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Myles Hunt, now a national service officer for the Disabled American Veterans’ St. Louis office, was a staff sergeant with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, U.S. Army.
Myles Hunt enlisted in 1996, long before Iraq. “Hard times,” he explains. “It got me out of a bind.” He was 22, married, working as a welder in Carthage, Mo., but not making enough money to keep a roof over their heads. “What I expected? What I’d seen on TV: Full Metal Jacket,” he says. “But I joined the Army because the Marine Corps, I’d heard, were crazy. I didn’t want to be on a boat for six months at a time, the Air Force was too soft and the Coast Guard was closed.”
He spent the next six years training in tanks, gunning and reconnaissance. What amazed him was that he loved it. “I planned on being in the Army forever,” he says, his voice tight. “I was a career soldier.”
It was March 29, 2003, and Hunt and his fellow scouts were doing nighttime gunnery exercises in the field, outside Fort Polk, La., when the call came over the radio: Everybody go to the commander’s truck, now.
“He had a light stick, and he pulled out our orders and read them,” Hunt recalls. “‘In support of Operation Enduring Freedom …’” They were to ship out in three days. “I was a little scared, a little excited,” Hunt says. “It was the chance to finally do our jobs. And we were going into combat; that’s just a rush in itself.” He pauses. “Besides, I had 14 guys under me I had to take care of; I had to be excited for their sake.”
Nobody slept much that night or the next, he says. “We had to have everything ready to put on a bird and go to Iraq. We were a rapid deployment unit: boots on the ground in 72 hours. We landed in Kuwait and convoyed over to the berm that separates Kuwait and Iraq. The chaplain pulled everybody in, we all prayed. Then we went into Iraq—came in behind the Marines and flanked off towards Sadr City.
“My driver was playing ‘Highway to Hell’ through portable speakers, and I had seven years of training cycling through my mind. I kept running scenarios: If you are coming up to a building and somebody jumps out with a rocket-propelled grenade … if someone jumps from a rooftop and starts shouting … if my gunner is hit … I was taking everything in, absorbing my surroundings. Complacency kills.”
Promoted on Iraq soil to staff sergeant, Hunt served as a section sergeant and truck commander. That meant he was in charge in June 2003, when he led a convoy down what they called IED Alley. “A National Guard girl’s truck hit a mine, and it blew her up pretty bad,” he says. “I jumped on the radio, relayed a med evac, told my regiment to set up security, waved on the other big trucks. They just put the hammer down and got out of there, scared to death.
“We got her out of the truck, and I had to cut her britches and belt off, just picked up my bayonet and did it. There was a big hunk of metal sticking out of her backside, probably shrapnel from the mine. I put an IV on her immediately, had my driver holding the bag up. The medic came, saw the blood and froze.” Hunt snapped at him to pull himself together, reached into the medic’s frag vest for scissors and a bandage, and cut a slot around the shrapnel, because tugging it out would have done more damage.
“Last I heard, she was paralyzed but alive, and they weren’t sure if the paralysis was temporary or permanent.”
Hunt received a commendation for valor and returned to his charge: “winning hearts and minds, and all that crap.” What worked, he says, never made the news: He and his squad cleared schools where Saddam had stockpiled ammunition and made them safe for the children to return. Meanwhile, the unit interpreter was going into the city to listen to the prayers: “Half the time it’d be ‘We kill Americans on Wednesday,’” Hunt says. “But we got Sadr City under control.”
In September, they were sent out into the desert, to what they dubbed Camp Bohica (“Bend over, here it comes again”). “No shade, unexploded ordnance all around us. We slept in or on our trucks, and we had to eat MREs. They are in little packets with self-contained heaters.” Heaters? In temperatures that reached 146 degrees Fahrenheit, wearing uniforms streaked white with the salt of their sweat? “If you don’t heat it, you just pull the whole meal out in a clump,” he says with a shrug.
