10 Years Later: 'Mission Accomplished' Speech Painfully Ironic

By Fred Lambert

When Raymond Parra’s convoy was ambushed, the Navy Corpsman’s instincts kicked in. It was a dark night in Ramadi, Iraq on March 22, 2004, mainly because of power outages throughout the city. For some reason the Marines had decided to drive down one of the only lit roads while picking up a platoon from a patrol.


A rocket-propelled grenade sailed in from the darkness and through the passenger-side window of the second Humvee, striking the driver in the head (without exploding) and forcing him to lose control. The Humvee struck a concrete barrier just as Parra heard bullets from an RPK machine gun plinking against the side of his vehicle.


“I ended up pulling off about seven shots before we drove across that sector,” he says. “And then right when the vehicle stopped, I was the first person to jump off. I got my med-bag and I ended up running toward the downed vehicle.”


Equipment and Marines were spewed everywhere from the crash, and several of the men were suffering from broken limbs and dislocated joints. While treating a Marine whose hand had been smashed between the Humvee and the concrete barrier, Parra took off the man’s green issued glove and skin peeled away with it.


Some of the men shined flashlights at the driver. Parra asked what they were doing, and they told him that the Marine was dead. He asked them if they were sure, and one replied, “Yeah, the back of his head is missing.”

Soon the quick reaction force arrived, and Parra ordered nearby Marines to collect the rest of the dead Marine’s remains from the street. They were unable to find his Kevlar helmet, but gathered chunks of his brain and skull into a plastic bag. “We didn’t want some Iraqi dog eating pieces of a Marine,” Parra says.


This was Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment’s first man killed in action during the war, and it was a shock. But what was “the war”? If Parra and Marine comrades from his first tour to the region were asked that question in the late spring of 2003, they would have noted what was initially known as “the invasion” or “the push,” and later known as “the initial push,” “Operation Iraqi Freedom” or “OIF 1.” All of those terms indicated “the war” to U.S. troops at one time or another, and rightfully so. They had taken Baghdad, and “the war” was over.


And while the 10-year anniversary of “the war” has been dissected in blogs and editorials, some forget that the real war that Americans came to recognize on their TVs and laptop screens – an insurgency with roadside bombs, kidnappings, beheadings and snipers -- came after President George W. Bush stepped out of a jet onto the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 and declared that “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”


This irony haunts Barbara Gannon, professor of military history at the University of Central Florida. At the time of the invasion, Gannon was a defense analyst for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, investigating U.S. Army issues for Congress. She feels that the main reason the war didn’t end on schedule is because the U.S. invaded with too few troops.


“The Army War College wrote a long report about the aftermath, and there were not enough troops,” she says. “You’ve got to have enough troops. And everyone knew it wasn’t even close.”


Noting that the effort to drive the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1991 utilized over half a million men, Gannon cites former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki’s appraisal before a Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2003 that the U.S. would need a similar figure to secure post-invasion Iraq. “And that was not the ‘Bush’ answer,” Gannon says. Shinseki’s term was not renewed, and the White House ended up green-lighting a force of less than 200,000.


The real catalyst for disaster came when Bush sent Ambassador Paul Bremer to take over the post-invasion effort. The upstart promptly fired the Iraqi Army on May 23, 2003.


Gannon screamed in anger when she heard the news. “Our troops weren’t enough to be a policeman in every little town,” she says. “You couldn’t even cover the arms dumps. So of course, the Sunni insurgents took advantage of that and looted them, and they’d make handy little [improvised explosive devices].”


Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 2, as it was called, had the dual effect of forcing a small number of coalition troops to police Iraq alone while making potential enemies of disgruntled, unemployed (not to mention armed and trained) Iraqi soldiers who could have helped.


This was compounded by the Bush administration’s refusal to increase the size of the armed forces, Gannon explains. “The solution was to churn the same people through over and over again” on multiple tours, she says.

