First Congregational Church of Long Beach will play host Sunday to Iraq veterans eager to talk about the war they saw; a war rife with death, anger, courage and lies. In anticipation of that event—a fundraiser to send the same vets to speak in Washington D.C.—we asked several of them to tell us their stories. Here’s what they told us.

PHOTO by JENNIE WARREN

“IT’S BEYOND ME” | SPECIALIST WENDY BARRANCO, COMBAT MEDIC | ARMY 

Wendy Barranco was 19 when she served as an anesthesia technician at a Tikrit field hospital—from October 2005 to July 2006. She was just out of high school, like so many of her patients, including the first one she saw die.

Now she is 22, a full-time student and anti-war activist, preparing herself for Sunday’s participation in the Winter Soldier fundraiser at the First Congregational Church of Long Beach. The fundraiser will bring together many veterans to speak about what they saw in Iraq in hopes of sending the vets to a similar conference in Washington D.C. later this month (www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier).

Barranco still sounds young, with the sleepy voice of a teenager. She’s deferential, too—true to her military training—and wonderfully patient as she spells out every acronym and explains every bit of army shorthand. Her poise falters occasionally: When describing three badly burned Iraqis, she suddenly stops speaking, pausing for a full 12 seconds to steady herself. And certain aspects of the military experience are so ludicrous as to absolutely require the strongest of obscenities.

There are also moments of emotional disconnect: She talks about a “guy” with a chronically infected leg, but it soon becomes clear that she is speaking of a child who may be as young as eight.

With all of this in mind, I thank her for her time and willingness to engage in a conversation that must be very difficult—either because the stories are so gruesome and terrible, or because frequent retellings have rendered the subject so tiresome that she feels as if she’s going to go out of her mind if she has to go over it one more time. “Both,” she says.

Are there any patients that stand out in your memory?
The first guy I saw die. We were in the emergency room and this guy came in, an American soldier. He was all shot up. And basically he was dead on arrival, but we were trying to resuscitate him so we stuck him on a bunch of lines and tried to pump him full of fluids and stuff, trying to bring him back. We did CPR and it just wasn’t working. The surgeon, as a last resort, went ahead and cracked his chest open and he started doing heart massage to try to get his heart back. That really doesn’t work, but you do that as a last resort, a last ditch effort to bring them back. He was wearing his flak vest, and there were a couple of bullets in his head and his neck. I think he was ambushed or . . . I don’t know. He was just shot up. He essentially bled out. That was the first time I saw somebody get their chest cracked. Eventually it became kind of mundane. With trauma we do a lot of exploratory laparotomies, which is basically cracking the chest down the mid-line and looking to see if there is any damage. And so in that type of surgery everything is wide-open, cracked-open. When the surgeon told us to get in there and keep massaging the heart after him, it was kind of surreal. I just stuck my hands in there and started doing what I needed to do. We all knew he wasn’t coming back. We were trying to make every effort, and then the surgeon said, “I’m just going to go ahead and call it.” That was it. That was when I stopped. And then we all kind of just walked away. I took a step back about six or seven feet and looked at his body, and it hit me: This guy is 19 years old, and he’s basically a kid. I saw myself on that gurney. That’s when my whole activism kicked in, because I started realizing what kind of crap war this is, and what kind of people it was killing, young men and women, kids, 18, 19, 20 years old.

Did you ever treat any Iraqis?
Oh yeah. We treat everybody: Marines, soldiers, contractors, insurgents, local nationals, a couple of coalition troops.

What sort of injuries did you see with the Iraqis?
With the Iraqis? I’ve never been asked that. Most of the things that we saw with the Iraqi locals were trauma, things like burns, shots. [There are] three guys that stick out in my mind. They were basically burnt to a crisp. They had nothing done for them, there was no treatment, there was no pain control, there was nothing. Needless to say, the surgeon was pretty pissed off, because their burns were a week old—the event was a week ago—and the Iraqi hospital took them in and did nothing for them. And now they come and they dump them on our doorstep and then we have to take care of them. The surgeon called in a favor and had them medivaced to a Baghdad hospital with a burn unit. Burn victims need all kinds of specialized care. We don’t have that type of facility. It’s not like we can send them to Germany.

