College Magazine

Tour of Duty

From the Iraq diaries of Allen Edwards '93

In 2000, after completing a master's degree in European history at George Mason University, Allen Edwards '93 began working at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as an intelligence analyst. Six years later he's still working at the DOE - but along the way there was a 15-month interruption, when his Army Reserve unit, the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade, was called up to serve in Iraq.

In the middle of January 2003, Edwards was posted to Kuwait, where his brigade was positioned to wait for the war to begin. He entered Iraq on the third day of the invasion and spent four weeks attached to British forces in the southern part of the country. His brigade then moved north to Baghdad six days after U.S. troops entered the city. For the rest of his tour he was based in what became the Green Zone and went out on regular missions that covered the entire country. Nearly two years have passed since Edwards returned to the United States, and he is now a "full-time civilian." Nevertheless, the year spent in Iraq hasn't left him. "My closest circle of friends are still those I served with in Iraq," he said. "I don't ever see that changing. All the guys from my team are still in touch with each other, and we get together when we're able."

Edwards is back at work in Washington, developing threat assessments for the national laboratories and determining how best to protect the science and technology housed inside. "DOE controls, designs, and fabricates the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile," he said, "so I've learned quite a bit about what makes things go 'BOOM!'" Edwards has also found a new relaxation. "My biggest pastime is my crew team," he said. "I row with the Capital Rowing Club in D.C., and those in the area can see our boats out on the Anacostia River when they commute to work in the morning."

While in Iraq, Edwards kept extensive diaries, which are far too long to include here in their entirety. We can only give some of the flavor of what he experienced in Iraq through a few excerpts from the first three months of his writings. Some passages he wrote after his return to the United States; these are indicated through italics.

March 25, 2003
Here we are in Umm Qasr [Iraq]. We rolled in yesterday morning. Crossing the border [from Kuwait] was a combination of feelings, excitement, curiosity, and some trepidation at what we might find in the port, or what was left of it after the USMC passed through. The night of the 23rd was certainly a fireworks show. Shortly after nightfall, we were chatting and sipping tea with the Brits ("God Save the Queen") when a HUGE fireball erupted in Umm Qasr. Everyone jumped to their feet and exclaimed "Holy shit!" in unison. I've never seen an explosion like this other than in a movie. Especially contrasted against the night sky in the featureless desert, it was simply awesome. We heard the BOOM! followed about 20 seconds later by a slight tremor from the concussion. Roughly 20 minutes later, we saw another detonation, much smaller in its effects, with what appeared to be sparks scattering all over. Farther west, high angle parachute flares arced down in a continuous stream making a small patch bright as day despite the nighttime sky. We had word of a pretty intense battle near Al Zubayr, so I assumed the illumination was part of that. Our night vision abilities far exceed those of Iraq, meaning the flares were probably theirs.

March 27
Our entire element is here now. The last several arrived yesterday afternoon. Personality clashes and agendas are really glaring now that our mission has begun. We're living a kind of perverted episode of Survivor except it doesn't end as quickly and there are no immunity challenges. (After all, only the government can vote us out of Iraq.) Two generic tribes are emerging: The Office Dwellers and the Adventurers. Office Dwellers are content to stay within our compound, fuss about building our office, and "coordinate" activities, usually without consulting others. Many openly disparage Adventurers for just "driving around town." Adventurers, on the other hand, seek to get out of the compound at any opportunity, get into the port and the town, work with the people and do real Civil Affairs stuff. (Guess where I fall?) Adventurers generally disparage the bureaucratic tendencies and sourpuss attitudes of the Office Dwellers.

March 30
Yesterday was totally crazy! We drove a CNN team with Christiane Amanpour into town for a story on Civil Affairs and the FIF [Free Iraqi Forces] attached to us. It turned into the most eventful day we've had yet . . . .

