Portrait of a Platoon
How a dozen soldiers—overworked, under fire, nervous, proud—chase insurgents and try to stay alive in one of Baghdad's nastiest districts
By Romesh Ratnesar and Michael Weisskopf TIME
Posted Sunday, December 21, 2003; 7:45 a.m. EST
The patrol has lasted an hour, the three humvees slashing and darting through hairpin turns and blind alleyways, looking for attackers. It's 9 o'clock on a clear, mild December night in Adhamiya, one of Baghdad's oldest neighborhoods and these days among the most restive. The soldiers are out to draw fire. They cruise the streets and make themselves targets in order to flush insurgents into the open.
But they encounter nothing. So now the convoy is heading back to base, a mile away. The platoon rolls into Adhamiya's main marketplace. The atmosphere is festive. Patrons of the teahouses and restaurants overflow onto the one-lane street. Traffic is running in both directions, and the convoy slows to a crawl. Just across Imam Street, the district's main thoroughfare, sits the Abu Hanifa mosque, where Saddam Hussein was last seen in public before his arrest by U.S. forces. A large crowd of Iraqis mills outside it. Private First Class Jim Beverly, 19, and Private Orion Jenks, 22, stand in the bed of the convoy's second vehicle, a roofless high-back humvee, which resembles a large pickup truck and is generally used to transport troops. Also riding in the back are two TIME journalists. As the convoy begins moving again, Jenks and Beverly chat casually and laugh. Sergeant Ronald Buxton, who is riding shotgun in the cab of the high-back, whips around. "I don't care if you joke or if you smoke," he tells the privates, "but make sure you watch our back."
The vehicles cross Imam Street and move toward the mosque. TIME senior correspondent Michael Weisskopf glances up at the mosque's clock tower, damaged by U.S. tank shells during a fierce battle in April. As he does, he hears a clunk and sees that an oval-shaped object has landed on the seat beside him. For a split second he thinks it's a rock, then he realizes it isn't. He reaches to throw it out. Suddenly there is a flash. The object explodes in Weisskopf's hand.
Shrapnel ricochets off the walls of the humvee, hitting Beverly, Jenks and TIME photographer James Nachtwey. Smoke rises from the high-back. Blood pours from Weisskopf's right arm; when he holds it up, he realizes the grenade has blown off his hand. Specialist Billie Grimes, a medic attached to the platoon, sprints out of the third humvee and hoists herself onto the high-back. She uses a Velcro strap tied to her pant leg as a tourniquet to stop Weisskopf's bleeding and applies a field dressing to the wound while loudly asking the three other passengers if they are injured. Nachtwey, who has taken shrapnel in his left arm, abdomen and both legs, briefly snaps pictures of Grimes treating Weisskopf before losing consciousness. For several seconds Jenks slumps motionless, stunned, but then instinctively slides his gun's safety to semiautomatic, preparing to return fire. Only later does he learn that shrapnel has fractured his leg.
The convoy halts in front of the mosque. Buxton turns around. "Are there any casualties?" he asks. "Yes! Yes!" replies Beverly. Shrapnel has hit him in the right hand and right knee. Two of his front teeth have been knocked out, and his tongue is lacerated. "Let's go!" he says. "Let's go!" The humvees peel out and roar for home.
This is not the war this army unit— officially known as the Survey Platoon, Headquarters Battery, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment of the 1st Armored Division—was trained to fight. On a traditional battlefield, field-artillery survey units stay behind the front lines and use gyroscopic devices to measure the distance to enemy positions so the Army's big guns can hit their targets. That was the job this platoon, based in Giessen, Germany, pictured for itself when it received deployment orders in March, before the start of the war with Iraq. The group, now nicknamed the "Tomb Raiders," was told to prepare for combat in the event of a prolonged siege of Baghdad. That battle never came. The platoon reached the capital in late May, nearly a month after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations. But the demands of the occupation of Iraq forced the Tomb Raiders to assume the duties of infantrymen—patrolling streets, conducting raids, hunting insurgents and imposing order in one of the most volatile neighborhoods of Baghdad. In that respect, the platoon embodies the ways in which the 120,000 American men and women in arms serving in Iraq have had to adapt to the evolving challenges of making the country secure.
Drawn from disparate backgrounds, the platoon's members provide a portrait of the military's diversity as well as insight into the motivations—and fears—of America's fighting forces. Its soldiers include Sergeant Marquette Whiteside, 24, an African-American gunner who pines for his 6-year-old daughter; Specialist Sky Schermerhorn, 29, an idealist now gnawed by doubt about what he is fighting for; and Buxton, 32, a brainy Gulf War I veteran who since being deployed has taught himself Arabic and missed the birth of a son. Specialist Bernard Talimeliyor, 24, a native of the U.S. protectorate of Yap, Micronesia, was so moved by the events of 9/11 that he decided to enlist, even though he had never seen mainland U.S. Two noncommissioned officers, Staff Sergeant Abe Winston, 42, and Sergeant David Kamont, 34, serve as mentors to the platoon's three youngest G.I.s, Private Lequine Arnold, 20, an African American from Goldsboro, N.C.; Beverly, an amateur artist from Akron, Ohio; and Jenks, who joined the platoon in late November. Grimes, 26, the only female soldier attached to the unit, maintains a steely grit around the guys but cries on the phone to her father when she talks about what she has witnessed in Iraq. Sergeant José Cesar Aparicio, 31, a reservist, heads a psychological-operations team attached to the platoon. The leader of the Tomb Raiders, First Lieutenant Brady Van Engelen, 24, took over command two months ago and is still fighting for his soldiers' respect.
The platoon has served in Iraq for seven months and expects to stay for five more. In three weeks with the Tomb Raiders, over the course of 30 patrols with the unit and sister platoons, TIME journalists witnessed the tedium and the terror, the sacrifice and resolve that epitomize the lives of G.I.s across Iraq. Like thousands of Americans in this war, the Tomb Raiders have absorbed losses that have changed their lives forever. Theirs is the story of what the Army looks like today and what this war has become.
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