So the men who had been burned: They were still alive when they came to you?
Oh yeah, very much so. Yeah, that was my turning point. They were Iraqi people and the Iraqi [doctors] had not helped them in the least. No pain control, no irrigation, no scrubbing, no temperature controlled room, nothing, absolutely nothing, not even the most basic care. And then they just house them for a week, just to be able to get that money from the government. And when they don’t feel like having them anymore, they put them in the little ambulance, bring them over to us, drop them at the front gate, we get a call to pick them up, and we bring them back. And everybody’s like, “What the fuck? What is this?”

Iraqi hospitals are paid by the US government?
For every patient that they get and that they take in, they get money from the US government because we’re trying to, I guess, initiate that drive to help your own kind. The problem is that once they take that patient in, there’s nothing that says that they have to treat them properly or efficiently or in a timely manner. And that wasn’t the only case. There was a guy who was dropped off who had a chest tube [for a collapsed lung], but it was on the wrong lung. [Another] guy was 60 or 70, and he had a whole array of problems. He was diabetic, he had GI problems . . . I mean, this guy was just a mess. And this guy got dropped off at our gate by the Iraqi hospital, just left there. We spent about eight hours in the operating room, taking tubes out that they had placed [incorrectly], putting things in where they needed to be, just things like that. There was one guy who was shot in the leg and we had to do numerous surgeries on him, because it kept re-infecting and it just wouldn’t heal properly. He was about 10 years old, eight years old, something like that.

How did the Iraqi patients seem to you? What were they like?
Most of them, their demeanor was very calm, cool and collected. It sounds ridiculous, but they were. And it has a lot to do with their culture. They were surrounded by people they don’t know, wearing hats and scrubs, we look completely different, we speak a totally different language. Most of them were just trying to take it all in, and discern if they were in good hands or not. I do remember one guy with a leg injury who, when we were rolling him in to the operating room, he kept saying, “I love America! I love America!” And looking back on it, I think that was his defense mechanism. He knew what surgery meant with Hussein. With us, I’m sure he was terrified. He knew what had happened to other people, so with him going under and into surgery, I think he was very scared that he might not be coming back.

As for the troops that you saw, did you have any sense of how they felt about the war?
To be honest, the last thing that I had on my mind was asking them, “How do you feel about the war?” They’re bleeding out on my table and I’m trying to save them, and to say, “How do you feel about the war?” while I’m pumping away at their chest. . . . Seeing the type of emotional state that they were in, whether they were completely lacking emotion or just straight-up bawling, like, “Am I going to freaking live? Am I going to lose my leg? Am I going to lose my arm?” To even ask [about the war] in that moment would be a bit disrespectful. “I’m blown up here, bleeding out, but you want to talk to me about how I feel about the war?”

So your feelings about the war changed relatively early in your experience?
Yeah, it was kind of a seed that was planted: “Wait a minute, these guys are just like me!” And then looking at how [the Iraqi] medical system was working, or lack thereof, it was like, “This is ridiculous. This whole little dream that we have of setting up a society, a democratic society, is bullshit.” From what I saw of the Iraqi people, our idea of “bettering” them is not the same as their idea of “bettering” themselves.

