salience
September 8, 2003
Straight from the source, ya’ll. A letter we got from one of our combat engineers in Iraq:
Its been about 2 months since I sat down and wrote a long letter. A lot has happened.
In early July, our company was tasked with facilitating the payment of former members of the Iraqi Army. They gave us a location and they gave us the people with the money and we made it happen. It was a company mission that lasted about 4 weeks. My platoon was tasked with night security on site to guard the money. My guys said there were firefights (Iraqi on Iraqi) every night out there. That mission really didn't involve much on my part aside from ensuring the guard force was prepared and properly rested up. It was a nice break from the usual running around town.
The night that Uday and Qusay were killed was a pretty exciting evening. All of the sudden, at 10:30 PM, gunfire erupted all over the city. My whole Platoon and I hopped up on the roof of our building with our rifles and watched the night sky, tracer fire coming up 360 degrees around us in the distance. At first we thought it was some kind of coordinated attack, but we figured after about 5 minutes of was just celebratory fire. Apparently falling bullets killed a lot of Iraqis that night.
Once the pay site mission ended, we received a new Battalion Commander. He brought to the table a whole new concept for Combat Engineers in a peacekeeping role.
Since early August, I have been doing Project Management (pretty close to what my major was in college). I am working with an Infantry Task Force in their sector. We work with the local Iraqi Neighborhood Advisory Counsels (NACs), which were set up in each neighborhood by the Army to let the people get a first taste of democracy. The NACs vote on, prioritize, and submit to us schools, public utilities, parks, infrastructure and general messes that need serious repairs, renovations and clean up. Of the 20 schools they've asked us to fix, most were built in the 30s and 40s, and haven't seen any major repairs since. We are using confiscated Ba'ath Party funds to pay civilian contractors to come in and renovate these schools completely. Right now I have 10 schools lined up and waiting for funding approval, all of which went through a bidding process with three local contractors. I work with an Iraqi named Jassim who's a mechanical engineer. Real nice guy. He and I spend our days driving around town together in an HMMWV. He assesses the scope of work and writes the tender for each project, solicits bids from local contractors, and then I handle the bidding process, the paperwork, the funding requests through the Army and the management of the project. Together, he and I will QC the construction and ensure that the work done is quality. Money is no object. Saddam's paying for all of this. These schools are going to be done right. Its pretty amazing what we are about to do. We just had the first two projects approved. Once the contracts are signed, construction will begin. Both projects are worth about $45,000 each. The most expensive one I have lined up is $118,000, which had to be broken down into multiple, smaller projects in order to get the funding approved. I work about 19 hours a day doing this stuff, but it's a worthwhile mission. During the day I drive around the sector with Jassim and soldiers from my platoon as a security element, looking at schools, sewage stations, parks and even broken traffic lights. There's a lot of broken stuff here, let me tell you. And just for the record, none of my projects involve any war damage, aside from the school that the Republican Guard decided to live in, fight from and trash before ditching their uniforms and running away. We didn't break one tenth of this stuff. This is how Iraqis lived under Saddam.
What's really blown my mind is the reality of the NGO's that are working here. I've personally seen the work of three of them, and I have to say that these groups are nothing but self-serving, inefficient, crooked organizations. When you drop money in a UNICEF jar at a McDonalds somewhere, you think you're helping someone, right? Not really. I've seen first hand the work that UNICEF (UN Childrens's group, the one that used to con us into collecting money for them on Halloween when we were little kids), IRD (International Reconstruction and Development) and UNDP (Another useless UN organization) have done here. UNDP and UNICEF have succeeded in causing serious problems with the sewage system here because they quick fixed a major pumping station rather than paid for a quality job. I've driven out to this same neighborhood every week for a month now because a lake of sewage erupts every other day from this station that UNDP said they "fixed" 2 months ago. Another experience with a crooked NGO is the group IRD. They've been going around to schools, offering to paint and spackle and change light bulbs. Five of the schools I'm working on were IRD schools that the NACs wanted us to do. The NACs want nothing to do with these "humanitarian" organizations. They say they're crooks and won't have their names associated with the work that these people want to "do." These aid organizations just want to do the minimum, and then boast about how much they have done (and then ask for more donations). It seems like their mission is more to sustain their own existence and pay their overhead, rather than actually help people in a real, long term way.
