A Friend Under Fire

My friend, a native of New Jersey who attended the same Philadelphia-area university that I did, was stationed almost directly between the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in central Iraq.

For a while, he and his comrades were posted on a bridge (the one pictured above) that fed an exit ramp across the Euphrates river. This was a highway that had been in disuse since the start of the conflict and the Marines were involved in an effort to return use of the bridge to civilians in the area.

To that end, they moved their post off of the bridge to a site 500 meters away. However, in the weeks following this decision, about a dozen IEDs were placed on or below the bridge, only two of which ever actually detonated.

It is apparently a fairly common tactic among insurgents to send children in with these potential IEDs, usually in the form of small knapsacks or bookbags. The idea is that if the Marines don't open fire on the child with the decoy bag, the next child will be sent in to deliver a real bomb. Some children are suckered into this or bribed, others go willingly with a terrifyingly adult devotion to their cause.

My friend was patrolling with a sniper company one day shortly after the two real bombs had gone off when the trigger man spotted a child approaching the underside of the bridge. According to the orders the company had received in the wake of the two recently detonated IEDs, the sniper opened fire, killing the child.

Further invesigation revealed that the bag the child had been carrying was, in fact, empty.

This tragic illustration of what is happening in Iraq is not the only story my friend had. There was the eight-year-old boy who approached a patrol of Iraqi army officers and US Marines, begging for water. He quickly triggered a bomb vest he had been wearing under his clothes and took the lives of five servicemen, as well as his own. There was the other young boy who drove a car bomb up to a local school, killing himself and a dozen other children.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the conversation I had with my friend about these stories was how he told them. We discussed the sad sickness of a war that involves children, but he made it clear that, in the field, second-guesses are dangerous luxuries.

We can only wonder, from this side of the war, what these situations are doing to the men and women on the front lines. The statistics are daunting, but this is not that kind of article. Making men into numbers is part of the problem.

Let's try to keep in mind, as Memorial Day approaches, what exactly it means to serve your country, and that sometimes, even if someone returns physically unharmed, they may not have survived unscathed.

It is a debt we cannot repay, but we must never stop trying.

Image courtesy an anonymous friend of the author, with permission.