“It was reported there were a number of AQ operatives at a house having some kind of meeting so my platoon and I hit the house in the middle of the night. We blew the doors off the target building and started clearing. One military aged male made a gesture that gave a SGT in my platoon reason to believe he was going for a weapon, so SGT shot and killed him. The dude ended up being unarmed, and some had doubts about wether our SGT should’ve shot him like that (myself included).

All the other occupants were sleeping or surrendered so we began to search the house. I was tasked with searching the room with the dead guy in it. Of course the room was not well ventilated, and the smell of the dead guy was intense. This was my first deployment, but I had been close enough to other dead enemy to know what a human smells like when they’ve been perforated by green tip. This smelled different. Sweet almost, in a sickening kind of way. I then realized I was smelling this guys’ brains that were swirling in a pool of blood on the floor. Looked like someone dropped a cup of red koolaid that was mixed with white rice.

A few days later, Intel comes back AGAIN and says “ehhh, turns out all those guys really were AQ after all. We fucked up. Those were really bad dudes…”

And that, kiddies, is how we won the war and the noble people of Iraq lived happily ever after.

– US Army Special Operations, Ramadi, Iraq 2006

This story was documented by Battles and Beers. Every soldier has a story, and every story deserves to be told. ©

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