Public Employee Press

Part of a series on DC 37 members in Iraq
On patrol with Local 924’s Robert Castro
The most dangerous road in the world

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Robert Castro wakes up every couple of hours at night, on edge from his experience as a sergeant in the Iraq War.

His war trauma is no surprise. He spent 19 months patrolling a six-mile stretch of the Baghdad airport highway, dubbed the most dangerous road on earth.

Castro, a member of Laborers Local 924, had nightmares when he first returned home late last year. Now doing construction work at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, he says counseling has helped him adapt.

“We are indebted to the men and women who like Robert, have put their lives on the line in wartime to preserve the safety and freedom we enjoy at home,” said Local 924 President Kyle Simmons.

Understandably, Castro is reticent about his combat experience — the foot patrols, the deadly highway, the nighttime raids. But he readily shares his conflicting feelings about the war, his deep sense of patriotism and camaraderie with his fellow soldiers, and the personal toll of his service in Iraq.

“Sometimes I thought I was never going to make it back,” Castro said. Riding with a five-member Humvee team in a security detail with three vehicles, Castro lived each day in fear of being blown apart by remote-controlled explosive devices.

Injured in a grenade attack
When a rocket-propelled grenade struck a wall in a building he was searching, he fell to the floor and aggravated a knee injury. Because Castro wanted to serve out his tour of duty with his wartime colleagues, he decided to wait until he returned home for a needed knee operation. “I had the chance for light duty, but I didn’t want to leave my men,” he said.

Castro has spent 16 years in the Army Reserve, serving in the 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry. His specialty is firing mortars, but he had little use for that skill in an urban conflict with an enemy who is often on the run and invisible.

The 69th Infantry started as the Irish-American militia memorialized in a 1940 movie, “The Fighting 69th.” Castro and his fellow reservists from the 69th were the first Army group to respond to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Castro was dispatched to Ground Zero, and then guarded city bridges and tunnels for six months. Nineteen members of the 69th Infantry have died in Iraq, including 10 from New York, and 50 have suffered injuries.

Castro remains devastated by the loss of his friend, Staff Sgt. Henry E. Irizzary, a Bronx resident, who was killed when a remote-controlled bomb blew him out of a Humvee on March 12, 2004, near the town of Taji, 30 miles north of Baghdad.

“I remember that we were shaving; we were going out on patrol,” said Castro, remembering his last contact with Irizzary. “We said, ‘See you later.’ We later got a call. We went to the scene, and it was Izzie, a friend that I knew for years.”

Castro said that he was anxious for action when he arrived in Iraq. “But it’s a shock,” he said, hitting himself on the chest as he described his feelings during that military rite of passage, going into combat the first time. “You ask, ‘Am I really here?’ ”

His patrol of three Humvees went out six hours a day, accompanying a battalion commander, but the unit was on-call 24 hours a day. “We didn’t have a schedule,” said Castro, recalling the sounds of footsteps that he’d hear as someone came to rouse him out of bed for a nighttime patrol or search. “We were the first on the scene.”

Unaccomplished mission
Castro acknowledged that the Bush administration failed to establish a connection between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks when it was preparing the United States for the war. But he said that when he questioned the purpose of the war and sought the meaning of his own presence in Iraq, he nevertheless looked back to the terrorist attacks.

“We are not there to shoot people,” Castro said, describing his view of the U.S. mission in Iraq. “We are there to establish a country.”

But Castro expressed his frustration over the chaos enveloping Iraq and the impediments to the rebuilding effort. “I didn’t see any progress in the country,” he said. “We would do it again,” said Castro, about the U.S. decision to go to war. “But is this really making a difference? No, because the country really isn’t secure.”