What does ‘wet’ involve? Grenades, if necessary. But for this house we didn’t use grenades. Because of the explosives the entire house was gray with smoke and dust in the air so you couldn’t see anything.
What did the house look like? A single-family Arab house, one for which construction hadn’t been completely finished. You could tell people had fled from the house – there were beds, mattresses, furniture. Outside every house we were in there were ducks, goats, donkeys, dogs. Every house we got to we would immediately go to the animals and make holes in their cages for them so they could escape.
After you ‘sterilize’ [the house], what’s the next step? The entire force enters, you make sure the whole force is inside, that everyone arrived, and you prepare the house for defense. You set up a MAG shooting post, an Mk 19 shooting post; you make holes in the wall through which to shoot. In the end you have a post on each side. When the house is ready and all the posts are ready to fire from, you set up cover – sandbags, closets, beds – and when everything is ready and there are people manning the posts, you can rest.
How many soldiers were you with? We were a platoon of 13, 14. The Arabs, they have tons of mattresses and pillows in every house. To rest you use either the beds or those mattresses or the floor, what can you do. We goofed up in the first and second houses – the explosives were placed on the concrete right by a pipe. When it was detonated the entire sewage system blew up, the place reeked. When you arrive [at a house] the officer comes over and sets rules: where to shit, where to piss. Whether or not you are allowed to go out for a second to take a piss. If we were on the ground floor of the house and it was possible, we would go out and make a ‘crap chair.’ We would make holes in a chair and take it outside, and whoever had to shit would go out with a helmet on, armed and with a bulletproof vest. The guy next to him would go out with all the equipment and a combat vest, and they would walk four or five meters from the house, and he would sit there and shit while another soldier covered for him. If it was a multi-story building we would allocate a room for shitting.
On the floor? No, in pots. You shit into the pot and then throw it out with the pot. But afterwards we would take a pot, put a shirt in it and shit into that.
A shirt from a closet in the house? Yeah. And then you use the shirt like a pooper scooper and throw it out the window, and the pot stays.
Was there anything left in the closet after 14 guys were in the house? Sometimes. Sometimes.