You Are Not Forgotten Read online

  “We had a kid in the turret doing all the right things … down under the turret shield,” he recounted in an e-mail to Scott. “Should have been safe. But when the IED blew … the base of the shell punched right through the shield and took most of his head off.”

  Ann didn’t like what she was hearing, either. “I like it better when you are off the streets,” she told him after the incident.

  George’s mother also noticed that her boy had a shorter fuse. His demeanor could be brusque, even angry at times, not the George she knew. Simple queries prompted him to lash out—for instance, when she asked whether Iraqis changed their clocks for daylight savings. The U.S. military abided by daylight savings, but the Iraqis didn’t observe it, he responded. Whatever time it was, it was killing time. “So now instead of shooting at him at 0900 we shoot at 1000.”

  Indeed, time meant little anymore. “I have no conception of time or day here,” he told her. “It’s either light or dark … that is it. Don’t even know the month without thinking about it.”

  But the ground patrols outside the wire would continue. “The boss likes what I am doing too much,” he said, warning her they were moving into even dicier territory.

  By the spring, George had left the relative comforts of Camp Anaconda for a remote FOB, or forward operating base, farther to the north near Samarra.

  Samarra, located deep in the Sunni Triangle, was where five thousand American troops had recently launched an offensive to wrest control of the violence-racked city from Sunni insurgents. The U.S.-led command was now trying to build up the local security and spending tens of millions of dollars on public works projects in the hopes of building a viable local government to hamstring the insurgents’ recruiting efforts. George knew they were having only mixed success and he was in for a tough fight.

  FOB McKenzie, formerly known as the Samarra East Air Base or al-Bakr Air Base, was eight square miles of sand, concrete blocks, and barbed wire. It had been bombed by the United States in the first Iraq War in 1991. By the time George arrived, it was still one of the more primitive American outposts in Iraq, with few amenities; there was one shower for every twenty soldiers. The only exception to the paucity of creature comforts was a movie theater and library with Internet access that had been cobbled together in one of the dozen aircraft bunkers on the base. The American forces stationed at the base were responsible for a vast desert area about the size of the state of Vermont. They had their hands full. Sunni insurgents were still moving freely through the area, bringing in weapons, explosives, and new recruits from elsewhere in Iraq. Sunni extremists allied with al-Qaeda were also slipping in from neighboring Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait to wage war against the Americans and Iraq’s Shia Muslim majority. FOB McKenzie was now the target of nightly rocket and mortar attacks—twenty-one on a single night.

  “There are different levels of paradise around here. And different levels of hell,” George told Ann about his new post. “Next stop Hell.”

  The relative isolation also forced George to take greater stock of his life. As he reflected in the solitude of his bunk, his thoughts often turned to how, unlike most of his fellow officers, he was still single. There was no special girl waiting for him to come home. Yet the passage of time, a series of failed relationships, and his duty to the Army gave him unsettling doubts that he would find her.

  He opened up to Ann in their lengthy Internet chats about how he worried that it was getting too late for him to find what she and his dad had. Why hadn’t his relationships succeeded with Viv or his high school girlfriend? They kept him around, he proffered, to “pick them up when they were in trouble … or they cried on my shoulder when they needed one … but of course … blew me off when it was important.” He was corresponding with a few girls he had met back in the States, he told her, but their interest seemed to have faded. Maybe he simply wasn’t good enough for the kinds of girls he liked.

  He sounded depressed about it, and Ann tried to reassure him, imploring him not to lose hope.

  “You are an attractive, interesting, extremely well-read, funny, sensitive, well-traveled person, with integrity and values,” she told him. “And there is someone for you.” There was, to paraphrase the Bible, “a season for all things.”

  “Well, we’re getting late into said season,” George offered. “Leaves are starting to turn.”

  “Yeah. But you are not exactly over the hill—is that what you are talking about?”

  “I am getting a bit too old to be screwing off and not thinking seriously about dismounts,” he responded, using the Army term for soldiers getting out of a vehicle. “You know … kids.… I am getting impatient.”

