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September 2005
Pellet the good luck hamster
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Taji, Iraq — Pellet the hamster has seen more of war-ravaged Iraq than most fury varmints.
That’s because the brown and cream-colored Beanie Baby is zip-tied to the hood of a Humvee. He sits there on his rump with his arms outstretched and his tiny pink hands open, almost as if he is expecting to catch something.
With good reason.
Louie Favorite/AJC
Sgt. Russell Dinkins of Darien attachs “Pellet” to Humvee before mission.
In this month alone, a car bomber killed an Iraqi soldier at the entrance to this base and a U.S. civil affairs soldier was killed by a roadside bomb just north of here. Insurgents occasionally attack the camp with rockets and mortars.
Sgt. Russell Dinkins tied Pellet to the Humvee Thursday morning.
“It’s a good luck symbol I guess,” said Dinkins, 35, a father of three who lives in Darien and is a mechanic at Fort Stewart.
Dinkins brought Pellet’s twin brother to a briefing before his convoy rolled out on a mission. The hamster sat atop the butt of his rifle.
“He has to listen for safety’s sake,” joked Staff Sgt. Mark Burns, 38, a full-time Georgia National Guard soldier from Jesup.
Pellet held on the rest of the morning, traveling along country roads lined with date palm trees, across the Tigris River and through the rubbish-strewn streets of Husseiniya.
He visited the future site of a municipal courthouse the U.S. government plans to build for the Iraqis. He stopped by a farming cooperative seeking U.S. taxpayer funding. And he watched as soldiers handed out other Beanie Babies, candy and school supplies to little boys stepping around piles of garbage. The children begged and tussled for more goodies but never reached for Pellet.
The hamster made it through the day without a scratch.
But he is now covered in a fine coat of talcum powder-like sand.
author=JEREMY REDMON
Hurry up and wait
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Baghdad, Iraq — He stood. He sat. He stood again. He told jokes. He told old war stories. He went looking for matches.
Spc. Harvey Beecher did this week what tens of thousands of other soldiers do in Iraq. He waited and waited. It’s part of the military culture. Waiting for hours. Waiting for days.
Things take time in a war zone. There are situations, complications, delays.
This time, Beecher was waiting for something good: a flight home to Glennville for two weeks of leave. “I would rather be here and wait than be back at my tent,” said Beecher, 32, a state corrections officer. “I have to do something to break the monotony.”
There are lines everywhere in Iraq. At the airport. At the Subway restaurants. At the free Internet trailers. Some lines are fast. Some are deathly slow. Waiting for hours for something is not unusual in the military.
At the airport, waits can last several hours. Some soldiers read, some sleep and some watch movies in the Twinkie-shaped passenger waiting tent. Occasionally, distant explosions vibrate in their chests.
Beecher waited for more than a hour until someone announced over a loudspeaker that his flight had arrived.
“Finally,” he said as he put on his body armor. He was going home. But he must soon return to Iraq — and more waiting.
You like, uh, the sauce?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Taji, Iraq — They are called “just-in-case letters.”
Soldiers leave them with their families before they go to war, telling them how much they love them. Some write about where they want to be buried. Some contain wills.
Photo by Louie Favorite/AJC — First Sgt. Bruce Oliver (left) shares a laugh with his son, Sgt. Jerome Register at Camp Taji.
First Sgt. Bruce Oliver prayed, double-checked his life insurance policy and left behind his super-secret barbecue sauce recipe.
The former restaurateur has been making the ketchup-based sauce since 1976. He wrote it down and tucked it away in his dresser at home for his son, Sgt. Jerome Register.
Oliver said he has never revealed all of the roughly 30 ingredients to anyone else. He will only say that it is a mild Georgia-South Carolina-style sauce. He makes it for yearly family reunions and turns batches of it into gifts for friends.
“I just kept adding to it and testing it,” said Oliver, 57, who lives in Reidsville and works as an internal affairs investigator for the state corrections department. “Hell, it hadn’t been written down until I wrote it down in this letter.”
Oliver serves with his son in the 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment. The two talked about the sauce as they smoked cigars on the front step of Oliver’s hooch.
Register, 33, said when he returned home on leave in the fall, he fished the recipe out of his father’s dresser and made the sauce on his own for the annual Labor Day weekend family reunion. He brought some back for his father to try in Iraq.
“He did good,” said his father, a Vietnam veteran. “It tasted just like I made it.”
Then Register turned to visitor and joked: “Do you want me to walk around the corner so he can tell you the truth?”
Take your gun, soldier. No, leave it behind
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
U.S. soldiers must carry their weapons with them when they step off their posts in Kuwait.
Yes, in Kuwait, the country the United States helped liberate from Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1991.
Hussein is no longer in power. But there are still threats of all kinds from terrorists in the Middle East.
So the soldiers remain armed in Kuwait per U.S. military policy. And that is causing some headaches.
Consider this recent incident:
Lt. Col. Paul Williams and Capt. Paul Edwards were in uniform, stopping by a hotel outside Kuwait City. They were there to pick up some newspapers when a bunch of hotel security guards approached them at the main gate. Such a show of force is common at many hotels in Kuwait.
“Do you have any weapons?” asked one of the guards.
Williams revealed that both he and Edwards were carrying pistols. But they didn’t plan to bring them into the hotel. One would stay behind with the weapons in their burgundy Chevrolet Suburban. Soldiers travel around Kuwait in groups so one can guard their weapons while the others do business.
The guard at the hotel appeared nervous. He told them to stay put and went to get a supervisor. Then, a more official-looking man in a black cap appeared. He asked the same question: “Do you have any weapons?”
Williams repeated his answer.
There seemed to be some confusion. The guards weren’t budging.
Then a third man in plain clothes showed up and told Williams and Edwards no weapons were allowed in the hotel.
Yes, Williams knew that but he wasn’t planning to bring his pistol inside.
But the hotel employees still weren’t budging. They didn’t seem to want the Suburban anywhere near the hotel. So they diverted the soldiers’ vehicle over some metal security spikes in the road and into a side parking lot.
Unarmed, Williams went inside and got his newspapers.
When he returned, Edwards, of Hinesville, Ga., joked: “Sorry, sir. I can’t let you in this vehicle with a weapon.”
Williams, of Park City, Utah, shot back: “You must have looked suspicious.”
Moni Basu’s farewell blog
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Baghdad, Iraq — I never imagined I would feel such mixed emotions when the wheels of the C-130 left Iraqi soil.
I was thrilled to be on my way home to Atlanta, leaving behind a nation in turmoil and yet, it was difficult to leave behind a place I had called home for the last two and a half months.
I arrived in Baghdad in July knowing that I would see a different Iraq though the eyes of the soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team. I knew it would be an experience like no other in my life — embedded with a brigade of 4,400 soldiers from all walks of life.
Over the last 10 weeks, I got the chance to make new friends and perhaps, even a few enemies who didn’t care for the images and thoughts in the stories I filed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Photographer Bita Honarvar and I arrived at Camp Striker at a difficult time for the brigade — soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment were rehearsing for a memorial service for four fallen comrades.
I had to ask difficult questions of grieving soldiers. I wanted so much to not interfere in their moment of pain and loss.
I wanted to let the world know they were committed soldiers who would carry on with their mission. They were strong. They were courageous.
But they were also human beings gutted by the horrific nature of war.
After that first service, came another. And another. In all I covered five tributes to Georgians who died for their country.
It was a solemn introduction for me. But one that helped forge friendships that I hope will last a lifetime.
My time here was not always easy. A stranger to the military before this assignment, I sometimes felt swallowed up by rules, regulations, procedures and a hierarchy that seemed mind-boggling. At other times, the pace, physical hardships and constant fear of the unknown almost seemed overwhelming. It gave me new appreciation for the life of a soldier at war.
Over the last 10 weeks, many of the 48th Brigade soldiers showed me kindness and generosity for which I am grateful. This assignment was challenging enough; I needed all the help I could get.
There were soldiers — I think you know who you are — who bared their souls to me, who were brave enough to speak not just about their experiences but about fears that kept them awake late into sweltering Baghdad nights.
Freedom of speech and the press are hard-won rights we sometimes take for granted in the United States. If the American soldiers who are in Iraq to help bring about those freedoms for the Iraqi people cannot themselves be honest, the intent of this war is all but gone.
To the soldiers who spoke openly to me, I say, thank you. They made my stay with Georgia’s citizen soldiers all the more worthwhile.
Goodbye, 48th Brigade. Stay safe.
Pirated movies come with their own surprises
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq - Headless characters. Random heads. Glowing red “Exit” signs. Crunching popcorn. Chatter. And always “Shhhhh!”
Georgia National Guard soldiers never know what they are going to get when they buy pirated movies in Iraq. Some of the DVDs are high quality. Others are so poorly done they are hilarious to watch.
Louie Favorite/AJC
These pirated movie DVDs are for sale at a bazaar at Camp Striker.
For example, in the opening scenes of the comedy “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” a shadow starts to grow on the white shirt of one of the characters.
After a few seconds, it becomes clear that someone’s head got in the way of the film pirate’s hand-held video recorder. Later in the movie, a man wearing eyeglasses walks down the center aisle of the theater and pauses as if he is looking for a seat, blocking almost the entire frame.
Some of the most obvious bloopers are in a copy of “The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement.” The opening credits are cut in half and so are the characters. There is a headless woman in the opening sequence.
“She had a short stay as princess. Her head got cut off part way through the film,” a soldier joked about his copy, a curiosity that has made the rounds among soldiers in his tent.
The pirate for that film must have been sitting too close to the screen or zooming in too close with his camera. Soldiers say they can hear people talking and eating popcorn in other copies.
One soldier at Forward Operating Base Marez in northern Iraq said he saw a DVD where the recorder left his camera on while he took a break and went to the men’s room.
Across Iraq, soldiers buy the movies by the dozens and watch them for entertainment between their high-stress missions. Local vendors here sell them for as little as $3 a disc. Haggling, however, is acceptable. No one seems worried about intellectual property rights.
Salesmen will jam as many as six movies on one DVD without following a particular theme. On one disc, for example, “The Prince Diaries 2,” was inexplicably combined with “Alien vs. Predator,” a horror-action movie.
There is a bonus to all this for the soldiers. They get new movies weeks before they are released in stores back in the United States.
But there is a challenge. The soldiers must have the patience to watch movies like “The Dukes of Hazzard” - with all the pirating defects - all the way to the end.
Soldiers’ diplomacy kid-friendly
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
AJC photographer Louie Favorite recently visited a school.
LOUIE FAVORITE / AJC
Iraqi children wear new book bags given them to by members of the 48th and the Iraqi army. Winning the hearts and minds of children is a key to success, a 48th major said. MORE PHOTOS
Return today for a new blog item from reporter Jeremy Redmon.
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‘Operation Boiled Peanut’ shells out taste of home
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq - All that Spc. Clark Rountree wanted was a bag of boiled peanuts from home.
Rountree got his wish, and then some.
More than two tons of the Georgia delicacy arrived in Baghdad this week for the soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team.
Louie Favorite/AJC
MSgt Daniel Fischer, Hinesville, Staff Sgt Terrence Williams, Milledgeville, and Sgt. Charles Morris, Thomaston, go for the gusto.
“It’s a little taste of home,” Rountree said.
The soldier with Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment called his mom, Patricia Anderson, in Owensboro back in August and told her he and his homesick buddies had a hankering for some good old-fashioned boiled peanuts. She immediately sent her son a personal stash.
“They were all gone like that,” Rountree said. “Everyone wanted them.”
So Anderson contacted Rex Bulloch, a peanut farmer in Wilcox County for 35 years. Rountree had worked on Bulloch’s farm before reporting for duty at Fort Stewart in January.