Believe it or not, despite the constant negativity I know is being spewed from the media, the Army is doing really great humanitarian things out here, and very slowly conditions are starting to improve. My task force is planning a toy drive for the 5 orphanages in our sector for around Christmas time (or for those Politically Correct out there, as a late Ramadan gift-giving event). A Captain from my Task Force Staff walked through one of these orphanages this week and said it broke his heart. One of the little kids he talked to had nothing to play with but a pile of old soda cans that he would use like building blocks. If any one wants to contribute, please send me toys or whatever and I'll make sure they get to these orphanages by winter time. I'm looking forward to getting this construction started next week. By late October, every school in my sector should be with completely renovated or 85% there.
One thing I don't understand is all the confusion about this UN bombing. Why is everyone so surprised? The UN did all it could to keep Saddam in power. If I were a UN official, I'd stay as far away from Baghdad as possible. I'm not sure what kind of credibility these people think they have in this part of the world, but it's not much. Jassim even asked me rhetorically why they were even in Iraq at all. Iraqi's have satellite TV now. They know how hard the UN tried to prevent this war from happening.
This week I actually went out to a hotel that UN officials were staying in since vacating their former residence. They needed an engineer estimate on security and barricade construction. American Soldiers were standing guard outside this hotel. One euro-looking UN guy gave me a dirty look when I walked into the hotel lobby. I guess they got better service at hotels when Saddam was around. This past month has really been amazing. My unit is helping these people far more than I ever thought a combat engineer battalion could.
As much as I miss home and decent weather and decent food, I'm pretty motivated about our job out here. We have 8 months to go, and there's a lot of stuff to fix.
That's all I got. I'm taking a lot of pictures and trying to document this as much as possible. Looking forward to making the picture slide show when I get home. I haven't written a letter in almost 2 weeks, and I definitely have a lot of thank you's to write. I'll be in touch soon though, I promise. Talk to you all later.
Steve*
*Name changed.
_________________________________________
It still amazes me how ignorant the general public is. There are two sides to every coin. Please, put some sunglasses so you can see past the media glare.
Its been about 2 months since I sat down and wrote a long letter. A lot has happened.
In early July, our company was tasked with facilitating the payment of former members of the Iraqi Army. They gave us a location and they gave us the people with the money and we made it happen. It was a company mission that lasted about 4 weeks. My platoon was tasked with night security on site to guard the money. My guys said there were firefights (Iraqi on Iraqi) every night out there. That mission really didn't involve much on my part aside from ensuring the guard force was prepared and properly rested up. It was a nice break from the usual running around town.
The night that Uday and Qusay were killed was a pretty exciting evening. All of the sudden, at 10:30 PM, gunfire erupted all over the city. My whole Platoon and I hopped up on the roof of our building with our rifles and watched the night sky, tracer fire coming up 360 degrees around us in the distance. At first we thought it was some kind of coordinated attack, but we figured after about 5 minutes of was just celebratory fire. Apparently falling bullets killed a lot of Iraqis that night.
Once the pay site mission ended, we received a new Battalion Commander. He brought to the table a whole new concept for Combat Engineers in a peacekeeping role.
Since early August, I have been doing Project Management (pretty close to what my major was in college). I am working with an Infantry Task Force in their sector. We work with the local Iraqi Neighborhood Advisory Counsels (NACs), which were set up in each neighborhood by the Army to let the people get a first taste of democracy. The NACs vote on, prioritize, and submit to us schools, public utilities, parks, infrastructure and general messes that need serious repairs, renovations and clean up. Of the 20 schools they've asked us to fix, most were built in the 30s and 40s, and haven't seen any major repairs since. We are using confiscated Ba'ath Party funds to pay civilian contractors to come in and renovate these schools completely. Right now I have 10 schools lined up and waiting for funding approval, all of which went through a bidding process with three local contractors. I work with an Iraqi named Jassim who's a mechanical engineer. Real nice guy. He and I spend our days driving around town together in an HMMWV. He assesses the scope of work and writes the tender for each project, solicits bids from local contractors, and then I handle the bidding process, the paperwork, the funding requests through the Army and the management of the project. Together, he and I will QC the construction and ensure that the work done is quality. Money is no object. Saddam's paying for all of this. These schools are going to be done right. Its pretty amazing what we are about to do. We just had the first two projects approved. Once the contracts are signed, construction will begin. Both projects are worth about $45,000 each. The most expensive one I have lined up is $118,000, which had to be broken down into multiple, smaller projects in order to get the funding approved. I work about 19 hours a day doing this stuff, but it's a worthwhile mission. During the day I drive around the sector with Jassim and soldiers from my platoon as a security element, looking at schools, sewage stations, parks and even broken traffic lights. There's a lot of broken stuff here, let me tell you. And just for the record, none of my projects involve any war damage, aside from the school that the Republican Guard decided to live in, fight from and trash before ditching their uniforms and running away. We didn't break one tenth of this stuff. This is how Iraqis lived under Saddam.
