5 May 2004

31 May 2004 - Happy Memorial Day!!! Especially tto all the veterans, past, present, and future. These men and women are the real heroes of our time. I was sitting here reading the AP articles on the WWII Memorial that was recently dedicated in Washington, and I began to wonder...why did it take so long for the greatest generation that fought the greatest war in our history to receive the memorial that was due to them? I understand the politics to some extent, but this was something that this nation, even this world, should've done many years ago. If not for the young men and women who helped in WWII, how long would Europe and the Pacific have been plunged into war? Could the Allies have won without the aid of the US military? I'm inclined to say no, as The Axis showed that they were more adept at war fighting then any of the allies were, as a whole. I've always liked Memorial Day. My father brought me up to look up to and respect those who have served, even if he never outright said this, his actions always reflected this attitude. Even when I was on active duty, I never really thought about Memorial Day as much other then as a day off from work. Rightly so, this year has taken on a much deeper meaning. As a result, it does pain me a little that I couldn't be in Washington to thank as many of those veterans as possible, and to be present at the dedication of their memorial.

This past week has been a difficult one due to our phone systems being down and our internet offline. Various reasons contributed to these issues, mortars being just one of them. Things are slowly getting back to normal in the communications side, and for those of you who have been so used to seeing me and the other soldiers online or hearing from us regularly, I can only imagine how difficult it has been. These things do happen. Our AT&T phone bank was down, believed to be hit my a mortar fragment, although I visibly couldn't see anything wrong with the system when I glanced at it. The internet had issues when we had a huge dust storm here, and somehow their satellite dish was damaged. Then it took them 5 days just to get the provider in Belgium to assist. Go figure. Like I said, things are getting back to normal.

We've been doing a lot of planning and war gaming these past few days. Lots of potential missions have popped up on the radar screen...some good...some not so good. I can't speak about them yet, but will let you all know as soon as I can. I went outside the wire a couple times this past week. Accompanied our IED and Bullet teams as they escorted EOD out to find/destroy unexploded ordnance (UXO) or IEDs. Fortunately for me, these two missions ended up being nothing more then "false" alarms for the crews. The UXO turned out to be in a friendly neighborhood, and it was buried so deep in the ground that we didn't get to blow it up. And the IED mission was a bust as the Iraqi EOD team beat us to it and destroyed a newly half buried coffee can with wires coming out of it. SO we turned around and returned to base. My mission was to see how my section could support the communications requirements, and what assets we needed to help facilitate these requirements. I hate to say it, but I'll go out a few more times since I didn't get to observe these guys in action and make a real determination. Some of you may be saying.."ok...so what?" Most of our combat injuries have been either the IED/Bullet teams. If anyone in our unit would be called combat veterans, I would say it's the soldiers on these teams. I guess it's one of those things that us staff officers don't get to do a lot of, and it actually means something to me to place myself in the same precarious situations that they place themselves into regularly. It also must mean a lot to the soldiers. See, I'm the first staff officer to go out on one of these IED & Bullet teams. Most of the soldiers didn't know I was going with them, and when I showed up all decked out in my IBA, kneepads, gloves, full combat load, etc, many of them began to cheer and hoot and holler. Made me laugh and feel honored that they were glad I was going out with them.

We got hit with rockets again last night, but this time they were the closest they've been since the first week here...less then 100 meters away. Man they are loud. The rockets were targeted at a volleyball court which had floodlights on it so some of the Strykers could play. Eight casualties, but nothing too serious. They all returned to duty within a few hours. Guess this means the volleyball court won't have any lights anymore. We also had a rather terrible tragedy that affects all of us on this base. Saturday, our Catholic Chaplain was driving back from another FOB after having his Saturday services, and his convoy was hit by and IED. He was seriously injured, and as of today, he is still in critical condition. He received shrapnel wounds to his head and neck, and he's almost certainly going to lose an eye. I'm not a very religious person, although I believe that is changing, but the loss of this chaplain was much harder to take then any of the other serious injuries I've known about. He made it a point to know all the soldiers who came to his Mass. And he's the only Catholic chaplain in the entire Northern AO of Iraq.

Everyone...thank a veteran today, and tomorrow, and everyday that you see one...they're the real heroes. Happy Memorial Day!!

Special thanks to Eric Holbrook for creating this picture. Please visit his site http://www.deepdarkdigital.com.

