Life in the WAR ZONE

I sit in the quarters once reserved for Egyptian officers who came to Al Sahra, the Iraqi Air Force College, to give instruction on their various tactics, techniques and procedures. The base currently bears an American name (which I am unable to disclose) and houses several thousand troops like me. And, although it's no longer used as a place of instruction, the airstrip remains well-worn as the stream of C-130's and other small fixed-wing aircraft fly in and out, carrying pallets of supplies. The constant swarm of rotary-wing birds buzzes down for fuel or to evacuate casualties of the most recent ambush.\nIt's from inside these helicopters and planes I've seen much of the countryside where roads do not go. As for the places with roads, there are many I've commanded my convoys down and many more I've yet to see. I've walked through the sands of the desert, been lost in the slums of Baghdad and stood in the gold and marble palaces of the deposed leader of this land.\nBut on my journey through the south and the many combat patrols I've run in the north, I've witnessed more significant things than the military complexes that demonstrate the prowess of our armed forces or the unimaginable technologies we possess; I've witnessed the conditions in which the citizens of this country reside.\nYou can't help but be amazed by how bad these people have it. All along the roads and spread across the fields is nothing but trash and filth. It's like being in a landfill, but instead of the garbage being covered with soil to mask the odor and keep down disease, it's covered with children playing with half-starved, rabid dogs.\nWhen you are in the wetlands, near the Tigris, the people live in huts made from hardened mud. In the dry areas, their homes are nothing more than shacks that sit along the sides of roads, made from nothing more than old boxes and bailing wire. You can see the brand names of foreign food manufacturers through the thatching that they use to try to fend off the wind.\nThe few people who are lucky enough to live in homes made of brick have huge chunks missing from their walls. Nearly every window is broken. Seldom does a home have a roof. Some of the homes have fashioned tattered tarps, blown off of passing convoys, as makeshift roofs, held in place by twisted metal from torn-down guardrails or abandoned vehicles.\nThere's no running water in the areas I've seen. Most of the villages depend on well water. And for the mud villages, the Tigris is the main source of water. But when you look down onto the surface of the river, you see how distorted the color is from the vast amount of oil flowing into it. This river, which has been so important to the history of mankind, now has banks that are blackened and marsh grasses coated in thick layers of crude oil. \nAs you look down the river to the settlements, you see the women, standing in this polluted water, washing their clothes and drawing buckets of it to drink or to cook their children's meals. When they get sick from it, they take the contaminated waste and toss it into the yard where other children might be playing soccer. \nAll along the roads are gas stations. They are all abandoned. There's no fuel to put in them. Every three or four days, a tanker of fuel will come and fill what vehicles it can before it's exhausted. People will wait in line for two days to try to get some of this fuel so that they can go to the market for food. As they wait, they watch as dozens of fuel tankers stream in and out of the bases. It seems as if we use more fuel here in a day than the entire civilian population of Iraq is rationed in a month.\nThe division headquarters is located in a series of Saddam's palaces. When you stand on one of the balconies, sipping gourmet coffee from the café within, you look out over the cliffs and the Tigris, and you can see the mud huts and the absolute poverty in which these people are forced to live. And they can see you.\nThe nature of my mission here is non-humanitarian, so I've seen only humanitarian projects in the pictures of newspapers. How great it would be to see where we've made a difference in the lives of more than just the third-country nationals who reside on this base with us.\nNow, it's true that I've seen shepherds cheering as I flew in low over their herds in the wetlands of the Kurdish region to the northeast of the Jabal Hamrîn Mountains. And it's true that I've seen children smiling and waving as I've driven past. But it's also true that I've had villagers open fire on me with AK-47s. It's also true that children have cursed and thrown stones at my fellow soldiers.\nThis country is supposedly being rebuilt by Halliburton. They've been given that responsibility as the result of accepting a no-bid contract for the job. As of yet, Halliburton hasn't begun; it's determined that the risk is too high for its employees to be sent into the cities. I completely understand Halliburton's hesitation because my convoys have encountered all of those bad things you hear about on the news. \nBut this is what I don't understand: Why did we give the contract to a huge international corporation that the Vice president just so happens to have been the former head of instead of creating a much larger number of smaller contracts that could have been given to local Iraqi contractors? Wouldn't it make more sense to pump jobs and money into this horribly depressed economy rather than have a bunch of imported laborers hoard the money while refusing to do the work?\nNow, it's true Iraqi contractors would be endangered by their association with America, just like the Iraqi National Guard members are. But it seems obvious to me that our current solution is not the answer.