Heliborne tour

Flying low over Baghdad, I could again see the streets in detail: cars, houses, mosques, swimming pools, donkeys, a stadium, and, in the southern distance, the huge smokestacks of the Dora refinery. After touching down briefly in the IZ to pick up a couple more soldiers, the bird flew east, beyond the city, over the most barren terrain I have ever seen -- dry, cracked desert punctuated by the occasional palm grove, village, and road – until we touched down at another landing zone in a cloud of dust. I could see no buildings at all from the door, only tents. At first I had no idea where we were – the base was so spartan that I thought we were on a patrol base or combat outpost – and it took me a moment to process the direction we were flying, the troops on board, and landmarks to realize that we were at FOB Hammer, the headquarters of 3rd BCT, 3rd ID, a base that was only built near the ancient ruins of Besmiya last March and still consists mostly of moveable tents. The one soldier who climbed aboard at Hammer looked at first like he was wearing Marine desert fatigues, his grey uniform was so faded by dust.

From Hammer, we flew southwest to a tiny base I immediately recognized from the shape of the town next to it as Yusufiya, a FOB in name only. Two of the 10th Mountain soldiers got off there. (FOB Yusufiya is the home of two battalions from 2nd BCT, 10th Mountain, the brigade 3rd ID has southwest of Baghdad: 2-14 and 4-31 Infantry. The three soldiers captured by al Qaeda in May were based at Yusufiya). From there we flew to Mahmudiya, an even smaller 10th Mountain base, where a Paladin self-propelled howitzer sat idle near the tarmac, probably detached from the brigade I was on my way to visit at Kalsu. Over the farms and irrigation canals between the two towns, in the area called the Fiyas or the Triangle of Death, the Black Hawk banked and fired flares, the bright-burning devices helicopters use to deter surface-to-air missiles – I didn’t flinch this time, since the flares my bird launched the previous day had been routine, but a moment later the aircraft banked again, more steeply, and I heard a fast, sharp string of cracks as the left-side door gunner fired one burst and then another, longer one at some target on the ground. Then the flight continued as before – I think Black Hawks respond to threats like that pretty often, but when I realized the gunner was firing at an actual hostile target, even a minor one, my stomach flipped quickly before I thought, "This is so, so cool." As we flew on a few minutes later, I could see through the open window a thin column of black smoke over an intersection, the lower part of it glowing with flames, but the origin of the fire was obscured by palm groves. No idea whether it was a trash fire, an IED, or something else.

FOB Kalsu

Finally, we touched down at Kalsu, engulfed in another cloud of dust. At the edge of the landing zone, a sergeant whose nametag read Stadel was waiting for me, and he took me across the base to the headquarters area of 2nd BCT, 3rd ID. We went inside the public affairs tent, where there was a bustle of activity – soldiers with 3rd ID and Psyops patches everywhere, and in the middle of it, two reporters in their armor. One of them was Michael Gordon, the New York Times star military correspondent and the co-author of The Generals’ War and Cobra II. I introduced myself and explained what I was doing there, he laughed in near-disbelief, and told me where he and his photographer were off to: along with the brigade commander, Col. Ferrell (whom Gordon knows well from writing Cobra II – Ferrell led the squadron at the tip of V Corps’s spear during the invasion), they were going up to embed in a town called Arab Jabour, as follow-up to Gordon’s pieces in June from Baqubah uring the assault there. After I met the public affairs officer and passed his obnoxious test of whether I could stand up for myself – shouting at me and a Psyops captain who was showing me maps until I confronted him about my clearance – another soldier, Sgt. Stravinsky, took me over to their quarters. I’d decided I’d stay with the enlisted troops at Kalsu instead of taking press accommodations, so I could see what it was like: a good decision, since it let me get to know the four enlisted soldiers on the public affairs team as well as some of the sergeants from neighboring civil affairs and Psyops, all of whom lived in one huge tent. After Sgt. Sky, as Stravinsky was called, drove me over to the tent (my first Humvee ride), talking about his beagle most of the way, I dropped off my armor and bags. I was settled into Kalsu.

