by Piers Platt
“Hey, Sergeant,” I asked, “What’s the deal with the cops?”
He shrugged, “I think they’ve been selected for some special training.”
“In Kuwait?” I asked, incredulous. I couldn’t see any way the Kuwaitis were going to pay for or run police training for Iraqis – they all still remembered 1991 fairly vividly.
“No, in Jordan,” he told me. “We’re routing through Jordan first. Didn’t you guys know?”
My Middle East geography wasn’t great, but I realized that our flight plan would be like flying through Chicago to get from New York to Miami. Resigned to a long night of flying, I headed back to my seat. The Iraqis fared well on their first flight – a couple started to look a little green, especially as we juked through more evasive maneuvers on takeoff, but no one blew chunks. This would not have been the case had they stayed on for the final leg into Kuwait. There were only about 15 of us left on the flight when we took off from Jordan, so we were able to stretch out along the canvas benches and try to sleep. About halfway to Kuwait, however, we ran into a freak thunderstorm over the desert.
I’ve been on planes in bad turbulence and storms before, but this was on a completely different level. Whether due to the nature of the storm, or the flight performance of a C-130 versus a civilian jet, I don’t know. Either way, we spent a solid hour rocking and rolling through what felt and sounded like a hurricane. I was asleep when we hit the first patch of turbulence, and I literally came out of my seat, weightless for an instant as the plane went into free-fall. I slammed down hard when we bottomed out, and learned my lesson well – I spent the rest of the time sitting upright, and later buckled my seat belt, too. It felt like an unending, completely unpredictable roller coaster ride, but though I felt queasy immediately, I managed to avoid puking. I talked to one of the crew chiefs after half an hour of stomach-churning drops.
“This is pretty bad, right?” I had to shout to be heard over the engine noise.
He considered for a second, then nodded. “Yeah. It’s not the worst I’ve seen, but it’s definitely in the top ten.”
“Great!” I told him, sarcastically.
“The Lieutenant’s flying, otherwise it might be a little smoother,” he said, meaning that the more experienced pilot had decided to let his junior officer fly in order to gain experience. That didn’t help allay my fears at all. We suddenly hit a particularly deep hole, and I felt the plane drop fast again, the sickening free-fall lasting for several seconds. I shook my head, wide-eyed.
“Jesus!”
The airman grinned, “That was a good one, sir! Probably a couple hundred foot drop!”
We made it to Kuwait a little bruised and battered, and thankfully I had a week in which to try to repress those memories, before I would have to fly back to Iraq.
Chapter Ten
“They gave me the malaria pills, and I was standing there, looking at the bottle, when I had this ‘Eureka!’ moment. I threw those bitches right out! I’ve got a shitload of mosquito bites … I figure if it all works out, I’ll get out of this shithole for at least 4 months. Malaria’s like mono: it comes back now and then, but that ain’t so bad, really.”
-First Lieutenant Joey Thomas
In Kuwait, I learned what I could about transportation logistics – mostly, what paperwork I needed to fill out to ensure that our tanks didn’t get shipped to Hawaii by accident – caught up on sleep, and when the class was finished, made the return journey to FOB Mackenzie. The morning after I got back, I led my platoon north to FOB Wilson, where we were to be attached to Charlie “Rock” Troop.
Rock Troop was commanded by Captain Young and his Executive Officer, Dan Cho, who were a blast to work for – smart and sensible, they were both natural leaders with a keen sense of humor. In fact, Rock Troop had already had a great deal of amusement at our commander’s expense. Captain Young’s fiancée and Captain Hoffman’s wife had gone on vacation together to the Mediterranean earlier in the year, which gave Young an excellent idea. He sent Hoffman an email after the women returned, commenting on how hot the topless photos of the two women had been. Hoffman, not realizing his chain was being yanked, flipped out and left his wife a bitter voicemail message and a scathing email to boot.
