Full of Heart: My Story of Survival, Strength, and Spirit Read online

  I could see she was relieved.

  But here in my hand, less than a year later, I held my orders. I turned the envelope over a few times and then took a deep breath. I pulled out the slip of paper.

  We were going to the Middle East.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Crucible

  After several excruciating weeks of waiting, on March 8, 2003, we finally got word that we’d be shipping out within twenty-four hours. First stop, the staging area in Kuwait, and then on to the war zone in Iraq.

  During the anxious days before, I had taken my personal stuff home to Dalton to store at our apartment. And I stayed in regular touch with my mom by phone, often several times a day, telling her, “Not today. Not today.” Many times I’d drive all the way home just to spend the afternoon there.

  After we received our orders, I dialed the familiar number in Dalton.

  “Mom, it’s time. We’re going in the morning.”

  That evening, most soldiers were permitted to spend time with their families, so my mom and Celestino drove the 225-plus miles from Dalton up to Fort Campbell to see me off. We went to dinner at a Shoney’s in nearby Hopkinsville and then over to Nashville for a carriage ride around the city. Just a regular night out with the family, as though nothing unusual were about to happen. But it was.

  I deployed with the 2nd Brigade and the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) out of Fort Campbell. I was one among approximately 150,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq for the initial invasion, which would begin ten days later. Paramilitary teams had been inside Iraq since the previous summer, doing reconnaissance to identify senior Iraqi leaders for later targeting and persuading Iraqi military officers to surrender before the fighting began.

  We were called to formation at 4 a.m. Afterward, I packed the rest of my stuff for my mother to take back to Dalton. The other soldiers’ families began flooding onto the base to say goodbye. There is perhaps nothing more wrenching than a deployment farewell. Imagine the most tearful goodbye you’ve ever said to a loved one, then multiply it by a thousand.

  When our sergeant gave the order for the soldiers to line up to board the buses, my mom started crying. I wanted her to believe I was okay, so I held in my own tears. I pulled her in for a hug, and we stayed like that for a long time. I leaned back and wiped at her tears with my thumb.

  “Don’t cry,” I told her. “One way or another, I’m going to come back home. They can’t stop me. I love you.”

  She reached into her bag and pulled out a small box. She placed it in my palm. Inside was a mariner’s cross—a stylized version of a cross with the Christ figure atop a ship’s anchor and wheel—hanging from a thin gold rope chain. It is traditionally given to sailors as a symbol of protection. I put it on, comforted by its feeling against my chest. Overseas, I would often pull it out of my shirt and kiss it.

  “Be careful, mijo. I love you, too.” My mom made the sign of the cross over me.

  I boarded the bus and took a window seat. As we headed out toward the airfield, I craned my neck to watch my mother and Celestino until they were specks.

  By the time I’d turned my gaze forward again, I’d compartmentalized my feelings. The crying and goodbyes were over. I was ready to do what I was trained to do.

  The flight on a chartered jet to our staging ground in Kuwait, including a stopover in Rome to refuel, took eighteen hours. The distance between home and the oil-rich country of Kuwait, on the northwestern shore of the Persian Gulf, was more than seven thousand miles, but to me it might as well have been seven billion.

  The desert landscape of this tiny nation—one of the smallest on the planet, with a population of fewer than three million souls—was completely alien to a boy from the American South. To me, the flat, sandy Arabian Desert, which covers most of the country, looked like the moon. The frequent sandstorms were unreal. We’d be walking to the dining facility when we’d see way off in the distance a swirl of sand. Moments later, the wind would pick up and start tossing around pebbles and earth. We had to put on our protective goggles, which made us look like ninjas.

  I’d certainly seen poverty in El Salvador, so that element didn’t surprise me. But the cultural differences were conspicuous. One of the first things I saw after touchdown in Kuwait was a woman squatting on the side of the road, peeing. She saw us curiously checking her out, and she didn’t seem to care.

  I also was struck by the emptiness, all these people living out in the middle of nowhere. There was no feeling of cohesiveness in the communities, no sense of this being anyone’s home.