23 May 2003 - Wow...didn't realize it's been so long ssince I last wrote. A lot has happened in the past 14 days. Kathy has been hounding me lately, so I'm sure others are as anxious to hear from me as much as she is. On the whole, things haven't improved any. All of our soldiers are fine...we haven't had anymore serious incidents from enemy attacks, although there have been some hits. Most of our injuries have been small shrapnel wounds and such. Our IED/Bullet teams have been hit 5 times in the past 2 weeks...mostly SAF and RPG's. Like I said...mostly just small shrapnel wounds. Easily healed. The other night we had a mortar attack which came very close to our living areas...so close that it actually made me jump up from what I was doing and run to the TOC to take up my duty position in the event of something like that. See, I was sitting down enjoying a conversation with some soldiers, getting the enlisted view of the company's leadership, and a mortar hit on the other side of the FOB, about a 2.5km away. Usually one mortar isn't anything to worry about. It's the successive rounds that you need to be concerned with. So a second round fell, louder and closer then the first, about 1km. Then a third, less then 500 meters away, in the other Engineer unit located next to us. The fourth round ended up landing about 25m from the gate we're manning. No one was injured, but it appears that whoever was shooting them off was walking these rounds in towards something...probably a light or a building. Either way, it made a lot of us jump when the 3rd and 4th hit. Many of us ran to get our body armor, and then fell into fighting positions...just in case. I was in the TOC listening to the traffic over the radio. I don't know what I was expecting, but it sounds like it was just Mr. Mortarman letting us know that he's still out there. We used to have to deal with Mr. Rocketman who used to shell us with RPG's, but we got him a month or so ago...now it's just Mr. Mortarman we have to kill. I was online with Kathy at the time too, but had gotten up to go talk to these soldiers, so when I came back for my IBA, I told her and logged off. I hope I didn't scare her too much. This comes to the third multi-mortar attack we've had in the past 2 weeks...a couple of deaths on the FOB as a result.

I heard a disturbing statistic today when I was at Mass...there have been 5 soldiers electrocuted in the past month here in the North. The Iraqi's rarely ground their electrical equipment...not sure why...even I know you have to ground your electrical equipment. Heck, we even had a soldier electrocuted while he was in the shower. The hot water heater somehow transferred the electrical current into the water, into the showerhead, and down into the soldier. We're now looking into regrounding all our living quarters, latrines, etc. No one is allowed to use the showers that weren't put here by the US.

In the past two weeks, I've been on a few convoys out to our far reaching bases, where we have task forces currently located to complete engineering missions. For all those wondering, our soldiers are working their tails off. 12 hour days, 7 days a week. They're haven't been any tactical injuries that I'm aware of. Soldiers out there are happy to be doing such good work, but they have expressed a need to slow down some. Seems that there are more missions to be done they can possible complete in a year, although some leaders would disagree with that assessment. Mail has been slow getting to them, since we have to push it all out from our current location out to them. Logistic convoys don't follow any specific timetable or pattern for where they go, so we're forced to send out mail whenever we happen to find out about a convoy in time. It's not efficient, but it has certainly reduced the number of attacks the logistics guys have had to deal with.

I mentioned above that out the IED/Bullet teams have been attacked a few times. Their track record is overall pretty good, with a 2% chance of getting hit anytime they go out, and dropping with each successive mission. Here are some pictures of the last RPG attack.

The pictures in order are of a truck that was hit in the bed by an RPG. The second is how "well" our kevlar laminate worked against the RPG, and the third is a close up shot of the actual penetration mark. I don't quite understand how an RPG works yet, but I've been told that there is a molten chemical that is expelled from the grenade when it impacts, and it is this chemical expellant which slices through the metal so that the grenade fragments can enter through whatever hole was created. In this case, you can see in #1 that the RPG hit right at the top of the metal, causing it's fragments to spray outwards onto the wood and the rest of the truck (look carefully). The expelled chemical cut through the metal, the multiple layers of kevlar laminate, and eventually cut it's way through the other side of the truck, laminate, and sandbags...where the chemical stopped we have no idea. If you look in the third pic, you can actually see where the tail of the RPG (which contains the propellant for the grenade) actually broke off and hit the truck...it's the circular dent to the left of the hole. Now that puppy was moving to leave a dent like that. No one was hurt. The gunner was lucky...the expellant missed is knees by about 2 inches...close enough for him to feel the heat. Gene - you guys have any ideas on what we can use to help stop an RPG? The required metal would make the truck too heavy to move efficiently.

