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Transcription of Oral History Interview with Robert Helton.
October 2, 2012
Boone, NC
Brindley Polk: I’m Brindley Polk, interviewing Rob Helton at Belk Library on the Appalachian
State campus in Boone, NC on October 2, 2012. So Rob, when is your birthday and where were
you born and raised?
Rob Helton: My birthday is 26 May 1983. I was born in Hickory, North Carolina and I
was..grew up outside of Hickory in a little town called Hildabrad.
Brindley Polk: Always in North Carolina…always lived in North Carolina?
Rob Helton: Yes, other than when I was in the army I’ve always lived here.
Brindley Polk: Alright. When and why did you choose to join the army?
Rob Helton: I signed up in May of 2003. I had…I was here at App, it was my first semester
when 9/11 happened and then of course the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq in
2003. Initially I thought wow Afghanistan will be over really quick. I had always wanted to join
the army ever since I was a little kid. It had always been a goal of mine. And so I thought I’d
graduate college and become an officer and probably spend a career in the military. And then we
invaded Iraq in 2003 and that really…I felt like this was going to last awhile and if I didn’t get
into it that it would be over before I got there. Oddly enough, I was calling my friends to
congratulate them in 2005 on graduating from Baghdad, so I miss called that one but…it was
still a good decision so…
Brindley Polk: So you say you wanted to be in the army ever since you were a kid. Is that
because there was family history in military service…or?
Rob Helton: No, in my dad’s time…he still tells the story of going to MEPS to register for the
draft but other than that he never went. He had two brothers who were drafted for Vietnam. But,
other than that there is no real family history. I had nine uncles and out of that one of them joined
the army voluntarily and spent a career in it, but I didn’t really know him so…O but my brother,
my older brother did spend six years in the Navy in the ‘90s. I was, he is ten years older than me
I was the little brother that’s probably the family history that most drove me to joining the
military.
Brindley Polk: OK. So did you hear any interesting stories from your family members or was it
really talked about too much?
Rob Helton: It really wasn’t spoken of. Dad always told me that uh none of them were the same
after they came back and I remember when I was a little boy…the movie o my goodness was it
Platoon? One of those eighties era Vietnam movies came out and my uncle saw part of it on TV.
And there was talk in the family for a little while because the pastor had to come out to talk to
him and he had to get some counseling because it had, I guess just disturbed things that he had
buried away. So, that was really the only thing that was talked about and my grandmother kept
my uncles silver star in the drawer in her bedroom which I didn’t know what it was at the time
�she showed it to me once. That was, I guess it was family history that was kept under the…kept
below the radar I guess.
Brindley Polk: Which service branch are you in and why did you join that one?
Rob Helton: I joined the army. It was what I always intended to join. I wasn’t going to go in the
air force. My brother always regretted joining the navy in a sense. He’s very proud of it but I
think he wished he’d joined the army. And the marines was just a whole different, and it still is a
whole different thing so…The army had the job that I wanted because I’ve been interested in o
tanks in stuff since I was a kid. I mean, I saw one in a parade once and I never could get enough
of them so I always wanted to do that.
Brindley Polk: What can you tell me about your basic training experiences?
Rob Helton: There’s probably a lot of stories but I went to Fort Knox. My actual date that I went
in was 23 October of 2003. So, we in processed at Fort Knox. And that’s, I will never go to the
state of Kentucky again because of that place. But, it was a good experience I guess. I got in with
a pretty good group of guys. We of course had our platoon idiot. It was, I mean it was
challenging in some ways but I guess the hardest part was the separation being cut off from the
world. I had just come straight from college to do this so having no information except for what
they gave me was the hardest part. Physically it wasn’t that bad, getting yelled at all the time
really didn’t bother me that was like expected. It was part of the experience and everybody
wanted it. I think my favorite memory that comes out of basic training was…it was a few weeks
from graduation. I had been sent out to do what’s called staff duty. You go up to the headquarters
of your training unit and you sit there and an actual sergeant, a real soldier sits up at the staff
duty. You’re just there to mop the floors and do other stuff for two hours and so everything was
done when I got there so the sergeant that was on staff duty he says just go over and sit down on
this couch and the couch faced the front door. The front door is where everyone walks in. He
says just make sure you call “At ease” if the sergeant major walks in or attention if the colonel
walks in. No big deal. I sat down, and I was exhausted. You know, we’re just finishing up one of
our exercises and I to this day don’t think I was actually asleep but my eyes may have been open
but the brain was not…nobody was home, and in walks a sergeant major. He went on a tirade
and by this point I had learned to block out pretty much everything except when to say yes
sergeant major or no sergeant major. The thing is, two years later that same sergeant major had
come to my regiment, the 3d Cav, to be the regimental sergeant major and he picked me out of
my entire troop in just sort of a horse shoe around him, he was talking to us. He picked me out
and says I remember you; you’re the one that slept on staff duty. And out of my mind, out of my
mouth oath bided comes sergeant major I wasn’t asleep. He was picking on me I think but at the
same time that’s not something you do but it was an interesting little exchange and to this day
I’m amazed that two years later he can remember this one me, that one little private that was
asleep with his eyes open sitting, you know sitting up. That was probably the best little memory
out of basic training for me. Other than that getting to play with Bradley’s was awesome. It’s like
a 35 ton, it’s like the ultimate four wheeler except it has tracks. You learn so much and it is just a
great experience I guess. I was sick of it by the time it was over with. O and I learned my first
double standard that is worth sharing.
Brindley Polk: Which was?
�Rob Helton: My first sergeant was this very intense man and he got very upset at somebody one
morning because he heard a private complaining about having to carry so much weight in their
ruck sack. And he comes out with this ruck sack that looks three times the size of ours and it’s
just this big ball, it’s a backpack, but its all full of stuff. And we’re like wow. We’re ruck
marching like, I think its twelve miles or so and he says I will never tell you to do anything I do
not do myself and neither will your drill sergeants. And then most of the drill sergeants have
these giant fluffed up ruck sacks. Well, on Fort Knox there are four hills and that is one thing
that came down from my uncle who volunteered, he went to Fort Knox. And he asked me if
misery, agony, heartbreak, and defeat were still used. They’re hills that are practically vertical
and you have to walk up and down them. I mean I’m not kidding; you put your hand to actually
hold yourself up on agony.
Brindley Polk: O Wow.
Rob Helton: It’s, it’s miserable. So we actually went through all…I don’t know how they got
route to go through all four. You can’t even buses down them that’s how steep they are. Actually
they’re gated against buses. But…we get to the range we’re going to and it starts to rain so the
drill sergeant tell us ok grip your ruck sacks, which you just take four and make a little square,
and then you take a poncho and wrap it around them so they don’t get soaked. They said make
sure you get the first sergeants and ours together. Well, one of our guys goes over to pick up the
first ruck sack after the drill sergeant walks away. He sticks his hands in the straps and he goes to
haul on it and he falls over backwards. We were like what? What did you just do man? And we
go and pick it up and its full of pillows. So he walked the twelve miles with us and I’m sure at
some point in his career he’s carried that ruck sack full of you know, weight or rocks or whatever
but to stand in front of a group of privates who have been in the army only a few months and tell
them I will never tell you to do something I don’t do myself and then find out that you’re faking.
Brindley Polk: Yeah that’s something (laughing).
Rob Helton: Yeah, so I probably better cut the basic training off there though, we’ve got a lot
more to cover.
Brindley Polk: Alright sure. Where were you deployed during your service?
Rob Helton: I was deployed to Iraq twice. From March of 2005 to February of 2006 I was in
Baghdad and then from December of 2007 to March of 2009 I was deployed FOB Kalsu. Which
is about forty clicks south of Baghdad.
Brindley Polk: Ok, and how long…well you just answered that question sorry. What was it
like…how did you like your experience over there?
Rob Helton: I loved it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. It…there are a lot of guys
who came back with a negative perception of Iraq. I can’t wait to go back some day as a tourist. I
think in about 10 or 20 years it should be calm enough for us to do that. But, you know it’s an
amazing place and amazing people. There are very few places in the world where you can get in
a vehicle in the morning and thirty minutes later you’re standing beside ruins that are five
thousand years old. And you can still find people who live, it’s like, as though it were biblical. I
mean, their implements are wooden…they live in literally straw and mud huts with their animals
living in a little wing of their house. And then you also have the modern city side but you’ll see
�a heard of camels get herded, you know they’ll be herded through the town by I guess betowin in
the middle of the day. I mean it’s this mix of the ancient and the semi modern. There’ll be a
Nissan factory here and then a little clay kiln where they cook bread. On the ins, they just slap it
on the inside of the kiln. I mean how basic can you get? So, I think it was in some ways a very
beautiful country. It has its downsides. It gets really hot in the summer and it rains and it gets
cold in the winter. But, you know that’s little things that you have to deal with and I think that it
was probably the best thing that I’ve ever gotten to do.
Brindley Polk: Did you see any combat while you were over there?
Rob Helton: Yes, I did. First tour was much worse than the second. Probably that has to do with
Baghdad. I think it also has to do with the army hadn’t yet found its way. Thinking about this, I
picked out a few stories that are appropriate and also I think illustrate a point. So, I think the first
one that’s the most…probably the funniest actually I think it’s hilarious but a lot of people talk
about their baptism by fire when you start reading history or their first experience in combat. My
first experience was defining but it was also probably the best experience you could possibly
have. It was in the early summer 2005 and part of our area of responsibility included check point
2-8. At one point this had been known as the mixing bowl. It was the most lethal area in Iraq. We
had controlled it to the point that insurgents just couldn’t plant bombs under it anymore. But, the
reason it’s called the mixing bowl is there’s two four lane highways that look just like interstates
intersect and there’s a large over pass that goes over both highways, so it’s this confusing jumble
of bridges. It kind of looks like the interchange in Atlanta actually is the thing that comes to
mind.
Brindley Polk: Spaghetti junction?
