their lives in Iraq; he plans to visit each of the 14
graves.
Emptiness at home and at heart

Sgt. Erik Osterman picked up his 2005 Jeep from the shop — it needed a
fresh battery — and then puttered down the Autobahn at 55 mph to break
it in. Puffs of smoke trailed behind him. Home wasn’t quite that yet.
Home. His wife, Sgt. 1st Class Tonya Osterman, was still in Iraq, and
the house was empty.

They met on a previous deployment in Samarra, where they’d seen each
other often. They married March 25, 2005. But this trip lacked the
closeness they’d found in Samarra. He deployed in August 2006, and she
deployed a month later. Even though they were both in Iraq, they rarely
saw each other.

“It’s impossible,” he said. “You can send e-mails. But not everywhere in
Iraq has nonsecure Internet and not everybody has cell phones. For the
first six months, she was in Ramadi, and I couldn’t get through to her.”
For five months, they didn’t speak on the phone, he said.

No one was at their off-post home to take care of bills or make sure the
pipes hadn’t burst. No one was home to send care packages. When Tonya
Osterman found out she was pregnant after R&R in the spring, the Army
sent her home. But when she lost the baby, they sent her back to Baghdad
in July.

“After she miscarried, the sergeant major put me on a bird to see her,”
Osterman said. But then the communications problems started again. The
Iraqi cell phones inevitably cut out after 30 minutes. They were both
stressed out, and the phone calls often ended in tears. Both were
diagnosed with PTSD after Samarra.

As he waited for her to come home around Thanksgiving, he did the same
thing he did in Iraq to calm himself: He tried to take care of everybody
else. He helped with a soldier’s promotion. He listened to his guys talk
about what they’d seen in Iraq.

“When I see another guy from the company, I appreciate everything a
little more,” he said. “Just know that each soldier fought for
something. They fought for what they believe in.”

They fought for each other.

In the barracks, German workers moved heavy boxes to the windows with
hydraulic lifts. The guys had moved out before leaving for Iraq, so they
returned to empty barracks. Spc. Gerry DeNardi pulled out clothes he
hadn’t seen in more than a year — including his favorite moccasins. He
unloaded the futon couch, mounted speakers on the walls and set up his
new projection TV. As he worked, guys poked their heads in the door
about every three minutes to see what he was doing that night.

“Camaraderie at Apache was just the coolest,” he said. “Everybody was
everybody else’s best friend. I don’t ever want to leave them.”

But he thinks about the friends who left him. One evening, he had a
buddy tattoo “strength” and “honor” down the insides of his forearms —
just as Sgt. Willsun Mock had done before he died Oct. 22, 2006, from a
roadside bomb.

And he remembers June 21, the day five friends died when a deep-buried
IED destroyed a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

“I try not to think about that day, but everything I do brings it up,”
DeNardi said. Because he organized the singing and playing, he couldn’t
do either without remembering a friend. But his anger had mellowed into
sadness.

He doesn’t believe Adhamiya was worth their loss. The Iraqis need to
fight for themselves, he said, and he didn’t see that.

He plans to get out of the military to become a history teacher.

“When I look back, nothing can stop me,” DeNardi said. “I’m lucky I made
it through Adhamiya — Iraq. I’m not going to waste the rest of my life
sitting around in a hammock.”

At his apartment, Sgt. Ely Chagoya pulled out his guitar. After months
of not playing, emotion seeped from the guitar to his fingers and up
through his voice. He sang a mournful piece he wrote in Spanish about a
homeless man who returned to the same park bench each day; that was
where his lover said to meet her, and he waited his whole life. But
feeling the emotions behind his song scared him. “The moment you start
feeling is the moment you’ll start remembering,” he said.

He worried about his family. The last he had heard, his brother and
sister were being deported. His parents, originally from Mexico, had
their green cards, and Chagoya had been born in the States, but his
siblings had not. “I feel like I’m fighting for our freedom, but there’s
none for me,” he said. “I got the news at Apache. I just wanted to turn
in my weapon and quit.”

But he wouldn’t quit his friends. “My main mission was to bring my
soldiers back,” he said. “That’s why I went out.”

