Warrior Dad Dies in Baghdad

I heard from one of my new correspondents in Baghdad, Lt. Matt Belfi (see my post on Matt - "Lieutenant Matt Belfi: Philly Cop & Warrior Pilot", a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard and a helicopter pilot. From his vantage point in Baghdad’s Green Zone at the U.S. Embassy, he wrote me about the tragic loss of a comrade on March 27th. Here is part of his email:

“The embassy has been getting attacked via IDF (indirect fire – mortars or rockets) lately and, unfortunately, last week’s attack resulted in a friend of mine getting killed. Sergeant First Class Sean Thomas (pictured above with his wife and child) was walking along when suddenly an enemy rocket exploded near him. A (civilian) contractor on location was also killed. Several were wounded also.

I was nearby and rendered medical aid to the wounded. Although I am not a medic, I was a civilian EMT for years (and Matt is a Philadelphia police officer now), so the basics are still with me. It’s interesting how quickly things change. It really reminds you that this is, in fact, a war zone - not that I needed that kind of reminder.

I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for soldiers such as you who experienced events such as this with regularity during the Vietnam War. I have thought about that a lot lately. It must have really been rough.

I know Sean’s death has taken a toll on me. It has taken a bigger toll on a friend of mine who was there rendering medical aid to Sean with me. Being a civilian “first responder” has helped me, but I think Jerry, my friend who was with me, is having a harder time dealing with the tragedy. He is also the type of person who keeps things bottled up as opposed to me, who is much more outward about my feelings (for better or worse)…”

I sent an email back to Matt:

“Matt: It never gets easier. When I first stood in front of the Vietnam Memorial and looked at the names of men I knew who had been killed, it was a sobering experience. Having been in Baghdad, I know firsthand about the IDF hazards there as well…

As a cop who has been in the first aid mode as both soldier and civilian, I am glad you were there. If your friend was aware of your presence, it surely comforted him.

Some day you will also stand before a memorial in Washington to the men and women who have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom. You will stare at your friend’s name and you will remember all of it. Then you will take your loved ones in your arms and be grateful once again for all of the simple blessings of life.”

Matt’s friend was posthumously promoted to the rank of master sergeant and awarded the Purple Heart and Combat Action Badge. Sean Michael Thomas was from Walker Township in Pennsylvania and he is survived by his wife, Carrie, and daughter Alexa. The couple would have celebrated their anniversary on Easter Sunday. Master Sergeant Thomas previously served in Afghanistan where he was awarded a Bronze Star.

A memorial fund has been established in his daughter’s name. Anyone who would like to contribute to the Alexa Thomas Fund can make donations to the fund in care of Omega Bank, 2 South Main Street, Hughesville, Pennsylvania 17737.

SFC Chuck Grist
www.AmericanRanger.blogspot.com

Mortars Along the Tigris

I am still involved in training activities at Fort Bragg and I will soon tell you about some of the extraordinary individuals I have met. Until I can do so, I’ll reflect once more on my tour in Iraq in 2004. The above photo shows the Tigris River and downtown Baghdad.

* * * *

I was fortunate to lead the men of the “C.O.B.R.A. Team” (Staff Sergeant Aaron Self, Sergeant Chad Higginbotham and Sergeant John “Doc” Actis, II). Our job as a protective service detail, or personal security detachment, was to protect the life of Brigadier General Charles “Sandy” Davidson, the commander of the 350th Civil Affairs Command. Davidson is now a major general assigned to Centcom. Our team’s website is http://www.thecobrateam.com/.

When we lived in Baghdad’s Green Zone, our little house was directly on the Tigris River across from the Sheraton Hotel, a frequent target of insurgent rockets or mortars. We called our residence the “cobra pit”.

The following excerpt from my in-progress book tells about an incident during which we were the target of other incoming rounds:

“I was sitting alone in the cobra pit on the evening of August 7th when I heard two loud explosions. Running outside to see what was happening, I stepped into the courtyard just as a mortar or small rocket flew directly over my head and exploded about a hundred meters away. I muttered an expletive to myself, but another round flew into the Green Zone and landed even closer.

Looking for some reasonable cover, I ran to the concrete stairway leading up to the street. There was a small space next to the wall of the cobra pit and it provided good protection for the moment. Another round landed on the other side of the wall and the explosion sent pieces of steel shrapnel flying over my head. I could hear chunks of metal landing on the roof of our house. It was the closest these weapons had ever come to me.

After seven or eight rounds, it appeared the attack was over. I walked up to the street and headed toward the general’s house where I knew Higginbotham was guarding the boss. Several Iraqi civilians came outside and pointed to the end of the street where one of the rounds might have landed on a house. We all began to walk in that direction to make sure there were no casualties.

As we passed the house next to the cobra pit, another round came over our heads and exploded nearby. I told the Iraqis to go back and take cover and they started running to their house. Other rounds continued to impact near us and the last Iraqi in the group acted like he didn’t know where to go. I directed him to our stairwell and he joined me in the small area next to the stairs. The attack ended shortly thereafter.

