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Friday, June 17, 2005
Trainer encounters grim conditions, eager soldiers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On his second day in Iraq, a Polk County police officer was informed he had been reassigned to train Iraqi army recruits.
Instead of leading 16 fellow Georgia Army National Guard soldiers in a war against insurgents, Dyer would move to a run-down military compound to live, eat and sleep with newly minted Iraqi fighters while training them for combat.
It is an assignment fraught with more than the normal amount of peril and frustration that is integral to the war in this country.
Killing boredom is a job for Superman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Baghdad, Iraq — At a bloodily contested highway overpass where a suicide bomber incinerated himself and turned his car into shopping cart-sized hunks of twisted metal two days earlier, a trio of 48th Brigade Combat Team soldiers looked out from a makeshift machine-gun nest, vigilant yet bored.
Their perch was a shabby, dusty, cement-and-sandbag lean-to on which someone had spray-painted “Hotel California” — an obvious reference to the “you can never leave” line in the hit song by the Eagles.
During a 12-hour watch on a blistering June day they kept each other alert by swapping gun positions every hour while the third member of the crew rested on a cot.
The off-duty soldier read aloud tidbits from Maxim and FHM magazines as the three compared the virtues of super-models, comic book figures and cruise ship destinations.
Although their mission is deadly serious — rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers were loaded and ready to fire and the soldiers suspiciously eyed every approaching person and vehicle — their banal banter was typical of the ongoing military mission here: hours of stupefying boredom and discomfort mixed with ambiguity and seasoned with moments of stark terror.
“I’ll bet Mr. Incredible could kick Superman’s [butt],” said Spc. Leomar Jackson, 21, of Athens, a square-jawed mischievous member of the Lawrenceville-based Alpha Company, 1st Battalion of the 121st Infantry Regiment. “Throw Kryptonite at Mr. Incredible and he’ll throw it right back at you. Do that to Superman and he turns to Jell-O. Mr. Incredible doesn’t have any obvious weaknesses.”
Cpl. Kevin Everett, 27, of Dallas, Texas, a thin, taciturn soldier, originally backed Superman. But Jackson’s rant persuaded him to switch to Batman.
Jackson slammed that choice, too.
“You’ve got to have superpowers to be a superhero,” Jackson said in exasperation. “Batman can’t fly or spin spider webs. All he’s got is lots of money and an impressive tool belt. That’s no superhero.”
Everett, who is back in Iraq two months after finishing a yearlong deployment on the Iran/Iraq border with an active-duty unit, gave Superman another lukewarm endorsement.
A Dallas Cowboys fan who calls them “America’s Team,” Everett offered that the Man of Steel “is more all-American,” although he said it without conviction.
Action unfolds below
On the street below, soldiers in two Bradley fighting vehicles discovered a pair of rocket-propelled grenades in a farm field about 100 yards from the highway. They called a bomb disposal team to destroy the weapons.
As the gun crew watched the area around the grenades being sealed off, Spc. Vianney Cornejo, 27, a glib native of El Salvador who now lives in Marietta, weighed in on the comics question.
“I like Batman because he’s a real man,” said Cornejo, who has a penchant for singing hip-hop tunes in Spanish.
With his machine gun resting atop a pile of green nylon sandbags, Cornejo said Batman “may not have superpowers, but that just makes him more realistic. He doesn’t have to go out and fight crime. He could just stay home with Alfred and Robin and chase [women] all day. But he fights crime because it’s the right thing to do.”
A pedestrian approached on the highway about 200 yards from the soldiers, interrupting the conversation. That was too close, the soldiers decided.
Everett, who has been married 10 years and has three young children at home, did not want to fire a warning shot. Instead, he raised and lowered his M-16 rifle several times, displaying it to the man on the highway and then pointing the barrel in his direction.
The pedestrian shrugged a sad, “woe-is-me” kind of gesture, then turned and walked away while the soldiers resumed their conversation.
What about the Incredible Hulk? Would his temper help or hurt him in a fight against Superman?
All three of these soldiers had been at this overpass 48 hours earlier when the car bomber struck. One of their fellow soldiers pumped the driver full of lead and suffered minor injuries when the car exploded. The part they all remember was the thunderous sound and concussion.
“I’ve never heard a sound like that,” Cornejo said. “It was so loud, and you could feel it as well as hear it.”
Mysterious gunfire
Another sound suddenly grabbed the soldiers’ attention.
Five or six rifle shots in rapid succession rang out from the highway about a half-mile away. The soldiers searched with binoculars but could not spot the shooter. They watched a blue pickup truck quickly reverse direction and drive away — but they could not tell whether the shots came from inside the truck or somewhere else.
They all said the gunshots had the distinctive, popping reports of an AK-47, the rifle of choice among Iraqis, both insurgents and police.
A few hundred feet overhead, a pair of heavily armed Apache helicopters orbited noisily, searching for the shooters. But the helicopters departed after about 30 minutes, apparently without success.
When the disposal team arrived and prepared to blow up the grenades, the three soldiers turned their attention to the nearby field. There, two soldiers attached a long detonation cord to the weapons and the grenades went off with a white, smoky fizzle — not a bang.
The gun crew was disappointed with the dud grenades. But Jackson soon engaged the others with another rhetorical question that promised to fill at least the next hour.
“If you could take a cruise anywhere,” he asked, “where would you go? Who would you take with you? And what would you bring?”
