thedrifter
04-12-07, 03:20 PM
Looking back
By: Heather Driscoll
Posted: 4/12/07
Nearly five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Marine Cpl. John Paul Arde found himself rolling along the sandy roads of Iraq, venturing towards a city called Zuwayah.
Once Arde and his team of Marines reached their destination, they made their way to an Iraqi police station.
While conversing with the local police, a woman approached Arde's squad and revealed that there was something buried in the road, perhaps a bomb known as an Improvised Explosive Device.
Through the interpreters, the team discovered that the bomb was buried just ahead of them, yet they continued to press onward in hopes to retrieve it.
"It's like we're driving in to meet death," Arde said.
As Arde and his fellow Marines drove through, the piercing sound of an explosion along with bright flashes and smoke suddenly struck the men.
The bomb fulminated and hit one of their trucks.
"To explain how mad you are when someone just tried to kill you," Arde said. "There are no words that will ever explain it."
Radio transmissions of sergeants giving orders began humming in their ears as the Marines jumped out of their trucks and began to push their attackers towards the Euphrates River.
As they pinned their enemy against the river, the Marines caught a young Iraqi man, who was partially responsible for the explosive.
"I wanted so bad to hurt him," Arde said. "But we couldn't. It taught me restraint, and it just showed me I can do anything. I'm not afraid."
Five days later, on July 6, 2006, four of Arde's close friends were severely injured in what America calls the War on Terror.
A war that San Jose State University Students Arde, Cpl. Justin DeOliveira and Cpl. Byran Glick have witnessed firsthand.
In a business where life and death rely on instinctual allegiance and the teachings of war veterans, these few souls dared to walk in the footsteps of the many who've been lost.
Since the war began, there have been 3,290 U.S. casualties, 346 of them being California natives, according to the Associated Press war casualties database.
Fortunately for Arde, DeOliveira and Glick, they received the opportunity to serve their county and lived to tell the story.
They are three of approximately 11 SJSU Marines that belonged to unit 1/14 out of Alameda, a unit that was deactivated on Nov. 30, DeOliveira said.
Of the Marines, each left to defend the United States for different reasons.
"I actually volunteered to go to Iraq," DeOliveira said. "Being a Marine you have a sense of duty."
"There's an analogy that people say: You're a football team and you practice every day but you never actually play a game. That's what the military generally is. All these years (of) practice, but when the time comes to go to war it's actually playing that game."
An experience not to forget
DeOliveira, a senior majoring in criminal justice, was deployed in Jan. 2006 when he volunteered for unit 1/14 after spending over two years in an infantry squad out of San Bruno.
"My experience was a little bit unique because I was military intelligence so I got to deal with a lot of different aspects which regular people don't get to," DeOliveira said. "I worked the majority counter-IED (Improvised Explosive Device) type stuff. My job was to create and disseminate intelligence."
While DeOliveira immersed himself in intelligence-driven operations, Arde, who was deployed in March 2006, was detached from his unit and put in an infantry squad where he trained Iraqi police.
Arde, a senior majoring in history, was stationed in the city of Hit in Al Anbar Province. Aside from being part of a police transition team, he also executed operations with the police including raids and counter-insurgency operations.
When his team of 14 Marines and one Navy Corpsman wasn't training police, it was traveling in Humvees, hunting for IED's.
"It was a life changing experience," Arde said. "It teaches you what kind of man you are - if you fight or if you don't."
Riffling through the pages of Cpl. Bryan Glick's online photo album, there are sequences of photographs, each telling a story or sparking a memory - candid moments of Glick with children of Iraqi police, a sign of legendary anchorman Ron Burgundy quoting "You Stay Classy, Iraq" to graphic images of an Iraqi suicide bomber's shredded flesh and bone.
"I won't ever forget anything that happened last year," Glick said. "But I just want to get on with my life."
Glick, a junior majoring in criminal justice, stood on towers as force protection in Fallujah, organized missions in Al Asad and took part in a nine-day mission in Dulab, Iraq.
During the mission, Glick and his team were attached to a separate unit, guarding a retransmission site for the radio so they could keep contact with their Combat Operations Center in Al Asad.
