the second day

The second day of DUSTWUN missions was quite different than the first.  I was on night shift this time and we were now a couple weeks into the search, so they had refined a little more of where they were searching.  One of the soldiers had since been accounted for, he hadn't survived the initial attack, but they had still proceeded with throwing his body in the river after they had decapitated him. 

During one of the raids in the last couple of days, they had found a video that had been recorded by those that had ambushed the soldiers, they had planned on using it for propaganda based on the person who had it when they found it.  Since we didn't have many missions scheduled, one of the individuals there asked us if seeing the video would give us an idea of what we were up against.  We all debated on whether it was something we needed to see and eventually we sat down to watch it.  I stayed in the room for a few minutes before the anger hit and I stepped out.  Within a few minutes the rest of the crews had walked out as well.  We already knew the reason for our mission there and had been doing everything we could to help them find these soldiers, we hadn't needed to see the video to validate that.

Throughout the night we ended up having two missions - one was a leaflet drop over one of the areas that they suspected they may have had the other two soldiers.  In Arabic, they stated that anyone who had information pertaining to the soldiers or anyone who had anything to do with the attack to please come forward and they would be rewarded for doing so (helping Americans often meant their families were attacked in retaliation).   

The second mission was another one that added emotion to the night....  The officer in charge of us from the unit there asked if we minded taking on a mission that didn't have anything to do with the DUSTWUN operations.  It was already time for us to head back and we were pushing being out of legal flying duty day, but when he told us what the mission was for we all quickly agreed.  The day prior a soldier within their division had been killed in action and the hero mission to start his trip home had already taken place.  His wife was also a soldier and was located at a FOB on the other side of Baghdad.  The initial processing of her husband had taken place and it was time for her to join him to escort him home. 

When we picked her up, she seemed calm for the most part, but you could tell that she had been crying.  I helped her get into the aircraft and secured.  I don't know if it was the fact that she was joining back up with her husband or all the other possible scenarios that she could be dealing with at that moment, but as we were taking off I could see that she was starting to cry again.  Within a few minutes, she was crying so loud that you could hear her above the sound of the helicopter.  My heart was breaking for her and the journey she was getting ready to begin without her husband.  After we took her to where she was supposed to be dropped off, we were all quiet - not understanding what she was going through but feeling a pain that we had never felt before.  This was the only mission like this our battalion conducted during the deployment, but it was one that came back to me when I married another soldier.  I think of her often and the fact that she didn't have the support of other spouses around her when she needed someone to understand her, there was no care team waiting for the notification to be made so they could step in to take care of her.  There was just a helicopter crew who didn't know her, nor could they understand what she was going through - there was no meals to comfort her or words that could be said.  We were trained to deal with many aspects of war, but how to help a widow wasn't something that we knew anything about...