FOB Kalsu is in a fairly calm region, as regions of central Iraq go – except for the town of Iskandariya to the northeast, the area around the base is sparsely populated, homogeneous, and, maybe just as important, the actual US troop presence is small. That sounds contradictory, but it’s true: FOB Kalsu is the headquarters of two entire brigades but not a single infantry, armor, or cavalry battalion is based there – the camp serves as a headquarters for operations to the north and east, and it’s an important stop for logistics convoys on the route from Kuwait to Baghdad and Balad, but it doesn’t directly send units out into combat. Its two brigades fall under Maj. Gen. Lynch’s 3rd Infantry Division, or MND-Center, which is finishing off Operation Marne Torch, its part of Operation Phantom Thunder. Marne Torch involved small operations by three of MND-C’s four brigades and a larger operation by the fifth and final surge brigade, Col. Terry Ferrell’s 2nd BCT, 3rd ID, which, although headquartered at Kalsu, oversaw an offensive in the Arab Jabour region south of Baghdad, which was infested with al Qaeda due to a chronic, three-year shortage of US troops there. The state of affairs now is that one of the brigade’s battalions, 1-30 Infantry, is solidifying its control in Arab Jabour by setting up a small base there, called Patrol Base Murray, while the other battalion, 1-40 Cav, is conducting raids almost nightly to the south and east of PB Murray in an effort to exploit Marne Torch’s apparent success in pushing al Qaeda out of Arab Jabour. Meanwhile al Qaeda and affiliated Sunni insurgents are harassing 1-30’s and 1-40’s outposts and laying IEDs along US supply routes and the back roads along which 1-40 needs to launch patrols.

For my first glimpse of lower-level operations in Iraq, I got to see a small part of this firsthand by staying with the 2nd BCT, 3rd ID’s public affairs soldiers and accompanying two logistical battalions – the 2-3 STB and 26th BSB – on supply convoys up to PB Murray and the Arab Jabour area. First, though, I had time to kill on the FOB. As I got to know them, the soldiers were less strict about my needing to have a military escort to go places, but on the first day they were on me like a shadow. I’m not complaining, though – all four of the soldiers, as well as Maj. Brownlee, were interesting guys, and extremely smart and keyed in to the tactical and operational levels of what’s going on in Iraq. (It seems like this is a requirement for public affairs soldiers, but since they also write their own “feel good” stories about Iraq for Army websites, they also get to travel around the area, talk to senior commanders, and observe operations from a variety of echelons – a pretty good deal as far as Iraq deployments go.) Maj. Brownlee was a former infantryman who had been with 2nd BCT during the invasion, and by coincidence knew my ROTC sergeant from back then; he was an extremely intense officer who related very well to his soldiers, keeping them entertained with stories, projects, and a habit of howling like a coyote after meals. Sgt. Stadel was a new arrival, on his third week in country, and was anxiously trying to arrange an early mid-tour leave so that he could be home for his son’s birth in late August. Sgt. Stravinsky was, as another soldier put it, “not exactly what you think of when you picture a US Army NCO” – he was an extremely friendly guy, from Pennsylvania, and he seemed slightly unhinged, chattering endlessly about his beagle and sharing his bizarre interpretations of the rules of engagement at the slightest chance. (I promised him that his most outlandish theory would get space on the blog: that if he fired his rifle at the moon, he should not be disciplined for negligent discharge because, one, there would be nothing negligent about it since he would be aiming very deliberately at a lunar target, and two, he could claim to be engaging the target for the purpose of saving lives – acceptable under the rules of engagement – since the moon is responsible for the tides and hence claims many lives to drowning every year.) The third soldier, Sgt. Delgadillo, looked, sounded, and acted exactly like Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in “Jarhead,” just with an Army uniform instead of Marine; a Reservist, he also did duty as a combat photographer, going out on patrol to some pretty intense sectors with paratroopers and other soldiers. Finally, there was Delgadillo-Gyllenhaal’s partner for missions, Spec. Townsend, a deeply patriotic Reserve soldier from Arkansas who, after 9/11, left college like Delgadillo to join the Army. He was unflappable, seemed to enjoy risk, and was very well-spoken. It seemed to me that he should be a military lawyer.

