Friendly fire?

Two uniformed Army officers were waiting for Roger Suarez when he arrived at his wife’s East Carson City restaurant one December evening two years ago. Through the glass he could see them in the tiny dining room of Lady Tamale and wondered why they were there.

Suarez’s wife Fidelina ran to meet her husband as he pushed through the glass door.

“They want to talk to you,” she whispered in Spanish.

“We’re here about your son,” an officer said.

Instinctively, Suarez backed into the wall and braced himself against it.

His oldest son, also named Roger, was a U.S. Army private who had been in Iraq for less than a month.

“Your son has died in combat,” Suarez heard someone say.

As Suarez sat at a table in that same dining room last week, facing the same wall that gave him little support, his gaze was fixed upon the memory. Tears ran over his quivering lips.

“I felt like a hole opened and sucked me down,” he wept.

The Report

An official report from the Army, prepared two weeks after the incident, didn’t make it to Suarez for nine months. It indicated that Roger was killed in an insurgent attack.

The report, filled with redactions where names had been, stated in belaboring detail and Armyspeak that Roger, 22, was on a roof in Ramadi with several other soldiers.

The report reads “The thorough investigation completed by Maj. (name redacted) provides evidence collected at building 2 showing that Spec. Suarez and Sgt. Nelson were killed by two enemy mortar rounds.”

The Army said enemy fire struck the rooftop, killing Roger instantly. The report also stated Pfc. Albert Nelson of Philadelphia was instantly killed by a second blast.

The elder Suarez said he never understood the report. He said he was surprised it came in the mail because he thought someone would deliver it to him. He said he still doesn’t understand what it all means.

“I was waiting for somebody to come and explain it to me,” he said. “I’m still waiting.”

Fresh Pain

Since receiving word on Dec. 6, 2006, that his oldest child was killed two days earlier, Suarez said he often imagined Roger still was alive, still serving with the 2nd Infantry Division in Iraq.

It made the reality easier to deny, he said.

But on Oct. 15, Suarez said, he received a call from a friend who saw a story about Roger on a Spanish news program.

The story on Univision referenced a video and article on Salon.com about an Army cover-up concerning his son’s death.

The story Suarez saw suggested that his son wasn’t killed by the enemy, but instead he and Nelson had been victims of friendly fire.

“After he died I think he’s still over there,” Suarez said in accented English, “until the day I saw the video.”

The pain came back, as fresh as the day he learned his son was dead, he said.

The Investigation

On Oct. 14 Salon.com ran a story on the incident in which Roger and Nelson were killed. They interviewed Nelson’s mother, Jean Feggins, a retired Philadelphia police officer, who said the Army told her that her son died instantly from an enemy attack.

The reporter, Mark Benjamin, said he’d been unable to locate Roger Suarez’s family.

That was understandable. Although Roger’s father lives in Carson City, Roger enlisted while living with his maternal uncle in Miami. His mother lives in Nicaragua. Salon.com said it had attempted to find Roger’s family in his home country to no avail. Not many people knew that he had a father and four half siblings in Carson City. Or that he attended two years at Eagle Valley Middle School and two years at Carson High.

Accompanying the five-page Salon.com story was a 52-minute video that the reporter had obtained.

The video showed the chaos that reigned after the blast and how the 40 some men in Roger’s unit believed they’d been fired on by a U.S. Army tank.

And it also showed Feggins that her son suffered for more than 30 minutes as his comrades tried in vain to save his life and stop the bleeding from his severed leg.

Helment Cam Video

Caution: Contains graphic images and profanity

Edited 12-minute version from Salon.com:



Unedited version (52 minutes)

The Video

Sgt. First Class Jack Robison was wearing a helmet-cam that wasn’t on when his platoon engaged in a gunfight with insurgents on Dec. 4, 2006.

When the video on Salon.com begins, Robison laments that he just missed the firefight his guys had undertaken.

