Jonathan Fujiu
Specialist E-4, U.S. Army
1-34 AR, 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division
Interview with Jonathan Fujiu, Afghanistan-Iraq Wars
Specialist E-4, U.S. Army
1-34 AR, 1 st Brigade, 1 st Infantry Division
Cook Memorial Public Library District
April 12, 2006
Interviewer: Ellen Bassett
Transcribed by: Connie J. Pfeifer
Proofread by: Ellen Bassett
ELLEN: This interview is taking place on April 12 th, 2006 at the Cook Memorial Public Library in Libertyville, Illinois. My name is Ellen Bassett and I am speaking with John Fujiu, who enlisted in the U.S. Army and is currently a Specialist E4. John enlisted in 2001 and is still serving as of this date. He spent one year serving in Iraq. John was born on May 29 th, 1983 and currently resides in Vernon Hills, Illinois
ELLEN: Okay, Jonathan, I normally…first question I usually ask is if you enlisted or were drafted but obviously since we no longer have the draft, you enlisted.
JOHN: It was gone long before I even joined, before I was even born.
ELLEN: You enlisted right out of high school?
JOHN: I signed up while I was still in high school and then shipped off just a couple of months after I graduated.
ELLEN: Oh. What made you decide to do that? You signed up for the Army.
JOHN: I was probably a lot more naïve back then kind of felt it was like my patriot duty and this was still peace time. This is still pre-9/11.
ELLEN: Oh. What year was that?
JOHN: I signed up in May, 2001 and I shipped off for training August 6, 2001.
ELLEN: Oh my gosh. So you were…
JOHN: We were in our First Aid Course when we heard the word about the terrorist attacks.
ELLEN: And you were in the middle of Basic Training?
JOHN: I was in the beginning of it.
ELLEN: Where did they send you for Basic?
JOHN: I went to Fort Knox. Actually, I didn’t have Basic Training in the traditional sense. I had what they called OSUT, One Station Unit Training, where I had my Basic Training and my Advanced Individual Training. Instead of two separate cycles, I had one combined long cycle, where they cut things out of Basic that I wouldn’t need to use for my job skills. Then I started right off with my Advanced Training.
ELLEN: What was the Advanced Training for?
JOHN: I was trained to be a Tank Crewman.
ELLEN: A Tank Crewman?
JOHN: Mm hmm.
ELLEN: I’m not even sure what that is.
JOHN: I was part of the tank crew.
ELLEN: You didn’t drive it?
JOHN: I was actually one of the guys in the tank. I was training to be a driver, a loader, and possibly a gunner if I had to.
ELLEN: Was that something you were able to choose to do?
JOHN: I was. They told me I could have with my test scores, I could have chosen anything. And at the time, this still being peace time, I figured, “Well, the quickest way to make rank is through combat arms, but if combat rolls through, I’d want to be in the safest place on the battlefield.”
ELLEN: Yes, I heard that the tanks are very safe. Obviously, you must have gotten good test scores if you thought that through.
JOHN: Uh huh. After I graduated, I learned that once you make a certain rank, it’s a little harder to actually change your job, once you’re higher up there.
ELLEN: What was the highest rank…you entered as a …..
JOHN: A private E-1, the bottom of the chain.
ELLEN: Okay.
JOHN: And currently, I’m a Specialist; it’s an E-4 level. I get the same kind of pay as a Corporal. I’m in that same sort of bracket, but I’m not in a leadership position. It’s kind of a sweet gig in where I get the same pay as them but I don’t have the same responsibilities.
ELLEN: That’s not a bad deal. Back to…you were at Fort Knox, and that’s where you were when you heard about…when 9-11 occurred. What was the reaction? What were your first thoughts? I know what we thought, but you being in the Army….
JOHN: We were in training. We didn’t have TV. We didn’t have newspapers, except my platoon for a little while, we had USA Today simply because our drill sergeant decided on his own that it was kind of important that these guys kind of know world issues going on. But then that kind of gotten taken away after he found people were cutting parts out of it, out of the paper. We were in our First Aid class when we heard the word, I think we were learning how to stop bleeding and our commander comes in and asks, “I’ve got something to say. Do you mind if I interrupt?” Being that he outranked everyone in that room, everyone was going, “No. Go ahead, Sir.” “Do you all know the World Trade Center?” And we’re like, “Yeah. What about it?” “There is no more World Trade Center.” We weren’t exactly sure what to make of that. We were like, “Okaaay.” “And the Pentagon is in flames, and all-attack fighter planes…and a fourth airplane has gone down somewhere in Pennsylvania and they don’t know where that one was going. We’re just kind of thinking, “Is this some kind of a joke?”
ELLEN: That’s what I would have thought.
JOHN: Later that evening we found out that it was terrorists who had flown airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and they had a fourth plane going somewhere.
ELLEN: Did you have any idea what that would mean for you? Did that pop into your head?
JOHN: It kind of goes with a lot of the…if you listen, the military rumors would start to fly. Those of us with a grasp on reality kind of know rumors just fly around all over the place. Until they actually happen, it’s just still a rumor. If you believe everything you hear, you’re going to be way off in left field.
ELLEN: It’s a good point. How long were you at Fort Knox?
JOHN: From August 6, 2001 until December 19 th.
ELLEN: Of the same year.
JOHN: Of the same year.
ELLEN: Okay. And then from there…because you didn’t ship out for another two years, right?
JOHN: Right. Right after I graduated, I entered what was called the “Hometown Recruiting Program” where I would actually go to the recruiting station that I had entered the military through.
ELLEN: Which was here in Libertyville?
JOHN: I went to the one in Waukegan.
ELLEN: Oh, Waukegan. Okay.
JOHN: They didn’t have an Army Recruiting Station in Libertyville at the time. So I’d go to Waukegan and I’d work with the recruiters sort of as …we were kind of used as a dog and pony show. “Hey, these guys were just in basic. You can ask them all about what basic training was like.” Because it was right around Christmas, the station was working on a skeleton crew, so like only half the people would be working at a time and I could work one day on and one day off. For us, we’d go everyday. I think the first day we went to the Vernon Hills High School to work with the students on a big inflatable obstacle course that the recruiters had set up. Other than that day, we’d show up at 9:00 and maybe answer phones until 10:00 or so and then one of the recruiters would be like, “Okay, here’s your mission. Go to Gurnee Mills and walk around there. Look to get some names if you can. Come back when either you have two names and numbers of people who would be willing to talk to us or just be back before 15:00, 3 o’clock. Or go to Hawthorn Mall and do the same thing.” So for most of the time that we were there, we’d just go to the mall and hang out.
ELLEN: Not a bad deal.
JOHN: It’s the Christmas holiday. No too many people are going to be wanting to talk to us about joining the military.
ELLEN: Yeah, right.
JOHN: Granted at the time, it was still shortly after 9-11. So I mean you still have the euphoria and the big supporting of the military because “we’ve been attacked” thing. I mean, it’s just a few months after so…
ELLEN: So you did that, and ……
JOHN: Had a bit of leave for a couple of weeks, and January 14 th I reported in to at Fort Riley, Kansas for duty, as my duty station. At first I kind of thought it might be kind of boring being in Kansas, but actually I kind of had fun there. I like the outdoors, so it wasn’t too bad for me.
ELLEN: That’s good. What do you do while you’re there?
JOHN: Most of our days, usually Monday to Friday, at 6:30, you’ve got PT in the morning for an hour.
ELLEN: PT is…?
