A few days later, Diana
replied. "Are you ok??? I haven't heard from you since Sunday and it is
now Wednesday ... I know you said you were going on a dangerous mission ... I
get so nervous when I don't hear from you ... phone call or e-mail ... I just
hope and pray your ok honey ... "
It was an E-mail
Griffin would never read.
As the Baghdad security
plan draws thousands more troops into densely populated parts of the Iraqi capital,
the danger from roadside bombs and small-arms fire grows exponentially. The
city has now surpassed Anbar province as the deadliest region for U.S. troops.
Since the war began, more than 3,370 American soldiers and marines have been
killed and more than 25,000 wounded in Iraq, and, in terms of American
casualties, the past six months have been the costliest of the war. American
commanders say they expect casualties to increase in the next three months.
One of those casualties
was Darrell Griffin, felled by a sniper's bullet on March 21, 2007, while
patrolling in Sadr City. He was fatally shot while standing in the hatch of a
Stryker armored vehicle. I interviewed him on March 3, 10 days before his 36th birthday,
at a forward operating base near the town of Iskandariyah, 35 miles south of
the city where he was killed. The desert sun was bright, and he wore a pair of
dark glasses, which covered his eyes but couldn't conceal a spasmodic muscle
tic in his face. He was quite self-conscious about the tic, he confessed, but
shrugged it off. "That's what happens after two combat tours in
Iraq." We talked about a recent battle and about his collection of digital
photographs chronicling his two tours in Iraq. He'd seen things, he said, that
he could never tell his wife or family on the phone.
We had met the day
before, inside a dusty green tent on the base. It was about 10 o'clock on a
Friday evening, and the men of Charger Company's 3rd platoon, 2-3 Stryker
Brigade, were preparing for a mission to nab a local suspected troublemaker who
was holed up in a farmhouse outside of town. Griffin was a big guy, even
without the bulky body armor, helmet, and "dangle"—what soldiers call
the bits of gear that they clip, strap, or otherwise buckle to their uniforms.
He had half a dozen rifle magazines strapped across his chest, two radios, a
medical pack, a flashlight, a digital camera, and a variety of other pouches and
pockets swollen with kit.
His rifle stock had a
sticker of a white skull, and on his helmet written in black Magic Marker was
the phrase "Malleus Dei," the Latin phrase meaning God's
hammer. During his first tour with a different infantry unit, it was John
Calvin's motto "Post Tenebras Lux"—after darkness, light. As
he fiddled with all his equipment, he talked about the upcoming mission—how it
was likely to be routine, how much things in Iraq had changed since his first
deployment, and how the folks back home simply couldn't understand the chaos
and carnage that soldiers see on a daily basis.
Embedded with Griffin's
unit from the last days of February into early March, I met many of the
soldiers in Charger Company. Griffin was a veteran in the unit and more than
willing to chat about all he had seen. We mostly talked about a fight near the
city of Najaf just a few weeks earlier. Assigned to recover the wreckage of a
downed Apache helicopter and the remains of the two pilots, the 2-3 stumbled
across what the Army called a Shiite doomsday cult known as the Heaven's Army,
which had amassed hundreds of fighters and hundreds of civilians in a compound
on the outskirts of town. The 2-3 dug in and called in airstrikes against the
buildings, a bombardment that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.
The men spoke often
about Najaf because memories of the engagement were still disturbingly fresh in
their minds. Hundreds had been killed or maimed, including women and children.
The 2-3 didn't lose a man. "Not even a sprained ankle," said Lt. Col.
Barry Huggins, the American commander of ground forces at the scene. But
several men were still having nightmares—a 19-year-old medic had dreams of
treating a child with a missing limb. "And I have lots of photographs of
what happened," Griffin offered that evening. "You should sit down
and have a look at them." So we sat on his cot, and he began narrating.
There were hundreds of
pictures, documenting his two tours with the Army's new Stryker brigades—crack
units equipped with the newest vehicles and assigned to some of the toughest
missions. We made it through only a few dozen pictures of the battle of Najaf
and its bloody aftermath before it was time to go out on the raid, but we
agreed to pick up it up again the next day.
The raid was
unremarkable. Griffin and his unit failed to nab their target, and the
platoon—with a reporter and photographer in tow—spent a few hours chasing five
men who had fled the scene across open farm fields. Crunching through those
fields, Griffin and I began talking about philosophy and politics and
famous thinkers. He hadn't been to college, but he read widely and spoke with a
remarkable clarity and urgency about what he had seen. The next afternoon,
Griffin again opened his laptop. "I'd like you to copy these pictures and
make sure that people see them," he told me. So I plugged my iPod into his
computer and began downloading several gigabytes' worth of folders with titles
like "SECOND DEPLOYMENT," "ELECTIONS," "TAL AFAR DEATH
PICS," and "CLOSE CALLS."
