thedrifter
07-24-05, 09:16 AM
Iraq stint scars Montanans
By KAREN OGDEN
Tribune Regional Editor
As a little boy, Adam McLain loved flipping through a collection of World War II books at his next-door-neighbor's house in Havre.
Aaron Birkholz, meanwhile, dreamed of becoming a highway patrolman. His junior year at Lincoln High School, he enlisted in the Montana Army National Guard, eager to graduate and start a law enforcement career with the military police.
Those boyhood dreams would bond them in one of the most trying experiences of their lives.
McLain, now 24, and Birkholz, 21, arrived in Baghdad together in June 2003, at the dawn of the Iraq war, and became fast friends.
Injured within days of each other, they joined the more than 13,000 Americans wounded in Iraq since May 2003, according to Defense Department figures.
Now back in Montana, both are figuring out what's next for their young lives, forever altered by wounds suffered and maturity gained.
War looms
Before they met, and before the nation was at war, McLain and Birkholz had each joined the Guard without worry of serving in an overseas battle zone.
"I didn't really understand the war at first ... It all happened so quick," said Birkholz, who at 21 is a married father and war veteran. "One minute (Bush) is talking about it and the next minute we're over there. One minute I saw it on TV and the next minute I was over there."
McLain's parents discouraged him from enlisting.
"They told me, 'You're going to end up in Iraq,'" said McLain, a quiet, brown-eyed devotee of the gym and Arnold Schwarzenegger. "I was like, 'No I'm not.' I didn't think they'd send units from Montana."
It was the fall of his senior year at the University of Montana and the $5,000 signup bonus was attractive.
"I just wanted some more money for school," McLain said.
Two weeks later, in October 2002, he set off for boot camp in Fort Leonard Wood Mo. where, McLain admits, he was "pretty miserable. I was second thinking everything."
He forgot to bring his backpack on one training exercise.
"I managed to get a senior drill sergeant on my butt," he recalls with a rueful smile.
In the end, McLain came to understand peers who had returned from boot camp with their chests puffed out.
"After you go through basic training and you graduate, you're proud of yourself," he said.
"The Army experience was kind of a rush."
He was on top of his game when, 10 days before the end of boot camp, his unit was called up.
After a three-day visit home, McLain went straight to Fort Benning, Ga., where the rest of the roughly 40 Montanans in the 143rd Military Police Detachment were gathering.
There they waited for a month and a half.
"We were stuck there for so long we thought maybe they'd send us back home," said Birkholz, who arrived at Fort Benning three months after he married his high school sweetheart, Kristen.
He met McLain at Fort Benning, but didn't get to know the quiet soldier from Havre.
Finally the Montanans boarded a chartered plane bound for Kuwait City.
For McLain, reality still didn't sink in, as they cruised toward the Middle East watching movies.
A home in the desert
More waiting lay ahead, this time in the desert, in tents without air conditioning.
The soldiers went to bed after 10 p.m., when the temperature finally dropped below 100, and woke at dawn.
A month passed, and on June 16, two days after Birkholz's 19th birthday, the 143rd landed in Baghdad.
"We were all nervous and tired," McLain said. "Everybody was thinking their own stuff."
As they drove toward their base, he stared out the back of the truck at the monotone cityscape of sand-colored buildings — catching glimpses of bombed out buildings and giant portraits of Saddam Hussein.
"I think we were all nervous that we were going to get shot at because we didn't know what to expect," McLain said.
Their new home was a three-story, yellow brick building that formerly housed members of Saddam's Baath party.
The windows were blasted out.
The soldiers scavenged couches and other comforts from a wrecked palace next door, raising a blue and yellow Montana flag on the roof to make it home.
Among the youngest soldiers in their unit, McLain and Birkholz buddied up.
On a mission
After three months of training and waiting, the 143rd Military Police Detachment finally went to work.
Birkholz and McLain felt good about their mission.
Both worked at Baghdad police stations outside the Green Zone, assigning badges and uniforms to the new Iraqi police force.
"Every day it was just trying to rebuild their society, train them to protect themselves," he said. "Just trying to train them to be free is what it was because they were so used to being controlled."