JOHN: Physical Training. Keep (?) or run around or whatever. You usually had that from 6:30 to 7:30. Then you had about an hour and a half to shower, change, get breakfast, whatever. 9:00 you report to duty, you go to whatever your duties may be. At the time, I was tank crewman, so I’d go…we’d go down there and we’d work on the tank and do maintenance, keep doing checks around the vehicle, make sure nothing was leaking or nothing broke. 11:30 to 1:00 was lunch. Then from 1:00 until whenever you’re done for the day, you just work and then in my unit, we’d bust our humps in the morning to get as much done as we could so that way when the afternoon duty rolled around, we already had gotten most of it done so we could cut out early. It was kind of nice because, I mean, a lot of the times I remember we’d get back from lunch and they’d be like, “Go up to the Company Area.” I live like ten feet from the Company Area in the barracks. “Stand by in your room until we need you.” I’d go to my room, I’d watch TV, play video games or sleep…whatever. The usually it would be an hour and a half, maybe at the latest two hours I’d wait, because the Sergeants would have to go through their Sergeant meeting stuff. Then finally they’d knock on my door, “Hey! Platoon Meeting! Go to the office.” We go to the office. “Alright, we did a good job today. We got this, that and the other thing done. Tomorrow plan to do this, this and the other thing. Bring this and that and we’ll see you tomorrow for PT. Go home.” So a lot of times I was done off of work usually somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon.
ELLEN: Not a bad deal.
JOHN: Yeah. It would be kind of interesting after that meeting, I’d go back to my room, change into my civilian clothes, go down to the first floor of the barracks to one of my friends who was living in another wing with a different company, go knock on his door and I’d see…there’d be a couple of people down the hall, “He’s not there. Charlie Company actually works ‘til five.” To which I’d answer, “It takes you all that long to do the work?”
ELLEN: That’s right. “What’s wrong with you guys?”
JOHN: Then after that on July 1 st , I got transferred over to the Headquarters Company because my company was actually over strength and so I got switched over to the Headquarters to end up, actually, working on trucks.
ELLEN: Was that 2002?
JOHN: Still 2001.
ELLEN: Still 2001?
JOHN: Oh, I mean 2002. I got over to the Support Platoon. So instead of being the guy on the tank, now I was the guy with the truck who would either bring the guy in the tank his fuel or his ammo.
ELLEN: Okay. You did mention that you drove a truck.
JOHN: And that one in a way was easier, but we were in uniform a lot longer. On the tank, you bust your hump in the morning then cut out early in the afternoon, well….Support Platoon, because we were supporting not just the Headquarters Company, we’re also supporting all three Tank Companies, which is like forty-four tanks for the entire unit that we got to work with so if anybody is still down in the motor pool doing work, you gotta’ stay there to help in case they would need something from us, which meant usually we would only be getting to cut out at maybe 4:00 or 4:30. I mean, granted, still it was work, but….
ELLEN: I know, but when you’re used to 2:00 or 3:00.
JOHN: It wasn’t so much that, it was just because if we did all of our work, which we usually could do in an hour on our trucks, other than that, the rest of the time because we were just waiting to help other people out if they needed help or needed something from us, most of the rest of the time we’d sit around. Most of the time half of us would be either sort of on the trucks just sort of hanging around, and the other half might be out smoking.
ELLEN: I was going to ask you…. a lot of guys picked up smoking.
JOHN: I haven’t.
ELLEN: Good for you.
JOHN: But I got plenty of second-hand from guys that do. I was with those guys up until I left active duty, actually, in 2004.
ELLEN: So you were there at Headquarters until September…was it September 200-?
JOHN: I was with them in September 2003 when we deployed to Iraq, and I was still with them in September ‘04 when we left Iraq and then I was still with them in December 2004 when I finally left active duty.
ELLEN: So, that’s where you were at Headquarters when you were deployed. When word came down, were you expecting it?
JOHN: In a way, we kind of were. At the time, we were gearing up to go to Fort Irwin, California, the National Training Center, where it’s out in the desert. That’s where they have guys who actually wear Russian insignia on their uniform and wear Russian head gear and actually train in Russian-style tactics, because…and this was set up in the Cold War…the idea being that we’d have guys who are trained to fight like the Russians, who were at the time were our enemy, and then afterwards still train that way because odds are in the future, anybody that we’re gonna’ be fighting, there’s a good chance that they were probably trained by the Russians. So, they actually wear Russian-style insignias on their uniforms and they even have modified vehicles to look like Russian vehicles.
ELLEN: That’s fascinating.
JOHN: So we were planning to go out there in early 2004; I think it was January we were gonna’ go. Sometime that fall, because there was rumor that we might be going to Iraq in like January or February of the next year and so we were in formation, and we figured they’d be talking about going to Fort Irwin, and they had…the entire…this was a brigade formation where we had like 3,000 soldiers out there instead of the usual couple hundred for our Company and so we’re standing out there, and we’re thinking they’re gonna’ just be pat each other on the backs talking about how we’re going to do so great out in California, and we hear, “Oh, we’re gonna’ be having to send a battalion of infantry over to Iraq, and we may have to send some armor out with them too.” Which meant that it was probably going to be our unit because from our brigade, we were, at the time the top tech unit. It ended up being…the entire brigade ended up going to Iraq instead of…in a month after we got the word.
ELLEN: So you did know it was coming.
JOHN: Sort of did, but it came sooner than we thought. Like I said, we kind of figured we’d probably go in like January or February 2004 and here it is in August 2002, and we’re hearing in about a month we’re probably gonna’ go. So…
ELLEN: Wow!
JOHN: We started kicking things into high gear. Any parts on our vehicles we might need, we got priority. Go down and drive new equipment to go to war with us. I mean, this was still fairly early in the fighting over there; we didn’t exactly know what to expect really when we got out there.
ELLEN: Okay, so now it’s September 2003, and you’ve been told you are going over to Iraq, your whole division or…
JOHN: …brigade. Usually, you’ve got three to five brigades that make up a division.
ELLEN: Okay…my terminology.
JOHN: A brigade is usually two to three thousands troops, and a division’s usually somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand troops, I think.
ELLEN: I’m assuming that you guys flew everybody over there?
JOHN: They flew us from Forbes Airfield, Kansas in Topeka. First we flew to Germany, actually to Ramstein Air Base for a few hours and then we flew into Kuwait. We flew out September 7 th. We got to Kuwait and we had left at “0-dark-hundred”. I don’t even remember what time it was; I just remember it was early. We landed in Kuwait after like a 21-hour flight, and it’s like late afternoon. We get out there….some of the older guys had already been to Iraq in Desert Storm, and we had a few guys who had actually been to Iraq in that spring when we first went into the country. We get there and we’re just kind of looking around, and it’s like tent city. We’re just thinking, “Man! This might suck.”
ELLEN: Tent city?
JOHN: We’re looking around…like all the buildings were tents. There were a couple of buildings, but the rest of it was like all tents.
ELLEN: Because everything had been destroyed?
JOHN: This was in Kuwait…because just the big build-up, they didn’t really have permanent facilities for having this many troops yet.
ELLEN: Oh, for the troops. I thought you meant like the locals and everybody was living in tents.
JOHN: Oh no. In Kuwait, those people are rich.
ELLEN: Oh really?
JOHN: I haven’t talked to a Kuwaiti local myself, but somebody had said they talked to a guy and said they work like instead of an eight-hour workday like here they work a four-hour workday, and they get paid more for it, too. I mean they’re quite wealthy. It’s one of those oil-rich countries but unlike places like Iraq, where most of the oil money would go to the top leaders.
ELLEN: True.
JOHN: I mean, the Kuwaiti royal family is rich, but they actually take care of their people.
ELLEN: So you’re in Kuwait; you got off the plane, and I’m imagining it was blistering hot.
JOHN: Yeah and we landed wearing a full combat load.
ELLEN: Oh.
JOHN: We weren’t expecting to fight right off the plane. I guess the idea was so we didn’t have to pack it into our gear…just wear it there.
ELLEN: Oh…and you get off…
JOHN: We get off the plane, we’re wearing pristine, new uniforms. We’re looking around at some of these guys that had already been there. A couple of our guys had been there in the spring and everyone else is looking dirty and wearing these really faded uniforms.
ELLEN: And they’re living out of tents, right? No barracks…
JOHN: We show up wearing these brand new uniforms, and we think “Man! We really stick out.”
ELLEN: I bet it didn’t take long before they…
JOHN: I’m sitting there going, “Fresh fish!” They took us into a tent and had our briefing into the country. Mainly, the big thing was stay hydrated because you don’t want to get dehydrated out there.
