BAGHDAD, 13 May 2003 — Baghdad fell more than a month ago but when gunner Joseph Aiello shuts his eyes at night he still sees one of his tank commanders — shot in the face during the battle for the city’s airport. “I had bad dreams after that,” said Aiello, 22, one of many young soldiers here who are haunted by the horrors of war.
“When we entered Baghdad, I saw dozens of (Iraqi) bodies. I had never seen a dead body before. It’s my worst memory,” added Pfc. Eduardo Govea, a tank driver also in his twenties standing guard at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry.
To help the soldiers, the army turns to special combat stress control teams. “When the battle begins, we see which units are exposed and we hold critical incident stress debriefings,” said Sgt. 1st Class Will Lana, a counselor with the Third Infantry Division’s combat team.
“The recurring themes of the nightmares are dead bodies, screaming women and babies.” After particularly traumatizing incidents, Lana approaches the soldiers “to find out what happened, to have them talk about what they went through.”
Another member of the counseling team, Cpl. Nicholas Locke, recalled one soldier who was scarred by an ambush in the southern city of Nassiriyah in March that left three soldiers dead. Even far from the fighting, the soldier insisted on sleeping with his boots on in case he had to run.
Lana said the hardest part of his job was helping the soldiers with feelings of guilt after having seen their comrades die in combat.
Aiello, who saw the tank commander go down on April 5, is one of them. “I feel better now,” he said simply, acknowledging nonetheless that he did not feel like talking with the counselors.
But others are more forthcoming, saying the only thing on their minds now is going home. “I’ve seen some terrible things — tanks rolling over bodies, corpses of civilians... Even if I’m one of the only ones who thinks it, I think we violated the Geneva Convention,” said one Third Infantry soldier with a maintenance unit who asked not to be named, referring to the internationally accepted rules of war.
Meanwhile, Iraqi villagers who looted uranium-tainted barrels from a former Iraqi nuclear facility may face the fallout within months, when the effects of using them at home could show up in rising cancer cases, experts say. US soldiers now guard the facility in Tuwaitha, about 25 km south of Baghdad, that was bombed first by the Israelis in 1981 and then by a US-led coalition in 1991.
But throughout the various raids, the “yellow cake factory” was undamaged.
“In the neighboring village, they are simple people, they don’t know about radiation and uranium. They went to what is called the ‘yellow cake factory’... They took these barrels and emptied these barrels with the yellow cake,” Hisham Abdel-Malik, an Iraqi nuclear expert said.