What's really blown my mind is the reality of the NGO's that are working here. I've personally seen the work of three of them, and I have to say that these groups are nothing but self-serving, inefficient, crooked organizations. When you drop money in a UNICEF jar at a McDonalds somewhere, you think you're helping someone, right? Not really. I've seen first hand the work that UNICEF (UN Childrens's group, the one that used to con us into collecting money for them on Halloween when we were little kids), IRD (International Reconstruction and Development) and UNDP (Another useless UN organization) have done here. UNDP and UNICEF have succeeded in causing serious problems with the sewage system here because they quick fixed a major pumping station rather than paid for a quality job. I've driven out to this same neighborhood every week for a month now because a lake of sewage erupts every other day from this station that UNDP said they "fixed" 2 months ago. Another experience with a crooked NGO is the group IRD. They've been going around to schools, offering to paint and spackle and change light bulbs. Five of the schools I'm working on were IRD schools that the NACs wanted us to do. The NACs want nothing to do with these "humanitarian" organizations. They say they're crooks and won't have their names associated with the work that these people want to "do." These aid organizations just want to do the minimum, and then boast about how much they have done (and then ask for more donations). It seems like their mission is more to sustain their own existence and pay their overhead, rather than actually help people in a real, long term way.
Believe it or not, despite the constant negativity I know is being spewed from the media, the Army is doing really great humanitarian things out here, and very slowly conditions are starting to improve. My task force is planning a toy drive for the 5 orphanages in our sector for around Christmas time (or for those Politically Correct out there, as a late Ramadan gift-giving event). A Captain from my Task Force Staff walked through one of these orphanages this week and said it broke his heart. One of the little kids he talked to had nothing to play with but a pile of old soda cans that he would use like building blocks. If any one wants to contribute, please send me toys or whatever and I'll make sure they get to these orphanages by winter time. I'm looking forward to getting this construction started next week. By late October, every school in my sector should be with completely renovated or 85% there.
One thing I don't understand is all the confusion about this UN bombing. Why is everyone so surprised? The UN did all it could to keep Saddam in power. If I were a UN official, I'd stay as far away from Baghdad as possible. I'm not sure what kind of credibility these people think they have in this part of the world, but it's not much. Jassim even asked me rhetorically why they were even in Iraq at all. Iraqi's have satellite TV now. They know how hard the UN tried to prevent this war from happening.
This week I actually went out to a hotel that UN officials were staying in since vacating their former residence. They needed an engineer estimate on security and barricade construction. American Soldiers were standing guard outside this hotel. One euro-looking UN guy gave me a dirty look when I walked into the hotel lobby. I guess they got better service at hotels when Saddam was around. This past month has really been amazing. My unit is helping these people far more than I ever thought a combat engineer battalion could.
As much as I miss home and decent weather and decent food, I'm pretty motivated about our job out here. We have 8 months to go, and there's a lot of stuff to fix.
That's all I got. I'm taking a lot of pictures and trying to document this as much as possible. Looking forward to making the picture slide show when I get home. I haven't written a letter in almost 2 weeks, and I definitely have a lot of thank you's to write. I'll be in touch soon though, I promise. Talk to you all later.
Steve*
*Name changed.
_________________________________________
It still amazes me how ignorant the general public is. There are two sides to every coin. Please, put some sunglasses so you can see past the media glare.
lasaliente, 17:22
