Paying for peace, Part Two

Soldiers dispose of trash with JP-8 fuel and fire at Patrol Base Jurf-as-Sakhr, about 30 miles SW of Baghdad in Babil (Babylon) province.

Jurfasucker.

Jurfasucker jurfasucker Jurfasucker.

Go ahead, say it a few times. It's fun. It's among the simple amusements soldiers have at Patrol Base Jurf, located in -- that's right, the town of Jurf-as-Sakhr.

Several of the young soldiers at PB Jurf are on their first tour -- a rarity in the 3rd Infantry Division, which has been deployed more often than not since the war began. It's not at all what they expected.

They heard tales of giant bases with all kinds of amenities. Those places do exist; for example, you can buy your very own Pizza Hut Iraq Collector's Edition merchandise at Camp Victory near Baghdad. Leave it to fast food companies to treat war like it was a war movie.

PB Jurf has electricity most of the time, which is its chief amusement. That, and burning stuff. There are no trash pickups and Dumpsters, no toilets and no maid services in town. So everything is burned. Yup, nothing like gathering around the ol' burn pit, telling tales by the fire and betting on whether the freeze-dried veggie and cheese omelet that no one will eat will produce a technicolor flame.

The soldiers at Jurf live there for eight days and return to Forward Operating Base Iskan for four days. That's also how long they go without showers.

"Baby wipes go a long way," said a private on his first tour. "That and hand sanitizer. Use it everywhere."

In the meantime, the 70 or so soldiers can at least be happy for now that no one is bombing their small base, located in the middle of town. For the past few years, practically everyone in town wanted the U.S. out. But not long ago, the sheiks in charge decided that Al Qaeda poking their nose into local business was a lot worse than the Americans doing the same thing. Plus, the Americans were willing to pay everybody, even the people who were bombing them all these years, to patrol the neighborhood and keep out the really bad bombers.

Like a lot of places, when I got to Jurf the colonel of the unit comes up to me and talks about what a great success story Jurf has becomes. Reconciliation, understanding, etc...I've heard it so many times now. The soldiers have a different perspective.

"We trained the whole year to come out and kill the terrorists," said private first class. "Now we have to ask permission from Sheik Sabbah if we want to search a building. And we're paying them $60,000 a month not to attack us. We should save that money and just go after them."

Well, the U.S. already tried "just going after them," and it hasn't exactly gone so splendidly. Turns out you can't just go after everyone. But you can go after the worst of them, and especially the foreign Al Qaeda guys. For now, the U.S. pays the "concerned citizens," and it's a good short-term fix to quell violence. But I wouldn't want to be around when the money runs out.

"Let's not lie. It's not that we love the Americans"

What happens when everyone has an AK-47

The lighter side of things here

Buying peace by the village

The town of Arab Jabour is like a lot of the villages just outside Baghdad’s limits. You can see hints of past affluence, like palm tree groves running along the Tigris River. There are a few large houses, but they’ve been bombed out during the last five years.

Mostly, there are a lot of poor people with a lot of pride. Too much sometimes. It’s drove a lot of men to plant roadside bombs for Al-Qaeda because it paid well enough to support their families. An Iraqi man who can’t support his family is barely a man in this culture.

The same pride has been turned on its head. The U.S. has found its most successful strategy in dealing with insurgents to date: paying them. Specifically, they pay them to be “concerned citizens.” It’s sort of like a neighborhood crime watch program, but with AK-47s.

Patrol Base Murray, the closest base to Arab Jabour’s main drag, used to get attacked with mortars regularly last June. They’d usually get hit when they lit fires to burn their – well, let’s just say they don’t have port-a-potties at every base.

Now that most of the military-age males are on the U.S. payroll for about $10 a day, they don’t get hit anymore. People have moved back to the neighborhood. The roadside bombings have stopped. And slowly, something resembling businesses are opening.

The Army, State Department and USAID are backing this up with microgrants. Barbers, tire repairmen, glass makers and others ask for $1,000 to expand their businesses and get them going. They roll out a business plan and they get some cash. One particularly ambitious guy, whose son has an engineering degree, wants to open an Internet café with two computers.

