Car Bombs, Babies, and Bad Guys

As a child, I can recall watching TV shows with easy to recognize good guys and bad guys.  G.I. Joe vs. Cobra Command and Power Rangers vs. Rita Repulsa and Lord Zedd.  Everyone involved, including the characters themselves, knew who the good guys and bad guys were and embraced their role in the story.  As I grew older and started to develop a better understanding of the world, I realized real conflict is never so simple as spandex clad heroes facing off against snarling villains.  The real world has much more nuance than what we are able to take in as kids.

When I was a 16-year-old high school senior, I watched the Twin Towers fall on morning television.  I made the decision that day to join the Marine Corps to fight in a conflict against terrorism.  I enlisted in the delayed entry program on my 17^th birthday and went to boot camp two months after I graduated high school in August of 2002.  During that time, we were told by our intelligence agencies there was a direct link between Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein, and that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction he intended to use on America.  I had no reason to believe our government would lie to us about the reason to enter a foreign war.  I had never heard of the military industrial complex.  I had no way of knowing large weapons manufacturers funded politicians who then pushed pointless wars as a way of enriching those weapons manufacturers who then funded those same politicians who pushed for more wars.  My level of understanding was that we were the Ninja Turtles, Saddam was Shredder, and the Iraqi military and later the Al Qaida operatives were his Foot Clan.

In March of 2006, I was deployed to Iraq a third time.  I was a 21-year-old corporal and a squad leader in charge of 13 other Marines.  My unit, 1^st Battalion 7^th Marines “Suicide Charley” was operating in the west end of the Al Anbar province along the Syrian border in a place called Al Qaim.  By this time, Saddam was long dead, and the Iraqi military worked for us.  The new threat we faced was Al Qaida and the consequences of our actions which had destabilized the entire region.  U.S. troops were being killed and injured mostly by pre-staged roadside bombs called improvised explosive devices, or IED’s.  The more dedicated Al Qaida fighters had started loading up cars full of explosives and driving them into American bases and personnel in what became known as VBIED’s, or suicide vehicle born IED’s.  What this meant for the average infantryman is that you were much more likely to be killed by a hidden explosive device, or a radical driving a car bomb into you than you were by being shot.  Naturally, this shifted the attention of the troops away from rooftop snipers to piles of trash on the ground, and every person driving on the road.

A standard operating procedure (SOP) was adopted by foot patrols and vehicle convoys for dealing with drivers on the streets.  Obviously, most Iraqi drivers were just regular people trying to carry on with their lives, but occasionally, one of these cars would pull alongside an American vehicle or troop formation and cause massive devastation.  Our SOP when dealing with vehicle traffic on a foot patrol was a force continuum involving multiple steps to turn normal drivers away and to try to protect us from VBIED’s.  The first step was a fluorescent-colored reflective flag we waved at the drivers to warn them to turn away.  If that did not stop an oncoming car, we would transition to a signaling device called a pen flare and shoot it at the vehicle.  If the driver kept coming, the next step was to fire warning shots to the front or the side of the vehicle.  The first five rounds in every Marine’s magazine were tracer rounds which have a pyrotechnic composition in the base of the bullet that burns bright enough to make the supersonic projectile visible to the human eye.  If the tracer round warning shots did not work, the next step was to fire into the engine block to disable the vehicle and if that did not work, we would shoot the driver.  There are a lot of steps here in this continuum and some situations unfold more rapidly than others, so each Marine is given the authority to skip to any step within it, including the final one, if they feel the situation calls for it.  The idea is if you have an obvious VBIED surprise you by coming around a corner and accelerating into your formation, you do not need to waste your time waving a pink flag or shooting a pen flare before you take the necessary action to save your own life.  One of the problems is it does not take long for tragedy to strike when you take a bunch of 19-year-olds who have had friends killed in VBIED attacks and then put them in situations where they must make split second life or death decisions.

Me (right) and my radio operator (left) and along the Euphrates River

So, one day in late May or early June of 2006, I was leading a foot patrol travelling westbound along Route Diamond on the north side of a town called Karabilah.  I had about seven or eight Marines and two Iraqi National Guard soldiers known as ING’s.  We were providing security for a Civil Intervention Team that was responsible for giving out aid to local businesses to try and rebuild the country we had destroyed.  This was a popular market area, and the CIT guys were there to talk to the local shopkeepers and do CIT stuff that did not matter to me.  My job was to try to keep everyone alive and get us back safely to our patrol base.  One of my fire team leaders named Larry had suggested to me that we post security on both sides of the road and allow normal traffic to travel through.  The problem with that, of course, was that we would have no way to prevent a VBIED from entering our formation and killing us all.  Since it was my mission to get everyone back safely, and because I was about three weeks away from returning home for good, I decided we were not going to allow any vehicle traffic through our formation.  I directed our point man and rear security to turn away any oncoming vehicles.

Larry-Suicide Charley 3rd Platoon, 2nd Squad, 1st Team Leader

About an hour into the operation, I was talking to one of my Marines named Bryan on the north side of the road near the rear of the formation.  We heard a commotion from the front of the patrol and looked up to see a vehicle coming eastbound on Diamond towards our position.  This was a particularly dangerous part of the route because the road had a bend we could not see around approximately 50 meters to the west of us.  This meant we could not see oncoming traffic and they could not see us.  I remember the point man frantically waiving the bright colored flag to try to get the driver to stop.  Then, he started to fumble with his pen flare and as he was about to point in, both of our ING soldiers opened up with their AK’s.  They were in the three and four position in our staggered column, so they were shooting past my point man and the Marine in the number two position.  Both Marines dove for cover to avoid the ING’s gunfire and the car accelerated faster into the patrol.  It drove between the ING’s and my Marines in the number five and six position both engaged.  The vehicle swerved to the south side of the road and slowed to a stop about 50 feet away from me.  As this was happening, the crowd of Iraqis in the market screamed and ran for cover.  Everything was in slow motion, and I remember physically slouching and accepting my fate.  A feeling of cosmic injustice and anger came over me.  I had made it through three combat deployments in a four-year enlistment, and now, three weeks before I was going home for good to start a real life, I was going to be blown to pieces while standing next to some fruit stand in a little town that no one had ever heard of.

