A Short War Story

By Pablo Pantoja 

I am an Infantry combat veteran of the Iraq war [Enlisted, Infantry (Light),Florida Army National Guard].  It was a long journey, but one of my deepest memories was early on. We encountered an enemy who had no match; weather events.  I remember March 25, 2003 like it was yesterday. We had invaded Iraq overnight a few days before and at this point my location was on the outskirts of Nasiriyah, near an Iraqi weapons depot. We were part of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (I-MEF) assigned to provide security for the Patriot missile batteries of the Army’s 108th Air Defense Artillery (Fort Bliss, Texas). These Patriot missiles were the defense against Scud-B missile attacks from Saddam Hussein with potential chemical warfare, considered a WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction).  We had established our perimeter and had assigned posts with considerable distance from each other. On the day-to-day we kept a watchful eye on not crossing in front of the path of the satellite dishes. The radiation emitted from them could lead to cancer, so we were told. “Hey knuckleheads! Don’t walk in front of the dishes or your damn balls will fry!” grunted the Platoon Sergeant (AKA Papa Bear), as he spit some Copenhagen. Four of us were assigned to a post, where we made a home in a trench we dug. We walked through the caulked mud following the path of the humvee tires since when we arrived, our RECON minesweepers identified some hotspots, and neither coffee nor Internet was located there. We had a Team Leader, a SAW gunner (M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon), a Grenadier (M-203), and myself, a rifleman (M-16).  We were all equipped with bayonets and a portable CD player. On that 25th day of March, the gates of hell were opened and the wrath of nature was felt in the desert. 

"Congratulations to a fine soldier and a superb leader!" MAJ GEN Doug Burnett - The Adjutant General of Florida

We were right in the middle of it. The skies turned dark, the temperature dropped dramatically, and we could not see our hands in front of our face.  The wind blew for hours. We remained at our post as directed by our General Orders. We had no idea what was happening and some of the first thoughts we had were that it was nuclear fallout from an attack of sorts. We couldn’t discard anything, we had no answers, no communications, and were experiencing something far from what we have ever imagined. “Are we still alive?” we wondered. It was surreal. After hours of battering sand and wind, thunder roaring and lighting illuminating the skies, the rain started to pour and the temperature continued to fall. We had no cover. The trenches that we had dug, were covered. Our chemical suits were thick with mud. The chunks of mud stuck to our chemical boots and even got inside of them. This made it even harder to walk. We were shivering and my  jaw trembling. Our sleeping bags were soaked, our uniforms were useless and even our weapons were out of commission. 

We decided our last defense was to wait with our bayonets at hand for the enemy to strike at our weakest point.  We had been trained in hand-to-hand combat and ready to give our last breath putting it to good use.  It was not on our turf, and they had home court advantage as we saw with PFC Jessica Lynch in Nasiriyah and the convoy of mechanics back in those days. Hours past into the night and I could feel it. I felt my body almost give in to hypothermia. I had nothing dry or warm, not even the expectation that the next day something would be dry. A gloom outlook was ahead of us. I no longer knew if we would make it. I continued to shake and we decided to sit close in hopes that our body temperature would warm up again.  I lost track of time and sense. All I remember at that point is closing my eyes and praying in my mind: “God, I tried to live right, I am sorry if I didn’t”. I fell asleep but woke up, eventually, disoriented. I realized at that point, this was going to be a long journey of personal growth for the rest of my life; and certainly not the last sandstorm I would have to go through. This was only the beginning of war, we still had to make it to Baghdad and apply counterinsurgency tactics and operations, and we did. My CD’s and portable player never made it after this event I must add. 

Here is an ABC News link referring to this specific sandstorm. “Well, we’ve had the sandstorm, we’ve had the rainstorm, let’s get ready for the locusts. And given the way our luck has been going so far, the locusts probably can’t be that far away” said one Marine in this article. Time Magazine also calls it the “worst sandstorm in 100 years”.