Major K.

Uncommon Valor

It is finally official.  It took the Army bureaucracy two years to do the right thing.  SFC Paul Smith was a man among men.  He was a member of the 3rd Infantry Division, "The Rock of the Marne," that went from Kuwait to Baghdad in 21 days.  Thank God for him and those like him.  Many soldiers and innocent Iraqis are alive and looking at a bright future because of him.  Click here to get the story on this Hero.  Tell everyone you know about him.  People get more of that which they honor.  We need more heroes.

Easter

It blew by in a blur of activity.  I hate to say it, but if it weren't for the reminding of my wife and the Chaplain, I'm not sure that i would have noticed.  Holy Saturday started with the usual morning information overload followed by the questioning of some detainees.  I then sat through the always-painfully-long weekly Command & Staff Meeting.  From there, I had to skip the Easter Vigil at the Chapel celebrated by the Marine Chaplain in order to get ready for a raid that night.  We returned from the raid at about 4ish in the morning with more detainees to question.  I finished up with that, released some, sent others to the holding cells and started contemplating sleep at about 10am.  I had a decision to make - Stay up for Easter Sunday Mass at 1pm during which I would certainly doze off, or get in about 5 hours of sleep in order to be back at the TOC catching up on all of the stuff that I had been neglecting while on the raid.  I decided that I really liked the idea of a loving and forgiving God and opted for the sleep.  I said a quick prayer before hitting the rack and let him know that I was thinking of him and grateful for everything.  I then got about 4 1/2 hours of sleep and got back to work.  I am pretty sure he is giving me a pass on this one.  After all, it is now almost 1am on Wednesday, and I am just getting around to reflecting on it.

Valhalla

It has been a while since I have posted, and there are many reasons for it, but I shall not make excuses.  First and foremost, We lost one.  Please say a prayer for the repose of the soul of Specialist Travis Bruce.  I am sure the warriors in Valhalla have greeted him warmly.  I did not know this young man as he was part of the Military Police unit that is attached to our battalion.  From what I am told, he was a great guy, and known for his positive attitude.  He was guarding an Iraqi Police station that was the target of several attacks in the past.  Some arhabi took a pot shot with an RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade - you've seen them on the news), and got lucky.  He was mortally wounded in the head and passed almost immediately.  The mess hall was so crowded with people for his memorial service that many of us just formed a crowd outside the door, hoping to listen in.  Again we are looking for payback.  Eventually we will get it.  Intelligence, however, is often a slow and painstaking process.  Luckily, I am a patient man...

Inaction

After 21 years of civil war and months of wholsale slaghter in Darfur, the bureacrats at the UN have finally decided to send "peacekeepers" to Sudan.  I always thought peacemakers are what you should send in first...  Anyway, after this magnificent display of indecision and ineffectiveness in the midst of genocide, they are going to "reform" this bloated beast by adding more decision-makers to the mess?!?!  I say we move them out of that shiny sky-scraper in NYC and move the UN headquarters to Darfur.  Maybe that will give them a sense of urgency.

Arhabi

It is pronounced: ahr-HAH-bee.  It is the Iraqi arabic word for terrorist.  2LT C. does not like it because "it just doesn't sing.  I learned this word from our interpreters and use it often.  I never use mujahedin or jihadi, because they imply a measure of respect due an actual warrior.  After all, both of those terms mean "holy warrior."  This distinction is also very important to the Iraqis.  They have told me repeatedly that these guys are cowards who will not even stand and fight.  They kill innocent people, and bomb indiscriminately.  They have been their own worst enemy in the public relations department.  Even though 2LT C. likes to refer to them using the A-word, (describing a posterior extremity) he would like to find something more catchy.  I am content to us arhabi.  It lets the locals know exactly who we are after, and what this really is about - not oil, not religion, but security and the hope for a better future.

Another big score...

