COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: Casualties
A Salute for His Wounded, a Last Touch for His Dead
RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr., New York Times
April 2, 2007
BAQUBA,
Iraq, March 31 — In the last moments of his life, Sgt. First
Class Benjamin L. Sebban saw the flatbed truck speed into the
concertina wire guarding his small Army patrol base near Baquba.
“Everybody get down! Get down!” he screamed. Soldiers dropped to the ground.
A combination of the strong wire and muddy gravel stopped the bomber,
who then detonated explosives packed into the truck bed. A 50-foot-wide
fireball enveloped the base, an L-shaped school that weeks earlier had
served as an insurgent hide-out. Soldiers were slammed into walls and
windows, they later recalled, battered by pieces of brick and glass
turned into shrapnel.
Unaware of a deep wound beneath his body armor, Sergeant Sebban, a
29-year-old medic, shook off the blast and staggered to his first-aid
station to treat casualties, other soldiers recalled.
“Let’s get ready!” he shouted, one soldier said. Then
he collapsed. He bled to death even before the evacuation helicopter
arrived to carry him away, 17 minutes after the 6 p.m. attack.
At almost precisely the same time another helicopter landed in Baquba.
It carried Col. David Sutherland, commander of the American combat
brigade in Diyala Province. He was returning from the large military
base in Balad, where he had visited wounded soldiers and gone to the
morgue, where he saluted and then prayed as he placed his hands on a
long black body bag containing the body of a military policeman killed
that day by a sniper in Baquba.
It had been a long day for Colonel Sutherland and his brigade chaplain,
Maj. Charlie Fenton, who have taken it on themselves to visit every
dead and badly wounded soldier in the 5,000-strong unit, the Third
Brigade Combat Team of the First Cavalry Division.
But it was still not over. After arriving in Baquba, Major Fenton
walked into the brigade headquarters and heard Colonel Sutherland on a
loudspeaker informing officers that a soldier from another brigade had
committed suicide in Muqdadiya. Then he was handed a list of nine new
casualties, the dead and the wounded. At the top was Sergeant Sebban.
Four hours later, he and Colonel Sutherland climbed into another
helicopter, bound once again for Balad. “We’ve never had to
see this many at once,” Major Fenton said as he walked in
darkness in helmet and body armor to the landing pad just after 11
p.m., trailed by soldiers grasping stacks of Purple Hearts in navy blue
leather cases.
The two officers have made the round trip to Balad more than 70 times
since arriving in October. But on that day, March 17, the brigade
suffered its highest daily toll, with two dead and 14 wounded.
Altogether, the unit has seen 39 soldiers die in five months, more in
that brief span than the number killed in any brigade that preceded it
in yearlong deployments here. Names of the dead are written on a piece
of metal affixed to a tall concrete barrier on Forward Operating Base
Warhorse, near Baquba. With the death of Sergeant Sebban, the barrier
ran out of space. A new barrier was just erected next to it.
A Vicious Battleground
Once described by the American military as comparatively stable,
Diyala, which is roughly the size of Maryland, has been transformed
into a fierce battleground as vicious in many places as the most
dangerous parts of Anbar Province, the volatile Sunni area in western
Iraq. It has been besieged by Sunni militants and extremists trying to
eradicate Shiites and establish a Taliban-like sanctuary, and by Shiite
militias, who have allies in the provincial government and security
forces that are Shiite-dominated even though Sunnis make up a majority
of the population.
More than a year ago the American military decided to cut back
drastically the number of troops in Diyala. But that plan is now in
reverse, as new troops move back into Baquba, the provincial capital,
trying to quell the bitter fighting as part of the plan to put more
troops in Iraq.
The casualties are taking a tremendous emotional toll on the brigade.
Major Fenton, 48, recently sought treatment for post-traumatic stress
disorder. He likes to say a unique psalm or Bible verse when he visits
each dead soldier, but he says he has almost run out of suitable
Scripture.
The troops ache and rage over the loss of friends. After Sergeant
Sebban was killed, “I was just mad,” said Sgt. Roy
Mitchell, who was wounded slightly in the attack. “I had in my
mind, the first person I saw, I was going to shoot them.”
For some, grief is compounded because they feel no one back home grasps
the perils they endure. “We’ve just got a lot of guys
dying,” said one combat soldier who did not want his name
published. “This country is not getting any better. Nobody really
understands what’s going on.”
At a cramped and dark outpost in southern Baquba, Pvt. Jason Myers said
that with friends shot by snipers or blown up by mortars and roadside
bombs there was little time to mourn, until the deployment was over.
“I’m going to go home, get really drunk, and cry a
lot,” he said.
