Happy Halloween Everyone!

Snippets from Iraq...

I love Halloween, SO sad I can’t enjoy it with you all. I hope you get lots of candy, hold some for me if you can’t ship it over. :(

I had another session with Osman the other night; he’s really a great kid (27 years old). It turns out he’s from Bangladesh and learned Arabic in Saudi Arabia. So, I’m not learning an Iraqi dialect, but a more formal Arabic which is fine with me.

Osman’s on salary, he makes about $20/day for a 12 hour day. He’s a contractor. There’s multi-levels of contracting involved, but $1.20/hr is probably a pretty good wage for him and all his friends here. But I know there’s a lot of money left on the table (Diann, take note). He sends his money home, has 5 sisters, 6 brothers or some combination like that. I asked him if he ever ate at the Burger King here and he said no, $3.50 could feed his family for quite a while. This is a good opportunity for him and all his friends and there’s lots of them here.

Our camp is filled with subcontractors from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. There are no Iraqis in key areas. There’s no unguarded Iraqi’s on post which is a conundrum for me. There was a bombing in one of our mess halls in Mosul last year, an insurgent worked his way into camp and detonated himself inside the chow tent. I can’t remember the exact number of deaths; I think it was 22 with lots of people injured. Since that time, the Commanding General of this post (and many of them around the country) issued a decree that said no Iraqi’s in our sensitive areas. Well, for people like me who are training the Iraqi’s to take over their country its presents an issue, as it’s not very good training if we hold the keys until the day we leave and then throw it to them as we run out the door. However, no base commander wants another Mosul on their conscience and it’s their prerogative to dictate security, so it’s a balancing act.

If you read Michael Yon’s blog (link on the right side) you’ll see a different perspective. He’s embedded with the Army and has been working with the Iraqi’s. The difference is he goes out into the field and works where they work. Well worth reading.

Gun Trucks –

I remember when the High Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) first came out and replaced the Jeep. It was terribly received, bigger than the beloved Jeep, clunkier, harder to maintain, more expensive and certainly not user friendly. Well, you should see them now; I think they got it right but I believe they stumbled into the solution. It’s the old necessity is the mother of invention, these HMMWV’s are awesome.

The configuration is up-armored and I mean heavy armor plates protecting the crew - top, sides, front and under carriage. On top of the vehicle sits a machine gunner right out of Rat Patrol with a .50 caliber or Mark 19 Grenade launcher that rocks the vehicle when it shoots. This vehicle will tear up a Bradley Armored Fighting vehicle. When that gun shoots you know you're firing a heavy weapon. They’re coming out with another version that increases the suspension, electrical capacity, etc because they keep adding features and components; the HMMWV’s turned into the perfect urban warfare vehicle. And, troops are starting to stencil slogans and pictures of deaths’ head on turrets which is a sure sign the vehicle has been accepted. I’ll try and post a pic in the future, or you can google for HMMWV, gun truck, Iraq and check it out.

Best wishes to all and again, happy Halloween. It coincides with the Night of Power, the last day of Ramadan here in the Middle East so watch the papers and pray that their “festival” is peaceful for us all…

Trip Report - Baghdad!

I just got back from Baghdad, what a great trip.

Don’t you hate it when people name drop? (Oh my, I just got back from Paris and have you seen what they’ve done to the LOUVRE? You haven’t? Oh my goodness, you MUST get there as soon as you can, I can’t TELL you how wonderful it is!). Well, something like that I guess.

But I did get a chance to go to Baghdad and had an eye opening trip. We flew down in a Blackhawk helicopter and he must have been flying about 200’ off the ground. They fly low and fast and when they bank hard, you are face down looking at rooftops. I made a mistake on the trip back and asked the crew chief if they’d leave the doors open. Well, I was in the wrong seat and got blasted by the airflow coming in; the guy next to me said my cheeks were being buffeted so hard, they looked like water rippling from a thrown rock. I thought about moving to a different seat, but that probably wouldn’t have been the smartest thing to do. I had goggles on, but if I turned my head they would have been ripped off, so I just stared straight into the wind and hoped they didn’t hit a bird.

My meeting was in the Green Zone downtown where we got the chance to meet some of our compatriots from other countries, all working to help build the Iraqi Army. My direct contact is U.S., but there’s a Canadian liaison officer, an Australian officer and I even saw a Macedonian on their team. We had lunch at the U.S. Embassy compound and that was another cool place. I’m scheduled to fly to many of the outposts in country and I think this is going to be an interesting tour.

