Drained

I am so tired I can hardly see straight, so I will make this brief.

The last few days have been very emotionally draining. Thanksgiving was tolerable, a good meal but a 45 minute wait to eat it. I found out on Thanksgiving afternoon that an old friend, who had deployed with another of our Batteries only to be sent home when he was diagnosed with cancer, had died. He was my age, and his sons are the same ages as my daughters.

I was still dealing with the loss of a friend and the simultaneous peek at my own mortality on Friday when I heard that 2 soldiers I knew and had worked with at the Gate had been hit by an IED and were Medevaced. The patrol captured the suspected triggermen, and was bringing them in for questioning, so I grabbed my Intell Sgt and volunteered our services to help question the bastards. They never talked, but their clothing did. It was covered in TNT residue, which was adequate evidence to send them to jail. The wounded soldiers will survive. I won’t say they’ll be fine, but they will survive.

Saturday morning, after only a few hours of sleep thanks to a late night of interrogations, I mounted up for a Civil Affairs patrol. During the mission brief we were reminded of an attack on a hospital in south Baghdad, which hit members of the same CA group we were supporting. We were also briefed about the tired tactic of booby trapping toys being used by the insurgents, dusted off from Soviet tactics in Afghanistan and again by the Serbs in the Balkans. We hand out toys, the terrorists take those same toys, booby trap them, and when innocent children are killed by them somehow we are blamed for it. I don’t have the energy to try to figure out a positive way to look at that. Fortunately the mission was uneventful.

Later in the day I heard that some more detainees were inbound, suspected of shooting one of our interpreters, but the biggest reason they were being detained was the contents of their car, which included several 107 mm rockets and a few mortar rounds, assorted AK 47’s, things like that. The excuse they gave for the presence of the weapons? “I just bought the car yesterday and didn’t know the rockets were in the trunk” Oh, in that case no problem, sorry for inconveniencing you! The fact that you had a freshly fired AK and we have an interpreter with a GSW, and the road you were driving on leads to an area from which rockets had been fired at our camp just the night before, total coincidence. We’ll let the guys at Abu Ghraib sort out the details.

I’m tired, I’m cynical, and in a month I should be on U.S. soil. The Artist is now a cheerleader, the Athlete made the “A” hockey team, and the Jedi has gone from barely reading to typing faster than me. I can’t get home soon enough.

Apparently it's not all going for body armor

It’s been really tough to find the time to post lately. We’re in the midst of a project that involves gathering fingerprints and iris scans from every Iraqi who works on the camp, and it’s a little daunting. This project was supposed to be performed by contractors, but the company hired to provide the labor hasn’t been able to deliver in a timely manner, so we have pressed soldiers into service gathering the information. The soldiers I had detailed to me are loving life. They are more than happy to spend their last two months in Iraq rolling fingerprints, since they spent the last ten months doing dismounted patrols on Haifa Street. If they hadn’t been detailed to me, they would have been assigned to tower guard.

I received some initial resistance to detailing soldiers to do a contractors job, in spite of the fact that accomplishing this task will greatly increase the security of the camp. Fortunately the Brigade Commander, upon reviewing the details of the program, agreed that it would be irresponsible to wait for civilian labor when we had all the necessary equipment on hand to do the job ourselves. We had the troops a week later, and after a few days of training we got the program off the ground. If we don’t run into any snags, we will have the initial stage of the program, the most labor intensive portion, done before we ever get the “labor” that your tax dollars are so injudiciously getting spent on.

We also have new office space, finally, several months after the rest of our unit moved into a new building. The building seemed sound when we moved in, but it is starting to turn into an Iraqi version of “the money pit”. Every improvement or repair seems to uncover another flaw that requires more labor to repair, which uncovers another problem, which…..yea you get it. Started out with network wiring, which I was promised was working. We spent the better part of a week troubleshooting wiring before we had active network connections in each office, which uncovered a break in a fiber run, which rather than splice the fiber that costs several dollars a foot, the contractor replaced a 1500 Meter run. $10K of your money. We also discovered that the heat pump units in each of the rooms, which are supposed to both cool and heat the rooms, only would cool. For ten months a year this is not a problem, but November is not one of those months. It’s friggin cold at night, especially if you have been acclimated to 120 degree heat for almost a year. Now you would think that replacing these units with units that also heat, like every other building on the camp, would be pretty easy. Nope. Apparently the wiring in the building won’t handle the additional load, so the wiring needs to be replaced, and oh by the way we have to cut through the sidewalk we just poured 2 weeks ago to replace the wiring. That will be $24,000 please. Those new laptops that we are plugging into the network connections that don’t work, which cost $1495 on Dell’s website? Yea, we are buying them from a local vendor, to help rebuild the economy. And at $4500 each, we are helping a lot.

This wasn’t the post I set out to write, but it is the one that ended up on the page. I think that is one of the truly wonderful things about blogging. I often start out wanting to talk about one thing, and find myself an hour later looking at a page full of something else. It must be because it needed to be said, or at least I needed to say it because it’s really pissing me off. I have a lot of other things pissing me off, and you will all get to hear about them later. But for now I have to get some sleep. More to follow.

A grunt at heart

Even though I am actually an Artilleryman, I have always been a Grunt at heart.