Hoffman wasn’t the only target of their pranks – Charlie Troop also stole a Notre Dame flag from one of the Squadron staff officers, who was an alumnus and outspoken football fan. For the rest of the rotation, they emailed him photos of his Notre Dame flag turning up in the wackiest places: flying atop the Iraqi Police station, next to an AK-47 found under a mattress during a raid, held up by three grinning detainees after another raid. The staff officer took it well, which may be why they preferred to target Hoffman – he reacted. The two of them endlessly urged me to tease Hoffman for them when I returned to FOB Mackenzie.
“You gotta ask him when they’re going to take the training wheels off,” Cho told me, referring to Hoffman’s junior status among the rest of the commanders.
I laughed. “Yeah, I’ll get right on that, Dan.”
Young chimed in: “No, this is what you have to do – in the middle of a troop meeting, when he briefs a plan for something, just shake your head and go, ‘hmmm.’ Then when he’s like, ‘What?’ You can say, ‘No, it’s nothing, sir … it’s just … I don’t think Captain Young would do it that way.’” Which was probably true.
Dan Cho’s penchant for insubordination wasn’t limited to pranks on officers in the Squadron. Units in combat are always assigned clearly delineated areas of operation, to ensure that just one commander “owns” that terrain. Just as airline pilots check in with various air traffic controllers as they move along their route, units out on operations are required to check in with the command center that controls an area of operations if they move into that sector. This ensures that everyone knows when there are friendlies in the area, and reduces the likelihood of a friendly fire incident. Charlie Troop’s area of operations was the collection of small towns where Saddam was eventually captured, directly across the river from Tikrit, where 1-18 Infantry operated.
For some reason, 1-18 Infantry formed a habit of driving over the bridge across the Tigris and surreptitiously patrolling or conducting a raid in Charlie Troop’s sector. A Charlie Troop patrol would be out checking the roads for IEDs, and suddenly see a bunch of Humvees disgorging infantrymen into a building in their town. As Troop Executive Officer, it was Dan Cho’s responsibility to run the Charlie Troop operations center, and after the first few times this happened, he politely called 1-18 and reminded them that it was not only common courtesy but in the best interests of their soldier’s long-term health that they notify him when they were in his area of operations. When it happened again, he lost his shit.
Dan called up 1-18 on the field phone and asked to speak with their Operations Officer, who was not only fifteen years his senior, but also outranked him by two full pay grades.
“This is Major Collins.”
“Sir, this is Lieutenant Cho over in Charlie Troop, 1-4 CAV. I was just notified by one of my patrols that there is a 1-18 unit in my area of operations … again. That makes the third time this month, sir, that your units have entered my battle space without checking in with my operations center. I could understand it if the boundary between us was just an arbitrary line on the map – mistakes happen, sir. But it’s the FUCKING TIGRIS RIVER! Please ensure your units maintain standard reporting procedures from now on.”
With that, he slammed the phone down, checked his watch, then sat down to wait. It took all of three minutes for the phone to ring again. He got an ass-chewing from our Squadron chain of command, but they knew he was in the right, and 1-18 Infantry never crossed the Tigris again.
* * *
We were attached to Charlie Troop to assist them in the upcoming elections, Iraq’s first free and democratic vote since the fall of Saddam. From the start of our tour, 1st Infantry Division headquarters had been hyping the crucial importance of these elections, with good r
eason. For a country mired in what was looking more and more like civil war, where our presence was becoming less tolerated and more resented by the day, a successful democratic election had the potential to reverse the downward spiral and set the country on the right path towards security and self-sufficiency.
For better or worse, our commanders had linked the success of our deployment with the success of the elections, so we all viewed them as our final exam of the tour, our last chance to salvage something from the months of frustration and stalled progress, something we might all believe was worth the sacrifices that had been made. It was a gamble, and we knew it: if all the citizens were too scared, too intimidated, or too indifferent to come out and vote, it would feel like a wasted year.