The Georgia 4-H Club got involved and launched “Operation Boiled Peanut.” The mission came to a successful - and happy - end this week. Soldiers started distributing the nuts from four blue crates Tuesday.
“I am thrilled,” Anderson said, “and flabbergasted that a small request could turn out like this.”
The heat is off (sort of)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq – Want to know what the weather is like in Baghdad?
Louie Favorite/AJC
The temperature was this high at 6 p.m. on an evening a couple weeks ago.
Turn on a hair dryer and point it at your face all day.
Since June, the average temperature has been 110 degrees. Today, it dropped to a cool 96 degrees. It was almost tolerable.
That’s the first time the temperature has dropped below 100 degrees since the 48th Brigade Combat Team got here.
Atlanta’s famous heat has nothing on Iraq.
Wounded in Iraq: Survivors face a painful and lonely road to recovery
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
White dots glow like stars across Sgt. Jim Kirchner’s chest X-ray. Each is a piece of shrapnel he carried home from Iraq. Kirchner has counted 28 throughout his body.
CURTIS COMPTON / AJC Army National Guard Sgt. Jim Kirchner of Paulding County still feels pain in his arm and shoulder from the mortar attack that nearly killed him June 12 in Iraq.
One is working its way out his left arm near a tattoo of a purple hooded Grim Reaper. Others, such as the pair close to his heart, aren’t going anywhere. Doctors told him it would be too risky to pull them out.
The Georgia Army National Guard soldier carries his X-ray images around on a compact disc. He shows them off to friends and gripes about getting hassled at airport metal detectors.
“I’m going to print some of them off to give to my son to do connect-the-dots,” said the father of four from Paulding County.
His sense of humor helps him cope. But he still hurts, sometimes intensely. An insurgent mortar attack on June 12 essentially ended his 18-year military career.
Kirchner’s unit, the 48th Brigade Combat Team, has drawn considerable attention in recent months for the combat deaths it has suffered. Since the brigade arrived in Iraq in early June, 18 members have died, 14 in insurgent bomb attacks. But more than 100 others have been wounded, some severely. And they rarely attract the same attention as those who have died.
CURTIS COMPTON / AJC Kirchner and his wife, Cynthia, had been married only one day when he received orders to Iraq.
Since the start of the war in Iraq, more than 14,500 American service members have been wounded, including nearly 7,000 whose injuries prevented them from returning to duty for at least 72 hours. Many of the more seriously wounded probably would have died in earlier wars but were saved by advanced medical procedures and quicker evacuation to field hospitals.
Federal privacy laws prohibit the military from identifying the wounded and the extent of their injuries without their consent, said Jim Driscoll, a spokesman for the Georgia National Guard. But 17 soldiers from the 48th, including Kirchner, have suffered “serious” or “very serious” injuries, Driscoll said. The group includes two amputees, a soldier with serious burns and others with shrapnel and gunshot wounds.
All have returned to the United States, although some are still recuperating in hospitals.
As of Sept. 13, 31 soldiers from the 48th had received Purple Hearts. Kirchner has not received his medal yet, although his unit nominated him for it.
The 48th also has counted 106 “non-serious” injuries, including concussions, broken bones and minor shrapnel wounds. Most of those soldiers were treated and returned to duty. Five were evacuated from the Middle East and remain in U.S. hospitals.
For those recuperating from their wounds, especially those with serious injuries, the struggle can be difficult, lonely and painful, as Kirchner has discovered.
Kirchner, 37, said the Army will retire him after his medical care is complete. He plans to return to his civilian job as a product specialist for a software company. That will be a challenge, however, because the job requires typing.
After five surgeries, parts of his neck, right arm and right hand remain paralyzed. His medical records say he can no longer carry a weapon or even salute. The doctors limit him to carrying no more than 5 pounds. He walks, but gingerly.
“I can’t give my kids a big hug. That sucks,” Kirchner said in a measured tone. “I’ll never play catch with my sons. I’ll never be able to teach my son to throw a baseball. That kind of stuff hurts me emotionally.”
Kirchner remembers many details about the mortar attack. It was his third day at Forward Operating Base Michael, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. He had just finished night guard duty.
He took off his body armor and helmet and lay in his cot half asleep. Some time that morning, a mortar round exploded just outside his tent, spraying his back, shoulders, right arm and head with shrapnel. The deafening blast threw him to the floor.
He glanced around and tried unsuccessfully to raise himself off the floor. He was injured too badly. He remembers seeing sunlight pouring through holes in the tent wall and thinking, “All of that is inside you.” His blood pooled beneath him on the plywood floor.
“My back was shredded. My arm was just bleeding like a pig. I was screaming, ‘I’m hit! I’m hit! Medic! Medic!’ “
Staff Sgt. Joe Wilson was also in the tent during the attack. He and other soldiers from the 1st Battalion of the 108th Armor Regiment rushed to Kirchner’s aid.
“I couldn’t hear anything because my ears had been blasted,” Wilson, of Canton, said in a telephone interview from Iraq. “I had temporary hearing loss. The tent was full of smoke and dust. Of course Jim was screaming in pain and bleeding. And I reached for my vest to throw over him to protect him from what else was going to happen.”
Wilson joined Kirchner in yelling for medics. Help arrived in less than a minute.
At least three or four more mortar rounds exploded that morning, Kirchner said, seriously wounding two other soldiers and a civilian contract worker.
He said he nearly bled to death in the moments after the blast. His left lung collapsed. The explosion damaged his liver, pancreas and a kidney. Doctors cut him open to repair his damaged organs. A nearly foot-long red scar stretches up his belly and around his belly-button.
When Kirchner was returned to the United States for treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, his wife, Cynthia, stayed by his bedside. She put her hands on his wounded body and prayed with an open Bible beside her.
“It is a miracle he survived,” she said. “It is a true blessing.”
The couple were married last Nov. 7, the day before he learned he would be going to Iraq.
Despite her constant presence, the nightmares started at Walter Reed. Kirchner screamed for medics in his sleep. Doctors diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental condition in which people relive combat experiences.
“I couldn’t hide it at all,” he said. “I was basically reliving getting blown up.”
When he was finally able to go on convalescent leave from the hospital, Kirchner and his wife went to dinner at a local TGI Friday’s. There, he admitted something to her: He wanted to be back in Iraq with his unit.
“It broke me,” Cynthia Kirchner said. “I cried all through dinner.”
She didn’t fully understand her husband’s bond with the other soldiers until last month, she said, when she saw him grieve for three who had died in a vehicle accident in Iraq.
The couple recently talked about his long recovery, sitting across from each other at the Georgia Army National Guard armory in Douglasville. Kirchner brightened when she arrived and grinned as they talked. She was picking him up from his first day back at work. He didn’t want to drive, because he was taking powerful painkillers. Kirchner spent that first day at work dealing with his medical paperwork and answering phones. The armory felt lonely. At times, he was the only one in the nondescript brick building. With the soldiers away, parts of the facility remain dark and empty.
But Kirchner has something to focus on. He is in charge of a big renovation of the decades-old armory. On his list: new flooring and paint and a good pressure washing.
He plans to get inmates from the local jail to do the work. He won’t let them cut corners. He wants the place to look nice for when his buddies return. He misses the soldiers, the ones he trained with, the ones who saved his life.
‘Buffalo Bill’ digs out bombs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mahmudiyah, Iraq — The bomb blew the Humvee and four soldiers inside it off the ground, shredding the hood and mangling the engine until it was an unrecognizable hunk of black metal.
Second Lt. Homer J. Wright III bit off a chunk of his tongue when he rocketed out of his seat and smashed his head on the roof. Blood oozed from his mouth and chin.
As black smoke and the smell of burning oil filled the vehicle, the Georgia Army National Guard soldier wondered, “Is this the end?” The Humvee was rolling off the road, toward a canal filled with deep, greenish water.
LOUIE FAVORITE / AJC One of the Humvees escorting the Buffalo was hit by an IED. MORE PHOTOS
The driver, Pfc. Jason Hall of Valdosta, was knocked out. The blast slammed him against the steering wheel. He hit the wheel so hard he bent it toward the dashboard.
Hall regained consciousness within moments and slammed his foot on the brakes. They weren’t working. But the vehicle came to a rest on its own, dangerously close to the water.
Wright, Hall and two other combat engineers with the 48th Brigade Combat Team in the Humvee were searching for improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, when one found them. It’s not uncommon for that to happen.
Some members of the 648th Engineer Battalion have survived as many as four or five explosions. Bombs have destroyed 24 of the unit’s vehicles.
One of the key missions is to find these bombs before they kill more members of the 48th. Since the brigade arrived in Iraq in early June, 14 have been killed in bomb attacks. That includes three 648th soldiers killed by a car bomb attack in August.
Rumors have spread through the battalion that insurgents put a price on the engineers’ heads as high as $100,000.
“They are out to get us,” said Wright, 38, who lives in Hazlehurst and works at a fabrics manufacturing company.
Wright’s Charlie Company alone has found more than 50 IEDs. When they got hit Saturday morning, the soldiers were riding in a convoy in mostly rural areas near Mahmudiyah and Yusufiyah, towns south of Baghdad.
Bombed-out buildings, scarecrows and piles of trash and rusting scrap metal dot the landscape. Bullet shell casings litter the roads. A pack of wild dogs loped by.
As the soldiers entered Yusufiyah, a flock of pigeons took flight. Insurgents sometimes use the birds to signal that U.S. soldiers are coming, said Spc. Jason Troupe. The insurgents bury their bombs in the sides of the streets, in storm water pipes that run under the roads, in piles of trash and in the carcasses of dead animals. Their weapons: leftover artillery shells, gas canisters, propane tanks, rocket fuel. They even set up fake bombs just to observe how the engineers try to disable them.
“It’s kind of like a chess game,” said Troupe, 31, of Douglas, a police officer in civilian life.
Troupe and two other soldiers in Wright’s convoy rode in one of the battalion’s bomb-detecting vehicles, called a Buffalo. The engineers nicknamed the heavily armored vehicle “Buffalo Bill.” Others go by “Grave Digger” and “Fat Bottom Girl.” Buffalos are equipped with a remote-controlled arm with a forklike device on the end of it. Soldiers use the powerful arm to dig through dirt and lift up trash in search of bombs.
An eye for detail
As they drove into the countryside, Troupe motioned to the side of the road, showing where his unit had found a large bomb in a refrigerator. A building nearby was riddled with bullet holes.
“Somebody has had a bad afternoon,” he said.
Farther down the road, Spc. Johnnie Perkins spotted something that didn’t look right in the shoulder. It was a mound of dirt where the engineers had previously found an IED. The soil around the site looked loose and disturbed.
Perkins and other sharp-eyed engineers have learned to look for things out of place. Sometimes they look too perfect, like a smooth layer of sand on a busy road covered with tank tracks.
Perkins drove closer and spotted two purple wires sticking out of the dirt. Troupe handed him the yellow control box for the Buffalo arm. Perkins dug into the soil until he unearthed a 155 mm cannon shell.
“Good job,” Troupe said.
Perkins flashed him the thumbs-up sign.
The soldiers continued on, sweeping the area for more bombs. Then it happened.
From inside the Buffalo, the explosion sounded muffled. But the shockwave vibrated the bottom of the vehicle. About 100 meters ahead, the blast tore through Wright’s Humvee, the second vehicle in the convoy.
A black crater measuring more than 4 feet deep and 6 feet across yawned in front of the Buffalo. Inside sat a piece of the Humvee’s hood. A radiator lay on its side by thick chunks of asphalt. Much of the Humvee’s front half was gone. The vehicle was totaled. The soldiers could have been inches from death.