Everyone was fine at the general’s house and Higginbotham made sure General Davidson was under sufficient cover. Fortunately, there were no casualties in our compound.”

SFC Chuck Grist
http://www.americanranger.blogspot.com/

Call to Duty

After I was back in the good old USA for a few months, I still remembered those with whom I served in Iraq. Only those who have been to war would understand the feelings I wrote about in the following op-ed piece:

CALL TO DUTY
Where the soldier’s heart dwells
Special to the Orlando Sentinel
June 26, 2005

After spending most of last year on active duty with the Army Reserve, I am having a difficult time relating to a civilian world that is far away, physically and emotionally, from the turbulent life of Baghdad. This life is the illusion – the war is the reality.

Last year was my turn in the swirling sandstorm of the war on terror. I spent most of my time running hundreds of convoys in and around Baghdad, including the infamous airport road, Route Irish, the most dangerous stretch of road in the world.

I may be home, but many of my comrades are not. Some remained in Iraq and some have returned voluntarily for subsequent tours. A few were killed. My former lieutenant now works for the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in the Green Zone.

Doc, my medic, is now a private security contractor, doing the same protective service job we did, but for a bigger paycheck. He was almost killed recently when a car bomb exploded as his team passed a checkpoint.

When I try to explain to someone that I miss Baghdad, they look at me as if I just escaped from a mental hospital. What they don’t understand, and will never understand, is that there is an exciting, electric feeling when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death – and live. A soldier is never more alive, and his senses are never more in tune, than when his universe is immersed in war.

I must admit that I have thought about going back. What keeps me here is an important job that I must prepare to retire from in a few short years, a wife who went through hell once, and does not deserve to go through it again, and the reality that I am not a youngster any more and will, in fact, probably retire from the Army Reserve next year.

It is still hard to sit in a restaurant, walk through a mall or drive down the road without thinking that most of the people around me are clueless about what their fellow Americans are doing on their behalf.

They could not understand what it feels like to walk out of your granddaughter’s recital and hear the thump of mortars in the distance. Turning to the sound, the realization hits that the explosion is a fireworks display at nearby Disney World, and not incoming rounds.

It is said that soldiers will naturally feel the urge to march toward the sound of the guns. After all, that is where their comrades are. It does not feel natural to stay behind, in safety, when your brothers and sisters are still on the battlefield. I cannot deny that I feel that sense of urgency and call to arms, even now.

It took a long time for me to “return home” after my tour in Vietnam more than 30 years ago. That is why I understand the reason I feel the way I do about Iraq. I am home, and it feels good to be safely in the arms of my beloved America. Still, something is missing.

I know I left a part of me in the jungles of Vietnam, and now I have left another piece of my soul in the deserts of Iraq. My wife understands, and sometimes, when she is about to enter the room, she will stop.

Somehow she knows that I am not at home at that moment. I am an American warrior in a Humvee, traveling hell-bent down the most dangerous road in the world, and may God have mercy on the terrorist who takes me on.

SFC Chuck Grist

NOTE: Obviously, I did not retire in 2006. I have discussed my upcoming mobilization with my wife and, as always, she is supportive because she is the wife of an American soldier and she understands. Whether I serve here or abroad, she will stand by me as she always has. I am indeed a lucky man.

October, 2004: Farewell to Baghdad

My 2004 tour finally came to an end. This op-ed piece was in the Orlando Sentinel on October 5, 2004.



FAREWELL TO BAGHDAD
Baghdad – October, 2004

Standing on the roof of our headquarters building on the Tigris River in Baghdad, I looked across the river at the Sheraton Hotel and thought about how many times it had been the target of rockets. I saw the blue dome of the nearby mosque and heard the evening call to prayer. Hearing this several times a day became a memorable experience in this exotic, though dangerous, part of the world. With my tour in Iraq about to end, I was smoking a farewell cigar. It was time to go home.

I had taken my last look at Assassin’s Gate, Iraq’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the gigantic monument of Swords and the presidential palace that is now the U.S. Embassy. I ate one more at the Chinese restaurant and the Green Zone Café. I experienced for the last time the intrigue of the al-Rasheed Hotel, where the reporters, the embassy staffers, the mercenaries and the spies hang out. I said my goodbyes to my Iraqi friends.

There would be one last convoy as we drove to the Baghdad airport. It would be a strange feeling to know that, once the wheels of the aircraft lifted off the ground, many of us would probably never again face the prospect of death by rockets, mortars, improvised explosive devices, ambushes or assassination. A few of us will surely return, but the job goes on for the thousands who remain behind.

Our four-man Protective Service Detail, the COBRA Team, was formed for one purpose. That mission was to ensure the safety of Gen. Charles Davidson, commander of the 350th Civil Affairs Command, during his tour of duty. To accomplish this, our movements in the air and on the ground had to be planned well enough that the enemy could not predict where we would be and would never see us as a “soft” target. True success would mean that we were never the victims of an IED, an ambush or an assassination attempt. The possibility of “bad luck” was always there, but it always is.

On Sept. 28, Davidson departed Iraq after completing his own important job. When he left, our primary mission had been successful and was at an end. My own last mission would be to get the members of my team out of Iraq and safely home.

