Perspective: A Penn student's service in Iraq

College senior Nicholas Miccarelli, a native of Ridley Park, Pa., recently returned to Penn after completing a tour of duty in Iraq in which he helped train and lead the new Iraqi military forces. Prior to transferring to Penn from Temple in 2003, Miccarelli had spent nine months in Kosovo conducting peacekeeping operations. He talked to the DP about his experiences.

DP: Where did your journey to the military begin?

NM: I signed up when I was 17. I said to my father, "If you don't sign up for me to go into the Army National Guard, then I'm going to join the Marines full time when I'm done. So he said, 'OK, OK, you win.' When you sign up for the reserves for the National Guard, you go through basic training just like everybody else, but instead of going to your unit you go home to your weekend drill status, which is one weekend a month and two weeks in the summertime.

DP: Where were you when you heard the news about the 9/11 terrorist attacks?

NM: I was sitting in a barber chair in my hometown of Ridley Park, [Pa.,] and the first plane hit the World Trade Center. I remember the woman cutting my hair was all freaked out about it, and I said, 'Well, it was probably an accident.' When the second [plane] hit I said, 'Hurry this up.' She finished the job in maybe 30 seconds, and I literally ran home from the barber shop and started packing my stuff.

DP: After Kosovo you went back to Penn. Was it hard to be in school when many of your friends were in Iraq and when you were hearing news about the war all the time?

NM: It was really tough. I'm sitting there trying to concentrate on linguistics when my buddies are in combat nearly every day or every other day. I felt like I was on the sidelines of major world events, and that's not where I'd like to be.

DP: How did you end up in Iraq?

NM: In 2005 the unit that I had transferred to when I got home, which is the oldest military unit in the United States, called the First City Troop on 23rd and Market, started asking for volunteers to replace guys who had been wounded in Iraq, and I volunteered. This was at the end of '05 before Christmas.

DP: When you talked to friends who were returning from Iraq, what was their mood like? What were they saying about the war?

NM: Most of the guys have a positive opinion about what's going on over there. Naturally there will be some who don't. Many of the guys I knew who were wounded wanted to get back over there, either to protect their fellow guys or to get back at the insurgents.

DP: What was ar-Ramadi like?

NM: It's about 70 miles west of Baghdad and about 30 miles west of Fallujah. We were in urban terrain the whole time. The insurgency was brutal. They were a small group, but they were brutal and willing to promote their cause by any means necessary, which included beheading children.

DP: Could you elaborate on that incident?

NM: We would go out on [information operations] missions, and we would give out soccer balls, Iraqi flags to the populace, because kids playing soccer are generally happy kids in Iraq. There was one incident where a guy from my battalion handed out sneakers to a little Iraqi kid. A couple days later the kid was found beheaded with the sneakers, which sent a loud and clear message to the people in the neighborhood that you shouldn't side with the Americans.

DP: Has your experience made you think any differently about the world?

NM: It brought a lot of the evil in the world right to my eyes. It showed me that a lot of Americans in particular have a very false sense of security. There are people in this world who are willing to fly planes into buildings and cut heads of children off, and these people need to be confronted and dealt with. A lot of people say negative things about us taking a more aggressive approach in the war on terror, but I would say for some years we didn't take such an aggressive approach, and the attacks still came.

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