They didn’t find the triggerman, but the engineers found the receiver and timer for the remote-controlled bomb beside the road. The blue and silver receiver box was labeled in English: “Super Long Range Cordless Telephone.” The bomb had been stuffed in a storm water pipe beneath the road. It probably consisted of three 155 mm artillery shells stacked together, the soldiers said.
Dazed by the blast, Wright climbed out of the Humvee and took cover in the Buffalo.
He held up the receiver and timer. “God has been with us.”
Still pumped with adrenaline, talking fast about his near-death experience, Wright suddenly calmed. Tears welled in his eyes as he cradled his head in his hands. He was thinking about his two young sons back home.
“I love my boys,” he said. “I would do anything for my boys.”
He waved his arm, as if he was trying to wave off his emotions. He insisted he was fine.
A surprise visit from the General
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq - The soldier just sat down to read the newspaper and watch television when a visitor surprised him at the recreation center Sunday.
Louie Favorite/AJC
Maj. Gen. David Poythress, commander of the Georgia National Guard, shakes hands with Spc. Sharon Williams, a hotel controller from Brunswick, while visiting soldiers of the 48th Brigade Combat Team. In the background are Sgt. Franklin Wright of Eatonton and Spc. Lisa Evans, a student from Griffin.
It was Maj. Gen. David B. Poythress, the head of Georgia’s National Guard.
“You guys are doing good work. I appreciate,” Poythress told Sgt. Marvin Paige. “You have had some tough hits.”
Paige is a member of the Valdosta-based 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment. He said his Alpha Company platoon has lost eight soldiers so far.
“Every one of them were good guys. I miss them,” said Paige, 39, who works at an ammunition can manufacturing plant in Homerville.
Poythress flew to Iraq to check on the soldiers’ morale and living conditions. The troops have been federalized, so they no longer fall under his command as adjutant general. But he wanted to come just to make sure they are OK.
Poythress toured the base, shook hands with soldiers at lunch and attended several briefings with officers. He plans to travel to the 48th Brigade Combat Team’s other bases in the area in the next few days.
The troops appear to have sufficient food, water and ways to communicate with their families back home, said Poythress, a former Georgia secretary of state and labor commissioner.
“They are kind of spartan and you expect them to be,” Poythress said of the facilities. “But they are certainly adequate.”
After Poythress left, Paige remarked how surprised he was to see the two-star general at his base. Insurgents have attacked soldiers in the area with mortars and rockets.
“It’s always good to see leadership come out to an area like this,” he said, “because, even here, it is dangerous.”
Guardsmen help fellow soldiers from Louisiana
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Taji, Iraq — When Capt. Kevin Hamm heard Army National Guard soldiers from Louisiana talk about seeing their houses under water after Hurricane Katrina, he felt compelled to help.
The Louisiana soldiers had spent a stressful year in Iraq and were returning home, not to a heroes’ welcome, but to a tragedy of enormous proportions.
Hamm, Staff Sgt. Amos Edwards and Spc. Ryan Copeland of the 48th Brigade Combat Team’s 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment began taking up a collection that would help fellow field artillerymen from New Orleans.
“The command sergeant major of 1-141 Field Artillery Regiment told us that three of his soldiers had seen their houses underwater on TV in the news coverage of Katrina aftermath,� Hamm said. “Later we were told that about one hundred soldiers have been affected by the hurricane.�
Hamm, a pharmaceutical sales manager from Middleburg, Fla., said the 118th soldiers raised roughly $2,600 that will be sent to a charitable fund to help needy soldiers.
The Louisianans’ plight tugged at the heartstrings of Georgians at Camp Striker, too. At first, 48th brigade soldiers thought about sending non-perishable food items they had received from families and friends, but that proved to be logistically difficult.
Instead, Georgia’s citizen soldiers raised $1,600 to send to the American Red Cross.
“It’s a drop in the bucket, I know,� Command Sgt. Major James Nelson. “But we couldn’t do anything else from here.�
The week that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, several units from the Louisiana Guard’s 256th Brigade Combat Team were stationed at Camp Striker on their way home. Georgia soldiers watched the devastation with them on television sets in the dining hall and recreation facilities.
Many said they wished they could be back home to help with hurricane relief effort, as they did after a series of hurricanes that hit Florida last year.
“What brought it home for us was the 256th coming through here,� Nelson said, adding that raising money “was the humanitarian thing to do.�
Getting ‘em into Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ali Al Salem Air Base, Kuwait — The big man’s voice is booming, so all eyes turn toward him.
It’s Joe Reilly, a 6-foot-3, barrel-chested man from Valdosta with a shock of gray-white hair.
Jeremy Redmon/AJC
Joe Reilly is a retired Air Force master sergeant.
He is commanding soldiers, State Department workers, contractors and journalists to step away from their luggage so a dog can sniff it for trouble. A cargo plane is waiting for them in the early morning darkness.
Reilly is the last man many people see before they enter Iraq these days. He helps arrange their flights for Kellogg Brown & Root, a large U.S. military contractor operating all over the war-torn country.
“We want to welcome you to Chrome 28,” he ceremoniously told a recent group of passengers, identifying the call sign for their flight.
Reilly barks out his instructions beside a large, graffiti-scarred wooden table. His desert combat boots scrape through the gray gravel dotted with dozens of cigarette butts, some his. He speaks to his passengers in the same commanding tone, no matter if they are enlisted soldiers or officers, low-rung government workers or high-ranking diplomats. He is trying to keep things running smoothly. No time for pleasantries.
Reilly didn’t start out with this job. He drove trucks for KBR after the U.S. invasion, carrying food and supplies from Kuwait to Baghdad. He swears he won’t do it again.
At first, the Iraqis welcomed the truck drivers, he said. Then some months passed and they started throwing rocks at them, cutting their fuel lines and stealing their gas caps. KBR has had 77 workers killed in Iraq, he said, including seven who were ambushed in a convoy. He went home to Georgia in May of last year.
“I had enough,” said Reilly, 48, a retired Air Force master sergeant, who is married with two grown children.
A buddy lured Reilly back with a new job as an air cargo specialist for KBR. He freely admits he is in the Middle East for the “fantastic” pay, not for any grand ideas of helping Iraqis. He does just about everything as part of his job: draw up passengers lists, pack luggage on pallets and hand out earplugs.
And as far as Iraq is concerned, he doesn’t plan to go back. Ever.
“I promised my family I wouldn’t,” he said. “I’m not going to put that on them and make them worry. I did my time.”
And with that, Reilly goes back to work. He has passengers waiting for the gut-churning flight into Iraq. They want to go where he doesn’t. They haven’t had enough yet.
Election security concerns cut number of leaves
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq — Some soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team won’t be going home on leave as planned.
Two-week leaves scheduled for October were cut back because of heightened security concerns surrounding the Oct. 15 referendum on the new Iraqi constitution, brigade officials said Wednesday.
Normally, every unit permits leaves for up to 12 percent of its total soldier strength, said Command Sgt. Major James Nelson. In October, he said, that number has been reduced to 6 percent.
Some soldiers who planned leaves in October were asked to draw names lottery-style to determine who would stay and who would go. Other soldiers, said Nelson, voluntarily gave up their slots for those who had specific reasons for going home such as childbirths, birthdays and weddings.
Overall, Nelson said the leave reassignments worked out well, although a few soldiers were disappointed. Soldiers who had their leaves canceled were upsetbut declined to comment on the record.
U.S. military officials have expressed concern of intensified insurgent activity as the upcoming referendum nears. A continued wave of violence has killed roughly 300 people in the last week.
Low on ordnance, high in spirits
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Photos by Jeremy RedmonCmdr. Roxanne Tweedy
Camp Arifjan, Kuwait — They may not be afraid of insurgents’ gunshots and exploding bombs. But some wounded soldiers sure are scared of needles.
They faint at the sight of needles at the U.S. Emergency Medical Facility Dallas at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. Others pass out when pricked.
Navy Commander Roxanne Tweedy knows the soldiers are on edge, so she jokes around with them.
For example, the nurse hung an eye-magnet of a photo in front of the patients’ beds. The picture shows a rifle-wielding soldier tied to the wing of a jet plane. The caption says: “military cutbacks.”
Then there is the Tweety Bird cartoon decal stuck on her left index finger. She threatens to flip patients the bird if they don’t behave.
“Military cutbacks”
“They are scared enough to begin with,” said Tweedy, of Tallahassee, Fla. “They would rather be in Iraq.”
Tweedy said she is simply trying to bring a “little sunshine” into their wounded lives.
Booze wrapped in body armor
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Arifjan, Kuwait — Don’t even try to bring alcohol into Kuwait.
It’s on the U.S. military’s list of “don’ts in Kuwait.â€? In official talk, it’s called “General Order Number 1A.” And soldiers must abide by it.
Booze is not the only thing banned. Also on the list: privately owned firearms, pornography, gambling, pets and promoting any religions.
The Army says it wants to be sensitive to “countries where laws and customs prohibit or restrict certain activities which are generally permissible in western societies.”
Jerry Williamson a documentary film maker from Redlands, Calif., learned the hard way recently at the Kuwait International Airport.
He had a bottle of scotch with him. It was a gift for a soldier.
Airport agents X-rayed his bags after he and a colleague got off the plane. They didn’t seem interested in their cameras, wires and tripods. And they weren’t concerned about Williamson’s body armor. But they wanted what was wrapped inside it.
Williams said the agent scowled at him as he confiscated the bottle.
“That was the only thing they were interested in,” Williamson said. “They went right after that bottle. It was good Scotch, too. Glenfiddich. Twelve years old.”
Of course, Williamson scoffed, the agent probably drank it on his way home.
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Captain wants to ease her sight plight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Taji, Iraq — More than a month ago, Capt. Alan Hicks promised a young girl in a central Iraqi village that he would help her regain sight in her right eye. He had told her mother he would never forget her daughter’s plight.
Sara Hussein damaged the eye three years ago when playing ball with her brother. Hicks, an Army reservist from Birmingham, Ala., told Sara’s family he would seek medical treatment so that Sara, 12, could see again.
He made good on his promise, but it wasn’t enough.
Sara was taken to the head of ophthalmology at a Baghdad hospital a few weeks ago. The prognosis, however, was not what Hicks wanted to hear.
The ophthalmologist told Hicks that all he could do was remove the bad eye and replace it with a prosthetic one.
“It’s not looking good,� said Hicks, who serves with Alpha Company of the 490th Civil Affairs Battalion.
Hicks’ soldiers routinely check up on residents who live in villages along the Tigris River 20 miles north of Baghdad. The Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Team Combat Team provides security for those missions.
But Hicks, who works for the Alabama Organ Center back home, hasn’t given up yet. Sara can see light with her bad eye, but she can no longer focus on anything.
“In the U.S., there might be a way to save her eye,� he said. “There’s probably a couple of places that could treat her. We are going to try to get her over there.�
48th will range widely in new Iraq security role
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq — The 48th Brigade Combat Team’s new mission in Iraq will involve providing security for major highways and bases throughout the country, brigade officials said Wednesday.
Instead of patrolling and securing specific areas of Iraq, the 4,500 soldiers in the Georgia Army National Guard unit will be splintered among several camps and will focus more on security than on combat missions.
“This is a totally separate and different mission,” said Lt. Col. Mark London, the brigade’s operations officer. “This is a theater security mission.”
London said one of the 48th’s four combat battalions would be dedicated solely to convoy security.
Another will be posted at a base north of Baghdad to provide base security, while a third will go to Tallil Air Base in southern Iraq as a security force for that facility.
The fourth combat battalion will head west near the Syrian border to work with multinational coalition forces. That battalion will be the only one responsible for controlling a specific piece of terrain.
London declined to say which battalions would be assigned to which areas for operational security reasons.