You scored as Combat Infantry. Your a combat infantry soldier,a grunt, a dogface, a footslogger. While some say your common, your a really a disciplined person who realizes the importantce of working in a team, and in reality you and your comrades get most of the work done. This country needs more people like you. Your a brave selfless person. And I salute you. TEN-HUT!!! Combat Infantry 94% Special Ops 88% Officer 81% Support Gunner 75% Medic 69% Engineer 44% Artillery 25% Civilian 0% Which soldier type are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Bottom of the 9th and batting .1000

Some people have asked me where the name Mustang 09 comes from. It was my call sign when I was the First Sergeant of an M198 howitzer Battery. I’ve had many calls signs, but that one, for some reason, has always been my favorite.

There is no job in the world that is more paternal than that of the First Sergeant. The First Sergeant is the Senior NCO in a Company sized unit, the NCO everyone else looks to for answers on everything. It really is like being everyone’s Dad. No other position in the Military directly affects the day to day lives and well being of soldiers as much, not even Command. At least in my humble opinion.

I have been a First Sergeant twice. I like to believe that I left my mark on both of the units I led, some sort of lasting legacy or at least an organizational, collective memory of the lessons I tried to impart or the attitudes I tried to exemplify. My first unit was a Target Acquisition Battery, a Field Artillery unit whose mission is to find hostile artillery and direct fire against it. I “grew up” in this unit, moving from an E4 just out of the Marine Corps, through section leader, Platoon Sergeant, and finally First Sergeant. I deployed twice with them, and brought all my soldiers home twice. After I moved on, the unit was activated for OIF 2. I watched them leave, some of them for the 3rd time, soldiers I had trained, soldiers I consider family, and I felt a combination of pride and guilt.

My second battery, my howitzer battery, was a very different experience. I arrived an outsider, hardly knowing anyone, having to earn their respect without the advantage of years of shared history. I must’ve done something right, because within a year by every measure I was the First Sergeant of the finest unit in the battalion. In all honesty it was luck on my part. I walked into a great unit and reaped the benefits. I was transferred out of that unit way too soon for a dreaded staff job. Six months after I left they were alerted. Two months later, I was. And again I watched soldiers I had trained leave.

When I arrived in country last January I was fortunate enough to meet up with “my” target acquisition battery, as they were completing their tour. We had one night together as I was transiting their base on the way to mine. I had dinner with some of my old NCO’s, and they told me the stories of the close calls. One of them told me” Top, it’s a miracle we didn’t lose anybody”. A week later they were all home safe, and I could breathe a little easier.

Over the last ten months I have had the opportunity to spend at least a little time with soldiers from my howitzer Battery. They had been retrained and were performing MP duties in southern Baghdad. They’ve had close calls. Soldiers have been wounded. On Sunday, I got confirmation that every one of “my” soldiers were back in the United States alive. Breathing gets easier still. One of our other Batteries was not so fortunate, and one of the first things I plan to do when I get home is to visit the graves of the 3 men they lost.

I know I am not the perfect leader by any stretch, but I have always cared about my soldiers. When I was in the Marine Corps, I came across a series of books by Major Gene Duncan, USMC (Ret). He ended a book on leadership with the following quote, which I have learned applies equally to my soldiers as it does Marines:

I have grown to look upon Marines as something sacred;
I have laughed with them and cried with them;
Cursed them and prayed for them;
Shivered and sweltered with them;
Suffered with them;
Fought with them, bled with them, and held them in my arms
While they died.
I have buried them.
And all the time, I have loved them.

If I have been that kind of leader, I have been a success.

How specific do you want it?

Vanity first: I got some MSM notice, pretty cool to see it in print. The Sergeant mentioned in the article, Todd Whipps, is an old and dear friend of mine. We were in Bosnia together many years ago, and when we were activated for this deployment we had hoped to be stationed together again. I am glad to see that he is enjoying his time here, at least at moments.

I was sitting in the S2 shop (intelligence office) waiting for a meeting to start when the S2 got a call from a patrol. They had a suspect in custody and were looking for verification that the guy they had was who they thought he was. The S2 gave them a physical description which was, well, pretty generic. Iraq is full of 5'6"160 pound dark haired males, so the patrol asked for some more specific information. A few more minutes of research told us that the guy we were looking for had a pretty specific injury, so he told the patrol "“If he is missing 3 toes, he's the guy. Go ahead and bring him in."” The patrol, not wanting to arrest the wrong 7 toed guy, promptly asked us "“from which foot?"

Perfect answer

I try to come up with original things to say in this Blog, but most of the time the words of others say what I am thinking far more eloquently. This article at Mudville discusses retention in the Guard, and in it 1Lt Bruce Bishop states his reasons for staying in:

..."because as I look around at the state of this nation and see all of the weak little pampered candy-asses that are whining about this or protesting that, I'd be afraid to leave the fate of this nation entirely up to them."

Thanks LT! I hope you don’t mind if I use this as my stock answer from now on when asked why I keep doing this. Priceless.

