U.S. troops return to peaceful Iraq war zone

TARMIYAH, Iraq | Popcorn popping, thought Army Staff Sgt. Jason Fisher. That’s the sound the bullets made as they hit the wall of the American outpost.

It was early morning and Sgt. Fisher’s comrades were still asleep. But he had stayed up overnight, processing suspects wanted in the killing of an American soldier two days earlier.

His outpost often took gunfire, usually sporadic, but this time it didn’t let up. Then he looked out the window and saw it: a white truck barreling toward the converted police station.

Sgt. Fisher turned to run. Suddenly, he was flying through the air.

The blast sheered off the front of the building, burying some of the soldiers. Others rushed to dig them out and find their weapons and flak vests in the rubble.

Coated in cement dust, the soldiers looked ghostlike as they made what would become a more than four-hour stand, outnumbered nearly 3-to-1 by militants.

It was Feb. 19, 2007, and the U.S. surge was under way. The battle of Tarmiyah would reveal how tough the core mission would be: push into territory held by Sunni militants and hold it.

Now Sgt. Fisher and a handful of others are with the forces assigned to Tarmiyah, 30 miles north of Baghdad, and counting down the days until they leave, likely in January — part of the U.S. plan to withdraw all but 50,000 troops by Aug. 31.

For those veterans of “Feb. 19,” as they call it, these final days are spent coming to terms with that battle — of retelling stories of “last time …,” “last time …” that offers a warning against complacency to their young comrades untested by war.

But they’re also absorbing the dramatic change since “last time”: the peace that has transformed Tarmiyah from a battleground to a fairly peaceful, ordinary-looking Iraqi town.

Back in December 2006, things looked grim. Tarmiyah, near the southern border of the dreaded Sunni Triangle, lay in the heartland of the insurgency. Threatened with death by al Qaeda-backed insurgents, Tarmiyah’s entire Iraqi police force, whom the U.S. troops were living with and training, had simply walked away from the job.

The town’s only defense was small detachments of U.S. troops rotated in for a few days at a time, taking them on a hellish 12-mile ride each way through gunfire and roadside bombs, on a route they called Coyote Road.

The following month, President George W. Bush unveiled the strategy called the surge — to flood Iraq with 20,000 more troops and extend the tours of some of the soldiers already in Iraq. For the men in Tarmiyah, a 12-month tour became a 15-month tour.

In February 2007, two platoons of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Calvary Regiment, 1st Calvary Division out of Fort Hood, Texas, moved into Tarmiyah. The 38 soldiers were part of Demon Company. On Feb. 17, a sniper killed Pfc. Justin T. Paton. He bled in the arms of his best friend, Sgt. Fisher. It was a foretaste of much worse to come two days later, when Sgt. Fisher saw the suicide truck bomb coming toward the building.

The truck bomb destroyed most of Demon Company’s communications equipment and Humvees. But the soldiers managed to start a Humvee engine for just a couple of minutes — long enough to turn on the radio and report being under fire.

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