A Time to Fold:
An Army Medic's Perspective from the Streets of Iraq

When I tell someone I was in the Army, they always ask if I served in Iraq. After learning the answer is yes, they inevitably ask what the experience was like.

There is no easy way to succinctly sum up a year of my life. I don't consider the experience painful, but I also don't like to diminish its magnitude with brief catch phrases. Usually I say, "Oh, it wasn't that bad. I enjoyed most of it," which is the truth. But I've noticed that people like to ask for more, for things that would make a good story about this guy they know who went to Iraq.

Iraq was miserable for a lot of people, especially those with families or better things to do with their time. But I was single and just waiting to complete my four years in the Army so I could get on with my life. I had nowhere else to be. When I started to realize how great of an opportunity it was to be there, I took on a positive attitude toward the situation – something I generally tried to extend to other people.

Our chaplain had the hardest job in my unit and he didn't even carry a gun. He always made it a point to know the soldiers by first name and once commented that he loved seeing me because I was always smiling.

I had my fears and worries, but as a medic it's hard to fear for your own life when so many people depend on you while fearing for their own. My cavalry unit spent most of the year looking for trouble while patrolling a Shi'ite ghetto known as Saddam City.

The city was renamed Sadr City after the former Grand Ayatollah who fought for religious freedoms for the large Shi'ite population in Iraq and was killed by Saddam's regime. In the beginning, no one was happier to see Saddam out of power than these people. Although dirty, hungry, and without running water or electricity – all resulting from the damage done to the infrastructure by American forces – the occupants of Sadr City were thrilled to share their town with us.

Unfortunately, the sentiment was not shared.

Sadly, the most important Arabic phrases I learned were apologies for the actions of my friends. I would never say that my fellow soldiers were bad people — just badly prepared and carelessly chosen for the task. Our "best and brightest" have never been accused of being the most gracious or the most appreciative, and when they start missing their families and the things that separate our lifestyles from the lifestyles of the Iraqis, they start placing blame on the local citizens.

For an American solder, training is focused on survival when it's not focused on overpowering and outmaneuvering an enemy. I vaguely recall a brief cultural sensitivity class given during three crazy days that we were in Kuwait before driving to Baghdad, but I can't be certain the exact date. I do remember most of the untested material, which included differences in hand gestures for demanding right-of-way while driving and a couple of things that would be considered offensive, such as showing the bottom of your shoes to someone.

But I never heard anything that indicated that Iraqi citizens were people in the same way our children, spouses, and parents were people. They were enemies and we were to forget we were guests in their country. We often joked that their country was now property of the United States.
Again, American troops are not bad people and I want to keep that notion in the forefront. They are soldiers and it's hard to understand the lives and mentalities of soldiers, and even harder to try to explain them.

Even so, I was disgusted on a daily basis by the display of disrespect my people showed the Iraqis. Unfortunately, I was low-ranking and powerless to stop it. My primary repressed emotion was guilt for saying nothing, followed by embarrassment for being affiliated with my group. I was well liked within my unit but labeled a "hajji lover" by my friends, which fortunately excluded me from participating in the malicious games that I still had to witness.

Often, a group of soldiers will spend every moment together for as long as a year. To add to this, many units are all male. If you've ever been exposed to a group of men in a heterosexual community who are shut off from all female contact, you know the kind of mentality it generates. Irrational notions that often start as humor evolve atrociously, and when given the power of the local police in a place where people are accustomed to tyrants, anything can happen.

In our country, a police officer would be imprisoned for some of the things I've seen happen to innocent Iraqi civilians. But combine the level of supervision many units are under with a common mentality that the Iraqis are less than human and it's easy to see why some soldiers don't worry about the consequences of their actions.

In the end, I decided we just don't belong in Iraq. We have the best of intentions, but every time we do a good thing for the Iraqi people, there is a soldier in a Hummer who speeds through a flooded street just to splash sewer-water, or another soldier that flips off a group of school-girls. There is no way to stop it. As we learned from Abu Ghraib or, more recently, the five soldiers who are accused of raping and murdering a young girl, the high-ranking officers don't necessarily accept "boys will be boys" as a valid excuse when someone is actually caught. But one of the first things a soldier learns in Basic Training is that a tattle-tale is not what you want to be, so things go unreported.

A good card player knows when to fold and the time is now. We need to look at the situation and understand the "cut" in "cut and run" merely refers to cutting our losses. We've been at war under false pretenses (anyone remember WMDs?) for long enough and now it's time to say goodbye. This will be an embarrassing chapter in American history but the sooner we can admit our errors, the sooner we can start patching them up.

Justin McPhee is a Petoskey native who served with the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Polk, Louisiana for the bulk of his four years in the Army. He was deployed to Iraq on April 1st, 2003, two months before his 21st birthday. Currently, he is attending Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.

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