| | As daylight began to fade on the evening of March 17, about 60 members of Charlie Troop waited for hot meals being trucked to As Sadah from Forward Operating Base Warhorse, a respite from plastic bags of prepared food. Some soldiers played cards or read books.
Specialist Jason Miera had just finished a set of pull-ups when he heard Sergeant Sebban scream to get down. “I heard him clear as day,” he said.
Immediately, he said, came the bright yellow explosion, followed by a thick ball of dust. “You couldn’t see one foot in front of your face.”
Five men from Charlie Troop, interviewed separately, all recalled that Sergeant Sebban yelled the warning that allowed some soldiers to take cover. Lt. Col. Andrew Poppas, the squadron commander, said Sergeant Sebban faced an instantaneous decision: to dive for cover and save himself or to shout a warning to others.
“He never sought cover for himself,” Colonel Poppas said.
The Wounded and the Weeping
Colonel Sutherland and Major Fenton’s two-and-a-half hour visit to Balad had followed a familiar routine, starting at the hospital, where they passed out Purple Hearts and consoled the wounded. Near the entrance they encountered a weeping first sergeant, who was in charge of the military policeman killed earlier in the day. “He was in the fight; he was on his 240 Bravo,” the sergeant said, referring to the dead soldier’s machine gun.
One wounded soldier, choking back tears, told the two officers he was shot in the lower back just as he warned his troops to spread out, so as not to present an easy target. “I looked back to tell my guys to stagger, and I got hit right away.”
Next, Colonel Sutherland and Major Fenton boarded a bus to the morgue. The routine was interrupted, though, when Major Fenton saw seven soldiers in the hospital parking lot.
One of the men, with a bushy red flattop, was shaking and crying. They were friends of the military policeman killed earlier in the day. Major Fenton and the colonel walked to group, where they prayed and told the troops it was all right to grieve.
In the military, “cultural norms, if you will, checkmate a lot of guys from healthy grieving,” Major Fenton said. “One of the jobs I have is to give them permission to do that.”
Major Fenton endured much grief even before deploying. While a chaplain at Arlington National Cemetery, he grew close to his driver, Cpl. William Long, who shuttled him from funeral to funeral. Corporal Long volunteered for Iraq, and was killed in June 2005.
“I wish I had talked him into not volunteering,” Major Fenton said. He said he also wished he had talked him into marrying his fiancée.
Major Fenton later adopted another soldier from Arlington. Eventually, he introduced his new son to Corporal Long’s former fiancée. They are now engaged.
Before deploying, Major Fenton worried how he would do. “I was self-medicating with alcohol, and became a crying drunk.” But arriving in Iraq seemed to lift the demons. “Something about having to do the job gave me strength.”
Then, a few weeks after getting here, he was shaken when he noticed Corporal Long’s name on the tall concrete memorial barrier. He had visited it before, never noticing the name.
Along with the brigade’s rising casualties, it led him to seek treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Sometimes you see four or five amputees, with no arms, no legs, or none of either,” Major Fenton said. “When the bed sheet lies flat and then angles up at the waist, it’s a horrific thing.”
Lying in bed at night, Major Fenton grows anxious when he hears footsteps crunch the gravel outside, fearing another death. One officer who lives nearby, Maj. Charles Poche, says a greeting when passing, to assure Major Fenton that grim news is not at his doorstep. “I usually tell him to go to bed,” Major Poche said.
A Purple Heart on a Body Bag
After visiting with the seven soldiers in the parking lot, Major Fenton and Colonel Sutherland boarded the bus for the morgue. Major Fenton visited the body of the M.P. alone, then Colonel Sutherland and a few other soldiers walked inside. Major Fenton said a psalm, the soldiers give a long salute, and Colonel Sutherland rested his hands on the body bag and prayed before placing a Purple Heart on top. “I talk to the soldiers, and I let them know that their buddies are going to be O.K.,” Colonel Sutherland said in an interview later.
In some months the military hospital in Balad sees more than 500 wounded soldiers from northern Iraq alone, said Staff Sgt. Tanisha Denton. Sergeant Denton offered Colonel Sutherland and his soldiers a familiar admonition: “Don’t take offense, but I don’t want to see any of you back here for a while.” But five and a half hours later they were back. Five soldiers wounded at As Sadah arrived, as well as three from the Fifth Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment shot on patrol in Baquba.
Colonel Sutherland moved from patient to patient, seeing newly wounded soldiers who now lie next to patients he visited just a few hours earlier.
After pinning a Purple Heart to their pillow or shirt, he told them that their buddies were praying for them and that they should call their families. He said it was all right to be scared, and that they should do what the doctors say. Drawing on his experience as an open-heart surgery patient three years ago, he told one soldier just out of surgery that it was natural to feel cold, a byproduct of the anesthesia.
“They are now understanding that they are mortal, at 23 or 24 years old,” he said. “I tell them they are going to go through drama in their heads. They have given enough to everybody else. They should just worry about themselves and their families.”
There was another stop this night. The soldiers boarded a bus bound for the morgue, where Sergeant Sebban lay in a body bag. They were joined by several soldiers who were close to the sergeant. They performed the same ritual they did earlier in the day, and boarded the bus again. Driving back to the hospital, the ride was quiet.
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