War, the military, COIN and stuff

Part I: The Farmhouse

“Looks like most of this stuff has been placed here pretty recently,” Captain Jeffrey Higgins observed as we walked a reed line along a canal with Sergeant Jamie Giles, inspecting a weapons cache 1st platoon found there earlier that morning. The two noted that the jugs of homemade explosives, 155mm and 120mm projectiles, blasting caps, and command wire (commonly used for IEDs) looked relatively clean, meaning they hadn’t been sitting outside for very long. They also found a Soviet DSHK (“Dishka”) rifle, a mounted heavy machine gun that can burn through several hundred rounds a minute, which is a pretty heavy-duty piece of weaponry to have lying around.

The cache was spread over a couple hundred meters, and to walk the dirt road next to the canal was to find an insurgent arms bazaar. The canal ran smack up against a tan brick farmhouse, unremarkable in this part of the country, but close enough to the canal to deduce that even if the people who lived there didn’t place the stuff there, they certainly knew who did.

The house wasn’t set too far back from the main road, but the tall reeds mostly hid it from view of passing traffic. It was a small, two-story structure with a wire-mesh chicken coop and a donkey tied to a pole out back, and an empty black plastic water tank next to it. The place was occupied by a young man, two women and a little girl, about five years old. When the platoon first rolled up on the house earlier that morning, Lt. Max Pappas asked the young man if he had seen anything suspicious in the area. He said he hadn’t, but he “looked nervous. Even if the guy hadn’t placed the stuff in the canal himself, he told me, “there’s so much of it, and it’s so close to the house, he had to have at least known about it.”

Sgt. Giles told Captain Higgins that “the guy started off pretty cool, but right now he’s about to have a heart attack.” I asked Sgt. Giles why the guy would be so stupid as to hide weapons so close to his own house. The locals, he said, “hide things in the reeds in the canals because they consider it public property, and they think we can’t tie it to them when we find it.”

Like many houses in the region, the farmhouse had a large concrete front porch, and the soldiers not checking the reed line had brought the women out on the porch while they checked the house. Three women sat against a wall, staring hard at the ground. The little girl looked confused and frightened, but the women remained motionless.

After 1st platoon radioed back to the base that they were pulling a significant amount of munitions out of the canal, and I went with Cpt. Higgins to investigate. The drive to the site bore testament to the recent violence in the area—the roads were scarred with a number of old, deep-buried IED craters. And the danger hadn’t passed. The convoy passed over one known live IED that wasn’t charged to go off. The team saw the wires, but it was a command-detonated IED and there was no one there to blow it. It had been marked, and would be taken care of later.

Leaving the reed line, I joined the soldiers searching the house. It was empty of furniture, save for a bed in one room, and a few mats and a small stove with some cooking utensils in the other two rooms. On the narrow back porch the young man, skinny, wispy-bearded and probably in his mid-twenties, had been flexi-cuffed and was standing in front of a pile of ammunition and some blasting caps that had been placed before him. Dressed in dirty pants and a jacket, wearing only sandals in the winter cold, he seemed somehow detached from what was going on around him.

The suspect was told to kneel in front of the cache for a picture to submit for evidence. “Hey, tell him to look up!” one of the soldiers told the interpreter. The terp translated, and the suspect furtively glanced up, then back down. “Up, up! Hey, look at me!” The order was translated again, but the suspect couldn’t—or wouldn’t—keep his head up. Finally, the terp forcibly lifted his chin up. The pictures were taken, and the suspect was hauled to his feet.

Out front, a shouting match had erupted between one of the women and a local man from the Sons of Iraq movement who we had brought along because he claimed to have additional information on more weapons in the area.

The two were shouting and gesticulating wildly, and the man had started to get uncomfortably close to her—close enough to hit her, I thought—and I began to wonder if someone was going to put an end to it. The little girl started crying. Finally, Lt. Pappas quickly walked up and shoved the man back, “Jesus Christ, knock it off! Go! Go!” he yelled, pointing to the Strykers parked nearby. The guy backed off, but the woman kept at it, and according to the terp was accusing the soldiers of scaring the little girl. One of the soldiers turned to her and yelled “Just shut up already! You’re the one scaring her with your yelling! Fuck!” Some messages don’t need a translator to be understood and she finally stopped, and sat back down.

Come mid-afternoon, the cache had been assembled in a pit and photographed, and the Explosives Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team had been summoned to blow it up.

By this time I had fanned out to the fields behind the house with 1st Lieutenant Mark Davis to check a few other smaller irrigation ditches and reed lines, where he found a tripod that he thought might be for a the DSKA rifle. We were walking back up the dirt path toward the farmhouse when the rest of the platoon up the porch started yelling “get down!” A second later, a deep “BOOM” rolled across the farmland behind us. We turned, and saw a plume of black smoke beginning to snake it’s way skyward. Lt. Davis, struggling under the weight of the heavy, rusted tripod, ran with it for a few steps before throwing it down. We got to the porch and knelt down near the other guys, and one of the men turned to me and said. “Dude, that was fucking big. We saw the fireball before the sound hit us.” Someone else chimed in, “That looks like it was back near the base.”