"I'm never going to forget that mission," Glick said. "Nine days sitting out there, all you have is your water and a little bit of food; sleeping about an hour a night.
"At night there was no moon and our night vision wasn't working 'cause it takes light and amplifies it. So we're just sitting out in the middle of nowhere and me and my buddy were living in a dirt hole freaking out at night 'cause people could have been two feet away from us and we wouldn't have known it."
In the heat of the moment
Though these three men rarely crossed paths in Iraq, there was one thing they could all agree upon - the environment.
The living conditions were the sum of heat and sand. Heat that reached up to 130 degrees during the day and no lower than 100 degrees at night, Glick said.
"It's hot and there's sand everywhere you look, except for if you go along the Euphrates River, there's a lot of palm trees," Glick said. "That was kind of nice when you got outside of the wire and you were driving along the Euphrates. You look to one side of the Humvee and you got all those palm trees, and the river just kind of reminds you of some places back home."
There's no place like home
Home; a place where mothers, fathers and friends awaited the return of their Marines.
A place where one mother, Renee Glick, sat in a foggy state of mind until she was able to see the look in her son's eyes as the lights flickered on and the bus came to a halt.
"I cried and gave him a big hug," said Renee, mother of Bryan Glick.
Renee said that her reaction to his deployment, however, wasn't as joyous.
"Scared was probably my first reaction," Renee said. "It was my job to protect him and I couldn't do that 'over there.' … But I was also extremely proud that he had the guts to do what he was doing."
Renee belonged to 1/14's Key Volunteer Network, a group made up of wives, mothers and fathers of the Marines from the Bay Area who were deployed with the unit.
Renee was responsible for 10 families and addressed any questions they had regarding anything they needed.
Family contact, however, was a bit sparse and often temporary.
"I lived away from any major base or anything," Arde said. "They had Internet and phone connections. Sometimes you could use it, other times you couldn't if the weather was bad."
DeOliveira said that because he was part of intelligence, they had more money and therefore better resources. However, the AT&T phone centers cost more than 30 cents a minute, which limited his phone calls home to only once a week.
Mixed feelings
Being so far from home, Arde looked at the war with perplexity. He said that Iraq had been one of the most difficult places for him to understand.
The mental stress of always being in danger was, for him, the hardest part.
Arde had been involved in nine separate IED strikes and had been mortared and rocketed more times than he could recall.
Being constantly shot at was a daily routine.
"We dealt with that environment every day for the last six months of my deployment," Arde said. "But every time we were attacked, the next day we had to go back and keep working with the Iraqi police and the people. It was hard getting over the suspicion that maybe the guys we were training were the ones shooting at us just 10 minutes before."
Besides the harshness of reality, Arde and his team were constantly dealing with only a semi-supportive populace. He said that some people loved them, but many hated them.
The only people he truly cared about were the little Iraqi girls. Arde and his squad would often bring them candy, toys that their parents would send them - anything they could get their hands on.
"They live their lives without any hope of advancement," Arde said. "The best they can hope for is a husband that treats them fairly. Whenever I got a chance I gave them as much as I could."
Though these Marines lived day to day, unsure of what would befall next, they discovered a safe haven away from all the chaos - getting lost in perverse humor.
"I'm just really grateful that I got to go with the people that I was with," Glick said. "They're the ones that really help you make it through 'cause whenever things get bad you just start cracking jokes, just calming people down; 'cause you're all going through it together."
For Arde, laughing through the close calls with his buddies was the only thing he could do to prevent it from eating him alive.
Just when things couldn't get worse
But on July 6, there was anything but laughs.
Arde's team was conducting a police recruitment and pulled up to some barriers that were blocking their way in.
He recalls when the first truck arrived, "We could hear them saying on the radio transmissions 'Hey something's not right, we gotta get outta here.'"
As the truck was turning around, it rolled over a land mine and four of Arde's friends were severely injured.
"Truck one said 'We're hit, we're hit bad.'" Arde said. "In the background you here my friend Dan screaming for his life 'cause he's bleeding all over the place."
Sgt. Dan Harrington took shrapnel in both legs and compressed his spine. He continues to limp and use a cane.