May you find peace

Because the core of my job is controlling access to the camp, I have met thousands of Iraqis over the past 9 months. Many I speak to for a moment, just to determine what their business is and to make a quick decision about one time access, most for about 10 minutes to interview them prior to granting them longer term access. The Iraqis I know best are the interpreters, my own and those who work for other units here on the camp. They are wonderful people, with a diversity of backgrounds, education, personalities. What they have in common is the ability to pass an English proficiency test and the guts to work side by side with U.S Troops, inside and outside the wire. As I have mentioned before, the job is incredibly dangerous.

When I first arrived here, and began learning the ropes at the gate, the first Iraqis I came to know were our gate interpreters. Interpreters are mostly known by nicknames, for their own protection and for ease of pronunciation by Americans. We have a really hard time getting our tongues around Arabic names. They have nicknames like Doc, Navigator, Bulldog, Cowboy, and Caesar. Some speak what I call “Hollywood English”, which they clearly learned watching American movies and TV, filled with slang and expressions they may or may not fully understand. These interpreters are always entertaining, not always for the reasons they think they are, and are very easy to get along with. New interpreters often speak very limited, literal English with little understanding of the subtleties of the language. Once they have spent some time around Americans, they grow into effective and trusted interpreters. Some, like Neo, speak fluent and proper English, sometimes better than the Soldiers they are interpreting for.

I met Neo the same day I met Fox and Junior, “my” interpreters. Neo, before he transferred to another job, worked the gate with about 12 other interpreters, and we considered him one of the best; intelligent, eloquent, and principled. He owned a jewelry business in Baghdad before the war and my predecessors introduced us quickly, advising me to talk to Neo before buying any jewelry, because he had the best quality at the most reasonable prices. After about a month, Neo left the gate to work at the base contracting office. This was the perfect match for him. His business experience and knowledge of the Baghdad economy allowed the contracting office to drive the hardest bargains and find the best suppliers. It also allowed him to get a little less face time in front of the other Iraqi workers, which he hoped would reduce the risk associated with working here, and the constant threats he received. Neo moved his family four times since I arrived here to protect them from those threats.

I found out this afternoon that two days ago, Neo was driving to work when his car was stopped by terrorists. They pulled him from his car and shot him in the back of the head. They left his body lying in the ditch alongside the road. Neo’s real name was Nabeel. Nabeel lived his life with more courage and honor than the cowards who murdered him will know in a thousand lifetimes.

Nabeel stayed here in spite of the danger because he believed that he was building a peaceful and free Iraq. I will miss you, my friend. May God grant you the peace you sought.

Cliches

I received this email last night:

Greetings!I've been follow troops morale and deployments and developments since the war began, and I've felt very upset about the ideas this country has about how best to "support the troops"...
As a social psych major in college, I spent a lot of time studying how good people can come to do bad things. And, unfortunately, war is the best petri dish for these kinds of occurences. Leave aside that I think the strategy in Iraq was flawed from the beginning, my concernis that the Administration continues to cut benefits and psychological support for the men and women defending our country. I think it's a disgrace that they will send soldiers overseas without proper equipment, under false pretense, and then, they won't even take responsibility when things go wrong.
Anyhow, I put my skills to use and made a 4-minute short film, and I built a website to provide information. I'd love for you to check itout and pass it along, if you think it holds any merit.
www.acatastrophicsuccess.com
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I wanted to share mine.
Cheers,Kaz

I followed the link and watched Kaz’s little cliché of an anti veteran film. It purports to be a psychological evaluation of a combat vet charged with murder. I’m sure they think they are being clever with the not so subtle ways that they make the vet look ignorant and brainwashed, but the effort was laughable. In the first few moments of the film, the “vet” refers to the president as “George Bush Jr” (because vets are too stupid to know the presidents real name). It heads downhill from there. I checked out the “learn” link on the page and was shocked, shocked I tell you, to find a page full of anti war links, running the gamut from MoveOn.org to Poets against the war.

One of the links led to “The Stanford Prison experiment”, detailing how dehumanizing the prison system in the U.S. is, and how it parallels the alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners. This experiment lasted 6 days. I was particularly interested in a statement on the main page about how guards in the experiment became sadistic after only a few days of experimentation. Before I decided to make a real living, I spent 9 years as a Corrections Officer. I worked in a segregation unit for most of that time. I also worked on the security squad and was a SORT (Special Operations Response Team) member. If anyone was in a position to become a sadistic thug, it was me. I won’t pretend for a moment that I wasn’t changed by my experience “doing time part time”, but I certainly wasn’t turned into some kind of sadistic monster. Psychological evaluations prior to hiring, weeks of training prior to inmate contact and ongoing training while working prevent this sort of devolution. Before anyone disparages Corrections Officers, they need to walk a tier, alone and unarmed, among a couple of hundred felons.

This is how the anti war crowd discounts the inconvenient reality of troops who believe in their mission; depict them as ignoramuses, or worse, as Psychos. Another favored tactic is to call them liars, like this little gem over at Huffington. I have no problem at all with those who disagree with the war, so long as they thank a veteran for the right to do so, but I have a big problem with the idiots who paint us with these stereotypes. If you believe the war is wrong, fine. Don’t pretend for a second that you are supporting the troops by calling them stupid insane liars.