  We bided our time in Kuwait at a camp called New York—others stayed in Camps Pennsylvania and New Jersey—while we waited for orders and equipment. We trained every day, which included lots of PT, time on the firing range, and briefing sessions about what to expect once we got inside enemy territory. Our lieutenant showed us a map of Iraq, pointing out population summaries and information about enemy forces. He briefed us on the locations and responsibilities of friendly units. He told us what we could expect from enemy efforts and how to be on the alert for saboteurs. He particularly noted the enemy’s favorite tactics: ambush and mining the routes of transportation.

  As a private I was the low man on the totem pole. I did the sorts of jobs no one else wanted to do. If trash needed to be dumped, I dumped it. If someone needed something, I fetched it. I got ammo for other soldiers, reloaded weapons as ordered. But I did these jobs with that little nerve that wanted to see action always twitching in the back of my mind.

  At night we’d take to our twenty-man tents and hit the cots hard, mentally and physically exhausted. But then the warning siren would wail, piercing our ears and unnerving the hell out of us. We had to jump up, grab our weapons, pull on our gas masks, run to the defensive position inside the bunker, and wait for clearance. This happened frequently, so sleep deprivation was quickly added to the growing list of challenges.

  But fatigue and fear of attack were no match for my propensity for getting into the usual trouble, courtesy of my big mouth.

  Most soldiers, especially lower-ranking troops like myself, carried an M-16, a lightweight assault rifle, which had been standard issue since the Vietnam War. Lucky me, I found myself stuck with a weapon called an M249 light machine gun, also known as a Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW). There was nothing light about it. It weighed seventeen pounds empty and twenty-two pounds loaded, more than twice as heavy as the M-16. The soldier who usually carried this weapon hadn’t yet reached the unit. I was assigned his piece until he arrived to claim it.

  It wouldn’t have been a big deal except that training meant running with much of our gear, and running with the M249 was like hauling a camel through the sand. I invariably fell behind the group.

  “Hurry up, Martinez! Catch up, soldier!” Sergeant O’Shea would yell.

  During one particularly brutal run, my anger bubbled up through my sweat. “It’s bullshit that we’re running in this heat!” Little did I know that we were enjoying what passes for spring in that part of the world, where high temperatures were merely in the high eighties; come summer, the high would soar another thirty-five degrees or more.

  O’Shea didn’t like my griping. “Get your soldier in line before I smoke his ass!” he hollered at Sergeant Valdez.

  “Calm down, Martinez!” Valdez yelled at me in turn. “And shut your trap!”

  I knew that refusing to behave could result in an Article 15, a nonjudicial punishment that permits commanders to mete out discipline without a court-martial. This write-up can range from a mere reprimand to a demotion and a dock in pay. It’s usually placed in your service record and can make it difficult for you to climb the rank ladder.

  As much as I wanted to steer clear of an Article 15, the truth is I had opinions and questions. I didn’t feel I was entitled to answers, but I wanted more direction instead of orders. But my superiors didn’t take kindly to an expressive nineteen-year-old. The consequences were swift and sure: push-ups,
sit-ups, extra runs, and, worst of all, long-winded lectures.

  My mouth often got me into trouble with my peers as well. One evening while one of my platoon mates was changing his shirt, I saw that he was tattooed across the chest with our unit crest, an eagle’s talon with the word strike below it.

  I wondered aloud why someone would tattoo the symbol of his unit on his body.

  With great restraint, he told me that our unit was a brotherhood and he was proud of it.

  “I’d never get that tattooed on my body, because this isn’t a brotherhood!” I said.

  Our lieutenant overheard me. Oops.

  As he smoked me outside, he reminded me that our unit indeed was a brotherhood. At that moment I realized what he was saying: We were at war, not running around in the Georgia woods playing Army. At the end of the day, we had to be able to count on each other to get ourselves back home. That is a brotherhood.

