thedrifter
08-10-05, 09:21 PM
Talking Wounded
Terry Rodgers Came Back From Iraq a Changed Man, and Not Just Because of the Bomb
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 10, 2005; C01
"So we're driving down the road and it's midnight, so it's pitch-black, and when you're driving at night, you don't use any lights," says Terry Rodgers, "but we can see fine because we've got night vision goggles."
He's sitting in the living room of his mother's townhouse in Gaithersburg, telling the story of his last night in Iraq. He's still got his Army crew cut and he's wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on the chest.
"We're driving down this road and there's this tiny bridge over a little canal," he says. "They had rigged up this bomb and they had a tripwire running across the bridge and we hit it and it blew up."
Like the rest of the 13,877 Americans wounded in Iraq, Rodgers has a story to tell. He tells it in a matter-of-fact voice, like he's talking about making a midnight pizza run or something. He's sitting in an armchair with his right leg propped on an ottoman, the foot encased in a soft black cast that reaches almost to the knee. His crutches are lying on the rug beside the chair.
"The Humvee finally comes to a stop and the right side is just torn apart and I hear my squad leader screaming, 'I think I lost my arm!' And my best friend Maida was in the front passenger seat where the bomb went off and he was screaming, 'Where's help? Where's help?' And then he went quiet.
"And me, I'm trying to crawl out of the Humvee and I get most of my body out and just this leg is stuck and I thought it must be caught on something in the twisted metal. I look back and I see it's just laying there on the seat, so I'm like, 'Why is it stuck?' So I try to lift my leg up and it won't lift. I just had to pick up my leg and crawl the rest of the way out."
He mimes the action of picking up his leg with his hands, then he continues the story.
"I started patting myself down and that's when I noticed that my face took some shrapnel," he says. "It was all swollen on this side, so when I'm patting myself down, my middle finger went, like, this deep into my cheek where the shrapnel went in."
He points to a spot about halfway down his finger, showing how far it went into the shrapnel wound behind his right eye, which is still pretty much blind, unable to see anything but bright light.
"Then I started checking out my leg. I knew my femur was broken, but at that time I didn't know my calf was missing," he says. "And that's when I hear my best friend Maida and he started heaving."
Rodgers takes a few loud, quick breaths to show what Mark Maida sounded like.
"And he breathes like that for a few seconds and then he just stops. And that's when he died."
Rodgers pauses a moment.
"The two trucks behind us had to stop and make sure the area was secure before they could help us," he says. "And the first guys that showed up saw Maida in the front seat, leaning against the windshield and all I heard was, 'Sir, we lost Maida.'
"And then they helped my squad leader, who lost his right arm, and then they came over and helped me. They bandaged us up . . . and when the helicopter finally showed up, they loaded me and Maida into the chopper and flew us to Baghdad.
"And after that, I don't remember anything till like a week after I got to Walter Reed."
Heeding the Call
Terry Rodgers, who just turned 21, grew up in Rockville, son of a carpenter and a courthouse clerk. After graduating from Richard Montgomery High School in 2002, he worked as a mechanic in a Washington gas station, then joined the Army.
"It was something I always wanted to do," he says. "I thought it looked fun. I just wanted to get out on my own for a while. I got kind of bored being around here. I wanted to try something new."
He signed up in October 2002, but he didn't go into the Army until the following July. In between, the United States invaded Iraq, but Rodgers didn't pay much attention to that.
"I didn't have a political view," he says. "I'm not into politics."
He did his basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. Then his outfit -- the 2nd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment -- was assigned to Fort Irwin, Calif., in the Mojave Desert, where they played the bad guys in warfare training exercises.
"Basically we would just play laser tag in the desert," he says. "It was kind of fun."
They deployed to Iraq this January, assigned to a town about 30 miles south of Baghdad. Two nights after they arrived, an IED -- improvised explosive device -- blew up near their patrol base but nobody got hurt. Later, somebody set off a car bomb on the street in front of the base.