Rob Helton: Yes. So it was a confusing little place to be and my patrols were originally
supposed to be a click north of there, about a kilometer. We weren’t supposed to be out after
dark which everyone who’s seen the movie Black Hawk Down knows you don’t plan on that, and
I thought that’s been built in the army’s memory. Some of us learned from the movies or learned
from experience to always carry your night vision and always have what’s called an infrared
chemlight, we usually call them IR. To the naked eye it’s this little plastic tube that’s just red but
in night vision it glows. Apparently, the National Guard’s night vision is not calibrated to see
that but the regular army we can. There’s a little joke to that that I’ll explain later. Sure enough I
carried a box of them in my salt pack; I carried my night vision goggles with me on my vest. So I
was always ready but at the same time I was always carrying extra stuff. Well, we get to what
we’re, what’s supposed to be the end of our patrol our lieutenant meets with the last sheik that
we’re supposed to meet with. A sheik is like a local chieftain, and even in Baghdad the
neighborhoods have sheiks. We hear some firing coming from around 2-8. We can hear
obviously, AK-47 fire which is distinctive, but we can also hear small arms fire, U.S. small arms
fire being returned. So we get in the trucks and our lieutenants try to call and find out who’s in
contact. It turns out it was the other scout platoon, and they weren’t really good about informing
anybody of what they were doing. When we got there we see some soldiers stretched out behind
the guard rail on the side of the highway, and there’s this large embankment that goes down. It’s
fairly steep but it’s about fifty feet to the ground because in Iraq everything is flat so when they
build they highways and they need to make a bridge over something, they just made a big mound
of sand and one highway will run over the other and its all manmade. So they’re up on top of this
manmade berm and they’re firing down into this small, it’s not really a neighborhood more like a
�hamlet I guess but…and there’s someone firing back at them, and there’s at least two sources or
fire. Well the lieutenant decides that we’re going to go down there and find these guys. And it’s
getting on towards dusk but nobody really thinks about night vision or to say anything and he’s
giving us a little briefing up here on the highway. There are rounds flying by every once in
awhile but we’re standing behind a truck. It’s just kind of a neat little experience just like wow
this is it, we’re really going to do it this time. He says the rally point for our section is going to
be behind the bridge pilings. For some reason we had starting wondering around in front of the
truck and all the sudden they cut loose with another burst of fire and the Lt’s says alright lets go.
To me the last instructions issued were the rally point is going to be down there at the bridge
pilings, so I hurtled the guard rail and started sprinting down this embankment. I don’t know how
far I got but I’m guessing it’s about ten steps and I hear Helton what the hell are you doing? I
look to my left and there’s absolutely no one out there, I came to a dead stop and I was like o I’m
by myself and I turned around and sure enough everyone’s up behind the guardrail. Somehow,
everybody but me understood lets go to mean lets go to the guard rail and then we’re going to go
down the bridge. Suddenly I realized I’m the only target out here, I’m the only show in town, so
I start running back up the hill and it feels like there’s lead in my entire body, I’m sure I was
running fast but it’s like eternity to get back to the guardrail, and every once in a while you hear
a round smack in the dirt. I don’t think they were really shooting at me but they were shooting at
something. I got across the guard rail, the Lt calls me an idiot ands like what do you think you’re
doing? He’s like alright now our section is going to move down to the bridge pilings. Well I just
tried to do that but yes sir. We finally get down to the bridge piling and the other section gets up
under the eve of the bridge, where the bridge meets the bank. All seems to be going well but we
realize in the last couple of minutes we’ve lost all sunlight. Suddenly the Lt realizes we don’t
have night vision, he looks around and says does anyone have their night vision goggles? And
it’s like I do sir and pulled them out of my pouch and mounted it on my weapon. He looks
around and he’s like anybody got any IR chemlights? I was like they’re in the truck sir. So he
kind of whispers to the other group, he’s like hey you guys have any night vision or IR
chemlights? One of the sergeants had his night vision with him that was it.
Brindley Polk: Wow.
Rob Helton: So he looks at me and it’s probably the biggest deer in the headlights moment in my
life. Because o my god he is really going to tell me to do this. He says Helton go back to the
trucks get as many night vision goggles as you can and all the IR chemlights you can get and
we’ll cover you. It flashed through my mind that this son of a bitch is really going to get me
killed today but I said yes sir. When they started laying down cover I ran back up the
embankment. Well, there was firing coming from the insurgents and I’m sure they were just
shooting back in response to being fired at but when you’re running and there are bullets being
fired at you for the first time it feels like every single one of them has a homing beacon, like
you’re wearing a homing beacon and they’re coming right at you. I’m sure that wasn’t the case
but I ran faster than I’ve ever run in my life. I hurtled the embankment going uphill, I still don’t
know how I did that wearing all my equipment but I gathered all the night vision and all the
chemlights that I could and when I started taking night vision goggles out of this one truck, the
sergeant who had been left back up there in charge was like you better keep those straight. Like
its dark, they’re being shot at, I don’t think anyone cares right now who belongs to which set of
night vision, but whatever. So now I got it all together and I was like man I got to go back down
this hill. This is where it gets really interesting because I didn’t wear night vision on my helmet
�and it wouldn’t have helped me anyway because it’s two dimensional. There is no depth
perception. You can’t tell how deep something is or how wide it is. I was like alright, I’ll I’ve got
to do is make it back down this hill. I jumped the guard rail and start running. I made about three
steps and because no one bothered to design drainage on these highways these big gullies have
formed in the embankment. And so, like I said I took about three steps and when my foot came
down it did not touch ground where it was supposed to, and I had an instant to just think damn,
and then my foot hit the ground 6 inches 8 inches lower than it was supposed to but it was pretty
shallow or pretty narrow I mean, and I started tumbling. I had a bag over my shoulder so it’s me,
a rifle, and a bag tumbling. Somehow, I am proud to say I rolled out of it, combat roll I do not
know but I got back on my feet and started running down the hill again. But the problem is I had
gotten disoriented so I ran straight back into the same gully and did the same thing again. This
time I rolled a little further and I know the word idiot went through my mind at some point
between all the uffs and umphs but I got out of it and started running again and realized the
ground was starting to flatten out and I ran into a thorn bush. So, I took a couple of minutes to
extricate myself from that probably less than a minute but it was painful and slow process from
where I was sitting. You can still hear fire every once in awhile. I finally make it to the bridge
piling and the Lt says why were you making all that noise? And I’m thinking are you serious?
You sent me back up there, I come all the way back down, I just went through all that and I
brought you night vision that you should have had and this is all you can say to me? But of
course I just I’m sorry sir and handed him the bag. We got everything spread out. We ended up
moving into the little hamlet, we search every single house. There were a couple of more times
where we fired at the insurgents because there was fire coming towards us. No big deal. By the
end it, it wasn’t a big deal anymore which is the amazing thing it probably lasted for twenty
thirty minutes. By the end of it we were like o they’re just shooting in our general direction
again. It was a great experience because nobody got hurt us or them. We all received our combat
action badge which was a big deal, it’s just a little badge that goes on your uniform but everyone
can see that you’ve actually seen combat. Yeah, when you are a new sergeant and you show up
to a unit all your new little privates see you their like o wow we’ve got a combat experienced
NCO and it’s like you have no idea. Actually, my commander a couple of years later in the MP’s
he says Sergeant Helton what did you get that cab for? Well sir it’s just a little fire fight around
2-8. I tried to make it sound all nonchalant because I don’t want to explain the tripping and the
falling and anything else. He’s like that’s some good shit sergeant and he moves off. I’m like you
have no idea you really don’t but…
Brindley Polk: That’s, that’s great. I feel like you said it last for probably 30 minutes maybe? I
bet it seemed like a lot longer especially running.
Rob Helton: It did, it did. The other thing we realized we didn’t have was water.
Brindley Polk: O!
Rob Helton: So I was like my mouths full of dust, dust is coming out of my ears, it’s in my
weapon and I suddenly realize I’m completely thirsty and nobody had water. We’re not going to
go back to the trucks for that so by the time it was over we were all…if you’ve ever seen a camel
drink water it takes awhile, and that’s what we looked like. We’re all a bunch of camel’s
drinking water. But that was my baptism by fire, my first combat experience. I think it was all
downhill after that but you know that’s one of the highlights of…I guess it’s one of the big
highlights in the army is that I have a story that I am proud to tell that most people would be
�humiliated by I think because the tripping and the falling is pretty clumsy but you know it was a
learning experience and at the same time I can’t imagine how a first, a first contact or whatever
you want to call it could go better because there was no bad memories that came out of it. Just
learning a lot of things like the lieutenant’s and the sergeant’s actually started to enforce the
policy of carrying your night vision and keeping a chemlight stuffed in your vest and making you
carry water. We added a little weight to our trip but after that there’s another story that’s really
important to me, it was in July of 2005. It was a little more complicated because…I didn’t
mention this before about the school but App State was a very liberal school before the war and I
remember after 9/11 there was a protest on campus and the students dressed up like terrorists.
The only kind of terrorists we know of at that point, they dressed up like the PLA. I’m sorry the
PLA that’s Chinese, the Palestinian group actually that is the PLA, but in any chase Yasser
Arafat. That was the only terrorists that any of us knew about we saw them on TV all the time in
the 90s. I guess the 90s were a really different time. I had sort of come up with this time of peace
and we had Desert Storm I remember that as a kid, and I vaguely remember the invasion of
Panama in 89 but war was this thing that just didn’t exist anymore. You would have peace
keeping missions like Bosnia and Somalia even though that didn’t turn out so well it was a peace
keeping mission. When I told my advisor that I was leaving the university in 2003 that I was
joining the army, another advisor popped her head in the office and said don’t do it you’re
ruining your life. That was the kind of attitude we had here on campus. It just wasn’t…it was a
different time. I had heard a lot of stuff when I would go home or see on TV about how we
were…actually there was an entire debate in this ethnic and issues class I took and the professor
was incredibly anti-military. In the class, pretty much the entire class was me against them but he
talked about how we were just killing innocent people in Afghanistan at that point we’d only
been in Afghanistan, and he’s like military you just don’t understand they’re all brain washed.
We are not brainwashed, but whatever. It is a form of programming in the military but it’s not
the point that you can’t think for yourself. In any case I…I usually try to digress around this
story but it’s important for me to have it recorded. There was a highway right in front of my
FOB, a fob-Ford Operating Base but no one really cares what it stands for its just another base.
