By GENE KEMMETER
of The Gazette
After about a year in Iraq, a Stevens Point man has returned home to spend some time with his family.
Dustin Kitzman, 19, son of Jay and Sherry Bindrich, talked to more than 50 friends and family who gathered Saturday, Feb. 14, at the New Beginnings Church, Country Club Drive, Stevens Point, to welcome him back home and view a video of photos taken of his unit in Iraq.
Kitzman, who graduated from Stevens Point Area Senior High School in 2002, is a private first class in the 82nd Airbourne Division stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. He left the U.S. before the Iraq War began last year and went first to Maine, Germany, then Kuwait, where his unit trained.
When the war broke out, Kitzman said his unit moved into Iraq by vehicle instead of parachuting in. The unit went first to southern Iraq, then took helicopters to north of Baghdad, going near the city of Falujah, which has been a trouble spot in recent weeks.
For the first six months, troops were in the war mode, he said, but the last six months they've been helping out with humanitarian aid. He said he's been helping to rebuild police stations and sewage and water treatment plants, secure malls and guard schools and city councils, as well as gas stations. "It's been a lot of guard duty," he said.
He said about 90 percent of the people are receptive, but the remaining 10 percent, usually the younger and older men, who may have been supporters of Saddam Hussein cause the problems. "The women and children will wave and are really friendly," he said. "They appreciate us so much."
As his year went by, Kitzman said he became accustomed to the culture in Iraq. For someone used to hearing church bells, he said he doesn't hear them anymore, but hears the Muslims as they go to the mosques to pray eight times a day.
"Women there have no rights," he said. "They wear veils."
He's also learned a lot from seeing how the Iraqis live. "It's so different," he said. "There's trash everywhere. People just throw garbage around like it's nothing. They don't get littering fines."
Iraqi food includes a lot of breads, he said, and a lot of lamb. "They pray for food and bless it before it becomes food." Many people wear clothing from the 1980s and 1990s, he said. "Michael Jackson is the big thing."
Although he was wounded in September, Kitzman said his scariest moment in Iraq was probably when the troops surrounded the first city. "You don't know what's going on. You haven't been shot at before. You're going in and hearing bullets go by your head and you have rockets go by."
He said he grew up quickly. "You hear guys scream that they're going to die and you have guys get blown up that you know."
Kitzman said he was injured while riding in a truck, when an improvised explosive device (IED) was detonated as the vehicle passed over it, a common threat for Americans. "They'll get a car alarm or a garage door opener to detonate a bomb," he said, adding that the Iraqis may add some more batteries to make the signal transmit a farther distance.
He suffered a hand wound, which has healed, and some loss of hearing, which he estimates is back to about 95 percent and went to a hospital in Germany for treatment before returning to Iraq.
Kitzman has heard the complaints from some troops about the situation in Iraq, but he shrugs them off, saying they're mostly from National Guard troops who are used to other jobs. "They're not even out there in the front lines, they're just sitting back usually," he said.
Lately, he's been working with the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. "We train them in battle drills, how to clear houses," he said. "A lot of Iraqis know English. They were trained in schools. They have a lot of trust. They're just really good. We're letting them take over our job."
Initially, the troops would take Iraqis along on a mission, he said, but now the Iraqis are taking over those duties. "They're just like the American army," he said.
Kitzman said the troops thought they would be in Iraq for about six months and then return home, but their stay was longer. That meant adapting to the climate, where temperatures got to 130 degrees. "You have to drink so many quarts of water each day," he said, "and the soil will drop 40 to 50 degrees at night. When the sun went down it got really cold."
Because his unit was in the field, he said he didn't get to take a shower for more than a month. "We couldn't get enough water to do it," he said. He also said his unit grew accustomed to eating from plastic bags (the military's Meals-Ready-to-Eat, which are called MREs). "You don't have cereal or eggs and bacon."
Kitzman has also witnessed the effects of Saddam's regime in Iraq. "You see burns and gash marks on people," he said. "If someone disagreed or said something, they might get 10 years in prison. You'd see guys without arms and they say it was because they disagreed with Saddam.
Kitzman will be home until March 5, when he has to report to Fort Benning, Ga. From there he expects to go to training in a desert in California and then Louisiana. "We'll be jumping out of airplanes because we haven't been able to jump in a long time. And that's what we're trained to do."