The Echoes from Echo Company

By: David Swanson It's been a year. It's been over a year. I am reminded by the front-page story in Monday's New York Times by Michael Moss that it really did happen.

He writes of 10 Marines who died in an ambush in Iraq on April 6, 2004, during three consecutive and separate firefights. I know this happened. I was there, and sometimes I think I never left.

Safely home for over a year now, I'm back to work at The Philadelphia Inquirer on a regular beat. Yet I still can't shake the memory of what happened during my two weeks with Echo Company of the Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment of the United States Marines -- The Magnificent Bastards.

Moss is correct. The company did suffer the most losses of any company in this war, as it did in previous wars in the Gulf and in Vietnam, which I would watch on a small black and white TV as I ate my lunch, home from elementary school. This would somehow water the seed in my mind that I wanted to be a war photographer.

Company Commander Captain Kelly Royer accepted me on April Fool's Day 2004 after my fixer drove me out of Baghdad, through Fallujah and its infamous green bridge, to Ramadi. Although he was four years my junior, and a few inches shorter, I looked up to Royer.

With a freckled face and wrestler's build, he looked his part. During this week in April, we experienced our first firefights, killing, and death.

During that week, a second lieutenant I walked twelve miles with one day was the next day shot in the jaw and killed. Another young marine I went to the PX with was killed two days later. Another, three days later.

I have never left Iraq. Nearly every day since my return I have received an e-mail from a mother of a son who survived or a letter of pride from a father whose son did not. I have received e-mails from a national guardsman criticizing the policy of the battalion leadership after the Marines took over Ramadi, and e-mails from veterans who question my expertise because I didn't capitalize the 'M' in Marine in a caption. I have a cookbook from the proud Marine mothers of Echo Company. I have new friends and an extended family of the survivors of the fallen.

I have a thank-you note from the widow of the second lieutenant thanking me for photographing her husband "walking to heaven."

At home, I have a four-year old daughter who at one point wanted to know if I was sleeping at mama's house tonight. I have a new appreciation for the little things. I have a small pink scar on the bottom of my right bicep where I was grazed by a bullet.

Moss writes of Kelly Royer's dismissal as company commander. I have known about this since it unfolded, and it saddened me beyond belief that he could not walk the last hundred yards with his men, as I did at Camp Pendleton while photographing their homecoming.

I have been admonished by some in Royer's charge, suggesting that I was only with Company E for two weeks and not for the remaining months when the heat of the desert reached over 100 degrees and an 18-year-old Marine, in his bed, may question himself, his leadership, and the corps.

I met a Deshon Otey while I was there. He survived the deadly attack on April 6 as the only survivor in the lead Humvee, in which eight Marines died. He said he could not sleep that night, his hooch so quiet, so empty. Otey died a month later with three other Marines.

On a Saturday morning all those months ago, I sunk deep in a sewage ditch, half covered in fetid human waste, smelling gunfire and smelling wet clover as Royer screamed he was hit in the head. A bullet had left a perfectly centered divot on his helmet. The Marine in front of me was hit from frag in his thigh, the Marine behind screaming from a broken leg, fiery red tracer rounds piercing the morning mist. They said a RPG hit the cement wall to our right.

There are opinions from both camps regarding the firing of Royer and the sudden change in his fitness report. I have stayed in touch with Royer, and his wife, although not as frequently as we did when he first came home. I have in my own way tried to confront him and ask for an explanation for his dismissal, and I am satisfied with his answer. He says that he can look himself in the mirror and accept who he sees.

That is good enough for me.