We took out a patrol one night to meet with a Shake and our troop commander was actually
going with us, he was Captain Sidel he was an absolutely outstanding officer. He was more or
less in charge of the patrol but our lieutenant, Lieutenant Tom Wiesel he was a young lieutenant
but he was also really squared away and knew what he was doing so he was really running the
show, the problem was we were in the rear truck because you don’t put the commander of a
troop in the lead or the rear of the convoy that’s the most dangerous position, so he goes in the
middle somewhere. We ended up being the last truck in the convoy which is not normal for a
lieutenant’s vehicle. All of that’s sort of superfluous anyway. We got on the highway and just
south of our fob was a traffic circle and it had an old base for a statue of Saddam in the middle of
it so you couldn’t see the other side from where you know you couldn’t see one side from the
other. Halfway around the traffic circle on the western side was a small side road, and there were
walls around it and a little market place. You really couldn’t see down the road unless you were
right in front of it. Essentially, you had three roads coming out of this traffic circle and this is a
pretty big threat to us when we’re in humvees. These are up armored humvees they’re ML-14’s.
The latest and greatest models but they weren’t impervious to large explosives, especially ones
that are in cars. The big concern was one day we’re going to be going around this traffic circle
and if we’re all too close together, the trucks are too close together, and somebody runs a what’s
called VBIED, vehicle born improvised explosive device, if someone runs one that’s big enough
�into the center truck then the other two trucks are going to be damaged and we’re all going to be
stuck in the middle of this traffic circle. We had come up with this policy that the first vehicle,
well the whole convoy would slow down and the first vehicle would go as fast as it could
through the check point and for 50 to 100 meters past the traffic circle and then all the other
trucks would repeat this process. This worked because we kept distance and spacing but the
problem was when you’re the last truck going into the traffic circle nobody really knows what
you’re doing. We never thought this was really a problem. O, and our radios did not work that
well because we had these jamming devices to jam cell phone signals but they also jammed our
radios. We can’t really talk to each other without turning off the jamming device; you turn the
jamming device off that means insurgents can detonate bombs using cell phones. So it’s kind of
a catch 22 I guess. In any case, our convoy came up to the traffic circle and the first three trucks
went through exactly as planned and our truck was set to fall. We got through the traffic circle
just fine. We were a little ways behind the third truck but not too far we were still going pretty
fast. I guess I should explain the lieutenant sits in the front right seat, I was sitting behind the
driver, our interpreter was behind the lieutenant, and our gunner was our sergeant and he was
actually facing to the rear with his weapon that way he could cover any vehicles coming up
behind us. Well, we’re almost to the point where we are going to slow down and I hear the
gunners scream o shit, and he starts trying to make himself one with the inside of the truck. I
mean, he was doing his best to get down through the gunners hatch, which is not normal. Usually
if anything happens they stand up and get on the gun or they say hey we got something that
might be coming up. There’s no warning, no firing, no nothing he just tried to get inside with us.
I had just enough time to consider how really odd that was when the back of our truck was
impacted, is the best way to put it. If you’ve ever been in a rear end accident, it was the hardest
rear ending I’ve ever felt. This guy was probably doing 50 to 60 miles an hour. It hit our truck so
hard that it actually damaged the transmission, it knocked the truck out of gear, it shorted
everything out inside, it turned the truck kind of sideways and this is a heavy vehicle. Our driver
wasn’t wearing a seat belt and he also didn’t have his helmet strapped under his chin so his
forehead impacts the steering wheel and knocks him out. The gunner had not…this is just a list
of complacent things but he had not put the retaining pin for the machine gun in the mount, so he
know has himself and an M240 sitting down inside the turret. The machine gun is just down in
here with him so he has no chance of using it at all. The interpreter Bob was a little shook up but
through all of this I kind of caught the Lt’s eye for just a split second and we were both thinking
the same thing at the same time, we got to talk about it later. See when a VBIED is set to
detonate usually they have what is called a crush wire in the bumper so when it impacts
something it completes the circuit. The two wires connect and the bomb goes off. This takes
everything out of the hands of the driver because he doesn’t actually have to push a button it’s
not like the movies, he just hits it and it blows up. However, if that fails or if his local
neighborhood insurgents or whatever don’t think he can do it they’ll rig a secondary trigger
device. Either he has it, if he doesn’t think he is going to make it to the target or the locals will
rig up a cell phone detonator just in case he doesn’t keep his nerve up, and they’ll blow it up for
him. It just kind of flashed through our heads that we’re dead already if this thing goes off we are
all going to die, we might as well go out fighting. We both jumped out to engage the car and
somehow Sergeant Garcia picked that 240 up out of the turret with him and he shouldered it like
Rambo and he started firing. The problem was he didn’t actually start firing at the car he started
firing at the back of our truck so for the rest of the tour there were six little holes in the back of
our truck. Which was not really what he was supposed to do but whatever. He actually did block
�the fire into the car but it was just like a mad minute on the range, everyone is firing as fast as
they can. Somehow we hear Godfrey say guys get in, he woke up and he got the truck back into
gear, essentially back into gear, and so somehow the Lt scrambled back into the truck and I got
back in the truck, Sergeant Garcia stopped firing at some point and we just started limping down
the road in this truck. Lt says Garcia what the hell just happened? He’s like sir he came out of
that side road and the car had no headlights. This is all critical stuff but it was dusk dark, there’s
no headlights, the car was swerving, and speeding up towards us and we have our lights on
because we need everyone to know we’re there. This was after curfew, no cars were supposed to
be on the road except us. So, essentially it looked in the old sense that if it looks like a duck,
quacks like a duck then it must be a duck. It looked like a VBIED and therefore it had to be one.
What was supposed to happen was Sergeant Garcia should have stood up and engaged the car
with his weapon because it’s obviously intends to impact our truck. Well, no one knew what had
happened to us and our radios were off but thankfully the commander who was two trucks in
front of us heard firing from a couple hundred meters down the road, ordered the convoy to stop.
The truck that was supposed to be in front of us hadn’t even noticed that we weren’t there. They
turned the convoy around and they caught up to us. We kind of met in the middle I guess. We
turned the whole convoy around to get back up to the car. By the time we got there the driver’s
side door is open and there’s this group of men leaving. The Lt and I jumped out and we stopped
them. They were just civilians but they had stopped to help this man, he was still alive when they
pulled him out of the car. They said he was really shot up and everything but he was alive, so
they put him on a bongo truck. A bongo truck is just a little pickup truck, flat nosed they’re
everywhere in Iraq. They put him on one to go up to the hospital. We just couldn’t believe the
guy was alive but we had to secure the scene because we thought this car was a bomb. We called
for EOD, explosive ordinance disposal. As usual they took about 45 minutes to get there. They
had to finish up whatever game they were playing on Xbox because that’s what they were always
doing. Hardest working people in Iraq because they are involved in combat from sun up to sun
down on that stupid TV but anyway. At least every time we went in there that’s what they were
doing but in any case they got out there, they used a little robot to clear the car. They get a guy in
a bomb suit and he actually goes up and opens everything in the car and they’re like if there are
explosives in this vehicle they’re really well concealed because we can’t find them. We
started…I started to get a real sinking feeling. They did find whiskey bottles in the back
floorboard. What we had run into, or had run into us was a drunk driver. Whether he was an
insurgent or not really didn’t matter at that point because what he had done had met all the
criteria of a VBIED so we, you know, there was no legalistic talk but over the years I’ve had
time to reason it out. Under the loss of laws of land warfronter (inaudible) and everything and
under our rules of engagement he met all the criteria so legally and I guess from the armies
standpoint morally we did nothing wrong but in the end none of that really changed the fact for
me that we killed an innocent man and he was guilty of nothing more than drinking and driving.
Which is foolish and selfish but…he really didn’t deserve to get shot. On the flip side of that we
could not have done anything else except sit there and just waited to die which is…I don’t know
from where we were sitting that’s what was going to happen. That’s not what a soldier does I
guess, that’s not what real soldiers do. So there was no way out of that situation without someone
being prepared to die I guess. I wrestled with that for a long time but finally I just came to the
conclusion that there’s nothing I can do about it and we all did what we thought was right at that
moment. That’s I guess the problem with war, every war.
Brindley Polk: You have a protocol to follow.
�Rob Helton: Yeah, well it’s also a matter of survival that you want to survive. You know, it still
amazes me that the Lt and I both thought we were just going to die at some point, at any moment
it’s all over with and we wouldn’t really know but we were not going to sit there and take it so
you know, how can we both be thinking the same thing at the same time and just glance at each
other and catch each other’s eyes and know that. Then of course there’s the whole thing with my
sergeant. That was just a series of wrong, wrong, and wrong but you know that happens and
nothing was done to him for it and he straightened himself up later I guess. That was an
experience that to me kind of explains so much else that happens in Iraq. When I hear about a
number of things that are not explained there are some recent incidents that have happened in
Afghanistan, they don’t fall in the category but in this case this man yes he was not supposed to
die, he was not an insurgent to our knowledge but there was nothing else we could do with him.
Do innocent people get killed in war, the stupid term collateral damage, yes it does happen but it
is not intentional. Like that professor used to tell us in class, we did not go out seeking to hurt an
innocent person. As a matter of fact professionals, you pride yourself on not involving the
innocence, leave them alone. I better get moving on because I don’t want to take too much time.
There’re far too many stories to share but especially from both tours that’s just from my first tour
that’s the first couple of months. There are a lot of just mundane details. There are a lot of days
where somebody shoots at you, you shoot back and then it’s like well where did they go? Then
you go looking for them and you can’t find them. Or there’s just an IED that goes off and you
spend 6 hours waiting on EOD to show up to just clear the area. There was a lot of that but one
of my favorite illustrations of how the propaganda machine of the insurgents works is third cav,
every line platoon or every line troop is split up into two platoons of scouts and bradley’s which
are like the little miniature tanks. I hate calling them that but it’s the easiest way to explain it.
Cause scouts have so much pride we are not tankers. Here’s two platoons’ of tanks and you all
work together and usually you each split off from your platoon to work with part of another
platoon from tanks. The tanks require very sophisticated units. They use what’s called a gas
turbine engine. It’s basically a jet engine but rather than having a nozzle to produce thrust it has a
drive shaft to produce torque. They’re fascinating, they’re actually comparatively quiet
compared to a diesel of the same size but they’re gas guzzlers and they’re extremely complex.
The maintenance on the engine itself is done by civilian contractors who are like LockheedMartin or somebody I don’t know but they…that’s all they do. Our mechanics are required to do
like the little things, the grunt work like unhooking the hoses and things. Well sometimes this
little process doesn’t go very well and in this case it didn’t because one tank the fuel line did not
get properly reconnected. This engine is producing 1500 horse power it’s really hot. In the
middle of winter if you’re really cold you want to stand behind one because it’s pretty awesome.
