Of the stories I’ve heard from Iraq this one is the most disturbing. Several months ago I hinted at the fact that I had met soldiers who had done terrible things in Iraq but before I tell you the story allow me to put on a disclaimer.

Don’t E-mail me telling me to report this guy to the authorities and its my moral obligation and blah blah blah etc. First of all he’s not my buddy, I cant remember his name and I wouldn’t know how to get a hold of him even if I wanted, so all the moral police can kiss my booty!

I met this guy randomly who started chatting with me and wouldn’t stop, we will refer to him as “Billy Bob”. Billy Bob seemed a little….umm strange. You know the type, when they are talking you are thinking, “wow something is REALLY wrong with this guy, how am I going to get out of this?”

Billy Bob had just come back from Iraq after being injured, apparently he was doing house sweeps when he walked in on an insurgent making a whole bunch of bombs. Deciding not to go without taking some infidel soldiers with him, the insurgent bomb maker chose to detonate the bomb next to him as Billy Bob approached. The insurgents brains and intestines flew all over the place. Billy was thrown across the room and when he woke up he found his left arm and left leg torn open down to exposed bone.

Before he was injured Billy fought in the Marines for almost a year and he took pictures of everything, he showed me most of them on his iPod. I have to give it to him, this guy is a very talented photographer but unfortunately his picture taking included snapshots of almost everyone he killed and he was so casual about it. “Oh here is another guy I killed, he came out of the woods with a rocket launcher but I shot him about 5 times in the head before he could fire.”

I looked at him and he had this crazy look in his eyes and a crazed smile, I asked him “whats the worst thing you saw there?” He told me one morning they were exchanging gun fire with insurgents in a house about 400 yards away but they couldn’t see the shooters and after 3 hours of shooting the firing showed no signs of slowing down or stopping, so he and his buddies made the decision to fire a missile into the house that would penetrate the walls and explode on the inside in order to kill everyone in the building. They launched the missile and the shooting stopped, 3 days later they walked back to the house to inspect what or who they had killed. They found no insurgents inside only a pregnant women laying on the ground, riddled with metal fragments. The sun had baked her body, turning her skin black and forcing the baby out of her womb and onto the floor. His remark to me was, “I regret everyday that I didn’t have my camera on me that day, I wanted a picture of it”. He had no explanation or guess as to where the insurgents who fired on them had gone and he had no remorse for the woman and child they had killed.

Its stories like these that give me a vividly ugly image of the war and sometimes I wish I didn’t know any better.

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