Chapter 01 - The War Of Liberation

It was a hot September day in Central Iraq.  We’d been in the region for seven months, the first three in Kuwait waiting to see if the President would make this the largest training exercise in history or actually send us across the border.  By now we were absolutely sick of the war.

We were the 357^th Reconnaissance, Security & Demolition Detachment, or RSDD.  It was an experimental army unit that had been thought up two years ago in the Pentagon and formed up one year ago.  The idea was to make a medium-sized unit of select, well trained individuals from the most important trades.  In the past there were large battalions of soldiers who primarily did one thing – infantrymen, artillerymen, tankers, mechanics, ordnance specialists, even finance units.  On the other end of the spectrum, the army had been using very small units of elite Special Forces – 12 men who knew everything there was to know about infantry combat, demolitions, medicine, communications, and intelligence.  These units were very good at what they did, but it took years and years to train each one.  They were quite often so overworked in the most stressful environments imaginable that they many times imploded psychologically and exploded physically onto their families, co-workers, and neighbors.  Now soldiers from varying trades were going to be mixed together in one unit of no more than 100 people.

Thus our unit, the 357th RSDD, came into being. We trained hard for an entire year, suspecting deep down that this was all in preparation for the upcoming war.  The army opened the fiscal floodgates on us, too. We had the best equipment, clothing, and food out there.  When we rolled over the border on March 20^th, just behind a massive aerial bombardment and a series of devastating raids on key Iraqi outposts by the Rangers, Navy SEALs, and Marine Force Recon companies, we were ready for anything that could take place.

Our first skirmish took place near the town of As-Samawah.  The 3^rd Infantry Division was busy blowing up tank after enemy tank, while the Air Force’s A-10 Warthogs were belching death from the sky on the Iraqi army.  They avoided the city limits as best they could, knowing that the 101^st Air Assault Division was right behind them in their helicopters to mop up the enemy soldiers who tried to hide in the towns.

Our job was to search for ‘bypassed units’ and destroy them.  Tanks will often bypass units that can’t harm them – lightly armed machine gun nests, recon trucks, and foot soldiers.  It’s a waste of a perfectly good tank round to shoot a soldier with it, plus it’s against the Geneva Convention.  While such ‘lightly’ armed troops posed virtually no threat to the tanks, they were very dangerous for the logistics units that were following behind.  We, along with several armored infantry companies, were given the task of taking them out.  The infantry units were specifically ordered to allow the 357th first dibs on enemy stragglers so the generals could see how we would fare.  We didn’t disappoint.  As-Samawah had an estimated 300 fighters holed up in the town where the helicopter-borne 101^st were steadily tightening the noose.  We swept around the south of the city from the river and on towards the west in a clockwise fashion, blowing up machine gun nests and entrenched foot soldiers that were too slow to flee back to the town.  The word must have spread because everyone we found north of As-Samawah surrendered with white flags and raised hands.  We collected the prisoners of war, searched them for information, and captured their weapons and ammo.  The infantry units came up soon after us, loaded up the POWs onto their trucks, and drove them back to the prison camps the army was erecting to the south in the newly-liberated Iraqi desert.

This became a universal trend, and by the time we neared the Karbala gap for the final thrust to Baghdad, the U.S. had more captured prisoners than they wanted.  I began to think that rumors of how tasty army rations had become over the past ten years had been spread among the Iraqi army and that was part of the reason they gave up.  Those poor suckers looked glad to be rid of their dictator-in-chief, and many of them were the first to sign up to be a part of the new Iraqi army that began training after the end of the ground war.

Our commander, Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Roger MacMillan, a former member of the deadly 75th Ranger Regiment, where he was baptized by fire during the mini-conflict in Panama, was thoroughly enjoying this war.  He had spent a long time, after a getting seriously injured in Panama and being promoted to an officer, behind a desk in the Pentagon as an intelligence analyst and was glad for the chance to get back to his combat roots.  His wife and mother were perhaps not as glad for the change, so he didn’t tell them all the exciting details of our wartime missions.

“Remember not to tell any of your loved ones where you’re currently located or what our mission is,” he told us early on one time during a lull in battle.  “It would just compromise our operational security and scare the heck out of them for nothing.”

“Thanks, sir,” someone said.  “Those are the only things they ask us about.  What are we supposed to talk about, the weather and this wonderful grub we’re eating?”

