Camp Victory, Iraq, 2010


The heat caught me off guard as I jumped off the helicopter, leaving me light headed and gasping for air. The pilot said it was usually around 120 degrees Fahrenheit but I honestly thought he was messing with me, trying to scare me or something. This felt like at least a hundred-fifty. I yearned to take off my flak jacket and Kevlar. Hell, what I really wanted to do was strip and jump in a swimming pool, a river, a pond, a puddle, anything! I staggered off the landing zone (LZ) towards a tent where a soldier was waving. The shade didn't make the heat the least bit more bearable but my wilting brain was distracted when I shook the soldier's hand.

"General Odierno, ma'am. Glad you made it safely." I recognized his voice as the one I had spoken to on the phone a few days earlier.

"Diana Rodriguez, General. Nice to meet you. Thanks for everything." The General beckoned me to follow him into what looked like the main building where he offered me coffee. I tried not to eye the steaming pot with disgust but I saw Odierno smirk.

"I feel you. Nobody ever really gets used to this heat. Your lucky though, I have some guys puking from this heat, like, literally, on their knees." Not exactly comforted, I gave a nervous laugh. Still grinning at my discomfort, he laid a map out on a desk.

"Let me show you where you're going today. Right now we're here, at Camp Victory and, depending on where the platoon's at with the mission you'll go outside the wire later." I asked General Odierno where the platoon was now and he told me they were in Sadr City, in Baghdad, right now, but would be back soon.

"You guys are goin' to Fallujah tomorrow so rest up." He led me to the tent where I would be sleeping. After settling in I went to the chow hall, more of a huge tarp really, where a group of soldiers were eating around a table. They were mechanics, most of them. I asked them if there had been any recent attacks. I asked them why they were looking at me all funny and one, baby-faced private answered.

"An attack at Camp Victory? You kidding? There hasn't been one since that suicide bomber two years ago!" I shrugged, determined to not seem timid or embarrassed, not in front of these guys. I asked them how long they'd been in Iraq and most of them had been here for two or three months. Asking them if they liked it here got me the same look that I got from the attack on Camp Victory question.

"Know anything about 3rd Platoon of D Company?" I was curious to here about the platoon that I was to spend around eight months with from other soldiers.

"The Gravediggers?" The baby-faced private spoke again. His uniform said his name was Harrison. "They're tough and mean. They're always yelling at us for being FOBBITS." FOBBITS are people who never leave the FOB, or the forward operating base, and they are the source of much teasing by other soldiers who leave the wire more often. "We've gotten into a couple of fights with them but that was just in the beginning of deployment. Now we know better." The group laughed but a few shook their heads.

"They're good soldiers, though. They just got a rough rep." Said an older soldier who sat picking at his food. This news frightened me a little but I was sure that meant they would make a better story if they were a little rough around the edges. Maybe they actually saw some combat, something a lot of soldiers didn't have the great pleasure of seeing here.

"I fix a lot of their cars cause' their always messin' 'em up so I got to repair them." A man with a southern drawl said. "I think they actually have races with the Strykers and Humvees, can you believe that? The Highers would freak." The 'Highers' were the commanding officers or officers of higher rank than Lieutenant. They were ridiculed and often hated by lower ranking soldiers who actually fought the war because Highers could order around soldiers who knew a lot more than they about what was actually happening outside the wire.

"I'm actually waiting for them to get back from Sadr cause' I know they'll have somethin' for me to fix." The man added. I asked them when they thought they would be back and, hearing that they would return soon, left to wait for them.


The "highway" from Baghdad to Fallujah was filled with so many potholes that after only ten minutes on the road my rear end was almost numb. The drive was around three hours long but that didn't include the inevitable mechanical problems, checks for IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and bathroom stops. The drive wound up taking seven hours, as a result of a suspicious man on a moped, a piece of string sticking out of the ground, and hordes of Iraqi children begging for candy.

