“They’re using our good will, our good-nature policy against us,” says Sgt. Bobby Walls, a 38-year-old Pennsylvania Guard National Guard member. “The fact that we fight as the good guys sometimes turns around and kicks us in the can, you know?”
Interviews with members of the largest contingent of Pennsylvania National Guard troops deployed into a combat zone since World War II reveal mixed emotions, pride in a job well done and frustration with the people they were trying to help.
This group recently rotated back to the States after a year long mission in Iraq.
Fifteen from their ranks of about 2,000 were killed during the nearly yearlong deployment in Iraq’s Anbar province, a huge swath of land that’s a stronghold of insurgency. Two others are being investigated in connection with the shooting death of an Iraqi civilian earlier this year.
For the rest of these part-time soldiers, it can be a struggle as they return home this summer to regain the sort of normalcy they knew before spending a year with their lives in danger wherever they went. During stopovers at Camp Shelby in Mississippi on their way home, some talked about their experiences.
From the interview:
At night, they’d sneak into rural villages and urban areas, tracking suspected terrorists for hours at a time. Sometimes, they’d kill them.
Back at the base camp, Walls became hyper-vigilant. He’d fear if he went to sleep, he would die.
“You start realizing how vulnerable you really are all the time,” Walls says. “You’re not safe anywhere in that damn place, and that’s a bad feeling. Too many guys got hurt or killed just walking to chow … or running to the bathroom, and they don’t come back.”
Walls is proud of the work he did as a sniper. He said he killed “upper-tier insurgents” who would have likely killed or injured other American soldiers if they had tried to capture them.
He wonders, though, about the future of the Anbar region. The people “will not be pacified, they will not work with us. I don’t ever see it happening,” he says.
Walls says insurgents wear civilian clothes and use women and children as shields.
“If you’re going to fight the enemy, there are two ways to look at it. You either become just like them, fight them on their own terms or you take the heavy burden like we’re doing it right now and it’s going to cost American lives. It’s a hell of a price to pay but if you fight them on their terms, you’re no better than them.
“That’s the true dilemma of the soldier right now, to get his sanity and keep his morals, keep his integrity. And it’s hard. It’s a … minute-by-minute struggle … over in Iraq.”
And yet, our Soldiers are being held on charges of murder. They are being smeared in the press by United States Congressmen for defending themselves.
It’s just infuriating!
Here’s the real kicker:
Children looking for handouts of candy would often approach 1st Lt. Anselm T.W. Richards and the men in his platoon. The soldiers would oblige them, then ask for information.
Sometimes, the children would tell them who made bombs and dealt in weapons. Everybody in town seemed to know the answer.
One day, Richards says, the parents of a 12-year-old boy told him their son had been beheaded by insurgents because he accepted a soccer ball as a gift from soldiers.
“We said to the parents, ‘You tell us who did it and we will get them.’ They said if we talk to you, they’ll kill us as well,’” says Richards, a hedge fund broker from Philadelphia.
“That’s the fear in which these people live. That’s probably the biggest hindrance to them moving forward.”
Like Walls, Richards believes no one should be too quick to judge the small group of Marines being investigated in the Nov. 19 deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians, including unarmed women and children, following a roadside bomb that killed a fellow Marine.
“My question is why are people so curious and so eager to find fault with the Marines or soldiers whose lives are on the line,” he says. “Why is it their behavior that’s being questioned, not the behavior of the guy placing the IED, or the bomb.”
He adds: “If it’s because children were killed or women, it’s understandable, but you know what, those Marines who are killed are children of someone as well.”
Among the difficulties: Richards says Iraqi insurgents know the U.S. troops wouldn’t fire at a school _ “so they will set up on a school or put a sniper on the roof of a school.”
Richards says the region is safer than it was a year ago, though five of his men were injured by a roadside bomb just a few weeks before the end of their deployment. Among other accomplishments, he says his brigade helped expand the hours of available electricity each day and trained Iraqi police and security officers.
“I’m optimistic in that I feel like I’ve done everything that I can do and we as a group could possibly do,” he says.
“Is it enough? I don’t know because that area, again this is Ramadi … it’s just such a grip, the insurgency. For them to think or to see anything else is so foreign to them.”
This is what bugs me. This is a Pennsylvania company returning from Iraq – they are represented in Congress by someone like John Surrender MURTHA! Will he hear what they are saying? Will he support them? No. He’s just interested in becoming House Majority Leader – or is senile – or both.
Will the main stream media hear them? No, I doubt it. They are too busy looking for something – ANYTHING – they can hang around our President’s neck.
Here’s the reality as I understand it.
The people in the towns know full well who is on which side. They know who plants the IEDs, they know where the IEDs are. They are giving them shelter in their towns. So when the Americans go in there to get the bad guys, they have a real dilemma on their hands. They can not identify the enemy from the locals who are living in fear of the enemy.
The people in the towns aren’t sure if the Americans are going to stay so they are afraid to trust their own fates to the good will of the Americans. When they hear the demented ramblings of Murtha, Kennedy, Kerry and their little league of traitors, they are going to hedge their bets. So would I. They aren’t going to give up the terrorists until they are certain the Americans are going to see this through an not leave them to the very imaginative torture of their tormenters. We might leave them to be executed as was done during the Clinton administration.
When our Soldiers are accused of killing ‘innocent’ women and children or helpless men in wheelchairs, it might do us all well to remember that the terrorists have a habit of killing their own people so they can accuse Americans of doing it. They also have the habit of using women and children as shields.
As the soldiers in this interview say pretty clearly, they use our Soldiers good will and good nature against them. They KNOW our Soldiers are disciplined and moral and use that to trap and kill them.
There are those in THIS country who would see us lose this war on terrorism, would see our Soldiers killed, would see us submit to islam, just so they can point to the President they hate and declare him a failure.
I know it’s not cool to like President Bush. But to me that is beside the point. This is about the survival of our Soldiers and the survival and honor of our nation. You need to decide whose side you are on and start to get a clue about who our enemy really is.
This is an enemy who will behead a child just to send a message to the other villagers not to be nice to the American Soldiers.
Want to know more? Here’s what OUR guys are up against.
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Theres more from these Soldiers here.
Thanks to Freedom Eden for pointing to this article. Also see Texas Fred’s post on this same group of returnees.
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(MONONGAHELA, June 29) – Washington County Commissioner and Pennsylvania 12th district Republican Congressional nominee Diana Irey – responding to a statement by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, in which Pelosi says the Supreme Court’s decision in the Guantanamo Bay case “reaffirms the rule of law†– today released the following statement:
Take the time to go over and read it. It’s a good read and enlightening. She takes on the whole lot of em.
Jihadists have beheaded the Russian Embassy workers they kidnapped earlier this month. They filmed the beheadings, of course, and the film is available for viewing on the internet.
“The Foreign Ministry is doing all it can and using all channels to check the validity of this information.”