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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Switching gears just part of duty
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Arab Jabour, Iraq — Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Brisley remembers the day he crossed the berms from Kuwait into Iraq in his Bradley Fighting Vehicle. It was March 20, 2003. He had his mental “kill” switch on.
His company rolled north through harsh desert terrain into Iraq’s urban epicenter: Baghdad.
There he began taking hits. Rocket-propelled grenades smashed into his Bradley. Hails of AK-47 fire pinged off the steel harness. The enemy — about 2,000 of them — charged his vehicle. His soldiers killed 150 of Saddam Hussein’s fighters.
A few days later, U.S. forces toppled a statue of the Iraqi dictator. Brisley, like so many other Americans, thought the war was over.
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| Curtis Compton/AJC |
| Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Brisley, 35, of Glennville is in the middle of his third tour of duty in Iraq, all with the same Fort Stewart-based battalion. For a photo gallery with this story, click here. |
Now, five years later, Brisley, 35, is stepping into Iraq again, this time after an 18-day leave at home in Georgia. He’s in the middle of his third tour of Iraq, all with the same Fort Stewart-based battalion.
“Hey, Sergeant Bris! Welcome back,” yells a soldier as Brisley walks toward his hooch in a metal shipping container, hidden behind tall concrete barriers at Patrol Base Hawks.
Brisley and the rest of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment have been at this small outpost in Arab Jabour, a poor, Sunni district southeast of Baghdad, since September. They were part of the “surge,” and as such, live and operate close to the local people.
Switches on and off
As the sixth year of the Iraq war begins, Brisley has become adept at flipping mental switches on and off.
Kill or no kill.
Platoon sergeant or father.
Stoic or emotional.
He’s had to turn switches on and off multiple times while going back and forth from Iraq. As he returns to the three dozen men who depend on him here, he has tucked away his wife, Carrie, (his Georgia Peach, he calls her) and four daughters safely in his head. He won’t see them again until the battalion returns home in August.
Five years ago, he never thought he’d go through any of this.
After months of hard train-up and gut-wrenching anticipation, he found the Iraqi resistance in 2003 to be weak. By May, the president declared Brisley’s “mission accomplished,” and he returned home to southeast Georgia that August, feeling “good about what we did.”
Inside his doublewide trailer that sits on 2 acres of land in Glennville, Brisley watched the war footage Carrie saved for him. He reveled in being an American hero. Life’s routine was interrupted for his young daughters to celebrate Daddy’s return after a year away.
But even then, somewhere in Brisley’s mind was this: He had not seen the last of Iraq.
All his years in the Army told him the U.S. military would not disengage so quickly.
As the months wore on and Iraq turned deadly for American forces, Brisley began questioning things. “Where did it all go wrong?” He didn’t know the answer. He didn’t understand.
All he knew was that he was going back to war.
In 2005, the battalion (it was then the 3rd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment) met a faceless enemy in Sadr City, a Shiite slum in northeast Baghdad. Survival had new meaning as American soldiers died routinely from unseen bombs hidden in roads, cars and buildings.
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| Curtis Compton/AJC |
| Brisley (foreground) and his men cross a field on a mission near Patrol Base Hawks in Arab Jabour, Iraq, last week. |
And the mission had changed. Brisley, an unwavering defender of the versatility of infantrymen, recalls how his platoon picked up raw sewage from the streets.
“To me, it wasn’t a kick in the face. You deal with what’s handed to you,” he says.
“I can’t worry about how the war is going in Iraq. I just have to worry about my piece of the pie. I can’t fight like that. I have to stay focused on what I am doing.”
It’s a statement fitting of a soldier’s soldier. Brisley is here to ensure the well-being of the young men in uniform who look to him for guidance.
‘Depend on me’
He has lost friends here — two were sergeants he raised in the Army who died in a house rigged with explosives last summer. Brisley watched one of them take his last few breaths.
One day, when he’s back in Glennville, when the leaves are green and the house is quiet, he’ll do his own grieving.
Or as he says, “I’ll take a knee.”
“But I can’t sit and sulk now. These men depend on me,” he says. “It hurts, but you got to turn it off.”
There are soldiers in Brisley’s battalion, veterans of the Iraq war, who are tired and frustrated. Some question American strategy here. Others have turned against the war. Not Brisley. “Too many American soldiers have died over here to say, ‘we’re done,’ ” he says.
