FOB Warrior

I leave Wed, May 31 for FOB (Forward Operating Base) Warror and will be there for two months. My new address is on the right here but mail will take 2+ weeks to get there. I'm hoping I have internet capability because I plan to unhook the camera again. I hope everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day holiday weekend. Best wishes from Iraq.

Going north...

Welp, it looks like its going to happen. I’ll be moving from here (Balad, LSA Anaconda) to go up north and join a MiTT.

I’m pretty excited about it, so first let me tell all the people I owe emails to that I’ll put as much news into this as I can, and then we can go from there. I’ve been really bad responding lately to emails, so if I write it out just once it’ll probably be coherent. Suffice it to say, it’s pretty busy here.

There are two groups here, the killers who go out and kick in the doors making the towns safer because of their presence (Paul) and then our embedded soldiers (MiTT’s) that work and live with the Iraqi soldiers and teach them soldier skills. Both jobs are huge and both expose the Iraqi’s to all of our best traits as Americans. It also exposes us to the Iraqi’s so that we can understand what they need to do to be successful, the kinds of training they need as well as the tools.

MiTT stands for Military Transition Team. They live with them, eat their food, train them, work with them and sleep in the same areas as they do, mostly. This is much like the Green Berets did in Vietnam. There are hundreds of US teams here in Iraq and they’re embedded at every level to include the Iraqi Divisions, Brigades, and Battalions of the Army. There’s Air Force MiTT’s that are teaching them how to fly their C-130’s and Huey helicopters. There’s BiTT’s which are Border Transition Teams, SPiTT’s for Special Police, LiTT’s for Logistical transition teams, thousands of different US soldiers and police embedded with the Iraqi infrastructure.

Standing up these forces is a daunting task. The police forces in the west are struggling to stand up enough police because a) it’s a dangerous place and police get shot, and b) they can’t pass the literacy test. There’s plenty of brave Iraqi’s that have applied, they just need to be able to read and write. So each of these teams are tailored to the mission and vary between 12-20 U.S. soldiers. They’re issued their own vehicles, weapons, supplies…everything they need to get the job done.

I’m joining one of the Motorized Transportation Regiments, also called an MTR. This is a regimental sized unit (just a bit bigger than a U.S. Battalion, about 300-400 Iraqi’s) headed by an Iraqi Colonel who’s responsible for transportation, maintenance and support to the division in his area. This unit provides the trucks and fuel tankers, major mechanical support, supply, etc. This is a brand new unit training to be logisticians, or more correctly, transporters.

Because the elections are coming and we need to get out of here, we’re accelerating all of the units that still need to be stood up. Most of this unit just graduated from basic training except for the officers. There’s plenty of training that we can do without really getting them out and into the fight for a while. They won’t be cut over to the Division until this fall, so we have them to train as we need.

There's a gap in their coverage because the MiTT that was supposed to be assigned aren’t shifting in early (they’re coming from the States) so we have to cover that gap. I’m very familiar with Iraqi logistics which was one of the reasons I’m going. We’ll fill it in with me and 2 Sergeants from this unit and some soldiers from the 101st stationed up north, a hodge podge of logisticians that can hold the fort for two months. We’ll be going up there around the 1st of June.

The north in a relatively safe area compared to Ramadi or Fallujah and I’ll be there for about two months. The good news is that it should be cooler by 5-10 degrees over these next summer months. The time is going to fly by because there’s so much to learn when I get there. They traditionally stay with these units for 1 year terms. When I get back I’ll have less than a month to go and I’ll be a short timer. I’ll be so short I can repel off a dime. I’ll be a two digit midget.

So that’s the news. I’ve got a lot of paperwork to get done before we go in a couple of weeks, we’re already starting to plan the redeployment back to Ft. McCoy.

Stop sending packages, I won't have a new address and probably won’t have time to get an address. I’m going to take my laptop with me and I believe there’s connectivity, so the emails can probably continue. We shall see.

More later! Best wishes from Iraq!

