You Are Not Forgotten Read online

  “That one was taken just after sunrise on Friday morning,” George explained. “We had done a raid of the house behind to pick up a couple of suspected insurgents.”

  “I don’t like to think of you doing that kind of job,” she replied. “Please be careful.”

  “Well … it’s a job anyway,” George wrote stoically. “There won’t be any flying for me anytime soon.”

  Then, just as abruptly as he woke her, George’s time was up. “Ohh … gotta go … I am getting kicked off.… I love you very much.… I’ll write soon.”

  “Love you too very much.”

  George rolled through most of Christmas at a hundred miles an hour, literally. He spent much of the holiday on patrol near an American outpost called Camp Paliwoda, an abandoned Iraqi military training center beside a canal that was believed to be surrounded by insurgent safe houses and hidden weapons supplies. The road between Anaconda, where he was based, and Paliwoda, about twelve miles away, was one of the most dangerous in Iraq. So unless they were engaging a target, the members of George’s unit never took their feet off the gas for the full eight hours they were outside the wire in their Humvees. George jokingly called it a “highway man’s paradise” because they drove “as fast as the chariots will take us” to avoid being ambushed. By traveling at such high speed, they also held out hope that if they hit one of the improvised explosive devices—the makeshift bombs insurgents were increasingly burying in the road—they would “blow right through” and come out the other side unscathed.

  Ann knew George would be outside the wire for Christmas and didn’t expect to hear from him for at least a few days. Over the holiday she watched the news out of Iraq with growing trepidation. There had been a large bombing in the city of Karbala to the south of Baghdad, and she felt even more anxious after a suicide bombing on December 21 inside a dining hall at an American base in the northern city of Mosul. Fourteen U.S. soldiers and eight others were killed and nearly eighty wounded in what commentators said marked a new, macabre twist to the escalating violence.

  So Ann felt especially relieved when George surprised her and signed in for a quick chat on Christmas night.

  “Hey mom.… Merry Christmas. I love you and miss [you] very much.”

  “Merry Christmas to you! I love you and miss you very much, too.”

  George had been on the go for much of the last twenty hours and was soon going on another raid in a nearby village. She asked him about the Mosul attack. He didn’t try to sugarcoat things for her. The bombing—by an Iraqi soldier who had been working with the Americans—was a new technique and “a bit dismaying,” he acknowledged. And there were new threats from what the brass were calling “vehicle-borne” IEDs, or car bombs. “We’ve also had an increase in activity,” he reported.

  Still, George assured her, he felt the American forces were making good progress. They were seizing weapons and explosives, along with suspected enemy fighters and bomb makers. What they were doing, he told her, was critical, as Iraqis were preparing to go to the polls at the end of January in the first elections since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Ensuring the election of a national assembly went off successfully was now the main effort of the U.S. military, and heavy emphasis was being given to helping prepare Iraq’s nascent security forces to secure polling sites. U.S. military leaders saw the January 30 elections as a key step toward democracy that would provide a much-needed incentive for some of the warring groups to lay down their arms and join the political process.

  The voting “will strike a blow [against] terrorism,” George wrote, sounding confident. “It will go a long way towards marginalizing insurgent efforts I think.”

  The pace of operations was steadily picking up, he told her, though he spared her a lot of the details. Those weren’t always pretty. Nor did they always make a lot of sense to him. Like the first time he had to fire his weapon.

  It happened one recent morning after a nighttime raid. They were headed back to base just after dawn when they heard a distress call over the radio net. Another patrol traveling in a combination of tanks and Humvees near the banks of the Tigris River had been attacked with a roadside bomb. There were no major injuries, but reinforcements were needed to search the adjacent homes and fields for the perpetrators or witnesses who might know where to find them.

  When he arrived at the scene a few minutes later, George tried to make sense of the shouted orders from several members of the jittery patrol, which had fanned out around their vehicles. They seemed confused and disagreed about what to do. He was struck by the incongruence of it all. A massive armored tank was sitting in the middle of the road, where the bomb had gone off underneath it. The explosion, believed to have been set off by a cell phone signal, had done minimal damage to the iron behemoth, but the patrol couldn’t seem to figure out what to do next. “This is nuts,” he thought. The U.S. Army was literally stopped in its tracks with no enemy in sight.

  A senior officer on the scene finally took control of the situation. George’s unit was ordered to search in an adjacent citrus orchard that spread out to a steep incline and the Tigris below. There, just out of sight from the orchard and hidden along the steep riverbank, they found a cache of weapons. The order was given to destroy it by setting off a controlled explosive charge. Just as the “fragging” ricocheted across the Tigris and back, George spotted what looked like a teenage boy in the distance darting down the bank. The platoon watched as the kid jumped into the river and began swimming toward the opposite shore. George raised his weapon, took aim, and fired warning shots into the water. The boy put his hands up and was taken into custody for questioning. Whatever happened to him George had no idea. But all he kept thinking that morning was, “He was just a kid.” If he set off the roadside bomb, he had almost single-handedly paralyzed a combat unit of the mightiest military in the world.

