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thedrifter
02-07-06, 06:20 PM
Associated Press
Embedded in Iraq With U.S. Forces
02.07.2006, 06:03 PM

AP Correspondent Antonio Castaneda is embedded with U.S. forces in Ramadi, Iraq. This is a periodic blog on his experiences.

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 8, 12:44 a.m., local

RAMADI, Iraq

The Super Bowl came and went early this week. While I didn't mind missing the game, I slept soundly in a storeroom full of IV bags and gauze bandages that night, I could tell the passing national celebration made some American troops long for home even more than usual. That was especially true for the Pennsylvania National Guard who missed their Steelers win a championship. One soldier outlined in detail the keg party he would have thrown back home; another told me about his efforts to have pierogies, a taste of Pittsburgh cuisine, shipped about 8,000 miles to him.

I didn't know the final score of the game until I asked a Marine brushing his teeth next to me the next day. He first responded with a startled look, he had mistaken me for an Iraqi interpreter. I guess interpreters don't usually ask for NFL updates.

Beyond missing out on sporting events and parties, many soldiers say the real pain of being away from home is directly correlated to your daily schedule. The busier you are in Iraq, the better it goes, many say. For others, though, home is still too far away.

"Man, I miss Atlanta ...," exclaimed Wylie Hughes, a Marine from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment, during a foot patrol in October in the western city of Haditha.

I also remember talking to another Marine at the same time whose wife had just suffered a miscarriage. The babyfaced Marine, who couldn't have been more than 21 or 22, was making expensive nightly calls to his wife back home on a satellite phone. I could tell the situation was wearing on him.

Other troops, particularly those on large city-bases such as Camp Victory in Baghdad or the enormous Balad airbase, now benefit from a stunning range of fast food restaurants, mini-department stores and large Internet and phone centers. Life near headquarters isn't bad, if you can escape the violence.

For those in remote areas of Iraq, a seven-month deployment (for Marines) or a one-year tour (for soldiers) can be an endurance test away from the conveniences of life in the Western world.

Over the weekend I ate with a group of transiting soldiers who hadn't been to a decent dining facility in months. Everyone overindulged, including one lieutenant who seemed intent on consuming all the food he had missed over the past few months. I watched him eat a cheeseburger, turkey breast, burrito, omelet, carrot cake, a serving of chili and four banana drinks. He explained his behavior by describing the food he usually eats back at his home base in Habaniyah.

"Sometimes it tastes funny, sometimes it's good, but you can't go back for more and then you end up going to heat up a Chili Mac," said 2nd Lt. Jacob Right of Pittsburgh. "I haven't eaten well in seven months."

_Antonio Castaneda

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 1, 11:53 p.m. local

KHALDIYAH, Iraq

As a child, I enjoyed reading the Dr. Seuss classic, "Oh, the places you'll go." More than two decades later, the operative theme during my assignment in Iraq seems to be, "Oh, the places you'll sleep."

I'm currently staying with U.S. soldiers who advise and train a battalion of Iraqi soldiers in a small base overlooking this riverside town between Fallujah and Ramadi, cities notorious for their history of violence. This outpost, made of several aging concrete buildings on a hilltop surrounded by barbed wire, is thought to have once been part of an ammunition dump used by Saddam's Army.

Some may find the idea of sleeping in an old ammo dump complex intolerable, but a year spent in over 30 military bases in Iraq - and a childhood with four siblings and a dog crowded into a small home - swept away such concerns.

I once soundly slept on top of shattered glass in the hallway of a bombed-out police station in Haditha, ignoring the dried bloodstains on the walls and using my bulletproof vest as a blanket on an unseasonably cold night.

In October, I shivered away but managed to sleep in the backseat of a Humvee as soldiers waited for a trailer to tow away another Humvee that had just been hit by a roadside bomb. And before the constitutional referendum that same month, I slept in a dusty storage room of a school that had been turned into a polling station, surrounded by piles of notebooks with covers displaying a smiling Saddam sitting next to a wide-eyed pupil.

