Elias Madrid will spend this Christmas catching up with friends
and family
Gilroy – Christmas was “a typical day” last year for Elias Madrid. He ate a grilled chicken sandwich, cheese, and some stale M&Ms. Most of the day, he stood holding a machine gun outside a palace that once belonged to Saddam Hussein’s son.
“It was just another day,” said Madrid, an Army Specialist who returned in September from a year in Iraq. “On Christmas Day I was doing a patrol in Yousefia. It was cold. It was raining. It was bad.”
This year, Madrid will spend Christmas in Sunnyvale with his mom, Debbie Tapia, his brother Ryan, and about 20 other relatives. He has a lot of catching up to do. A few new cousins have been born since he left, and his phone has been ringing off the hook with old classmates from Gilroy High School.
The 23-year-old graduated in 2002 and joined the military a year later. That was Sept. 2003, six months after the United States invaded Iraq. He had his pick of jobs, but he chose the infantry – an assignment sure to land him on the front lines.
“My personal reason for joining,” he said, “was I’d rather take the fight to these guys’ doorsteps than wait for them to come to us.”
Madrid spent his first six months patrolling Baghdad, Sadr City, Yousefia and other parts of the Sunni Triangle. The area, which soldiers call the Triangle of Death, is a stronghold of insurgents loyal to Saddam Hussein. On its first day in the area, Madrid’s company lost three soldiers to improvised explosive devices.
He would get to know the ravages of IEDs well. The second half of his tour was spent on security detail for a colonel who delivered food supplies, helped reconstruct roads, and rescued injured soldiers or, in many cases, retrieved their bodies.
They spent months driving around roads littered with IEDs and the occasional sniper. On one rescue mission, Madrid’s Humvee stopped after sighting an IED. They heard a shot in the distance but didn’t think much of it. When Madrid returned to the Humvee, another soldier noticed a mark in his helmet where the bullet glanced off. They ducked for cover and managed to get out without any injuries.
That wasn’t Madrid’s only close call. On another rescue mission, an IED destroyed the front of their Humvee and sent it hurtling down an embankment. Madrid escaped with a gash on his waist, but had to carry one of his best friends from the vehicle after shrapnel ripped through his friend’s mouth.
Madrid’s mother can hardly believe her son is home in one piece. She chokes up as she recalls waiting for him to return in September. She and her husband flew to a military base in Tennessee and waited with hundreds of other people on the tarmac.
“Everybody had signs, flags,” she recalled. “People had babies. Over the loud speaker they say, ‘They’re coming in,’ and you see this big jet. People are screaming and crying. It was unreal. I couldn’t believe I was watching my son come back from war.”
Madrid survived his year in Iraq without any major injuries, though he suffers from a case of post-traumatic stress syndrome and bad dreams.
“The hardest part of getting out of the military is hitting the brakes at 90 miles an hour,” he said. “It’s just a slower pace and I always need to be doing something.”
He fills his daily schedule with exercise, helping around the house and visiting with friends. He’s also planning for his future, both short- and long-term. Madrid and a best friend will travel to Europe for two weeks at the end of the month, and Madrid is carefully staking out the route – Dublin, London, maybe a stop in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Spain (where Madrid’s family is from). When he returns in January, he will attend Monterey Peninsula College on the path to joining a local sheriff’s department.
A chance remains that Madrid, who will remain on inactive reserves for another four years, could get called back to duty. In Washington, some politicians are talking of a 30,000 troop increase. The possibility is always in the back of his mind, Madrid said, but he doesn’t dwell on it.
In the meantime, he looks forward to a Christmas far from the guardhouse in Yousefia.
“My whole family comes together from all over the Bay Area,” Madrid said. “We just catch up on old times, sit around and play cards, video games, basketball. We hang out and tell each other what’s been going on for the past year. … That’s probably the biggest topic – what I’ve missed.
“It’s a great feeling to be home with my family and friends,” he added. “But at the same time, I think about my brothers and sisters still fighting overseas.”
