9 November 2005

 

Hello everyone,

     Well, it is November and we are working on getting our butts home.  We are still doing missions and mine are at night.  The weather is cooling down and so have the insurgents.  This is part of a cycle the insurgents do, they must like hot weather.  It has been in the 80's during the day with cloudy skies and in the 40's at night.  We have started to wear our long johns.   Iraq had their Christmas the end of last week, and guess what the #1 toy of choice is.  A toy AK-47 rifle, and they look real. They don't have the red or orange ends like back in the states.  With that and the rocks being thrown at us daily, it keeps us on our toes.  We are giving the IP stations a final report and I have to say, I am proud of the station I visit.  They are doing great. One night we were on our way to another station to start our mission and we went by the station I visit.  They got a call of two dead bodies so we stopped so I could see how they do.  In the past they would just pick up the bodies and take them to the morg.  Now they take pictures of the scene and do an investigation of the scene and ask the crowd and neighborhood if they have any information.  The murder was and execution style.  Hands tied behind their backs and blindfolded with two holes to the temple.  This will go no further because it is the work of the Madhr Army and the two dead are  part of the old regime or bathe party.  Some day they will understand that the Madhr Army is a militia group and that they are subject to the law like everyone else is.  Everyone in Sadr City is scared of them.  They do help keep the peace and if you mess with them.  You could end up beaten or dead.  Around the IP station I visit, they get a lot of murders.  Majority of them are execution style like the one I explained above.  They are mostly from the Bathe party and or Saddam's regime, which is no great lost here.  When one of them shows up in Sadr City, the City counsel puts out a hit on them and the Madhr Army does the work.  A little history about Sadr City.  Saddam Hussain took people that were a problem to him and made this city which is a suburb of Baghdad and has a population of almost 3 thousand and is no bigger that a 20 mile square.  This was his way of keeping an eye on them.  Well, now things have changed.  This is a city that is giving what they have been taking for almost 30 years.  The IP were Saddam's personal hit men and it has been a real challenge to turn them around and be officers of the law and not hit men.  The public is starting to trust them and we can see our hard work paying off. 

     Us here have been looking for a reason why we are here.  The only reason I came up with is to stop the draft.  I would rather be here, with the experience of myself and my comrades, than have someone here that got rushed through training to keep enough troops on ground.  The death toll would be a lot higher, just like Vietnam.  Yes the death toll is high but just think what it would be if we had the draft. 

     I have made a lot of friends here, the IP, and they have been great to me.  What ever I need or if I am in trouble, like the IED that it us.  They have gone out of their way to help me.  I have found out that a lot of the other squad leaders are having a hard time getting their stations to do things.  I show up and ask and bingo it is done.  I treat them as equals, even though they have along ways to go.  But they are living in this hell and deal with it every day, were we deal with it for about a year.  You have to respect that.  I have learned something from them too.  They have nothing and yet, they will give their shirt off their back to a friend.  Us Americans need to learn that lesson.  We have a lot and we are always thinking of ourselves.