Another email from Phil in Iraq

A week has passed since I got back off leave, so I figured it was time for another update.

It probably sounds boring, but I spend about 75 percent of my time here doing staff work. I try to get out on missions every few days, but only if I’m current on my paperwork. The reality is that my job is about planning, coordinating, and managing operations much more than actually doing them. So from the time I wake up (around 7) to the time I go to bed (around 10 or 11), I spend the majority of the time in meetings or in front of my laptop, hooked up to the classified intranet, doing staff work. Today went just like that. I woke up, brewed a pot of Peet’s coffee, and checked my classified e-mail for stuff that came in last night. Then I started updating a 40-slide PowerPoint briefing that we use to capture all of the Iraqi police and emergency call center data for the province. That meant gathering a bunch of information from our station assessments, figuring out the right way to graphically depict the data, and then cross-checking it against some other assessments that we’ve done. After finishing that, I hammered out some small tasks like scheduling a couple of guys for a helo flight. And then I spent the afternoon working on an operations order tasking our subordinate military police platoons with a couple of upcoming missions. Small wonder my ops sergeant (a burly cop from the NYPD) gave me a hug when I came back off leave; he was glad to have someone to shoulder all this paperwork so he could do the fun stuff again. I try to get out on missions at least once or twice a week to break the monotony, and also to get a feel for how operations are going out in the field. 3-4 missions a week would be better. But at this point, one week back from leave, it doesn’t look like I’ll get nearly as much field time as I’d like. Oh well.

A couple of new faces have shown up in the last few weeks. My favorite is this new interpreter that everyone calls “Doc”. Everyone calls him that because he has a doctorate in law and was a law professor under the old regime. He speaks English very well and is a very interesting guy. He’s shared a bunch of war stories about his time as a criminal defense attorney under the old regime, and he’s always trying to engage me in some deep theoretical, academic discussion about “the law”. I think he’s more of an intellectual than just about anyone I’ve met in Iraq. Even though I usually don’t have time for his discussions, I really like them so I usually blow off whatever I’m working on to talk with Doc for a few minutes. He studied and taught comparative law, so he has a really unique perspective on the old and new Iraqi legal systems. Technically, he works for a U.S. government contractor as an interpreter, but we’ve already made him our informal legal adviser because he’s so knowledgeable and personable. And, if all goes well, I’m going to co-opt him into teaching law classes for Iraqi police so that we can leverage his expertise to train them on the basics of law enforcement and criminal procedure.

We’ve had a fair number of visitors pass through here recently. General George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, stopped by for an hour or so. Not to meet with us, of course. He was here to meet with the provincial governor and a number of the other Iraqi leaders who work on this compound. Still, it’s always high adventure when you have a 4-star general officer coming through. He travels with a large enough entourage where we were worried that we’d have enough parking on our postage stamp of a compound for all the trucks (we did), and we had no idea what sort of welcome he’d want from us (none, as it turned out). A few hours beforehand, we thought we might have to wave the whole thing off because one of our sentries spotted a bag with what he thought were protruding wires just outside the entrance to the compound. We called out the Iraqi police bomb disposal team – who sometimes have more guts than brains – to check it out. Their preferred technique is to walk up to a suspected bomb and kick it. That’s exactly what one of them did, finding that it was just a bag of trash. As he walked back, the Iraqi cop casually said “boom finished” in English to one of our guys watching the scene. Then he drove off. Gotta love those guys. “Boom finished” – what a great line. We’re all using it now.

Occasionally, these visits result in very good things happening. Another general (not Casey) came through the other day asking a lot of questions about our operations. He got an earful about the new police assessment report – you remember, the really long one that precipitated that Iraqi colonel sticking his radio antenna up his nose. Anyway, our colonel was pretty candid with him about how long, cumbersome and impractical this thing was. (The new boss is great about that stuff… he’s got no compunction whatsoever about giving the unvarnished truth to headquarters, and he’s really great to work for too.) And so, we now have a tasker to develop a shorter, better version that captures the stuff that really matters out at the police stations. We’re pretty stoked about this small victory over headquarters.

The violence around here seems to have abated over the last few days. We’ve had a few IEDs go off near our compound (one as I was writing the paragraph before this, in fact), but nothing too close. No direct attacks on our compound in downtown, nor any attacks on any of our U.S. convoys. I think we’ve gotten a little numb to it all though. If the explosion isn’t close enough to feel the overpressure from the blast in your ears, it’s not close enough to worry about; I rarely get up from my desk, or get out of bed, unless it’s big or close enough to shake the concrete buildings we live and work in. (Truth be told, I usually just sleep through the explosions at night, since I’m a pretty heavy sleeper.) Or close enough that you can hear shrapnel and debris raining down. The same is true for gunfire. There’s enough sporadic gunfire around here that you’d go crazy if you jumped at every shot. So long as it stays a couple hundred meters away, we don’t worry about it much. It’s smarter to just let the situation develop, get the reports of what’s going on, and then react if necessary. Otherwise you’d go crazy here.

Division released the first draft of its redeployment order this week. Which is kind of crazy, because we still have 6 months to go. But there is just so much crap that goes into moving the 101st Airborne Division around the world – lining up schedules, planning for the shipment of trucks, helicopters, and shipping containers; scheduling Air Force plane flights and charter plane flights, etc., that it all has to be planned months in advance. I like having the planning process underway though. It gives us a bunch of milestones to look forward to, i.e. the date that the incoming unit sends its recon party, the date that we pack up our shipping container, the date we redeploy back up to Tikrit, etc. Time seems to pass more quickly when you break it into smaller chunks, I guess.

I learned last week that I was awarded the Combat Action Badge by division for a raid I went on in December when my patrol hit an IED. It feels strange to receive an award like this, because I don’t really think of what we do here as “combat,” despite the risks and hazards around us. Vietnam was combat; what the Marines did in Fallujah was combat; my war is something different. Still, I’m proud to receive the award, which the Army created to recognize non-infantry soldiers who see action over here. It’s just a piece of metal; it doesn’t help me do my job better or come home faster. But to warriors, these little pieces of metal and cloth mean something that’s hard to describe.

Attached are a couple of pictures so you can visualize what life is like over here. The first (pps-hq.jpg) is the view from our old headquarters into the neighborhood of Tahrir in Baqubah. The second (gc.roof.jpg) is the view from our new building’s roof into the slightly nicer neighborhood of Old Baqubah. (It seems that social stratification and gentrification aren’t just an L.A. thing after all.) The third (gc.bldg.jpg) is the side view of my barracks building; we occupy a corner of the state capitol building for the Diyala province. And the fourth (gc.room.jpg) is my room. It feels a lot like a college dorm room and has about as much space, so I really can’t complain.

That’s all for now. I hope all’s well back in the states. Talk to you soon.

--Phil