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Middle of Iraq 2003-04: A WAR MEMOIR
By Ben Staggs
I was a Combat Engineer in Iraq during
‘03-‘04. I left my devastated and dislocated home March 6th, 2003. I had
lost my only immediate family, my Mother and her companion Tom, in a car
accident two months and about twenty-eight days before. It was a black moment in
my life to say the least.
I was sent to Fort Carson, Colorado to train for
the big mission into Iraq. We thought we would face gas warfare, and it might be
a war like WWII. The invasion was on TV for us in our gymnasium. We slept in a field house
on cots with about 2,500 men on a basketball court. This was the Shock and Awe
Campaign. We entered Iraq on the coat-tails of that invasion wave, as the second
wave “in country”, as the jargon terms it. Training on Carson
was , looking back, naive and not presuming things to be as hot as a real small
scale guerilla war can get, which is what we found. We saw the teeth of the most
dangerous part of Iraq during our time in country.
I will say I was very glad to have grown up
around the Western Slope people because hunting and shooting were common stuff
to me. This came to be a great relief in the combat zone, even if the machine
gun I carried is supposed to fired while lying prone behind it. Besides being
almost always in the field, I was “riding shotgun” as a gunner escort.
Anything from a major riding in a hum-vee to a truck full of spare parts had an
escort. A lot of the time it was soldiers on their way in or out of country
during a two-week leave that some, not all by any means, got to have.
I had a unique position within our group. I was a
machine gunner, and thus usually escorted a vehicle on convoy missions. We ran
supplies, the US mail, a satellite phone, red cross messages, replacement
soldiers. Also we did the runs to and from an airfield in an effort to get as
many of our men and women on trips to the States for leave or at least to Bahrain
for R&R. These trips did start out short; our company's first mission was a
quarter to half hour away, and by hum-vee, mind you, they don’t go too fast.
But by the winter of ‘03, we were on the regular run of 110 miles one way to
the airfield south of Tikrit. In the Tigris River Valley on Iraq’s main
interstate highway Route 1, the road for this run was quickly dubbed RPG Alley
by the fun loving troops. It didn’t take us long to realize we were now “grunts”
or “just a grunt”, if you wanted to sugar coat it, to maybe make us feel
better about our new life.
RPG Alley was about a mile or two from Samara. Our
people worked in it and much outside of it. A huge bridge over the Tigris had
never been bombed out and this marked the start of the most dangerous stretch of
this highway. Any one who was on this road should remember the bridge.
As 2004 started, we on convoy occasionally got choppers
flying close air support. That was one small milestone for me, you know that
when you're more than glad too see the Apaches show up beside you are indeed
deep in the s**t. I happened to be manning a turret-mounted 50 caliber machine
gun the first day this happened. The pilot was so close I could almost see
the expression on his face! I must have looked funny too him. It was cold a lot
in winter there and our trucks usually cruised at 45 to 50 mph. So the wind
freezes you. I suffered a good deal from the cold and wore long underwear nearly
constantly those months. I also wore raingear for warmth, as well dryness.
Our guys built a swivel machine gun mount for the
bed of a Hummer or two we had. A brake drum, found in an Iraqi junk yard, was
welded too the bed in back and chair welded to that with an arm to hold a
swiveling mount. (We owed our welder in my motor pool a lot– the whole battalion
did. Most all our mounts and any armor plate we ever had was improvised from
when we got in-country.) I recall one cold, cold evening sitting in it as we
returned too base camp on a convoy mission. The sun was sinking in that red ball
of flame color it gets from so much dust in that part of the world. This
experience was one heck of an adventure if nothing else. That was a convoy with
some majors along, and I got little chuckle from it that evening.
Here follows a few vignettes of life in wartime:
We got to convoy through the ruins at Samara,
which is a historical site.
I was in my element in a manner of speaking, with
some exceptions. That description fits most people there I think.
One of my Sgt’s came up with a way to make
prefabricated concrete guard towers for Army soldiers, dubbed Maypoles in the
Stars and Stripes newspaper. They neglected to give the guy credit for his
invention.
A running joke with us was the nickname for our battalion:
the Triple J Ranch-JJJ. It’s an inside joke about someone's name.
Finally a word about mail from stateside. It was
always appreciated and whatever stuff was sent makes a big difference to the
soldiers in the field. Without it we are truly forsaken from the rest of the
world.
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