They’re really easy to spot when there’s snow outside because there’s this big fan of dry land
behind them. In the desert nobody wants to be anywhere near it unless somebody is shooting at
you, in that case you want to be as close as you can. We…I can’t even remember which tank it
was, it was from 4th platoon I’m like 90% certain of that because they had the worst luck
but…anyways this tank catches on fire in the middle of Tampa. MSR Tampa is this big four lane
highway just south of Baghdad. Highway one to the Iraqis’. In any case it catches on fire; well
the crew figures it out. The tracks on fire they try the fire extinguishers and everything nothing is
working. They all get out of the track, they try and start throwing their equipment off and my
patrol rolls up to it right as they’re bailing the last of their equipment off the track. Our
lieutenant, old eagle eyes, he looks across this there’s this large canal just to the south of the road
and he sees a van over there and someone has a video camera filming this tank burning. He’s like
�o no no no no they’re not doing that. We have to back track up the highway to the nearest bridge
which is like a mile up the road. We get across the bridge and now we’re going down this little
bitty dirt road it’s like a cart road and its right under this power line so even when we turn off the
jamming systems we still can’t get a radio signal. It doesn’t really matter because all we’re going
to do is sprint; you know drive a mile back down to this road. We get to the van and suddenly
there’s one guy there and no camera. We’re like hmmm wonder where the camera went probably
to Al Tizera but whatever the case is he’s doing nothing wrong, we search the vehicle there’s
nothing in there that indicates he’s been filming. We ask him where the camera is, o I don’t
know I’m here alone you know. Our commander has no arrived at the burning tank which is not
far away it’s like 150-200 meters. There’s no way to talk to each other because we can’t get our
radios to work and we can’t yell at each other. Our Lt is like we’re going to drive back up to the
bridge and we’ll get a signal and talk to the commander then come back down here. We leave
two trucks there, we take the other two and we drive back up. The only reason that’s important is
because we’ve crossed the same section of road three times. Well we get back to the van, the
other two trucks are getting kind of antsy, they’re ready to leave so we all get back in convoy and
we start driving out of this dirt road and we come to this…it’s like a small dip just a meter less, a
meter lower than the rest of the road. The truck in front of us disintegrates by the hood of it does.
The truck the body itself was fine, the whole crew was fine but the wheels go different directions
the hood actually flies, I even remember watching it out my window craning my neck to watch
as it just flipped and flipped and landed in the canal. It was just crazy to watch and we all of
course come to a dead stop. The Lt and I got out and we jumped, we ran all the way up to this
truck start pulling everybody out and they’re dazed. I mean the nose of the truck if nothing else
impacted the dirt and kind of stopped so they’ve all been thrown around pretty hard. We ended
up calling in a medivac for the gunner because he’d been jarred around so bad they were afraid
he’d broken his ribs but it turned out they were just bruised. In any case, the whole incident
destroyed a truck everybody was fine that’s great. Somehow the insurgents had not set this bomb
off. The worst they could have done was when we only had two trucks out there alone but they
didn’t do that so they managed to destroy a humvee. Well, a couple of weeks later somebody
managed to pull up, I can’t remember if it was on you-tube or in one of those other sites, but it’s
a video of that tank burning out on the highway and it’s a clip from Al Terzera and they’re
claiming responsibility for blowing up this tank. The problem is they can’t really blow them up
unless the tank actually runs over a bomb they’re too well armed but sure enough there they are
claiming responsibility. Yes we’ve destroyed this American tank; you know the imperialist
aggressors or whatever. That’s the propaganda machine that was insurgents. They were masters
of editing video to make it look like they were responsible for things that they didn’t actually do.
There’s a famous example of a medic who was shot in the chest but he was wearing his bullet
proof vest. The insurgent video shows him just falling over, the rest of the video shows him
getting back up and running around like what just happened to me.
Brindley Polk: Dazed and Confused.
Rob Helton: Exactly. Am I taking too long?
Brindley Polk: No, no you’re fine I’m enjoying your stories.
Rob Helton: OK.
Brindley Polk: Did you see any casualties while you were in combat?
�Rob Helton: Yeah, we had six killed my first tour and one permanently disabled and we lost our
interpreter as well. Actually, that is one of the couple of things that I would like to mention
because there are some people in particular that I would like to mention. There are a lot of names
that I don’t want to throw into the interview because I still know them and I don’t know, you
know I didn’t go ask them hey do you mind if I bring up what you did but… there’s sergeant first
class Christopher Phelps is the first one I’d like to mention. He was a platoon sergeant for the
fourth platoon. He’s a tanker a career tanker, he was getting ready to retire. He had some really,
really cute kids and he talked a lot about them, I’m going to go fishing with my son all the time
when I retire. He was really looking forward to that. Platoon sergeants and Cav, I guess any
combat arms they’re infallible they’re immortal. Nothing can ever happen to them. They’re
never tired, they’re never hungry and I mean this literally. They just seem to eat when they feel
like it and they sleep when they feel like it. If they don’t get to they don’t seem to mind all that
much, they might be a little more testy than other times but… Sergeant Phelps was a very
approachable platoon sergeant. I very rarely interacted with my own platoon sergeant but
Sergeant Phelps you could just…he liked to laugh and he liked to joke but he was also very
tough and very serious, he was a formal drill sergeant. Sometimes we would split into what were
called quarter troops they would take a section and a half of Bradley’s, so three Bradley’s, and
two tanks, there were only four tanks in a tank platoon, and so they would take the platoon
sergeant from the tank platoon and the platoon leader from the scout platoon and then just
reverse that for the other sections and it’s called a quarter troop. You got equivalent, four
equivalent levels of fire power or four equivalent blocks of fire power. The leadership is all
integrated so it’s a really great idea actually, it works out really well. That’s what we had done
for a month we were working out of…o my gosh I can’t remember the name of that FOB.
Anyway, it was the southwest FOB on byop because we were conducting operation safe skies.
That’s a whole different story. The rest of the time we were at FOB talk and we had already
moved back there. I went to eat breakfast with my buddy Buckles and if there’s one thing the
army does right its breakfast. Every morning there’s eggs, there’s bacon, there’s ham, there’s
French toast which is my favorite. This morning in particular there had been an IED attack the
night before and had killed a local, or a third party, third country national basically a truck driver.
The bomb had been sitting right next to us when we were stopped at one point and we didn’t
realize it so I’m having one of those I’m lucky to be alive moments and I’m like I’m going to
have some awesome French toast this morning because this is my little pleasure in life. I got a
couple of slices and I got the syrup, and I got the whip cream, and I got the little strawberry
topping and we had all of this it was awesome, every morning. I go to sit down with Buckles and
Sergeant Phelps comes over and I don’t know how to describe him, he was black as night and
just this big guy but he always had this funny looking grin on his face. He comes over; he’s
really sitting down with Buckles because he knows Buckles pretty well. He looks at my plate, he
goes Helton that is some Martha Stewart shit right there and he’s talking about the French toast,
and he’s like I swear to it you’re going to eat breakfast with me every morning for the rest of this
tour and you’re going to fix me some French toast. I was like roger Ser. And we had a nice little
breakfast conversation. It was a distinct memory of Sergeant Phelps. You’re only vaguely aware
of what the other platoons are doing most of the time at least soldiers are because it’s not
important for us to know. My section went on patrol that day and we came back late that
evening, we cleaned up cleaned our weapons. Well it’s free time you can go to the gym, you can
go to the phones you can do whatever so I told my sergeant hey I’m going to go over to the
phones and call my girlfriend. I went over there and called my girlfriend of the time, talked to
�her for a little while. I stopped by the chow and grabbed a snack and then I go back to the
barracks. This is old Iraqi army barracks they look like they were falling down but they worked.
I get there and I get upstairs and it is dead quiet. I realize that my entire troop is not there, no
one. Never at any time is everyone gone and I walked down…I get up my nerve and I walk down
to the platoon talk, the tactical operation center, it’s really just the platoon I’m sorry troop
headquarters and it’s where all the radios and things are, and it’s locked and there’s no one
inside. I felt really…I mean it’s the worst feeling that I’d had at that point because I realized that
my, everyone I know, everyone I trained with is gone right now and I don’t know where they are
and I don’t know what they’re doing and I’m not there. I’m freaking out a little bit, and I’m a
private that’s allowed you just do it. I walk back to my room; I think I actually ran back, I got all
gear together. I had everything set up so I could throw it on in a moment’s notice and I walk over
to our neighbor troop, killer troop, and they’re our rivals but I went to basic training with some
of their guys so I found my buddies and I’m like hey man do you know where my troop is? This
is a really stupid question because there’s like 130 of us. He’s like hey man yeah iron hog got
called out for something and they’re headed up north and I don’t know what’s going on dude. I
was like well listen if you hear anything or if you guys get called out you come get me I’m ready
to go just come get me. So I went back to my barracks and I broke down one of my weapons and
started cleaning it because it’s the only thing I had to do. Eventually, I start hearing people
coming back into the building and this is a couple of hours later and the entire time I’m flipping
out because I just know my guys are involved in some big battle somewhere and I’m not there
with them. The thing is when you come back in the buildings after patrol even if you’re, I mean
maybe if you’re dead tired, most of the time you’re joking with each other you’re like yeah I’m
going to call Trip’s wife you know my other girlfriend or something. It’s just guy talk, and we do
it all the time and everything is dead quite. All I can hear is their equipment as they’re carrying it
scraping on their uniform. I walk out in the hall and there’s Stevenson, and Sergeant Rode and I
think I think Lawson. They look at me and Sergeant Rode goes where the hell were you at? I said
I’ve been here for hour’s sergeant. He just kind of shakes his head and goes pshh and walks on
down the hallway. Well finally the rest of the troop gets back, and my whole platoon gets back
and I start finding out what happened. The issue was that Sergeant Phelps patrol had been
traveling up Tampa towards Baghdad airport and this new bomb that we’ve never heard of called
EFP, explosively formed projectile, had gone through his truck and it had amputated three of his
limbs and both of his drivers’ arms and continued on out the other side of the truck. Until this
point we thought we were pretty safe inside our vehicles. It was a pretty big shock in itself. The
amazing thing was the medic that was on scene, Beaton who is absolutely outstanding, kept him
alive and got him on a medivac bird and got him to Baghdad. The driver survived and Sergeant
Phelps lived for seven and a half hours. That is almost impossible with that level of trauma but
the reason the entire troop went is because we all received the same inoculation so that everyone
who is eligible, and I would have been because I’m an O-, was taken up there and everyone who
was the same blood type, he had one of the really common blood types, so everybody because
we all have the same stuff floating around in our blood stream. Everybody that wasn’t his blood
type could provide security on the way back because you’re obviously going to be a little weak
because they’re not just taking like a blood bank sample this is like draining you. That just about
killed me knowing maybe my couple of whatever liters or whatever would have made a
difference. I don’t think you can live if they take liters but that’s the idea. That really hurt
but…that was the first time that we lost somebody and I mean it wasn’t the first casualty in the
regiment that was actually the regimental sergeant major. It wasn’t the first casualty in the squad
�rant that was a kid that drove his tank off into a ditch and drowned. There had been others but it
was the first one for our troop and to lose Sergeant Phelps, platoon sergeant was earth shattering.
