Bobby Leonhard recalls the time, around Thanksgiving 2003, when he was told his West Virginia National Guard unit was being sent to Iraq. “Starting out it was kind of exciting, just knowing we were going off to this foreign land and we were going to be on the front line. At the same time I was like, wow, I might die out there.” A drama student at West Virginia University whose dad was a career army officer, Leonhard had joined the guard in 1999, when being a weekend warrior seemed a good way to help with college costs. As one of Leonhard’s college friends, Christopher Smith, says: “When it first started happening, Bobby was like, ‘They’re never going to call us. This stuff they do, we don’t know how to do that.’”
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By early March 2004 Sergeant Leonhard found himself in charge of a three-man Humvee, guarding convoys on Iraqi highways. “I was in the middle vehicle, so they’d have me be the aggressor. If the convoy got attacked, I’d have to be the one that pursued them. We got hit with AKs and things like that, a few IEDs.” They weren’t exactly well prepared for the job. “The only training we got for that duty was from the people we were replacing,” he says. “We rode with them a couple of times, and then we took over.”
But Leonhard still had all that footage. Projected over the set in Infidel, forming part of the story, are images of Humvees and tractor-trailers choking dusty highways, a soldier at his mounted gun grinning at the camera like a kid, Iraqis kicking a ball around.