ELLEN: No I can imagine.
JOHN: At least we were lucky enough that our unit we had a…what we called a family readiness group. It’s mainly something like a group, for the families of soldiers, they can belong to and like a support group for the families. They had given us all camelbacks, it’s like a backpack that holds three liters of water with a drinking tube. So, at least we all had camelbacks to hold like three liters of water, and that lasted half a day, depending on how thirsty you get. It really depends on how thirsty you get.
ELLEN: Supplies weren’t a problem?
JOHN: No. Not really.
ELLEN: You were always able to get enough?
JOHN: Mm hmm.
ELLEN: Which leads me to another question. Living in tents, not barracks like you were expecting, what….
JOHN: We didn’t know what to expect. We were prepared, if we had to, we were gonna’ to sleep on our vehicles.
ELLEN: I’ve heard people had to do that.
JOHN: We had to for the first few days when we actually got into Iraq itself.
ELLEN: You just had to sleep in the……
JOHN: Yeah, under the stars.
ELLEN: In a jeep or under the….
JOHN: I was on a 10 ton truck called a Hemet. It’s an eight-wheel cargo truck. They also have a fueler version that will hold like 2,500 gallons of fuel.
ELLEN: How long were you in Kuwait, then?
JOHN: We were in Kuwait for about a week.
ELLEN: Oh, okay.
JOHN: We went up to what they call Camp New York. It’s one of these staging areas they had. They had other ones, like Camp New Jersey and Camp Virginia. Some closed, some reopened. It kind of changed, but Camp New York was there. Apparently, it was the oldest one of the camps there, because when I got into my unit in 2002, they had just gotten back from six month rotation to Kuwait doing border guard duty and cased it out and deciding to come back across the borders so we always had troops already in Kuwait just sort of patrolling the desert, making sure nobody came across the border and I had talked to some of the guys who had been in Kuwait that six months. And they said, “Yeah, this is the same camp that we were in when we were here two years ago.” From that one camp that they had, which we went to, then they had like six other ones out there. I think the Marines even had their own base on their own.
ELLEN: So, you were in Kuwait a week.
JOHN: During that time we were still doing file maintenance checks, making sure everything was still in running order, loading up on ammunition, loading our trucks up with boxes of MRE’s, you know, the ready-to-eat, the individual field chow.
ELLEN: Is that what MRE is, Meal-Ready? It’s like a C-ration, I suppose.
JOHN: It’s the updated one. I called it “Mysteries”.
ELLEN: Just give me an idea of what was in a MRE.
JOHN: Actually, they have twenty-four different kinds. There’s a Case A and Case B. Each case will hold twelve MRE’s and you can have stuff from like a Beef Stew to, actually, two vegetarian ones, a black bean and rice burrito, cheese tortellini. Then they got stuff like beef teriyaki, grilled chicken breast, chicken and salsa, chicken tetrazzini, like spaghetti.
ELLEN: It wasn’t too bad, or it sounds good, but…?
JOHN: Well, if you’re only having them once in a while, they aren’t too bad. But like when you’re living on them, they get really old really quickly.
ELLEN: I’ve also heard from somebody who served in Vietnam that said when you’re out in that kind of weather, the last thing you want is this big, heavy meal. You’re not too hungry. Did you find that?
JOHN: At the time, we were still mainly on our vehicles. We weren’t having to walk around a lot of places. You could toss a ton of MRE’s into the back of the truck. If you’re living on them, they kind of get boring, but when that’s all you’ve got…..
ELLEN: Right.
JOHN: At least when we were in Kuwait while we were still staging, they actually had a chow hall that was actually being staffed by guys from India and so, I mean you’d go to the chow hall, and it was kind of like a mini chow hall that we had back in the states. I mean, it wasn’t as furnished, but it sufficed.
ELLEN: It did the trick.
JOHN: Yeah.
ELLEN: Were these guys that staffed the hall, were they in the Army or were they just guys the Army hired from India…that did the cooking.
JOHN: Yeah. We hired a lot of guys from foreign countries…here they’re foreign. We hired them from different countries to do labor work or things. That…because one of the things that they started doing in the Army was shuffle things around where if they could get a civilian to work the job, depending on what the job was, the soldiers who were trained for that job might get shuffled to a combat unit or some other kind of unit with the idea being then you have more troops who are available for combat duty instead of doing support duties. When I get more into Iraq, I’ve got some more of that stuff. We were there for a week, we got our ammo and we loaded up and the day or two before we finally went across the border, they took us out into the middle of nowhere, set up some targets, so we’d have final familiarization fire, shooting off our weapons to make sure that we could still knew how to use them. We kind of already knew having been a heavy combat unit…that we trained for heavy action. But this was like more of a…the targets are 15 meters away. Take up whatever position you’re comfortable with, because when you go to the range to qualify in training, you almost never use the positions that they have you shooting from. I carried an M-16 A-2 rifle. We’ve had that one since the early ‘80’s. It’s alright. The weapon system got a bad reputation in Vietnam when the early versions of the guns do that. The fact that when I got pushed into action at the start, it was still a prototype. I’m not really going to get into the politics with that. The reputation is still there that it can jam quite often. As long as you take the time to actually clean your weapon, it really doesn’t give you a whole lot of trouble.
ELLEN: So, you never really had trouble with it?
JOHN: I didn’t, but I also cleaned my weapons every day.
ELLEN: You took good care of it. Good for you.
JOHN: As long as you actually take the time to maintain it, it will run all day. Anybody nowadays that talks about their weapon jamming on them…it’s the fault of the weapon, they’re full of it.
ELLEN: It’s because they aren’t taking care of it?
JOHN: Yes. It doesn’t even take that long. Granted, since we were cleaning our weapons everyday, there wasn’t a whole lot of chance for a whole lot to build up on it. You could be done in like five minutes.
ELLEN: Right.As long as you keep up with it, that’s true. Okay, so you’re doing that, and now you’re finally
JOHN: I’m going to end up being in the first “stick”, we called them, the cowboy groups, and I was going to be in the one going out…that first convoy for that day out of a hundred vehicles in a twenty-five vehicle stick, and we were going to be the first going out the first day to be the advanced party going to our base that we’re going to be going to. We crossed on September 15 th. We staged in a place called Navstar, I think it was, right by the border. The morning of the 15 th we got into convoy line and rolled across the border.
ELLEN: That must have been a….
JOHN: There was a lot of anxiety about it, but like when you first crossed the border and the first Iraqi village we drove through I was appalled at just how primitive it looked. Here we had been in Kuwait for a week, and the first few of those days we were driving back and forth across country getting our vehicles, from the (?) seeing how the Kuwaitis had been living in their high standard of living. This first place we come across, I don’t even think they had electricity or running water. It looked like these people were living in mud huts. I saw kids walking around with no shoes. It was like I’d stepped back in time.
ELLEN: Obviously, you guys were coming through on trucks. What was the reaction of these people in these towns?
JOHN: Either what I noticed….at the time, I was driving the truck so I was a little….
ELLEN: You were driving the truck?
JOHN: Yeah. When I wasn’t looking at the road, if they weren’t ignoring us, they might stand on the side of the road and wave to us. I’m sure in that village, being that it’s still…it was Shiite territory, and those were the ones who were oppressed by Saddam and his tribe.
ELLEN: So they were happy to see the American soldiers.
JOHN: Yeah. Looking at the level of their low standard of living, how could somebody not be encouraged to have us come in there to boot out the guy that put them into that position?
ELLEN: Yes, that’s a good point.
JOHN: I didn’t get any pictures of that but some of the other guys were getting films. Looking at it later, at the base we ended up at, we thought, “How can the people around us live as good as they did, and the people down south just live in squalor?”
ELLEN: Yeah, right.
JOHN: We drove. It took us three days to drive up through there. We drove, I think it was five hundred miles in three days.
ELLEN: Were you ever in any kind of danger?
