Troy Torguson- Audio Clip

Troy Torguson Interview

 

What conflicts did you participate in?

I participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom. We were actually on alert for the first go around. But we got held up, and that was in Operation Iraqi Freedom 2. For my deployment, and then Operation Iraqi 4 and 5 were my second mobilization.

 

What branch of the military were you in?

When I was activated for my deployment, I was with the 264th engineer group out of the Wisconsin Army National Guard. During the deployment I was with the 1st Infantry Division part of the army up in North Central Iraq.

 

What kind of Pre-War Training did you receive?

Well we’d been training; before I went in I spent just under sixteen years in the National Guard, which is weekend and two weeks. So we’d been training for something along the lines of this conflict for that entire time, but we spent from December 7th 2003 until February 8th 2004 at Fort McCoy doing mobilization preparation for the job that we were going to be doing while we were overseas.

 

What was an average day in the Military like?

The days were really long, usually started, they could range starting anywhere from four in the morning and end up, not everyday, but getting up and two or three in the morning the next day. My job, it varied, it depended on if I was going to be inside the wire or outside the wire during the day.

 

Where were you deployed in your service?

I was deployed up in Tikrit, Iraq. Which is about 100 miles north of Baghdad, and our area of responsibility was pretty much the Northeastern section of Iraq, that ranges from Tikrit down to Samarra, the Sunni Triangle, and all the way to the Iranian border, up in there the cities of Okubah (sp?) and Kirkuk.

 

When was it that you were deployed?

I actually arrived in Iraq in February of 2004, and came home in February of 2005. The second time I was just mobilized here in the state to backfill for a unit that was mobilized, and that was from 2005 through 2006.

 

What did you do at your Duty Station?

When I was deployed, my rank, I was a major when I was deployed, and I was the Logistics Officer for the 264th Engineer Group, and the Engineer Group, our job, we had three primary missions; the first was to clear roadside bombs from the highways, I.E.D.’s, the second was to improve force protection measures. If you’ve seen those concrete barriers that for road construction and everything, you make the traffic weave back in and out like that. So part of my job was those, making sure we fortified all the bases, and we had 22 bases  within our area of operation., from car bombs, to I.E.D.’s to incoming mortar shells. And then the third one was to improve the quality of life, we got there we were living in tents, we didn’t have bathrooms, and pretty much using latrines filled with kerosene that you would burn when you had to go to the bathroom. So we ended up just building small cities all over the countryside, when we would get people out of tents, the easiest way to describe that is, you’ve camped in Wisconsin and it gets to be 95 degrees outside, and when you’re inside of a tent, it’s about 120 inside the tent, and know it’s 120 outside, so it’s about 180 inside that tent with air conditioners going so, you’ve got a lot of people out of tents and in decent living conditions.

 

What kind of preparations did you make prior to your employment?  

It’s not just about what I did here back home, obviously I got my will in place, my children were really young at that time. We knew we were going up into a very hot spot as far as, I mean Tikrit was where Saddam Hussein was captured, that’s his home town, and we were pretty much involved in combat on a daily basis, we found out after the fact. But, you get your will around, you get some stuff there, you pretty much make sure all your affairs are taken care of back here, so that while you’re gone, somebody else can do all your daily functions for that, and then obviously I prepared myself militarily by getting all of the gear around, I get all of my issued stuff around, but there were some thing that I picked up extra that I figured I would need based on hearing when I talked to some folks.

 

What kind of training did you receive in preparation for the mission?

Basic skills, we did everything like combat lifesaving techniques, everyone in the unit got trained in to be a combat lifesaver which is above CPR but not quite EMT level. That was one thing, we got trained in combat patrol tactics, basic rifle marksmanship, we already knew how to do our job as construction and combat engineers, we knew how to blow things up and to clear the roads, but we needed to brush up on our basic combat skills, because we were going to be actively engaged in combat patrols on a daily basis.

 

How did that training differ from your normal training?