But it is believed that the 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment, out of Springfield, will be moving to Camp Anaconda near Balad, north of Baghdad. The battalion currently is stationed at Camp Taji, in the same vicinity.
“It’s not like we are being pulled out of combat into a noncombat role,” London said. “We have convoys hit every day by IEDs [improvised explosive devices], or they get ambushed.”
The brigade headquarters will be located at Tallil, but there will be a forward command post located north of Baghdad.
The 48th is picking up duties from the 56th Brigade Combat Team from Texas, which is due to return to the United States at the end of the year. The 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, based at Fort Campbell, Ky., is scheduled to take over control of the southwest Baghdad area from the 48th.
Since its arrival in Iraq in early June for a yearlong tour, the 48th has been responsible for a large area south and west of Baghdad International Airport. Some of this area stretches into what is known as the Triangle of Death because of the anti-American insurgency, fueled largely by the predominantly Sunni Muslim population.
The brigade has been engaged in missions to snuff out insurgent activity and promote reconstruction and civil affairs projects. Much of that activity will stop when it shifts gears.
Brigade Command Sgt. Major James Nelson said officers were doing all they could to keep platoons together when the 48th is dispersed.
“We try to keep teams together whenever possible,” he said.
But the prospect of being separated from platoon mates or battle buddies concerned some soldiers at Camp Striker as details of the big move began trickling down into the tents.
“Separating us now is like taking away our backbone,” said Sgt. Rufus Veal of the Dublin-based Alpha Company of the 148th Support Battalion. “We’re like family. We need each other.”
Soldiers from the brigade’s support units will be sent wherever they are needed to supply the four combat battalions, London said. That means that companies of the 148th Support Battalion might be split up after having trained and deployed together for 10 months.
London said the 48th’s move was part of the military’s plan to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.
“As we stand up Iraqi units and as their numbers go up, ours go down,” London said. “As Iraqi security forces increase, they have to restructure the battle space. And as [U.S.] units move out, they have to restructure other units to cover them.”
Another National Guard unit that was providing convoy and base security — the 29th Brigade Combat Team from Hawaii — also is scheduled to leave Iraq by December or January.
Both the 56th BCT and the 29th BCT are conducting “critical security missions” that the 48th soldiers will assume in the weeks ahead.
No timetable has been given for the moves, but in an earlier interview Brig. Gen. Stewart Rodeheaver, commander of the 48th, said they were likely to happen in the next two months.
There are about 17 U.S. combat brigades in Iraq and a total of about 135,000 soldiers. Senior military officials recently told The Washington Post that a reduction of American forces was possible after the Iraqi national elections in December, depending on the training of Iraqi soldiers and the intensity of violence in the country.
London said 48th officials expected their role change because the Georgia soldiers came into Iraq under an off-cycle rotation. The brigade entered Iraq almost six months after the 3rd Infantry Division, to which it is now attached, and had planned for a new mission to begin as the Fort Stewart-based unit began returning home in December.
“We came in five to six months after the 3rd ID,” London said. “That’s why we got caught between two missions.”
London acknowledged the 48th would be widely scattered but said retaining command of such a large unit should not be a problem because of current technological advances in communications.
“It will obviously be more difficult,” he said. “But really, it’s no different than us talking to the 108th in Mahmudiyah.”
Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 108th Armor Regiment, have been based in three forward operating bases located in Mahmudiyah, Lutafiyah and Yusufiyah, near the Euphrates River south of Baghdad.
In Love and War: Military life tests couples serving in Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq — Peggy and Tim Fair have been married five years. But, at the moment, she lives two dirt lanes away from her husband and, except for a few meals together, the Glennville couple doesn’t have any private time.
Not that their marriage is falling apart, though. Their relationship couldn’t be stronger.
Moni Basu/AJC
Sgt. Peggy Fair and Sgt. 1st Class Tim Fair are stationed in Iraq.
But the Fairs are soldiers in the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team in Iraq. They deployed together to the Middle East in mid-May. Since then, intimacy has not been a word in their vocabulary.
Like the brigade’s other married couples, Sgt. Peggy Fair, 51, and Sgt. 1st Class Tim Fair, 41, sleep in separate tents and must get permission to visit each other’s living quarters. If they want to spend time together, it has to be in a public place — no display of affection allowed.
“I hate it,” said Tim Fair, leader of an engineer platoon in Bravo Company, 148th Support Battalion.
The Department of Defense estimates that 84,000 couples serve in the military. Because the 48th Brigade is a National Guard unit, a higher number of husband-wife teams are serving together in the Iraq war, although the exact figures could not be obtained.
The Army has specific orders regarding conduct for soldiers deployed in Iraq. Alcohol and pornographic material, for instance, are strictly prohibited. The policy for cohabitation, however, differs from unit to unit.
The Fort Stewart-based 3rd Infantry Division, under whose control the 48th Brigade operates in Iraq, does not permit visitation or cohabitation between men and women but makes an exception for married couples if they request it, said 48th Brigade Command Sgt. Maj. James Nelson Jr.
He said the brigade policy falls in line with the 3rd Infantry Division’s, but that under current circumstances at Camp Striker, cohabitation is not possible.
“There was nowhere for us to accommodate them in the tents,” Nelson said. “We looked when we first got here but we could not find any situation where married couples could live with any privacy or dignity.”
Initially, 48th leaders thought the brigade would be stationed at nearby Camp Liberty, where soldiers are housed in two-person trailers. Married soldiers had been told then that they would likely be able to share housing.
But when Georgia’s citizen soldiers found themselves at Camp Striker, a transitional tent city on the southwest corner of the Baghdad airport, married couples were separated and placed in 16-person male or female tents.
Striker has a few two-person tents, but those are generally reserved for higher-ranking officers.
No time for honeymoon
Monica and Bernard Fluellen were married last Nov. 12 at the Gwinnett County Courthouse. Before they could even think of a honeymoon, they learned they were deploying to Iraq.
They locked up their house in Lawrenceville and put their desires to start a family on the back burner.
“I do feel like I’ve had to put my personal life on hold,” said 2nd Lt. Monica Fluellen, 32, of the 148th Support Battalion’s Alpha Company.
But the Fluellens said they are glad to at least have one another around. They eat lunch and dinner together and go to basketball games and other social events at Camp Striker.
“It would have been a lot harder to deal with all the stress without him,” said Monica Fluellen, a researcher with Southern States Energy Board in Norcross. “It’s like having your best friend here.”
Her husband agreed.
“It’s cool,” said Sgt. Bernard Fluellen, a full-time technician for the Guard who serves in the 248th Military Intelligence Company. “I get to be with my wife while we’re here. I can see her every day.
“It’s a combat situation,” he continued. “I don’t think they should let husbands and wives get too comfortable.”
The armed forces prohibit fraternization between soldiers of the opposite sex to retain discipline and cohesion.
Moni Basu/AJC
Sgt. Tracy Chisholm and Spc. Zachary Chisholm.
“The military policy was born out of attempts to establish control and to deter sexual assaults,” Nelson said.
He admitted, however, that separating husbands and wives could be a morale buster.
“We’re only human,” Nelson said. “It would have to affect them in some way.”
The Fluellens said they would rather have their spouses here than worry about them from afar. But the lack of privacy is wearing.
‘A touchy subject’
“We’ve had to find other ways of communicating with each other,” said Sgt. Tracy Chisholm, 30, who celebrated her first wedding anniversary Sept. 14 with husband Spc. Zachary Chisholm, 31. “We’ve had to find new ways of showing affection. You can’t hold hands. You can’t do anything here.”
The Chisholms are in Bravo Company, 148th Support Battalion, and met while drilling in Hinesville. She manages a Dunwoody branch of Bank of America. He’s an airbrush artist.
“We like to say we honeymooned in Iraq,” joked Tracy.
“Spouses back home in Georgia don’t really see our point,” she said.
“We don’t get any extra compensation, no separation pay. But we’re really not together.”
Added her husband: “It’s a touchy subject, but it’s an issue that needs to be addressed.”
First Lt. Paul Douglas, chaplain for the 148th Support Battalion, said there are no easy answers for married couples in Iraq, but he had not heard of any relationships ending.
For the Fairs, the stress is old hat. The couple deployed to Bosnia together a few years ago, where living conditions were considerably better.
Peggy Fair would rather be home in Glennville, going to work at the maintenance facility at Fort Stewart and enjoying evenings with her husband.
“Yeah, it would be nice to be able to spend time together,” she said. “But under the circumstances, I understand.”
Foreign-born GIs join fight in Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Taji, Iraq — After Pfc. Diego Rincon of Conyers died in Iraq in March 2003, he received a special honor at his funeral. An immigration officer was there to present the fallen soldier from Colombia a certificate of U.S. citizenship.
Photos by Bita HonarvarBulgaria native Spc. Svetlin Gueorguiev shares the dream of many foreign-born GIs — becoming a U.S. citizen.
More than 37,000 immigrants from 200 nations are serving in the U.S. military, according to the Department of Defense. At least 80 of them have died in Iraq, fighting for the country they call home, and been naturalized posthumously.
America’s immigrant soldiers remain unique in their individual identities but undeterred in their allegiance to their adopted homeland. They say they have the ultimate proof of their love of America: They are willing to die for the freedoms and opportunities the United States has afforded them.
Periodically, foreign-born soldiers from various nations hold up their right hands and take the oath of U.S. citizenship at ceremonies at al-Faw Palace at Camp Liberty near the Baghdad airport.
The Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team has several soldiers who dream of being there one day.
One is Spc. Svetlin Gueorguiev, a lanky, laid-back 23-year-old who stores letters from his grandmother, written in Bulgarian, in his footlocker. She writes to him frequently from his native Pleven, a small city in the east European nation.
Gueorguiev, who serves in the 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment, thinks about the life he had. His mother, Ivana, was an opera singer and a teacher.
Sgt. Frederick Kipkemboi, a native of Kenya, has lived in Massachusetts since age 14.
His family could not have foreseen that Gueorguiev would move to the United States with his mother and American stepfather and, at the age of 22, travel back across the Atlantic to a war zone in Iraq as a Bulgarian citizen wearing a U.S. Army uniform.
Gueorguiev, known as “Geo” to his fellow soldiers who can’t pronounce his name, admits his Bulgarian background and Bohemian inclinations — he’s an art major at Savannah’s Armstrong Atlantic State University — put him outside the Army stereotype.
But his resolve is as steely as the rest of the men in his battalion, many of whom were raised in patriotic small towns across Georgia.
“I believe in what I am doing,” said Gueorguiev, who spends his days on the gun line at Camp Taji. The 118th’s Alpha Battery has three Paladin 155 mm howitzers parked there, ready to counter incoming insurgent fire.
“As I see it, he is one of us,” said Pfc. Matthew Simmons, a platoon mate. “He is fighting for something he lives in right now.”
When Gueorguiev finally does make it to the citizenship ceremony, he will have to swear to bear arms for the United States of America when necessary.
As far as Army officials are concerned, Georgia’s immigrant soldiers have already proved their mettle with their military service.
Brothers Dmitri (left) and Pavel Rybakov are Russians who moved to Dexter, Ga., when their mother married an American.
“I believe that speaks volumes for their commitment to the ideals of freedom and democracy,” said Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman.
Since the American Revolution, the nation has relied on foreign-born troops to help wage war, according to the Immigration Policy Center.
About 500,000 non-citizens fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. Nearly 175,000 soldiers in World War I, World War II and the Korean War were immigrants who were naturalized.
Filling gaps in the ranks
Dwindling recruitment numbers have made immigrants even more important in keeping the ranks filled for the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2002, President Bush signed an executive order — partly to boost recruitment — allowing non-citizens on active duty starting Sept. 21, 2001, to apply for citizenship with no further residency requirements.