JOHN: You’re always kind of in danger. At that time, you really didn’t have to worry about the IED’s, the road-side bombs. IED’s are Improvised Explosive Device. At the time, being so early on in the campaign, you’re still more likely to get shot at with AK47’s and RPG’s than you were to get hit by a bomb. That was still earlier on. We didn’t see any action on the road up, but we’re driving through there, and a couple of times…there’s always gonna’ be times where you worry, especially if you’re around urban areas. You’ve got people you don’t always know if they’re friendly to you or not. We were expecting the entire country to be like a big desert. The first village we go through, it was still a desert. Most of it was. But once we got by the Euphrates River, parts of the land around the Euphrates looked like a jungle. You’re not expecting that out in Iraq.
ELLEN: No, not at all.
JOHN: I’ve got some of the pictures, and I’ll show you some of that stuff. I remember crossing the bridge going over the Euphrates River on the road up, looking along the side of the river and I’m sitting here thinking, “If I didn’t know that I had just driven though a desert, I’d swear that I was in the tropics.”
ELLEN: Yeah. I would never have expected that.
JOHN: Just palm trees and green. It’s what you see by a river. I’m like, “Man! Maybe this won’t be so bad.”
ELLEN: Yeah. It looks like Palm Springs.
JOHN: Little did I know. We ended up, after three days driving, we ended up in the Sunni Triangle, at a place called Al Habbaniyah, right between Fallujah and Ramadi. At the time, Fallujah had already gotten a reputation for being a tough place. A lot of guys were referring to it as “RPG Alley” because there had been a lot of RPG attacks at the place.
ELLEN: RPG standing for….?
JOHN: Rapid Propelled Grenade. It’s an old Soviet anti-tank weapon. It’s like their version of the bazooka. There’s a lot of them around. On our route, instead of going through Fallujah and having a short trip, they had us go drive out into the middle of desert and cut around the whole area. Instead of coming into the base from the southeast, we ended up coming from the southwest. It was really out of our way, but it was probably a lot safer.
ELLEN: Yes. That’s good.
JOHN: The base we went into we ended up calling “ Camp Manhattan.” I’m guessing it had to do with the nearest town right by Fort Riley is Manhattan, Kansas, the little apple.
ELLEN: Oh.
JOHN: I’m guessing that because we were from Fort Riley, that’s probably why they changed the name to Camp Manhattan.
ELLEN: You guys had a sense of humor then.
JOHN: Yeah. We had about nine hundred troops that were there in the task force, which I was a part of. Then the rest of the brigade and brigade headquarters went to Ramadi to set up shop there. They named their base camp “ Junction City”, and that was the other town right by Fort Riley. I’m sure they changed the names since we left. At least we can name our bases after our old homes.
ELLEN: That’s right. A little bit of homesickness.
JOHN: We actually lucked out at the base that we got onto, because it was an old Iraqi Air Base. We had actually bombed it back in ’91, and Saddam never rebuilt it.
ELLEN: So you took it over.
JOHN: We moved in, and because it had already been an Iraqi Air Base, we had buildings to move into.
ELLEN: Excellent.
JOHN: We had to actually clear out almost all of it, because the guy…we actually took over for a unit of the 3 rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, but they were only just a holding unit. They were just sort of there. They were doing mounted patrols around the base, because they simply didn’t have enough people to fully man the base. So, we took over and started clearing out the base and clearing out the buildings that were bombed in and clearing out the rubble, moving into them, setting up barbed wire, building fortifications. The first few nights that we were up there, we were sleeping on our vehicles under the stars.
ELLEN: Wow. That’s where you were for a year then, on that old Iraqi…did you say it was an Air Base?
JOHN: Yep. It was a Training Air Base. It had a runway, but it wouldn’t have been big enough to support any of our cargo planes. The best we could get on our base was helicopters. The thing that kind of threw us for a bit was actually that there were locals living out on the base.
ELLEN: There were?
JOHN: Yeah.
ELLEN: Were they working there on the base?
JOHN: Some of them were. It turns out that some of the translators that were working for the previous unit, because they kind of feared for their families lives, they were actually allowed to move their families onto the base for protection. When we first got on there, we didn’t know about this. So at night, we had locals and some people walking around the base. We don’t know who they are, so we suddenly throw on the lights and aim machine guns at them, not knowing who they are until finally someone said, “They live on the base. Leave them alone.” I think the first full day that we were there, I think the first thing we actually dug…we actually had to dig our own latrine.
ELLEN: Well there’s a memory for you.
JOHN: Yeah. I remember having to…called piss-pipes, having to put pipes in the ground and bury them part of the way so the odor wouldn’t come back up.
ELLEN: Oh man.
JOHN: The other one was boxes that you had to do your business in that you put behind tarps. Then everyday there would be a burning detail, they’d burn off the waste. We were quite grateful a couple of weeks later when they finally brought in port-a-johns.
ELLEN: Oh excellent.You were probably never so grateful in your life.
JOHN: Those first few days we were eating those MRE’s, for the first few weeks. Then they finally brought in what we called T-rations, which are like a giant tin, like a foil tin. I think a full set of T-rations would feed like 50 guys. Finally we got those, and they were a little higher quality than an MRE. We were able to get those for breakfast and dinner for like a few months, and we still had MRE’s for lunch. It was a little nicer being able to get a T-ration instead of an MRE; although sometimes breakfast, it was kind of debatable.
ELLEN: Yeah. I saw a picture of that egg.
JOHN: When you’re looking at an egg and it’s green or orange…..
ELLEN: Well, they wrote a book about that, Green Eggs and Ham.
JOHN: I’m pretty sure it wasn’t due to preservatives.
ELLEN: So now you’re at that base. What were some of the jobs you had there? What did you do?
JOHN: Earlier on, because we were still taking over from the other unit, we were mainly still working on clearing out some more buildings, setting up barbed wire…
ELLEN: To secure the base?
JOHN: To secure the area. I actually broke my ankle within like the first week, falling off a truck.
ELLEN: You did? Oh no. Did they treat you right there or send you off somewhere?
JOHN: At first, we didn’t know it was a break. They thought it was just a sprain. For like two months, I was walking around in this...well, for the first month, I had a cane that I’d made, walking around on a cane. For that first month, instead of doing manual labor, I just sat down at a fueler truck and would fuel up vehicles as they came by.
ELLEN: What made you decide it wasn’t getting any better? Or getting worse?
JOHN: After the first month, it started to feel better so I was actually walking on it. That second month, I actually ended up on night guard duty at the Ammo Dump. And being that it was night duty, there was not as much going on. The place was completely surrounded by barbed wire.
ELLEN: So guard duty was really not that big of a deal there?
JOHN: Well, it was kind of bad to have the day shift, because you had the sun beating down on you. Nights were actually not too bad. You didn’t have the sun, and it was usually open. It actually can get kind of cold at night.
ELLEN: That’s what I heard. The desert can get cold.
JOHN: It was cool. It wasn’t too cold, but it wasn’t hot, which was nice. It was nice in that because we had the night shift that meant that when we got back the first eight hours they couldn’t touch us. They had to let us sleep, because everyone else was sleeping at night.
ELLEN: That’s only fair. So you’re on guard duty and then…
JOHN: Finally after a month of guard duty, I finally said, “Look, I still have pains in this thing. This is not right that two months later I’m still having problems with my ankle.” So I told my squad leader that I’d like to go to the Aid Station, because my ankle is still giving me trouble. So I go to the Aid Station and they say, “Well the TQ,” the next base that’s right by us, “they just got in an x-ray machine. So, we’ll take you over tomorrow.” They said, “Oh! You broke your ankle,” when they finally x-rayed it. I said, “Great. That ought to explain it.” It had already been two months. I mean I was walking on it. They said, “We’ll give you some crutches and an Ace wrap for now.” I guess because of the kind of break I had a cast wasn’t called for. I never was able to completely grasp just what kind of a break it was, other than they said it was an emulsion fracture. But beyond that….
ELLEN: Do you have any trouble with it now?
JOHN: No.
