thedrifter
01-10-07, 01:06 PM
Fighting Words
D.C. Lawyer Adam Tiffen Forgoes the Legalese for Frank Dispatches From Iraq
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 10, 2007; C01
"The man was standing 100 meters from the explosion and he said there was no explosion," Adam Tiffen says.
He's looking at his computer screen, where a photo shows him in his Army uniform, questioning a kneeling Iraqi who was captured after a roadside bomb exploded near Humvees carrying Tiffen and other soldiers from the Maryland National Guard.
"If he wasn't the triggerman, he was the spotter for the triggerman," Tiffen says. "But I had to let him go. I had nothing on him. What can you do? Iraqis have rights, too."
Tiffen, 31, is sitting in his office at the law firm of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, a few blocks from the White House, looking at pictures from his year in Iraq. His law degree hangs on the wall near his Bronze Star. On his desk sit a couple of souvenirs of Iraq -- a .50-caliber machine gun bullet and a hunk of shrapnel from a roadside bomb. His black crew cut matches his black suit.
"Look at me, I'm in my lawyer uniform," he says. "I'm Mr. Attorney on Pennsylvania Avenue with my degrees on the wall. And seven months ago, I was in Iraq wearing body armor and I hadn't slept in three days and I was running around the desert."
While he was in Iraq, leading a 40-man rifle platoon, he wrote a blog about his experiences. He called it "The Replacements" because, he says, "we replaced guys and then other people replaced us -- we were just in a chain, a cycle." His blog contained no editorial comments, no political messages. He just told stories about what he saw every day:
The first round explodes with a shattering crack, and I can hear shouting coming from outside the sandbagged room.
"Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!"
I leap to my feet and quickly settle my advanced combat uniform helmet onto my head. Despite the explosions and yelling coming from outside, somehow my mind registers the inconsequential thought that the helmet pads lining the inside of the helmet feel tacky from days of sweat and grime and will need to be washed.
At first the blog was just for his family and friends but soon word got out and his stories were e-mailed around and he started getting feedback from strangers: "Thank you so much for allowing us to see the human side of the war."
Armchair General, a military history Web site, printed part of his blog ( thereplacements.blogspot.com). So did the liberal journal Mother Jones. Last October, several of his stories were posted on The Sandbox, a military blog founded by "Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau. Last Sunday, two tiny snippets from Tiffen's stories were quoted in the "Doonesbury" comic strip.
An Unexpected Call
"People asked me, what are you doing?" Tiffen says, laughing. "You're a nice Jewish boy. You're a lawyer, Why are you in the Army? Why are you in the infantry? Why are you in Iraq?"
When he was a kid, growing up on Long Island, his parents took him to Gettysburg and that sparked an interest in military history. "My heroes were not basketball players, they were soldiers," he says. "I thought, I want that experience. I think I wanted to test myself against those soldiers, to see how I stacked up."
He joined Army ROTC in 2000, while he was studying at George Washington University Law School. He graduated in 2003 and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Maryland National Guard. He was working on an insider-trading case at Porter Wright when the unit he'd trained with was called up for duty in Iraq. By then, Tiffen was in another unit but he got a call from his old platoon sergeant, Thomas Thompson.
"He's the lieutenant I wanted to go to war with," Thompson says. "I called him on the phone and said, 'I need a platoon leader. Have you thought of coming back?' "
Tiffen volunteered to go. "When soldiers you respect ask you to go with them, I couldn't say no," he explains. "I couldn't stay home and wave goodbye to these guys."
They arrived in Iraq in May of 2005, assigned to an area outside Baghdad, near a town called Saba al-Bor. For a few days, the guys they were replacing showed them around.
"We would drive past Saba al-Bor and they would say, 'Don't go in this town, nobody's been in there for six months, you don't want to go there,' " Tiffen recalls. "So it built up in my mind that it was a town occupied by the boogeyman. And then my company commander came up to me and said, 'Take your platoon and go into Saba al-Bor and occupy the building next to the police station.' "
"Insurgents were using the town as a staging point for moving weapons into Baghdad," says Capt. Brian Borakove, Tiffen's company commander. "That's why it was very important for us to take it under our control."
So Tiffen took his 40-man platoon into Saba al-Bor and occupied the municipal building next to the police station.
"We put .50-caliber machine guns on the roof and parked the Humvee in front of the gate and started sandbagging windows," Tiffen says.