McLain is still frustrated with media reports that show only the bad aspects of the war in Iraq.
"It's unfair to everybody, all the soldiers," he said.
The Iraqis were friendly, but frustrated. He recalls a conversation with an Iraqi contractor:
"I kept asking him, 'why do you guys keep blowing us up?'" McLain said. "He was trying to explain that the power goes out and the water goes off and they blame us."
A new job
After two months of police work the unit broke into squads.
McLain was assigned to an intelligence group that interviewed Iraqi prisoners, sorting the benign from the dangerous.
He also served as a gunner on his group's Humvee.
After several weeks of observing interviews, McLain was allowed to interrogate his first prisoner.
"I didn't do so well," he said. Nevertheless, he was excited about his new job.
A couple days later, on Sept. 4, he stayed on base in the Green Zone to write a report on his interview.
He was walking from the headquarters building to his living quarters, a distance of about two blocks, when he saw a woman from his unit drive by in a Humvee.
Suddenly, just as she passed him, she flipped a U-turn.
"All of a sudden something hit me in the back," McLain said. "I didn't know what was going on."
The front right tire caught his right leg.
The back tire rolled over his head.
Dreaded call
At home in Havre, McLain's mom, Mary, was getting ready for a morning doctor's appointment when the phone rang.
His dad Bruce, an engineer with the BNSF Railway, answered.
"I knew something was wrong right way, it was freaky — as soon as he said 'what'?" Mary McLain recalls.
The captain on the phone could tell the McLains only that their son was seriously injured and was being flown to Germany.
While several other Montanans serving in the regular Army or Marines had been wounded previously, McLain was the first Montana guardsman injured in Iraq, and the captain, who was calling from Fort Harrison in Helena, sounded shaken.
"I don't know who was worse, Bruce or him," said Mary McLain.
Then the hours started to pass.
She called the numbers on the emergency card Adam had given them. No one had information.
Finally, at 2:30 a.m., the phone rang again. Adam was stabilized, but details, including what happened, were scant.
Two days later they finally spoke to Adam, who could barely hear them and struggled to speak, his facial muscles paralyzed.
"I was a speed bump," he said.
Though McLain preserved his sense of humor, his injuries were sobering.
The back of his skull was cracked from ear to ear.
A doctor on the plane to Germany put it to him bluntly: "You're lucky your head didn't pop like a watermelon."
He was seeing double and almost deaf. Spinal fluid and blood seeped out of his damaged right eardrum.
The truck's tire had broken his right fibula, ankle, foot and second toe.
The journey home to Havre would be arduous.
Flash of red
Back in Baghdad, Birkholz returned to the Green Zone one day to find the quarters buzzing with activity in the wake of McLain's accident.
Though he was sorry for his friend, the freak accident didn't scare him.
"I never put it in my head that I was going to get hurt," he said.
Four days later, on Sept. 8, his team departed as usual at 7 a.m. for the Rusafa police station in western Baghdad.
Birkholz rode in the open bed of the front Humvee, his gun leveled over the roof.
About a mile outside the Green Zone they crossed the Tigris River and dropped into an underpass.
"It was dark and I had my sunglasses on," Birkholz said.
He had just slid his shades down his nose when it hit: a flash of red and a bang, like a car backfiring "but 30 times louder."
The roadside bomb tipped over the trailer they were pulling, but the driver somehow powered the Humvee out of the tunnel.
"Iraqis were all around us," Birkholz said.
Some rushed forward to help.
But the soldiers shouted at them to get back, knowing the bomber could be among them.
"I went to grab my weapon with my left arm and my arm wouldn't move and I saw a bunch of blood," Birkholz said.
Suddenly he felt the pain.
"It felt like my arm was just hanging on by a little bit."
He later remembered seeing three men above the tunnel, pointing down and laughing, as they drove under.
The blare of sirens grew closer and soon he and his captain, who was hit by shrapnel, were back in the Green Zone. Medics cut off Birkholz's clothes and anesthetized him.
"I woke up and I was in a big cast lying in a bed," he said.
A few hours later he was on his way to Germany. He doesn't remember the flight.