How are you feeling now? Have you been able to walk away from all of it?
To try and walk away from it is a mistake in and of itself. I’ve come to terms with the fact that what happened, happened. I’m very proud of the fact that I was there, I’m very proud of the fact that I did something to, in my mind, help humankind, trying to save lives and stuff like that. I go to therapy at the VA. When I came back I thought, “I’m better than that. All this stuff about PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] and nightmares . . . man, I’m a combat medic. I’m above that.” But it’s not so. I learned that real quick. But now I’ve, as cliche as it sounds, “come to terms” with it. Activism is my therapy, talking about it and letting people know what’s going on. But what helps me the most is just being around other veterans, exchanging stories, just talking about our experiences and just laughing, sometimes even crying, sometimes even just shaking our heads, like “Fuck! The military is just [eaten] up!” [But at first] it just hurt to breathe. And the whole range of emotions inside of me, that I’d been quietly collecting . . . and I realized, “Shit, this [PTSD] might be a problem.” I’m not incapacitated by it—I know so many people who can’t even sleep, they patrol their own home with their M16, you know? At night, instead of going to sleep, they just walk around with their M16. And they can’t get out of bed in the morning. So I consider myself to be truly lucky to be where I am today; I didn’t see all the combat stuff and the front line stuff that the other guys saw. That’s why I have so much respect for them. They go through so much, it’s insane. It’s beyond me.

Is there anything else that you would like to tell me?
I’m just trying to get the message out that veterans are here for veterans. That’s all. I’m not here to say, “Go to the VA,” because that blows. I’m not here to say, “The war affected you and so therefore you should be against it.” Veterans are here for veterans. // RACHEL POWERS

“HOW WOULD I BE ABLE TO LOOK MYSELF IN THE MIRROR?” | SGT. JASON LEMIEUX | MARINES
“I got to Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina, on Sept. 10, 2001. Boot camp is a media blackout so we didn’t realize the gravity of what was going on. The drill instructor told us the country had just been attacked by terrorists. But for all we knew he could have been exaggerating to scare us into submission.

“My first deployment was to Kuwait on Jan. 21, 2003, in preparation for the invasion. I was part of a huge boot drop. That’s not official terminology—boot drop—but it’s what they call dropping fresh infantry school graduates straight into combat. Our boot drop comprised 50 percent of the manpower of the unit we were joining. Normally they wouldn’t put so many fresh, inexperienced soldiers together in combat, but that’s the way they’re doing it in this war. I invaded Iraq on March 21, 2003, and went all the way to Baghdad. Most of the units we were supposed to attack fled when they found out we were coming. After the invasion we moved down to Karbala, the safest city in the country at the time. We supported the local businesses with our money, and were welcomed for our ability to maintain order. I came home in September.

“My second deployment was to Husaybah, from February to September of 2004. It was a meat grinder, incredibly violent, a whole different world than the Iraq I had left five months before. Husaybah was a nightmare. It was a place where human life lost all meaning for most people—American, Iraqi, or otherwise. The only life worth saving was your own. Among our forces there was blatant disregard for rules of engagement. Instead, there was an understanding all along the chain of command that those rules were a formality for the sake of political protection for the people at the highest levels—so they would be able to fall back on those rules and say, ‘Well, he did commit crime X, but we have this rule against it so we’re not to blame.’ My section had a 50 percent attrition rate. We went with 14 Marines and came back to the States with seven.

“Personally, I didn’t agree with the war from the very beginning. I thought it was strategically unwise and legally unjustifiable. It is unconstitutional, and it was very demoralizing to fight an unconstitutional war. It contradicted the whole basis of my service in the Marine Corps. My enlistment oath was to protect and defend the Constitution that this war was violating.

“But I actually served three deployments to Iraq. For the third, I voluntarily extended my contract for 10 months. Why? Most of the combat experience in my unit was leaving at the same time—all those members of that huge boot drop I’d come in with—and it was happening right before a redeployment to Rimadi, the center of gravity for the insurgency. They were replacing us with another big boot drop—sending new and inexperienced guys to a horrible, dangerous place. I extended my contract to help bring home alive as many of these 18-year-old kids as I could. Looking at those kids, I wondered how I would feel if I was back home—drinking beer, talking to girls—and I got a phone call telling me that so-and-so got killed, I wasn’t there to do something about it. How would I be able to look myself in the mirror?” // AS TOLD TO DAVE WIELENGA

“I SWORE TO THE HOLY FAMILY” | SPEC. EDGAR CUEVAS | ARMY
Edgar Cuevas hated the Iraq war long before he landed in Tikrit where, 24 hours into his first Iraq assignment, he watched medics haul in two soldiers injured in a roadside bombing.