Camp Fallujah was much like Camp Victory, dusty, a dull beige color, and the unbearable heat. It was smaller than Camp Victory though and there were mostly Iraqi Army soldiers here. The U.S. Marine Corps turned Camp Fallujah over to the Iraqi Army in 2009 but the Americans still came and stayed here and sometimes helped train the IA (Iraqi Army).

This time when I asked a few soldiers when the last time they had been attacked they didn't act like I was dumb but instead grimaced and looked at the ground.

"Last week insurgents put a bomb in a little kid and sent him in here looking for medical help for his mom." A Specialist named Wilson told me while he stood guard at the gate. "He blew up in the medical center. Four Iraqi civilians died and two US nurses were killed, I think ten were wounded. That was messed up, I can tell you. The Iraqis who died were all sick patients getting medicine.” A sick look grew on his face.

“Later I found a finger left when we were cleaning up. It looked like the suicide bomber but it could've been one of the patients. I can't really tell the difference anymore." He dragged on his cigarette. Another soldier guarding the gates walked over to us, joining in on the conversation.

"Hajjis are dumb guerilla fighters if you ask me. Blowing up a bunch of sick civilians with a little kid like that is not only sick but it's not winning no hearts and minds." Wilson shook his head and walked away. "Wilson has a kid the same age as the kid bomber. Don't tell him I said this but I think he's taking it really hard." We looked after him and then Wilson’s friend followed him back to the gate where an Iraqi driver waited for his truck to be inspected. All you could do here to get through things was to keep doing your job, it seemed. Thank god for jobs then, whatever it takes to get through.



Lieutenant DeNiro, otherwise known as Raging Bull from the film starring Robert DeNiro who shares her name. But after some time I realized that her nickname is not just because of her name. She was the only woman in her squad and she had a quiet, vigilant, toughness about her but one day I saw her explode at a couple of IA who had fallen asleep at their checkpoint and she had them paralyzed with fear for twenty minutes, I wouldn't have been surprised if one of them peed in his pants. She was quiet when she walked but when she talked she was quick and witty. The first couple weeks I was with 3rd Platoon she stayed guarded and distant but after I kept trying to start conversations with her she started to open up bit by bit.

Antonia DeNiro was born in Sicily, the island off of Italy. When she was nine years old her father shot her in the arm when he was drunk one night. Her mom took her and her two younger brothers to New Orleans where DeNiro's aunt had immigrated a few years earlier. DeNiro's father was involved in the Italian mafia although, as DeNiro always jokes, he was so low on the pecking order no one even counted him in it. He had a small piece of land where he grew various crops and gave it to the Mafioso in exchange for barely enough money to survive. He often beat his wife and kids but when he shot his nine-year-old daughter the whole family was shocked. He had drank a lot that night when he heard that he wasn't getting paid that month because he had gotten into a fight with another man higher up in the mafia and so he got out his gun, slurring that he couldn't take it anymore. When he tripped and fell and accidentally pulled the trigger and shooting the shocked Antonia in the arm. He passed out on the floor and that was when Maria, DeNiro's mother, took the three children and left, taking the pistol with her.

"When I was a teenager I started getting angry at my mom for staying with my dad for as long as she did, it's not like that accident was inconceivable, he was a dangerous man and he made mistakes like that all the time, mistakes that could easily get us killed." DeNiro told me one day as she patrolled a checkpoint on the edge of Camp Fallujah. She used binoculars to scan the horizon. The whole time she talked she never stopped looking through the lenses, sometimes pausing to look closer at something suspicious before moving on with her story.

"I also knew that it took tremendous strength for her to leave him when she did, especially since it meant leaving our homeland. And when we moved she really took care of all of us." In order to get into America, they had to wait for Antonia's arm to heal because they were afraid that officials would be curious about a little girl with a bullet in her arm. When they arrived in New Orleans DeNiro's aunt wasn't there anymore so they had to live in a shelter for a while.

