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Like thousands before him, a soldier comes of age

Mar- 5-2005 » Filed Under: TF Freedom

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By JACK LEWIS, GUEST COLUMNIST

NORTHERN IRAQ -- He's young enough to be my son. Annoying enough, too.

When I beat on his hooch door this morning to get him up for a mission, he was his typical floppy-jointed, addle-headed, eye-rolling self. It was pouring down rain, I was standing out in it wearing PT shorts and a raincoat, and I had no patience: "Get up, time to move. You're going down with Apache."

Long groan -- but he knew what the mission was since last night.

"Quit your bitchin', Y---," I told him. "You're lucky as hell -- you get to hang out at the castle, and I have to ride the hatch in this shit."

Y--- was going downtown to broadcast over the LRAD -- i.e., "Long Range Acoustical Device," a gizmo originally designed to warn boaters away from the exclusion zone surrounding naval vessels, while I was going to charge around town in one of Charger Troop's Stryker armored vehicles, broadcasting pro-election messages, pre-recorded in Arabic, from a manpack loudspeaker system.

"Yeah ... I guess," he said, rubbing the back of his head, sullen as a teenager, which, at 21, he practically is.

"Be at the office no later than zero-seven-thirty," I told him, before throwing on a uniform and $400 worth of rain gear to go there myself.

I was closing in on a peak experience of blood pressure when he slouched through the door at 0729.

"I took the trailer off."

"Oh," I said. "How we doin' on fuel?"

"I filled it last night."

"All right, let's get your pack together."

"I already got it, sergeant -- it's ready to go."

"Damn, Y---. I hardly know you!"

Goofy grin from him: "I do what I can, sar'nt."

And so I dropped him down at Apache's hangar, ran to the DFAC (dining facility) to get him a box breakfast, and presently, off he went into Tall 'Afar.

But I never went out on my mission today. After I put together a briefing memo for the squadron commander, I ran straight into the battle captain.

He said, "Oh.

"It's good you're here. Y---'s your guy, right? We got a report he was shot in the neck --"

"WHAT?"

" -- but apparently he was wounded in the hand. A fragment hit him in the chin, and it bled all over, and they thought he had a neck wound."

"IDF or small arms?"

"We don't know yet."

"Are they bringing him in now?"

"We don't know yet."

Everything takes too long, and the cavalry's axiom is true: The first report is always WRONG. And so I grabbed my troop data notes, and dropped the Squadron Commanding Officer's memo, and Capt. Murphy and I settled the report.

Be sure to read the rest.


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