ELLEN: Oh good.
JOHN: So after that, I had to wait another month. They put me back on the fueler. So I had the crutches and the Ace wrap.
ELLEN: You said you’d driven a truck over there, too. Were you bringing supplies back and forth or men?
JOHN: If we were with like a transportation unit we probably would have. Our trucking duties…we might go to another base to pick up supplies, but most of our duties we were like core support. We were actually up with the units like we’d have the ammo for the tank. If guys got in to action and needed ammo real quick, we’d be the ones to go to run up there with a truck and get them ammo.
ELLEN: So if they were in the midst of something going on, you had to….
JOHN: We might have to do that or like we had guys who were going on missions everyday. We’d have a fueler go out to meet them and top them back off, because we never knew when we might need the extra vehicles to go out. We’d have people running fuelers to keep everyone else running. Our cargo trucks were snatched up a lot of times to go to the coast to pick up the T-rations from the next base and pick up the food supplies. We’d have the guys with the fuelers every once in awhile might have to go to the next base to pick up extra…top off with more fuel for the fuelers themselves. We had guys who would be guarding local workers who would come onto our base and actually do manual labor. I did that for a little while, too.
ELLEN: I know you said you did guard duty, and then you also issued ammo for a while so you…
JOHN: I think ammo I ended up doing for the seven out of twelve months that we were there.
ELLEN: Really? What does that involve?
JOHN: A lot of guard duty, sort of sitting there making sure nobody comes in. (END OF SIDE A)
JOHN:(BEGINNING OF SIDE B) Then if somebody comes by and needs ammo, going over to the ammo pile with them, filling out the paperwork and issuing it out, making sure they get what they signed for. But other than that it’s a lot of sitting around. You kind of get (?) after a while. I think the only reason I ended up on that for so long was because…
ELLEN: Okay we were just talking about you issuing ammo and…
JOHN: They got this weird idea that I could be trusted. I’m not sure if he was playing with a full deck of cards. They decided it was probably just easier to give him a couple guys you could trust to keep him placated than make trouble with it. That’s partly why I ended up doing ammo for seven months, just because the guy thought he could trust me. It turned out to work, but then a lot of times for twelve hours a day I would just sort of sit there, “I wonder if anybody’s going to come get ammo today.”
ELLEN: Oh man.
JOHN: It ended up being that that was also the place that they would dump off a lot of the captured weapons, ammunition and explosives that we’d find, when they were out doing missions. So there’d be days where I’d be really bored. It’s like, “Hmmm. I’m bored. I’m going to learn how to field strip an AK-47.” I’d just go pick up an AK-47 and would just sit there. I had plenty of time, making sure there was no ammunition in it, of course. “How do I take this thing apart? Oh. That worked.”
ELLEN: You guys were never under attack where you were, were you?
JOHN: We took a lot of mortar and rocket fire, especially in the earlier days. Most of the gun fighting, shooting was done by the guys in the tank units or the infantry units. The mortar and rocket attacks, after the first three weeks, they really started to die down in our area. I don’t remember what it was called, but we had these radar units that can actually track incoming rocket and mortar rounds. They can track them while they’re still in flight before they even impact, and they can track where they’re getting shot from. When we had that radar unit on our base, we had two heavy M-109 Paladin’s self- propelled artillery, like 155mm cannons and three or four mortar tubes, so when the rounds still in flight, before it’s even impacted against us, our own artillery is already turning their guns to shoot back.
ELLEN: In your opinion, were we ahead of....
JOHN: Oh yeah. Technologically, we were years ahead, but they were pretty good at improvising what they needed.
ELLEN: I think mentally it’s hard to deal with the fact that they would do these suicide missions, I suppose.
JOHN: Well, suicide missions didn’t come until later, actually.
ELLEN: Oh.
JOHN: When we first got over there, our brigade got attached to the 82 nd Airborne. We were from the 1 st Infantry Division. The 82 nd was short on troops, so we got sent over and we were attached to the 82 nd. They were the ones that actually had the radar unit that was put at our base. That spring when they started rotating out the divisions when the 82 nd left, it was decided that even though our own 1 st Infantry Division was finally deployed, too, that all the new units that were coming into the rotation to take over for the units that had been there for a year, they were already at one hundred percent on troop numbers. It was decided that, “Well, your brigade already is set where you are and you’ve been there for six months, you’re going to sit there for another six years but the Marines are taking over your area the 82 nd has, so you’re going to be attached to the Marines.” It kind of made for some interesting situations being attached to the 1 st Marine Division.
ELLEN: In what ways?
JOHN: With the 82 nd, we had all of those radar units so we could shoot our own artillery right back at the guys who were hitting us. Well, the Marines were anticipating that they were going to do things quite differently from us and do it the Marine way. We go out there and we have heavy artillery, heavy tanks, and in our bases at minimum, we would have at least a few hundred troops. Well, they had the idea that they weren’t going to need heavy artillery or heavy tanks, and they were going to have a lot more little bases scattered around the country and be out among the locals. They were even going to… for the first month, they weren’t even going to wear desert uniforms. They were going to still wear their green woodland uniforms for the sole purpose to show that “We’re in the Marines; we’re not the Army, and we’re going to do things different.” When the 82 nd left and the Marines took over, we had…finally were able to get…stop having T-rations, and we were able to get, “hot chow”, which was a step up from T-rations. It was more edible, I guess. It was better. Then the Marines take over, “We don’t have the same refrigeration facilities as the 82 nd, so you’re not going to get the same kind of food that they were giving you.” It was hot chow, and our cooks ended up going off base three times a day, just go driving over to the next base picking up enough food for like nine hundred soldiers and bringing it back and serving it, which actually meant that they would go off base more often than our combat patrols. Each time, they weren’t out there as long, but it was just the number of times that they were leaving the base. The other base was…. if you had a good arm, you could probably throw a rock to the other base. I’m kind of exaggerating, but from our front gate, you could see them, and you could probably shoot them from our base. Not that we would…..
ELLEN: But that’s how close they were.
JOHN: Yes, that’s how close they were. Once you left our base, you’re already within sight of the other one. They had the serviceable airstrip, so they could actually land planes.
ELLEN: One thing I’m curious about, other than some of the locals that maybe were living on the base….did you have any dealings with the Iraqi people and the kids? I’ve always seen pictures of the soldiers and the kids.
JOHN: For awhile, I was on what we called Escort Duty, where I’d get a truck and I’d go up to the front gate, and there would be a crowd of maybe a couple hundred people up at the gate looking for work. We’d go up there and, “I need ten guys to fill sand bags, or I need twenty guys to set up barbed wire,” or whatever. We had some of our translators…“We need twenty guys with boots so they could set up wire or we need like ten guys to fill sand bags.” So they’d get ten guys, and I’d load them up on my truck and we’d go do whatever we were supposed to do.
ELLEN: You would pay them for a day’s work?
JOHN: Yes. At the time, we would pay them at the end of the day. They were getting good pay, too. I mean for us, not even minimum wage, but for them….the first day I did that, I had guys…we were just going to be spreading gravel around so that we weren’t always on dirt making dust clouds and everything. It turns out that one of the guys on the work detail I had, he said he was a school manager. I’m not sure if that meant like a principal or a superintendent.
ELLEN: He spoke English?
JOHN: He actually spoke good English, which meant I duly appointed him to be my translator.
ELLEN: Good thinking.
JOHN: Which it made it easier to work with the locals. I wasn’t actually doing the work myself. I was keeping guard, making sure nobody was like mapping out our area or doing subversive activity. I was talking to him, and I asked, “Do you like working for us?” He said, “Oh yes. Under Saddam, I make three thousand lire a month. I have a wife and children. That’s not enough to raise a family. Now, I work for the Americans and work by day, do some manual labor, some light work, and now I can buy good food and good clothes and I can provide for them.” That’s positive.
ELLEN: Yes. That’s right. You’re doing something for the economy.