If you believe the war is wrong but honestly want to support the troops by getting them home, here is what you can do: find a charity that is helping the children of Iraq and Afghanistan by providing medical care, school supplies, clothing, or shelter. They are out there. Donate to them. Send me an email or comment with a link to the charity; I will build a Blogroll of them. Everybody wins.

One more note to Kaz: Spell check, Grammar check, read it out loud to see if it makes sense, and then hit send. Oh, and put down the Kool-Aid.

Success

This morning, I shook the purple stained hand of a dear friend. The skeptics, and the ignorant, can spin the turnout and result all they want, I know the truth. I saw it in Junior’s eyes when he held up his finger. I didn’t ask him how he voted, that doesn’t matter. I think that’s what the naysayers don’t get. The outcome doesn’t matter because the process was successful, therefore whatever the outcome, freedom triumphed.
My job on Saturday was to handle any detainees picked up in our sector, questioning them and making recommendations regarding what to do with them. Take a guess at how many people I questioned. Not one. I spent the day doing redeployment planning and talking to soldiers coming off of patrols, who all reported happy crowds waving purple fingers at the passing Soldiers. No violence. No IED’s. No detainees. It was so quiet in our sector that the Brigade commander personally escorted the family of an Iraqi baby with a broken leg to a hospital, because he had nothing else going on. It was actually boring. Boring is good. My seat as a witness to history was a quiet room, watching AFN News and waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened, and that is News. Nothing happened!
Something I haven’t seen mentioned in press reports of the election is the fact that no American troops were guarding any of the polling sites. Security was handled entirely by the Iraqi Army and Police. We had patrols sweeping the MSR’s, but no one was even allowed within sight of a polling place. It was the Iraqi’s election, not ours.
It was a success. I know, I was there.

Driving on

I have a lot to say and no time to say it, at least until after the elections. This has been a busy week and it isn't slowing down. More, much more, next week.

Islamofacism = Pinky and the Brain

The president gave a speech Thursday in which he (finally) eloquently stated the stakes in this war. He described the threat we face from Islamofacism, how militant Islam plans to take over the world, and what we must do to defeat them.

The threat is real. They want to take over the world. TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Say it with me. THEY WANT TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Internalize it, breathe it in, and contemplate it. The frontline terrorists are Pinky to Al Qaeda’s Brain. The Islamic masses listen to the Imams on Friday, asking “what are we going to do today, Brain?” and the Imams answer “the same thing we do every day Pinky, try to take over the world!” The intellectual elites pretend this reality is alarmist, reactionary, and must be exemplary of some sort of dim fundamentalism. After all in the real world, adults are more reasonable. Intelligent and enlightened people can be reasoned with, and after all isn’t the United States is much guiltier of trying to force our brand of freedom (since when is individual liberty a brand) down people’s throats? Well, elitist pipedreams notwithstanding, in Al Qaeda’s own words, their goal is to take over the world by 2020. There is no negotiation that will dissuade them from this goal. There is no appeasement that will change there minds, short off every human being on the planet converting to Wahabbi Islam. My daughters are not going to put on Urbayas, so no deal. The consequences of fundamental Islamists succeeding are unthinkable. In the Presidents words:

“We're facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers -- and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.”

Why does the President believe that these are the goals of our enemies? Because they said so, and have demonstrated that they mean it. The questions that raise disagreement are the problem we face now. I believe the following to be established facts; Al Qaeda and by proxy much of the Muslim world desires the destruction of the United States and Israel. This same enemy desires and has a plan to install a Muslim Caliphate to rule the entire world, and will murder anyone who they define as an infidel or apostate. Many of our enemies are currently concentrated in Iraq. They were in Iraq before we invaded. If what I believe is true, then this war is the most just and necessary war the United States has fought since the Second World War.

We have a plan to win. It’s not easy and it won’t happen quickly. But we will win. By applying a combination of military, diplomatic, economic, humanitarian and educational strategies worldwide, we will destroy both today’s active terrorists and tomorrow’s potential terrorists. 6 methodologies, 8 pressure points. Not just Iraq, but worldwide. Not just Al Qaeda, but Islamic extremism. This war is bigger than 9-11, but some people just can’t see the bigger picture. We are not at war to bring the perpetrators of 9-11 to justice. We are at war to prevent Islamic extremists from taking over the world. We have been fighting this war since the creation of the PLO in 1965, only we didn’t know it. We continued to run around denying the significance of the threat in the face of the Iran hostage crisis, the Beirut barracks bombing, hijackings, kidnappings, assassinations of Americans, and attacks on our own soil. Most of America is now aware of the reality of the threat. Unfortunately, many of our countrymen can’t think in terms beyond that of a 10 second sound bite. So hear this sound bite:

Islamofacists are like Pinky and the Brain; they want to take over the world.

Not on my watch.

UPDATE: in case you are wondering, Religion of peace has a rundown of terrorist attacks perpetrated by militant islam since 9-11

HAT TIP: Little Green Footballs

Self indulgent prattling

DADMANLY is getting short…..I wonder if that would make me the senior enlisted Milblogger in Iraq? I don’t know of any E9’s who are blogging, and the only other E8 blogger I know about is in Afghanistan. OK, there is this guy, but he just made MSG, so I have time in grade on him, plus his BOG date is about 4 months after me…So, would that make me the First Sergeant of the Milblogosphere? I’ve been First Sergeant of a Firing Battery and a Target Acquisition Battery in the past, but putting a “virtual Diamond” on would be a great new experience…..Ah well, I think I will only have about 45 days left in country after Dadmanly leaves, and I know I could never find the time to post as prolifically as he does.