"I've always thought that that time when we were homeless and illegal was when I turned tough and mean. My mom couldn't protect me from everything. Right away I saw the darker side of New Orleans." She would later see the lighter side of this city that she now calls home later. "I learned English pretty quickly and I started 7th grade. My school had mostly African Americans in it and the fact that I wasn't even a citizen made the wall between me and the other kids worse, not to mention the language barrier." But after DeNiro broke a bully's nose after he had been teasing her about her accent she started getting more respect. "Suddenly I got a ton of friends and it was really weird. I was so confused but at least I wasn't getting picked on anymore." She started going to the famous Mardi Gras parades and other festivals of New Orleans and she started to like her new home. When she was eleven she got her first job, working at construction sites where there were mostly tobacco-chewing men. She said that got her used to men and their "animal sides".

When DeNiro was seventeen she wanted to give her family citizenship to the country so she joined the army. Her mom didn't want her to go but when she heard about the citizenship part she relented because she couldn't get an actual job other than some waitressing here and there with no green card.

When 9/11 happened DeNiro was on inactive duty, taking some classes at a junior college in Baton Rouge. She was called immediately to war and she shipped out to Kuwait with the 25th Infantry Brigade, which was technically an all male section of the Army, but they needed her because males cannot search Iraqi women. There were only nine other women in the entire brigade. When I asked how it was with so many men around her she just laughed. Yeah it really was a stupid question.


The sun crept up over the decrepit, bombed out buildings of the Askari District surrounding us with a sort of glowing mist. For the first time since I'd been in Iraq, this dusty country looked kind of beautiful. It was hard to stay alert, the Gravediggers being in a dangerous area with lots of buildings holding potential snipers, because this golden haze made me sleepy. Well, that and the fact that we had been patrolling these streets all night with very little sleep. After awhile I had to ignore the sleepy landscape and focus on the surrounding buildings, trying to spy the barrel of a gun, a masked face, something that could mean the end of me. Four soldiers walked in front of the humvee and two were in the humvee, one driving and one in the turret. SPC Walker, the squads funny man, who had a strange love and excitement for getting shot at, walked in front of me and I watched him like a hawk to make sure I did nothing wrong. The worst thing that could happen in my job, even more than getting killed, is to do something that could get someone else killed. Here, it seemed so easy to make a minuscule mistake and get a whole team blown up or ambushed. I was haunted by stories of non-athletic journalists holding back the team and landing everyone right in the middle of a deadly ambush.

Orders from camp told the Gravediggers to switch the patrol to a different highway and we were on the way over there through a Sunni neighborhood, famous because of the four Blackwater private contractors that were killed and strung up on a bridge. It was still hostile, years later, more, I think, because of the terrible revenge that the U.S. Army acted on afterwards than for any other reason.

I let out yet another yawn when, out of the peaceful silence of dawn, the sound of screeching tires came racing around a bend in the road. The humvee came to an abrupt halt and rifles went up all around. I crouched as close to the humvee as possible, not knowing what else to do as PVT Neil yelled for the car to stop. It raced forward, seemingly oblivious to the soldiers rifles pointed right at it. I spotted a man driving and a woman next to him. If he was planning to bomb us, was he planning to sacrifice his wife to jihad, too? It didn't seem very thought out but I knew of the Muslims strange relationship with death and jihad, jihad meaning 'holy war'. In the 80's I went to Afghanistan to report on the mujahedeen’s war against the Soviets and I remembered the way the young warriors ran around in the streets when fighter jets flew overhead, trying to be killed for their country, for Allah. If he wasn't killed it was God's will, if he was killed it was God's will too, never the bombers in the jets. Of course not.

