Iraq War

Soldier says it's too late in Iraq

Written by Stephanie McPherson, AmherstWire.com Friday, 25 April 2008 12:00

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I was sitting at my butcher’s block in my comfortable rural home, dinner heating on the stove. I was on my laptop, chatting with a friend, discussing what would happen when the 48 hour deadline President Bush set had passed. It was March 20, 2003, just hours before the end of the deadline. I remember wondering, if Saddam Hussein and his sons didn’t leave Iraq, would they immediately start bombing? Was this really going to happen?

Halfway around the world, my cousin, Kyle Frost, of Kernersville, N.C., sat waiting as well. Waiting for the message stating the deadline passed. Waiting for the order to start the attack on Iraq.

We come from a family full of veterans from every branch of the military. Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force - the Frosts have covered it all. It seemed natural Kyle enter the Army, like his father and uncles before him, like their father before them.

During a recent phone interview, he told me that before Sept. 11, 2001, he knew he wanted to sign up, but wasn’t sure when. As soon as the planes hit the towers, “I felt like I didn’t have a choice – like it was my duty,” he said, in a slight southern drawl. He enlisted two months later.

As part of third battalion of the 101st Airborne, on March 1, 2003, he was deployed to Kuwait to gather supplies and prepare to enter Iraq one month later.

Kyle enlisted in 2001 because he wanted to help free a suppressed and tortured country. But now, five years later, his views have changed.

“There’s a lot of hatred, when you see – it’s not just friends, it’s your brothers – you saw a lot of your brothers get killed or hurt real bad, so you build up this anger. Now, I don’t think us being over there still is right,” he said. He said that helping a people who clearly do not want assistance is wrong.

Since getting out of Iraq, Kyle doesn’t watch the news. He doesn’t vote, and he doesn’t think he will any time soon, especially in this election. He is disillusioned and doesn’t see anyone who can or will turn the tides in Iraq.

“I think they just talk the talk and when it comes down to it nobody does anything…I don’t believe any of them,” he said.

He continues, saying, “It’s kind of a too late thing – if we stay there, of course more soldiers are gonna die, that’s what I don’t like to see, but if we leave there, though, it’s gonna be an area where terrorists are gonna gather in a real strong force…I think we’re gonna be in Iraq for a long, long time.”

The bitterness in his voice comes from a culmination of experiences – experiences that took place over the course of a year that have been forever burned into Kyle’s memory.

It started even before his battalion left in 2003, the Army ordered somewhere around 20,000 body bags, according to Kyle. “That kind of played with my head a little bit,” he said.

Other than the foreboding sense conjured up by the tens of thousands of body bags, Kyle simply didn’t know what to expect. He had images from Vietnam and Desert Storm floating around in his mind. Kyle’s battalion, 3-337 of the 101st, was in charge of infantry.

“We were the first ones in, front line,” he said. “When I went in, I was an Alpha team leader; I was in charge of anywhere between six to nine guys in my squad.”

He and his battalion would enter into the cities in the area to make their presence known. They’d establish base camps and target their enemies by any means necessary.

According to Kyle, from March 1 until he went home a year later, he traveled with his “brothers” from Kuwait all the way up to Mosul, Iraq, where they stayed for about seven months

At the beginning, the third battalion of the 101st Airborne gave school and medical supplies to the people of the cities in which they stayed.

“A lot of them looked up to us,” he said. “They wanted that freedom and were looking at us to give it to them. It was our job…to give them something new and better.”

As the war continued on, however, that sentiment began to fade as civilians began to turn against the soldiers, stirring up questions of who to trust. Morale was low.

On Nov. 7, 2003, at 7:15 a.m., his platoon got ambushed again. At least three quarters of his comrades went down. The insurgents fired about 100 rounds of AK-47 and an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) before fleeing.

“The RPG…flew over one hummer, went through another one, and then hit the first one, and it blew up…it blew up Sgt. Kennon – he died instantly…Sgt. Calhoun was sitting on the hummer when it blew up, and the actual RPG came and clipped both of his legs off.” he said. Another sergeant lost his left hand. Even to this day, that Nov. 7 saw the largest number of casualties for the 101st Airborne during its time in Iraq, which is now on its third tour.

Another memorable and historic moment in which Kyle’s battalion took part was the July 22, 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, the second and third targets for the military.

“That was a good moment,” he said, “because that showed a lot of the people that we were the force to be reckoned with, that we took those guys…those two sons did a lot of horrible things to the people.”

Kyle is now settled into a comfortable home in North Carolina with his wife and high-school sweetheart, Courtney. They were married a little less than a month before his deployment. Their beautiful four year old daughter Kendall is enrolled in a private pre-school. He went to night school for a while, and plans on going back to study environmental issues. He has a well-paying job near his home. But he still can’t leave Iraq.

“The worst thing about being over there was that it’s something I’ve got to live with for the rest of my life – I’m never going to forget it,” he said. He suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); any smell, sound, touch at any given moment can take him back there. Iraq still lingers in his nightmares.

Until 2009, the Army can call Kyle back. Every day, he gets letters from different branches of the military, and every time he goes to the mailbox, he is terrified he’ll see the Army’s official seal. Every day, he thinks, “Is this day that I’m getting called back? That I have to leave my family?” He continues, with a bitter voice, “If they would quit [sending mail], it would be easier on us veterans to get over a lot of these things we’ve experienced.”

Currently, Kyle is working on a book. It is written in the second person, placing the readers in the soldier’s boots, allowing the reader to experience all the things Kyle went through. He wants the public to know the things the media won’t tell them.

“The government doesn’t want everything to be seen,” he said, but he wants to make sure Americans knows what is really going on in Iraq.