MDI man recalls war in Iraq Sight of mass graves leaves abiding image in Marine’s memory

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MOUNT DESERT – The Iraqi man couldn’t speak English, so he tugged on the shirt of a U.S. Marine patrolling near As Samawah in southern Iraq. Even with the language barrier, the troops from the 1st Marine Division understood that the man wanted to show them something.

In the end, no words in any language could aptly describe what the Marines found in May: a mass grave containing the remains of 3,000 Kuwaitis, victims of a merciless Saddam Hussein regime that killed its own people and southern neighbors.

But even with so much carnage, it was the indelible image of a tiny skull that stopped Marine Capt. Warren Cook Jr.

“When you see a baby skull – a fist-sized skull would better describe it – with a bullet hole in it, you begin to realize what this country has been through,” Cook said Friday during an interview at his home in Pretty Marsh Village.

A quiet rain dribbled across the lush green landscape of Mount Desert Island, heaven for a man who has spent the last two years in dusty and desolate Afghanistan and Iraq as aide-de-camp to a ranking commander in the field.

“It’s the hardest thing to deal with,” Cook said of the mass graves, which continue to be unearthed throughout Iraq. “It’s an emotional experience.

“You’re prepared to puke your guts out when you see a baby skull, but we are so well prepared” that the American soldiers, rattled and distressed by what they see, are able to complete their mission.

At another mass grave, where an estimated 15,000 men, women and their children were unceremoniously buried near Babylon, Cook listened as a witness told a hair-raising story through an interpreter. The man had watched in shocked horror as Saddam’s henchmen systematically murdered 60 busloads of people – many of them appearing to be entire families – in a single night.

The man remembered the screams of the victims, believed to be Iraqis, who were unloaded from the buses and lined up for execution. He recounted for the soldiers the sound of gunshots and the images of people dropping to the dirt. He remembered the morbid silence that followed, the bodies being heaved into a pit, the earth-moving equipment used to cover them over.

“There is no secret where the mass graves are,” Cook, 28, said.

“It’s just that people haven’t had the guts to go in there for fear of being killed themselves,” he said, adding, “The most profound thing about the mass graves for me was listening to that man tell that story.”

More and more Iraqis are coming forward now to identify mass graves, Cook said, especially after Americans killed Saddam’s two sons last month.

“We still have people leaping up [in celebration] at the sight of American convoys,” he said.

Cook is happy to be home from the two wars, which he has witnessed up close from the beginning. As chief aide to a commanding general, Cook was sitting next to his superior when he got his orders to “Land, raise hell and topple the Taliban.”

Cook is the son of Brammie and Warren Cook, president of JAX Research Systems, a subsidiary of The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor. The young man grew up in the western Maine mountains in Kingfield and graduated from Williams College with a history degree before joining the Marines.

Cook, who is unmarried, will leave later this month for Marine instructor school, first in Arizona and then in Georgia, where he’ll learn how to teach infantry skills to “freshly minted Marines” just out of boot camp.

Although he was in the thick of the action in both Afghanistan and Iraq – his division took the eastern part of Baghdad – there never was a time when his life was in imminent threat of injury or death, he said.

He looked away for a moment as he remembered that not all of the 1st Division Marines were as fortunate: 22 were killed and 175 others were wounded in action.

“The most distressing thing to me is the young Marines who were killed, and sending them home to families you know,” he said. “That is very difficult.”

Cook praised the 1st Division for its commitment, and predicted that the Marines would not slow until they get new orders.

“The Marines are not sucking their thumbs saying, ‘We want to go home,'” Cook said in reference to media reports that some soldiers are complaining about how long they’ve been in Iraq.

“We’ll go home when we’re told to go home,” he said. “We are prepared to stay as long as the president wants us to stay.”

Cook said Americans should have more patience as the military scours Iraq for weapons of mass destruction – the primary reason the Bush administration used for invading Iraq in March.

“If you asked someone in Maine to hide something, and gave them four or five months lead time to do it in a place the size of Maine, it’s going to take awhile to find it,” he said. “I have no doubt we will find weapons of mass destruction.”

Cook has horrific memories of his days in Iraq, but also a deep sense of pride about helping to liberate the country. He is hopeful that the Iraqi people will build a new country free from fear and tyranny.

Unlike Afghanistan, there are skilled “technocrats” in Iraq who “have a lot of pride in their professions” who will rebuild the country. They include engineers, craftsmen, electrical and oil experts and others, Cook said.

He predicted that the most challenging work facing Iraq would be to forming a government from two disparate religious groups, the Shiite Muslim Arabs and the Sunni Muslims.

“Eventually we want to come home,” Cook said of the military, “and our ticket home is a country back on its feet functioning on its own.”