Iraq has many a time been a discussion subject on here. Some may find this interesting

others of course may not.
Was received from a (distant) relative of mine who is serving with the U.S. out there.

Warning - long post!

My job in Iraq is an interesting and, admittedly, sometimes dangerous one. I lead a Route Clearance Team. For those of you that don't know what that is, basically it's a group of Combat Engineers that drive around in ridiculously large vehicles and look for bombs, most of the time we find them the "easy way," but every once in a while one finds us the "hard way." I'll let you figure out what that is.

This job puts us in a unique position because we spend more time on the roads and in the middle of Iraqi culture than most units here and we do it across all provincial and battle space lines. I've seen and talked to everyone from the rich suburbanites of Baqubah and Baghdad to the poor farmers in Diyala province near the Iranian border.

The children in the rural areas are my favorite. Every time we come down the road, they run out to the end of their driveways and wave, dance, and scream like we're a parade. Anytime I have something to give them, I make my gunner throw it out, candy, food, soccer balls, even a plain bottle of water. They love it, and it does my heart good to see them happy.

Before I joined the Army, I heard so many people say,"We have so many problems here in the US, why don't we fix those problems before we spend all this money to send soldiers halfway across the world." I would put a year's salary at 100:1 odds that those people have never left the United States.

A 4.8% unemployment rate and 0.4% violent crime rate are nothing compared to a country where, if you make a wrong turn, you won't just get lost, you will probably run into anti-tank mines (I know, because I've done it).

Iraq is a country where fanatics will blow up a car-bomb and kill 30 people just to scare the population into letting them do whatever they want without turning them in. Imagine if the US had groups of people throughout that would torture and kill regular citizens just so those citizens wouldn't tell the police that they were there. Oh, and that's not all, the fear of going out and running into these people is ruining the economy from the bottom up and your family is starving because of it.

Now, imagine that there was a country that controlled 27% of the word's wealth with only 5% of the world's population and said "we need to fix our own problems first." Also, imagine that this country already had security forces in the US, had almost fixed the problem, and, just before complete success, are told by people that had never seen the progress that they needed to come home because they weren't doing any good.

I digress, as that last sentence is an entirely different story. My point is, the success in Iraq is real, the Iraqi people are really beginning to trust us, and we need to nurture that trust to establish the security needed to be able to leave it entirely in the Iraqis' hands without fear of implosion.

When I'm out on a mission and I see the children at the ends of their driveways waving, I want so much to get out of my vehicle, take off all my armor, and just walk with them and experience their day.

I'm proud of my job and what I do here in Iraq, I know that my platoon directly saves a lot of lives, both American and Iraqi. However, it's very hard to keep focused on the job at hand when I see all of these people living in poor conditions.

I think it's because I'm a missionary trapped in a soldier's body. But, no matter what my "hard-core" fellow soldiers say, I don't think that's a bad thing. In fact, I think that is the way that we're going to eventually win this war. The problem we have is that we can't finish the job because we can't find the insurgents.

Those people I talked about before, the ones with the car-bombs, are hard to find. They're even harder to find when they've successfully scared the population into helping them hide. Our best option is to befriend the local population, gain their trust, and let them tell us who needs to go.

This isn't a new idea; it has had success in a lot of Iraq already. The Sons of Iraq have taken back much of the country by merely standing out on roads and questioning people as they drive by. Anything suspicious is turned over to the Iraqi or US forces, who act on it. We need to take this to an entirely new level, though.

We can gain trust by merely stopping and talking to the locals. I've personally had three bombs turned over to me in the last month just because I stopped and asked people how their family was and gave them some clean water to take home.

When I first talked to them they said everything was fine, but I continued to talk to them because I was genuinely interested in their lives (there's the missionary thing again).

After we talked for a while and they realized I wasn't just a faceless soldier hidden behind a bunch of armor, but someone who genuinely cared for them, they told me where the bombs were and we were able to remove them.

It's hard to convince the soldiers that have been here before that this will work. I'm the first to admit, I wasn't here and I didn't see what they saw in the early years of this war. I know that the insurgents did some horrendous things. If I had seen children used as weapons, I probably would have a hard time trusting anyone too.

The war here is in an entirely new stage, though. The vast majority of the people here are not only trustworthy, but are beginning to trust us in return. It only takes one disgruntled soldier to ruin that, though.

Imagine if you saw a police officer driving down the street and when you ran up to tell him you saw something bad, he pointed his gun at you and started yelling. That's the problem a lot of units here are facing. I'm not sure how to fix it, but the soldiers that have been here before need to realize that Iraq has evolved and we need to evolve with it.

Maybe we need to get some more missionary-minded people over here to help explain the right way to treat others. Maybe we need to spend more on humanitarian efforts. I'm not sure what the answer is; I'm way too low on the food chain to make those big decisions. I just know what I've seen work at my level.

This isn't really a plea for help or anything, but more of an observation of how things are in Iraq right now for those that only get the experience through the filters of American media. Slow progress and the success of just being genuinely nice are not sensationalist enough to sell commercial time.

Posted By: South_West_Canary, Oct 8, 20:46:03