Heading into Umm Qasr, we visited districts I hadn't yet seen. (Certain sections had only recently been cleared of known Ba'athists and enemy personnel by the Brits.) The more I see of Umm Qasr, the more appalled I feel at the conditions here. The garbage and raw sewage strewn everywhere is gross. Every building is falling apart. Half the kids are running around barefoot in dirt streets filled with debris, broken glass, and rusting shards of metal. To an American living in the relative affluence of Falls Church, Va. it's totally shocking. Any Coalition vehicle that stops attracts a crowd, any TV vehicle that stops attracts a larger crowd; put the two together and you get a circus!

April 10
I saw a prison yesterday. Not a regular, U.S.-style penitentiary, but an Iraqi military prison just south of Basra: Division 51 Military Prison. This was a relatively small one; I can't imagine what the larger political ones in Baghdad are like. This one was horrible enough. After two years spent working at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, I thought I was pretty well inured to images of cells, prison camps, and torture devices, but I had never experienced the other senses or felt the chill of actually standing in one for real. Standing in a dark cell with nothing but an electrical wire dangling from the center of the ceiling down to chest height made me slightly nauseous. I don't know how many men had been dragged into that room and tortured with it. The size of the room indicated that many potential interrogators could have participated, maybe taking turns jabbing the wire into the victim's neck. Statements from Saddam's speeches adorned the walls so the prisoner would know exactly who was responsible for his pain.

April 16
We heard about the fall of Baghdad from our two embedded reporters. (Funny how the media gets info to us faster than our own G2, Intelligence Officer.) The following morning we wanted to see what the local reaction of Umm Qasr would be to the news of the regime's final demise. Wow! It was like Mardi Gras, only without the booze, the music, or the nudity. (Ok, so that's a bad comparison.) But there were a LOT of people in the streets cheering, waving at our Humvee as we drove by, and carrying Shi'a prayer banners or pictures of prominent Shi'a leaders. Saddam's security forces would have executed people for such demonstrations before. A large crowd blocked passage across the entire road. Rather than turning where we normally did, we drove up to the souk [marketplace] to see what was up. Again, crowds roamed all over blocking traffic and causing us to creep along at walking speed. We received big thumbs up, smiles, and cheers of "U.S. good! America good!" Continuing around the block, we entered another street. By this time, the mob had meandered away from its first place in town and was headed in our direction. We encountered a long procession of excited and happy people flowing around our vehicle as we inched forward. Kids chanted, "George Bush! George Bush!" when we passed. Another group of young boys stomped up and down on torn pieces of Saddam posters. When they saw our Humvee they leapt into the road and motioned for us stop. As we rolled to a halt scanning the crowd for potential threats, the boys laid the pieces of Saddam on the ground directly in front of our tires. With beaming smiles and shouts, they motioned us forward with their hands and cheered wildly as we dutifully drove over Saddam's face. The rest of the crowd cheered, too! This is what our grandfathers must have experienced in Europe during WWII, the absolute euphoria of people who realize their worst fears are gone.

Notice I refrained from saying "liberated." I still feel we've just opened Pandora's Box and leapt in with both feet. We will see how long the celebration lasts, and who or what steps into the power void. As awful as Saddam's regime obviously was, the chaos following his removal may be just as bad for a while. Reconstituting a workable government, let alone one that is "representative of all Iraqis" (whatever the hell that means) will take a very long time. . . .

We finally reached as far north as Basra two days ago. We convoyed up there to assess the city rail yards, grain silos, and milling facilities to get an idea of how quickly we could get the OFP (Oil for Food Program) running again in the city. Before rolling out of Umm Qasr, I made damn sure I cleaned my weapon, then checked my frag grenades and smoke. Even though the Brits officially secured the city a couple days ago, armed militia and suicide bombers pop up here and there to ambush Coalition forces. It's definitely still Indian Country, including looting, arson, and vandalism. When I first heard we were going to Basra, I thought "Cool. City." Basra has 2 million people in it, the second largest city in Iraq, and it's supposedly some big cultural center with museums, universities, and big theaters. Sounds good, right? Wrong. Basra is as run-down and ill-maintained as Umm Qasr, only exponentially larger. It is dirt and filth on a grand scale. There's much more battle damage visible than in Umm Qasr because the Brits faced some pretty heavy resistance in certain sections of the city. Even though I am growing accustomed to the sight of daily squalor, the sheer magnitude of it here is mind-boggling. The living conditions suck, Basra University looks like a grammar school from Detroit, and what passed for the Basra Museum of Natural History was looted and burned by the locals themselves.