From offscreen, a voice calls out to Robison and he hurries around a wall into a room nearby. There, someone asks him if he can see the U.S. tank outside the window.

“Oh yeah,” Robison says when he gets a view of the tank.

But shortly after, an explosion goes off outside. Then almost as soon as that blast stops reverberating, another goes off, this time coming into the room.

Robison is knocked back and a soldier comes into the frame.

“You all right,” he asks.

“Yep, I’m good,” Robison says.

Off camera a soldier asks: “What the f*** was that?”

“Dude, that was the tank,” says Robison.

“Is he shooting at us?” a soldier asks.

“I think so,” Robison says.

Gunfire erupts outside the room.

“Make sure that tank knows where we’re at. I think the tank fired at us,” says Robison.

More automatic gunfire goes off.

“Yeah, he just took out the f****** roof,” a soldier says.

“Somebody call that tank and make sure they know where we’re at,” says Robison.

A chorus of cease fires ring out from the men in the room with Robison shouting the loudest above the din, “Cease fire, cease fire, cease fire!”

One of the soldiers fires a white star cluster canister — a sign that friendly troops are in the line of fire — out the door.

The shooting stops almost immediately.

“Dude, I’m almost positive that that was that tank, cause I saw it flash,” Robison says.

The video shows a chaotic scene as soldiers rush from room to room, and two of them work to secure a tourniquet on Nelson’s leg. Nelson’s face was blurred by Salon.com at the request of his family, but it was clear that the lower part of his left leg was gone.

Downstairs again, rounds go off around the building and a voice can be heard screaming for the soldiers to get inside.

Another voice yells, “They’re still f****** shooting at us!”

Robison pauses for a moment then says to the troops: “That’s mortars.”

A voice in the background reassures the platoon that they are being hit now by enemy mortars.

After Nelson has been carried downstairs, Robison returns upstairs alone. He hears people on the roof and calls out to them.

A soldier meets Robison at the doorway.

“I can’t find Suarez,” he says breathlessly.

“Where was he?” Robison asks.

“He was up on the roof,” the soldier says. “I don’t know if he’s downstairs, sergeant. I’ve looked up there and I didn’t see him.”

Robison later walks through the house to go out back, and is stopped by a soldier.

“Sgt. Rob, I found Suarez,” he says.

“Out back?” Robison asks.

“He’s,” the soldier stutters, “gone.”

Later, after Nelson (who later died from his injuries) is taken from the scene and the soldiers have calmed down, Robison grabs the radio to call his commanders.

“I want it understood that that was a tank. That was one of our tanks,” he says into the radio.

After he gets off the radio, soldiers around him are talking about the tank firing on them.

“It is a tank, I was up there,” a voice says.

“Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. None of it matters,” Robison says.

“Yeah it matters,” a soldier spits. “It matters to me.”

“They are saying that we got hit with a 120 mortar,” another voice says.

“It was a 120 mortar. You got it?” Robinson says. “You f****** got it? It’s a 120 mortar.”



Later, Robison tells the soldiers around him, “Until we hear different it was a hundred-and-twenty millimeter mortar. I don’t think it was, but for now, that’s the way it is, and that’s what happened.”

The Facts

In Carson City on Oct. 16, the elder Suarez watched the Salon.com video alone.

“Why they don’t tell me the truth?” Suarez asked. “Why they lie to me? Nobody gives me answers.”

He doesn’t know where to go for help. He has no idea if someone else can look into the Army’s investigation.

He thinks the Army could have handled the situation very differently, by being up front about the evidence at hand.

“I don’t want this to happen again. But believe (the report) or not, what I can do?”

In 1997, Suarez, who became a U.S. citizen in 1995, flew to Nicaragua to pick up his son from his first marriage and bring him to Carson City to join his new family.

Suarez works two jobs. From 4:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. he is at Chromalloy. From 3 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. he works at Lady Tamale.

He said he works all those hours for all those years so his children wouldn’t have to.

“I tell all my kids, ‘I want the best for you. I want you to stay in school. I don’t want you to work like me,’” he said.

