On the ground with US troops in Iraq

Stretched Thin, Lied to & Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq

by Christian Parenti

Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the
wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba,
you owe me a strawberry milk!"

It’s a private joke but could just as easily summarize
the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the
fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld’s house of victory.
Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut
off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla
war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for.

On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and
awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are
drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators,
Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-
arms fire.

Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon
bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of
counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way—by
hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck
with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
It is noon and the mercury is hanging steady at 115
Fahrenheit. The filmmaker Garrett Scott and I are
"embedded" with Alpha Company of the Third Battalion of
the 124th Infantry, a Florida National Guard unit about
half of whom did time in the regular Army, often with
elite groups like the Rangers.

Like most frontline
troops in Iraq, the majority are white but there is a
sizable minority of African-American and Latino soldiers
among them. Unlike most combat units, about 65 percent
are college students—they’ve traded six years with the
Guard for tuition at Florida State. Typically, that
means occasional weekends in the Everglades or directing
traffic during hurricanes. Instead, these guys got sent
to Iraq, and as yet they have no sure departure date.
Mobilized in December, they crossed over from Kuwait on
day one of the invasion and are now bivouacked in the
looted remains of a Republican Guard officers’ club, a
modernist slab of polished marble and tinted glass that
the GIs have fortified with plywood, sandbags and razor
wire.

Behind "the club" is a three-story dormitory, a warren
of small one-bedroom apartments, each holding a nine-man
squad of soldiers and all their gear. Around 200 guys
are packed in here. Their sweaty fatigues drape the
banisters of the exterior stairway, while inside the
cramped, dark rooms the floors are covered with cots,
heaps of flak vests, guns and, where possible, big tin,
water-based air-conditioners called swamp coolers.
Surrounding the base is a chaotic working-class
neighborhood of two- and three-story cement homes and
apartment buildings. Not far away is the muddy Tigris
River.

This company limits patrols to three or four hours a
day. For the many hours in between, the guys pull guard
duty, hang out in their cavelike rooms or work out in a
makeshift weight room.
"We’re getting just a little bit stir-crazy," explains
the lanky Sergeant Sellers. His demeanor is typical of
the nine-man squad we have been assigned to, friendly
but serious, with a wry and angry sense of humor. On the
side of his helmet Sellers has, in violation of regs,
attached the unmistakable pin and ring of a hand
grenade. Next to it is written, "Pull Here."

Leaning back on a cot, he’s drawing a large, intricate
pattern on a female mannequin leg. The wall above him
displays a photo collage of pictures retrieved from a
looted Iraqi women’s college. Smiling young ladies
wearing the hijab sip sodas and stroll past buses. They
seem to be on some sort of field trip. Nearby are photos
clipped from Maxim, of coy young American girls offering
up their pert round bottoms. Dominating it all is a
large hand-drawn dragon and a photo of Jessica Lynch
with a bubble caption reading: "Hi, I am a war hero. And
I think that weapons maintenance is totally
unimportant."

The boys don’t like Lynch and find the story of her
rescue ridiculous. They’d been down the same road a day
earlier and are unsympathetic. "We just feel that it’s
unfair and kind of distorted the way the whole Jessica,
quote, ’rescue’ thing got hyped," explains Staff Sgt.
Kreed Howell. He is in charge of the squad, and at 31 a
bit older than most of his men. Muscular and clean-cut,
Howell is a relaxed and natural leader, with the
gracious bearing of a proper Southern upbringing.
"In other words, you’d have to be really fucking dumb to
get lost on the road," says another, less diplomatic
soldier.

Specialist John Crawford sits in a tiny, windowless
supply closet that is loaded with packs and gear. He is
two credits short of a BA in anthropology and wants to
go to graduate school. Howell, a Republican, amicably
describes Crawford as the squad’s house liberal.
There’s just enough extra room in the closet for
Crawford, a chair and a little shelf on which sits a
laptop. Hanging by this makeshift desk is a handwritten
sign from "the management" requesting that soldiers
masturbating in the supply closet "remove their
donations in a receptacle." Instead of watching
pornography DVDs, Crawford is here to finish a short
story. "Trying to start writing again," he says.

Crawford is a fan of Tim O’Brien, particularly The
Things They Carried. We chat, then he shows me his short
story. It’s about a vet who is back home in north
Florida trying to deal with the memory of having
accidentally blown away a child while serving in Iraq.
Later in the cramped main room, Sellers and Sergeant
Brunelle, another one of the squad’s more gregarious and
dominant personalities, are matter-of-factly showing us
digital photos of dead Iraqis.