It was more intense, it was real. The weekend for the National Guard, although you’re training and you don’t, there’s not a real feeling of war, you’re getting ready to go and there’s a lot more attention to detail and a lot more, it’s a lot more on edge, you don’t know, you wrap it up again, it’s a real game, there’s real bullets flying at you, it’s real live explosives going off.

 

What was life like at your duty station?

It wasn’t too bad, we were pretty fortunate because we fell in behind another engineer unit who had things pretty well set up for us. We had just under 1200 guys that worked for us on a daily basis. If you’re asking just how my living conditions were, I lived in something about the size of a dorm room. Pretty small, that was where I stayed because of my rank I got my own quarters. It wasn’t too bad, I think we got shelled, someone gave me a number and I never kept track, but we got shelled about 250 out of 300 nights that we were over, that hit our base. So that was always, it was hard to get to sleep, after a while you get so used to it, you don’t even roll out of bed anymore, you just listen for the explosions to hit, and you just kind of go; “ I’m still here I guess I can keep sleeping”.

 

What was the hardest thing about being there?

I think it was time away from my kids, my son and my daughter. I’d been in the military for 16 years already prior to going over there. Solely focused on the job during the day, the chance to talk to my kids once or twice a week was all, and we had technology over there where we were able to keep track through webcams, and we were able to talk through the computers, e-mail. But that definitely was the hardest thing. During the missions, we lost 27 guys in our Division, and one of the hardest things, I had a lot of Civilian Contractors working for me, and I lost quite a few of them during the war.

 

Did you see a lot of combat while you were there?

I was probably on the road, as I mentioned before, the incoming artillery came pretty much three quarters of the nights we were there. I was on combat patrols anywhere from two to three days a week, we took fire, sometimes you could go two to three weeks and you wouldn’t take fire, then other weeks you would. I was indirectly involved every day, just because of the fact that I was working with civilian contractors,  and we ended up losing, I don’t know that the total count was, but we had, I think it was close to 70 KIA, that worked for us, so I was exposed to it enough, not every day, but every time you got out of your base, you were suspect to I.E.D.’s going off, there were no frontlines up there, you were just in amongst the population, and you don’t know.

 

What kind of stress did you endure while deployed, and how was it different from everyday stress as a soldier?

Some things were actually more simplified, because usually the stress you worry about, you just worry about being alive at the time. You can take away the everyday stresses, because you don’t have to, when you’re over in combat, you don’t have to have to worry about paying bills or anything like that, somebody else is handling that back here. You worry about being alive or being dead, so there really isn’t anything that you can compare back in civilian life to combat. Just because it is, you’re alive or you’re dead. So it’s really different, two totally different scenarios.

 

What kind of equipment did you have when you were at your station?

Again we were an Engineer Unit; we just had the standard issue Humvees without the up amour to them. We worked a lot with dozers, graters, scrapers, because we were building roads and clearing roads of I.E.D.’s. While we were there we worked with some specialized mining equipment. We blew up a lot of roadside demolitions. One of the cooler things that some of these guys came up with, I can’t even take credit or anything for, but they took remote control cars with C4 on them, plastic explosive, and they would rig that and they would go up to the roadside bomb, instead of just risking a persons life, we would just wheel it up with a video camera, or regular camera, like your regular picture camera, or digital camera with the movie screen on there, wheel it up to the bomb and blow it off. And then we had the Armored Personnel Carriers, and everything from the tanks to the AH 64 Apaches, we worked with everybody overseas.

 

When you had free time, what did you do?

I didn’t have free time. Like I said, my days were pretty much all work, I had half a dozen people working for me, plus the Civilian Contractors, and we had available to us, we had the internet available to us, we had the gym available to us. I did work out, I played a lot of sand volleyball when I had time off, I mean it was very little time, but when I did it was a lot of the exercise where I’d get up early in the mornings and run, I talked to friends and family, but pretty much, there really wasn’t anything else to do, so I just worked a lot.

 

How long did you usually stay up during the day, working?

Eighteen to twenty hours.

 

Are there any real memorable moments that you would like to share from over there?