This one was too big for even the big news agencies to ignore.  US and Iraqi good guys raided a terrorist base north of here and sent over 80 bloodthirsty murderers to get a first-hand ruling from Allah on the validity of killing innocent people in his name.  It is a good score for the Iraqis and for us eventually being able to go home and let them handle their own security.  However, it is not the most significant story of the day over here.  It took 5 Google searches to find a link, and I found it in the most unlikely of places, The Guardian.  Anyway, the bottom line is that about 10 guys in ski masks (terrorists) went on a shooting spree in a business district not far from here.  A couple of local residents and one shopkeeper pulled out their AK-47's and gunned three of them down.  They then chased after the rest as the terrorists jumped back in their cars and ran for their lives.  I smiled from ear to ear reading this in the morning intel reports.  I also knew it would be overlooked or talked down by the press.  THIS IS NOT ONLY SIGNIFICANT, IT IS BECOMING A PATTERN.   A similar incident happened within 24 hours.  The people are getting fed up, and they know who the good guys are.  Now, if we could just get some one to clean up all of this garbage in the streets...

The fifth column

We are two years into this phase of the Iraq front of the war on islamo-fascism.  The truth be told it is actually going quite well.  With the success of the elections, my section is getting bombarded with tips, calls and other forms of intelligence on where to find the bad guys.  My only time off is still spent blogging, sleeping or eating.  I long to get in a good workout at the gym or on the road around the FOB.  Meanwhile, a bunch of nitwits is still hoping that we lose.  The fact that they oppose the war isn't what bugs me as much as the psuedo-sympathy that they show for the troops.  They only give a rip about us as much as sympathy for us helps push their political agenda.  I'm not even bothered by the 'head in the clouds' genuine pacifists.  It is easy to think that pacifism works when you live behind the guns of the US Navy.  It is the ones that only hate war when their guy isn't waging it that bug me.  I hope they are absolutely infuriated by another one of the coalition's recent success stories.  Way to go, Kentucky boys!!  Chalk up 26 for the good guys.  I actually understand the real total to be a bit higher.  I also wonder if they noticed that the Iraqi's seem to like what the future holds after the invasion more than before.  This is true from my personal experience.  The bottom line is that it is working here.  It also seems to be rippling out to places like Libya, Lebanon and others.  Rome was not built in a day.  There will be pain, sacrifice and setbacks, but those are the temporary wages of worthy endeavors.  For an astute, even-tempered analysis, I highly recommend Karl Zinmeister.  Spot on, as usual.  Hat tip to my brother-in-law, Steve.

Pay Raise

This is one of the parts of the job that I love.  I got to pin the next higher rank on two fine Non-Commissioned Officers last night. Sergeant S. and and Sergeant A.  are now Staff Sergeants.  They also happen to be damned good intelligence analysts.  Their orders have been done for weeks.  They have only been waiting for a moment of formal recognition to pin it on.  They never complained about it.  They just waited patiently. I got tired of waiting for a Battalion formation.  Besides, with our fast pace of operations, it is difficult to get a big group together.  They will still have their moment in front of a large formation later in the deployment at a Baghdad landmark.  Right now, I wanted these two great soldiers, one a former Paratrooper and the other a former Force Recon Marine to have the rank they so richly deserve.  The Commander spoke eloquently of their new level of responsibility as he always does at these things, and knighted them with his tomahawk.  I wish I could give the whole battalion a pay raise, but for now I'll settle for these two deserving NCO's.

