The Road to Safwan: The 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the 1991 ...

Postwar Operations 225
Iraqi agents tried to avoid the roadblock and get away. However,
Pope’s troopers caught them and sent them back to a prisoner
of war camp. 23
Sometimes the cause of the problem was simple starvation,
a typical problem for civilians caught in a war zone. In one instance,
a family approached a military checkpoint. The soldiers
went through the normal procedures to verify that they did not
have weapons. All of the women were wearing their typical
black robes and one was obviously hiding something. As a soldier
approached and began to question her, she moved away
and began acting extremely strangely. The young troops took
their weapons off safe and began to react to what could be a
hostile incident. Finally, the women disclosed that she was hiding
a very sick baby about one year old. She told the soldiers
that the child had not eaten for about four or five days because
she had run out of breast milk. The infant was in bad shape and
the troopers took them both to the medic vehicle and attempted
to get the child to suck some milk from a gauze. Nothing
seemed to work. At the same time, they gave the woman some
of their rations and protected her while she ate, since the men
normally tried to take the food and eat it first. 24 The baby would
not eat and looked more like a few months old rather than almost
twelve months. Six years later, the officer who witnessed
the whole scene was still grieving over what he had observed
that spring day in Iraq. 25
The treatment of women and children by the Iraqi males
grated on some of the soldiers. In one case CPT Pope noticed a
sixteen-year-old girl sitting apart from the family as if she had
some kind of strange disease. When he asked her younger
brother, who spoke English, he discovered that she had been
gang-raped by Iraqi soldiers and was no longer considered to
be part of her own family. 26 In another instance a young child
came to the checkpoint everyday to talk to the soldiers and get
food. He told them that Iraqi soldiers had raped his sister many
times and asked for help. It made the soldiers angry, but there
was nothing they could do. 27
One other thing stuck in squadron members’ minds during
this period: the dogs. Packs of wild, and recently wild, dogs ran
throughout the area. Having attacked wounded soldiers and