  “Well, we will continue to pray,” Ann assured her son, though privately she was more worried than ever about his state of mind and well-being.

  “Thanks mom,” George typed. “It really helps me to be able to talk to you … gives me a bit of peace.”

  He also felt a bit more at ease when he thought about what he might do if he left the Army. Sometimes it was a vision of a beachfront house on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where he could buy a fishing vessel and start a charter business. Sometimes George and Ann talked about going in on a beach house together.

  His mother, conjuring up the image from the movie Forrest Gump that they both loved, sometimes ribbed him about the life he was planning when all this was over.

  “When you get back are you going in the shrimp business?”

  “No I am going to run across America ten times,” he wrote, playing along.

  “Oh, how disappointing …”

  “Okay … maybe not … But I would like to find a nice girl and have a little boy named Forrest … or George.”

  On other occasions, George envisioned what it might be like to get away from America altogether, perhaps buy a place in Costa Rica or Mexico and find a local girl to settle down with.

  He also still held out hope that his next post, even with all the expected travel, would allow him to develop “some sort of root system.”

  The expectation of living in Hawaii for his next assignment planted the seeds of a plan: to live on a boat. Some of George’s fondest memories were of boating in the Chesapeake Bay when his father kept a small motorboat while he was stationed in Maryland, and he was determined to make the most of the opportunity.

  “A lieutenant of mine turned me on to the idea,” he told Ann of his plan. “I’ve done some research and it is not unreasonable.… Question is what to do with it on the backside … have it sailed to mainland or sell.”

  He was also adamant that he didn’t want to live anywhere near a military base if he could help it. “I want to be as far away from everyday military as possible,” he told Scott.

  George surfed the Internet looking for vessels for sale in Hawaii and how to get a boat out there if he bought it on the mainland. Ann sent him copies of Boat Trader and other fishing and boating magazines. He had his sights set on a forty- to fifty-foot motorboat that he could finance as a second home.

  To further stir his imagination and keep him thinking about the future, Ann also sent him a copy of James Michener’s epic novel Hawaii, the saga of the first Hawaiians who arrived from Bora-Bora. For a little while each day, as his grimy fingers turned the dog-eared pages of the thick paperback, George was transported from the barbed wire and blast walls of the base to a chain of bucolic islands with sandy beaches lapped by the brilliant blue waters of the Pacific—about as far away as one could get from the dust, dirt, and danger that was his daily existence in Iraq.

  George was mesmerized by the descriptions of thousands of years of volcanic fury that left a crater, in the shape of a punch bowl, in the middle of Oahu and another, at the very edge, in the shape of a diamond head. He was captivated to learn that the Hawaiian Islands were the youngest landmasses on earth, still forming after the Bible was written and Jesus and Muhammad walked the earth, where no man had arrived until the end of the first millennium. “Raw, youthful islands, sleepin
g in the sun and whipped by rain, they waited,” Michener wrote. Nearly everything that grew on the islands grew nowhere else; in Michener’s telling, it was “an authentic natural paradise where each growing thing had its opportunity to develop in its own unique way, according to the dictates and limitations of its own abilities.”

  The novel spoke to George, who longed to be born anew, to etch his own story on a new slate.

  One day out on patrol George befriended a mentally handicapped boy, earning a winning smile when he gave him some candy.

  “The thing is about a foot tall, with coke bottle glasses,” he wrote to Ann. “Adorable.”

  George was increasingly troubled by the mounting number of innocent Iraqis who were victims of the conflict, caught in the cross fire of what looked more with each passing day like a full-blown civil war. Especially hit hard, he knew, were the new Iraqi security forces fighting alongside the Americans. “Bad to be in the Army or Police right now,” he told Scott.

  Now it was also common for multiple car bombs to go off in downtown Baghdad and other crowded Iraqi cities. Many of the victims were not soldiers or police but women and children. The spreading violence was affecting nearly everyone and only increasing the number of Iraqis living in abject poverty, with little hope of a better life.

