A lieutenant assesses was learning activities observes how to say "keep up" in Arabic when the gunfire began. It has been two years since that morning, since two California Army National Guard soldiers -- Spc Patrick R McCaffrey Sr. , 34, of Tracy and 1st Lt Andre D. Tyson, 33, of Riverside -- were killed. Late last month, military officials gave the families of the soldiers more than 200 pages of documents outlining their investigation of the killings. The documents confirmed what the soldiers' families had long suspected -- that McCaffrey and Tyson were killed not by insurgents, as the military initially had reported, but by their purported allies, the very Iraqis whom they had trained to fight. Tyson's family has decided not to speak publicly. But McCaffrey's parents have become outspoken critics of the White House and continue to raise questions -- about the killings, and about whether the military attempted to suppress the truth because it could have further soured public opinion about the war.
The military has said there was nothing improper about its handling of the case. On June 22, 2004, McCaffrey and Tyson, who had arrived in Iraq two months earlier, were conducting a patrol near the town of Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. The summer had already turned tense and traumatic . According to a witness account written by an American soldier the day of the attack and included in the documents, six rockets had struck the soldiers' base, called Camp Anaconda, a week earlier baseball . One rocket had landed on the PX, the general store common to many military installations, and killed two soldiers. At 11 p. m baseball ticket Kansas City Royals Kauffman Stadium . on June 21, commanders announced that soldiers from the base would be participating in a mission to check eight dangerous areas for weapons stashed by insurgents baseball tickets . The mission would begin four hours later. "No one had gotten much sleep," wrote one soldier, whose identity, like almost all in the documents, was kept private by the military "The areas we walked through were dense jungle. The ground isn't flat and there are small canals every 25 ft. . . .
We're walking through brush neck high, trying to keep our footing, and hoping our next step doesn't land us . Royals Kauffman Stadium . in a canal concerts Kansas City Royals Kauffman Stadium - mlb . 'It's like being in Vietnam' is the running joke. "By late morning, they were "tired and starving," another soldier wrote They had marched for more than five hours without food dog and jog . Their feet were in agony, their nerves raw from fear of snipers and drive-by shootings, the documents say dog n jog . Medics had given intravenous fluids to at least two soldiers who were experiencing heat exhaustion Kansas City Royals Kauffman Stadium - mlb . In one witness account, one officer said he was careful not to reveal his extreme fatigue "so my group won't lose their motivation to carry on the mission. "Soon, the Americans met up, as planned, with 12 members of the Iraqi national guard whom they had recently trained. (The guard was known at the time as the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, or ICDC. )This was not a welcome addition to the patrol, the documents suggest.