One day Hunt saw a truck with “Missouri Boys” painted on the side: The Missouri National Guard had arrived, with cots and air conditioning. Still giddy at the luck, Hunt left one morning to lead 10 trucks of engineers to Baghdad International Airport. The route took him back down IED Alley for probably the hundredth time.
“We were in first-generation Humvees, and they were pieces of crap. If you were getting shot at, and we got shot at all the time, you couldn’t get out. So we had our doors off,” he says. “It was me, my driver and my gunner. I’m scanning, and then I look over my shoulder and see my driver trying to light a cigarette. Oh hell no. I mean, I’ve got no problem with them smoking—sure, we had three cases of C-4 plastic explosives and 13 cans of grenades, but you’re in Baghdad, smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. Still, we were on IED Alley; he should have been concentrating on driving. I smack him in the back of his head and take his cigarette: ‘You watch the road; I’ll light your cigarette.’ I leaned over and lit it, and both of our hands were on the cigarette when the explosion ripped my left thumb off and a piece of shrapnel sheared his face. The force blew me out of the truck. I woke up 30, 45 seconds later hanging over a guard rail, covered in my driver’s blood.”
Training kicked in: He froze, listening for a follow-up attack. Then he realized the explosion had come from an IED. (It was a 122-millimeter artillery round about 18 inches long.)
“I took my helmet off, thinking, ‘Man, it kinda hurts.’ I let it fall, and it started filling up with blood. I thought, ‘I gotta stand up.’ I put my helmet back on, went to button my strap and realized my thumb was gone.
“I look up, and my driver’s laid out in the road. Between the adrenaline and the need to get to him, I was feeling no pain. I knew I was bleeding, but I didn’t know half my face was missing. The engineers were there by then, working on me. I was trying to get them off so I could get to my driver, so they tackled me.
“They had a bird on the ground in 15 minutes. That saved my driver and probably me, too; there was cerebral fluid leaking from my head into my eye socket. If you lose enough of it, you go brain-dead.” Hunt had 17 fractures in his skull and another 12 in his face. “When the helicopter arrived, I still had no clue where my gunner was. They put me on the helicopter—I’m looking around still, trying to find my guys—and then they put my driver beside me and my gunner above him. They don’t put the dead on with the wounded, so I knew they were alive. Then I went into shock.
“I woke up in the Baghdad field hospital. There were pieces of my eye left, they had to go in and finish digging those out. A day later they gave me my Purple Heart—my entire chain of command drove an hour to present it—and that’s when it sank in. My biggest fear was, ‘Am I going to be put out of the Army for this?’ And it came true. I appealed their decision, qualified my weapon left-handed, took the fitness test, did everything a soldier’s supposed to do. But it’s all about my job position: Could I perform the duties of a scout? You have regulations if you are missing so much of a finger or an eye.”
Hunt had nine surgeries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He points to the corner of his eye: “This bone’s out of my hip. This piece right here that holds my eye in is out of the roof of my mouth. This square graft is from behind my ears. I’ve got six titanium plates in my head.
“Nowadays they are keeping us in, guys in my shoes, but I was wounded in ’03. If I were doing anything but what I’m doing right now [helping veterans with disabilities], I probably would have tried to reenlist. I went from Walter Reed to Fort Polk, back in uniform for seven or eight months until I got put out. I was going to wear that uniform as long as I could.”
Hunt has a surprisingly mild case of traumatic brain injury—or TBI—which is considered the “signature injury” of this war. (See “The Brain & the Battlefield” story in this issue.) His theory is that the skull fractures and leaking cerebral fluid saved him from a more severe case by relieving the pressure on the brain. He has some memory loss; nothing he can’t cope with. He has PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder: “My wife kind of opened my eye to it,” he says, looking away. “I still scan rooftops. Things in the road—debris, tires—that makes me nervous. Driving—you have to obey the traffic laws, and we didn’t. I’ve got anger issues, but they’re controllable. Nightmares, yeah, but it’s nothing I really want on paper.
