Iraq New Year

Dear Mom,

It is kind of hard being a floater, essentially going from team to team as people go on leave because you are a member of every team, but not really a part of any team. I don't know how much sense that makes ... like that saying "a jack of all trades but a master of none." I have been a gunner, a driver, dismounted security, paperwork bitch, and assorted other things, but my job isn't steady and neither is my location. I just did another temporary move to backfill for a guy out on leave. I've worked with this team before (I was their driver for about a month during the summer) so I knew the area I was going to and the people I would be working with.

The day started off fairly normal. In fact, given that we didn't have to come in until 1000 it started off pretty well. I slept until about 0830 and woke up to brush my teeth, get dressed, clean my weapons, inspect my equipment and check our truck for any problems. Everything seemed to be in order, so we started setting the truck up for the mission, checked and double checked everything, and went to link up with our patrol around 1230.Since our teams only have three people and an interpreter, we need to go out in sector with other people to have the proper security. The deal works like this, we provide PSYOP support for their mission, and they provide security for us. Of course, we are all riflemen first, and PSYOP soldiers second. With 80 odd days left in country, at this point the most important thing is getting in and out alive. We met up with the patrol inside the gate and headed out.

Our sector is al Dora, with the exception of Ramadi, the most dangerous area of Baghdad, and the worst area for sectarian violence. Dora is what they call a Sunni stronghold. They say that because the country is mostly Shia, and the Shia tend to kill off the Sunnis if they find them by themselves, so while Sunni and Shia used to be spread out amongst each other, in the past year and a half to two years they have been self segregating within the city. There are Shia neighborhoods and then there are Sunni neighborhoods right next to them, with the fault lines between them.

It's neighborhood vs. neighborhood in Baghdad, not family vs. family: Furat & Jihad, Dora & Abu Tschir, Ameriyah & Ghazaliyah-you can't see the lines when you're standing in the area, but everyone knows they are there. One area kidnaps and kills, then rushes to the other and dumps the bodies; small death squads go into the opposing neighborhood to kill, and then hurry back to the safety of their ghetto. People fire rockets and mortars from a couple of streets over, indiscriminately killing anyone in the area. After all, if they live on the other side, they must be the enemy.

The great equalizer is their hatred for us, though I'm not saying that this in any way unifies them. It just means that, if given a choice between blowing up a truck full of Sunnis or a truck full of US soldiers, a Shia might think twice about killing the Sunnis ... I mean they can always kill them later when we aren't around, right?

I'm straying off topic -- the point is that working in a Sunni neighborhood after we just killed off Saddam Hussein, is not a place you want to be.

We rolled out the gate and on to the main road. The plan was fairly simple. We were to go by one of the National Police checkpoints in the area and do a drive-by check on them, then go into the Muhallas (residential areas) and do a little PSYOP. We rolled through the checkpoint, but the volume of cars lined up to go through prevented us from taking the first turn into the Muhalla, so we went down one street to an unimproved (translate: dirt)road to go in that way.

Our truck was the second truck in the patrol, and the moment that we turned onto the street an IED exploded, striking the vehicle directly in front of us. It was only about 15 meters in front of us and it was one of the bigger IED blasts I've seen in my time here.Our trucks weigh in at about 9,000 lbs straight from the factory, and with armor they weigh around 12,000 lbs. Lately, we have added additional armor supplements throughout the truck. Fully loaded with personnel and equipment, our trucks weigh anywhere from 17,000-18,000 lbs. That's a lot of truck. The IED that went off lifted the truck in front of us into the air about 5 ft and ripped off the turret shield and the mounted weapon. When the truck slammed back into the ground, the driver's door and 2 tires fell off.

Everyone stopped for about a millisecond, figuring the guys inside were dead and trying to integrate the event into their brains. Then everyone moved, going in to get the guys, responding to incoming gunfire, moving to pull security 360 degrees around our position. I pulled our truck out and moved to set up a roadblock. We were securing the north end of the street and taking fire from the north and west.We had guys out trying to retrieve casualties and attempting to hook up the downed vehicle so it could be towed back to a more secure location. It took about 15-20 minutes to bring the vehicle back to the checkpoint (only about 50 meters behind us) and we were taking fire the whole time. We pulled back to the checkpoint and set up our position.

One soldier standing behind our truck was crouched behind a jersey barrier looking north. The report of a sniper rifle is very distinct and we all heard it as the soldier went down. The round hit him in the head, through and through and then lodged itself into another soldier's kneepad. Someone yelled for a medic. I grabbed the aid bag and my boss wrapped the guys head up with a bandage. There wasn't a lot of blood ... usually there's more but there wasn't that much this time.

Someone brought a stretcher and the guy was loaded up. We were still taking fire, and the only protection was those short jersey barriers. Rounds were impacting everywhere. The wounded soldier started throwing up and his bandage fell off, poor bastard.Bullets were impacting all around us as we loaded the stretcher into our truck. Military stretchers are too long to fit in a military vehicle and this very situation had presented us some problems in similar situations in the past. This time, we had to close the 1,000 lb door with a bungee cord and hope it held long enough to get to the hospital.

