Carol scrapes enough money together and we start the long drive south from Connecticut. We leave in the late afternoon and stop in Virginia at midnight, and hit the road early the next morning.
In Georgia, we meet Erick, who worked in a motor pool in Baghdad. Erick was fairly amazed at the lack of major media coverage of a march in Washington that he participated in. “You have all these vets, they’re against the war for a reason, you’d think people would want to know.”
Adam, in Atlanta, was ready for payback after 9/11, but he could never make any logical connection between Iraq and the World Trade Center. “Most of the hijackers were Saudi. We don’t have a single soldier deployed in the war on terror in Saudi Arabia,” he says wryly.
In North Carolina we spoke with Jimmy, a very amiable former sergeant in the Marines, who tells us a harrowing tale of a speeding car that would not stop at a checkpoint in Iraq, where he was in charge. The Marines opened fire, killing everyone but the driver. It was a miscommunication—they were not terrorists. The driver, unharmed, was in agony and began pulling his hair out by the roots. He approached Jimmy, and raised a finger. “You did this. You killed my brother.” Jimmy could say nothing in response. “That’s something I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life,” he tells us quietly.
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