“Right now people have to go to Baghdad,” Abbas told me. Many people in Arab Jabour want to communicate with people outside. We need this business for our area.”

Abbas’ Internet café building would have been condemned under U.S. building codes. The cinder blocks stuck together at sharp ends, with old plaster keeping them precariously in place. The roof was made of whatever materials were available. But for Iraq right now, this is what works.

Arab Jabour is a tiny spot in a country twice the size of Idaho. Two miles south, Al Qaeda is still ruling the area. There are Arab Jabours in many places, will it ever be enough?

Few of the soldiers here really want to be here right now. But many want all the time and sweat and blood they spent here to count for something. They hope that small success stories will spread like an ink spot into neighboring villages – as the same speed as the money they’re paying out.

The Euphrates River at sunset

A military pontoon bridge connects Patrol Base Dragon (an abandoned power plant) to the farming village of Owesat, about 15 miles southwest of Baghdad.

Al Qaeda's old truck stop

Search continues for soldiers missing since May

Suspect in soldier abductions detained

After five days at at tiny little outposts, I spent the last three at Forward Operating Base Hammer.

This particular base is surrounded by absolutely nothing but sand for miles. The command tries to make up for this by offering karaoke and speedy laundry service.

While walking through my tent I saw a soldier wielding a surgical instrument and plunging it into another soldier's bloody head. I didn't mean to be nosy but I had to ask.

"Shaun was hit by an IED (roadside bomb) two years ago," explained Matt, an Oregon National Guardsman and medic. "It got infected and he says it abcesses every now and then. So I drain it for him."

But Shaun didn't seem all that distraught about it. He showed me another notch on the back of his head from a second IED.

"Each time, my friends heard about it and thought I was dead," Shaun said. "The told the local paper and they've run my obituary three times."

Over people 250 showed up at Shaun's first funeral. Awful nice of them too, he says. He's thanked as many as he could for remembering him.

There is no point to shoes that aren't tan in Iraq.

***

Spent some time in a relatively peaceful town called Narwan that, like a lot of towns in Iraq, really needs water, electricity and other basic services. The kids beg you to take their picture everywhere. They beg the soldiers for pens and water. They're real cute until they start throwing rocks. But I suppose a kid will get away with what he can, especially if he isn't in school all day. I'd say more, but it's midnight and I've got a story coming up in a few hours. Should be a busy work weekend.

Kids at the Narwan market, about 20 miles east of Baghdad.

In the neighborhood

A couple of infantrymen wait for others after finishing a search at a home on the Tigris River about 20 miles southeast of Baghdad. The family waits behind them. Al Qaeda likes to hang out in some of these houses, especially the ones on the other side of the river.


He says he's 18. He is one of 362 "concerned citizens" sanctioned by the U.S. military to act as something like a community crime watch. They've actually done fairly well. Working with U.S. troops and Iraqi police, attacks and roadside bombs are way down. However, a lot of the guys they drove out are probably living a few villages over now.

Not quite a beach

It’s easy to tell people about Iraq’s politics or its military gains. But I doubt anyone who hasn’t been here has a sense for the feel of living in ever-present sand.

It is not the soft-white quartz you find on a coral beach. It’s not the dredged, crushed ocean bottom of a Miami Beach. Nor is it the brown dirt posing as sand at a northeastern shore or the mucky stuff I remember from an island near Seoul.

The top layer of sand here is chalky-tasting and it gets on everything. There is really no such thing as dark clothing, especially outside of the city. It is bright tan in color, if there is such a thing. It never really comes off hands, which is why everyone carries a bottle of hand sanitizer.

I drink water and Gatorade to wash the sand down. I brush off my shoes for no apparent reason. But after today, I’ll probably give up. My dark brown shoes will turn the color of Army desert combat boots for the remainder of my stay. However, they are still more comfortable.

I’m currently at COP Cahill, a speck of a base 20 miles or so outside Baghdad, where the walls are made of what else, but sandbags.


