Home from war

The sleepless days and nights on the mattress in front of the TV with CNN murmuring war news to a hushed living room are now over. Delores King, whose nephew, Lance Corporal Eric C. Hunt of the First Battalion Fifth Marines is home at last, can now rest easier. For Eric, four months of short rations, intestinal viruses, “gas-mask Wednesdays,” and two-week-old socks has ended, and he’s glad to be home for a brief stay before continuing the next two years in his tour of duty. “I was pretty certain that we were going to get gassed and we were going to die,” Eric told The Herald. “The equipment we use [against chemical and biological agents] is well tested but you never know if your mask is going to slip when you’re out in a firefight.” Three times during his tour in Iraq, Eric and his unit heard the cry of “Lighting! Lighting! Lighting!” signaling the danger of a chemical/biological attack, via the SCUD missiles that Iraq used. Quickly, his team donned their gear and made for shelter where they were dug in. “Once we got that warning while we were in our transport vehicles,” Eric related, “So we had to shut all the hatches and put on our suits in the dark. It was very hot.” Heat and dehydration were among the unconventional enemies that US troops faced every day during the liberation of the country from the clutches of Saddam Hussein. Many times, posted in sweltering heat, Eric would drink two quarts of water, sweat it out in a matter of minutes, and then drink some more. Luckily, supplies of water were more plentiful than the MRE’s the soldiers ate during the conflict. “We were moving so fast forward that the supplies had a hard time keeping up with us,” he said. “When that happened, we had to drop to two and sometimes only one MRE per day.” Often, the squalor in which the Iraqis lived was depressing. “It was very third-world,” Eric said. “The people were extremely poor. Everywhere we went until we moved right up into Baghdad people were living in mud huts and stick shelters.” The conflict itself was often intense, with firefights breaking out throughout the city as Hunt’s unit moved up toward their objective, one of the Presidential Palaces for which the Iraqis paid so dearly. Fire from rocket-propelled grenades was heavy, as Saddam’s irregulars would pop up from behind cover to harass the freedom fighters, once wounding the artillery forward observer with Eric’s unit by shrapnel taken in the neck and arm. Fortunately, the injured lieutenant survived. Not every enemy carries a gun. Intestinal infections were a constant problem for the unit due to unsanitary conditions, with long periods of dehydration following the stomach cramps and watery stools. Eric spent time in the camp hospital with an IV in his arm to keep him from dangerously losing too much body fluid during his bouts with the illness It wasn’t all bad though. Many times, the cries and waves of the Iraqi people buoyed his spirits as they celebrated the arrival of their liberators. “The thing that I’ll remember most is the looks on the faces of the very young and the very old,” Eric said. “You know that they haven’t been put up to something, and that their smiles and waves are genuine. When they cheered us it really meant something.” “It’s the greatest feeling I’ve ever had.”