 "Photo: Peter Franklin")
Editor's Note: This is the sixth part in a series on UT students who have served or are serving in Iraq.
While students fill libraries and coffee shops this weekend in preparation for final exams, petroleum engineering junior Norb Roda will condition in Houston as part of his U.S. Marine Reserve training.
Roda served an eight-month deployment as an infantry rifleman in Ar Rutbah, Iraq, near the Jordanian and Syrian borders.
He joined the Marine Corps Reserve two days after graduating from Willowridge High School in Houston in 2002, where he was in the Marine Corps JROTC. He enrolled at UT several months later for the fall semester.
When President Bush declared war in March 2003, Roda said deployment was not something he thought about.
"I was trying to be a student and a Marine at the same time," Roda said. "It was just something that was in the back of my mind. If it happened, it happened. If it didn't, it didn't."
In the middle of his fourth semester at UT, Roda learned he was going to Iraq. His unit left for Kuwait in August 2004.
Once in Iraq, Roda said it was hard to cope with the drastic
climate change, which went from 100-plus degree temperatures to a frigid winter, when even insulated CamelBaks were frozen solid.
"[Summer] didn't even give us a warning to what we were going to expect that winter," Roda said. "Come late November, early December, we faced one of the coldest times in Iraq in approximately 25 years."
Roda initially patrolled the streets of Ar Rutbah and protected a highway that served as the main supply route from Jordan to Baghdad. He also provided security for a hospital and two schools that were under construction.
Two months into his deployment, Roda was attached to a four-man sniper team that spent most of its time on rooftops monitoring intersections and known enemy houses. He did this for two to three days at a time, sleeping and eating on the concrete rooftops of houses and businesses. For the next four-day period, he would rest at a permanent base 30 minutes outside of town before returning to Ar Rutbah for another period of surveillance.
"Any kind of restroom use had to be done in a bottle or a bag, and we had to carry it because we couldn't leave a trace," Roda said.
He said the hardest part of surveillance was knowing that he only had three guys to back him up and that support would take time to arrive if he was in trouble.
Roda said insurgent activity increased drastically on election day in Iraq.
"From 6 o'clock in the morning, explosions started going off," Roda said. "The insurgents' whole tactic on this was just to keep everyone from voting, so they had random explosions everywhere on different intersections. And people actually still came out to vote, [which] was the surprising part about it."
While preparing to cross a street in town on the day of the election, an enemy popped out of a corner 30 feet from Roda and unloaded an AK-47 in his direction.
"You could tell the difference of a shot, of how close it is. If it just whizzes above your head, it makes that 'fshoo' noise," he said. "If it comes close to you in any way, it breaks the sound barrier near your ear so it actually makes a pop. So, I was hearing pops."
Roda said he jumped to the deck and aimed in the enemy's direction, but another sniper had already taken him out.
"You have to stay focused until you're completely out of there," Roda said. "You can't just say 'OK, he missed me that time, I can get comfortable.'"
He said his unit's position was sometimes compromised by kids who stumbled upon it while doing chores. He said families in town were sometimes threatened by enemies who wanted information about the Marines' whereabouts.
Roda returned to the U.S. in April 2005 and re-enrolled in UT that fall.
He said the transition back to crowded civilian life was difficult and he was frustrated by people who had a negative view of the military presence in Iraq.
"Seeing what these people were capable of doing, it's just like, what makes you think that they wouldn't do it here in the states if they had the opportunity?" Roda said. "It was just very frustrating when a lot of people thought they knew what they were talking about when they really didn't know jack."
Roda said he sometimes has nightmares and paranoid feelings, but appreciates life more now - now that he lives in the U.S.
He finishes his commitment to the Reserves in June but is considering going with his unit to Ghana for humanitarian work.
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