This time I was kindly given the top bunk in a cluttered room. My host offered me the bed while another soldier studiously shot several virtual policemen while playing the "Grand Theft Auto" videogame. The room far exceeded my original expectations: heat was available and those exceptional chocolate mint Girl Scout cookies, sent by a soldier's thoughtful relative, were available down the hall.

On other occasions, though, I was not this fortunate. Perhaps my most distressing evening came not during an early morning mission or nighttime mortar attack, but inside a warm, comfortable trailer just outside the city of Tal Afar in northern Iraq.

My roommate at the time was a German journalist who wrote for a trade magazine that profiled U.S. military trucks a "People" magazine of sorts for those inclined toward heavy weaponry. The writer's knowledge of military equipment and weapons was remarkable, as were the number of days that had passed since he had last bathed. To compound the situation, one morning around 2 a.m. the Paladins on the U.S. base started shooting rounds in the distance, shaking our trailer and abruptly waking both of us up.

The "outgoing" fire wasn't the problem I had long grown accustomed to sleeping through explosions but the nearby booms commenced a line of commentary about the likely weapons systems employed. Prior to that memorable night, I did not know how to identify various shells in the U.S. arsenal by the sounds they make when fired.

_Antonio Castaneda

SATURDAY, Jan. 28, 3:46 p.m. local

EXITING RAMADI, Iraq, on HIGHWAY 10

If the guardrails weren't all smashed, you might believe you were riding down a new highway somewhere in southwest America.

There's smooth asphalt and three lanes neatly separated by lines of white paint cutting through miles of desert on this stretch of road just outside the western city of Ramadi. This part of Highway 10, which cuts across from Amman, Jordan to Baghdad, stood out; I'm accustomed to riding roads marked with craters from powerful bombs that regularly throw blocks of asphalt into the air. I thought of a trip I made to Baqouba last month, where one night I saw a wedding party of singing guests packed in tiny decorated cars swerve around craters along a downtown street.

Roadside bombs are the most common form of insurgent attack in Iraq: According to U.S. military statistics, there were nearly 11,000 roadside bombings here last year, or about 30 per day. Most American casualties come from such attacks.

These bombings, along with the threat of suicide car bombers, have resulted in one unfortunate reality for Iraqi drivers: they must pay attention and suddenly turn off onto roadsides or keep a safe distance every time a U.S. patrol or convoy passes by.

The drivers on this highway were alerted to the convoy I was riding with by a blaring siren that signaled them to pull over.

At one point the gunner's legs dangling from the hatch above tensed up, which I've seen before as soldiers prepare to fire their 50 caliber gun from the top of the Humvee. Fortunately, the suspect car turned away.

For all their armor and weaponry, the Humvees sharply turned away from each vehicle they passed, carefully steering away from both tiny, aging jalopies and large cargo trucks. The soldiers methodically scanned the vehicles and roadsides.

Shortly after we turned off onto a small paved road that led to a U.S. military base, a suspicious mound of trash lay beside the road. Our driver tried to stop, but he hit the brakes too late.

One soldier braced for the blast, but nothing detonated. Then began a recurring debate among the troops that must take place dozens of times each day: whether to call in an explosives detonation team, which could take hours for them to arrive, or diagnose the litter themselves with binoculars from afar.

"This is just stupid. There's just no reason why we can't just shoot and tear it up," said Staff Sgt. Jeff McConnell, a National Guardsman from Grand Island, Nebraska, as soldiers looked at the trash. "For two or three dollars of ammo we could take care of this. Instead, we're going to send a soldier to go and kick it around."

Patience was thin. "Come on ... stick your head over the hill," said McConnell, a Nebraska National Guardsman, as he looked out onto a long ridge of sand in the distance for a possible triggerman. Eventually the trash was discovered to be just that - a pile of harmless roadside garbage.

