Local News - August 2003

Medic sees gory side of Iraqi war

By CALEB HAWKINS, LTN Staff Writer

Not all of the soldiers in Iraq used a gun. Some of them were there to preserve life.

Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Ronnie Mashburn of Lincoln served in Iraq as the Marine equivalent of a field medic.

His first patient was a civilian who said he was a school teacher. “But everybody there said they did another occupation because they didn’t want to be captured,” said Mashburn.

Nobody died on his watch, but he did retrieve two bodies from the convoy that Jessica Lynch had been in when attacked.

“That was a bad feeling, seeing American troops dead, being left behind,” said Mashburn.

Mashburn went to East Lincoln High School before enlisting in the Marines.

He was with America’s Battalion — the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines — when they crossed the border into Iraq.

“It was kind of scary,” he said. “There were signs for minefields but they (the military) had plowed a road through.”

Further on, there was razor wire for miles in either direction. After that was a berm of dirt and a 40-foot deep ditch to impede the invasion.

All the soldiers slept in their clothes to be ready at any notice.

One night after crossing the border, Mashburn looked up into the sky. “I heard this loud rush, like a rocket, and saw this light. I though it was a Scud missile coming in. You couldn’t do anything, I just laid there and watched it.”

The missiles were Patriots, going up to intercept other missiles or bomb targets.

His troop stopped in convoy outside of Al Nasiriya to back up the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines.

The area was jungle-like, due to the Euphrates River nearby, and had small houses everywhere.

The Marines had to clear the buildings house- by- house. Eventually they took over a hospital where Lynch had been before being moved.

“The first couple of days, there were lots of firefights,” Mashburn said. “Mortars would explode just a few hundred feet away. You couldn’t get much sleep.”

“Once you heard a mortar, you kind of got a rush because you knew our guys were going to whoop up on them.”

Mashburn found himself angered at the tactics of the Iraqi troops, who would change between civilian and military dress.

At one point, the Iraqi troops hid in the houses of Shiite Muslims, hoping that American troops would fire into the homes, destroying the buildings or the families inside them.

Even more terrible was the practice of shooting civilians that gave up. “The Republican Guard would shoot anyone who wouldn’t fight for them,” Mashburn said.

A lot of civilians did surrender to the troops. “It was like a mass movement at one time,” he said.

Morale was high in Iraq, Mashburn said. “At first, when we got into Kuwait, it was low because it felt that we weren’t using our talents for the better of the war. Once we were in the fighting, it went up.”

The troops wanted to fight. One soldier, who was later awarded the Purple Heart, lied about a shrapnel wound, saying it was nothing.

“So when we opened it up, it was a hole I could probably fit my fist in,” Mashburn said. “He wanted to stay out there with the Marines.”

Even though the locals were nice — some would give the American troops food and cold drinks — Mashburn saw much looting and rioting.

There was a building, not far from where Mashburn was stationed in Al Kut, that the locals would burn every day. “Their fire department would put it out and the next day they would set it on fire again,” he said.

Kerry Sanders from NBC was embedded with Mashburn’s troop. His presence was no problem, Mashburn said.

 “They did their jobs, and we did ours,” he said. It was nothing like baby-sitting.

For Mashburn’s mother, Shirley, the constant news coverage of the war was a good thing. “I wanted to know where he was at,” she said.

After seeing how the Iraqi people lived, Mashburn has no doubt that this was a just war. Most Iraqis had no running water and their toilets were holes in the ground, he said.

“It had to be done some day,” he said.

“We would pull cars over during stops and there would be hundreds of thousands of dollars in the trunk, just in bags,” Mashburn said. “All the wealth is taken from the people by the government.”

Now he is in charge of immunization and preventive medicines at Camp Lejune.

“I want to go back. You feel like you’re sitting on your butt here.”

© 2001 Lincoln Times-News  

Terms and Conditions