They called it the Alamo and chalked the name on the roof. In his blog, Tiffen described the place:
Inside the building, soldiers sleep on dirty concrete floors, often using their hard body armor as a pillow. They sleep where they have collapsed, exhausted from a long day and night of continuous dismounted patrols and sandbag details . . . I walk to the north wall of the roof . . . No man's land stretches before me in the darkness, a half kilometer of broken ground, trash, feral dogs, and half-grown, stunted weeds . . . I can't help but reflect that if Hell had a Central Park, it would be a lot like this.
From their base at the Alamo, Tiffen and his platoon patrolled Saba al-Bor and the nearby farmland, setting up roadblocks, searching houses, trying to catch insurgents. Every day or two, whenever he got the chance, Tiffen would take out his laptop, write about what he'd seen and upload it to his blog.
He wrote about the heat: By 12:00 it was 120 degrees. Imagine putting your face into a lit oven, turning a powerful hairdryer on your face and throwing sand in your eyes."
He wrote about searching a house and arresting a suspected insurgent while his wife pled for mercy: Trembling, she turns to me and starts asking questions in Arabic. "What has he done? Where are you taking him?" . . . The pain in her voice is obvious. She is terrified for her family and for her husband. The soldiers have come to take him away, and for all she knows, she may never see him again. My heart is in my mouth.
He wrote about getting hit by shrapnel from a roadside bomb: I feel a sharp blow to my abdomen below my body armor, just as my mind registers the blast. The blow doubles me over, and knocks me back on my feet. I don't want to look. Gingerly reaching down, I feel for wetness, for the sign that I am cut and bleeding. I close my eyes and check for pain. Nothing. Breathing a sigh of relief, I open my eyes.
He was fine, not hurt at all, but the story scared his sister, Margo, who fired back an e-mail saying: "Sheesh, boy! You're giving us heart attacks over here."
His parents checked the blog every day. "It was a lifeline," says his mother, Michelle Goldsmith.
Bill McGrath, his boss at Porter Wright, was reading it, too, and sending back news of the insider-trading case Tiffen had been working on back in Washington. (Their client was convicted on 19 out of 27 charges.)
Tiffen loved getting e-mail from friends and family, of course, but he was really floored by the ones he received from strangers. "If I didn't post something for a few days," he says, "I would get dozens of panicked e-mails from people I'd never met, saying 'Are you okay?' "
Meanwhile, Tiffen was fighting a war, trying to keep his soldiers alive and learning to deal with Iraqis.
"I watched him question prisoners and he was very good," Thompson recalls. "He treated the Iraqis with respect until they gave him reason to do otherwise. But he was no pushover."
The view from the Alamo was confusing. In Saba al-Bor, it was tough to tell what side people were on. Many of the locals supported the Americans and several became informants, providing information on the insurgents. But Tiffen suspected that one of his Iraqi translators was secretly working for the other side. And his men arrested several of the local cops for aiding the insurgents.
"One of them tried to kill one of our informants," Tiffen says. "They were taking him out to execute him and he managed to open the trunk he was in and crawl out of the moving vehicle and he ran to the Alamo and told us about it."
In Saba al-Bor, a death squad was at work. Tiffen wrote about it in his blog: Across from the mosque, in a small woodworking shop, a man has just been murdered. An hour ago, three insurgents entered his shop and shot him in the head. The weapon was held so close to his head that the muzzle blast burned and blackened his ear. Only 300 meters from the Alamo, he was left to die, four AK-47 shell casings lying next to his body.
Still, Tiffen thought he was making progress in Saba al-Bor. "We rolled up some of the insurgent operations there," he says. "We secured the town and we brought in some of the local sheiks and we built a town council to address their problems."
After about six months, Tiffen's soldiers handed Saba al-Bor over to a new group of American replacements, then spent a few months escorting military convoys across the desert near the Syrian border.
Back Home
"When I first got back, it was very uncomfortable," Tiffen says. He's sitting in an Arlington restaurant, ignoring his cheeseburger and fries.
"It bothered me that people weren't talking about Iraq," he says. "People go through life like nothing is happening when so many Americans are in harm's way. We just hit the 3,000 casualty mark and nobody batted an eye. I mean, Britney Spears is more important."
When he returned, he spent about 10 days seeing his family and friends and his girlfriend, then he flew to Israel.
"I studied religion in a school there for a couple weeks," he says. "They say there are no atheists in the foxholes and after spending a year in Iraq, you sort of come back a little more religious than when you left."
He studied the Torah and lived in the Old City of Jerusalem, near the Wailing Wall, and watched the Israeli soldiers patrolling. "I felt more comfortable there, surrounded by soldiers and checkpoints, than I was here," he says. "I was used to it."