While exploring the base and going with these five soldiers to the DFAC, PX, and other facilities, I got a pretty good picture of the FOB. More than anything else, it was dusty – if you didn’t wear gloves, you only had to be outside a few seconds before your skin was dried out and coated with a fine layer of powdery dust. It was also hot, of course: 120-plus degrees all day, and not much better in the headquarters tent because the air condition was broken. Soldiers from both 2nd BCT, 3rd ID and 4th Airborne BCT, 25th ID, as well as other miscellaneous units, crisscrossed the base at all hours; in the cavernous DFAC, they were also joined by a wide array of contractors. In stark contrast to Victory and the IZ, where there are Australian, British, Georgian, and other Allied soldiers everywhere you look, there were absolutely no foreign uniforms on Kalsu except for a platoon of Iraqi soldiers marching by the DFAC, shouting cadences in Arabic. Black Hawks flew in and out of the base continually, either ferrying soldiers in and out or evacuating casualties on medevac flights. Apaches were there in strength too, a detachment from the 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade, to provide close air support for convoys along MSR Tampa, the main highway from Kuwait to Baghdad; on the first day I was there, the brigade executive officer told us that an Apache team was taking off to destroy a suspicious bongo truck (the trucks al Qaeda often uses as car bombs or platforms for antiaircraft weapons). The brigade was also overseeing 1-40 Cav paratrooper raids against al Qaeda targets just about every other night. But the bulk of the work being done on Kalsu seemed to be in support of convoys, either to Baghdad or to the patrol bases out near Arab Jabour, or in support of civil-military cooperation projects, the bread-and-butter of the post-clearance stage of Phantom Thunder’s counterinsurgency push. These projects, which the public affairs soldiers loved to tout, since they seem so much more tame than the dangerous convoys and violent direct action missions, ranged from water supply projects to billboards with tip line numbers on them, and have met with varying degrees of success in 2nd BCT’s area. (The troops know, and accept as part of the war effort, that the pieces they are writing do not present the whole picture. I think being disingenuous can get tiring for them, though.) It was fascinating to get to see some of the more detailed intel on the raids 1-40 is launching against al Qaeda in the wake of Marne Torch, too, although I can’t write about that.

After spending the day in the scorching sun, coated in what feels like chalk dust, it was amazing to get to the DFAC for dinner – there’s a sink to wash your hands, and the air conditioning is arctic-cold. The soldiers will talk about anything at mess, from which celebrities deserve to have cancer and which should get a free pass for all transgressions (Spec. Townsend’s favorite), to the loyalties and motives of the local Iraqis (they call them “hajjis,” an Arabic honorific that has morphed into this war’s version of “gook” or “kraut”) and their favorite Olympic sports (one soldier was fascinated by curling). They’ll talk about the contractors, too; while one colonel in the IZ said he preferred the Peruvians from Triple Canopy over the Georgian soldiers, whom he saw as sloppy, and the CPIC guards didn’t seem to mind them, the troops I talked to at Kalsu didn’t think much of them.

