After a quick breakfast in the mess hall, Roy and I meet up with the patrol. Six vehicles today, scheduled for a full run to all the prisons.
Our convoy arrives at Abu...
Our convoy arrives at Abu Ghraib; insurgents almost overran the gates in April.
First, we head for the al-Sadeer Hotel, where most of our charges congregate for pickup. The hotel, where they presumably reside, is owned by Kurds (whom most Iraqi Arabs hate) and heavily fortified. Last March, insurgents tried to ram a garbage truck stuffed with 200 pounds of explosives into the lobby. Security guards shot the driver before he could get too close, but it still exploded, injuring 40. What a place to live.
The "guests" are all heavily armed: Blue, SWAT-team-style Type IIIA vests, with ceramic armor plates, sidearms, and military-issue repeating rifles. I start to feel sorry for them, but then I realize: These guys are soldiers of fortune, gunslingers in their own private war. They volunteered for this: Their chance to star in their own John Wayne movie. They may not love the smell of napalm in the morning, but they love making two hundred grand a year.
Our Humvees take up positions guarding their armored Suburbans. We blast off at high speed through the growing crowds in the streets. Three prisons are in town, and those are fairly close together. Each day we drive a slightly different route, at varying times, to keep those who might want to target us off balance.
Today we also take the long drive out to Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison west of Baghdad. It's considered a "long-range mission," and we are gone all day. The route takes us out into agricultural areas, where Sunni Muslims tend their crops and their livestock in much the same way they did thousands of years ago: by hand, with back-breaking manual labor. The women work in full, black burkhas, which must be hot as hell inside-it's 110 today. The men dress in cheap cotton shirts and pants, some in long robes. Children dress like little kids anywhere; most don't wear anything, and splash in the puddles. This countryside is fertile territory for farming-and insurgents.
The patrol unfolds without incident-a rarity. We don't know if this was just a rare cool day in the hot zone, or the result of secret electronic counter-measures the Army is using experimentally with our unit to thwart remote-controlled bombs.
Next morning, the dust storm is gone, but its layer of dust is not forgotten. When a slight breeze kicks up later in the morning, so does all the talc of the day before. That almost scrubs our plan to take a couple of M1114s over to Saddam Hussein's mammoth troop reviewing stand/stadium known as the Crossed Sabres.
We want to see an M1114 do zero-to-60 runs. So I take off from the far set of Crossed Sabres, driving toward a mythical "finish line" under the final set-ironically, almost exactly a quarter-mile away. We can't really get zero-to-60s because the damn thing won't go fast enough. They have 60mph speedometers, and they can barely hit that. With 4,000 pounds of 1/4-inch-thick armament, they're lucky they move.
The turbodiesel does its best, as does its three-speed automatic with overdrive. But it's a struggle to peg the speedo. After turning off the A/C and shifting to 2-Hi, we just barely manage to touch 60. But it takes the entire distance to do it-and nearly 35 seconds. I can't ever remember driving a vehicle that had identical zero-to-60 and quarter-mile ETs. Either way, it's a New World Record!
Logbook note: Next time, run at night, remove ammo boxes, take off roof-mounted machine guns. They create drag.
The roof dome of Defense Ministry...
The roof dome of Defense Ministry fell eight stories into the lobby after Tomahawk missile direct hit.
Last day in Baghdad: I wind up getting on the Oil-Electricity-Minerals Ministry runs. This is an interesting trip around the unpredictable east side of town. We escort ministers and employees to the various government-run offices. It's ironic, I think, as we pass hundreds lined up at each gas station, waiting for the precious fuel needed to keep all these zillions of rattletrap Iraqi cars on the road. The Ministry of Oil is keeping the tap wide open on Iraqi oil flowing to the U.S. Even pro-American Iraqis are cynical about America's system of priorities in Iraq, when it comes to oil. When the United Nations building in Iraq was blown up by terrorists, sending the U.N. delegation packing, it was noted there was not one single tank protecting the U.N., but there was a phalanx of them surrounding the Oil Ministry.
Colonel Pinnell joins us for a farewell lunch. He seems like a straight shooter. He looks you in the eye and tells it like it is. I like his definition of the ways to do things around here. "The American way-which I like to think is the logical, common sense way-is that if a suicide bomber attacks a checkpoint, we change the design of the checkpoint so that can't happen again," he explains. "The Iraqi way is that if someone blows up a checkpoint, and a lot of people are hurt or killed, it was God's will. So nothing needs to be changed. They leave it the way it was."
"God's will" explains away everything bad that happens. Accountability, ingenuity, and proactive behavior aren't core attributes here. Still, the colonel sees things getting better every day, and I have to agree with him.
Another uneventful trip on Route Irish to the airport. Wonder if anyone has made as many as four round trips on that notorious road without getting shot at? Over 200 miles of convoy runs, and no incidents. Lucky me.
"We didn't think you'd go on any," a soldier told me.
"That's what I came here to do," I said.
He laughed, "I know, but we thought after the first one, you'd want to hide out in the motor pool the rest of the time."
I thought, "You mean I had a choice?"