May 2
OK, forget everything I said about how nice the airport palace was [one of Saddam Hussein's palaces]. I mean, it was nice, but we now have the ultimate Man Pad. We only spent one night in the ballroom [at the airport palace] because we moved to our permanent billets in central Baghdad the next day. We have a place slightly less gaudy but awesome just the same! We're staying in what had been the Special Republican Guards officers compound along the Tigris River directly across from the Palestine Hotel. I'm sharing a small villa with only two (2!!!) other guys, and we're all on the Col.'s Command Staff now. We're at the end of a cul-de-sac on a dead-end road away from the buildings where the rest of our brigade is housed. We have privacy!!! After nearly five months of open bay barracks, warehouses with hundreds of people, and various tents living in close quarters, the villa is sheer luxury! I can't believe our luck! . . .

As if the Man Pad villa, furnishings, and premium booze weren't enough, our team, minus me because I was late, found $16 MILLION in U.S. $100 bills hidden behind a false wall in our compound! . . . It turns out that that room was only the first in a series of bricked up hiding places that yielded a total of $112 million. Jesus. $112 MILLION! Can you believe it? Because everyone knew our Col. had custody of the cash for the night until the MPs picked it up, he brought it down to our villa so it would be in an unknown location and there would be more of us to protect it against any soldiers who got wise ideas of enriching themselves. Have you ever held a $100,000 bundle of crisp $100 bills in your hand? Or opened the lid of a metal box containing $4 million? God, what a rush! You start thinking of the Lotto and how that money could change your life forever if only a dozen people, the media, and the MPs hadn't seen you uncover it. Ha! (Can you say Leavenworth?) We turned the boxes over to Army MPs in the morning but I can now say that I have been, temporarily, a millionaire.

May 6
Wow. Someone shot at us yesterday. I mean, it was the first time aimed enemy fire came at me. Returning from a meeting (!!) at the 2ACR TOC (2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Tactical Operations Center) way into the eastern part of the city, we were almost back to the 14th of July Bridge near the entrance to the "secured" part of central Baghdad when it happened. (This secured part of Baghdad is what evolved into the Green Zone. There was no such thing when we first arrived and the east bank of the Tigris was still technically enemy territory. We had no idea of the insurgency that was to come.) We came down the main street of Karradah, a district in Baghdad, in a convoy of three vehicles, moving slower than if we had been in charge of it. A tactic of these Fedayeen f-ers is to fire at vehicles from the rear (generally a blind spot on our Humvees) after they have passed the shooter's position. It's harder for us to see them and harder to direct return fire at them as we drive down the road, especially since we don't have roof-mounted machine guns on a turret. That's exactly what happened to us. I sat in the rear passenger seat facing outwards and watching my sector with the barrel of my submachine gun poking out of the doorsill. We neared the souk and BANG! BANG! Two shots rang out.

Baghdad did settle into more or less of a routine as the Green Zone coalesced. We made regular runs up and down the BIAP [Baghdad International Airport] Road, but we rarely ventured much farther than that. Throughout the summer of 2003 the security situation in Baghdad steadily degenerated. CA [Civil Affairs] units operating through the city encountered more attacks. First, there were individual small arms attacks like those that we went through. Next, homemade grenades, the first of the now ubiquitous improvised explosive devices (IEDs), starting making their appearance. These were small at first, generally converted soda cans placed on guard rails or dropped onto convoys from overpasses. Then Hajji (U.S. soldier slang for enemy Muslims equally applied in Afghanistan or Iraq) started combining these first generation IEDs with small arms. It then moved to IEDs, small arms, and maybe a secondary IED to hit the reaction forces that came to the rescue of the attacked Americans. The city became more unstable and Hajji altered his tactics as he learned U.S. methods and routines. The insurgency gathered force. By the autumn of 2003, the first rockets impacted inside the Green Zone.