Spc. Armando Cardenas hit the dance floor at a local club, solemn-faced
as he moved to the merengue, sharply dressed, eyes flashing behind his
scholarly wire glasses. He and Chagoya took over the floor, switched out
partners, and danced as if the sound of salsa hadn’t brought tears a
week before as they thought about their buddy Mock. Mock had loved to
dance. Chagoya danced, smooth and elegant, the star of the show, as
Cardenas sat on a low couch to watch. His eyes grew even darker as he
remembered.

“There’s always somebody missing,” he said. “Mock and Montenegro. Nobody
really says it, but it’s on everybody’s mind. They’re not here.”
No more war stories

Sgt. Jake Richardson walked into the gym hoping his wife would be there.
She had promised to buy the tickets to Germany from Arizona. They’d
married at the end of 2005 so he could bring her to Germany before he
deployed.

“She was really nice,” he said. “Real patient with a sweet attitude. She
was a little bit shy at first.” They dated for eight months. “She wanted
to be here with me.” But the day she arrived in Germany, he found out he
was deploying. They had a long talk about how hard it would be.

Soon, they found out she was pregnant, and he went home on leave for the
birth of their daughter, Sedona, in April.

But when he returned to Iraq, things changed. He called home and the
phone had been shut off. His bank account had been emptied out. She
moved back to Arizona, leaving him to pay for two apartments. When he
contacted his chain of command and legal services, they left him on his
own, saying he could not return home to fix the situation. And, like
most soldiers, he had given his wife a power of attorney.

She wasn’t at the gym.

“I thought she was trying to surprise me,” he said. “I just don’t want
to accept this.” When he asked what was going on, he said she told him
she didn’t want to talk about it.

When he arrived at his apartment, it was empty. Totally empty. All his
photographs, all his clothing, all the wedding gifts and dishes — the
whole little world they’d built together was gone.

“I have two pairs of pants,” Richardson said. At night, instead of
celebrating his return home, he stares at the photos he had with him in
Iraq of his wife and his little girl, and he tries to figure out what
he’s going to do next.

Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson, 29, jumps up as his wife Jeana comes in the
front door of his apartment with the stroller. When he left from R&R
just after she was born, his daughter Mia weighed six pounds. Now she
crawls to him. He plays with their son, Sean, 2, on the floor and beams
at his wife, who understands where he’s been. They met on his last
deployment in Samarra, when she was a medic and he was a self-described
schmuck.

She worked at the aide station, one of several female soldiers who would
go out on patrol with the infantry guys, and he didn’t think she could
hold her own.

“They told me I had to go get the medic. When I saw it was her, I was
pissed,” Johnson said, grinning. “The whole time I refused to talk to
her.” He spent the whole patrol “sulking because I had to work with a
female.” They were engaged four months later. Now, she watches carefully
for signs of PTSD, and he continues to try to watch out for 2nd Platoon.

“The biggest thing is really staying close with each other,” he said.
“No one can handle it by themselves.”

Every time he sees someone who was at Apache — at the gym, walking past
the PX — he calls him “brother” and gives him a hug. He knows they had
his back, and he said Spc. Ross McGinnis proved it when he gave up his
life by throwing himself on a grenade to save four friends.

“We all say, ‘I don’t know what I would have done,’” he said. “But every
single one was willing to die for somebody else.”

That makes it all the harder to come back and feel like the war will
never be won.

“I don’t think it’s ever going to end,” he said. “For every one we kill,
three more are going to pop up. We can defeat each network, but they’ll
just go somewhere else. We used to make fun of the soldiers in Baghdad
when we were in Fallujah and Samarra. Then it was Ramadi. Now it’s
Baghdad. It’s almost like we’re chasing our tails.” For a time, he said,
soldiers will make an area better, but the Iraqi people “don’t keep it
better.”

Sgt. 1st Class Tim Ybay moved into his new office as first sergeant of
Charlie Company. Three of the company’s platoon sergeants had moved into
first sergeant positions within the battalion. Ybay had taken on other
responsibilities as well: helping with his children’s homework. While he
was in Iraq, Timothy, 12, Aryana, 8, and Tyler, 5, sent e-mails and
drawings, while his wife, Maybelline, made sure he could talk to them on
the phone.