During our missions in Iraq, we have been shot at but never wounded. We have been on the receiving end of rockets and mortars, but the shrapnel did not hit us. We have never been the victims of an improvised explosive device, a vehicle bomb or an ambush, but we have missed them all by only minutes. We have seen mysterious men in masks with AK-47s lurking in alleys along our routes but, with the general in our convoy, our job was to avoid contact. We are all combat veterans of other wars and did not need to “face the elephant” again, but we were ready, willing and able to do so.

For their overwhelming support, our families, friends, churches, employers and average Americans will have our gratitude forever. They kept our spirits up with letters, cards, e-mails and generous packages. Saying “thank you” could never be enough.

We are looking forward to reuniting with our families and resuming our civilian careers. Staff Sgt. Aaron Self will return to Texas to complete the police academy. He had only two weeks to go when he was activated. Sgt. Chad Higginbotham will return to his family and his law enforcement career in Mississippi. Newly promoted Sgt. John “Doc” Actis II, another Mississippi cop, has joined the ranks of the private security contractors making the big bucks. After taking a short break, he will return to Iraq as one of the “new” mercenary soldiers of his generation.

As for me, with Vietnam and Iraq on opposite ends of my career, it is time to return to the States and to my job as a police officer with the Altamonte Springs Police Department. At least the bad guys back there don’t use rockets and mortars.

To Debbie, my dear wife of 30 years who is the girl I left behind, I must simply say how blessed I will be to walk with you through every day of the rest of our lives.

SFC Chuck Grist
Baghdad, Iraq

August, 2004: Close Calls Getting Closer

The photo at left shows a damaged steel fence in front of a rocket crater. This impact was only about 100 meters from where I lived with my team in the Green Zone in 2004. With only a couple of months left in our tour, I wrote this for the Orlando Sentinel and it was published on August 19, 2004:





IN BAGHDAD, CLOSE CALLS ARE GETTING CLOSER

The enemy rocket tore through the sky over my head and exploded nearby, shaking the ground under my feet and sending me rushing for cover. I had heard two other loud explosions before running out of my residence on the west bank of the Tigris River. This third explosion sounded even closer. It was dark this night of Aug. 7 and I could not see the rockets, but there was no mistaking the air-piercing sounds of the projectiles above me or the explosions that followed their impact.

Soldiers like me who live in Baghdad’s Green Zone, now known as the “International Zone”, have become accustomed to frequent mortar or rocket attacks. Most are aimed at the U.S. Embassy, which is south of us around the bend in the river. Other attacks target nearby coalition installations or Iraqi government buildings. The resulting explosions are heard, but are rarely this close.

Kneeling in a fairly secure walled-in area, I tried to count the rockets that seemed to come from the area of Sadr City to the east, the home of Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army. They continued to fly over my head, and one rocket exploded only about 75 meters away, hurling debris and razor-sharp steel shrapnel onto the roof of our house.

A total of 10 rockets landed perilously close to us and to our neighbors. This was the closest brush with these weapons that I have had here in Iraq. We do our best on convoys to avoid ambushes or IEDs (improvised explosive devices), but with these rockets, it is like living near the bull’s-eye of a target. If the insurgents had aimed only a little lower and to the right, that one rocket would have landed on top of me.

Within the last week or 10 days, there have been a lot of close calls for people I know. In addition to having their house peppered with shrapnel from the same rocket that impacted near me, the civil affairs team living next door has had other near misses. In the most recent incident, a mortar landed in front of one of their Humvees in downtown Baghdad but, miraculously, most of the blast went away from them.

Staff Sgt. Aaron Self, one of the soldiers I supervise on the Protective Service Detail, had two bullets whiz by his head as he stood in the gun turret during one of our convoys.

A friend from my former Army Reserve unit in Orlando was seriously wounded in Sadr City. Another soldier from the same unit was lightly wounded.

The other day, we passed a group of Iraqi soldiers surrounding a rocket that only minutes before had buried itself in the middle of our route, failing to detonate. Also that day, our convoy returned along the airport road to the International Zone, passing the remains of an IED that had just exploded. On a recent night, a rocket-propelled grenade narrowly missed a Marine colonel we have worked with.

When I was in Vietnam, it seemed that the last 60 to 90 days of a soldier’s tour were the most dangerous. A lot of guys were killed on their last helicopter ride, their last convoy or their last patrol. In Iraq, this same phenomenon has happened again, as it did to the Apopka soldier killed just before he was to return home.

With around 140,000 of us in Iraq, the odds are small that we will be the ones wounded or killed. Still, as the end of our own tour approaches in a couple of months, those odds can slowly begin to work against us. After hundreds of convoys and dozens of rocket or mortar attacks, the chances begin to increase that we will also be ambushed, hit by an IED or found by one of those poorly aimed rockets or mortars. Fortunately, these potential threats only heighten our senses and strengthen our resolve to survive.

I keep telling my wife, Debbie, not to worry. If the whole North Vietnamese Army couldn’t kill me, I won’t let these guys get me either.

SFC Chuck Grist
Baghdad, Iraq