Our gunner had to sit on top of the casualty and hold the bungee cord while they drove to the Combat Support Hospital (CSH, known as the CASH.) Because the medic and the wounded soldier were in our vehicle, me and our terp (interpreter) had to stay behind. I got the terp into a truck, and went to pull security.It had been an hour since the attack began and we were still taking heavy fire from two sides. It was like a game of whack-a-mole: a guy would pop out, then back, and another guy would pop up, and then down. They called everyone to get into the trucks and used the machine guns for about 20 minutes, and then we dismounted again. Two guys came out on the street with weapons and fired on us and the guy next to me shot off a high explosive round from his grenade launcher. Those two guys didn't shoot at us again.

I spotted two more in ski masks on a rooftop and fired on them, and damned if they didn't fire right back at me. I fired back, as did the machine gunner right next to me. The shots continued all around us as a kid ran out in the street and lit a car on fire. No one killed the kid. No one wanted to be the guy on TV that was going to jail because he shot an unarmed kid.We had broadcasted in Arabic after the first 45 minutes that even coming out onto the street was an act of aggression at this point. The kid lived but we probably should have shot him because he was lighting the car on fire to provide a smoke screen for more people to shoot at us and to go in and out of the mosque that was right in front of us.

After a hot second, we just fired through the smoke so we could suppress the incoming fire from that direction. We all got on line and fired for about 5 minutes, then launched a grenade for good measure. Another sniper shot went off but no one went down. At this point we had been fighting for 2 hours and it was decided that anyone who was even the least bit sane would not be near a window, so we fired on windows at random, hoping to catch the sniper off guard before he could get another one of our guys. We had called in attack aviation as a show of force and the F18 did two flyovers, then the Apaches came in looking for people running away, or on rooftops. After another 30 minutes of intermittent fighting, we loaded up and went on our way.

In my time here, I have never seen such a sustained fight. Ordinarily, a gunfight only lasts about 15-20 minutes, then everyone has either left or been killed. This one dragged on for almost 3 hours. It was ridiculous. Our convoy had loaded up the downed truck on a wrecker and we were escorting it back to the base when the F18 came overhead one more time.

I'venever seen an Iraqi move as quickly as when a jet flys low through an area. I saw it on a mission once a while back and it amazed me then too. People get out of dodge when a jet flies by. It is a knee jerk reaction when you got the shit bombed out of your city three years ago, I guess. It felt good to have the birds around, even if would take an act of congress for them to actually help us out when we are under attack.

We had five wounded in action that day. The thing that bothered me the most about the whole day was that I didn't flinch when the IED went off ... during the firefight I was about as stressed out as I would be reading a book or cooking dinner. Let me just say that I don't mean this to imply that I'm so "tough" or any of that crap, it just is. I don't like it either. Stress like that hits you later. Weird things set it off- when people speak Arabic, my hands shake. It happens in situations that don't make sense, like kids asking for chocolate or a soccer ball.

On New Year's Day we cordoned off an IED and waited for Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) to come make it go away for us. Then, we got called out to support an SKT (Small Kill Team-sniper team) that had witnessed a guy emplacing an IED and, instead of killing him from a distance (which they had every right to do) left the relative safety of their nest and pursued him down the main road on foot. They tackled him and roughed him up a bit, then called for help because their position had been compromised.

We were called in to tactically question the men about terrorist activities in the area (al-Qaeda has a big presence in Dora.) Now, this is not interrogation, it's tactical questioning and there is a fine line between the correct tactical question and jail time so that's all I am going to say about that.

When we were finished, we had the Iraqi National Police bring the detainees to their barracks for holding to wait on another patrol and we went on our way. Acting on intelligence, we went in search of something first in our vehicles, then on foot through the Muhalla. We went to every house and searched behind every gate on the block. We never found what we were after, but (shock) we did find a weapons cache full of military grade weapons and bags of home made explosives during our search. Then we waited around for EOD to collect the stuff. A fairly uneventful day, only a couple of random gun shots, no dead people, and a lot of hurry up and wait.

When we returned, it was to the news that one of our guys had been killed and two wounded while we were out. Now, our first act as a unit for the New Year will be attending a memorial service. Battlefield memorial services are the most depressing thing in existence, FYI.

Yesterday we picked up some dead people and then collected some new al-Qaeda propaganda to analyze. Al-Qaeda is big on intimidation, leaving death threats and spray painting on walls at night, that kind of thing. The day was fairly uneventful, but for it being frickin freezing, and we were happy to return to the base that night. Once again, we returned to bad news: three more of our guys wounded in action.

Our numbers don't sound so bad when you compare them to other units. The thing is that PSYOP is a family. There aren't many of us and we are spread out thin. Our company supports the entire city of Baghdad and the surrounding rural areas. There are only about three PSYOP soldiers per every 1000 regular Army soldiers. We are so spread out that a loss of two people is the largest number of people killed in any one PSYOP company during a deployment. There was one other unit that lost two soldiers in the same attack.

Like any family, we take the loss of one of our own pretty hard. Go ask an infantryman how many infantry have been killed, ask him to list names and dates, ask him if he went to their services, their funerals, did he know them all? PSYOP soldiers know each other, even in other units, we know names and dates, and go to the funerals. It's what you do for family. PSYOP has lost 8 soldiers since 2001, I knew 5 of them. I am really tired of memorial services. The ones that we attend for people that we work with here are hard, but when it is a PSYOP soldier, it is a very whole different kind of hard.

Love [her daughter]