CSI: Iraq

So let me explain what I’ve been doing this week. We had a huge operation on Monday that scored us three significant caches of weapons, explosives, etc. (pat myself on the back for that intel) On Tuesday one of our patrols found the remains of a body.

So here’s 1LT Rockwell, cataloging body parts, picking up jawbones, hipbones, and documenting everything. Then we sent the teeth in to be examined and found out the identity of the individual. There are no dental records in Iraq. True, but the body was positively identified, even though he was not American. Interesting. My conclusion for the commander was that three people had been executed the day prior and and during the night some of the millions of dogs there had a good meal. Disgusting.

So there I am Wednesday morning, thrilled that my little CSI mission was over with and I get a call on the radio. Rock 14 we need you to get your truck ready and down to the Check Point 109. For what? Oh well we found another body on the side of the road, this one intact we need you to come investigate. So that’s what I’ve done all week. Take blood samples, hair, fingernails, etc.

Let me just point out that never in my life of west point, georgia, or colorado had anyone ever prepared me to do any of that and I’m sure we screwed it up royally. Ha, serves them right. I’m an infantry officer, I’m trained to kick down doors and fight face-to-face with the bad guy. Yet I’m acting as a policeman, politician, an intel analyst, and a fire support officer. What are they thinking? Good thing west point prepared me for…..none of this.

After my last council meeting in the town of Kan’an, one of my informants called me and said he had to come and see me. He’s Kurdish. He came and saw me and we talked about family, drank, Chai Tea, and smoked cigarettes for at least 30 minutes before we got down to business. I was pleased, usually it takes an hour or two before they actually say what they want to say. He said that the AIF in his town feel like we’re making too much progress and the town is too safe. Sure enough, the next day an IED went off right outside of town, nobody was injured. My fault. So naturally I expected them to try to attack me on my way to the council meeting. So I took the lead vehicle and we pushed up our movement time about 3 hours. Instead of leaving at 8 we left at 5. We saw a group of men digging a hole by the side of the road, we fired at them but they took off running into the palms. There were blood trails so we’ll see if a body turns up at the hospital or in the field.

For those of you I called the other day, ANSWER YOUR PHONE!!

Anyone else that would like a random phone call in the middle of the afternoon just email me your number

I hope everyone is doing well

Enjoy the Superbowl, I’m boycotting it only because I’ll already know who won before I get to watch the game and we don’t get to see any of the good ads.

With Love

What Haven’t I Told?

So, I’m not really sure what stories I have told everyone and which ones I
haven’t.

We’ve been super busy the past three days. We caught an international High
Value Target and are handing him over to the CIA today. We also found three
huge caches. All my intel paid off and the Iraqi and American soldiers did
a good job finding everything that was there. We were all anxious to have
some action.

I have been working on my city councils. They are improving and I’m getting
them to believe in themselves. One was having a huge problem receiving
their allotted amount of benzine(gas). So I showed them how to go to the
Kada(state government)and get what is rightfully theirs. They love me now.
It was a case of corrupt state officials and I showed them the democratic
way of getting it done. Something they just don’t understand.

Some people have asked me questions about our missions and what we do. I
will try to explain without giving out sensitive information.

Each combat patrol has to have a minimum of 3 vehicles and 15 soldiers to
leave the front gate. My truck consists of me, my driver, gunner, my TERP,
and one of my soldiers. Once we’re outside the gate, we usually have our
own missions to accomplish so we typically do our own thing.

Normal Patrols consist of clearing roads(driving and waiting to get hit by
and IED), checkpoints( stopping all traffic to find anything suspicious), and
IO ops.

IO Ops is the heart of what I do. We basically walk through the towns and
shake hands, listen to complaints, and try to recruit informants. Most of
the time the only information that we receive are complaints about power.
The fact is we’re providing 150% more electricity now than we were a year
ago. They complain because now they have heaters, AC, computers, TV, and
200% more appliances than were allowed under the old regime. Nothing is
good enough for these people.

Of course we have to take a combat patrol to my city council meetings. They
drop me off and continue their missions. They are supposed to stay but I
told them to do other missions so they are not sitting and waiting for me
for three hours. There are enough personal security detachments with the
politicians that I am not worried.

When I come up with some good intelligence, we do a raid. Right now, we
have intel, but I have to find more than one source or verify the source
before I send my guys in to get men/women/weapons.