“From the beginning of the war, I was like, ‘Why are we even invading?’ There was no connection between Iraq and 9/11,” Cuevas says.

He grew up in Burbank, joining the Army out of high school, in January 2001.“At that time I didn’t think we’d be in a war, so I thought it was good timing,” he says.

The Army sent Specialist Cuevas to Schweinfurt, with tours in the Balkans—“police actions,” he calls them. “Both the Serbs and Albanians were really happy we were there,” he says. “We helped them and they helped us. Nothing there made me say, ‘I don’t like this, I want to get out.’”

Then, in Nov. 2003, just 12 days from the end of his service, the Army hit Cuevas and thousands of other military men and women with a stop-loss order.

“If you remember the election of 2004, John Kerry was talking about the ‘backdoor draft.’ That’s what happened to me,” Cuevas says. “Days from coming home, my family waiting for me, and all of a sudden they extended my time a year and a half. I had to serve three months of training time before Iraq, one year in Iraq, and three months of reintegration—which is not an easy thing if you’ve seen some of the stuff. . . .”

He’s a funny, open, smart and articulate guy, Cuevas is—he’s going to LA Valley College now—but when the conversation seems likely to lead us toward a bog of dark fact, he doesn’t complete this thought or others.

The Army assigned Cuevas to a base in Tikrit, in March 2004. On his first night there, Cuevas monitored radio traffic. His shift ended at 4 a.m., and he walked toward a phone to call home. But then the gates swung open and a swirl of activity surrounding two wounded soldiers swept Cuevas toward an aid tent. Medics under lights worked so close to Cuevas that he can tell you in detail about the injured men: Jason Ford was just 19 years old, and he was clearly not going to survive his head wound; 31-year-old Captain John F. Kurth would live the rest of his life a triple amputee if he lived. But both men died there, in front of Cuevas and the others. “Right before breakfast,” Cuevas says without affect. “And then I’m supposed to just go on with my day like . . .”

That day? “Rather traumatizing,” he says with delicacy. “I had to push through all that emotional stuff, set everything aside. As the days went by I continued to push stuff aside, and I just kept doing that until I had almost no feelings.”

Does he have any feelings now? “The feeling that they’re trying to kill off our generation.”

In Tikrit, Cuevas was a scout—“binoculars, a map, compass, radio and a machine gun mounted on a Humvee. We conducted raids, mounted and foot patrols, checkpoints, gate guard, convoys . . .” He remembers the first time he was shot at. “They were aiming at us, but they weren’t getting anywhere near us. I was a gunner for a truck, and the gun I was firing was a 240 Bravo machine gun—the same rounds as an AK-47.

“I fired that toward a man, but not intending to kill him. I didn’t feel like killing someone. It’s not how I was raised. So I fired just beneath him—just to scare him, you know? It was a two-story building, so I fired underneath, at the building, just enough to kick up debris from the wall. He dropped the weapon and he ran off. He just took off. And I stopped shooting.”

“My parents brought me up Catholic,” he says. “Right then I heard my mom saying, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

A colleague—raised differently, we might suppose—picked up the man’s abandoned AK and bristled. “Why didn’t you shoot him?” the man asked Cuevas.

“Because he didn’t have a weapon,” Cuevas told him.

He recalls the time “a rocket-propelled grenade flew 16 feet over my head.”

“Jesus,” I say.

