Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
U.S. News & World Report
May 21, 2007 Cover Story
By Alex Kingsbury
Four days before his death, Army Staff Sgt. Darrell Ray Griffin Jr., an infantry squad leader in Baghdad, sent an E-mail to his wife, Diana. "Spartan women of Greece used to tell their husbands, before they went into battle, to come back with their shields or laying on them, dying honorably in battle. But if they did not return with their shield, this showed that they ran away from the battle. Cowardice was not a Spartan virtue... Tell me that you love me the same by me coming back with my shield or on it."
A few days later, Diana replied. "Are you ok??? I haven't heard from you since Sunday and it is now Wednesday... I know you said you were going on a dangerous mission... I get so nervous when I don't hear from you... phone call or e-mail... I just hope and pray your ok honey... "
It was an E-mail Griffin would never read.
As the Baghdad security plan draws thousands more troops into densely populated parts of the Iraqi capital, the danger from roadside bombs and small-arms fire grows exponentially. The city has now surpassed Anbar province as the deadliest region for U.S. troops. Since the war began, more than 3,370 American soldiers and marines have been killed and more than 25,000 wounded in Iraq, and, in terms of American casualties, the past six months have been the costliest of the war. American commanders say they expect casualties to increase in the next three months.
One of those casualties was Darrell Griffin, felled by a sniper's bullet on March 21, 2007, while patrolling in Sadr City. He was fatally shot while standing in the hatch of a Stryker armored vehicle. I interviewed him on March 3, 10 days before his 36th birthday, at a forward operating base near the town of Iskandariyah, 35 miles south of the city where he was killed. The desert sun was bright, and he wore a pair of dark glasses, which covered his eyes but couldn't conceal a spasmodic muscle tic in his face. He was quite self-conscious about the tic, he confessed, but shrugged it off. "That's what happens after two combat tours in Iraq." We talked about a recent battle and about his collection of digital photographs chronicling his two tours in Iraq. He'd seen things, he said, that he could never tell his wife or family on the phone.
We had met the day before, inside a dusty green tent on the base. It was about 10 o'clock on a Friday evening, and the men of Charger Company's 3rd platoon, 2-3 Stryker Brigade, were preparing for a mission to nab a local suspected troublemaker who was holed up in a farmhouse outside of town. Griffin was a big guy, even without the bulky body armor, helmet, and "dangle"—what soldiers call the bits of gear that they clip, strap, or otherwise buckle to their uniforms. He had half a dozen rifle magazines strapped across his chest, two radios, a medical pack, a flashlight, a digital camera, and a variety of other pouches and pockets swollen with kit.
His rifle stock had a sticker of a white skull, and on his helmet written in black Magic Marker was the phrase "Malleus Dei," the Latin phrase meaning God's hammer. During his first tour with a different infantry unit, it was John Calvin's motto "Post Tenebras Lux"—after darkness, light. As he fiddled with all his equipment, he talked about the upcoming mission—how it was likely to be routine, how much things in Iraq had changed since his first deployment, and how the folks back home simply couldn't understand the chaos and carnage that soldiers see on a daily basis.
Embedded with Griffin's unit from the last days of February into early March, I met many of the soldiers in Charger Company. Griffin was a veteran in the unit and more than willing to chat about all he had seen. We mostly talked about a fight near the city of Najaf just a few weeks earlier. Assigned to recover the wreckage of a downed Apache helicopter and the remains of the two pilots, the 2-3 stumbled across what the Army called a Shiite doomsday cult known as the Heaven's Army, which had amassed hundreds of fighters and hundreds of civilians in a compound on the outskirts of town. The 2-3 dug in and called in airstrikes against the buildings, a bombardment that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.
The men spoke often about Najaf because memories of the engagement were still disturbingly fresh in their minds. Hundreds had been killed or maimed, including women and children. The 2-3 didn't lose a man. "Not even a sprained ankle," said Lt. Col. Barry Huggins, the American commander of ground forces at the scene. But several men were still having nightmares—a 19-year-old medic had dreams of treating a child with a missing limb. "And I have lots of photographs of what happened," Griffin offered that evening. "You should sit down and have a look at them." So we sat on his cot, and he began narrating.
There were hundreds of pictures, documenting his two tours with the Army's new Stryker brigades—crack units equipped with the newest vehicles and assigned to some of the toughest missions. We made it through only a few dozen pictures of the battle of Najaf and its bloody aftermath before it was time to go out on the raid, but we agreed to pick up it up again the next day.
The raid was unremarkable. Griffin and his unit failed to nab their target, and the platoon—with a reporter and photographer in tow—spent a few hours chasing five men who had fled the scene across open farm fields. Crunching through those fields, Griffin and I began talking about philosophy and politics and famous thinkers. He hadn't been to college, but he read widely and spoke with a remarkable clarity and urgency about what he had seen. The next afternoon, Griffin again opened his laptop. "I'd like you to copy these pictures and make sure that people see them," he told me. So I plugged my iPod into his computer and began downloading several gigabytes' worth of folders with titles like "SECOND DEPLOYMENT," "ELECTIONS," "TAL AFAR DEATH PICS," and "CLOSE CALLS."