“Yep.  And make it sound like you’re on a beach sipping margaritas and eating hamburgers off the grill.”

“We have a grill?!  Where are you hiding that, sir?” another soldier commented sarcastically.

“Yeah, Colonel, that was kind of mean, bringing up the beach while we’re stuck in this hellhole.”

“Sorry guys.  Just think of all the medals you’re in for after we wipe Saddam’s Republican Guard off the face of the earth,” he said, focusing our attention back to the mission.  “Let’s go.  Mount up”

Our unit consisted of 12 specialty teams, each with four to twelve members:

Infantry.................................................5 soldiers,

Artillery................................................8,

Military Police......................................5,

Special Forces.......................................4,

Engineers..............................................4,

Mechanics.............................................4,

Communications...................................4,

Intelligence Analysts.............................4,

Logisticians...........................................4,

Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD)..............4,

Medics...................................................4, and

Staff officers.........................................12.

There were four others – the commander, the Sergeant Major, and their drivers, so the grand total for our unit was 66 soldiers – not even the size of a normal infantry company.  We were all extremely good at what we did – we were handpicked from a large assortment of units, and our leadership had pretty high ranks.  Normally an army company is led by a Captain and a First Sergeant.  We had a Lieutenant Colonel and a Sergeant Major at the top and many more officers and senior sergeants within the unit than usual.  Each team got at least one armored truck, or Humvee; and the absolute best in weaponry, radios, and ammunition – all equipment being especially tailored to the needs of the teams.

I was on the artillery team.  We had the largest one, not counting the staff officers, who weren’t exactly a team, just bunched together for organizational sake.  We artillerymen, however, lived together, worked together, and looked down on most of the others.

Our crowning moment came one day while our unit was about to cross the Euphrates south of Baghdad.  In a matter of seconds, we deftly directed our howitzer at an entrenched company of Iraqi infantry sitting in front of the bridge. We nearly obliterated the whole line with a series of well-aimed high-explosive rounds, which our section chief, Staff Sergeant (SSG) Johnny Brequer, had timed to explode in mid-air and rain down on their heads.  The infantry team leader actually hugged SSG Brequer after it was all over.  They would have faced certain death if our artillery hadn’t softened up the Iraqi’s position so swiftly and thoroughly.  SSG Brequer was a weird guy and kind of clumsy.  We came up with a cool nickname for him one day while we were repairing our Humvees.

“Hey, how about we ask the Colonel for a larger howitzer so we can blow up a bigger radius of enemies,” he said. “That enemy position at the bridge would have been easier to take out with that new 155 mm gun they have.”

“Forget it, man!” said one of the guys responsible for loading the heavy ammunition into the gun.  “105 mm rounds are big enough.  Those one-five-five shells weigh almost a hundred pounds.  My knees couldn’t take it.”

“Yeah, Sergeant, you wanna become a knee breaker?” I asked.

“Sergeant Johnny Knee-breaker!” another said.

“Very funny,” he said.  “You think I’ve never heard that before?”  Just then he swung his arm around and knocked a wrench off the top of his truck.  It landed hard on a soldier’s leg while he was working underneath the vehicle.  He wasn’t hurt, so after we all had had a good laugh, poor SSG Brequer was henceforth permanently known as Sergeant Knee-breaker.

All jokes aside, nobody was better than SSG Brequer.  He could calculate multiple trajectories at various angles and with various propellant charges in order to shoot several rounds in rapid succession, ensuring all of them landed on the target at the same time.  This technique was called ‘Multiple Round, Simultaneous Impact’, or MRSI (pronounced ‘mercy’).  His record number of simultaneous impacts from one howitzer was four rounds, which all landed on a large enemy bunker complex, burying or killing everyone inside before they knew what hit them.  Having them all land at the same time was better than peppering them with four sequential shots, enabling them to flee in between volleys.  Usually artillery units used anywhere from six to eighteen howitzers simultaneously firing in order to ‘mass’ upon one target.  We only had one gun, so we had to make it count.

Captain (CPT) Tony Luciano was the artillery section leader.  He and I, Specialist (SPC) James Learner, were the forward observers, or FOs. We had to sneak dangerously close to enemy targets and call in the fire missions on our radios.  A clever enemy usually tried to guess where the observers were during an artillery attack, and if any of them survived they’d try to kill the FOs first.  CPT Luciano was very happy SSG Brequer could perform MRSI missions so well.  The quicker we killed the enemy, the less likely they were to come after us.

