MOSUL 31DEC08

Happy New Year. The CO is due back this evening, so it shouldn’t be too long before we’re able to roll out and see our area. I’m heading over to brief him on the state of our platoon in an hour, so I won’t have too long for this entry. Blue Platoon is doing well; we’ve been covering our new radios and equipment in recent training, including the famed MRAP vehicle—we should be issued some of them. This new contraption may be the Army’s next major fighting line vehicle and our answer to IEDs. It has a V-shaped hull, intended to deflect general blasts from run-of-the-mill IEDs, and tons of armor. The vehicle is still somewhat vulnerable to Explosively Formed Projectiles, or EFPs, the newer and better constructed IEDs the military’s been encountering for the past couple of years. These things are ingenious, really. Take a copper pot or ashtray, orient it behind explosives, throw a little laser on it (usually the motion sensors or line-of-sight sensors found in the lights around your garage door), and you’ve got a recipe for fiery death. Turn the laser on as the convoy approaches so it detonates when one of your vehicles breaks the beam. The explosion immediately melts the copper, which shoots through your vehicle like a bullet, setting fire to anything it comes in contact with. Very ugly. The entrance wound is miniscule, but the exit wound can be catastrophic. Kind of a lesson in counter-insurgency, really. We spend billions on a new weapon system, and the enemy counters with a thirty-cent ashtray. Granted, these things are difficult to construct properly, and only insurgents with outside connections can really get them going. But they’re still ridiculously cheap, minus the cost of expertise. Additionally, the profile of the MRAP is so high that it tends to run into power lines on patrol. And it’s so wide that it can’t make it through most of the streets in Mosul. We’ll be able to use it on missions skirting the edges of the city, but otherwise it’ll just sit here in the motor pool, waiting to be mortared.

Speaking of which, still no mortars. The XO got his fill of them when he arrived early, but it seems the rest of us just aren’t worth killing. It’s almost as if the enemy doesn’t care anymore. I’m kind of insulted.

Blue Platoon will be assuming a battle space previously owned by a whole company, so I’ll have plenty of work on my hands. The area is relatively quiet right now. Nevertheless, it was a major hotspot a few months ago, so we expect some volatility. There are two large populations of refugees in the area; we have some Turkoman refugees in the south who are generally cooperative and peaceful, and some Tal Afar refugees in the west who apparently have a reputation for causing trouble. We’ll be keeping a close eye on them. They fled Coalition operations in Tal Afar and came here because the size of the city gives them better opportunities to blend in with the population. While most of them are just petty criminals or general opportunists, some are undoubtedly here with more violent intentions. The area is overwhelmingly Sunni, which is good because the homogeneity probably means a minimum of ethnic violence will be conducted in the AO, but bad because a potential Shia landslide in January’s elections could send them into riots and increased support for insurgent elements. The Coalition will become, in their eyes, the enforcers of a Shia-controlled Baghdad and a Kurdish-controlled Mosul. We might not be well liked, soon.

I attempted to brief these items to my partner in crime, SSG Lark, but we quickly ran into a serious conflict of minds. The qualities that make him good as a platoon sergeant, namely his tunnel vision and absolutist mindset, can make him absolutely infuriating here. “Religion doesn’t mean a damn here,” he claimed. “It’s all about the money. All the Hajjis (wince) are baddies, and they don’t care about the reasons. Don’t worry about the religion or the politics.” I tried to patiently stress that yes, religion is in fact a MAJOR issue in Iraq, but was quickly shut down. “Oh, I forgot that you’d also spent 13 months here,” he replied sarcastically. True, I haven’t been here before. Yes, experience is the best teacher. But I was just about ready to start banging my head against the wall until sweet unconsciousness took me away. The political make-up of the neighborhoods? Of no consequence. Refugees? Just more willing to plant IEDs for an extra buck. Doesn’t matter what they’re fleeing from. And the unit we’re taking over from? They’re not to be trusted, they’re just trying to make themselves look good, they’ve done a terrible job, etc. It took all of my self-restraint not to rejoin that they have been here for 15 months, in fact, and more recently than he was here. Oh, well. He does an excellent job as a platoon sergeant, and I have no complaints on that front, so this is more frustrating from a personal than professional standpoint. I just told him that he needn’t worry about those details, that I would concern myself with the subtleties in the local populace, and that I would consider it a favor if he humored me whenever I naively acted as if such things were occasionally important.

I’ll be conducting all of the engagements with our counterpart leadership in the Iraqi Security Forces. If worse comes to worse, I may have to issue a standing order that he just not speak around them. It’s amazing how such trivial misunderstandings—your religious and political views are merely a front for your avaricious desire to blow things up—could cause diplomatic tension.

I suppose I’m just angry right now, and later on I’ll look back at this conversation with greater understanding. We are soldiers. We’re trained to find, fix, and finish our enemies on the field of battle. If he isn’t wearing an allied uniform and he’s armed, he’s an enemy. A simple premise. And while the response to this simplicity is in fact an incredibly complicated series of tactical maneuvers and cross-force coordination, the initiating act is supposed to be very easy to understand. Find, fix, finish. Unfortunately this isn’t the kind of war we’re engaged in. That armed civilian could be on our side, conceivably, trying to protect his property from looters or insurgents. The world is very, very confusing. And while the Army has done an outstanding job adapting our tactics and procedures in dealing with the new war, we haven’t been able to fundamentally change the individual soldier. They’re young, jumpy, confused, and armed. They’re good men, and they all want to effect positive change here, but it’s obvious that we all yearn for a simpler day when the enemy made it clear that he was an enemy. Here, they sell you fruit in the day and plant bombs in the night. And not just against you; against their neighbors, their political enemies, and their own police forces. Some of these people even conduct these attacks in the belief that they share a common goal with the Coalition, and that if they could eliminate this one particular group from the city it would finally be stable and secure. It is nuanced, it is subtle, and it is frustrating as hell. And these are not things a fighting man likes to hear. Give me a target, set me loose, and I’ll deal with it. But as that is a rarity, my job becomes something a bit different than those of my colleagues in previous wars. Explain the nuance, clarify the subtlety, and be ready to turn on—or off—the killing spirit in my men on command. I only hope I’m up to the task.

Since I’ve spent most of my time in meetings or conversations with the people I’ll be replacing, I really haven’t been around the rest of Blue Platoon that much. I’m feeling pretty detached from them (which is actually how my NCOs like it, as they feel—and rightly so—that the men are their territory).

That’s enough for now, though. I’ve got to go brief the commander and learn about our course of action for the next few days. Happy New Year to all of you..