Last August he returned to work at Porter Wright, doing litigation and international trade work. McGrath, his boss, says Tiffen is doing a great job. But Tiffen says the transition is tough.
"It's hard to go back and sit at a desk when you think about all the stuff that's going on and you remember what you've been through," he says. "You come back and you say to yourself: Should I be different? What did it all mean? I don't think anybody comes back the same."
He thought about the war every day. He toyed with the idea of turning his blog into a book. He made a video of the footage he shot in Iraq, set to Loreena McKennit's mournful song "Dante's Prayer," and posted it on YouTube.
Then one day in November, sitting in his office at work, he got an e-mail from one of his soldiers with a link to an article from USA Today. The dateline was Saba al-Bor. The headline read: "Hard-won turf easily lost in transfer to Iraqis."
Saba al-Bor was so peaceful last summer, the article said, that the American troops left, handing the Alamo over to Iraqi police in a ceremony on Sept. 20. "Fifteen days later, on Oct. 5, U.S. troops had to return to Saba al-Bor to restore order," the story continued. "Most of the town's police had fled, Sunni and Shiite residents were at war with each other, and sectarian death squads roamed the town. The progress built over months had evaporated."
Tiffen read on. Sunnis had hit the Shiite section of town with 44 mortar shells. Shiite militants responded by killing Sunnis. American troops found 44 bodies dumped around the city, some of them decapitated.
Tiffen was stunned. He left his office, took a walk. "I needed to get some air," he says. "I walked past the White House. I don't know why. My feet just carried me there. My reaction surprised me. I didn't realize how much I'd invested in that town."
Nearly two months later, the story still bothers him. "It's astonishing," he says. "The whole place went to [excrement] when they pulled U.S. troops out. And yet it was considered a success story -- that's why they turned it over to the Iraqis. All our efforts over all that time -- I don't want to say it was for nothing. All I want to say is that it hit me really hard because we invested so much time and energy in the people that lived there. I felt like I was part of the town. And a year later, to read that because the U.S. troops left, people are being executed, that hurt. That really hit home."
He eats his cheeseburger, sips his Coke, talks about other things for a while. But then he returns to the story of Saba al-Bor.
"What does that say?" he asks, not expecting an answer. "Something has to change. I really don't know what it is. Maybe putting 30,000 more troops in will help. I don't know. I don't think anybody knows."
Ellie
D.C. Lawyer Adam Tiffen Forgoes the Legalese for Frank Dispatches From Iraq
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 10, 2007; C01
"The man was standing 100 meters from the explosion and he said there was no explosion," Adam Tiffen says.
He's looking at his computer screen, where a photo shows him in his Army uniform, questioning a kneeling Iraqi who was captured after a roadside bomb exploded near Humvees carrying Tiffen and other soldiers from the Maryland National Guard.
"If he wasn't the triggerman, he was the spotter for the triggerman," Tiffen says. "But I had to let him go. I had nothing on him. What can you do? Iraqis have rights, too."
Tiffen, 31, is sitting in his office at the law firm of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, a few blocks from the White House, looking at pictures from his year in Iraq. His law degree hangs on the wall near his Bronze Star. On his desk sit a couple of souvenirs of Iraq -- a .50-caliber machine gun bullet and a hunk of shrapnel from a roadside bomb. His black crew cut matches his black suit.
"Look at me, I'm in my lawyer uniform," he says. "I'm Mr. Attorney on Pennsylvania Avenue with my degrees on the wall. And seven months ago, I was in Iraq wearing body armor and I hadn't slept in three days and I was running around the desert."
While he was in Iraq, leading a 40-man rifle platoon, he wrote a blog about his experiences. He called it "The Replacements" because, he says, "we replaced guys and then other people replaced us -- we were just in a chain, a cycle." His blog contained no editorial comments, no political messages. He just told stories about what he saw every day:
The first round explodes with a shattering crack, and I can hear shouting coming from outside the sandbagged room.
"Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!"
I leap to my feet and quickly settle my advanced combat uniform helmet onto my head. Despite the explosions and yelling coming from outside, somehow my mind registers the inconsequential thought that the helmet pads lining the inside of the helmet feel tacky from days of sweat and grime and will need to be washed.
At first the blog was just for his family and friends but soon word got out and his stories were e-mailed around and he started getting feedback from strangers: "Thank you so much for allowing us to see the human side of the war."
Armchair General, a military history Web site, printed part of his blog ( thereplacements.blogspot.com). So did the liberal journal Mother Jones. Last October, several of his stories were posted on The Sandbox, a military blog founded by "Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau. Last Sunday, two tiny snippets from Tiffen's stories were quoted in the "Doonesbury" comic strip.