  After about two weeks in Kuwait, our vehicles and equipment arrived. We were ready to drive our trucks across the border into Iraq. We were exhausted from the heat, from waiting, but we were unified in our desire to get in there and do our job.

  Before we left, our commanders told us what would go down if we took casualties. If something happened to a guy, we shouldn’t rush right in to give him aid, because we could be entering an ambush. Of course the Army doesn’t advocate abandoning fallen comrades, but we needed to follow a procedure so we didn’t jeopardize the mission and cause additional casualties.

  But to me, it was black and white. I said, “Bullshit. There’s no way I’m leaving anybody behind.” I found myself doing push-ups for that one. The Army didn’t need me to tell them how to run their operation.

  We were warned to distrust all Iraqis. Rumors flew about women being sent forward to consort with the troops to get inside information and insurgents strapping explosives to children.

  “If a child comes up to your truck, don’t stop, no matter what,” they told us.

  “What, we’re just supposed to keep going?”

  “Just nudge them out of the way and keep going.”

  How could I do that? I wondered.

  We’d all been trained to spot land mines and roadside bombs, but they blended pretty well with the terrain. They were like the bogeyman—you knew they were out there waiting to get you, but you didn’t know where or when.

  Driving along, we’d frequently encounter Iraqi locals walking alongside the road. We’d nod and pass by. Sometimes the inevitable happened: After a few minutes, we’d hear kaboom! The pedestrian we’d just passed had triggered a mine. Occasionally we’d cruise past bodies and body parts—land mine victims all.

  I remember one specific occasion when we passed a lone woman on foot. Her black abaya slapped at the ground, revealing her worn black sandals. Ten minutes later I heard the explosion. I wondered, How could you be there one minute, walking with a purpose, your sons and daughters waiting for you at home, and then the next minute you don’t exist? The sound of that explosion haunted me.

  The George W. Bush administration launched Operation Iraqi Freedom with several objectives: end the despotic regime of Saddam Hussein, which purportedly was allied with Al Qaeda; locate weapons of mass destruction (the existence of which was later found to be grossly exaggerated); secure the infrastructure and populace; and eventually assist in rebuilding the country and establishing a representative government.

  The invasion north from Kuwait through Hillah and Najaf would move on to Karbala and finally to Baghdad and then Mosul in the far north. Our division attacked through the entire country from south to north, conducting two of the longest air assaults in history back-to-back. The 3rd Infantry Division, the first conventional U.S. unit to enter Baghdad during the 2003 invasion, had basically bypassed the city of Karbala, about sixty miles southwest of Baghdad, in their race to the capital, so the city hadn’t been secured. The mission of the 2nd Brigade was to clear Karbala.

  In early April, my company received its orders: We were to clear routes and provide external and perimeter security while our units approached Karbala. It was a two-day fight to seize the city, incorporating ten battalions and around six thousand soldiers.

  Just a couple of days earlier, Jessica Lynch, an Army supply clerk from West Virginia, had been snatched back from the hands of Iraqis after her convoy had been attacked. She and a dozen other soldiers had been taken hostage. Lynch was the first American POW since World War II to be rescued (although in the months to follow it was revealed that the rescue was dramatized as more of a PR stunt than a rescue, since the enemy had fled the hospital where she was being kept before our forces swept in under the cloak of darkness to grab her). Eight members of her company weren’t as lucky—their bodies were recovered at the time of Lynch’s rescue.

  April 5 started at the miserable hour of 4 a.m. Stumbling around groggy, I gathered my gear, muttering, “This sucks.” We members of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, Delta Company, brushed our teeth, emptied our bladders, and put on our gear.

  Less than a month in the war zone, I had already reached the point where I was looking forward to seeing action. Plenty of times our sergeant had summoned us to explain our mission, and the other guys and I would tell each other, “Okay, now we’re getting into the real shit.” Then twenty minutes later we’d be told to stand down, that the assignment had been canceled or that it had been given to another unit. When we actually went out on the missions, they weren’t what they were cracked up to be.

