Home from the fighting, a local Marine reflects on days in Iraq

[thedrifter]

October 05, 2003
?Day and night, nonstop'

Home from the fighting, a local Marine reflects on days in Iraq


By Tara Tuckwiller
STAFF WRITER

In July, the Sunday Gazette-Mail published excerpts from the letters that Lance Cpl. Dan Wyatt, a 26-year-old Marine, wrote home to his parents in Hurricane during his nine months in the Middle East. Wyatt is home on a four-week leave.

Lance Cpl. Dan Wyatt is a slender, gentle-spoken man with a tendency for understatement. He quit college and joined the Marine Corps because he wants to be a police officer, and he thought the military would be a good way to get experience.

On his first day of fighting in Iraq, he saw two men blown apart by land mines.

??OK, we need so many bodies to go up and stand around the perimeter,?? Wyatt remembers being told. It was the first day of the war, and his caravan was rolling toward Baghdad. It had stumbled across a cluster of tanks, apparently abandoned just moments before by the Iraqi army.

Wyatt was one of the soldiers chosen to stand guard while other soldiers did something with the tanks.

Then, ?right behind the vehicle I would normally ride in, there was an explosion,? he said. ?I didn?t know if it was a grenade, or incoming artillery.

?It was Staff Sgt. Alva. He was in his early 30s. He had stepped on a mine, and that took one of his legs off.

?It almost took one of his arms off, too. It was there, but mangled ... I was 100 feet away.? He remembers looking at what was left of the leg. ?That was just a pile of mush.? He remembers the quiet. ?He wasn?t screaming or anything. I thought for sure he was dead.?

Wyatt and his fellow perimeter troops were ordered to return. Less than a minute after the first explosion, there was another, just as close.

?Somebody stepped on another one that took his leg off,? Wyatt said. ?He was one of our younger guys ? a Navy corps man who was prepping the back of the ambulance? for the first victim.

?I knew he was alive. He was screaming like I never heard anybody screaming before.?

Wyatt and a young corporal, who was ?maybe 21 or 22,? looked at each other. ?He said, ?What do we do?? I said, Tell you what, if we just walk back [to the perimeter] and watch where we?re going, and stay in the tire tracks or the other footprints, I think we?ll be fine.??

And they were.

As for the two injured men, ?those were the first two casualties of the war ? so I?ve been told,? Wyatt said.

?We were told that the president awarded them the Purple Heart, and they were on Oprah Winfrey.?

Fedayeen torture chamber

That was the first day of the war. After that, Wyatt barely slept for a month.

?That?s how long the fighting lasted,? he said. ?Day and night, nonstop.?

He brought home the boots he wore on the march to Baghdad. Holes are worn through the tough leather uppers, and the giant lug soles are worn to a nub.

?You?re basically just living down in the dirt,? he said.

With disposable cameras, Wyatt captured photo after photo of himself and his fellow soldiers, M-16s slung over their shoulders, tramping through eerie buildings, obviously just abandoned by Saddam?s forces.

Such as Olympic Park. Saddam?s son Odai apparently thought he was going to convince the Olympics to come to Iraq, Wyatt said. He built a cavernous soccer stadium, complete with a lushly furnished luxury box for himself. Wyatt had a comrade photograph him in one of Odai?s upholstered Louis XV armchairs, and sitting on Odai?s personal gold-trimmed toilet.

?Here, I?m at the one-month mark with no shower,? Wyatt narrated, pointing to a photo of himself, shirtless and grinning, in the Olympic Park restroom. ?We found a trickle of water coming out of this sink, so we grabbed our washcloths and soap dishes and tried to get some of the big grime off. That felt so good.?

As they marched toward Baghdad, the soldiers met a farmer on the road. He told them he used to be in Saddam?s army.

?Everyone had to serve for two or three years,? the farmer told them. If you refused, Saddam?s men ?would send somebody to your house and start killing your family, starting with the youngest.?

The soldiers marched on to the headquarters of Saddam?s loyal Fedayeen troops. It was abandoned.

In the basement was an empty room. ?It had a big, gray metal door, with two big bolts on the outside ? and no handle on the inside,? Wyatt said. ?It had fresh paint on the walls and floor, but the neighbors knew what went on in there. They were glad to see us. They brought us flowers and little cups of tea.?

Wyatt believes the group had stumbled upon the Fedayeen torture chamber.