Colonel Sutherland, 45, broke down after the 20th brigade soldier was
killed earlier this year. “I went into a deep sorrow,” he
said. “I was wallowing about in self-pity, worrying about the
dead, worrying about those who have no worries. I was overwhelmed. At
no point did I doubt our mission, but I couldn’t sleep that
night.”
After talking to his wife and his commanding general, he said, he
steeled himself with the realization that it was those whom the dead
leave behind who need to be cared for.
“It was an epiphany,” he said. “I needed this brigade
to go on, and these soldiers needed to go on, for the living. Our
reactions need to be for the people here, who need me and my soldiers
to make the right decisions.”
Laying his hands on the bodies of dead soldiers before they are flown
out of Iraq is a crucial part of saying goodbye, he said, a way to tell
friends and families he was with them. “I put my hands on every
one of them,” he said.
Of the hundreds of thousands of American troops who have deployed to
Iraq in four years of war, more than 3,200 have been killed. But those
numbers understate the mortal risk faced by those in dangerous regions
like Diyala. The primary combat unit in Baquba since November, the 1-12
Combined Arms Battalion, has seen 21 soldiers killed in five months,
out of close to 1,000. An additional 93 have been wounded. The
battalion’s deployment is less than half over.
“Crying doesn’t make me any less of a man,” said the
1-12 commander, Lt. Col. Morris Goins, who tears up as he recounts how
one of his soldiers drowned in a canal, trapped in his Bradley fighting
vehicle. “To not show emotion, you’re an idiot, or
you’re living a pipe dream. If someone were to tell me not to
show emotion, I’d hit them in the lip.”
Settling Into a Nightmare
Sergeant Sebban was in charge of the first-aid station for Charlie
Troop, of the Fifth Squadron of the 73rd Cavalry Regiment. Handpicked
from a large battalion of airborne troops, the squadron’s 300
highly conditioned soldiers spend most of their time in small patrol
bases or on long foot patrols. The unit is small, and its soldiers have
been together for years. The bonds are tight.
Last month, most of the squadron moved from its base in Kirkush near
the Iranian border to small bases around the eastern edge of Baquba.
Charlie Troop set up a base in As Sadah, a bleak, rural village four
miles northeast of Baquba, where the residents were being killed and
terrorized by Sunni extremists and Shiite militias, as well as by the
Iraqi Army soldiers who were supposed to be protecting them.
One Iraqi Army officer, a Shiite, had been ridding the area of Sunnis,
telling them, “If you don’t leave this area, we’ll
come back and kill you,” said the most senior enlisted man in
Charlie Troop, First Sgt. John Coomer. Troops said many Sunnis in the
area had turned to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia to protect them from Shiite
soldiers.
In turn, Sunni fighters had begun attacking Iraqi soldiers, fueling
more attacks on Sunnis. Iraqi soldiers stationed at a checkpoint on the
main road between As Sadah and Baquba tried to kill Sunni villagers as
they dashed to Baquba to get food or medical treatment, American troops
said.
In response, Capt. Jesse Stewart, commander of Charlie Troop, put his
own soldiers on the checkpoint for two hours each morning and two hours
each afternoon so villagers could come and go without fear of being
killed. The first morning 450 villagers fled, Captain Stewart said, but
only about 50 came back.
It was into this nightmarish situation that Sergeant Sebban and the
rest of his troops settled, establishing a base in a schoolhouse that
had previously been a staging area for Al Qaeda operations in northern
Baquba.
As the troops began to go out on wearying foot patrols, Sergeant Sebban
resumed one of his obsessions: caring for soldiers’ feet, a
crucial task for a unit that conducts such long missions. He was
especially concerned about trench foot, in which skin peels off wet
feet in cold temperatures, as well as stress fractures and rashes.
As daylight began to fade on the evening of March 17, about 60 members
of Charlie Troop waited for hot meals being trucked to As Sadah from
Forward Operating Base Warhorse, a respite from plastic bags of
prepared food. Some soldiers played cards or read books.
Specialist Jason Miera had just finished a set of pull-ups when he
heard Sergeant Sebban scream to get down. “I heard him clear as
day,” he said.
Immediately, he said, came the bright yellow explosion, followed by a
thick ball of dust. “You couldn’t see one foot in front of
your face.”
Five men from Charlie Troop, interviewed separately, all recalled that
Sergeant Sebban yelled the warning that allowed some soldiers to take
cover. Lt. Col. Andrew Poppas, the squadron commander, said Sergeant
Sebban faced an instantaneous decision: to dive for cover and save
himself or to shout a warning to others.