But after getting his first job and finding a paycheck more enticing, Roger began talking about dropping out.

Ultimately Suarez told Roger: “If you don’t want to go to school you have to go to your mom.”

And back to Nicaragua, Roger went for a year. After much pleading, Suarez brought his son back, allowing him to live with his uncle in Miami — where it was more likely he could get a short, inexpensive flight back to Nicaragua to see his mother.

When Roger told his dad he couldn’t become a police officer because of his troubles with school, Suarez said he suggested that Roger join the Coast Guard.

Roger instead joined the Army.

“This Is A Miracle”

The October before Roger left for Iraq, Suarez was in the kitchen of Lady Tamales when the door of the restaurant opened.

Standing there was his newlywed soldier-son Roger, on a surprise four-day visit from Fort Carson, Colo., that everyone was in on except for dad.

“When I saw him, I almost cried,” said Suarez. “He was beautiful.”

The family cooked meals for Roger and over those meals they shared stories.

When Roger told his father he was going to Iraq in a month, Suarez was worried.

“I told him, ‘I pray for you’ and I kiss him and we cry — both,” Suarez said.

That was the last time he saw his son alive.

When Roger was killed, Suarez, his wife and two young children bought tickets for a flight to Nicaragua to attend the funeral. Suarez said he chose to bury his son in his native country.

The Army told him Roger’s body was to be flown from Washington, D.C. to Colorado Springs to pick up members of his platoon as pallbearers. The flight would then take Roger’s remains to Nicaragua.

Suarez booked a flight from Reno to Los Angeles, then Miami, and finally to Nicaragua.

But leaving Reno, there was a problem and the flight into Los Angeles was late. Then they missed their connection to Miami. By the time they reached Florida, the last fight to Nicaragua had left for the day.

Suarez said they had to stay overnight and arrive the following day just hours before Roger’s funeral.

The next morning, Suarez and his family made it onto their Nicaraguan flight at about 10 a.m.

As they waited onboard, the pilot came over the intercom.

“We have an honor because on this airplane we take a soldier who died in Iraq back to Nicaragua,” Suarez recalled the pilot announcing.

Immediately, he said, he began to cry. A proud father, Suarez showed everyone on the plane Roger’s pictures and told them proudly, that soldier was his son.

Somehow Roger’s body did not take the route that was intended for it, Suarez said.

“Maybe he don’t want to go home by himself,” he explained, a smile crossing his face as he recognized the one good moment in a horror story that has no ending. “This is a miracle. Roger want me to take him home.”

Report prompts questions

A 12-page report concluded two weeks after the incident and provided to Suarez concerning Roger and Nelson’s death was conducted by Col. Sean McFarland, commander 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, the same tank unit that may have fired on the building.

That is disturbing to Suarez, who hopes that another investigation is done into the situation. The video casts doubt on the official version of the events that Suarez has spent the last 24 months believing.

A Philadelphia congressman apparently agrees that another investigation is warranted.

The Stars & Stripes reported on Oct. 16 that U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., had called on the Army to reinvestigate the deaths.

“In light of new information regarding the circumstances of a deadly firefight that resulted in the death of Pfc. Albert M. Nelson and his comrade, Pfc. Roger A. Suarez-Gonzalez, I am requesting the Army conduct an official and thorough investigation into the incident surrounding their demise,” wrote Fattah in an e-mail to the Stars & Stripes, a Department of Defense-authorized daily newspaper distributed overseas for the U.S. military community.

“Though it is expected that lives will be lost in war, it is imperative that factual information, no matter how painful, is provided to the victim’s families,” Fattah wrote. “As a result of the ultimate sacrifice of their loved ones, the truth is the least their loved ones deserve.”

More on this story

See story about this incident at Salon.com

See battle plan map of this incident

A follow up report from Salon alleging Army officers ordered documents about this incident destroyed

• Contact reporter F.T. Norton at ftnorton@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1213.