"Would you like to
see a picture of the first guy I had to kill?" he asked. It was taken at
12:33 p.m. on April 21, 2005, according to the time stamp. The young man lies
dead, covered in blood and dressed in a blue sweater and white jacket.
Then there were
pictures of the clash in Najaf in late January, with panoramic shots of the
rows of weapons that were seized and the rows of corpses. "I'd never seen
anything like it," Griffin said. "The destruction was almost
biblical." He wrote about that battle, too.
My squad and I along
with my platoon leader 1LT Weber established a strongpoint at the first corner
that we approached. I noticed a mutilated child thrown against a wall from
random bomb blasts and as I was setting my machine gunner for security, a man
was trying to get out of the village with a dead baby in his arms, holding her
as if she was still alive along with his wife who could barely walk because her
face had been torn open by the bombing. As this all happened at the same time,
a man brought a young 10-12 year old boy to me in his arms and it was obvious
that the child was barely breathing but still alive. He tried to hand this
child to me but I did not want to take my eyes off of all the villagers who
were now approaching my position in droves. The man knew that this boy would
die so he placed the boy next to a man whose legs had been blown off lying
across from me and in the arms of a dead man this boy finally died. I witnessed
so much carnage on this particular day that words and descriptions of the
horror would become trivial in attempting to paint a picture of what I saw ...
I achieved my 8th
confirmed kill in this village when I opened a door to what I thought was just
another small room and upon entering, saw human bodies strewn on the floor,
wall to wall, that had been placed there because the room had obviously been
established as a casualty collection point. One man lying close to the door had
been pleading for me to help him and kept pointing to his injured leg. I did
not want to commit to entering the room because I had a blind spot to my front
left and did not want to be engaged by any survivors; the room was strewn with
massive amounts of AK-47's, magazines, grenades and other assortments of
weaponry. I motioned for the man to crawl out and he would not or could not
comply. He then looked dead into my eyes and suddenly began to smile at me
while he reached for his AK-47. I lifted my rifle and fired 8 rounds into his
forehead from about 3 feet killing him instantly ...
There was so much
sensory overload as to the horrific that I was forced to make my squad work in
cycles stacking bodies so that they would not have any mental breakdowns. Our
local [Iraqi] interpreter "Ricki" even vomited from seeing this
macabre spectacle. I knew that as U.S. forces in Iraq, we were definitely now
in an even more unpredictable and unstable environment than I had thought prior
to this.
After the battle, they found stores of food
and ammunition, 11 mortar launchers, and an antiaircraft gun inside the
compound. There were so many enemy
weapons that the Army filled three pickup trucks with captured guns. More than
200 people surrendered in the morning, and more than 250 were reported killed.
"We shifted from secure helicopter, defense, to hasty attack, to clear the
trench, to humanitarian mission," says Colonel Huggins.
I asked Griffin if he'd
like to talk about the Najaf battle and all his pictures in a video interview.
We borrowed some plastic chairs from an Internet cafe on the base, found an
abandoned tent that was far away from the noise of the helicopter landing pad,
and talked for 26 minutes.
He didn't say much
about why he had joined the Army—for all the reasons printed on the recruiting
posters, he offered. He'd been a rebellious kid, the kind that his junior high
school assistant principal was happy to see move to high school so he could
stop sticking him in detention. Griffin ran away from home several times, too,
once waiting a month to call his father, telling him he was living in the attic
of a martial arts studio. He met his wife while he was jogging in Pasadena,
Calif. ("I know it sounds corny," he told her, stopping in the middle
of the sidewalk, "but you look really beautiful.") They were married
in 1994. Looking for excitement, he became a paramedic in the not-so-nice parts
of Los Angeles, where he was shot at for the first time. But it was in the military
that he found a new purpose and direction; he joined the National Guard in 1999
and, finding that too slow, went on active duty in July 2001.
In his first Iraq tour,
Griffin spent time in Mosul and Tal Afar. He earned his chops kicking down
doors and chasing bad guys, adventures that he documented in a journal on his
laptop. He even won a Bronze Star with V for valor for saving the lives of
three American and two Iraqi soldiers after an ied attack in Tal Afar.
When I got to the top
of the vehicle, I saw Sgt. Gordon's right leg hanging on by skin only ... As we
were still taking heavy small-arms fire Doc and I were pulling out our First
Sergeant, whose legs had both been broken by the powerful blast. As soon as we
handed him down we began to treat Sgt. Gordon by applying a tourniquet to his
nearly severed leg and then handed him down.
When I climbed down from the vehicle to assess PFC Rosenthal, I noticed
that his face had been severely burned, so I thought, but it was merely the
soot from the blast. As soon as I knelt down to cut his pants off to assess his
wounds, asphalt began chipping all around us due to the small-arms [fire]
getting closer ... Once at the front of the vehicle, we began taking heavy fire
from a mosque off to our east and there was just nowhere else to take cover.
