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Friends Leave

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

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Personalities

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.

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Seeing the Old Things

I made it to the Archeological Museum today – finally.  No strike today.  Lots of the things there I have seen many times in pictures.  It is interesting to see them in real life.  The museum is very well organized. Each of the exhibits has explanations and descriptions in Greek and English.  The English is very good, obviously written by an educated native speaker.  Many of the sculptures are grave monuments and they can be very poignant.  As the descriptions explain, they often show the deceased saying goodbye to his/her family and the joys of life.  The artists capture the expressions very well so that we can feel the grief across the millennia.

 I also saw the gold mask of Agamemnon from Mycenae. This is the real one. The one in Mycenae is just a copy.  There are also lots of pots.  Pots are some of the most important clues to archeologists because they are so common and cheap.  When they break, people don’t bother to retrieve the all pieces.  They just sweep them outside.  Ancient cities tended to rise in layers of dirt, refuse and pottery shards, with each layer representing a different time period, so everything lays around in distinct layers and archeologists can use pieces of pottery to identify and date cultures. 

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Nothing Too Much

This is the kind of place I always find, a little stream in a quiet park.  I am sitting again in the garden park near the Parliament.  I put the kids on the plane at 0655.  My plane doesn’t go until 1805, so I figured that I would go to the Archeology Museum, the one I missed because of the strike.   I will write about that later.

I sat at this very spot before the kids came a few days ago.  The feeling was different.  That day the sun was shinning; today it is overcast and drizzly.  My moods reflected the weather on both occasions.  Then I was about to get on the Metro to go and get them at the airport so that we could see Greece together.  Today I am getting ready to get on the Metro to go back to Iraq.  The kids have left.

The excitement of Iraq wore off with the first step I took in that dusty desert. Now I just want to finish my job.  Some people think it is a bad idea to go on R&R, especially the short ones I have chosen.  The received wisdom is that getting out for a short time just makes you want to stay out.  Of course that is right, but most people still want to take the R&R. 

Above is a very from a hill in Aegina, an island near Athens.  Maybe because I am in Greece, I remember the classical debate about having and not having.  Some thought that you should not have anything you could lose, so as to avoid the pain of loss.  Most Greek thinkers were moderates, however,  who didn’t believe in excess – nothing too much. They understood that an excess of pleasure seeking would lead to unhappiness, but they also knew that an excess of denial would produce the same result. 

I enjoyed being with the kids and finally seeing this place and adding Greece to our shared landscape of memory.  The joy of having done these things greatly outweighs the pain of losing it and the memory will brighten up my time left in Iraq.  It is not that long anyway.  I have half done and since I have saved my R&Rs for the second half of my tour, I have lots of time out coming.

Below are cats in Poros sharing the catch.

Iraq has been a fantastic experience, but it is less attractive prospectively than retrospectively.  This is a great thing to HAVE done, less fun to be doing.

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Island Hopping

Much of Greece consists of islands.  The Aegean is really a drowned mountain range with the peaks protruding above the water and the valleys sunk below.  And the islands are very close together.  You can usually see the next island from the one you are on.  This invited exploration even by sailors who didn’t like to be out of sight of land. 

Below is the Orthodox church on Aegina. Aegina is a big island, as you can see from the background.

We took a cruise to three islands: Poros, Hydra and Aegina.  Poros was not very attractive.  Well, the island was pretty but the houses were that 1960 socialist style.  It was worth seeing, but not worth going to see.  Hydra was beautiful.  The natural setting was spectacular and the buildings were well constructed and good looking.  There are no cars on Hydra, which makes it an exceptionally good place to walk. Aegina is the biggest of the three and it was an important center in ancient and medieval times. There is an ancient temple and a Greek Orthodox monastery.  This island is fertile and is a paradise, with olive & pasticcio groves mixed with citrus framed by pine forests all overlooking the blue sea.   The pictures do not do it justice, but look at them anyway.

Above is the Temple of Athesis on Aegina.    

Cruising itself is not much fun. A cruise boat is like a big floating bus.  But being there among the islands is great.

Below, Espen deals with the early wake time and the slow boat syndrome.

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The Theatre

The amphitheatre at Epidarus supposedly has nearly perfect acoustics.  We walked up to the top and indeed we could hear people speaking down in the center.  Evidently the sound waves flow up the hill and then some bounce off the stone seats in back of each audience member.  Given the speed of sound, this is not enough to produce a discernible echo, but prolongs the sound.  This is not perceivable and our brains make the necessary corrections so the whole thing enhances our senses.  At least that is what I heard.  This is one of the birthplaces of drama.  It started out as story telling and gradually developed into the kinds of things we would recognize as a play. 

This theater is still intact because it was isolated and people didn’t have as much incenitive to steal the stones.   Many ruins are not wrecked by time, but rather by salvage.

Epidarus started out as a healing center dedicated to the god of healing, Aesclepius.  People would come here to make offerings to the gods.   After a while the priests developed a modicum of physician skills and you can trace the origins of medicine to these places.  Of course most of what they did had little more effect on actual sickness, other than the value of the rest and psychosomatic benefits.  The ancient Greeks were profoundly superstitious people.  All pre-modern people were/are superstitious because they don’t have any scientific alternatives.  Even those of us who should know better still fall for faith healers, shamans and other charlatans.