Some big things are brewing, but I have to be patient. We’re not going to
win this in a week. A decade is more reasonable. Every mission we go on,
is led by IA soldiers. A lot of times they fail. I don’t really mind. Look
how many times the American Army has failed in order to get where we are
today. If we win this for them, they are never going to evolve into a
legitimate secure country.

A few thank yous:

I received 12 boxes on one day. They haven’t been keeping up with the mail.

Kim: I got your box with the picture of the girls. They’ve grown up a lot.

Uncle Danny: Great box. Everything in there was very useful. Thank you so
much. The Gold Fish were a key addition.

Uncle Joel: I’ve never seen a bottle of crown that big. Thanks for the
smokes.

Amy: Thanks for all the letters and the magazines. Although the 17 and cosmo
were a little in appropriate. I thought so anyway, but my soldiers grabbed
those two first.

Celeste: Thanks for the letter, it was great to hear you haven’t changed a
bit.

Mom: Thanks for everything. Especially the pictures.

Court: Good job beating Navy and getting some PT.

I hope everyone enjoys the superbowl.

Maybe I’ll get to watch.

Love you all

Best Birthday Ever!

Even as I’ve become entrenched in my twenties, I can still rely on a few friends and family for some solid presents. My grandparents are always good for a few bills for the slots. Norm and Dee always send me a book that gets read by the end of the week (though this year I got Lonesome Dove on DVD, which with its 6 hour running time and Larry McMurtry source material is still in the same vein). But even with those all-stars having my back, nothing can compare to the gift the city of Rock Island left at the end of our driveway today.

Check it out.

Jealous?

26 and Climbing

So, last year, fully entrenched in my first year of blogging, I decided I needed some sort of staple for my birthday, to see how I’ve changed over the years. I fell upon James Lipton’s questionnaire from the end of Inside the Actor’s Studio. So, being that I have just recently begun my downhill slide to 30, I thought I’d share this year’s questionnaire (with last year’s answers for perspective).

Phil (dramatic pause) what is your favorite word?

25: Asinine
26: Grace (as in that of a dancer)

What is your least favorite word?

25: Dude.
26: Job,

What turns you on?

25: Intelligent conversation.
26: Grace.

What turns you off?

25: Ignorance, and indifference to one’s own ignorance.
26: Bad and/or irrational arguments.

What sound do you love?

25: The ticking clock theme from 24.
26: Rain with a dash of distant thunder.

What sound do you hate?

25: My dog, Scamp, barking at the raccoons at three in the morning.
26: Wire hangers scraping against the metal crossbeam in my mother’s fabric room.

What profession, other than yours, would you like to attempt?

25: Chicago Cubs’ play-by-play man. I’d say starting pitcher, but who are we kidding?
26: Well, being that I’m unemployed, I can pick anything here. Dramatic television writer.

What profession, other than yours, would you not like to participate in?

25: Anything involving tips. Never again.
26: We’re gonna stick with last year’s on that one.

What is your favorite curse word?

25: Bullshit or horseshit. Any word involving animal excrement I find quite delightful.
26: Bollocks.

Finally, if heaven exists, what would you like God to say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

“I suppose I have some explaining to do.” This answer will never change.

Still Alive

According to my mother, it’s been a long time since I sent an email. Which actually makes me happy because time is flying by. I appologize. I don’t have much time but I wanted to relate the highlights of my past week.

-We shot up a car a couple days back. It was driving crazy and we thought it was a possible IED. Turns out it was just 3 drunken Haji’s attempting to stay on the road. We had to create a drunk tank at the local IP station. They weren’t charged.

-A bongo truck got stuck in the mud and we had to push it out. Rather than just get the thing unstuck, my soldiers decided to race it around the FOB getting it stuck over and over again in the 12 inches of mud.

-I’ve been spending every night working on Falconview as I’m processing the intelligence I’m gathering in order to help with the missions. It’s satellite Imagery.

I will write more later. For now I must call my mommy.

But yes I am still alive.

En Shallah [God Willing] I will see you all soon

I love you

God Created the Universe in Seven Days. You’d Think Andrew Could Find Time To Write and E-mail

We’re all on edge. Obviously. It’s been one week since we received any communication from Andrew, and I felt I should come out and tell everyone to take a deep breath and chill. I think we may have been a bit spoiled by the wealth of e-mails we got since his arrival, but with Andrew’s unit taking over at Gabe I suspect that his schedule has filled up rather quickly. No worries. I’ll try to keep the posts coming, but honestly, when there’s little news from him, I’m limited with what I can contribute. Still, I’ll try and be a little more gung-ho about entertaining the masses while we wait for word from him.