This is good news, and news you likely won’t hear about on TV. You probably heard about this all weekend, they were babbling about it on all the Sunday news shows. I have a few things to say about it, but Major K. says it better.

This from Iraq the model is a good post with a spectacular title. I had to link it just for that.

Jamie Hailer in St Petersburg is running a business I am envious of. Oh to find that perfect niche.

Dueling statistics: this seems to contradict this. Or not, depending on how you bend the numbers and demographic assumptions to conform to your personal preexisting biases. My bias leans in the direction of asking Congressman Rangel to stop running his soup cooler.

Too close

I mentioned in an earlier post that I usually get the jitters before I go out on a patrol. A few days ago, I didn’t and should have. It was an ill conceived mission to begin with, we were supposed to drive into downtown Baghdad, locate 4 civilian trucks, driven by Iraqis, which had been having trouble getting to our camp. They claimed they were getting turned around at a checkpoint, but it was unclear whether it was an Iraqi Army, Iraqi police, or US checkpoint. Based on the location they gave us, it was actually most likely Shiia militia stopping them and shaking them down for money. Anyway, we were supposed to find them and escort them through our Brigade sector, to the FOB so they could pick up what they needed to pick up. We had about a one hour window of time to meet these guys, but Iraqi time is different than American time. In the US Army, time is measured in seconds, with margins of error measured in, well, there are no margins, and you do things on time to the second. In Iraq, time is more flowing; it is more a concept than a measurement. In the US Army, 0800 means 8 AM, not 0758 and most assuredly not 0802. To an Iraqi, 0800 is in the morning, therefore it means sometime between 0600 and noon, give or take, depending on traffic and if it’s not to hot, in’shallah. We were supposed to meet these guys between 0900 and 1000. I had a real warm fuzzy about that happening. We had no effective communications with them, only a point on the map and a description of the trucks. The Major who needed these trucks thought it would be a piece of cake, no problem. He wasn’t going though; he had a very important meeting instead. Through some twist of fate, I was a driver, mostly because my unit has way too few E4’s. The E4 with us was our gunner, the most dangerous job in the vehicle by far. We were the lead vehicle.

We got loaded up and started rolling. We hit the MSR (Main supply route, really a highway) and headed for the link up point. Traffic sucked, but US patrols don’t get stuck in traffic. We just jump the median and drive into oncoming traffic, horns blazing. They move. They have learned. We own the road. We zigzagged our way into downtown, crossing medians as traffic backed up, jumping back over as traffic subsided. It’s actually very efficient. It also pushes your heart rate up a bit. As we were heading into the city, at one point I saw a taxi on the side of the road, pointed towards traffic, and a bunch of cars parked off the shoulder behind the taxi. It just didn’t feel right, so I yelled to the gunner to watch him and I swung over to the center of the road as we passed. Nothing exploded. A few minutes later, we hit the intersection for the link up. No trucks. Big surprise. We orbited the intersection a couple times, driving a bit past it, turning around, heading north and then south past it. On the second orbit, another patrol passed us going in the opposite direction, back towards our camp. I turned us around, and we headed back up the road. We were a couple hundred yards behind the patrol we had just passed. As we approached the point where I had seen the taxi, an IED detonated on the patrol in front of us. We heard the explosion, and traffic stopped. I swung towards the center of the road, hit the center island, and gunned it past the traffic. One local wasn’t paying enough attention, and tried the same move. He was pulling directly in front of us. My gunner tossed a water bottle at him, hitting his door. That woke him up. The look of shock in his eyes when he saw 3 Humvees headed right for him was unforgettable. We swung past the traffic and pulled in behind the patrol that had been hit, and set up rear security. Junior, our interpreter, began redirecting traffic to another route. The vehicle that was hit was torn up pretty good, all 4 tires were shredded and there was shrapnel damage to the left side of the vehicle, but no one was wounded. Armor rocks.

The IED had been buried in the center island, directly across the road from where the taxi had been parked. When I swerved to avoid the taxi, I had driven within 10 feet of the IED. I never saw it. If that patrol hadn’t passed us, we would have been the next patrol on the road. It would have been us.

We continued to pull security while the damaged vehicle was recovered. We escorted them to the next US checkpoint, pulling security for them as they towed the damaged vehicle, at a speed of about 10 miles per hour, through Baghdad. Loads of fun, I recommend it to everyone. At that point, we aborted trying to find our trucks, as we had long missed the window to meet them. We headed back to the FOB. The rest of the trip was uneventful, thankfully. When we got back, we discovered the trucks we were trying to escort had arrived. They had passed us while we were pulling security.

Get it right

Just wanted to put up a link to this post. His experience is not unusual, the Iraqis are very friendly, hospitable people. I heard some talking head interviewing another talking head a few days ago about Iraq -v- Al Qaeda, saying "why are we fighting Iraqis?" I am getting really tired of this being the depiction of the War. We are not fighting the Iraqis! We are fighting in Iraq, alongside Iraqis, against terrorists. Many are from other countries, some are from Iraq. So for the record, we are not at war with Iraq. We are at war in Iraq. There is a difference.

