October 18, 2004

We’re starting to stay in the field for longer intervals and in the rear for shorter. On the bright side, our base now has real flushing toilets and the showers have water pressure, sweet, sweet water pressure!

A few days ago we stopped out in the desert somewheres and set up a hasty range. We did some familiarization fire with AK-47s, and I put seven magazines (×30 rounds/magazine = 210 rounds!) through my M-16 on a 100-yard squad rush, which is by far the most rounds I’ve ever put through my rifle at once. It felt good. I also got to put a couple of mags through my Platoon Sergeant’s M-4 Carbine, which had me drooling, and now I want one.

Overall, though, I’m getting increasingly frustrated out here. Our purported mission is to support and help train the Iraqi Border Patrol on the Syrian border, but mostly it just feels like we’re babysitting. The problem is that these IBP guys aren’t here out of any sense of civic duty or nationalistic pride, they have no unit loyalty or integrity or any sense of esprit de corps. These guys are in it simply for the paycheck, to feed and clothe their families, and they’re understandably unwilling to risk life or limb.

The Border Patrolhouses (built with US $$) have, one after another, been attacked and blown up, apparently by mujahideen insurgents who are not stupid enough to attack while Marines are posted there. So the IBP refuse to man any post w/o Marines, which pretty much defeats the purpose of having an IBP at all. And our one company simply doesn’t have the manpower to cover our area of operation.

The worst part is: while we’re sitting around babysitting these guys, (hoping for an attack that will never come) every night we can hear adjacent units getting into firefights patrolling through towns; we can hear Marines dying, Marines doing their jobs, doing what they’re trained to do.

I’ve spent a couple of nights standing post with some IBP guys, and between my minimal Arabic and a few of the Iraqis’ meager English skills, supplemented by the intermittent presence of a barely competent translator, the first night I managed to converse a little. They told me that even being in the IBP puts them and their families in danger. What I gathered is that the mujahideen find out who they are and come to their homes and threaten them. I didn’t get a very clear idea of why they allow this to happen, but I think that was the gist of it.

The second night we had a real translator, an electrical engineer from Baghdad, but I ended up mostly just talking to him instead of talking through him to the IBP guys. We talked for hours. He told me about himself, about his marriage to (and divorce from) a woman from a community in Baghdad that, according to him, is descended from the invading Mongol hordes and look exactly like North Chinese people, but are in every other respect compeltely Iraqi. They call him the man with the Chinese wife. He told me about his 14-year-old daughter who’s into gymnastics. He taught me a little about Islam, about Shia and Sunni, and the threat of Wahabbism. He told me that the general sentiment toward the insurgency is negative, that he is full of hope for the future of Iraq, but that he dreams of emigrating to the US. He believes that there could be peace between Israel and Palestine, that a secular government is the only way, and that all faiths are beautiful, though he is a Shiite Muslim himself. Pretty fascinating guy, but my (admittedly limited) experience with the Iraqi people informs me that he is an exception.

Arab culture in general fascinates me in that it’s so thoroughly steeped in religion. We’re in Ramadan now and to a man all these IBP guys fast from food and water during daylight hours, though I doubt many of them would be considered devout. I’ve never been out of earshot of a Mosque that broadcasts prayer recital five times daily.

Here in the North, there’s a heavy emphasis on tribe. The guy in charge of the IBP in the area will go to the extent of feeding only his own people. I can’t imagine any sort of military or police organization surviving in this kind of atmosphere. This kind of thing makes me really skeptical of our mission here, and I long to go somewhere I can be an infantryman. It’s probably perverse of me, but I envy the units in real combat zones right now.