Iraq and Roll

Apache Troop spent a couple of weeks getting ready at a base camp in Kuwait City before crossing the Iraqi border headed for Al Qa'im, a rural enclave just a few miles west of the porous Syrian border in Al Anbar Province. On a road south of Baghdad, the convoy ran across a group of Iraqis in a truck full of stolen munitions. Guns drawn, the Apache soldiers did a hasty traffic-control operation, confiscated the ammo and took the Iraqis to a U.S. Army jail, zip-tied and blindfolded in the back of their Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

"It was a huge catch, a substantial amount of munitions," Dave says. "It was a huge confidence-builder for us. When you're on base training, you always wonder if your guys are going to get complacent. The mindset is, 'When's it gonna happen?' At that point, I think the war became a reality for all of us."

When Apache Troop rolled up on Al Qa'im in mid-April, they made sure the Iraqis felt it. The area was an entry point for Islamic fundamentalists and others who saw unfinished business, and opportunity, in the rubble of Iraq. Al Qa'im would make news in June, when a convoy of tanks from Tiger Squadron's Bandit Troop crossed the Syrian border in pursuit of a party they believed was transporting Saddam Hussein and his sons out of Iraq. But for now the big news was the American troops who were wreaking havoc both on the ground and in the sky. From inside a Bradley parked on a hilltop command post overlooking town, Dave choreographed the arrival of tanks, choppers and F-16s, a symphony of shock and awe.

Most of Apache's missions were far less dramatic. The troop patrolled gas stations, helped rebuild hospitals and distributed school supplies to kids. But occasionally they got to round up the "bad guys" -- the soldier term for those loyal to Saddam Hussein. Once, after Al Qa'im residents complained that they hadn't had access to their money since Hussein was yanked from power in April, Apache Troop raided two bank branches and arrested the Baathist leaders who controlled them. On several occasions, they did smash-and-grab raids to round up prominent pro-Saddam sheikhs, crashing their tanks into the palatial residences on the outskirts of town.

These were not the kinds of missions they'd prepared for in officer training. "Out of 130 guys, you might have six people who are really good at urban-type stuff, so you had to improvise a certain amount in the field," Dave says. "Sometimes we'd just park our damn tanks in their yard instead of doing it the doctrine way. We'd be like, 'Well, let's just smash into their shit.' We'd do a grab on a guy while he's sitting there eating his Camel-os. He's shaking his shoe at you to show you he hates you, and the next thing he knows he's surrounded by eighty guys and crapping his pants."

After a couple of months on the ground, Dave began to suspect he was going to be there a while. In a letter to his girlfriend in Colorado Springs, he wrote: Better send my guitar.

Dave and First Lieutenant Luis Castellanos led parallel lives in the military. Both were Army brats, with fathers in the military. Both had helped each other endure four years at West Point, where they met as sophomore yuks in 1997. When they discovered that they both liked to sing and play guitar, they cobbled together some covers and played gigs at the Firsty Club, an upperclassman hangout on campus. After graduation, they did their officer-training course together at Fort Knox and ascended quickly through the ranks. In 2001 they landed at Fort Carson, lieutenants by 23.

"We're both pretty highly competitive," says Lu. "We wound up in the same squads during our trainings, and we were always two of the better guys. We'd help each other out, but we'd challenge each other. West Point, in particular, is absolute hell, especially your first year. You really come to rely on your friends to get you through."

Lu got Colonel Teeples's letter, too. At the end of March, he found himself on the ground in Kuwait City, getting ready to cross over into an unfriendly new world. "I think it's hard to be scared of death unless you really know what could happen," he says. "When we got to Kuwait, and we were driving around with loaded pistols, getting ready to go into a hostile country. That's when I started to feel that fear of going to war. Of possibly dying."

As the executive officer of Dragon Company, Lu was second in command of a one-hundred-man platoon with thirteen tanks. Many of Dragon's soldiers were green -- eighteen-, nineteen-year-old kids from all over the country -- and their job was to provide heavy reinforcement for the squadron and secure the Haditha Dam, a major power supply plant on the Euphrates River. The dam supplied the entire Al Anbar Province, and the Army considered it to be a potential terrorist target.

Dragon soldiers sometimes got sick from mosquitoes that carried malaria out of the river, but the post was still better than some in Al Anbar. There was a quasi-beach area where soldiers stripped down and swam in the Euphrates, a temporary escape from the unrelenting Iraqi sun.