  He was most distressed by the plight of women, especially the young girls he encountered in Iraq’s dusty, garbage-strewn streets. They were unbelievably beautiful, he thought, almost angelic. They were being treated so poorly by Iraqi society, forced to do manual labor and afforded so few rights.

  “You could never imagine what it means to be a woman in this country or society,” he reported home. “It breaks my heart.”

  He longed to do something for them, to brighten their bleak existence, even for a little while. Scott had been sending him a seemingly never-ending supply of travel shampoos, and George began handing them out to the young girls he encountered on his patrols. Before long, some of them recognized him and came running up to his vehicle, eager to get their hands on a simple luxury that most of them had never known.

  George needed to feel that what he was doing here might ultimately help improve the plight of some of the most vulnerable. He snapped a picture of the mentally retarded boy who brightened an otherwise tough day out on patrol to help him remember whom he was fighting for.

  “It’s my favorite of all that I have taken,” he told Ann.

  He also learned that beginning in April, he would no longer be a liaison with ground troops and would finally get to fly. With the blazing-hot summer quickly approaching, the good news couldn’t have come soon enough. What he didn’t tell Ann when he relayed the news was that flying Kiowas was now one of the most dangerous assignments of the war.

  One of George’s all-time favorite movies was the 1979 Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now. He had seen it so many times he had lost count. One character he particularly got a kick out of was Colonel Kilgore, the fearless air cavalry officer played by Robert Duvall whose bravado in the face of combat is matched only by his obsession with surfing. A caricature of a fanatical military officer, Kilgore even embraces chemical warfare, exclaiming in one of the movie’s most memorable lines, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” as he paces before his men, shirtless in his cavalry Stetson.

  “It’s my favorite part,” George told Ann in an Internet chat from FOB McKenzie after she wrote that she stayed up late watching the movie on television for the first time with her new husband, Mike, whom she had married the previous fall.

  The famous line was also something of an inside joke in the Eyster household. When Big George oversaw the spraying of pesticides in Florida citrus groves after he retired from the Army, a critical newspaper cartoon at the time pictured him as Kilgore bragging how he loved the smell of malathion in the morning, referring to the controversial chemical that was being used to fight the agricultural infestation.

  “I went and got the scrapbook and showed Mike the cartoon of Daddy saying he loved the smell of malathion in the morning,” Ann reported. “I re-read everything this morning—haven’t done that in a while. A great guy,” she said of his father.

  George and his fellow pilots weren’t playing Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” on full volume as they flew into combat, like the cav guys in Apocalypse Now, but what they were doing would certainly have impressed the thrill-seeking Kilgore and his men.

  Kiowa pilots in Iraq were being deployed more than any other helicopter crews and were routinely flying within the range of insurgents’ AK-47 machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs. Most of them felt that if they weren’t getting shot at, they weren’t doing their jobs. The need for Kiowas to support ground troops was exacting a heavy toll. By the summer of 2005, nearly a dozen Kiowa pilots had been killed in Iraq, more than any other military fliers. They had been shot down or crashed after clipping power lines or striking other obstacles, while excessive heat and sandstorms were causing a host of mechanical problems for their aging aircraft, many of which were older than the pilots flying them.

  “We are the only pilots in country doing anything,” George boasted a few weeks after getting back in the cockpit, telling Ann how other pilots flying in the war were mostly just going from point A to point B, dropping bombs from twenty thousand feet, or weren’t seeing any action at all.

  When he wasn’t flying, George was filling the role he briefly held in Kuwait as the squadron’s assistant operations officer, overseeing a staff of ten—four captains and six enlisted soldiers—managing what he called “nugging,” the nuts and bolts of the squadron’s daily activities. On good days he was on the clock sixteen hours.

  He was flying missions at least two to three times a week, most of them lasting up to five hours. His job was mostly to circle near ground units and await a radio call to help locate suspected insurgents or, if needed, provide supporting fire. George, usually sitting in the left seat, flew many of his early missions with Matt Lourey, a tall and lanky forty-one-year-old chief warrant officer with fair skin and a shaved head whose long legs could barely fit in the cockpit. Married to an Army officer, the enlisted Lourey had a reputation as one of the kindest and most intelligent pilots in the squadron. Many looked up to him as a mentor, including officers like George.

