Dust or Mud? Also, an Iraqi Brigade's 'March Madness' Story

A couple of weeks ago, I overheard a pair of soldiers idly debating an important question: which do you prefer, the dust or the mud? It’s a discussion I’ve heard more than once – a rhetorical one, of course, since in Iraq you are inevitably stuck with both, at different times of year. The dust, I’m familiar with (and hate): it is so fine that you barely notice it most of the time, except when a gust of wind blinds you with it, or you realize that your nose is clogged with it, or you step barefoot onto a floor that is, of course, coated invisibly with it. The mud, though, I got my first taste of a couple weeks ago, while embedded with the 101st Airborne's 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment ("One Five-Oh-Two"). Maybe I’ll learn better eventually, but I have to say, I like it. I like that it isn’t dust. Even more, I like what comes before it: rain. Before yesterday, I hadn’t seen rain in Iraq, but when I woke up and went to the port-a-john, it was pouring; torrents of water washing down from the gutters of the big building in the middle of FOB Justice, puddles of brown water up to your ankles. Also, no blinding sun, and no flies. If the price of this is mud, I’ll take it over dust any day. My fear, though, is that when the sun comes out tomorrow or the next day and dries out the puddles and the mud, all that will be left is the same dust as before, just spread around better.

After the jump, a piece I wrote for the Long War Journal about the performance of the Iraqi Army's 22nd Brigade, which 1-502 is partnered with.

In Northwest Baghdad, Iraqi Forces Stand Up, Slowly

Last March, as violence erupted across Shia areas of Baghdad, Lt. Col. Joseph McLamb told the company commanders in his battalion that they had just one priority: “Do not let the Iraqi Army fail.” Faced with attacks in every area, from the Shula slums to upscale Kadhimiya, McLamb’s soldiers could have pushed the less competent Iraqi forces aside and taken on the fighters of the Jaysh al-Mahdi themselves. In the colonel’s view, though, ensuring that the Iraqi Army did not appear weak before the local population was the goal of most pressing importance.

In Kadhimiya, the heart of the battalion’s zone, the Iraqi Army had a history of failure. In April 2007, Jaysh al-Mahdi fighters attacked a patrol of American paratroopers near the Kadhimayn mosque. Elements of the Iraqi Army battalion stationed in the area responded, but when the soldiers entered the fight, they did so on the side of the militia. During the firefight, the American unit, 1-325 Airborne Infantry, killed both Mahdi fighters and Iraqi soldiers. The incident left American troops distrustful not only of Iraqi National Police and local police units, as is more often the case, but of the Iraqi Army units in the area as well.

In March, though, the Iraqi Army did not fail. Although a nearby National Police unit called the “Justice Battalion” all but collapsed, refusing to fight the Jaysh, the army unit in Kadhimiya stood its ground, and, with American help, blocked Mahdi fighters from escaping across the Tigris to safety. The unit, the 3-22 Iraqi Army, was the same battalion that had fired on American troops the previous year. As the situation in northwest Baghdad stabilized, Iraqi Army units moved into an offensive role in the Hurriya and Shula neighborhoods, bases for the Jaysh offshoots that the U.S. military calls “special groups,” a more difficult and complex task. Their success there was less clear-cut, but in the view of the American officers here, it was success nonetheless.

The 3-22 Iraqi Army battalion’s transformation from a force willing to fight for the Jaysh al-Mahdi to a force willing to cut off its retreat was slow and difficult, American soldiers in Kadhimiya say, and was due largely to the attention lavished on all three battalions of the 22nd Brigade by both American advisors and American combat troops. The U.S. battalion responsible for northwest Baghdad for most of 2007, when the area was at its worst, 1-325 Airborne Infantry, put much of its resources toward hunting special groups leaders in Shula and Hurriya, trying to dismantle the militia network faster than it could kill Americans and Shia Iraqis. The unit had little time and almost no manpower left over for training or “mentoring” the Iraqi battalions in the area, a task that was left to a handful of small, under-resourced advisory teams.