There was a lot of different thing that I could talk about, you try to compartmentalize some of the bad memories, my best memory is getting off the plane coming home, and seeing Evan and Kayla, my son and daughter for the first time in, it was almost sixteen months. A lot of the missions we went on, the Engineers were in close clearing the roads of missions, we had some funny incidents where we took incoming shells, and there were some funny stories where it wasn’t too funny at the time, but you think about it after it happened and we were still all OK. One buddy of mine, we had an incoming shell, hit about 50 yards from our operations center, and we both dove to the ground, and we almost ended up knocking each other out, because we hit each other in the head when we hit the ground, so, but day in and day out, memorable experiences, there’s a lot of memories that aren’t really good, we lost a lot of guys. But overall, our mission was a success, I got, the Iraqi Election, I got to be there for the very first Iraqi Election which was really, really incredible, because if you think about it, we get a 50% turnout in our voting if we’re lucky here for the Presidential Election, and they had, it was somewhere over 90%, and these folks there, knew that they had a chance of being killed those nights, so that’s a really cool experience right there. Some of the fun stuff, Puddle of Mud came over, and played for us, WWE came over, and we got to see that, and a couple different experiences to unwind time right at the base.

 

You mentioned that a memorable moment was coming home, what kind of reception did you get when you returned home?

It was pretty awesome, we landed at Folk (sp?) Field, and there were probably two to three hundred people waiting for us on the runway. My dad, a couple of friends, were down there, and my mom was down there, my son and my daughter, my sister, my brother in law and their two kids were all down, and that was just incredible. The support that we received coming home was just incredible because we flew through Bangor Main (sp?) and anybody that didn’t have a cell phone, they were handing out cell phones so you could call your family and let them know that you reached U.S. soil for the first time. So it was really incredible, really a lot of support from the, form everybody, from the United States Citizens.

 

What did serving your country mean to you while on active duty?

I guess if you look at it, it’s probably the single biggest defining moment in my life outside of the birth of my two children. There’s been a lot of conflicts in the past, you go all the way back from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to World War I, World War II to Korea, Vietnam, and I was really proud to serve my country. There was no other place I would rather of been in the time of war when my country needed me, and I would have gone back in a heartbeat. Just a great sense of honor, a great sense of pride.

 

When our Operation Legion leaves the Middle East, what state do you think the Middle East will be in?

When I was coming home, somebody asked me how long we thought we’d be there, and I came home in 05 and I thought anywhere from five to seven years, and I kind of feel like some kind of a prophet because we’re coming home in about that time frame, but we really did take a dictator of a country and wipe out their whole country and their military and we’ve had to take and rebuild that. I think that before we leave, there will be stability in the region and I don’t know if we’ll ever really completely leave, so that we can really maintain that stability. Like we never really left Kuwait after the Persian Gulf War. So I think the Middle East is going to remain a conflicted place, but I think that with putting in a more Democratic type government that in time, we’ll start to see some stabilization in Iraq and the Middle East.

 

What do you think that will mean for the U.S.?

That’s a good question, got some kind of a long term commitment there, and I’m really proud that we’ve actually stayed the course and we haven’t pulled out. So there’s going to be a commitment to that area I think that we end up with some strategic allies over in that part of the world, both economically and militarily to help maintain a balance of peace between all the areas of Southwest Asia. With any luck, I think that everybody wants to see some of our soldiers come home, I just don’t know when that means, if they’re all going to come home, all of them in their entirety or if it’s going to be more of a, maybe like a Korean scenario where you see some of the soldiers there 50/60 years after the conflict.

 

Do you think some things should have been done differently with the conflict?

I think that, in all honesty, I think that there were some intelligence things that were missed, the U.S. Military had asked to come in with a much higher number than what we did go in. We went in with about 150,000 troops, but there was a lack of a plan from the administration standpoint of a follow on force, but there was some chaos, not only chaos, but their was a vacuum left there, because we weren’t planning on having to stay as long as we were. We needed a bigger force for follow on occupation to maintain the peace a little bit more right after it happened. When President Bush announced the end of major combat operations, and I don’t remember the exact date on that, the whole time I was there we saw more attacks, and we saw a lot more insurgency operations than would have been expected. So if I was going to say anything, I would say that we should have had a bigger follow on force going in there right away instead of having the number of troops that we did. But all in all I think that forced the Iraqi Government to step up and build their army faster, so there’s some pros and cons both ways.