My contact with the Iraqi Army is going to be limited, but I will still get a chance to work with them. I’m a cog, a paper pusher that watches the equipment and personnel being fielded and tracks to make sure it’s fixed, maintained, serviced, supported, etc. in support of the new Iraqi Army. The challenge is that their way of doing things are not the U.S.’s way of doing things. We try to force our system down their throat and it doesn’t always work. We could give them our system, shake their hand and walk away, but we’d leave them with unworkable systems they wouldn’t use, so we’re trying hard to find systems that works for them. We’re learning fast, but must go faster.

There is limited automation in the Iraqi Army; we are focusing on stubby pencil supply systems. Our concept of support is to push supplies to the end user before they ask for them. We know how many people are in each unit, where they’re located, how many vehicles we drive and other metrics. We know what part breaks down often, our daily ration cycle, wholesale/retail supply operations and much more because we’ve been perfecting our system for many years. Think about how much Target Corp has learned about warehouse management and distribution and then what would happen if they tried to force that onto a Mom and Pop grocery store around the corner. How much of Target’s gigantic institutional knowledge would even be relevant? We’re starting from scratch here.

Here’s one of the situations: we tried to help them feed their force. We were going to give them mobile kitchens, supplies, utensils, food and purification systems and then send them to schools to learn how to cook, how to provide sanitary work environments, operate generators, etc. These are basic skills, to us. The commander of the Iraqi force just shook his head and said bring me 30 sheep, we’ll kill one sheep per day and we’ll be happy. This was anecdotal, but characterizes their concept of support and we have to find something in the middle. It’s cultural awareness. So, we need to rethink how to give them a system they’ll use. It’s very interesting and I’m looking forward to learning more.

I have more traveling to do. There are regular air terminals set up and units in place to provide it. There’s not much ground movement allowed outside of convoys (using gun trucks) and those are highly regulated because of the IED danger. So, air travel is the key.

I’m in a routine now. If I don’t get up early to fly (listen to me, I’ve been out once) I get to the gym in the morning and try to work off the food. I have never been around so much food before. There are 3 full meals a day unless you get up for midnight chow which would be 4. The portions are huge, there are no shortages and they heap it on the plates. Last Wed was fish night, and I swear to God…Lobster or Prime rib, your choice. You could have both is you wanted. And, it was pretty good. There’s a dessert bar with Baskins & Robbins and we’ve been warned that 3 trips back to the bar might be overdoing it. I’m trying, but it’s hard. I probably shouldn’t have even said anything about this cause my cookies won’t make it, but its part of the routine and does break up the day. I’ll have to take some pictures at the holidays; they say the food is unbelievable at Thanksgiving.

Best wishes to all and keep up the good thoughts! More later!

Osman the Tutor...

I went shopping last night; I wanted to stop by the rug dealer that is set up on post. One of the rugs that most interested me was priced at $6500 which quickly fell to $5900 after a couple of minutes (dealers are from India) and I’m sure it would have gone another $1000 if I just would have stood around for a bit longer. I’m going to have to do some research on the rugs, they were awfully expensive and I have no clue how valuable they really were, or if there’s a better place to get them. These stores are Army sponsored, so they have to be a bit legit to do business on post, but its still caveat emptor. These were 6’ X 9’ silk rugs, 700 knots per square inch.

I went shopping for a rug and settled on a tutor, instead.

I’ve been looking around this post for some language classes (Arabic) and stopped into the Army Distance Learning Center, the Ed center (you know, Iraq…Arabic…Ed Center, I didn’t think that was such a leap) but there were no language classes available. They did have a multitude of classes to get my GED but I’m probable OK in that area. I’d been asking around to see if I could pay for a tutor, someone that could help me pick up the language but wasn’t having much luck. I’m going to get the chance to work with the Iraqi Security Forces (their Army), so I thought it’d be worthwhile to at least be able to say hello.

It truly is amazing and this is one thing that hasn’t changed in all my years in the military. There is no demand on these foreign posts to learn host nation languages. We run everything on the post ala America. Sure we have cultural awareness and things like that, but the majority of the inhabitants make no efforts to dig beyond the surface. Granted, most people can’t go downtown and order Hallah meals, but there are not a lot of things to do here and if someone wanted to travel to say, Jordan or Qatar in the future, it might just come in handy, no? Well, that’s what I thought, too.

I’m walking out the rug shop, got the manager’s name and their trying to drag me back in to haggle some more and I end up escaping but not without the name of a local that could help. He said, “Go see Osman at the Alterations store!”