I spent much of the day at a Sunni Iraqi sheik’s house, listening to him talk with soldiers and even a few Shia Sheiks. That’s a good thing, since the two religious groups have had a tendency to hurl exploding objects at each other for the past few years.

I’ll have more on that in the next couple of days.

For now, I’ve got to get some work done and then get to my bed. I’m excited; last night I had a green stretcher with a mattress on top. Tonight I have a bed frame.

How much should it take to make a person materially happy? I wonder if anyone who hasn’t gone without luxuries like a real bed and hot showers for extended time can really appreciate them.

The snorer of war

War is often portrayed as drawn-out stretches of boredom punctuated by pounding intensity.

I am now experiencing that first part while watching Pirates of the Caribbean 2 for the third time in the Baghdad International Zone Combined Press Information Center lounge/gulag. This time around, I'm rooting for the giant squid to win.

The Baghdad CPIC is a tad less glamorous than it might sound. There are three sets of bunk beds for journalists in transit, a couple of computers, a TV and a DVD player. The whole thing is set in a small bunker-like maze of portable buildings, porta-pottys, porta-showers and whatever else the contractors had for sale with that porta- prefix.

The larger Baghdad International Zone, or "Green Zone" as its popularly known, has checkpoints manned everywhere by Peruvian guards with machine guns (red-tipped with blanks in most cases) every 300 yards or so, making walking anywhere time-consuming. And since I didn't have my CPIC ID yet, a young soldier said, there was a chance if I left that I wouldn't be able to get back in. Fortunately, he was wrong, but I wouldn't know this until a Sunday afternoon and Monday morning of marinating at the lounge.

In between, a very large "journalist" showed up Sunday night dressed vaguely like a soldier and carrying three standard issue camouflage bags.

"That's good thinking. Play soldier and make himself an even bigger target than he already is," said Jon, a Kiwi television producer who, like most of us, is waiting for his embed in another area.

Neither Jon nor I could imagine this paunchy guy going "outside the wire," out on patrol with soldiers for eight hours. I can't believe a doctor cleared him.

He probably never got a checkup. Which is unfortunate, since a doctor might have been able to help him with his tendency to snore louder than a jet engine.

I put my earplugs in from my earlier helicopter ride, but the plugs that comforted me in an open-door Army Blackhawk helicopter were no match for this man's respiratory system. He finally calmed down around 2 a.m. This made for great sleep until 3 a.m., when another large man in a crew cut and wearing an Operation Iraqi Freedom theme T-shirt showed up.

It seems the military isn't too picky about handing out press credentials these days, which is probably a good thing. But they're not too picky about the whole torture thing either, since I do believe being subjected to a chorus of snoring men who don't use sheets to cover their sparsely clothed bodies is expressly forbidden under the Geneva Convention.

I thought about applying for asylum in the morning, when a group of Yemeni journalists showed up and began the Pirates of the Caribbean 2 marathon. Apparently, Johnny Depp is huge in Yemen.

Instead of petitioning the UN, Jon and I make a break for it. We casually walked out of our bunker and past a few checkpoints, smiling and greeting the guards with "Que tal?" and "Hola, amigo." I always knew high school Spanish would come in handy for that one day I'd be in a fortified Middle East war compound.

Jon and I kept walking and made it to the Al-Rashid hotel, a 12-story building that doesn't do a whole lot of business, being that most Iraqis can't get into the Green Zone and insurgents aren't big fans of anyone working or staying there.

It cost $13 for a large plate of fries, two milk teas and a bottle of water. Guess when business is slow, you've got to make up for it with higher prices. That or the dollar is so weak it's even making the Iraqi dinar look good. Probably both.

The Al-Rashid had a few shops, mostly specializing in Afghan (Iraqi?) rugs and haircuts from the 1980s. I always wondered what happened to Jheri curls. Now I know.

I should be off to somewhere a bit more interesting in a few days. By then I'll have my audition tape ready for the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie, should it ever come to nearby Yemen. And I can't think of a reason why it shouldn't.