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| "I got to where I could stomach a lot of things," she said. "I've come back a combat veteran. And I'm only 20." |
http://www.suntimes.com/output/iraq/cst-nw...-soldier04.html
From Kuwait to Baghdad with 'GI Jane'
August 4, 2003
BY CHERYL L. REED Staff Reporter
Alicia Flores' relatives call her GI Jane. The Army calls her one of the first servicewomen to enter Iraq during the war.
On March 19, Flores, a Proviso East High School graduate and an Army chemical operations specialist based at Fort Stewart, Ga., volunteered to accompany a smoke platoon--including three other women--with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division.
Before dawn, they left the safety of their camp in Kuwait and crossed into Iraq. Wearing her Kevlar vest over a chemical suit, Flores expected to take gunfire immediately as her unit crossed the border. But the landscape was vacant and eerily quiet.
Within 15 minutes, the sun peaked over the sand, casting a surreal light spectacle against the convoy of 30 armored tanks and trucks snaking through the desert.
"The sun was so beautiful, and I was thinking: Who knows if I'll be alive to see it go down today?" Flores remembered as she sat on her mother's couch in West Lawn last Tuesday, a day after she returned home. As family members listened intently, she described how it took three days in Iraq before she could relax. But as one of only four women in a convoy of about 150 men, Flores couldn't let on to her fellow soldiers that she was scared.
(Although Flores' unit had few females, 10 percent of the enlisted troops deployed to Iraq in March were women. While Desert Storm deployed more troops, including more women--48,755 then compared with 22,285 in this war--they made up just 7 percent of those who served then.)
On the fourth morning, an ambush of mortar rounds marked their first encounter with Iraqi troops--and Flores' 20th birthday.
"After the firefight, the guys stopped the tanks and got out and sang happy birthday to me," said Flores. "That was about it."
Her four months in Iraq, though, weren't all gunfire. First, she had to learn to live with an armory of men who'd never served alongside women before.
"I think I intimidated them more than they did me," she said.
The desert offered no privacy, so Flores had to swallow her modesty, dig holes and tell the men to turn their heads. She became accustomed to curious looks.
"It was awkward at first," she remembered. "They stared for the first week."
On their second week in Iraq, Flores and her platoon took the heaviest gunfire yet, with AK-40s and mortar rounds landing 20 feet away as they created a smoke screen so their convoy's tanks could cross the Euphrates River. The Army says it was the first time such a smoke mission was deployed in a river crossing since 1942.
As Flores' convoy made its way north, they passed dead bodies swarming with flies, body parts and wild dogs that were feasting on the decaying flesh. One morning while Flores was brushing her teeth, she walked upon a dead Iraqi lying next to her tank. A casualty of an earlier battle, the soldier had been dead for only a couple of hours.
By the third week, the convoy reached Baghdad, where they helped guard the airport, which was under attack daily. Eventually she pulled guard duty at Saddam Hussein's presidential palace, where she and other soldiers amused themselves by playing dress-up with Saddam's extensive wardrobe and performing skits for each other.
They broke up the monotony of guard duty by taking pictures of themselves pointing weapons at Saddam's many portraits or posing as a dictator in one of his oversize throne chairs or pretending to dip their toes in his empty swimming pool.
When soldiers discovered a stash of more than $600 million, Flores was assigned to guard it, too.
"All we could do was sit there and watch it," she said. Less fun was "baby-sitting" the enemy prisoners of war, including five from the military's deck of cards and several others she called "High-Dollar Value Guys." Part of her responsibility was to make sure the prisoners received one MRE (meal ready to eat) and one bottle of water a day. Prisoners were kept 25 to a cell. Several offered her marriage proposals.
"They would tell the other male soldiers that they had a camel and a sheep and wanted to trade them for me. A lot of them wanted me to marry them and take them back to America."
Several spoke English and would try to engage Flores in conversation.
"They kept asking me why we came over there. Why did we do this to their land, their people? I told them that I didn't have an answer," she said flatly. "I didn't know why I was over there. I had a job to do. We weren't supposed to show sympathy. We were supposed to push them around."
At 5-foot-2, the petite and soft-spoken Flores hardly seems threatening, with her delicate features and soft voice, but apparently when she wielded her M-16, the Iraqi prisoners took her seriously.
"They were really impressed," she said, smiling.
When her convoy left Iraq in late June, Flores says she had hardened into an experienced soldier.
"I got to where I could stomach a lot of things," she said. "I've come back a combat veteran. And I'm only 20."
