http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.soldier26oct26,0,3871536.story?coll=bal-iraq-headlines


Here is the address above, and a bit of the piece to wet the appitite..
By Scott Calvert
Sun Foreign Staff
Originally published April 11, 2003



NAJAF, Iraq - The three hand-drawn feathers on the back of Pfc. Tyrone Roper's Kevlar helmet are not the idle doodles of a bored soldier. They are marks of a killer.

Roper, a 26-year-old soft-featured Native American from Canada, has three confirmed kills in the war with Iraq, more than any other member of the 3rd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment.

His battlefield feats have made him something of a star in Bravo Company.

The comrades who came up with the feather idea pat him on the back, call him Savage and say they wish they could do what he did.

Again and again, they ask how it feels to drop an enemy soldier with a pointed 5.56 mm bullet the length of a man's pinky finger.

Around them he will flash a smile and speak with pride of doing what he had to do, and doing it well. Quietly, though, he will admit he has been thinking about the people whose lives he ended.

It's not guilt exactly, just a recognition that however bad these men may have been, however eager they were to kill him with an AK-47 assault rifle, they were people.

"The next day, I started to feel I killed someone, took away somebody's grandfather, somebody's father, somebody's son," he says, lying in the sand during a down period. "I kind of felt how my wife would feel if I never came home."

Shooting to kill is an elemental part of an infantryman's job description. It is, as any number of soldiers will remind you, what they are trained to do. A doctor is taught to save people, soldiers are taught to kill them. And because soldiers on the other side can be expected to think the same, it is kill or be killed as far as they are concerned.

Yet the vast majority of soldiers in this 700-person battalion have never killed anyone. Before the war, most had never been shot at by anyone, had never shot at anyone, had never seen real combat.

'You're doing your job'

Now that they are here in the combat zone, soldiers are reflecting on what it means to kill.

Only Bravo Company's troops have killed combatants for certain - a dozen or so plus two caught in crossfire. Alpha and Charlie, the other two companies, have had firefights, but if any enemy soldiers fell it was not clear, says Lt. Col. Ed Palekas, the commander.

There sits Roper with not one, not two, but three feathers on his helmet.