Soldier's Story
POSTED DEC.29, 2006

Shawn Tabankin, 32, completed New York Law School in Tribeca last month. As a lieutenant in the Army National Guard, he took a leave of absence after his first year of law school to lead a platoon in Iraq, for which he received the Bronze Star. He is the school’s only veteran of the war in Iraq. This is his story, as told to Trib editor Carl Glassman.

When we first got to Al Zourr, a town of 15,000, in early 2004, they all hated us. Their kids threw rocks. The adult males avoided us. We had saturated the area with a bigger American presence than they ever had. Eventually we won over the kids with candy and soccer balls.

When the men saw we weren’t coming to hurt people then they started to talk to us, and in less than a month they were inviting us to tea. This was a Sunni village and on the first couple of patrols we were trying to identify the key leaders—the mayor, imams, the mosques and schools. We were literally starting from scratch. During our first months there we were doing everything — antipersonnel ambushes, cache searches, training the Iraqi National Guard, assessing the need for civil works projects.

And we were always trying to gain intelligence. Nobody in a crystal palace is going to come down and tell you which guys are bad. You only get intelligence in a conventional war. In an unconventional war you have to get it yourself.

For example, there was a bad guy who put a bomb in the road—on one of our major supply routes—and it didn’t go off when he tried to detonate it. When he went to check on it he blew himself up. His home was right in the middle of what we thought was a bad area, especially unfriendly to the Americans. I remembered seeing on “The Sopranos” where the FBI goes to the bad guy’s funeral to get pictures of the whole mob family. So we went to his funeral. I said, ‘screw it, everybody at this funeral hates us anyway,’ so we surrounded the funeral, lined up all the guys, took photographs of them. Now we had a photo catalogue. When we were getting information from people in the town and people were saying a certain person was bad, we could open the book and ask them to point him out. Then we could show the photo to other people to find out where he lived—we could go get him.

A particular Sheik, Sheik Ahmed, was  an important source for me. With most Sheiks, if you visited them and gave them a case of water they would keep it for themselves. But Sheik Ahmed would instantly give it out to his people. I figured this was a guy I could bond with. So we met with him almost every day and gave him and a bunch of his family jobs at our base, filling sandbags.

Someone from home sent us a package that included a “Connect Four” game. One of my soldiers said, “Let’s give it to Sheik Ahmed.” We figured he would give it to his kid. But one day I had to visit him to find out if a certain guy was really bad before we raided his house that night. When I got to the Sheik’s house there was like a Connect Four tournament going on, with 50 or 60 people watching one guy put the black chip in. I wrote home and said “Send me more Connect Fours. They love it!” They were a bigger hit than soccer balls.

That’s pretty much the way it worked—meet with people and build relationships. Very few people were motivated to help you because of the ideal of a free and democratic Iraq. You had to make personal relationships. Also, we started paving roads, built two schools, and set up a water treatment plant, which I personally appreciated because people got their water from the Tigris River and every time I had tea in people’s homes I had to drink it or it would be an insult.

I’m telling you there was a good three or four months when I thought I was fighting a war with my stomach.

Before June of 2004, there was a 9 p.m. curfew. Basically, if you were out of your house after 9 you were up to no good. Nobody would run the risk of being killed by the Americans just to visit their girlfriend; we’d assume that you’re putting a bomb in the road or launching a mortar at the base. And that was typically what was going on at that time; a mortar or a rocket would be fired at our base every day.

Sometimes we would drive down the street and there would be like eight guys in the bushes and they’d open fire at us and ambush us. As soon as we returned fire we would immediately suppress them. Then we’d dismount from the Humvees and assault through, or flank around them if there was room to maneuver. The enemy was pretty smart, though. They liked to ambush us from the other sides of canals or rivers, so most of the time we could only return fire.

Until about August of 2004, we drove with our windows down and our weapons out the windows—direct fire ambushes were a bigger threat than roadside bombs. That’s how I lost some of my hearing, in an ambush, when I returned fire from inside the Humvee.

The fear factor varied. All of our vehicles are armored so I never really feared an IED [improvised explosive device]. I have a Purple Heart from when an IED blew up right underneath our vehicle. The armor did its job, but it was like the worst “car accident” I had ever been in. I received a back injury from it and my gunner had a leg injury from an ammo can flying through the air. But everybody survived.

At night, when we were sleeping, I worried about a mortar round coming in.

I was living in a little plywood command post that we made ourselves. And there was a time, I don’t know why, when I imagined getting shot in the neck. On our body armor there was a Kevlar collar and I remember constantly pulling it up.

Then there was the night before we went into Samarra. We were part of the assault to clear the city from the Anti-Iraqi forces. For us it was a four-day, World War II-style house-to-house fight. Our platoon would end up clearing 300 to 500 houses, looking for bad guys held up inside and destroying weapons caches when we found them. I was really nervous because it is different from being on patrol, when you never know if something is going to happen. The night before we went in to Samarra, we knew we would have enemy contact.

Over the course of the year that we were in our town, we conducted raids on the three terrorist cells operating there and took most of them out. The enemy activity in the town dropped off; there were fewer and fewer roadside bombs, the number of rockets being fired at our base went down to almost nothing. We found weapons caches and destroyed them. Because the enemy activity dropped, roads were paved and schools got built. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but in our little area we absolutely had a local success story.

The day we left Iraq, our company commander, Capt. Johnson, sat us down and said that when you go home you’ll have tons of war stories to tell and that’s fine. And you’re going to meet girls and embellish your stories for them and that’s all fine. But one thing that you should not have when you go back is a chip on your shoulder. You might have earned the right to be a citizen more than your neighbor, but nobody owes you anything.

I didn’t really know what he meant at the time but I know what he means now. Even a mundane thing—like a bouncer not letting us into a club because we’re six guys and only two girls—in my head I’m thinking, I fought in Iraq and you’re not going to let me in? But you can’t say that. Yes, inside, there’s a chip on your shoulder maybe. But I internalize it because I listened to my captain’s advice, and it’s gotten less and less over time.

The biggest adjustment I had to make when I came home, I admit, was ego. Over there I’m rolling out with four Humvees, turret-mounted machine guns, 20 guys armed to the teeth with the most ferocious weapons known to mankind. When we got out of that Humvee, we owned that street. Then I came home, and I remember distinctly, I was on the subway returning to school and I was squished in among 150 or 200 people. I’m looking around and I’m thinking, “I’m an ant on an anthill. Insignificant.” But in Iraq, we made a huge difference.

I still drill one weekend a month in the National Guard and two weeks during the summer. But if I were asked to volunteer to go back to Iraq, at this point, I would say no. I’m 32 years old. I want to finish law school, I want to take the bar, I want to start a career. I’d feel like crap about saying no, though. I really would.