What's that taste?

Most of the time, right before I roll out of the gate on a mission, I get the jitters. Maybe not so much jitters, just a very sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s this queasy knot of fear that I can’t quite control but doesn’t really incapacitate me. Usually it hits after the mission brief, as we are loading up, buckling in, doing that last second check of your gear to make sure everything is where it is supposed to be and is secure. It sits in my stomach, and I usually think something like “it would be really embarrassing to throw up in front of these kids. That wouldn’t do at all.” It goes away when we hit the gate and all that excess adrenaline is routed to my eyes and ears, where it is needed. Then it is all business, yelling about what you see and what to do, pointing out potential hazards to the driver and gunner, yelling into the radio, and trying to stay on top of the chaos of Baghdad traffic. Last week, as we were rolling out, we were talking about one of the villages we would be going through, doing an assessment of some construction being completed there. I told my crew to that this was a nasty insurgent village. I mentioned that the last time I was there, doing a cordon and search, we had gotten into a firefight with some jokers on the other side of the Tigris, who lit up our cordon as we were searching a riverside house. I said that during the firefight, I was hiding behind a wall, wetting my pants and sucking my thumb (Only partially true). The laughter shed some tension, and my stomach relaxed.
We hit the road and pulled into our first stop, everything went great, happy smiling kids waving, yada yada yada. The poverty in this little squatter’s village, alongside a canal leading to the Tigris, is as abject as it gets. One of the “homes” we parked beside was an old conex container with a door and window cut out of it, with a satellite dish on the roof. One of these days I will get around to posting about the post war Baghdad real estate market. Anyway, as we were leaving that village, rounding a line of buildings that border the highway, we spotted a guy digging a hole next to the road. Now in Iraq there is only one reason why some guy would dig a hole next to the road, and that is to throw an IED in the hole. Imagine his surprise to suddenly find 3 humvee’s surrounding him, and 3 M240 Bravo’s pointed at him. We searched him and his car, and turned him over to the Battalion QRF (quick reaction force). A short lived success, 2 days later another US patrol was hit by an IED in the same spot. We moved down the road to our next stop, a school we are renovating. We were supposed to meet a civilian contractor there, who was going with us to the “nasty” village. The contractor showed up without his car, and asked if he could ride with us. The fact that he was unwilling to drive his own car into that particular village was enough to make us reassess the necessity of going into that village that day. We decided the work could wait for another day, when perhaps we weren’t expected. In Iraq, dropping by unexpectedly is a good way to do business.
We revised our route, and stopped into another village to talk with some of the local civilian leadership. This village is reasonably friendly, and full of happy smiling kids, yada yada yada. We started handing out toys and goodies, which always causes a near riot of kids fighting over the best stuff. We had a couple of soccer balls to hand out. These are the prime items for the boy in the village. Scoring a “futbul” makes their week. One of the things I have learned over the years is that if you want to know what is going on somewhere, ask the kids. So I did. I asked, in Arabic, one of the preteen boys surrounding us if there were any problems with bad guys. He replied in perfect English, while rolling his eyes and pointing to the village across the highway, “yeah there are wahhabis in that village, now give me a F#*&ing futbul”. OK then, I guess I am not the first American soldier this kid has had contact with!
Finally, the glad handing is over, the goodies are distributed, progress is made. We mount up, and head in. Final tally: an IED delayed, a terrorist in jail, a school gets just a little closer to complete, and a village gets maybe too Americanized. Not a bad morning.

Dad interrupted

On Friday, my Wife and I celebrated our 16th anniversary. It was the third anniversary we have spent apart, and each time I promise that this will be the last time. Somehow that hasn’t worked out yet. 8000 miles and 9 time zones is a long ways apart, but we managed to spend some time together anyway. It was early evening here, late morning there, the kids were at school, and I was done with work for the day. We chatted, flirted, and blew each other kisses on the webcam. We smiled and laughed. We talked about the past and the future and pretended that the present wasn’t real, like we were on a date, enjoying dinner and each others company. Keeping a marriage going is tough under any circumstances, but we are pretty much a statistical miracle. 3 deployments, and 9 years working in a prison, night’s weekends and holidays, working Christmas day or Thanksgiving evening, it amazes me still that she stuck with me. What the hell is she thinking? Well, whatever keeps her from tossing me out like yesterdays trash, Thank God for it!

Missing another anniversary reminded me of all the other moments I have been missing. A couple of weeks ago, school started. Our oldest daughter (the artist) started high school. Our middle Daughter (the athlete) started middle school. And our youngest Son(the Jedi) started second grade, his first year of being “alone” at school, without the burden of a big sister running around the school creating oh so unreasonable expectations for him. The Artist is keeping my absence a secret from her teachers to avoid any special attention it may bring, because talking about it with people who lack a mutual perspective just doesn’t help her deal with it. She made me very proud the other day when she told me that she doesn’t like her government teacher because “Dad, she is really liberal”. I get the feeling that if this particular teacher knew that The Artist spent Election Day 2004 waving a Bush/Cheney sign over Highway 10, it may cost her a few points on the final. She is currently scheming to create the perfect moment to inform this teacher that “My Dad’s in Baghdad and he says wishing failure on his mission does not support him!” She chuckles with glee when she talks about this, and at the same time feels bad that I am not there to share the fun. Her confirmation is next spring, and I will be home.