  Some of the other raids that George went on that first winter were simply bizarre. Like the nighttime operation when they blew open the door of a suspected insurgent’s home with a shotgun only to run right into the rear end of a massive milk cow in the middle of the living room. There was no one else in sight. On another raid, they kicked in the door of a home to find the husband and wife in the middle of having sex. Embarrassed, George’s patrol turned around and left.

  It sure beat having a desk job, though. And, he confided to Scott, what really kept him going, often in the face of grave danger, was something else: he was becoming an “adrenaline junky.”

  When he wasn’t on patrol or spending long, caffeine-fueled hours in the command center, George escaped to the confines of his bunk, the so-called containerized housing unit that was alternately beastly hot from the overpowering heating system or bone-chilling cold. Even in the desert, the mercury dipped into the thirties at night, and he was grateful for the “snuggly blanket” that Ann had shipped in one of her care packages to keep him warm. Not to mention some of the comfort food that arrived from Tallahassee every few weeks like Tostitos corn chips, which they had learned somehow didn’t crumble on the long journey.

  When he could keep his eyes open, he wrote letters to Grandma Harriet, who had recently fallen and broken her arm, and a few other pen pals or played video games with his “Joes,” the enlisted soldiers in the squadron. Another escape was watching movies on his portable DVD player. Every Tuesday he went down to the PX on Anaconda to buy another movie to add to his collection, already up to twenty-five by the turn of the year. One of his favorites was The Big Lebowski, a comedy about an out-of-work ex-hippie, and some of his other standbys were action and war films like Gladiator and Black Hawk Down.

  Then, one day in late January, while he was in between missions, George caught a television special playing in one of the R&R tents. It was about the MIA unit in Hawaii, where he would be going after his Iraq tour. What captured him most was the exotic location where it was filmed.

  “They were in Palau. Some beautiful little island in the Pacific … recovering a plane that had crashed
in World War II,” he told Scott. “Looked like hell … not.”

  Scott was excited for him. “Everybody I talk to about the [Hawaii] thing thinks that sounds outstanding,” he told his little brother.

  The last thing George saw before he fell fitfully asleep each day was the collage of family photographs he had taped to the bunk above him. There was the one of George with Mom, Dad, and Schotzy, the little cockapoo they had owned years before at Fort Bragg, along with a few of his two step-siblings, Scott and Teri, and her two children. They all kept him company in those quiet moments. He also worried about them.

  In recent years George had taken a particular interest in Teri’s teenage kids, his niece, Tara, and nephew, Stevie, at times even filling the role of a stand-in father figure. He desperately wanted to see them avoid some of the struggles of their parents, who were now divorced and facing mounting financial troubles. What would become of Tara and Stevie wore on him even more now that he knew Teri had filed for bankruptcy and her home was threatened by foreclosure. George sought ways he could help and encourage the kids to strive for something better. He feared most that Stevie, who was now nearing high school graduation, would squander his opportunity to go to college and make something of himself. George saw a bit of himself in Stevie, a headstrong kid with all the right instincts and brains. But just as George had been at his age, Stevie was vulnerable to others around him who weren’t the best of influences.

  In an Internet chat from Camp Anaconda, George raised the prospect with his mother of doing something special for young Stevie, who he knew was working hard in school. He proposed giving him his pickup truck, which had just been paid off, as a reward for his achievements and an incentive to keep at it. “Seems to me that his schoolwork and attitude are more than enough,” George told Ann, “when compared to what I got when I was 16 … meaning he is certainly more deserving than me.”

  Ann wondered if the truck might be too much responsibility for him, but George insisted. “Kids need cars. He needs to be able to do his own thing.”

  The early months of 2005 brought key milestones in the war, but like the wet weather, which caked everything in mud, they were mostly discouraging.

  The Iraq Survey Group, a special American unit set up after the invasion, officially ended its search for weapons of mass destruction, reporting that none had been found. The conclusion further fueled antiwar sentiment back home, as the main rationale for the war—the threat of Saddam Hussein’s secret arsenal of doomsday weapons—proved faulty. In the view of a growing number of Americans, the war had been launched under false pretenses.

  Then, on Iraq’s Election Day, the Sunni population, the minority that had held power under Saddam, largely stayed home from the polls, as many had predicted, while the country was engulfed in bloodshed. More than a hundred attacks shook Iraq, killing forty-five people; nine of the attacks were set off by suicide bombers, an ominous sign of what might lie ahead. This was despite the fact that U.S. forces imposed curfews, closed Iraq’s borders, and banned the carrying of weapons in public, and more than 130,000 newly trained Iraqi security forces guarded polling stations.

  To George, the security situation looked bleaker by the day. It was getting harder to have faith that their efforts were making a real difference. For every success they were having on the battlefield, the insurgents often simply moved to a new battleground and recruited new foot soldiers to replace those who had been killed or captured. While there were restrictions on what he could reveal to Ann about the situation, he cryptically alluded to the enemy’s resilience.

  “Bunch of new kids on the block,” he relayed one day when she asked how he thought the war was going, his code for how many of the bad guys who had been driven from one area were showing up to sow chaos somewhere else.