JOHN: This was before we caught Saddam. I asked him, “Well, what do you guys think about Saddam?” He said, “The only people who like Saddam are Saddam’s friends. You ask any Iraqi around here. We love George Bush. We love America. We hate Saddam.”
ELLEN: Oh, no kidding?
JOHN: Granted this was back in 2003. My info’s a little dated, but hearing that it was like, “Well, maybe we are doing the right thing here.”
ELLEN: How about the kids? Did you ever have any….
JOHN: Some kids. Some of the guys had some older kids come to our base to do some work. Partly, they would come by in the morning. Over there, I guess, they did school in the afternoon, at least kids that would go to school. I don’t know if it was always enforced. We had some older kids that would come by maybe help fill sand bags or dig a trench. Some of them actually were able to speak English fairly well. A lot of guys actually were able to know some English. I think I remember the most that we dealt with some of the kids was when we were doing a practice for, “What would we do if our base was being overrun.” The truckers that I was with, we were supposed to go to the opposite side of the base and set up in some buildings over there. It was right literally on the edge of the base, right next to the town. The only thing separating the base from the town were two sets of barbed wire and like thirty feet of, we guessed, mined land. We’d go out there to set up, and we just had kids on the other side of the water jumping up and down waving, “Mister! Mister! I love you!”
ELLEN: Oh really? So they really did like the Americans.
JOHN: They seemed to. I mean, I don’t know if they were doing that because we were right there, I mean they could have just turned around and walked away.
ELLEN: Right. It could be that, too.
JOHN: We got, “Mister! Mister! I love you!” Some of our guys said, “I love you, too!” We wanted to be good to the people there. We didn’t want to make any more enemies, which is one of the things that we didn’t like about the Marines coming in. When they took over, they decided they wanted to do things different, get in good with the local people. The problem ended up being that they could have come in and made themselves look like the good guys, like “Oh, look at the 82nd. They were being so harsh to you people. We’re going to be nice here.” What ends up happening? The first couple of missions, they kind of botched up, because they didn’t know what to expect. That base was right by us. We were telling them what kind of things that we saw when our guys would go out on patrols. “This is what kinds of things you can expect. This is what happens. If you’re going to go off-base on a mission, this is what you should be bringing with you.” Well, for our guys, they were on Humvee’s at the least, they’d have at least improvised armor if not actual armor. This was still earlier on before the roadside bombs got really big. Always have the ballistic plate in your body armor that can stop an AK-47 round at point-blank range. Always have the plate. Always carry as much ammunition as you can. Unless you have to get off of your vehicle, stay on the vehicles. Well, their first mission from the base, they went off on foot. They didn’t have the plates in the armor, only one magazine of ammo per rifleman and just a short belt for their machine guns and their first mission off, they got like three guys killed. I’m hearing about this, and I can just imagine one of the terrorist guys sitting out there with his (?) saying, “Hey! Look! It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.” In short work then the Marines ended up cracking down even harder than the 82 nd had been. Shortly after that was when we had that first big battle for Fallujah in April, 2004.
ELLEN: Were you involved in that?
JOHN: At the time, I was on ammo duty.
ELLEN: So you weren’t.
JONATHAN: I had to maintain a truck with ammo on it in case we needed to send it out. We had some of our own guys…..they weren’t doing the fighting, but we did send out some of our scouts or some of the other guys on vehicles out just to do recognizance on the western border to keep people from going in or out and maintaining security along the edge. They didn’t actually go into Fallujah itself for the heavy fighting.
ELLEN: You mentioned these missions. Are you comfortable talking about those or about what you saw?
JOHN: Some of them weren’t too bad, like the longest mission I was on; we drove to Ramadi to pick up mattresses. The time when I went, we drove through Ramadi, which probably wasn’t the smartest of ideas, given how big the crowds were, and that we often got stopped in traffic. Nothing happened, luckily.
ELLEN: But it could have.
JOHN: Yeah. You could kind of tell that something had changed when about five or six months later when we were on our way to drive back through Iraq to get leave. We first stopped in Ramadi to pick up some extra people and drop some other people off. The driving had taken like two hours to drive through Ramadi. We ended up going into the desert, going around….taking the long way around, taking like five hours but it was a much shorter trip. It’s easier to spot somebody out in the middle of the desert than it is in a crowded city.
ELLEN: You said that towards the end roadside bombings got bad?
JOHN: They found that it is the most effective weapon out there.
ELLEN: You mean the Iraqis would…..
JOHN: Some of those are Iraqis, and some of them are other foreign volunteers. We found people from all over the Middle East. It’s a weird situation. I don’t know if they wanted to blame us as scapegoats for the sort of problems they’ve had over there or what. While we were over there, the bombs got more sophisticated, got bigger. At least around where we were, they kind of learned pretty quick that if you get into a fire-fight with us, odds are, we’re gonna be the ones going to be coming out on top. We’re actually smart enough to realize with your weapon, you’ve got two sets of sights; you’ve got your front sight and your rear sight. You line up the front sight in the middle of your rear sight, and that’s where your bullet is going to go. Most of the time these guys just put it to your head and just spray an arm, just blow them all out there. A lot of them have the ideology of “If Allah Wills It”, like if Allah wills it that these rounds or these bullets are going to kill that guy, he’s going to die. If he doesn’t will it, he’s not going to die. That’s why you have these guys spraying from the hip or just sticking their guns around the corner and just spraying the area.
ELLEN: Were they known for booby-trapping?
JOHN: To an extent. If some things…like things they thought that we might want for souvenirs, maybe they might set up with a trap. They were there but they weren’t too common. I wasn’t sure how common until actually a couple weeks ago, I actually had to teach a course on the roads…the IED’s…to my reserve unit so I was able to get statistics on that. They are out there, but they weren’t too common.
ELLEN: You mentioned some of the things that they did booby trap, which were….
JOHN: Just anything, basically.
ELLEN: Dead animals even?
JOHN: Dead animals. You might see a dead dog on the side of the road with wires coming out of it.
ELLEN: What did you do when you saw something like that? Leave it go or would you…
JOHN: It kind of depends on the situation. Either you might stop and call in the EOD team, the Explosive Ordinance Disposal, or sometimes you might try and drive past it. Earlier on, you could drive by more often because they weren’t as big, but also that’s partly because earlier on our vehicles didn’t have as much armor on the vehicles as we do now. The better armor we had on our vehicles and the better tactics, the bigger the bombs would get.
ELLEN: You said they booby trapped garbage which I imagine would be quite a big...just big piles of garbage.
JOHN: Yeah. Some of the places, sanitation didn’t seem to be too big of an issue.
ELLEN: Yeah, based on what you said about some of the towns you went through.
JOHN: It kind of threw me off that there would as much trash around as there was given how much of a neat-freak Saddam had been. I mean, he wouldn’t shake people’s hands, because he was afraid of getting germs. He was telling his people, “If you can, you should be bathing twice a day. If you can’t, you should be bathing at least once.” Then seeing how much trash there was….like that first village we had gone through and saw the squalor they had been living in, it was kind of surprising.
ELLEN: You weren’t over there when he was captured.
JOHN: Yes, I was.
ELLEN: You were? That must have been….
JOHN: The first few days we just thought it was like…maybe they caught one of his doubles or it was a hoax. Finally…no, they really captured him. Hey, that’s cool.
ELLEN: I bet the morale just went through the ceiling.
JOHN: It gave it a little bump, but for us, it was kind of like, “Okay. They caught Saddam. There are still other people out there.”
ELLEN: Just as crazy as him.
JOHN: Yeah, if not crazier. It kind of varied. The roadside bombs were there before him, and they were there after him.
ELLEN: Not a lot changed after he was caught, in other words.
JOHN: From my perspective, no. Maybe for some people it did. I mean, just given the kind of conditions that he was in. He was always getting moved around from place to place so he wouldn’t get caught. I’m kind of guessing that he probably wasn’t actually too active in leading the resistance against us.
ELLEN: I’m going to ask you kind of a fun question. Well, I know what you did for fun; you took guns apart and put them back together.
JOHN: That was one of the things.
