Camp Virginia, Kuwait - 02/13/05
Camp Virginia is a sprawling and desolate base in the Kuwaiti desert defined by 10-foot high earthen berms, speckled with canvas tents, trailers, and living room-size generators, and peopled by soldiers and civilians contractors. As far as I can tell, Donald Rumsfeld's Coalition of the Willing is better represented here than in Iraq. There are robust contingents of Salvadorans, Poles, Japanese, and Dutch shuffling through the sand, plus a smattering of Koreans and Lithuanians.
Despite the desert bleakness, there are many diversions here: an enormous chow hall that serves four meals a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and "midrats" -- midnight rations); a Morale Welfare and Recreation tent that shows movies and stages events like Thursday's Karaoke Night; a giant gym with cardio stations, weight machines, and free weights; two Internet centers; an AT&T Call Center; a modest PX; and food concessions like Subway, Pizza Inn, and Green Beans Coffee, which always has a line out the door. Most of the work on base, like serving food, cleaning johns, and digging ditches, is done by South Asian men, employees of various subcontractors of KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg, Brown, and Root. Military folks, who are either headed north or going home after deployment to Iraq, don't have much to do here other than queue for the amenities. Waiting kills huge swaths of time for most everyone here.
It's Sunday, so the new chapel is humming. Roughly 150 souls gathered inside this spiffy corrugated metal building with its faux stained-glass window. (I saw it and immediately thought, this must be The Lord's Tool Shed.) A female US Army soldier led worshipers in a succession of Protestant hymns. Bodies swayed in the front pews; bald heads bobbed. "I love you more than anything," they sang. "Because of you my cloudy days are gone." The more subdued folk and curious hangers-on like me collected in the rear. Except for a contingent of Dutch troops. They stood stock-still at the center of all the praising, rocking, and Amening.
I bunk in a 100-foot long tent at the edge of the base with men from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit's Battalion Landing Team 1/2, the infantry. The commanding officer, his XO (executive officer), and the Sergeant Major share it with the BLT's staff officers and noncommissioned officers. There is room to waste here, unlike in Iskandariyah, where living quarters were cramped. Each man has carved out a little zone of comfort around his cot where he passes the hours. The XO reads a paperback thriller. The commander of the BLT's Weapons Company and his First Sergeant watch a DVD on a Mac laptop. Others nap. I type, relieved to be in Kuwait, but disturbed by fragments of news I get from "up north."
A car bomb exploded Saturday outside Musayyib Hospital, the XO told me last night. More than a dozen people were killed, he said. Stars & Stripes newspaper confirmed it this morning with a thin Associated Press account. "A car bomb killed 17 people Saturday and injured 21 in a mostly Shiite Muslim town south of Baghdad," reporter Robert Reid writes. It "exploded near the main hospital in Musayyib..." No other details.
Around Iraq's Election Day I spent three frigid mornings and several equally cold, cold nights at Musayyib Hospital's gate. Musayyib Hospital happens to sit on a stretch of road leading to Musayyib Police Station, another appealing target for the insurgents. Shortly after daybreak the same old man set up a table immediately to the left of the US military checkpoint there. He'd place an already-hot brazier on the ground and start heating tea in a battered and blackened aluminum pot. Iraqi men -- doctors, orderlies, cops -- gathered around him urging him to hurry up. Some were truly impatient, curt. Others needled him good-naturedly, as I imagined they did every morning. They stirred and sipped their sweet tea, milled and chatted for a few moments, then handed the man their empty glasses. He rinsed each in a basin of water, then filled it with tea for the next customer. A silent little boy, nine or 10-years-old, accompanied him one of the days I was there.
I interviewed and bullshitted with Marines and soldiers at the checkpoint, which was just 10 feet from the hospital's gate. There I met a quiet, thoughtful 19-year-old soldier surnamed Biehl. I walked a foot patrol through Musayyib with Biehl and a handful of US soldiers and Marines. For a mere child, his composure, even after sunset, was remarkable. This is his first deployment, he told me.
As the sun rose on the morning of January 29th, I interviewed a boisterous jarhead, Marine Lance Corporal Roger McNulty at the gate. McNulty has a bit of the schoolyard bully in him. He enjoyed badgering the Iraqis walking to the police station, whom he had to search for weapons, and cadging food from the young man who delivered meals to the cops. McNulty's on his way home. Biehl has another 11 months in Iskandariyah.
Could the bombing have been prevented? I don't know. I wasn't there, and I can't creep into the mind of the people who planted it. But I do know that Musayyib Hospital workers have in the past alerted Iraqi cops to suspected "VBIEDs" -- vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices. Often the Iraq police would pass word of a suspicious vehicle parked near the hospital to the Marines, who would investigate. Sometimes, the police would check into it themselves, the Marines told me. There seemed to be a loose cooperation among Iraqis and Americans there, and this may have limited the number of attacks.
Marines up and down the ranks attribute the Musayyib Hospital attack and others in their former area of operation to the Army's inexperience and, fundamentally, their passiveness and minimal training. The Marines whittled away at IED and mortar attacks in north Babil over seven months by constantly patrolling, day and night. They deployed up to 12 patrols at a time, the BLT commander told me. Marine presence in towns and on roads, and the unpredictability of its patrolling routes, kept insurgents guessing, Marines assert. The "bad guys" may have managed a mortar attack on the FOB now and again -- maybe six or seven rounds -- but they launched few long, withering assaults once the BLT settled into Iskandariyah. Insurgents also planted IEDs here and there, but the threat of discovery by a mounted or dismounted Marine patrol, kept them from carefully laying more destructive charges.
How many patrols did the Army's 155th Infantry, the new military power in Iskandariyah, field on one of the last nights the Marines' were on base? Several on paper but only one actually in the street, a senior Marine officer told me. Patrolling wasn't necessary in certain areas, Army commanders felt, because "it was quiet," the officer said with a snort. That's like giving bomb planters a free pass. Marine commanders diverted their last two Kuwait-bound convoys to alternate routes for fear of newly planted IEDs and ambushes along these unpoliced roads.
The Marines built "firm bases" in several towns, no-frills temporary outposts in areas with heavy insurgent activity, from which they launched patrols. These minibases got attacked -- Musayyib's was hit on Election Day -- but they also established presence and disrupted insurgent activity, Marine officers say. The Army has committed to manning these posts, but a senior Marine tells me it started equipping the formerly Spartan settlements with Internet and flat-screen TVs even before they set up their own radio communications with the main base. As one Marine lieutenant put it, the more comfortable you are in your quarters, the less eager you are to leave them. Another ingredient in the recipe for disaster.
Am I biased against the Army? Am I in the tank with the Marines, a victim of a new strain of Stockholm syndrome? I would say no to both. In so many ways the Marines (and the rest of the US military) are a hammer -- a backhoe was how I put it before --where a scalpel is needed. The Marines (and again, the military) are not structured or adequately trained for the nonmartial aspects of this conflict, this mess -- the policing, the diplomacy, the restoration of essential services, and the rebuilding of an atomized civil society. But on the purely military side, I have seen things -- tactics and missions -- that have worked. The Marines didn't complete the "security and stability" in north Babil by a long shot, but they did succeed in cutting down measurable insurgent activity, particularly attacks on Forward Operating Base Iskandariyah. Mostly, this saved American lives, but it probably saved some Iraqi ones, too.
The wisdom of deploying a minimally trained Army National Guard unit to a dangerous and often deceptively quiet region of Iraq escapes me, civilian though I am. I hope for the best -- low loss of life and steady improvement of the Iraqi standard of living -- but I fear for the worst.
ENDS