  “Why, what happened to the old kids?” Ann didn’t quite understand the lingo.

  “I’m not supposed to answer those questions from my mother. I am supposed to say that everyone waves and throws flowers,” George answered wryly.

  “Oh, okay. But it won’t work for me.”

  Ann knew what the news reports were saying, including that insurgents were building more powerful roadside bombs to attack American troops.

  “It’s getting more gamey across the country,” George allowed. “We’ve definitely had more incidences.”

  Camp Anaconda itself was now the target of almost daily mortar attacks from insurgents hiding in the warren of neighborhoods just outside the perimeter. On a number of occasions George had to cut short an Internet chat with his mother because the base was taking incoming fire. The whine of air raid sirens frequently sent him and hundreds of other soldiers scrambling into bunkers for safety. The attacks rarely caused significant damage, but they contributed to the growing sense that the enemy was everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  It soon became a running joke that those who were launching mortars and rockets before melting back into the population might not even know whom they were attacking. They might not care. George had learned that the base had also been rocketed when Saddam’s troops had been using it. He couldn’t help but suspect that in the view of many Iraqis the American forces that had liberated the country weren’t any different from those of the toppled tyrant who had enslaved it.

  “They are just mad that anyone is here,” George reluctantly concluded.

  Such awareness only increased his desire for a greater understanding of Iraq’s tortured history and politics, and he began scouring the Internet for articles on the country’s different ethnic and religious groups. What he learned only fueled his doubts.

  “One thing you can be assured of is that the Sunni margin will not be happy,” he told his stepbrother Scott at the time. “They will be disenfranchised completely.” The Sunnis, he knew, were most responsible for the insurgency, and their hardening position could only spell more violence.

  It was with Scott, who had been in his share of scrapes as a Florida state trooper, that George felt comfortable discussing some of the more gruesome details of what he was experiencing when he was outside the wire. The two of them had a special bond. Scott was supplying George with those most important of care packages: cigars and Copenhagen long-cut chewing tobacco, which became part of his daily routine. George had a tradition of lighting up one of the cigars Scott had sent just before he went on night missions. He joked that they helped him look the part of the “dog-faced” soldier.

  “Just like Dad!” Scott ribbed him.

  As a police officer, Scott patrolled some of Tampa’s most dangerous neighborhoods and could relate to what George was seeing in ways that their mom never could. George confided in him in terms he knew Scott would understand.

  “This place is really the wild wild west,” he said. There was no rule of law—at least not until the U.S. military showed up, and “only then if the locals aren’t packing more heat.” George found it hard to see how all the bloodshed would abate. It was probably not unlike what Scott was seeing in gangland Tampa, only worse, fueled by ancient animosities and religious differences.

  “They’ll knock each other over all day long,” George ventured. “Everybody wants to be king of the block.”

  It was also getting harder and harder to know who the bad guys were. “I can’t help but see a terrorist in each boy,” George confided to Scott after the elections. Whether the locals were friendly often depended largely on whether he was pointing a gun at them or giving them candy. The toughest challenge was figuring out when to use force to protect himself and his fellow soldiers. One thing that he thought might make it a hell of a lot easier would be if—like Scott—he carried a Taser.

  “There are about 100 kids a day I’d like to ZZZZZZZZZap,” he told him.

  The worst thing U.S. troops were facing, though, was the IEDs. Insurgents were simply too creative, George reported to Scott, planting the makeshift bombs in old tires and under signs or underpasses. George had recently encountered a cannon shell hidden in the carcass o
f a dead dog. The ballistic and armored protection installed on their vehicles made a difference—“I’m living proof,” he offered—but all too often it wasn’t enough.

  “Doesn’t save everybody.… They’ve figured out how much it takes to wreck a [Humvee] and how much it takes to rip a Bradley” armored troop carrier. “We just can’t fight them.”

  The explosion was almost half a mile away, but it shook George’s vehicle. A huge plume of smoke began to billow in the sky ahead. His patrol rushed to the scene to learn that a large car bomb had gone off and a young trooper from a fellow unit had been killed. The blast had been so large that George was surprised more people hadn’t died. It nearly destroyed all the adjacent shops.

  George thought very highly of the dead soldier’s platoon leader, a bright and engaging young lieutenant from Virginia who had learned to play the bagpipes at West Point. George had gone on a number of patrols with him in recent weeks and was slated to go out with him again the very next day. As a higher-ranking officer, George quickly found himself counseling the distraught lieutenant.

  “Please remember to say a prayer for that fallen soldier, and for the confidence of my young friend,” he wrote to Ann afterward. “He is shaken by the events of the last few weeks … where he has lost two soldiers and had his own vehicle destroyed twice. I sat with him for several hours after we returned home.”

  The circumstances couldn’t be more different, but George drew on his experience as platoon leader when the young soldier under his command at Fort Bragg had committed suicide out on the range.

  “I shared my experiences, where as a young platoon leader, I too had lost a man,” he told Ann. “We talked about the leadership challenges that would follow this tragedy and how he had to find the means necessary to show strength in this most trying of times.”

  The next day George was on patrol in the same area of the city of Balad when his patrol got it.