Student soldiers tell different side of story than media

Nathan Chiantella / photo editor From left, junior Matthew Mills, senior Corrie Baier and junior Andrew Carnahan speak to students on their experiences in Iraq.

Three student soldiers just returning from missions in the Middle East answered questions about their experiences serving in Iraq Thursday night as part of an effort to correct incomplete coverage given by the media.

The JMU Student Soldier Forum was co-sponsored by Americans for Informed Democracy, the OrangeBand Initiative and Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

"I believe dialogue provides a powerful tool to quell mistaken identities of one another, and can help to better understand situations outside the realm of mass media," said senior Kevin Melton, the student representative from AID and the forum's mediator said. "Events such as the Student Soldier Forum enable the audience to experience a variety of differing views and opinions."

The three student soldiers who spoke at the forum were senior Corrie Baier, a U.S. Army Reserves Sergeant, and juniors Andrew Carnahan, a U.S. Marines Corporal, and Matthew Mills, a U.S. Army Reserves Sergeant.

Students and other members of the audience were invited to ask the soldiers questions about their experiences.

The soldiers described their duties in the Middle East, what their living conditions were like and their experiences with the Iraqi peoples.

Carnahan said his unit was deployed several months before the war in Iraq started, and during that time, its job was to be trained and ready for anything. Once the war in Iraq began, he said, his unit moved as part of the invasion of Iraq and built a bridge over the Euphrates River so the Third Infantry Division could cross over to Baghdad.

Mills said that, while in Iraq, he switched jobs a lot. "I was a motor vehicle director, which is a fancy name for a truck driver," he said about one of his duties. For a while, Mills stayed in a machine gun pit where he said he "basically sat in a hole for three weeks and looked for 'bad guys.'"

Baier said that while she was in Iraq, she interacted a lot with the Iraqi people. "I wanted to know them, develop relationships with them and figure out what they [were] thinking," she said. Her duty was to help make the US military's interaction with the Iraqis better, she said.

Some of Baier's other duties while serving her term in Iraq were to question Iraqis deained by coallition forces about the effectiveness of some of the products that the U.S. Army was using and to explain to the Iraqi people the value of the United States being in Iraq.

The three soldiers agreed that much of the American presence in Iraq is not depicted correctly in the media's coverage of the war.

"The media is largely in Baghdad and the sentiment there is completely different than in the rest of the country," Baier said.

All three said they had each had many positive experiences with the Iraqis while abroad.

"I got to meet a lot of the local people," Mills said. He said that he swam in the Tigris River and walked around the markets in his free time. "We were like very wall-armed tourists," he added.

Mills said and Baier affirmed that they will not re-enlist in the military because they hope to start families. Carnahan said he is torn as to whether or not he will re-enlist. After his time in Iraq, the military is even a bigger part of him and how he thinks of himself had he remained a civilian, he added.

The other soldiers agreed with Mills that there is a lot of downtime while stationed in Iraq.

"Be prepared to be bored," Mills said.

To pass the time, Carnahan said, he played a lot of card games and chess. His unit made a gym with old car parts and pieces of metal, he said.

Mills said his unit hosted its own Olympics. One of the events was to see "who can throw this rock the farthest. You do what you gotta do [to keep yourself entertained]," he said.

Melton said, "I was very pleased at the turnout for this discussion. We were successful in stepping away from the debate on whether the war in Iraq was justified, and received some great questions pertaining to the panelist's role as both a student and a soldier."

JMU President Linwood Rose spoke at the event, saying he thinks open forums such as the Student Soldier Forum are important and that it is imperative "to learn [and] to reflect before [the public judges]."