Last night was one of those nights.  We went out to do a recon patrol, interview an informant that is tired of the Wahabbi bullies in his neighborhood, and stopped in to a couple of houses to say hello and see who was staring at us from their windows.  We drove and walked by mansions and mud-brick hovels in the same block.   At one point drove through a 400m stretch of neighborhood that was still flooded with water and sewage over a foot deep and wall to wall.  There are no curbs in most places.  The smell was so oppressive I thought that I was going to lose my lunch for awhile.  Ironically, I snapped a picture of a banner hanging nearby thinking it was propaganda from the mujahedin.  After I had the text translated by one of our interpreters, I found out that it read: “The Ministry of Health is going to open a medical clinic for the treatment of chronic diseases in <this neighborhood>.”  I honestly wonder if the person who hung that banner knew that it was going to less than a block from a massive cesspool.  Of the houses that we entered that night, we greeted either casually or warmly.  A couple of times, the reception we received was a sort of giddy excitement that US Soldiers were coming in to talk to them.   It was the first time that I was the one that was the recipient of candy as opposed to the provider.  We spread some goodwill, chased away a few guys with AK-47’s that we could not catch, got more familiar with our area and headed for home(the FOB).  The drive home ruined the night when a lead-footed soldier in our group crashed the HUMMWV into the concrete barriers in front of an Iraqi Army checkpoint.  He was driving too fast with no lights and no night vision goggles on.  (We frequently drive with our lights off to make us harder to target, but the soldier was not wearing the night vision goggles that he had been issued.  We were lucky the Iraqi’s did not mistake him for a VBIED and shoot at the HMMWV.  We spent the next several hours shivering in the cold night air guarding the gun-truck while the wrecker was dispatched to recover it.  I kept joking with the driver and the Platoon Leader that they had wrecked the car and “boy, is Dad gonna be pissed!  We’re gonna get grounded for sure!”  It provoked a laugh as I had hoped, and we were just glad that no one had really been hurt.  Accidents happen, and we were lucky that only the gun-truck was messed up.  I got back to do some paperwork and into bed by about 4am to grab a few hours before going out again the next morning.  Another day done.  I have good news to share tomorrow....

Assisted Suicide

I woke up this morning to the sound of an explosion and the building rattling.  It was another VBIED.  It was not far from the FOB, and it killed a few Iraqi Soldiers, some innocent civilians and wounded an American Soldier from another unit.  We have had a few more of these lately as the new National Assembly has been getting ready to convene.  The pictures that you see here are from another one that attacked a hotel in our area not too long ago.  It was BIG.  4000 lbs. of explosives makes a big bang, and a big hole.  This one killed the suicide bomber, a few private security guards, and wounded one of our guys.  Luckily, it was a "John Kerry" wound.  He was just scratched up by some shrapnel.  One of the most effective tactics used by terrorists here is the suicide bombing.  Sometimes they are wearing a vest or carrying a backpack filled with explosives.  The bearers are usually foreign fighters, often younger, with heads filled to the point of brainwashing with the sick mantras of martyrdom, hatred of infidels and disregard for innocent human life.  Sometimes, their courage is buoyed by the use of drugs for their final walk – provided by their sponsor of course. In this sick ideology all of the normal rules of Islam are waived for jihad.  An ever more frequent use of suicide bombing is the suicide car bomb - like the one pictured above.  In Armyspeak, it is known as the VBIED(Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device).  The dirty little secret of the Islamo-fascists is that many of these car bombs are not the suicide sacrifice that they tell of in their recruiting propaganda.  All too frequently, the driver of many of these vehicles is unaware that he is doing anything more than smuggling supplies through a checkpoint or planting a car bomb for later detonation.  These murderers are often driving not far behind the VBIED with a remote control detonation device.  The bomb is detonated as soon as the vehicle gets close enough to the target, or, as in many cases, the device is about to be discovered and the mission compromised at a checkpoint.  The checkpoint becomes a target of opportunity, no matter how many innocents are there.  We refer to this as a Kervorkian, or an assisted suicide bombing.  It is loathsome.  I have only seen USA Today ever report on the practice.  It was a story about a maimed Saudi teenager in an Iraqi prison for an assisted suicide bombing that didn’t quite kill him.  The mind of the terrorist believes “the end justifies the means,” and innocent victims are “insha allah – the will of God.”  Any innocents killed in jihad go to Heaven.  I figure that jihadis go to hell to keep the afterlife ledger balanced.