That means any legal resident who joins the military can immediately petition for citizenship rather than wait the normal five years required for civilians to begin the process. Bush also waived petitioning and fingerprinting fees for service members.
Immigrant soldiers in the 48th Brigade said they enlisted mostly to learn new skills, to pay for their higher education and to expedite their U.S. citizenship.
“The Army has been good to me,” said Frederick Kipkemboi, 24, who was born in Eldama Ravine, Kenya, and emigrated to Massachusetts when he was 14.
“My life is so different now,” said Kipkemboi, a mechanic in Bravo Company, 148th Support Battalion. “In Kenya, I never even played sports in school. Then I went to another country and joined the Army. My friends back home would be shocked.”
Spc. Miguel Alves, 32, an infantryman in a Rhode Island unit attached to the 118th, left his native Lisbon, Portugal, in 1992 when his family moved to America to seek a better life.
At 25, he found himself floundering, and he enlisted in the Army to get his life back on track.
He is hoping his deployment to Iraq will help him acquire citizenship. He has tried before, even showing up at the Immigration and Naturalization Office in Providence in his Army uniform.
But two previous attempts ended nowhere; one of them was vetoed because of a DUI charge, he said.
Alves said he has paid his dues to America and deserves to become a citizen.
Spc. Miguel Alves wants U.S. citizenship.
“We are putting our lives on the line for the United States,” he said. “We deserve a break.”
Dmitri and Pavel Rybakov are hoping that break will come soon.
The two Russian brothers, who restarted their lives when their mother married an American and moved to Dexter, would have faced mandatory conscription in the country they left behind.
Brotherhood of brothers
In their new homeland, they volunteered for military service. They are both gunners on Bradley fighting vehicles in the 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment.
On a blistering afternoon, Dmitri, 21, got into the gunner’s seat, ready to go out on another security patrol in southwest Baghdad.
At the last minute, he yelled to his brother in Russian. He had forgotten his Kevlar helmet and wanted to borrow Pavel’s.
The brothers often communicate with each other in their native tongue.
“English is still a foreign language for us,” said Pavel, 26, the quieter of the two. “It takes a split second more to understand.”
They are glad they have each other in the war zone.
When the brothers joined the Army, they didn’t give much thought to the possibility of the United States going to war with countries of the former Soviet Union, once its staunchest Cold War foe.
“In all honesty, I wouldn’t want to go and start killing Russian people,” Dmitri said, even though neither brother thinks of himself as a Russian citizen anymore.
“I believe the Army has policies where in such a case, you can stay in the rear,” he said.
The Rybakovs said their family and friends in Russia are proud of their service, even though many Russians are opposed to U.S. involvement in Iraq.
Pavel said he had not expected to be fighting in Iraq. He initially opposed the U.S. invasion but said he will do his part because America has to follow through on what it started.
Sgt. 1st Class Louis Audain, a medic in Charlie Company, 148th Support Battalion, who was born in Trinidad, said nationality makes little difference in the Army.
In Iraq, he said, everyone is an American soldier first.
“We duck like the rest of them when things go boom,” he said.
No easy goodbyes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
No more goodbyes like this. Staff Sgt. Joseph Williams promises.
He is sitting in the E terminal of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport with his wife, Constance, waiting for his flight back to Iraq.
Joseph Williams shares a moment with his wife, Constance, before getting on a plane to return to duty in Iraq.
His leave has run out. He must get back to the 48th Brigade Combat Team’s base near the Baghdad International Airport.
All around the couple, other soldiers in desert camouflage uniforms are parting with their families. They are on their way to Iraq. The same scene is repeated throughout the afternoon and early evening.
Joseph has his arm draped around Constance. She is leaning in close to him. His flight is set to leave in about an hour. The painful moment is coming.
“There is no easy way,” he said.
This is his third time to Iraq. Since the couple married a year ago, the two have been apart more than they have been together. They didn’t even have time to enjoy their honeymoon before he was deployed.
Sunday was their first wedding anniversary. They celebrated with a big seafood feast in their backyard. King crab legs, shrimp, corn and potatoes. To top it, they polished off some leftover pineapple-filled wedding cake. Constance had been storing it in their freezer just for that special occasion.
Joseph says he will retire from the 648th Engineer Battalion after this deployment. On Sept. 30, he will have completed 25 years of military service.
“I’m going to get out and enjoy my wife and my kids,” said the father of three. He then turned to Constance. “The first thing we will do is have a honeymoon, an official honeymoon.”
The couple is thinking about a cruise, perhaps to Hawaii. Constance is looking forward to the day her husband is through with the military. She doesn’t like how the war has changed him.
“He can’t relax in public. He’s always at attention,” she said.
Joseph has good reason to be on guard. About a month ago, insurgents attacked the motor pool where he repairs Humvees at Camp Striker. He said a mortar round exploded about 20 meters from where he stood. Shrapnel drilled through the engines of some of the vehicles.
“There is something about crowds. I’d rather stand up against a wall. I don’t like a lot of people standing behind me,” said Joseph, who works as a welder for DeKalb County in his civilian life.
The only time Joseph really relaxes, Constance said, is when he is sitting in the backyard of their ranch house in Forest Park, in the shade of their oak trees, drinking a cold beer.
“No matter how hot it is, there is always some shade,” he said dreamily.
Joseph would rather stay home. He said the military could help more in the United States, in places like Louisiana, helping Hurricane Katrina victims.
But he won’t be able to return for good until his unit is through with its tour of Iraq some time next year.
Constance rattles off the special events he will miss with his family: their daughter’s 16th birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Joseph’s 44th birthday, and Valentine’s Day.
For their goodbye, Constance is wearing a special lime green dress, the one with tiny green, pink and blue beads. Joseph bought it for her two years ago.
Finally, it’s about time. The couple walk hand-in-hand to his flight. But they learn it has been delayed until later in the evening. They now have more time to spend together, more time to think about being apart.
Apocalyptic bleakness in Husseiniya
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Husseiniya, Iraq — The stench around the corner was overpowering. “Turn right,” 1st. Lt. David Disi commanded the driver.
“But sir,” said Spc. Jason Faber, “it looks kind of deep.”
Photo by Louie FavoriteSpc. Joseph Monteiro goes on patrol through a souk in Husseiniya. | More photos
“Go! Go!” Disi said. “Don’t stop.”
Within seconds the heavily armored Humvee was plowing through deep muck, the putrid odor of human waste wafting inside through the open gun turret.
“Oh yeah. Oh yeah,” Faber yelled, stepping on the accelerator.
If there is any place in Iraq today that has slid into apocalyptic bleakness, it is Husseiniya, just 15 miles north of Baghdad.
The congested urban slums, home to 750,000 Iraqis, lack continuous electricity, garbage collection, potable water supplies and most of all, proper sewage disposal.
It’s hard for American soldiers to imagine how human beings can live here. It’s more difficult to witness Husseiniya’s devastation and accept that more than two years have gone by since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Lakes of stagnant groundwater and raw sewage seep into the streets, open fields and in through the gates of private homes. Children walk through disease-inviting sludge as though they were harmless mud bogs created by heavy rains. They play on garbage heaps strewn with plastic bags full of household waste, bottles and food scraps. A barefooted girl picked through a blue bag of trash alongside a stray cat and a donkey looking for its evening meal.
It is as though a full-scale war had occurred just yesterday.
Soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team have been routinely patrolling these filthy streets since they arrived in Iraq in June.
“Do you think if you lived here you’d get used to this smell?” asked Faber, who works at a printing company in West Warwick, R.I. “When we first got here I was a lot more sensitive to it,” Disi replied.
Disi, a Harvard University student with Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment, said mostly Shiite Husseiniya was relatively safe compared to more hostile towns nearby, although his soldiers come under fire on the outskirts of town.
But residents said they are fed up with a lack of services in Husseiniya, seemingly forgotten by the civilized world.
“There are no new schools, no new hospitals here,” said Mohammed Amin, who has lived here for 15 years. “The children are getting sick from all the sewage.”
U.S. military officials said Husseiniya grew as a city with a large influx of Iraqis fleeing Baghdad under Saddam Hussein. Public works systems built in Baghdad in the 1960s and 1970s were never fully extended to this area.
What little existed deteriorated even further under years of international sanctions and war.
Last month, U.S. soldiers and local leaders signed a charter to correct the crisis in Husseiniya. The charter mandated the use of local contractors to build sewage treatment plants, improve water quality and storm water runoff systems. It was designed for use as a blueprint for other cities and towns in the northern Baghdad area. But Amin said he had little faith in what he called corrupt city councils to deliver basic services.
“They take our money and we get nothing in return,” he said. “Husseiniya has always been dirty. We need the Americans to force these people to do a good job for us.”
Just as he uttered those words, the electricity went out at Amin’s small shop at a fly-infested souk. “See. This is what happens every day,” he said. “We need help.”
Disi, however, said Husseiniya has already seen improvements since his platoon began patrolling here three months ago.
“This whole area was under sewage water before a sewage system was put in,” Disi said. A nearby soccer field where boys, some of them barefoot, kicked around a ball, was a cesspool just weeks ago, Disi said.
Others in Husseiniya said that U.S. presence in the area would mean the continuation of chaos and that it was time for the Americans to leave.
“Only Iraqis know the Iraqi people,” said Malik Flihiyah, a Husseniya resident. “Iraqis need to deal with Iraqis to solve our problems.”
Disi’s platoon, soldiers from a Rhode Island infantry unit that is attached to the 118th Regiment, ride several times a week through Husseiniya’s foul streets, keeping an eye on local activity.
Like other soldiers in Iraq, Disi, 27, gets a big kick out of handing out toys to the local children. He climbed on top of his Humvee, throwing out hot pink Yo-Yos and other toys as kids crawled through muck and dirt to grab one. Within minutes, the Humvee was surrounded.
“Disi! Disi!, the children yelled as though they were cheering a presidential candidate.
Other soldiers of Delta Company were ambushed earlier in the week just outside Husseiniya; some were injured by roadside bombs.
Disi’s men kept the conversation on the light side and tried not to think about potential danger as they drove down side roads with their headlights off.
“I could go for a piece of Oreo cheesecake,” said Cpl. Eric Madonna, a police officer from Fall River, Mass., while the soldiers waited on a main highway to stop violators of the midnight to 4 a.m. curfew. “From the Cheescake Factory. That’s the best stuff.”
On this patrol, Delta Company checked on several sites in the Husseiniya area that will be used as polling stations in the upcoming Oct. 15 referendum on a new Iraqi constitution. Later in the evening, Georgia Guard trucks would deliver concrete barriers and concertina wire to secure the polling stations, mostly at public places such as schools.
Using a military grid, Disi and his men walked down a dark alley that smelled of fermenting alcohol. The young lieutenant, far removed from his Ivy League schooling, banged on a painted metal gate of a schoolyard.
A startled voice on the other side asked who it was.
“Americans. Americans!” shouted the interpreter.
Samir Hussein, a guard and an Islamic studies teacher at the school, opened the gate slowly.
“I thought you were joking,” he said.
“Come on. Who would joke with a New York accent,” Disi said, storming inside.
“We’re going to start putting barriers up,” Disi told Hussein. “We’re going to make this the safest place in all of Iraq.”
Hussein was pleased to hear there would be more security at the school. But he wasn’t sure the referendum would accomplish anything. He wasn’t sure that the quality of his life would get any better.
“I don’t know if it will help,” he said, looking at his wife and children, sleeping on mats on an open veranda. “Only God can help us now.”
Security hangs on the grapevine
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Baghdad, Iraq — Capt. Michael Cannon leapt out of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and walked over to inspect the bomb damage by the side of the road.