Spent a couple of days talking to the US civilian police officers whoa re here training the Iraqi Police (IP). The IP have a loooooooong way to go to meet what we consider the police standard. They're afraid to draw their guns. They're horrible shots, hitting 1 out of 8 targets. Most of the time they just sit at major intersections to take care of any accidents that happen, since no one in the area obeys the traffic lights (which have been working for a month now, but no one seems to notice). The IP are especially good for stopping the traffic whenever one of our convoys approaches, so we can barrel through the intersection. This is an example of how far the IP still have to go...in America a friendly protest that gets out of hand can usually be handled by the local police with riot gear. Our police aren't afraid to meet the protestors. The IP had to quell a peaceful demonstration that was coming across one of the bridges in the city. On one side was the demonstration, and the other, one of the Infantry Battalions...IP caught in the middle. It took the US military basically threatening the IP's before they even tried to disperse the demonstration. They were too afraid to face this relatively peaceful demonstration. This country is going to need a lot of work with a VERY long commitment by the US...oil be damned. The basic infrastructure still needs to be emplaced.

I'll try to be more diligent in my writings. Kept forgetting.

09 May 2004 - When I posted my log yesterday, it was aabout 8pm. Unfortunately, about 9pm our base was attacked with mortars. Other units on the base had multiple casualties and a fatality. Then, to add to this...a unit on a different FOB somehow had a soldier electrocuted while he was swimming in a makeshift pool. I don't know what was up, but the stars must not have been aligned for this Brigade yesterday. To add to that, the phones here have been shut down...and no one has been able to call their mothers or spouses for Mother's Day.

In stark contrast to that, today has been extremely quiet, with little in the way of enemy actions. We had our MWR ribbon cutting ceremony. The MWR room is where our soldiers can go to relax, watch some TV, play some ping pong, read, play board games, etc. It was a very nice, very respectful ceremony. We even managed to have a BBQ afterwards. But, this is what I liked. In an Officer's career, there are certain things which bring him the most satisfaction. For some, it's knowing that you accomplished a mission...maybe you connected with a soldier and his family...but for me, one of the most rewarding things as an Officer, is when I get to promote someone. Now, I know I'm not a commander, but CPT Highley asked if I wanted to do the pinning ceremony for this soldier...and of course I said yes. The soldier being promoted was my commo chief...from Sergeant First Class (E7) to Master Sergeant (E8). First for me to pin someone of that rank. It gave me such a feeling of pride to finally give Robert that which he so rightly deserves. He's been the hardest working NCO in the company, and I'm not the only officer who says that. Now, he has joined the E8 club, and that puts him into a small group of NCO's here. I just hope, that if the opportunity arises, that he'll be willing to be the company 1SG.

Well, early to bed, early to rise.

8 May 2004 - Since we got here, we've been extremely lucky. We haven't been hit by any mortars, no one has been injured by the small arms fire, any IEDs encountered have all blown before or after our convoys. Today, our luck ran out. Thankfully, no one has been killed. If it wasn't for the quick thinking and superb training we've given our soldiers, the general agreement is that we would've lost at least one soldier. What happened was that one of our platoons was out doing some work. The gunner on the .50 cal was changing out with another soldier (don't know why). The .50 cal is mounted to a 5-ton dump truck that has been converted to a armored gun truck. Apparently, an RPG was shot at the truck, hitting it right in it's side, wounding numerous soldiers near or in the truck. The soldier that was getting out of the truck had his leg over the side that got hit with the RPG. One of the most important tenants during this deployment is to ensure that we do everything we can to save soldiers' life, limbs, and eyesight. The RPG severed this soldiers leg just below the knee. The senior NCO on site was close enough to the truck that he was able to get there almost as soon as the injured soldier was able to fall out of the truck. He applied a tourniquet on the soldier's leg and treated for shock, just as we were trained prior to mobilizing, and the doctors say he soldier would've quickly died from blood loss and shock had it not been for this NCO's quick actions. I was sitting in the TOC when the panicked and rushed call came through. In hindsight it all seemed so surreal. I've been expecting something like this eventually, but you can never really prepare for what you hear when the call comes. To make matters worse, one of our trucks at the opposite side of our AO doing an entirely different mission somehow ran over an anti-personnel mine...completely disabling the truck. No injuries though. This is our first real experience with real-world casualties and combat operations. Everything else has been relatively sanitized in the fact the most of what we've done has been quiet, or it has been exactly as we trained so it didn't seem like war, etc. Well, for those who have been to NTC/JRTC, the chaos you experience training there is nothing like here. In training soldiers know that they're going to have multiple scenarios thrown at them at one time. This time, when the casualty call came in, everyone became focused on that and it took a few calls to sort out the second call about the mine explosion. Even I didn't realize it. First we heard it was a thrown IED, then we heard an RPG, then we heard a mine, then we heard an RPG again. It was confusing, but the RTO's did a very good job of sorting it out and then letting the leadership know what was actually going on.