"Would you like to see a picture of the first guy I had to kill?" he asked. It was taken at 12:33 p.m. on April 21, 2005, according to the time stamp. The young man lies dead, covered in blood and dressed in a blue sweater and white jacket.
Then there were pictures of the clash in Najaf in late January, with panoramic shots of the rows of weapons that were seized and the rows of corpses. "I'd never seen anything like it," Griffin said. "The destruction was almost biblical." He wrote about that battle, too.
My squad and I along with my platoon leader 1LT Weber established a strongpoint at the first corner that we approached. I noticed a mutilated child thrown against a wall from random bomb blasts and as I was setting my machine gunner for security, a man was trying to get out of the village with a dead baby in his arms, holding her as if she was still alive along with his wife who could barely walk because her face had been torn open by the bombing. As this all happened at the same time, a man brought a young 10-12 year old boy to me in his arms and it was obvious that the child was barely breathing but still alive. He tried to hand this child to me but I did not want to take my eyes off of all the villagers who were now approaching my position in droves. The man knew that this boy would die so he placed the boy next to a man whose legs had been blown off lying across from me and in the arms of a dead man this boy finally died. I witnessed so much carnage on this particular day that words and descriptions of the horror would become trivial in attempting to paint a picture of what I saw ...
I achieved my 8th confirmed kill in this village when I opened a door to what I thought was just another small room and upon entering, saw human bodies strewn on the floor, wall to wall, that had been placed there because the room had obviously been established as a casualty collection point. One man lying close to the door had been pleading for me to help him and kept pointing to his injured leg. I did not want to commit to entering the room because I had a blind spot to my front left and did not want to be engaged by any survivors; the room was strewn with massive amounts of AK-47's, magazines, grenades and other assortments of weaponry. I motioned for the man to crawl out and he would not or could not comply. He then looked dead into my eyes and suddenly began to smile at me while he reached for his AK-47. I lifted my rifle and fired 8 rounds into his forehead from about 3 feet killing him instantly ...
There was so much sensory overload as to the horrific that I was forced to make my squad work in cycles stacking bodies so that they would not have any mental breakdowns. Our local [Iraqi] interpreter "Ricki" even vomited from seeing this macabre spectacle. I knew that as U.S. forces in Iraq, we were definitely now in an even more unpredictable and unstable environment than I had thought prior to this.
May 21, 2007 Cover Story
By Alex Kingsbury
Four days before his death, Army Staff Sgt. Darrell Ray Griffin Jr., an infantry squad leader in Baghdad, sent an E-mail to his wife, Diana. "Spartan women of Greece used to tell their husbands, before they went into battle, to come back with their shields or laying on them, dying honorably in battle. But if they did not return with their shield, this showed that they ran away from the battle. Cowardice was not a Spartan virtue... Tell me that you love me the same by me coming back with my shield or on it."
A few days later, Diana replied. "Are you ok??? I haven't heard from you since Sunday and it is now Wednesday... I know you said you were going on a dangerous mission... I get so nervous when I don't hear from you... phone call or e-mail... I just hope and pray your ok honey... "
It was an E-mail Griffin would never read.
As the Baghdad security plan draws thousands more troops into densely populated parts of the Iraqi capital, the danger from roadside bombs and small-arms fire grows exponentially. The city has now surpassed Anbar province as the deadliest region for U.S. troops. Since the war began, more than 3,370 American soldiers and marines have been killed and more than 25,000 wounded in Iraq, and, in terms of American casualties, the past six months have been the costliest of the war. American commanders say they expect casualties to increase in the next three months.
One of those casualties was Darrell Griffin, felled by a sniper's bullet on March 21, 2007, while patrolling in Sadr City. He was fatally shot while standing in the hatch of a Stryker armored vehicle. I interviewed him on March 3, 10 days before his 36th birthday, at a forward operating base near the town of Iskandariyah, 35 miles south of the city where he was killed. The desert sun was bright, and he wore a pair of dark glasses, which covered his eyes but couldn't conceal a spasmodic muscle tic in his face. He was quite self-conscious about the tic, he confessed, but shrugged it off. "That's what happens after two combat tours in Iraq." We talked about a recent battle and about his collection of digital photographs chronicling his two tours in Iraq. He'd seen things, he said, that he could never tell his wife or family on the phone.
We had met the day before, inside a dusty green tent on the base. It was about 10 o'clock on a Friday evening, and the men of Charger Company's 3rd platoon, 2-3 Stryker Brigade, were preparing for a mission to nab a local suspected troublemaker who was holed up in a farmhouse outside of town. Griffin was a big guy, even without the bulky body armor, helmet, and "dangle"—what soldiers call the bits of gear that they clip, strap, or otherwise buckle to their uniforms. He had half a dozen rifle magazines strapped across his chest, two radios, a medical pack, a flashlight, a digital camera, and a variety of other pouches and pockets swollen with kit.
