Weeks later, it happened again, only this time to Fennerty: a bomb exploded under his vehicle during a patrol in Karmah near Fallujah. Three months after their deployment to Iraq, all three roommates were dead.
But their letters remain. Three months ago, NEWSWEEK began gathering letters and e-mails written home by troops killed in Iraq, hoping to learn something about the war that can’t be gleaned from the daily press accounts and news analyses. Nearly a thousand families were contacted. Many wanted to know their letters would not be used to make a political statement for or against the war. Once reassured, they poured out to our reporters, forwarding e-mails, faxing handwritten letters, mailing in recordings with the voices of their loved ones. “With less than 1 percent of the U.S. population serving in the military, this project will put a name on a number,” wrote Karen Meredith, whose son, First Lt. Kenneth Ballard was killed in May 2004.
The result is a special issue of NEWSWEEK next week, on newsstands Monday, almost entirely devoted to the writings of service members who lost their lives, and complementary material on our Web site, Newsweek.com, which will continue to publish soldiers’ messages home in an ongoing series during the coming weeks. Strung together, the letters draw the arc of the four-year-old conflict, from the initial invasion, through the rise of the insurgency, the stabs at democracy and the spasms of civil war.
Separately, the letters tell us something more intimate about people at war. Fennerty, both in the run-up to the deployment and in Iraq itself, talked about anticipation and fear. “This sitting around and waiting so close to our goal gets old,” he wrote his family from Kuwait, where his unit spent more than two weeks waiting to enter Iraq. “All joking aside, there’s some stupid stuff going on up north and I’m anxious/nervous/excited/scared to go.” In Iraq, his job was to comb Baghdad neighborhoods for roadside bombs (“improvised explosive devices”). “We hunt for IEDs on a main highway and set up checkpoints. Taking small arms fire and patrolling is the easy stuff. The hard stuff is finding these damn IEDs and keeping focused.” Later, he tells a few family members (but not his mother, so as not to alarm her) about the first of three attacks on his convoy. “The night of Thanksgiving … my truck was blown up. No one in my team was hurt, it just scared the bejesus out of all of us and did some serious damage to the truck. None of us saw this thing coming.” Almost always, he signed his letters GO BEAVERS, a reference to the football team of his alma mater, Oregon State University.
Fennerty, who grew up in Portland, Ore., enlisted after getting a degree in history. His father had been a doctor in the Navy, and the memories of military life were sweet for everyone in the family. “It was the best period of our lives,” says Sean’s mother, Maureen. She said Fennerty tried to hide his comfortable upbringing from friends in the military, but his constant reading set him apart. After long days of training, other soldiers would get mad at Fennerty for keeping the light on in the barracks to read his tomes, like Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” “They’d yell at him to turn the bleeping light off,” Maureen says. As a sergeant in Anchorage, he began hunting for an apartment off base.
Gifford teamed up with Fennerty in the search, and Linck (whose family could not be reached by NEWSWEEK) joined later. A 27-year-old staff sergeant and the son of a preacher, Gifford graduated from Harding University, a Christian liberal-arts school in Arkansas, in 2003, then moved back in with his parents in Redding, Calif. He decided to enlist after watching the beheading of Nicholas Berg, an American businessman who had been kidnapped in Iraq. “We were both just totally aghast,” says Gifford’s mother, Marsha. “My older son was serving in the Marines, so we were glued to the television, and when this came on, Micah got angry.” The beheading took place in May 2004. Gifford was in boot camp by August.
He wrote few letters from Iraq. In one from Kuwait dated Oct. 21, 2006, Gifford described the routine to his girlfriend, Niki Milano. “As for the things I can talk about that you may or may not want to know … the camp here is pretty chill. We train every once in a while and the squad leaders try to keep us busy in a good way. Sgt. always ends up asking me what I think we need to work on and I am flattered that he thinks to ask me, but at the same time a little disheartened at the fact that he needs to ask me. Also, the guys get pissy when they have a choice to train or sleep and I come up with something that we need to train on. Then they get mad at me for being the reason they are training and not sleeping.”
Later, Gifford tells Niki how soldiers in his unit pass the time: “Reading, playing PSP, watching episodes of House M.D., the Simpsons, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, playing nerdy PC games linked to each others laptops, playing with I-tunes and wandering around aimlessly, doing crossword puzzles and su-dork-u’s … When someone comes up with training that disturbs those things, everyone gets peeved and grumbles all the way through whatever training we do.”
After Gifford and Linck were killed Dec. 7, 2006, officers from the base in Anchorage entered the apartment and packed up the belongings of two of the roommates. “They tried to determine what belonged to each of them,” Marsha Gifford says. Her son’s things arrived to Redding in a box, among them a yellowed copy he’d kept of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper announcing the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Weeks later, officers entered the apartment again to pack Fennerty’s belongings. His family received clothes and books, Fennerty’s drivers license and a journal he kept before his deployment to Iraq.
In his last e-mail home, dated Jan 5, 2007—15 days before he was killed—Fennerty wrote about being moved out of Baghdad to “topsecretsville, Iraq.” “It starts with F and looks a lot like hallelujah,” he wrote from Fallujah. “Where I was earlier was like kindergarten and barney compared to this place. No running water, showers, hot chow, phones or Internet … But the biggest difference is the people friegen HATE us here. I guess it goes with the territory … Anyway, happy new year to all and take care of yourselves, as I will.