Walker fired his rifle into the air in warning but the car continued. Why the hell weren't they stopping? When it was clear that the car was going to drive right through the line of soldiers blocking it's path the whole team opened fire. The car stopped when both passengers were killed. The driver fell forward, onto his horn and the continuous honking of the horn sounded like his final cry. The couple were dragged out of the car and laid out on the dirt. The woman's belly was big with child. The medic, a medical school graduate named Murphy examined the woman and, covering his face with his hands, told me the woman was having contractions, she was going into labor. When I asked him if the baby could be saved he just looked at me and shook his head. It was too late. The worst silence I've ever experienced filled the air as all the soldiers stared in shock at the woman, blood pooling from between her legs as well as her gunshot wounds. CPL Ross vomited at the side of the road.

"Torch the car, we'll deal with their family tomorrow." LT DeNiro ordered. No one moved: everyone stared in shock at the bodies. "Guys, it happens, this is war. It sucks, but we have to deal with this." I tried to move my arm but I stayed absolutely frozen. The other soldiers were hardly handling this better than me: PVT Neil started to hyperventilate and PFC Wolf, a Native American boy who towered over everyone, being 6'3", and as tough as they come, started choking.

"Come on, y'all, breathe." It seemed a spell was broken, sort of a sick cliché, now that I think about it. I tried to pat Neil on the back but tripped on the way to it and I fell against the humvee. Suddenly everyone wanted to get out of there as fast as possible, Ross torched the vehicle and stumbled into the humvee. The two bodies were loaded on the back of the truck and we trotted away as fast as possible. Apparently we still had to patrol the highway, a funny way of handling the uncertain state of mind everyone was in, accept, it seemed, LT DeNiro who acted perfectly normal if not even calmer than usual. I asked her about how she acted that day and she said that she actually had been screaming inside.

"When I came to Iraq," she said, her jaw twitching, "I promised myself that I would never kill an innocent civilian even though I knew it happened all the time." she looked close to tears. "I knew that I would remember the faces of that person I killed forever. I've seen stuff like this change someone forever. I met someone in Kuwait that ran over a family of six with her humvee one time and she said that when she got home she had a mental breakdown. The Army blamed her mental health on the fact that she was trying to get out of going back to Iraq so they forced her to go despite being incredibly unstable." DeNiro swallowed. "I don't think I'll ever go that far but you never know." As for how she could act so together when some of the toughest men I had ever known were choking on their own tears? She said that she owed it to her team to keep it together.

"3rd Platoon has some of the best soldiers out there but without strong leadership, a group is nothing. As soon as we saw those bodies, I looked around at everyone and knew that if I didn't stay calm they would freak out and do something stupid, even dangerous." The 'Raging Bull' stopped talking and looked straight at me. The intensity in her face sort of scared me and I realized how great of a soldier she really was. She held my gaze so I couldn't look away, even to write down what she was saying.

"I tried not to look at their faces…I really did. But I looked at them before they were moved and I haven't lost the image yet. The patrol after that was the most torturous time of my life. I was just waiting for privacy so I could think about what I had just seen but I was so determined not to let down my guard during that patrol that, I swear, I was reciting every marching song I ever learned just so I couldn't think about it." She laughed, shaking her head. "When we got back to base, I ran as fast as I could to the bathrooms where I completely broke down. I stayed in there so long I missed dinner." But, according to DeNiro she was fine then. And she was, until she got home from Iraq.

I often think about that night and try to convince myself that that man should have seen the rifles, the soldiers, the humvee, and stopped. Why didn't he stop? But I know that he was just trying to get her to a doctor, to help because, according to Doc Murphy she had started bleeding before she was killed so he was probably so stressed out that it didn't even enter his brain that while he was trying to save his newborn son, he was getting them all killed.

I thought that I would never look at the soldiers who had killed two innocent human beings the same way again but I thought wrong. Before I found out that the driver wasn't trying to kill us I honestly thought I was going to die from a car bomb. Images of my family and friends flew through my head. I said my last goodbyes and even closed my eyes. So to me that woman could've been the reason my kids would be without a mom, the reason all of the soldiers families would lose a son, a father, a husband. But that thought fills me with shame and guilt. How sick am I to be thankful to soldiers who killed innocent civilians?