“Exactly what I said,” he tells me. “I swore to the whole Holy Family—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

“Comic books kept me sane,” he says. “I’m a big comic-book reader—X-Men, Wolverine, all the Marvel Comics. Those books kept me going,” he says. He’s attracted to the parable in each, the fact that graphic stories parallel real-world events. “If you read the Civil War comics that Marvel published about a year or two ago you would understand some of the problems of the war,” he says—and then he cites issues 42 through 47, and recommends a close reading of “the character known as Wolverine” if you want to “learn about war profiteering.”

He doesn’t say anything about the backstory—that the X-Men are born normal but in teenhood blossom with the blessings and curses of superhuman powers and the almost unbearable responsibility that attends those powers: It may be no accident that Cuevas identifies most with Wolverine, a man of bullish strength and fists that sport adamantium claws whom the Canadian government hoped to transform into a kind of enfleshed weapon.

I ask Cuevas about warnings that an American pullout will lead to a bloodbath. He figures the Iraqis will shoulder the responsibility to create peace if we refuse—as we should—to enforce it.

But if they don’t? He responds with a kind of dry but patriotic calculation: “If they start shooting each other up, are we going to send more of our people—our men and women—over there to die?”  // WILL SWAIM

“WE DON’T GO ANYWHERE” | SGT. JABBAR MAGRUDER | ARMY NATIONAL GUARD
“I joined the Army National Guard in 2000. I was a high school kid who wanted to learn a trade while serving my country. The day of September 11, I called my National Guard unit and asked them, ‘Are we going to get involved, are we going to go anywhere?’ And they told me, ‘We’re the National Guard. We don’t go anywhere.’

“By 2003 we were told we’d go to Kosovo. Then, in March of 2004, we learned we were going to Iraq. We arrived in January of 2005. I was stationed in Tikrit. Iraq was essentially in chaos. Explosions were so normal that you got so that you could tell, just by the sound, the difference between an insurgent blast and one where the MPs were doing a controlled blast. It got to a point that we were so jaded that if we heard an explosion our first concern wasn’t safety but would they close the chow hall down this time?

“I guess the scariest times for me were whenever we had to go out with a convoy. Those were times when you think, okay, I’m going to have to shoot someone. It was around the time that I was there that one of the specialists embarrassed the Secretary of Defense [Donald Rumsfeld] by asking him why we didn’t have the equipment we needed, especially on the troop transports. So they sent us three-quarter-inch steel plates to put on the trucks. But all that meant is that it would allow us to have open casket funerals. We’re still sitting in open trucks with people shooting at you all the time.

“I don’t think people here understand what it’s like to be occupied. To be without electricity, to have your house raided. I use the analogy of telling people to imagine if China invaded Southern California. All those factions in Southern California, racial, gang-related, that hated each other and fought with each other, would all of a sudden direct their attention to the Chinese. That’s what it’s like in Iraq. We’ve destabilized it and so it’s now a breeding ground for terrorists.

“I began to feel like I’d been lied to once I got there. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Yes, Saddam was a bad man, but I didn’t have the feeling we were necessarily making things better. In the end, I did my job, 12 hours a day, nine straight days with one day off. I did that because I wanted to bring my friends home safely.

“That’s why I’m speaking out now. When I hear people say that you shouldn’t speak out against the war because it will discourage our soldiers, I find that insulting; it treats soldiers as if they’re children. They’re intelligent people who understand that a nation built on political dissent is supposed to have open discussions. Soldiers talk about the war. There’s as wide a political spectrum in the military as in America. It’s the soldiers who bear most of this burden, we need to talk about that burden.” // AS TOLD TO STEVE LOWERY

IRAQ VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR FUNDRAISER FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH OF LONG BEACH | 241 CEDAR AVE  LONG BEACH 90802 | FIRSTCHURCHLB.ORG/PARKING.HTM | SUN NOON-2PM   $10 MINIMUM DONATION AT THE DOOR 

Tags: , Iraq Veterans Against the War, iraq war, Long Beach, winter soldier