99% Boredom, 1% Action

Here is an interesting read courtesy of Michael Gisick, a reporter from The Albuquerque Tribune in Baghdad reporting on the war effort. It's a close-up look at combat operations conducted by the 3rd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment in Southeastern Baghdad. As you probably know the 3rd Squadron has been operating in a Sunni enclave that has been deadly at times.

Grab your body armor and walk a mission with the 3rd Squadron...and I thought I had a tough job...

v/r,
- Collabman

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Army patrol finds danger in Baghdad enclave, but the enemy remains hidden
By Michael Gisick (Contact)
Tuesday, October 23, 2007

He has learned to trust suspicion.

Electrical wires, doors, floor tiles, bumps in the road - all have proven deadly. They are the enemy's ruses, or else they are nothing, just loose wires in a jury-rigged country, just bad roads and abandoned houses. But he has learned not to trust them.

Staff Sgt. Timothy Kees has spent the last month patrolling a Sunni enclave in southeastern Baghdad. It has been, in the military jargon du jour, a "highly kinetic operation."

It has been, in other words, a fight. Six men from the Army's 500-plus member 3rd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, Kees' unit, have been killed in the neighborhood since mid-September, falling victim to exploding houses and roads and gunfire.

The signs of the enemy have been everywhere. Kees has seen the gunner on his vehicle shot through the shoulder and says he still can barely hear in one ear after a bomb went off in the sidewalk 20 feet away.

Most of the men in the squadron have seen as much or worse. But few, Kees included, have seen the face of their enemy.

"I've seen muzzle flashes," he said as the hours waned Saturday night, an armored vehicle carrying his squad back to base after a long patrol.

But that comes later. Now, his suspicions are focused on the round hole in the second-story window of an abandoned house. His squad moves into the walled front yard, fringed with dying grass and some exhausted, collapsing perennials.

Spc. Alexander Flores, who has also seen muzzle flashes but no faces, levels a shotgun and blows the lock out of the front door. Kees puts his shoulder to it, and it swings open.

There is a split-second in which nothing explodes. Then they move in.

They sweep past a few effects of Iraqi family life: a saying from the Quran in a little gold frame on a wall, a refrigerator, some furniture. There are also signs of more recent occupation. Most of the entrances are barricaded. The upstairs window with the hole in it is blacked out with paint. A wooden bed frame has been propped up below it.

"Yup," Kees says, sighting his rifle out the window toward the street below. "This was definitely a firing position."

They take a few photographs, smash out all the windows and move on.

"This was the Wild West until about a week ago," says Capt. Francisco Lopez, the commander of Nemesis Troop, the squadron's reconnaissance unit. "It's calmed down some, but it can still be unpredictable."

Two days before, a trio of explosions rocked one of the squadron's Stryker vehicles, killing one soldier and wounding several others. The squadron has found more than 100 improvised explosive devices during its month in the Hadar district.

"We found 80 percent of them," says Lt. Col Rod Coffey, the squadron commander. "Twenty percent of them found us."

Coffey says nearly every soldier in the squadron has seen some kind of enemy contact, but few have seen the enemy up close, even in death. Squadron members say they have killed 30 to 40 insurgents but have found only "a couple" of bodies, he says.

"If they establish a base of fire in a building, they've made a big mistake," Coffey says. "They're probably dead. We have hit buildings with enough firepower that afterward there isn't really anything left."

As the attacks on their patrols have become less and less frequent over the past week, squadron members have come to believe that most of the al-Qaida militants have died, left or quit. Admittedly, that hardly means the war is over.

Coffey says most of the fighters were lower-level but says he believes they did have ties to larger financing and training networks. During the three months before the squadron's arrival in mid-September, a period in which no U.S. forces operated in the area, the militants had set up shop, offering protection to a population weary of the Shiite neighborhoods nearby.

"We can offer them better protection, and we can help them rebuild their lives," Coffey says. "I think most people just want to live normally. The people there had a choice, and when it comes down to it, I think they've realized that they're better with us than with al-Qaida."

Kees, for the record, refers to the enemy as the "al-Qaida J.V. squad." Still, the militants proved adept enough at turning the city into a minefield.

And in a neighborhood that offered a constant fight a little more than a week ago, the question of what exactly became of the enemy hangs in the air.