Luckily, our Commander's vehicle approached the wreckage and we immediately
loaded all the casualties and they were brought back to [Forward Operating
Base] Sykes.
His war experiences fueled his obsessive
reading. "Philosophy has kept me grounded in conjunction with the things
that I have seen in my life that have changed me drastically," he told me.
His family and friends joke that they'd ask Griffin to send them reading lists
before seeing him just so that they could keep up with his conversations.
"He would come into the store and regularly drop a few hundred dollars on
books," says Michael Smythe, the manager of Griffin's favorite bookstore,
who spoke at his funeral.
While the books were
helping him think, events on the ground were changing him. "I can't wait
to see you guys," he wrote home to his father in April 2005. "I will
not be right for sometime when all this is over. I have done some things that
will haunt me for a long time to come and pray that G-d will forgive me for
having done them. Let's just say that the enemy can start to appear in the very
people that you are here to 'help.'"
Many of the soldiers in
Iraq carry cameras. One in the 2-3 went into battle with a Canon slr strapped
in a pouchlike holster on his thigh. Griffin went through three digital cameras
during his two tours, once running through a hail of enemy bullets to fetch one
he'd dropped in the sand. "I hope, in the long run, that those pictures
will help this generation to deal with whatever will have to be dealt with in
the aftermath of this thing," says Huggins, reflecting on the thousands of
personal pictures that his soldiers have taken. "They will certainly never
forget the things that they have done here."
When Griffin was home
in Fort Lewis, Wash., between his first and second deployments, Diana would
sometimes find her husband with head lowered, crying. "He had a slightly
harder heart when he came back," she said. "He wanted to appear
unchanged by what he had seen. All I could do was keep telling him that it was
ok either way."
Griffin was first
deployed with a Stryker unit from the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division. On
Jan. 3, 2005, in Tal Afar, his unit was called from its base in an old castle
to head into the city to deal with the body of an Iraqi policeman's son, who
had been beheaded.
We took some Iraqi cops to the scene and did
in fact see a headless body with the head carefully stacked on top of the chest
with the body lying flat on the ground. The police officers (3) went up to the
body to identify it while security was maintained for them by us. Before they
got within 8 ft. of the body, the body exploded and killed one while injuring
severely the others ... We took the torso back to the castle where we have been
for awhile and had to unzip the body bag so that other family members could
identify the lower half by the shoes he was wearing.
Later in the day, the
Iraqi police, who were family members of the destroyed body, began to drink
heavily and one of them (Ali) started shooting randomly into the crowded
traffic circle below the castle. We watched as he killed a 17 yr. old girl, a 7
yr. old girl and a 28 yr. old male. We could not intervene as this was
happening for very complex reasons. This has been one of the most horrific days
of my entire 34 yrs. of living on this earth ... I am stupefied and stand in
tragic awe in the face of this carnage, what could I possibly say? Where was
God today?
He often wrote about
God in his E-mails home. He'd been a part-time pastor at a California Baptist
church once, giving sermons on Wednesday nights. He'd knocked on the door of a
church shortly after he met his wife in 1992. "I'd like to be saved,"
he'd said. In January, he asked his wife to send him a copy of the Koran, because
he wanted to read about the Muslim faith. But in early March of this year, he
told me that he'd stopped attending church. "I started studying philosophy
and became an atheist," he said.
"I'm still trying to contemplate God, but it is kind of hard
here." Ten days later, on his birthday, he called home. "He was
remarkably calm," recalled his father. "The things he has seen in war
and the fact that he read so deeply in philosophical and theological issues led
him to be often conflicted internally about God. He said that he reconciled his
conflicts and that he was ready anytime God called him. Not the statement of an
atheist."
Whatever his personal
convictions, the memories of Najaf and other missions in early March were
becoming a heavy piece of dangle. While embedded on March 5, I followed Charger
Company on another raid that Griffin recounted in his journal. The platoon
entered the home of a family whose only crime was having names similar to those
of wanted insurgents.
I noticed the mother
attempting to breast feed her little baby and yet the baby continued to cry.
[The interpreter] who is a certified and well educated doctor of internal
medicine educated in Iraq, told me that the mother, because she was very
frightened by our presence, was not able to breast feed her baby because the
glands in the breast close up due to sympathetic responses to fear and
stressful situations. I then tried to reassure the mother by allowing her to
leave the room and attain some privacy so that she could relax and feed her
child. I felt something that had been brooding under the attained callousness
of my heart for some time.