The Athlete doesn’t share too much with me about how she feels, until it is time to say goodbye, then the emotion comes surging to the surface. She has always been the fiery one, tough as nails and determined, but still a little girl when faced with a father going to war for what seems a lifetime. The single most painful moment of my life was in 1996, as I was leaving for Bosnia, when my name was called to get on the bus. The athlete, who had been tough through the whole thing, asking questions and taking in answers with little comment, watched me turn to climb on the bus and screamed, as only a 3 year old can, “Daddy Noooooooo!” as I walked away. How I climbed onto that bus I don’t know to this day. Subsequent goodbyes have gotten easier, sort of, if only through repetition and familiarity. Hockey tryouts start in 2 weeks. I won’t be there.

The Jedi, named that because he is 7, and what else could a 7 year boy old be? While I was home on leave, we saw “Revenge of the Sith” together. It was all he would ask me before I came home. “Dad, are we going to see Star Wars together?” As far as he was concerned, once we checked that box, it was a successful vacation. The rest was icing. His current plan involves building a clubhouse in the backyard together when I get home. The plans are elaborate, as they should be. When I asked him how we would build the clubhouse in the middle of winter, when I get home, he applied perfect 7 year old logic: “we can build it in the garage, and then move it when the snow is gone”. As far as I am concerned, it is a perfect plan. A few minutes a day of sweeping snow off of cars, and scraping windows, is an insignificant price to pay. Cars come and go; clubhouses last forever in a son’s mind.

Four more months. I get to be a real Dad again in four more months.

Has it been a week?

This has been a busy, boring week. I have spent a lot of time doing mundane stuff that must be done but still turns the mind to mush. Inventories, evaluations, and a lot of correspondence about a lot of stuff that is necessary but not very exciting. The dirty little secret of war is that these things don’t stop, as much as I wish they would. We are starting to plan for our redeployment, still 4 months away, but, like Christmas shopping, you can’t start too early.

The saving grace of the last week has been the temperature. We are starting to see perceptible dips, at last. Now I never in my life thought that I would be calling highs of 115 cooling off, but amazingly enough that is the case. It has been getting down into the low 70’s at night, and staying below 100 until late in the morning. Just a couple of weeks ago it would start at about 98 in the morning and head up into the mid 120’s by 11:00, and stay there until sundown. Hopefully in a few weeks the temperature will be bearable around the clock, and we can start to open windows, and get some of the summer funk out of our rooms. In Minnesota, we look forward to spring so we can throw open the windows and get some fresh air after a long winter, after surviving in heated spaces for 5 or 6 months. Here, the cycle is reversed, and autumn gives us the chance to air out rooms that have had air conditioners running non stop, not staying ahead of the drying sweat smell in the rooms. After 6 months of sweaty socks, boots, and t-shirts, my room REALLY needs to air out. Gold Bond can only do so much.

When I think back over past deployments, there is always some environmental factor that stands out, some unpleasant memory that defines that particular place. When I was on the USS John F. Kennedy, it was the constant noise, hum, and motion of the ship. In the Balkans, it was the mud. And here, it’s going to be the heat, the pain of inhaling mouthfuls of dust and fire, and feeling the water leave your body faster than you can replace it. I believe in what I am doing here, but I will not miss this place.

I thought I would throw in a few links to some great posts I read this week. I have decided that this essay in particular, Tribes, needs to be read by everyone. Bill Whittle is a genius. Read it, and then take a moment to define yourself. I have decided that after 22 years of military service and 9 years working as a corrections officer, I have probably earned the right to call myself a sheepdog. I am somewhat at peace with the fact that even if the sheep do not want saving, and may curse being saved, save them I will, because it is my nature. I know the wolf when I see it.

Ben Stein does a great job of stating the obvious here.

Here is a great timeline of Katrina and the aftermath, and here is a nice “grey” look at the math.

For those who toss around the “chickenhawk” label.

As fast as they can

The events of the last week in New Orleans have left me, well, speechless. Even the tragedy in Khademiya, just a few miles from here, on Wednesday, where nearly 900 Iraqis were killed in a human stampede seem insignificant compared to Katrina’s aftermath. That makes it tough to post from here, because while yes, the war does go on, everyone’s attention is focused on New Orleans, which is as it should be.

I do want to spout off a little bit at some of the critics who are attacking how long it took for the military to arrive. There seems to be a perception that the National Guard is available at a moments notice, capable of just rising out of the ground where they are needed, instantly capable of providing food, shelter and medical care. Reality is that it’s going to take 2-3 days from the time the Governor decides they need large numbers of Guard troops until any are available. Think about it. What needs to happen? What are the troops needed for, what’s expected of them, what expectation is there of the need for force, how long are they needed, what facilities exist to support them logistically, who is in charge….these are just a few of the questions that need to be answered before the first phone call is made. Then units start to get called up. 24 hours minimum to get 75% of your soldiers to the Armory. The other 25% are out of town, or they moved, or gave us a bad phone number, or any one of many other excuses. Then you start getting trucks loaded, weapons issued, ammunition drawn, food and tentage loaded, life support for the troops coordinated, turning the probably very general deployment order into an executable Operations order, and finally start moving. That’s another day, minimum. You’re looking at 72 hours from the time the Governor says “we need the Guard” until you can put any troops on the ground. Logistics convoys that can actually deliver relief supplies will take another 24 hours to load, minimum. If everything goes right, and the relief supplies needed are actually on hand in the quantities needed. So 4 days to get relief supplies delivered.