So I did. Osman is about 25 years old and speaks halting English. He didn’t understand the word tutor, but he figured it out when I equated it to teacher. Once he realized what I wanted, his face lit up and he immediately agreed. I liked him from the start; he’s a pretty bright kid with an ambitious streak a mile wide. We decided on 10-15 sessions and we’re going to start tonight. I asked him what he would charge, and he totally declined any payment, he said he would do it just to help. I said no, I’d pay him and we spend a good bit of time haggling, we finally agreed that I’d pay him something at the end, whatever that would be. It turns out he works from 9am in the morning to 9pm at night and would do it after then. I’m not sure what he even makes, but it looks like we’ll start tonight and see how it goes. I’ve got his first name, Osman, but that’s all I know about him.

I travel tomorrow; and I hope to have some pictures that I can post. Best wishes to all and mucho love to all my family and friends.

Landed: Iraq

My address for the foreseeable future is:

LTC Tim Murphy
CDC, 3rd COSCOM
LSA Anaconda
APO AE 09391

The weather is cooling down; its 10 degrees cooler than Kuwait, that’s for sure. The base is large, one of the largest in the country and I can’t find anything on base, I’m lost.

The Army doesn’t mark buildings for security reasons and everything is surrounded by Texas barriers. They’re like Jersey barriers, but bigger. You’ve seen Jersey barriers on the freeways at home; they’re the movable cement barriers that temporarily reroute traffic, common in construction zones. The Texas barriers are a bit different; they’re about 16 feet high stood on end. They’re everywhere. Every building is surrounded by them, interlocking so you have a curtain of cement surrounding all the buildings & tents. Barriers, and then sandbags stacked up past the windows, it reminds me of the movie Apocalypse Now where everywhere was sand bagged and then these Texas barriers. To get into the building, they leave a couple of barriers out and you slip in between the sides of them. ID checks everywhere, it’s a very secure place. The barriers are there in case of mortars, but we haven’t had a single one since I’ve gotten here. I guess they got the memo.

Today is the Iraqi Referendum, and we’re all on high alert. We can’t go outside without body armor, weapon and helmet, the minimum essentials at our threat level. I went to the gym this morning in PT clothes and wore everything else over it. It’s been a while since they’ve been at a lower alert level but everyone is hoping that the Referendum and elections in December go well. Then it will be nicer to be outside, maybe even run the streets inside the compound.

My room is nice, I share it with one other person but we rarely see each other, I was up at the gym by 5am this morning and got on the treadmill for a nice long run. We rarely get back to the room before 9pm and honestly, there’s not a lot to do on the time off. At least I haven’t been able to find any trouble to get into.

I’m at my desk at my new job and trying to figure out exactly what I’ll be doing. There’s a unit here that we’re replacing, they’ll be leaving in the next couple of weeks. They have short-timers attitude, can’t wait to leave and we have 1000’s of questions on how they do their job. It’s like a new consultant starting on the job and the replacement has already given notice and now they’re going to dump the world on your shoulders. It’s pretty big, and I don’t want to screw something up and wind up on CNN, or Al Jazeera. That would be embarrassing but I’ll do my best to uphold the red, white and blue.

I think I could do it better with a cookie…
/Murph

Ok, Kuwait is really bad...

I watched the sun come up yesterday morning around 6 am. I turned to all four cardinal directions to see if I could see any kind of landmark at all, anything like a tree, blade of grass, building, tower, anything. I only saw sand. Sand as far as the eye could see. From the small atoll from which we camped last night (we had tents, some slept outside under the stars) I could see miles in two of the four directions. It was barren and desolate. I haven’t seen much alive out here in this desert; a couple of dung beetles and ants, an occasional bird and some camels. Oh, yeah, the camels!

On one of the convoy training exercises, we came across green scrub bushes which looked so out of place in the barren wasteland and then, lo and behold, there they were, maybe about 30-40 of them in a group with two shepherds (bedouins?). The camels were kind of cool; they were munching away and moving along. They were about to cross our path so the bedouins stopped walking and then so did the camels, all of them! They all stopped and looked back to see what the chief was doing, so that was kind of cool. I guess they’re smert (?)!

We’ve been in the field for the last couple of days. We came in this afternoon in time for hot food at dinner time and that was most welcome. We’ve had days of training on different lanes. One of them is called close quarters maneuver and it’s where we shoot at targets from a number of different positions. Some we have to pivot left or right to bring the target to bear, some we have to run up to a point and fire, or walk and shoot into the target. On one of them, the target is behind us and we all pivot to shoot without flagging the muzzle at the guy (or gal) to your left or right.