 

You had mentioned you worked with the Civilian Contractors, what exactly were they?

Like I mentioned before, my job was the Division Engineer Logistics Officer, and everything from providing plywood to plumbing supplies, to build up bases and everything. So we would work with the contractors, the local contractors from Kuwait and all over the Middle East actually to bring in construction supplies. That was one part, the other part was when we were moving the concrete barriers around we contracted the local Turkish company that used local Iraqi drivers, that’s where we saw most our sustained casualties from my standpoint because they would go out unarmed and they would get ambushed with I.E.D.’s. They knew they were working for me, so a lot of nights I would get dragged out of bed at two or three in the morning and I’d have to go identify truck drivers either by name or by picture or that some would have a card of mine, we would have a special card that they knew that could get on this special base that I was on, because the checkpoints would let them in to receive medical treatment  unless I showed up, so I  had to show up on those things and having to show up and identify bodies as they were coming in, or treat wounded. I.E.D.’s are a very lethal weapon, even if they don/t catch you with a full blast, what you can end up with is a lot of shrapnel from glass and flying debris, and they really do an awful lot of damage, that’s permanently debilitating to soldiers and civilians alike.

 

Could you explain what an I.E.D. is?

An I.E.D. is an Improvised Explosive Device, and it can be everything from a coffee can filled with C4 Plastic Explosive and nails to more complex, to using mortar rounds, to old mortar rounds. While we were there the Iraqis had developed techniques to take the tops off of old turrets, and a copper explosive rounds, some of the I.E.D.’s I saw would take an entire Humvee, and obliterate it, and everybody inside, even when they were up armored. Literally they could be placed in concrete curbs; they would sew up dead dogs, they would put explosives on a dog on the side of the road, or an animal on the side of the road, eventually they started taking mannequins and started placing plastic explosives and shrapnel inside of them using mortar rounds, or rockets, or what have you, and as the convoy went by, one of the things we used over there were walkie talkies, the Motorolas that you use for maybe deer hunting or whatever, but we used those for communication because we were short some stuff, and that would trigger these I.E.D.’s, and they would be aimed about if you and I were sitting like we  are right now, they would be aimed from one side of the road to the other, and aimed to directionalize right at the passenger window, which in most cases was bulletproof, but the explosives that they put in there would be enough to blow right through that and the up armored doors, and take out the gunner, there was always a gunner up on top of the Humvees, and they would be able to take out those guys as well.

 

What effect did the new technology at the time have on your experience and what exactly is your opinion on the technology?

Some of the new equipment that we got was incredible, and it was developed by the South Africans to demine South Africa, literally because they’ve been fighting over there for so long. The new technology made it a lot safer for our soldiers, the problem was it wasn’t being procured and fielded fast enough for us to get it out there, and this is back 2004 2005, so we were still improvising and getting it fielded as we did. I think we’ve seen the number of casualties decrease in Iraq, and I think that’s directly related to how we use that up armored equipment, and it’s an ever changing as soon as we would change something, they would do something, and we would have to keep continually adapting to that.

 

So overall would you say that your experience there was it safe? Was it dangerous? Was it an average scenario for Iraq?

I don’t know if it was safer or more dangerous where I was, I was up in the Sunni Triangle, which was the Hot Spot; it was where the Sunni Party got overthrown. Saddam had most of his support there, so they really didn’t have too much respect for the U.S. Coalition led troops. Every day, like I said, you could tell the time of day at some bases by when we were getting shot at, at some part of the bases. My experience with the Iraqi people was wonderful, there weren’t, it was such a small fraction of the population that didn’t want us there, which was insurgency led. I worked with some wonderful contractors, and they really wanted us there. A far as danger goes, on some days it was at the high end. It tends the worst I was there, maybe once or twice a week for the most days, other days it was pretty average. But when it was really bad, it was horrible, and there was no getting around it.

