Posted on 04/07/2005 12:38:49 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Michael Paterson was 45 years old when his Navy Reserve unit arrived in Iraq. He was virtually at the end of his Navy career. Paterson was more than a little surprised when he discovered he wouldn't be based at some rear area hospital where he could practice his advanced skills. He was headed to the front lines.
His brothers in arms were the same age as his children.
The other hospital corpsmen called him "Grandpa," and it was true. He had young grandchildren at home. When Paterson deployed into Iraq in 2003 with "follow-on" forces just behind the main invasion spearhead, his son was finishing high school and pondering his own enlistment.
Paterson outranked most of the young Marines he was surrounded by in life experience, and also in rank.
"They called me 'Grandpa,' and that was all right, because then I told them, 'Now, you're going to have to keep up with 'Grandpa.'Ê"
As a senior chief hospital corpsman with the Marines, his noncommissioned officer rank was the Navy equivalent of a master sergeant or first sergeant.
He had other life experience to bring to Iraq with him.
Paterson had been carrying a gun for nearly 30 years as a Navy man, a reservist and in his civilian employment as an officer with the California Highway Patrol.
"I've had to point my gun at some people before," he said.
But he had one thing in common with every green recruit straight out of boot camp.
None of them had ever faced combat before.
"In that kind of environment, you find yourself doing things you never dreamed of," he said.
He never dreamed that he would train Iraqi police, help numbers of local children and encounter the legacy of torture common to Saddam Hussein's rule.
Paterson deployed as medical support for the 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, a unit of fast-moving lightly armored vehicles with .25 mm cannons, in some ways similar to the Army's "Stryker" vehicles.
The unit moved into Iraq from Kuwait in March 2003. Their first mission was to "mop up" the remaining military resistance and get a rein on criminals on the rampage who were let loose from their jails and prisons by Saddam Hussein.
The veteran CHP officer told a room full of members of the Lancaster West Rotary Club that he arrived in the combat zone only partially equipped.
He told the business and community leaders that the unit he was sent to had run out of gas masks, and there were no M-16s available to spare for the late-arriving Navy "doc." His only issued weapon was a 9 mm sidearm - a gun he thought little of. He had to buy his own pistol belt. He didn't speak the language.
Yet he shared a conviction with his young comrades.
"All of them knew that what we were doing was right," Paterson said.
A few months later, some things had changed. Paterson had seen Iraq, and the desert had left its mark on him.
He carried a rebuilt AK-47, a favorite household weapon of Iraqis, be they civilians, military - or insurgents.
He still had no gas mask, but he no longer cared.
"That's just one less thing I had to carry around," he said.
His personal translator had scrawled his helmet with Arabic.
"Haji" it said on the front, an Arabic equivalent of "grandpa" and a term of respect used for Muslims who have made a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Instead of the rank senior chief, which did not translate, the man had written "The one in charge of all."
"I got a lot of traction among local Iraqis with that inscription," he said.
Paterson worked with a Marine civil affairs unit charged with training Iraqi police in the Shia city of Al-Kut south of Baghdad.
He also worked advising battalion aid stations in Babylon, Baghdad and Mahmudia. He had met the Iraqi people and tended their sick and wounded as well as tending the wounds and injuries of his own troops.
Nothing he saw changed Paterson's belief that the war was worth fighting. Rather it seems to have affirmed and encouraged that conviction.
Insurgents, Paterson said, were mainly foreigners, as well as the criminal element released from prison by Saddam.
When asked about the much-criticized U.S. intelligence agencies, Paterson said that some of the information had been shoddy.
In his opinion, however, the elusive and as yet undiscovered weapons of mass destruction probably do exist - somewhere in the Middle East.
"I think they got them out to Syria, where a lot of the senior Ba'athists escaped to," he said.
WMDs seemed a moot point, however, in a country that was full of munitions, Paterson said.
In Al-Kut, schoolchildren had to meet outside because the classrooms were stacked with weaponry. The senior chief could find all the ammunition he needed for his AK-47.
Paterson's personal translator, an Iraqi who had served in the Iraqi military special forces under Saddam, spoke perfect, unaccented English.
When the senior chief asked where he had learned such excellent English, the man replied that he learned it as part of his responsibilities in Saddam Hussein's commando forces - forces, he said, that were busy training foreign terrorists.