Farther down the road, we passed an enormous crater in the center from a prior bombing. From its size, it easily could have killed everyone inside a Humvee, regardless if it was uparmored or not. As we swerved around the hole, a group of enormous military trucks, one with the name "LUCIFER" painted in black on its front, passed by, heading the opposite way down the road.

_Antonio Castaneda

FRIDAY, Jan. 27, 7:05 p.m. local

RAMADI, Iraq

A portrait of a scorching Iraq made of oceans of sand, sagging and nondescript buildings has been etched into the public mindset. But there's another side of Iraq that slowly takes form over the winter: one of freezing nights and occasional rainstorms that turn swaths of the country into giant mud puddles.

Here in Ramadi, possibly Iraq's most violent city, weather should be the last thing on anyone's mind as the city endures urban shootouts and daily explosions. But weather is morale, remarked a colleague to me as he trudged through a mud landscape and tentatively tested the depth of murky pools of water with the tip of his boot. A usually annoying inconvenience took on new dimensions as tanks and multi-ton armored vehicles plowed down the narrow streets of this military base, creating ravines hidden by sheets of cold, standing water. The mud stuck on boots, socks, jackets, hair, mattresses and brought a dull chill to everything. "Everything else isn't so bad but it's the mud that gets to you. Look, you've only been here two days and you're already packed in it," said Sgt. Rich Scaricaciottoli as he escorted me through Camp Ar Ramadi, which looked mostly the same since my last visit in May. I wondered how Korean war veterans had endured tours through similar weather - and more casualties - over longer periods of time.

For as miserable as the weather was, it still didn't halt the violence. Early in the morning I headed out with U.S. Marines and soldiers searching for an Iraqi contractor accused of using a large generator - purchased with U.S. reconstruction funds for a local school - for about 20 homes, including his own and those of several relatives and friends. Instead, the unit was initially diverted to look for gunmen who had decided to spend their Friday morning taking potshots at a U.S. position beside a major highway.

Things were surprisingly calm in the small cluster of homes where U.S. troops said they saw the gunfire originate. While semis and cars traveling from Syria and western Iraq to Baghdad sped in the distance, with flapping tarps smacking against speeding trucks hauling various goods, the residents said they knew nothing about the attack. It was an all too familiar - and frustrating - predicament for U.S. troops in Iraq, who regularly met Iraqi residents who either supported insurgents or remained too afraid of them to disclose any valuable intelligence.

And then there, in one family's front yard, was the mud again - but this time partly covered by red pools of blood harbored within fresh, round footprints. U.S. troops had fired back and shot one man in the rear, sending him sprawling into the mud lake that was this family's front yard. The family claimed their son, who had been taken away for medical treatment by U.S. troops, had simply been walking to the outhouse when the bullets came flying by. U.S. troops countered that their son had tested positive for gunshot residue and questioned a "MAM" - or military age male.

The family of the injured man was surprisingly calm and quiet for a group that had just seen a relative crumple on their front yard from a gunshot wound. They mostly watched the Americans and gave short answers to questions from the commanding officer, Lt. Jason Secrest, a young officer from York, Pa., assigned to the 1st Battalion, 172nd Regiment. The middle-aged Iraqi produced an ID badge that said he once worked at a nearby U.S. base. The troops moved on to the neighboring house.

There were no men at the next home - only a middle-aged woman wearing a blue headscarf and dark dress who waited to be questioned as several restless children milled around. As she held her baby girl, she said she knew nothing of the gunfire but said her husband had left to buy a new car and had gone missing.

"He left for Baghdad one month ago and he's disappeared," she explained as roosters crowed and ran around in the mud of her backyard. Violence was nearly impossible to escape in this tortured part of Iraq.

"Can you check his name in the computer to see if he is dead?" she calmly asked. "If you find anything, please let me know."

_Antonio Castaneda