From Billy Bob:
To Billy Bob:Hi Bill,
Good to hear from you! Things are going pretty well here, and I can actually tell you quite a bit more now that we're all here and rolling. I'm working on an update to send out, but here's the quick version...
We're at a base with many names . . . North of Baghdad, and near Falluja. Our mission is varied, but primarily focuses on logistics - escorting "log" convoys around the country. My particular piece of the pie, in addition to the basic promotion of our troops back home through the website, newsletters, and videos, is to work with our Civil Military Operations Team. The CMO team works with the local population around the base to maintain relations and security. A lot of our work is with local Sheiks, helping them integrate into the new Iraqi government (primarily through contracting for redevelopment projects...they caught right on to capitalism, not so quickly to the regulations that go with it). We also do humanitarian aid (clothing, school supplies, etc.) drops at local villages and provide medical assistance programs on occasion. I primarily work on the base, but I expect to be "outside the wire" once or twice a week.
The base provides a pretty high standard of living, especially considering where we're at. We live in trailers, which are broken into three two-man rooms. We have real beds, a locker, and a little night stand. It's pretty Spartan, but each room has its own AC unit and sleeping on a real mattress is heaven after months on cots. We walk everywhere, it's a little under a mile from our living area to work, with the chow hall somewhere in between. Biking is also an option, I managed to pick up two bikes for $10 and $5 each off of outgoing soldiers, but right now I'm walking while it's still cool enough to be outside for a half hour at a stretch. The chow hall is fantastic, with two salad bars, a desert bar, sandwich bar, four main-lines, two short-order lines, and plenty to drink from juice to Gatorade to NA beer.
The job's keeping me busy, partly by choice, which is making time fly. The routine is comforting. I also have a good friend here, Paul, from my skiing days. He's a Major with the CMO team, so we work together quite a bit. (He's the one on the cover of the attached newsletter.) The newsletter's been my latest project...the version I inherited from my predecessor was pretty bland and I'd never changed the format until this issue. I dreaded working on it each month, as did the contributors, so I
decided to spice it up. My hope was that making it a great product would inspire everyone (including me) to put more time into it. So far, so good. We'll see if it lasts.
OK, I have to work on my general update so I can share my first month in Iraq with everyone. So good to hear from you. Hope the Spring's treating you well, and thanks again for the updates on Parentheticals....that reminds me...one more story... The wife of our Battalion Commander heads the Family Readiness Groups back in MN. She's been sharing my DVD with every General in the State, and I've actually had some pretty positive feedback. She was recently invited to meet with the VP (Dick) to discuss military family issues, so she'll be in his office on Monday. I was on a conference call with her last night and she said that she's going to give him the DVD. Our Chaplain, who is perhaps the most conservative man I know, said, "You
know Bill, pretty soon you'll be making videos for the Republican National Committee!" Needless to say, there are a few things about me he does not yet know. :)
OK, I'm really going this time. I'll be sure to include you in the update distro. Take care!-Bill
Bill --From Billy Bob:
Your newsletter is really cool. [For anyone who is interested you can see the newsletter here]. How often do you publish this? It is obviously a lot of work, but it sure seems worth it. I read both of your pieces, but the one that intrigues me most obviously is the "outside the wire: piece. It's hard for any of us to relate to that.
The question I keep wanting an answer to is whether there is enough hope to warrant staying the course. That's obviously not an issue you can address in the newsletter, and it may not even be something you can address in e-mail. But, apart from keeping track of what you are doing, that is the one issue I'd like to know more about. The stakes are so damn high. What do the "boots on the ground" think about all of this?
What's this DVD thing? I haven't heard about that. Where can I get it? And a (virtual) audience with Darth Cheney, eh? Your life is filled with irony, isn't it? Still getting your name in front of Cheney is not a bad thing either now or in the future. Halliburton and KBR hire a lot of Chem. Es.
Fallujah. Ugh. That place (and anywhere close to it) has a baaaad rep over here. Stay safe man.
Parentheticals has suffered from its author's boredom recently. Glad to know it's serving some prupose other than my own navel gazing. Maybe that will inspire me to get back to it again.
Write whenever you can.
Bill
The DVD... I put together a training video for our battalion, and it's been pretty well received. I don't have any spare copies right now, but when I do the next run I'll make sure to get a copy for you. Wayne and Pam have one, and I think there are a few other copies floating around up North der, eh.
The newsletter... I publish it every three weeks on a Monday. Next one's due out the 27th. I'm glad you like it. It is a lot of work, but it's not bad work by any means.
And the not so easy question...staying the course. It's such a tough call from where I sit. Overall, I've seen the troops fall into three categories:1. Don't care about politics at all - let's just focus on the mission.
2. Flag-waving, elephant-worshiping, fox-praising, CNN and NPR-bashing, blind faith to the great W conservatives - let's just focus on the mission and how righteous we are.
3. Closet liberals...and conservatives, who read books, watch several different channels, think for themselves, and hate the dominance of group #2 in the military.
Luckily, I've found a few friends in group #3. The hard part is how quiet we need to be. I truly feel that my obligation to the soldiers around me is far more important, at least while we're here, than any feelings I have about politics, the war, and all other things far above my pay grade. That wouldn't cut it for the 2's, however. Any questions about the motives of this administration is equivalent to treason. (By the way, before I forget...reading Paul Krugman's "The Great Unraveling" Interesting stuff. Have you read it?)