"Sgt. Dodd is laying face first in the gutter 'cause there's open sewers," Arde said. "He's laying in sewage water."
Sgt. Cullen Dodd was thrown from his gun turret and suffered broken facial bones.
Arde plays back the memory in his mind, "It was surreal when we pull up 'cause (Sgt. Quinones) is running around pulling guys out of puddles and its like 'Am I going to step on a land mine right now?'"
Sgt. Victor Quinones broke his back and Lance Cpl. Dana Tandy lost most of his hearing in both ears.
Tandy is only 23 years old.
"I'll never forget every single thing that happened that day," Arde said. "I'll remember the radio transmissions 'til I die."
Luckily, Arde only took a minor injury from a different incident - a brass burn on the back of his neck from a bullet casing.
Life goes on
After returning from their long departure in Oct. 2006, the men have one thing on their minds - moving forward.
"I'm set for graduation in May and I get my diploma in the summer," DeOliveira said. "I just finished the background process for Oakland (Police Department) and San Jose (Police Department), and I join the Academy in July for one of the two."
Glick, who also desires a career as a cop, said that if anything, he took away a positive experience from Iraq.
"A lot of people look back at the experience of going to Iraq and have a negative tone or say it was a waste of time," Glick said. "I look back at my experience and it gave me a great benefit to shape my resume and who I am going to be as far as my career goals."
However, transitioning from war lifestyle to normal living hasn't been the easiest.
When Arde first returned home, he said that bright camera flashes and loud noises "flipped" him out.
"It was hard adjusting, but it's nice to know that there are people here you can talk to who understand what you've gone through," Arde said. "Guys that have been in war, it doesn't matter which war you're in, you share something with them. It doesn't have to be the same enemy, the same war, the same years or decades. The experience of war transcends all borders and all barriers."
And as for Arde's future plans?
"Hopefully one day I'll be able to teach history in high school 'cause I think my experiences can help guide kids in the right direction," Arde said.
But as for right now, Arde plans on graduating from college and enjoying life.
"Every day that I can drive up the street and not have to worry about getting blown up or worry about getting shot in the face, then it's a lovely day," Arde said. "Today - today is lovely."
Ellie
By: Heather Driscoll
Posted: 4/12/07
Nearly five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Marine Cpl. John Paul Arde found himself rolling along the sandy roads of Iraq, venturing towards a city called Zuwayah.
Once Arde and his team of Marines reached their destination, they made their way to an Iraqi police station.
While conversing with the local police, a woman approached Arde's squad and revealed that there was something buried in the road, perhaps a bomb known as an Improvised Explosive Device.
Through the interpreters, the team discovered that the bomb was buried just ahead of them, yet they continued to press onward in hopes to retrieve it.
"It's like we're driving in to meet death," Arde said.
As Arde and his fellow Marines drove through, the piercing sound of an explosion along with bright flashes and smoke suddenly struck the men.
The bomb fulminated and hit one of their trucks.
"To explain how mad you are when someone just tried to kill you," Arde said. "There are no words that will ever explain it."
Radio transmissions of sergeants giving orders began humming in their ears as the Marines jumped out of their trucks and began to push their attackers towards the Euphrates River.
As they pinned their enemy against the river, the Marines caught a young Iraqi man, who was partially responsible for the explosive.
"I wanted so bad to hurt him," Arde said. "But we couldn't. It taught me restraint, and it just showed me I can do anything. I'm not afraid."
Five days later, on July 6, 2006, four of Arde's close friends were severely injured in what America calls the War on Terror.
A war that San Jose State University Students Arde, Cpl. Justin DeOliveira and Cpl. Byran Glick have witnessed firsthand.
In a business where life and death rely on instinctual allegiance and the teachings of war veterans, these few souls dared to walk in the footsteps of the many who've been lost.
Since the war began, there have been 3,290 U.S. casualties, 346 of them being California natives, according to the Associated Press war casualties database.
Fortunately for Arde, DeOliveira and Glick, they received the opportunity to serve their county and lived to tell the story.
They are three of approximately 11 SJSU Marines that belonged to unit 1/14 out of Alameda, a unit that was deactivated on Nov. 30, DeOliveira said.
Of the Marines, each left to defend the United States for different reasons.