The blast from a makeshift bomb, detonated in broad daylight the day before as 48th Brigade Combat Team soldiers were patrolling in southwest Baghdad, left a crater large enough to swallow a small car.
“I think it’s something homemade. I don’t see any shrapnel,” Cannon said.
No one was hurt in the incident, but Cannon was determined to find out who had planted the potentially deadly bomb.
After almost four months on the ground in Iraq, the 48th’s infantry soldiers have become intimately acquainted with the areas in which they operate. The soldiers who patrol the highways and villages west of the Baghdad airport know the more dangerous routes from the safer ones.
But geography is often not enough, given the random nature of the insurgency in Iraq.
Because there is little defense against some enemy tactics, the key, say soldiers, is to flush out insurgents before they can plant deadly bombs in roads, blow themselves up at checkpoints or launch rocket attacks and mortar rounds into U.S. camps.
Of the 18 brigade soldiers who have been killed in Iraq, 14 died in bombings that have become leading killers of American soldiers here.
After inspecting the damage, Cannon walked to a small shop at an intersection just a few feet away. He was certain the shopkeeper Najeeb, who lives nearby, would know something about the bomb.
At the shop, Cannon found a middle-aged man dressed in a traditional white dishdasha leaning on metal crutches. He knew nothing, he said, looking away from Cannon.
“Do you know where Najeeb is?” asked Cannon, commander of Alpha Company of the 121st Infantry Regiment’s 1st Battalion.
Silence fell over the simple shop, which had three outdoor bins filled with half-rotten potatoes, tomatoes and onions. A young boy pointed to the woman keeping the shop. “Najeeb is my father. He is not here,” he said. “That’s my mother.”
The woman’s name was Badriyah. She said she heard the loud noise from the explosion, but didn’t know anything else.
“I swear to God I don’t know anything,” she told Cannon through an interpreter. “I am sure they put the bomb in at night.”
Cannon was convinced that Badriyah and Najeeb were keeping secrets. “There’s no way someone could put something in the ground 20 meters from Najeeb’s store and [they] not know about it,” Cannon said.
The key to getting information, he added, is working with the Iraqi people. “But most people are scared that insurgents will kill them if they are seen talking to Americans.”
On a recent raid in Sadr Yusufiyah near the banks of the Euphrates River, 2nd Lt. Michael Persley faced the same frustrations as Cannon did at the roadside shop.
After a swift 10-minute ride from Camp Striker, a Black Hawk helicopter swooped down into a field behind a one-story house that had come under suspicion. Persley led soldiers of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment, on house-to-house searches in the middle of the night.
No one confessed to knowing the man Persley was seeking. After several rounds of questioning, Persley decided to detain a man who knew a secondary suspect.
The cat-and-mouse game between American soldiers and insurgents in Iraq might seem old hat to Persley, who has been a police officer in Albany for 13 years. But nothing, not even his crime-fighting experience, can prepare a soldier for the violence in Iraq, he said.
“Yes, we know our area better. But people stay away from us,” Persley said. “We don’t really get to know them very well. We’re like the Goliath here. The insurgents consider themselves David.”
Persley said it would help to have more interaction with residents, just like police officers who hang out in their neighborhoods at home. But in this nation gripped with fear, no one trusts anyone any more.
“Back home, people may threaten you for talking to the police, but here, if you talk today to an American soldier, tomorrow, you might end up dead,” Persley said.
Cannon said, ultimately, building trust is essential for U.S. security efforts.
“Seeing people over and over again is crucial,” he said.
Cannon tries to meet with villagers when he is out on patrol.
In Al Radwaniyah, he sat down for tea with Abbas Hamza, a village elder.
Hamza gave Cannon his account of the situation in Iraq; that his nation needs a single governing entity, whether it be Sunni, Shiite or Kurd.
“It doesn’t matter who will be president of Iraq,” Hamza said, taking a long drag of his Miami cigarette. “The most important thing is for my people to feel safe. We can’t even go into Baghdad when we want because we don’t feel safe.”
Cannon had met twice before with Hamza. In this third, more revealing conversation, Hamza told Cannon about recent attacks in his village.
“I’m starting to develop a friendship with him,” Cannon said. “The past two times, he didn’t mention the anti-Iraqi forces. This time he began to open up.”
Cannon thought he was developing the same relationship with Najeeb, the store owner.
“I told him I held him responsible for that area,” Cannon said. “The first few times, he had remained silent. But now he’s started to divulge information.”
Cannon vowed to return to the shop to find Najeeb.
In the meantime, he left Najeeb’s wife with a stern warning.
“I find it hard to believe you were here and you didn’t notice anything,” Cannon told her. “If my men die and I think that Najeeb knows about it, I will bulldoze this store. One more bomb in this area, and your store is gone.”
Heartache at Dublin home
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
3 a.m. calls from her husband in Iraq bring comfort, and concern to Belinda Stanley. STORY HERE.
Challenging duty at the checkpoint
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Taji, Iraq - Highway One, Iraq’s first national highway known by the U.S. military as Main Supply Route Tampa, cuts through the battered nation from its northernmost towns to the Persian Gulf in the South.
Its six lanes are often clogged these days with supply trucks and passenger cars at checkpoints set up at the on- and off-ramps and at dangerous locations under bridges and overpasses that provide launching points for insurgent attacks.
Louie Favorite/AJC
Spc. Corey Thomas of Toccoa keeps a close eye on a main North South artery in Iraq, from Checkpoint 57.
More photos
Checkpoint 57 Alpha sits on Highway One in Taji, about 15 miles north of Baghdad. Soldiers from the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team took over the checkpoint about three weeks ago. The Iraqi Army runs the traffic control point while the Georgia soldiers provide security and lend support when needed. Most days are relatively quiet; the hostilities come in spurts, the soldiers said.
But on Saturday, the recent spike in violence caught up to soldiers of the Springfield-based Alpha Battery of the 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment.
A series of incidents from drive-by gunfire to Iraqi Army soldiers shooting a traffic violator frazzled some of the soldiers.
“I just got out of basic training in December,” said Pfc. Matthew Simmons, a student from Clarkesville. “This is all new for me. I’ve never even seen a man shot before.”
Alpha Battery soldiers have set up a mobile command center under a massive highway bridge that crosses over a wide irrigation canal. They keep close watch over activities at the checkpoint from posts high up a nearby dirt hill that runs parallel to the highway.
U.S. officials fear insurgents will step up hostilities ahead of the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum in an effort to mar the democratic process. In the last four days, more than 200 people were killed and 600 wounded in a series of shootings and bombings throughout Iraq.
Highway One is crowded at rush hour — it’s the fastest way for Iraqis to commute to Baghdad from northern towns and villages on the capital’s outskirts.
Before sunrise Saturday, Alpha Battery soldiers spotted a man with a rocket-propelled grenade, who was quickly captured by U.S. soldiers from another unit patrolling the area. A few hours later, when traffic was heavy on the highway, the Georgia soldiers came under fire from a car on the bridge.
Soldiers said a 1st Battalion, 118th Regiment security patrol caught two Iraqi men suspected of firing the shots.
Just after noon, a man stepped out of his car at the checkpoint. Iraqi Army soldiers asked the man to get back into his car but he began running over the dirt hill.
Iraqi Army soldiers shot the man when he ran down the other side of the hill, military officials confirmed. The Georgia soldiers treated the injured man the best they could and had him evacuated by chopper to a hospital. The man was bleeding heavily.
“He went from a Middle Eastern brown to Casper white,” said Staff Sgt. Tazz Hardwick, a corrections officer from Savannah who was in charge of the Georgia security team.
A second Iraqi man was found dead in the back of a black BMW that came through the checkpoint. One of the passengers claimed the man was his friend and that the Georgia soldiers had shot him.
“We didn’t fire a single shot,” said Hardwick, adding that there was confusion about how the man wound up in the BMW with a bullet in his head. Hardwick wrote up his account of the incidents for his commanding officers but he himself was puzzled over when, how and why the man had been killed.
“There was no interpreter on site,” Hardwick said. “We’ve encountered situations where we need an interpreter and we don’t have one.”
Many of the Iraqi Army soldiers and local residents don’t speak any English.
“It can be a dangerous situation out there,” Hardwick said. “Sometimes nobody knows what’s going on.”
“Usually, it’s not like that out there,” he added. “But today was tough.”
His one-man mission gives disabled Iraqis normalcy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Al Radwaniyah, Iraq � The gift from Staff Sgt. Joe Neely was nothing extravagant. Yet for the family of Hussein Ali Tamer, the gesture was life-changing.
The gift was a shiny new wheelchair purchased with Neely’s money by his interpreter in Baghdad.
It means Tamer’s disabled mother, Sabiha Mahawez, will not have to sit all day on a dusty mattress laid out on the small veranda attached to his sparsely furnished house. It means that his daughter, Iman, 12, will no longer have to stay home to take care of her grandmother â€â€? she can go back to school.
Louie Favorite/AJC
Staff Sgt. Joe Neely provided crutches for Hussein Ahmed, 10. MORE PHOTOS
Mahawez said she is 60 years old, but the deep wrinkles that intersect the faded indigo tattoo marks on her face suggest she has lived longer. She has not been able to walk since unsuccessful surgery for a leg condition 18 months ago.
“With your permission, we’d like to present your mother with this wheelchair,” the soft-spoken Neely told Tamer, a farmer who ekes out a living from a few small crops.
Soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team frequently interact with residents of the southwest Baghdad area on official civil affairs missions. They hand out school supplies, tend to medical needs, or help with the rebuilding of infrastructure.
Acts of goodwill are one way for the soldiers to build relationships with Iraqis, who might in return divulge information about anti-American activity.
In comparison, Neely’s project was small â€â€? a private one-man mission â€â€? and the goal simple: to give three human beings a chance at a little bit of normalcy.
Neely, a self-employed insurance salesman from Lawrenceville, noticed Mahawez on one of his outings to this village, where soldiers of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment, patrol. He also noticed there were several disabled children in nearby villages who needed wheelchairs.
With money from his own pocket, he purchased wheelchairs for Mahawez and two of the children.
In this area just south of Abu Ghraib and west of Baghdad International Airport, subsistence farmers struggle to survive as their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. Life is uncomplicated, but hard, for poor villagers without access to the basics of life, such as clean water and electricity.
The children swarm American soldiers, begging for their pens, sunglasses, watches and bottles of cold drinking water.
As an infantryman, Neely has seen the worst of Iraq. In the first week after his arrival here, Neely saw a suicide bombing, three dead bodies and the remains of a fourth.
But in these rustic hamlets, where some villagers sleep with AK-47 rifles beside their pillow, Neely let compassion do the talking.
Neely contacted his ex-wife, Sara Kleese, who works at a nursing home in Lawrenceville, to see if her company would donate the wheelchairs. Life Care Center was willing to donate the chairs, but the shipping cost � $500 each � was prohibitive, Kleese said.
Soldiers’ Angels, a support organization for deployed troops, offered a $250 gift certificate at Amazon.com. But that too proved futile, said Neely, because Amazon was not willing to ship wheelchairs to a military address in Iraq.
Neely finally found help through an Alpha Company interpreter who goes only by his nickname, Imad, to shield his identity. Imad returned from a trip to central Baghdad with three shiny chairs that cost a total $290.
“I don’t really care about having to pay anything out of my pocket,” Neely said. “I just wanted to make a difference in [Iraqi] lives.”
This week, Neely eyed a Sony PlayStation 2 at the PX but walked away from it. Instead, he gave Imad another $250 to buy medication for local villagers to treat ailments such as headaches, high blood pressure, diarrhea and diabetes.
Even if they are able to see a doctor, Al Radwaniyah residents have to travel to Abu Ghraib for medicine because there aren’t pharmacies in their villages.