My job was to do all the paperwork necessary to keep track of the fire missions.  I had been to college, so they of course gave me the closest thing to a desk job they could find.  It was adventurous enough, though.  I’d sit there next to the boss like an old-fashioned bookkeeper while enormous artillery shells were exploding a few hundred meters away and rocking our vehicle with the shockwaves.  CPT Luciano was thankfully good at what he did.  He could figure out the enemy’s position quickly and accurately, he knew exactly what type of artillery rounds and fuses to use, and he usually knew how many shots it would take to get the job done.  We were like little kids burning ants with a microscope, shouting for joy when the artillery met its mark.  On rare occasions SSG Brequer would be slightly off.  We’d get a few rounds too close for comfort, or the enemy target would still be sitting there unscathed, seeming to laugh at our team’s aim.  The Captain would chew out SSG Brequer when that happened, but at the end of the day, all of us were friends again.  We knew how stressful and unforgiving our job could be, so as long as no real damage was done, all was well.

I had been brought up in a Christian home, but I prayed more during those artillery missions than I had ever done in the past.  I normally avoided talking about my beliefs with others unless asked.  They’d jokingly tell me it was my job to smite the enemy for his wickedness, but I usually didn’t mix religion with combat.  I saw enough of that in the Terrorists, the Jihadists, and the Fedayeen we were fighting that it made me sick.  I didn’t feel guilty about being in the military and being religious, but I strictly separated the two and limited myself to praying for my unit’s safety and health.  I did not pray for God to literally smite the enemy, nor did I try to preach to people on the battlefield.  When my fellow soldiers started getting killed, I struggled with that inside, but for the time being, early on in the war, I was content to focus on being an artillery observer.

There were a few females in our unit.  Women are barred from combat-heavy jobs in the army, such as infantry, artillery, or Special Forces, but there were a few working in the staff, logistics, engineer, and military police (MP) teams.  This was the closest thing to combat a female could get.  During wartime, MPs actually see quite a lot of action, so a lot of brave, highly motivated, or just gung-ho women join to become ‘cops.’  One in particular SPC Carly Smith was the turret gunner for the MP section.  I kind of liked her.  She was good to have on a turret gun, for she had incredible aim.  She could do more with her machine gun than ten soldiers armed with rifles.  There were quite a few occasions where her skills would mean the difference between a stunning victory or a bloodbath for us.  She was in a pretty dangerous position, however, having her upper body exposed to the enemy in that turret.  Of course if I had half my body hanging out the top of a Humvee, I’d learn to shoot well too.  “It’s kill or be killed up here,” she told me once.  Still, she wouldn’t let anyone else do her job, which was fine for the rest of her team since she was so good.

“I’d rather do what I do than what you do, Learner,” she told me.  ”I can’t understand how you and CPT Luciano can sneak up so close to the enemy without getting caught, and then call up crazy old Sergeant Knee-breaker to shoot enough shells at the enemy to blow up a village or vaporize the two of you, while you just sit there watching it all.”  Every time we called in a fire mission she would get sick to her stomach from worrying about us.

“To each his own,” I told her.  “I’d rather strike the enemy indirectly than ‘Kill or be killed’ from a gun turret on a daily basis.”

“Those rounds sometimes land awfully close to you two,” she said frowning.  “The mechanics are complaining about all the shrapnel they’re finding embedded in your truck.”

“That doesn’t happen much,” I said waving dismissively.  Still, hearing her tell it made it sound a lot worse.  I made a mental note to make sure our Humvee didn’t have any holes in the armored plating.

We became pretty good friends while we were there.  Much to the chagrin of many of the other guys, she and I would hang out constantly in our down time.  Rumors abounded that we were doing more than just hanging out, but none of it was true.

One time when we were talking about the gossip we were hearing, I said,  “We could never have a relationship for the same reasons farmers don’t allow their kids to name the pigs they’re going to slaughter for food.”