“I don’t know if we are causing the violence, but the Iraqi people — they’ve got to stand up,” he says, just before heading out on a mission, his first since returning from his leave.
“I can’t make Mohammed like Mohammed,” he says about the sectarian strife.
“Providing security here — sometimes it’s working, sometimes it’s not. But it’s worth it. It’s got to be.”
Brisley puts his personal beefs aside as he steps into the turret of his Bradley. It’s his third tour up there as the vehicle commander, scanning the battered sights of Iraq through high-powered opticals.
Except today, he won’t be ordering his gunner to pull any triggers. Brisley’s men are going to negotiate the repair of a village mosque damaged in the fighting.
It’s another role Brisley has assumed: counterinsurgency. He often monitors the call to prayers that echo from the mosque loudspeakers, just in case the message is violent. Today, he wants to assure community leader Abdullah Ahmed Thedan that he’ll receive $2,000 to fix the broken windows and shattered ceilings.
“These patrol bases started a whole new thing in putting us with the local populace,” Brisley says. “The fighting’s over with. Now we’re told to go be the nice guys.”
Learning experience
Brisley has learned to adapt as an infantryman. He’s also learned to adapt as a human being.
It’s all about the mental switches.
He found out the hard way that life doesn’t stand still while he is away at war; this latest deployment is 15 months long.
“My mind-set used to be that everything is supposed to stop,” he says. “My children weren’t supposed to grow up without me.”
When he arrived in Glennville for leave this time, Brisley insisted his daughters, between the ages of 3 and 10, keep going to school. Don’t do anything differently for me, he told them, because I will be gone again.
Brisley has hope that Iraq will find peace and prosper. He also knows that won’t happen anytime soon. Word is that his battalion is scheduled to deploy for a fourth time in November 2009. As a veteran with three tours already, he would have other options.
He is certain Georgia-based soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division will be back in Iraq.
He just isn’t sure whether Sgt. Brisley will be among them.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Moni Basu
My house is your house
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Patrol Base Red, Iraq - Ken Adgie says he wanted to be an air-conditioning repairman but when that didn’t work out, he joined the Army. He rose all the way to commander of a Georgia-based 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment. But this week, the lieutenant colonel may have found a new calling.
Adgie, 41, was more a real-estate agent than infantry commander as he showed a prime piece of property in Arab Jabour to Ehsan Salim Hassan. Large eight-bedroom, three-bathroom house with kitchen, verandahs, and terrazzo floors, winding staircase and off-street parking.
“There’s a pretty big yard for parking,” Adgie says, scanning the compound from the roof.
“That’s our overflow tent - sleeps 20.”
Except this is no regular real-estate transaction.
The house, once owned by a wealthy Iraqi family has suffered in the war. Sandbagged and guarded by concrete barriers, it has been home to 1-30 Infantry’s Dragon Company for 10 months and sits on the U.S. military map as Patrol Base Red. The guys here call it the “frat house.”
Soon, Dragon Company will be moving back to Forward Operating Base Falcon; the frat house will be turned over to Iraqi security forces.
Arab Jabour, a Sunni district southeast of Baghdad, was once an al-Qaida stronghold. Last June, Adgie’s battalion arrived here as part of the U.S. surge in troops. Almost a year later, the area is a changed place, the soldiers say. Now, it’s time to hand the reins to the Iraqis, though Adgie’s battalion will continue a presence here until they return to Fort Stewart this summer.
Neither the Iraqi Army nor the police have any manpower in Arab Jabour. Adgie has been helping them get started.
He takes Hassan, an Iraqi Army major, around the house, showing him rooms just like a realtor would. He points to an open field nearby and tells Hassan that soon, an Iraqi police station will be built there.
“It’s a good building,” Adgie says, making his pitch. He tells Hassan he would need at least two weeks to get it in move-in ready condition. Hassan, who grew up nearby, says he’ll consider the house. It would be a great location for his soldiers.
They pass through the kitchen and a storage area filled with cases of Gatorade, soda pop, near-beer and snacks.
“Look at all this junk food they keep,” Adgie says.
His soldiers joke that it could very well seal the deal.
Permalink | | Categories: Moni Basu
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