As we watched the line of black smoke rise, word came from the base that a bomb went off only about two hundred meters outside the gate at the house of the leader of the local Sons of Iraq group. A few minutes later we learned that the target of the attack, Abu Zakaria, had survived the suicide car bomb attack, but that it looked like a “mass casualty event.”

Captain Higgins ordered a quick response team to load up and head back to the base, not knowing if this was the start of a multiple bomb attack. A Sergeant told some his men to load up, but a few of them had ammunition in their pockets that they had picked up in the reed line. They started to dump the ammo before getting in the Stryker but one of the guys started yelling at a buddy for throwing ammo around. An NCO stepped in and yelled “Guys, calm down.” His voice grew louder, “calm the fuck down! Calm down!” He seemed to be saying this to himself as much as to his soldiers, since they actually weren’t making too much of a scene. They finally emptied their pockets of rusted rounds, loaded up a Stryker and headed out.

I would follow Cpt. Higgins to the scene of the suicide bomb attack as soon as the weapons cache was blown up and the suspect taken away for processing. The only thing we knew at this point was that a long day was about to get longer.

"Forgiveness for the greater good"

After a few days at combat outpost Courage embedded with C company, I was able to hitch a ride a little bit further north and west to another company-sized combat outpost, named Warrior (it has since been renamed combat outpost Ibrahim Bin Ali—IBA for short—which is the name of a town a few kilometers south of the base.) Manned by the men of company B of the of the 1st Battalion, 21st Infantry, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, in many respects Courage and IBA are similar in setup and in the spartan lives the soldiers live. They’re each ringed by high blast walls that enclose a large farmhouse converted into a headquarters; the soldiers live in large communal tents, and each outpost has a mobile mess unit for hot meals, a couple of shower and toilet trailers, and a handful of computers for Internet use and phones to call home. In total, it’s maybe two city blocks large, if that. Also like Courage, IBA is situated out in the flat farmlands of rural Iraq, where farms are cut into squares by irrigation canals overgrown with high reeds, which make excellent hiding places for insurgents to hide weapons and explosives.

Unlike Courage’s area of operations however, which boasted a sizeable Shia minority, IBA’s area of operations is almost completely Sunni, owing to its proximity to the almost wholly Sunni Anbar province. 

Company B, like C company, is part of the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, meaning they drive Stryker vehicles, sixteen-ton infantry carriers that are fast (reaching speeds of up to 60 mph), can travel 330 miles in one sprint, and boast the latest communications technology. One particularly useful technology is the FBCB2 (Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below) system, which allows each vehicle commander—and the commander back at the base—to monitor all friendly forces in the area on a screen that shows exactly where the forces are arrayed. Other items of interest, such as suspected IED locations, are represented by red symbols on the digital map. Much else, communications-wise, is classified. Stryker vehicles also come equipped with a .50 caliber machine gun operated by a gunner seated inside the vehicle, who views the outside world via flat screen monitor, and is armed with a joystick that allows him to manipulate both his weapon and his screen view. Most importantly, the vehicle seats eleven soldiers, including nine infantrymen who can jump out of the back door in a matter of seconds. In other words, a couple of Strykers can put a lot of boots on the ground, very quickly.

B company is commanded by Captain Jeffrey Higgins, a tall, thin, rather thoughtful-looking 29 year-old on his second tour of Iraq, having previously served as a platoon leader in Mosul in 2003-2004. Like many officers I met in Iraq, Higgins grew up an Army brat, and told me that among the many differences between his two tours is that his wife had just days before given birth to twins.

Things had been relatively quiet for Higgins’ men since they began their tour around Christmas, 2007. There had been a few potshots, a few caches rolled up, and an incident in which a patrol at a checkpoint was forced to open fire on a car that refused to stop, wounding the driver who apparently told the soldiers that he had been trying to commit suicide, (or, as the joke later went, “suicide by coalition forces”). It had been tough, methodical work, but not the run-and-gun some soldiers thought they might find. “Things are a lot different than I expected,” Higgins told me one evening in a cramped office that doubled as his bedroom—his cot and desk were jammed into a room that looked like it used to be a large closet—saying that he thought he would find a much more “kinetic” environment prior to deployment.

al Qaeda used to practically run the area, but Higgins said that with the recent downturn in violence and the rise of the Sons of Iraq movement, the group has been mostly pushed out to the north and to the west. But Higgins knows that at least some of the Sons of Iraq he is placing his trust in are the very same men who were attacking U.S. forces just a few months ago. It’s something he has learned to accept. Many of the Iraqis, he says, “were really just acting out of a sense of survival, and there’s got to be some level of forgiveness for the greater good.”

In this area, as in many others in which al Qaeda has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the local Iraqis, one can blame al Qaeda just as much as one can praise any great strategic shift in American policy. In conversation with Iraqis, I heard time and again stories of torture, public beheadings, children of uncooperative Iraqis being tortured or killed, men having their fingers cut off or hands broken for smoking, and al Qaeda forcing local women to marry their fighters, among other atrocities and insults to local honor. It brings to mind Mao’s warning that “because guerrilla warfare basically derives from the masses and is supported by them, it can neither exist or flourish if it separates itself from their sympathies and cooperation.” Once the Sunnis saw the life al Qaeda wanted to impose, they rejected it and switched sides.

Read the rest of the story at the Columbia Journalism Review