(Un)Intelligent Design

I have two family members in public office. This is the first time that I ever considered that I could cause them some trouble. I woke up this morning to an editorial in the Rock Island Argus entitled “What are the scientists all afraid of?” In the editorial, which you can hopefully read here he basically calls the scientific community cowards for not adjusting the scientific credo so that it can include intelligent design. Among his more absurd pronouncements is that science “will collapse, sooner or later, like the Soviet Union.” Now, people who know me know that that kind of ludicrous shit cannot stand without rebuttal. So, after spending a couple hours at a hopeless job fair *sniff* this afternoon, I got to writing. Since I have serious doubts whether this will actually make it to print, I wanted to share it with you here. This is what the Argus’ People’s Pulpit will be getting in their inbox this afternoon :

William Rusher’s column of January 12 asked what the scientific community is so afraid of when it comes to intelligent design, and in doing so, he exemplified what terrifies scientists so much. Quite simply, the fear of those in the scientific community is that a philosophical and theological concept will rewrite the definition of what science is. Rusher argues for just that in his column. He chastises science for its adherence to “materialistic interpretations of reality.” He criticizes science for being an empirically based enterprise and not allowing supernatural explanations into the formula. He wants to change the rules of science, plain and simple, and he calls the scientific community cowardly for not doing so. It’s like Peyton Manning deciding to plant landmines in the backfield to keep a defense off his back, and then calling his opponents wimps for not allowing for more lenient interpretation of the rule book. You don’t hear any scientists calling for ammendments to the Ten Commandments in order to make them more scientifically inclusive, so why should we twist the fudamentals of science to make room for faith-based explanations?

The rejection of intelligent design in the scientific community comes from an absence of compelling evidence, not some underlying political dogma. Rusher makes a number of baseless suggestions about the scientific community that completely misrepresents their worldview. First among them is that science has a worldview. It does not. The theories and laws that guide science are the result of years of testing and experimentation; science didn’t bend these conclusions to fit with what it believed to be true. If that were the case we’d all still be worried about falling off the edge of the Earth. Rusher also labels the scientific community as intrinsicly godless. Again, incorrect. At worst, the scientific community is, in practice, agnostic. There is no empirical data to support the existence of God, so scientists study independently of that faith-based variable. Still, there is no universal claim from scientists that there is no God. Certainly there are a number of atheists in the scientific community, just as there are in the world at large. But some of the best scientific minds also had deeply held religious beliefs. Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds in history, often spoke eloquently and faithfully about God, and he is not the only scientist to do so. And despite Rusher’s claims, science does not show, without a doubt, that the universe had no beginning. It suspects. It has ideas. But it is constantly testing those ideas against empirical data. If science played by intelligent design’s rules, the scientific community’s work would be done. They could just give it all up to the “designer”.

One of Rusher’s more naive suggestions is that intelligent design leaves the identity of said designer open. Of course, he admits, “one obvious possibility is God.” I’m curious what he believes the other identities to be. Zeus, perhaps? Or possibly some extra-terrestrial? Alf, maybe? Or those little chain-smoking aliens from Men in Black? Let’s ask Tom Cruise who he’d slip in as his cosmic architect. I’m sure Rusher would appreciate an open conversation on the topic. After all, we don’t want to be like those narrow-minded scientists. In truth, God is not one possibility for the intelligent designer in an open-ended spectrum; which God is where I.D. remains mute. Yet, this is where intelligent design becomes more dangerous than Rusher’s aww-shucks presentation. If we institute I.D. into schools, how long before the conversation turns to who, specifically, this designer is? Suddenly, science is no longer science. It is theology. And despite what Rusher seems to believe, that is a bad thing.

Intelligent Design does have its place in public schools, in philosophy or theology classes, but its inclusion in science classes further corrodes an American student body that is falling further and further behind the rest of the world in those “materialistic” areas like math and science. If we want to broaden that divide, we need only adopt a concept like intelligent design into our classrooms under the pretense of inclusiveness and well-roundedness. Despite Rusher’s prediction that science and its godless worldview “will collapse, sooner or later, like the Soviet Union,” I assure him that science and faith will have equal influence on the future of humanity, but that doesn’t mean we should change the nature of either so that we can bring the two together. That is what intelligent design is asking us to do, and that is what scientists and the faithful alike should be afraid of.