His poor driver, who’s name I can’t remember, his baby had just been born he hadn’t been sent
home for it as far as I know so at some point you realize that he’s never going to get to hold his
son with his own arms so he’s going to have to use his prosthetics. That gets really disturbing
after a couple of years of thinking about it. In any case it was a rough experience but Sergeant
Phelps apparently was still talking to everybody even when he was so badly wounded. They
could make out most of what he was saying; he was still looking after his soldiers. His
driver…this poor kid that got to us a month before he deployed, at most it was three months
before he deployed but I think he was in the last group. He actually, in spite of the fact that he’s
lost his arms actually kept his mind in the game and asked the gunner to grab the wheel because
he couldn’t stop the truck, or he couldn’t steer the truck. That level of commitment, you know
I’ve never been wounded thankfully but they were incredible soldiers. Sergeant Phelps’ family I
know they were taken care of but I’ll never forget him and I’ll never forget seeing his family
around the troop and things. I really hate that he didn’t get to take those fishing trips. It’s hard to
realize that someone can spend an entire career in the military and then everything gets snatched
away right at the end. At the same time he was very proud and I know that he would have been
out there with his soldiers. Our other casualties, fourth platoon got hit hard during the
deployment. Like I said, their tank burned up, they lost their platoon sergeant, one of their
soldiers; then they lose their lieutenant, their replacement platoon sergeant and two of their
soldiers. Lieutenant Smith, I don’t remember his first name he was from Durham, North
Carolina. Sergeant Freeman had just come to us I don’t really know anything about him except
that at his memorial they said that the first thing he told the first, our first sergeant was I’m going
to be sergeant major in the army one day. That’s a pretty lofty goal when you’re not that far up
on the list but he was determined. The other two were Reyes and Pope. Pope sticks out in my
mind because he was one of the comedians. Every platoon it seems to be the case is issued an
idiot and a comedian. The idiot is there to make everyone else look better and the comedian is
there for the laughs and he can keep everybody going. Pope was that guy for fourth platoon. He
would do these things called who-wa-days. Now you have to understand Pope was stop lost he
wasn’t really supposed to be there but he you know made him be there. He would paint his face
up in camo paint and he would put on his spurs, he would put his spurs on his boots and
apparently he would even strap his Stetson to the top of his helmet. He would go on mission like
this and he would get out of his truck, or get out of the tank and the Iraqi’s would be staring at
him like who is this idiot? His platoon sergeant and everything allowed it so nobody is going to
stop him but that was just Pope’s way and he had some really funny stories. He had some really
close buddies in the troop and they were really funny to watch because they could say one word
and all of them would bust out laughing, that’s just the kind of guy he was. They were killed by a
VBIED at checkpoint 32. They were actually searching cars under a bridge and that was the
same day that our interpreter Bob was killed. That’s another casualties of the war that I don’t
think gets mentioned a lot but the interpreters some of them were absolutely outstanding, other
ones you never knew if you could trust them or not. We weren’t really sure if they were
interpreting what you were saying or just telling both sides what they wanted to hear.
Brindley Polk: Right.
Rob Helton: Bob was really good he was a school teacher before the war. He was just this nice
quiet little guy and we eventually finally got him to start expressing himself a little more. Like
�hey Bob when we’re mad, when we’re yelling you need to be yelling too that way they
understand that we’re mad. Otherwise they might just think we’re being stupid or something. He
really got the picture and he was a great little guy. He was always asked us what words meant
because he couldn’t understand what we were talking about. Usually they would be swear words
but sometimes it would be really significant stuff and it’s like alright Bob, get your notebook out
let me explain. Really cool guy and we lost him that day too. That was a rough experience
because the thing that they don’t show in the movies is somebody has to clean up afterwards and
that’s usually just soldiers, we get sent out to clean it up. When it’s your friends it’s not…it’s not
easy but at some point your mind shuts off what you’re actually doing and you just develop a
process of dealing with it and I guess just kind of shut it out. That was a bad day for fourth
platoon especially because they’ve lost over a quarter of their platoon at this point. There are
only 16 guys in a tank platoon, and they’ve lost 5. Really rough for them, they never got enough
replacements so we ended up having to stick some scouts over there to work with them. The last
casualty was actually my really good friend Jared Kubasak. He was from Rocky Mountain,
Virginia and his parents are Dana and Daryl Kubasak two wonderful people. Jared, Lord God
don’t let me misquote the date, but it was 12 December of 2005. We’re on a routine patrol,
nothing new nothing different. We’re just going out to set up some positions and his Bradley
commander, I’ll refrain from using his name, but he got lazy and decided to take a dirt road
instead of a hardball, paved road. The thing was we had been strictly ordered unless it was
necessary for a mission or in direct pursuit of the enemy we were not to come of the paved roads
because you can’t bury a bomb under a paved road. You can, but you’d have to fill it back in
whatever. Well he got lazy and took a dirt road ten meters from a paved one and there was a
bomb buried there and it went off and killed Jared. It blew a hole in the floor of the track…I
don’t know two or three feet behind Jared and I’m sure the concussions what killed him. The
thing was the track caught on fire; of course the radios aren’t working so our lieutenant if he had
not been looking back through this little tiny hole between the hatch and the top of the turret, he
just for some reason was looking back that way, and he saw the detonation. I was asleep in the
back of our Bradley cause there’s nothing else for me to do and I feel it stand up on its nose
almost. That only happens when the driver actually slams on the brakes normally you don’t use
them you just take your foot off the gas and it’ll stop by itself. We actually, there was sliding and
a really steep angle down the nose and I was like Jesus what just happened? I’m trying to get my
little helmet on to be able to talk to the rest of the crew which didn’t work anyway but for some
reason it’s just the reaction I had, and I’m like hey Godfrey what’s going on man? The track
spins around and we start flying back in the other direction. Nobody can tell me anything, I get
my helmet on and I’m like o yeah it doesn’t work. I just get my gear ready because I’m sure
whatever is about to happen is going to be serious. The thing is we get there and the drivers hatch
pops open and I watch Godfrey climb out through the hell hole, the hell hole is just a gap
between the back and front of the track where the driver can climb through. I watch him jump
out of the track and I started to open the turret door and the turret spins and it’s like wow, what
what’s going on here? I did hear the Lt yelling and I knew he was gone. I realized that two
people had just gotten off my track, nobody’s let the ramp down to let me out, there’s a crew
door we never opened it but I did this day. As soon as I get it open I’ve got…o my gosh what
was his name, a sergeant from the other track from Jared’s track is yanking me out through that
hole. It’s a little tiny door but he pulls me modally out of the door and is just yelling for a fire
extinguisher. He is in a panic and I have no idea what he is talking about until I look. I get
around from, I step away from the track and I see that their track is on fire. I grab a hold of him
�because he is obviously in a panic and I just kind of shook him and was like hey, hey is anyone
still inside? He said Kuba is still in the front, and we called Jared Kuba all the time you just
shorten every bodies name. I pretty much just forgot about him or and just ran to the track
because Jared was my friend and it doesn’t matter if they’re your friend not you don’t leave
somebody like that. We all got to the track and the Lt and Godfrey are already trying to pull
Kuba out and the track commander is just running around like a mad man I have no idea what
he’s doing. He did get a fire extinguisher eventually and he sprayed the top of the flames for
some reason, he was obviously a little out of his mind. I got up on the track and this thing is
obviously busted really bad like the engine is on fire and is right in front of us. Well I can see
Jared and he looks perfectly fine. Bodily he is completely intact. We actually, they initially
pulled on his gear and had pulled his vest and his shirt off and his skin wasn’t even broken, he’s
just kind of sitting there. We’re all three pulling and the problem with fire is the inside of the
track started catching on fire and we’d already tried all the fire extinguishers nothing worked; the
internal fire extinguishers the hand-held fire extinguishers wouldn’t stop the burning. The flames
actually started getting in the ammo this took a couple of minutes. Well we finally realized what
had happened was that the engine had been knocked off its block and had come through the
firewall between the driver and the engine. The engine sits right next to the driver, or the drivers
next to it whatever. It had pinned his legs inside and there’s no way we were going to be able to
move the engine block and there’s no way to get him out, at least at the time we didn’t think of it
later we realized what we could have done but it would have been rather gruesome and we
weren’t prepared for that in the moment I guess. In any case, the fire got into the ammunition
that’s stowed in the back and there’s no way around that…there’s also two tow missiles mounted
on the side of the turret, those are pretty big explosives and eventually they’re going to blow up.
The big problem wasn’t the small arms ammunition in the back, the little just regular
bullets…they’re not really a problem I guess and we didn’t really think about them at first. The
problem is that the ammunition for the 25 mike mike (25mm) the main, the little automatic
cannon that the Bradley has is in plastic crates and its high explosive. They’re small but enough
of them blowing up in a small space like that were going to get, basically it’s going to kill us.