One thing that I’m surprised by every night is how fast the sun sets – you can go into the DFAC when it’s completely light out, eat, and walk back out into near-blackness. There’s something about the heat early in the night that is much more oppressive than the far hotter daylight hours; I’m not sure why, but while I don’t mind the 120-plus heat of the day, the 100-plus heat of the first half of the night makes it seem like the very air you’re walking through is thick and heavy. Then, of course, before dawn, it drops down below 90, which actually feels really cold if you wake up to it needing to hit the latrine (which always happens – you hydrate so much during the day, when you sweat it all out, that in the cooler night you’ve still got liters of water sitting around in you). Waking up cold feels like an amazing luxury. The sleeping quarters aren’t bad at all, either. On Kalsu, where I opted to stay with the enlisted men, I had a bed in a tent with twenty other soldiers, including a fascinating Army interpreter named Sgt. Franklin who was an Egyptian immigrant and said he enlisted because “I love the life the Army provides – the deployments, the waking up early, the purpose.” I’d noticed the sergeant in the headquarters tent during the day, because he was playing some kind of Arabized Christmas music on his computer, which struck me as odd.

Sometime before dawn on my first night at Kalsu, I woke up to a huge, rolling boom, louder than any gunfire or explosion I’d ever heard. Assuming, correctly as it turned out, that it was outgoing 155mm artillery fire, I closed my eyes, but a minute later, after a second explosion, a couple of the soldiers rolled out of bed, blearily cursing – as one told me, it was louder than any fire they’d ever heard either, and for a moment they thought it was incoming. Over the next few minutes, though, four more crushing booms, evenly spaced, made it clear that the fire was coming from Kalsu, not hitting it, and by the latrine the next morning, a soldier who’d been at the tactical operations center during the night mentioned that the fire had been some kind of nonstandard ammunition, responding to an insurgent attack a few miles out, near PB Whiskey 1, that had crippled one of the massively armored Buffalo minesweeping vehicles that the engineers use to clear roads of IEDs. PB Whiskey 1, apparently, was in an extremely dangerous area, worse now than PB Murray, since al Qaeda elements were dispersing there from Arab Jabour in the wake of Marne Torch. Both Sgt. Delgadillo and Spec. Townsend, who had done overnight missions to Whiskey 1 to photograph 1-40 Cav paratroopers on patrol, had unsettling things to say about the place. “It’s 120 degrees all the time, no air conditioning,” he said of the base. “After spending time there, I can really say I’ve been to war, real war. I’ll be able to look my granddad in the eye when I get home and tell him I’ve seen war, and he won’t be able to say that what he saw in World War II was worse.” Townsend had also recently been featured on CNN because, while filming from a Humvee on a route up there between Whiskey 1 and Falcon, his vehicle had been hit by an IED and he had actually captured the experience on tape. Luckily no one was hurt. (It’s an eerie clip to watch, especially because, one, I later drove over that exact same spot on a convoy, recognizable by the huge arch at the edge of Baghdad, and two, as Townsend pointed out, if you enhance the video and watch carefully, you can actually see the triggerman by the side of the road who detonated the bomb.)

Rolling to Falcon, Red, and Murray

I did not go to Whiskey 1 – I didn’t want to and I they wouldn’t have let me anyway. On July 30, though, Monday, I did go on my first convoy, from FOB Kalsu to PB Murray and PB Red near Arab Jabour to FOB Falcon and back to FOB Kalsu. During the early morning hours before we rolled out, there was more outgoing artillery fire, as well as sustained machine gun fire from the direction of the perimeter – the guards in the towers firing at something, insurgent or shadow, outside the wire. After daylight, though, as the convoy rolled out of the gate in the still-cool morning air, we saw evidence that there really had been some kind of enemy activity outside the wire a few hours before. As our four Humvees prepared to depart, the buzzing chatter of the radio told us to wait: an ambulance was coming through the gate, bringing in a wounded Iraqi policemen for Black Hawk medevac. I have no idea what the circumstances of the policeman’s injury were, but it was pretty clear that it was due to enemy action and not an accident. As the ambulance pulled up inside the gate, just below the guard tower, US soldiers, some just in their gray fatigues and others in full battle rattle, slung their carbines and sprinted toward the vehicle, securing it and pulling open the back doors. The scene was a good 70 yards away, so there was no sound, just the mute image of the soldiers moving through their emergency procedures with machine-like efficiency. Inside our vehicle, there was no reaction to the scene – to the soldiers in the Humvee, it was routine – so I didn’t feel any anxiety or sense that anything was not as it should be. It took me a moment – a long moment – even to register what I was seeing as the bulky forms of the soldiers lifted a litter from inside the ambulance, the end of it soaked with blood. On the litter was the limp form of the Iraqi policeman. It was hard to tell whether he was missing one leg or two, because it was from a distance and so messy, but it looked like both. Blood dripped onto the sand. When I watch “Saving Private Ryan” or “Black Hawk Down,” I always cringe a bit when I see gore like that, but watching it in reality for the first time, I didn’t react, not as the soldiers shoved the litter into a waiting Humvee and drove off, and not as a second, intact Iraqi policeman held his hands out in front of him, covered in the deep red of his friend’s blood, shining even at that distance, and a soldier sitting in the door of the ambulance poured water over them to wash it off into the sand. Maybe it’s because there was no sound. I didn’t react, but that visual of the soldier washing the blood of the policeman’s hands is still very sharp in my mind.