"It didn't do anything to us Americans," he says, "but it killed a few civilians."
Most days, Rodgers's platoon would patrol the town in Humvees, then set up a TCP -- traffic control point -- where they'd stop cars and search them for weapons. Or they'd do "house calls": "We'd pick random houses and just go in and search 'em." Sometimes they'd do a "dismounted patrol," which meant they wandered through the streets on foot.
"We'd have an interpreter with us and we'd try to talk to people," he says. "We didn't have any incidents when we were out walking. The biggest incident we'd have on foot patrol is we'd be mobbed by little kids asking us for candy. When people from back home would send me candy, I'd always give that to the kids."
Occasionally the Americans would hear about a house where somebody was rumored to be storing weapons or building bombs. They'd wait until dark and raid the place.
"It was very intense and very fast," he says. "We'd try to be as quiet as we could until we got to the front door, and then you just have the battering ram and you open the front door and you run in yelling and pulling your weapons and try to gain control of the house as fast as you can."
Other patrols found illegal weapons on these raids, but Rodgers's never did.
"We did hit the wrong house quite often," he says. "We had these overhead maps, satellite maps, and when you're on the street in the middle of the night, it's hard to find the right house. In those instances, we'd say, 'Sorry,' and give 'em a card with a phone number to call the Army and we'd pay for the damages."
In April, Rodgers's company was transferred to a tiny farming town about 20 miles away -- a place where no Americans had been stationed.
"We started looking for a building that would be suitable for a patrol base," he says. "And we took this building over. There was a family living there and we had to kick 'em out. . . . They weren't too happy about it, but there was nothing they could do."
A few days after they arrived in the little town, a Humvee on patrol was blown up by a bomb buried on a dirt road.
"It picked up the Humvee, and when it was in the air, it turned on its side," Rodgers says, "and my friend fell out and the Humvee ended up landing on him and it crushed him and he was killed."
His friend was Kevin W. Prince, 22, of Plain City, Ohio.
continued..
Terry Rodgers Came Back From Iraq a Changed Man, and Not Just Because of the Bomb
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 10, 2005; C01
"So we're driving down the road and it's midnight, so it's pitch-black, and when you're driving at night, you don't use any lights," says Terry Rodgers, "but we can see fine because we've got night vision goggles."
He's sitting in the living room of his mother's townhouse in Gaithersburg, telling the story of his last night in Iraq. He's still got his Army crew cut and he's wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on the chest.
"We're driving down this road and there's this tiny bridge over a little canal," he says. "They had rigged up this bomb and they had a tripwire running across the bridge and we hit it and it blew up."
Like the rest of the 13,877 Americans wounded in Iraq, Rodgers has a story to tell. He tells it in a matter-of-fact voice, like he's talking about making a midnight pizza run or something. He's sitting in an armchair with his right leg propped on an ottoman, the foot encased in a soft black cast that reaches almost to the knee. His crutches are lying on the rug beside the chair.
"The Humvee finally comes to a stop and the right side is just torn apart and I hear my squad leader screaming, 'I think I lost my arm!' And my best friend Maida was in the front passenger seat where the bomb went off and he was screaming, 'Where's help? Where's help?' And then he went quiet.
"And me, I'm trying to crawl out of the Humvee and I get most of my body out and just this leg is stuck and I thought it must be caught on something in the twisted metal. I look back and I see it's just laying there on the seat, so I'm like, 'Why is it stuck?' So I try to lift my leg up and it won't lift. I just had to pick up my leg and crawl the rest of the way out."
He mimes the action of picking up his leg with his hands, then he continues the story.
"I started patting myself down and that's when I noticed that my face took some shrapnel," he says. "It was all swollen on this side, so when I'm patting myself down, my middle finger went, like, this deep into my cheek where the shrapnel went in."
He points to a spot about halfway down his finger, showing how far it went into the shrapnel wound behind his right eye, which is still pretty much blind, unable to see anything but bright light.