“The one big thing that helps me is just talking about it. But I don’t tell the details of the brain matter all over the car, just that I had to shoot this guy or that guy. Some things were just so horrifying that guys can only relive them involuntarily, by themselves. Nobody wants to remember that crap.”
Yet he’s wearing a metal bracelet so he won’t forget a buddy from another unit.
“Staff Sgt. Christopher Swisher, bullet to the brain,” he recites. “Hasn’t been off my wrist in three years.”
Sgt. Eric Shelvy, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, India Company, was with the first forces to enter Baghdad, and later fought in the famous month-long battle at Fallujah. He is now an assistant detachment commander stationed at the American embassy in The Hague, Netherlands.
Senior year at DeSmet Jesuit High School, Eric Shelvy was fed up with classwork, eager for “adventure, character building, separation from my peers—a unique distinctiveness.” In July 2002, he left for U.S. Marines boot camp as a high school graduate, then flew to Kuwait.
“We hung out in the desert for about a month,” he says. “Then the president gave the word, and we started moving north and didn’t stop until we got to Baghdad.” After the city was liberated from Saddam Hussein, Shelvy returned to the States for almost a year. In November 2004, his battalion was assigned to attack Fallujah.
“It was loud, and it was violent,” he says. “Hue City from Vietnam is what they compare it to. All-out chaotic urban battle for almost a month. We were on the streets, in the homes, buildings blowing up, constant gunfire.” They discovered 568 weapons caches, 26 IED factories and 47 mosques being used as fighting positions, and they detained 2,435 insurgents, reports Lt. Lawton King, media officer for the 1st Marine Division. (The number of civilian deaths has not been made available.) By November 15, the U.S. Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton had an estimate of 1,200 insurgents killed. Shelvy’s unit went house-to-house. Half-dead combatants fired AK-47s at them from the ground, sprang out of cupboards or dropped from ceilings. U.S. casualties that month were the highest to date: 141 killed, 1,431 wounded.
What got Shelvy through it? “You are with your friends,” he says simply. What do you say if someone’s having a rough time? “Most people didn’t,” he replies. “This is what you are trained for.”
The photographer embedded with Shelvy’s squad photographed skulls with flesh still clinging to the bone, bodies dragged bloody through the dust, Marines leaping across the tops of bombed-out buildings. The
3rd Battalion, 5th Marines received six Navy Crosses—the second highest award a Marine can receive—for Fallujah alone.
There’s an inverse law in this war: The worse the experience, the more matter-of-fact the account. Asked again what was hardest about that month, Shelvy says, “Just being tired. We slept on the ground or in houses or in holes”—or not at all, if they were in a 12-hour gun battle. Unit leaders got together at night, Shelvy says, to plan; in the morning the plans were executed. Word went all the way up and down the line, by radio and word of mouth.
“I wouldn’t say there was anything in particular that bothered me more than anything else,” he says. “Do I think about Iraq? Sometimes. But do I think about it negatively or have some type of negative condition that makes me think about it? Probably not any more than someone my age would think about college.”
A Vietnam vet, hearing that statement, shakes his head slowly. “I don’t believe his ass,” he says. “But I would have said the same thing.”
Did Shelvy lose any friends in Iraq? “Sure.”
One? More than one?
“Enough.”
Shelvy’s mother, Diane Guerra, says that two weeks after he arrived in Iraq, his corporal was killed. In Fallujah, he lost another good friend. “He told me a bit about it at the time,” she says. “Then he stopped talking about it.”
Jack Senneff, now an MBA student at Washington University, led 150 soldiers through Iraq as a company commander, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, Fourth Infantry.
“As cheesy as it sounds, I just had a sense that this was what I needed to do—some kind of service, some way to give back,” says Jack Senneff, who graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. He left for Iraq right after 9/11.
