Oral History Of Iraq & Afghanistan: Sgt. Patrick Campbell

As Told To Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

Saturday, Nov. 22, 2008



Sgt. Patrick Campbell
30 Years Old
Army National Guard, 2002-present
Served in Falluja, Baghdad corridor

• Oral History Project

Patrick Campbell joined the Army National Guard in 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq. He spent a year in and around Baghdad in 2005-2006. A lawyer, he is now a legislative counsel for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, working on issues he often knows first-hand -- including life with post-traumatic stress disorder.

I've done one deployment, I'll probably do one more next year. My initial enlistment was up in January. [I re-enlisted because] I have a lot of personal value from serving in the military, I love being a medic, it gives me a reason to be physically fit. It's going to pay off a lot of my student loans -- they're going to pay $20,000 off my student loans plus another $20,000 bonus that's going to go to student loans.

I'd graduated undergrad and applied for law school when I joined; now I have a law degree and I'm a lawyer. I've had the opportunity to go officer since the moment I joined. One of the reasons I haven't is, unless you're a doctor or a nurse or a physician's assistant, you can't treat people as a medical officer. I'd rather treat people as an enlisted medic rather than be an officer who doesn't see patients at all.

All my grandfathers served in the military. Neither my dad nor any of my stepdads did. It was actually a pretty big influence. I look up to my grandfather on my mother's side a lot, and he definitely taught me the value of service. It's something I thought a lot about when I decided to join. He said, "If there are people around you serving and you're not, helping and you're not, there's something wrong."

I joined about a month before we invaded Iraq. At that point, everyone knew we were invading, they'd authorized the use of force. I didn't think we should be invading Iraq, but as someone who's in the military, that's not your decision to make. It affected my parents a lot more than me. You don't choose your wars. The question was, when it was my turn to serve, would I serve or not?

That's a lot of the reason I became a medic. It's almost a neutral position; You help everyone no matter what. That was my way of saying, "All right, I can do this, but as long as I can do it on my terms."

That became extremely important to my well-being while I was in Iraq. My core function, my role there, was to save lives. I value that a great deal. Thankfully, I was never called upon to really treat a U.S. soldier who was in life-threatening danger, but I did save a lot of Iraqis, specifically Iraqi police who were pretty banged-up.

I even saved an Iraqi insurgent.We were driving up what's called "Dead Chicken Road" because there are thousands of dead chickens on the side of the road. It stinks to high hell. They like to put a lot of IEDs there. We had a sniper team watching the road; they had seen a pair of young men [drive up], get out, survey the [area]. They basically lit up the car with .50 cal rounds, 20 to 30 rounds inside the cab of the vehicle.

When I arrived there, the driver had been shot three or four times in the leg. I had to treat his wounds, basically medically evacuate him to a coalition hospital. It was very weird to think that moments earlier the guy who I was treating was plotting to blow us up, but as long as he wasn't a danger to me or my soldiers, that was my role.

For me it was very easy to accept, for other people it was very frustrating. You don't want to treat the people who make you suffer. With IEDs, there's no way to fight back, and when you finally find the people who've been planting the IEDs, you want to inflict pain on them. For a lot of other guys, they feel like they don't deserve that type of treatment.

[He went to Iraq attached to a unit from the Louisiana National Guard]. I got static because I was from California. When the student body president from Berkeley joined a unit from western Louisiana, they called me the "gay liberal faggot," "Tootsie." It was funny. We spent days talking about the difference between a coon, a Cajun, and a redneck. They all knew each other, they knew each other's families, they went to high school together.These National Guard units, they've known each other and known each others' families for generations. There was a little bit of distrust in the beginning, but I proved I wasn't a liability: The first time somebody got hurt and needed to be evacuated, I did it right; the second time, I did it right. I also showed them I was going to do everything they were going to do: When they were searching cars, I was searching cars; when they were raiding houses, I was raiding houses.

We were at Victory [later renamed Liberty]. It was the biggest FOB [forward operating base], which was great. The chow halls were amazing. The biggest PX in Iraq was only like a half-mile off. You could go running: We were in Saddam's old hunting and fishing palace, so there were plenty of lakes to go run around.

I had a cell phone. I could call, but I couldn't receive calls for some reason. I had a girlfriend -- until she cheated on me. [We had] lots of "Dear John" letters while we were over there.

