Jimmy Breslin – Memphis Flyer

At the end of this column is the latest list of American soldiers killed in Iraq. The Pentagon stresses that they were killed in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” (We are giving Iraqis the freedom to kill us.) This list of 12 is for less than two weeks, ending October 21st. As I fail to find these names in other public prints, I write them here on the notion that if they have died for their country, the least we all should do is read them and perhaps even remember some of them. The names raise anger on two levels: because they died so young and for so useless a reason. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is another preposterous lie by the Bush government. Why not say the facts: “Iraqi Oil.”

Our troops should instead be out there enforcing a New York custom that we have lived by for generations. The patrol guide for the police department of the city of New York has the code 1013: “Officer needs assistance.” When this call goes out, the police of the city stop. There ensues a large rush to a hospital to give blood and a sprawling, frantic search for the person or persons who killed a cop.

We have 23 dead police from the World Trade Center bombing. There is no code 1013. The actual killers are dead, including 15 Saudi Arabians. But the master of the attack is loose. He is Osama bin Laden and he lives on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Why haven’t we caught bin Laden, the cop killer?

Why haven’t we followed the New York tradition and put all the men we need, tens of thousands, tens of thousands more if needed, and nobody stops until bin Laden, the cop killer, is caught.

George Bush stood in the World Trade Center ruins and said he would get bin Laden as a sheriff would — smoke him out, shoot him cold dead. All the poor cops cheered. What a thrill to have a good tough guy as president! That was over two years ago. Now you never hear bin Laden mentioned.

And the cops who have lost their own do nothing. They are the most extraordinarily gullible of people. They support with all fervor the idea of our president sending troops to Iraq and not where they could capture bin Laden. The cops say nothing about their dead. They are afraid to demand that their government honor the tradition of code 1013 and catch this common cop killer. If they yelled with the emotion they use when pushing around a peace demonstration, their prep-school hero, Bush, would quiver, and I say he’d make bin Laden the goal again.

Bin Laden has killed cops and now we have to listen to tapes of him threatening to attack us again? Why do we put up with this? And why we are left with these young dead, lost while in the wrong place, and whose names we might try to memorize:

Army Spc. James E. Powell, 26, B Company, lst Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. Radliff, Kentucky. Killed October 12th in Baji, Iraq, when his vehicle struck an enemy anti-tank mine.

Army Pfc. Stephen E. Wyatt, 19, C Battery, lst Battalion, 173rd Field Artillery Regiment. Kilgore, Texas. Killed October 13th in Baladad when an improvised explosive device and small-arms fire struck his convoy.

Army Spc. Douglas J. Wheeler, 22, A Company, lst Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment. Concord, Michigan. Killed October 13th in Tikrit when his unit came under attack from a rocket-propelled grenade while searching for a possible improvised explosive device.

Army Spc. Douglas J. Weismantle, 28, lst Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Killed October 13th in Baghdad when an Iraqi dump truck swerved and rolled over on top of his military vehicle.

Army Pvt. Benjamin L. Freeman, 19, K Troop, 3rd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Valdosta, Georgia. Drowned near Al Asad, Iraq, on October 13th.

Army Pfc. Jose Casanova, 23, lst Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne. El Monte, California. Died October 13th in Baghdad when an Iraqi dump truck swerved and rolled over on top of his military vehicle.

Army Lt. Col. Kim S. Orlando, 43, 716th Military Police Battalion, 101st Airborne Division. Nashville, Tennessee. Army Cpl. Sean R. Grilley, 24, 716th Military Police Battalion, 101st Airborne. San Bernardino, California. Army Staff Sgt. Joseph P. Bellevia, 28, 716th Military Police Battalion, 101st Airborne. Wakefield, Massachusetts. All three killed October 16th while attempting to negotiate with armed men near a mosque after curfew. The Iraqis opened fire.

Army Spc. Michael L. Williams, 46, 105th Military Police Company, Army National Guard. Buffalo, New York. Killed October 17th near Baghdad when his vehicle ran over an improvised explosive device.