“I can’t give you a grand reason why I did it,” Neely said. “I just wanted to. I look at the people in these villages, and all they have are the shirts on their back.”
Kleese said giving had always been part of Neely’s nature.
“He gives at church. He’s always been a generous person,” she said.
Neely was an Eagle Scout as a youngster and is still active in the Scout troop his son, Joey, 15, belongs to. When he is out among Iraqi children, Neely said, he often thinks of Joey and his two daughters, Lauren, 13, and Madeline, 10.
“My kids get to do a lot of stuff these kids will never get to do,” he said.
In a hamlet known as Hamza Sadoun, Salim Fadil, 13, beamed in his new wheelchair. The boy, born with legs twisted in an unnatural position, had been using a rickety old chair on the verge of falling apart.
“I hope he really enjoys it,” Neely told the interpreter to relay to Salim.
“Inshallah [God willing],” Salim said. “Inshallah.”
A third wheelchair was bought for Hussein Ahmed, 10. The Georgia soldiers found him sitting barefoot on the filthy roadside a few yards off the main highway. His parents, Karim and Hebba, began treatments for the boy’s legs when he was 9 months old. When Hussein turned 3, his parents abandoned hope.
Hussein already had a wheelchair he had outgrown. Neely was ready to hand over a new chair when the soldiers noticed that the boy could actually stand holding onto the armrests. They decided it would be best if Neely bought Hussein a pair of crutches so he could learn to walk.
Imad said Neely had been instrumental in his own efforts to help Iraqis.
“We are both Roman Catholic, so we have a bond there,” Neely said. “We believe if you do something good it will come back tenfold. I know it’s not going to fix everything here, but it’s going to impact the lives of those people.”
The day after she received her new wheelchair, Mahawez, the disabled woman, was no longer watching day turn to night from her worn spot on the veranda floor.
She had wheeled herself out to the yard, to a shady spot under a date palm from which she could watch her grandchildren playing.
Staff writer Dave Hirschman contributed to this article.
Worry over storm hard to handle
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq � If she were in the United States, Spc. Shareema Love would probably be on the Gulf Coast now with thousands of other Army National Guard soldiers helping in the hurricane relief effort.
Instead, Love, a member of the 48th Brigade Combat Team, is almost 7,000 miles away in southwest Baghdad, checking identification cards of soldiers entering a recreational facility at Camp Striker.
“It’s crazy to be here right now and not be there to help, particularly because that’s our specialty,” said Love, an administrative clerk in Savannah.
Many of her fellow Georgia soldiers feel the same way. Their emotions have been heightened by the presence of soldiers from Louisiana’s 256th Brigade Combat Team, who have been temporarily housed at Striker before they head home.
Spc. Jennifer Jones played softball with Louisianans this week.
Hearing their stories of flooded homes and loved ones in trouble was difficult to bear.
“I can’t imagine what they are going through,” said Jones, a student and certified nursing assistant from Dublin.
After Hurricane Frances last year, Jones was called up to distribute water and food to storm victims. She wished she could be home now to help.
“That’s our job, to protect our homeland,” she said. “And we’re not there.”
For some support battalion soldiers such as Jones, who drives a supply truck, helping hurricane victims would be a more personally rewarding job.
She acknowledged the Army needs her in Iraq’s war zone, but she would rather be helping fellow Americans than be a part of a combat mission in a foreign land that she doesn’t always fully comprehend.
About 1,500 citizen soldiers from Georgia have been sent to the Gulf Coast, including about 250 members of the 48th Brigade’s rear detachment.
Pfc. Jacob Chapman, whose father serves in the Monroe-based 178th Military Police Co., which is among the units involved in hurricane aid, said every soldier has a role to play.
He is glad the 48th Brigade soldiers who stayed behind in Georgia are doing their part in hurricane-ravaged areas. But, as an infantryman, he said he would rather be fighting the insurgency in Iraq.
“I’d rather be here than there,” said Chapman, an employee of a Walton County utilities network.
“There’s too much politics over there,” he said referring to criticism of government response to the disaster.
Staff Sgt. Eddie Riggins, a heavy-equipment operator from Albany, said he hopes America has enough Guard units to assist in the emergency.
“If I was there, I would want to be a part of it,” he said. “That’s what I do.”
But, for the moment, he said, 48th Brigade soldiers in Iraq have to concentrate on their tasks at hand.
First Lt. Michael Zellous, a schoolteacher from McDonough, agreed.
“It’s a terrible shame I can’t help my fellow Americans,” he said. “But when duty calls, I am required to serve wherever they send me. It’s true I’d rather help Americans, but I feel like my presence here is helping Americans too.”
Families walk the walk for the 48th
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Deborah and Steve Johnston get to talk to their son, who commands a team in a Bradley fighting vehicle in Iraq, about once a week.
Of course, they think about him all the time. And when they walk together or with friends, that’s a special time to think about their 24-year-old son, 2nd Lt. Stephen Johnston.
Like many National Guard families across Georgia, the Johnstons have been keeping track of how many miles they’ve walked in honor of their soldier. Families and others with a loved one in the 48th Brigade Combat Team are striving for a total of 6,695 miles â€â€? the distance between the brigade’s base in Fort Stewart and their current assignment in Baghdad.
On Saturday, the Johnstons drove two hours to Pharr Elementary School in Snellville to join other families in a Walk to Baghdad event.
“Fellowship is always good,” said Deborah Johnston. “We’re from Rome and we don’t have much contact with the folks here … and even something like this, even though it’s symbolic, it makes you feel like you’ve contributed in some way or supported.”
The couple logged 8.1 miles each on Saturday and recorded a total of about 700 miles that they and friends have walked since July.
Some walkers have found sponsors to donate money for each mile they cover and others have sought donations from friends, co-workers or church members. Organizers hope to use the proceeds to buy needed items for 48th Brigade soldiers and their families, and to help the families of Louisiana Guard families affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Groups also walked Saturday at the National Guard Armory in Canton and in Albany.
Kimberly Keene organized the Snellville walk for members of the 1/121st Infantry Regiment’s Alpha Company, which is based in Lawrenceville.
Keene, leader of Alpha Company’s family readiness group, said 48th Brigade families have hit the halfway point for their mileage.
When they reach their goal, they’ll start all over again. Then, Keene said, it will be the symbolic walk home.
48th draws safer assignment
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq � The 48th Brigade Combat Team will change bases and be assigned less risky missions in the next few months, National Guard officials confirmed Saturday.
While there are no clearly distinguished front lines in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Stewart Rodeheaver, commander of the 48th, said his soldiers would be moving away from direct combat operations. Since the brigade arrived in Iraq in early June, 18 soldiers have been killed, 14 in insurgent bomb attacks.
“Sometime in the next couple of months, we are anticipating a mission change that will change our territory and our mission posture,” Rodeheaver said. “We’re going through [an] analysis to determine our mission requirements.”
Rodeheaver said the change was anticipated and is part of normal U.S. military maneuvering in Iraq. He said the new tasks would suit a large brigade such as the 48th, which has about 4,500 soldiers.
The brigade’s size is likely to increase as it moves out of Camp Striker near the Baghdad International Airport and into other bases. Rodeheaver said units already in Iraq as well as other troops from the U.S. would likely be attached to the 48th Brigade and fall under his command.
The new assignment will not cut short the yearlong tour in Iraq for Georgia Army National Guard soldiers, who are not scheduled to go home until May or June 2006.
“Our deployment dates are still the same,” Rodeheaver said.
Rodeheaver described the brigade’s new role as more of a combat support and security mission that “probably will not be as intense.”
He declined to provide details or specific move dates because of security issues.
“The operation tempo will still be high,” he said. “However, the most likely threat of conducting full spectrum combat will be reduced.”
Bigger territory
Georgia soldiers now operate in about a 115-square-mile area southwest of Baghdad. A majority of them are based at Camp Striker.
The 1st Battalion, 108th Armor Regiment is spread out among three temporary forward operating bases in Mahmudiyah, Lutafiyah and Yusufiyah, towns in a mostly Sunni area known as the Triangle of Death. The 1st Battalion, 118th Field Artillery Regiment is stationed at Taji, north of Baghdad, and in Mahmudiyah.
The new mission will stretch the 48th’s territory throughout Iraq from the Syrian, Turkish and Kuwaiti borders. Soldiers will be based at U.S. military camps scattered across the war-ravaged nation.
“The brigade will be given multiple missions throughout the country,” Rodeheaver said. “I’m excited. With the new mission, I will see the whole country. That will be a big plus.”
In its new mission, the 48th will no longer fall under the command of the of Fort Stewart-based 3rd Infantry Division, which is due to return home in January.
Soldiers happy
Many of the 48th soldiers welcomed the shift, especially those in infantry units that have been patrolling and conducting ambushes in treacherous areas.
“I can’t wait to get out of here,” said Sgt. Bill Jones of the 121st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Battalion, which lost eight soldiers to bombs planted in roads near Camp Striker.
Others are looking forward to improved living conditions. Striker, a vast, dusty tent-city, was designed as a transitional camp for soldiers on their way in and out of Iraq.
But the 48th Brigade was asked to stay in the area because of security needs, Rodeheaver said. He said the 48th made several improvements to Striker and requested trailers similar to ones at larger camps such as Liberty and Taji. They are scheduled to start arriving within days.
Many 48th soldiers, especially those at the three forward operating bases, have complained of austere conditions and lack of basic amenities.
“Some soldiers have been in difficult conditions because of combat mission requirements,” Rodeheaver acknowledged, adding that their comforts are sure to grow in their new assignment.
Note to readers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The latest installment of “One Town’s War,” a series documenting the deployment of National Guard soldiers from Dublin, can be found here.
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A baseball surprise
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Forward Operating Base Michael, Iraq — Staff Sgt. Fran Ellison of Rex opened her mail last week to find an extra special surprise in one box — a baseball autographed by Braves second baseman Marcus Giles.
Moni Basu/AJCStaff Sgt. Fran Ellison shows off her baseball autographed by the Braves’ Marcus Giles.
“I was screaming,� said Ellison, who serves in the Macon-based Headquarters and Headquarters Company of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team.
“I was totally surprised,� she said.
Ellison showed off her prized possession at the chow hall here to a bunch of jealous soldiers. Oh yeah, she was special.
Ellison had run into Giles in a Chicago hotel when she was there during a Braves-Cubs series. She has been a fan ever since.
Her colleagues at John Wieland Homes in College Park knew Ellison was a huge Braves fan and decided to do something special for her. Jeff Thomas sent her a letter explaining how he acquired the baseball.
“I’ve been working on some basement built-ins for Giles and I got him to sign a baseball for you. It was Dave’s idea,� he wrote, referring to another one of Ellison’s colleagues, Dave Wenegan.
One soldier at the mess hall suggested the excited food service manager ought to put her prized new possession up for auction on eBay. No way Ellison was parting with her souvenir. He could keep his steak dinner; she was keeping her baseball.
Twist of fate saves soldier who lost buddies
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mahmudiyah, Iraq — The Echo Troop soldiers had been out searching houses and fields for insurgents all morning on the road the military calls Route Peggy. It was early afternoon and the Georgia troops were ready to call it a day.
Spc. Charles Flowers got into the Humvee, taking the seat behind the driver. Normally he would be behind the wheel. But last Thursday, Flowers decided to give Staff Sgt. Robert Hollar a break. Flowers would take the dismount seat; he would clamber out of the vehicle in case of trouble.
The five men of the Griffin-based 108th Cavalry Regiment led the convoy up the road, then heard a thundering boom. The Humvee tossed and turned like a roller coaster. For a few seconds, everything went black for Flowers.
