24th May 2003
Letter from a Friend in Iraq
A great guy I worked with for a few months in 2001 joined the military soon after Sept. 11th that year. Earlier this year, he was posted to the Middle East (not surprisingly). Haven’t heard from him in a while, but he just wrote a long letter to a bunch of his friends. Here’s most of it:
The last time I touched base with anyone was in April. At the time, I was at a large makeshift military base in the middle of the southern Iraqi desert. At the end of April, I went on the road and I?ve been traveling around ever since. I?ve logged over 2,500 miles on my Humvee in the last month, visiting cities everywhere from the Kuwaiti border in the south to Baghdad to the Iranian border in the East and the Turkish border to the North. I?ve recently settled down in Balad, which is 80 miles north of Baghdad and 80 miles south of Tikrit (Saddam Hussein?s birth home).
For those of you not familiar with my job here, I am part of the US Army Civil Affairs Command. We are responsible for all things affecting civilians in what the military calls ?its battle space.? Specifically, during the fighting we try to get civilians out of harms way and when necessary into refugee camps. After the fighting, we work on getting the civil administration back up and running (public finance, healthcare, facilities including electric and water, safety including police and fire, education system, museums, etc). We spend much of our time assessing facilities and towns in areas that are less than ?permissive? and passing that information to aid/charity groups and government organizations such as UNICEF and USAID to help in planning their missions once things calm down. We also take over the government and appoint local people into new government positions until proper elections can be held (more on this sticky issue later). In Iraq, we are working together with a new organization called ORHA (Organization for Reconstruction & Humanitarian Assistance). If you are wondering what the difference is between ORHA and Civil Affairs, and who reports to whom, so are we. That?s part of the problem here now. ORHA has been getting lots of coverage by CNN/BBC etc, most of it bad for moving too slowly. This is in part because Civil Affairs and ORHA keep stumbling over each other with little coordination.
Back to my ?road-trip?: Much of Iraq is brutally ugly, quite frankly. Especially the south. The deserts are not like the US Southwest. They are barren, completely devoid of anything but dust. Its not even sand. Its dust, and it gets in everything you have no matter how hard you fight to stop it. Your lungs and nasal passages fill with it. Your clothes and hair take on its dull color. It is omnipresent, especially when you live outside and take your showers from a 2 liter water bottle as I have for most of the last month. The exceptions to this barren ugliness are the areas near the Tigris & Euphrates and the mountainous north, both of which are beautiful. The date palm trees and fields of wheat near the rivers remind you that this is the ?fertile crescent?, the land where man first farmed. It also reminds you of the value of water in this part of the world. Take an ugly desert wasteland, add water rich in nutrient-laden silt and you have paradise. Unfortunately, add oil and you have a wealthy paradise that had delusions of even greater grandeur. The foothills and mountains near Iran are reminiscent of the Alps. It was weird having thoughts of ?The Sound of Music? while standing in front of a minefield only a few miles from Iran.
As for the people, do they love us or hate us? Of course the answer varies across the whole spectrum. Within every region I?ve met people who love us and others who hate us. For example, the Kurds in the north are most grateful to the US for removing Saddam. They were brutally repressed by Saddam before we established the Northern no-fly zone in the early 1990?s. When in Irbil, a Kurdish capital, people cheered us and threw flowers at us as we drove through town. I was sitting in the passenger seat enjoying the attention and waving at all the kids when someone threw a cement-filled tin can at me. It just missed my head (we have no doors on our Humvee ? easier to jump out if under attack) and smashed into the Humvee with a thud. We kept driving and everyone else kept waving. Down here in Balad, the stakes are higher. We?re in predominantly Sunni territory, and the majority of people don?t like us. We?re stuck in a miserable game of cat and mouse with guerilla Saddam-regime leftovers who love to shoot at us as we drive around. We?re averaging 10 gunshot injuries to US troops in Iraq per week, and most are in this region. The guerillas are faring much worse, as would be expected, but they keep playing their games. If you think the fighting is over, I assure you it is not.