This is unheard of from the Army of old. For those who were in the Army fighting the Cold War, it is so much different than it used to be. The safety considerations that we use to “play” under would NEVER let us move outside of a highly restricted firing line where we all fired on command. It’s not that they’ve loosened the safety restrictions, they still have extremely high safety standards, it’s just that they’ve realized that valuable reaction time on the battlefield was being lost when soldiers didn’t feel comfortable firing without an order from the tower. The rules of engagement here are pretty strict; you will fire without hesitation in order to protect yourself or those people under your protection. There are just too many people being hurt and killed when they give the other guy the benefit of the doubt. Now, we fire upon hostile intent, no questions asked. Welcome to the war zone.

God love people like Paul and the 3rd ACR who live in the field all the time, I just don’t know how they do it. We’re only getting a taste of this because we’re going to be in a relative office environment when we finally go north. But for our soldiers in the field with day to day duties working with the people or driving/protecting convoys, they deserve our total gratitude. They certainly have my utmost respect.

We head north soon if there’s a flight available. More later from Iraq!

Hellow from Kuwait

We landed. The first taste of Kuwait isn’t too bad; it’s about 88 degrees as we got off the plane around 8PM. We saw lots of lights of Kuwait City as we flew in by commercial airline, and I thought it was a fairly commercial city. It took about 25 hours counting stops in Newfoundland and Frankfurt to get here.

There was a nice wind blowing when we get off and it’s not bad at all. The ground is different though; it’s finely crushed sand, like the bottom of a gravel pit that’s been driven over by trucks for years, somewhat rough but with plumes of sand that billow up with each step you take. We board buses and they tell us to keep the curtains of the windows closed. They haven’t had a hostile shot fired in Kuwait for 10 months but they don’t like to advertise any more than the convoy of buses already do. We board the buses and travel about 2 hours to the U.S. staging area north of Kuwait City.

Once we arrive, we swipe our ID cards. That’s the most important first item because it logs us “in-country”. No swipe, not here. So, we all make sure we get a good read the first time.

We file into a tent for the in-briefing and in true Army fashion, we will get the in-briefing no matter how late it is. Welcome to the theater of Iraq; get your game face on because you’re now in a war zone. We’ve spent a lot of time preparing for this moment, but it’s still a little surreal to be here.

After the welcome, it’s time for the bag drag. All of our bags have been stacked on the ground and you have to go find yours and drag it to your new cot. It would be nice if we could be unique and have our own style, but Army green bags all look alike and if you haven’t marked it somehow, you work with the other 300 people looking for their green bags and snatch them as you can. I have two duffel bags, a rucksack, a computer case and a travel case to bag. I end up making a couple of trips. We’re still putting things away around 4am, the lights in the tent never went out…..it’s already been a long day.

We’re in large Quonset huts with electricity, wood floors and cots….about 60 per group. Our huts are air conditioned which is a welcome respite from the heat. Oh, yeah, forgot to mention that the 88 degree welcome we got the other morning was a fluke. It took me 3 tries this morning to go outside of the tent to shave, even at that early hour. The door would open and this blast of sunshine literally drove me back inside, it was so bright. The next time, even with sun glasses and boonie hat on, it’s so very hot. I forced myself out and stood in the sunshine for a minute to acclimate, but I’ve never been in a sun so hot before. We use to kid the people of our group because some of their mission will be here in Kuwait, which we’ve equated to easy duty…but Kuwait is actually further south than Iraq and hotter. I have yet to see any green vegetation here, it’s all sand. Its sand as far as the eye can see. This place is a hell hole and I pity anyone working in this. The Army built this place in a remote area and there is nothing else here. I think it’s pretty typical of Kuwait in general, but I’m not sure about that. (Girls, write me a report, pls?)

I do see the millions of dollars being spent on the GWOT here, the mess halls feed thousands of troops in just a couple of hours, and there are 3 mess halls on this post alone. There’s a nice gym and an air conditioned tent for movies. You can get Burger King if you want but you have to stand outside to get it and it’s just too damn hot and uncomfortable most of the time, so we don’t.

I’m on the 1st chalk. Once our training here is finished, we’re going north ahead of the rest of the group, so I’ll be one of the first people in-country from this group. That doesn’t mean anything except I’ll be out of Kuwait sooner than most. Thank goodness Kuwait has oil; I don’t see any other redeeming factors at all…

I did find out that I’ll be getting a chance to travel while I’m in-country. One of my first tasks is to see how much of that I can arrange by air.

P.S., the wheelchairs are here with us and safe. The next step is to get them on a flight north to the 3rd ACR and Paul as soon as we can. We got a lot of strange looks when we loaded them, but they made it. There are three of them, anyone want to post who they’re from?

Love to all!