  What made their missions even more dangerous was the enormous pressure to be restrained when using the Kiowa’s firepower, even in the face of a hail of bullets or rocket-propelled grenades. They were flying mostly in densely populated areas where they could kill large numbers of innocent bystanders with their powerful weapons if they weren’t judicious in their use of force. As a result, they often chose to simply aim their M4 carbines out of the sides of the cockpits to shoot at insurgents rather than open up with the Kiowa’s cannons or missiles. It wasn’t a tactic George had learned in flight training, but like his fellow pilots he had to quickly get the hang of it. The learning curve was not without its challenges; some pilots firing their weapons out of the cockpit of a banking Kiowa shot up some of their own rocket pods underneath.

  “This isn’t exactly the Fulda Gap and we ain’t shootin’ missiles at tanks,” as Big George had trained on the plains of Europe, he told his mother in April. “Not too hard to lean out the door and shoot back. You can be much more accurate … precise.”

  Sometimes the Kiowas were called in to determine if a neighborhood was friendly or hostile simply by flying over it. If they elicited cheers and waves, it was probably friendly territory; if the people opened fire, it was probably an insurgent stronghold.

  As the insurgency continued to expand, the cowboy grit and street-fighter instincts of the so-called flying infantry were earning Kiowa pilots a special place in the hearts of the ground pounders, who had grown to love the thwump-thwump-thwump sound of the twin rotors arriving as if out of nowhere on the scene of an ambush.

  Late on the night of Thursday, May 26, 2005, as George was pulling a shift as assistant operations officer in the command post on FOB
McKenzie, the terrible news flashed over the radio. Matt Lourey and another pilot, Josh Scott, who had been flying a mission near the insurgent stronghold of Baquba, went down. George scrambled with other pilots and flew to the scene, where air cover was needed to secure the area around the crash site while ground forces tried to reach the downed pilots.

  Lourey and Scott had been flying cover for four Humvees patrolling down a narrow street in the village of Buhriz, a known insurgent stronghold framed by date palms and orange groves along the Diyala River. When the Humvees got about halfway through the main market street, an RPG fired from a rooftop sailed past the hood of one of the vehicles. Within moments the entire patrol was under attack from three sides by a flurry of RPGs and insurgents wielding AK-47s. The troops tried to escape, but the last vehicle got pinned down.

  Just as the situation appeared desperate, Lourey and Scott swooped down with their .50-caliber guns blazing. The soldiers in the Humvee had enough time to hit the gas and speed out to the open road. As they exited the market, they looked up to see the Kiowa barrel into the thick palm groves. A round had entered the cockpit above the two pilots and struck the engine below the main rotor, causing a catastrophic power failure. Lourey and Scott had no time to recover before hitting the tops of the trees.

  For most of the next three hours, George and a swarm of other Kiowas and Apache helicopter gunships struggled to keep the insurgents in the area at bay while fellow troops reached the crash site. Together, they expended thirty thousand rounds of .50-caliber ammunition and fired at least thirty rockets. Finally, the news came over the net that Lourey and Scott were dead.

  That same day, as she was preparing to go to bed on the East Coast, Ann saw a news report on television that a Kiowa had been shot down over Baquba. The identities of the pilots were not yet being divulged, but she was pretty sure they were from George’s squadron when the report cited the Forty-Second Division. The hours ticked slowly by as she lay awake wondering how long it might take for the military to pay a visit to the mother of a soldier killed in combat. She listened for a car pulling up the gravel drive in the middle of the night. But no one came. As Thursday became Friday, Ann pushed aside her gnawing worries and went to work. But she could barely think about anything else. She searched every news story every hour all day for more information. When nearly twenty-four hours had passed, she started to breathe a sigh of relief that she probably wasn’t going to get a dreaded visit from a military chaplain. But there was still no word from George.