"He said, 'I taught English to foreigners so they could infiltrate your country,' " Paterson said.
The translator later declined to become a member of the Ba'athist party. For that offense, the man said, he was tortured for six months.
The U.S. military had found him wandering without home or resource. Iraqis had been forbidden to give him aid. The translator's father and brothers had been killed. One of them was dropped into an industrial plastic shredder, Paterson said.
At the ruins of Babylon, Paterson and his unit discovered a similar shredder used for torture and execution in a palace frequented by Uday Hussein.
If the executioner was merciful, he dropped his victim in headfirst, Paterson said. If not, the torturer would slowly feed the victim feet-first into the machine.
The palace was known as a killing zone, Paterson said. When Uday came into town he took whichever women or young girls that struck his fancy in the surrounding villages. When his vehicles left the area, the villagers waited by the banks of the Tigris to fish the women's bodies out of the river so they could be given a decent burial.
It was this kind of treatment, Paterson said, that made the average Iraqi encountered by the Marines give a warm welcome to the Americans.
"There was nowhere I went in Iraq that the people didn't greet us with flowers and hugs and handshakes, and thank us," he said.
To train the Iraqi police, Paterson and his civil affairs Marines used a curriculum based on the Bill of Rights. Iraqi law had no such provisions.
"These people were very excited to have a system with rights, after years of not having rights," Paterson said.
Paterson said he feels great respect for the Iraqis and has affection for them.
"The Iraqi people are wonderful people and very enterprising," he said.
They opened their shops as soon as the fighting had stopped, "set up satellite dishes and started watching CNN."
Paterson criticized the mainstream media in the United States, saying they presented a skewed and negative picture of the views that Iraqis hold toward Americans.
Seeing those reports, the Iraqis he had contact with were perplexed. Paterson's units operated in cities where the Shiite population was most numerous. Most Iraqi opposition has formed in the minority Sunni region called the "Sunni Triangle" west of Baghdad.
The Iraqis "asked why the American press was lying about the Iraqi people," Paterson said. "They said, 'They (the American press) lie because we love you and want you to stay.' "
The now-retired Navy chief said he also is perplexed by mainstream media coverage of the war. It is no wonder, he said, that a substantial number of American people oppose the war when all they get are numerous reports of Iraqi hatred toward Americans and opposition to the aims of the coalition that toppled Saddam.
Still, he has great optimism for the future. In remarks after his speech, he said the Iraqis now have the opportunity to form their own government, and with that momentum toward democracy, the insurgency is fast losing ground.
The armor reconnaissance he served with lost two Marines to vehicle accidents. All the others that came through the battalion aid stations that Paterson supervised came home alive.
Now, Paterson is able to compare notes with his son, Galen, who joined the Marines immediately after high school. Paterson missed that high school graduation but was able to get home to California in time to see his son graduate from boot camp.
"I was able to see him get his eagle, globe and anchor, and that was pretty special," he said.
While Paterson was in Iraq, Galen graduated from high school, married his sweetheart and joined the Marines. Paterson missed his share of family milestones.
The young man recently returned from his own combat tour in Iraq with the Combat Support Supply Battalion 7, Paterson said. Galen works in communications, repairing radios and telephones. He returned in February from his first deployment.
His experience was much the same as his father's, Paterson said.
The only difference is "the Iraqi people are doing a lot more for themselves than they could when I was there. ... They said, 'We are ready to do things for ourselves now,' " Paterson said.
The senior chief was confident that they would do just that.
"Their government will be strong and they will be democratic," he said. When the shooting stops, he said, "I highly recommend going there and seeing some of the things that have been closed to the Western world."
"FIRST AID ACTION - California Highway Patrol Officer Michael Paterson, left, went to Iraq at the end of a 23-year Navy and Navy Reserve career to serve as a medical corpsman with the Marines. Here he joins a Marine in applying first aid to an Iraqi youth. "
Something you won't hear on the MSM.
Thanks for this neat post. It's too bad the MSM can't/won't tell the real story....
Bump and thanks!
This is what makes America great..........
Imagine how the man felt. He was a dead man walking, and was saved by the invading troops. Multiply that feeling by millions of people!
Amazing. And sickening.
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