Roberta Infanti and all six children were waiting for Lieutenant Colonel Infanti when he stepped off the Freedom Bird in Virginia in June 2007 on a short leave home to attend his son’s high-school graduation. His nine-year-old daughter threw herself into his arms and hugged him so tightly he thought she would never let him go. He had departed Iraq with reluctance. The hunt for his two missing soldiers continued. In his pocket he carried casualty cards bearing their names.
Major Mark Manns, his XO, could handle anything that came up during the CO’s short absence. The war in his AO had quieted down until crime and evil in The Triangle, it seemed, were no worse than a wild Saturday night in New York City or Detroit. In fact, he felt as safe these days driving down Malibu Road where he had been blown up and wounded only months ago as he would have felt walking alone at night in Times Square.
He returned home to a nation even more divided and at war with itself than when the 2nd BCT had left on deployment the previous August. The next year was election year, in which Americans would choose a new President and quite probably a new direction. The campaigns for nomination were already loud, strident, partisan, and confrontational, in many ways more savage than the fighting in Iraq.
A military officer owed it to his nation, to his commander-in-chief, and to his uniform to remain apolitical and outside the process, loyal to his country no matter what it demanded of him. That didn’t mean he wasn’t allowed to form personal opinions and to express them. Having a few days’ liberty to reflect on the “Big Picture” of what was happening to the United States of America while he was away left Infanti feeling discouraged and disgusted.
Even discounting a terrorist connection, U.S. goals to remove a dangerous and murderous dictator from power and establish a base of freedom in the Middle East had been laudable ones. If these goals were met, history would record them as some of the world’s most notable accomplishments. The initial reaction to the war when it began in 2003 was immediate and positive. Middle Eastern dictators and strongmen warily watched and wondered how far the U.S. would go to create a free nation while they pondered their own fates if they continued to support Islamic terror against the West. Libya’s dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi suddenly announced he would end his nuclear program and establish closer diplomatic ties with the United States. The House of Saud broadened voting privileges in Saudi Arabia. Syria tried to break all ties with Iraqi insurgents. Even Iran stepped back to take a more cautious look at developments.
Tragically, a certain amount of death and mutilation was the unavoidable cost of combat. Almost from the first day, pundits in the media began decrying the loss of life. Network newscasts flooded American living rooms with bombings and death, emphasizing U.S. failures and ignoring its successes, suggesting in the process that America was losing the war since its soldiers were taking hits. Politicians began calling for an exit strategy before the smoke had cleared from the initial blitz to Baghdad.
Infanti knew from personal experience that America was winning in its effort to bring peace, economic liberty, and a freely elected representative government to Iraq. If the media and certain politicians hadn’t been so hell-bent on destroying President Bush’s administration, if they had truly got behind the nation in a non-partisan unity, chances were the war would have been over and won long before the 10th Mountain Division deployed to Iraq for the second time. The Arab world feared and respected a determined enemy.
Islamic fascists watched and learned. It didn’t take them long to realize the U.S. was split, demoralized, less than determined, and as unlikely to stick this one out as it had in Vietnam or, for that matter, Somalia. They knew that if they could just maintain a steady stream of American soldier deaths while exploiting American misdeeds and atrocities, whether real or manufactured, the American people led by self-serving politicians and Western news outlets would eventually throw in the towel.
“When people stand up for a political sound bite and say they support the troops but don’t support the war, I have questions,” Infanti responded to a news interview while he was home on leave. “Politicians are the ones that allowed what happened to go on. They’re the ones who authorized the President to go to war against Iraq. The question I would ask, not as a soldier, but as a citizen, is when did they change their minds? We’ve had 3,700 soldiers killed. Did they change their minds at 1,999, at 2,999? Or did they change their minds when a poll said the American people were losing support for the war. That’s the question I want to ask them: ‘Did you change your mind when a poll said you weren’t going to be re-elected?’ ”
Would the next election encourage the Islamic radicals by revealing a lack of American resolve, a weakness to be exploited by those already planning their next terrorist attack on American soil? To cut and run at this crucial point, as so many political hacks were advocating if it would win them a few more votes, meant that everything American soldiers had achieved in Iraq would be thrown out like yesterday’s garbage. To have won the war, then abandoned it and the country’s people back to tyranny, was nothing more than a betrayal of sacrifices made by American soldiers like Chris Messer, Joe Given, Sergeant Connell, Courneya, Schober, Murphy, Fouty, Jimenez, Anzak, and all the others.
Damn them! Damn the lily-livered politicians who would treat the lives of young soldiers as though they meant nothing.
The prospect of what the next election likely foretold broke Lieutenant Colonel Infanti’s heart, all the more so when he and his wife visited wounded and maimed soldiers from the 10th Mountain at Bethesda’s Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Here were young men who had given so much and were still willing to give in a cause they believed in. A twenty-year-old soldier who had lost most of one leg and part of his arm to an IED grinned at his former commander.
“Sir, as soon as this arm gets better,” he said, “I’m ready to go back to work. I think I can operate a machine gun.”
A sniper had shot another soldier in the leg, shattering it so that he could no longer straighten it. Units of the 2nd BCT had finally nailed the sniper, who was being paid 500,000 dinars a month, about $490, to take shots at American soldiers, with a bonus of another $490 for each hit.
“It’s really a shame because he’s not getting any more money,” Infanti told the soldier. “He took three rounds in his chest from an Apache helicopter.”
“Sir, what about our guys still missing from the 4/31st?”
The greatest thing about American soldiers, Infanti once observed, “is that they will do whatever you ask them to do. They’ll go without food, without family, without a bed to sleep on other than the hard ground. They’ll shave out of a canteen cup and take a bath in a mud puddle. They’ll wear filthy clothes, get body sores, go without a break while they wait for the next bullet or the next explosion, waiting to die or waiting to get wounded, hoping that if they do get it their buddies won’t get it too. They always think of each other first before they think of themselves. If only the world were made up of more men like them.”
All too soon, still limping, still in constant pain, Michael Infanti was on his way back to Iraq and his 4th Battalion. He had a job to finish. Two of his men were still missing.
“I’m going to search until they kill me or they send me home,” he pledged. “That’s just the bottom line. And when I find them, I’m going to keep running down the guys who did it like they were dogs—until they kill me or send me home. The bad guys know I’m coming. And they’re going to put up a fight. And that’s okay.”