We’re not thinking about that, Godfrey and I weren’t, and that’s…the Lt if he had not been there
to make the call and tell us to leave…I don’t think it…we probably would have stayed there until
we died but he looked at both of us he looked at Kuba and he says guys we’ve got to go. We
kind of just… that was a stunning statement, you’re taught from day one to never leave anybody
and we didn’t really realize at the time we weren’t really leaving him we just had to get away
from the track but we both just kind of glanced at him like he was an idiot and we went back to
what we were doing. He grabbed a hold of us and he’s like we have to go now and so we did and
that was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. Literally, there are things that I say every once in
awhile this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, no. Leaving my friend was hard, the worst. That
was the first time that I had ever really been angry…at the insurgents. To this day I’m not mad at
them but at that particular moment I was because why did you have to do this, you know. That
bomb could have been there a month, six months it had just been sitting there waiting and it was
on a crushed switch, the same concept as a crush switch in a VBIED but you just run over it and
it detonates the bomb. It’s the perfect weapon because it’s just going to wait. In any case, I was
mad but thankfully I exercised self control because you’re just looking around and you’re just
like man is there anybody to shoot at right now, and that sounds terrible but I never acted on it. I
know some people that didn’t maintain that level of discipline but thoughts, strange thoughts go
through your mind. We just pulled back to a minimum safe distance and watched the track burn.
�Probably the most annoying part of the day outside of…no that wasn’t annoying losing your
friend that was devastating. Annoying is our squandrant commander pulls up and Lieutenant
Colonel Brown comes out and he sends us back to the base without the track, without Kuba. He
says that my guys are going to take care of this we’ll watch it burn down you guys go back to
base. To this day I cannot forgive him for that because that was the wrong answer he should have
let us stay there it was…it’s his funeral fire and his dad is actually the one who put it that way.
We became very good friends when I got back, he called it his son’s funeral fire and he’s right
that’s what it was. There’s no need to go into the details of how that turned out but we recovered
the track, and Jared was recovered in the sense that needed to be done. That was the first time
that I really got to up close see the cost of war because after it was over I felt a need to see his
family. We had talked about going to visit each other. Hey my parents live in Rocky Mountain,
my dad’s a big gun nut you guys would get along great…hey I’m just down in Hickory you
could come visit and so I called them when I was on my post deployment leave and his dad’s
response was you are shitty me right? I thought he meant he didn’t want to see me and he’s like I
would love to meet you, you are for real right? I went to meet them and they are two of the most
wonderful people ever and they’re what is called gold star parents because they lost their son and
he was also their only child. That has been very hard but Dana, his mother, has found some
really amazing outlets and they honor their son. They go to all… the warrior’s walk down in Fort
Stuart, they’ve gone to visit the memorial for 3d Cav…they stay really active and really positive
and I love them dearly. They came down and had Christmas with us last year even they’re like
family. You see the cost of war in the lives around them as well because Jared’s friends were all
there in Rocky Mountain. It’s devastating for a small town. There’s a memorial that dates back to
the Civil War, everyone in Franklin County, Virginia who’s been killed in a conflict. Of course
the Confederate dead, World War I, and World War II, Jared is the only name on his side. It just
says Gulf Wars 1991 and there’s no end date and his name is there and that’s it. One man from
Franklin County, Virginia but you can see the affects. It makes it…it makes the reality of war
much more significant. In any case, those are our casualties. My second tour there was only one
incident and they lived that day but…it’s what I call a hidden cost of the war. Two men, Alex
Knapp and James Hackimer, both lost both legs. They lived then and they…James actually
received prosthetics and he was learning to walk again and he was thrown out of a roller coaster
in upstate New York last year and killed him. I saw the article on yahoo initially and there were
comments like who would let a double amputee on a roller coaster? It’s like o my gosh, you
can’t comment on something like that because James Hackimer if he wanted on that roller
coaster he was going to get on it. He was that kind of guy. The first time he and I ever met we
argued, we were yelling at each other. I think the second time we ever talked to each other we
were yelling at each other. It doesn’t matter, when I saw him after we got back it was a 15 month
tour by the time we got back to Germany he recovered enough to come see us. You see them,
you hug them and they’re like brothers it doesn’t matter how you felt about each other before.
Knapp ended up dying of his injuries two years ago so there’s one guy that’s still alive, Meyer. I
told him I was like dude you got to, you got to keep kicking. He’s tough, he’s a good guy. Those
two, Knapp and Hackimer, they are just as surely casualties of this war as anybody else, just as if
they died there on the battlefield. The thing is they got to come home and see their families.
Hackimer got to see his kids, Knapp got to see his parents at least they got that chance a little
extra time. It was very inspiring to read Hack’s mothers words after he died. She said we were
gifted with two more years with him or another year and a half I think, it was borrowed time but
we got it and we were fortunate. That really you know to me is an inspiration. She took a
�tragedy, double tragedies but she turned it into the right you know positive. That was kind of I
don’t know, in my own way of dealing with the war there are many other things that I…there are
some things that I just wouldn’t want to talk about but in any case there’s a lot to deal with and
some guys can’t handle that some guys box it up. After listening to Dana and Daryl and reading
that quote from Hacker’s mother and so many others I realized that boxing it up and trying to put
it away, that’s the wrong answer...because you’re turning yourself into another casualty. No one
likes to talk about all the veterans who commit suicide, the veterans who have severe post
traumatic stress disorder; they can’t live a daily normal life. For myself I learned to live with it,
to make it apart of myself. This is an experience that I chose to have and I wanted to be there.
There’s no reason to block all of that out and try to…a friend of mine up here said one time that
he puts it in a box and every once in awhile it comes out and plays with him. I was like that’s not
how I’m going to live my life…in these tragedies I guess I found my inspiration for living. Those
were our guys that we lost I’m sorry I got kind of poetic there for a second.
Brindley Polk: That’s fine and you’re way of living, and you’re back here at App even after
leaving. Why did you come back?
Rob Helton: Well there’s the whole transfer credits thing. I’ll just go ahead and get the mundane
reason out of the way, I mean I had a lot of credits here I qualified for academic forgiveness
because I was a dumb kid like a lot of other people that go to college. I in a way was looking for
the challenge because I didn’t expect App to be what it is now. I thought it was still going to be
that real liberal hippy anti-war anti-military school and it’s not. My first day back in class, twice
I was told…in both classes I couldn’t get out of explaining that I’d been in the military for the
last six years because they were very specific about where’ve you been what have you been
doing? It’s like well I’m either going to sound like an idiot since I hadn’t been in college since
2003 and it’s 2010 or I can explain, so I did. In both cases they were like wow we would really
like to hear about your experiences. I was like what?! What did you just say? Are you serious?
You know when I left here people were looking at me like I was some kind of a leper and now
it’s like you’re happy to have me here. That’s the experience that I’ve had consistently. You
know, it’s really heartening because I know my uncles were, as I said family history was just
buried under the rug as far as their time in Vietnam but that’s the way it was in the entire
country. They had to suffer and in some cases it’s been forty years since they’ve been back
almost I guess it’s 2012. Closing in on forty years that they had to suffer and because they did
because of what they went through and being ignored and being spit upon and everything else,
veterans today don’t have to be treated like that. People understand that even if you don’t like the
war, I have a good friend up here that’s a Core Man that’s a marine medic. He’s a navy personal
who’s was a medic with the marines. He was in the invasion of Iraq, he completed his time
honorably he got out and he became a war protester with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans against
the war or Iraq veterans against the war or one of those groups. He actually organized…he
helped organize the protest down at Crawford, Texas at the western white house (bushes house?
In audible) I don’t agree with what he was doing, he was protesting at the same time I was in
Iraq but at the same time I was like dude that is awesome way to go and that’s sort of where the
country has come to. Most of the country, there are still people out there who don’t like us. They
treat us so much better so much nicer. The weekend I proposed to my wife in Blowing Rock we
stayed at one of those little cabins over there and the morning that we were checking out I left
my at that time fiancé at the front desk and I went and got my jeep and pulled up to the front. I
walk in and the lady hands me a couple of hundred bucks in cash I was like what’s this for? You
�had to pay in advance…well she said that’s the military discount if you had told me you were in
the military I would have given you the discount to start with so here it is. I said you don’t have
to do this. She said no I appreciate what you’re doing, I appreciate you all and she said if you
ever come back make sure you tell me you’re military. Yes ma’am I’ll do that. It just wasn’t
something that I told people. One of my friends says real professionals don’t do that and you
know what he’s right. It’s your job it’s your profession. It used kind of annoy me when I was in
Atlanta airport coming or going from Iraq and people, random people would walk up to me and
say I want to thank you for what you’re doing. I said how do you know what I’m doing? I
understand now how they feel because I thank young veterans, I thank older veterans because I
realize there are a lot of men and women that came before me but the point is…that…I’m sorry I
got off subject but Appalachian has changed so much and it’s so much more positive now. I’m
not sure I’m a big fan of the whole football thing, still haven’t gone to a game but you know it’s
at this place I have seen 9/11, invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Iraq, I’ve seen the end of war
in Iraq and the death of Osama Bin Laden. The exact opposite reaction that night there was a
celebration on campus and yet for 9/11 there was a protest in support of the terrorists saying that
America brought this on itself and this is all our fault you know we deserve this. I was like wow
what a difference and that’s ten years later, what a difference ten years makes. I’m sure it’s a lot
to do with University leadership and also the…I’ve got to admit I think the student body is a
little smarter than it used to be. When I came here the first time they were a little stuck on
themselves; now it seems they’re more open and actually interested in questioning things. It’s a
great place and I’m really glad I chose to come back here.
Brindley Polk: Good. Do you have any future plans? You know, more military service maybe?
Rob Helton: No more military service. I am happy and my wife and I are going to be content
raising a family down in Burk county and hopefully in the next year and a half, two years
because there’s always more school and more dues to be paid I will be a police officer
somewhere down in that area Hickory, Morganton, Lenoir somebody that will take me. If they
think that I’m qualified enough. I did have three years of MP time and I was a sergeant for
that…that’s my plans basically live life work to support my farming habit have a little couple of
cows a couple of kids and live a happy life.
Brindley Polk: In that order cows then kids.
Rob Helton: Pretty much you’ve got to get the cows before the kids.
Brindley Polk: Well, is there anything you would like to cover in this interview?
Rob Helton: …There were a lot of things, but there’s one particular story I just want to share.