?We found human bones in the dirt out back,? he said. ?I just know if we had some of that luminol,? which forensics experts use to detect blood on clean-looking surfaces, ?that place would have just lit up.?

The soldiers slept there for two nights.

?That,? Wyatt said, ?was kind of creepy.?

Burial by bulldozer

At one point, Wyatt?s caravan halted beside a big piece of machinery ? it looked like a cement factory ? smack in the middle of the open desert.

?To this day, I don?t know why we stopped,? Wyatt said.

It was an ambush.

?You could see muzzle flashes? coming from the factory, he said. ?You could hear ?ping, ping? as the rounds hit the truck.?

Wyatt and the others lay in the dirt and fired back. There was no cover.

?This probably doesn?t sound like a long time, but that probably went on for 10 minutes,? he said. A specialist who stayed in one of the bullet-proof vehicles taped it all on his camcorder.

?There?s mud and dirt all over the windows, so you can?t see much, but you can hear all these shots,? Wyatt said. ?It didn?t seem that long at the time, but when I hear it on the tape, I think, man, that just keeps going and going.

?I wasn?t thinking, ?I?m going to die.? What was going through my mind was, ?I hope I just don?t get shot, like in the shoulder or something.??

He didn?t.

Eventually, Saddam fled and the war ground to a standstill. But not the deaths.

?We had two deaths after the war in our battalion,? Wyatt said. ?One was ? officially, they?re going to call it an accidental discharge of his weapon, but there?s a lot of talk that it was suicide.?

Another soldier came across an abandoned Iraqi bomb. ?I don?t know if they were trying to detonate it or what,? Wyatt said. ?They said that guy was pretty much dead before he hit the ground.? Other soldiers around him were injured. ?One, I think they amputated his arm. I think one guy lost his vision.?

And always, the dead Iraqis.

?I could?ve used up every picture I had taking pictures of dead bodies,? Wyatt said. He did take one such photograph. Two men are simply lying in a heap on the roadside. One of them is in his sock feet; his shoes are scattered beside him.

?Whenever we?d come across ? something like that ? we had a bulldozer with us. It would dig a hole, scoop up the bodies and cover them up. There was a little marker to say somebody was buried there. That was it.?

Peacekeeping in Karbala

Wyatt?s crew wound up as peacekeeping troops in Karbala. There, their barracks suffered mortar attacks and nightly shootings. ?Routine little things,? as Wyatt came to think of them.

?There was shooting every night, up until the day we left,? he said. One night, as he stood guard at the gate, ?a 10- or 12-round burst from an AK-47 went right above my head.

?You know, you had stuff like that going on during the war. But with the fighting supposed to be over, it did kinda startle you.?

Standing at the gate in the 115- to 130-degree heat, the soldiers had a chance to get to know the people of Karbala. Wyatt has a photograph of two pretty, smiling little girls: Zaneb, age 8, holding her sister Yam, a toddler. They lived near the base. The soldiers taught them quite a bit of English, Wyatt said. Some got their families to send American clothing for the girls.

Their 12-year-old sister wasn?t allowed to leave the house without being shrouded head-to-toe, Wyatt said.

?She was of marrying age,? he explained. ?In fact, her mother asked some of our guys if they wanted to marry her.?

Once, a man stumbled up to the gate who ?looked like he?d just gotten out of a concentration camp,? Wyatt said. ?He was a POW from the Iran-Iraq war, from the ?80s. He?d been a POW in Iran all that time, and he?d just been let out. He got back to Karbala somehow, and now he wanted his pay.?

With Saddam?s government in ruin, he appealed to the American army that now occupied his homeland. Wyatt asked his superiors what he should tell the man. He was ordered to tell him to go to Baghdad and plead his case there.

?That stuff kinda sucks, when you?re told to turn somebody like that away,? Wyatt said. ?There?s nothing you can do about it. You feel like an idiot out there.

?If anybody deserved some kind of compensation, it was him.?

Wyatt has a year and a half left in the Marines. He does not plan to re-enlist.

?I wish,? he said, ?that I?d finished my last year of college.?

To contact staff writer Tara Tuckwiller use e-mail or call 348-5189.

http://sundaygazettemail.com/section/News/2003100433

Sempers,

Roger

[the humper]

Correct the staff writer on th word usage. L/Cpl. Wyatt was not one of the SOLDIERS to guard anything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SF
NC