“He never sought cover for himself,” Colonel Poppas said.
The Wounded and the Weeping
Colonel Sutherland and Major Fenton’s two-and-a-half hour visit
to Balad had followed a familiar routine, starting at the hospital,
where they passed out Purple Hearts and consoled the wounded. Near the
entrance they encountered a weeping first sergeant, who was in charge
of the military policeman killed earlier in the day. “He was in
the fight; he was on his 240 Bravo,” the sergeant said, referring
to the dead soldier’s machine gun.
One wounded soldier, choking back tears, told the two officers he was
shot in the lower back just as he warned his troops to spread out, so
as not to present an easy target. “I looked back to tell my guys
to stagger, and I got hit right away.”
Next, Colonel Sutherland and Major Fenton boarded a bus to the morgue.
The routine was interrupted, though, when Major Fenton saw seven
soldiers in the hospital parking lot.
One of the men, with a bushy red flattop, was shaking and crying. They
were friends of the military policeman killed earlier in the day. Major
Fenton and the colonel walked to group, where they prayed and told the
troops it was all right to grieve.
In the military, “cultural norms, if you will, checkmate a lot of
guys from healthy grieving,” Major Fenton said. “One of the
jobs I have is to give them permission to do that.”
Major Fenton endured much grief even before deploying. While a chaplain
at Arlington National Cemetery, he grew close to his driver, Cpl.
William Long, who shuttled him from funeral to funeral. Corporal Long
volunteered for Iraq, and was killed in June 2005.
“I wish I had talked him into not volunteering,” Major
Fenton said. He said he also wished he had talked him into marrying his
fiancée.
Major Fenton later adopted another soldier from Arlington. Eventually,
he introduced his new son to Corporal Long’s former
fiancée. They are now engaged.
Before deploying, Major Fenton worried how he would do. “I was
self-medicating with alcohol, and became a crying drunk.” But
arriving in Iraq seemed to lift the demons. “Something about
having to do the job gave me strength.”
Then, a few weeks after getting here, he was shaken when he noticed
Corporal Long’s name on the tall concrete memorial barrier. He
had visited it before, never noticing the name.
Along with the brigade’s rising casualties, it led him to seek treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Sometimes you see four or five amputees, with no arms, no legs,
or none of either,” Major Fenton said. “When the bed sheet
lies flat and then angles up at the waist, it’s a horrific
thing.”
Lying in bed at night, Major Fenton grows anxious when he hears
footsteps crunch the gravel outside, fearing another death. One officer
who lives nearby, Maj. Charles Poche, says a greeting when passing, to
assure Major Fenton that grim news is not at his doorstep. “I
usually tell him to go to bed,” Major Poche said.
A Purple Heart on a Body Bag
After visiting with the seven soldiers in the parking lot, Major Fenton
and Colonel Sutherland boarded the bus for the morgue. Major Fenton
visited the body of the M.P. alone, then Colonel Sutherland and a few
other soldiers walked inside. Major Fenton said a psalm, the soldiers
give a long salute, and Colonel Sutherland rested his hands on the body
bag and prayed before placing a Purple Heart on top. “I talk to
the soldiers, and I let them know that their buddies are going to be
O.K.,” Colonel Sutherland said in an interview later.
In some months the military hospital in Balad sees more than 500
wounded soldiers from northern Iraq alone, said Staff Sgt. Tanisha
Denton. Sergeant Denton offered Colonel Sutherland and his soldiers a
familiar admonition: “Don’t take offense, but I don’t
want to see any of you back here for a while.” But five and a
half hours later they were back. Five soldiers wounded at As Sadah
arrived, as well as three from the Fifth Battalion, 20th Infantry
Regiment shot on patrol in Baquba.
Colonel Sutherland moved from patient to patient, seeing newly wounded
soldiers who now lie next to patients he visited just a few hours
earlier.
After pinning a Purple Heart to their pillow or shirt, he told them
that their buddies were praying for them and that they should call
their families. He said it was all right to be scared, and that they
should do what the doctors say. Drawing on his experience as an
open-heart surgery patient three years ago, he told one soldier just
out of surgery that it was natural to feel cold, a byproduct of the
anesthesia.
“They are now understanding that they are mortal, at 23 or 24
years old,” he said. “I tell them they are going to go
through drama in their heads. They have given enough to everybody else.
They should just worry about themselves and their families.”
There was another stop this night. The soldiers boarded a bus bound for
the morgue, where Sergeant Sebban lay in a body bag. They were joined
by several soldiers who were close to the sergeant. They performed the
same ritual they did earlier in the day, and boarded the bus again.
Driving back to the hospital, the ride was quiet.
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