Ten years later, the “Mission Accomplished” speech is a searing irony for many veterans who served in Iraq through 2003 and 2004 in some of the most brutal fighting of the conflict.


Parra, now 29, was a skinny Pasadena native when he joined the Navy -- a choice inspired partly by his father, who was a Vietnam veteran. “He was a grunt with the Army -- Bronze Star, Purple Heart recipient -- and he told me to join the Navy because he didn’t want me to see the horrors of war,” Parra says with a chuckle.


This precaution vanished when Parra’s assigned Marine battalion deployed to Kuwait in February 2003, invading Iraq in a 21-day blitz in March and April. Parra distinguished himself in a firefight on April 4, treating wounded Marines and Iraqis as his company cut through a field of entrenched fighters south of Baghdad.


After Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed, Parra’s unit settled down for security and stabilization operations in the southern town of Ad Diwaniyah.


“There was a bit of peace,” he remembers. “”And that’s the time when we would just stand out at the [observation post] and eat chicken, kabobs; you know, just mess around.”


After his unit returned from Iraq in August, Parra spent only a short time stateside before he was transferred to 2/4, which was short of corpsmen for its upcoming deployment to Ramadi.


This would be 2/4’s first deployment to Iraq. The battalion had little combat experience outside the staff non-commissioned officer ranks who’d served in Somalia and Desert Storm, and Parra’s knowledge from his first tour was utilized in classes about traumatic wounds.


“Once we got to Ramadi, we had that whole, ‘Open hearts, open minds,’ type thing -- a peacekeeping operation,” he explains. “I would tell the guys stories about staying in OPs and eating chicken and fucking off. And that’s what the Marines kind of expected. They expected it to be a peacekeeping deployment. And they had no idea what we were walking into.”


Their first KIA was a wet slap in the face. The following days would be marked with more stinging wake-up calls as 2/4 absorbed a three-day wave of insurgent ambushes and roadside bombings in what became known as the Battle of Ramadi, in which a dozen Marines from 2/4 were killed.


This fight was indicative of what was occurring in other areas of the country that spring, such as Fallujah and Sadr City, and it seemed unlikely that anyone could have been more wrong than President Bush was on an aircraft carrier the previous May.


This new phase would be known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom II,” or “OIF II.” But few -- from the lowliest private to the Commander in Chief -- seemed willing to call it an insurgency until places like Ramadi were blowing up.


“From OIF I to OIF II, in the transition of those two periods, it just went from the normal peacekeeping operations -- having hajis come over, drinking cokes with them, them making us stuff to eat -- to the next thing you know, we were killing these fuckers in a brutal war,” Parra says.


But the pot had been boiling since the previous fall, when Spc. Perry Houchenf and his comrades in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division arrived in country.


Houchenf, 30, also known as “Hooch” by some of his Army pals, is an Ohio native now living in Columbus. He spent 10 years in the Army as a paratrooper and infantryman, and was deployed twice to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan.


He doesn’t even remember where he was when Bush gave his May 1 speech. “We just got back from Afghanistan in January of 2003, so we were just trying to get reintegrated,” he says. His brother was a member of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and was preparing to jump into northern Iraq. This was how Houchenf first learned of the incursion. He would join his brother in country by August 2003, when the 82nd Airborne was sent to Fallujah.


The levels of violence jolted Houchenf, despite previous warnings from his commanders. “It was a bit of a shock, because our last tour in Afghanistan, they were telling us the same stuff, but not a lot of things happened,” he says. “When we got into Iraq, we thought it might be a little bit of the same thing -- you know, building tents and shaking hands with people and stuff -- and suddenly there were people shooting at us.”


Most attacks occurred when soldiers would move “from point A to point B.” Roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices, were the biggest threat. “Almost every day someone would see an IED or get blown up by an IED,” Houchenf says.


