Pink Mist and Hamburger Meat a Warrior’s Tale

“It’s like your entire body is being punched at the same time,” Marine Corp. Keith Richardson offered, looking up after a thoughtful pause, and a big sip from a can of Monster Energy Drink. “ The Humvee fills up with smoke and debris. And you get this nasty metallic taste in your mouth. Kinda like you’ve been sucking on a penny.”

It was late on an unusually warm June afternoon, and Richardson and I sat alone, talking on the patio of the Common Market Southend. The 26-year-old had spent a few years in a much hotter place, and he had made the drive up from his Lake Wylie home to tell me about it. In Iraq, scalding afternoons topped 120 degrees, and some of the locals weren’t OK with him being there. They proved how they felt by trying to kill him with little pieces of exploding hot metal shot in his direction. In the Marine Corps, he didn’t make a living dodging automatic weapons fire, though; he was paid to seek it out. His job description included finding the enemy and enticing him to shoot at him. And then shooting back at them even harder. Richardson’s eyes are ice blue and serious, and he speaks with a Long Island, N.Y., accent softened by a decade living in the South.

He’s been on the receiving end of no less than 15 IED (improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb) attacks in Iraq. As he explained the “pucker effect” – how certain anatomy puckers in anticipation of trouble when driving through dangerous intersections, serving as an accurate sort of sixth sense, the after-work beer crowd streamed in and quickly filled the surrounding tables. Boisterous laughter began to drown out the rumbles of thunder growing in the distance.

“You always knew something bad was about to happen when all the Iraqi civilians would suddenly vanish from normally crowded areas,” Richardson said.
“The force of an IED explosion is massive,” he continued. “My first one happened in Fallujah. A pretty good-sized IED exploded underneath our truck as we rolled over. When we stopped, everyone checked in on the radio, and there were no casualties. The vehicle was mangled, and there were a couple of concussions, but everyone was fine.

“Then the corpsman (medic) started yelling that he couldn’t feel his feet.”

Richardson’s 5-foot-9-inch frame is burly, and he could be the all-American good guy in a cable TV action show. He projects an intensity that must have served him well in the Marines. So far he had delivered each of his answers in a methodical, factual manner that would make the Corps proud.

“His feet were fine though,” he continued. “The explosion had blown a piece of shrapnel up through the floor right up between his boots, and they were just numbed from the force of the blast and the vacuum created by the shrapnel. He was back on patrol the next day.”

Richardson did have the benefit of riding in the armored Humvees that were a favorite topic of the media a few years ago. It was a huge improvement over the unarmored “thin skinned” trucks that were easily destroyed early in the war. But getting blown up by an IED is still not ideal, and the armor makes it only about as safe as a face shield protecting a hockey player from bodily harm. He continued talking as dark clouds rolled in overheard.

“Another time we got hit by a pretty small IED. I mean it was so small that our truck wasn’t even really damaged that much. A piece of shrapnel slipped in between a tiny gap in the armor plating, though, and came in through the back seat and hit one of our guys.

“He was talking the whole time, and they got him back to medical pretty fast.” He paused for a minute, looking down, rolling his thumb over the graphics on the can of Monster.
They just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

“He was fine. I mean, he was talking the whole time. They just couldn’t stop the bleeding.” He nodded his head, looking up, as he repeated this to both of us.

“They told us the next day that he didn’t make it.”

The joke told two tables over was a hit and the group erupted in raucous laughter. A single girl at the next table lit another cigarette, and the first few drops of the summer thunderstorm began to fall.

Richardson’s initial job in Iraq involved keeping one of the most bomb-riddled stretches of highway in one of the meanest places in the world – Fallujah – clear of danger for convoys. The road was a critical supply line for coalition forces.

“We were basically a heavily armed highway patrol,” he continued. “Insurgents would come out almost every night and plant new IEDs, and we’d deal with them the next day. This wasn’t official policy, but it was pretty much understood that if anyone was going to get blown up by an IED, it was to be our patrol and not one of the convoy vehicles.”
When I asked him how he felt about that, he shrugged. “All part of the job I guess.”

A common ambush tactic of Iraqi insurgents is to plant an obvious IED, knowing that an American patrol will stop when they spot it. Insurgents then rake the vehicles with small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and the occasional Chinese- or Russian-made heavy machine gun. This was how Richardson’s first firefight began.

“What was that like?” I asked, realizing I had moved toward the edge of my seat. “Did you take it personally when you realized for the first time that someone you’d never met was trying to kill you?”

“Yeah, it got my attention when I could hear incoming rounds hit the truck, but you don’t really think about the danger when you’re in the midst of the fight,” Richardson said. “They weren’t coming that close to me anyway.” He laughed. “For the most part the Iraqis can’t shoot for shit.”  Richardson went on to describe how they identified two MAM’s (military aged males) shooting at them from an irrigation ditch about 200 meters away. Even despite his rigid, chronological delivery of the facts of the story, and frequent use of military terms, I could still see the angry orange muzzle flashes and tracers slicing up a postcard-pretty desert sunset. Palm tree silhouettes swaying in a warm desert breeze.

“We killed one and the other guy took off. We searched a nearby house but didn’t find anything. I remember right after all that happened a really big sandstorm rolled through.

“It was ominous.”

He glanced over at the group of hipsters comparing tattoos at the next table, and back to me.

“I was never really scared during a firefight. Instinct and training take over and you know you have to kill them before they kill you,” he confided. “It’s afterwards that you really think about it. Kind of like, ‘Did I actually really do that?’