  Many of us younger soldiers didn’t understand what we were doing in this war, thousands of miles from home. But when we were handed a mission, we always got worked up because inactivity could be so boring.

  Tasked with providing security for other military groups as they traveled through war-torn Iraq, this morning we found ourselves escorting an enormous convoy of about ninety trucks. I was in my HMMWV—a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Humvee—along with three other soldiers: Justin Hart, Joshua Hopkins, and Ernest Clayton. The vehicle was equipped with cloth doors and basic armor around a weapon mount on the roof. There was no air-conditioning to relieve us from the searing heat, the kind of heat that causes the landscape to ripple in the distance.

  Every time the group came to a halt, we all dismounted, observed the area, and waited for the next order. At some point we were told that we couldn’t travel along the road we’d originally been on, so we pulled off and three of the four of us got out to pull security. I was already exhausted from lack of sleep, and the sun zapped every last reserve of my stamina. Standing upright with my weapon, I dozed off for a couple of minutes.

  I was startled awake by Hopkins, our truck commander, or TC.

  “Martinez, it’s your turn to drive!”

  His permanent position was in the front passenger seat, and he called the shots. Out of the four guys in the hummer, only two of us rotated the driving.

  I’d developed a hatred of driving since we’d gotten to Iraq. It seemed I was always picked to drive when we were either going out or returning to camp late at night. In the pitch black, with helmet-mounted night vision goggles our only resource, I found it harrowing to try to propel a wide truck down a dark road. The stress is intense on the eyes and you can’t see anything clearly. Sometimes I would fall off the trail because I couldn’t see. A few times I got the Humvee stuck in a ditch, and we had to be pulled out. Sergeant O’Shea wasn’t amused, and frankly neither was I—all those missteps made me feel like a failure.

  But at the TC’s instruction, I took the wheel.

  Near 11 a.m. we received our second set of orders for the day, modifying our original mission. We were directed to pull security around Karbala while we waited for our command to decide the next move.

  We pulled up into a staging area, and Hart got into a firing position behind his .50-cal. Clayton, Hopkins, and I dismounted to pull security. We were parked for about forty minutes. More than the whole platoon was there, about seventy-five soldiers, but our vehicles we
re separated in case of enemy contact. Stinging sweat poured into my eyes.

  Then we received orders to push on along a route that hadn’t been cleared. This wasn’t an uncommon scenario at this stage of the game. We didn’t always have route-clearance teams and other explosive ordnance or engineer support. Units were required to clear on the move or, as we said, conduct in-stride breaches. This practice included firing .50-caliber rounds into berms and using bangalore torpedoes and other explosives. It didn’t seem like a great idea. I complained about it, and I heard others, including Sergeant Valdez, doing the same. But with no choice about the matter, we shoved the thought to the back of our minds and moved on.

  When American troops first took Baghdad, only our military police had fully armored vehicles, so combat soldiers would line the floorboards of their Humvees with sandbags to deflect blasts and repel bomb fragments. That’s how our unit outfitted our vehicles. Other units improvised armor for themselves out of scrap metal, calling it “hillbilly armor” or “hajji armor.” By August the Army would begin deploying “up-armor” kits that included ballistic windows and fully integrated armor to better protect military vehicles. But on that day in April, there wasn’t much more than a pile of sandbags on the floorboards between us and the enemy.

  I was ordered to move up to the lead group of the convoy. I sighed and pushed on the accelerator, driving the Humvee with one hand on the wheel and the other on the center console, like I was tooling around in my own car back home. Someone made a joke, and I remember laughing through my irritation. I turned onto a concrete road, following closely behind Sergeant Valdez in the Humvee directly in front of me.

  BOOM!

  My left front tire made contact with a roadside bomb.

  The sound crashed through my ears to my brain, banging it against either side of my skull. A pressurized blast wave unfurled outward at a pace of hundreds of meters per second. A secondary wind followed—a huge volume of displaced air flooding back into the vacuum—pounding me with debris. I felt the waves at my feet and then as they quivered up my body.