I waited to see what would happen after the incident and was surprised at how simple it was; the Army was experienced in dealing with civilian deaths. The seven soldiers who had been there at the incident and I went and visited the family the very next day, just as DeNiro said we would.

Our somber crew was greeted by two Iraqi children at the house of the two dead civilians. They begged for chocolate as usual and, slightly confused, I helped Walker and DeNiro give them chocolate and bottles of water. Through the interpreter, Abdul, I found out that they were the deceased man's nephews. LT DeNiro, who was in charge of talking with the women, led the way into the house. Everyone took off their helmets and trooped into the house. The tiny, dirt floored, room was filled with mostly women dressed all in black. A few men stood around too and one man who looked to be the man of the house stepped forward to greet us. We were all offered chai and told to sit down. The leader, the killed driver's brother, gestured to the family of the deceased in hesitating English. There was the man's mother, father, brothers (two of them including the leader of the family), four sisters, the man's two other wives, who, for the duration of the meeting, sat in a corner and cried, and I counted about ten kids, aged from one to twelve-years-old. The dead couple also had three children remaining and they sat with their grandparents, staring suspiciously at the soldiers in front of them. I asked why one of the nine-year-old cousins was smiling and he laughed.

"Because we get much money!" He held out his hands to me. "Americans give us money so we rich more than before." Not sure what he was talking about, I turned back to the meeting at large. The grandmother was talking, through Abdul, to LT DeNiro.

"Why do you shoot him, he do nothing wrong. He no Ali Baba." She all but yelled at DeNiro who tried to calm the maniacal woman. Ali Baba is the Iraqi term for liar and it is often used to refer to an insurgent. I found out what the laughing cousin had been talking about when, by the end of the meeting, more than $250 dollars had been given to the family, a near fortune for an Iraqi family, and almost three hours later we finally began to leave. I spoke to the brother, Youcef, and, like the young cousin, he seemed more happy than sad at the death of his brother and sister-in-law.

"Hussein's wife Ali Baba. She do suspicious things, I begin to think she cheat on Hussein. Very bad, better that they both die and make us rich." He seemed to realize what he sounded like and quickly defended himself. "Of course we very, very sad. Very bad accident. Terrible." I nodded at him and turned to follow CPL Ross to the humvee when he stopped me. "My brother very good man. He no like the Ali Baba's who kill Americans and I no either!" I thanked him for talking to me and climbed into the humvee. The two cousins ran after our convoy for a few blocks, still begging for chocolate and I begged the gunner, CPL Ross to throw a couple more and he obliged. I felt almost cross-eyed I was so confused.


Most of 3rd Platoon is made up of 18 and 19 year olds, right out of high school. Some moved right out of their childhood homes and had never lived away from their families. There were a few soldiers who looked so young they didn't look old enough to drive, let alone hold a lethal weapon. Other than shear boredom, homesickness caused the most unhappiness among soldiers.

During many a night at the checkpoint did a soldier go crazy thinking about home. They constantly worried about whether their partners were being unfaithful or had just outright forgotten them. It drove them crazy and a lot of soldiers told me they preferred combat to being safe with time to brood. Some received so-called 'Dear John' letters in which their girlfriends, wives, or fiancées would tell them they couldn't handle them being away or that they just weren't in love anymore. Every time one such letter flew into the camp, one soldier would swear, become violent, or sob with grief. The other soldiers would comfort him by telling their stories of 'Dear John's' and heartbreak while at war. Everyone had a story like this; everyone had his or her heart broken in one way or another.