"I actually volunteered to go to Iraq," DeOliveira said. "Being a Marine you have a sense of duty."
"There's an analogy that people say: You're a football team and you practice every day but you never actually play a game. That's what the military generally is. All these years (of) practice, but when the time comes to go to war it's actually playing that game."
An experience not to forget
DeOliveira, a senior majoring in criminal justice, was deployed in Jan. 2006 when he volunteered for unit 1/14 after spending over two years in an infantry squad out of San Bruno.
"My experience was a little bit unique because I was military intelligence so I got to deal with a lot of different aspects which regular people don't get to," DeOliveira said. "I worked the majority counter-IED (Improvised Explosive Device) type stuff. My job was to create and disseminate intelligence."
While DeOliveira immersed himself in intelligence-driven operations, Arde, who was deployed in March 2006, was detached from his unit and put in an infantry squad where he trained Iraqi police.
Arde, a senior majoring in history, was stationed in the city of Hit in Al Anbar Province. Aside from being part of a police transition team, he also executed operations with the police including raids and counter-insurgency operations.
When his team of 14 Marines and one Navy Corpsman wasn't training police, it was traveling in Humvees, hunting for IED's.
"It was a life changing experience," Arde said. "It teaches you what kind of man you are - if you fight or if you don't."
Riffling through the pages of Cpl. Bryan Glick's online photo album, there are sequences of photographs, each telling a story or sparking a memory - candid moments of Glick with children of Iraqi police, a sign of legendary anchorman Ron Burgundy quoting "You Stay Classy, Iraq" to graphic images of an Iraqi suicide bomber's shredded flesh and bone.
"I won't ever forget anything that happened last year," Glick said. "But I just want to get on with my life."
Glick, a junior majoring in criminal justice, stood on towers as force protection in Fallujah, organized missions in Al Asad and took part in a nine-day mission in Dulab, Iraq.
During the mission, Glick and his team were attached to a separate unit, guarding a retransmission site for the radio so they could keep contact with their Combat Operations Center in Al Asad.
"I'm never going to forget that mission," Glick said. "Nine days sitting out there, all you have is your water and a little bit of food; sleeping about an hour a night.
"At night there was no moon and our night vision wasn't working 'cause it takes light and amplifies it. So we're just sitting out in the middle of nowhere and me and my buddy were living in a dirt hole freaking out at night 'cause people could have been two feet away from us and we wouldn't have known it."
In the heat of the moment
Though these three men rarely crossed paths in Iraq, there was one thing they could all agree upon - the environment.
The living conditions were the sum of heat and sand. Heat that reached up to 130 degrees during the day and no lower than 100 degrees at night, Glick said.
"It's hot and there's sand everywhere you look, except for if you go along the Euphrates River, there's a lot of palm trees," Glick said. "That was kind of nice when you got outside of the wire and you were driving along the Euphrates. You look to one side of the Humvee and you got all those palm trees, and the river just kind of reminds you of some places back home."
There's no place like home
Home; a place where mothers, fathers and friends awaited the return of their Marines.
A place where one mother, Renee Glick, sat in a foggy state of mind until she was able to see the look in her son's eyes as the lights flickered on and the bus came to a halt.
"I cried and gave him a big hug," said Renee, mother of Bryan Glick.
Renee said that her reaction to his deployment, however, wasn't as joyous.
"Scared was probably my first reaction," Renee said. "It was my job to protect him and I couldn't do that 'over there.' … But I was also extremely proud that he had the guts to do what he was doing."
Renee belonged to 1/14's Key Volunteer Network, a group made up of wives, mothers and fathers of the Marines from the Bay Area who were deployed with the unit.
Renee was responsible for 10 families and addressed any questions they had regarding anything they needed.
Family contact, however, was a bit sparse and often temporary.
"I lived away from any major base or anything," Arde said. "They had Internet and phone connections. Sometimes you could use it, other times you couldn't if the weather was bad."
DeOliveira said that because he was part of intelligence, they had more money and therefore better resources. However, the AT&T phone centers cost more than 30 cents a minute, which limited his phone calls home to only once a week.
Mixed feelings
Being so far from home, Arde looked at the war with perplexity. He said that Iraq had been one of the most difficult places for him to understand.
