Bravo By Day, Bravo By Night
January 17, 2008
It’s hard to remember when the day went from routine, almost boring, to unpredictable, even exciting. It’s hard to remember when we went from chatting up the locals in town to staring at piles of dirt in the desert. I know we got back to the base at about 11:00 pm. I know I hadn’t peed since 8:30 am. I had eaten an Otis Spunkmeyer muffin around lunchtime, figuring that would hold me until dinner. But then dinner turned out to be goldfish crackers and the hard candy that is kept in the humvee to hand out to the local kids.
The Day
We left FOB (Forward Operating Base) Summerall, home of the 1st Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade, at about 10:00 am. Captain Aaron Billingsley, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion’s Bravo Company, had a number of stops he wanted to make. First up: an Iraqi-manned checkpoint. Everyone who passes through has to show an identification card, which is checked against a list of bad people. Suspicious vehicles are searched. The checkpoint is as effective as the Iraqis who run it, which is why the American soldiers continue to make stops here. Or maybe they stop to visit with three puppies who live at the checkpoint in a small tent the soldiers set up for them.
Next we visited an area where snipers targeting the checkpoint we had just left were rumored to be located. Residents were questioned. Children gathered. A herd of sheep wandered past the parked humvees. Garbage and raw sewage had collected at the end of the street, and whenever the wind picked up conversation became difficult. More difficult. No one knew anything about any snipers; there were no bad people living among them.
Everyone began to seem as though he or she knew something but had made the choice to remain silent, not just in this neighborhood, but wherever the soldiers got out of their trucks in this country. The people may have been afraid or maybe they were working with the enemy; either way, the silence worked against us.
We got back in the trucks, and I was hungry but didn’t want to eat my muffin with the smell of waste still hanging in the air. We made our way to another neighborhood, this time to scout out locations for a future Iraqi police station. One house seemed perfectly situated, but the woman who owned the property said she wasn’t interested in selling it. She said her husband had died and she wanted to hold onto the property for her children and as a way to remember him. It’s possible she was telling the truth, but one of our interpreters said she didn’t want to sell the property to the Americans because that would get her killed.
The day was not shaping up to be one rich in rewards, but the sun was still high in the sky. We pulled into a large vacant field where a CLC (Concerned Local Citizen) guard perched on a ridge with his AK-47. The field seemed free of waste, so I pulled out my muffin, which had been crushed under the weight of my protective vest, and tried get the majority of the crumbs into my mouth. We had not been there long when the sound of an explosion turned our heads. Over the radio, the soldiers were notified that two men were seen fleeing a distant location. The timing made it look like they might be responsible for the round fired in our direction.
The convoy sped off in pursuit of the men. We arrived in an area that was mostly desert, and mostly deserted. A truck containing two men approached us, and it was immediately stopped, the men searched. There was nothing to tie them to the attempted attack, but they were detained for the time being. Meanwhile, there was activity in a small cluster of mud houses nearby, so some of the soldiers were dispatched to investigate.
At a glance, the dry, dusty landscape revealed nothing but old irrigation ditches, occasionally marked by tire tracks. There appeared to be no means of sustaining life, and yet there was life. There were people in at least some of the mud huts scattered randomly along the makeshift roads, and there was traffic. Most of the country is desert, and increasingly the desert is becoming an area of interest to the soldiers, an area where things can be hidden, an area so vast, a needle in a haystack doesn’t begin to describe it.
Undaunted, the soldiers began searching outlying huts, mounds of dirt, dug out ruts, and their efforts began to pay off. A triggering device, two lengths of pipe and a few sandbags--equipment that could be used to set off rockets--rested on top of the sand as if recently abandoned.
Outside an empty hut, our interpreter, George, stumbled upon two IEDs made out of oil cans. As if possessed with a magical talent, George discovered three large bags of explosive materials, possibly wired to explode, in a second hut. And later he sniffed out what appeared to be a mine in a defunct well.
We came upon another CLC guard, presiding over an expanse of dirt much like the first one, and shortly thereafter other CLC members arrived in a small white pick-up truck. Originally organized by local sheiks as an additional layer of security for their communities, CLC groups are now under contract with the United States, but still managed by the sheiks who have taken it upon themselves to curb the violence, theoretically.
As with any other group in charge of security in an area where the stakes are high, there is room for corruption. But the men who got out of the truck seemed friendly and happy to talk with us. They got back in their truck to manage traffic while our search continued, and as soon as they were out of sight, we heard an explosion. It seemed certain their truck had been hit.
Braced for the worst, we piled into our vehicles and raced toward the little white truck. Miraculously, they were okay. Standing by the truck smiling, they gestured toward the damage. Large holes had been punched in the door, but amazingly the shrapnel had gone no further. Did they have any idea how lucky they were?
A remote control device was retrieved from the dirt, which meant someone had been there to set off the IED; someone had targeted the CLC truck. The triggerman was nowhere in sight, but a couple of vehicles were heading out of the area, so we loaded up again and went to stop them. Hitting speeds perhaps not recommended for armored vehicles in a desert landscape, at one point our humvee lurched forward and everything went black for a second. We recovered and managed to catch the vehicles before they reached the main road, but once again, the soldiers could find nothing to connect the people in either car to the IED that hit the truck.
It was difficult to keep track of what had happened where. Every pile of dirt looked the same. Footsteps and tire tracks, like the men responsible for the explosives, could vanish in the wind. But at least we had uncovered some of the tools of their dark trade before they had done any damage.