Moni Basu/AJC
Spc. Charles Flowers recalls Staff Sgt. Robert Hollar, one of two soldiers from Griffin-based Echo Troop, 108th Cavalry Regiment, killed Thursday.
“You just wait for the ride to stop,” he said.
When the Humvee stopped rolling, Flowers was upside down; the truck had flipped and was facing the opposite direction. Even with Flowers’ armored door in combat lock position, it had flown open.
Flowers jumped out to find gunner Spc. Charles Mays on the pavement 20 feet away.
“I did a quick check on him and told him to lay still,” said Flowers, 36, a mechanic for Delta Air Lines.
Then he found Sgt. George Draughn. Flowers looked back at the next vehicle in the convoy and called for a medic.
By then the medics were on the scene. Draughn, 29, of Hiram and Hollar, 35, of Thomaston were taken by helicopter to the Combat Surgical Hospital in the heavily fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad.
Neither of them survived.
The bomb injured Mays and Sgt. Wyatt New. Mays was flown to Germany, while New was treated for minor injuries. He later returned to duty.
The Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team has lost 18 soldiers since arriving in Iraq in early June. Bombs hidden on the roads, one of the leading killers of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, caused 14 of those deaths.
Just a few days ago, Flowers’ Humvee had hit a similar improvised explosive device. He was in a newly issued Humvee when they rolled over another bomb. This time Flowers lost two of his friends.
He was the only one who walked away from that Humvee unscathed. “I question that a lot,” he said Monday, the day of the memorial service for his fallen comrades.
“I should have been in the driver’s seat. Everyone tells me it wasn’t my time, that God wasn’t ready for me” he said. “I sure wish he’d let me in on his plan. What do you say to someone’s wife and kids?”
Flowers recalled a happy day in May when he and his buddy Hollar had taken their kids to see a Braves game during their 10 days of leave immediately before deployment to the Middle East.
“He loved his kids. He loved his wife,” Flowers said of Hollar. “He was always making plans for what he would do on leave, about maybe going up to Gatlinburg.”
Flowers and Hollar had known each other for five years, the same amount of time Sgt. Cleveland Carter, 41, had known Draughn.
The Clark Atlanta University police officer was in an M1A1 Abrams tank following Draughn and Hollar’s Humvee. When the bomb exploded, Carter wanted to rush to the aid of his friend.
“It’s so hard seeing a friend go down,” he said. “But you have to remain calm.”
Carter’s first sergeant told all his men to keep “your head in the game” that afternoon. They were soldiers still on duty.
But later that day, when Carter returned to his tent and looked at Draughn’s empty bunk next to his, he could no longer contain his pain.
“It’s afterward that it hits you, when your adrenaline goes down,” Carter said of the death of a man who had spent Christmas and New Year’s Day with him. The two vacationed in Cancun together and were planning a trip to Miami when they returned home.
“I just dropped. I wanted to go out and kill them all,” Carter said of the insurgents who planted the bomb.
Carter had not planned to go home to Atlanta on leave until midway through the 48th Brigade’s yearlong deployment. But now, he said, he would ask for time off in October.
“I need to get away from here,” he said.
Hoops, movies help blunt the stress
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bita Honarva/AJC
1st Lt. Venus Wright and 2nd Lt. Chris Burton take a seat and watch a movie.
Camp Striker, Iraq — A different kind of war was waged here on a recent evening, a battle within a battalion that got the fiercest soldiers riled up.
It had nothing to do with the insurgency consuming Iraq and everything to do with basketball.
Alpha vs. Bravo.
Bita Honarvar/AJC
1st Sgt. Chris Harris of Rincon, Ga, serves it up in volleyball game.
Both companies of the 146th Support Battalion were undefeated in the ongoing tournament. Both had beaten Charlie Company and Headquarters Company. The game at hand would leave only one company on top.
On a dusty concrete court at Camp Striker, the game got under way to the delight of soldiers crowding the sidelines. It was one way to relieve stress and have a little fun.
Soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team have come up with various ways to make the time in Iraq go by a little faster.
From talent shows and open mic nights, to basketball and volleyball, to simple barbecues on homemade decks outside the tents, Georgia soldiers have devised ways to have fun amid the grimness of war.
Others get together in the evenings outside their tents and sit on Army cots for a game of Uno, spades or dominoes.
As for the basketball game, well, things got a bit ugly when both teams began blaming the referee’s bad calls for the close game. In the end, Alpha Company emerged with the victory, 34-32. “We knew it would be close,” said Bravo Company’s 1st Sgt. Bobby Barnes of Glennville. “It’s just a lot of fun.”
Soldier returns from leave to grieve for two more comrades
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Forward Operating Base Michael, Iraq — During his short two weeks leave at home in Georgia, Spc. Robert Shea attended a solemn memorial service for his friend, Spc. Michael Stokely.
“It’s not something you expect to happen while you are at home,” he said, waiting for a Black Hawk helicopter to ferry him from Baghdad back to FOB Michael.
Moni Basu/AJC
108th Armor Regiment’s Command Sgt. Maj. Tony Gayton remembers fallen comrades.
Shea returned from Kuwait knowing he would again be paying last respects to another two soldiers from his unit, Echo Troop, 108th Cavalry Regiment. The unit is attached to the 108th Armor Regiment and has been operating under austere conditions from FOB Michael and another base in the nearby town of Yusifiyah.
Stokely, 23, of Loganville died three weeks ago when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Humvee. Staff Sgt. Robert Lee Hollar, 35, of Thomaston and Sgt. George Ray Draughn, 29, of Hiram were killed Thursday in another roadside bomb attack near Mahmudiyah, an area south of Baghdad that has proven especially hostile for U.S. soldiers.
It was hard enough for Shea, a 25-year-old Locust Grove cable installer who wants to join the Henry County police force one day, to be returning to Iraq. In Kuwait, he got the bad news about the latest deaths.
“It made me feel kind of weak in the knees,” he said. “It’s tough to come back to something like this. They were really cool guys.”
Hollar and Draughn were remembered Monday in the same kind of military service that 16 other soldiers from the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team have received in Iraq.
But behind the symbolic helmets, upended rifles, boots and dog tags, were two more men from Georgia, each with their own story to tell, each with grieving families who will never see their loved ones again.
“We are sad today because we miss the companionship of these two great soldiers,” said Lt. Col John King, the Doraville police chief who commands the 108th Armor Regiment. “It’s because of soldiers like these that we are the strongest nation in the world.”
Soldiers grieved openly for the comrades they lost, wiping tears and clutching each other while the sounds of “Amazing Grace” filled the vehicle maintenance bay.
Among the more distraught was Sgt. Cleveland Carter, who had been out on the patrol Thursday with Draughn and Hollar. He was in an M1A1 Abrams tank following their vehicle. Draughn and Carter had known each other for five years. They went to Cancun together during time off before the brigade deployed to the Middle East in May.
“I’ve seen people hurt like that before, but never anyone so close,” said Carter, 41, a police officer at Clark Atlanta University. “It’s so hard.”
Later, the anger set in.
“I wanted to go to the hospital and shoot the doctors who could not save him. We put them on that bird alive.”
Draughn and Hollar were taken by helicopter to the Combat Surgical Hospital in central Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, where they died from injuries suffered in the blast. Two other soldiers in the Humvee were also injured.
After Stokely’s death, it had been Draughn that had held the soldiers together. Carter said Draughn had acted as counselor for his platoon. Draughn was the one who led prayer before a mission.
“I found myself spending a lot of time outside my tent,” Carter said. “Draughn had the first bunk on the left. I’m the second. It was too hard to walk by.”
Roadside bomb kills two 48th members
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Two members of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade were killed and another was seriously injured in Iraq when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb, U.S. Army officials said Friday.
Ssg. Robert Lee Hollar, 35, of Thomaston and Sgt. George Ray Draughn, 29, of Hiram died in Thursday’s attack. The name of the wounded soldier was not released.
All three were members of Griffin-based Echo Troop, 108th Armor Regiment.
“They were both great guys who gave 100 percent,” said Maj. Larry Deaton, a member of the Griffin-based Echo Troop, 108th Armor Regiment said of Hollar and Draughn. “They volunteered for this mission and served with honor.”
In a separate incident, two members of the 108th were seriously injured by another roadside bomb.
The 108th operates from three austere forward operating bases near Mahmudiyah, a mostly rural area in the so-called “Sunni triangle” south of Baghdad.
Four members of the 108th were killed in August. Sgt. Thomas Strickland, 27, of Douglasville, Spc. Joshua Dingler, 19, of Hiram and Sgt. Paul Saylor, 21, of Bremen, died when their Humvee left a narrow road and rolled into an irrigation canal. Sgt. Michael Stokely, 23, of Loganville, was killed when he stepped on a hidden explosive.
In civilian life, Hollar was a postal worker in Jonesboro. Draughn was a delivery driver for the Coca-Cola Co., said his sister, Charlene Demming, who lived with him in Hiram. Draughn grew up in Shreveport, La., and moved to metro Atlanta in 1999.
He spent eight years in the Guard and had never been deployed overseas before going to Iraq. When his unit was called up, “his first thought was it’s not going to be that bad,” said Demming, who is in the Air Force.
But Demming said her brother was upset recently about the death of a buddy in his unit, Stokely, who was killed Aug. 16.
Draughn was also injured in an IED attack on a vehicle he was riding in 3-4 weeks ago. He sent a text message to his sister’s cellphone saying that it wasn’t a direct hit â€â€? he suffered a concussion and bruising.
She talked to him Wednesday afternoon and he told her he was looking forward to coming home on leave in October.
Demming described her brother as the family clown. “He is the baby of the family and he is the only boy. Basically he was always joking.”
She said Draughn loved to spoil his son, Akeem, a first-grader who lives in Ft. Worth, Texas, and his nieces and nephews.
Draughn is also survived by his parents, George and Lucy, and sister Lessie White, all of Shreveport, and sister Stephanie Barfield of Douglasville.
Draughn will have a full military funeral and will be buried at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery. Heavenly Gates Funeral Home in Shreveport is handling arrangements.
The 4,200-member 48th Brigade left Georgia in May for a year-long combat tour in Iraq. Eighteen of its soldiers have been killed in Iraq, 14 of them by roadside bombs.
As of Friday, at least 1,886 members of the U.S. military have died since the war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Soldiers thrilled at new PX
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Camp Striker, Iraq — It might have been the biggest thing here sincethe invention of the Humvee.
A new PX opened here this week to the joy of soldiers of the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48th Brigade Combat Team, a majority of whom are stationed at Camp Striker.
In what was formerly a tent that housed the brigade’s tactical operations center, the new PX was a popular place to visit this week.
The old post exchange was housed in a small and hot tent. Beyond your standard beef jerkies, wet wipes and pretty basic Army gear, it didn’t offer the kinds of goods soldiers wanted. Instead, most of them went onshopping sprees to nearby Camp Liberty, which boasts a huge shopping plaza.
Compared to the convenience-store feel of the old PX, the new one is more like a mini Wal-Mart. It offers a wider variety of toiletries, clothing, housewares and all-important snacks from Pringles to imported Scottish shortbread cookies. There’s also a hot dog and slushy stand.
Two small private stalls near operated by Indians sell 22-karat gold jewelry and other souvenirs for those soldiers in search of gifts for family and friends � or themselves.
The new PX was supposed to have set up for business almost a month ago and Georgia soldiers had been waiting eagerly for the grand opening.
“This is great,” said Staff Sgt. Jason Howland of Temple. “It’s much better than the old one.”
Howland went shopping with friend Capt. Thomas Meeks after lunch on Wednesday. Both are full-time Guard employees in Atlanta.
Meeks was checking out a backpack to take home with him.
“This saves me a trip to Liberty,” he said.
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