Because there are a lot of guys that came back with really negative impressions of the Iraqi’s and
I did not actually. You have to understand that there’s a word not popular in America called
peasant, they still exist. These are people who have no education no real future but their just
filling their spot in society over there. They’re not the majority of the population and I met some
really fantastic people. There were two in particular Major Quessey and Colonel Salman,
thankfully I don’t know their first names. Just a little explanation of why I felt so great about the
Iraqi’s and why I felt there was a future for the country of Iraq. Major Quessey was actually, he’s
called a Sayyid he’s a direct descendent to Muhammad through his daughter Fatima. This
generates a lot of respect from the locals, wherever he went he was well respected. He was also,
�he was a very handsome man he the perfect mustache, the perfect hair all the time. Very French,
his mannerisms because he was educated in France so he had this curious way of holding a
cigarette, crossing his legs he’s obviously different from everybody else. He was incredibly
educated incredibly just…like I said he’s like a movie star. We weren’t really sure about him at
first because it’s like wow how does this guy, how’s he really going to stack up in this? Well in
March of 2008 Letada Alsod already cleared an uprising and it was against the Iraqi forces. The
local affiliate was called Jay Shalimadi, Jam is what we revered to them as. They were to attack
all Iraqi security forces. Eventually what ends up happening is they attack our Iraqi police that
we’ve been training. This is the reason that I had changed jobs was to train the Iraqi police. I
took it very seriously I was very happy to train them. Yes, you did not turn your back but at the
same time like with the officers we sat down we drank tea we talked we became friends, and I do
mean friends I trusted these men well some of them. Major Quessey was one of them. We get a
call one day that there’s been a patrol ambushed two pickup trucks full of IPs had been attacked
with an IED. Most of them were down and there’s a serious fire fight in our town. The town is
called Tunis, it was…it had a different name before the war but it was changed for some reason.
Just a little town on ASR Jackson that four lane highway that runs up to Baghdad, it’s like 40
kilometers straight south of Baghdad. Nothing really to it just the highway runs through and
there’s a technical university there it was kind of operational. Well anyway, we get all of our
equipment together we go rolling out there and we get to the station and the IPs tell us that Major
Quessey and all the officers and all the IPs are down at the end of town and so we get back in the
trucks and we go flying to the traffic circle in the middle of town, we go around it the wrong way
we get on the highway an we’re headed south. I’m in the lead truck and I can see something
flashing in the distance and I’m like what is that? It’s like a little camera flash ping, ping. As we
get closer I realize that it is a chrome plated AK-47 on some body’s shoulder and there’s only
one person that has one around there and that’s Major Quessey. He is standing, as we get closer
this al resolves itself, he is standing in the center of a highway open to everything. There are
bullets flying by, there are rockets being fired at him. He is standing out there with his chrome
plated AK-47 on his shoulder, a pair of aviator sunglass, and what we call a chicken vest. It’s not
bullet proof it’s not proof against anything but he’s got it on. He is standing out there directing
his IP’s standing as tall and proud as anything, not afraid in the least not slowing down for
anybody. When we pull up the insurgents all stop firing and as it turns out their orders were in
this up rising to not engage with us to not engage with the United States forces or I’m sorry
coalition forces we weren’t American forces at that point. In any case, they were only to engage
the Iraqi’s so they stop firing and they all fun away. We’re still concerned that he’s going to get
shot so we’re running out there like sir Major Quessey you’ve got to get down please, you’ve got
to come over here and take cover. You know, this is all going through and interpreter and he says
no my friends I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine they won’t shoot me. I was like well it looks like they were
doing a pretty good job at trying and you know you could put him in a crowd of Iraqi’s and he’d
stand out anyway he’s also fairly tall. He’s standing in the middle of a highway with a flashy
rifle and big sunglasses, yeah he stands out but he was so brave and so courageous, so
committed. He loved his country dearly. I’m sure with his education he could have gone
somewhere else but he chose to stay and he had a beautiful family. Eventually he was promoted
and moved away from our station which is good for him, he got promoted. He had also once
been personally decorated by Saddam they had a picture of that, he’s all pale faced and he looked
really scared. Saddam is shaking his hand looking all happy and it’s because he got injured
during a raid during the Saddam period. He was…what did he do, o yeah he busted up a car
�hijacking ring basically single handedly basically it was a funny story but we don’t have time for
that I guess. In any case we got our new commander Colonel Salman. The only thing that we
were told about this man was that he was getting out of prison. So we’re like well we’re getting
an IP commander who’s getting out of prison this is wonderful. Well, he shows up and he’s this
really happy guy. He’s a pretty big guy and he’s always smiling and he’s like my friends, my
friends and he actually I think he understood English fairly well because there were times that
our interpreter would not have time to explain what we were talking about and he would just say
something in Arabic. He couldn’t speak it but he could understand what we were saying. He was
a former intelligence officer in the Iraqi army. He was in the invasion of Kuwait, he’d
experienced American fire power first hand but he didn’t hold a grudge so pretty, pretty good
guy. We had to get him to explain to us why he’d been to prison and he says that’s not really for
me to tell you so we had to go down to see the district commander who explained that Colonel
Salman is so committed to his job and he’s the best IP commander you will ever meet. Really
why is that? He explains in 2004 that Colonel Salman was actually working with us, with the
American forces and he was not scared of the insurgents and they kept threatening him. They
finally executed his son to discourage him and he would not quit. What he does instead, and I
don’t know how this relates or how it fits together exactly but this is just what the district
commander told us that Colonel Salman had been trying to prosecute this local shake that was
really involved in the insurgency but he was also really wealthy and politically connected so no
one would touch him. I was like wow it’s like the mob. Well, he got fed up with the process and
so he went to the market one day where he knew the shake would be and he pulled out his pistol
and killed him. That was…and he surrendered immediately thereafter to be tried and put in
prison so he was. Under their laws, under their legal system after a certain amount of time I
guess the family can forgive you. If they do then you’ve committed no more crime and you’re
released so they forgave him after a year and he was sent to us at the station in Tunis. We
realized that he had no fear and that he would do his job and a couple of months later, and he was
absolutely outstanding he was very tough but also very fair with his IPs. He brought a more
militant stance to it and expected them to, for instance when they report to him in the American
military you salute your officers and their military you salute as well but it’s more of a flat you
put the back of your fingers against your forehead thing but they also do this little weird hop and
stomp. There’s no other way to describe it they kind of hop off of both feet, they stomp the left
on then the right one in sequence. It’s really funny looking but he required them to do it and
normally they didn’t have to so he was very serious. A few months into him being there, one
morning he’s not at the station and he’s supposed to be. He’s never late, he’s never called in sick
he’s a diabetic even and he doesn’t call in sick. We were sitting here kind of morose because
we’re like wow he’s dead, we know he’s dead he has to be dead he wouldn’t be late otherwise.
Well, we were wrong. Three hours later he walked in all smiles my friends, my friends and he
offers us some baklava which is this nice little dessert. He offers to buy us lunch, I’m so sorry
I’m late you know and the interpreter is having a hard time keeping up with him. Finally, he’s
like I’m so sorry I must explain why I was late and he said this morning I go out to get into my
car, he drove himself around. Most of them had bodyguards and escorts and they needed them.
Colonel Salmam did not need them apparently but he goes out to get in his car and he realizes
there is a bomb under his car so most people in America we would call in and be like hey my
tires flat I can’t make it today. No, he goes inside he calls an Iraqi EOD team they come out
disarm the bomb. As soon as it’s taken away he gets in his car and he comes to work. He was
that committed.
�Brindley Polk: Wow.
Rob Helton: No fear, he went out that day with us and did a walking patrol around town which
was highly unusual for officers to do, Iraqi officers. He loved his job he loved his profession.
Amazingly that station was the only was considered tier one station in the entire babel province.
Babel province was considered the key to Iraq and this station was considered self-sustaining by
the we left. That had some, a lot of it had to do with our troops. My squad worked very hard with
that station, the other squads looked very hard with the other stations. A lot of long hours a lot of
training from our soldiers but it also had to do with Colonel Salmam and that particular station
because he you know made them a tight knit group. They day that we realized that we were
succeeding, and that was one of the big clues in Iraq. You rarely realized you were succeeding in
anything. The day we realized we had succeeded was our latest MP battalion commander was
rolling in they were like a revolving door we got new commanders all the time that’d be a long
explanation but he rolled through and he congratulated my squad leader when he got to the FOB
because our IPs had what’s called muzzle awareness. They had their weapons pointed at the
ground and their fingers off the trigger. Every other Iraqi army and police…you would never see,
would carry it either across their chest with the muzzle pointing at everybody to their left or their
right depending on which hand they used or they carried it up on their shoulder so the muzzle
was usually pointed at somebody’s head behind them. Their finger was always on the trigger and
because of the rudimentary nature of the safety the weapon was usually on fire and I have
actually seen them shoot themselves in the foot, shoot another… my first tour we worked with
the Iraqi army some and we saw them shoot each other in the leg by accident, all of it’s an
accident. He was, this new Colonel was really impressed that our IPs out of the thousands that
he’s seen across Iraq have achieved muzzle awareness and that’s exactly what he said. He’s like
you guys have done such hard work. Hard work well, yelling at them every day to stop pointing
their weapons at us. That is part of it but also teaching them that this is the smart way to do it
because what if your family is walking by another IP do you want him pointing his weapon at
your family? No, you learn to integrate the lessons to them. It’s also a matter of respect. In
fifteen months my squad was never once touched. When Hackimer, Knapp, and Meyer were hit
we had just rolled through that checkpoint literally five minutes before that so the bomb was
already there. My commander to this day probably convinced it wasn’t there but it was, it had to
be and they didn’t touch us. There was a lethal attack one day in our town and we had just left,
we had rolled by the same stretch of road and no one had touched us. There were small arms
incidents where another patrol that was right in front of us would get lit up or behind us but
never once did they touch our squad. It’s not because we were soft on them it’s not because we
didn’t do our jobs I’m convinced to this day it’s because we showed respect to the local people.
