Thursday, May 29, 2008

Memorial Day in Mosul


Updated MOSUL – The closest thing to a Memorial Day barbecue for soldiers at Combat Outpost Rabiy came when one of their Bradley fighting vehicles, rumbling along a rubble-strewn street in Mosul, hit a sheep.

Out on the dusty edge of the American deployment here, there was nary a green park or picnic table in sight on the traditional first holiday of summer, the day to honor soldiers who die in war.

As far as the eye could see, they were surrounded by a tableau of up collapsed houses, trash and piles of dirt. They live in a fort of concrete walls that is no larger than a city block, shared with Iraqi Army colleagues; each nationality occupies one-half of a plywood barracks.

Wheeling into the base late last week, the Bradley, a lumbering machine that rolls on tracks like a tank, clipped the leg of a sheep.

The Iraqis caught the bleating, hobbling sheep and killed it. As the muezzin made the call to prayer, and the sun dipped a bloody red in the dusty evening, the Iraqis hung the carcass on a pipe protruding from a wall and went to work.

In a mishmash of camouflage and sweat pants, some older men with pot bellies and mustaches, others wearing flip flops instead of boots, the Iraqi soldiers milled about. One grinning, wiry older man made a rumbling sound, extended his hands like two tank tracks, and mimed the Bradley hitting the sheep.

The Americans grew alarmed at the prospect of a pool of guts in the outpost parking lot. One soldier ran for an interpreter to ask these allies to clean the animal somewhere else, to no avail.

About two dozen soldiers with K Troop in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment rotate on three-day shifts through the outpost, one of two dozen built in this city’s violent western side since January. Far from the oil resources in the south and the Shiite heartland, the city of Mosul slipped into neglect during the surge last year. While attacks elsewhere fell, here they spiked.

To stem the violence, the U.S. military built forts, about a half mile apart, amid the warren of alleys and trash-filled vacant lots throughout Mosul. It is tough, dirty work.

“We’re cavalry,” Lt. Rusty Morris, the platoon commander, explained. “It’s like the American West. We build forts close enough that one can come to the aid of another.”

On this Memorial Day, though, they faced a different enemy than their predecessors. Insurgents have taken to what the U.S. Army describes as suicide “up-armored” dump trucks. A steel plate is welded across the windshield to allow a driver to survive machine gun fire long enough to reach the wall or gate of a fort, before detonating.

The tactic adopted here, as elsewhere in Iraq, has been closer cooperation with the Iraqi Army; more joint operations, an effort by the Americans to hand over control and planning to the Iraqis. And this has become a large part of the experience of soldiering in Iraq these days.

A New York Times photographer and I spent two days embedded here with soldiers who were a tossed salad of races and backgrounds, most straight out of high school. The American soldiers, surprisingly given the death all around them, spent their down time watching slasher movies on DVD, to the dismay of the Iraqi translators who lived with them.

With the sound of screams and a chainsaw revving in the background on the TV screen, one young interpreter turned his face away and made a show of reading an English dictionary.

To be sure, at the larger Forward Operating Base Marez, commanders staged a Memorial Day ceremony. The chaplain, Maj. Larry Holland, spoke of the distinction between Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and asked soldiers to remember those who were killed.

In the 3rd Armored Cavalry’s latest deployment, 22 soldiers from the regiment and units attached to it have been killed. At Combat Outpost Rabiy, soldiers passed around a book of photographs of Sgt. Chad Caldwell of Spokane, Wash., who died a few hundred yards from here on April 30, at 9:42 p.m., when an I.E.D. detonated as he walked past on patrol.

Out at the outpost, as the Iraqis cleaned the sheep, Lt. Morris heaved on his body armor and headed for the gate with a damage claim form for the shepherd. “Livestock is property,” Lieutenant Morris said, and the man should be paid for the damage caused by the American Bradley.

But this barbecue was not for the Iraqi Army, either. The Iraqi soldiers had volunteered to dress the sheep and return it to the shepherd, as payment, settling the matter in their own manner.

Baghdad Bureau

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