Special Report

The Iraqi farmer was an older man who ran into the road in front of the U.S. Army Abrams tank. His hands, thrown in the air, waved frantically. The sergeant from the 1-167th pulled over his patrol and found the IED in the road set up to kill the soldiers in his tank.

“Three 105-rounds — that’s a big boom,” remembers 1st Sgt. Shannon Cryer, another infantryman.

The farmer knew his life was in danger; people had seen him help the Americans. He didn’t leave his land, even for town a few miles away. The black car still found him. Four men had hoods. One slapped his wife, and they threw him in the car.

“His family actually stopped my patrol and wanted me to go find his body so they could bury him,” Cryer says. They couldn’t go themselves, or they too would be killed. “Yet they continued to give us information. People risk their lives to help us all the time.”

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“There are people who want them there, who know it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” says Ann Cryer, his wife.

That is one thing the people against the war don’t understand, he said. But somebody needs to defend them, too — “Give them the right to say I’m wrong for killing.

“America is impatient. I say ‘Yes,’ we need to be there. We need to finish the job and rebuild.”

If not, they’ve died in vain.

The weight on his heart springs up as tears in his throat when he thinks of them. But then he moves forward. He is a strong man, big enough to fight off half his six kids at once as they swing playfully at his belly.

Two of Cryer’s three boys were born while he was in the Middle East. It was the Gulf War in ’91 when Cody was born, and Mamadia with Eli, now 2. Eli is a little man, steady on his feet. Suddenly he’s atop a 3-foot stool nobody saw him climb.

“Mostly the educated people in Iraq realize what our goal is,” Cryer said. Like the engineer whose house he searched. “Are you Sunni or Shia?” Cryer asked him. “I am an Iraqi,” said the man. “One nation.”