She got offended by that.  In retaliation, she put some firecrackers in my Humvee, rigged them with a remote detonator the Special Forces team made for her, and then during one of our practice fire missions, set them off, scaring the living daylights out of me.  CPT Luciano had apparently been forewarned, because he didn’t jump at all.  He refused to look at me while I was freaking out.  I’m convinced he was trying to hide the fact that he couldn’t keep a straight face and was on the verge of crying from laughter.  After I found out who pulled this joke on me, I fumed for a few days and refused to speak to her.  Eventually, after the CPT had a serious word with me, I went to apologize for my callous comments a week prior and to forgive her for her dramatic stunt.

After that we were even better friends.  We still refused to feed the rumor mill, but she and I had an agreement that if we survived this war we’d see each other back home.  Once our unit hit the seven month mark, I began to regret this decision.  It just made me hate being here all the more, longing to get back home with her and fulfill some of the stories being told about us.  She seemed a bit depressed as well, which cheered me up slightly, knowing that she felt the same way I did.

The Special Forces team I mentioned earlier was the most mysterious team in our unit, and one of the only ones I looked up to.  They reported only to the staff officers or the commander, telling no one else what they were doing.  Sometimes the infantry would ask for permission to go scout out an enemy position or raid a supply camp, and the officers would tell them to stay put.  In those situations, we suspected our own SF team, or ‘Science Fiction’ as we called them, were enigmatically introducing hundreds of enemy soldiers to their maker.  We rarely found out anything.  Near the beginning of the war, we passed the shockingly burnt out, demolished remains of a supply depot – one the infantry had desperately wanted to raid, yet they had been denied.  The Science Fiction team had been gone that entire night.  When they came back, their Humvee, usually loaded to the top with ammo, was almost empty.  Some of the operatives were scraped up, but they went directly to our commander, where they stayed all morning.  We didn’t even see them until the next day.  When we asked them what happened, they just changed the subject, talking about the weather.  “It looks like we’re going to have a sand storm from hell tomorrow,” was all they said.

Sure enough, we no sooner had driven past the destroyed depot when the sky blackened.  Mud and dust dumped on our heads for the rest of the day on into the night, and a slightly milder version continued through the next day or so.  The entire invasion of Iraq paused that day – about a week into the war.  We circled the wagons and hunkered down in a defensive position as best we could.  Soon we just shut all doors and hatches, concentrating on breathing while the suffocating sand onslaught continued to swirl around us.

I spent the night and day pulling guard duty and trading war stories with the SF.  Mine were pretty mundane since I only had a week’s worth, but the operatives had some amazing tales to tell.  They’d all been to many countries in the Middle East, some of which I had barely even heard of.  They told tales of precision airstrikes onto Afghani cave entrances, teaching insurgents in some country how to overthrow a government hostile to the U.S., and of harrowing firefights and hand-to-hand battles during other secret missions.

Our unit’s highest ranking sergeant, Sergeant Major (SGM) Rasmussen, along with his driver, usually traveled with their vehicle right in the middle of the formation.  Having been in the army for over 30 years, Sergeant Major knew all the tricks of his trade.  His Humvee was the closest thing to a “sweet ride” one could find in the army.  He actually had comfortable seats, an air conditioner, and a seemingly never-ending supply of candy, beef jerky, and sodas in his truck.  He’d share with us, of course, but the price was steep.  You’d get to sit in a cool, comfy truck, munching on goodies, but you’d have to listen to Sergeant Major tell old war stories or complain about how soft the army had become until you wanted to plug your ears with Tootsie-rolls or bail out of the moving Humvee.  He was a good leader and a nice guy, but unless you found overly-dramatic war stories and dismal complaints about the sad state of things nowadays interesting, you tried to avoid him.  His driver Private First Class (PFC) Jake Louis did find his constant talk interesting or was at least able to tolerate it better than the rest of us. Louis was a nice guy and a hard worker, so we liked him – especially since he absorbed most of Sergeant Major’s endless chatter for us.

The operations officer, or S-3, was Major (MAJ) Ndi Banta.  His parents had emigrated from Cameroon to the U.S. shortly before he was born.  He looked and talked like an American, but his parents also had taught him their tribal language and French.  He had worked as a military advisor in several American embassies in and around his parents’ homeland, and before that he had been in the Special Forces and had conducted secret missions on that continent to protect the various governments from insurgents – mostly the same Islamic extremists who had been plaguing those who didn’t agree with them for decades.  He was on friendly terms with the Special Forces soldiers in our unit and occasionally insisted on joining them on missions.  They appreciated his help since they were kind of shorthanded, but the commander preferred that his S-3 run the unit operations and not risk getting himself killed.  MAJ Banta insisted that his well-trained assistants could run the unit without him should he die, which was true, so the commander sometimes allowed him his fun.  He was pretty laid back, dishing out friendly insults to everyone regardless of rank and accepting our abuse in return.

