The Atlanta Journal-Constitution August 29, 2004
Halfway home
Cecilia Cotterino's tiny arms locked around her daddy's neck like bands of steel.
By Christopher J. Kelly
With the screech of airplane wheels and the hiss of glass doors, the distance between the 12-year-old and the soldier she calls "Poppa" had dropped from 7,000 miles to less than 20 feet. She closed the gap in three steps and a long leap.
First Lt. Joe Cotterino fought back tears as his wife, Denise, put her hand to his cheek. The three held each other in tight silence as strangers filled the terminal at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport with applause.
Welcome home, the clapping hands roared. It wasn't for keeps, but the Cotterinos weren't complaining.
Lt. Cotterino is back in his Dalton home on a 15-day leave he wasn't counting on when he and some 370 other soldiers of the Scranton-based 2nd Battalion of the 103rd Armor of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard left for Iraq in March. More than half of the unit's soldiers have made it home on leave, local Guard officials say, and most will have abbreviated reunions with their families by year's end. At the halfway point:
- A handful of 103rd soldiers have been sent home for medical and family emergencies, including the first sergeant determined to see them through to the end.
- At least three ended their tours with serious injuries.
- One came home in a flag-draped casket.
'Where I have to go, what I have to do'
April opened like an ugly wound.
March had closed with the brutal murders of four American contractors in Fallujah. Their blackened bodies were dragged through the town's ancient streets by mobs chanting "Death to America!" and "Long Live Saddam!"
Forty miles west, at Camp Ferrin-Huggins, Echo Company - second and fourth platoons of the former Bravo Company - were still settling into the 12- to 14-hour shifts they started as soon as they arrived in Baghdad.
On April 5, the word came: Be ready to leave in 24 hours. They were going to Fallujah. Before they had finished unpacking, they were being tossed into the crucible of a flaring insurgency.
"That was one awful e-mail," Denise Cotterino remembers. "He just wrote, 'This is where I have to go and this is what I have to do.'§" Echo Company got just the kind of welcome it was expecting in Fallujah, Lt. Cotterino says.
"We were in a very large firefight within a week or so," he says. "There were some bad guys on the roof of a building and they had two teams of Marines pinned down.
"The bad guys didn't see us because we were on the other side of the building. We saw the muzzle flashes and we engaged. The Marines were able to escape while we kept the bad guys busy."
For most of April, Fallujah was under siege as Marines fought to secure the town. Echo Company manned checkpoints at the main entrance, screening Iraqis for weapons and other contraband. It was believed that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist with Al-Qaida ties, was holed up in the town. The 37-year-old Jordanian radical has been accused of masterminding a string of suicide bombings in Iraq. It was up to Echo Company to make sure he didn't get any outside help.
"One day, a guy ran our checkpoint (in a car)," Lt. Cotterino says. "He went under this bridge, and I told my men, 'When he comes out the other end, take him out.'
"When he came out, he was leaning out the window with an AK-47... and they lit him up."
One of the younger soldiers was troubled after killing the man, the 37-year-old Lt. Cotterino says.
"He was a little shaken up," he says. "It's not an easy thing to do. But I told him he did the right thing. I gave the order and he followed it. It had to be done. The guy in the car made the choice. It was a bad one."
By the end of April, 10 Marines and at least 600 Iraqis had been killed in and around Fallujah. Fearing an all-out assault on the town would result in massive loss of civilian life and fuel the insurgency, U.S. and Iraqi officials negotiated a truce that put Fallujah under the control of a former general in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard.
The decision didn't sit well with many on the ground who had watched fellow soldiers die and who knew that the insurgents would see the withdrawal as a victory.
"Well, the diplomats got involved," Lt. Cotterino says. "We would see them when they came in and they'd be talking about what to do and this and that. Here's an idea: Tell the insurgents, 'If you want peace, put the damn guns down.'
"And then when we do pull out, they call it a victory? Are you kidding? All I saw was your (town) burning, and you call that a victory? Unbelievable."
Echo Company left Fallujah after about two months, Lt. Cotterino says. Soldiers from the storied 1st Marine Expeditionary Force presented each of their 103rd comrades with a unit patch. The honor is among the highest the Marines issue. The Department of Defense must authorize Lt. Cotterino and his fellow soldiers to wear it. If permission is granted, they will be the first Pennsylvania Army National Guard soldiers to wear the patch.
"That shows you what a good job the guys did over there," Lt. Cotterino says. "They (Marines) didn't want us to leave."
SECRET SQUIRRELS & ALPHABET PEOPLE
Since their last days of training at Fort Dix, N.J., the mission of Charlie Company has been shrouded in secrecy. Neither the government nor individual soldiers will comment on their work, except to say that it is what rank-and-file soldiers call, "Secret Squirrel stuff."