Ambushed

Feb. 22, 2004
Holy shit. We had our asses handed to us yesterday. While driving south toward Najaf we were ambushed hard on the outskirts of Iskandariyah. I have no earthly idea how any of us got out of there alive. I've never seen anything like it in my life.

We had three SUVs bombing down the highway at 75-80 mph south of Baghdad heading for a dumpy town southwest of Najaf. The commander's vehicle was #2 in line; I drove the trail vehicle, #3. It was a bad mission from the beginning. It was unnecessary and, at this stage of the game, completely foolish. . . . One second we're driving down the highway, the next bullets flew everywhere. We heard rounds furiously impacting our Toyota Landcruiser first, like an angry hailstorm slamming against metal. My windshield exploded from the fusillade right in front of my face. Broken glass blew past my head then I heard the report from the enemy weapons. Tracers slammed into the vehicle ahead of me, the commander's SUV, then my radio headset squawked, "You're on fire! You're on fire!" I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw flames rolling out the back half of our truck from the cargo area; my friend sat right in front of the fire in the rear seat. One of the first rounds to hit us must have been a tracer. It ignited the fuel tanks immediately.

I instinctively hunkered down behind the steering wheel with my eyes just above the dash board. I floored the accelerator and zig zagged to try to throw off the enemy's aim. Escaping the kill zone was the only thing I thought about. I saw no shooters, just bullets everywhere. The noise was terrific; multiple automatic weapons are LOUD! Bullet holes ripped into the hood in front of my face and the door around my arm. All our windows were shot out, then tracers came right down the middle of the vehicle between us. . . .

"It's getting HOT back here Captain! We gotta stop NOW!" Bullets no longer hit our vehicle since we were just on the edge of the kill zone. I slammed on the brakes, all of us bailing out as fast as we could. We ended up on different sides of the road taking cover in the shallow ditches common to most Iraqi roadways. I quickly swept my muzzle around checking the area for bad guys, then looked back over my shoulder toward the pavement. Ten-foot flames engulfed our entire truck, oily black smoke trailed into the sky. . . . I counted heads on the other side of the road, saw everyone safely out of the vehicle. A couple rounds cracked past us, ricocheting off the roadway. . . . My friend opened fire at the berm where much of the tracer fire seemed to originate; he saw furtive movement and ducking heads. I ran up my side of the road along the shallow ditch back into the kill zone, toward the commander's wrecked SUV. I thought they would all be dead. . . .

I reached the wreckage. The commander's aide and the commander himself were already out of the vehicle! I couldn't believe it. How was that possible? All those bullets, the rollover, the destroyed SUV. "Are you hurt, sir?!" I yelled as I quickly scanned him for injuries. No visible bleeding, no holes, no broken bones protruding, and he answered lucidly if a bit dazed. It was good enough at that moment. . . . I took up a forward position in a slight gully to cover the scene while two others tended the wounded. Our interpreter was dead. Shot in the shoulder and the head, most of the blood on the back of the vehicle was his from when half his head was blown off. We only had one vehicle still running. #1 got through mostly unscathed. The brunt of the ambush fell on our two trucks. We commandeered an Iraqi car from a used car lot that happened to be next to the wreckage. . . . We loaded up and hauled ass away from the site.

Eight days later, on March 2, 2004, Edwards' tour in Iraq ended and he was transported back to the United States with his brigade.

Allen Edwards can be reached at aweds@cox.net.