FALLUJAH, Iraq, 24 June 2003 — Feeling tired and depressed after being away from home for months, young US soldiers in Iraq say they are not peacekeepers and are ready to go home. “I think I had enough. It’s time for us to go home,” said Pfc. Joe Cruz, 18, from the Second Brigade of the Army’s Third Infantry Division in Fallujah, 50 kilometers west of Baghdad.
Cruz, a native of Guam, has been away from his family for nearly one year and said not knowing when he would go home depressed him. “When I get depressed, I just write a letter. I write a lot. Writing a letter relieves my stress,” said the shy soldier. In letters, he tells his mother he is doing fine.
He is lying. “I wake up in the middle of the night just to look around. I am always half-asleep,” said Cruz, one of 4,000 US soldiers assigned to keep the peace in this Sunni Muslim city, which has often been a flash point since US troops shot dead at least 16 civilians during protests in late April.
Sgt. Robert Meadows, one of six doctors at the brigade’s compound, said he treats one soldier a day on average for illnesses related to combat fatigue. “The biggest problem is sleep. Some people just sleep for hours and hours but still don’t have any energy to get up,” said the 39-year-old doctor from Brooklyn, New York City.
Meadows has seen soldiers suffering from symptoms of combat stress including depression, agitation and short temper and said a majority of them are men in their early 20s.
Pfc. Miguel Balderas, 22, said he sleeps inside the compound most of his off-duty time. “I’m tired. I sleep most of the time,” said Balderas from Santa Maria, California. His friend, Pfc. James Mierop, 20, from Joliet, Illinois, described the mood as grim. “I think a lot of people here are at the breaking point,” said the baby-faced blond.
Morale, soldiers said, is low since their roles have changed from waging war to postwar peacekeeping. “It went down rapidly shortly after they said ‘we got more missions for you guys to do’,” said Spc. Adam Nuelken, 23, from Columbia, South Carolina.
“Morale is never gonna be sky-rocket high, like when we rolled into Baghdad. I think only the victory of that scale could ever boost morale that high,” Nuelken said.
“I don’t think you can ever get near that level unless you won another war,” he said. Cruz agrees morale plummeted after the war. “We need morale so that we can do our job. But everyone is down and depressed. It’s hard for us to do our job. We need to be boosted up.”
Soldiers also said they were frustrated with their peacekeeping roles. “I think that the transition is somewhat difficult. We came with a war mentality, not with a peacekeeping mentality,” Balderas said.
First Lt. Herb Leggette, 23, from Andrew, South Carolina, explained: “The most difficult part (of peacekeeping) is simply figuring out that not everybody wants to kill you,” he said.