The sharp downturn in violence across Baghdad during the fall of 2007 coincided with 1-325’s relief by McLamb’s battalion, 1-502 Infantry. As a result, McLamb says, his battalion was able to focus its manpower less on raids against special groups leaders, and more on working directly with the line companies of the Iraqi Army and National Police. Capt. Jeffrey Mackinnon, the lead advisor to 3-22, says that this has allowed the advisor teams to focus on improving the Iraqi battalions at the staff level, a more realistic task for detachments of their size and makeup.

Throughout the winter of 2008, 1-502’s rifle companies paired off with Iraqi battalions, and its platoons with Iraqi companies, patrolling with their counterparts and pushing them to improve their tactics and posture at checkpoints. The battalion commander of 3-22, known as Col. Abbas, emphasized the importance of the basic combat training that the advisory teams continued to provide to his troops on a regular basis: “It was after these things that I told Colonel McLamb we were ready to fight.”

Equally important, in the view of Mackinnon, the advisor chief, was the reorganization of less reliable units. To him, many of 3-22’s woes stemmed from its recruiting roots. When first raised, Mackinnon said, the battalion was formed largely from the personal security detachments, or PSDs, of two local leaders, both with ties to the Jaysh al-Mahdi: “You had one group who were the Baha al-Araji PSD guys, and another who were the Hussein al-Sadr PSD guys, so that they didn’t have their loyalties lined up isn’t surprising.” Gradually, these contingents were split up and sent to different units, to be replaced by new recruits from other parts of Baghdad and Iraq.

The spring fighting that has since been nicknamed “March Madness” put Iraqi units throughout Kadhimiya, Shula, and Hurriya to the test. In Kadhimiya, an American infantry platoon, from Capt. Brad Henry’s Delta Company, was ambushed by a large force of Mahdi militiamen. “It was the exact same plan they used to attack 1-325,” said Capt. Elijah Ward, of 1-502’s headquarters, referring to the April 2007 firefight between Mahdi fighters and U.S. paratroopers. As before, 3-22 arrived on the scene quickly – but this time, instead of joining in with the militia, the Iraqi soldiers held them off. Harassed by American attack helicopters, and with their hopes for an easy, symbolic victory over Iraqi government troops dashed, the Jaysh’s leaders in Kadhimiya headed north, hoping to escape into the rural areas across the Tigris.

At the bridge they planned to cross, though, the militia leaders were confronted by a detachment of soldiers from 3-22, who held them off until American reinforcements arrived. “It was the first time I’ve seen an Iraqi unit take serious casualties and still hold their ground,” said McLamb, who went with his troops to the bridge. “It was an awesome thing to see. People say the Iraqi soldiers don’t want to fight, but I’ll tell you, these guys fought hard.” In the days that followed, 3-22’s sister battalion, 2-22, also performed well in the clearance of the Shula neighborhood, an area that the Jaysh and special groups had used as a base during their March offensive, said a platoon leader in Bravo Company, the American unit there.

While the Iraqi Army units passed the test, the National Police unit responsible for part of Kadhimiya, the Justice Battalion, did not. Drawn mostly from the Kadhimiya area, the battalion dissolved rather than fight the Jaysh. The unit that deployed early in April to replace it, though, called the “Unity Battalion,” was more in the mold of the Iraqi Army units. “Before, people’s assumption would be that the National Police were complicit,” Ward explained. “But when the Unity Battalion came in from Mahmudiya, they kicked ass. They’ve shown no hesitation in going out and bringing it to JAM, and the locals take notice of that.”

Both American and Iraqi officers suggest that for the units here, the spring fighting was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the fighting interrupted the training schedule that Abbas called so important to 3-22’s growth. Faced with continuous operations in Hurriya, Shula, and Kadhimiya, none of the Iraqi Army battalions in the area have yet resumed that schedule. On the other hand, though, the battalions’ stand against the militia has substantially boosted respect for the Iraqi Army uniform among the local population. In the view of Capt. Muhammad Qasim, a staff officer in 3-22, this has paid off in tips and intelligence, the key weapons of counterinsurgency: “Before the fight, no one talked to the Iraqi soldiers. Now, seventy-five, eighty percent do, and that is very good.”