They sat on the Iraqi border for almost half a year. “I think there’d been this upwelling of ‘Hey, we need to do something,’” he says. He flew home in 2002—then back to Iraq in 2003. “When we flew to Kuwait, the lead element was already in Baghdad,” he says. “My division moved up behind them really quickly and took the lead.” They fought their way north through Samarra and Tikrit before linking up with the 173rd Airborne, which had already jumped into Kirkuk. “Along the way, we moved in tactical formation, in Humvees we called California Cruisers,” he says. “We took the nylon doors and top off, and I got my mechanics to weld a bar to the frame, and a guy would stand between the seats with a machine gun. We made different mounting systems over the year, got better and better at it.”
Others have raged about that early, inadequate equipment, now that the newer Humvees have thick bulletproof doors, thicker base plates to diffuse explosions and turret mounts to protect the gunner. “The only frustration I had was with myself for not having thought about it earlier,” Senneff says. “We could have worked on those mounts while we were still at Fort Carson.”
He’s quick to take responsibility. All of it. “My biggest fault was not saying earlier, ‘Hey, sir, what do we do after that?’” he says. “We overcame resistance, seized a Republican guard compound, seized an airfield in Tikrit, forced surrender of a large element at the Iranian border. Then, up and down the chain of command, we literally said, ‘This was what we had planned—what now?’ My battalion commander said, ‘Guys, I don’t know. Let’s get some presence out there, clean up any resistance that’s still out there, maybe do some rebuilding.’ My company was sent to Hawijah for what my commander thought would be a couple of weeks; he thought the war was about to end. Ten months later, we came home.”
By then, Senneff had learned to split his personality: “Half the time I was thinking tactically, and the other half I was working with local Iraqis to build a new government, hold limited elections, build a new police force, put in a water treatment system.” How’d they fund it? “I’ll probably be arrested for this, but we took the money from captured insurgents. I have no idea if it was legal.”
He spent his first months puzzling over social and political undercurrents; as he got to know Iraqis, he realized the divisions weren’t what he’d expected. “The way people align themselves is much more tribal,” he explains. “We had two major tribes, al-Jaburi and al-Alabati, and then clans, families. In many cases, the tribes bridge the ethnic fault lines of Kurd versus Sunni
and Shiite.”
Originally headed for a military career, Senneff has since changed his mind. (Almost 36 percent of his graduating class at West Point left after their first tour of duty, says Joe Tombrello, the deputy public affairs officer at the academy.)
The worst moments, Senneff says, were when soldiers under him got wounded. “Just one example: I had a soldier lose a leg with an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. He’s an awesome guy, a schoolteacher now, incredibly smart. Earlier that day I was going to all the foxholes, checking on everybody, and he and his buddy were off duty playing chess in the bottom of
the foxhole.”
When Senneff came home, he ran a gantlet of therapists screening for PTSD, but he figured he’d find his own way to deal with it. “I was very worried that I wouldn’t seem normal,” he admits. “It’s almost surreal being back. I was working at my new job, in an office, in a suit. There was a big boom—something fell off a truck—and I literally got down on the floor. The guy I was with was like, ‘Wow, dude.’ But it’s muscle memory.”
Sgt. Sonny Wolfe is a communications officer for the 5-73rd Cav/Recon, 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, stationed in the Diyala Province at this writing.
“This place is at the beginning and end of time. It’s like 18th-century Arabian Nights with current dress codes,” Sgt. Sonny Wolfe emails from the Diyala Province, a hotbed of Sunni insurgents, criminal gangs, former Hussein army and paramilitary forces and al-Qaeda Islamists. Wolfe’s almost 40, with two sons and a wife, and he thought long and hard about his decision to serve.
“The first year went by, and all I could do was watch on TV and listen to people do the Monday morning quarterback thing,” he writes. “They would say, ‘If I was over there, this is what I would do.’ I’d just listen and think, ‘Bullshit.’” He started talking, tentatively, about enlisting. “Most of my family, friends and clients [he was a personal trainer at Magna Fitness Center in Richmond Heights] thought I was crazy, but I felt that if guys like me didn’t join then, our shorthanded Army would be in trouble.”
