Tag: foreign service

Above is a picture of Dennis,  our agronomist, and  Reid who has done engagement with local leaders on a truly impressive scale.

My good friend Reid Smith will be leaving Iraq today.  He is one of those I mentioned a few posts back re losing my best.  I am losing him a little earlier than anticipated because of bureaucratic mazes we couldn’t find out way through.

Reid has his own newsletter about his time in Iraq.  As military person, his perceptive is a bit different than mine, but the similarities far outweigh the differences.  Below is a copy of his last post in Iraq.

Hey everyone,

I planned on staying here in Iraq until mid May in order to complete my one year boots on the ground.  As sometimes happens, the paperwork got screwed up.  The State Department, who doesn’t have a thorough understanding of how the Army orders process works, failed to request an extension to my initial mobilization orders.  Now, with less than a week’s notice, I have to clear out. 

The bottom line here is that I am coming home earlier than anticipated.  I know, I know, I should be happy right?, but this made me very angry at first because I feel like I’m just now getting really good at my  job.  That’s just the way it is sometimes.  As my first platoon sergeant, SSG Velez told me in 1984 in his very strong Puerto Rican accent “well ju know sir…sometimes…ju just get f—-d”.  This is a true statement if ever I heard one.

I’ve now had a few days to let it settle in and I couldn’t more excited to go back to my home and family.  Everything works itself out the way it is supposed to and I’m very glad to be headed home.
From my perspective we have defeated the insurgents.  We are only dealing with amateurs now and of them there are only a few stragglers. Those few that we do encounter are poorly led, poorly equipped and poorly trained.  In our sector for the third time in a couple months an  insurgent has blown himself up accidentally.  The latest blew his own hands off and if not for prompt medical care he would have died. 

In another case we were able to locate an IED emplacement group while they were meeting together.  We could have simply bombed them and been certain of killing them, but in order to make sure no innocent people were killed we used different techniques.  This is important because terrorists frequently travel with women and children just for the protection they provide relative to our targeting.  It took us three tries, but task force elements finally got them and no innocents were hurt.  This is an amazing capability we have developed as a military and you should definitely be proud.

We recently had one Marine Infantry battalion complete their seven-month rotation here and head home without having even one KIA.  This was  1/7 Marines who I worked with in the city of Hit, they were extremely active, did a lot of great work.  This is remarkable when you consider that normally in just one month at the National Training Center, in a training environment, we will suffer at least one soldier killed as a result of accident or mishap.

Now it is up to the Iraqis to take the victory over the insurgents we’ve handed them and be successful at governing themselves.  This has been my job over the past 10 ½ months.  It has been frustratingly slow work, but we have seen significant improvements and I am confident now that we will succeed.

It has been quite a ride and now as I look back I will miss both my team mates and the Marines who I’ve had the honor and privilege to serve with.  I will miss the many Iraqis heroes who I’ve become friends with who struggle daily to make this work despite a constant threat to their life and that of their family.  It’s an odd thing how as bad as this place sucks, it does get in your bones in a way that is hard to describe.  Without trying to be too melodramatic, perhaps it’s the fact our struggle here in many ways marks the success or failure of America  in the post cold war world. 

To all of you who have supported me with your e-mails, letters, packages etc I just want to provide a very heartfelt “Thank You”!  I would add that it doesn’t stop here and even though everyone is tired of this war, the troops over here still very much desire and appreciate your steadfast support. 

In terms of support I haven’t run into anyone over here who simply desires and end to this for their own personal safety.  This is an all volunteer force and if there is any disappointment felt at being here it normally surrounds not getting any “trigger time”.  We want the victory we’ve worked so hard for and will settle for nothing less.  We hear people often say “I support the troops”, but what we wished we’d hear more often is “I support victory in Iraq”.  
 

Semper Fi
Reid

Sorry about not writing for awhile.  I arrived safely back in Iraq, via Kuwait.  My trip & being back in Iraq is my new normal.  I have written about such things before.  You can only go on your first helicopter or c-130 ride once.

I have been involved in some inside management issues, which I was not going to write about, but as I consider it, I think it might be important to mention some of the prosaic things that occupy a lot of our time here, so here are a few.

Five new team members have arrived in the last couple of weeks.  Let me introduce them.

I have a new deputy and he is a great guy.  As a retired USAF bird colonel, my new deputy knows the military and how to manage a team.  He also worked as a program manager in Baghdad, so he knows the inside game there.   We have already developed a good working relationship.  We agree on goals and seem to have complementary skill sets.  I do not think I could have hoped for a better situation. 

Our economic and budget specialist is a young man on his first tour outside the U.S.  He is also exactly what I need at this time.  In October, we got a budget for making grants to stimulate projects among the Iraqis.  My team and I were extremely enthusiastic about these things.  It allowed us to build influence and complete project that would create an environment unpleasant for the insurgency (our mission).  But all grants require accounting and all projects must be tracked.  All of us were into doing.  We had a bias for action.  This is good, but you can action yourself right out of business.  I was beginning to become seriously concerned.  Now I got somebody who has the skills and inclination to take on the task.

