Carl Covington
Credit: Carl Covington
If I make it home, that’s cool. If I don’t make it home, that’s cool, too. I’m done. I’m tired. I'm tired of this life-style.
Charles Handy
Credit: Charles Handy
This is going to sound crazy, but I probably feel more safe over in Iraq than in Oakland...
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Let me introduce you to Carl Covington, Terrance Harris, and Charles Handy. Terrance just finished boot camp. Charles enlisted in the Army before the U.S. invaded Iraq. So did Carl. He was in charge of equipment maintenance and supplies in the field.
Six days before he was scheduled to ship back home, Carl was badly injured.
CARL (on tape)
We hit a T- intersection and there was a 155-millimeter artillery shell. It blew up, and the ground was shaking. My friend told me, he said “Man your legs are messed-up pretty bad. Are you hurt, are you hurt?”
He said, “You’re bleeding pretty bad from your legs.”
I said, “I don’t know, I don’t feel anything.”
IRIE
Carl said from there, it just got worse.
CARL (on tape)
I had a hole in my left leg about a foot long and bout five inches wide on both sides of my calf, and my knee-cap was blown off on my right leg, and I had two holes about the size of a silver dollar underneath my knee. I was happy it was over.
I was like, “If I make it home, that’s cool. If I don’t make it home, that’s cool, too. I’m done. I’m tired. I'm tired of this life-style. I’m done.”
Three years of going to war, and there’s not a day that goes by that you’re happy to be there. And my first sergeant told us, “I don’t care what you do. If you see an Iraqi outside past nine o’clock, I want you to shoot ‘em. Shoot ‘em dead because they’re out there planting IED’s out in the roads.”
He said his job was to make sure we came home.
IRIE
And that’s where Carl went to recover, lying on his mom’s couch in the San Francisco Bay Area. And then there’s Terrence Harris. He’s passionate about the military. When Terrence finished boot camp, he started working as a hometown recruiter, visiting high schools to get students to enlist. He was a member of the Junior ROTC as a high school student himself. That’s when he went to a recruiting office, where he met Sergeant McGee.
TERRENCE (on tape)
Iraq is in a struggle, but Sergeant McGee showed me how people weren’t eating, they didn’t have clothes, they didn’t have shoes.
IRIE
Terrance signed up for the Army. He’s 19. He knows he may be sent to Iraq. Terrance’s feelings about Iraqis sound similar to what we’ve heard from some other U.S. Soldiers.
TERRANCE (on tape)
The Army, going over there, a lot of things need to be done, and there are a lot of uncivilized ways they have. And, some people ask me, do I have fear, as far as joining the Army and getting hurt. I tell you, when you walk in level faith that I walk in with the Lord, fear is not an option. It’s not an idea. It’s not thought.
If Iraq is where they’d like to send me, I wouldn’t mind going and experiencing it. I believe the benefits of it when you get back are powerful. Money can’t buy what you understand, how you feel, and what you see, how all of that changes when you go on a tour in Iraq. This uniform is powerful.
My first negative experience I’d ever had when I was in uniform was when a man came up to me out of rage and said, you know, “What the F you doing?” It was like his eyes went from clear white to red, bloody red. I told him that’s my decision to make. This is just Oakland, but I plan to see the world.
IRIE
Charles Handy’s already seen what Terrence only dreams about.
CHARLES (on tape)
This is going to sound crazy, but I probably feel more safe over in Iraq than in Oakland...
IRIE
When Charles returned home to Oakland, he got a hero’s welcome. He never saw combat in Iraq, but his time at war made him realize something crazy about combat...in his own neighborhood.
CHARLES (on tape)
Being over there, I had ammunition and Kevlar, and being over there, I knew I had the license to kill somebody if they wanted to pulled a gun on me or something.
When I got here. When I got to America, I wanted to kiss the ground, but I didn’t. I just hugged everybody and I almost cried and stuff.
But my little cousins, they say ever since I came back from the army, they say I don’t like to play with them so much. They say I’m too serious.
I think in some ways, since I’ve been back, I am a little bit more serious. But I see that being back in Oakland, I like Oakland, I love Oakland, and I’ve got friends and family. But at the same time it’s a lot of bad things here too, but I just try to stay away from all that stuff.
My best friend probably experienced more combat in Oakland than I experienced down in Iraq. He was telling me one night how he almost got shot and he dodged two bullets. I was over there with M-16s and going on convoys and things like that, but nobody ever shot at me. And he was over here just walking home one day and somebody shot at him.
IRIE
Charles made it clear--he doesn’t plan on going back to Iraq.
Terrence is now working as an x-ray technician at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Carl is recovering at Walter Reed Medical Center. After he is released next spring, he won’t be sent back to active duty because he has permanent nerve damage to his injured leg. |