His wife, Jodie Lee Wolfe, remembers seeing the resolve harden Sonny’s face after NFL safety Pat Tillman gave up a multimillion–dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army Rangers. “Sonny said, ‘If I join the Army, will you follow me?’ I said yes, not thinking he’d really do it. On August 3 of 2003, he called and said, ‘Honey, I enlisted.’” As he left for boot camp, he said, “You know I’ll never be back to St. Louis.”
“Excuse me?” Jodie said.
“I’ve committed to the next four years. You can move with me where I get stationed or stay here.”
“I’m going with you.”
Sonny was the one who got their easily distracted son, Mat, ready for bed; who did the bath-times; who provided the structure. “They’d go to movies together, eat lots of candy and come home sick as dogs,” Jodie says. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do
this alone.’”
At the time, she wasn’t close to his family. “Please,” Sonny said, “if there’s nothing else you do, put aside any feelings you have and call my mom every other day.” He was sent to Fort Bragg, just outside of Fayetteville, N.C. Jodie wasn’t in a hurry to follow—until what she thought was food poisoning turned out to be pregnancy.
“I cried the whole way to Fayetteville,” she recalls. “And poor Mat: He thought there were snipers in the trees. Two days later I was going to pack the car and go back. Sonny came home and found me in the empty walk-in closet, holding our cat and rocking back and forth weeping.”
He convinced her to stay, and they had a full two years together in Fayetteville before he was sent to Iraq. “They loaded the plane and then unloaded it, saying they weren’t going,” she recalls. “I was so relieved, drove home all relaxed. Then Sonny called and said, ‘I’m shipping out in 10 days.’”
He sees his second-born on a videophone once a week and emails Jodie as often as he can. “Mat is 14, very shy but very polite; 2-year-old Tucker is wild and fearless,” he writes. “I miss them so much.”
Yet when he was home on leave, Jodie says, “He was sharp with me, which is not like him, and he was sharp with Mat, and he was very tired. When we were driving, he said, ‘Jodie, you don’t understand: On the highway in Iraq, if a car even comes near us, we are told to start firing.’”
“Sometimes the Army brings out the worst in me,” concedes Sonny, who’s afraid he’s losing patience and doesn’t want his family to suffer. “You develop a lack of tolerance for bullshit or nonsense.”
He’s achingly proud, though, to be a member of the 82nd Airborne. “I like the honor of standing next to individuals who know the meaning of team,” he writes. “But to put pieces of your brother in a body bag at times sickens me. Some higher-ups like to call it the ultimate sacrifice. I think that’s a cheap way to describe it.”
He thinks every day about a young specialist named Marshall. “Marshall and I had an old man–young man relationship. I would tease him about being a Southern wannabe rodeo hillbilly. He would call me Old Balls. Sorry, but that’s what he called me. The kid had a great heart and did his job really well.”
One day a Bravo platoon was ambushed as a distraction, while two dump trucks drove in and exploded. “Marshall was the first man KIA,” Wolfe writes. “Nine of my guys perished, the worst loss in one day for 3 Panther 3rd Brigade 82nd Airborne since Vietnam. I went numb. I think when we get home and finally realize the men that didn’t come home with us are never coming back, that’s when it will hit and hit hard.”
In less than a year, 21 men in Wolfe’s squadron were killed in action.
“I don’t know what to expect when Sonny comes home,” Jodie says. “I hope he’ll talk if he needs to. A lot of these guys, the mentality is just, ‘Let’s kill somebody.’ But Sonny’s never been afraid to cry or to be honest.” And yet, when an IED exploded 30 feet ahead of his Humvee, he didn’t tell her for three months. “He said, ‘I didn’t want you to worry.’ He got a combat medal, and he wanted to tell me that, so that’s how I found out.”
He was scheduled to come home on August 21 of this year, but his service was extended until October 21. Then he was told it might be extended again.
“I don’t think St. Louisans realize we need more people in the fight,” he writes. “Fighting in large numbers sure would help me and my guys out. Where is my backup, where are my replacements? They’re at home having fun while the rest of us who volunteer take on the burdens of a nation at war. Not mad about it, just stating a fact.”