Read More...

Summary only...

The "Walking Dead" in the New Ramadi

The troops assigned to the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines (1/9, pronounced “one-nine”) call themselves the “Walking Dead,” but on this deployment, their missions have involved little killing – precious little combat at all, in fact. For the past seven months, the battalion has spent its first deployment to Iraq conducting operations worlds apart from what their predecessors in other wars saw – and worlds apart, too, from the operations that previous battalions conducted in Ramadi, the Anbari capital that was once the heart of the Sunni insurgency in this country. Equally dramatic has been the reorganization of the unit for these new operations, in which it advises Iraqi police units across a battlespace that an entire Army brigade once held down with difficulty. With its rifle platoons almost all broken down into advisor teams, 1/9 Marines is almost unrecognizable as a traditional infantry battalion.

Two paths have converged in this deployment. The first is the path taken by the city of Ramadi, once one of the most contested cities in Iraq, to its current state of relative calm, with the security situation largely managed by Iraqi police units. The second is the path taken by 1/9 Marines, from its formal standup less than two years ago, when the Marine Corps needed new battalions to sustain the brutal fight in Anbar, to its deployment as a radically reorganized advisory task force this past spring.

As recently as two years ago, the idea of deploying a Marine battalion to Ramadi in an advisory rather than a straight infantry capacity would have seemed unfathomable to many observers, and to think that such a unit could control the volatile area then home to five full combat battalions would have seemed downright absurd. Then, Ramadi was home turf for al-Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group fueling sectarian violence in central Iraq; huge IEDs made large portions of the city impassable to the beleaguered units deployed there, which suffered fatalities at least weekly.

Today, though, the scars left by heavy machine gun and M1 Abrams main gun rounds are the only reminder of what Ramadi once was – it is a city reborn. During its deployment, according to records kept by the battalion, the Marines of 1/9 have been engaged in fewer than ten “troops in contact” incidents (cases in which troops and insurgents exchanged gunfire), and there have been barely a dozen IED attacks on the unit’s vehicles. Two Marines have been killed, both early in the tour – a far cry from the days in which Army brigades in Ramadi suffered seventy or eighty fatalities on a deployment.

The turnaround in Ramadi is not the work of 1/9 Marines. That credit belongs to the pair of Army brigades (and the Marine battalions attached to them) that painstakingly cleared the worst insurgent strongholds during the fierce fighting of summer 2006 and late winter 2007, and to the Iraqi policemen who, following the lead of Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi and other local sheikhs, stood up to al-Qaeda en masse beginning in fall 2006. What 1/9 has done is manage success: since the departure of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division in April, it alone has been responsible for a vast area of operations, wrought with tribal and political tensions, that the U.S. command and Iraqi government have held up as a model of success. That the battalion has in fact pushed progress forward and into the hands of the Iraqi police across the area is seen as an encouraging sign as Anbar heads toward both provincial elections and further U.S. troop withdrawals.

This fall, in Ramadi and the rural areas surrounding it, the Marines of 1/9 and its replacement battalion, 2/9, have essentially pulled back not only from daily counterinsurgency operations, but also from their daily advisory role – a reflection of the increasing confidence and efficacy of the Iraqi police units that patrol the city. On a night last week that Marines here characterized as unusually eventful, the company in charge of the city itself (Weapons Company, 2/9 Marines, commanded by Capt. Dallas Shaw) found itself following the trail of the police rather than of insurgents: after a rocket attack marred the calm of northeastern Ramadi, police units from three districts had shared intelligence and detained suspects by the time Marine based at nearby Camp Karama had arrived on the scene.