I have to digress for a moment about how much some of the 2's drive me nuts. During our departure ceremony weekend, a reporter from MPR was down, Mark Zdechlik (sp?). Our chaplain asked me about who we had for visiting press, and I mentioned a few names, then Mark. Chaplain, "Wow, I didn't know they covered the military!" "He's actually done some great stuff of our soldiers, brigade was psyched to have him back, and he seems excited to be here." "The reporters from MPR would be excited to see their own shadow." I dropped it. It disappointed me that he held his stereotypes about public radio above the fact that this guy had already done several incredibly positive on our soldiers. So it goes...
Ok, I'm being random and avoiding the question (it's a slow morning and this is therapeutic...thanks for listening). Our mission is very focused on sustaining the coalition forces here, so we don't see much of the "progress on the ground." What I have seen is a bit more of the culture and how localized their circles of trust are. That will be part of the problem...the much, much bigger problem is poverty. It's unbelievable.There seems to be a strong enough sense of community among the tribes in our rural area to keep people (read: young men) on track, but I can only imagine what it's like in urban areas. (I, thankfully, have not seen or plan to see any of urban Iraq.)
Trying to look at the big picture, I just don't see this going well on any time-scale we, as a nation, will tolerate. (Random thought...partially influenced by Krugman's book...why is it that they're calling for patience and endurance in this war, yet fiscal policy has a four year horizon?) The other side of the time-scale coin is how much damage will be done by our being here. It's the usually laundry list of concerns we both know too well...shrinking recruitment, not being able to fight a more important fight should it arise (when it arises?), cost, etc. So many people (the 2s) yell about the schools being built, elections had, and all the other wonderful things that are happening. But I want to see a pro-con list, chart, whatever, comparing schools built to cost - both is $ and in lives. I'm guessing they're pretty spendy schools, which could be built for less if we weren't here hiring Halliburton to do it. As far as democracy goes, I have had a few insights here. The locals understand that there's a new system, yet even officials will openly ask us to help them short-circuit the process. It seems no more than a new system to undermine. And elections...in the rural area I've seen, it would be impossible to devise an electoral system even remotely as effective as their patriarchal system of Sheiks.
I didn't vote for my Dad, but he still ran things, and Grandpa was in charge at his cabin...is it such a bad thing? On the bigger scale, none of these people know or care. If they do, it's only because they know who they have influence with. And with a literacy rate only slightly above the single digits, how many people are voting for themselves? (I'm talking about Iraq, not Texas.)
OK, I've rambled too long. Thanks for sticking with me. Overall I feel about the same as before I got here. I just feel a little more informed of the situation and a lot more justified in my bitching. I pity the first Fox-praising-couch-jockey who crosses me on this after I get home.
:)
Other than my usual disgust with the powers that be, I'm doing well. A few very close friends to keep me sane and enough cordial friends (when we avoid politics) to enjoy the days. Hope all is well!
Enjoy the day,
-Bill
PS: One more thought, inspired by a reading of the day's news...
In my humble opinion, saying the Iraqi Forces are ready to take over from the US is like saying your local high school football team is ready to take over for the Vikings. Will they show up for the first game? Sure. Will the last the season, even the first game? Not a chance. And every pro team in the league will want to play against the kids...even in their home stadium.
To Billy Bob:
That (the Vikings analogy) is bleak! The only saving grace, perhaps, is that the league they are playing in is not the NFL. It's not even a good high school league. If the military history of the middle east over the past 75 years proves anything it is that militarily the Muslims are a joke. I suspect that it has a lot to do with the fact that the Muslim world is still essentially feudal. The loyalties are -- as you note -- all to the tribe, and the internecine rivalries between these tribes make anything like a modern military command and control system impossible. It was not better arms that let the Israelis kick the shit out of the Arab armies again and again. It was better organization.
The problem, though, is that Muslims do make good insurgents. They can't do anything in a conventional military sense, but their passion makes them ultimately unconquerable and probably ungovernable as well.
More broadly, I tend to think that Iraq is not long for this world. Either de facto or de jure it's going to end up looking a lot like the former Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union. And maybe that is not all that bad. It never was a nation to begin with. But the process of breaking up is going to be long and painful -- made all the more so I suspect but our efforts to prevent that from happening.
Krugman. No, I haven't read The Great Unraveling or any of his other books either. I get just about all I can take of Krugman on the NYT Op-Ed page. I have actually been trying to figure out why he rubs me the wrong way, because, in principle at least, I tend to agree with him on a lot of things. But he's just so damn ANGRY. He seems like the mirror image of Bill O'Reilly. What's missing in both is any sense of nuance, any sense that things are complicated and that there are no easy answers to anything that is worth thinking or writing about. I just finished "Acts of Faith" by Philip Caputo. It is a novel, ostensibly about aid workers in southern Sudan, people driven by a desire -- a need in fact -- to help others. But what it is really about is the traps created by "true belief," about how efforts to do good so often end up producing great evil. To my mind, the scourge of our time (perhaps all times) is deep conviction. It's a theme I suspect will run through a lot of what you see over the next year or so.
So elections in Iraq have yet to sweep away the indigenous political culture, huh? Shocked, I say. Just shocked. We need to get over the idea that we can remake Iraq or the middle east in our image. Not only is it hopeless, the process of trying to do it actually makes things worse. "Acts of Faith" again.
In hindsight, I think what we should have done, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, is take down the government, capture or kill the leaders and then leave. The message we send is that "We can't build your nation, but we sure as hell can destroy it. And, we are going to do that every time you attack us or someone important to us. Once we get done with that task we will leave and you can build your own damn country. Fight amongst yourselves to your hearts' content. Just leave us and our friends out of it. And, if you don't, we'll be back and give you another clean slate on which to try to write your own destiny. It may take a few times, but sooner or later you'll get it right."
Not very idealistic, but we are proving to ourselves that it is about all we can actually do. Reality bites.
Bill
To be continued . . .
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