“I never threw those pictures away,” Ybay said. “That tears me up. My
son — he really surprised me. He’s getting tall.”

But his surrogate family was still on his mind, as were the nine men who
died in his platoon.

“First Sergeant [Kenneth] Hendrix said, ‘Let’s do a prayer for the
soldiers we lost,’ the day we flew out of Taji,” Ybay said, speaking of
the Army camp outside Baghdad. “That hurt me a lot. I’m coming home and
my battle buddies weren’t. I say a prayer for them every night.”

The deployment taught him a lesson with actions that he said Staff Sgt.
Garth Sizemore had tried to teach him with words. Sizemore was fatally
shot Oct. 16, 2006.

“He would always say, ‘Enough of the war stories,’” Ybay said. “I didn’t
understand that until this deployment. You talk about the good times.”

He learned other lessons: Deployments should not last longer than a
year, and soldiers should have more time off. And he was upset when the
platoon was split apart after they refused to go out on a mission.

“I understand where the commander’s coming from,” he said. “But it did
hurt. I would like to come back in formation with all my guys — they did
outstanding. I’m proud of them.”

When they’d regained some sense of self, Charlie Company crowded into
the local clubs. They gathered in groups, toasting each other and their
14 friends. They ordered beers and passed around shots and acted as if
they had been away from each other for years rather than hours. They
talked about old times like grizzled old men at the VFW.

They drank their beer, arms wrapped around each other. They told endless
stories. They’d heard them all before but they couldn’t help but listen:
chasing down that moped with a Bradley. The rocket battle with an
insurgent. Karaoke in the basement at Apache. They comforted each other
as they cried thinking about the 14 men who should have been there with
them.

Remember how Pfc. Daniel Agami gave up his clothes when Johnson’s
laundry got lost?

How Pfc. Alberto Garcia learned to play Johnny Cash songs within a week
of picking up a guitar?

Remember when Pfc. Anthony Hebert wore that purple wig all day on patrol?

And how McGinnis could always make us laugh?

Always.
--
Civis Romanus Sum

[marika]

On Jan 11, 7:35 pm, Jim Higgins <gordian...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Part 1: To Adhamiya and backhttp://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/11/army_bloodbrothers_071126/

>
> As they started loading into the Bradley fighting vehicle to roll out of
> Combat Outpost Apache, the soldiers laughed as if they weren't afraid.

I have to send this to my mom, she will find this really interesting

> As if each, at least twice, hadn't felt the shocking heat and been
> deafened by the roar of roadside bombs.

But I don't understand some of this

>As if they hadn't already lost
> eight friends to improvised explosive devices and snipers and grenades.
>
> These soldiers of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry
> Regiment, laughed because it gave them courage to step back into the
> Bradleys. If they didn't go, somebody else would have to.
>
> "Somewhere on that street there's an IED," Sgt. 1st Class Tim Ybay told
> 2nd Platoon on June 20, briefing them just before they patrolled the
> streets of Adhamiya, Iraq, as they had been doing for 10 months.
>
> "I'll find it!" shouted Bradley driver Spc. Ernesto Martin.
>

> Not that day. Not that soldier. But othersridingon that patrol would

Are these mansions limited to HDTV and cellular, or are we now pretty
much
converting everything to this standard,
And also, is there a way to light these things up for planes and still
make that
light completely unpleasant for birds

mk5000

"For Túrin put on again the Helm of Hador; and far and wide in
Beleriand the whisper went, under wood and over stream and through the
passes of the hills, saying that the Helm and Bow that had fallen in
Dimbar had arisen again beyond hope. (...) And Túrin named himself
anew, Gorthol, the Dread Helm, and his heart was high again. In
Menegroth, and in the deep halls of Nargothrond, and even in the
hidden realm of Gondolin, the fame of the deeds of the Two Captains
was heard; and in Angband also they were known. Then Morgoth laughed,
for now by the Dragon-helm was Húrin's son revealed to him again; and
ere long Amon Rûdh was ringed with spies." --Children of Hurin, J R R
Tolien