A hallmark of the conflict in Iraq, for the U.S. military, has been the constant need to reorganize units in the country on an ad hoc basis, to adapt formations better suited for conventional combat to the requirements of counterinsurgency and advisory operations. The battalions that preceded 1/9 in Ramadi trained and organized for difficult urban combat of the kind the city saw daily for years; as violence dropped during 2007, the units were compelled to reorganize on the fly. By contrast, 1/9 reorganized as an advisory task force well before it deployed, and retained that organization for the bulk of the deployment as it maintained small teams of police advisors across the sector.

In reorganizing and preparing for the advisory mission, 1/9 Marines enjoyed several advantages over other deploying units, according to the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Brett Bourne. To begin with, the battalion was effectively a blank slate, with no prior deployments to the old, violent Anbar fight to unduly influence its training: as part of the Marine Corps’s expansion for the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, 1/9 began to form during 2006 and officially stood up as an active unit in April 2007, a year before it deployed to Ramadi. This, Bourne emphasized, gave the battalion almost a year to train for the mission, a significant boost over the seven months that most Marine battalions have between deployments in the “seven on, seven off” cycle of combat tours. After training for basic combat skills all fall, culminating in the Mojave Viper exercises at the end of 2007, the battalion still had all winter to make changes in its structure and planning.

After a pre-deployment “leaders’ recon” in December 2007, during which the 1/9 leadership learned that they would be replacing two full battalions, Bourne and his staff and commanders instituted a sweeping change, based on reorganizations that other units had been forced to conduct once in theater. In three of the battalion’s four companies, every rifle platoon was dissolved, and the resulting pool of Marines was divided into roughly thirty-five advisory detachments called Police Transition Teams (PTTs); one rifle company remained as a general reserve. In a Marine Corps based around infantry formations, and particularly rifle platoons, this change was a drastic one, but Bourne dismisses the idea that the battalion’s basic infantry skills might suffer from it later – those, he says, are “muscle memory” for Marine units. True or not, 1/9’s predeployment reorganization into advisory teams has been a major step in the military’s adaption to new kinds of operations. The deployment of such a reorganized battalion to Ramadi, once the most dangerous infantry battleground in the country, signifies a major step in Anbar’s move from a province all but written off as lost to the Sunni insurgency, to a province under Iraqi control in fact as well as name.

Read More...

Summary only...

The Not-So-Wild West

Eighteen months ago, the city of Ramadi looked like a miniature Hue City; a year before that, it was the self-declared capital of al-Qaeda in Iraq. I’ve spent the past ten days out here in Anbar province, including a week in Ramadi (the provincial capital), and to be honest, it’s very difficult even to imagine what the city was like in those days. Then, five battalions of American combat troops suffered weekly fatalities as they fought tooth and nail for enemy strongholds like Tamim and the Malaab; today, one battalion remains, advising the Iraqi police who now control the city, and the only evidence of combat is the scars of machine gun and tank rounds. More than perhaps anywhere else in Iraq, Ramadi is a city that has emerged from years of war transformed.


Crazy Ramadi
For anyone who doesn’t know the story of Ramadi, I’ll provide the Spark Notes version. When the Sunni insurgency exploded in Falluja in April 2004, it took root in nextdoor Ramadi as well, and by early 2005, after Falluja had been cleared in the massive offensive there, Ramadi had become the heart of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Two U.S. brigades (one from Korea and one from the Pennsylvania National Guard) tried and failed to keep a lid on the city, suffering heavy casualties; during its tour, the 2nd Brigade, 28th Infantry Division lost roughly seventy soldiers and Marines. In 2006, as al-Qaeda in Iraq and affiliated groups locked down their hold on the Sunni insurgency and inflamed sectarian violence in Baghdad with a campaign of suicide bombings, Ramadi became a key base, housing top insurgent leaders and pushing foreign fighters downriver toward the sectarian fight. Various parts of the area – the Malaab, the Racetrack, Sufia, Abu Bali – came to be known by different units as the “heart of darkness,” packed with torture houses and car bomb factories and protected by scores of deeply buried IEDs and bands of fighters armed with small arms and RPGs. There were many parts of the city into which U.S. troops simply could not venture without suffering heavy casualties, and a senior officer stationed there at the time believed that the place could not be pacified with less than three full combat brigades, an impossible number. The place was a magnet for the secretive special operations forces whose task was to hunt the leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq; in fact, the only two Navy SEALs to lose their lives in Iraq did so in Ramadi in 2006.