 

Other than your contractors, did you encounter any other Iraqi civilians?

Yes, we had a lot of groups that helped with the Rotary groups, or the Optimists, we worked with in giving out backpacks and shoes and school supplies, and we did a lot of humanitarian aid efforts. Some of these folks never even had wells or anything, and it was the first time they ever had running water. And that was part of our job as well, was to get out there and create that for them. Mostly with contractors, but then again with local Iraqis. During the election and everything, for the most part they just wanted to live their lives, and get everything back t normal as soon as possible, so there’s a very small percentage of them coming in from outside sources that was causing the I.E.D.’s and things like that.

 

What lessons did you learn from your experiences?

I think that you can never take anything for granted, life’s a gift, and you’ve got to live every day, I don’t want to say like it’s going to be your last, but every day when we went out, you didn’t know if you were going to come back alive or not, and just not take things for granted. There’s so many things back here in the states that we take as rights that are really privileges. I remember sometimes not taking a shower for four, five or six days and using baby wipes just to clean up, and to see some of the things here that, where we take just a normal shower. You know the biggest thing that I was excited for when I came home on leave for was getting a cold glass of real milk, because they had to give us milk that was irradiated to the point that it could last, and it was treated so it could last in the desert in extreme heat conditions, so I learned that the simple things like sitting down here in the basement, and not having to worry about an incoming rocket hitting us was really quite a privilege that we enjoy, and a lot of our freedom. Freedom isn’t free, and that’s coined phrase, but a lot of people have given up there lives so you and I can sit here and appreciate what we’ve got, and I think that’s the biggest lesson I took as to never take anything for granted.

 

So is that your message that you would like people to think about, to not take anything for granted?

Yes, that’s one of them. I think in many cases the American Media had some negative portrayals of the Iraqi War, and I think that people if they really want to know the war need to take the time to talk to the people that were there. The Iraqi people were just a wonderful experience for the most part, except for the guys trying to kill me, but I guess that’s just for granted there. Yes, don’t take anything for granted, everything here, it’s a wonderful privilege to be so lucky to be born in the United States where you’re not in the middle of a fight your entire life.

 

Is there anything else you would like to add? Any other details?

No, I think in looking at one of the toughest missions I did, and I was kind of thinking about this as we were going through the interview was the hardest thing that I had to overcome when I came back out of the deployment when I was mobilized, and there’s a difference, you can stay right here in the states, and I worked out of the Wausau Armory for the better part of the year and a half and right when that tour was winding down there was a soldier from Merrill that got killed, his name as Ryan Jopeck (sp?), and I was assigned the casualty assistance officer for that job, and that casualty assistance officer just guides the family through all of the ins and outs of what’s going to happen, from a military standpoint with how the funeral is going to go, and the benefits the family is going to get, and that gives me the last impression of the war that young man as I escorted his body down from the airport in Milwaukee and brought him back up to Merrill. I think that’s my lasting impression of the war, and if I was going to say anything it was my hardest mission, because I was out of the combat zone, and somewhat removed from it living back here. You know, it’s pretty safe back here, you’ve got some stuff but all of the sudden there it was, the war was brought right back to me, and on a personal side, not on a combat side where you can really focus your energy to just doing your job and being there, and the emotional side of that young soldiers family. He was 20 years old, going to be 21 the next year and I think he was about a week away from coming home, I think it was his last mission. So that one will stick out in my mind for a long time as the toughest thing I ever had to do.

 

When you came home, are there any friends from overseas that you are still in contact with?

Yes, I just retired, just this past June, but a lot of our guys, we went over with a unit of 82, and a lot of those guys got out or retired, but I’ll talk pretty much on a weekly basis with at least three or four of them. A couple of my Active Duty friends, we still keep in touch via e-mail, and there will e an occasional phone call here and there. The guys from my old unit are right around here, I’ll run into one guy that I work with every day; so, yes we get to keep in touch.