This Memorial Day: One Horrific Look Back at Sacrifice

The stench of human waste from sewage-drowned streets cut through the evening chill and wafted to the rooftop.

There, beneath camouflage netting that shielded them from snipers below, young men with do-it-yourself buzz cuts moshed to thumping rock music, shaking and then stabbing cans of near beer with their boot knives and racing to down the foamy piss.

This is how one group of American soldiers, serving in Baghdad, bid farewell to 2008. When their cell phones ticked off the year's final few seconds, a couple of the soldiers fired off parachute flares from their grenade launchers. Across the rooftops, Iraqis celebrated the New Year with bursts from their Kalashnikovs.

Today, Americans across the country will take some time to honor wartime sacrifices. I learned everything I know about sacrifice on that Baghdad rooftop.

Three days before that New Year’s celebration, an insurgent hiding in an alley detonated a roadside bomb near a heavily armored American vehicle. A soldier called Gonzo was the turret gunner. The explosion fired off a bolt of molten copper that missed the vehicle but took off Gonzo’s head.

I was a journalist embedded with Gonzo’s unit in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood—a particularly violent Shiite slum in the Iraqi capital. The blast that killed Gonzo rocked the compound where we were staying, and we rushed the couple hundred meters to survey the damage.

Many Memorial Day speakers this weekend will pontificate on soldiers “laying down their lives” for their country. In sterile ceremonies, citizens will wave the flag and then head off to their traditional barbeques. The scene of the explosion offered a more horrific look of sacrifice.

The soldiers noted the chunks of Gonzo’s head that had come to rest on a rooftop. I glanced at one soldier nudging a piece of detritus with his toe. At first, it appeared to be a PVC shard. On closer inspection, it proved to be a skull fragment. That piece of skull haunts me more than any other image from Iraq.

I honestly didn’t know Gonzo that well. He spent his days in Iraq with his head poking from the armored vehicle I rode in. I knew him only as a voice in my headset en route to a foot patrol.

I do know that his comrades are far more complex than today’s ceremonies will give them credit for. Some ventured to Iraq for the excitement, some for the money and, yes, some for their country. But most are there for some combination of motivations known only to them.

There’s a place for ritual. There’s a need to meditate on our ideals—even if they’re too perfect for our messy world. Gonzo had certainly earned his military ceremony—the prayer, the upside down rifle, the flag-draped coffin. But Gonzo didn’t lay down his life—it was taken from him suddenly and violently.

That New Year’s Eve celebration in Baghdad wasn’t about ideals. It was about young men doing the best they could to make sense of a confusing situation. It was about mourning the friend they’d been living, working and fighting beside for so many months.

The soldiers opened more cans of near beer and circled around for a moment of silence to honor someone with whom they’d shared laughter and curses, sweat and blood.

“To Gonzo!” they said after the moment passed, and then downed their drinks.

Someone turned up the stereo again and everyone shouted along—middle fingers raised—to another anarchic rock song: “From the banks of the ocean and the ice in the hills/To the fight in the desert where progress stands still!”

The melancholy didn’t last long. The soldiers knew that soon they’d have to head back down to the stench below. Another day. Another patrol. Another plod through the stench and the grime.