My heart finally broke
for the Iraqi people. I wanted to just sit down and cry while saying I'm so, so
sorry for what we had done. I had the acute sense that we had failed these
people. It was at this time, and after an entire year of being deployed and
well into the next deployment that I realized something. We burst into homes,
frighten the hell out of families, and destroy their homes looking for an elusive
enemy. We do this out of fear of the unseen and attempt to compensate for our
inability to capture insurgents by swatting mosquitoes with a sledge-hammer in
glass houses.
It was weeks later and back in the states
that I realized that Griffin was the only soldier I had interviewed at any
length with the video camera. Taking the camera along was just an experiment
with multimedia reporting, after all. In the end, Griffin was only briefly
mentioned in a story about the Stryker unit raids that appeared in the
magazine. "Every night is something different," he's quoted as
saying, while sitting in the back of his eight-wheel Stryker vehicle. "The
uncertainty is one of the hardest things to deal with."
On March 23, I received
an E-mail from Capt. Steve Phillips, the commander of Charger Company. Diana
Griffin, he wrote, had bought out three stores' worth of magazines when her
husband's quote appeared in print. "She called my wife several times to
brag about how her husband was in the news," Phillips wrote. "I don't
know if you remember him, but he was with [the] platoon the night you chased
around for the 5 individuals that were fleeing us. Darrell was shot and killed
two days ago when we were returning from our new area of operations within Sadr
City."
Snipers are an
infantryman's worst nightmare—an unseen enemy who can kill with ease. Even
worse, insurgents these days have taken to videotaping kills, videos that are
sometimes broadcast on Iraqi satellite television. "We have been the
deepest conventional force in Sadr City in the past 2 years I believe,"
Phillips wrote. "It is tense and it is a tough mission." Griffin was
the first soldier from his unit killed during this combat deployment.
There was an E-mail
message from Diana Griffin in my in box as well. "I was wondering if you
have anything more of his interview [whether] you taped him or wrote it down
that I may have, and also any pictures." I sent copies of the interview
and the pictures to his family, and agreed to say few words at the funeral.
The bullet that ended
his life also deprived him of an open-casket funeral. The ceremony was held at
a large church in Porter Ranch, Calif., not far from his final resting place,
the National Cemetery in downtown Los Angeles, in front of about 150 mourners. The
local television station was there; so were members of the Patriot Guard
Riders, a group of former servicemen who voluntarily escort military funerals
to protect families from religious zealots who protest such things. Indeed, as
the funeral procession made its way along the freeway from the church to the
cemetery, a Toyota pickup swerved toward the hearse, beeping its horn with the
driver's hand extending his arm with his thumb down.
The often distant
branches of Griffin's family came together for the first time in years. His
father sat modestly dressed next to Diana, who wore black. There were other
family members there, too, some buttoned down, others with tattoos and long
hair. And Darrell's sister, who, like her brother, excels in martial arts.
His remains lie under a
sliver of white marble in the veterans' cemetery. Despite requests from his
family members, the Army erased Griffin's laptop hard drive before returning it
to them. It's done for security, officials said, but it also erases pictures
and writings. Deletions are done by the military on a case-by-case basis,
"but a lot of people buy recovery software and get some of the files
back," an Army official offered. The Department of Defense also recently
issued new regulations that, in practice, may severely limit soldiers'
E-mailing and blogging. "[I] believe that readers should know the
situation as it really is over here without any partisan interpretation of the
facts," Griffin once blogged to a MySpace group. "Perception must not
be reality; reality must stand on its own merits good or bad."
Darrell Griffin Sr., an accountant who also
runs several business ventures, is compiling his son's writings into a book and
hopes to travel to Iraq to see where his son died. "My emotions have
[been] on a roller coaster going from extreme anger, to sadness, to
helplessness, to acceptance to confusion and then all over again," he
wrote me five days after his son's death. And the elder Griffin has been
pressed by many of his friends and colleagues in Southern California to join
the ranks of the antiwar movement and use the story of his son's death to help
end the war. "They just don't seem to understand or accept that my son
loved the Army—that the Army saved him in many ways—and that the thing he hated
the most was politics getting in the way of finding real solutions for the
Iraqis."
This month, his
son-in-law's National Guard unit was activated for deployment to Iraq. In the
coming months, he expects his grandson, a Marine medic, to go there as well. "There
should be a limit on how much of this a family is asked to bear," he says.
Diana Griffin is moving from Fort Lewis, Wash., to be closer to
her family in Southern California. And she remembers the chaplain coming to the
door. "The President of the United States ... " he began. That's
where her memory of the event stops. By her bedside, she still keeps a book on
the 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard that her husband hadn't
finished reading. She didn't speak at the microphone to the assembled mourners
at the funeral, but after the echoes of the graveside 21-gun salute faded into
the din of the nearby freeway, she said this: "Today, Darrell has come
home on his shield."
Bush plan denounced as insensitive, untimely
Information from Reuters is included in this report.