Aspirations

In order to succeed in life, one must have goals. Of course the right goals are important. For instance, I probably should have a goal to find a job by my birthday in a week and a half (by the way, if anybody out there knows how I could get some quality snuggle time with Kristen Bell, I can’t think of a greater birthday gift. Nothing tawdry. Just some friendly afternoon spooning). But lately, my most pressing goal has been to win a prestigous spot on a watch list. NSA, FBI, Pentagon… I’m not really picky. But by God if the Raging Grannies can get attention from our Federal Government, why can’t I?

Well, my family took a good first step towards a reservation at the Black Site Hilton with our newest wall decoration. Warrantless wiretaps… I can almost hear the click on the phone lines now.

Another Sad Reality

One of the things I swore to myself when my brother left was I would learn as much as I could about the situation over there. So occasionally, when I get the chance to talk to my brother on IM in between teasing our mother and talking about the Cubs, I find a chance to ask him about what he’s seeing. This is an exchange we had today where I asked him, in so many words, who he was fighting:

Phil: Let me ask you something. The guys who plant the IEDs, are they like hardcore guys, or are they more chickenshits who do that because they can’t fight any other way?

Andrew: Everyone here is a chickenshit

Phil: Well, that answers that question.

Andrew: there are only small groups, Terrorists, Shia extremeists, Wahabbis, the Badr Corps or the Madhi army that would actually fight us

Phil: Damn. Now I’m gonna have to go look up all of those words.

Andrew: but most of them prefer to do things the easy way and just take cheapshots and run like little bitches. I went to a town called Narwhan. it’s a 100% SHIA town and my experiences there were completely different from my previous towns

Phil: How was the Shia town different?

Andrew: They hated us and want us out

Phil: So, you give them the power, and now they want you guys to bail?

Andrew: No we’re taking power from them and giving the Sunni’s more

Phil: But weren’t the Sunnis in power under Saddam?

Andrew: yet the sunnis think the opposite, but they’re afraid of Iran coming in when we leave

Phil: So you’re actually trying to create a situation of equality, but both sides think you’re screwing them.

Andrew: Basically

Phil: So do you trust anyone there? CAN you trust anyone there?

Andrew: No

I don’t know if this is what the experts mean when they use the word “quagmire,” but we are undoubtedly caught in a centuries old Catch-22. Groups who hate us need us to stay to protect them from even greater dangers. There don’t seem to be any allies for the United States, but merely groups protecting their own self-interests by playing both sides. Nobody trusts us, and in turn, we don’t trust them. A complete lack of trust — the perfect foundation for a sparkling democracy.

No Subject

FYI,

Many of you may not know what it’s like to be in a desert monsoon season. Let me explain, in the Quad Cities, when the Mississippi floods, what do we use to to keep the water out of homes and off the streets. Some us who have intimate experience know that we fill a buttload of sandbags. Well the same principle applies in Iraq. The ground is one or two things, mud or sand and my Dad the Geography could tell you neither mud or sand have the composition to drain effectively. Therefore, I have one or two options. I can trapse through the mud everywhere i go, or I either walk through standing water (which in the country of Iraq is the vector for hundreds of diseases) or through mud (which leaves us dirty). Naturally i would choose option three and stay in my room if that were possible. Alas i have chosen standing water as my means of travel.

I have had many questions regarding the Kurdish girls I said were beautiful. They are. However, in Iraqi culture they marry years earlier that here in the states. They are only 14 and 16 years old and therefore it is not appropriate. And Brian, NO, is the answer to your question.

For the first time, I received hostile treatment at a council meeting. I drove down to the town of Narwhan which is 100% Shi’a. I walked in to the council meeting and surprised them. The previous mayor had stopped going months ago. The town is a hotspot of the Mahdi Army, Wahabbis, and several other factions. We know it’s there, but they keep their town peaceful so we’ve left them alone. Leave it to me to go stir the pot. Their immediate response is you cannot do anything to help us leave us alone. Due to circumstances that I cannot mention, leaving them alone is no longer an option. I told them that I would be at every meeting and in their business for the next 11 months. Either they can work with me or they can be my enemy and that it’s their choice. I finished by telling them that regardless of their choice, I expect to be treated with more respect the next time I come in. I got up and walked out. I left my Terp in there to
eavesdrop after I left. They were concerned that I was serious. So I did my job. We’ll see next week how it turns out.

Other than that, nothing is really new.

Emilie: I appreciate all the books.

I love you all