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Friday, April 13, 2007
To the heart of darkness
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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| Louie Favorite / AJC |
| Staff Sgt. Adam Troxel, of Acworth, in his quarters at Camp Corregidor in Ramadi. |
Ramadi, Iraq - It’s not easy to travel to the heart of an insurgency.
In more peaceful times, Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar province is about eight hours drive from Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq. But in the middle of a war, it took us three days. By air.
From Tal Afar, photographer Louie Favorite and I flew to Camp Anaconda in Balad to stay overnight. On Easter afternoon, a C-130 ferried us west to al-Asad and then back east to al-Taqaddum, where we spent another night and a full day. We finally got on a helicopter and landed at Camp Ramadi on Tuesday morning.
Normally, the journey might have been an adventure. But I was anxious about going to Ramadi, once dubbed the most dangerous city in the world.
This city of about 400,000 is on the banks of the Euphrates River and is the capital of heavily Sunni al-Anbar province. The terrorist group al-Qaida in Mesopotamia also claimed Ramadi as its capital.
“You’re going to Ramadi? What? Why would you voluntarily want to go there?”
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| Louie Favorite / AJC |
| Some of the ruins of Ramadi. |
That was a common reaction when I told soldiers of our plans to embed with the Third Infantry Division, based at Georgia’s Fort Stewart.
So at each stop in our journey, I lay awake in my sleeping bag wondering what I would see in Ramadi. I had not been there since 2003 when I passed through on the way from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad. The fighting here in the initial invasion had been fierce. Ramadi never settled down.
I’d heard that the situation had improved considerably in the last few weeks. Still, it was Ramadi where car bombs and improvised explosive devices had become as much a part of the urban landscape as telephone poles and electrical lines.
The choppers dropped us off on the landing pad in the absolute darkness of night. We were shuttled to a row of wooden huts that house transients on the camp.
After a few hours of sleep, we collected our things and climbed into the hatch of a M1A1 Abrams tank for a 20-minute ride to Camp Corregidor. The barrel of the tank said “Customer Service.” Staff Sgt, Michael Widelko of the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment said the crew often gives “taxi rides” to people between Ramadi and Corregidor. Thus, the name.
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| Louie Favorite / AJC |
| The barrel of the tank says “Customer Service.” |
There wasn’t anything else in the world I would have rather been transported in but a massive, seemingly impenetrable tank. At least not for my first ride through Ramadi.
During our first few days of travel, we drove in and out of Corregidor, headquarters of 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, which falls under 3rd ID here.
The battalion’s intelligence shop is managed in part by a Staff Sgt. Adam Troxel, 40, of Acworth. Troxel was an Acworth police officer for 11 years and served in the Georgia Army National Guard for a number of years. He was in Company H, 121st Infantry (ABN) (LRS) from 1993 to 1996 and again in 2005.
I told him about some of our experiences with Company H during my five weeks with the long-range surveillance unit in Tal Afar and along the Syrian border. Troxel told me about his wife, Holly, and his three children and offered me Girl Scout cookies from a massive box that his daughter Kyla, 9, sent him.
Troxel has been in Ramadi since October. He manages the temporary holding facility at the camp and assists with evidence handling and seized weapons. On his wall is a M1919 Browning, a .30 cal machine gun manufactured at the GM plant in Saginaw, Mich. It was the weapon of choice in World War II. This one was seized with a 200-round belt of ammunition when soldiers found a weapons cache.
Troxel keeps it in his room as a trophy. He’s a fan of antique weapons and this Browning is in mint condition. Troxel guesses it was given to the Iraqis when relations between the United States and Iraq were warm.
Our conversation about Atlanta was over a good, strong cup of coffee and centered on the Olympics and traffic woes. I forgot that I was in Ramadi. The images of the day — of bloodshed and despair — were gone. If just for that moment.
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