ELLEN: What did you guys do for fun?
JOHN: A lot of guys got portable DVD players.
ELLEN: Boy, that’s sure changed.
JOHN: I’m sure if they’d had them in Vietnam, the guys would have got them in Vietnam. We actually had locals…the trusted locals would actually be like…. they might go to Bagdad on Sundays, because it’s not a holy day for them. They’d go to Bagdad and pick up a bunch of bootleg DVDs, bring them back to our base and sell them for like five bucks. It was like, “I can get a movie for five dollars?” Soon after, they’d have two movies on a disk still five dollars. It was five dollars for a DVD.
ELLEN: You never went into Bagdad, did you?
JOHN: No, I didn’t go to Bagdad. I’m trying to remember one of the places I went to, whether it was Bagdad or not, but I don’t think it was. We could have DVDs to watch. Spades ended up being the card game of choice in our unit. I never learned to play, but I found out other ways to do things. I actually got pictures of one day we actually had a baseball game where we made a ball out of tape and a rock, and for a bat, I don’t remember what we used, some kind of stick and we wrapped that in tape to give it more of the shape of a bat and used sandbags for bases and played baseball. That was at the first building we lived in. In November, we moved to a different building that was better to live in. Behind that one, we actually made our own volleyball court out of chain link fence and some engineer tape so we played volleyball together. We got a volleyball somewhere.
ELLEN: I’m impressed with your ingenuity. Sandbags leads me to ask you something else. Was that a real issue, the sand? Did it get into everything?
JOHN: Yeah. You got used to it. It kind of was…because there was always sand. I remember the building we moved into…well, both buildings…every morning or sometime during the day you’d sweep out your area, just so it wouldn’t build up. The earlier problems we had with sand were sand fleas. We didn’t really notice them later after the first couple of months.
ELLEN: Sand fleas? I don’t even know what a sand flea is.
JOHN: They’re just like fleas, but they’re in the sand.
ELLEN: They don’t bother humans?
JOHN: They do. They can.
ELLEN: But you just didn’t notice them after…
JOHN: After the first couple of months, we didn’t really notice them. But that’s also about the time that we got shower facilities set up. And actually, the first showers that we had were….at the time we didn’t know what to expect. We actually had brought our chemical de-contamination shower in case there were chemicals weapons used against us. So, we rigged up the shower just to use as a regular shower. Most of the time it was really cold, but a shower is a shower.
ELLEN: It probably felt good out there in the heat sometimes.
JOHN: It was odd thatit was cold water, and we were out in the desert and it’s hot.
ELLEN: I know we had talked earlier before we started interviewing that you had seen some things that were very difficult to talk about.
JOHN: Yeah. It’s one of those things….some of it’s just the kind of stuff you can really only talk to other veterans about who have seen that kind of stuff.
ELLEN: Who understand?
JOHN: Yeah. There are just some things that you’re not really expecting to see that can be done to the human body.
ELLEN: Things you had come across driving just along the road?
JOHN: Things you’ve seen, sometimes the effects of those roadside bombs.
ELLEN: Yeah, that would be difficult. I’m sure you made good friends over there? Some good buddies?
JOHN: Yeah. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen them since I left active duty, but I’ve found I’ve made other friends.
ELLEN: I guess everybody stays over there a year. So as your year was coming up….
JOHN: Some of the guys that were coming from Germany were only there for six months. It kind of depended on the unit. Some guys were there six months. I think most of them it’s a year, though. The Marine rotations are only seven months. I mean, it’s nice that you get to go home sooner, but on the down side though, if you are there longer, you can form closer ties to the local people. You have more time for them to learn to trust you and to trust them, and to work better with them.
ELLEN: That’s a good point.
JOHN: You always want to be on good terms with the locals, because you don’t want to have any more enemies against you than you need.
ELLEN: That’s true.
JOHN: The more they trust you, the more likely they are to help you out. You might be out on patrol, and one of them might stop you, “Mister, Mister! Don’t go that way. There’s a bomb! Bomb!”
ELLEN: They would tell you stuff like that?
JOHN: If they trusted you, and they thought you were the good guys.
ELLEN: Did you ever have anybody who helped you out that way?
JOHN: People in my unit did. I, personally, didn’t have that happen to me. We did have times where they would warn us like that. I remember reading in Stars and Stripes, the newspaper we got there, that they had an article about a kid who actually turned in his own father for being a terrorist cell leader. Then they employed him as a translator.
ELLEN: They rewarded him. That’s good.
JOHN: Even gave him his own uniform.
ELLEN: So you knew your time was coming up. I’m going to ask, “How did you feel?” knowing you’d be leaving. Were you relieved? Were you glad?
JOHN: Yeah, in a way, I was a little….. it was mostly, “Finally, we get to go home!” In a way, partly because I had spent the majority of my time in that ammo dump. In a way, I kind of thought, “It wasn’t too bad. I could probably stay for a little longer.” I mean, it had been a year so…
ELLEN: Yeah. Right.
JOHN: We started doing some paperwork process to go back, to leave Iraq. We kicked up maintenance, re-zeroed our weapons to make sure our sights were still set up to still fire…shoot our weapons right if we had to on the way back, got briefings. One of the ones was actually a Chaplain’s briefing when he said in front of us, “This country sickens me.” And this is our Chaplain!
ELLEN: The country…. I hope he’s not meaning the U. S.
JOHN: No. We were still in Iraq at the time.
ELLEN: Okay, good.
JOHN: “We’ve got people stabbing each other in the back, assassinating each other, all of this murder, death and destruction. It sickens me, and I’m the Chaplain.” We’re kind of sitting there saying, “You’re preaching to the choir, Sir.”
ELLEN: “Yeah, we’ve seen it too!”
JOHN: I mean, there were a lot of locals that we had gotten to be friends with who we knew pretty well. We’re still getting attacked and getting hit with IEDs. Yeah, we’ve made friends here, but there are still a lot of people who want to kill us.
ELLEN: Was it pretty routine that you guys would get hit with bombs and stuff?
JOHN: Routine in the way that you could pretty much expect that. There was a pretty good chance that somewhere you could get hit just about any day that you went off base. Not that… we didn’t get hit everyday, but everyday there was somewhere in Iraq somebody got hit with something. I think in our year that we were there, we had 22 or 23 dead.
ELLEN: From your….
JOHN: From the guys that were at our base.
ELLEN: These were just guys that had gone out?
JOHN: Most of them they had gone out and got shot or got hit with a bomb. One of them actually was in a helicopter that got shot down. There were a couple of them, I think, maybe. We had other wounded, but I mean….there were units that apparently had gotten hit harder than us, I’m told.
ELLEN: It wasn’t anybody you ever knew, was it?
JOHN: Some of the people.
ELLEN: That’s hard, I bet.
JOHN: It’s especially hard on my parents, because one of the guys was actually from Lake Forest, one of the guys that I knew. So they hear, “A soldier from Fort Riley, Kansas, from the Chicago suburbs was killed today.” So, my parents are kind of freaking out.
ELLEN: Right, they’re not knowing yet that…
JOHN: I mean, they hear, “A soldier from Fort Riley, Kansas who’s from North of Chicago…..”
ELLEN: You were able to keep in touch with your parents, though.
JOHN: It started off with letters. It might take like two weeks for a letter to get through. They did have some kind of satellite phone set up. They only had like two of them, and usually, you weren’t able to get through just because of how many people were trying to get through to call home. But then, I think it was in maybe March, I think, they finally got set up with the MWR, the Morale, Welfare and Recreation Center, where they actually were able to send out packages where…they had like twelve video game systems and TVs that they were able to set up for us to have entertainment, to sort of blow off some steam, sixteen laptop computers with satellite dishes set up so we could use the internet, four satellite phones, and then a big screen TV that we used for our movie theater.
ELLEN: Boy, things have really changed.
JOHN: Partly the reason that they had to give us more to do on our bases because unlike Vietnam where say you could go out to the village and interact and be with the locals. Us? No. Earlier on, they had a couple of cases were guys might be out on patrol, and maybe they stopped in a shop to buy something and they got shot in the back of the head.