In retrospect that sounds like an unsettling start to my first ride outside the wire, but at the time it wasn’t; it was just part of a million new images and flashes of scenery I was taking in from the Humvee’s thick, bulletproof window. We had begun staging about an hour before, with a briefing for all the enlisted soldiers at which the convoy commander, a staff sergeant, explained to the troops who Sgt. Stadel and I were and then what the mission was. It was a four-Humvee convoy, with 16 soldiers total; the task was to transport a lieutenant colonel, the commander of the 2-3 Special Troops Battalion (the unit that provides MP, intelligence, medical, and other support to the 2nd BCT) up to two patrol bases in Arab Jabour so he could assess the progress that his soldiers were making in building up infrastructure in the midst of 1-30 Infantry’s continuing patrols. The first stop would be PB Murray, 1-30’s newly constructed outpost in the heart of Arab Jabour, on the banks of the Tigris; from there we would go to PB Red, an older outpost that 1-40 had built but which 1-30 now controlled and had used as a starting point for Marne Torch. The third stop would be FOB Falcon, the main base on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, which supports both the MND-B brigade in the Rashid district of the city itself and the two 2nd BCT battalions operating in and around Arab Jabour; from there we would go back along MSR Tampa to FOB Kalsu. If we kept to our schedule, we would get to Falcon before the DFAC closed, in time for lunch.

I was in the lead Humvee, in the seat behind the driver, supposedly the safest part of the vehicle. To my right was a pile of 7.62mm ammunition boxes; my only job (besides scanning out my window for “anything out of place,” which of course meant nothing to me) was to feed ammunition up to the gunner in the event of an ambush. The gunner, a Sgt. Z., stood in the center of the vehicle, his torso and head protruding out the top hatch but protected by the steel turret and bulletproof glass that all the new M1151 armored Humvees have, manning an M240 medium machine gun; his M4 carbine rested next to him in the turret. In the right-hand back seat, across from me, was Spec. Elrifai, a mechanic of Lebanese descent who also, somewhat unwillingly, served as the battalion commander’s “terp,” or interpreter (also called a “tranny,” the ever-so-witty abbreviation for translator). Elrifai did not talk much; when he did, he always called the addressee “brah,” so I’d hear things over the radio like, "Three hajjis walking at the 2 o’clock, brah," or "Gap’s widening with vehicle 2, brah, let’s close it up." The other soldiers thought it was funny, or else annoying. In front of me was a talkative, redheaded specialist who spent most of the ride chattering over the intercom about everything from the state of the war to how, apparently, buying his wife a vibrator had saved his marriage. He said his wife was 20; he couldn’t have been much older. He also used the F-bomb more than I ever imagined was possible. Finally, the vehicle commander, Sgt. Jadick, rode shotgun; an almost unnervingly cheery soldier who put me at ease from the first moment, he was on his third tour, had three children, and looked about 50 although he was only 35. All four were part of the colonel’s PSD, or personal security detachment, an element slightly larger than a squad that consists of the best soldiers of a unit; it drew on soldiers of all branches, from military policemen like Jadick to mechanics like Elrifai to 11-Bravos, or straight-up leg infantrymen, like the tiny soldier named Spec. Yang who drove the Humvee directly behind us – an interesting cross-section of the battalion. (Yang was an interesting guy – although he practically looked younger than me and wasn’t more than 5 feet 3 inches, he was on his second tour, and had joined as soon as he was old enough after 9/11. “This is exactly what I wanted to do, being an infantryman,” he told me, “so I’m not complaining.”)