What's interesting about this is how some of our junior enlisted soldiers reacted to the news of fellow soldiers being hurt...even though they don't really know these soldiers. One of our soldiers actually began to cry when the news came across. As far as I could gather, she's one of those soldiers who hasn't really realized what is going on...that we're in a warzone and people are trying to kill us. Everyone pulls gate guard at some point, and small arms fire at the gate and towers is nothing new, but for some reason this one hit home much more so then actually being shot at. Another of our TOC enlisted jumped up and wanted to convoy out to the site of the attack and kick everyone's ass. Some enlisted just kept going about their business like usual...the call into the TOC didn't phase them. For me, it got me a little bit jumpy knowing that what we had feared all this time may have just come true. It took a little bit of effort to get my mind focused on the job at hand, as I have specific duties that I must do during a serious incident like this. I wanted to stay in the TOC and hear what was going on...what the updates were going to be. Alas, after some calls to the Combat Support Hospital, we heard that the soldiers were in stable condition. Two of them were already in surgery. The process of notifying the soldiers loved ones has already begun, so by the time I post this, we should be good.

Later... It's been about 8 hours since the attack this morning, and soldiers here are much more somber then they were when this day began. The company who the soldiers belonged to have already begun to pull closer together. The grieving started as soon as they heard it. And this is one of the best companies in the Battalion. I know that this incident will make them a stronger unit. What really chaps my ass about this attack is that this is the same unit that was in one of the villages and had brought school supplies to the head of the village for their children. The single school made for 100 children currently teaches over 900. They're short on supplies, so this unit pulled together and got school supplies shipped in...and the attack still happened in the same village less then a week after.

It's time for me to unwind. I need a good movie, and a quiet place to watch it. I think tonight a lot of people are going to be hanging out with their fellow soldiers, trying to enjoy themselves as best as they can though. As I walked through the Battalion living area, I saw more soldiers out talking with one another, playing cards, playing games, listening to music together, etc, then I have seen since we got into country. I hope that this is a good sign. Only time will tell...let's hope and pray that this is the only real serious incident this unit has to see.

5 May 2004 - Since we got here, we've been extremely lucky. We haven't been hit by any mortars, no one has been injured by the small arms fire, any IEDs encountered have all blown before or after our convoys. Today, our luck ran out. Thankfully, no one has been killed. If it wasn't for the quick thinking and superb training we've given our soldiers, the general agreement is that we would've lost at least one soldier. What happened was that one of our platoons was out doing some work. The gunner on the .50 cal was changing out with another soldier (don't know why). The .50 cal is mounted to a 5-ton dump truck that has been converted to a armored gun truck. Apparently, an RPG was shot at the truck, hitting it right in it's side, wounding numerous soldiers near or in the truck. The soldier that was getting out of the truck had his leg over the side that got hit with the RPG. One of the most important tenants during this deployment is to ensure that we do everything we can to save soldiers' life, limbs, and eyesight. The RPG severed this soldiers leg just below the knee. The senior NCO on site was close enough to the truck that he was able to get there almost as soon as the injured soldier was able to fall out of the truck. He applied a tourniquet on the soldier's leg and treated for shock, just as we were trained prior to mobilizing, and the doctors say he soldier would've quickly died from blood loss and shock had it not been for this NCO's quick actions. I was sitting in the TOC when the panicked and rushed call came through. In hindsight it all seemed so surreal. I've been expecting something like this eventually, but you can never really prepare for what you hear when the call comes. To make matters worse, one of our trucks at the opposite side of our AO doing an entirely different mission somehow ran over an anti-personnel mine...completely disabling the truck. No injuries though. This is our first real experience with real-world casualties and combat operations. Everything else has been relatively sanitized in the fact the most of what we've done has been quiet, or it has been exactly as we trained so it didn't seem like war, etc. Well, for those who have been to NTC/JRTC, the chaos you experience training there is nothing like here. In training soldiers know that they're going to have multiple scenarios thrown at them at one time. This time, when the casualty call came in, everyone became focused on that and it took a few calls to sort out the second call about the mine explosion. Even I didn't realize it. First we heard it was a thrown IED, then we heard an RPG, then we heard a mine, then we heard an RPG again. It was confusing, but the RTO's did a very good job of sorting it out and then letting the leadership know what was actually going on.

Later... It's been about 8 hours since the attack this morning, and soldiers here are much more somber then they were when this day began. The company who the soldiers belonged to have already begun to pull closer together. The grieving started as soon as they heard it. And this is one of the best companies in the Battalion. I know that this incident will make them a stronger unit. What really chaps my ass about this attack is that this is the same unit that was in one of the villages and had brought school supplies to the head of the village for their children. The single school made for 100 children currently teaches over 900. They're short on supplies, so this unit pulled together and got school supplies shipped in...and the attack still happened in the same village less then a week after.