More From the Winter Soldiers
Winter Soldier II will take place March 13-16. Here are some excerpts from more soldiers’ stories. Credit to jimstaro on VetVoice.
SPEC. WENDY BARRANCO, COMBAT MEDIC | ARMY
Wendy Barranco was 19 when she served as an anesthesia technician at a Tikrit field hospital—from October 2005 to July 2006. She was just out of high school, like so many of her patients, including the first one she saw die.
…When the surgeon told us to get in there and keep massaging the heart… it was kind of surreal. I just stuck my hands in there and started doing what I needed to do. We all knew he wasn’t coming back. We were trying to make every effort, and then the surgeon said, “I’m just going to go ahead and call it.†That was it. That was when I stopped. And then we all kind of just walked away. I took a step back about six or seven feet and looked at his body, and it hit me: This guy is 19 years old, and he’s basically a kid. I saw myself on that gurney. That’s when my whole activism kicked in, because I started realizing what kind of crap war this is, and what kind of people it was killing, young men and women, kids, 18, 19, 20 years old.
SGT. JASON LEMIEUX | MARINES
“My second deployment was to Husaybah, from February to September of 2004. It was a meat grinder, incredibly violent, a whole different world than the Iraq I had left five months before. Husaybah was a nightmare. It was a place where human life lost all meaning for most people—American, Iraqi, or otherwise. The only life worth saving was your own. Among our forces there was blatant disregard for rules of engagement. Instead, there was an understanding all along the chain of command that those rules were a formality for the sake of political protection for the people at the highest levels—so they would be able to fall back on those rules and say, ‘Well, he did commit crime X, but we have this rule against it so we’re not to blame.’ My section had a 50 percent attrition rate. We went with 14 Marines and came back to the States with seven.”
SPEC. EDGAR CUEVAS | ARMY
In Tikrit, Cuevas was a scout—“binoculars, a map, compass, radio and a machine gun mounted on a Humvee. We conducted raids, mounted and foot patrols, checkpoints, gate guard, convoys …†He remembers the first time he was shot at. “They were aiming at us, but they weren’t getting anywhere near us. I was a gunner for a truck, and the gun I was firing was a 240 Bravo machine gun—the same rounds as an AK-47.
“I fired that toward a man, but not intending to kill him. I didn’t feel like killing someone. It’s not how I was raised. So I fired just beneath him—just to scare him, you know? It was a two-story building, so I fired underneath, at the building, just enough to kick up debris from the wall. He dropped the weapon and he ran off. He just took off. And I stopped shooting.â€
SGT. JABBAR MAGRUDER | ARMY NATIONAL GUARD
“I don’t think people here understand what it’s like to be occupied. To be without electricity, to have your house raided. I use the analogy of telling people to imagine if China invaded Southern California. All those factions in Southern California, racial, gang-related, that hated each other and fought with each other, would all of a sudden direct their attention to the Chinese. That’s what it’s like in Iraq. We’ve destabilized it and so it’s now a breeding ground for terrorists.”
Previous One Utah posts:
Return of the Winter Soldiers (March 3, 2008)
‘I thought I was signing up to do something honorable’ (March 7, 2008)