In June 2006, a new unit, the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, took the reins in Ramadi. Over the course of an extraordinarily bloody deployment – eighty fatalities in eight months – the brigade pushed Ramadi in a new direction. (The best article about it, by two of the participants, is here.) Employing a strategy learned earlier in Tel Afar (and replicated later on a larger scale in parts of Baghdad), the unit, which was able to mass five battalions in the zone where there had earlier been only three, pushed north into the city, building small “combat outposts” as they went and patrolling outward from them. Simultaneously, the movement that came to be known as the “Anbar Awakening” took root north of Ramadi when an upstart sheikh, Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, stood up against al-Qaeda and pushed the men of his tribe to enlist as police auxiliaries en masse, inspiring other sheikhs to the north of the city to do the same. After the crucial battle of Sufia in December, the movement spread to the east of the city as well. When the 1st Brigade, 1st AD left Ramadi in February 2007, large parts of the city were still under firm insurgent control, but the tide had turned, and the enemy would not regain the initiative.

When the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division inherited Ramadi in the winter of 2007, it took drastic measures almost immediately. The city, in the words of General Petraeus, “looked like Stalingrad,” and there was still hard fighting to do. In a series of three multi-battalion operations, launched in quick succession, the brigade cleared the Malaab, the Racetrack, and South-Central, three neighborhoods where al-Qaeda had remained deeply rooted, and solidified the gains by building dozens of outposts and flooding the neighborhoods with policemen freshly recruited from the tribes turned by the Sahwa. After clearing the city, the brigade pushed outward, taking on insurgent strongholds on the outskirts like Tamim and Abu Bali before moving even further out into the enemy’s supply routes near Lake Habbaniya and Lake Tharthar. Al-Qaeda launched two major counterattacks in the summer of 2007: a force of fighters trying to infiltrate the city from the south was defeated at a place called Donkey Island, and in September, a suicide bomber killed Sheikh Sattar, the charismatic leader of the Sahwa, about a week after he had met personally with President Bush.

Neither attack achieved its strategic purpose, and after levels of violence dove sharply in the spring of 2007 they continued to drop off more steadily, approaching zero in early 2008. The brigade in the area cut its forces from five battalions to three during the fall of 2007, and when it departed for good in April 2008 (a year after its last major offensive inside the city wound down), it handed over its entire sector to just one battalion: 1/9 Marines. That’s the unit I went out to visit, just as it was leaving; I wanted to see how a unit operated in the new, drastically different Ramadi security environment.

Lazy Ramadi
Flights out to Anbar seem to be scarcer than they once were (the number of battalions in the province has fallen from sixteen to eight since the height of the surge), but getting out there was easy enough. From the IZ in central Baghdad, where the military’s press center is, I flew on a Marine helicopter that was headed west, stopping at various bases on the way to Camp Ramadi. The flight was in the middle of the night, so there wasn’t much to see besides the green glow of the lights inside the Sea Knight – a twin-rotor, Vietnam-era transport helo that is beginning to be phased out by the brand-new Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

After settling in, I spent my week in Ramadi observing one of the most frequent and yet most important processes that the military has had to learn during this war: relief in place. Army battalions stay in Iraq for a year or more, Marine ones for seven months; in either case, a unit learns a tremendous amount about the situation in its sector during its deployment, and it has to pass that information along to the next unit somehow so that it doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel, as many units early in the war did.

The military’s solution is an overlap period of about two weeks, during which the troops of the departing unit show their replacements around their new sector, teaching them what works and what doesn’t, and most importantly in a place like Ramadi, introducing them to key local leaders. This happens at every level, from the privates and lance corporals in the rifle squads up through the captains who command companies and the colonels who command battalions and brigades.