With Sgt. Jadick scanning for IEDs, the gunner rotating in his turret, and a stream of fuzzy chatter issuing from the radio (the headsets worked for both the intervehicle radio and the intercom), we rolled out of Kalsu, down a bumpy dirt road, and up an exit ramp onto the raised ridge of MSR Tampa. As we turned onto the highway, a convoy of Humvees, minesweepers, heavily armored Army cargo trucks, and huge contractor rigs rumbled past, with a pair of Apaches buzzing overhead like giant wasps. For the next two hours, we moved slowly north along MSR Tampa and then along a smaller road that branched off to the east south of Baghdad, toward the Tigris and Arab Jabour. Inside, the soldiers stared unflinchingly out the windows, eyes peeled for anything remotely IED-like; dust swirled inside, pouring in from the gunner’s hatch. On the intercom, the driver led a spirited discussion about the details of female anatomy, punctuated occasionally by warnings like, "Two dudes running away from the road at 9 o’clock" or "Check out the trash pile at 2 o’clock, brah." After 20 minutes or so of driving, I was plastered to my seat by own sweat, which was pouring faster than it had even on the Hercules, in spite of the air conditioning; in my armor and helmet, I had to empty my three-liter CamelBak on the drive up just to replace what I sweated out. Outside, on the other side of the 6-inch-thick armored doors, cars, bongo trucks, donkeys, Iraqi soldiers and police, clusters of men standing ominously idle by the roadside, and women in burqas passed by the window; the terrain was, as always, cracked and dusty, with concrete barriers at the many checkpoint along the road. We slowed for every palm grove, since insurgents often hide there to launch hit-and-run RPG attacks or to detonate IEDs, so that the gunner could swing around and train his 240 on the danger area. Maybe half an hour north of Kalsu, we passed a sobering sight: the ruins of an overpass called Checkpoint 20 that had been completely collapsed by an al Qaeda attack earlier in the summer, trapping several soldiers under the rubble. The rubble itself had been cleared away, but there was no effort underway to bridge the overpass – it just stood there, shattered.

As we turned east toward Arab Jabour and away from Baghdad, we passed through the edge of the battlespace of the 4th BCT, 1st ID, which is clearing the East Rashid district of al Qaeda pockets. To the north, the smokestacks of the Dora refinery, located next to the worst neighborhood in East Rashid (and maybe in all Baghdad), were visible, the only tall landmark you can see from anywhere in the city, and to our left, in the urban sprawl just off the raised highway, dark green Strykers of the 2-23 or 1-38 Infantry stood imposingly at intersections, sometimes with dismounted infantry advancing in the streets in squad formation, carbines raised. Like the scene of the policeman with the blood on his hands, the picture of those soldiers cautiously advancing a few hundred yards away, backed by Strykers, is particularly sharp for me, but silent. As we moved out of 4th BCT’s area, the Stryker checkpoints gave way to the desert-tan Bradleys of 1-30, and the densely packed houses off the highway to thick vegetation and palm groves. The highway itself became a badly battered road, mostly hard-packed dirt. The houses stood back from the road, and the only residents visible were older men, who watched us pass blankly, and children, who waved happily as we passed, along with the occasional woman in a burqa; I saw no military-aged men. This was Arab Jabour, the scene, a month ago, of 1-30’s offensive against the second-most heavily entrenched al Qaeda stronghold in Iraq.