I only saw him really mad one time.  We had come across a village near the city of An-Najaf whose people were nearly slaughtered and where half of the buildings were destroyed.  MAJ Banta asked them through a translator what had happened, and they told him that they had resisted the Fedayeen Saddam, a terrorist group wholly dedicated to the doomed dictator, with the thought that the Americans would liberate them very soon.  Well, the main fighting force bypassed their village completely, and the Fedayeen started raping, killing, and burning in the village.  MAJ Banta was infuriated.  He told the villagers through the translator, “I’m sorry the Americans arrived so late.  As a demonstration of our regret and goodwill to the people of Iraq, we will root out the evil murderers and thieves who drove you out of your homes.”

With that he organized us for an all-out raid on the strongholds.  The Special Forces team cut the power to the village while the engineers built berms and strung razor wire around the village to prevent escape.  Then the infantry and artillery teams set up sniper positions around the perimeter and started picking off Fedayeen dumb enough to be caught outside.  The villagers estimated there to be about a hundred of them inside.  Our snipers had reduced that number by ten.

The special ops sneaked in after dark on the first day and quickly took over one building with only a few occupants on the edge of town.  They forced those they captured to cry for help, causing the other Fedayeen to swarm out of the other houses to their aid.  Thanks to two well-placed Claymore mines they had hidden in the middle of the town beforehand, the first swarm of Fedayeen disappeared in a wall of shrapnel.  We thought that would be enough to scare the others into giving up, but Fedayeen are notorious for not knowing when they are defeated and will fight to the death.  They smoke a lot of hashish (giving rise to the term ‘assassin’) to give them courage, but it eliminates their common sense.

The remainder of our unit had set up firing positions on the side of the town closest to the SF stronghold.  It was a good thing we did because the remaining 70 Fedayeen assassins rushed the building like bloodthirsty cheetahs.  We took out about a third of them before they split their forces.  Half rushed toward us, and the other half entered the building where the SF were waiting.  The half who attacked our positions got picked off one by one, but two made it to our line, where they each detonated a string of dynamite around their waists.  One suicide bomber only managed to destroy himself and half bury SSG Brequer in his own foxhole.  The second one unfortunately jumped onto one of our soldiers before blowing up.  He killed PFC Louis, Sergeant Major’s patient driver.

Louis had shot the assailant several times, but in his drugged-up state, he just kept on stumbling forward, repeatedly screaming something that sounded like ‘Allah’ in Arabic until the sickening explosion silenced everything.  We could still hear shooting in the SF stronghold, but they emerged a few minutes later relatively unscathed.  Sergeant Major eventually came down the line to the crater where his driver had been.  There he silently removed the Fedayeen’s body parts from the mess and threw them into the open desert.  The commander, who had been on a radio in a vehicle behind us, brought a body bag to us.  There he and MAJ Banta put Louis’ remains inside and gently laid him in the Sergeant Major’s vehicle.  Not a word was spoken while this occurred.  The SF, infantry, and artillery meanwhile conducted a door to door search of the town to make sure every Fedayeen was dead or captured.  We stayed a few days – long enough to help the villagers resettle their town and bury the bodies – but then we moved on.  We handed the prisoners we captured here over to the town mayor, who probably set up a small court, and handed out some frontier justice in the form of a gallows and a hangman’s rope.  A much quieter Sergeant Major drove his own truck with the body bag back to the first logistical camp we could find so they could return the body of our friend to his family in the United States.  Then we moved out.  The war wasn’t over for the rest of us.

Once Baghdad was taken, our unit headed north, helping subdue miscellaneous holdouts around the country.  We encountered several diehard Special Republican Guard units, Wahhabi terrorists who didn’t like anyone non-Muslim, and even several units of Iranian insurgents Saddam had welcomed to him.  Their goal was the overthrow of the Ayatollah’s government, but they were close allies of Saddam.  Figuring out what to do with them was tricky.