After we settled into our quarters at FOB Wilson, Sergeant First Class Martin and I attended a Charlie Troop meeting to discuss the upcoming operation. It would not be easy – while Anvil’s sector in the south included nine polling sites which were relatively tightly clustered in and around Ad Duluiyah, Rock Troop’s area of operations included no less than 16 polling sites, some as far as three hours’ drive away by Humvee. Securing them all was impossible, even with Iraqi assistance, so Rock’s commander, Captain Young, had determined the ones that would be most prone to insurgent attack, and divided them equally among his forces. All 16 sites would have to be visited both before and after the elections, however, in order to drop off the ballots and voting equipment, and then later to pick up the completed ballots and deliver them to the processing center in Tikrit.
As an additional wrinkle, while we were ultimately responsible for the security of the polling sites, the Iraqi Army and Police would be the only forces present at each site. This was an Iraqi event, so it would be kept safe by Iraqis, and no one wanted it to look like the Americans were forcing people to vote or tampering in any way with the electoral process. We would help enforce the curfew the night before, and we could help them plan and set up security, but little more. During the actual elections, we would take up positions in hide sites nearby, close enough to the polling sites to lend immediate assistance if necessary, but otherwise invisible to the general populace, except for a few short trips to each site to ensure everything was running smoothly.
I split my platoon into two sections – Martin and Barnes would lead the three Bradleys in one section, and I would take our three up-armored Humvees in the other, Staff Sergeant Landry serving as my wingman. The following morning, with Major Randall from Squadron staff leading the patrol, we escorted several cargo trucks to the farthest polling sites out by the Jabal Hamrin ridge, where we had conducted our troop area reconnaissance so many months before. It was a long, hot drive, and we stopped along the way at three or four rural schools to meet with the local sheikh, imam, or mayor – whoever was in charge – to hand off the voting equipment and check security arrangements. Each site received several thousand ballots and flyers describing (in Arabic) the voting process and the candidates running for election, as well as several large plastic tubs to hold the ballots, cardboard dividers to serve as privacy booths, and some posters to put up around town. Major Randall engaged the local leaders in conversation with the help of an interpreter, while my team and I pulled security, unloaded the equipment, and gave each site a quick once-over, looking for anything that might indicate an attack was planned.
On the eve of the elections, we moved out to our hide site near the town of Al Alam, stopping by the nearest site to let the Iraqi Police Captain know that we were there if he needed us. It was a long, mainly sleepless night, all of us dozing in our Humvee seats, weapons at the ready. Dawn was bitterly cold. We stamped our feet on the frozen mud, blowing on our hands to warm up. I heated up my breakfast MRE, and when it was warm, stuck the heating pack inside my uniform as a hot water bottle. By the afternoon it would warm up to about 60 degrees, forcing us to peel off layers throughout the day, but winter nights in the desert were hovering around freezing. Voting wasn’t scheduled to start for another couple hours, so we took the chance to shave – using the side-mirrors on the Humvee for help – brush our teeth, and relieve ourselves in preparation for the long day ahead.
I was impatient to see what the turnout would be for the vote, but I waited until just before voting was scheduled to begin to take the Humvees down to the polling site, wanting to minimize our presence at the beginning of the day. We walked into complete chaos in the schoolhouse – about the only good news was that most of the town seemed to be there, and seemed to be enthusiastic about being there, but the organizers were still at least 30 minutes away from having everything set up. The election officials who had been trained how to put everything together had waited until the last minute to arrive, and the impatient townspeople had started putting the whole operation together themselves. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, really – the concept of punctuality is somewhat foreign to Iraqis, especially compared to the U.S. military.
In every room, three or four men were loudly talking and ripping open boxes full of supplies, their heavy winter coats looking comically incongruous over their night-shirt-like dishdashas and sandals. I poked around for a few minutes, then found the police chief, who was arguing with an older man in a red-and-white-checked head-scarf. The police chief excused himself when he saw me, looked around at the chaos, shrugged, and smiled, as if to say, “What a mess, right?”