What is known is sketchy, cobbled together from various news reports and military experts. The company is stationed at Camp Cropper, adjacent to Baghdad International Airport. The camp is a "High Value Detention Site," according to GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think-tank based in Alexandria, Va. It is likely that Saddam himself is being held at Cropper, many news accounts and experts suggest. It is unlikely that any of the soldiers of Charlie Company will talk about their experiences over the past six months until they come home.
The mission of Alpha Company - first and third platoons of the former Bravo Company - is only slightly less secret. Spc. Teddy Habeeb, 34, of Clarks Summit, and his fellow soldiers are stationed at Camp Slayer, a former Iraqi presidential palace and amusement complex near the airport.
The complex, which includes at least 20 opulent guest houses and three man-made lakes, is now a logistics and operations center for U.S. intelligence and the Iraq Survey Group, which has searched in vain for weapons of mass destruction. Besides the ISG, the camp is home to FBI and CIA officials, commonly known among grunts as "The Alphabet People."
All that the military will say about Camp Slayer is that soldiers there provide security for members of the ISG as they search for WMD. Compared to other camps, life is good at Slayer, Spc. Habeeb says. Troops stay in quarters once occupied by elite Republican Guard soldiers and guests of Saddam. The food is good ñ steak at least one night a week.
The temperature hit 154 degrees at Slayer in July, Spc. Habeeb says. Lately, "it's cooled down to about 117," he says. Also home on leave, he says an 80-degree day is "chilly" to him now. And he feels "naked" without his 9-mm sidearm.
His family was waiting with a limousine when he arrived at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International late last week. They also brought the white Ford Mustang he bought on the Internet auction site e-Bay during a free moment in Baghdad.
Happy to be home, his face darkens when he talks about Sgt. Sherwood Baker, the lone 103rd soldier to die since the unit was deployed. The 30-year-old Plains Township husband and father was killed April 26 in an explosion in Baghdad while securing a suspected chemical weapons warehouse. He left behind a wife, Debra, 27, and a 9-year-old son, James.
At the time of Sgt. Baker's death, Spc. Habeeb was handling the mail for Alpha Company. Sgt. Baker was waiting on a package containing a video game system.
"The last thing he said to me as he was leaving was, 'I want my PlayStation 2 today,' " Spc. Habeeb remembers.
"I never saw him again."
The game came about a week later, Spc. Habeeb says absently as he sits on the porch of his Clarks Summit home. A kiss from his 8-year-old daughter, Brianna, brings him back around. Before he left, he gave her a jar filled with M&Ms candies. There was one for each day of the year her daddy is supposed to be gone and 35 extras, just in case. She eats one a day, even while he's home.
"These days count, too," she says, wrapping her arms around her father's neck.
"Every day counts," Spc. Habeeb says, pulling her close.
GETTING THEIR 'GOAT' TO CUT THE GRASS
The newest member of Alpha Company has four legs and floppy ears.
Seeking a cost-effective way to eliminate high brush behind the barracks at Camp Slayer, some of the men of Alpha Company arranged to buy
what they thought was a goat.
It's just one of many stories Sgt. Shawn Stanford, of West Pittston, plans to relate in a book about his experiences in Iraq. Among the tongue-in-cheek titles he's considering is "Iraqalypse Now." In an e-mail to The Sunday Times, he describes the neighborhood around Camp Slayer:
"Mohammed is the foreman of the Iraqi workers on our end of camp. He lives in Farrat City, the neighborhood outside our eastern wall. Farrat City is a crazy quilt of ramshackle huts; blocky, concrete single-family houses; multi-story apartment buildings and trash-strewn debris fields. The local kids have a destroyed Iraqi tank for a jungle gym. There was a good-sized government office building very near the wall, but the camp took a lot of fire from it in the first months after the war and the (Army) 1st Armored (Division) knocked it down.
"We still take fire from Farrat City, but it's not from the people living there. The Bad Guys will drive in, set up a mortar tube, lob a few our way and then pile back in and drive off. This presents us with two problems - aside from the obvious: mortars coming our way. First, we have a hard time engaging someone who's only there for a minute or two, and second, we don't want to shoot up Farrat City when the people that are shooting at us don't live there and have already left, anyway.
"We asked Mohammed about this and he told us that even though Farrat City is as ridiculously well-armed with personal AK-47s as any other Baghdad neighborhood, they don't want to risk shooting at the Bad Guys. The simple reason is that our towers might not be able to tell the difference between who's shooting who and, in the heat of the firefight, could shoot at the Farrat City residents who aren't shooting at us, but are encouraging the Bad Guys to stop using their neighborhood as a fire base.
"So, when the Bad Guys show up the residents put their heads down and wait for them to go away. And, really, we can't blame them."
Getting the "goat," Sgt. Stanford writes, was the brainchild of Spc. Joe Toth, 23, of Clarks Summit. He bought it from the Iraqi work foreman, Mohammed, for $80. The animal is actually a lamb, and Mohammed had trouble getting it past security until Spc. Toth convinced the gate guards to let it through.