By the time I arrived in Ramadi, the departing battalion, 1/9 Marines, was almost completely gone, replaced by its sister battalion, 2/9. Only the leadership of the old unit remained, including the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Brett Bourne, with whom I’d been in touch before arriving. In an interview with him and during patrols with the new executive officer and the incoming and outgoing Weapons Company commanders, I was able to observe a small part of what has happened in Ramadi, and in a later interview at Camp Falluja with Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the U.S. commander in Anbar, I heard a bit about the extent to which the success in Ramadi has been replicated across the province. I’ve written more about the security situation and the way 1/9 reorganized to deal with it at the Long War Journal, and I’ll also cross-post that here later.

I’ve written a bit about what 1/9 Marines accomplished during its tour at my parent site, the Long War Journal, but I’ll go over it briefly. Unlike any other unit deploying to Ramadi since the war began, 1/9 reorganized before it left not as a conventional combat infantry battalion, but as a task force of about thirty-five advisory teams. It’s a radical reorganization for a completely different kind of mission than that performed by previous battalions in Ramadi: with no infantry combat to conduct, three of the battalion’s four companies deployed with all of their rifle platoons reorganized into advisory teams.

On patrols, the atmosphere in Ramadi is almost sedate, at least compared to Baghdad last year. Even Karkh district, the calmest part of Baghdad that I saw last time, seemed like a whole different world from what you see in Ramadi today. Iraqi police are everywhere you look, directing traffic, manning checkpoints, and cruising the streets in shiny new blue-and-white pickup trucks; the Marines, who have pulled back even from the advisory effort now, stay in the background.

More striking still is the bearing of the Marines as they patrol or stand guard. At a maternity hospital across the river from Tamim, where a conference was being held, riflemen stood out in the open, on the flat roof, unmoving and not under cover – the sniper threat that was once an ever-present fear here, and that troops in many parts of Iraq must still be mindful of, simply does not exist in Ramadi anymore. When dismounting from their vehicles (mainly the big, heavily armored MRAPs, and some Humvees) to meet with local leaders, the Weapons Company commanders of both 1/9 and 2/9 made a point of leaving not only their helmets but also their body armor inside, as a gesture of trust to their hosts. In a place where U.S. troops used to have to sprint from the vehicle to the door and never took their armor off outside the wire, that’s a pretty big step.

This sense of security seems to affect the relationship between the Marines and local leaders and citizens, too. During meetings over tea or dinner with two local sheikhs, not only the commanders but their security details, too, seemed relaxed, removing their armor without hesitation, trying to make sure they ate the food in the same way that their hosts did, and asking interpreters and policemen for help pronouncing Arabic expressions. These may seem like small things, but they are significant. That U.S. troops can feel so at ease anywhere outside the wire in Iraq is a big change from my last trip, when even on Haifa Street, the safest road in Baghdad, soldiers remained tense and had little reason to trust Iraqi police or soldiers. That they can feel so at ease in Ramadi in particular – well, that’s just amazing.

The weather is really nice, too, but I suppose you can’t credit that to either the surge or the Sahwa – it’s just a lot, lot more pleasant here in the fall than in the summer.

Read More...

Summary only...

Back to Iraq

Some things are just as I remember them, and some are quite different. I don’t mean the security situation; I’ll get to that at some point, I’m sure. I’m just talking about the sights and sounds of getting back to Baghdad’s major bases, before even flying out west or going back outside the wire or talking to commanders, the two staples of my work here.

About ten days ago, I caught the DC-Kuwait direct flight, which seems to cater primarily to contractors supporting the military effort out here (which makes sense, of course). The number of desert boots and grey camouflage bags on the flight was telling, and in the seat next to me on the flight over (twelve hours) was a sharp, quiet, obviously ex-military guy in civilian clothes who said he’d spent a decade in 10th Special Forces and was returning to a contracting job at Balad.