His rifle stock had a sticker of a white skull, and on his helmet written in black Magic Marker was the phrase "Malleus Dei," the Latin phrase meaning God's hammer. During his first tour with a different infantry unit, it was John Calvin's motto "Post Tenebras Lux"—after darkness, light. As he fiddled with all his equipment, he talked about the upcoming mission—how it was likely to be routine, how much things in Iraq had changed since his first deployment, and how the folks back home simply couldn't understand the chaos and carnage that soldiers see on a daily basis.
Embedded with Griffin's unit from the last days of February into early March, I met many of the soldiers in Charger Company. Griffin was a veteran in the unit and more than willing to chat about all he had seen. We mostly talked about a fight near the city of Najaf just a few weeks earlier. Assigned to recover the wreckage of a downed Apache helicopter and the remains of the two pilots, the 2-3 stumbled across what the Army called a Shiite doomsday cult known as the Heaven's Army, which had amassed hundreds of fighters and hundreds of civilians in a compound on the outskirts of town. The 2-3 dug in and called in airstrikes against the buildings, a bombardment that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.
The men spoke often about Najaf because memories of the engagement were still disturbingly fresh in their minds. Hundreds had been killed or maimed, including women and children. The 2-3 didn't lose a man. "Not even a sprained ankle," said Lt. Col. Barry Huggins, the American commander of ground forces at the scene. But several men were still having nightmares—a 19-year-old medic had dreams of treating a child with a missing limb. "And I have lots of photographs of what happened," Griffin offered that evening. "You should sit down and have a look at them." So we sat on his cot, and he began narrating.
There were hundreds of pictures, documenting his two tours with the Army's new Stryker brigades—crack units equipped with the newest vehicles and assigned to some of the toughest missions. We made it through only a few dozen pictures of the battle of Najaf and its bloody aftermath before it was time to go out on the raid, but we agreed to pick up it up again the next day.
The raid was unremarkable. Griffin and his unit failed to nab their target, and the platoon—with a reporter and photographer in tow—spent a few hours chasing five men who had fled the scene across open farm fields. Crunching through those fields, Griffin and I began talking about philosophy and politics and famous thinkers. He hadn't been to college, but he read widely and spoke with a remarkable clarity and urgency about what he had seen. The next afternoon, Griffin again opened his laptop. "I'd like you to copy these pictures and make sure that people see them," he told me. So I plugged my iPod into his computer and began downloading several gigabytes' worth of folders with titles like "SECOND DEPLOYMENT," "ELECTIONS," "TAL AFAR DEATH PICS," and "CLOSE CALLS."
"Would you like to see a picture of the first guy I had to kill?" he asked. It was taken at 12:33 p.m. on April 21, 2005, according to the time stamp. The young man lies dead, covered in blood and dressed in a blue sweater and white jacket.
Then there were pictures of the clash in Najaf in late January, with panoramic shots of the rows of weapons that were seized and the rows of corpses. "I'd never seen anything like it," Griffin said. "The destruction was almost biblical." He wrote about that battle, too.
My squad and I along with my platoon leader 1LT Weber established a strongpoint at the first corner that we approached. I noticed a mutilated child thrown against a wall from random bomb blasts and as I was setting my machine gunner for security, a man was trying to get out of the village with a dead baby in his arms, holding her as if she was still alive along with his wife who could barely walk because her face had been torn open by the bombing. As this all happened at the same time, a man brought a young 10-12 year old boy to me in his arms and it was obvious that the child was barely breathing but still alive. He tried to hand this child to me but I did not want to take my eyes off of all the villagers who were now approaching my position in droves. The man knew that this boy would die so he placed the boy next to a man whose legs had been blown off lying across from me and in the arms of a dead man this boy finally died. I witnessed so much carnage on this particular day that words and descriptions of the horror would become trivial in attempting to paint a picture of what I saw ...
I achieved my 8th confirmed kill in this village when I opened a door to what I thought was just another small room and upon entering, saw human bodies strewn on the floor, wall to wall, that had been placed there because the room had obviously been established as a casualty collection point. One man lying close to the door had been pleading for me to help him and kept pointing to his injured leg. I did not want to commit to entering the room because I had a blind spot to my front left and did not want to be engaged by any survivors; the room was strewn with massive amounts of AK-47's, magazines, grenades and other assortments of weaponry. I motioned for the man to crawl out and he would not or could not comply. He then looked dead into my eyes and suddenly began to smile at me while he reached for his AK-47. I lifted my rifle and fired 8 rounds into his forehead from about 3 feet killing him instantly ...
There was so much sensory overload as to the horrific that I was forced to make my squad work in cycles stacking bodies so that they would not have any mental breakdowns. Our local [Iraqi] interpreter "Ricki" even vomited from seeing this macabre spectacle. I knew that as U.S. forces in Iraq, we were definitely now in an even more unpredictable and unstable environment than I had thought prior to this.