Life on Mars

I have obviously not been able to post in quite awhile, so I will do what I can to catch up. I have been sending a series of emails to family/friends over the past couple of months, so I will copy those emails on this blog every few days until I catch up to what is happening today. Bottom line is that I will be compressing the last 2 months into about a 3 week period on this blog, so some of what you read will have to be understood in the (slightly) past tense.

For openers, I am based out of COB Speicher mear Tikrit, Iraq. I am attached to Multi-National Division North (MND-MN), and our main insurgency problem up here is a Sunni problem. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is the largest and most vicious of the groups, but none are afraid to kill. There is some Shiite activity down around Diyala Province, which is in the southeast sector of MND-N. AQI is fighting hard for its last stronghold up here, which is in Mosul. The following was first sent out to my list around late April:

Hello everyone,
If any of you ever had the desire to live on Mars, come here to Speicher on a day like today and you will be pleased. The attached photo doesn’t do justice to how red the day was with this massive sandstorm. It blew in Wednesday night around midnight and it will be going strong until around noon on Friday. It actually got worse as the day wore on after that picture was taken.

I spent the week adjusting and attending briefings to get a good grip on what is happening in the region. Someone back home asked me about rockets, and if we were receiving rocket fire like the troops down in Baghdad. The answer is almost entirely “no.” Speicher sits in open desert (hence the massive sand storms). In the past, the insurgents tried to get close enough to hit Speicher with rockets or mortars. Due to the normally great visibility for miles around the camp, these insurgents were easily spotted and they didn’t manage to live long enough to do much shooting. Somebody occasionally fires a round in this direction, but they usually land in open desert. Relatively speaking, the Tikrit area is fairly stable. Being the home town and home tribe of Saddam Hussein, the people in this area are fairly educated and not prone to run around fighting. As I mentioned, the areas to the north and east of here are a little livelier, in military terms. The locals do not necessarily like the US in Tikrit, so they will not pass up the opportunity to do damage when they can.

As I was making contacts the other day, I went to lunch with an Iraqi-American interpreter (Isaac). He works for our Civil Affairs section. They are the people who go into the community and perform outreach duties. Isaac used to be a college professor of economics in Tikrit before he left for the US. He told me that the reason that he volunteered to come back to Iraq is because he loves his country and he wants it to be successful. He paused for a minute and then said, “I’ll bet you think I am talking about Iraq when I say that I love my country.” Of course he was correct – that is what I was thinking. He was talking about the US, though. He said that he loves the United States and that he will do all that he can to help in this battle. He feels that the downfall of Iraq really accelerated during the Iran-Iraq war. He says that corruption is the norm here and that it will take a generation before that changes. Isaac wonders why the US keeps handing out US money and not Iraqi money to make Iraqis invest in their own economy. He invited me to come out with him in the future to meet some local leaders. By the way, Isaac is a Christian who points out that his Christian ancestry goes back in this area much further than does the Islamic religion which has forced him and his family from the country.

Another Major from Civil Affairs had lunch with us as well. He is part of a team that holds town meetings to listen to claims from Iraqi citizens who claim to have been injured or had property damaged from US military operations. The Major said that the stories these people tell to get money are unbelievable but very creative. His instructions are to do what he can to make the people happy. He said that he keeps getting into trouble because he turns down more requests for money than he grants. He believes that these people need to be taught that corruption is not OK. The Major is going to have me attend one of these meetings with him up in Mosul, and he is going to have me be the person hearing the claims so that I can see for myself what he is dealing with. I figure that this will be easy. I will just educate these Iraqis on the true value of a dollar bill these days and they will be thanking me for not paying them in US dollars.

Here are a couple of other tidbits of information before I sign off. The majority of forces helping the Iraqis are obviously from the US, and we are criticized for going it alone. We are joined here by Britain, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain, Denmark, El Salvador, Slovakia, Latvia, Romania, Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand, Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, and South Korea. Each of those countries has lost soldiers in battle. Sure, they don’t have thousands of troops from each of their countries, but most of them don’t have huge militaries in the first place. They are doing what they can to participate in the effort. Notice that we don’t have most of our NATO “allies” in country. I would suggest that this might not be a bad thing. Look how NATO has been handling their part of the mission in Afghanistan.

I wish everyone the best, and I will be posting again soon.