Limo's in the back...

These two cars are reputed to be high level limo’s used by Saddam’s staff but they didn’t survive the war too well. I spent two days in Bagdad last week and two Iraqi's I worked with in the Green Zone showed these to me.

Travel sure screws up your schedule though, it’s like taking two days off in the middle of your work week and going to Chicago for meetings, everything gets out of whack. Then we had some people up from Kuwait and we helped them get around camp. It was great to see them, but company is just as tiring here as it is at home, I guess I’m settled into a routine.

Wonderful news from my business partner, Diann, who’s now a “Glammy”. Her daughter Sally gave birth to Alexandra Kailee, born 5-12-06, 7 lbs, 6 oz and 20 ¾” LONG! My GAWD, she can practically slam dunk NOW. Best wishes to both Sally and Jason, she looks beautiful.

Taji Trip

Great trip yesterday, first time I’ve been out since I got back from leave. It felt good to get out of this office. The fields have been greening up and looked pretty good from the air. The two pilots we had were both about 23 years old. I’m not sure why that scared me, but they did a nice job and didn’t hit anything.

Taji itself is really safe as a whole, but the front gates (heavily guarded/fortified) get rammed by VB-suicide bombers more and more lately as well as a lot of IED’s are going off on the roads near by. We’re tons safer in our vehicles than we were just last year but there’s definitely more IED’s and the overall injured/killed rate has been going up. It's been a tough couple of months since the election for our kids over here.

There’s lots of Iraqi’s on Taji. It’s a warehouse facility which we visit often. We work side by side with them but we’re starting to struggle. Some of them just up and quit when they want to and usually its payday. There’s no contract to stay in like our military so when they decide to leave, they just...leave. It’s being addressed on the American side at a pretty high level. It’s hard to train them and then see them take off. We’ve also run into problems (nationwide) where soldiers/police leave because they don’t feel any nationalism to fight in a province they don't live in. Then, they resurface next month enlisting in their home town units. It’s an issue.

We were looking at medical supplies. This is the last class of supply that’s a black hole to my group and it's support to the IA. The U.S. has combat medics embedded with them and any soldier hurt in the field has immediate care until a medevac arrives. The Iraqi’s don’t have Medevac capability (unless they’re training with us) so their next level of care is the local hospital. We went to see how much equipment they have in the warehouse, get some pictures and work with the guys on site to see if they needed any of our help. It’s 1 U.S. Sergeant and 3-4 Iraqi’s that distribute to the whole country. It’s probably not enough support when we leave but good enough for now. Lots of bandages, litters, but no controlled substances. That's handled at a higher level which cuts down on the pilferage.

I had a bit of a scare while we were there, we were in the PX walking thru and this huge BOOM went off that moved the shelving, the signs came off their chains suspended from ceiling and everyone just froze and looked at each other! A SECOND one, even louder than the first when off and we all dashed for the door and the cement bunkers. This one sounded closer and they always come in three’s (they can get three off before counter battery zeros in) and nobody wanted to be around to see where it landed. We were RUNNING for the door when the third one went off and then the BigVoice comes on and says, “controlled detonation, controlled detonation”. Damn. That meant somebody was getting rid of excess munitions and thank you very much for telling us AFTER you blow them up, how about a little warning?? They were getting phone calls from around the base on that, lots of irate people and I’m sure a couple of new heart attack victims. :)

Water- A couple of years ago I was reading about the Army's first tour in Iraq during the War. There was an article about U.S. forces taking truck loads of bottled water from the states and how expensive it was to bring it over here. They were spending millions of dollars and it wasn’t because they couldn’t get water anywhere else, we know how to transport water, we've been doing so for decades. In the past we’d drink out of water buffaloes (tanks pulled behind trucks) or we’d use lister bags (canvas bags suspended from a tree). Both were certified “suitable for drinking” but tasted really bad and they were buying bottled water because the soldiers weren't drinking the other. But if you’re thirsty, you’ll drink it. Anyways, I’m happy to report that we've solved that issue by building bottled water plants here in country. We now have pallets and pallets of locally produced bottled water and it doesn’t taste bad, either. These are being turned over to the Iraqi’s, another example of your tax dollars at work.

