Jeff Englehart sat at an outdoor cafe on Tejon Street in downtown Colorado Springs, sipping beer and catching up on his website, which was jumping with traffic after his appearance on a national radio show.
Two months earlier, an Italian television crew set up bright lights and studio umbrellas and talked to Englehart for five hours. The journalists’ documentary, in which Englehart was quoted as saying he believed the incendiary white phosphorus was used on Iraqi civilians, had been released early on Nov. 8.
During his year as a gunner on a Humvee in Baqubah, Iraq, in the Sunni Triangle, Englehart imagined there would be days like this. He told himself that if he made it home in anything other than a body bag, he would make his voice heard. He would tell people about the atrocities of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Englehart’s cellphone rang. Caller ID showed it was an old Army buddy.
“Hello.”
Englehart, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, leaned back in the patio chair, the phone pinned to his right ear.
“Well,” he said, “I better get an attorney at this point. I guess they’ll have room for me at Guantanamo.”
He laughed nervously.
“Dude, I never thought it would get this big, you know what I’m saying? I thought it would stay in Italy and would never reach here. Now, it’s getting (expletive) crazy.”
“Well, (expletive),” he said. “All right. Thanks a lot, man. Thanks.”
Englehart flipped the cellphone shut.
“I’m on al-Jazeera,” he said, with a hint of concern.
Time to think, to talk
The plane carrying the American soldiers landed in Germany without fanfare in February 2005. Only a blast of winter, a stark contrast to the warm weather in Iraq, greeted Englehart when he stepped off.
Englehart didn’t care. His appetite for red-white-and-blue rah- rah is slim. He was free from the Army for 30 days. He tied one on in the nearest bar. He had saved $20,000 in the Army and was about to spend it.
He flew to Scotland for a Bouncing Souls concert. Flew from there to Munich, Germany, then to Prague, Czech Republic, and met her there in the art deco train station.
Raia Apostolova rode the bus 30 hours from Bulgaria to the crowded station. Englehart had fallen in love with her in June 2003 while on leave in Sofia, Bulgaria, while he was deployed to Kosovo.
Englehart found her on a bench, where she said she would be.
“Sweetheart,” he said as he held her, kissed her, 10 days after leaving Iraq.
“It was like the world stopped,” Apostolova said.
They held hands as they walked quietly from the station onto the streets of Prague.
Over the next few weeks, they would eat in the finest cafes and stay in the finest inns, but all the world’s comforts couldn’t bring Englehart a restful night’s sleep.
“There were nights when he was just yelling while he was sleeping,” Apostolova said. “He’s just yelling, like he was afraid of something.”
The couple took the train to Nuremberg and then to Schweinfurt, Germany, then flew to Amsterdam, Netherlands, where they would stay for 10 days. They met Jordan Englehart, Jeff’s younger brother and a student at Colorado State University.
The Englehart brothers found an Irish pub. With a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Jeff Englehart talked nonstop for four hours. He told his brother how scared he was in Iraq when the Army threatened to court- martial him for writing an anti- war, anti-Army, anti-Bush blog. He told him about the assault on Fallujah, how it sickened him to witness the massacre.
Jordan Englehart hardly said a word.
The next night, over more beers, Jordan heard more. Englehart’s war buddy Joe Hatcher had joined them that night, and the two traded war stories.
Englehart mentioned the explosion that cleanly severed a face they found lying in an open watermelon in the street.
Again, Jordan Englehart hardly said a word.
“You could tell they just needed to get it out,” he said.
An independent thinker
Jeff Englehart wasn’t bred to be a follower. His parents raised him to think independently, set his own agenda.
He moved seven times during his childhood, from Rhode Island to California, as his father, who owns a construction company, took on new jobs. Englehart graduated from high school in California with a 3.8 grade-point average, but he wasn’t a happy- go-lucky student.
“I would have a problem with my teachers that would try to force-feed the students information and lessons that I didn’t feel I needed in life; I think education is very important, but if I’m not interested in something, why should I have to take trigonometry?”
He spent a year at Mount San Jacinto College in Southern California, and when his family moved to Cortez, Englehart moved to Grand Junction to establish in-state residency for college. He spent 16 months in Grand Junction, but when it came time to enroll in school, he didn’t.
“I was really kind of confused about what I wanted to do. I basically was caught up with my job and friends. I wasn’t necessarily partying all the time, but I was having a good time not going to school,” he said.
He joined the Army in June 2001 – a decision that to this day he cannot fully explain. Englehart thought the Army might offer a good way for him to see and live in Europe, which seemed more exciting than his job at Home Depot.