"Then I started checking out my leg. I knew my femur was broken, but at that time I didn't know my calf was missing," he says. "And that's when I hear my best friend Maida and he started heaving."
Rodgers takes a few loud, quick breaths to show what Mark Maida sounded like.
"And he breathes like that for a few seconds and then he just stops. And that's when he died."
Rodgers pauses a moment.
"The two trucks behind us had to stop and make sure the area was secure before they could help us," he says. "And the first guys that showed up saw Maida in the front seat, leaning against the windshield and all I heard was, 'Sir, we lost Maida.'
"And then they helped my squad leader, who lost his right arm, and then they came over and helped me. They bandaged us up . . . and when the helicopter finally showed up, they loaded me and Maida into the chopper and flew us to Baghdad.
"And after that, I don't remember anything till like a week after I got to Walter Reed."
Heeding the Call
Terry Rodgers, who just turned 21, grew up in Rockville, son of a carpenter and a courthouse clerk. After graduating from Richard Montgomery High School in 2002, he worked as a mechanic in a Washington gas station, then joined the Army.
"It was something I always wanted to do," he says. "I thought it looked fun. I just wanted to get out on my own for a while. I got kind of bored being around here. I wanted to try something new."
He signed up in October 2002, but he didn't go into the Army until the following July. In between, the United States invaded Iraq, but Rodgers didn't pay much attention to that.
"I didn't have a political view," he says. "I'm not into politics."
He did his basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. Then his outfit -- the 2nd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment -- was assigned to Fort Irwin, Calif., in the Mojave Desert, where they played the bad guys in warfare training exercises.
"Basically we would just play laser tag in the desert," he says. "It was kind of fun."
They deployed to Iraq this January, assigned to a town about 30 miles south of Baghdad. Two nights after they arrived, an IED -- improvised explosive device -- blew up near their patrol base but nobody got hurt. Later, somebody set off a car bomb on the street in front of the base.
"It didn't do anything to us Americans," he says, "but it killed a few civilians."
Most days, Rodgers's platoon would patrol the town in Humvees, then set up a TCP -- traffic control point -- where they'd stop cars and search them for weapons. Or they'd do "house calls": "We'd pick random houses and just go in and search 'em." Sometimes they'd do a "dismounted patrol," which meant they wandered through the streets on foot.
"We'd have an interpreter with us and we'd try to talk to people," he says. "We didn't have any incidents when we were out walking. The biggest incident we'd have on foot patrol is we'd be mobbed by little kids asking us for candy. When people from back home would send me candy, I'd always give that to the kids."
Occasionally the Americans would hear about a house where somebody was rumored to be storing weapons or building bombs. They'd wait until dark and raid the place.
"It was very intense and very fast," he says. "We'd try to be as quiet as we could until we got to the front door, and then you just have the battering ram and you open the front door and you run in yelling and pulling your weapons and try to gain control of the house as fast as you can."
Other patrols found illegal weapons on these raids, but Rodgers's never did.
"We did hit the wrong house quite often," he says. "We had these overhead maps, satellite maps, and when you're on the street in the middle of the night, it's hard to find the right house. In those instances, we'd say, 'Sorry,' and give 'em a card with a phone number to call the Army and we'd pay for the damages."
In April, Rodgers's company was transferred to a tiny farming town about 20 miles away -- a place where no Americans had been stationed.
"We started looking for a building that would be suitable for a patrol base," he says. "And we took this building over. There was a family living there and we had to kick 'em out. . . . They weren't too happy about it, but there was nothing they could do."
A few days after they arrived in the little town, a Humvee on patrol was blown up by a bomb buried on a dirt road.
"It picked up the Humvee, and when it was in the air, it turned on its side," Rodgers says, "and my friend fell out and the Humvee ended up landing on him and it crushed him and he was killed."
His friend was Kevin W. Prince, 22, of Plain City, Ohio.
continued..