The worst town, of course, is Tikrit. Saddam took care of his home-town, and they still love him there. I?ve had the unfortunate luck of having to visit many times. We are responsible for re-establishing the local government, which is next to impossible without dealing with the scum of the earth. Every time I?m there, my skin crawls. I?ve managed to avoid being shot directly at throughout my travels, something highly unusual at this point for a Civil Affairs person (we spend every day out in public, so we?re high profile and an easy target), but I thought my luck was out last week. Four of my fellow Civil Affairs soldiers and I showed up at a meeting with the newly appointed Tikrit Govenor (an ex-Special Republican Guard Colonel who some ass-hole US Army Colonel decided to empower with the govenorship and arm with AK-47s) to introduce him to the newly appointed Dujayl Mayor (a town the Tikrit Govenor felt he had control over). We never even got into the building. The govenor and 30 of his thugs met us in the parking lot as we pulled in. All 30 thugs were carrying their AK-47?s (which remember, some US Army asshole allowed them to have) fully locked and loaded with their fingers on the triggers. We were outnumbered 30 to 5. Three surrounded me. One spoke English, and with a shit-eating grin asked me if he could have my M-16. I knew if bullets started flying, I was dead, but I still wasn?t going to give him my weapon, so I just stood there waiting for shit to start raining down on me. Meanwhile the Dujayli and his contingent of 20 unarmed goons start arguing loudly with the Tikriti and his armed goons. 10 minutes of screaming ensue. I?m left staring at the faces of 3 goons, wondering which one will shoot me first and which one I might get before going down. Thankfully the Tikriti Govenor decides to leave the scene and his goons all jump in vehicles and drive away, leaving us still standing in their parking lot. So we thanked our lucky stars and went to find an ice cream shop (where they sold us the first ice cream I?ve had in a while and then told us in Arabic to fuck ourselves ? they didn?t know one of us spoke Arabic).
Two days later, I was called to run to downtown Balad where a riot had broken out and two civil affairs soldiers were holed up in a building with no escape. It turns out they were holed up with that Tikriti Govenor who was visiting the town trying to tell Balad that he?s the boss of that town too. The Balad residents also hate the Tikriti Govenor it turns out. And there I was responding to a riot I felt like joining. Long story short: the riot ended once we sent in the infantry. The Tikriti Govenor has now been stripped of US support (without his goons with guns, he?ll most likely be assassinated within the week by one of his many enemies) and the US Army Colonel who put him in charge may no longer be in charge of making such decisions for Tikrit any more. All?s well that ends well, I guess.
In case you think I?m living a life of constant adventure, keep in mind I?m just writing about the highlights. My job is a lot like a cop?s, I guess. Most of the time I do a whole lot of nothing, followed boring drudgery. For example, since we don?t have running water, we shit into barrels and burn it with diesel each morning. How?s that for glorious work. Further adding to the glamour, every meal but three in the last month came from a bag called an ?MRE? (meal-ready-to-eat). Finally, I have only 2 uniforms and neither has been machine washed in 60 days. Yes, I smell. Once I found myself visiting ORHA headquarters in Baghdad, which is located in Saddam?s main palace, the most ornate palace of them all, and I looked like I just rolled in the mud with a pig. I felt more than just a little out of place.
If I get a chance to write more, next time I?ll tell the story of the Iranian Mujahideen Organization we met with. They are an Iranian exile group based in Iraq for the last 23 years. They are trying to overthrow the Iranian regime ? something both the US and Saddam supported. What made them truly interesting was that their top 5 commanders and 40% of their soldiers are women. I got to ride in one of their tanks driven by a strikingly beautiful green-eyed woman who lost her husband to the Iranian ?cleansing? which occurred throughout the 80?s and 90?s, and still occurs today. My mother would have been proud to call these women friends. These are true feminists, willing to put their money where their mouth is. It broke my heart that the purpose of our visit was to confirm their disarmament ?something the US Army was demanding to encourage stability in Iraq right now. Further complicating matters was strong evidence that the very Mujahideen I broke bread with had no qualms using what we call ?terrorist tactics? to fight their Iranian oppressors. Another story for another day.
In the meantime, I will stay safe. My goal is to return with all 210 rounds issued to me… Please have a beer for me: a Guinness.
Leave a Reply