I’ve found that sometimes things happen in life that you just can’t explain. Something that when you see it you just can’t understand it or fathom how a human being could be capable of such an act. During my 15 month deployment there were a number of situations we encountered where you really didn’t know what to say. All you could do was just look and wonder what is wrong with some people. I’m getting at a specific incident or series of incidents that we partook in that just kind of left me baffled, and in the end feeling extremely lucky.

As I’ve said before, the city of Baquba was in a river valley and surrounded by thousands of acres of palm grove forests. These palm groves were a haven for the bad guys because it was so dense and hard to find people and they could disappear very easily. One day we received word that we’d be going on a raid to farm complex built among the palm grove forests because it was suspected that two foreign journalists were being held captive at this farm, which was also thought to be a torture farm where civilians that were kidnapped and held for ransom would be tortured and killed if no money was received. In order to get to this farm we had to patrol through about a half mile of palm forests, which we did at about one o’clock in the morning. This was an exceptionally eerie feeling.

We got out of our vehicles at the edge of the woods without talking and with no lights. Once you’re outside of your vehicle you have to assume that you’re being watched by the enemy and you can’t do anything to draw any more attention to yourselves than is necessary. We did as we did many times before and got into a tactical formation and walked into the palm groves that we’d had many fights in before. Equipped with night vision and infrared sights on our weapons, we slowly made our way through the woods towards whatever was waiting for us at the farm. As we got closer we could see lights on in the main house so we prepared to do a tactical clearance. This involves kicking in the door with teams of soldiers rushing into the house and systematically clearing each room until it is determined safe. In that house we found one individual who had documents that said he was from Jordan, and an operational IED in one bedroom that was finished, only needing to be rigged to a door to set it off. It was always a real possibility to walk through a door and set off a large bomb. It was just one more thing to try to not think about when out on missions.

After we secured that house and set up a command post and restrained the person we kept moving. There were many smaller buildings scattered around the farms property and each time we came to one we cleared it just like the first one. Everything seemed pretty quiet and we started to think the whole mission was a false alarm. Then we came to a building that was about 30 feet long by 12 feet wide. It didn’t look impressive from the outside so we cleared it like every other building. When it was cleared I looked around and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was obvious now that the people who were living on the farm must have gotten word that we were coming and evacuated all the people, but the room we were in was quite obviously used in the torturing of people. The smell was possibly the foulest thing I’d ever smelled. There was dried blood on the floor and a couple of meat hooks hanging from the ceiling with flesh on them. There were cages on the floor that a person could fit in, maybe if someone was forcing their body into it. There were knives and other devices on a counter. When I realized what this was, it left me kind of speechless. It was truly a, “What the $*#% is wrong with people” kind of moment.

When we eventually walked out of the building we heard heavy weapons firing. It was very startling as I was not really ready for it at that moment. As we found out later, the inhabitants of the farm had indeed gotten advance warning that we were coming and had a large scale ambush set up for us to walk into. It was about 75 yards ahead of us and had we walked into it, it would have been extremely bad news because they had a picture perfect ambush site set up to wait for us. The firing we heard was our own helicopters; they had spotted the ambush and killed about thirty bad guys that were waiting for us. Needless to say, this was a rather unpleasant day.