An Unexpected Call
"People asked me, what are you doing?" Tiffen says, laughing. "You're a nice Jewish boy. You're a lawyer, Why are you in the Army? Why are you in the infantry? Why are you in Iraq?"
When he was a kid, growing up on Long Island, his parents took him to Gettysburg and that sparked an interest in military history. "My heroes were not basketball players, they were soldiers," he says. "I thought, I want that experience. I think I wanted to test myself against those soldiers, to see how I stacked up."
He joined Army ROTC in 2000, while he was studying at George Washington University Law School. He graduated in 2003 and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Maryland National Guard. He was working on an insider-trading case at Porter Wright when the unit he'd trained with was called up for duty in Iraq. By then, Tiffen was in another unit but he got a call from his old platoon sergeant, Thomas Thompson.
"He's the lieutenant I wanted to go to war with," Thompson says. "I called him on the phone and said, 'I need a platoon leader. Have you thought of coming back?' "
Tiffen volunteered to go. "When soldiers you respect ask you to go with them, I couldn't say no," he explains. "I couldn't stay home and wave goodbye to these guys."
They arrived in Iraq in May of 2005, assigned to an area outside Baghdad, near a town called Saba al-Bor. For a few days, the guys they were replacing showed them around.
"We would drive past Saba al-Bor and they would say, 'Don't go in this town, nobody's been in there for six months, you don't want to go there,' " Tiffen recalls. "So it built up in my mind that it was a town occupied by the boogeyman. And then my company commander came up to me and said, 'Take your platoon and go into Saba al-Bor and occupy the building next to the police station.' "
"Insurgents were using the town as a staging point for moving weapons into Baghdad," says Capt. Brian Borakove, Tiffen's company commander. "That's why it was very important for us to take it under our control."
So Tiffen took his 40-man platoon into Saba al-Bor and occupied the municipal building next to the police station.
"We put .50-caliber machine guns on the roof and parked the Humvee in front of the gate and started sandbagging windows," Tiffen says.
They called it the Alamo and chalked the name on the roof. In his blog, Tiffen described the place:
Inside the building, soldiers sleep on dirty concrete floors, often using their hard body armor as a pillow. They sleep where they have collapsed, exhausted from a long day and night of continuous dismounted patrols and sandbag details . . . I walk to the north wall of the roof . . . No man's land stretches before me in the darkness, a half kilometer of broken ground, trash, feral dogs, and half-grown, stunted weeds . . . I can't help but reflect that if Hell had a Central Park, it would be a lot like this.
From their base at the Alamo, Tiffen and his platoon patrolled Saba al-Bor and the nearby farmland, setting up roadblocks, searching houses, trying to catch insurgents. Every day or two, whenever he got the chance, Tiffen would take out his laptop, write about what he'd seen and upload it to his blog.
He wrote about the heat: By 12:00 it was 120 degrees. Imagine putting your face into a lit oven, turning a powerful hairdryer on your face and throwing sand in your eyes."
He wrote about searching a house and arresting a suspected insurgent while his wife pled for mercy: Trembling, she turns to me and starts asking questions in Arabic. "What has he done? Where are you taking him?" . . . The pain in her voice is obvious. She is terrified for her family and for her husband. The soldiers have come to take him away, and for all she knows, she may never see him again. My heart is in my mouth.
He wrote about getting hit by shrapnel from a roadside bomb: I feel a sharp blow to my abdomen below my body armor, just as my mind registers the blast. The blow doubles me over, and knocks me back on my feet. I don't want to look. Gingerly reaching down, I feel for wetness, for the sign that I am cut and bleeding. I close my eyes and check for pain. Nothing. Breathing a sigh of relief, I open my eyes.
He was fine, not hurt at all, but the story scared his sister, Margo, who fired back an e-mail saying: "Sheesh, boy! You're giving us heart attacks over here."
His parents checked the blog every day. "It was a lifeline," says his mother, Michelle Goldsmith.
Bill McGrath, his boss at Porter Wright, was reading it, too, and sending back news of the insider-trading case Tiffen had been working on back in Washington. (Their client was convicted on 19 out of 27 charges.)
Tiffen loved getting e-mail from friends and family, of course, but he was really floored by the ones he received from strangers. "If I didn't post something for a few days," he says, "I would get dozens of panicked e-mails from people I'd never met, saying 'Are you okay?' "
Meanwhile, Tiffen was fighting a war, trying to keep his soldiers alive and learning to deal with Iraqis.