Finally, we passed another Bradley, rolled through a gate in a towering wall, and were inside the compound of PB Murray. While the colonel’s Humvee and another one branched off to visit the center of the base, which was really nothing more than a ruinous estate with a swimming pool that US troops had taken over, the two lead Humvees parked near a set of enormous supply containers, which gave us cover from one direction. Still, we could see the tree line clearly, and since there were still occasional sniper attacks on the base, the soldiers instructed me to stay between the Humvees if I got out of the vehicle at all, and not to stay in one place for more than 10 seconds or so, to make it harder for snipers to fix on you (that’s why on TV, soldiers on the battlefield are almost never standing still). Since I, like most of the soldiers, had to pee really, really, really badly, I did get out and go over to the containers, but I followed the instructions and kept moving every few seconds. Back in the parked Humvee, Sgt. Jadick passed out Skittle and Spec. Elrifai got out a New York Times crossword puzzle book. Eventually the other two Humvees returned, the convoy got back into formation (with our vehicle taking a quick break from the lead), and we left PB Murray and rolled out through another part of Arab Jabour toward PB Red. Along the way we the radio buzzed that an IED had been found on Route Redwings, the road we had taken to get to Murray – either it had been emplaced after we passed by or it was on the part of the road to the north of Murray, where we hadn’t gone, or we had just been lucky. As we approached Red, a convoy of Strykers drove by on an intersecting road, headed back toward Rashid and Dora. Inside the base we saw the heaviest of 1-30’s firepower: a platoon of parked Abrams tanks, their monstrous hulls and turrets fitted with minesweeping gear to push IEDs out of the way. We only stayed at Red a few minutes; then we headed out for Falcon.

We reached Falcon in time for lunch, as planned, and stayed just long enough to grab a meal at the DFAC, which was full of soldiers with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ID patches, and to visit the PX. (The PX had a small bookshelf that stocked such diverse publications as Princetonian T. R. Fehrenbach’s classic This Kind of War and various issues of the "Sports Illustrated" swimsuit edition. One soldier also bought a flat-screen TV and shoved it in the back of the Humvee by the ammunition boxes, to my amazement.) Passing by lines of Humvees, M113 armored personnel carriers, and Strykers in the motor pool, we rolled back out of the gate and south toward MSR Tampa to return to Kalsu, with our vehicle again in the lead. Most of the ride was routine, passing by one Iraqi Army checkpoint after another the route south, while Apaches flitted about somewhere in the vicinity of PB Copper, but we did have two scares. First, about five minutes out of Falcon, when we were still in Rashid and could see Dora refinery clearly, a huge supply convoy passed us and as a result we became separated from the other three Humvees for a few minutes; the problem was that being in a lone vehicle is bad news bears, but stopping for the others to catch up would have been even worse. Eventually, after we slowed down and the others gradually sped up, the convoy was reunited. The second and more serious scare occurred on MSR Tampa itself, and vividly demonstrated to me why the lead vehicle is known as the “IED finder.” We were driving along, the soldiers have a relaxed conversation over the intercom, when the gunner interjected, "Stop the vehicle. Stop it now." The Humvee jerked to a halt as the gunner explained: "Possible IED 15 meters up at 10 o’clock. White tarp. It’s close." Sure enough, there was some item on the median up there, about a foot square and wrapped in a tarp. While the driver hissed obscenities and Elrifai waited nervously, in the wrong part of the vehicle to be able to see it, Jadick and I got out binoculars and started looking. We sat there for a good five or six minutes, completely halted, debating whether to pull back and call in the engineers or to continue forward – through the binoculars, you could definitely see something suspiciously wire-like on the top of the tarp, but there were no wires leading away from the item, a good sign. Eventually, Jadick barked, we’re rolling forward, it’s just trash. Thankfully, he knew what he was talking about – I guess after two full tours here and part of a third one, he had to. Half an hour later we were back inside the wire at Kalsu. The whole trip had taken about six hours.

