A Soldier's Scrapbook: Kevin Devine Returns from Iraq with
Vivid Combat Memories
By CHRIS BURRELL
Kevin Devine is not sugarcoating anything about his last 11 months
as a soldier in Iraq. The photographs stored on his laptop computer are
proof of that.
"You couldn't use these," the U.S. Army Ranger
tells a reporter Wednesday morning after breakfast at Linda Jean's
in Oak Bluffs as he clicks through some pictures that depict the horror
of war.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/02/20/content/kevin_devine_sm.jpg" Suddenly, the contrast between the two worlds is unmistakable.
It's snowing outside, but just three weeks ago, this staff
sergeant from Oak Bluffs was still in the heat of the desert near
Baghdad with his Third Ranger Battalion.
It's peaceful and quiet here on the Island, but three days
before Christmas, the Humvee that Sergeant Devine was riding in was
blasted by a roadside bomb, an improvised explosive device (IED) hidden
inside a guardrail.
They were lucky. The bomb was set in the wrong direction. "The
back-blast blew at us," he says. "My friends, it blew out
their eardrums. It knocked me out. I had a bloody nose."
To sit with this U.S. Army Ranger for a couple of hours while the
snow falls on Circuit avenue, you can't help but be moved.
A career soldier and a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head
(Aquinnah), he is 32 years old, married and the father of three
children. He is also extremely candid and reflective about his
experience.
"You go in," he says, "and all you want is combat,
that CIB (Combat Infantryman Badge) patch, all that stuff."
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/02/20/content/baghdad_base_sm.jpg"But the desire is different from the reality.
"All that training you do, when the bullets start flying, that
stuff's a lot different," he says.
The first fire fight was at As Samawah on the Euphrates River.
"We had to secure three bridges and hold them. On the other side
of the bridge was a military compound. . . . It was like stuff out of
Saving Private Ryan, bullets flying like crazy," he says.
Sergeant Devine is home on a 30-day leave before having to report
back to base in North Carolina for more training. After living through
combat, the reentry hasn't been exactly smooth.
"I went out last weekend with my wife and father. I was there
15 minutes, and the loud music was bothering me, people bumping into
me," he says. "I just need more time before I go out."
He also isn't taking any chances with alcohol. "I
haven't drunk in the last 14 months. I don't know how
I'd react, don't want to see what I'm like," he
says bluntly.
Sergeant Devine has already seen a lot. In 12 years as an Army
Ranger, he's been posted to some precarious assignments in Haiti
and then in Bosnia and Kosovo, but none of it compares to Iraq.
For one thing, it was unbearably hot. "The highest it got was
151 degrees. Mostly, it was 110 to 130. The stuff was horrible,"
he says.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/02/20/content/fire_plane_sm.jpg"The first couple months, water was rationed, a couple bottles a day.
Sergeant Devine's accounts jibe with much of what you've
heard in the news. The killing seemed to start after American troops
took over Baghdad. The British troops taught the Americans about the
explosives.
"They knew all about it from the IRA," says the
sergeant.
The IEDs were deadly. "They'd throw them off overpasses
on the highway," he says. "They'd set them up on the
sides of the road. There was trash all over the sides of the street.
They put phones inside them and call from another phone [to detonate
them]."
Of the roughly 500 soldiers in his brigade, he says, eight
didn't come home from Iraq.
Not surprisingly, Sergeant Devine singles out the people who helped
him and his squad survive. As he clicks through the photos on his
laptop, he stops for them.
Yousif, their Iraqi interpreter, is worthy of a long pause and a
story. "He was a great guy, and he saved a lot of our guys. He put
himself at a lot of risk," says Sergeant Devine.
Indeed, Iraqis who worked for the American were targeted for
threats. "They threatened his family," he says. "At
the end of the summer, a lot of interpreters were coming up dead. We
were finding them in the river with signs on them, laid face down: If
you help Americans, this is how you end up. A lot of people quit."
Yousif and his family, fearful of such reprisals, moved out of their
house. Sergeant Devine's squad gave him a gun to protect himself.
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/02/20/content/raid_map_sm.jpg" But weapons were commonplace in Baghdad. The daily grind for
Sergeant Devine involved cordon searches, blocking off a neighborhood
and searching all the homes.
"Every household has an AK-47. They were allowed one weapon
and one magazine that held 30 to 40 rounds," he says.
American troops, he says, were told us not to trust anyone over 15.
Sergeant Devine, maybe because he's a father, took a special
liking to the Iraqi children he met on his patrols.
They present some of the few smiles in his photography archives
- clusters of kids, probably no more than eight years old,
standing there arm in arm and grinning.
Those pictures are a sharp contrast to the most disturbing ones
stored in that laptop, haunting images of children wounded or killed.
"They used them as shields," says Sergeant Devine.
"I wanted people to know that." His anger and revulsion are
palpable.
Sergeant Devine is spending a lot of time with his own children now.
"My kids are eight, 11 and 14 now. It's time for me to be a
dad," he says.
The experience is making him rethink his career in the Army.
"I love the military. It's a big part of my life," he
says. "But I don't think it's a good life for them. My
wife has done an awesome job raising them on her own for the most part.
I never thanked her enough for all that she's done."
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/02/20/content/iraqi_children_sm.jpg" Indeed, his wife, Tabitha Devine, can easily size up the toll the
last 11 months have taken on her and the children.
"It was hard, very hard," she says in a telephone
conversation. "I just worried all the time, scared for the phone
to ring, for somebody to knock on the door."
The children were sad. "They cried a lot, prayed a lot,"
she says.
War, she adds, "It's not something he wants to see
again, and it's not something I would want him to go through
again."
For now, though, Sergeant Devine is still in the Army, still
processing the memories of some grueling, dragging months in Iraq. He
stops over a photograph showing the highway to the airport littered with
land mines.
When they rolled into Baghdad in early May, they were told
they'd be home by Memorial Day. Then it was June and then
September. "That was messing with guys' minds," he
says.
Sergeant Devine tries to steer clear of the politics, but he
can't help himself.
"I ain't the smartest fellow out there, but I foresee
real problems. The Suni and Shiites don't get along," he
says of the challenges in bringing peace to Iraq.
As for controversy over the chemical and biological weapons -
President Bush's stated reason for launching the attack on Iraq
- Sergeant Devine is equally blunt: "There's nothing
there. We've been in the whole country."
SRC="http://www.mvgazette.com/news/2004/02/20/content/firing_range_sm.jpg" But there's also room in his stories for some laughter. He met
other Native Americans fighting in the war, but they'd never heard
of Wampanoags. "They called me ‘ham and no eggs,'
" says Sergeant Devine, laughing.
He also finds relief in the fact that he's now part of an
exclusive club, a combat veteran. Thinking about Vietnam vets, he says,
"I have mad respect for those guys now."
But he holds older veterans in even higher regard. "I love
talking to guys from World War II," he says. "It was nothing
like what I dealt with. They were gone for three or four years."
But although Sergeant Devine draws that distinction, sees their
sacrifice as greater than his, still he feels the bond, the brotherhood
with those who view his photographs and immediately understand.
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