Army Pfc. John Hart, 20, 1st Battalion (Airborne), 508th Infantry Battalion, 173rd Infantry Brigade. Bedford, Massachusetts. One of two soldiers who died in a guerrilla attack October 18th in a clash outside Kirkuk.

One soldier from the Army’s 377 Theater Support Group was killed October 21st in a maintenance accident north of Baghdad. (Name unavailable at this writing.)

Jimmy Breslin writes for Newsday, where this column first appeared.

There was no ceremonial viewing of the body of Pfc. Raheen Tyson Heighter on July 28th. His remains have not arrived here from Iraq. He was a spectacular 21-year-old who was killed when a convoy in which he was riding was attacked early in the morning outside of Baghdad.

His mother, Cathy Heighter, spent yesterday afternoon sitting with relatives in her mother’s house on Long Island. She expects the body back next week. Then there will be a public viewing.

“I want to let people know he died for this country,” the mother was saying. “He died an American hero.”

“He was supposed to be home in June,” one of the women in the living room said.

“Been there too long,” an aunt, Barbara Adams, said.

“They wanted to come home,” one of the others said.

Cathy Heighter is a pretty woman of 45. She wore a cream blouse and blue pants and sat on a living-room couch underneath front windows. “The field commander called me,” she was saying. “He talked so very highly of Raheen. He said the troops looked up to him. He fought to the end. He emptied his gun.

“I loved him,” she said.

“He loved you,” one of the women said.

Her son has written moving, memorable lines of the war. They were in a letter sent on June 20th that arrived at his mother’s house on July 2nd: “Today is a blissful day … . Today is the first time I realized you have tried your hardest to bring the bestowed, hidden, optimistic, and spontaneous qualities out of me … . As I sit here in tears, I thank you.”

His mother never liked the idea of the Army from the start. He was 17, and she was in her beauty shop, “Beyond Images of Beauty” on Main Street in Bay Shore, when an Army recruiting officer came in. He said that he had seen Raheen in high school and the young man told him that he wanted to join.

“The recruiter said he just needed my signature,” she said. “I told him, ‘Don’t even ask. Get out of here.'”

Her son, however, saw his life ahead as something that he had to run right up to like a train on the tracks outside. At 14, he came home from school and took a number-two pencil and drew a father holding his son. Holding the child to his chest with a powerful left arm protecting the child from a world that the father, his face strong and simultaneously haunted by pain, could see ahead for the son.

It is a wonderful drawing.

He and his mother, who sells art out of her beauty shop, made prints of the drawing and sold them. He thought that was a good enough start, but he was going to go so much higher. He was going to pierce the sky. When he graduated from high school, he worked in a brokerage and he studied for a license exam, but he saw so much more dancing on the horizon. He wanted to go to college outside of New York. He would use such a place, with its walks through trees, with its professors, as an exciting studio for his art.

The combined income of his mother and father, who was in construction, wasn’t spectacular, but it was over the limit for scholarships and loans.

There was one way. Out there in the high school halls were the military recruiters with their dark bargains. You put your body up and if nothing happens you get college paid for. Raheen took the Army. That is the contract signed by so many. The Army buys them for a college degree. It works unless you wind up in Iraq and come home in a box.

On August 7, 2001, he walked into his mother’s shop and said he was leaving for the Army the next day. He had sold himself. He was now old enough to enlist without her written permission. “He put me in shock,” she said. “We got up at 5:30 the next morning. He had three big duffel bags packed. They told him to bring only one. I hugged him. I told him I loved him. I told him be a man.”

The other day at 10 a.m., she was on the phone in her beauty shop with a customer. Her oldest son, Glynn, and two Army officers walked in and stood nervously. “You think you’re seeing ghosts,” she said. “I’m standing there on the phone and I know they are there to tell me that my son is dead. How can this be happening? They are ghosts.”

“Why do we stay there?” an aunt said. “They don’t want us there.”

“Shooting at us. They don’t want us there.”

“Do they know why they’re there?”

“No. They don’t know. They’re there for their country. That’s what they know,” the soldier’s mother said.

“Do you know?” one aunt was asked.

“Oil.”

“Oil,” Cathy Heighter said, softly and so sadly.

Jimmy Breslin writes for Newsday, where this column first appeared.