The mental stress of always being in danger was, for him, the hardest part.
Arde had been involved in nine separate IED strikes and had been mortared and rocketed more times than he could recall.
Being constantly shot at was a daily routine.
"We dealt with that environment every day for the last six months of my deployment," Arde said. "But every time we were attacked, the next day we had to go back and keep working with the Iraqi police and the people. It was hard getting over the suspicion that maybe the guys we were training were the ones shooting at us just 10 minutes before."
Besides the harshness of reality, Arde and his team were constantly dealing with only a semi-supportive populace. He said that some people loved them, but many hated them.
The only people he truly cared about were the little Iraqi girls. Arde and his squad would often bring them candy, toys that their parents would send them - anything they could get their hands on.
"They live their lives without any hope of advancement," Arde said. "The best they can hope for is a husband that treats them fairly. Whenever I got a chance I gave them as much as I could."
Though these Marines lived day to day, unsure of what would befall next, they discovered a safe haven away from all the chaos - getting lost in perverse humor.
"I'm just really grateful that I got to go with the people that I was with," Glick said. "They're the ones that really help you make it through 'cause whenever things get bad you just start cracking jokes, just calming people down; 'cause you're all going through it together."
For Arde, laughing through the close calls with his buddies was the only thing he could do to prevent it from eating him alive.
Just when things couldn't get worse
But on July 6, there was anything but laughs.
Arde's team was conducting a police recruitment and pulled up to some barriers that were blocking their way in.
He recalls when the first truck arrived, "We could hear them saying on the radio transmissions 'Hey something's not right, we gotta get outta here.'"
As the truck was turning around, it rolled over a land mine and four of Arde's friends were severely injured.
"Truck one said 'We're hit, we're hit bad.'" Arde said. "In the background you here my friend Dan screaming for his life 'cause he's bleeding all over the place."
Sgt. Dan Harrington took shrapnel in both legs and compressed his spine. He continues to limp and use a cane.
"Sgt. Dodd is laying face first in the gutter 'cause there's open sewers," Arde said. "He's laying in sewage water."
Sgt. Cullen Dodd was thrown from his gun turret and suffered broken facial bones.
Arde plays back the memory in his mind, "It was surreal when we pull up 'cause (Sgt. Quinones) is running around pulling guys out of puddles and its like 'Am I going to step on a land mine right now?'"
Sgt. Victor Quinones broke his back and Lance Cpl. Dana Tandy lost most of his hearing in both ears.
Tandy is only 23 years old.
"I'll never forget every single thing that happened that day," Arde said. "I'll remember the radio transmissions 'til I die."
Luckily, Arde only took a minor injury from a different incident - a brass burn on the back of his neck from a bullet casing.
Life goes on
After returning from their long departure in Oct. 2006, the men have one thing on their minds - moving forward.
"I'm set for graduation in May and I get my diploma in the summer," DeOliveira said. "I just finished the background process for Oakland (Police Department) and San Jose (Police Department), and I join the Academy in July for one of the two."
Glick, who also desires a career as a cop, said that if anything, he took away a positive experience from Iraq.
"A lot of people look back at the experience of going to Iraq and have a negative tone or say it was a waste of time," Glick said. "I look back at my experience and it gave me a great benefit to shape my resume and who I am going to be as far as my career goals."
However, transitioning from war lifestyle to normal living hasn't been the easiest.
When Arde first returned home, he said that bright camera flashes and loud noises "flipped" him out.
"It was hard adjusting, but it's nice to know that there are people here you can talk to who understand what you've gone through," Arde said. "Guys that have been in war, it doesn't matter which war you're in, you share something with them. It doesn't have to be the same enemy, the same war, the same years or decades. The experience of war transcends all borders and all barriers."
And as for Arde's future plans?
"Hopefully one day I'll be able to teach history in high school 'cause I think my experiences can help guide kids in the right direction," Arde said.
But as for right now, Arde plans on graduating from college and enjoying life.
"Every day that I can drive up the street and not have to worry about getting blown up or worry about getting shot in the face, then it's a lovely day," Arde said. "Today - today is lovely."
Ellie