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Why Are We There?

Even after serving in Iraq for a year, Sgt. Jolicia Harper doesn't know why American soldiers are there.

“When I first got there, I was still trying to figure out what was the purpose of us being there,” says the 23-year-old sophomore nursing student.

“I don’t care if anyone sat down and explained to me why we were there. It might sound funny—I just don’t understand.”

Harper and her platoon drove trucks to deliver supplies to camps all over Iraq. One of her first missions was delivering toilet paper.

“We were mad,” she says. “Why do we have to haul this stuff and risk our lives?”

“You didn't even know they were bombs”

A group of soldiers were supposed to scout out the area the convoys would be driving through, but sometimes that didn’t happen.

“It was a fear of being in danger pretty much every time we left from our camp,” she says. “We never knew what was ahead.”

Most of the time, Harper was on the lookout for roadside bombs. She recognized a dead dog on the road as a bomb because there were wires coming out from under it. Other times, the bombs would be buried in the sand.

“The bombs they’d set up, you didn’t even know they were bombs,” she says.

 Toward the end of one mission, as Harper was driving, she thought about how she wanted to get back to camp, eat and take a shower. She was about to merge into the left lane but changed her mind at the last second.

“Something just kept me in the middle lane,” she says.

Then, to her left, she heard an explosion. Through the windshield of the Humvee, she saw dirt in the air. In her seat, she felt the ground shaking.

“It just all happened so fast. We didn’t know. We thought we were being shot at,” she says. “From that day on, I was scared. I wanted to go home.”

That was in February. In April, things got worse. Insurgents blew up bridges and roads to slow the convoys. Harper’s convoy was stuck at a camp because a fuel truck couldn’t make it to them. They left two hours before insurgents tried to get into the camp where they had been stranded.

That mission would be one of Harper’s last. In May, she and the rest of the 762nd unit were sent home.

“I didn’t believe it until the plane was up in the air,” she says. From Kuwait, Harper’s unit was flown to a base in Kentucky before they were bused to Akron.

Harper got to Akron on her grandmother’s birthday, and her grandmother told her it was the best birthday present she could have received. When Harper got off the bus, a woman she didn’t know hugged her and thanked her.

“People I didn’t know were just glad for us to be home,” she says.

Harper doesn’t like to think about being in Iraq, and after she got home, she didn’t watch the news or read the newspaper because she was afraid she would see or read about someone she knew.

But the war changed Harper in ways she can’t ignore.

She doesn’t like being in large groups of people because, for a year, she lived in a tent with 18 people. The sound and sight of helicopters remind her of being in danger. On the Fourth of July, she stayed home instead of going to see the fireworks because the loud noises emotionally disturb her.

These souvenirs will stay with her long after the heat of the war has passed.

Amanda Codispoti is a senior newspaper journalism major. This is her first time writing for The Burr.

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