"Aaron Ringel is the Republican Candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates in Arlington (48th District), as well as a former Capitol Hill staffer and Marine Arabic linguist who served a tour of duty in the Al Anabar province of Iraq in 2005."
She wasn’t even five years old, yet she knew enough to understand her country was going through upheaval and that new men with guns replaced the old men with guns. Old enough to have only known a time when her family loved her and that was all that mattered. This was the natural order of things and it would never change. Her memories began when we got here and they ended before we had even left.
Our convoy was cruising down route Mobile, the largest and most dangerous east-west highway in Iraq. The Iraqis had a phrase for the people who drive this road, they would say “they work on the doorstep of God”. The insurgents focused their roadside IED’s on Mobile since it was one of the few places they ‘knew’ we would have to travel. Outside of the IEDs there was always some form of activity on this stretch of road. If you went west, there were men selling ice where the road split towards Syria or Jordan, go east and there were young boys and old men selling gas and sodas under the bridges, and there was always at least one stray donkey wandering away from its former life, trailing a leash behind it like a fishing boat trawls a net.
Yet on this singular day there were no donkeys, and the insurgents had slept in much too late to place any bombs on the side of this road. The only thing moving on this stretch of highway was our vehicles and the burden they carried. We got there too late, yet we didn’t feel that way. It had been twenty minutes since she had fallen in. The water level was higher than it had been in a long time due to the unseasonable rains that seemed to have been following my unit like the plague since we had begun workups in Camp Lejuene two months earlier. With so much water soaking into the arid land the fields along the road were glutted with the mud and runoff, which flowed into the storm drains abutting the road much too rapidly for them to handle.
It was at one of these drains that this hapless family decided to cross the road; a mother and her six or seven daughters ranging from fifteen down to that of not more than five years old. In the confusion of crossing the road her littlest daughter disappeared. With so much water rushing from the fields to the drain she had almost no time to cry out, yet her family had seen her fall.
We happened upon this scene, all of the women hysterically yelling and waving at our passing vehicles, crying out for any help that we could possibly provide. Naturally, our convoy stopped. It was the way we handled business, if it was out of the ordinary we looked into it regardless of the situation. It was a prudent rule we always followed and it had served us well in the past.
There was little we could do, but we did all we possibly could. One Marine ran down the side of the road where the water ran out of the drain while another went down the opposite side, both sprinting as hard as they could in hope of finding the child. This is difficult to maintain for any stretch of time with gear weighing close to forty pounds…they ran for nearly a kilometer, yet there was nothing at the end.
We all wanted to go into the drain. Our vehicles had winches on them and we were willing to hook one up to our belts and crawl in to look for her, yet the water was all the way to the top of the pipe and it was deemed too dangerous. The father of the child showed up a short time later, clearly in grief he shed his robe and attempted to climb in to find his daughter, his whole family had to restrain him.
Twenty minutes on the side of the road waving, twenty minutes on the busiest highway in all of Iraq, twenty minutes that must have felt like a lifetime to this family. No one had stopped, no one had slowed down, and no one had given it a second thought or a passing glance except our convoy. The family found the little girl’s body about a kilometer and a half down from where she had fallen in the drain. Sadly there was little we could have done to save her.
The fear from rockets and mortars that fell on our base and the IEDs that detonated next to our vehicles paled in comparison to how we all felt upon seeing the grief on this mother’s face when she knew there was nothing that would save her child. This needless death, in a country already full of violence and bloodshed, has led me to draw one conclusion about its people. When tragedy occurs they will turn to those most able to help, not their fellow Iraqis, not the Iraqi Police or National Guard, but us, the coalition forces.
This was the burden shouldered when we first set foot on this soil, it is the burden we carry when we went out on a convoy, and it is the burden we gladly accept when we see a family in distress. Not only are we protecting the freedoms of every American, but we are also trying to preserve and establish those of every Iraqi until the time their country is firm enough in its resolve and strong enough in its ideals that we are no longer needed. It is my hope that on that day I will no longer have to bear witness to a mother’s grief on the side of route Mobile.
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