"These guys shot at some of our guys, so we lit ’em up.
Put two .50-cal rounds in their vehicle. One went
through this dude’s hip and into the other guy’s head,"
explains Brunelle. The third man in the car lived. "His
buddy was crying like a baby. Just sitting there bawling
with his friend’s brains and skull fragments all over
his face. One of our guys came up to him and is like:
’Hey! No crying in baseball!’"

"I know that probably sounds sick," says Sellers, "but
humor is the only way you can deal with this shit."
And just below the humor is volcanic rage. These guys
are proud to be soldiers and don’t want to come across
as whiners, but they are furious about what they’ve been
through. They hate having their lives disrupted and put
at risk. They hate the military for its stupidity, its
feckless lieutenants and blowhard brass living
comfortably in Saddam’s palaces. They hate Iraqis—or,
as they say, "hajis"—for trying to kill them. They hate
the country for its dust, heat and sewage-clogged
streets. They hate having killed people.

Some even hate
the politics of the war. And because most of them are,
ultimately, just regular well-intentioned guys, one
senses the distinct fear that someday a few may hate
themselves for what they have been forced to do here.
Added to such injury is insult: The military treats
these soldiers like unwanted stepchildren. This unit’s
rifles are retooled hand-me-downs from Vietnam. They
have inadequate radio gear, so they buy their own
unencrypted Motorola walkie-talkies. The same goes for
flashlights, knives and some components for night-vision
sights.

The low-performance Iraqi air-conditioners and
fans, as well as the one satellite phone and payment
cards shared by the whole company for calling home, were
also purchased out of pocket from civilian suppliers.
Bottled water rations are kept to two liters a day.
After that the guys drink from "water buffaloes"—big,
hot chlorination tanks that turn the amoeba-infested
dreck from the local taps into something like swimming-
pool water. Mix this with powdered Gatorade and you can
wash down a famously bad MRE (Meal Ready to Eat).

To top it all off they must endure the pathologically
uptight culture of the Army hierarchy. The Third of the
124th is now attached to the newly arrived First Armored
Division, and when it is time to raid suspected
resistance cells it’s the Guardsmen who have to kick in
the doors and clear the apartments.

QUOT-The First AD wants us to catch bullets for them but
won’t give us enough water, doesn’t let us wear do-rags
and makes us roll down our shirt sleeves so we look
proper! Can you believe that shit?" Sergeant Sellers is
pissed off.

The soldiers’ improvisation extends to food as well.
After a month or so of occupying "the club," the company
commander, Captain Sanchez, allowed two Iraqi
entrepreneurs to open shop on his side of the wire—one
runs a slow Internet cafe, the other a kebab stand where
the "Joes" pay US dollars for grilled lamb on flat
bread.

"The haji stand is one of the only things we have to
look forward to, but the First AD keeps getting scared
and shutting it down." Sellers is on a roll, but he’s
not alone.
Even the lighthearted Howell, who insists that the squad
has it better than most troops, chimes in. "The one
thing I will say is that we have been here entirely too
long. If I am not home by Christmas my business will
fail." Back "on earth" (in Panama City, Florida), Howell
is a building contractor, with a wife, two small
children, equipment, debts and employees.
Perhaps the most shocking bit of military incompetence
is the unit’s lack of formal training in what’s called
"close-quarter combat." The urbanized mayhem of
Mogadishu may loom large in the discourse of the
military’s academic journals like Parameters and the
Naval War College Review, but many US infantrymen are
trained only in large-scale, open-country maneuvers—how
to defend Germany from a wave of Russian tanks.
So, since "the end of the war" these guys have had to
retrain themselves in the dark arts of urban combat.

"The houses here are small, too," says Brunelle. "Once
you’re inside you can barely get your rifle up. You got
women screaming, people, furniture everywhere. It’s
insane."
By now this company has conducted scores of raids, taken
fire on the street, taken casualties, taken rocket-
propelled grenade attacks to the club and are defiantly
proud of the fact that they have essentially been
abandoned, survived, retrained themselves and can keep a
lid on their little piece of Baghdad. But it’s not
always the Joes who have the upper hand. Increasingly,
Haji seems to sets the agenda.

A thick black plume of smoke rises from Karrada Street,
a popular electronics district where US patrols often
buy air-conditioners and DVDs. An American Humvee,
making just such a stop, has been blown to pieces by a
remote-activated "improvised explosive device," or IED,
buried in the median between two lanes of traffic. By
chance two colleagues and I are the first press on the
scene. The street is empty of traffic and quiet except
for the local shopkeepers, who occasionally call out to
us in Arabic and English: "Be careful."

