Today, my team met our Iraqi Army brigade, which only recently formed. We toured the post and spent time getting to know the brigade’s leadership. By the end of a lunch of bread, rice, fish and chicken, we felt comfortable around our Iraqi counterparts, and relationships formed with some laughs.
Bags on the airfield
Connaugton, Connaroe, and Major Brott (bossman)
Staff Sergeant Murrell
So there I was...
seated towards the front of the passenger cabin of the Chinook, which is an aircraft that looks like an olive drab school bus with helicopter blades attached, with the rest of my team at 1500 feet. Despite the constant airflow similar to standing in front of a man sized fan at a gym, sweat poured down our backs underneath our helmets and body armor. The only light came from the instrument panels and the moon.
Settling in to the forward operating base has been relieving. Not only are we out of instruction, but with the old team leaving, it feels like we are even closer to getting to go home ourselves. All in all we are very satisfied with the accomadations.
I recently received a message from an anonymous reader, who was concerned about my recent writings. This individual felt that I was divulging too much information, worrying that the enemy could use it against his/her deployed family member. I promised a response to this concern and the following is just that.
In the later 90s, the U.S. Army’s main focus was in the Balkans, we noticed a problem with contracted local workers. The workers, whose job was to clean or build, would lose their job for any one of various reasons, like incompetence, and would simply move to the next Army base and begin the cycle over again.
My team arrived at Camp Taji, outside of Baghdad, very early in the morning on Monday, after the last leg of flights on a Chinook cargo helicopter. The camp itself is split into two sides: U.S. and Iraqi. We are located in the middle of the Iraqi side, where we are staying in Iraqi barracks.
Around the world, the humvee, or HMMWV (M998, High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle), has been the standard for U.S. Armed Services’ ground transportation since 1985. However, even the up-armored version of the HMMWV has proven less than effective in the case of an improvised explosive device (IEDs) attack. Though the HMMWV was a good solution to the threat of small arms fire during WWII, when mines accounted for five percent of casualties, today’s Servicemen serve on a battlefield where IEDs account for 42 percent of the 4,141 American causalities. Therefore, beginning now, the summer of 2008, America’s sons and daughters are kept safe with the IED solution—the MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected).
If you’ve ever seen a humvee with a flat screen monitor on the driver’s side dash, it is not a DVD player. The display is part of a system called blue force tracker (U.S. forces are blue forces). My team just finished training on blue force tracker (BFT). Not that the system is new, but it is much more prevalent and updated than just a few years ago.
Ed Summers wrote to ask, "are English-speaking personnel in each Iraqi truck [while you are on a mounted combat patrol with them], or do you think communication with the Iraqi personnal to be a little difficult?"
Rich Connaroe graduated from Northside High School in 2000 and VMI in 2004. Now a Captain in the U.S. Army, Connaroe begins a one-year deployment to Iraq in August. During that time, he plans to make regular blog posts that he hopes will connect readers of the The Roanoke Times to U.S. soldiers who are deployed in Iraq.
Leaving our mark on Kuwait.