Spc. Toth named the animal "Jihad." Sgt. Stanford writes that his gunner, Cpl. Nick Dilmore, 28, of Tunkhannock, is an animal lover who can often be found reading with the lamb "curled up at his feet."
"We all love animals ñ they're delicious," Sgt. Stanford writes, hinting that Jihad will be the "guest of honor" at a dinner Alpha Company is planning for when it's time to come home.
"In the meantime, there's plenty of grass back there. Eat up, Jihad." <*L>MISSION INCOMPLETE: <*C>'IT'S REAL BITTERSWEET'
MISSION INCOMPLETE: 'IT'S REAL BITTERSWEET'
First Sgt. Raymond Boccardi knew something was wrong.
He'd been having chest pains and was fighting a harsh cough he just couldn't shake. It had to be the sand in the air, he figured. Everyone else was hacking, too.
By May, he couldn't ignore the pain any longer. His superiors ordered him to get a stress test.
"I figured, OK, I'll go to a hospital in downtown Baghdad and take a stress test, no big deal," Sgt. Boccardi says.
"They wanted me to go to Germany."
Fiercely protective of his soldiers, Sgt. Boccardi didn't want to leave. He took the loss of Sgt. Baker hard. Two other soldiers, Spc. Brian Messersmith, 30, of Danville, and Spc. Ryan Owlett, 22, of Middlebury, near Mansfield, Tioga County, suffered burns in the explosion that killed Sgt. Baker. And Sgt. Boccardi had two platoons in Fallujah.
So instead of hopping a flight to Germany, Sgt. Boccardi hopped in a Humvee and went to check on the soldiers of second and fourth platoons. When he returned from Fallujah, his superiors weren't happy. He was going to Germany. Immediately.
Doctors there did an EKG, Sgt. Boccardi says, "and they didn't like what they saw." He was sent back to Fort Dix in June, where he was diagnosed with asthma. The army judged him unfit for duty in the Iraqi theater. He won't be going back.
Neither will Spc. Messersmith and Spc. Owlett, local Guard officials say. Also home for good for health reasons are Sgt. 1st Class Anthony Maszeroski of Archbald, who will be 59 this month, and Sgt. Brian Dean, 30, of the Philadelphia area. Sgt. Dean suffered serious neck and brain injuries in a Humvee accident in Baghdad. He is undergoing treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
While he's happy to be home with his family, Sgt. Boccardi says he misses his soldiers. He's proud of the job they've been doing. He's disappointed he won't be there to complete the mission.
"It's real bittersweet," he says in a telephone interview from his Millville home. "I keep in touch and I try to keep up on what's going on, but once you're away from there you're no longer part of all that. That's hard."
TIME WITH FAMILY 'ALL THAT MATTERS'
While the occupation of Iraq is an increasingly dangerous business, morale in the 103rd remains high, Lt. Cotterino, Spc. Habeeb and other soldiers say.
"Football season is starting," Spc. Habeeb says with a grin. "If we just follow that up to the Super Bowl (Feb. 6), we'll only have a month or so to go. That's the way I'm looking at it."
And what will Iraq look like when the 103rd comes home?
"I don't see any change, at least right now," Spc. Habeeb says. "People are still killing each other and soldiers are still dying. It's good that Saddam is gone, but it seems like Zarqawi or Sadr are just taking his place.
"It's a 5,000-year-old argument. I don't know if we're going to be able to change that. I think some of them are trying. You know, if they'd just stop shooting at us for six months, (American troops) would go home. They don't get that."
Lt. Cotterino agrees, pulling out a cigarette lighter he bought from a vendor in Baghdad. It is engraved with "9.11." and a relief portrait of Osama Bin Laden. The twin towers of the World Trade Center rise above the terrorist's head, with a passenger jet close to impact. When you open the lid, the towers glow red.
"Nice, huh?" Lt. Cotterino says, calling the sentiment behind the lighter just one of many obstacles to the Iraqi people establishing a lasting democracy.
"They have no concept of freedom, and I'm not sure they want it," he says. "Sometimes I think they want somebody telling them what to do." Whatever the Iraqi people make of their chance at democracy, Lt. Cotterino says the soldiers of the 103rd are working hard to help them.
"That's what I want people back here to know," Lt. Cotterino says. "Our guys are over there kicking ass. They're doing a great job and it means a lot to know that people back here appreciate it. We don't take the support of the people back home for granted."
In little more than a week, the Cotterinos will again stand at the glass doors of the airport, repeating their brief reunion in reverse.
"It'll be hard to leave again, but I'm not going to think about it right now," Lt. Cotterino says. "I'm home with my family. That's all that matters right now."
© Copyright 2004, The Citizens Voice