Other soldiers had children, young and old. Their daughter or son's birthday would roll around and the whole day they would be just a little bit quieter than usual as they thought about the party at home, where they weren't. A high school graduation would come, a baby's first steps and words would excitedly be relived through a letter, the phone, or e-mail, and the soldier would be so sad that they missed it. PFC Barry, a forty-year-old soldier on his third deployment missed the birth of both of his kids, something, he says, he will never forgive himself for. Barry enlisted in the Army before he met his wife so he never thought he would still be in the Army when his kids were born but he was stop-lossed, redeployed, after he was supposed to get out of the army and so he missed the most important time in his children's lives.

Marriages fell apart during deployment or after the soldiers returned home. Some men went home to find a new man occupying his place in the house without his wife bothering to tell him before he drove across the country see her. Even when spouses stayed faithful, suspicion and jealousy stuck around forever after the soldier's return. I heard stories about kids not knowing who this strange man who came home telling him or her that he was their father, or even wives having kids during their husbands deployment and not telling this soldier and him coming home to find a newborn baby lying in a crib.

Soldiers saw mind boggling things in Iraq all the time, blown up and maimed bodies, gushing blood coming out of gaping wounds, legs lying separate from their owners, death everywhere and the thing that got to them most was whether their spouses missed them or even loved them anymore.


DeNiro greeted me at the door to her apartment in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she moved a year after she returned home from Iraq. Her skin looked sallow and she looked underweight. She wore a big jacket and a hood that covered most of her face. Her hands shook when she talked about memories of Iraq and she smoked cigarettes the whole time we talked. Apparently she was doing better than a few months previous.

DeNiro never completed her eight-year contract with the Army but was given an honorable discharge after an incident in a train station relating to a train whistle triggering her PTSD and some sort of mental breakdown, she wasn't specific. The Army left her homeless, with very little money. She moved to New Orleans where she stayed with her brother. But living with him became a problem because she couldn't sleep for more than an hour at a time, she would wake up yelling about attacks and she started seeing dead pregnant women all over the house. Her brother finally couldn’t take it anymore and told her that she either had to get help or he would kick her out. She stubbornly refused therapy or medication and there she was, homeless again. She drank a lot and got into lots of fights and one night someone took a baseball bat to her and her nose was broken and her left eye swollen shut.

"I realized that I couldn't keep on going like this." And, just like that, she went to a psychiatric ward at a hospital in Baton Rouge. She stayed there for three months and then went back to her brother to ask to move back in. The hospital was giving her medication and she was still going to therapy sessions. Her brother wasn't living in New Orleans anymore, though; she had no idea where he was, so she applied for a job in Hawaii as a hotel clerk. It seemed the last job I would guess DeNiro to go for but she explained that the doctors in Baton Rouge told her that Hawaii would be a good place for her health and that a job as a hotel clerk would be as far away from war as possible and it would keep her from completely isolating herself from people.

"I hated it at first, I yelled at staff a lot the first couple of weeks but they knew about my health situation so they were really patient with me. It's what I needed and after awhile I started to make friends with a lot of them and they're helping me a lot, now." I nodded, looking at her sallow cheeks and the cigarette in her hands. "It's a work in process, a long journey, I can tell you." She muttered. I visited the hotel where she worked and she looked almost normal in her flowery uniform. She even smiled a little when she saw me. The spell was broken, though, when a guest dropped their bag on the marble floors and she flinched. I could've sworn she almost ducked. It reminded me of another time and place in which the spell had been broken, when she took control of her squad and held everyone together when everyone was in shock. She seemed so together then, I remembered wondering in awe how she stayed so calm. Now I was the one who told her everything was all right, that she needed to pull herself together and patted her on her back as her breathing slowed back down. This fearless leader, this warrior that I so respected now cowered at the slightest noise as I assured her that there were no gunshots, no dead civilians, no incoming mortars and that she didn't have to find her men and make sure they were ok because that noise was the noise of a tourist waiting to be shown to their room, where a nice bed welcomed them and no angry insurgent waited for them in the shadows, only a beautiful view of the most gorgeous beach in the world and a vase full of flowers.