"I watched him question prisoners and he was very good," Thompson recalls. "He treated the Iraqis with respect until they gave him reason to do otherwise. But he was no pushover."
The view from the Alamo was confusing. In Saba al-Bor, it was tough to tell what side people were on. Many of the locals supported the Americans and several became informants, providing information on the insurgents. But Tiffen suspected that one of his Iraqi translators was secretly working for the other side. And his men arrested several of the local cops for aiding the insurgents.
"One of them tried to kill one of our informants," Tiffen says. "They were taking him out to execute him and he managed to open the trunk he was in and crawl out of the moving vehicle and he ran to the Alamo and told us about it."
In Saba al-Bor, a death squad was at work. Tiffen wrote about it in his blog: Across from the mosque, in a small woodworking shop, a man has just been murdered. An hour ago, three insurgents entered his shop and shot him in the head. The weapon was held so close to his head that the muzzle blast burned and blackened his ear. Only 300 meters from the Alamo, he was left to die, four AK-47 shell casings lying next to his body.
Still, Tiffen thought he was making progress in Saba al-Bor. "We rolled up some of the insurgent operations there," he says. "We secured the town and we brought in some of the local sheiks and we built a town council to address their problems."
After about six months, Tiffen's soldiers handed Saba al-Bor over to a new group of American replacements, then spent a few months escorting military convoys across the desert near the Syrian border.
Back Home
"When I first got back, it was very uncomfortable," Tiffen says. He's sitting in an Arlington restaurant, ignoring his cheeseburger and fries.
"It bothered me that people weren't talking about Iraq," he says. "People go through life like nothing is happening when so many Americans are in harm's way. We just hit the 3,000 casualty mark and nobody batted an eye. I mean, Britney Spears is more important."
When he returned, he spent about 10 days seeing his family and friends and his girlfriend, then he flew to Israel.
"I studied religion in a school there for a couple weeks," he says. "They say there are no atheists in the foxholes and after spending a year in Iraq, you sort of come back a little more religious than when you left."
He studied the Torah and lived in the Old City of Jerusalem, near the Wailing Wall, and watched the Israeli soldiers patrolling. "I felt more comfortable there, surrounded by soldiers and checkpoints, than I was here," he says. "I was used to it."
Last August he returned to work at Porter Wright, doing litigation and international trade work. McGrath, his boss, says Tiffen is doing a great job. But Tiffen says the transition is tough.
"It's hard to go back and sit at a desk when you think about all the stuff that's going on and you remember what you've been through," he says. "You come back and you say to yourself: Should I be different? What did it all mean? I don't think anybody comes back the same."
He thought about the war every day. He toyed with the idea of turning his blog into a book. He made a video of the footage he shot in Iraq, set to Loreena McKennit's mournful song "Dante's Prayer," and posted it on YouTube.
Then one day in November, sitting in his office at work, he got an e-mail from one of his soldiers with a link to an article from USA Today. The dateline was Saba al-Bor. The headline read: "Hard-won turf easily lost in transfer to Iraqis."
Saba al-Bor was so peaceful last summer, the article said, that the American troops left, handing the Alamo over to Iraqi police in a ceremony on Sept. 20. "Fifteen days later, on Oct. 5, U.S. troops had to return to Saba al-Bor to restore order," the story continued. "Most of the town's police had fled, Sunni and Shiite residents were at war with each other, and sectarian death squads roamed the town. The progress built over months had evaporated."
Tiffen read on. Sunnis had hit the Shiite section of town with 44 mortar shells. Shiite militants responded by killing Sunnis. American troops found 44 bodies dumped around the city, some of them decapitated.
Tiffen was stunned. He left his office, took a walk. "I needed to get some air," he says. "I walked past the White House. I don't know why. My feet just carried me there. My reaction surprised me. I didn't realize how much I'd invested in that town."
Nearly two months later, the story still bothers him. "It's astonishing," he says. "The whole place went to [excrement] when they pulled U.S. troops out. And yet it was considered a success story -- that's why they turned it over to the Iraqis. All our efforts over all that time -- I don't want to say it was for nothing. All I want to say is that it hit me really hard because we invested so much time and energy in the people that lived there. I felt like I was part of the town. And a year later, to read that because the U.S. troops left, people are being executed, that hurt. That really hit home."
He eats his cheeseburger, sips his Coke, talks about other things for a while. But then he returns to the story of Saba al-Bor.
"What does that say?" he asks, not expecting an answer. "Something has to change. I really don't know what it is. Maybe putting 30,000 more troops in will help. I don't know. I don't think anybody knows."
Ellie