That was a big thing to me and my first patrol outside the wire my first day in my second tour or
the first patrol I actually did with my soldiers. I unloaded my gunners machine gun when we got
to the station because he’d been pointing it at people till we got there and that’s what he’d been
trained to do. He had been brought over to my team after like two weeks before we deployed so I
hadn’t had a chance to train him in how I wanted him to do the job. He’d been trained to point
his weapon at anybody who got to close and this including cars well there are thousands of cars
in Iraq. They go see their grandma’s they go to the market they go for a drive. They do
everything that we do and he was pointing his weapon at them scaring the living daylights out of
them. We got to the station and the first thing I do was climb up on top of the truck and took his
rounds out of his weapon and he’s looking at me like I’ve shot his dog or something and he’s
like sergeant what am I going to do if they attack us? You put them back in you know it’s not
�hard it’s not complicated but until you can show me that you’re not going to shoot and innocent
person you’re not getting them back and so we rolled all the way back to the FOB like that
several hours later. The next day I was tempted to not even let him put them in again but I was
overruled on that but it was one way to teach a lesson and he never once fired a shot. No one, not
one of my soldiers ever fired a shot. I did not even so much as point my weapon at anyone for 15
months. There were times that I would have been justified but I had learned that lesson my first
tour and I chose to verbally or you know make little hand signs to basically play the situation out
non- violently and it worked out, I’m fortunate that it worked out in my favor. It was a definite
slave in my conscious I guess, I call it my therapy tour but I got to do the right thing for 15
months and it was awesome and I got to do a lot of cool things my first tour. I got to do air
assault missions that was cool. There’s nothing greater than the feeling of getting on a helicopter
and flying off into the dark to land on top of some little terrorists stronghold which it turns out
none of them were. It was exciting and it was cool to be young and the tip of the spear and it’s a
great guy like all of these combat vets, it was great. In the end we didn’t accomplish anything
that was the big lesson that I took from the war. That killing insurgents detaining them or
whatever it doesn’t accomplish anything. The only thing that ever worked was working with the
locals respecting the locals and when we did that and did it right, this will be the last, the last one
I promise.
Brindley Polk: OK.
Rob Helton: One of my great, the most fulfilling experience of my life. My squad leader went
on leave in December of 2008 so I was left in charge. And this was… well it was going to be
boring because we weren’t really going to be doing anything. There was no big training to do,
we were just going to do routine training the entire month he was gone. If you’re on a 15 month
tour you’ve got a lot of leave. I had been looking forward to it for months because I get to do
things the way I want to so the first day I said hey this is what we’re going to do while he’s gone
and it wasn’t different from what he did it was just more organized. That’s a different story. Day
two that he’s gone I get the call that the new brigade in town, there’s this new unit had taken
over their called land owners. MPs don’t own the area they don’t responsible for all the security
we’re responsible for the Iraqi police and training them. We operate within the land owners area
but we aren’t responsible for all of it. Well, this new brigade came in and they had this hard
charging attitude like a bunch of dummies, like a bunch of cowboys actually. They managed to
shoot the district attorney. He’s not called the district attorney in Iraq but whatever the equivalent
is and I’m told, the lieutenant is standing there telling me this like he’s ordering popcorn or
something and he’s like O and he’s a personal friend of Colonel Salman or something so take
your squad out there right now and make sure Colonel Salman is still with us and find out what
you can. He always said the dumbest things he goes tootles and he walks away and I’m like
sweet Jesus did he just say all of that to me? They shot the district attorney? This is going to be a
nightmare you know the whole area is going to be up in an up roar. Well, I get the squad together
and we roll out there and this is way off schedule I mean this is like we’ve already done our
patrol that day, we did some training that day and now we’re rolling out to what I’m assuming is
about to be like hell on earth. We get to the station and Colonel Salman’s actually very calm,
very polite and explains to me that the district attorney he’s already talked to the man’s wife.
They were personal friends sure enough and she told him that that day the doctor had given him
the final prognosis of his…it wasn’t type two diabetes it was something else but basically he’d
been given a death sentence at least in their medical system did their best. He decided instead of
�being a burden on his family he was going to commit basically death by soldier so he called
everybody in his family and that’s a lot of calls, and he called all of them. He told them he loved
them and how much you know don’t worry about him and the funny thing in their society they
didn’t question this at all apparently that was some of the statements that we got later. Then he
went to a place where he knew American patrol would pass by and we were always armed we
have to be its not that at that point that we felt the need to be it’s just that it’s best to be prepared.
Well, the particular intersection he chose to do this at was within 150 meters of the FOB, you
could literally see the walls from where he was and its what was a truck washing, a gravel
washing station and these trucks full of gravel would pull up and they would just run water over
the gravel for some reason. He pulls up next to that and he waits for the first patrol to go by
which happens to be what’s called a log pack it’s a big supply convoy and he opens fire. The
funny thing is that you wouldn’t have known it but you don’t realize this when you’re being shot
at but he wasn’t actually aiming at them. All of the bullet holes were in the concrete, the asphalt.
He was intentionally aiming away from them but he knew they would shoot back. Now they
didn’t do a very good job. The fist truck the weapon jammed they didn’t get a shot off, the
second truck same story, third truck got a shot off didn’t hit anything, the fourth truck finally
gets one round off and their gun jams because it’s not been cleaned and that one shot killed him.
By the time that we got out to the station, and understand this is only been like two to three
hours, our IPs had already taken the digital camera that they had been issued by the army and
they’d already gone out and done a full investigation. They collected every shell casing; they had
put gloves on and collected the man’s weapon. They’d even collected a few of casings from our
weapons well that stupid brigade anyway. They collected them off the side of the road, they
collected all of the forensic evidence and they taken crime scene photos they had taped it off,
they had gotten lists of names of interviews, interviewed everybody that witnessed it and
anybody that wasn’t there that had witnessed it they went and found them and interviewed them.
They coordinated all of this by themselves. Now we had been training them for a year at this
point but they did all of this. I wish I could remember that major’s name but we called him
snoopy because he looked like snoopy, major snoopy basically. He was in charge of it and
everybody when they met him thought he was kind of you know not too sure how smart he was,
he was extremely intelligent but you had to get past the fact that yes he is Iraqi he doesn’t speak
English big deal. You know, nobody over here does well almost nobody if they do we employ
them to an interpreter but he’s actually really intelligent he was a good police officer. He took
the training that we’d been giving him for a year and the equipment and he conducted a full
forensic investigation and determined that the Americans were not at all at fault. Which I think
everybody was kind of scared that they were going to find that we were and it’s going to get in
the newspaper and everything else. Again, we it was not we because we weren’t part of those
idiots. They made us stand in a formation Christmas Eve, or New Years Eve and lit us all up and
it was horrible. There’s a whole different story about how stupid they were. That was routine for
them but they weren’t at fault. The funny thing is I had to go through my chain of command to
try to request their statements, their witness statements. They had all their soldiers fill on out and
essentially they blocked me, they wouldn’t allow me to have any of the statements but they told
me, they told my platoon sergeant actually at the it was one of the information meetings that
senior people have that tell your sergeant to get all of the Iraqi evidences get copies of it at the
very least, originals if you can and bring it back here to the FOB for our investigators. My
sergeant came and told me this, platoon sergeant, and Sergeant Moore and I had had a tricky
relationship till I got to be the squad leader for a month and then he loved me because I worked
�really hard at it because I’d been wanting to do it for so long and I had an objective to work out.
He and I sat down and I was like sergeant honestly I can’t go tell them that because our own
people won’t give me the witness statements that our troops provided and he’s like you know
you’re absolutely right and so we fought this tug of war with this Brigade which the thing is we
didn’t have a leg to stand on we didn’t have anybody high enough up to be like hey brigade
commander you will turn over this information because he’s a colonel, a full bird colonel and the
most we could muster was a lieutenant colonel. Now, he should have done it out of professional
courtesy. He at the very least could have gone out to the station it was like if you got up on the
highest point on our police station you could vaguely make out the line of walls of our FOB it’s
pretty close. If he’d really wanted to he could have gotten a helicopter and flown out there but
that’s just to me the example of why we ended up I say losing the war. It was a lot of it had to do
with attitudes people that weren’t willing to look at the Iraqi’s as people that weren’t willing to
treat them with respect. When the first…well when a field grade officer can just totally ignore
common courtesy of what should be his equivalent field grade officer out here who’s trying to
conduct a professional investigation and this is our future in this country is to build up the Iraqi
police. There’s an old quote about something about democracy can’t exist in a country policed
by its army. I’m sure I’m miss quoting it terribly but that’s the basic idea. Building their police
was the future and he wasn’t committed to this he was committed to combat operations and this
is in 2008, actually 2009 at this point early 2009 and he’s not with the program because he wants
his soldiers to have combat experience he wants to be a combat commander. He doesn’t want to
conduct a counter insurgency where you build up the local forces so you can get yourself out.
That’s why we lost Iraq, it’s not because of a basically some wild scheme to kill innocent
civilians as again that ethics professor philosophy professor said in 2001 or 2002. It’s because
people in the positions that they’re in most a lot of field grad positions basically didn’t want to
commit to the mission that they had they wanted the mission they wanted or they wanted to
make the mission that they desired therefore they went to combat. That’s just my final thought
there’s a lot more and we would be here for hours I’m sorry I’ve taken so much time as it is.
Brindley Polk: No, no it’s perfectly fine. Thank you so much for doing the interview.
Rob Helton: Thank you for interviewing me.
Brindley Polk: It was a lot of good information.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Appalachian State University American Military History Course Veterans Oral History Project
Description
An account of the resource
Each semester, the students of the American Military History Course at Appalachian State University conduct interviews with military veterans and record their military experiences in order to create an archive of oral history interviews that are publicly accessible to researchers. The oral histories are permanently available in the Appalachian State University Special Collections. The project is supervised by Dr. Judkin Browning, Associate Professor of History at Appalachian State University and all interviews are transcribed by the student interviewers.
Copyright Notice:
Copyright for the Veterans Oral History Project’s audio and transcripts is held by Appalachian State University. These materials are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used (e.g. Veterans Oral History Project, University Archives and Records, Special Collections, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC).
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed.
Helton, Robert
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview.
Polk, Brindley
Interview Date
10/2/12
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
1:39:12
File name
2013_063_Helton, Robert
2013_063_Helton_Robert_transcript
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Robert Helton, 2 October 2012
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Polk, Brindley
Helton, Robert
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a title="UA.5018. American Military History Course Records" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/167" target="_blank">UA.5018. American Military History Course Records</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright for the Veterans Oral History Project's audio and transcripts is held by Appalachian State University. These materials are available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used.
Extent
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25 pages
Language
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English
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Subject
The topic of the resource
Helton, Robert
Iraq War, 2003-2011
Veterans
Personal narratives, American
United States
Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Rob Helton gives a detailed account of his experience in the military for 6 years 2003-2009. He was deployed to Baghdad and describes it as an interesting place, a mix between the ancient and the modern. He shares stories about his time abroad, his basic training in Fort Knox, and his experience returning to civilian life in 2010.
army
ASU
Baghdad Iraq
baptism by fire
Fort Knox
Major Quessey
Sargeant Phelps