The new civil affairs man is an Army Lieutenant Colonel with experience in Iraq.  I am asking him to be our man in Rawah/Anah.  This is a place we have needed someone for a long time.  He has been working hard to get up to speed on the tribal and civil relationships and he has the experience to command respect.  I am confident that we can expect good things from him.

Just yesterday we got two new bicultural-bicultural specialists.  Since I just met them, I cannot say anything in particular.  They are native Arabic speakers and both have experience working with coalition forces in Iraq.  I insisted that our colleagues be American citizens and have security clearances and both our new guys fit the bill.  We work very well with Iraqi citizen translators in the field, but on the base it is hard for anyone to work w/o a clearance and only American citizens can get one.  It is a bit of a myth that we do not have enough Americans who speak Arabic.  This may have been the case a few years ago, but we now are doing okay with finding and hiring fluent American citizen Arabic speakers.   

Perhaps the biggest challenge of team leader in an isolated, intense and stressful environment like ours is to balance the personalities, skills & predilections of team members.   Team member skills are complementary and the team leader has to make sure these synergies work.  Not everybody can work in this environment.  The day before yesterday I lost one of my team members.  He arrived only a couple months ago and has not been a strong performer.  He went down to Baghdad for some routine work and never came back.  He literally fled the country mentioning that he had enough.  Since he was a contractor, that is his prerogative to quit, but I have never before experienced anything like this before.  I keep on thinking of that rhyme, “when in danger when in doubt, run in circles scream and shout.” 

I have thought about what I might have done to help him out, but have concluded that his leaving was the best thing for us all.  I am not sympathetic.  I probably should have pushed him out sooner.  He was not working out well.  My job is to help my team accomplish our common goals and it is my duty to ensure they do.  Most of my team is great and they would perform even w/o my efforts.  Those who cannot or will not do that should go home.  I don’t want to create an environment where the non-productive can feel comfortable.  It may sound mean and I don’t think of myself as a mean person, but that is the way it has to be in our particular situation.

I wrote about dust and wind, but when Chrissy asked me if I would write about water, I told her probably not, because there was not enough water around here to comment about.  Today there was.  We had a bodacious Noah-class thunderstorm, one of the most violent thunderstorm I ever experienced.  It knocked out our power and left big and deep puddles all over the place.   The disadvantage of boots designed for the desert became quickly apparent as I walked through ankle deep water.

I went out to run at around 5 pm.  It was a normal day until then, a little dusty.   As I ran NW I notice the sky was very black.  There was a bank of clouds coming.  It looked like something out of an apocalyptical movie, or on the funnier side, that sky scene from Ghost Busters.   The black clouds looked angry.   I ran out for around five minutes and then decided better to turn around and run back home, quick as I could.  That was smart.  Even as I ran back I could feel the big cold drops begin to fall.  The wind picked up.  Fortunately, it was right at my back so it pushed me along and I didn’t get the rain in the face.  Just as I got back to my can, all hell seemed to break loose.  Think of the storm music from the William Tell Overture.  It just started to pound like that.  It went on for around a half hour and then, also like the storm in the William Tell Overture, just stopped.  

Now it is clear but chilly.  The rain washed the dust out of the air and it smells good to have a little moisture in clean air.  I am writing this part at night on battery.  Tomorrow I will go out and take some pictures of the water in the daylight.   Although I expect much will have drained off, I think there still will be a lot. 

The ground here does not accept water.  It doesn’t soak in.  What doesn’t drain off just sits on the surface until it dries out, leaving a salty ring to make the erstwhile puddle.

The picture is not Iraq.  It is from one of the spots I used to hang around as a kid in Milwaukee.  People often think this is “virgin forest”.  This wall dividing forest from forest shows how nature regenerates.  You often find signs of walls and fences that used to mark cultivated fields that are now in the middle of the woods.

Iraqi Colonel seemed almost a little shy at first.  He answered questions with as few words as possible and did not elaborate much beyond what was required.  When we went down to breakfast, of flatbread, eggs, cheese and marmalade, there were often long silences. Then we started to talk about agriculture in Iraq.

It seems the colonel is the proud owner of 25 donum (in Iraq 1 donum =  0.62 acres) of farmland between Basra and Karbala.  Twenty-five donum is a fairly good sized farm around here, especially 25 donum of irrigated land.  The colonel grows truck farm products like tomatoes and has tried, so far w/o success, to raise a few beef cattle.