I hid my impatience and smiled back, nodding, but then he beckoned me to follow him to the back of the school, where he showed me an empty room with glass shards all over the floor. Through charades he made me understand that there had been an attack during the night. Several men had approached the school’s outer wall, thrown grenades over the side of it, and run off under fire from the police guarding the school. No one had been hurt, the grenades had simply blown in the windows on this side of the building. The attack had clearly done little to blunt the local people’s desire to vote, thankfully.
I sent the report up, and Captain Young, who was out in sector moving between his disparate units to check on progress, trekked up north to see the damage for himself. While we were walking around the outside of the building, Captain Young spotted a grenade body that hadn’t exploded, and we called EOD in to deal with it, clearing everyone out of that side of the building for safety. A half hour later, EOD rolled in, and their NCO sauntered around the school to the unexploded grenade. He bent over it for a second, peering closely at it, then picked it up and put it in his cargo pocket.
“Okay, we’ll see you guys later,” he said.
Young and I shared a look – crazy-ass EOD!
Though the leader and organizer in me was dying to establish order and get voting started quickly, we mounted up and left the Iraqis to figure the voting out on their own, heading south to the second polling site, which was running a bit more smoothly. Our morning checks completed, we returned to the hide site to rest and kill some more time. All other polling sites were reporting steady activity, which hinted at success, but like a pitcher throwing a no-hitter, we were reluctant to discuss it and thereby jinx ourselves.
Instead, we talked about going home, the topic at the forefront of everyone’s mind now that we were just five weeks away from our scheduled return. Though we knew it was a completely pointless exercise, we bandied about theories on exactly when we would be leaving, speculating and sharing rumors we had overheard. Just the thought that we were so close to going home was enough to put a smile on my face.
In the mid-afternoon, we did another round of checks, and this time found all as it should be at the sites: people were lining up in an orderly fashion (sometimes a hundred or more at a time), voting in the semi-privacy of the cardboard booths, and placing their ballots in the sealed containers after getting their fingers marked with ink. The mood in town was festive, and it wasn’t just because no one was going to work that day – people were genuinely excited. For the first time during our tour, I saw adults waving and smiling at us. Granted, this small town was known for being a quiet
sector, a well-to-do suburb of Tikrit whose citizens were mostly white-collar types with steady jobs and little incentive to take up arms. But we were willing to take any small victories we could get.
Across Iraq, things were not always as quiet, as the insurgents tried to undermine the election process with coordinated attacks on the Iraqis who turned out to vote. In Balad, a line of several hundred people formed at one of the busiest polling sites, and quickly came under insurgent mortar fire, the deadly rounds killing or injuring several civilians. While the Army responded, the dead and wounded were cared for, and the line of people, undeterred, stoically reassembled. One of my most potent memories of the day was seeing an ancient Iraqi woman emerge from the southern polling site, a triumphant, toothless grin on her weathered face, her ink-stained finger held high.
Finally, after sundown, the polls were closed, and we linked up with the cargo trucks once again to begin collecting the sealed ballot boxes for transport back to Tikrit, where they would be counted. At the northern site, despite their disorganization of the morning, the population had finished voting sooner, and they were ready for us, the Iraqi Police lending a hand as we tossed the boxes up onto the high cargo beds. I shook the police chief’s hand, and he gripped mine firmly in return, touching his left hand to his heart in the traditional gesture of appreciation and respect.
Full dark had fallen by the time we left for the southern polling site, where a power outage in town forced them to break out flashlights and oil lamps to help see what they were doing. Here the air was downright celebratory – I tried to make my way inside to try to find someone in charge and start collecting the ballot boxes, but I was stopped numerous times by Iraqi soldiers and civilians, laughing and clapping me on the back.