ELLEN: So, you really put your own safety at risk if you left the base.
JOHN: So unless you had to….. so we improvised some of our own entertainment, but they also provided more for us to do, because we couldn’t really leave the base.
ELLEN: That’s great.
JOHN: They even had like two ping-pong tables, too. And our movie theater was another one of our ingenuity things. We had the big TV, and we set up a box a couple feet off the ground, but to make it so everybody could see, and to get that movie theater feel, we set up risers. The base that we were on actually had a movie theater from when it was an Iraqi air base, which we actually would have used but we couldn’t find a new screen for it. So we ended up going in there, ripping out the actual movie theater seats from the Iraqi movie theater and set them up on our risers so when our guys would go to the movies, it kind of feels like you’re going to the movies because you got the movie theater seats going up towards the back and you feel like a movie theater. I mean, it wasn’t a big screen like a movie theater screen, but it was like a 50” TV or something like that.
ELLEN: Not too bad.
JOHN: Yeah. Every time that I was off guard duty and they weren’t showing a movie, I got a couple of video games in or use the internet equipment to do email. That way I could talk to home.
ELLEN: Yes. That’s amazing you e-mailed them.
JOHN: For the last couple of months, AT & T actually got a satellite phone trailer set up right outside the MWR building. You could use phone cards, so I’d call home. That’s actually how I found out that my dad had kidney failure.
ELLEN: Oh no!
JOHN: I called home like a week before his birthday, because I was able to get in it at that time. He sounded fine. I said this was sort of an early birthday present in case I can’t actually call home on your birthday and then a couple weeks later, I got a letter and find out, “your dad’s kidneys have failed.” Finally, I was able to call home. I said, “Hey! Why didn’t you tell me anything?” They said, “We didn’t want to worry you.” I mean it’s nice they didn’t want to add more to my worries, but I still have to know.
ELLEN: It’s your dad. You want to know. When you came back, the reaction you got from people when you came back...were you embraced and welcomed back?
JOHN: If people talked to me, I was welcomed back pretty well. I was anticipating having a lot of people be against what I did over there, having been there.
ELLEN: Really?
JOHN: You mainly hear about people who were against….were for the troops, but were against the war which in my opinion is complete bull because our job is war. If you’re against the war, that’s basically saying you’re against us.
ELLEN: I’ve heard people say, “No war is good, but…..”
JOHN: Granted, every war is bad.
ELLEN: Right. I agree with you.
JOHN: I think partly I was anticipating that kind of (?) partly because, right by Fort Riley, back in Kansas is Manhattan, Kansas, and that’s the home of K State. There’s always been some hostilities between some of the college guys and soldiers. Some of us were kind of figuring that the college kids who, you know, are going through school on mommy and daddy’s pay and not actually going to the military and going to war were probably going to be against us. I kind of thought maybe that when I started going up to college to the College of Lake County or to some other people, and actually, I never had anybody start arguing with me or getting into fights with me. I don’t know if either there’s not as many of those kinds of people out there as I was led to believe, or if they’re afraid to come up to me to my face and tell me that. The only people who I’ve really kind of, that I’ve seen kind of put up that kind of, not just anti-war, but anti-soldier or anti-military stance are people on the internet, you know, where you have the anonymity and you can be a coward and get away with it.
ELLEN: Yeah.
JOHN: If somebody had come up to me face-to-face and said that they think that I’m a murderer or any kind of protesting, I probably would punch them in the face.
ELLEN: Well, not knowing what you’ve been through…..
JOHN: I could see somebody saying that they don’t think that we should be over there. Really, we shouldn’t have to be over there. They should be able to do it on there own. But, the fact is, we are there.
ELLEN: Yes, we are there. That’s right.
JOHN: Debating about whether or not we should be there is pointless. We are there. We’re gonna’ be there for awhile.
ELLEN: Exactly. You mentioned the College of Lake County. So, is that what you’re…taking classes now, working towards a degree?
JOHN: Currently, I’m working in International Studies.
ELLEN: Oh!
JOHN: I’ve got Philosophy of Religion, partly in case because I’m still a reservist. It’s partly the case. At the time, I wasn’t really having too much trouble with stuff I saw over there…yet. And so I figured, “Well, if they send me back, maybe this will help me get a little better understanding of the people and their religion.” I mean, people here in the States might be religious, like they might go to church on Sundays and maybe pray before they have their dinner or whatever. We had some people who were like really “Holy, holy” and always tried to be religious. People here can’t hold a candle to the level of devotion that they have over there.
ELLEN: Right. Well, when you are willing to give your life up…you’re right. That mentality.
JOHN: In a way, from what I understand, Islam isn’t that bad of a religion. But it’s like with any religion, it’s the people themselves who do the practicing of it and the way that they interpret it. I mean, right now, nowadays most people they hear Muslim or Islam, and they think terrorist. Well, heck look at a few hundred years ago when we had the Inquisition.
ELLEN: It wasn’t a whole lot different.
JOHN: All religions are capable of doing all those things. It’s just that currently in the world, right now, the one that you hear about is Islam.
ELLEN: Right. That’s very true.
JOHN: I have Islam for Dummies. Some of the ideas aren’t that bad of ideas. I mean, it’s their duty to take care of the elderly and take care of the poor. Look at our country. Yeah, we might have welfare and unemployment, how often does the average American think, “It’s my duty to take care of the poor and take care of the elderly.”
ELLEN: Right. I see what you’re saying…the principles.
JOHN: Their family ties are a lot closer, it seems, than most traditional Christian families are. I mean, my mom talks to her mother every week on the phone, and my grandmother lives in Michigan. Over there, you might have your grandparents live, if not in the same house, maybe then next door or in the same town. You see them a lot more often. It’s part of that thing about taking care of them. It’s part of the respect thing to have ideas like, “They raised me, so now that they’re old, I’m going to take care of them.” It’s that sort of an idea but unfortunately, their religion has been hijacked by fundamentalists who have visions of the old glory days when Muslim empires were like the most powerful ones…people in the world, way back when.
ELLEN: I’ve covered just about everything I wanted to cover. Is there anything else you wanted to add or any statements you want to make that maybe I didn’t cover?
JOHN: I knew you’d asked…. I mentioned about building furniture.
ELLEN: Oh, yes. You said you had built furniture while you were over in Iraq.
JOHN: Yeah, when we were on that ammo guard… a couple of the guys had their own fold-up chairs, like camping chairs. Those kind of wore out after awhile. They’re only made for a certain weight. I’m not saying we were fat or anything, but the body armor and all of that gear we had really cranked up the weight we were putting on those chairs. We actually started using ammo crates and wood pallets and pulling them apart, building our own furniture for the ammo guards. I think I have a couple of pictures of them, too. Some of them we’d actually use the cloth from the old chairs. We actually used them to make seats.
ELLEN: You just made chairs, then?
JOHN: Mostly chairs, but we made a couple tables. It was mostly the chairs, though, because you were going to be sitting there for a long time. I think we improvised a bench. Some guys used sandbags but we used wood.
ELLEN: I think that’s a riot. That’s great.
JOHN: Yes, making ammo crate chairs.
ELLEN: Once again…your ingenuity. Just a riot. Well Jonathan, I want to really thank you…or John, I’m sorry, I want to thank you for speaking with me today. But most of all, I really want to thank you for your service to our country, and I just want to thank you for everything that you’ve done. It means a lot to everybody and you are a hero.
JOHN: Well, the heroes are the ones who didn’t come back alive.
ELLEN: Well, you’re all heroes; those guys are heroes, too.
1. John, in Iraq, is pictured in the center with fellow Ammunition Stockpile Guard Crew members (l. to r.): William Brassfield, Charlie Hyde, John Fujiu, Patrick Peterson. 2. John, pictured in center wearing glasses. This picture was taken at basic training in Fort Knox, Kentucky, November 2001. 3. John pictured in combat gear in Iraq, 2001.