We talked about the importance of being close to the soil, one (part-time) farmer to another.  The colonel mentioned that he had seen some good irrigated and dry land farming practices in Jordan and Egypt and in the not too distant past Iraq had also been a leader in this area.   Unfortunately, agriculture had fallen into a state of disrepair.  The unsettled conditions of the war didn’t help, but much of this problem resulted from the challenge of a country like Iraq that is rich in oil wealth.   Many farmers didn’t want to stay on the land, because they saw opportunities for more money and less work in the non-farm economy.  Often the best farmers were the first to leave because they had the resources to go and try something else. 

Iraq is not like the Eastern U.S. or Central Europe.  In these rainy places, when people stop cultivating the land, you get weeds, grass and then little trees. Within only around twenty years in a place like Virginia you have a beginner forest.  It quickly reverts to a natural state. Iraq also reverts to a natural form when the hand of man is removed, but the natural form in most of this place is desolate desert.  It takes significant human effort to create productive land and significant effort to maintain it.  When maintenance stops, it can be disastrous, as trees and vegetation die setting up a depressing domino effect of fewer plants sustaining ever fewer plants until there is nothing left but dust and after the wind blows that away, there is nothing at all.  Dust to dust. Restoration is possible.  We agreed that restoration would be good for the Iraqi economy and even better for the Iraqi spirit. 

Foreign terrorists are the most serious problem, but fraud at border crossings is a border crossing problem in all times and places and routine fraud is a lot more common. The POE at Waleed processes many travelers every day and among the travelers are some dishonest people, some very clever. 

The new director of the passport unit was a real professional.  He showed us a variety of fake visas, each more professionally done than the last.  At first they were easy to detect.  Forgers merely replaced a page or photo shopped in a different picture.   They became more and more professionally done.  Eventually, the only way to tell the fraudulent passports from the real ones was by matching their serial numbers.  Finally it was not even possible to do that.   The director showed us a perfect fake passport.  If it was perfect, how did it come to be detected?  The director was a very intelligent man, but unassuming.  He reminded me of Colombo on the old television series, a little disheveled and diffident.  He explained that his experience made him think something was wrong.  As he asked a few questions, it became clear that the passport holder knew few details about the city where he ostensibly lived.   The director cracked the case the old fashioned way: with experience, persistence and intelligence.  As I said, a real professional.

The director told us that the most common passport besides Iraqi was Syrian. This is not surprise at the Syrian border.  Next most common?  Swedish.  Who’d a thought that?  But it makes sense. Lots of Iraqis have gone to Sweden over the years seeking asylum.  Now they come back, at least temporarily, but it is still good to have that kind of document.

The POE has access to decent equipment, but it is hooked up to a primitive system.  To make the black light machine work properly, the director had to jiggle the plug in the outlet.   Offices left the impression of an abandoned building.  The director told us that he was going to go down to Baghdad and make sure he got some renovations done.  If he is as good at this part of his job as he is at detecting fraud, he will probably succeed.

I always thought it was a joke.  Iraqi men would ask me if I was married.  When I said, “yes”, they would ask me how many wives.  We both laughed a little.  Then a couple of weeks ago, I thought I would play along with the joke and when they told me that they were married, I asked the same question about wives.  To my surprise, it had been a serious question and almost everybody has more than one.  It should not have come as a surprise.  This is a Muslim country and the men I meet are usually well off and so are the kinds of guys who can afford larger families, but somehow it never really occurred to me.

Some of these guys are very active.  One old toothless sheik has a very young son from a very young new wife.  While I suspect it is possible that there might be more men on the job, nobody is particularly surprised by this.  A local mayor mentioned in passing that he had three wives and fourteen kids.  He also said, perfunctorily, that he was getting married next week.  When I pressed him on the fact that he didn’t seem that excited, he explained that he was just marrying his sister in law.  His brother had died and somebody had to take care of her.  He got the job to keep it all in the family. 

The extended family is one of the pillars of the polygamy.  We tend to project the system into the American context of a nuclear family just with a couple additional women.  That is not really how it works here.  It is more of a welfare system married (literally) to a system of tribal or dynastic alliances.  Tribal affiliation is the key to success for individuals.  You can be born into a tribe or you can marry into a tribe and if you are particularly clever you can marry into up to four tribes.   This both complicates and simplifies genealogy because after a few generations there are lots of overlaps, so you have fewer family lines but a lot more permutations among them.

If you assume that there is rough gender parity for 18-25 year-olds, polygamy means that if some guys get two or three wives, others don’t get any at all, or at least they have to pick up the older women from the age groups where women come to outnumber men.  I suppose in a culture where a lot of men died in warfare, such a system works out well.  I recall reading about the Blackfoot Indians of Montana.  They were a particularly warlike people and sometimes as many as 2/3 of the male population was killed in the low-level but perpetual warfare they favored.  No matter.  The remaining men did triple duty and each generation was as big as the one previous.   

I don’t think this is the way it is working in Iraq.  It is just the traditional Muslim practice and seems fairly routine & uncontroversial at least among the men of western Al Anbar.