Nemesis Troop's day begins with a 9 a.m. briefing. The soldiers leave their base around 11, traveling southeast and stopping at a trash-strewn Iraqi army outpost for a meeting.

Lopez heads inside to meet with his Iraqi counterpart. The soldiers tell stories, eat, smoke, urinate against a wall.

The patrol moves out around 1, driving through puddles of water and sewage and into the neighborhood. They leave their armored vehicles and start moving house to house. About half the homes are abandoned. In the ones that aren't, the soldiers ask residents about a neighborhood generator they suspect might have been commandeered by al-Qaida, used as a money-making venture and finally turned off after people refused to pay.

The soldiers wear body armor that, with a full load of ammunition, puts between 70 and 90 pounds on their shoulders. The temperature is in the low 90s.

After a couple of hours, Kees, Lopez, Flores and Spc. Jerod Organ, a civil affairs specialist, pause in a man's walled yard, sitting on the edge of his porch.

"It's 99 percent boredom, 1 percent action," Kees says, describing the average day.

"Then it's the mad minute," Flores says.

They leave the yard, thanking the man and moving back into the street. Kees notices a group of children around the corner and pulls a bag of candy from one of his ammo pouches.

"Time to go hearts-and-minds Õem," he says.

Life stutters on in the street. There's one store open. A vegetable stall across the street sells figs, tiny cucumbers and okra, persimmons and tomatoes, many rotting.

Shaggy sheep and dogs walk past, commanded by a pair of boys. Open land stretches toward an insurgent stronghold known as The Farms. An Iraqi army officer carrying a faux-pearl-handled assault rifle jokes that he is converting to Christianity. He tips his hand toward his mouth.

"I like to drink," he says. Muslim tradition forbids alcohol.

Night falls quickly and finds the squad - seven soldiers and an Iraqi translator nicknamed "Johnny K," plus a reporter - packed inside the Stryker vehicle.

Some eat meals out of cans that warm themselves through a chemical reaction when exposed to air. Others on the patrol fall asleep. Then they head back out on patrol. It's about 7 p.m. The evening has fallen pleasantly.

"A gentle breeze," Johnny K says.

In one house the patrol finds a family watching TV under fluorescent lights powered by a generator on the roof. The small yard outside is freshly mowed, lined with blooming rosebushes.

In others, families sit around kerosene lamps or outside, as though they are waiting for something.

"It was like this 40 years ago," one gray-haired man says genially in the lamplight. "Now it's the same thing again."

Residents say electricity has been off for two days. One man, an antiques dealer and former army officer who says he was captured and treated "very well" by the Americans during the Gulf War, gives some history on the neighborhood generators. There used to be a good man with a generator but he fled because he was a Shiite. Then another man arrived with a generator, but he was arrested with insurgent propaganda.

Holding a battery-powered lamp and a boy on his knee, the man says he is glad to have the Americans in the neighborhood. He did not trust the Iraqi police, who have been widely discredited because of infiltration by Shiite militants and general corruption.

"They asked me questions that made me afraid," he says. "What tribe I was from. Whether I was Sunni or Shiite."

Lt. Andrew Vandenhoek tells the residents that the Americans are going to continue patrolling the neighborhood with the Iraqi army unit and will eventually turn control over to the Iraqis. Water and electricity projects are in the works, as is a plan to build walls around the neighborhood and set up checkpoints at the entrances.

But all that depends on security, the lieutenant says, and security depends on the residents' cooperation.

"If you see anyone who doesn't belong here, any men with masks over their faces, you need to tell us," he says.

The residents agree, but most say they rarely leave their homes.

Just after 9 p.m., the soldiers mount up and head back to their base. Talk turns to home and the future. Kees, who was raised in Ohio, claims Arizona and Hawaii as home, more or less, but says the only thing he really cares about in the states is his daughter.

"I went home pretty messed from my last tour, but I got some help," he says. "I think this time it will go better. But obviously, when you have buddies in the hospital with concussions and guys from your sister companies getting killed, it's frustrating. Firefights I can deal with. What scares me is getting blown up."

The night is over, but there is a long year in Iraq ahead.

The next day, Sunday, a vehicle from Nemesis Troop hit an IED during a patrol. Four soldiers were injured.

"It was a very chaotic day," Lopez said.