It’s hard to remember when the day went from routine, almost boring, to unpredictable, even exciting. It’s hard to remember when we went from chatting up the locals in town to staring at piles of dirt in the desert. I know we got back to the base at about 11:00 pm. I know I hadn’t peed since 8:30 am. I had eaten an Otis Spunkmeyer muffin around lunchtime, figuring that would hold me until dinner. But then dinner turned out to be goldfish crackers and the hard candy that is kept in the humvee to hand out to the local kids.
The Day
We left FOB (Forward Operating Base) Summerall, home of the 1st Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade, at about 10:00 am. Captain Aaron Billingsley, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion’s Bravo Company, had a number of stops he wanted to make. First up: an Iraqi-manned checkpoint. Everyone who passes through has to show an identification card, which is checked against a list of bad people. Suspicious vehicles are searched. The checkpoint is as effective as the Iraqis who run it, which is why the American soldiers continue to make stops here. Or maybe they stop to visit with three puppies who live at the checkpoint in a small tent the soldiers set up for them.
Next we visited an area where snipers targeting the checkpoint we had just left were rumored to be located. Residents were questioned. Children gathered. A herd of sheep wandered past the parked humvees. Garbage and raw sewage had collected at the end of the street, and whenever the wind picked up conversation became difficult. More difficult. No one knew anything about any snipers; there were no bad people living among them.
Everyone began to seem as though he or she knew something but had made the choice to remain silent, not just in this neighborhood, but wherever the soldiers got out of their trucks in this country. The people may have been afraid or maybe they were working with the enemy; either way, the silence worked against us.
We got back in the trucks, and I was hungry but didn’t want to eat my muffin with the smell of waste still hanging in the air. We made our way to another neighborhood, this time to scout out locations for a future Iraqi police station. One house seemed perfectly situated, but the woman who owned the property said she wasn’t interested in selling it. She said her husband had died and she wanted to hold onto the property for her children and as a way to remember him. It’s possible she was telling the truth, but one of our interpreters said she didn’t want to sell the property to the Americans because that would get her killed.
The day was not shaping up to be one rich in rewards, but the sun was still high in the sky. We pulled into a large vacant field where a CLC (Concerned Local Citizen) guard perched on a ridge with his AK-47. The field seemed free of waste, so I pulled out my muffin, which had been crushed under the weight of my protective vest, and tried get the majority of the crumbs into my mouth. We had not been there long when the sound of an explosion turned our heads. Over the radio, the soldiers were notified that two men were seen fleeing a distant location. The timing made it look like they might be responsible for the round fired in our direction.
The convoy sped off in pursuit of the men. We arrived in an area that was mostly desert, and mostly deserted. A truck containing two men approached us, and it was immediately stopped, the men searched. There was nothing to tie them to the attempted attack, but they were detained for the time being. Meanwhile, there was activity in a small cluster of mud houses nearby, so some of the soldiers were dispatched to investigate.
At a glance, the dry, dusty landscape revealed nothing but old irrigation ditches, occasionally marked by tire tracks. There appeared to be no means of sustaining life, and yet there was life. There were people in at least some of the mud huts scattered randomly along the makeshift roads, and there was traffic. Most of the country is desert, and increasingly the desert is becoming an area of interest to the soldiers, an area where things can be hidden, an area so vast, a needle in a haystack doesn’t begin to describe it.
Undaunted, the soldiers began searching outlying huts, mounds of dirt, dug out ruts, and their efforts began to pay off. A triggering device, two lengths of pipe and a few sandbags--equipment that could be used to set off rockets--rested on top of the sand as if recently abandoned.
Outside an empty hut, our interpreter, George, stumbled upon two IEDs made out of oil cans. As if possessed with a magical talent, George discovered three large bags of explosive materials, possibly wired to explode, in a second hut. And later he sniffed out what appeared to be a mine in a defunct well.
We came upon another CLC guard, presiding over an expanse of dirt much like the first one, and shortly thereafter other CLC members arrived in a small white pick-up truck. Originally organized by local sheiks as an additional layer of security for their communities, CLC groups are now under contract with the United States, but still managed by the sheiks who have taken it upon themselves to curb the violence, theoretically.
As with any other group in charge of security in an area where the stakes are high, there is room for corruption. But the men who got out of the truck seemed friendly and happy to talk with us. They got back in their truck to manage traffic while our search continued, and as soon as they were out of sight, we heard an explosion. It seemed certain their truck had been hit.
Braced for the worst, we piled into our vehicles and raced toward the little white truck. Miraculously, they were okay. Standing by the truck smiling, they gestured toward the damage. Large holes had been punched in the door, but amazingly the shrapnel had gone no further. Did they have any idea how lucky they were?
A remote control device was retrieved from the dirt, which meant someone had been there to set off the IED; someone had targeted the CLC truck. The triggerman was nowhere in sight, but a couple of vehicles were heading out of the area, so we loaded up again and went to stop them. Hitting speeds perhaps not recommended for armored vehicles in a desert landscape, at one point our humvee lurched forward and everything went black for a second. We recovered and managed to catch the vehicles before they reached the main road, but once again, the soldiers could find nothing to connect the people in either car to the IED that hit the truck.
It was difficult to keep track of what had happened where. Every pile of dirt looked the same. Footsteps and tire tracks, like the men responsible for the explosives, could vanish in the wind. But at least we had uncovered some of the tools of their dark trade before they had done any damage.
posted by Shelby Monroe at 1:30 AM
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