If I recall correctly, the Governor of Louisiana asked for troops on Tuesday. Troops began showing up on Wednesday, were providing security on Thursday, and food showed up on Friday. That is actually a phenomenal response time. Now those troops need to be supported logistically, meaning tens of thousands of meals daily, thousand of gallons of water, medical support just to keep the troops healthy not to mention the victims, billeting, toilets, and trash removal. Add to that fuel and maintenance requirements. Not an insignificant task.

I just ask people, before you get too critical of the response, to consider the scope, the numbers, and the reality of how long stuff really takes to get done. It may not seem fast enough, but it is as fast as it can be.

Similarities

I was surfing around a few blogs this weekend and came across one via Mudville that really grabbed me. Sunshine is a 14 year old girl from Mosul, writing about life as an Iraqi child growing up in war. I fervently hope it doesn’t turn out to be something like this.

What really grabbed me about her blog was how much she reminds me of my own 14 year old daughter, the same tastes in music, movies, books, and the same sensitivities and optimistic hope in the basic goodness of humanity. They even have a younger brother and sister in common. As I read Sunshine’s words it was my daughter’s voice I heard, and I imagined her caught up in this madness. I admit that thinking about her, going through what Sunshine has gone through, brought a tear to my eye. No father wants to imagine his child living a life like that, I mean, that’s what we are supposed to protect our children from, that’s what I tell myself I am here for. Like the quote on the top of the page says, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” I believe to the core of my being that I am helping to bring my children peace. I only hope that along the way, Sunshine can know peace too. In spite of what some are telling you, that day is not so far away.

This post did bother me. Here, Sunshine tells of an American patrol searching her home, and while most of the soldiers were respectful and courteous, one did damage some of their belongings. This bothered Sunshine, as she believed that if she was polite and welcoming to the Troops, they would respond in kind. I hope she still retains some of that belief. Her story reminded me of the first Cordon and Search operation I participated in, a joint U.S. & Iraqi army operation in a village near here this past April. We received intelligence that several “persons of interest” and information we were interested in were located at a house in the village. Now again, I am not going to give out operational details, but we went in, secured the area, and searched the target house. Turned out the intell was close, but not perfect, and the first house we searched was the wrong one. We wanted the guys next door. Luckily, because everyone searching, U.S. and Iraqi, was respectful during the search, we didn’t alienate a house full of innocent people. They went back to bed, we took down the right house, and got what we were looking for. That was the first time I was in an Iraqi’s house, and what struck me was the fear in the eyes of the children. 10 soldiers going through your house at 5 in the morning is a scary thing no matter how nice the soldiers are. I didn’t let it bother me at the time, but those eyes haunted me for a while afterward. Maybe they still do. Knowing a mission is noble doesn’t mean you don’t feel guilty about how it’s accomplished sometimes.

Jeeb Ginsea Jedeeda

This country loves forgeries. They aren’t very good at it, but they love insisting that their forgeries are in fact authentic. Whether it be watches, DVD’s, or identification, they love to make knock offs.

I see a lot of Iraqi ID’s in a day, and the phrase above, which literally translated means “get Identification new”, is a sentence I have mastered. I utter it several times a day, and then smile as I hear the onslaught of excuses. “No meestah, is good ginsea!” “Not fake, I’m from Basrah, this is how Basrah ginseas are.” ”Iraqis only get one ginsea, you cannot get new one.” Sometimes, they get a perplexed look, and say “how could you know this?” as an incredulous Iraqi wonders how an American infidel could possibly tell that the piece of paper in my hand was not legally issued by any Iraqi government office. I am not going to get into the specifics of how we identify the forgeries, but I will say that if they ever master “spellcheck” my job will get a lot harder.

Add to this an apparent cultural belief that if you forge the document yourself, that somehow makes it authentic. Many times I have turned someone away because the picture on their ID was unrecognizable, for instance they are 30 years old and the picture is of an 8 year old. The next day they are back, with the same ID, and a current picture of themselves laminated right on top of the old one. When I explain that this is not adequate, they indignantly point to the picture and say “But this is me! I change it!” They simply cannot understand how I can have a problem with that logic.

They get these fakes from local Souks, or markets, that look like a cross between the sets of Casablanca and Mad Max. These outposts of capitalism give me confidence that freedom can work here, because they certainly have the instincts for it. According to rumor, any document can be created in 15 minutes for 5 dollars, as long as you are not too picky about the quality. I joked with one of my NCO’s recently that if he needed to get his passport renewed, he should do it in the Market, as long as he didn’t mind a passport from the “Unitted Stats of Amrika”.

By the way, if you see me back home wearing a Rolex, rest assured: “is real meestah, very good watch!”