The natural setting is beautiful and if you got to hang around here watching plays and not having to work, I bet many people did recover their health, so I suppose it worked.  The proximate cause is not always the apparent one, or that one advertised.  I remember reading that in the 18th & 19th Centuries many of the very young women who married old rich guys were evidently barren.  Their husbands sent them off to “take the waters” at some spa, where lots of young men worked and the miracle of the spa restored their fertility.  

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The Workers – United – Will Close All Museums

I would have to tell the story of today by telling what we didn’t do.  We didn’t go to the Archeological Museum.  We didn’t go any other museums.  We didn’t even go to the park.  All these places were shut because of a strike/demonstration by government unions.  We DID see them marching and chanting.  It was very 1930s except the banners are more colorful: less red, brighter pastels. 

Demonstrations are always the same.  You get the big march and the chanting in simple words and cadences that the cognitively challenged can repeat w/o too much trouble, something like “The workers – united – will never be defeated.”  We saw on the news that some fire bombs and tear gas were used after the main demonstration.  The protestors looked peaceful enough when we saw them.  I think most were just ordinary people, but there are always some of the violent guys who take any opportunity to make trouble.  

We walked a lot, since the Marriott shuttle couldn’t drop us or pick us up in town. I had a good time being with Mariza & Espen.   Above is one of the steep paths we climbed.  Since I didn’t get to go to the museums, I have rationalized it away.  It is true that actually seeing the real thing is sometimes less satisfying than seeing a really good photo, since you can usually see more detail in the photo and there is more explanation.  That is what I am telling myself anyway.  It is not entirely wrong.  I recall when Chrissy and I saw the Mona Lisa in Paris.  It is smaller than you think and farther away than you would want.  The same went for Stonehenge.  On the other hand, even on this short trip the Acropolis and Mycenae were more than I expected.

Anyway tomorrow we have an island cruise day and then the kids go back to America and I go back to Iraq.  They rhythm of that reminds me of Davy Crockett’s campaign slogan.  I will recall as best I can.  “If you reelect me, I will serve you well and honestly; if you do not, you can go to hell and I shall go to Texas.”  I felt funny not being in Iraq for a few hours, but I came to my senses.  Still I have to go back so I may as well make the most of it. 

Espen has decided he will look angry (and tough) at all the photo sessions from now on, so whenever he notices the camera…well you see.  Who knows why?  But I will post in any case.

I did get him when he wasn’t looking, however.

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Cyclops’ Wall

The ancient Greeks thought that giant Cyclops built the walls of Mycenae, since they could not understand how such big rocks could be brought to the site and stacked.  When I looked at the place, I could see how they were astonished.  The rocks are big and the hill is high, but with simple tools and a lot of persistence the ancient Mycenaeans did not need the help of Cyclops. Nevertheless, despite all the monumental precautions their civilization was destroyed and Mycenae abandoned.  These Bronze Age warriors were no match for Iron Age weapons of invaders.

BTW – it is not true that a man armed with iron weapons was so much superior to one armed with bronze, but iron is more common and so more men could be well armed. Of course the most famous representatives of Mycenaean culture were Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus & Odysseus.  The Iliad makes it sound like these sorts of heroes were the only guys who counted on the battlefield and they were.  With bronze weapons and kit, only a few can have complete armor, horses and chariots AND even fewer have the talent and time to develop the skills of an expert fighting man.  The Homeric heroes were a lot like tanks on a battlefield.  They could mow down the opposing infantry until they ran into a hero from the other side, hence the importance of single combat.  Besides, it makes a better story.  The later Greeks developed the phalanx, where they all stood in lines with spears and shields and pushed the other side until somebody broke.  Individual valour was merged with the larger group. It was an excellent war machine, but not as cool as Achilles v Hector. 

The 19th Century amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann used the Iliad to find both Agamemnon’s Mycenae and Helen’s Troy.  When he found a body in a tomb and took off the death mask, he thought he had looked on the face of Agamemnon and the gold death mask is still often associated with the face of Agamemnon, but modern historians think that the king with the golden mask predated the Trojan War period by a couple centuries.

We still take much of our understanding of the period from Homer, who wrote centuries after the events based on oral tradition, which tends to be corrupted.  The Mycenaeans had a written language.  There was great excitement when it was deciphered, about 50 years ago now, but all they wrote about were lists of who owned what and where things were stored.  It did prove that they were indeed Greeks (or proto-Greeks) but there is no literature or sense of history.   Knowing that Agamemnon owned a dozen sheep &  three cows in a particular local valley was probably really important back then, but fails to capture our imaginations today.  Mycenaean civilization remains pre-historic in the practical sense of the term.

Nevertheless, Mycenae is impressive even today in its ruined state.  The Lion Gate you see in the picture is sort of a reverse arch, with the triangle in the middle bearing and spreading the load. 