“You get locked in a rut,” he said. “You’re in a rut and you want to get out.”
For a young man who had never been responsive to authority, the Army seemed an odd choice.
Jeff’s brother didn’t understand the decision, but by the time he heard about it, Jeff had already committed.
“He just called one day and said he joined the Army,” Jordan Englehart said.
“It’s not like he had any real major issues, no problems with the law,” Jordan said. “He likes to express himself, but he was never a big fan of people telling him how to act.”
Englehart returned to Colorado after he got out of the Army in May. He had no real plans except to try to tell people that the war was wrong in his eyes.
Almost as soon as he returned, he had one regret. He had come home without Raia. He should have married her before he left Europe and moved with her to Colorado.
In August, Englehart waited outside a Marine recruiter’s office and stopped to talk to a young man who emerged.
“Why do you want to go to the Marine Corps?” he asked. “What do you want to do?”
The kid, about 17, said he wanted to know what it was like to kill another man.
“It’s not a video game, man. It’s real. You have to put a person in the sight of your rifle and shoot him, and you know that he’s a farmer, the father of five or six kids, with a life and a family. He’s only fighting you because you’re occupying his land.
“No matter who you kill, it’s not easy because it’s one of your own, a human being.”
By the time Englehart moved to the Colorado Springs area in August, he had spent the last of his $20,000 on a small Mitsu bishi automobile. He took a job delivering pizzas and continued to write in Fight to Survive, the blog he and his friends created while they were in Iraq.
Aug. 22, 2005
“Every morning I wake up and follow at least one routine that I will carry out for the rest of my life. I look into the mirror and see an average guy with a turbulent past and an uncertain future.
“I see my flowing brown hair growing longer everyday and a reddish brown beard that has now consumed my entire face.
“I see dark circles under my bloodshot blue eyes and wrinkles from at least four years of undue stress. I have just turned twenty- five but I feel as though I’m forty.
“… At times it feels as though many years have passed. Weeks go by so fast in my new civilian life that I don’t even realize that it was only five months ago when I was counting days to escape the suffocating madness of Operation Iraqi Freedom II (It Looks Good On Paper). But it doesn’t mean I have forgotten about it. On the contrary, I think about this meaningless war everyday. I can’t hide from the soldier I once was much like I will never be able to bury the memories of one year in combat. Whenever I glance at war coverage on a television, or hear the ignorant hate-talk of our blood mongering president, or read the latest death tolls in the news papers my eyes fill with rage and my heart fills with sorrow. It is impossible for me to ignore what is going on in Iraq when I am constantly reminded of the death and carnage, as well as my participation in the war machine. Some people boast the war chant ‘never forget.’ Well, I never do.”
Later that evening, at 11:53 p.m., an anonymous writer left a response:
“I am on my 3rd tour here and I can dispute every one of your seditious lies. … You are a weak miserable excuse for a man and I can assure you the American people will not support your attempts to threaten the security of the United States and further endanger its citizens by your reckless aiding, abetting and encouraging the enemy in their efforts to defeat our forces.”
Voicing frustrations
Englehart poured himself a tumbler half-full of Gilbey’s vodka and sat on a gold-quilted retro couch just after noon in October.
Behind him on the wall hung an inverted American flag and a poster of Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary who was murdered in 1967. Guitars leaned against a wall.
Englehart steamed about his laptop computer, which wasn’t working after it took a power hit. He didn’t want to lose his photographs from Iraq, including pictures of badly burned Iraqis and other carnage.
The one image he couldn’t get out of his head, he said, wasn’t on the computer. It happened one day when Englehart was in a civic center.
A car bomb exploded in a coffee shop next to an Iraqi police station where 20 police recruits were enjoying cups of caffeine.
Englehart and other U.S. forces drove to the building, only 50 yards away. Englehart was on the gun, providing security.
As he surveyed the carnage – metal, concrete, machine parts everywhere – he saw it so clearly: a child’s severed foot in a sandal.
“It was a tiny little foot in a pink sandal,” Englehart said. “That’s the only way I can rationalize it being a girl. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but it was a child.
“It’s something that will never leave me.”
Seeing war firsthand played tricks with his mind.
“It’s going to happen to me,” he thought. “A roadside bomb is going to blow off half my face or take an arm. I started to plan how I would play my guitar with one arm. I started to plan my life around not having certain abilities.”
Englehart and his friends were determined to let the rest of the world see Iraq through their eyes, so they started their Fight to Survive blog.
Englehart’s first post came under the name “Heckle” in May 2004.