Houchenf says that the politics of the continued fighting escaped many soldiers, including him. “I think that a lot of people were under the impression that it was supposed to be over with the invasion,” he says. “But as a young soldier who was lower enlisted, I didn’t have to be politically-minded. I just did what they told me.”


Houchenf knew, however, that the region was a tinderbox even as U.S. Marines relieved the 82nd months later. “It seemed to steadily increase in danger from when we got there to when we left,” he recalls. Night movements into Fallujah became protocol, since Houchenf and his unit were “getting ambushed and blown up too much during the day.”


What later came to be known as the First Battle of Fallujah – a bloody assault that took place at the same time Parra and 2/4 fought in Ramadi -- occurred after Houchenf and his unit left the city to the Marines. “It seemed like the environment was kind of boiling up,” he says. “It seemed like it was a pot ready to explode when we were there. And that often made it so that we were just trying to keep it from exploding, more or less.”


Ultimately, Houchenf says, they were just waiting to leave the country. “I can say that as soon as we got there we were counting down the days until we left,” he says. “Nobody wanted to be over there.”


Just as Houchenf and his unit were leaving Iraq, Jason Rossman, then an 18-year-old rifleman with Hotel Company 2/4, was flying in.


His unit commanders were far more complacent in their warnings about Ramadi.

“We were told that the people were going to love us -- we were told specifically that the only reason we were going to bring our weapons is because we had to,” the 27-year-old Las Vegas resident amusedly recalls. “But we wouldn’t have to use them -- we were going to be loved, and they would be giving us flowers when we got there.”


When Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech, Rossman was a senior at Canyon High School in Anaheim Hills, Calif. He joined the Marines not for benefits or patriotism, but because it was what he wanted to do since he was 7 years old.


He signed up for the Delayed Entry Program when he was 17, but didn’t fathom that he might go to Iraq. “I mean, the invasion happened during my senior year and the war ended when I was done with high school,” he says. “But I really didn’t know. I figured if I went, I would just be hanging out. I didn’t think there would be real combat.”


Ramadi seemed quiet at first, especially when Rossman’s company replaced a Puerto Rican National Guard unit. “What we were told was that they never left the base,” he says. “They just made sure they got their food every day, and they briefed our captain that there was no violence, no attacks, nothing of any kind; there was nothing going on in the city.”


The frenzy of bloody combat that proceeded in the spring flipped this notion on its head. Rossman survived the Battle of Ramadi – what he calls “three days of non-stop fighting; real Black Hawk Down, without the helicopters” – only to be wounded on a patrol the following June.


“We were just leaving an observation post, and I was always the last guy in the patrol,” he recalls. “And I got shot by a machine gun from one of the buildings that was behind me.”


Missing his protective plate by an inch, a bullet pierced Rossman’s shoulder, traveled into his chest and through his lung, exiting and striking his wrist. Another grazed his midsection, breaking some ribs. His time in Ramadi was over, but like many U.S. troops, he would recover and eventually return to Iraq.


“The problem was that we were very arrogant. You [should] never underestimate the enemy,” Rossman says. “Everyone there was very patriotic and motivated. I was very proud to be a Marine. And I didn’t know any better -- I was barely 18.”


On his second tour to Iraq, Rossman recalls having an embittered, cynical feeling on board the ship that sailed toward the war zone. “I wasn’t demotivated or anything like that; I’m just a realist. I knew that what we were doing wasn’t going to help us in any way -- our country, anything,” he says.


Gannon agrees, but credits how well U.S. troops fought.  “I don’t think anyone thought the all-volunteer force would hold up as well as it did through all those rotations,” she says. “That’s what I was always astonished by.”


When asked whether he finds it ironic that former President Bush declared “major combat operations in Iraq” over nearly a year before the spring 2004 fighting, Rossman says: “I don’t find it an irony, I find it a tragedy. Because in any fucking war, when you say the war is over, that means nobody else is going to die. But the funny part is barely anybody died during the war. But after the war was over, everybody died.”