Dave Kinsler grew up in Morristown, Tennessee, a small town east of Knoxville. He graduated from high school in 1999 and, after playing college baseball for a couple of years, joined the Army because he wanted to go out into the world and make a difference. He completed five deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan—a total of fifty-seven months spent overseas. He’s a staff sergeant, 11 Bravo Infantry.
In late 2002, after Airborne School, I’m assigned to a mech unit in Friedberg, Germany. In-processing is going to be a two-week deal because of all you have to learn—the culture and some of the language, how to use the train system.
When I arrive, I’m asked if I’m ready to go to Iraq.
“Don’t you mean Afghanistan?” I ask. We’ve been over there only seven, maybe eight months.
“You’re going to Iraq. We have our DCUs in now.”
“What the hell are DCUs?”
“Desert combat uniforms, Private.”
I head to Iraq for a six-month deployment, nervous as shit. President Bush has been talking a lot about how the US is going to invade this, that, and the other. I’m being told the attack plan is for 1st Armored Division to come into Iraq through Turkey. The 3rd Infantry Division (ID) is going to push their way into Baghdad, which is roughly located in the middle of the country.
My unit, the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, is a good three to four weeks behind 3rd ID. When we finally link up with them in Baghdad, in late April of 2003, some feel like the war is over. A couple of weeks later, President Bush delivers a televised speech aboard an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln. Behind him is a banner that reads MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
We soon find out that the war is far from over.
Five months into my six-month deployment, we’re told we’re going to be there for nine months. The Iraqi Shia cleric and militia leader, al-Sadr, shows his ass and starts creating all sorts of havoc and problems. Then nine months gets extended to twelve, and then fifteen, so we head down to the city of Karbala, located southwest of Baghdad.
It’s an absolute shit show down there. Al-Sadr is holed up in mosques. The military drops leaflets that basically say, “If you’re innocent, get out of the city now, because we’re going to come in and destroy it.” Our mission is to go into Karbala and kill al-Sadr.
We’re two hours from executing our kill mission when al-Sadr decides he wants to negotiate. The military, from my understanding, ends up doing a big deal with him—trading arms for money. The Iraqis turn in enough arms and munitions to fill a bus. We give them a little money.
IEDs aren’t a thing in 2002. They don’t exist yet. That year, we roll through Baghdad in Humvees with no doors, our feet hanging out.
That changes in 2007 and 2008. We learn a lot about IEDs—what to look for, what to do when we think we encounter one. The problem is, the Iraqis are so good at disguising them.
IEDs change the whole spectrum of the war.
I’m on a resupply mission to a very small town called Jurf al-Sakhar. I’m driving in a convoy, on an elevated road, when the enemy fires an RPG. Fortunately, the road levels out, and an RPG misses my vehicle and ends up exploding against the tree beside me.
On the way back, they go at us again. We’re about to take a right-hand turn into an intersection when the whole median to my left blows up. The explosion rocks our truck, and we can’t see shit through the thick blackish-grayish cloud outside.
“Push it,” I tell the driver. The standard operating procedure at the time is to keep moving through a kill zone because it could be an ambush. “Push it,” I tell him again.
Later, I find out that when the IED blew, it blew the wrong way, which is why no one got hurt or killed. We got lucky—real lucky.
When the enemy isn’t attacking our little outpost in Jurf al-Sakhar, trying to overrun our base, they’re coming up with ingenious ways to blow us up. One of my guys, a gunner, gets out of a Bradley to move the coiled concertina wire, or C-wire, away from the road so the convoy can leave our outpost and go out on patrol. This kid looks down and sees a heavy plastic US MRE food pouch. He moves the C-wire back, not knowing the pouch has explosives in it.
It blows up and he bleeds out before we can medevac him out.
The enemy runs an IED wire across a river and connects it to a pressure plate. One of our trucks rolls over it. Everyone inside the truck is killed.
On Father’s Day, we go out on a three-day mission to clear villages. It’s all desert. A minefield of IEDs is buried deep in the ground.
We lose four tanks and two Bradleys.
The Bradley I’m in drives over an IED. It blows up right underneath the driver’s seat. This kid gets out and starts running. He’s so pumped with adrenaline he doesn’t realize chunks of his leg and arm are missing. We have to tackle him in order to patch him up.
The commander tells us to halt movement. We’ve lost too many vehicles.
The Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) guys have to come in and clear a path for the Black Hawk that will be coming to airlift us out.
I look across the desert, thinking about all these deep-buried IEDs that have been strategically placed out there. They’re buried so deep that when we roll through with our tanks and Bradleys, the IEDs respond to the pressure and explode. But we can walk across them because our bodies don’t apply enough pressure to make them explode. These guys can take a simple AAA battery and make it into a lethal weapon. They hide it in trash because in Iraq there is trash everywhere.
The enemy is smart.