The natural setting is beautiful.  Most of the scenery we saw as we drove past Corinth into the Peloponnesus was beautiful.  The mountains in Greece go right down into the sea giving the country an unusually indented coast and long coastline.  Greece has more miles of coastline than all of Africa and no place in Greece is very far from both the mountains and the sea.  Little fertile valleys sit next to barren rocks and all have access to the sea.  It is a unique combination and scenery is not the most important consequence.  Geography helps explain much of Greek history and achievement.  

The picuture is a fish farm, BTW. Sorry for the blurr. I took it from the moving bus.

It has been really great to see the geography of the places and people I studied since I was a kid.  I realize how little I understand.   It is possible to know lots of facts and understand little.   When you put your feet on the ground, it is easier to understand the history.

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Things Are Getting Better

I talked to an English guy named Joe, who evidently made a lot of money selling prosthetic and orthopedic devices.  Exciting as that business was, he preferred history and knew a lot about it.  He said that he had been coming to Athens for more than 20 years and had seen a lot of improvements.  That is why I didn’t find the smoggy, dingy Athens I had expected, he explained.  He pointed out that 20 years ago you couldn’t look out from the Acropolis and expect to see the mountains because they were usually obscured by smog.  The green space had been much less green and was filled with garbage back then.  The Greeks had made significant progress.  He also confirmed that much of the forest I had seen coming in was a recent improvement. 

Contrary to what you might think watching the news, things have generally been getting better, especially in Europe and North America, where forest cover has increased and water and air quality has improved remarkably.  As a teenage environmentalist, I recall reading all those books that predicted mass famines by 1985, resource depletion and general collapse of the environment by now.  Instead we get this (see below).

What a beautiful place.   That is not to say our problems are all finished.  China is already making our pitiful attempts are planet wrecking look like a junior varsity effort of a class C team, but if we in the West can make such progress, I suppose they can too.  If they work really hard, maybe the athletes at this year’s Olympics in Beijing will be able to breathe deeply as they compete and that temporary improvement might be the start of something bigger.

Below is a parade next to the Greek parliament.  I just happened on it.

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Kids Arrive in Athens

Mariza & Espen arrived about an hour & a half late. They were tired, which was good since they arrived late and could go to bed soon.  We had supper at a place called “Goody’s” a fast food place.  Even with all the money I get for being in Iraq, we cannot afford (or at least I cannot tolerate) to eat at the restaurants in Marriott.  It would be costing around $50 a person.  It is expensive around here in general and it is not only the strong Euro.

I let the kids sleep late and we had the Euro tourist breakfast of bread & cheese and then headed down to see the Acropolis.  Marriott runs a shuttle bus to the downtown.  We walked up the steep path to the Acropolis.  This place is not handicapped friendly and the rocks are worn smooth, shinny and slippery but it is worth the trip.  Actually, there is not much left of the monuments on the Acropolis, but standing amid all this history and at the origins of our civilization is a special experience.  Espen and Mariza enjoyed it too and that made it a much better day for me than yesterday when I scouted it out alone – and yesterday was a good day. 


I have grown old and softer especially my feet.  I walked all day yesterday and most of the day before and on the third day my feet hurt.  Tomorrow we plan to go to Mycenae.  It is a bus trip, so I figure I will walk a bit less and the old feet will recover. 

Mariza got sick.  We don’t know why.  She ate all the same things we all did, but she threw up a little.  As I write now, she is feeling better and I hope she will be in shape tomorrow.  


The irony of trying to eat in Athens is that the gyros are not good or not available.  They just don’t have those rotating meat things I saw in Turkey or that I remember from the Greek restaurants in Madison.  I had a poor imitation of the legendary Zorba’s of Madison gyros. It was actually just little pieces of meat with the bread and sauce.  I may never again enjoy the total experience.  Last time I went to Madison, I found only one gyros place and it was run by Mexicans.  Evidently there are not enough Greek immigrants anymore and these guys were way too polite.  I recall the Zorba’s experience as something like the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld.  YOU! They would say and if you didn’t answer quick enough “no gyros for you.”  Well, not quite that, but the feeling was the same.  

As important as gyros is to human happiness, there is much more to the country.  I expected to enjoy Greece, but I have been pleasantly surprised so far. My disappointments are that I will not see it all.  For example, I will not go to Thermopylae.  It is not on the beaten track, even after the success of “The 300”.  As I understand it, silt and erosion has widened the pass since the time of Leonidas, so it is hard to picture the battle anyway.  Maybe it is best to keep it in the imagination.  I saw the old movie “The 300 Spartans” when I was in 5th grade and that is what started me reading about the ancient Greeks.  Forty years later I know that movie was not accurate in most details and the real Greeks were much more interesting than those in the movie, but I still acknowledge what started me down the path.  After so many changes, I guess we sort of stay the same, or more correctly I think we circle around the same places.  

I was worried that the kids would get sunburned.  I am a little tan from living in Iraq – and I have a hat – but they are still pale.  Sunblock is expensive and harder to find around here than I thought but we got some.  It cost 20 Euro or around $30.  Note to self – bring sunblock.