Dates- Iraq used to be the 3rd largest producer of Dates in the world but that’s slipped over time. We’ve agreed to spray herbicide/insecticide on the trees to jump start the Date farmers and the only speed bump is the information campaign to the local farmers and mayors. They want to make sure that the terrorists don’t poison a town and blame it on the Coalition spraying. No good deed goes unpunished around here.

I hope everyone is well, best wishes from Iraq!

Flowering bugs

It hit 100 degrees again here this afternoon.

There are bushes here that have been flowering from all the heavy rains. They’re planted along the sidewalks and I run past them in the morning (65 degrees). They grow fairly tall and I duck under them as I run, they’re not unlike flowering lilac bushes at home, just not as huge. I shy away from touching any part of them because I don’t know what kind of bugs are in them. I’ve never had a problem with bugs or crawlies, but you know how you’ll walk to a lilac bush and sweep the leaves with your hands or pick the flowers? You don’t do that here, or at least I don’t. It’s the difference between growing up in the Midwest v. a desert environment, I guess; I just don’t know what’s in the bushes. And it’s not on my list of things to do to go rummage around in the bushes to see what’s in them.

They do look nice though, they’re pink flowering dessert plants that’ll bloom until it gets terribly hot. They’re around the castles and buildings and I imagine somebody planted them and cocked his green thumb and patted himself on the back for their beauty. I, however, miss the greenhouses with a hundred varieties of perennials, bushes, shrubs that you just insert into the dirt and walk away from. I miss the greening in the spring, the new sprouts, the trees.

Different subject – We still have a lot of injuries and deaths over here, but they’ve gone down dramatically because we’ve up-armored everything. The HMMWV’s are so heavily armored now that many of them have remote gun turret's on top, the gunner can sit inside his cab and swivel the turret and watch outside using optics or night vision sights. They can see further down the road than somebody on top with binoculars, its very state of the art equipment (and expensive). Gunners riding up on top in the turret were getting their arms, heads and upper bodies hurt because of the blast radius from the IED, but everybody else inside the truck were just getting shook up. The IED’s were not being as effective as they were in the past. But then, EFP’s came to the theater.

EFP’s are explosive formed projectiles. We haven’t seen too many of these because it takes some skill to put them together, but suffice it to say that traditional IED’s were like a shotgun blast that usually just rocked the truck a bit, EFP’s were like slugs, they’d punch a hole thru the armor and do a lot of damage. I bring this up because we’re up-armoring everything now, including the civilian trucks that make up the convoy. They have blast “grates” around the cabs of the truck and windows and they look like vehicles right out of Road Warrior. The Iraqi Army has adopted a lot of these techniques as well; they’re targets out there just like we are. EFP’s really need to be aimed so they’re not as effective with convoys running 55 MPH down the road. We’re also now able to prematurely detonate most of the IED’s out there with electronics so again, the numbers are dropping. It’s a good news story.

We really are planning on how to reduce our size here in country; it’s a big push from everyone involved. Some of the planning meetings I get to attend are figuring out how to support the Army if the CSS side is reduced. We provide combat service support (food/water/fuel) to more than just the Army, the Army makes up only about 60% of who we support.

All is well here. People have crested the mid point of the tour and starting to think about the last 4-5 months. The weather has been pretty nice, the heat still feels good and we’re not in Kuwait. I traveled again thru Kuwait coming and going from leave and still think it’s a hole, no saving grace but the oil. It’ll hit 140 degrees there at the height of the summer, that’s not fit for man or beast. Half of our unit is down there and we make up missions to get them to come here and visit, just to get them out of that desolation. All sand, not even flowering plants, just scorpions and camel spiders.

Thanks for all the emails and notes I’ve gotten from everyone, nice to keep in contact and stay in touch.

Best wishes from Iraq!