“Shooting stays with you, it’s like riding a bike, you don’t forget it.” On this subject George MacMasters speaks from recent and deadly experience.

A few months ago, this soon-to-be-50-year-old Harvard aquatics instructor returned home from the war in Iraq. He was physically unscathed, though for weeks after his arrival back in the U.S., he felt nausea every morning.

That phenomenon he attributes to seeing “a lot of dead bodies, heads blown off, brains blown out, and limbs torn off, things like that.” He feels bad especially about the loss of so many young people and knowing that “they had hardly lived yet.”

His son, stationed in Falluja, only 15 minutes away from his father, was among the seriously wounded. Still in his early twenties, he suffered drastic burns in both hands, along with wounds in his face and ear. “Shrapnel was coming out of his head weeks and months later,” says his father.

Despite his desire to go there and fight in the front lines, getting to Iraq was not easy for George. From the beginning he emphasized that he could speak Arabic, but the Army and National Guard brass seemed not to value this asset. Nor did they apparently care that he had served in the Marine Corps from 1976 to 1986, the latter four years as an officer.

After getting a waiver for his age, George, a tall, strapping, athletic middle-ager, was accepted into the active reserve and volunteered for Guantánamo where he spent the next six months patrolling the hills near the U. S. base. Only at the end of this duty did the head of the intelligence unit discover his proficiency in Arabic.

For the remaining five months of his sojourn in Guantánamo, MacMasters spent his time striking up conversations with the prisoners held by American forces. “A lot of times they would talk and they didn’t want to tell me anything. But slowly, as you get talking, they would volunteer information.”

“We got some good intelligence,” George reports, some of it leading to certain prisoners being released from the most difficult confinement. But others would try to get intelligence from their interrogator. “It was a kind of chess game: They would be working on me while I was working on them.”

But George still hoped to serve in Iraq as a private and a rifleman because “that’s where the real fighting is done, right on the fire team.” Unable to get released from his unit back home, he called up the Pentagon. “I got to full-bird colonels,” he says, and pressed his case.

The brass inquired who was pressing them and heard “Oh, it’s Sergeant MacMasters and he’s a pain in the ass, that guy.” Finally, he got his way and ended up in an Iraqi police station in Ramadi. If you wanted action, it was the place to be. Among other things, “we were mortared every morning and every night, all the time,” he reports.

During his 12 months there, he engaged in two dozen firefights and three major attacks. “I actually got to see the enemy and I shot at them. I knew I hit a few of them but I have no idea how many I killed.”

A Marine rifle company was based next door to help provide security. George would eat with them regularly. One day when the company went out on patrol in a 7-ton truck, George heard explosions 500 yards away. Six of the marines were hit: “One marine was killed, four had two legs blown off, one had one leg blown off,” according to George.

He saw them brought in: “These were all kids – 19, 21, 22.” When the grievously wounded were brought to a hospital, a navy corpsman reportedly joked with them later about them now having to learn how “to pick up girls from a wheelchair.”

About other casualties, he observes, “When you looked in their faces, they looked like babies, not men.” Of himself at their stage he observes: “I knew nothing at that age, I had learned nothing, what I wanted or even what the world was about.”

He holds it against civilian and military leaders whose policies are responsible for these casualties. “Their policies result in the deaths of young people,” this veteran says boldly. “To me staying the course meant accepting the death of so many young people killed each month as an acceptable loss to maintain a policy.”

George believed that getting rid of Saddam was a good thing. “What I didn’t agree with, over time, was the lack of preparedness of the leadership in conducting the war; right from the get-go I wanted them to have more troops.”

He hates the thought of American troops leaving. But he considers “pretty absurd” training up the Iraqis to defeat the insurgency. “If we can’t defeat this insurgency with the greatest military in the world, how can we expect a rag-tag bunch of light infantry Iraqis to defeat it?”  

Richard Griffin