Convoy number two

The next day, I hitched a ride on another, larger convoy, this time to Falcon and then BIAP, where I needed to go anyway to get back to Baghdad. This time I was with the 26th Brigade Support Battalion, another support unit for 2nd BCT but one with a completely different personality. Where 2-3 STB and its soldiers had been harsh and unconcerned with anything besides accomplishing their mission and, if possible, getting some kills, 26th BSB was friendly, smart, and seemed to have a good idea of how its operations fit into and supported the war effort as a whole. The stark difference was the most convincing example I’ve seen of what’s called “command climate,” the influence of the leaders’ personalities and attitudes on the unit. The officers in charge of the convoy were three ROTC graduates: a huge, friendly, black major who talked nonstop and joked with every soldier he walked past; a laid-back female captain from Hawaii who had a supreme confidence in her mission and job as battalion S-3; and an eager-to-please second lieutenant from Virginia Tech who seemed to know as little about what was going as I did, but who did not hesitate to go to the sergeants for advice.

Most important, the senior enlisted soldier of the battalion, Sgt. Maj. Johnson, was, it seemed, the ideal NCO. “Everything you’ve heard about sergeant majors is probably true,” he told me, but he was completely different from the dismissive sergeant major of 2-3 STB, who had hurled criticism at his soldiers without explanation or suggestions; Johnson was imperious, but with purpose. He was also, it appeared, extremely smart as well as battle-hardened; he had supported special operations forces operations in Honduras and El Salvador at the beginning of his career, when assigned to the 82nd Airborne, and since the war started he had served as a first sergeant with the 101st Airborne in Mosul and then done a second tour in Baghdad. He was now on his third tour, and his first ever with a heavy unit after decades in the light infantry. He also explained to me, on the drive up to Falcon, that he wore his 3rd ID combat patch only because he felt it was his responsibility as sergeant major – if not for that, he said, he’d be wearing his 101st combat patch, since he looked back on his time with the Screaming Eagles in Mosul under then-Maj. Gen. Petraeus as the highpoint of his 24 years in the Army. “I’m a fan,” he said of Petraeus. “He’s as smart as a whip.” He also gave me an eloquent explanation of what he saw as the future of the war, ending with this assessment: “Our forces can facilitate the Iraqis and provide them with security for a long time, a longer time than many people think, but not indefinitely. At some point, regardless of the danger and the difficulties, they’re going to have to stand up without us and do what’s right.”

The convoy was mostly routine; the only hang-up occurred when our air cover, two Kiowa scout-attack helicopters that had been soaring around us, showing off their flying skills as they searched for IEDs, peeled off from us and flew off to the north to provide support to an Apache that had crash-landed somewhere in Baghdad. The sights and procedures of the convoy, as well as the heat, were familiar from yesterday, though, and as far as Falcon we were taking almost exactly the same route; there was not a lot new to see. Strykers patrolled the area around Falcon, and the stretch from Falcon to BIAP was completely uneventful. By 1030 we had arrived, and Sgt. Maj. Johnson’s vehicle peeled off to dump me by the passenger terminal, where I was being met by someone from Victory, before rejoining the convoy for their return trip to Kalsu. I was back in Baghdad and at the terminal I had a fascinating conversation with a Marine aviation captain who had flown Cobras during the invasion and over Anbar and now tracked enemy antiaircraft activity for MNC-I, but most of the time I was thinking back over the two convoys. I’d been outside the wire into the real Iraq, first on an eye-opening run to patrol bases in Arab Jabour, and then on a supply convoy that, even though it was only my second time out, had seemed ordinary and nonthreatening. Interesting, I thought, how fast you can adjust – on Monday I’d been antsy and carefully observed everything in my field of vision, but on Tuesday I’d just armored up, buckled in, and rolled with the rest.

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