The entry that nearly landed him a bunk at Fort Leavenworth came under the heading “Holiday in Fallujah,” dated Nov. 19, 2004, in which he called the attack a “massacre” where American troops used white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon.
“… As America grows increasingly disturbed by the images of carnage and violent death of her own sons in arms, its government loses the justification to continue the bloody debacle. … In Iraq’s case, complete destruction of the United States military is impossible, but through perseverance the insurgency will drive us out. This will prove to be the inevitable outcome of the war.”
After the piece was posted on the blog, Englehart said, “Socialist Worker took it and asked us if they could run it. We said, ‘Yeah.”‘
Within a week, the heat came down. Englehart was in his bunk when a staff sergeant came to him and said his buddy had been caught writing on the blog and faced a court-martial. The staff sergeant said the Army was looking for another blogger in Englehart’s camp.
Englehart started cleaning his hard drive. When a 1st sergeant examined Englehart’s computer, it was clean. Englehart cleaned his room, which was filled with anti- war books, socialist propaganda, anarchist literature and posters.
He stuffed everything in a trash bag and hid the items under a pile of sandbags that formed a wall outside his camp.
“I was scared,” he said. “I was afraid some people wanted me dead.”
Englehart said he later learned the Army’s criminal investigators found he had not breached operational security.
In the middle of the investigation, Englehart’s platoon sergeant told him to lie low. He told him to stay off the Internet and that if he wanted to write, to keep it in a journal.
“Wait till you’re out,” Englehart remember the sergeant saying.
Speaking out for others
In October, he dressed in a black shirt, black tie, black pants and black leather jacket and drove to City Hall. He had read that Colorado Springs Mayor Lionel Rivera was pulling his support from a program being developed by a veterans group to provide mental health care to returning soldiers.
Englehart stood for a rabbi’s invocation about making good choices, doing the right thing.
After niceties, the mayor asked the crowd to remain standing for the Pledge of Allegiance. The fire chief, the police chief, the city clerk placed their right hands over their hearts.
Englehart stood with his hands buried in his pockets.
“I don’t pledge allegiance to anyone,” he recalled. “That is the most (expletive) offensive part of our culture, indoctrinating these children of this country.”
The meeting began with citizens’ comments. Those who put their names on a list could tell the council anything they wanted, in three minutes or less.
“Jeff Englehart,” Rivera said.
He walked to the lectern.
“I understand that you recently pulled your support on the Just One program,” Englehart said into the microphone, his nerves rattling in his voice. “… Mayor Rivera, you say that you have found no concrete evidence that war has caused trauma in individual soldiers, but, sir, I must say that I feel that you are enormously wrong in your assessment.”
“… Every one of my friends that has returned home is dealing with one form or another of post-traumatic stress, and many of them are going to the VA and told to wait weeks to get the health care then need.”
Applause from a dozen sympathizers filled the room.
In the media’s eye
Dressed in khaki pants and a red shirt, Englehart stood in the kitchen at Louie’s Pizza.
His cellphone rang.
A producer for “Democracy Now,” a radio program aired on more than 120 stations in the U.S. and Canada, wanted Englehart on the show at 5 a.m. The Italian documentary about whether the U.S. used white phosphorus on civilians during the assault on Fallujah in November 2004 had been released.
The manager of the pizza shop wanted Englehart to take the call during a break.
“There’s more important things happening than delivering a pizza to some ungrateful person,” Englehart thought.
Englehart declined the invitation to appear on the radio. His cellphone rang again. ABC News.
“No, thanks,” Englehart said.
The phone rang again. “Democracy Now” wasn’t giving up.
“OK,” Englehart said, agreeing to appear on the show.
That morning in November, Englehart told the host of “Democracy Now” that he heard U.S. troops call for “Willie Pete,” military vernacular for white phosphorus, while he watched from the outskirts of town.
When the show ended, Englehart drove to the Social Security office in Colorado Springs to pick up a new Social Security card, the last of the paperwork he would need before heading to Bulgaria to visit Raia. He wanted to marry her.
As he sat on Tejon Street later that morning, he couldn’t believe that the Italian documentary was playing on al-Jazeera.
“I don’t want the feds at my door,” he said. “I don’t want to be on some terrorist list and not able to leave the country.”
Three weeks later, Englehart packed his suitcases, drove to Denver International Airport and boarded a plane for Bulgaria.
He rented a black tuxedo and made arrangements for a ceremony at a civic center in Sofia. On Dec. 17, he took Raia Apostolova’s hand in marriage.
Staff writer Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com.