Every woman over there was like Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston. With a 40-to-1 male-to-female ratio and a rule that you're not supposed to be in each other's rooms at night, I couldn't just have dated someone else, have a rebound relationship. I am proud to say that I beat the odds. That was an Iraq experience -- something I think that both of us needed.

The rule wasn't no fraternization, the rule was you can't be in each other's rooms. That caused all sorts of weird things because it didn't say anything about, like, CONEX boxes [container express boxes, standardized cargo containers reused as living quarters] or offices, it just said your room; so people took that rule very literally. Most people just ignored that rule altogether, as long as you had a cool roommate. Officer-enlisted lines were usually respected, no one in your chain of command -- that's what really affects good order or discipline.

The way our brigade was set up, each battalion had a series of trailers, three rooms to a trailer, two people to a room. The battalion right next to us got hit by a rocket. I was shaving. I looked outside, and I could hear CRACK, and I could see the smoke rising.

[Campbell rushed to help one of the casualties.] When I cut off the clothes, I found out that it was a woman, it was a female contractor.. She had got a piece of shrapnel in her stomach. [It looked] like the movie "Aliens." I remember the general, the brigade commander, coming down and asking me; [I said], "I don't think she's going to live."

There was nothing you could do. It was really random. I had a couple of very close calls, more so than other people. I had a rocket land about 10 feet from me. Thankfully, I was on the other side of a wall when it landed. I was in the headquarters coming home from church; If I had got the patrol schedule [right away and gone outside], and not stood there and shot the shit, it would've pretty much landed on my head.

One day, I decided to take a piss on the side of the road, and I looked down, and there was an IED, fully wired. I didn't actually pee on the IED, but I was peeing next to the IED. [I] ran. Yelling at the top of my lungs. That type of IED had like a 50- to 75-meter kill radius. It was the quickest 100-yard dash I've ever had in my life, even with my pants around my heels.

I believe that Providence had everything to do with us surviving. It was so random: an extra inch this way, leaving a couple minutes earlier. We said prayers every day over there. There was someone looking out for us.

One of the hard things to adjust to, we didn't have a set schedule. We wanted to not have a schedule so the insurgents didn't know where and when we were going, but that makes it extremely hard to sleep: Sometimes you were sleeping during the day, sometimes you were sleeping during the night.

We didn't stop at intersections, we didn't do the same pattern every day, we made sure vehicles weren't allowed to get close to us; we did a lot of things which prevented the insurgents from deciding you were a good target. You want to make it so if they pick a target, you're not the one they're going to pick.

If you stop on the side of the road, the next day there's going to be an IED at that corner. One of the biggest problems they have is timing the detonation; if you slow down, a chokepoint is the [best] point to put an IED. [So] we didn't stop. We caused a lot of accidents. Cars used to drive right next to us. No, no, no. We fired warning shots. Cars in Iraq don't follow any rules. Doesn't matter what side of the road they're on.

We had laser pointers, which were actually extremely helpful: A $10 pointer saved a lot of lives. At night, we had giant beam flashlights, but we didn't have batteries. At night you don't have any lights on, so they don't know where you are. You have a hasty checkpoint, unless you put chem lights out and concertina wire. At some point you had to draw an imaginary line in the sand and hope they understood.

I shot lots of warning shots. The only ever time I ever shot at someone was, we saw a triggerman disappear in to a corn field. [They never found him.]

For the first six months, we patrolled the rural area between Baghdad and Fallujah. Because of all the rivers, it was so incredibly lush and beautiful, fields and fields of agriculture. It reminded me of home. I always thought it would just be desert.

Typical day was: Wake up, try to make it to the chow hall -- which was about a mile away -- if you could; take off, go drive around. Sometimes we'd talk to local Iraqis, but not often. I always brought toys to give out to little kids.

It was really boring most of the time. We kind of sat around. We did have raids, and we did get attacked when we'd drive out in the sector, I'd say once every two months on average. [There'd be] a month of nothing, then a week of boom, boom, boom being hit by IEDs, then another month of nothing. Being shot at and blown up you have very little control over, and the best part is you sometimes get to shoot back. [But most of the time] your mind isn't what's busy, your body is what's busy.

We were in [that] sector until April, May, then we moved to Baghdad -- downtown Baghdad, which was remarkably different. We were pretty much in the heart of the city.