“GO BEAVERS.”
title: “Iraq U.S. Soldiers Letters Left Behind” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-13” author: “Samuel Turcotte”
Weeks later, it happened again, only this time to Fennerty: a bomb exploded under his vehicle during a patrol in Karmah near Fallujah. Three months after their deployment to Iraq, all three roommates were dead.
But their letters remain. Three months ago, NEWSWEEK began gathering letters and e-mails written home by troops killed in Iraq, hoping to learn something about the war that can’t be gleaned from the daily press accounts and news analyses. Nearly a thousand families were contacted. Many wanted to know their letters would not be used to make a political statement for or against the war. Once reassured, they poured out to our reporters, forwarding e-mails, faxing handwritten letters, mailing in recordings with the voices of their loved ones. “With less than 1 percent of the U.S. population serving in the military, this project will put a name on a number,” wrote Karen Meredith, whose son, First Lt. Kenneth Ballard was killed in May 2004.
The result is a special issue of NEWSWEEK next week, on newsstands Monday, almost entirely devoted to the writings of service members who lost their lives, and complementary material on our Web site, Newsweek.com, which will continue to publish soldiers’ messages home in an ongoing series during the coming weeks. Strung together, the letters draw the arc of the four-year-old conflict, from the initial invasion, through the rise of the insurgency, the stabs at democracy and the spasms of civil war.
Separately, the letters tell us something more intimate about people at war. Fennerty, both in the run-up to the deployment and in Iraq itself, talked about anticipation and fear. “This sitting around and waiting so close to our goal gets old,” he wrote his family from Kuwait, where his unit spent more than two weeks waiting to enter Iraq. “All joking aside, there’s some stupid stuff going on up north and I’m anxious/nervous/excited/scared to go.” In Iraq, his job was to comb Baghdad neighborhoods for roadside bombs (“improvised explosive devices”). “We hunt for IEDs on a main highway and set up checkpoints. Taking small arms fire and patrolling is the easy stuff. The hard stuff is finding these damn IEDs and keeping focused.” Later, he tells a few family members (but not his mother, so as not to alarm her) about the first of three attacks on his convoy. “The night of Thanksgiving … my truck was blown up. No one in my team was hurt, it just scared the bejesus out of all of us and did some serious damage to the truck. None of us saw this thing coming.” Almost always, he signed his letters GO BEAVERS, a reference to the football team of his alma mater, Oregon State University.
Fennerty, who grew up in Portland, Ore., enlisted after getting a degree in history. His father had been a doctor in the Navy, and the memories of military life were sweet for everyone in the family. “It was the best period of our lives,” says Sean’s mother, Maureen. She said Fennerty tried to hide his comfortable upbringing from friends in the military, but his constant reading set him apart. After long days of training, other soldiers would get mad at Fennerty for keeping the light on in the barracks to read his tomes, like Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” “They’d yell at him to turn the bleeping light off,” Maureen says. As a sergeant in Anchorage, he began hunting for an apartment off base.
Gifford teamed up with Fennerty in the search, and Linck (whose family could not be reached by NEWSWEEK) joined later. A 27-year-old staff sergeant and the son of a preacher, Gifford graduated from Harding University, a Christian liberal-arts school in Arkansas, in 2003, then moved back in with his parents in Redding, Calif. He decided to enlist after watching the beheading of Nicholas Berg, an American businessman who had been kidnapped in Iraq. “We were both just totally aghast,” says Gifford’s mother, Marsha. “My older son was serving in the Marines, so we were glued to the television, and when this came on, Micah got angry.” The beheading took place in May 2004. Gifford was in boot camp by August.
He wrote few letters from Iraq. In one from Kuwait dated Oct. 21, 2006, Gifford described the routine to his girlfriend, Niki Milano. “As for the things I can talk about that you may or may not want to know … the camp here is pretty chill. We train every once in a while and the squad leaders try to keep us busy in a good way. Sgt. always ends up asking me what I think we need to work on and I am flattered that he thinks to ask me, but at the same time a little disheartened at the fact that he needs to ask me. Also, the guys get pissy when they have a choice to train or sleep and I come up with something that we need to train on. Then they get mad at me for being the reason they are training and not sleeping.”
Later, Gifford tells Niki how soldiers in his unit pass the time: “Reading, playing PSP, watching episodes of House M.D., the Simpsons, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, playing nerdy PC games linked to each others laptops, playing with I-tunes and wandering around aimlessly, doing crossword puzzles and su-dork-u’s … When someone comes up with training that disturbs those things, everyone gets peeved and grumbles all the way through whatever training we do.”
After Gifford and Linck were killed Dec. 7, 2006, officers from the base in Anchorage entered the apartment and packed up the belongings of two of the roommates. “They tried to determine what belonged to each of them,” Marsha Gifford says. Her son’s things arrived to Redding in a box, among them a yellowed copy he’d kept of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper announcing the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Weeks later, officers entered the apartment again to pack Fennerty’s belongings. His family received clothes and books, Fennerty’s drivers license and a journal he kept before his deployment to Iraq.
In his last e-mail home, dated Jan 5, 2007—15 days before he was killed—Fennerty wrote about being moved out of Baghdad to “topsecretsville, Iraq.” “It starts with F and looks a lot like hallelujah,” he wrote from Fallujah. “Where I was earlier was like kindergarten and barney compared to this place. No running water, showers, hot chow, phones or Internet … But the biggest difference is the people friegen HATE us here. I guess it goes with the territory … Anyway, happy new year to all and take care of yourselves, as I will.
“GO BEAVERS.”
