| Title | Memories of Iraq haunt Tri-City man | |
| Date | Sunday December 05, @08:51AM | |
| Author | admin | |
| Topic | Iraq | |
| from the what-do-we-tell-our-children dept. | ||
Schoolteacher, guardsman struggles to forget atrocities
By Rob Dennis, STAFF WRITER
Capt. Jarrell Southall still can't shake the nightmares.
They
intrude on his sleep with military precision at 2 every morning --
horrific visions of starving, beaten, tortured men. Men he tried to
help. Men he was ordered to abandon.
Southall, a Union City
resident who taught history at the Challenger School in Newark before
he was called back to uniform and sent to Iraq, gives his nightmares a
historical context.
"It stank of near-death," he says, his gaze
fixed on the desktop in his office at the Camp Parks Reserve Forces
Training Area in Dublin. "What I'd compare this to would be witnessing
Dachau or Auschwitz before the Final Solution -- 1941 or 1939 in a
German concentration camp. Historically speaking, that's how I'd
explain what I saw."
... nothing had prepared him for that June
day in Baghdad when his squad of national guardsmen stumbled upon an
atrocity they were told to forget.
"We tried to help those
people, and we weren't allowed to help them," he says. "It still haunts
me. The damage to those prisoners who were abused ... haunts me so
much."
...
In a move that shocked Southall and the rest
of the squad, Hendrickson was ordered, over the lieutenant colonel's
strong objections, to return the prisoners to their captors and
withdraw his troops. In the days that followed, there were reports that
many of the prisoners were released. Still, the memory stings for
Southall.
...
"I can't shake it, you know, I can't shake it. The nightmares."
(more)
http://www.theargusonline.com/Stories/0,1413,83~1968~25...
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printed from GlobalFreePress, Memories of Iraq haunt Tri-City man on 2004-12-05 20:27:51