A second passed, then two seconds, then three seconds, but I was still standing.  I looked down and saw Bryan kneeling in front of me pointed in with his rifle.  He flipped the selector switch on his M203 grenade launcher from safe to fire.  As he was just about to press the shot, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Wait.”  The engine was smoking now from the burning tracer rounds which had cut through the flammable liquids.  A moment later, the driver door came open and a middle-aged man stepped out of the car with blood streaming down from his neck.  He cried out in pain and horror from his gunshot wound as well as what the rest of us were all about to see.  Realizing this was not a VBIED attack, the locals started to come out from behind cover.  The fire was growing and spreading quickly as they opened the front and rear passenger doors and dragged out the lifeless bodies of two women.  I moved closer to the car and saw someone from the crowd take a little boy who was about 18 months old out of the back seat.  My heart sank as I saw the blood all over the child’s head and face, and as I looked at him, I was surprised he was not in distress.  The whole scene was chaos and pain, but this little boy was steadfast and calm.  I looked at him up close and noticed he was uninjured.  The blood covering his head and face had come from his mother who was holding him in her lap at the time the car came through our patrol.

By this time, maybe a minute or two into the event, the car was fully engulfed.  All four occupants had been removed and I looked at the two dead women who were now on the side of the road.  The mother of the little boy was covered with her burka which hid her wounds, but the front seat passenger was more exposed.  Her eyes were rolled back in her head and her body convulsed the way dying people with head wounds often do.  She had a bullet hole in her forehead and her right forearm had been completely blown apart with her hand still attached by just a thin piece of flesh.  When a 5.56 or .223 round hits a human body, the entry wound is minimal, but an exit wound looks more like what you would expect from a battle axe than a bullet strike.

One of our Mobile Assault Platoons, or MAP platoons, was in the area and pulled up when they heard the gunfire.  They assisted with security, crowd control, and loading the bodies into an Iraqi civilian truck to transport them to a hospital.  We returned to our patrol base and debriefed the incident.  The man who had exited the car was the driver and the husband of the two women, which is a common practice in this part of the world.  He suffered a minor graze wound to the neck and survived.  The baby was one of his children and he was unharmed.  Both women were dead.  The man was driving on MSR Diamond and not paying attention as he came around the bend.  He did not see the point man waving the flag and the first indication he had of our patrol was when the ING’s started shooting his car.  Instead of stopping or pulling over, he panicked and accelerated which caused everyone else to believe this was a VBIED, and by the time he realized he was in an American patrol, it was too late.

I think about that little blood covered boy sometimes.  What did his father tell him about that day?  What is it like to grow up knowing your mother was shot out from under you by foreign invaders?  If he survived the destabilization and the ISIS takeover, then he is about 20 years old today.  How is it possible for him to be anything but an American hating terrorist?  I certainly would be if I were him.

Like I said before, we tend to frame the world and human conflict in the lens of good guys versus bad guys.  It seems easy to look back at history and decide who the good guys and who the bad guys were.  Unlike the cartoons of my youth, there is a thing all the real-world good guys and bad guys have in common-everyone thinks they are the good guys.  That 20-year-old kid in western Iraq whose mother was killed by U.S. Marines probably thinks the Americans are the bad guys.  If he turns to terrorism to get revenge, he will believe he is the good guy.  Is he wrong?

What happens when you start off thinking you were a good guy fighting for freedom and realize you were just another goon in a pointless war that made the world worse?  I could reason my way out of what happened that day and say we were facing a real threat of VBIED’s, that we had no way to see around that bend, that the ING’s fired before we could use the pen flare, that the driver should have stopped, and that the Iraqi civilians all thought it was a suicide attack as well.  But at the end of the day, I made the call to stop traffic instead of allowing it to flow through and my orders lead to the death of those two women.

They say there are 22 veterans who commit suicide every day.  I know it is not quantifiable, but how much of that comes from the realization they were played, and innocent people died because of it?  The two Marines who fired their rifles in this incident have both struggled with depression.  I lost touch with one of them. The other got a law degree and became a prosecutor in El Paso before moving into the private sector.  He has a normal life but was definitely damaged by what happened to him.  Bryan, the one who almost shot the car with a grenade, died of a drug overdose in 2014.  He was the most talented Marine I ever knew, and he had all the skills needed to lead a successful life.  I don’t know if that would have been his fate regardless, but I don’t think gore covered babies and dead women helped. 

Bryan

I have not experienced depression or had suicidal thoughts.  I was lucky to have a wife and children to take care of which has kept me on track.  If I didn’t have a purpose and people who depended on me, it’s possible I would have slipped into the same pattern as many other veterans.  I also understand I’m not one of the good guys.  Life is more complicated than our Saturday morning cartoons would have us believe.

In the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said,

“the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil. "

We are all a strange mixture of light and dark, capable of both charity and mayhem.  The important thing is to recognize the dark “unuprooted” corners of evil in our hearts and to make a conscious decision to act with love and integrity.