Finally we get close enough to see clearly. About twenty
feet away is a military transport truck and a Humvee,
and beyond that are the flaming remains of a third
Humvee. A handful of American soldiers are crouched
behind the truck, totally still. There’s no firing, no
yelling, no talking, no radio traffic. No one is
screaming, but two GIs are down. As yet there are no
reinforcements or helicopters overhead. All one can hear
is the burning of the Humvee.
Then it begins: The ammunition in the burning Humvee
starts to explode and the troops in the street start
firing. Armored personnel carriers arrive and disgorge
dozens of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne to join the
fight. The target is a three-story office building just
across from the engulfed Humvee.

Occasionally we hear a
few rounds of return fire pass by like hot razors
slashing straight lines through the air. The really
close rounds just sound like loud cracks.
"That’s Kalashnikov. I know the voice," says Ahmed, our
friend and translator. There is a distinct note of
national pride in his voice—his countrymen are fighting
back—never mind the fact that we are now mixed in with
the most forward US troops and getting shot at.
The firefight goes on for about two hours, moving slowly
and methodically. It is in many ways an encapsulation of
the whole war—confusing and labor-intensive. The GIs
have more firepower than they can use, and they don’t
even know exactly where or who the enemy is. Civilians
are hiding in every corner, the ground floor of the
target building is full of merchants and shoppers, and
undisciplined fire could mean scores of dead civilians.

There are two GIs on the ground, one with his legs gone
and probably set to die. When a medevac helicopter
arrives just overhead, it, too, like much other
technology, is foiled. The street is crisscrossed with
electrical wires and there is no way the chopper can
land to extract the wounded. The soldiers around us look
grave and tired.

Eventually some Bradley fighting vehicles start pounding
the building with mean 250-millimeter cannon shells.
Whoever might have been shooting from upstairs is either
dead or gone.
The street is now littered with overturned air-
conditioners, fans and refrigerators. A cooler of sodas
sits forlorn on the sidewalk. Farther away two civilians
lie dead, caught in the crossfire. A soldier peeks out
from the hatch of a Bradley and calls over to a
journalist, "Hey, can you grab me one of those Cokes?"
After the shootout we promised ourselves we’d stay out
of Humvees and away from US soldiers. But that was
yesterday. Now Crawford is helping us put on body armor
and soon we’ll be on patrol. As we move out with the
nine soldiers the mood is somewhere between tense and
bored.

Crawford mockingly introduces himself to no one
in particular: "John Crawford, I work in population
reduction."
QUOT-Watch the garbage—if you see wires coming out of a
pile it’s an IED," warns Howell. The patrol is
uneventful. We walk fast through back streets and
rubbish-strewn lots, pouring sweat in the late afternoon
heat. Local residents watch the small squad with a
mixture of civility, indifference and open hostility. An
Iraqi man shouts, "When? When? When? Go!" The soldiers
ignore him.

"Sometimes we sham," explains one of the guys. "We’ll
just go out and kick it behind some wall. Watch what’s
going on but skip the walking. And sometimes at night we
get sneaky-deaky. Creep up on Haji, so he knows we’re
all around."
"I am just walking to be walking," says the laconic
Fredrick Pearson, a k a "Diddy," the only African-
American in Howell’s squad. Back home he works in the
State Supreme Court bureaucracy and plans to go to law
school. "I just keep an eye on the rooftops, look around
and walk."

The patrols aren’t always peaceful. One soldier mentions
that he recently "kicked the shit out of a 12-year-old
kid" who menaced him with a toy gun.
Later we roll with the squad on another patrol, this
time at night and in two Humvees. Now there’s more
evident hostility from the young Iraqi men loitering in
the dark. Most of these infantry soldiers don’t like
being stuck in vehicles. At a blacked-out corner where a
particularly large group of youths are clustered, the
Humvees stop and Howell bails out into the crowd. There
is no interpreter along tonight.

"Hey, guys! What’s up? How y’all doing? OK? Everything
OK? All right?" asks Howell in his jaunty, laid-back
north Florida accent. The sullen young men fade away
into the dark, except for two, who shake the sergeant’s
hand. Howell’s attempt to take the high road, winning
hearts and minds, doesn’t seem to be for show. He really
believes in this war. But in the torrid gloom of the
Baghdad night, his efforts seem tragically doomed.
Watching Howell I think about the civilian technocrats
working with Paul Bremer at the Coalition Provisional
Authority; the electricity is out half the time, and
these folks hold meetings on how best to privatize state
industries and end food rations.

Meanwhile, the city
seethes. The Pentagon, likewise, seems to have no clear
plan; its troops are stretched thin, lied to and
mistreated. The whole charade feels increasingly patched
together, poorly improvised. Ultimately, there’s very
little that Howell and his squad can do about any of
this. After all, it’s not their war. They just work
here.

Christian Parenti is the author, most recently, of The
Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the
War on Terror (Basic) and a fellow at City University of
New York’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.

Copyright © 2003 The Nation