Part of our mission was also finding and retrieving weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).  We looked and looked, documenting any ammunition or weapon dumps we found.  We sent the locations of the hundreds upon hundreds of weapons & ammo caches we found up to higher headquarters, but there were so many that they simply did not have enough soldiers to guard them all.  It was a mistake sending so few soldiers into Iraq initially.  We could have easily used another two or three hundred thousand personnel to help guard all this military hardware, weaponry, and ammo.  Saddam didn’t need WMDs.  He had enough conventional weaponry to kill everyone in the world several times over.  And now that there were too few friendly troops guarding these stockpiles, the insurgents were raiding them to supply their own fighters with all the equipment they would need to drag this war out for years to come.  We feared this situation would soon turn into a real mess.

Some U.S. units were given the mission of gathering up these stockpiles to use in supplying the new Iraqi army we were trying to build.  Still, there were too few soldiers with far too much equipment to gather.  They were in way over their heads.  Several times they gathered so much ammunition together, without knowing how to safely separate it, that it created an enormous hazard.  One particular artillery round containing white phosphorus (WP) becomes highly unstable at temperatures over 111 degrees Fahrenheit.  It was quickly becoming summer here, so as soon as the temperature started going over this level, the WP rounds would cook off and explode.  An entire military camp literally blew up when these WP rounds started igniting the tons and tons of ammo around them.  4^th of July fireworks came early in Iraq for those poor soldiers.  Nobody was killed thanks to the evacuation efforts of some alert soldiers at the camp, but it could have been a monumental disaster.

Our commander seemed to become more and more frustrated with the lack of protection over these stockpiles.  He just wanted to take his EOD people and blow everything up in place.  This was not usually possible.  Our EOD technicians flatly refused to blow up many piles due to their proximity to villages or farms, and the Army wanted to gather up the equipment for themselves.  LTC MacMillan spent hours yelling at people from headquarters over the radio or telephone, saying that we were in for a disaster if they did not start policing up these piles of weaponry.  Shoot, even little kids could go outside their village, pick up mines, mortars, bullets by the fistful, and occasionally blow themselves up in the process.  This was sad enough to witness, but we were more concerned with the bad guys who could just take what they wanted, lace it up to detonators, and use these improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against us.  I totally understood the frustration the commander felt.  Here we survived the ground war with only one casualty, and yet now our entire unit could get blown up by some terrorists strapping a bomb to a roadside billboard or an abandoned automobile.  Or they could just bury one in the dirt and then detonate it as we drove by.

Sure enough, as the months went by we lost a few more soldiers.  One of the Engineers got shot by a sniper while his team was helping fix an Iraqi bridge.  Someone from the logistics section got killed when the Humvee he was in ran over an IED on the way to make a delivery.  The Humvee flipped completely over, landing on its tires and severely rattling the others.  Only the guy nearest the blast in the right rear seat died, but the others were badly traumatized by the attack.  Well, most of us had our nerves on edge.  One of our missions was to drive around and look for insurgents planting IEDs, snipers, or suicide bombers.  We were just asking for trouble.  I kept having nightmares about a massive attack that would wipe out half our unit, waking up drenched in sweat regardless of the temperature.  One other soldier died – an EOD technician.  He was trying to defuse what we thought was a simple IED buried in the side of the road when another IED buried underneath the first was remote detonated.  Occasionally the insurgents would rig dud bombs right on top of real ones.  While the EOD technician would work to defuse the dud, the real one would blow up, killing the bomb squad member.  It was a dirty tactic.  Whenever this would happen, there would be one less person capable of eliminating the dangerous bombs and mines that were daily killing or injuring soldiers, innocent kids, and livestock.  The insurgents who did this were beasts, in our opinion.

By September we had lost four soldiers on four separate occasions.  The army usually sent us replacements as quickly as possible, but it was tough finding qualified people that met our commander’s strict standards.  He would rather go without a replacement than accept a dirt-bag, so we sometimes waited weeks at a time for a new soldier.  Still, it was a good policy.  We were an elite unit which had to rely on the competence and trustworthiness of its members for survival.  One lazy idiot could get a lot of people killed, so it was better having nobody than a complete moron.

This was my life in Iraq for the first seven months.  We had taken more casualties than a lot of units, but we were still hanging in there.  We all just wished it would end soon.  My nightmares got steadily worse, and I kept worrying daily that the big disaster I feared would come to pass.