Continued.......
By KAREN OGDEN
Tribune Regional Editor
As a little boy, Adam McLain loved flipping through a collection of World War II books at his next-door-neighbor's house in Havre.
Aaron Birkholz, meanwhile, dreamed of becoming a highway patrolman. His junior year at Lincoln High School, he enlisted in the Montana Army National Guard, eager to graduate and start a law enforcement career with the military police.
Those boyhood dreams would bond them in one of the most trying experiences of their lives.
McLain, now 24, and Birkholz, 21, arrived in Baghdad together in June 2003, at the dawn of the Iraq war, and became fast friends.
Injured within days of each other, they joined the more than 13,000 Americans wounded in Iraq since May 2003, according to Defense Department figures.
Now back in Montana, both are figuring out what's next for their young lives, forever altered by wounds suffered and maturity gained.
War looms
Before they met, and before the nation was at war, McLain and Birkholz had each joined the Guard without worry of serving in an overseas battle zone.
"I didn't really understand the war at first ... It all happened so quick," said Birkholz, who at 21 is a married father and war veteran. "One minute (Bush) is talking about it and the next minute we're over there. One minute I saw it on TV and the next minute I was over there."
McLain's parents discouraged him from enlisting.
"They told me, 'You're going to end up in Iraq,'" said McLain, a quiet, brown-eyed devotee of the gym and Arnold Schwarzenegger. "I was like, 'No I'm not.' I didn't think they'd send units from Montana."
It was the fall of his senior year at the University of Montana and the $5,000 signup bonus was attractive.
"I just wanted some more money for school," McLain said.
Two weeks later, in October 2002, he set off for boot camp in Fort Leonard Wood Mo. where, McLain admits, he was "pretty miserable. I was second thinking everything."
He forgot to bring his backpack on one training exercise.
"I managed to get a senior drill sergeant on my butt," he recalls with a rueful smile.
In the end, McLain came to understand peers who had returned from boot camp with their chests puffed out.
"After you go through basic training and you graduate, you're proud of yourself," he said.
"The Army experience was kind of a rush."
He was on top of his game when, 10 days before the end of boot camp, his unit was called up.
After a three-day visit home, McLain went straight to Fort Benning, Ga., where the rest of the roughly 40 Montanans in the 143rd Military Police Detachment were gathering.
There they waited for a month and a half.
"We were stuck there for so long we thought maybe they'd send us back home," said Birkholz, who arrived at Fort Benning three months after he married his high school sweetheart, Kristen.
He met McLain at Fort Benning, but didn't get to know the quiet soldier from Havre.
Finally the Montanans boarded a chartered plane bound for Kuwait City.
For McLain, reality still didn't sink in, as they cruised toward the Middle East watching movies.
A home in the desert
More waiting lay ahead, this time in the desert, in tents without air conditioning.
The soldiers went to bed after 10 p.m., when the temperature finally dropped below 100, and woke at dawn.
A month passed, and on June 16, two days after Birkholz's 19th birthday, the 143rd landed in Baghdad.
"We were all nervous and tired," McLain said. "Everybody was thinking their own stuff."
As they drove toward their base, he stared out the back of the truck at the monotone cityscape of sand-colored buildings — catching glimpses of bombed out buildings and giant portraits of Saddam Hussein.
"I think we were all nervous that we were going to get shot at because we didn't know what to expect," McLain said.
Their new home was a three-story, yellow brick building that formerly housed members of Saddam's Baath party.
The windows were blasted out.
The soldiers scavenged couches and other comforts from a wrecked palace next door, raising a blue and yellow Montana flag on the roof to make it home.
Among the youngest soldiers in their unit, McLain and Birkholz buddied up.
On a mission
After three months of training and waiting, the 143rd Military Police Detachment finally went to work.
Birkholz and McLain felt good about their mission.
Both worked at Baghdad police stations outside the Green Zone, assigning badges and uniforms to the new Iraqi police force.
"Every day it was just trying to rebuild their society, train them to protect themselves," he said. "Just trying to train them to be free is what it was because they were so used to being controlled."
