04 July 2007

This place has this bizarre dichotomy about it. Every detail you could think to describe a war zone –houses rubbled, fairly regular explosions, military occupation, ever-present attack helicopters, curfews and cordons, breakdown of essential services – it’s all present. When we run patrols, we do so expecting contact, covering high and low, down alleys, popping smoke grenades to mask our movement through open areas and clearing every building we go into. If we need to, we will bust in or even blow up doors to get into buildings we suspect. Despite that, despite the fact it seems it would be very difficult to forget that there’s a war on, the people we see everyday often seem to be doing just that. There is a discordant air in this place.
I think part of what feels odd about this place is the air of familiarity. Despite all the massive and obvious differences between life here and the life that I’m accustomed to, there are enough small similarities. My platoon seized a house that overwatched an intersection that we need to control. We were as nice as we could be in the situation, but in the final look we evicted a family of six from their house with minimal compensation. While I sat or lay in the ridiculous heat in this house for several days it reminded me of my grandparents’ home in southern California. The heat (though Baquoba is much worse than Dana Point), the slight breezes, the concrete, and most of all, the light all reminded me of sitting on the patio with my grandparents in the summer.
Perhaps the strangest thing is the reaction of many people we encounter. Despite then fact that we are an occupying army, and that when we came into this neighborhood we cordoned off the entire city and started blowing up houses (houses that were rigged with explosives by Al Queda, or used by snipers), many of the residents I’ve talked to have thanked us for being in the neighborhood. The head of the family I evicted, whose house we essentially stole for several days, told me that he was very grateful that we, US forces, were there to protect the neighborhood and that we had kicked out Al Queda. His was not an unusual sentiment. As we patrolled through the neighborhood and went into houses to speak with residents we were often offered chai (hot, sweetened black tea) and food.
Days later we walked through a neighborhood in southwestern Baquoba. Even before the war, this place had open sewers that flowed into the dirt road between houses. We were polling the residents on the overall feeling in the community, looking for sources that would inform against Al Queda, getting what we call “atmospherics.” The power has been out in this part of Baquoba since the beginning of this operation (taking with it local well water pumps), and no one is allowed out of the neighborhood, so almost all food and water come from US/Iraqi Army sources or small local stockpiles. The complaints we get often center around the scarcity of food and water, the lack of power, and the cordon.
We came to the door of the courtyard of one house (all houses here have walled courtyards around them), and listened to an old woman bound to a wheelchair tell us that they had very little food and water because she couldn’t go to the humanitarian aid drops. She was surrounded by her family members, one of which was a little girl of perhaps ten or twelve. The little girl, through all of this talk of deprivation, had a bright, adorable smile spread across her face. Perhaps she was used to the situation – children seem to adapt more quickly – and perhaps she was excited or intrigued by our presence, but she seemed genuinely happy despite all that was going on around her. And even as we moved down to the next house I couldn’t get over how much she looked like Susann Almasi when she was that age.

posted by Interested Soldier @ 09:09