Ali al-Salem airbase was as I remembered it, except for the absence of unbearable heat; that month of September really makes a difference. The various members of the press with whom I waited for the flight north were an interesting bunch, as always, including a furiously pro-military blogger in his sixties and a pair heading to Mosul for a brief embed for the National – a British writer and his very pretty American photographer. Neither of them looked like they should be in Iraq, but of course neither do I, and Iraq is not the same as it once was.

My stay at Ali al-Salem, the major transit hub in Kuwait for Air Force flights into Iraq and Afghanistan, was mercifully short. The patches on the shoulders of the soldiers waiting there were a very different mix from last time, a small reflection of just how much has happened since then – a full rotation of new units, with a second one beginning. A company or so of Marines were on their way to Anbar; no telling what unit they were from. Another company, wearing the “Tropic Lightning” patch of the 25th Infantry Division and with a good number of 172nd Stryker Brigade combat patches, was presumably on its way to Diyala, where the fight is still on. Most interesting, from my perspective, there were a whole bunch of Special Forces soldiers, more than I’ve ever seen in one place before, identifiable by their coverless tan helmets, their arrowhead patches, their longish hair, and the brown plate carriers they wear instead of standard Army body armor. Wherever they were going, we won’t hear much about it. Special Forces and other SOF run a whole side of the war that is kept very quiet, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they shun the glamorous mystique they had in the Vietnam era – you’ll never hear one call himself a “Green Beret,” for example.

Before catching a cramped C-130 flight on to Baghdad (there is, as far as I can tell, no way to get comfortable on one of those unless you are the pretty female photographer whom the crew invite to sit in the jump seat), I also did a quick inspection of one of my own favorite art forms: latrine graffiti. I’ll quote one delightful inscription in full:

THE NEW WORLD ORDER
IS NEAR
MARTIAL LAW
FOOD RATIONS
Middle Class Will Be Destroyed
The illuminatie will kill you thru Ass Probe
Govt controlled poison immunizations
SHIT THE BED!

A true gem, as any connoisseur of this medium would agree.

Read More...

Summary only...

Hello

For the next three months or so, I will be in Iraq, embedding with U.S. military units there. While downrange, I will write for the Long War Journal, so please visit that site to see the bulk of my writing. The purpose of this blog, here, is to provide some more personal insight into the lives of the servicemen and civilians who are still hard at work in Iraq, and also to keep my friends and family apprised of my whereabouts and activities.

I have toyed with the idea of making this blog anonymous, in the mold of some other Long War-related blogs (although the third-person style of one site I love, Abu Muqawama, makes the writer in me wince in pain). I suspect, though, that that wouldn't last very long. So: my name is Wes Morgan, I used to study and will study again at Princeton University, and I am quite young (hence the handle Tintin). I have spent time in Iraq, briefly, once before, in the summer of 2007, when I trailed a couple of senior officers and embedded for quick stints with units in and around Baghdad during the "surge." It is my expectation that this trip will be less dramatic than that one, due to Iraq's vastly reduced levels of violence, but extremely enlightening all the same.

This blog is not intended as a forum for discussion and argument about the war, because a) I hate things like that and b) I do not have the time or the qualifications to moderate such a discussion. So if you have questions, comments, or outbursts about military strategy, U.S. or Iraqi politics, the general rightness or wrongness of this or other wars, or anything else like that, please take them elsewhere. I have linked a few blogs that I find useful, edifying, or entertaining on the right-hand side of the page, so go read and post there instead. You will receive better and smarter feedback, I promise.

One other introductory note: when posting here, please think, as I try to do, of operational security. The U.S. military has a number of rules for press embeds to follow as they write from downrange, and all of them make good sense. Their essence is this: avoid specifics that could compromise the safety of U.S. or Iraqi troops, harm current or upcoming operations, or cause emotional distress to the families of the soldiers in the fight. If you sometimes find the lack of specificity or timeliness in my posts here frustrating, the reason is my more-than-willing compliance with the letter and spirit of those rules. In the comments section, whether you are stateside or downrange, please try to do the same.

Thanks very much, and please enjoy!

Read More...

Summary only...