Our job went from patrolling villages to watching a road, making sure they don't put IEDs on it. [Our first six months] involved a lot of traveling, meeting with tribal leaders; we were out in the field. But when you were in the city, we had a couple-mile strip of road. We sat on a trash pile all day. Driving into the city was dangerous, but once we got into the city it was actually pretty safe because we knew everyone around us.

We took over Khadamiya. Our job was to do route security; it was a major coalition thoroughfare. Any car stopping on the side of the road, we'd get them to move on. We were basically like CHP [California Highway Patrol]. The last six months, we sat in our Humvees the entire time, watching the road. Roads like that were the most dangerous places in Iraq. There's a joke in California that highway patrol is Triple-A with a gun; I felt like that.

[When we got attacked,] it was exciting, exhilarating. You'd be, like, bored and falling asleep, and then, all of a sudden, a rush of adrenaline and anger and frustration and lots of bullets flying everywhere, My lieutenant had an SOP: If an IED hits, [fire] some rounds downrange, no matter what. If an IED went off, there were bullets going, no matter what, even if it was at the berm next to us. Keep the guy's head down [so he can't detonate another IED].

[Interviewer: So how did you prevent shots from hitting civilian vehicles or houses?] [Campbell shakes his head] We didn't. Our gunners were some of the best gunners in the brigade; they outscored their opponents, that's why we got picked over and over again for special tasks. But I remember one time we were driving at 3 o'clock in the morning, and we got ambushed from the side of the road, there was no discrimination at the point, just unloading. At night like that all you can tell is the muzzle flash -- quick, like a camera flash.

We used to drive Iraqi police from their base to our base, from their headquarters to our base, to get fuel. We used to go to the police station -- literally, there was concertina wire straight down the middle of the [station], like something out of an "I Love Lucy" episode. Basically we heard one of them was corrupt and insurgents didn't attack them, and the other side, they did their job, they were just hampered. It's not like here, where you drive around in a police cruiser. When they go somewhere, they had to go three or four trucks deep, armed to the teeth. When IED is the choice of weapon, and you have people standing in the back of pickup trucks -- we used to call it "the meat grinder."

The girl I was dating [before going to Iraq] kept saying, "Are you going to come home changed?" Within three months of coming home, I alienated three of my best friends. I was numb to the idea that words hurt people. Words weren't allowed to hurt people anymore in Iraq, you didn't have the luxury. And I got in two fights -- both of the people I got in fights with deserved it, but I was excited to get in the fight. I lied to my best friend multiple times and he still, to this day, doesn't talk to me. I was being selfish and I was acting like words didn't hurt people, IEDs hurt people, get over it. It took another year before someone sat me down and said they wouldn't be my friend anymore if I didn't get counseling. I realized I had been shutting my emotions off.

Choosing to join the Army, choosing to go to Iraq, was the best decision I've ever made. It made me stronger, made me wiser, it's given me opportunities I would never have imagined, like the fact that you're talking to me. However, with it comes so much baggage. The skills that help you over there tend to hurt you over here, and especially the psychological Kevlar.

[I want to redeploy, and] I kind of feel me putting that Kevlar back on, that kind of fuck-it mentality. "Why not? Why not say that? Why not do that? It's not gonna hurt me. If I don't do it now, I may not have the chance." It gives you a little harder edge, but that's not a long-term way of dealing with life. You burn a lot of bridges that way.

[I have] PTSD. I don't take any medications because I refuse to. I go to counseling on a regular basis. You need to journal, you need to exercise, and you need to talk about it. Right before we went to Iraq, they said the secrets that you keep are the secrets that kill you. Every time I feel scared to talk about something, I just have to say it -- and that has kept me sane throughout my entire return home.

I don't have a disability rating. All I want to do is try to be normal; I don't need money from the VA. I want to go talk to a counselor when I need it; I don't go all the time. But there are certain things, some triggers. [This summer,] I went to a funeral for one of my buddies who committed suicide. That made me start having nightmares again.

There was an article coming out in the Nation magazine that really hurt me. I had worked months with this war reporter, helped her get access to a lot of my friends, [but she wrote about] how we were killing Iraqi civilians. The idea that my guys and myself were going to be called baby-killers, I was just in tears. For the first time, I felt what Vietnam veterans must've felt when they came home, wanting to curl up in a ball and repress all those thoughts -- that's a very scary mixture.

This interview was conducted on Aug. 5, 2008.