His War Is Over

Before his Humvee left Mosul, Iraq, for the one-hour trip to Al Kisik Military Base early one April morning, Army Capt. Matt Bowen, his driver and a gunner paused for a quick prayer.

"Lord, watch over us as we travel," he said through the intercom system.

And they were off, the trail vehicle in a convoy along what the military calls the "Santa Fe Route," a four-lane highway linking Mosul to Tal Afar, which is near Al Kisik.

It was about 2 a.m. when the convoy left Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city. The streets were empty, and darkness blanketed the city and surrounding countryside. They barreled down the road with lights out to draw as little attention as possible.

Fifteen minutes later, Bowen told his driver through a headset, "You're doing a good job."

Within seconds, a burst of light flashed before him. A deep boom rocked the truck. An improvised explosive device, or IED, packed with ball bearings had detonated on the left side of the vehicle.

The ball bearings pitted the back window and left side of the vehicle, broke the headlights and blew out the left front tire. From bumper to fender, the Humvee was riddled with holes.

Smoke from the disintegrating tire filled the cab, clouding their view of the vehicle in front of them, but a fan helped clear some of the smoke.

Stopping to fix the tire was too dangerous, so they crept along at 10 miles an hour for four hours, finally reaching Tal Afar at 6:30 a.m.

It was Bowen's third brush with death since he arrived for his yearlong tour in Iraq as a member of the Army Reserves. Last July, a convoy he was a part of was hit with small-arms fire, and in February, his vehicle was hit by an IED on the way to Mosul.

But the third brush was the most intense. It made Bowen wonder if his luck was running out and altered his feelings toward the Iraqi people, he said.

"You almost get killed a third time, and it's hard to explain," Bowen said last week. "You know it's not the average person doing it, but they are a representation of the country."

Bowen, 35, returned home to his wife, Sandy, and sons, Sawyer, 7, and Henry, 2, on June 22 after 14 months, which included two months of training at Fort Hood, Texas, and in Kuwait.

His duty served, Bowen has thrown himself back into his roles as a father and husband. He has been assembling bunk beds, mowing the yard, playing with the kids and cooking out almost every night.

The transition has gone well, he said, but he hasn't been able to rid himself of Iraq.

Loud noises such as car horns remind him of exploding IEDs and have rattled him, he said.

Bowen, dressed in shorts, a T-shirt and running shoes, looked every bit the civilian as he lounged on a couch at his home off Shattalon Drive and talked about his year in Iraq.

The past few months were difficult for his wife of 13 years. She got sick twice and had trouble taking care of the kids, Henry got rotavirus, and she worried about her husband and the increased violence he was seeing.

More than once, she said, she stood by the front window of their two-story brick home waiting for a car to pull up the driveway and bring her bad news.

Bowen is a captain with the 1st Battalion, 485th regiment, 108th Division of the U.S. Army. In Iraq, he worked on a military transition team that trained Iraqi men to be soldiers. He lived in a compound with coalition forces at Al Kisik, an Iraqi military base.

He started his tour thinking he could make a difference in the lives of the Iraqi people, he said. On goodwill missions with Iraqi soldiers to distribute toys and school supplies, Bowen said he was moved by the poverty of the people, especially the children, who scampered around the villages dirty and barefooted.

People live in mud huts with sewage streaming through the middle of the village, he said. Cows meander freely through the streets, and chickens and goats populate the dirt yards.

"It was like people lived 2,000 years ago," he said.

Bowen said that the villagers were friendly and polite, and appeared grateful for the small gifts the soldiers brought them. When a convoy pulled into the villages, children would swarm around the vehicles for candy; sometimes the soldiers had to pull adults from the mass.

Bowen got the idea to hand out teddy bears to the children. Tom Boone, a friend from Winston-Salem, collected donated bears from hundreds of people in the area and sent them to Iraq. Bowen estimated that he gave out about 5,000 teddy bears to Iraqi kids.

Word spread that the American and Iraqi soldiers gave out gifts. When a convoy of vehicles left Al Kisik for a mission, children would line the street and kick their legs up, indicating that they would like a soccer ball.

"They were always smiling, always laughing," Bowen said.

The average Iraqi, he said, was cordial. But on missions into villages to find blacklisted insurgents, he and other soldiers learned to recognize what they called the "stink eye."

"It's an openly hostile look from a male. A contempt that says, 'You're not welcome here,'" Bowen said.

In some of these villages, he saw "Death to America" and other anti-American slogans spray painted on cinderblock buildings.

His convoy was hit with small-arms fire in Mosul during the first week of his tour. Other than that, the first half of his tour was incident-free. Most of the fighting was confined to the southern half of the country.

But about the first of the year, the violence started to inch northward. Soldiers at Al Kisik dreaded trips to Mosul because of the high-risk of IEDs.

Bowen rode in a convoy in February from Tal Afar to Mosul that encountered three IEDs. An American explosive team detonated two of the bombs; a third, which was embedded in the dirt near a bridge, detonated near Bowen's truck.

The truck was not heavily damaged, and the convoy arrived at Mosul without further incident. The explosives team detonated another IED on their way back to Tal Afar.

About a month later, Bowen and some soldiers from his unit were called to a checkpoint on the Santa Fe route 25 miles north of Mosul.

A bloody scene awaited them.

Insurgents had raided the checkpoint near dawn, killing 10 Iraqi soldiers, at least one of whom, Bowen realized after arriving, he had helped train.

The wounds were so bad on the other soldiers that they couldn't be recognized.

Brass casings, duds and spent grenades littered the ground around the checkpoint.

The scene inside the tent was grisly. Bowen said it was obvious by the blood spatters on the tent that some of the soldiers had been executed with machine guns.

The dead soldiers were not wearing boots, indicating that they had been sleeping when the insurgents attacked. That was a violation of what they had been taught by the American soldiers.

"Everyone was sleeping, and they paid for it with their lives," Bowen said.

They had been told repeatedly that someone needs to stand guard, especially at first light when the night-long curfew is lifted, he said.

One Iraqi soldier in a checkpoint across the road apparently hid in a vehicle. The insurgents, however, dropped a grenade in the vehicle, which was still burning with the dead soldier inside when Bowen arrived.

Bowen said he coped with the situation by "dehumanizing it" and sticking to his job, which was to clean up the area. He said he doesn't allow the images of the dead soldiers to enter his mind.

It was about two weeks after the massacre that Bowen's convoy was hit by the IED on the way back from Mosul. The attack changed him. He said he no longer had the desire to hand out gifts on goodwill visits to villages or connect with Iraqis.

"After a while, I got jaded," Bowen said. "You arrive with this idealistic attitude that you're going to save the world, and as the year goes by, you see you're not going to."

Although some of his fellow soldiers counted down the days until they got home, Bowen never did. He preferred to stay focused on the job in Iraq.

It wasn't until he got to Tal Afar, the last stop before Kuwait, on June 12, that he allowed himself to get excited.

"My war was over at that point," Bowen said. "And I was very lucky."

■ Lisa O'Donnell can be reached at 727-7420 or at lodonnell@wsjournal.com.