McLain is still frustrated with media reports that show only the bad aspects of the war in Iraq.
"It's unfair to everybody, all the soldiers," he said.
The Iraqis were friendly, but frustrated. He recalls a conversation with an Iraqi contractor:
"I kept asking him, 'why do you guys keep blowing us up?'" McLain said. "He was trying to explain that the power goes out and the water goes off and they blame us."
A new job
After two months of police work the unit broke into squads.
McLain was assigned to an intelligence group that interviewed Iraqi prisoners, sorting the benign from the dangerous.
He also served as a gunner on his group's Humvee.
After several weeks of observing interviews, McLain was allowed to interrogate his first prisoner.
"I didn't do so well," he said. Nevertheless, he was excited about his new job.
A couple days later, on Sept. 4, he stayed on base in the Green Zone to write a report on his interview.
He was walking from the headquarters building to his living quarters, a distance of about two blocks, when he saw a woman from his unit drive by in a Humvee.
Suddenly, just as she passed him, she flipped a U-turn.
"All of a sudden something hit me in the back," McLain said. "I didn't know what was going on."
The front right tire caught his right leg.
The back tire rolled over his head.
Dreaded call
At home in Havre, McLain's mom, Mary, was getting ready for a morning doctor's appointment when the phone rang.
His dad Bruce, an engineer with the BNSF Railway, answered.
"I knew something was wrong right way, it was freaky — as soon as he said 'what'?" Mary McLain recalls.
The captain on the phone could tell the McLains only that their son was seriously injured and was being flown to Germany.
While several other Montanans serving in the regular Army or Marines had been wounded previously, McLain was the first Montana guardsman injured in Iraq, and the captain, who was calling from Fort Harrison in Helena, sounded shaken.
"I don't know who was worse, Bruce or him," said Mary McLain.
Then the hours started to pass.
She called the numbers on the emergency card Adam had given them. No one had information.
Finally, at 2:30 a.m., the phone rang again. Adam was stabilized, but details, including what happened, were scant.
Two days later they finally spoke to Adam, who could barely hear them and struggled to speak, his facial muscles paralyzed.
"I was a speed bump," he said.
Though McLain preserved his sense of humor, his injuries were sobering.
The back of his skull was cracked from ear to ear.
A doctor on the plane to Germany put it to him bluntly: "You're lucky your head didn't pop like a watermelon."
He was seeing double and almost deaf. Spinal fluid and blood seeped out of his damaged right eardrum.
The truck's tire had broken his right fibula, ankle, foot and second toe.
The journey home to Havre would be arduous.
Flash of red
Back in Baghdad, Birkholz returned to the Green Zone one day to find the quarters buzzing with activity in the wake of McLain's accident.
Though he was sorry for his friend, the freak accident didn't scare him.
"I never put it in my head that I was going to get hurt," he said.
Four days later, on Sept. 8, his team departed as usual at 7 a.m. for the Rusafa police station in western Baghdad.
Birkholz rode in the open bed of the front Humvee, his gun leveled over the roof.
About a mile outside the Green Zone they crossed the Tigris River and dropped into an underpass.
"It was dark and I had my sunglasses on," Birkholz said.
He had just slid his shades down his nose when it hit: a flash of red and a bang, like a car backfiring "but 30 times louder."
The roadside bomb tipped over the trailer they were pulling, but the driver somehow powered the Humvee out of the tunnel.
"Iraqis were all around us," Birkholz said.
Some rushed forward to help.
But the soldiers shouted at them to get back, knowing the bomber could be among them.
"I went to grab my weapon with my left arm and my arm wouldn't move and I saw a bunch of blood," Birkholz said.
Suddenly he felt the pain.
"It felt like my arm was just hanging on by a little bit."
He later remembered seeing three men above the tunnel, pointing down and laughing, as they drove under.
The blare of sirens grew closer and soon he and his captain, who was hit by shrapnel, were back in the Green Zone. Medics cut off Birkholz's clothes and anesthetized him.
"I woke up and I was in a big cast lying in a bed," he said.
A few hours later he was on his way to Germany. He doesn't remember the flight.
Continued.......